The Bloodprint Read online

  Dedication

  For Ayesha, Irfan, and Kashif

  with so much love it’s inconceivable . . .

  (and that does mean what we think it means).

  Siblings, best friends, and accomplices

  in miracles, shenanigans, and crimes.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  Acknowledgments

  Cast of Characters

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Maps

  1

  Seven. Eight. Six.

  Arian traced the numbers in the sand. She was crouched behind a dusty ridge, surveying the land ahead. The wide, flat plains extended in every direction, broken in places by sparse shrubs, the faintest traces of greenery and life. She passed her field glasses to the coal-skinned woman perched to her right.

  “Do you see it?”

  “Yes. Four Talisman. Two at the front, two at the back. And a boy who takes the tally.”

  “Yes.” Arian’s voice was thoughtful. “They beat him nearly as much as they beat the women.”

  The other woman stretched to her full height. She summoned the horses with a low whistle.

  “It doesn’t seem to have taught him any kindness. His whip is as swift and furious as theirs. What is your judgment, Arian?”

  Arian was the older of the two women, also the more seasoned. She carried the senior rank. Companion. First Oralist.

  “We do what we always do with slave-chains—we break them. Get ready to ride, Sinnia.”

  Through the eerie quiet and the dust, the khamsa mares approached. Both women mounted, cloaks thrown back, arms bared to reveal the gold circlets they wore.

  Arian spurred her black horse to the left, her green cloak stirring in the wind. She nodded to the slavers below. “Let’s not give them warning. Let’s fly.”

  They descended down the ridge, the khamsa sure-footed, hungry for speed. The thunder of their hooves was swallowed by the sand, little whorls of dust rising into the sun.

  Soon they were spotted by guards at the rear of the slave-chain. The guards turned, braced themselves in a synchronized movement, bringing up their swords. Sinnia let loose two arrows, aiming for the neck.

  The guards fell. A startled cry rose from the long line of women, robed in the sorrowful blue of dusk, their pale eyes tasting light for the first time that day. The women were chained together in pairs, and now Arian and Sinnia parted at the rear to outpace the column on either side. The tally-taking boy with the whip sprang into Arian’s path, his crop glancing off the flanks of the black horse.

  “Take him,” Sinnia shouted, but Arian left the boy. The man at the head of the slave-chain was a more formidable target. Clearly battle-tested, he had gained the saddle of his war horse at the first sound of unrest. He used his shield, parrying the thrust of Arian’s quick, silver daggers. He was too big for her to match in direct combat so she feinted beneath the outthrust of his sword to slice through the girth on the flanks of his horse. When the saddle slipped, the horse stumbled under its rider’s weight. The slave handler went down, his foot caught in the stirrup as the horse bolted. Sinnia’s arrow took him in the distance.

  That left one, apart from the boy.

  The man was on his knees before Sinnia. She lashed the man’s hands behind his back with a thick fold of softened leather. Then she spooled out the strips of leather and staked them in the hard, cold ground. The boy rallied to his master, brandishing the only weapon at his disposal, but a flick of Arian’s wrist sent his crop into the dust. She held up a hand to motion him to stillness, and as she did, the sun glinted off the gold circlet on her upper arm. A murmur of astonishment whispered through the slave-chain at the sight of it.

  The boy, scrawny and dirty in his tattered rags, fell back from his master, his blue eyes bright in a wind-reddened face.

  With slow, considered movements, Arian slipped to the ground while Sinnia unhooked the ring of keys from the belt tied at the slave master’s waist. One by one, she unlocked the iron rings that had bound the long row of women to the slave-chain and each other. As Sinnia moved up and down the ranks of the women, she saw scarred wrists, broken fingers, bruised arms, and shadowed, weary faces emptied of expectation.

  She touched each woman with a soft word and a kind gesture, and as she passed down the line, she ripped the dust-blue netting from each face, freeing the women’s skin and eyes to the brush of wind and sun. Muted cries followed in her wake.

  “This is the legend,” the women whispered back and forth. “It cannot be real.”

  Arian pushed back her hood, her dark hair falling loose about her shoulders. The familiar gasp of surprise followed her action as she came to stand before the slave master.

  He turned his bearded, sunburned face up to hers, his eyes narrowed against the sight of skin and hair uncovered, the gold circlets closed about Arian’s upper arms with leather ties, in the manner of the Companions of Hira.

  She had done this many times before, but Arian still took a breath to fortify her courage before she spoke.

  “Do you know who I am, slave master?”

  He seemed stunned by the sight of her, straight-backed with confidence, unfettered. He struggled to speak.

  “How have I offended, Companion? Why did you kill my men?”

  He spoke the Common Tongue with the guttural accent of his native dialect.

  “Why have you chained these women?” she asked by way of answer. “Where were you taking them?”

  The man looked angry. Arian felt the tension of the boy who stood poised behind her, his mouth agape at the sight of Arian’s hair. She felt a twinge of empathy. The boy was unloved, abandoned, enslaved. He would be used until broken, then discarded, no fate for a child to face. Pursuing the slave-chains was Arian’s means of disrupting that fate.

