The Bloodprint Page 3

  What was left of such beauty was a single turquoise dome presiding over half-fallen arches. The khamsa cantered into the interior of the courtyard, and there the Companions left them. As fabled as they were, the mares could not enter a holy space.

  The attention of the mob was still on the rescue of their leader from the flames, but Arian was well aware that whatever time was granted to them would be brief. The shouts of the mob were close by. The rising smoke had singed the shrine’s pillars.

  They reached the silver doors without incident. Here Arian took a moment to contemplate the beauty of what she beheld. The Talisman had removed the faience above and around the arch that framed the doors, erasing the written word wherever possible. But they could not erase the flourishes on the doors themselves without breaching the shrine’s security.

  Beyond these doors, beneath the turquoise dome, was a relic that appeared insignificant at first glance: a dusty, ancient garment. Yet it was something that few deemed themselves worthy to gaze upon. Its power lay in its history. For any man who laid claim to the mantle of the Cloak, laid claim to the inheritance of the One. And the legend of the Cloak favored only men. No woman had breached the Shrine before this day.

  Overwhelmed by a sense of history, Arian paused to kiss the inscription. Beside her, there were tears in Sinnia’s eyes.

  When she murmured the coda known only to the Oralists, the doors gave way.

  Deep in its secluded interior, a window set at a great height allowed shafts of sunlight to pierce the gloom. Here the room’s beauty was intact. The lower half of the great walls were paneled in the green marble of Helm. A cool spray of lapis lazuli tiles lined the upper gallery, their floral motifs entwined in a forest of blues and greens. Upon a plain marble stand in the center of the room, a simple wooden box reposed.

  Behind the stand, the Immolan’s guard stood waiting.

  There were tears in the eyes that echoed the color of the marble. The hand that held his sword was trembling.

  “You cannot be here,” he whispered through shaking lips, the tears seeping into his beard. “This is a sacred place. You must not be here.”

  Now Arian and Sinnia raised their hoods over their hair, until all they revealed of themselves were their faces.

  “I come from Hira as an enemy of the Talisman.”

  The Talisman guard shook his head from side to side.

  “You must leave,” he begged them. “I do not wish to harm you.”

  In a gesture of the deepest respect, Arian brought her arms together before her chest. She bowed as she did so.

  “Akhundzada. Your work here is done. You have been the Cloak’s guardian for many long years, bearing this burden alone. It is no longer yours to bear.”

  The sword wavered in the man’s hand.

  “How do you know me?” he whispered. “How can you release me?”

  “Your people are known to the Sahabah. You have upheld the law, you have not transgressed it. You shall know neither fear nor grief.”

  The words were a formula Arian knew the man would recognize.

  His sword clanged down to the marble floor. He sank to his knees.

  “How—”

  Arian waited no longer. “I need the key.”

  Without further hesitation, the last descendant of the guardians of the Cloak took the small silver key from the lace he had tied around his neck. As he pressed it into Arian’s hand, it still held the warmth of his skin.

  With a ragged breath, Arian fitted the key into the lock.

  The catch gave way with a groaning sound. Arian pried the wooden lid loose with her fingers. She beheld for the first time what no one else had seen in centuries, not even the Akhundzada. The soft brown folds of the Cloak.

  It smelled of honey.

  These centuries later, the scent of honey still clings to its folds.

  The dark cloth was coarse and heavy, yet in Arian’s fingers it felt like silk.

  Nothing in the years of Talisman rule had broken her, but at this moment Arian wept. And Sinnia and the Akhundzada wept with her.

  A sharp object struck her shoulder with force. The box fell from her hands, its contents spilling forth. With a cry of horror, the Akhundzada leapt forward, just catching the Cloak before it tumbled to the ground. The sound of his dismay filled the small chamber.

  Arian spun around, the reflexes of her body readying themselves for combat, even as her mind shied away from the thought of bloodshed in this place.

  A boy confronted her.

