I am too horrified to form a response. She is right. Any kingdom would salivate to seize a weapon of mass destruction, would they not?
‘Business is where war begins, and business is where it ends.’ Farzaneh grins. ‘That’s hard work. For Azadniabad to grow, Mitra will secure our stakes in the Camel Road, beginning with coercing the steppe-tribes to concede to Azadniabad, or they risk their youngest becoming Mitra hosts.’
‘But...’ My voice drains, pale like my thoughts.
For any source of labour with costs as high as Mitra, the empire must create depravity – must make the conditions of the borderlands so impoverished that the tribes have no choice but to accept Akashun’s rule.
I imagine what it is like for a tribe like Uma’s in the Camel Road – they raid us, they kill us, they burn the steppes and pastures, they destroy our subsistence and demolish our tribes and rape our lands. They create our poverty. And then they swoop in, declaring they will save us.
Mitra would simply magnify this. It vexes me. If Azadniabad controls the supply of Mitra, Warlord Akashun has a monopoly. It forceskingdoms to trade, because any two entities in a mutually beneficial relationship are bound to engage in concessions with each other. Things become symmetrical again, and against the rest of the cold, barren world, Azadniabad hassomething. The same way Sajamistan secured control over Eajiz.
But a thought pushes back.Akashun used innocents.
The natural order of creation is this – neither creature can become the other: human cannot be jinn and jinn cannot be human. Warlord Akashun is fracturing that reality. We would become no better than the Jazatah.
Suddenly, Farzaneh spreads her good hand and takes my fingers gripping the knife, pressing it against her chest. She begins smashing her fist against it. Again and again, the crunch of bones unmistakable.
‘What are you doing?’I say, yanking the blade out of her reach.
She smiles coldly, the abandoned coils of a woman cemented in her beliefs. Her eyes grow black, the jinn seizing control. ‘What will you do? Put this woman out of her misery? She was going to die by your hands anyway. This mortal body is now unfit for me.’
Her teeth tremble in her gums, and one by one, begin clattering out. Like marble ingots. In her eyes, the pupils disappear. The knobs roll out of her skull.
Thud, thud, thud, wet rolling balls. I reel back, hitting the cavern wall. My gaze catches on a scar bisecting the skin below her collar.
Eyeless with two bloodied sockets, she cackles, ‘Kill her.’ Then her voice raises, straining. ‘Kill me.I want you to kill me.’
I plunge my knife into her, so deep that my fingers slip into the bloodied hole.
The pain strikes me as if I’m stabbing myself – the oath to my clan once my conviction but now like my bird cage:Forged by blood, bound by duty, I offer my soul by the white blade.
‘Such loyalty,’ No-Name murmurs. ‘Such beautiful loyalty.’
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 organscrinkled 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?