  The man on his knees studied her. “Do you not know the laws of this country? These women have no guardians, no homes. They pollute the public square with their hands held out for alms.”

  “Because you killed their men and their children,” Arian concluded.

  The slave master tried to struggle to his feet. With a gesture she sketched with her hand, Arian sent him to his knees again.

  “Instead of feeding them, you enslaved them, and you take them elsewhere, far from their homes, for some deadlier purpose. What purpose, slave master? I wish to know it.”

  The man’s face darkened. As with all the men she had dealt with before this one, Arian could read his anger in the rigidity of his limbs, just as she could feel his urge to str
ike and strike hard.

  Arian pitied him his anger.

  “I do not answer to you, Companion. I serve the Immolan.”

  Arian rubbed her forehead, then turned to her friend. “Have you finished, Sinnia?”

  “I have.”

  The blue-robed women gathered in little clusters behind Sinnia.

  “What do you want to do with this one?” Sinnia prodded the boy.

  Arian’s eyes found the boy, read something in his face, then glanced at the women.

  “I do not think this man will prove to be any different than the others.” She motioned to the pack horses that accompanied the slave-chain. “My sisters, take what you wish from these horses, and flee from here as quickly as you can. Find your families, but do not head east. These men have taken the eastern road and everything that lies beyond it.”

  The women scattered at her words, the slave master watching the dismantling of his supplies with impotent rage.

  “Haramzadah!” He shouted the filthy epithet at the boy. “Is this how you serve me? I should flay you alive!”

  The threat touched something inside Arian.

  “You think I would let you?” she asked, her voice cool. “Do you think I would leave you alive to visit any more pain on this boy? Sinnia.”

  Before the boy could speak, his master’s blood was on the sand, startling a bewildered sob from the boy’s throat. Gently, Arian touched the boy’s shoulder, forgetting for a moment that he would flinch. Fluid leaked from his eyes and nose. He rubbed it aside with his dirty hands.

  “He kept you, so you were grateful,” she told him. “But this was not kindness to you. When you had served your short life of labor, he would have killed you in the street.” She motioned at the women who’d fled in all directions. “Nor was that kindness, to wreak violence upon the helpless. Take your freedom,” she told him. “Find what happiness you can with it.”

  He stared back at her. Perhaps he had heard of the Companions, heard of their magic, and waited to see if she would use it against him. But there had been no call to use the Claim, no point in trying to persuade the guards or the boy with the magic she’d been blessed with, no sense in reworking their understanding of the Tradition. It was lost now, all of it. When the lands of the Far Range had been devastated by war, all of it had been lost. The most that she and Sinnia could hope for was this continued disruption of the slave-chains.

  She had killed many men in this effort.

  And did not regret it.

  But she would leave the boy with blue eyes. The boy had raised his crop and his voice, he’d shown no more mercy than he’d been shown, and if left to himself, he would resort to cruelty again. Yet she could sense the innocence of the boy, the bewilderment of his blind obedience, his hunger for something else.

  Arian hungered for it, too. Because unlike the boy, she had felt it once. Not now. Not in the lands she had once roamed freely, where cruelty and violence were all there was.

  We live in the age of secrets and fear.

  We live in the Age of Ignorance.

  She searched for one item in the slave master’s pack, her hands careful and thorough. The boy did not leave. He watched her helplessly, sobs shaking his slight frame, until her search uncovered the Talisman flag, the only flag flown in these lands.

  Sketched on the field of the flag was a book, opened to two facing pages.

  It was far from a symbol of literacy.

  The book’s blank pages were marked with blood.

  And the Talisman fist had set its message on fire.

  Arian suited symbol to action. She burned the flag, planting it in the ground beside the body of the slave master. She felt no contempt for the dead, but the pity she afforded them was of a lesser shade than her feeling for their victims.

  The boy had stopped crying, yet remained. As she and Sinnia drew their cloaks close around their naked arms, he raised a dirty fist at them.

  “You’ll know blood and loss before this day ends.”

  “Boy,” she said softly. “There is more to life than blood and loss. May you find peace in their stead.”

  He wouldn’t, she knew. Who in these lost lands of Khorasan knew peace anymore? Who knew safety or truth, or the innermost kindling of joy?

  These were the days of the Talisman fist.

  The fist that crushed everything to dust.

  2

  Arian looked up at the sound of a cry on the wind. Sinnia raised her left arm, clothed at the wrist in a gauntlet. In a moment, a falcon had descended to alight on Sinnia’s wrist.

  Sinnia read the message gripped in its talons with a grim look. She spoke the name Arian had anticipated at the falcon’s first cry, a name Arian never heard without a sense of foreboding.

  “Ilea. The High Companion has summoned us to Hira.”

  Arian’s heart misgave her. Ilea’s Summons meant censure and disparagement. Rarely had the Council offered her encouragement.

  She did not want to go.

  She could not disobey.

