The Blue Eye

A black scowl from Rukh in response. “How did you hear of the attempt? Neither Arsalan nor Arian would have told you.”

“Do you still not understand how the power works?” A haughty tilt of her head. “I felt the ripples of it through the continuity of our magic. Just as the Silver Mage would have.”

Daniyar shook his head, dark hair brushing his nape. “I was fighting for my life. When I was brought back to the walls by the Assassin’s men, the One-Eyed Preacher’s thunder served to uproot my magic.”

Something moved behind Rukh’s eyes. Not uncertainty. Perhaps the regret that his attempt to use Arian’s blood in the blood-rites had stripped him of his abilities.

“You reclaimed your power,” he said to Daniyar. “I felt its pulse in my veins. Why can I not feel my own?”

Daniyar edged back from the table. “This is your first attempt. Give yourself more time.”

Rukh swore to himself. “What time do you think I have? They’re battering the Zhayedan Gate. Soon the Talisman will move east. If we lose the gates, we lose the city.” He made a swift calculation. “How far does your power extend—the Golden Mage and Silver Mage in concert?”

But Daniyar was shaking his head. “Not far enough to hold the city.”

Rukh turned to Ilea. “What of the Bloodprint, then? You read from it. You copied a verse you said would serve to defend the Citadel. Use it here, first.”

There was no softness in the golden eyes that dwelt upon Rukh’s face, nor any of the indulgence of a former lover. Her gaze was mesmerizing … predatory. The skin over Rukh’s cheekbones tightened in response. But she ignored his request, speaking to the Silver Mage.

“The only thing that will aid you is the dawn rite. You know it as well as I do. Arian taught you the verse.” It was a signal to Rukh, as well.

Rukh threw back his chair, striding across the room to throw open a pair of windows. A thousand watchfires rose against the darkness, showing them the depth of the Talisman’s forces.

“You think a single verse will hold the Emissary Gate.”

Daniyar came to stand beside him, his gaze picking out the bloodstained flags dotted about the camp.

“Five verses. Each backed by the power of this Conference.”

Rukh’s hands balled into fists. “I cannot summon it.”

And he wondered then if the Conference of the Mages had failed because each of the Mages was an enemy to the others.

“You have yet to try.” Daniyar motioned to Ilea. “High Companion.”

She moved to join them, her eyes on the Talisman advance. “They will devour everything in their path, if you do not stop them here. You should have forced the First Oralist to stay. The Codex—if it exists—will not deliver you in time.”

Rukh left aside the fact that the only person in the room with the power to command the First Oralist had chosen to disavow her, expelling her from the sisterhood of the Council of Hira.

“What. Of. The Bloodprint.” He ground out the words through his teeth. “You studied it. Your knowledge could deliver us!”

Ilea held up both hands, the ends of her sleeves belling out. With a cutting smile at Rukh, she said, “Your search for easy answers will not avail you, but I will give you what you seek. If only to show you a truth the Council of Hira has long known.”

Eagerly, the Black Khan stepped forward.

“Tell me your truths after you have offered your benediction to my city.”

“Very well.” She turned away from him, calling out an incantation.

“When the sky is shrouded in darkness … when the stars lose their light … when the mountains are made to vanish … when the seas boil over, and when all beings are linked to their deeds …”

Hot white light inside the chamber, the coils of Ilea’s hair catching fire.

“… And when the girl-child that was buried alive is able to ask for what crime she was slain … when the scrolls of your deeds are unfolded … when heaven is laid bare … when the blazing fire is kindled bright, and when paradise is brought into view; on that Day, every human being will come to know what they have prepared for themselves.”

Though chilling in their meaning, the words were curiously devoid of impact.

Then Ilea’s arms jerked forward, forming a V. Her trailing sleeves caught fire, and the fire lanced straight from her arms to cut through Talisman lines. A pale gold tinged with crimson, the fire burned two lines through the camp, searing all in its path. It blazed brightly for an instant—a gilt-edged sword shearing through the final hours of the night. When it vanished, it left two blackened tracks on the ground. She had killed perhaps twenty men all told, but the Talisman rapidly regrouped.

Rukh glared at her. “Is that all?”

