The emperor snorted. “Then don’t, unless you want to find your efforts wasted.”
He held her in silence for a time and she gathered herself. The emperor felt different from Banreh. Softer. His hair reminded her of her father’s. But my father doesn’t kill girls. Or did he? She remembered what Eldra had told her about pulling a spear from her sister’s neck. She didn’t know what to believe. I may be a killer, too.
“I’m better now,” she said. Her finger hurt.
As they rode towards the caravan, Mesema held tight to her reins, feeling so dizzy she feared a grain of sand might knock her from the saddle. The Hidden God had shown her a future, but she hoped it wasn’t true. Gods do not lie. They can be unclear, but they do not lie.
The emperor rode beside her, as lost in thought as she. The movement of sand filled the silence between them as the moon rose in the sky, a wide crescent. The Bright One moved closer, his long journey three-quarters finished.
“Tonight you will dine with me,” he said, and spurred his horse forwards.
Eyul left his camel in the valley and crawled up the dune on his elbows. Amalya waited below in the darkness. He looked out over the campsite and slid back down to her.
“The emperor’s caravan, a large one, with his and Arigu’s soldiers both.” “Do we join him?”
Eyul considered it. No. Get to the city first. Deal with Govnan.
“They’re bound to move slowly. We’ll go around. If the scouts stop us, they stop us.”
“Eyul.” She looked at the crest of the dune, where the sounds of men and horses carried. “Since he’s here, do you think he was the one-?”
“I don’t know.” He gathered his camel’s tether and pulled. “There are more important things than a girl.”
Amalya moved her lips, but said nothing. She took her camel’s rope and followed him.
Sarmin closed his eyes and let his mind seek the Many. He moved among them, their whispers brushing against him as he passed. Their words shimmered on the edges of the pattern-shapes and pulsed into the threads, strengthening the pattern-bonds he passed between. Sarmin kept to the dark spaces, unseen, unnoticed.
A flash, and the Many turned as one, called by an unfamiliar touch, a vibration at the heart of the pattern. Sarmin felt it too, a prickling against his skin, a hollow in the design. One of the Many drew away. Sarmin followed, curious, ever cautious of the pattern’s Master.
“Rise.” Mesema rose from her obeisance and the emperor motioned her towards a low table. “Please, eat.”
Torchlight danced over the red cloth covering the table, revealing apples and gleaming oranges, flat pillows of bread, and bowls of steaming lamb decorated with zabrina blossoms of deepest blue. The scents of garlic and thyme reminded her of home.
She stood over the feast and stared at her reflection rippling in a golden plate. The body-slaves had crushed berries against her lips, giving them a bloody look, and swept her hair into a cascade of curls. She did not look Felting. She would never look Felting again.
Is this what a killer looks like?
She knew the emperor would not eat. Emperors were descended from the gods, Sahree had told her, and they did not break bread with mere mortals. He did, however, pick up a goblet and gulp down the sour red brew he’d shared with her before.
Mesema settled down and picked up a piece of bread. The emperor kept his eyes on her, as if she were giving a performance. She didn’t think she could eat, no matter how delicious it smelled. She crumbled a bit of bread between her fingertips.
“We should arrive at the palace soon.” The emperor’s voice fell deep and heavy, as if just thinking about the palace made him tired.
“You’d rather stay in the desert,” she murmured. Not a question.
“Always.”
He reminded her of a Rider in winter, restless, waiting for the day the raids would begin, but for the emperor there would be no raids. The empire was at peace, if living with the pattern could be called peace.
“What is the palace like, Your Majesty?”
He smiled. “Like a garden full of snakes.”
Like me. Mesema tried to bite the bread, but ended up just brushing it against her lips. The crust felt sharp and tough. She tried to push the evening’s vision from her mind.
“Something worries you, Zabrina.”
