The grip that Sinnia had freed from the base of the lamp wasn’t an iron bar.
Instead, the handhold had come apart in two halves, each formed like a fan small enough to fit a woman’s hand.
Wordlessly, the Companions stared at each other.
They were looking at two palmettes.
She had clarity now, the knowledge singing inside her veins. She’d forgotten her mother’s words.
“When you reach the hills known as Shorn Rock, you will find the guardian of the lost city, the Golden Finger. Read it well. It will show you the path into the hills.”
Read it well.
The words had a literal meaning, as did the ring-verse that capped the Golden Finger.
Grabbing Sinnia’s hand, Arian flew down the stairs, dust streaming from her hair. She dragged Sinnia outside through flakes of falling snow.
“Read,” she insisted.
Sinnia took her time, working her way around the panels, stopping when she came to the trees planted in the shelter of the tower. A colony of date palms spread their wavy fronds up and over the river.
She read the words on the panels facing east.
“Grieve not. The One has provided a rivulet beneath you. Shake the trunk of the palm-tree toward you: it will drop fresh, ripe dates upon you. Eat then and drink, and let your eyes be gladdened.”
“This is the story of the people of East Wind, the sacred story,” Sinnia said. “It is renowned in the lands of the Negus.” She took a deep breath. “It’s the story of the Adhraa—the woman who was chosen.”
They stared at each other, deeply moved by this demonstration of esteem for the Adhraa.
“Why?” Sinnia breathed. “Why did the people who built this tower honor a woman of the East Wind, whom my people call the Esayin?”
Arian took Sinnia’s hand and squeezed it.
“I’ve been thinking of this. A graveyard for the Everword, a tower for the Esayin—the Claim throughout it all. These were people who built bridges between worlds. People of tolerance, unlike the Talisman who tolerate no one. If they found this tower, they would bring it down.”
The realization planted a small seed of hope inside Arian. There were things that had escaped the Talisman’s blind destruction, things powerful enough to endure. Was it possible to return to a world such as the Esayin had known?
Sinnia paced the ground. “Do the palm trees help us? Does the verse of the Adhraa?”
Arian scrutinized the tower.
“Not by themselves. But look at the bands of turquoise. What do you see?”
Sinnia’s voice was dry. “Yet another male glorifying himself for posterity.”
Arian smiled at that, shaking her head. “I mean besides the names and the titles. What else?”
Sinnia circled the tower again, appraising the scrolls that illustrated the words. A pair of palmettes nestled inside the decoration, one at each end.
“Whoever was responsible for the beautification of this tower introduced the palm as a motif. That can’t be a coincidence.”
Arian thought of her mother’s instruction.
Read it well.
What if there was more to read on this tower than the verses of the Adhraa? What if the palms were meant to tell them more?
The storm was gathering, blanking out the sun. On the north bank of the river, Wafa staggered through a snowdrift to reach them.
“Bring me parchment and charcoal,” Arian said to Sinnia. “And hurry.” Sinnia hastened to obey. She and Wafa reached Arian’s side at the same time.
“Warm yourself,” she said to the boy. “Go inside, light the fire.”
He shook his head. “We don’t have time,” he said. “Something watches from the mountains.” He went on before they could question him. “I didn’t see it, I could feel it.”
Arian believed him.
“Read the tower,” she said to Sinnia. “Show me the places on the tower where you see a palmette.”
“Where do I begin?” Sinnia asked.
“At the palm trees. We’ll move right to left, as the Claim is written.”
She took the parchment in hand, making dark notations with the charcoal. “Don’t miss any,” she cautioned.
The wind began to howl, slipping inside their clothes. The women moved quickly, one calling out, the other marking the parchment, Wafa trailing in their wake, a second pair of eyes for Sinnia. They came full circle to the palm trees.
Arian and Sinnia peered down at the parchment, Wafa wedging himself between them.
A jagged sequence of dots marched across the page.
“What is it?” Sinnia asked. “A map?”
Moving right to left, her hand sweeping up the parchment, Arian traced a series of lines between the dots.
“It’s a landscape,” she said. “Do you see it?”
But she couldn’t wait for the others to reach her conclusion.
“Let me take it to the top of the tower.”
Sinnia held her back. “It’s not safe up there. We barely made it out last time.”
“Wait for me on the stairs, then.”
Arian ran lightly up the stairs, snow swirling through the lunettes, the parchment clasped in her hand, Sinnia and Wafa at her heels.
“Don’t come any further.”
She inched her way onto the platform, ducking under the lantern. She held up the rough sketch of the landscape, assessing the terrain through the first of six arches.
The wind whipped against the parchment, almost snatching it from her hand.
She had drawn a path from the palm trees, a path that breached the river and wound up the side of a granite ridge—but which ridge? Which of these passes led to Firuzkoh? The platform trembled under her feet, the lantern swinging to and fro. Arian gripped the wall, buffeted by the wind. The snow was falling like a dense cloud, obscuring her view of the ridgeline. She moved from one arch to the next, feeling the ground shift with each step.
“Arian!” Sinnia called. “Look east!”