Sly acceptance. “That is all.”

He grabbed her shoulders, shaking her.

“Then do it again. Again and again, unto a world without end.”

Daniyar wrested Ilea free of Rukh’s bruising grip. “Even if she did, you would still be facing an army of thousands at your gates.” Rukh paused. Deliberated. Turned his back to them both, a gesture considered offensive at his court. But it was still his court. He may have failed as Dark Mage, but he was still the Prince of Khorasan.

He looked out over the path of Ilea’s deliberate destruction. She had recited verses of the Claim—more in number than Arian and Sinnia combined. Deadly and more threatening than anything he had heard fall from the First Oralist’s lips. Because the Verse of the Throne was an assertion, not a source of annihilation.

Why, then, had Ilea’s recitation had so little impact on his enemy? If Arsalan had been with him in this room, he might have known the answer. Arsalan’s calling to the Claim was sincere, richer and deeper than Rukh’s.

At that, a door opened in Rukh’s mind. He entered a room filled with light. He raised his face into the light—it pushed at him, moved through him, penetrated through to his cells, blinding and calming in the same calamitous instant. Throbbing like the answer to a question he’d forgotten to ask. The light expanded outward into his mind, pricked at his fears, made nonsense of his certainties, mocked him for his stubborn refusal to see it for what it was. Part of him. All of him. That was when he understood.

Ilea’s warning … the taste of Daniyar’s fear … the significance of Arian’s absence. All trace of pretense fell away.

He turned back to Ilea, ignoring the Silver Mage. He raised a hand to untangle the golden coils of her hair, a gesture she allowed. When they’d fallen free of their intricate arrangement, he brushed back a lock from her forehead. Then he pressed his lips to her diadem and whispered, “It isn’t just the words, is it? It’s the qari who recites them—the gift given to the First Oralist.”

She blinked, and he finished softly, “A gift you do not share.”

Bitter acknowledgment in her golden eyes.

“Tell me your truth now, Ilea.”

He had already guessed at the answer. The High Companion could recite verses from the Bloodprint, but without the depths of Arian’s conviction, without the gift for language that had seen Arian rise to the rank of First Oralist, she would never be able to harness the power of the Claim as Arian had done. She couldn’t bend it to her will.

She wound her hands around his wrists, removing them from her hair.

“My gifts are aligned to Hira. Ashfall must rely on the strength of the Dark Mage.”

She told these half-truths to the Black Khan without compunction. Why? Daniyar’s thoughts moved swiftly. Because of Hira. The Black Khan had delayed her return to the Citadel. And with Arian and the High Companion both absent, Hira was at risk. Ilea would know as well as he did that the Black Khan would not relinquish any advantage to his city. Whatever the extent of the Golden Mage’s powers, Rukh would try to keep her at his side.

What Ilea had shown him—what she had done with the Claim—was designed to prove to Rukh that her talents would serve him no further. She couldn’t do what Arian had done.

A misdirection the Black Khan would accept, knowing that of all the Companions of Hira, only Arian’s gifts existed to serve more than her allegiance to the Council. Arian had shown him as much with her defense of the people of Ashfall. Though her Audacy was directed by the High Companion, she had chosen her own means of fulfilling it. And even after Ilea had stripped her of rank, she hadn’t given up the fight. Daniyar felt a fierce throb of pride at Arian’s defiance of Ilea. Her service on behalf of the Council wasn’t that of blind adherence. Her calling was to the Claim—and the ethics that underlined it.

No ritual without purpose, she had whispered to him in another life, the whisper tinged with love.

And he had understood. Without a commitment to the values they espoused, rituals meant little to Arian, a position that often placed her at odds with the Council. Even the story of the Night Journey, a sacred visitation to the heavens, Arian viewed as an allegory, and not as a physical voyage, as so many of her sisters did.

No form without substance. No sacred duty more hallowed than the worth of a single life.

The words had meant more to him after the fall of Candour. They defined them both in opposition to the Talisman.

In whose name was our heritage set to the fire? Daniyar had demanded.

And the Talisman’s acolytes had answered, In the name of the One.