“Yes.” She took a gulp from her goblet- wine, they called it. She shaped the Cerantic word as the wine ran over her tongue, deciding how much to say. “The wind showed me something in the sand, Your Magnificence.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“I saw the pattern.” She left out the rest, for now, and it made an empty space in the room.
He stared at her, his hand clutched around his goblet. “You play a game with me?” He lifted it in a rough movement and the wine sloshed over the side and ran across his fingers, but he didn’t take a drink. “There are enough women in the palace who play games. Perhaps I should have sent you home to your father.”
“I…” Banreh had warned her to keep silent. Mesema looked down at her hands. A smudge of blue showed on her fingertip, a threatening touch of colour. Everything seemed to slow as she wiped the mark against her skirt. She felt the soft threads against her finger, the fabric moving against her thigh, the sweat on the back of her hand. It’s just a mark from the colour they put on my eyes. It’s from the soap. It’s from the dye in my clothing. But when she looked at her finger again, the spot remained, taking the shape of a crescent moon. It sent a message she couldn’t read, though she knew it to be fearsome.
“What is it?” the emperor asked, putting his drink aside. She had nearly forgotten him. He would kill her now.
“Nothing.” Run. Go now-find Tumble and go. But she hadn’t run the first time, when she saw the vision in Mirra’s garden, and she wouldn’t run now. The emperor stared across the table at her, and she kept still as a tent pole. His face remained that of a stranger, his expressions alien and unreadable, except when transformed by anger.
“Show me.” He knocked the pile of food aside with his elbow and grabbed her hand. Fruit fell and rolled against her slippers as he examined her fingers. He must have felt her hand shaking. He must have felt her fear.
To end here, in the desert… She had seen death fly through her village on the back of red-hoofed horses. Jakar’s clouded eyes made a hollow in her that she felt to this day. Iron was terrible, but the pattern was worse. The pattern wrote your end upon you. It made you wait, knowing your death, wondering to what sinister goal you were to give your life’s breath.
At long last the emperor looked up and told her what she already knew. “A tiny moon.”
“No!”
“A pattern-mark.” His lips grew tight.
“It’s not!” Her mouth lied without asking permission.
He let go and patted her hand. “Don’t let anybody see it.” She watched him. He should kill her, or at least call his guards and have her removed, but instead he drank again from his goblet. If she were to guess at his expression now, she would call it worried. No, he will not kill me. It is I who will kill him. Would the pattern make her do it? At last she said, “I’ll… I’ll be careful.”
“When we get to the palace, I’ll have the mages protect you as they do me.”
They fell silent for a time. She thought about Eldra, first with the marks across her skin, and then lying on the desert sand with an arrow sprouting from her chest. She thought of herself, standing over the emperor with a knife.
“Your Majesty, why are you helping me?”
He smiled. “You have spirit. I wish I had known you before.”
“Before the pattern touched me?”
He shook his head. “In Mirra’s garden-when you touched me-my robes fell open. Isn’t that when you saw the pattern?” She stared at him, a dark idea taking form in her mind. Banreh had spoken of the emperor as if he were sick, as if he were going to die.
“You really do see things in the wind? And all this ti
me I thought you played Settu with me. The way you always hinted at the pattern-”
“The pattern… was inside your robe?”
“But you are exactly as you seem. How do you do that?” He stood and untied his sash. Mesema thought she should turn her head, or tell him to stop, but a terrible fascination won her over. A truth hid behind his silks, ready to be revealed, and she wanted to see. The knot came loose and the purple silk fell to the floor of the tent.
“See.” He lifted her chin with one hand. She saw.
His flesh showed line upon line of red and blue, the larger shapes followed by smaller and yet smaller again, so that looking at his skin, she felt as though she gazed into the distance. His arms, too, were banded by pattern-shapes. In the centre of his chest, where a crescent moon floated above a series of smaller circles and polygons, she could see a smear of her own blood.
“I touched you, there,” she said. “I cut my finger on a little air-ship.” Would her skin look like this also?
