“But she came!” Sarmin twisted his head towards the unbroken lines beneath his window. “She brought me the urn.” It remained unopened, a rounded shadow against the wall, threat and promise together.
— She is coming.
“Who? Who!” He strained his ears, but the answer, when it came, rose from within. A vision, a scene remembered through the eyes of one of the Many he bore, one of the dead.
In the mountain dark he stands, shivers by the clan hall. Someone has to take their finds to Her. Someone. And it falls to him. They leave him in the dark with the cloth bag limp in his hand. A dozen white-stars, not much for a day’s work on the high ridges, but the tiny blooms are rare as opals. He watches as Costos hauls open the clan-hall door. For a moment firelight colours the two older boys, strains of “The Peaks of East-March” reach out, scattered notes from Voice Zanar’s harp. The door bangs shut behind them.
He shakes himself, this boy of the mountain clans, this boy whose memories flow in an emperor’s head, shakes himself and sets off. He starts slow and gets slower. No one hurries to see Her. She’ll be pleased with the flowers, the very first in the briefest of seasons. She’ll be pleased and she’ll let him go without looking into him the way she does, the way that leaves people feeling ill-suited to their skin.
No light shows in The Megra’s hut, nothing to lead the boy across the slope of scree-stone. The frost-shattered gravel shifts beneath each step, creet bushes, stunted and long-thorned, try to trip him. The muted sounds of the hall grow fainter and he leaves the village home-stones behind him, coming in time to the walls of Her round-house.
“Megra?” She won’t be asleep. She burns no lights, eats cold, sits wrapped in furs all winter before a cold hearth, but she never sleeps.
“Megra?” Her hut stands away from the village, from the stink from the tanning hall, from the mustiness of goats and the choking richness of composting waste. The wind over the ridges brings the promise of rain and the faint tang of granite.
He sets a hand to the walls of her hut, round like every other save the clanhall and tannery, but built of different stone, older rocks shaped by some lost people and worn beyond corners or edges. The blocks must have been carried at least from Crowspire to build this place, but no-one could say why. Pressing his fingers to the smooth stones it seems for a moment that he can hear an echo of those vanished people, chanting, deep-voiced around the crack and snap of fire. The moment leaves him.
“Boy?” The Megra’s voice through the slit window. To hear her speak you might think her young, or at least a mother with young sons.
“It’s Gallar. I’ve brought the white-stars.” He moves around the curve of the wall to the hide flap that hangs as a door.
“Just Gallar?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Well bring my flowers, boy.”
And he ducks in, pushing the hide away.
“Sit, before you break something,” she says. The darkness offers nothing of her. Gallar doesn’t mind-she looks too old to be alive. When he had been small he would hide behind his mother if The Megra came to their hut. The first time she touched him-when he had the red fever-he screamed. He had thought her fingers would mark him forever, though what with he couldn’t say. He’d recovered though and she had let him see the ring of gold she wore always on a thong about her neck. Too big for a finger, too small for a wrist. He’d run his fingertip along the inner surface and she’d read the words there for him. Different for every person. “Be brave,” she had said. Her face had softened for a moment. “I was sick and you made me better,” he had told her, being of an age that likes to tell such things. “We’re none of us one thing,” she had replied. Wisdom of her own on offer this time. He’d asked who gave her the ring but she left without answer.
A cough reminds him he is not alone in this darkness.
“The white-stars.” He opens the bag half convinced that some glimmer will escape it, but even the whiteness of the stars can’t break the night inside Megra’s hut. He just wants her to take it so he can leave.
“Do you know what’s coming, boy? Have you smelled it on the wind?”
“Rain?” She doesn’t mean rain.
“Something is coming. Something worse than wickedness.”
Gallar imagines her withered lips twitching as that young voice falls from them. Had she stolen it? Roggon said she had. “What’s coming?” he asks, wanting to be gone, wanting to run from her and the bad thing both.
But The Megra doesn’t answer. Instead like any ancient she slips into something new.
