For a moment Sarmin thought he would get no answer. He opened his mouth but the girl shuddered and spoke. “My emperor, there’s an old woman in the dungeons-”
“No! The dungeons are empty.”
“I–I spoke with an old woman, my emperor.”
“I ordered the dungeons cleared!” Sarmin turned to Ta-Sann. “Summon my vizier.”
As Ta-Sann relayed the order to one of his men Sarmin motioned for the girl to continue.
“I wanted to put the stone back in that little cell. I needed to. The stone insisted.” She paused and looked at her hands, turned up as if for inspection, or to catch her tears, though she had stopped crying. Her voice took on a sing-song tone as if she were too deep in memory to remember where she was. “But the cell was locked. An old woman put her face to the window. I wanted to give her the stone, asked her to put it back, but she wouldn’t take it. She said I must take the stone to the emperor and tell him that she knew the man who hid it there in that… she called it an oubliette. Rhymes with forget, that’s how she told me to remember it.”
Rushes’ head snapped up, sudden as if startling from sleep, her hair swung to either side, leaving her face to face with Sarmin, eyes wide and staring into his. “I didn’t want to come to you. I didn’t. I was scared. But it’s important. I know it is.”
“Ta-Sann, have this prisoner brought to me. This old woman.” “Here, my emperor?”
Sarmin thought of having her taken to the throne room, of sitting above his captive in the Petal Throne, lord of all Cerana. “Here,” he said. “This is where it began.”
Azeem entered the room, robes swishing, with Ta-Sann behind him, returning from sending for the old woman. The vizier took in the scene with a quick glance. Rushes, red-eyed, still clutching her tray, and held in turn by a sword-son, Sarmin standing in the wreckage of his former prison. The vizier’s eyes caught for a moment on the stone in Sarmin’s hands, then moved on.
“My emperor has need of me?” He went into the obeisance, and Sarmin let him, counting out his temper while the man kept his face to the dusty carpet.
“Rise.” Sarmin waited while the Azeem got to his feet, traces of plaster on his cheekbones making sharp contrast with the darkness of his skin. Sarmin remembered when they had spoken together of the islands. We are both strangers here. Sarmin’s anger softened. “I ordered the dungeons emptied, but I’m told we keep old women locked there now?”
Azeem bowed his head. “The dungeons were emptied, my emperor, in obedience to your command. Each prisoner was released or executed according to their crime, and each man to die was first taken to the wall where they spoke with priest Dinar of Herzu’s order and saw the sky.”
“The dungeons were emptied… but now they are being filled again?”
Sarmin saw the gap he had left in his order.
“Even so, my emperor. Prisoners from the Fryth campaign arrived during the night in waggons from the front.”
“Vizier, the man I want in your slippers is a man who obeys the intent of my commands not one who contorts around the letter of them. That island of yours…?”
“Konomagh, my emperor.”
“It may be that you should consider a return to it.”
“As my emperor commands.” Azeem bowed lower. “But before I empty the dungeons again may I offer the reasons for placing the Fryth there?”
Sarmin sealed his lips and taking the pause for assent Azeem continued.
“The prisoners arrived after envoy Kavic and Austere Adam, having taken the longer route. They were still being processed when news of the envoy’s death reached me. Many of these prisoners are soldiers, violent men with grievances. To loose such men outside the palace on a night when their envoy had been murdered would have been unwise. Moreover discussions in the throne room touched on the possibility that the envoy never arrived in Nooria but was attacked by bandits and slain along the borderland trails on his way to your palace.”
“Herran did suggest that,” Sarmin agreed.
“Such a fiction would be hard to maintain if freed prisoners from Fryth were allowed to wander, perhaps picking up news of the envoy’s arrival in the city, or even rumours of his fate.”
“An emperor is not allowed to apologise.” Sarmin set a hand to Azeem’s shoulder then turned away to look at the wall where his councillors had once lived in the scroll and detail of the decoration. Had he been mad?
Had he projected parts of his own personality onto imagined faces? Or had he summoned the wisdom of spirits living behind what men took for real?