“I have been patterned for years,” he said, “and I am still alive.” The crescent moon drew her eyes, the twin to the one on her finger. Blue outlined with red, her blood a brown smear across it, it seemed to stretch with each breath the emperor took. Stretch, and reach towards her.
She touched her finger to it, moon to moon.
Sarmin felt it again, a brightness between the pattern-threads. He moved towards it, feeling the silence around him. The others hung back, silent, waiting, though for what, he didn’t know. Closer to the brightness he felt many barriers, lines that stopped and twisted the pattern-threads and made them wrong. He studied the ugliness until he found a way to slip through.
The emperor drew in his breath, long and hard. “I remember,’ he said, “so many things.”
Mesema saw them too, the boys running in the throne room and hiding in the women’s wing. She heard the Old Wives singing and nibbled the honeycakes the cooks slipped into Beyon’s pocket. She could feel the taste of them on her tongue. She saw Emperor Tahal, laughing and reaching for her to sit on his lap. She saw her brothers, dead. She never stopped seeing them. She screamed and beat her fists upon the throne. She pushed her mother down the dais steps, seeing the hurt and confusion in her eyes. A gutted nobleman lay prone before her, his blood soaking into a silk runner. Then another, and another. Tuvaini spoke in her ear, soft and urgent, making her stomach twist. Then he left her, and the dark throne room echoed with her finger-taps. Light came and with it children, running across the courtyard, chasing a dog, laughing-but not her children. Never hers.
And the dreams carried her away from the palace. She spied on a caravan, watching a girl with wheaten curls. She thrust her knife at the vizier. She laughed at an assassin, knowing he was trapped.
I was an emperor.
She gasped and pulled her finger away. “Memories.”
“It can’t take mine. There are protections woven all around me.” His hand shook as he replaced his robe.
“But there were things you had forgotten until I touched you.” That, too, she had seen.
“I hadn’t forgotten them, not really.” He sat down, grasping at his purple sash. “It’s more that I stopped feeling them.”
“Your Majesty,” she said, meeting his copper gaze, “listen. We are both trapped in the pattern-web.”
“In that case you should call me Beyon.”
Was he joking with her? She tried his name in her mouth.“ Beyon.
What shall we do? We have to stop it.” She thought of her promise to Eldra, not forgotten even when the feather lay beneath heavy wools in her trunk. He laughed. “What shall we do? You are ever brave, Zabrina, Windreader.” She didn’t feel brave, but she tilted her chin at him anyway. “I am Felt. We carry on.”
“Well, Zabrina, Felt, Windreader,” he said, moving to the door flap, “why don’t you have something to eat before you get some rest? We’ll reach the city soon enough, and then we can… do something.”
He didn’t sound convincing, but Mesema nodded before falling into her obeisance. He remained the emperor, and she would obey.
Sarmin had found a way through, only to discover new barriers before him, barriers made of moving ghosts: Pelar. Lana singing a melody in the women’s wing. His father, grunting with pain as he lifted himself from the throne. Every time Sarmin tried to move forwards, a new image from the past blocked his way. On the other side he heard voices. Beyon’s, and a woman’s. The woman’s accent was soft and sibilant. He wanted to stay and listen.
A voice purred in Sarmin’s ear, unexpected, smooth as the silk on his bed. “You move in my place, Stranger.”
Sarmin kept his mind still.
“The emperor is troublesome, isn’t he?” The Master took a conversational tone. “So many protections to move through. Nevertheless, he is mine. Not yours.” The last reverberated with anger.
Fury beat its wings in Sarmin’s chest. The Pattern Master didn’t sense it, or didn’t care.
“Beyon will serve me, alive or dead, broken or no. It is too late for him. And you…’
Sarmin felt himself falling.
“You do not belong.”