“Old Helmar came here once upon a when-did you know that? He was a man grown, with nothing but a century on him, and I ran barefoot no higher than his hip.”
Gallar doesn’t ask who Helmar was. The Megra speaks to people as if they know everything and treats them as if they know nothing.
“Bad things are coming, boy. Helmar could have told you. He didn’t just catch people in his patterns, he caught the past too, and the future.”
The slither of the cloth bag being taken, the wet noise of chewing. Is she eating the flowers?
“Don’t ever eat a white-star, boy. Poisons the body quicker than it opens up the mind. But if you’re hardened to it-ain’t nothing better for seeing. For really seeing. Helmar would have known what’s coming through and through. Me, I have to chew poison just to catch a glimpse of-” She draws in a sharp breath. Another. A low moan. “…empty, the desert is empty, a place without time where the djinn howl in silence and the wind moans-” She sounds in pain. “There’s a hole in the world. A hole that devours and the sands are running through it. There’s a-” She stops, cut off and for a moment he thinks she’s fainted. The sudden sound of a chair scraping on stone makes him flinch.
“I’m leaving, boy. You should too. Yrkmen are coming up the passes, austeres laying their patterns. Rangers with them. Anyone who stays here will be dead by dawn.”
“What?” His mind can’t make sense of it. Yrkmen in the mountains? Fryth was their ally! And they didn’t need to take the high passes… “You were talking about the desert! You never said about Yrkmen!”
“The death of all of us is coming from the desert, boy. That’s for tomorrow though. The Yrkmen are here today and they’ll kill you just as good.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SARMIN
“Do you believe in the gods?”
Sarmin blinked. He had been half in dreams, wondering at his last night’s vision. Though tied to his bed he had traveled far, to speak with a wise woman of the mountain clans while Yrkmen swarmed the passes, bound for Fryth. He recalled none of it from Histories, the book that had been ruined. Now Mesema’s voice pulled him back to her room where sunlight fell in bright spots against their cushions. “Do you?”
It seemed so odd a question. He answered as he would have answered before he saw the nothingness in Beyon’s tomb. “Ask me if I believe in stone.” He rolled across the rugs to be closer to Mesema, sprawled on her piled cushions, naked and still complaining of the heat.
“Do you believe in stone?” Mesema asked him, lifting her head to watch him in the sunlight that reached them through the perforations overhead.
“I do.”
“And why?” She lifted up, a sway of milk-heavy breasts, and reached for her fan.
“There are slaves-” Sarmin bit off the words. She wouldn’t allow her body slaves into the chamber when he visited. She would rather sweat in private than be cool beneath the gaze of others. And he liked it also, being truly alone with her, in the sunlight, without even the Many haunting him.
“Why?” she asked again.
“I see it, touch it, it’s all around us.” Uncertainty tinged his words. The nothingness in Beyon’s tomb made everything he felt, everything he saw, feel temporary, delicate.
“And the gods?” she asked.
“I have only to walk to the temple and I can see them too.”
“You see stone there, cut into the shapes men have imagi
ned, impermanent.” Her hand fluttered and a breath of the fan reached him, an unseen caress.
She was right without knowing why, and irritation washed over him. “Should the gods be hidden? Nothing but ripples in the grass?” His annoyance was erased an instant later with shame at mocking her.
“The Hidden God watches over the Felt, or so my people say. The Red Hooves believe that the Hidden God revealed himself to them at last and that he is Mogyrk, still faceless but ready to guide those who will hear him. They say that he lives in the houses they build him from stone, as the Cerani say Herzu and Mirra and Ghesh and Meksha and so many others live in the statues that are made for their temples.” She rolled onto her back, spotted with bright points of light. “The gods of the Felt roam the sky and grass, but only the Hidden God cares if we live or die.”
“I believe in the gods but they don’t care if I believe or not.” Do they care about us at all? “Any more than that room cared if I were in it or not.”
