The Black Khan. Ausma Khan Zehanat
to take the guards by surprise.
They never spoke of their fears or their memories of Jaslyk, but each action they took now was weighted with their determination to protect each other from the consequences of failure. The two women were at their strongest, single-minded with purpose. They had no choice: as leaders of the resistance and as sisters bound to each other’s survival, they couldn’t afford self-doubt.
Larisa and Elena separated. Each moved in a different direction, their bows strung. They waited a heartbeat for the minzars to sweep the ward, then came to their feet and whistled. The guards at both ends turned. Two pairs of arrows found the weak spots in their armor. But they couldn’t catch the men at the door, who wheeled and drew their swords. The sisters were soon engaged in close combat, and they fought as they always did, back to back, using back-alley tricks against the size and strength of their opponents, utterly without fear.
Elena grunted as a sword thrust nearly slashed her ribs. Larisa took her weight, flashing a sharp knife up and under Elena’s arm, stabbing the guard in the chest. Elena whirled around, taking her sister’s place.
The minzars swept the ward again, catching the fierce and soundless tussle. Horns rose in warning. Two more men spilled from the inside of the cell guarded by the Crimson Watch, pressing the sisters back. It was Larisa’s turn to cry out. She dropped her knife as her sword arm was slashed. Elena stabbed her blade through the assailant’s eye. They were losing ground, losing strength. The Ahdath forced them back toward the stairs.
A loud metallic clang rang inside the cell.
Sinnia’s scream pierced the air again—edged with something new—something bold and eerily familiar.
Prisoners came to the doors of their cells, shouting and banging at their doors, distracting the Crimson Watch. Elena tripped one man, then rolled with his momentum to stab through his armor with the full weight of her body. She lay on him for the space of a breath, wiping the sweat from her eyes. Boots stamped down an intersecting corridor, the sound drawing closer.
In the courtyard below, the dogs began to howl.
A guard grabbed Larisa by the hair, yanking back her head, his knife at her throat.
A minzar’s light found her face, and the guard who’d seized Elena’s knife arm staggered around, Elena struggling in his grip.
“Stop!” he shouted. The other man stilled.
“Look at her,” he went on. “Look at them. Don’t you know who they are?”
Now the ward was filled with soldiers, half a dozen members of the Watch clambering up from the level below and from the corridor that linked to another block. Larisa and Elena stood panting.
Men shouted all around them, prisoners, guards, adding to the noise coming from inside the cell—a gurgling noise that petered out.
Illarion appeared at the head of the ward, escorted by a handful of men, just as the door of Sinnia’s cell was thrown open. Elena caught a glimpse of the woman on the table. She was unrestrained. Somehow she had snapped the hose attached to a dark green canister. Blood leaked from her eyes, ears, and nose, glistening and sticky against her mulberry skin.
What she’d attempted had nearly killed her, yet when she raised her head, her eyes blazed with a contemptuous conviction that said there was no man who could defeat her.
A man taller than any of the others stepped out of the room, a nightmarish mask covering his face. Elena shrank in her captor’s arms, suddenly unable to breathe.
Illarion strode to meet him, and the tall man unhooked his mask with sleek and raptorial movements. His face emerged into the sharp light cast by the sweep of the minzar. Beneath the mask, his ghastly skin was waxy, his lips without blood. His colorless eyes bulged from their sockets, a disfiguring effect of the mask.
At the sharp clap of his hands, two of the guards lit torches.
The tall man bent to look first at Elena, then at Larisa. A smile spread over the cadaverous planes of his face. He clapped his hands together lightly. “How beautiful,” he said with delight. “I’ve missed you.” His natural voice rasped like the spike-edged barbs on his gloves.
Elena’s sob caught in her throat.
The tall man noticed Illarion. “Captain.”
“Technologist.” Illarion nodded in return.
Elena’s frantic eyes sought out Illarion’s face. The teasing warmth he’d shown her earlier had vanished—the mask he’d worn over his purposes as a soldier of the Ahdath, as a tool of the Technologist’s will. His high-planed face was set and hard. She hadn’t believed she had anything left to lose—anything to hope for or believe in—yet a savage sense of betrayal pierced her thoughts, and hard on its heels, a passionate, volatile fury. She would kill him with her bare hands.
But Illarion had dismissed her without a glance, his eyes fixed on the Technologist.
“You’re a man of your word,” the Technologist praised him. “You delivered the sisters as promised.”
Illarion nodded curtly. “It was easy enough to deceive them—they were desperate to believe.”
Elena made a throttled noise in her throat, thrashing against her captors, her hands scrabbling for a blade to plunge deep into his heart.
“What beautiful misery,” the Technologist said, his smile deepening to a leer.
“And now I require what you promised me in turn,” the captain said. “The talisman. The one that unlocks the Plague Wing.”
MEN, DOGS, PRISONERS SHOUTING, WEAPONS BEING SHEATHED—THERE was so much noise in the ward and along the watchtowers that at first Elena didn’t hear it. She’d failed her sister so completely, she couldn’t fathom it. She was swamped by a wave of panic and dread, watching the men who’d captured them now handle her sister with careless, bestial ease. A roar of outrage broke from her throat, climbing rapidly to hysteria.
And then beneath it, she heard the sound again, strange and oddly familiar, a sound she remembered from childhood. It seemed to be coming from two places at once. From a door on the other side of the ward—she had a brief impression of wild eyes and matted hair—but also from behind the Technologist in the room with the shattered canister, where an instrument with curved blades lay twisted and deformed on the floor.
It was the Malleus, a tool the Technologist used to sever the hearing of the followers of the Usul Jade, its tiny blades burrowing into their ears, tunneling ever deeper.
The otherworldly sound grew stronger. Larisa’s head snapped up.
She was hearing it too. And like Elena, some part of her recognized the sound.
The sisters looked at each other. Larisa’s hands flickered with a subtle signal; Elena’s mirrored the gesture.
Kill me, Larisa said. Kill me now, end it here.
Elena gave her word.
The sound warned her not to do it. The sound was lyrical and clear, poetic and soft, pliant yet also urgent. As dire as their circumstances were, some of Elena’s panic eased. She was able to think calmly, observing the men who had captured them. The Technologist and Illarion she marked off as dead men, but neither they nor the Crimson Watch appeared to hear the sound.
Untroubled by it, the Technologist issued an order. “Strip them and take them to the Plague Wing. It’s time for me to chart their progress.”
The Crimson Watch were slow to comply, the sound from the cells growing louder.
“The talisman,” Illarion repeated, the words rasping in his throat.
The Technologist tried to reach something covered by his robes. He frowned when he found he couldn’t. His