Sarmin fell past the whispers and calls of the Many, through the dawntinted desert sky and the dark places suspended in the pattern, between the gods painted on the ceiling and through the purple light of his room, and onto the pillows and comforters of his royal bed.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Eyul stared at the dim canvas roof of the tent. Near midnight, close to the city, they’d stopped and tried to sleep, in an attempt to reacquaint themselves with city-time. Soon they would walk the stone streets in the burning sunlight, conduct their business when it should be time for making love, and sleep when the cool breezes rushed across the sand. Sleep when the stars formed their patterns in the sky, pointing to other destinations, and to the time when they would not be together.
Amalya slept beside him, her breathing even and easy. The Tower comforted her; she harboured no suspicions against Govnan. She had faith that everything would work as it should, and that Beyon would be saved; otherwise, he hoped, she’d have run away with him as he’d asked. He thought once more about the west, and what was said to exist there: an ocean full of fish, islands peppered with fruit trees, and space. Specks of land lost in seas wider than deserts, places where a person might stop and think, even for the rest of his life.
Everything would change after today, with Govnan, with Beyon, and with Amalya. Whatever decisions he made regarding Govnan, things would be different.
Unless Beyon had turned-then everything was already too late.
He rolled to face her. “Are you still awake?” A question for children whispering under the covers.
Amalya pulled her blankets up around her shoulders. “Mmm.”
“Do you think Beyon sent those guardsmen?”
“You said not.”
“But if the pattern has him-”
She sighed and fell quiet until he thought she was sleeping. Then she spoke again. “We won’t know until we see him. But you should give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“Why?”
“Because you never have before.”
“That has no effect on whether or not-”
“It has an effect on you. It matters to you.”
He pressed his lips against her arm. “And you?”
If he could hear a smile, he thought he heard one then.
“Very much. Now sleep.”
Instead he rolled to his other side and looked at his Knife. Something had happened to it in the buried city when he freed Tahal. It whispered. When the sandcat had come upon him, the Knife had kept him from dying. It had helped him kill the guardsmen when he couldn’t see. And yet it spoke with the voice of a child.
He was not even sure it spoke with just one voice.
Perhaps he had gone mad, after all. But he thought not. He’d never noticed madness help a man as much as the Knife had helped him. This was something else; some other mag
ic that was neither elemental nor patterned had infused the Knife.
He reached out to touch the warm blade and he heard it: a child’s voice. “Eyul. Assassin.” It blew over his skin, soft and calm as afternoon wind, and fell still.
“Who are you?” he whispered, but the Knife had nothing more to say.
Sarmin stood by a fountain, its gentle music the only sound in the circular hall with red walls. Oil lamps burned low and smokeless in well-spaced niches. He turned, making a slow survey of the chamber. He couldn’t see a door, but what he could see looked familiar.
“Find the Red Door,” he said. They were his words, but he didn’t own the voice that spoke them.
The fountain room. We have bled here. This is the red heart of the palace of the Cerani emperors. This the pattern. This the price.
Sarmin crossed the hall, seeing the marble fountain in the room beyond, and set his hand to the wall.
Sarmin watched the Carrier’s fingers search until they found hidden studs. A door swung inwards, noiseless, invisible until it began to open. The whispers came again.
The Carrier took an oil lamp and trimmed the wick so low it could barely sustain a flame, then passed through the doorway into a narrow corridor hewn from undressed rock. This building, the whole city, had been constructed about a rocky outcrop where nomads had once found shelter. Hidden pathways ran through the palace, accommodated within walls, making stone-filled voids. Sarmin could feel the rough floor through the Carrier’s slippers, the coolness of the stone as he brushed his fingers along the wall. The Carrier moved with purpose and caution, making turns without pause where the ways split. Left. Turn here. The lower way, Tuvaini said. The fool said. Take the lower way.
An unease grew in Sarmin, an unease he couldn’t name. The Carrier seemed to feel it too. Close. We grow close.
Ahead, flickers described a rock wall, torchlight from around the next corner. The Carrier slowed, pressed tight to the stone now as he moved forwards. From among the Many, several rose to guide the Carrier.
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