and cold finality? She removed the bracelets from Ruslan’s mouth and slipped them onto her wrists. Then she kissed both his cheeks with a tenderness she had never expressed before.
I should have buried you, spared you from this. I should have chosen you above any emissary of the Black Khan’s, any Companion of Hira. As Larisa should have also.
What didn’t you do for us, Ruslan?
She wanted to ignore Larisa’s summons—her rage, her grief were still too new. But if Ruslan was lost to her, Larisa was all she had left.
She would return and bury her beloved, but time was against her now. It was foolish of Larisa to have summoned her to the Hazing. The streets around the Gur-e-Mir were swarming with Ahdath. After the First Oralist’s sundering of the Registan, the Ahdath had doubled their patrols. They hunted the Usul Jade with a singular determination. She hadn’t forgiven Larisa, but she needed to get her sister out of the necropolis of the Hazing. She had already sent orders to the Basmachi to retreat, knowing Marakand was lost. She’d told them to regroup at the ruins of the Summer Palace. Its rugged surroundings would shelter them until Larisa returned. Then they would be able to get word to the warriors of the Cloud Door in the mountains. The time to strike at the Wall was almost upon them now. She knew Zerafshan’s men were ready, just as she knew that without Larisa’s support, she could not prod them into action.
It was time for Larisa to remember that she led the Usul Jade—her duty was to the women behind the Wall and to the people who still upheld the teachings of their father. As the daughters of Mudjadid Salikh, they bore a responsibility unlike any other: resist until the battle was won or until their resistance atrophied into dust.
As leaders of the Basmachi, she and Larisa were not tools to be used by the First Oralist, no matter the nature of the bargain Larisa had struck with the Black Khan. The First Oralist may have dismantled the Registan, but she’d also delivered Ruslan to his fate at the gates of the Gur-e-Mir. Ruslan, her dearest companion, the one who’d rescued her from Jaslyk, risking agonies greater than hers. She closed his eyes with her fingers, his bracelets softly striking hers. Then she spat out her rage on the ground.
She was on the hunt for the First Oralist.
And she would take her measure of blood.
SEVEN DAYS. SINNIA HAD BEEN IN JASLYK SEVEN DAYS, EACH DAY BRINGING forth new torments, new reasons to pray for rescue. Not that she’d been idle—her first course of action had been to attempt to rescue herself. The wardens of Jaslyk seemed to have no memory or knowledge of the Claim, and she had been able to use it with some success, escaping a room, a ward, a building. only to run into Jaslyk’s guards or its impenetrable defenses. The watchtowers were like the eyes of a dragon-horse. Red and fiery and unblinking. No matter which route she took to steal from her cell, the watchtowers picked her out along the perimeter, setting off a collision of horns. Then the guards of Jaslyk would come, dressed in black, wearing blind-eyed masks, four crimson slashes marking their chests and spreading across their ribs.
They looked like they’d been clawed by demons.
She’d never seen their faces or heard their voices. She’d simply felt the grip of implacable hands covered with leather gloves whose palms were studded with tiny spikes. Her arms were marked with dozens of pinpricks that healed over, then formed again with each new attempt to escape. The pinpricks burned, but they were only a reminder of her failure.
And they were nothing compared to the mask.
On the third day, Sinnia had learned about the mask. Two of the guards had chained her to a bed in a locked room at the far end of a dismal corridor. At once she’d missed the cruel teasing of the Ahdath. When they’d turned her over to Jaslyk, she’d met an incarnation of their regiment more to be feared than the soldiers who guarded the Wall. They were called the Crimson Watch, a name given to the Ahdath elite. The crudely jovial soldiers of the Ahdath who’d handed her over to their care had fallen silent during the transfer. One had flashed her a look of regret, muttering to his partner. The other man shook his head. They spoke with surprising deference to the soldiers of the Crimson Watch. The masked men didn’t speak. They waved the Ahdath away.
When they’d chained Sinnia to the bed, her body had tensed in dread. The Claim coiled up in her throat. The scent of blood was fresh in the room. It oozed from every door in the ward, a patina that formed a pattern on the floor. Fear ripened in her mouth.
“Please,” she said, “don’t do this.”
A third guard entered the room, pushing a steel-framed cart before him. It bore a tray of instruments. Torture, she thought. They’ve come to torture me. For a moment, it seemed like a reprieve.
But the largest of the three guards lifted a bizarre contraption from the cart: a thick leather mask with sightless glass eyes that protruded like eyeballs distended from a skull. A long black hose at the back of the mask was attached to a dark green canister on the cart. It appeared to breathe on its own. At the base of the mask were six round nozzles, three to either side.
The guard wheeled the cart closer to the bed where Sinnia lay chained.
She wanted to scream, but the sound died in her throat. She wrestled with the chains they had fiendishly attached to the circlets on her upper arms. One of the guards held her down. The other raised her head so the third could fit the mask over her head.
Her body bucked on the bed. The inside of the mask smelled of horror and fear. It suffocated her. Her breathing constricted, she mumbled the Claim to herself. There would be words, there had to be words, to stop this.
In the name of the One—
In the name of the One, the Merciful, the Compassionate—
Ah, by the powers of the One, where were Arian and Daniyar? Surely they would save her from this … unless somehow they had fallen or been taken at the Ark. She wished she could think of them, pray for them … but in this moment of extremis, she could think only of herself.
She could see through the bulbous eyes of the mask. The guard at the cart flicked a switch on the canister. A terrible gurgling sound came from the hose at the back of Sinnia’s neck. She breathed in sharply, her mouth filling with the acrid taste of smoke. With her first inhaled breath, the nozzles at the base of the mask fastened to her neck. She felt a searing pain.
Inside the mask, she cried out. Her mouth and throat filled with gas. The three men loomed above her.
Burning tears scalded her eyes. When they misted over her skin, the tears seemed to catch fire. Sinnia screamed again. The men didn’t touch her, didn’t tear at her clothes. One of them produced a small bundle wrapped in a leather cover. He watched Sinnia with careful attention. Then he began to write.
He held a book in his hands.
A book that chronicled her torture.
Four days later, she was at the perimeter again. They had gassed her every day since, but when the mask had been removed, Sinnia had recovered consciousness to find herself alone, still chained to the bed by her circlets. Though they monitored her reaction to the gas, no one seemed to be observing her in the cell.
They didn’t know she drew comfort from the circlets that were the secret
