“And the people would whisper louder of madness if they knew that you spent your time up here staring at a stone.” Mesema pursed her lips, the compassion in her motherly. In that moment more than any other he wanted her to want him, needed her to need him. And yet he had left her in the women’s wing to live a life separate from the threats that consumed his time. Had he meant to protect her, or protect himself from the clear insight of her gaze? He watched her as she spoke, waited for her to reach out, to show that she wanted to touch him. But instead she folded her hands in her lap. “They tell me it came from the dungeons. Some old woman brought it to you out of a cell?”
Sarmin sat before her, cross-legged on the carpet. He leaned forward and placed the stone on her lap like an offering. “Helmar made it.”
“The Pattern Master?” Mesema flinched as if he had placed a rat-spider on her legs. “It can be nothing good!” She raised her hands to her shoulders, palms out.
“Perhaps.” Sarmin sighed and retrieved the stone. “But he wasn’t always the creature we saw. He grew here.” He set his fingers to the floor. “Walked my paths, shared my blood. He was a young man full of passions, hopes, ambition, all locked away here year upon year. I can’t hate him, Mesema.”
Mesema said nothing, only looked away to the narrow slot of sky through the Sayakarva window. They sat in silence for a time.
“Gala fell sick last night,” Mesema said.
“Who?”
“Gala! She’s one of your harem. I thought I mentioned her…”
It pulled them apart. How many times had his lips spoken to Mesema with another man’s voice? “Has Assar sent a healer?” Sarmin asked.
“Assar came himself.”
Sarmin blinked at that. “Mirra’s own priest attending a concubine? Was her illness that interesting?”
“Her hair turned white and she won’t speak.” Mesema drew her knees up, hunching in, all of a sudden a nervous girl lost within an empress’ dress. “And, Sarmin, her eyes…” A shudder ran through her. “She’s not the first. Irisa fell ill before her.”
Sarmin stood and went to the window, rising to his toes so he could look down upon Beyon’s mausoleum, a squat, wide building out beyond the palace walls.
“I’m scared, Sarmin.”
“Yes.” The mausoleum’s ceiling had fallen in two days before. He had heard it as distant thunder. Now the outer walls shed their plaster in white clouds, teased away by the wind like funeral smoke, bare and pale brick exposed beneath.
“And the guards speak of ghosts, here and in the city also. Tarub saw one, in the Red Room, a reflection in the fountain. She won’t speak of it. If you ask her what she saw she tells you, “nothing”, but it haunts her. She won’t walk anywhere alone. Willa sleeps with her now.”
The djinn. Notheen had warned of them. Sarmin pressed the stone to his forehead. “The trouble spreads from the tomb.” He turned to face her.
“Beyon’s tomb?” She coloured at that.
“Yes.” At last she knew. He had kept it from her so long. “It isn’t pattern work. Something new, or rather something old, from the desert, bleeding in through the hole Helmar made when you-” He lifted a hand to stop her objection. “When Beyon died.”
“But I have Seen it,” she said, to his surprise, “and never knew-can it be stopped?” Mesema leaned forwards, eyes intent. “How can I help?”
“I don’t know.” Sarmin brought his shoulders forward, trying to shrug off the helplessness. “The mages might…” He let out his exasperation in a long breath. “I don’t know.”
“Will your gods help us?”
Sarmin looked at her and for a moment saw once again the young girl on her horse, trekking the grasslands. The tribes spoke to their Hidden God, and he spoke back. “Our gods in Cerana are not so…” He groped for the word. Real? “They don’t help, only watch.” He gestured to the ceiling where the pantheon crowded amid painted heavens. “If I were to set the priests to healing this wound, and were they to fail, it would erode Cerana’s faith at a time when our people are already flocking to the Yrkman church.”
“What then?” She showed no mercy, and why should she? He was emperor, Sarmin the Saviour, the light of heaven, pattern mage. He was her husband. What mother wouldn’t demand the same when her baby lay in the path of destruction? “What will you do, Sarmin?”
“I… I don’t know.” His hand rose, the black stone filling it. “Perhaps this…”
“But you said pattern magic wouldn’t work, you-”
“I don’t know!” His answer came out louder and more angry than he had intended. He knelt beside her chair, before the shock on her face had time to harden into something else. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. And I’m scared too.”