“Do they not give you your magic?” Mesema asked.
“They put it there in the world, just like they put arithmetic there, and the wind. I don’t need to bother them each time I use it any more than Donato needs their approval to calculate the tax on a caravan or a leatherworker needs it to put his tools to good use.”
“I had a friend, Eldra of the Red Hooves. She followed Mogyrk,” Mesema said.
“The girl who travelled with you?” Sarmin remembered the blue feathers Mesema kept from the arrow that killed the Red Hoof woman.
Mesema nodded. “They don’t believe like you do, at least Eldra didn’t. It’s a different kind of faith. Just one god, always on her mind. She needed to speak about him all the time, and it’s a greedy faith. They hold that all other gods are false, just mistakes and imaginations.”
Greedy, indeed. Mogyrk’s end had been selfish, slowly drawing the world into death with him. Sarmin waited for Mesema’s next words. It was the Windreader way, to approach new topics along familiar paths. A nation of storytellers… he wondered how long it might take to relate even the simplest information in their longhouses when all of them gathered in the besna-smoke and made tales out of the day’s events.
“Windreaders live among the gods. We move through them every day, see them work. The Yrkmen have a dead god. They carry his corpse like a burden and demand you see it and know that all other gods are false. They need to stamp this fact on each thing they meet, like a herder marking his beasts with iron.”
“You’re worried about this peace envoy?” Sarmin watched the points of light slide over her as she moved. She had once taken a softer view of Mogyrk. Perhaps her father’s death at Mogyrk hands had altered her opinion.
“I want you to be worried,” Mesema said. “I want you to understand how these people think, not just what some scribe has put down about the church of Mogyrk.”
Oh, but I am worried. About this and so many other things. Sarmin sat and drew his knees up to rest his cheek on, bare feet among the cushions. He watched his wife and she watched the ceiling, the only sound the flutter of her fan and the distant wail of a tower-mage threading the sky with spells so old the words lost meaning long ago. He wanted to feel alive, to abandon himself in her flesh again, but her nakedness left him unmoved. Perhaps it was the other women he had seen on his way to her; finer figures and softer skin could be found by walking into the hall and pointing. The greatest beauties of the known world roamed this wing, forever drawing his eye, invading his imagination.
Mesema rolled towards him, tilting her head in that way of hers. What pleased him most were her imperfections, the faint pink lines on her belly where her child had stretched the skin, the scar on her collarbone, some riding injury from long ago. The things that made her Mesema.
She smiled, knowing where his eyes roamed.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, perhaps the first question the first woman asked the first man when Mirra and Herzu scattered words into the world.
“I-” Sarmin opened his mouth but caught his tongue. In that instant Grada had filled his thoughts, solid, strong, honest with dirt, not shaped like the girls strewn before him, but every inch alive. “Marke Kavic.” The envoy’s name came to his rescue and Sarmin repeated it, laying the emphasis where Azeem had placed his, the word’s edges sharp and alien. “He has brought an austere of Mogyrk with him and demands reparations. And so the courtiers make him wait, to show their displeasure.” He wondered again whether the priest knew of the emptiness that filled Beyon’s tomb, whether he could use it to destroy them all.
“Watch the austere,” she said, as if she knew his thoughts, “If we do not respect his dead god he will move against the peace. And your mother, too. She is asking questions about the war and my people.”
Without answering he stood and pulled on his robe. Mesema watched him with disappointed eyes, but she said nothing. Many unspoken words lay between them now-about the voices of the Many, Beyon’s tomb, and his vision of the old woman; but tonight was not the time to begin speaking them. It was better she not know how fragile her safety lay, how fragile his mind. But he had brought something for her to see, one thing he could share. He lifted the urn, still sealed, for her inspection. She stood up, wrapping herself in silk sheets. He was reminded of the day she had run into his tower room, hair wild and blood on her arms. “What is it?” she asked.
“It contains papers, records.” He turned it between his hands. “I cannot open it.”
