The Bloodprint

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  “Rumors, no more. It was chance that we stumbled upon their caravan. From the report of my men, their numbers are small.”

  The truth would surprise him, then.

  “May we speak of the High Companion? And how you came to be at the Sorrowsong? Or would that be intrusive?”

  “I am at the Companion’s service. Whatever you would know, I would share.”

  “Will you not call me Arian? As you must have done when I was a child.”

  A fleeting expression crossed the captain’s face, so fleeting she couldn’t put a name to it.

  “What would the lady Arian know?”

  “Why did Ilea send you to the Sorrowsong? And when?”

  “It has been some months. The previous commander fell out of favor when he failed to discover the lajward the Preacher sought from the mines.”

  “How did the Preacher know these pieces could be found in the quarries? Did he not expect the Sorrowsong to yield raw stone mined from the veins?”

  “There is a palimpsest in the Preacher’s possession that is a catalogue of manuscripts. It was stolen from the northland, from the House of Wisdom at Black Aura. You can imagine the prize it foretold.”

  “The Bloodprint.”

  “Yes. He knows it was held by the Authoritan, but also that it was stolen and taken west. And now he knows it has been returned.”

  Without naming him, Turan was describing the efforts of the Black Khan.

  “Ilea told you this?”

  “Part of this story comes from the High Companion, part from my spies among the Shin War.”

  “Then the Shin War are not united on this question.”

  Turan glanced at her briefly. “It was a mistake, I think, to spare some of the conservators of Candour’s scriptoria to work the Preacher’s ends.” His voice was dry. “The Preacher thought his mastery of the Claim could control them, but there are many among the literate who survived the Talisman purges. They bide their time in the Preacher’s service until a killing blow can be struck.”

  Arian’s face paled.

  “You mean to the Shin War.”

  “I mean to all the tribes of Candour. Immolans rise and fall, the Preacher is rarely seen, and this ill wind will blow over our land and vanish into the desert. There are many who resist the Talisman creed.”

  “It has been decades.” Arian’s voice was bleak.

  “It has been centuries, Lady Arian, but you must not despair. The High Companion anticipates the Preacher’s stratagems. She will triumph in the end because we serve her cause.”

  Arian couldn’t be as sure. There was another player to consider. And she feared the Black Khan’s motives, the strike of shah-mat that could checkmate her Audacy. But she kept such thoughts to herself; she needed to learn what she could of Turan.

  “So you come from the ranks of those who resist, while disguised as a Talisman loyalist. The kind of double game that pleases the High Companion. And yet I think the cost to you must have been great, Captain.”

  She was remembering his stoicism at the Sorrowsong. None of these hardships showed in his face. She admired him for it, even as she felt the pain of it.

  “Neither has your path been easy,” he replied. “We cannot afford regret, Lady Arian. I told the High Companion of the manuscript, she directed me to the Sorrowsong to await you.”

  For the little Ilea shared, there were a hundred things she held in reserve. As Arian mulled this over, Turan directed her attention back to the importance of the palimpsest.

  “The scribe who prepared the catalogue added a coda in his own words in the High Tongue.”

  “You’re an Affluent, Captain Turan?”

  “It was your mother who taught me.” His voice caught on the words. He turned his face away. And as much as Arian wanted to know, she suppressed her longing. There would be another time to ask after her mother, to ask why Turan, of all men, had been chosen to deliver Arian to Hira. She let her silence act as encouragement, until Turan picked up his story.

  “The coda described three pieces of lajward that serve as clues to the Bloodprint’s location—its safehold.”

  Arian frowned. A piece of the story was missing.

  “The catalogue in the Preacher’s keeping must be a manuscript of the old world.”

  “It is, yes.”

  “Then why would the lajward hold clues to the Bloodprint’s safehold?”

  Turan flashed her a sharp look.

  “You met with the High Companion and the Black Khan, I believe.”

  She nodded, surprised. “You knew it was the Black Khan who brought word of the Bloodprint to Hira?”