He pushed down the familiar ache caused by Arian’s absence. It was a weakness Ilea would exploit, at the moment he needed to turn her to his purpose. Which was to keep her in Ashfall, until Rukh could learn to harness his abilities as the Dark Mage.

He’d felt something stir at the way Rukh watched him, a prickling of his nerves along the tendrils of his magic. An awakening that the Conference of the Mages would fulfill. He recalled the Conference he’d been summoned to in Timeback, where he’d visited the scriptorium and sifted through its manuscripts, including one where the arguments of theologians had gone around in circles, perhaps like this Conference now. The memory passed from his thoughts as suddenly as it had come.

“Let us return,” he said, holding out Ilea’s chair. She pressed her lips together in refusal.

“Why try again?” Rukh asked. “The High Companion’s powers—”

Daniyar cut him off. “The High Companion lacks the First Oralist’s ability with the Claim, but she is still the Golden Mage. She can awaken your gifts. As she said, Ashfall must rely on itself. It needs the power of its Mage.” And now he made use of the Black Khan’s persistence to further his own resolve. “Your power is merely dormant. I felt it stir, as you must have felt mine.” They could and would hold the Emissary Gate. “The Golden Mage can help to bring your powers to life. As can I.”

A narrowing of Rukh’s eyes. A hand at Ilea’s elbow, as he urged her back to the table.

“You used the Claim to open the Conference,” he pointed out.

Daniyar nodded. “A ritual.” No ritual without purpose. “Just as the dawn rite is a ritual.”

“Wherein lies its power?”

A question that cut to the heart of things. One for which he had the answer.

“In the strength you have to wield it. In the use you would make of it.” His silver eyes shone, his words deadly as a blade. “Can you think of a suitable use?”

Eyes of midnight glittered in response.

7

A KNOCK ON THE DOOR TO THE CHAMBER. THIS TIME ONE OF THE Zhayedan’s runners came to bring news of the Talisman’s maneuvers and of Arsalan’s response.

The Black Khan excused himself—no closer to retrieving his power—leaving Daniyar and Ilea alone in the room. The closing of the maghrebi doors cut off the cries of battle as suddenly as a blade thrown at an unprotected throat.

The High Companion reached for Daniyar’s hands. Silent and watchful, he let her hold them. The act reinforced their mutual power; otherwise he wouldn’t have permitted her touch.

“You still don’t trust me.” His hands clenched on hers, a betraying gesture. He eased the pressure of his grip, but not before they both felt the rise of their magic. In a few more hours, it would be dawn, and the dawn rite would be possible. That was all that was holding him in Ashfall. Were it not for his commitment to the Conference, he would have been on Arian’s trail.

That didn’t mean he needed to respond to the High Companion with anything other than the truth. “Why would I trust you, Ilea? You’ve stood between me and Arian from the first.”

She looked into eyes like frozen silver lakes, eyes that had gazed into the void. But what was the void to Daniyar? The Talisman’s desolation of his city? Or the loss of the woman he wanted for his own? Her fingers stroked his callused palms, the touch deliberately careful to contrast with pitiless words.

“One man’s desires cannot undo centuries of tradition. There is no place for a man at the side of a Companion of Hira.”

“Liar.” Her hands jerked at the accusation. “How long after you arrived at the Citadel did you take the Black Khan as your lover?”

“He is a tool I use to further the Citadel’s aims; he means nothing to me beyond that. What you seek from Arian is something else entirely.”

She studied the flawless arrangement of his bones, wondering how to unsettle a man as dangerous as he was beautiful. One who had every reason to oppose her.

He proved that with his response. “You seem to have forgotten my gift.”

Ilea had forgotten. For the Silver Mage possessed the ability to discern the lies she told from the truth, a gift given to those who held the title of Authenticate.

“You tore her from me,” he said now. “With no thought to her needs when she’d already suffered such loss. Your duty as High Companion is to serve the Companions of Hira.”

“You need not teach me a duty I have never failed to honor.”

“How can you claim to honor it, when your actions serve only yourself?”

“Oh? And what of you, Daniyar? When I sent Arian to Candour more than a decade ago, your duty was to teach her of the manuscripts of Candour. Not to train her in war. Nor to take her as your own. It was you who betrayed my trust, before I raised a hand against you.”