He touched his hand to the broken plaster, rubbed the powder between his fingers. Aherim had spoken to him from the pattern written here, the sternest of the angels, cautious in his council. Zanasta too, oldest of the devils, and given to secrets. They had bound him to this room more securely than locks and guards. Mesema had given him his freedom when she destroyed them. I miss them.
Sarmin wiped his hand across his robe. “Sometimes I sound like my brother. A man with the lives of five hundred thousand and more in his hands should not be quick to anger, nor quick to take offence, nor slow to forgive.”
“Emperor Beyon was a great man.” A girl’s voice.
Sarmin turned in surprise and found Rushes covering her mouth as if scared of what words might escape next. “I loved him too, Rushes.” He smiled. “And I can see where you got your name. Perhaps that’s why he liked you. Both of you led by the heart. Rushing in.” Sarmin met Azeem’s eyes, pleased that the vizier didn’t look away but watched him closely.
“Good men, great men, men of the heart, all of them can make bad emperors.” Sarmin’s gaze returned to the stone, so ordinary in all respects and yet somehow fascinating. “So tell me, Azeem, how many prisoners do we have in the cells?”
“Two hundred and six, my emperor. General Arigu’s report indicates over three hundred departed his camp in Fryth. I understand there were many casualties along the route. Privation and disease led to high rates of attrition.”
“And how many old women are among them?”
“I believe there are twenty women, my emperor, I was not informed of their ages.” From the expression that passed across Azeem’s face Sarmin judged it physically pained the man to be found wanting in information. A knock and one of the sword-sons entered at Sarmin’s permission. “The prisoner is being helped up the stairs, my emperor.”
“Would this be the old woman you alluded to, my emperor?” Azeem tilted his head in question.
Sarmin held up the stone, not quite a perfect circle, not quite smooth, not quite black. “What can you tell me about this?”
“I-”Azeem blinked. “Nothing, your Excellency.” Again that look of acute unhappiness.
“Well our guest claims to have more knowledge, so I have extended her my invitation.”
It took less time that Sarmin anticipated for the knock announcing the prisoner. Fryth bred its old women tough it seemed. Perhaps the mountains there made the two hundred steps of his tower feel like nothing. Govnan had once told him that mountains, like the sea, must be seen to be believed, and lived in to be understood.
She walked in behind the largest of the sword-sons, at first obscured by his frame, then revealed. He knew her in that moment and the sight of her took the strength from his limbs. For a moment he stood once more in the gloom beneath innumerable trees with the deluge shedding cold across his shoulders. Stick thin, ragged, gristle and wrinkles over old bones, but somehow she radiated a strength that made the island warriors look frail in comparison. The Megra looked to the stone first, then to Sarmin, her eyes hard, the colour of flint. Sarmin had seen her through Gallar’s eyes and now she stood before him in the place where he had watched her from without and from within.
“I never thought to see another.” Her words, dry with age, wrapped in the harsh accents of the east.
Ta-Sann motioned to his brothers that they should put the woman into the obeisance. She must have been instructed, but like all these norther
ners she would rather break than bend.
“Leave her.” Sarmin waved his guard back. Beyon would have had her legs broken. That or swept her into his arms, calling her Grandmother and laughing at her audacity. Either one a possibility depending on his mood.
“I am the emperor Sarmin. What is your name, madam?” Sarmin had no desire to admit his knowledge of her, a stolen glimpse tarnished by the act of theft, though he had not been the one to steal it. He wondered what the Megra thought of his own stiff formality. She looked to have seen a hundred summers but two hundred would be closer to the mark. Did a hundred summers bring wisdom, and if so, what did the wise think of Sarmin? “They called me the Megra.” She shook her head. “A Yrkman pattern killed all the people that knew my name. All save one. A boy escaped, and your soldiers strung him from a tree.” She extended a finger towards the stone. “It wasn’t chance that put me in that cell. I knew a man who spent a year in it, lifetimes ago. I could taste him still, on the air, in the darkness.