She withdrew from her family to a place in the east.
The palm trees were planted to the east.
She would have to climb to reach the other side. She hunkered down to the floor, crawling across the stage, the parchment tucked in her vest. Bricks began to shift as she moved.
“Come back!” Wafa called. Then to Sinnia, “Tell her to come back.”
Arian looked over her shoulder.
“Get down!” she said, her heart in her mouth. “The stairs might collapse!”
Neither listened to her—just as she hadn’t listened to them.
She forged ahead to the other side, scrambling to her feet.
She couldn’t see; there was too much snow. She grabbed at the parchment, holding it up in vain hope. The wind snatched at it again, rising, roaring, and then with a stroke of fortune at last, clearing the clouds from the horizon.
Tipping off the eastern axis, a broken ridge took the shape of the sketch on the parchment. The sun broke through the snow.
For the briefest moment, Arian could see the path to the Turquoise City.
When the clouds shifted again, it was lost.
Wind roared through the small enclosure. The lantern broke free, rolling down the platform, off the edge of the tower. It crashed to the ground below.
Arian held her breath.
The rod stayed in place.
She scooted beneath it into Sinnia’s waiting arms.
The boy’s face was white. When they reached the ground again, he buried it in her shoulder.
16
The eastern horizon broke into fragments of gold, rivulets of warmth trickling through the dark.
“There’s a bridge up ahead. We should cross the river for a new vantage point.”
She went first, Sinnia and Wafa treading behind her on broad, wet planks slick with snow. The rope bridge swayed in the wind. Below them, the icy mouth of the river opened up in a deadly black swirl.
One by one, they reached the far bank.
As
they climbed the rise, Arian looked back at the tower. The starscope had shifted but not fallen. She didn’t know if it was a trick of her vision as they gained the distance, but it seemed to her that the palm motif was gilded by motes of light in such a way that it mirrored their path.
A long-forgotten scholar of the Claim had mapped the road to Firuzkoh on the flanks of the Golden Finger. The clues had been laid so that even if the Talisman should find it, they would miss the significance of the palms, because they denied the significance of the Adhraa.
Why should a woman speak? What could she have to say that mattered?
Arian’s answer was not for the Talisman.
Mother of the Esayin, your words of wisdom deliver us.
They followed the steep path indicated by the tower, the air growing cold as they climbed. Soon, they began to feel the exertion in their legs and lungs. The higher they climbed, the less they saw of the sun, the heavy snowfall masking the little of the light not swallowed by the crowding mass of rugged gray cliffs.
It was a day’s climb along a narrow, icy trail that slithered off into a fatal mixture of snow and rock. In the distance, the path dipped below the horizon, vanishing between granite ridges that closed in on each other. A shadow crossed the path up ahead. Arian motioned to Sinnia, who shook her head.
“Talisman?”
“I don’t see anything.”
But something had moved ahead of them, large and quiet. And it wasn’t the shadow of Ilea’s falcon, tracking their progress east.
Sinnia drew back her cape, leaving her whip hand free. Arian considered the possibility that the Talisman had found their road, and were on the hunt.
She had disrupted too many caravans to be safe. And she had taken the Sacred Cloak.
A pang smote her at the thought of the Cloak on the Black Khan’s shoulders.
Was he the man to wear it? When she’d last been in the western capital, the court at Ashfall had been known not for its dispensation of justice, but for its dissoluteness.
She remembered her sense of wrongness at Hira, of something out of place. A ritual absent of peace, a witnessing of something other than submission. And though this feeling was different, she knew she had cause to worry.
“Be on your guard,” she told Wafa.
They climbed another five hundred feet without incident. And then the trail began to descend, low into a sloping valley. As it curved around the side of a cliff, Arian thought she felt something heavy and warm brush against her shoulder.
In the snow, she could see nothing. When she looked behind her, the pass they had crossed through disappeared, lost in the overlapping shadows of the hills.
Straight ahead, a cliff of sheer gray stone rose before them, banded with streaks of blue. As the trail sloped downward, the ridges on either side fell away. And as they did, an impossible sight unfurled on the snow-covered plain below.
A series of irregular blue domes crested a small city preserved in a mantle of ice.
Firuzkoh.
“By all the known and unknown verses of the Claim,” Sinnia murmured. “The healer spoke the truth.”
At her heels, the boy nudged Arian. She had learned to pay attention to his silent communication. His shy nod indicated the road ahead that wound to the valley floor. Here the snowfall was soft and sparse. Arian cleared snowflakes from her brow and lashes.
She witnessed a wondrous sight.
People were gathered in dozens of little groups at the end of the secret pass. Clad in the thick shawls and caps of their custom, their full faces peered out from behind folds of cloth. They were mostly dark-haired and dark-eyed. Here and there Arian caught flashes of eyes like gold and green gems and silky hair the color of sand. The fold of skin that cut off the inner angle of the eyes told her that these were the people of Hazarajat.
The boy’s people.
He looked at their wind-reddened faces in awe, his wide blue gaze traveling from person to person. In the clusters gathered at the trailhead, there were dozens of faces that resembled his own, whereas the bloodline of the Talisman was tellingly absent.
