The Bloodprint Read online

  Arian tried to find that reassuring. She thought of Ash hiding in the shadows and pressed Psalm’s sturdy arm—the arm that had always defended the Citadel.

  “Don’t let anything happen to Ash,” she said. “If we can’t trust Ilea, we have no one else as rooted in the Claim. If I do find the Bloodprint, Hira will need her.”

  A cold smile settled on Psalm’s lips, her eyes sharp and canny within the hood she raised over her gray hair.

  “They’ll have to go through me to get to Ash.”

  She rested her hand over Arian’s.

  “Do you think the Black Khan lied? Does the Bloodprint exist?”

  For the briefest moment, Arian detected a trace of wonder in the eyes of the battle-hardened tactician, the Citadel’s foremost General.

  Her reply was soft.

  “My mother always told me it did.”

  Psalm cleared her throat.

  “Then we can still change the future. Take the eastern road, but watch your back.”

  There were rumors that the wars of the Far Range had laid waste to a wide swath of territory that fell between the borders of Khorasan and North Khorasan. Whatever plague had devastated those lands, the Wall had been built to prevent a second encroachment. The men who guarded its battlements were a combat-hardened force known as the Ahdath, warriors of the north. They had never given quarter, nor did their master permit them to surrender.

  The eastern road through Hazarajat would take them to the mountains, through passes that would be snowbound for another three months. It scaled impossible heights to reach the fertile valley that bounded the Authoritan’s territory on the eastern part of its border. Once they struck north into the Authoritan’s lands, Arian and Sinnia would trek west to Marakand, a city north of the Wall, in the hope that some small part of the Black Khan’s tale was true. And that a defence of Hira was possible.

  As they rode down the ramparts of the Citadel, across the moat that provided its first defence, Arian didn’t look back. The countryside ahead would be a mixture of snow-covered plains and dark, rutted tracks, steep brown defiles interspersed with infrequent traces of pasture. They would find peasant farmers and their livestock, as well as stray dogs from a stock known as mastiffs, partly wild, partly hungry for human companionship. All the while, the air would be bright and cold, the sunlight harsh. But the people of Hazarajat would be friendly, she reminded herself.

  And that would be something to set against the miseries of the past year, and the greater losses that had preceded it.

  Arian’s pale eyes tracked the flight of a falcon across the thin, white line of a sky too impoverished even for clouds.

  So Ilea watches over us. Or just watches us.

  Psalm’s warning echoed through her thoughts.

  “You don’t like her, do you?” Sinnia asked, at her side.

  They had left the Citadel behind them in the distance. Ahead on the road, there was silence and muddied snow, and a thin green line that wound ahead. The river. Flowing down to Hira from the east, filled with dirt and debris, well above its seasonal levels. The winter had been long, the snowmelt abundant. The road would continue to climb until they reached the Ice Kill. When they could climb no higher, she would send the khamsa back to Hira.

  “My relationship with the High Companion has never been easy,” Arian said. “We may want the same things, but we see the world in different ways.”

  “She is young to serve as High Companion, but I’ve never doubted her wisdom.”

  “Nor I. I doubt only her motives.”

  Sinnia urged her mount forward over a patch of tricky ground, where stones had loosened under the hard crunch of snow.

  “Do you? Are you sure it was Ilea’s motives that preoccupied you during the Council?”

  Arian glanced at her friend.

  “Speak your mind. I’m not likely to guess what you’re hinting at.”

  “She is young and much too beautiful. She is also something of an exotic, seeing as we have never seen a woman of the Far Range before, nor had reason to believe that any person from beyond the Boundary might have the smallest knowledge of the Claim, let alone rise to become the High Companion. Before Ilea, you were the senior member of the Council, and the most respected. You must have noticed how the Black Khan treated her.”

  A sly note crept into Sinnia’s voice. Arian frowned, shading her eyes against the attenuated light of the sun. A short distance ahead, a shallow line of blue wedged itself against the horizon.

  “The Black Khan is nothing to me.”

