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 wayto 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 halfalive 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 Eajiz, 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?
