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.”
“COME WATCH ME, SISTER.” THE KHANUM OF BLACK AURA SEATED HERSELF on a golden stool whose seat was inlaid with pearls. It was placed in front of a pearl-encrusted mirror before a table that held an apothecary’s treasure in colored jars, a mixture of paints and ointments and dozens of sweet-smelling oils. Filmy curtains stirred in the breeze from a pair of windows that looked out over Black Aura. Sentries patrolled the ramparts in the distance, but this side of the Ark was spared the grisly remains of prisoners or the stench that hung over the square.
Layers of blues shadowed an evening sky that blossomed with clusters of stars. Now that the Authoritan had finished for the day with Arian, a fragile peace existed between the sisters.
‘Black Aura Blue,’” Lania said with a smile. “The name of a song my doves sing to the Ahdath in the evenings, a song of our twilight skies.”
Arian knelt on the ground beside her sister. When they were alone together like this, Lania removed her collar. She had no need to fear Arian’s use of the Claim: Daniyar’s life was bought with her compliance. Then too, Lania was gifted with her own magic, a dark sorcery she conjured to keep Arian in her place.
Now Arian pondered the opposite fates of the daughters of their house, daughters who were gifted in the Claim. They had been taught by parents who cherished the written word, linguists who had curated their own small scriptorium, guarding a treasury of manuscripts. When the Talisman had come to their door to proclaim the law of the Assimilate, her parents and brother had been murdered, and Lania stolen away. Only Arian had been saved by her mother’s quick action and by her deliverance into the hands of a Talisman captain named Turan. Turan had come to her aid again during her pursuit of the Bloodprint. And he had paid the price for riding at her side, when Lania—with her powers as the Khanum—might have chosen to save him.
But short of the darkest sorcery, Lania could not revive the dead. If Arian’s struggles with the Claim had taught her nothing else, this much she’d witnessed for herself. And she wondered with a pang of dread how Lania’s distortion of the Claim had caused her sister to lose her way.
Now Lania sat before her mirror, shorn of her intricate headdress, her silky hair brushed over her shoulders, her face bare of the wraithlike mask. Her slender fingers picked up a brush. She dipped it in a pot of lead inscribed with thick-lined calligraphy. It was charmed with incantations that promised power and protection. She settled in to paint her face.
“Why?” Arian asked. “Why do you wear this mask? Your face is beautiful unadorned.”
“You compliment yourself, sister,” Lania said coolly. “The mask is my shield. It warns my enemies to be wary of my power.”
They studied each other in the mirror. They shared the same felicitous arrangement of their bones, the same delicate hollows at the temple, the same quick mannerisms captured by a tilt of the head. Lania’s green eyes were flecked with spears of gold; Arian’s were darker and deeper. And where Lania’s pale skin had been unnaturally preserved by the mask, Arian’s bore the glow of frequent exposure to the elements. They looked of an age, but on closer inspection, one would never be taken for the other. And from the grim twist of Lania’s bare lips, she wasn’t pleased by the contrast.
Whereas Arian’s heart ached to find the mirror of her sister in herself.
She tried to urge Lania again, seeking a point of connection. “Come with me, Lania. Escape this place with me. Help me save you. Help me save myself.”
She’d made the same plea each night, seeking a means to return to her companions, desperate for deliverance from the misery of the Ark, wanting to find herself clasped in the safety of Daniyar’s arms. And to embrace him in turn, cleaving hard to his strength. She knew that she had squandered the time she’d been blessed to be given at his side, a lesson too painful to bear. She took an audible breath, reminding Lania that she waited for an answer to her plea.
With one last stroke of her brush, Lania’s mask was in place. The illusion of familiarity vanished: a stranger’s face looked back at Arian, remote and formidable with secrets.
“What do you imagine I need saving from?” Lania asked idly. “I am queen of an empire. Why would I seek deliverance?”
Arian hesitated. This was a new response. Though Lania fussed over Arian like a pet, she rarely provided answers. The question Arian’s words had brought to light might yet move Lania against her, a risk she had decided to accept. As it stood now, her future encompassed only two possibilities: her continued captivity or her public execution. To free herself from the misery of the Ark, she needed Lania to give herself away—to give her something she could use. To put an end to Daniyar’s suffering and the daily misery it evoked.
Lania’s silky reproach interrupted the racing of her thoughts. “I have many gifts, Arian, but reading your mind isn’t one of them.”
Arian forged ahead, sketching the outline of a plan. “You are queen because you are consort to the Authoritan. Do you not find your duties … onerous?”
Repellent, she wanted to say. Grievously injurious to Lania’s spirit, and hardly bearable to one once destined to be a Companion of Hira.
Lania understood her meaning without her judgment being voiced. Within the painted mask, her tilted eyes were cold. “The Authoritan does not importune me. He is beyond such desires.”
What Arian had witnessed in her decade of liberating slave-chains told her this couldn’t be true. She had hunted every kind of man, from the pious to the sadistic, and they had all desired to inflict their lust upon women. And in some cases, on children. The thought reminded her of Sartor—and of Wafa, stolen by the Black Khan.
Convinced of her conclusions, she asked, “If the Authoritan does not desire women, why does he barter with the Talisman for slaves? What of your dovecote? What of the Tilla Kari?”
What she most wanted to ask was if Lania would stand with her against the Talisman’s enslavement of women, given her firsthand knowledge of their trade.
Lania took her time choosing another pigment from the colored jars. This time she applied a searing crimson to her lips, in preparation for her nightly blood-feast. There was a purpose behind the bloodrites that Arian hadn’t fathomed, and she had very little time to work it out. She needed something to break her way, and it wouldn’t happen by chance.
As if sensing her urgency, Lania spoke up. “You presume a perfect equality between the Authoritan and me, and that is your own illusion. You understand nothing of how he rules.”
“Then teach me! Teach me what I do not know. Help me understand why you are here,