“Who are you?” he asked them in his own language.
“Hazara,” they chanted in the same tongue.
The boy fell quiet, made tentative by new discoveries.
There were others who looked like him and spoke his language.
And they were not enslaved.
Under the mantle of ice, the people gathered in the valley had made the ancient city their home. The signs of occupation were scant. They had taken great care with the city’s panoply of domes and towers, making use of a paved square at the city’s center to keep their livestock. Smaller dwellings that ran along the perimeter of the city had been opened up and used for shelter. Families crowded together in narrow doorways.
And every surface carved of stucco and brick was inlaid with geometric motifs and the faintest traces of calligraphy.
Here, as in all the lands of Khorasan, Arian found the commandment stenciled beneath a small blue dome.
There is no one but the One. And so the One commands.
She said the words aloud, pitching them to the receptivity of her audience, drawing the words out to offer solace in lieu of the Talisman menace.
It must have worked.
As Arian and her companions passed through the crowd of people to find shelter beneath the largest of the blue domes, the men and women held up cloth bags full of sweets, offering them to the newcomers.
These were sacred sweets. They reflected a desire to share the blessings they embodied in a time of famine. Ten years in the south had lessened her memory of the hospitality of the Hazara, but this she remembered. The sight of almond-eyed women in colorful shawls thronging the public square heartened her. Yes, Arian carried the bloodline of the Talisman, her graceful features and pale eyes a symbol of that line. And yet she was still welcome.
As were Sinnia and Wafa, each distinct from the other.
She searched the faces in the crowd, but could see no one who might serve as the leader of these people, the Mir of the Hazara.
“May we shelter here for the night?” she asked. “Would the Mir grant us permission?”
In lieu of an answer, a group of young men ushered them forward through doors that led to the inner sanctuary of the dome. Thick wool carpets in jewel-bright reds and blues covered the floor, a barrier against the cold. Small lanterns hung at intervals, cast their pendants of light upon a room rich in geometric motifs. Under a carved niche in the wall, a slender man with a smooth goatee waited, his head covered by a dusk-blue turban set back upon his skull.
His features were as neat and precise as his dress and manner.
He greeted them politely, his eyes flaring at the sight of Sinnia.
“May peace be with you, travelers. You are welcome at the Hallow. Have you come here fleeing the Talisman, or in hopes of observing ziyara?”
As he spoke, he invited them to join him and his followers on the carpets, and they took their seats at a respectful distance. Sweet tea and tawa bread were served to them all. Wafa sat down at Arian’s heels, studying the face of the turbaned Mir with interest.
“Ziyara?” she asked when they were settled.
“There is a graveyard behind these walls where our people lie buried.”
There was something this punctilious leader of the Hazara was not telling her. And she guessed the reason why when she saw his gaze travel from her face to the boy at her heels.
“Is this your servant?” he asked her.
Which meant that despite the warmth and grace his people had shown her, the Mir knew more about them than she had revealed.
“No,” she said. “Wafa is not my servant. He is my companion and friend.”
The boy ducked his head at the words, his face heating up. But he couldn’t resist a quick peek at the Mir, to see how Arian’s words were received.
It was not the reply the Mir had been expecting. He looked thoughtful, trying to connect the three
travelers in his mind.
Arian tried a question of her own. “My lord, why are your people gathered here instead of in their own lands? What graveyard do you speak of?”
“If you speak of Hazarajat, it fell to the Talisman. The villages were burned, the people and livestock massacred.”
A murmured prayer whistled through the ranks of his hearers.
Arian caught the word qiyamah.
The Mir’s followers understood it as a judgment or cataclysm.
She knew its deeper meaning, as rising or resurrection. But she understood the sense of what the Mir was telling them. The Talisman had visited a cataclysm upon Hazarajat.
“Did they take your women for their caravans?”
“No. The women they captured, they killed along with our children.”
“So you found safety here.”
The Mir smiled a pensive smile. “We were guided. To this hall in the valley that we have named the Hallow.”
“How?”
And when he did not seem as if he would confide any further, Arian removed her cloak and laid it across her knees. Wafa leapt to his feet to help Sinnia do the same.
They had been speaking the Common Tongue, but now Arian used the dialect of Khorasan native to the Hazara.
“Peace be with you, Alamdar.” She gave the Mir the most venerated title of his people. “We come not as your enemies, but as your helpmates in dark times from the Council of Hira.”
The leader of the Hazara braced his palms on his thighs.
“That cannot be.”
“Then which of the One’s Blessings will you deny?”
The Mir’s response was automatic.
“The stars and the trees both prostrate.”
For the first time in months, a smile reached Arian’s lips. How long she had traveled, through such dangers and hardships as she couldn’t account for, through shattered and desolate country, her victories no more than a handful, her hopes edged by nightmare. And here in this ancient capital, where a helpless people had gathered to shield themselves against the Talisman thirst for death, she found such words, offered with sweetness and pride.
As the Mir moved to bow to her, she stopped him.
The Bloodprint Page 11
