Chapter 31
Outside of the chamber, I step into a corridor of bedrock below this strange edifice that they abuse as a monastery.
Cavities stretch on either side of the cavern, long and uneven, descending into a rocky spiral, the bottom impossible to grasp in endless darkness.
A stench wafts in the air. Rotted and bitter.
I taste blood, as potent as if sticking out my tongue would coat it crimson.
The tunnels branch into chambers that appear to be praying rooms, with shuttered partitions and the slightest flickers of incense.
There must be apprentices from the monastery inside.
My bonds tingle, as if this place is carved from the bindings of time.
From the blasphemous magick, I can hardly summon my affinity.
Quietly, I decide to investigate further, where the copper lanterns above provide the barest light. Where there is no torchlight must mean there are no apprentices. At the first row of chambers, I pause.
‘Go in,’ No-Name prompts me.
But the partition does not budge. I see an inverted triangular seal on the bedrock and press my hand against it. A sharp prick against my finger. I realise the seal stabbed it to draw blood. Aglow, the bedrock shudders and opens like a mouth.
Inside the chamber are more coasters in the triangular pattern, friezes etched against bedrock and .
. . naked sleeping bodies. Three women, with sooty scars roving their necks.
I step closer. Between their breasts, flaps of skin reveal dark cavities, empty of hearts.
Inside each ribbed carcass, strings of black-threading form inverted cuneiforms with the symbols for the heart, ruh and corporeal body. I fight a gag.
A thread hews through the torsos, tying them together. I follow the string to the centre of the incense, seeing a trifecta of heart organs crinkled in a dark liquid. This must be a type of jinn-catching to begin the Mitra bond.
The next chamber reveals what can only be more Mitra rituals -men and women with strings seaming together empty chests with their hearts in a platter; in another I find mouths stitched up, with tongues snipped out and submerged in blood and jinn-poison.
I recall monks teaching us how the ruh is manifested in the heart, eyes and tongue, but I’d never imagined it like this.
In the fifth chamber, I choke at the size of the bodies. Smaller. These boys could not have been more than ten years old. I imagine Farzaneh chuckling, saying the youngest souls are the purest – the easiest to tame for a jinn.
My hand lifts. Black gaping holes for eyes, and inside the sockets, thread stitches the cavities in a stringy mangle. The incongruity makes me stumble back. My hands drop and I lean over my knees, dry-heaving.
I go further down the maze, seeing men, women – and children -as still as corpses, but somehow in-between life and death, like black magick has withered their skin; there seem to be thousands.
The sheer number of bodies informs me that these are not merely labourers. How many tribes were raided in Sajamistan?
If war lacks a clear enemy, then what war am I fighting?
I begin rushing into more rooms. I see skin stripped off chests; some still with hearts, the raw, pink muscle thudding from an ebbing heartbeat.
The deeper I descend in the bowels of the mountain, the more mutated I find the bodies.
I see one with a tail; another with a stem at its spine as if to sprout wings – the soul between jinn-folk and man entwined.
The worst I find is a small crate, with a woman laid beside it, hands folded upon her womb. No-Name peers into it.
Two babes with horns curling out of their heads. How many women were forced into impregnation through Mitra?
I find that I am unable to look away; there is something mesmerising about the grotesqueness. One would not think any of them alive, but the smell of human blood and piss indicates otherwise. Or perhaps the quiet pain from those bodies is the most undeniably human thing left.
Who is foe and friend? Sajamistan? Azadniabad?
If I think too hard about why this exists, the meaning of what Azadniabad is doing, I will combust. Making myself see is the only way to keep my insides quiet, keep my thoughts to a whisper instead of a scream.
I ask myself questions, too. My hands trail a long black string.
How old was this body? Fifteen? Perhaps.
Which jinn creature is this? I do not know.
How much do you think they screamed? How long do you think it took for them to degrade as a jinn slowly possessed—
I can take it no longer. Trembling, I climb upwards, toward my original chamber.
Until I hear a clamour of voices coming from the brightest glow of torchlights. I lean around the partition, making out the glint of iron gates at the far end. There’s a distinct smell of smoke.
I see scholars emerge through the open slit.
‘– no, seven souls cannot contain a falak . . .’
I still. A falak? The great serpent of the Unseen?
My mind whirls. Perhaps to its scholars, this is the paragon of invention. My hands clamp over my ears.