  Sinnia laughed aloud. “Isn’t he? He is not so beautiful as your friend from the tavern, but certainly there is a majesty to him, a sleekness. When you stepped forward to the All Ways, he was no longer thinking of Ilea. He touched you.”

  “To stop me from falling.”

  “The way it looked to me, he would have taken any excuse at all to touch you.”

  Something twisted inside Arian. Rukh’s image rose in her mind, the dark hair, the hooded gaze, the insinuating voice.

  “You said yourself he was dangerous.”

  Sinnia reached over and squeezed Arian’s shoulder, her gold circlet catching the light as she moved. Her glance said she was well aware the Black Khan had overstepped his bounds, but she teased Arian, anyway.

  “Dangerous men are the only ones worth knowing. Witness your beautiful friend.”

  “Never mind any of that, Sinnia. What dances against the wind, up ahead? There, do you see it?”

  The blue line Arian had mistaken for the lower edge of the horizon shifted against the wind. It was heading toward them, accompanied by a sound unmistakable in its harshness. The repetitive fall of the lash.

  A slave-chain. Not more than an hour distant from the Citadel.

  These were the lands of the Council of Hira. Arian knew the eastern towns had been taken, but that was in the south of the country. Not here, not in the territory that stretched from Hira to the roof of the world.

  Ilea had been telling her the truth.

  “Ride!” she urged Sinnia. “They’ll see us long before we can reach them. We must use the Claim before they can disarm us.”

  Sinnia caught at her horse. “Arian! We cannot risk the Audacy. We can take the High Road by the river to circumvent the slavers.”

  She flinched from Arian’s incredulous glare.

  “I am not leaving the women of a slave-chain to its misery. Follow me, as you choose.”

  Safanad streaked ahead like the wind for which she was named. Sinnia followed without a second thought.

  Where you ride, I ride, she had once said.

  And that summed up her entire history with Arian. Sinnia might disagree, but she would never turn away from the woman she admired with her whole heart, the woman she considered her sister.

  As she rode, she could see that Arian had forecast the danger correctly.

  The Talisman guards were waiting for them. Half a dozen armed men barricaded themselves behind the women whose chains were now staked to the ground beneath the snow. Sinnia’s arrows were useless. She could not strike without risking the lives of the women. The strategy was designed to engage them in close combat, where they thought the Companions would be helpless.

  Arian rode ahead at a furious pace, standing in her stirrups, her dark hair streaking behind her like a banner of war. Her sword was braced in her right hand, and as she descended upon the slave-chain, the women let out a terrified wailing. They hadn’t heard of the mystic rider freeing women from slavery across the length and breadth of Khorasan. Arian didn’t wait to use her sword. As she reached the slave caravan, the Claim took shape in her mouth.

  A terrible pronouncement issued from her throat, language leaping like flame over the huddled mass of women, a wall of sound that battered the soldiers of the Talisman, sundering their shields.

  Two of the men fell dead at the sound. A third and fourth scrambled into the distance, their booted feet struggling for purchase on the snow. These two fell to S
innia’s calculated aim, their human shields no longer preventing the use of her bow. The remaining two stood their ground.

  They were tall and well built, their beards close-cropped, swords in one hand, short daggers in the other, and their strategy was to unseat the woman who descended upon them like a cataclysm.

  Safanad danced away from a knife thrust at her foreleg, a gesture that enraged Arian further. Words ignited like sparks from her tongue.

  “When the sun is wrapped up in darkness, when the stars fall dispersing, when the mountains are erased and the oceans are aflame, then will you know everything you have wrought.”

  One of the men staggered to his knees, his hands covering his ears. Sinnia leapt from her horse to engage the other. Her wickedly curved scimitar balanced to her strength, she dodged the frantic thrusts of the man’s sword, her blade slicing through his sternum. He fell to the ground without another word.

  Sinnia rode to the front of the caravan. She leapt down from her horse to unstake the iron shafts that secured the slave-chain. As she touched the ground, an arrow whistled through the air.

  It caught her in the shoulder.

  “Sinnia!”