A contemptuous glance from eyes silvered over with frost. “My commitment to Arian was never a threat to Hira.”

“Your seduction of Arian was meant to sever her from the Council—you knew our traditions; you swore to defend her honor. Instead, you took her, claimed her, kept her.”

“No man keeps the First Oralist. She followed your dictates to the end. She gave me up to do so.”

There was a primal beauty to his rage, to the dark brows that slashed down over eyes of arctic fire. And Ilea was not insensible to it. So she marshaled her words against him.

“You only think you know her.” Her head tilted toward the sound of the Black Khan’s voice beyond the door. She was gathering information, another tool to exploit. Despite the warmth that pulsed through their linked hands, she felt the chill of his response in her bones. “You think you know a history even Arian doesn’t know. But as I warned you when you asked for dispensation, Arian is First Oralist. I will not cede her powers to your base desires.”

She made sure he heard the truth in her words. A rawer form of her magic raced along her arms, rippling through her veins to flare around the center of her power, vibrating with fire. But she knew he was too arrogant, too certain of his claim to be deflected.

“Your insults cannot diminish the loyalty that binds Arian to me.” His shrug was careless. “Besides which, you no longer have the power to command her. You dismissed her from the Council.”

She gave a crystal-edged laugh.

“What future are you imagining, Daniyar? That the two of you will leave this war and flee to a place of safety, so you might finally have the chance to prove to her your devotion?” A mocking reproof. “Are you no longer Guardian of Candour? Have you no other obligations beyond your undisciplined desires?”

His thoughts flashed to the Damson Vale.

When it was done … when he had passed on the trust of the Guardian of Candour, he would take Arian to his secret valley in the mountains.

She caught the thought from his mind with a hissed incantation of the Claim.

“So the limit of your ambition is the vale you deem an earthly paradise?” She laced the words with contempt, her nails digging into his palms. “What a parochial fate you would choose.”

“Only for someone who doesn’t know how to love.”

He felt her stillness in his own bones, knew the words had found their mark. The doors to the chamber opened, the Black Khan stepping inside. He perceived the tension between them without a word being said.

Ilea released one of Daniyar’s hands to raise a palm in invitation. Rukh moved to take it.

“Did I miss something?” he asked.

She made her voice low and inviting as Rukh pulled his stool to the table, leaning over the fragrant copper bowl. “How fortunate that you differ so greatly from the Silver Mage.”

“Oh?”

A sensual smile on her lips as she scored her nails against his palm.

“His pledge keeps him here at your side, when in truth he is longing to chase through the night after his beloved.” Her gaze moved between the two men, measuring one against the other, confident that in her ambition, she was greater than both. “But there is no place for honor in war, a truth you illustrate so well.”

Rukh dropped her hand. There was no merit to him in such a comparison, but angry at himself for allowing Ilea to provoke him, he picked up her hand again and kissed it.

“No doubt, I am to the Silver Mage what you are to the First Oralist.”

An unexpected glance of appreciation from Daniyar, even as Ilea turned her fury at the comparison on the Silver Mage.

“She’s not coming back to you.” The hit cold and precise.

Daniyar reached for Rukh’s other hand, completing the necessary circle. But it was also a gesture of fellowship.

“She doesn’t need to.”

“Oh?” The disdainful arch of a fine gold brow. “And why is that?”

“Because nothing that happens in Ashfall could keep me from her side.”

So confident, Ilea thought. So certain of his powers of attraction. So certain of the bond between Arian and himself. When she returned to Hira, her actions would sever that bond with the cold finality of truth.

She felt her power rise, augmented by his.

And savored the strike to come.

8

KHASHAYAR HAD WASTED NO TIME. HE’D FREED HIMSELF AND SLIT THE throats of the two men left to guard him. Quiet prevailed over the Shaykh’s tent as they stole out into the night to cross a wide ridge of sand, disturbing only the rest of cape hares burrowed deep in the grass, under a night of no moon, with stars flung up against the stony darkness.

“Horses?” Arian whispered to Khashayar.

He forged the path ahead, his footsteps sinking into sand, setting a harsh pace.

