‘What are you doing to me?’ My voice wheezes, arms shaking to budge the rope.
‘Hush.’ Now it is Farzaneh from behind me. She leans in and cups my jaw, as if meaning to soothe me. She’s spoken in a southern Azadnian dialect. In what cruel blessing must it come from her lips? I tug again at the bonds.
She carries on with a thread and needle, poking above my chest. ‘As the Jazatah said, some of us exist for sacrifice by the universe. And today,’ her brown eyes twinkle, ‘our potential will blossom once more because of sacrifices like you. I give my thanks, barbarian.’
‘Sacrifice?’ I still, even with the frantic pull within me.
She says some kind of incantation before lifting a vessel of dark liquid. It smells...familiar. It writhes like it’s alive. A needle gleams in her other hand, wicked in the torchlight.
My eyes shut and I release my meditations. Weakened as they are by the unholiness around me, still they work. My forearm bonds contract against the rope.
At once, compressed nur cuts the bindings like a blade of divinity. My toes crack, a wire of nur shooting outward. The force cracks one’s neck. The second is delayed in unsheathing her blade as, in rivulets, the dense light drips on to her, bursting her flesh into oozing pink-yellow pustules. When she swings, I leap from the cot, arms locking around her neck until the vessels in her eyes bulge red and burst.
Horror shudders through me at the grim knowledge that I havekilledsomeone after so long. I have killed two people so quickly.
Pain rips across my shoulder, Farzaneh’s knife slashing down. My elbow rears into her fragile jugular and she loses her balance, screaming. I stomp on her left wrist, snapping it perpendicular until whitebone juts out. Wrenching her collar, I stuff her robes into her mouth as another cry erupts.
‘Now,’ I begin, wiping my blood-stricken cheeks, hoping she does not notice my quivering hands, ‘You will answer my questions.’
She continues mewling. With no choice, I take the nearest coaster and smash it like a stone on each of her knees, crushing the bones. She shrieks and shrieks into the cloth, face boiling red.
‘You have one chance to respond. What is this place?’
I expect fear, panic, anything but the slow hope that bleeds into Farzaneh’s eyes – the realisation that she has information I want. I loosen the cloth from her tongue.
‘Y-you must speak to i-it,’ she wheezes out.
‘Who?’ But her mouth spasms. So my fingers grip her chin until white blotches appear. ‘You assume your life matters to your Great Father after letting me escape my bindings? You think your masters do not already look down their noses at you, like you are anything but a pawn? Why else are you here, probing at naked flesh and smelling filth?’ I lean nose to nose. ‘Wearing rich robes, yet living in poverty of the acknowledgement you seek. The only reason I don’t have a knife to your neck is because you are replaceable. They will always treat subordinates like us as dirt.’
Her mouth opens, a fish gasping in air. Garbled words come out that I cannot understand. The skin around her face stretches, the muscles twitching as if...
I rip the knife from my shoulder and press it against her throat. ‘Whatare you? You are possessed!’
Her nose lifts and her eyes flicker black as she rasps, ‘I smell it in your blood.’ But her intonation has changed – younger with curiosity. ‘How do our poisons run through your soul?’ Her gaze darts to the copper vessel.
And the familiarity clicks. The blade falters. ‘Jinn-poisons... this vessel has a jinn-poison. And you are a jinn speaking to me.’
Farzaneh’s chest thrums with a contained laugh, her gaze running up and down my body. This must be a young one possessing Farzaneh’s body. No-Name glances at me. ‘The jinn is perhaps only a century old. A child. Curious and eager. We can pull information from her.’
I face Farzaneh again. ‘Only the Zahr clan used jinn-poisons.’
She starts to struggle again, huge-eyed, jinn and human competing for control inside her. ‘N-not anymore. For so long we have been servants, kissing the continent’s feet. Mitra will change the paradigm through its magick. Can you blame us for making something powerful in a world that spits at us?’
The wordMitratickles my mind... where have I heard this before?
She steadies, the jinn seemingly in control. ‘How strange... you have his scent,’ she murmurs. ‘Akashun’s scent.’
My head spins. ‘You said magick. Black magick is forbidden.’
Quick as thunder, her face contorts as she growls, ‘You Eajiz are narrow-minded, stranded by your arrogance. You believe in Heavenly powers when the jinn-folk’s magick is untapped potential waiting to be exploited. Sajamistan will no longer have the forces of the Unseen. We have formed Mitra.’
‘I don’t understand—’
‘To permanently transit jinn souls from the Unseen to the mortal world requires a bond of magick. That is Mitra.’
Disgust beats against me. The Jazatah tribes, who once conquered this continent, harvested black magick and committed infanticide for ancient jinn masters.
‘Black magick cannot be done without steep costs – sacrifices.’