  She scanned the dull hills of the surrounding countryside. The blue-robed women were specks in the distance, fleeing from the ruins that were Arian’s destination.

  Sinnia slowed her mare. “Do you not intend to heed the Summons?”

  “I came here for the Cloak. I will not leave without it.”

  “We will not have as easy a time of it inside the walls of Candour,” Sinnia cautioned. “The slave-chains in the city are guarded by whole companies. They will be heavily armed. Swords, maces, fire lances.”

  But Arian knew that none of these could stand against the power of the Claim, the power that sustained her campaign against the Talisman. Sinnia had been at Arian’s side for months now. She was a trusted friend who obeyed Arian’s orders with diligence and resolution, if not without question. And Arian had learned to welcome her questions. They spoke of a mind unconstrained by fear. Yet, it wasn’t the exchange of equals. Sinnia knew nothing of the forbidden knowledge Arian carried inside her head because knowledge, like love, was a weapon. It was too dangerous a burden to share. If that made her seem remote in lieu of a greater closeness, it was something Arian could accept.

  “The Talisman have taken Candour,” Sinnia continued. “Is that not a fight best abandoned?”

  “I will not surrender the women of Candour. We will move on to Hira once we have the Cloak.”

  “What of its guardians? The Ancient Dead?”

  “None that I know of survive. No, the Sacred Cloak is under Talisman guard, nothing more. And they dare not touch it or bring it to light. They fear its power even as they use it to strengthen their legitimacy.”

  “Then how can you hope to retrieve it from their stronghold?”

  “The Blue Shrine isn’t a Talisman stronghold. It will yield its secrets to us.”

  Sinnia was unconvinced. Sinnia was at best a minor Oralist, with scant knowledge of the Claim or its powers. She had been selected as Arian’s adjutant by Ilea, the highest member of their Order. She could not know the things known to Ilea and Arian, the deeper traditions buried beneath the High Tongue, the sacred language known only to the Oralists, nor the magic and power of its rites.

  Arian couldn’t reassure her friend, much as she wished to. She could only show her.

  She nudged her horse, Safanad, the steadiest mare of the khamsa, on a straight course to the ruined city’s gates.

  “Keep your arms covered but your head bare,” she reminded Sinnia.

  There was no idle decoration about either woman. That they were mounted would be cause enough for disturbance—women didn’t ride in Talisman territory. They covered their heads, their faces, their bodies. Their voices were silenced, oftimes by a Talisman dagger, while others who survived were shackled and sent away. And though Arian had been raiding the trains for months, the destination of the slave-chains was still unknown to her. She hoped coming here would bring her closer to the truth.

  A crowd had gathered about the old gates. These gates had p
ossessed other names once, names rich in beauty. Gate of the Pomegranate. Gate of the Apricot. Gate of the Poppies. Now they were in disrepair, ravaged like the city by centuries of war. The Talisman were the last in a long line of despoilers, the victims the same in every era:

  Women.

  Children.

  Joy.

  She brushed the thought of the boy aside—the chin that trembled, the blue eyes that had questioned her actions. The spies of the Talisman would reach their masters quickly, and if the boy chose not to seize his freedom, he would soon find a new master, whose fist would bludgeon just as well, whose crop would rise over his shoulders a thousand times a day. He would drink when his master had finished drinking and would be fed from the remnants of his master’s plate.

  If at all.

  In the Age of Ignorance, the Talisman held a monopoly on food supplies. The rest of Khorasan was gripped by a famine created by the Talisman, rugged and fierce warriors whose code determined who would live, who would die, who would eat, who would starve, while the banner of their bloodlust flew before their hordes, each orchard, each fig tree guarded by the sword of a petty and joyless tyrant.

  Sinnia was tense beside her as they rode down the main thoroughfare of the ancient capital, so long ago festooned with fruit trees. Everything about the city was brown or gray—the streets, the worn shopfronts, the derelict houses, each flying a Talisman flag. A crowd composed of wild-eyed boys and belligerent young men followed the course of their horses.

  As the road climbed to meet the horizon, the blue dome of the shrine spread a marbled glow across the lower half of the sky. More men gathered, their faces shadowed beneath their turbans.

  Sinnia’s dark skin was glowing with beads of sweat. The young Oralist was afraid, a thought that awakened Arian’s compassion. She was so bent on her own purposes that she seldom stopped to consider the cost to Sinnia.

  “You need not fear. The Oralists have never traveled a land without friends.”

  But Sinnia was pointing to the burned-out shell of a building behind the shrine.

  “They’ve destroyed it,” she said. “The Library of Candour.”

  That was only the first of our losses.

  Arian didn’t say as much aloud. Sinnia had come to her in recent months. In the decade that had passed before, Arian had traveled with great difficulty through towns and villages that had fallen to the Talisman, while further west, the Empty Quarter had been seized by the Rising Nineteen. Sinnia didn’t know that from the mountains to the east, there was nothing other than silence. Sinnia came from the lands of the Negus in the south, well beyond the Empty Quarter.