Mesema held out her arms. He handed her the urn and she tested the weight of it, frowning. Then in a sudden movement she smashed it against the floor, sending shards of clay across the rug. Scrolls and parchment fragments spilled out from between the lid and what had been the base, some tied together with strips of leather, others loose and crumbling. Sarmin smiled. “I had forgotten how quickly you get to the heart of a matter.”
She leaned over the smashed pottery and and he kissed her, once, twice, and more, heat demanding he hold her, run his hands along her skin.
Mesema pulled back and smiled, colour in her cheeks. “Will you stay a bit longer?”
“I…” In the distance, a baby cried. Pelar? The child was Beyon’s, given to Mesema hours before his death-a final gift, the promise of another person to love, but the memory cooled Sarmin’s passion. The pile at her feet drew his eye. He longed to explore those burnt scraps, dry, rolled-up scrolls, and ragged books. Perhaps he would stay and explore Helmar’s secrets with her — Sarmin and Mesema, as Sarmin and Grada once had explored the desert.
But Mesema raised her hands, blue eyes knowing, and pushed. “Go. Read.”
Whenever he left Mesema Sarmin had a falling sensation. The feeling of an opportunity missed, a chance passed by, just fluttering out of his grasp. He gathered his documents and made his way to the corridor.
Dust hung in the air, motes made golden by the last rays of this day’s sun. Sarmin held one of Helmar’s scrolls, listening all the while to the rising voices.
— he should not-I worked the fields, I always-the horsegirl is filth, she smells of-I’m lost! — I would hit him until he understood-the child is the foremost-he will kill him! — the desert is where hope dies-
Perhaps Helmar had known how to free the Many. Perhaps the answer lay in these old parchments brought by the priestess. Her predecessor had visited the palace centuries ago, when Helmar was just a boy, held in the lonely room. The Tower had seen his potential, as they had seen Sarmin’s. They thought he might swear to earth and fire both, the first to do so in forever, and called the priests of Meksha to his training. The scrolls contained their story as much as his.
The priests wrote of Helmar’s testing, of the fits he had as a child, the way he spoke in other languages and had visions-and the patterns he saw, even before the Yrkmen took him. The scrolls the priestess brought were nearly all fragments, some so brittle from age and fire that they crumbled when he tried to read them. His mind wandered to Grada. He had set her on the path of the concubines; if they w
ere part of a larger scheme then he would know it, and he trusted nobody else with the task. And it was well to send her from Azeem, from the old men, away from their glares and their judgement. As busy as they were forcing Marke Kavic wait upon their pleasure, as much as they occupied themselves with drawing up demands to go with the peace, they would still have made time to disapprove of Grada.
Ta-Sann, sword-son, entered and fell into his obeisance, muscles rippling as he moved. “Master Herran requests an audience, Your Majesty.” — Kill him. One of the Many spoke.
Sarmin put down the scroll and eased up from the bed. His joints ached just from the short walks he had taken today. A lifetime in a tower room had not prepared him to journey the breadth and width of the larger palace. “Send him away, Ta-Sann.”
The empire needs a Knife, the old assassin would say for the seventh time. Not only because of war: Helmar was not the first heir to surface from the confusion of our history and neither will he be the last. Any man armed with old writings, ambition and time could be a danger to you if he sets to digging among the lost lines and bastard lines. You need a Knife. The master assassin had brought several candidates before him in recent months, but Sarmin had little interest in such matters; with a knife comes the pressure to use it.
In any event he would continue with knives the same way he had begun, on the day Tuvaini had opened a new door for him-he would not be given one, but he would choose his own and take it. Herran’s men had been calm and deadly, suited to their duties, but none had fitted, none carried that mix of tragedy and strength that in the end allowed Sarmin to forgive Eyul, even for his brothers. Eyul, like the holy weapon itself, had carried his scars and the insults of time. The hand that held that Knife must have known many tasks, must have touched life and been touched by it. It was not enough that they be a killer and no more.
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