The Black Khan. Ausma Khan Zehanat

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      IN THE DESERTED COURTYARD OF THE CLAY MINAR, THE BODIES OF BASMACHI fighters were gathered in a pile beneath a stunted tree in the shelter of a square stone base. White ribbons streamed down from the tree’s slender limbs, tied to its branches and twigs. The ribbons were bare of script: the people of Black Aura could not write. The ribbons were meant as a reminder of their sacred traditions; they were desperate, desolate prayers. The bodies piled beneath the tree formed the Authoritan’s answer to those prayers.

      No wind stirred the ribbons or the dying branches. Sunlight blunted the edges of Arian’s vision, and she found her way around the tree more by instinct than anything else. She knew she was about to be taken inside the house of worship, just as she knew the Authoritan expected a demonstration of her power, a compulsion she had resisted with all the force and determination she was capable of as a Companion of Hira.

      There were only three people in the courtyard: Arian, the Authoritan, and his consort, Lania, Arian’s older sister. Each night since she’d been captured in Black Aura attempting to retrieve the Bloodprint, Lania and the Authoritan had brought Arian to this place. They showed her the stunted tree and the bodies moldering beneath it, then coerced her into entering the blue-domed house of worship to test her abilities with the Claim.

      Situated on the eastern side of the square, the dome was the pinnacle of a massive structure. Four arcades met at its doubled entrance, each lined with portals decorated with mosaics and glazed bronze brick. At the entrance to the main portal, a sand-colored octahedron with open arches could be reached by a set of stairs. Here great recitations of the Claim had once been addressed to the people of Black Aura, the Bloodless sharing the teachings of the Bloodprint, an ancient and powerful manuscript long believed to be lost. The manuscript that was the oldest, most venerable record of the Claim—the powerful, mysterious magic seeded throughout the history of all the lands of Khorasan, but lost to a people now condemned to a final Age of Ignorance.

      Skirting the pulpit, Arian was taken through to the indoor galleries covered by dozens of smaller domes perched on a peristyle. Though well lit, the interior space was cold, and as quiet and deserted as the courtyard.

      They stopped at a niche in the wall where multicolored mosaics were arranged in a magnificent declamation. Lania read the words first, verses commonly known to the Companions of Hira, though Lania’s inflection was different, the words gathered up in hubris and flung out, outlining the niche in a darkly radiant fire while the Authoritan nodded his approval.

      Prodded by her sister, Arian repeated the same words, her strong voice giving them distinctions of grace that coaxed out their inner meaning.

      The Authoritan looked down on Arian from the top of a flight of wooden stairs positioned beside the niche. He stood tall and thin, enclosed in his white robes, his ghastly crimson eyes flickering out from a bloodless white face, a nimbus of silver hair floating above the harshly etched bones of his skull. He seemed too frail to do her any damage, yet his hands and voice transmitted his inescapable power.

      “Now the rest.”

      His reedy voice was like a needle in Arian’s ear.

      “That’s all there is,” she said.

      “You know the conclusion of these verses from your training at the Citadel of Hira. Recite them for us now.”

      The cold command in his voice whipped at Arian’s nerves. It was a compulsion to do as he asked or suffer intolerable pain. Yet she’d learned that though he could otherwise affect her, he could not compel the Claim to issue from her lips. It was a tiny point of victory that Arian held to herself, infusing her with a strength of self-reliance that was no reproof against the pain.

      He raised a bony finger in the air and aimed it at the top of her skull. “Recite.”

      The word stabbed at Arian’s temples, a sharp, probing injury. She reached for Lania’s hand, insisting that her sister acknowledge the injury being done to her. But Lania stepped back, her painted face impassive, the bonds of sisterhood sundered by the tortures she was forced to endure.

      “Recite!”

      Now the word thundered through Arian’s skull. The muscles of her throat seized up; Arian began to shiver. The Authoritan could visit pain upon her—this he had shown her night after night, cruel and imaginative in his punishments. Yet her training at Hira resisted him. Of greater significance, the Claim resisted him, refusing to issue from her throat, a pitiless battle of magic against magic that caused her palpable injury. It was no different this day: she was forced to her knees by the Authoritan’s power, pressure building in her skull. Teardrops of blood leaked from her eyes, a sickening residue on her skin. She choked on the scent of it, tainted and dark, and tasted it in her mouth.

      She had exerted this power over men—the power of the Claim—but it had never been used against her—a battle of the occult against the uncorrupted. It was a setback, nothing more. She wouldn’t let the Authoritan twist the beauty and power of her magic. She fought to raise her head. She held on to her circlets, the two gold armbands that signified her status as a Companion of Hira, one of a group of women entrusted with the care of the sacred scriptorium at the Citadel. The Citadel was the stronghold of the Companions of Hira, a place where they sought to protect the written word from the devouring onslaught of the Talisman, men—and it was always men—who waged war upon all forms of knowledge, under the flag of the One-Eyed Preacher, a tyrant whose will Arian had spent a decade trying to subvert.

      As a Companion, Arian had been charged with a mission to rescue the women of Khorasan from the Talisman’s efforts at enslavement. But then the leader of her order, the High Companion Ilea, had assigned her to seek out the Bloodprint as a means of unseating the Talisman. Arian had been chosen for this Audacy because of her exceptional gifts. She was Hira’s most accomplished linguist, fluent in the Claim and armed with the power of its magic. She was First Oralist of Hira.

      And because of that—and despite the tortures the Authoritan inflicted—she should be able to resist.

      Gasping at the effort, she tried to draw power from the inscriptions on her circlets. Her fledgling attempt failed, just as it had before. She was brought to a posture of submission once more, her arms stretched out before her, her forehead pressed to the floor in a perversion

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