Chapter 5
In the mornings, I drink diluted doses of the slow-acting jinn-poison. The first type consists of the bones of horned beasts. Eliyas takes the powder provided by the emperor: ground karkadann hooves.
By the end of morning lessons, Eliyas scribes any effects of the jinn-poison. At noon, he raises the potency by brewing it in tea. I taste my way through breads and broths and more teas.
By eve, the jinn-poison fully kicks in, racking me in sweats and hearing strange whispers.
Some nights I perceive a familiar shadow at the corner of my floor-bed, a pair of milky eyes watching me.
Eliyas exorcises the poison through a bath of blessed olive oil.
He questions me about my symptoms and collects blood drops.
I tell him everything except about the strange shadow, since I had seen it before I began mastering jinn-poisons.
It is not real, I always chant to myself.
With more poison exposure, my symptoms lessen over time until the night terrors disappear, though the shadow does not.
But the shadow is not the only strange happening.
In the next eighteen months, the emperor becomes absent; he spends his resources fighting melees across the northern and western prefectures.
He recalls his kin from the autumn and winter capital Yalon, returning them to his stronghold in Navia.
I am rarely permitted to leave the palace grounds.
With scarce cattle from the steppe-borderlands raided by Sajamistan, and the shortage of white wheat from Yalon due to border incursions, Eliyas becomes more creative in diluting poisons in my meals.
During one morning of jinn-poison training, Eliyas holds out a clay bowl.
My tongue dips into the yakhni stewed from a skinny rooster. The backs of my feet are blistered from endless scratching. With a practised motion, I heave the poison out of my body into an empty clay pot. We’ve moved on to poisons derived from the feathers of a?i.
‘No more,’ I whisper. Eliyas takes the bowl with a troubled look. I take note of a smattering of bruises under his jaw as he helps me lay on the floor-bed. He forces rosehip tea down my throat with a dollop of walnut oil and whisks me with cedar branches to return feeling to my limbs.
As I begin to drift off, I hear the emperor ask, ‘How is she?’, from the entrance of the apothecary. I keep my eyes closed, my breathing slow and sleep-like.
Eliyas answers as though a clenched jaw.
‘This is the third time she’s been bedridden this month alone.
You promised one jinn-poison every lunar month, but you’ve forced her to ingest three in the past week.
You rarely let her leave the apothecary now.
It’s her prison. She’s hardly done being a child. ’
‘She’s sixteen,’ the emperor snaps. ‘Her people from her uma’s tribe would marry and rule their tribe long before this age.’
‘Your Blessed, she’s under your clan and is your child. Not your weapon. Her soul cannot handle such poisons much longer,’ Eliyas continues in a tight voice.
Our father sounds bitter. ‘Know your place as my adviser, not a clansman. You ceded that right.’
Silence.
Eliyas’s voice turns to cold steel. ‘My Emperor, I am still your adviser. You hope to harvest the strengths of jinn-poison, to use it in your armies – to counter the Eajīz from Sajamistan, and your dissenting warlords. But it’s no use if the girl dies.’
I hold my breath, unaccustomed to hearing someone defy the emperor like so.
‘Please, Dada,’ Eliyas insists more gently. The rare use of the honorific thaws the emperor before he releases a heavy sigh.
‘I ought to throw you out for your disrespect.’
‘Ah, but you could never forgo your favoured son.’
I half squint as the emperor clasps Eliyas’s shoulder. There’s a strange clench in my chest watching the familiar ease at which they push and pull in their exchange. My father has never done this with me.
‘Understand, my son, that I have no choice but to use these jinn-poisons.’ The emperor turns toward me and crouches, hand cold against my head. ‘Daughter, tell me, did you not beg for a name? And to join my clan?’
I stir, blinking my eyes open fully, avoiding Eliyas. ‘Of course,’ I say, my voice hoarse.
‘You have yet to fully earn it. I do not want to test you like this.’ He caresses my cheek. A strange sensation rises in me. ‘But sometimes . . .’
Swallowing hard, I finish his sentence. ‘Sometimes pain is necessary for control.’
‘You will remain here until you’ve conquered the poison.’
After the emperor has left, Eliyas scowls at me. ‘He is worse. Paranoid, and desperate.’
‘He is backed into a corner.’ I watch Eliyas wring a wet cloth, bringing it to my forehead.
‘And that is his fault,’ he says.
It might be the fever raging in my head, but for a second, Eliyas’s lips turn down, defiant. My eyes narrow. ‘Do not speak of our dada like so.’