I helped the guards select that one for me. That man called me Meg. His Meg.” She made to spit, as if a moment of sweetness had turned sour on the instant.
In Sarmin’s hands the stone grew suddenly warmer, more heavy. “Tell them to leave.” The voice came from behind him, not from within, not from the Many. A stern voice remembered from a thousand nights alone in this room. “All of them but Meg.”
“Aherim?” Sarmin wanted to laugh.
“My emperor?” Azeem looked surprised. None of them had reacted to Aherim’s voice, only to Sarmin speaking the angel’s name.
Aherim! Always so stern! “Leave me. All of you. Only the Megra is to stay.”
Sarmin clapped his hands to startle them into action.
Ta-Sann led his brothers from the room, ushering Rushes with them.
Azeem followed, a worried frown but saying nothing. As the door closed Sarmin whirled to face the wall beside his bed. He’d half expected to see Aherim’s face written back across the broken plaster, half expected that the scrolling decoration that concealed and revealed him would be spreading out across the wall once more like vine tendrils growing as he watched. “Aherim?” he asked.
“I heard a voice too.” The Megra spoke behind him.
“You heard Aherim?” Sarmin glanced back at her.
“I heard a voice.” She nodded. The Megra took six steps and set her bony hands to the wall beside the door where the decoration remained. “There used to be many voices here. Angels and devils. But you had to hunt for them. It took years to find some of them,” Sarmin told her. “They kept you here?” She didn’t wait for his agreement. “They kept him here too. Year after year. He grew up here, until the Yrkmen brought their war into the desert. His brother hid him in the dungeon then. For safe keeping. In an oubliette. To forget.”
“Who?” But Sarmin knew the answer.
“Helmar.”
“The Pattern Master.” Sarmin’s hand remembered how it had felt to thrust the Knife into Helmar’s chest.
The Megra traced a single line through the complexity of the scrollwork.
“He told me they brought him to a bare room. He was too young to understand, but he grew into it. They let him paint the walls. He would spend months at it, then rub it all away and start again.” Her nail ended its path where one of Mesema’s blows had cratered the wall. “This is all his work.
He wrote himself here.”
“My angels…” Sarmin hunted for his next breath.
“Echoes of Helmar, reflections of him, aspects and fragments.” The Megra turned her flint eyes towards him. “We’re none of us one thing. Someone told me that once.”
Sarmin held the stone up, his arm trembling with the effort. “Then this is his? The Pattern Master’s stone?”
“Helmar’s.” She nodded. “He made one for me, back when I was young, and he was… less old.”
“She loved me.” Aherim’s voice, from the walls, pulsing at the edge of hearing.
“You loved him?”
A long pause and the Megra nodded, a smile of remembrance softening the hard angles of her face for a moment. Her teeth perfect, just one gone, leaving a black slot. We’re none of us one thing. A hint perhaps of the mountain girl Helmar once met. Then a shrug. He could almost hear the creak of her shoulders. “A passing thing. Love is like that. The Voice in my village, Voice Zanar, used to sing that love came like a cloud’s shadow on the mountain slopes. When you’re in it you don’t see that it’s always mov ing. Just a boy of fifty that Keller, but he had it right.
“I kept that stone. Kept it as my home-stone. Close on two hundred years sitting in the middle of my hut, watching me get old. It’s still there now I expect. Filthy rangers wouldn’t have a use for it. They’d be too busy stealing my copper pans.” She shook her head and made to spit again, before thinking better of it. Her hair hung in grey rat-tails, mottled scalp showing beneath. Dirt crusted on the ragged wool of her dress; she smelled of decay, but still Sarmin felt a resonance between them. Something shared. Perhaps just the knowing that develops in those who have been too much alone. “Tell me about Helmar’s stone. You asked to see me, put a charm on that girl to get your way. What is it you have to say?” He swapped the stone from one hand to the other as he spoke, and her eyes followed.
“It holds a power and a secret,” she said.