‘Your emperor was quite a clever man,’ No-Name comments, oddly pleasant. ‘You never once wondered why he had you test jinn-poisons?’
The part of me that is horrified clashes with the part that longs for assurance. My nails scratch into my right palm until the pain erases the rebellion in my mind, the one that will incite the emperor’s anger, the one that will make him demonstrate to me that pain equals obedience.
He has hurt you; he has always hurt you.
‘Face it,’ No-Name says. ‘You are a Farzaneh. You would be accepting orders without a care under your clan. In the hands of a tyrant, many become monsters.’
My knees lock. And then I retch. As I heave yellow liquid, her words prod more.
Studying the bodies is like gazing at my own mistakes. How could humans be capable of this? But a scarier revelation strikes me. If I’d never left Azadniabad, would I accept this, too?
Memories flash behind my eyes, ones that never gained purchase on my consciousness until now.
The night of the raids, morality did not matter, age did not matter.
What mattered was victory, which the enemy would achieve by any means.
Tribesmen were tortured and discarded. Rape was an act to bestow shame, as deftly as a dagger strike.
Sajamistani tribes left us half alive or snatched, not out of mercy but as punishment.
Our scars were a haunting reminder so we would die inside as we continued to live.
My eyes burn. ‘The emperor could not have . . .’
No-Name shakes my shoulders. ‘He sacrificed you. He called you wanderers – barbarians. He ordered you to forget your maternal tribe. Think. Which soul are they speaking of . . . which soul was sacrificed for Mitra.’
The air rushes from my lungs.
‘Your uma was insignificant to the emperor, so you were left as a nameless heir. That was the exchange your father made to commune with the ancient jinn master, to obtain the knowledge of Mitra. And even in Azadniabad, when he learnt that you are an Eajīz, he threw you into jinn-poisons to progress Mitra. It’s your resistant blood your father needed to access different jinn creatures.
The same blood that Eliyas collected in your training and gave to Warlord Akashun, to ingest. When the emperor died, Akashun completed the exchange with the jinn master, to send creatures across the Veil for his Mitra bonds. ’
‘The Zahr emperor sacrificed me . . .’ My voice breaks as I glance down at myself. But my soul is here, is it not?
I flee back into the room where Farzaneh’s corpse lies, huddling next to bloodied teeth and eyes. It’s better than seeing the broken bodies down there.
I face No-Name. ‘What you speak of cannot be true. It makes my work for nothing. Who will give me orders? I always follow the clan!’
‘The emperor is dead.’
‘No.’ I shove her to the wall until we are nose to nose. The anger, it flashes as keenly as the night of my parents’ deaths. ‘He’s not dead. He’s in me. He has always been in me! ’
‘Pathetic slave,’ she sneers, ‘the fear you feel is your own. He cannot punish you. He is dead. He was no noble emperor. Your Older Brother warned you.’
Is that why Eliyas turned against us, leaving the shelter of the clan’s lies?
I think about the girl I became. She was willing to kill for her emperor because she’d been taught to look at her opponents and glimpse only empty monsters.
She had followed orders. She’d had purpose.
She unabashedly liked her purpose. She was one amongst an empire of many.
She was me. I’m terrified that I liked it.
No-Name continues. ‘Powerful rulers can topple. And the emperor has.’
‘Because he was murdered.’
No-Name frowns. ‘Khamilla, you have a habit of creating things that are not there and removing things that are. You made yourself forget Babshah Khatun, the khan, your milk-siblings – even Eliyas, after your brother became a traitor to you. Haven’t you ever wondered what other horrors you’ve forgotten? ’
‘Do not say their names,’ I beg of her, but she carries on ruthlessly.
‘If you had the chance to see the emperor in the flesh, the true emperor, would you?’ No-Name asks.
My head throbs, the skeins where the soul meets the heart of the mind aching. I take laborious breaths as if Qabl monks guide me. Darkness swirls at the edge of my vision and, like parchment, I tear it from its corner.
My eyes open. No-Name merges into the countenance of the emperor: his sharp, handsome, but cold face. My father leans close, thumb caressing my chin. ‘Little bird,’ he greets me.
A whimper escapes me. Suddenly, I am a child again before her dada. A dada she misses. A dada she loves dearly.
‘Dada,’ I echo but the honorific tastes wrong. ‘You are alive. You are here.’
He looks powerful. Exactly as I remember him. But then his thumb presses harder and harder. Sharp pain reverberates beneath my jaw.
‘You are hurting me,’ I whisper.