‘You defend him even when he hurts you; even when you are ill because of him – and nameless because he refuses to acknowledge you? Now he uses your body for these jinn-poisons.’
I startle and my hands grip the blanket tighter. ‘He does not hurt me.’ My tone is like ice.
‘He does.’ But Eliyas pauses as if reading something in me, that I cannot.
‘The emperor will acknowledge me.’
Eliyas places the clay pot down with a thud.
‘Foolish little bird,’ he sighs. ‘The warlords are not wrong. Look at what I feed you. If we don’t have bread in the palaces, we certainly have none for our subjects.
The emperor couldn’t defend our border from the raids or control the buffer tribes from taking the wheat trade in Yalon, so we all suffer. The famine out east is his doing.’
‘Which warlord?’ I demand, fearing the answer.
But Eliyas has already turned away, his pale robes brushing against my blistered skin. The clang of the pot is the only sign of his cold anger.
Nameless, he said. The emperor will name me. I know the language he speaks, one of values and bargains.
At night, in the apothecary, I rummage through the poison manuscripts that the emperor had given to Eliyas, made of cotton-stuffed camel skin.
There are also salt tablet copies, hieroglyphs etched in the red baked clay, and newer manuscripts written in standard cuneiform logo script.
It’s rudimentary Adamic, derived from the original children of Adam.
I hold the first text, called Za’skar City, the Magicians’ Study of Jinn-Poisons. These are texts on the Unseen world of the jinn and on the oldest human civilisations before those nations were destroyed by the Divine in the Great Flood.
I skim through the parchment, covered in faded symbols. Aged olive oil, two azhdahak winged serpent’s feathers, a drop of goat’s blood, ground apricot seeds, Black Mountain snake scales . . .
Bile sears my throat. This poison causes limb paralysis before changing the human skin into the scales of an azhdahak. Then you die miserably. There is also an antidote. Aged olive oil, black cumin blessed with the Divine’s seventy-seven names, the soot of frankincense.
More bile. I swallow it. ‘Perfect,’ I breathe.
In the apothecary, after grinding the ingredients in a coppery mortar, I extract a fraction of the poison’s amount to begin exposure.
I lift my right hand and mentally recite a remembrance of the Divine, manifesting a Heavenly bond from my finger.
On it, nūr splinters like gold glass through the room’s copper lanterns.
Using its pale light, I kneel on the divan, wind chill pricking my skin from the slightly ajar window shutters.
Gritting my teeth, I use my left hand to drag the tip of my ivory khanjar down my right forearm.
The skin peels back like a ripened pear, crimson pooling into the cup containing the poison.
It takes six counts before the blood blackens.
For this first taste, it’s a test of exposure, not ingestion.
I arrange the extracted poison on the brass tray beside kumis; the fermented lamb milk will help my mouth hold in the poison. After I bless the antidote, I lay out my indigo shawl to muffle any sounds.
Sloshing the clay cup, I contemplate which method to use to take it. Will it be too bitter to gargle? Or shall I swish it around inside my cheeks to make note of its taste?
I settle on the latter and braid my hair back with a tassel.
Nameless. The emperor’s sneer penetrates my mind his obsidian gaze coating my thoughts in black.
Lifting the cup, I throw back the poison, holding it in my mouth.
A burnt bitter flavour bursts on to my tongue, stinging my gums before the kumis soothes the pain.
I shove the shawl over my mouth, stray tawny threads piercing my flaky lips.
Immediately, a blinding pain spears my gut. A choked sound gets wrangled in my mouth. A drop of the poison slides down my throat and I panic.
The spasms reverberate up my spine, and I struggle to remain upright. Cold sweat drenches my qaftan, but the heat slithering through my blood makes it feel as if my body is boiling.
The heat rises and I cry out into the shawl, hoping the noise doesn’t rouse any attendants. At my feet, the shadow that has always followed at my heels grows into a crooked shape, staring hungrily at me.
My skin intensifies from pink to a red hue, and I spit out the poison, my shawl absorbing it. My fingernails claw into the rugs as I grope around for the antidote, but my vision blurs.
I blink furiously. I cannot see. You will die here, the product of your own failures. The emperor will find your body, black and red with feathers, blood clogged into tar—
My limbs numb to a prickly sensation. I collapse face first into the tray, spilling the contents. O, Divine, I beg. Desperately, my mouth opens, and I dip my tongue into the spilled antidote.