  The blue-eyed boy from the morning’s slave-chain.

  His face wet, he howled like a wolf as he leapt at Arian, his scarred hands empty of weapons as he sprang. Before he could reach her, a flick of the whip Sinnia carried at her waist coiled around his ankles, bringing him down. He landed on his elbows with jarring force.

  “This time shall I kill him?” Sinnia asked.

  “No! Blood cannot be spilled inside the shrine!”

  The Akhundzada spoke in a tortured voice. He rose to his feet with infinite care, the Cloak cradled in his arms, a look of disbelief on his battle-scarred features. He spoke to the boy.

  “This is the Sacred Cloak. Have you lost your wits? You cannot kill in its presence.”

  Arian watched the boy’s face. And when awareness came, she saw the nature of his tears transform from rage into awe, and from awe to the wonder of ignorance. He reached out a dirty hand toward the Cloak. With a shout of consternation, the Akhundzada kicked his hand away.

  “I accept the Sahabah as witnesses from Hira, but you are a filthy mongrel.”

  The boy’s hand fell, his chest heaving with silent sobs. In a surreptitious gesture, he tried to rub it clean against his tattered tunic, his head lowered in shame.

  Arian knelt before the boy. She loosed the laces on the waterskin she carried to pour water over his unresisting hands. His head came up in surprise when she took his hands within her own and dried them with her cloak. She used the same damp corner of her cloak to wipe the dirt and humiliation from his face. Her hands gentle, she raised him to his feet, feeling the deep trembling of his bones beneath her touch.

  This boy had never been touched except in anger, and certainly not by a woman.

  She turned to the Akhundzada, and in that moment, everything she kept disguised as a hunter on the trail of Talisman slave-chains appeared in the dignity of her carriage, and in the clarity of her eyes. Her cloak fell away from her arms. The radiance of her circlets illuminated the chamber.

  She took the Sacred Cloak from the Akhundzada’s hands, and despite the guardian’s gasp of protest, pressed its folds to the boy’s scarred brow.

  “We are none of us impure before the One.”

  And to the boy she said, “You are not filthy. You are not a mongrel. You are not of the Talisman; you are not unworthy.”

  She slipped the Sacred Cloak over the boy’s shaking frame.

  “This Cloak belongs to the orphans of this world. It exists for their protection.”

  It was too much. The boy couldn’t bear kindness when he had never known any. He returned the cloak to the Akhundzada with hands that shook with fright. Then he worked his ankles free from the grip of Sinnia’s whip. He fled backward from the small chamber, his face white beneath its windburn.

  “You may place it in the box.”

  There was too much to teach here, Arian realized. It was the work of decades, not moments.

  Arian bowed to the guardian again. The box, at least, would make the journey to Hira.

  “Companion,” the man murmured. “The Talisman are at the outer gates, let me hide the box.”

  “Would that I could, Akhundzada, but the time for secrets is over. Your life may be spared, however, if you return to the Immolan’s side. Go now with haste.”

  “They’ve come for us,” Sinnia said grimly.

  “We’ll make our stand at the top of the hill.”

  Arian worried not for herself but for Sinnia. This was the first time she had ex
posed her friend to such danger. For a fleeting moment, she considered whether she had been reckless in her pursuit of the Cloak. She opened her mouth to apologize, but Sinnia spoke first.

  “I wish you wouldn’t worry about me.” Her voice caught in her throat. “What you dare, what you attempt—the least I can do is stand fast by your side.” A corner of her mouth tipped up. “And perfect the aim of my arrows.”

  Arian squeezed Sinnia’s hand.

  The mob followed at the heels of the Immolan. No longer subdued by the presence of messengers from Hira, the Immolan rode at the head of a column of fighters, his face and beard blackened by smoke. Though the mob around him called for blood, his face betrayed no emotion save for a certain brittle calculation.

  They met at the top of the overlook, the pillaged grasslands of Candour spread vast and wide below them.