“It’s too risky to head back. We could be intercepted.” Arian kept pace beside him, though Sinnia was the more sure-footed over sand. Her steady hand propelled Wafa along, the boy stumbling more than once, as he kept glancing back to the camp.

“We’ll be discovered,” Sinnia warned. “We can’t outrun them.”

Khashayar herded them over another rib of sand, moving them farther west.

“I did some scouting earlier. They’ve set up a supply depot just south of us. There are camel herders there. If we can reach it in time …” He shot a grim glance at Arian and Sinnia. “Let me carry the boy.”

Without waiting for permission, he scooped up Wafa and settled him on his back.

“Hold on.” Then, to the Companions: “Now run.”

Wafa’s arms fastened around Khashayar’s neck in a death grip that he adjusted with a grimace. He set the grueling pace of a soldier trained from birth to overcome physical discomfort. His strength was enormous, his pace unflagging as he found a depression between two ridges of grass-feathered sand, its surface nearly flat.

Arian stumbled on the downslope of the ridge, falling to her hands and knees. Khashayar grabbed her under the arm and set her on her feet without breaking his rhythm. Sinnia flew beside him. When Arian brushed off her knees, she found herself staring at a startled caracal, whose tawny coat had camouflaged its hiding place in the sand.

She kept moving, hearing sounds of discovery break out in the camp behind them.

Not enough moon to trace their footprints in the sand, but all it would require to track them was a torch. The army of the Nineteen had men enough to spare to follow several different trails at once. Or they could save themselves the bother and ride the Companions to ground. A simpler method still: they could loose their hunting falcons on the night. It was what she would have done in their place.

All these thoughts raced through her mind as the wind whipped her hair against her face. She was the slowest of their party, Khashayar moving with deadly grace and Sinnia as though born to these sands.

Arian made her way across the depression, picking her steps with care over the swaying grass. She couldn’t see the depot ahead and was trusting to Khashayar’s instincts. She’d had a moment when she wanted to tell him to cut his losses and run—to return to Ashfall, to lend his strength to his Khan. But she needed him. She wouldn’t be able to cross the desert without him.

He cut south across the sand, Wafa clinging to his back. As the ridge dipped southward, the roof of stars cast a sharp orange flare against the sand. Her heart in her mouth, Arian feared they had fallen on a desert-dweller’s campfire. But the light dimmed with the curve of sand, and she realized what she’d seen was a field of orange poppies.

Her relief was short-lived. Angry voices carried across the sand, followed by the thunder of hooves. Desert horses trained for speed and agility. And guided, as Arian had feared, by the telltale cry of a hawk.

The Nineteen had found their trail.

His voice gravel-edged and deep, Khashayar urged them to hurry. “We have to reach the supply depot before the guards hear the alarm.”

They sank into another valley, but Arian knew it for a losing battle. They couldn’t outrun the Nineteen’s horses. And the pursuit was too close to give her time to conjure a mirage. Wind snapped her hair against her face again, and she caught the glimmer of an answer.

“Go,” she said to the others. “I’ll meet you at the depot.”

“No, sahabiya. My orders are to stay at your side.” Khashayar grabbed hold of her arm.

Arian shook herself free. “I’m not helpless, Khashayar. Trust to my use of the Claim.”

He didn’t argue further, her self-assurance persuasive.

When Sinnia hesitated, Arian urged her on. “Khashayar will need your help. If I need you, I’ll call you back.” She pressed her circlets; Sinnia did the same.

They split up without further discussion, though Arian heard Wafa’s broken cry of protest.

She moved through a maze of gullies, seeking the valley of sand’s center. A band of caracals followed her high along one ridge, their golden eyes aglow in the dark. She used them to pinpoint her progress, the sound of hooves at her back. A red fox froze as she crossed his path, its black eyes sharp and curious. It darted away again at the earsplitting cry of a hawk.

She was almost at the center of the valley, bringing the riders with her, leaving Khashayar’s way clear ahead.

She moved along curled eddies of grass deep into the valley of sand. The riders approached, a party of six astride the mares that were bred in the heart of the desert, their arrow-straight manes tossing in the wind, their heads thrown up high and proud.