  Turan’s lips thinned into a harsh line.

  “I’ve dealt with the Black Khan before. It shouldn’t surprise me that he withheld this from you. You knew the Bloodprint was removed from the Stone City at his request?”

  At her nod, he continued, “But not perhaps that it was originally stolen from those sworn in the Bloodprint’s service.”

  “You think the Bloodless have returned it to their safehold.”

  “That would be my guess. It’s what the palimpsest suggests they would do. Just as it tells us that centuries ago, the clues to this safehold were spirited away into the depths of the Sorrowsong.”

  “The oldest continuously worked mines in Khorasan.”

  “Yes.”

  Arian was seeing another connection, one she wondered if either Ilea or the One-Eyed Preacher knew. The Bloodprint itself was a manuscript of plain ink on parchment. Its beauties rested in the eloquence of the Claim.

  But subsequent copies, lost to ignorance and time, were said to be ornamented with gold leaf and an ink of the bluest indigo, the lajward stone ground into powder and liquefied.

  Was there a connection between the stone of heaven and the men who guarded the Bloodprint? Could one or more of them have been scribes?

  She was curious about their name, as well. What could the Bloodless signify?

  When asked, Turan responded, “They are ascetics. They have no other calling except to protect the Bloodprint.”

  He hesitated, unwilling to continue.

  “Tell me,” Arian said, reading his face. “I would know it all.”

  “There was a time when the Bloodless held great renown as guardians of the Bloodprint. They were chosen from among the ranks of scholars who traveled the world to study at Black Aura. To serve as Bloodless was a position of the highest honor. It is not so with the Authoritan.”

  A despot steeped in blood and lawlessness, whose ancestors built the Wall that divided the northland from the south. He had instituted the slave trade, bartering a thing as precious as the Verse of the Throne.

  “He holds the Bloodless to ransom in some manner?” she guessed. For the Authoritan would wish to secure his monopoly of the Claim.

  Turan brought his horse to a halt. His hand covered Arian’s where it rested on the pommel of her saddle.

  “Some manner, indeed. It is said the Authoritan has cut out their tongues.”

  36

  It took the rest of the day to complete their long descent through the mountain pass to the rough, uncharted terrain that lay ahead. The sun sloped down into the west, its rays thrown like arrows against a fruitless wind.

  The air became rich, the snows giving way to a sinuous mud that slowed the steady pace of the kuluk. Arian felt her lungs expand to drink in the warmth of the lower altitudes.

  “There is drier ground ahead,” Zelgai assured them.

  Although he had been appointed head of their party, he did not carry the horsehair banner. Arian asked him about this, curious.

  Zelgai spoke to her without taking his gaze from the path ahead.

  “The Sulde is our spirit banner. It signifies the strength endowed by wind, sky, and sun. It remains with the Aybek to be carried to war.”

  “To carry it must be a great honor, then.”

  “The greatest. A warrior of the Buzkashi may permit anything to fall except the Sulde.”


  “And who is the Aybek’s right hand, should he fall?”

  Zelgai didn’t answer. He rode ahead, silencing a rustle of displeasure from his men.

  Arian turned to find the Silver Mage at her side.

  “The people of the mountain have their own traditions,” he cautioned her. “Their warriors do not speak of death because to acknowledge it may cause it to occur. By law, they assume their warriors are immortal.”

  “You speak of a martial philosophy,” Arian mused. “And the Aybek spoke of preparing his armies for war as if that war is imminent. But Ilea didn’t speak of this at Hira. She spoke only of the danger to the Citadel.”

  It was a reasonable point for Arian to raise, but it earned her an unwarranted response.

  “If we had tarried longer, we could have learned more about the forces at the Wall. But I saw no benefit to keeping you under Zerafshan’s eye.”

  Arian twisted in her saddle. She had not mistaken Daniyar’s anger.

  “It was a matter of fortune that we found our way to the Ice Kill.”

  “It was a matter of fortune you were not wed to him before our departure. If Zerafshan had then seen fit to let you go.”