“I know. It drew me to his cell, kept me there until I found it. But what power? What secret?” Perhaps it was a key to the pattern, to reversing Helmar’s work, to healing Mogyrk’s wound.
“Ha! If I knew that I wouldn’t have let the austeres destroy my home, or your soldiers lay hands on me.” She paused and looked away from the stone. “I wouldn’t have let them hang that fool boy.”
“What was his name?” Sarmin saw Gallar had meant more to her than she wanted to let show. But sometimes what a person wants is not what they need.
“Gallar. Almost grown but still a boy. We’re none of us one thing-he said that to me. Be brave, he said. Always spouting nonsense. Look inside, he said, as if an old woman needs a child to teach her to see past surfaces.
A foolish child, wasted, hung from a tree. Did you know your soldiers hang men in foreign lands, emperor? Shop-keepers, wood cutters, charcoal men, foolish boys, all throttled on ropes under a tree. That’s the lesson age teaches us. The one about waste.”
“I’ve tried to stop this war. It’s nothing of mine.” But the ache in his throat, the memory of the rope tightening about Gallar’s neck for the last time-that told a different story. Sarmin owned the war as he owned the empire. Responsibility had to lie somewhere, had to be claimed. Sarmin turned the stone over and found no insight. “So all you have to tell me is that it’s powerful?”
“The truth?” The Megra reached out again to the wall. “I wanted to see you. To see what there was of him in you. To see where he had been kept so long. To see you in Helmar’s room.”
“You took quite a risk. The Reclaimer’s line are not famed for their patience.”
Again the shrug of ancient shoulders. “I’m an old woman with no roots left, waiting to die. They brought me a long way to reach Nooria. It didn’t seem so big a thing to travel the last few hundred yards and see Helmar’s heir.”
That sent a shiver down his spine. Helmar’s heir. Sarmin went back to where Aherim and Zanasta had hidden in the detail. He knelt before the wall, careless of the Megra. Had the faces still been there they would have been positioned level with his shoulders, an angel for one shoulder and a devil for the other, to whisper in his ears.
“All this time I spoke to the Pattern Master?”
“To echoes Helmar left behind, yes. Echoes of a young man, much like you, sharing a similar fate.”
“I never killed. I-”
“And yet people died, and you became emperor. As did Helmar. And every day more people die, more throats are cut, more boys hung from branches with a rope about their neck. It’s the way of things, what we do.
People hurt each other.
Sometimes good men shed more innocent blood than the bad ones do.”
Sarmin set the stone before the wall. For an instant he saw himself setting the stone down on desert sands, stepping back, stepping away, watching that one dark point dwindle among the white and blinding expanse of the dunes.
“What do you know of the desert, Megra?” The question bubbled up within him and he claimed it as his own, though his thoughts had been very much on what lay before him.
“The desert?” A shrill note entered the old woman’s voice. “You ask a woman of the mountains about the desert?”
“Yes. What do you know of it?”
“You won’t make me go there?”
“No.”
A long pause and then, “Only what Helmar knew. Only that the story of men is being unwritten in the desert. Only that nothing lives there… and that the nothing is growing.”
She looked old. As old as her years and weary with them. Sarmin turned towards the scrollwork by the window, the place where he had found the voice and seen the first steps of the Megra’s journey towards him. “Here,” he said, and pointed. “He still lives here.”
The Megra stepped in closer, tilting her head. “It’s his name.” And Sarmin tilting his head in the same way saw what had eluded his eyes for so many years, lettering reduced to pattern and slanted through a confusion of calligraphic swirls. Helmar.
The Megra reached the wall, knelt, as swift as if she were a child, and set her withered hand to the writing. It seemed that the room released a longheld breath and in that moment each part of the wall stole into motion, the lines the Pattern Master wrote there so long ago flowing and unfolding, drawn like water to a spout. Lines writhed in black and blue across the Megra’s hand, wrapping her fingers, curling up around her wrist, sinking in. In the space of five heartbeats all trace of Helmar’s work had vanished, sunk into the Megra, deep as bones.
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