Читать книгу The Black Khan - Ausma Khan Zehanat - Страница 14

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.

Gathering himself, he had turned his head to try to glimpse her. His token effort had failed. He’d offered her what comfort he could, speaking in the dialect of Candour, an undertone of the Claim murmuring through his words. “Da zerra sara, I can bear this, but I need you to be strong. I cannot also bear your tears.”

“Jaan,” she had whispered in reply. It was all she’d been able to say. He’d heard the sounds of her struggle, but he couldn’t see the collar being fitted over her throat, suffocating Arian in the cruelest manner possible—the First Oralist, silenced and chained.

Then he’d felt the cool touch of a woman’s hand on his shoulder, her nails trailing through his blood, spreading it across his back in a pattern he couldn’t see. “Collect it,” she said to a servant at her side.

A vial was placed at the base of his spine, its warmth nearly intolerable against his ravaged skin. The Khanum was collecting his blood.

Briefly he closed his eyes.

She moved closer so he could see her, her lead mask reeking of poison. She dragged her bloodied fingers across her lips, staining her white mask red. “You taste better than I imagined.” Then she kissed him on the lips.

What can you tell me of the First Oralist of Hira?” He used the bars of the cell to support his weight, asking the question of Uktam, who was slumped against a wall of his cell.

Uktam’s head lolled in Daniyar’s direction, his eyes bulging from within his hollow skull. He raised a hand and let it fall. “The Khanum keeps her at her side. The collar prevents her use of the Claim. The Khanum has enchanted it somehow.”

Daniyar nodded. Though Uktam told him the same thing every night, he had yet to comprehend the full extent of Lania’s powers.

“She hasn’t been put to the service of the Ahdath?”

The possibility filled him with terror. The Authoritan threatened him with it each time Nevus whipped him, but he hadn’t seen Arian since that first night in the throne room. And Lania had refused to enlighten him, relishing the power of her silence.

He was devastated by the thought of Arian being given to the Ahdath: as the man who’d loved her for a decade, and as the Silver Mage of Candour. The violation of a Companion of Hira was a sacrilege, but he’d learned a critical lesson from the threat: no laws of honor bound either the Authoritan or his consort.

Yet Lania was Arian’s sister. Could she truly bring herself to give Arian to the Ahdath? Without her use of the Claim, Arian was defenseless against them. With the power of speech restored to her, he knew she would bring down the Ark, just as she’d razed the Registan.

No wonder the Authoritan feared her power. No wonder he sought to claim it for himself.

He focused on his questions for Uktam. “Why don’t they take the First Oralist to the throne room?”

Uktam was too weak to shrug. With an effort underscored by the Claim, Daniyar slid his bowl across the passage between the cells. Two of the yellow snakes raised their sleek heads with interest. Daniyar murmured to them; they lowered their heads again.

“Take it,” he said to Uktam. “You need it more than I do.”

Uktam’s fingers scrabbled weakly between the bars. He found the bowl and scooped up the rice it contained. Daniyar let him finish, then asked his question again. Uktam licked the bowl clean before he answered. “I shouldn’t have taken your ration.”

“You’re at the end of your strength.” Daniyar didn’t add that he held something of his own in reserve, despite his nightly sessions in the throne room. Since the Talisman’s ascent, he’d lived a hard, demanding life. He’d spent years honing his skills, testing the reserves of his strength against a desolate landscape. Though his trials at the Ark were brutal, he was confident he would be able to endure them. But if Uktam was an informant, it was wiser to keep this knowledge to himself. “Please,” he said again. “Tell me what you know.”

Uktam considered. “The Khanum is jealous of her sister. She does not wish the Companion of Hira recalled to your mind when she is present.”

“There is nothing they could do with the whip that would cause me to forget her.” That much was common knowledge.

Uktam nodded. “She is well aware. But she has some purpose for your blood.”

“Do you know what that purpose is?”

Uktam stared at the empty bowl as if it were an oracle that could divine the truth.

“Don’t trust him,” another voice whispered from the darkness. “He tells you that which the Khanum wishes you to know.”

Uktam scowled. “I would not betray the Silver Mage,” he said with dignity.

The other prisoner snorted. “You’ve betrayed each one of us in these cells. You’ve been kept alive these months for a reason.”

“And what of you?” Daniyar intervened. “You’ve been here some time yourself.” He needed Uktam on his side.

“A day before you, my lord. Tomorrow they execute me, but this one will still be here.”

Uktam slid the bowl back across the passage to the Silver Mage. His head fell back against the bars. “Even if I lied to you, I follow the Usul Jade. I’m a student of the teachings of Mudjadid Salikh. He trained many generations in the Claim—which is why the Authoritan destroyed him. But what he could not destroy was the flame of knowledge he lit, and now his daughters carry that light forward. With what I owe Mudjadid—my sanity, my life, my unsundered belief in the Claim—I would never betray the First Oralist.”

Daniyar read the truth of it in his words. He hadn’t told these men of his skills as Authenticate; he wanted them to speak to him freely.

And he wondered about Salikh, whose daughters Larisa and Elena had helped Arian to find the tomb that had led her to the safehold of the Bloodprint. Would Larisa and Elena Salikh be willing to aid them again? He kept the thought to himself, the merest hope in his chest.

Uktam was speaking again, and he forced himself to consider the boy’s advice. “You could use the Khanum’s interest to your benefit,” he suggested. “She is taken with more than your blood. You need not endure the whip. I do not know how you bear it.”

Daniyar softened his voice. “You were kind enough to tell me of the loess; it has served to ease my pain. I am grateful to you, Uktam. If you know a course of action I might take, I am willing to hear it.”

“No, my lord!” The cry came from a prisoner Daniyar couldn’t see. “You cannot trust him. You must not trust him. He is the Khanum’s man.”

“Who better, then, to know the Khanum’s mind?” He turned his silver gaze on Uktam. “What does she want?”

This time Uktam managed a shrug. “She wants you, my lord. But you will need to prove yourself to her.”

“And how do you suggest I do that? With the Authoritan’s eyes on us both, and Nevus’s hunger for the whip yet to be fulfilled?”

And my bond with Arian plain for all the world to witness, as we suffer each other’s torments?

“The Authoritan enjoys your pain. You must find a way to turn that to your advantage. You must divide the Khanum from her consort. Then she will rally to your cause.”

My cause is Arian. It will always be Arian.

But if there was a path to Arian through Lania—if Lania could be seduced, if her message to him through Uktam was that she would welcome proof of her powers of enthrallment—he would be a fool not to pursue it when here at last was a chance. A chance to break free of the Pit, and also to discover the reason that Lania hunted his blood.

“What must I do? Speak plainly.”

Uktam’s head lolled on his shoulders. As the boy dropped his tired eyes, Daniyar heard the truth in his voice. Uktam did not deceive him. “You must fight for her,” he said. “You must fight the Ahdath.”