  “What do you want, Companion? What do you seek in the lands of the Talisman?”

  She had underestimated the Immolan. The leader of the Talisman spoke in the accents of an educated man. His book-burning purges could not be attributed to a veneration of ignorance.

  Arian passed the box that held the Sacred Cloak to Sinnia. This gave her the freedom to uncover her hair, and to bare the insignia of the Companions—the two gold tahweez tied to her upper arms.

  “By the last reckoning of the Council at Hira, Candour does not belong to the Talisman. It belongs to the people of Candour. To all the free people of Khorasan.”

  The Immolan smiled. It was not a smile to encourage a feeling of safety.

  Arian grasped that he was comfortable. He believed he had nothing to fear from the power of the Claim. As little as he knew of it, perhaps he disbelieved it entirely.

  “You are a woman, but I permitted you to speak in public. I permitted you to wander at will through the streets of Candour as a mark of respect to the Council, but you possess no authority in this city. I suggest you and your lackey retreat to Hira, while you still may be sure of a welcome. After you have given me the box.”

  She met his gaze calmly, motioning to Sinnia for the box. With smooth, practiced movements, she withdrew the cloak from its resting place and held it up to the bracing light of day. The cries of the mob dwindled into silence.

  And then the sky was riven.

  To a murmur of hushed awe, Arian slipped the Cloak over her own shoulders.

  It was a challenge to everything the Talisman had taught the mob. That women were dirty, despoiled, defiling everything they touched. That they were to be kept locked up, chained away from sunlight and gardens and fresh air, serving the men of Khorasan in whatever way the Immolan deemed fit.

  There is no one but the Talisman. And so the Talisman command.

  Arian understood the mob for what it was. A hungry and war-ravaged people, destitute in knowledge, impoverished by ignorance, victims of the Talisman as much as the slave caravans herded to the north, stealing away the women who had lost the protection of their families.

  Years of Talisman warfare had hardened these people. When she looked into their faces, trying to read something other than ugliness, Arian wondered if it had destroyed them.

  Then she heard the whispers.

  “She is bound by the tahweez.”

  “She wears the Sacred Cloak.”

  “It must be the legend.”

  She raised her voice without effort.

  “The Talisman have no authority over you. If the Immolan were your legitimate representative, he would be wearing the Sacred Cloak, not I.”

  Her pale eyes searched their faces, Sinnia tense at her side. She had drawn none of her weapons, but the moment couldn’t last.

  “What is their talisman?” she challenged them. “A bloodstained page? Whose blood? What page? Do you know even so little as this? They have robbed you of your history, your memories. Now you have burned to ash the final traces of your heritage. Are they right to keep you in darkness? Do you prefer the Age of Ignorance?”

  A restless murmur passed through the crowd. Arian’s faultless vision caught sight of the boy at the edge of it. She wished him well away from the violence about to ensue, but it was too late to see to his safety now. She pressed on.

  “Do you prefer a life of cruelty and coldness to the warmth and companionship of your women? What right do the Talisman have to enslave those whom you love?”

  “They take only the women who do not obey the law,” a man shouted. “The women no one wants, the widows and the orphaned.”

  Arian straightened her back in the saddle. This was almost the moment. The reverence for the Cloak was transforming into something else. Anger, wretched and cold.

  “The widowed and orphaned are your most sacred charge,” she said gravely. “If they are cast off, is it not because the Talisman have killed their protectors?”

  Had Daniyar been right? Did the people of Candour follow the Talisman because they had no other choice? Or had they adopted the Talisman doctrines as law because they found comfort in the Talisman’s narrowness of vision?

  “You have the right to knowledge,” Arian told them. “You have the right to all of your traditions. You have the right to the history of your forebears.”

  The mob was wavering on the edge now. Arian had donned the Sacred Cloak without setting herself aflame. She wore the golden circlets they had venerated since the dawn of their settlement in these valleys, circlets inscribed with the written word. And if she was a Companion of the Order at Hira, that meant she was also an Oralist. There was no rank more honored among the people of Khorasan.