  Arian wheeled about. The surviving Talisman guard bounced to his feet. Instead of using his sword, he flung a loose length of cloth around Arian’s throat and tightened it. She fell to her knees before him. His broad fist struck a blow that wrenched her head to the right. Moving fast, he gagged her first, then secured her wrists and ankles.

  “Boy!” he shouted up the bend in the road. “Bring the irons!”

  Another guard and an undernourished boy descended on the caravan from their hiding place in the brush that covered the bend in the road, and Arian realized the men had staged an ambush.

  Pinned to the ground by an arrow, Sinnia lay defenceless. All she could do was watch.

  The head guard joined the caravan, distinguished by an aigrette on his turban. He kicked at Sinnia with his boot, moving past her to Arian.

  His whip struck, but Sinnia was not the target. It was the boy at his heels with leather cuffs on his wrists.

  “Hazara,” the man spat at him. “Kill the black.”

  He tossed a dagger to the boy, whose blue eyes were set in folds in a face marked with bloody welts. The boy’s nose was running; he wiped it with the back of his hand, the dagger gripped precariously in the other.

  Sinnia recognized him at once. It was the boy they had spared from the slave-chain in Candour.

  Stumbling toward her, he reached down with the dagger.

  Sinnia brushed his feint aside with her unpinned arm, feeling the painful sting of blood against her palm. She steeled herself to meet the next blow. Instead, the boy reached out a tentative hand to her cloak.

  The commander of the Talisman guard strode toward him, flicking his lash against the boy’s face.

  “Worthless Hazara, I’ll do it myself.”

  The boy pointed to the gold circlets bound on Sinnia’s arms.

  The Commandhan slowed.

  “Is that gold? Bring those to me, then kill her.”

  He flicked the boy with his whip again, jolting him out of his thrall. The boy he had called by the race name Hazara was careful not to touch Sinnia’s arm. He moved the circlet sideways so its leather tie was invisible to the Talisman commander. Then he yanked at it. As expected, the circlet didn’t shift.

  The Commandhan lashed him again. Hardened to it, the boy yanked at the bracelet a second time.

  “Use the dagger I gave you.”

  “It’s not wide enough,” the boy said, in his own dialect.

  “Then use my sword, you useless piece of filth.”

  He thrust it into the boy’s hands.

  It was the opening the boy had been waiting for. He belted the dagger at his waist, gripped the Commandhan’s sword in his palm, whirled about in a sudden, quick motion, and swiped the sword across the Commandhan’s throat.

  Taken by surprise, the man jerked forward onto the snow, falling dead.

  Sinnia called a command to her horse. The boy leapt into the khamsa’s saddle, the horse uneasy beneath his attempts at control. With a bloodcurdling cry, he launched himself at the guard who stood over Arian. Swinging sideways from the saddle, he drove the sword into the man’s arm.

  The Talisman guard staggered back but didn’t fall, wrenching the boy from the saddle, beating him down from the horse.

  The boy lay still in the snow.

  “Don’t touch him!” Sinnia screamed. Arian watched, helpless.

  Use the Claim, her eyes pleaded with the younger Companion.

  Sinnia tried. Her voice was weak as it left her throat.

  “I warn you about the blazing Fire. None burn there except the wretched.”

  It wasn’t powerful enough to stop the man, but his movements were sluggish as he kicked the boy over with his boot. He raised his sword for the killing stroke.

  The boy opened his blue eyes and waited.

  When the Talisman guard leaned down, the Commandhan’s dagger in the boy’s hand darted its way to his neck. Rolling over in the snow, the boy evaded the man’s body as it fell. For a moment, he lay still, his breathing harsh. Then he struggled to his knees and cut Arian free, trembling as he loosened the gag from her mouth.

  “Hazara,” Sinnia called. “Help me.”

  The boy flew back to her side. Bracing his knee on Sinnia’s back, he yanked the arrow from her shoulder.

  Blood flowed from the wound. Sinnia staggered to her feet.

  Arian called out to the women.