  The contempt in his eyes was scathing.

  Arian lowered her voice.

  “It was you who asked me to prevail upon him. I sought no contact with him.”

  Daniyar struck out with his riding crop. It fell harmlessly against his saddle bag.

  “You were not loath to hear his compliments, nor to suffer his attentions.”

  “You grasped his hand in the bond of trust.”

  “To gain us safe passage.”

  “I did no less, as should be clear to you.”

  “You did more. For a Companion who took a vow of chastity at Hira, your ease with strangers discredits you.”

  The vicious words hit at her, the rancor behind them palpable. She set her jaw and looked away.

  “You were prepared to relinquish the Candour for me—”

  “For Wafa. Another admirer you so carelessly accrued.”

  Now Arian’s temper flared. She would not accept injustice, even from Daniyar.

  “Have a care how you speak to me,” she warned him. “I am not blind to your jealousy—it leads you to accuse me without cause. Look deeper. Read me, if you must, though you should have no need.”

  He had the grace to look ashamed though he couldn’t manage an apology.

  Perhaps it was no longer possible for Daniyar to trust her. His first taste of betrayal had come from the hands of the woman he loved—her hands. She hadn’t wanted to leave him in Candour. He wasn’t a man to be given up lightly, nor the kind of man whose equal she’d ever found.

  She had filled the loneliness of the years without him with an implacable hatred of the Talisman.

  The world she had seen was black and white, men against women, Talisman against herself. A perspective that failed to account for Daniyar and Turan, leaders among the Talisman. Or Zerafshan and his Buzkashi.

  She understood the Silver Mage now with a clarity she hadn’t possessed in Candour.

  The women of the Shin War lived lives of grueling, painful seclusion. But they were safe from the Talisman slave-chains, an end Daniyar had effected by staying in Candour, doing what he believed to be right.

  Arian had tried to do the same.

  Except for that moment in Zerafshan’s camp, when setting everything else aside, she had put Daniyar first.

  “I surrendered my tahweez to spare you such a sacrifice. How can you not read the truth of this?”

  Her voice breaking, she rode ahead, leaving their caravan behind.

  “Arian—”

  He called after her in vain. Sinnia’s horse cantered to his side.

  “Leave her, my lord. Her Audacy troubles her, making her spirit restless.”

  “I misspoke earlier,” he said grimly. “I am a fool.”

  Sinnia studied him, curious. “Do you not want her then, my lord? Did I misunderstand your purpose in coming on this journey?”

  A caustic smile settled on his lips.

  “Have you come to take the measure of my conscience?” His eyes followed Arian’s progress down the slope. “Because I’ve never wanted anyone else.”

  A wide expanse of blue met them upon the plains, the first blush of spring sweeping across the lowlands. Green blades of grass sprang from the cellar of mud-brown hills. Clusters of cyclamen and gentian dotted the fertile plain. Fruit trees stirred under the heavy hand of winter, their branches sprightly with budding life, while stands of wild poplar bordered the lake.

  A low gold light brushed the sky.

  “Lop Nur,” Zelgai said.

  Daniyar spurred his kuluk to Arian’s side. Unable to think of a suitable gesture of contrition, he settled for stroking a hand across the kuluk’s mane, catching his fingers in the coarseness of its hair.

  “Lop Nur,” he explained, “is the name of the wandering lake. It was once a lake of the Tarim Basin, fed by rivers that sprang from glaciers. In times of drought, the lake was swallowed by the desert. When it reappeared, a new civilization would flourish on its banks.”

  But it was not the lake that captured Arian’s attention.

  It was the Army of the Right camped upon its banks.

  And the thousands of horses pastured behind them.

  37

  A herald rode up to meet Zelgai. He was dressed in black armor. In his right hand he carried the standard of the Army of the Right, a flame-coated horse stamped on a field of gold.

  “Aybek of the Right!” he called.

  From the camp behind him, a volley of horns sounded.

  He met Zelgai on the plains; they embraced like brothers. They sniffed at each other’s hands and necks, laughing.