  “The written word is corrupt,” another man called out from the back of a Talisman war horse. “It sows corruption in the land; it leads us astray. We have cleansed the earth of it.”

  “You have burned the libraries of the south,” Arian answered wearily. “And condemned yourselves to darkness. That is all you’ve done.”

  She took a long, controlled breath. Holding up both her palms to the sky, she brought forth the power of the magic. This was the gift of the Oralist, these golden tones that rose and fell in perfectly measured rhythms, this lost language of the Claim, recognized by all upon utterance, known by only a few.

  “If all the trees on earth were made into pens, and the ocean supplied the ink, augmented by seven more oceans, still the words of the One would not run out.”

  The men on the war horses covered their ears with a synchronous cry. The group of followers at their heels stayed motionless, held by the power of the words, the magic of the incantation. They swayed at its rhythm, staring up at Arian as if they’d never seen a woman.

  And they hadn’t. Not a woman with her long hair loose and free, her face unveiled, her bare arms gilded with sacred inscriptions.

  The Immolan leaned forward in his saddle to grab Arian by the throat, choking off the sound of her words.

  “Harlot,” he rasped at her. “You will give me the Cloak, then I will find a use for you.”

  An arrow whistled through the air catching the man at his jugular vein. As a bright stream of blood erupted from his neck, pandemonium set in among the Talisman riders. The spell of the Claim shattered against the sight of blood.

  “Ride!” a man’s voice shouted from the rear. It was Daniyar. “Ride like the khamsin wind!”

  He’d said he wouldn’t help her, yet here he was at the moment of utmost need.

  He’d killed a widely feared leader of the Talisman just for putting a hand to her throat. A swell of joy, quickly tamped down, surged in her veins.

  He had come for her.

  Would he come with her?

  As she and Sinnia spurred the khamsa forward, she spared a thought for the boy.

  With Sinnia’s aid, she had freed many of Khorasan’s women from the slave-chains. She had convinced the last descendant of a long line of guardians to part with the Sacred Cloak on the basis of no more than the circlets bound about her arms.

  And she had won a sign of loyalty from the man who had yielded her nothing in her long w
ar against the Talisman, the man who had buried the memory of their days among the manuscripts of Candour, turning his talents to the needs of the Talisman leadership.

  She had loved him, cursed him, and forgotten him.

  He had sent her to find the treasure under the blue dome on her own, consigning her to a death unmourned. But he’d saved her from the Immolan in the end.

  It isn’t as I feared, then. I haven’t destroyed all there was between us.

  With everything she had gained, she was riding from Candour victorious.

  But the memory of the Akhundzada’s tears, and her last sight of the boy abandoned to the vagaries of a Talisman mob, reminded her—if she had forgotten—that her victories came at a price. When she turned to look back from a greater distance, expecting Daniyar to be riding at her heels, Sinnia echoed her thoughts.

  “No,” the Companion from the Negus said. “The beautiful one did not follow.”

  A price she had now paid twice.

  5

  “Why does he leave you alone and forsaken on this road?” Sinnia asked, some time later. “I do not mistake his desertion for disinterest.”

  Arian glanced over at Sinnia, who had fastened the box that held the Sacred Cloak to her back with a set of ropes, not daring to uncover it or wear it, an honor she seemed to believe was reserved for the First Oralist.

  “He does what he thinks is right. I regret that doesn’t mean he trusts me.”

  “How could he not trust you? Doesn’t he know who you are? You said he was a friend.”

  The words held an undercurrent of outrage. To Sinnia, Arian epitomized all that was best about the Council of Hira. Through the months they had ridden together, Arian had been strong, firm, determined—and unfailingly kind. That anyone who knew her could doubt her was something Sinnia took as a personal affront.

  “Not all friendships are like ours.”

  And her history with Daniyar was too painful for Arian to share.