  “Are there healers among you? Can any of you aid my friend? Here.” She gave the boy the loose cloth she had freed from her neck. “Hold this against the wound, it will staunch the blood.”

  A little dazed, the boy took the cloth from Arian’s hands. Arian moved to free the women, using the Commandhan’s keys to unfasten their shackles. As Sinnia had done with the last caravan, she ripped the netting from the women’s faces as she raced down the length of the chain.

  “Please. We are Companions of Hira. We need a healer.”

  She knew the women would be frightened. Revealing themselves as practitioners of the healing arts earned the death penalty from the Talisman.

  “Please,” she said again, reading one face after another. “I will allow no harm to come to you.”

  She heard the familiar gasps of wonder. Her circlets glinted in the harsh light off the snow.

  “Whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it.”

  A murmur of amazement whispered through the caravan.

  An older woman with fine lines around her eyes and mouth raised her hand. She came forward, her body moving as if still weighted by the chains. She stared at Arian rapt, her mouth agape, her eyes uncomprehending at the sight of the golden circlets.

  “Companion,” she breathed. “Can it be true? Have you been sent to deliver us?”

  “If you continue down this road, you will soon be at Hira. But first, will you help my friend? Can you help her?”

  The woman’s sense of dignity and purpose reasserted itself.

  “My tools were taken by our captors. They tied them to one of the pack horses. If the boy will help me?”

  The boy wasted no time. He searched through the packs for the healer’s belongings. He ran to Sinnia’s side, eager to be of help.

  Worry in every syllable, Arian addressed the women of the caravan.

  “The Talisman have twelve pack horses here. If you leave behind their supplies, riding two to each horse, you will be at the Citadel well before noonrise. Tell the Council of Hira that you have been sent to them for sanctuary by the First Oralist.”

  A second wave of shock quivered through the caravan.

  “The Claim is merciful!”

  “The First Oralist walks among us.”

  “The Talisman will fall.”

  “There is hope for Khorasan.”

  “Our time has come.”

  Arian wished she could share the
ir hope.

  12

  She could promise these women nothing. Except that Ilea would not turn them away. Even if the High Companion sought to move against Arian, her retaliation would not take this form. Not with the entire Council assembled at Hira. Not with the Black Khan in residence.

  Ilea would wish to appear bountiful. She would set her stratagems aside to demonstrate this, though doing so would be another device that served her purpose. It was not upon Ilea’s kindness that Arian relied. Zeb and Mask were at the Citadel. In their lands, they were protectors of the innocent. They would defend the women of the caravan with their lives. Ilea would be able to do no less.

  Arian waited as the healer bound up Sinnia’s shoulder.

  “Will my friend be able to travel?”

  It was as close as she could come to voicing her deep sense of loss at having to part with Sinnia.

  The healer nodded. Her name was Ghotai.

  “Do you travel the eastern road?” she asked Arian.

  “Yes. We thought to take shelter in Hazarajat, the Hazara’s lands.”

  Ghotai shook her head. “We came by that road. The Hazara’s lands are forfeit to the Talisman. Their reach has extended north, well beyond Candour. It would be madness to take that road. No one ventures outside their villages without a Talisman escort.”

  More proof that Arian had been in the south too long.

  If the Talisman had taken Hazarajat, how long could the Citadel hope to hold out?

  “There is no other way.”

  Ghotai hesitated. At her feet, the Talisman commander’s blood snaked a path through the snow. The sight of it seemed to hearten the healer.

  “I served as a healer in Hazara lands for years. The Talisman do not deem them worthy of enslavement. Instead, their people have been massacred, their villages burned. If you are heading east, there is only one place of safety, and only one road by which to reach it. You must take the High Road.”

  Arian frowned. “I don’t understand. The High Road is our path to the east.”

  “I do not mean the pass through the mountains. You may not have lived in this country, so perhaps you do not know its names. The High Road is a name given also to the river. Perhaps you know it as the Tejen. If you take the river, it is said you will find refuge under the Turquoise Mountain, in Firuzkoh.”