his gloved fingers, watching the boy eat with a ravenous hunger, oblivious to the fact he was tasting the food for poison.
“My needs are simple, Excellency. While you provision your men for the journey ahead, I require a candle’s length of time to read in this room on my own.”
Wafa stopped chewing, his mouth half-open, his amazement clear that here was another who could read.
The Black Khan signaled for the return of his goblet. He tipped it toward the light to study the liquid inside. “And what will you be reading, old friend?” He asked this even though he knew the answer.
The Assassin wanted an hour with the Bloodprint.
“Excellency, if you honor my request, I would offer a gift in exchange.” The Assassin indicated another wall of the chamber. Its shelves were broader and held a selection of treasures displayed in open boxes: gemstones, talismans, astrolabes, sextants. A silver light pulsed from a slender box at the far end of the room.
“What does that box contain?”
“The tokens of the Silver Mage. I … liberated … them from his safehold in Maze Aura. Would you like to take them for your own?”
Rukh fingered the symbol of empire on his hand: the onyx ring carved with a silver rook. It was token enough for him: whatever his reputation, the Prince of Khorasan wasn’t a common thief, though it intrigued him that the Silver Mage had set aside the symbols of his rank. He remembered the other man’s self-contained strength with a scowl, admitting to himself that perhaps the Silver Mage had no need of his tokens at all.
“I have no use for the trifles of the Silver Mage, and I am satisfied with the bargain we have struck. Take your hour, Hasbah. Then I must hasten to Ashfall.”
He looked to Arsalan, his closest adviser, who stood behind Hasbah’s seat, his hand on the pommel of his sword. But Arsalan’s state of alertness was futile. If it came to it, even Rukh’s fiercest commander would not succeed at besting the Assassin.
No one ever had.
A NEST OF SNAKES MADE THEIR PRESENCE KNOWN IN HIS CELL, BUT THEY left the Silver Mage to bleed in peace in the dungeons of the Ark, a desperate place called the Pit. Its blood-smeared walls were riddled with alcoves the Authoritan had converted into cells. No light penetrated from the great hall above to the dungeons that sloped beneath the palace, but some of its passages accessed the air aboveground, an ever-present torment to the Basmachi suffering below. The agonizing sound of Arian’s screams had floated through the passageways during his first week in the Pit, and he had nearly gone mad—powerless to reach her, ablaze with an incandescent fury matched only by his abject desperation. His fingers had scored the walls of his cell, the unyielding muscles of his shoulders bruised by his efforts to break free. He’d gained nothing from those efforts except the terror that followed from hearing Arian’s cries fade away.
Had the Authoritan killed her? Had he given her to the Ahdath? What did she suffer alone in the darkest reaches of the Ark?
He needed to clear his mind to resolve upon a path of escape. But Arian’s anguish made it impossible to succeed. He found himself floundering without agency, bound by the borders of the Pit, his ability to endure worn away. Then after a week had passed, Arian’s screams had ceased—leaving him free to focus on the depravities of the Pit, with none of his torments assuaged.
The humid air carried the stench of boiling flesh to the deepest corners of the pit, a scent further corroded by the odors of waste and blood. Then in the last hour of a man’s strength, a hint of peach blossom would drift through the Pit’s passageways like a promise of salvation. Peach and pomegranate and hope—false promises all.
Daniyar grunted, shifting his body along the wall to the bars that looked out along the passage. A handful of Basmachi were held in the other cells. He’d managed to speak with them over the past few days, learning what he could of the Ark. An emaciated youth with hopeless eyes had been the one to tell him about the healing effects of the loess that coated the walls. He hadn’t believed the boy at first, but after his first lashing, he’d been willing to consider any means of healing his wounds. Each time he was bled by the whip, he rubbed his back against the golden loess. As he did so, his pain decreased and the marks of the whip ceased to throb. When Nevus slashed his palms with a blade, the loess healed his hands in a night.
“It’s the secret of Marakand,” the boy said. “It may be the only one the Authoritan doesn’t know.”
A blessing in a place of despair.
The boy’s name was Uktam, and he’d been imprisoned in the Pit much longer than the others. He was kept alive because he was useful to the Authoritan as an informant against the Basmachi. He’d seen many of his compatriots come and go from the cells, each cursing him as a traitor. Daniyar set his distaste at the boy’s actions aside, as he needed information. So he asked Uktam questions, but shared no intelligence of his own, warned by the others to watch himself when Uktam was summoned to the palace. Not that he needed a warning—the proof of Uktam’s betrayal could be seen on his body. The boy may have been beaten and starved, but his back had been spared the whip.
Daniyar groaned to himself. The loess was less effective with each new flogging he suffered. Night after night, Nevus escorted him to the throne room for a display of the Authoritan’s sadism. It was Nevus who whipped him, a cold satisfaction in his eyes, and Nevus’s arm was powerful. The six-tailed whip was unlike anything Daniyar had experienced. Its filaments seemed to strike his most vulnerable places at once. The tails of the whip were barbed. They scored his skin with dozens of agonizing bites, mocking the strength and endurance he had honed since he’d come to manhood.
Perhaps worse than the whip was his degradation—his punishment had become an entertainment for the court. Ahdath bartered with Nevus to take a turn with the whip. On occasion, pretty young girls from among the Khanum’s doves would plead for a chance to bend him to their will.
Their blows didn’t land with enough force to hurt him. They couldn’t compare to the memory of his first night at the Ark, when the Authoritan had taken the whip into his hands, strengthened by an unholy magic.
Daniyar had tried to summon his knowledge of the Claim to meet the Authoritan’s brutality, until Arian’s screams had shattered the Ahdath’s merriment, and their attention had shifted from him. In that moment, his will had foundered. Chained to the wall, he hadn’t been able to see her. But he’d heard the sounds of Arian being subdued. She had fought the Ahdath like a wild thing, and when she could fight no longer, she had screamed for his deliverance, begging the Authoritan with a furious desperation, pleading with the Khanum to put an end to his torment.
Daniyar hadn’t been able to master himself. He’d shouted at the force of the blows, at the insidious incursions of the whip’s barbed tails. The whip had been devised to inflict maximum damage. At the end of it, he’d hung suspended from his chains, unable to support his own weight, his face wet with sweat and tears, the muscles of his back sectioned by trails of blood.
And with every breath he had summoned, he’d heard Arian’s broken pleading. “Leave him, leave him, take me.”
Better not to have betrayed their feeling for each other before the eyes of the Authoritan, but he couldn’t have done anything differently. If the whip had fallen on Arian instead, he would have gone mad with rage.