  Soon they were joined by others from the camp, an escort of dozens, all in black armor with a gold crest embossed at their throats. It astonished Arian that as each man joined their group, he made an obeisance before Zelgai, who nodded at each soldier, taking stock of the state of his uniform, and the time to praise or correct his bearing.

  Zelgai made rapid introductions, beginning with the Silver Mage.

  “My lord Daniyar, this is Shiremun of the Army of the Right.”

  More men joined them.

  The soldiers wore fur-lined coats secured by leather belts that held swords, daggers, or double-headed axes. Silk undershirts with long, flaring sleeves were worn beneath the coats. The crest at the neck of these shirts was the insignia of the flame-coated horse, red upon gold. Beneath the shirts, baggy trousers were tucked into boots made of leather and felt.

  Arian could see heavier armor—iron breastplates and corselets, cone-shaped helmets with leather neck guards stacked in rows against the walls of an armory. In the distance, the clang of steel rang out as soldiers tested their speed and strength against each other. Small yurts darkened the plain, busy with preparation for battle.

  To the east of the camp, the sound of a doleful singing arose. A group of commanders, distinguished by the quality of their armor, was gathered about a small fire, echoing a series of low-pitched phrases to each other.

  Arian and Sinnia exchanged a look. The Lord of the Buzkashi had left much unsaid in his discussion of his people’s philosophy. His army wasn’t preparing its defence of the Cloud Door. It was readying itself for full-scale war.

  We have intelligence of the north, Zerafshan had said.

  What intelligence did he have? Were the Talisman and the Ahdath in league? Did Arian need to send an exigent warning to Hira? Or did Ilea already know, and was the urgency of Arian’s Audacy based on Ilea’s foreknowledge of the war?

  She would ask Zelgai what he knew of the Ahdath’s plans when they found a moment alone. Shiremun, his deputy, escorted them to a small yurt established by the lake, close to the command tent. As their horses were pastured, she caught more than one suspicious glance flung in Turan’s direction, taking note of the Shin War crest he still wore at his
throat.

  The presence of the women at the camp aroused little interest, the Army of the Right continuing its training exercises with unrivaled focus and discipline. Arian found herself unnerved by this without knowing why.

  Zelgai spread the news of the success of the Mangudah raid upon the Sorrowsong, and as he did, Arian observed something else. She had scarcely noticed Zelgai in his brother’s presence. Altan had made more of an impression, whereas Zelgai had remained in the background, attentive to the Lord of the Buzkashi. Even his victory with the goat’s carcass had been achieved more by stealth than flourishes of fanfare.

  But it was Zelgai who commanded the vast army at the banks of Lop Nur, his men greeting him with a mixture of warmth and respect.

  Zelgai excused himself from their company, making for the command tent. He left six guards behind. To bring them food and water? Or to stand watch over the party from the Sorrowsong?

  Daniyar addressed her in the dialect of Candour.

  “Come inside,” he said, gesturing to one of the yurts. He nodded at Turan. “You also.”

  Inside the yurt, the Silver Mage wasted no time.

  “Zerafshan’s army prepares for war.”

  Turan agreed. “A fearsome force, waiting for the spring thaw.”

  “Did you know of this?”

  “You think this war comes to us?” Turan massaged the still-healing wound at his throat.

  “It was Talisman who offended the Buzkashi, transgressing against their women. Perhaps the raid of the Mangudah was the preliminary event.”

  “Kill. Don’t mourn,” Arian said. “Their philosophy of war. Zerafshan said his people do not seek war, they ready themselves to answer it.”

  “A war through the mountains doesn’t sound like something the Buzkashi would risk. To take this army through the Death Run?” Turan shook his head. “They would lose too many.”

  “Look at the way they’ve laid out this camp, consider their formations. They prepare to ride north, not west. They’re fortified against the north, not the west. What does this suggest to you?” As Arian spoke, the answer became clear. “Their war is with the Authoritan. They’re riding to the Wall.”