A dull rumbling rolled across the silence that followed. The wall of Beyon’s tomb falling. There would be no hiding it now. Somewhere away towards the kitchen wing a high wail went up, perhaps another person emptied, perhaps another djinn staring hungry from the shadows. Mesema took his hand, squeezed it, hard. “We’ll find a way. We are Cerani. We carry on.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
SARMIN
Sarmin went to the Megra. In the Book of Etiquette an emperor is instructed never to visit but always to summon. The world flows to the feet of the mighty. From the Petal Throne the emperor may see all that concerns him, for he is the light of heaven. Sarmin had spent days upon each page of that fat tome, but a year into his freedom it occurred to him that a man who can have his brothers killed, who can send an Untouchable to kill a prince and find none to stop him should hardly be instructed by a book, however many pages it may possess.
Ta-Marn knocked upon the door then pushed it open. An emperor at least does not wait on permission.
In the bright room beyond, the Megra sat with an old servant woman, one of his mother’s perhaps; she seemed familiar. They sat amid white cushions scattered in abandon, a Settu board between them.
“Who is winning?” Sarmin walked past Ta-Marn. The serving woman sent the board spinning as she fell into her obeisance.
“No one, now.” The Megra gave him half a gap-toothed smile. They had traded her crawling rags for a grey shift from the kitchen staff.
Sarmin rifled through the pages of the Book of Etiquette. Were commoners even permitted to play Settu? Were women? It occurred to him that he didn’t care. “Perhaps we could speak alone. Ta-Marn will escort…”
“Her name is Sahree. You should let her up. She’s an old woman and not well.”
“Ta-Marn will escort Sahree to a seat in some other chamber.”
The sword-son followed his instructions and the Megra scooped up Settu tiles, standing some on the board. At last they both sat facing each other, the light streaming in through high windows.
“Has the high mage found you useful, Megra?” Sarmin asked. He had wondered what Govnan would make of her, that rare individual at once older, more shrewd, and more sour than himself.
The Megra licked the corner of her mouth as if tasting the memory. “I remembered a thing or two that his tower had forgotten. His kind have spent too long looking into the fire, watching the skies, contemplating the deep places. The secrets most worth having are to be found close at hand. Always.”
“Helmar told you that?”
“I told me that.”
“And did these secrets please Govnan?”
“They puzzled him. Good secrets are always a puzzle.” She took the last grape from a copper bowl and set it in her mouth. “His mages seek new accords with their cousins in flame and air. The void has opened on man and elemental alike and fear breeds compromise.”
“You know about the problem in my brother’s tomb, then?”
“You have so many brothers in tombs, emperor.”
“In Beyon’s tomb.”
“Helmar’s work is coming undone. Your man from the desert thinks you should move.”
“A city cannot be moved. If the people are taken from it the city remains. If these
stones crumble, Cerana is done. What people would serve an emperor who cannot hold his capital?”
The Megra squashed the grape beneath her tongue and sucked the juice. “I am too old to care.”
“I have a wife, a baby son, Helmar’s blood. Is there no secret you have that might save us?” Beyon would have threatened a stake and fire.
“Your Notheen has the right of it. Leave. Take your wife, your child, some gold. Live free in some other place. You will be happier.”
Sarmin smiled at the thought. A small house of seven floors, in some city compound, Mesema and him and Pelar, a few servants, no duties but to spend gold and grow fat. “I would be happier-but I am Sarmin the Saviour. It is not my part to be happy. And besides, the nothing would spread, would follow us. Sooner or later we would run out of places to flee.”
The Megra pursed her lips and nodded. “It picks up pace, like a fire. An ember has smouldered for a thousand years but now the flame is woken.”
“And so I must stay. Be brave though I have never been before, look inside myself for the person I need to be. And all the hope I have is this stone.” He pulled it from his robe. “Helmar’s stone. And I think that if there is a key to it then you must be the key.”
The Megra looked old, suddenly, as if her years had fallen from a great height and landed upon her all at once. She shook her head. “I’ve been too long alone. Helmar taught me to see through darkness and I chose instead to live in it. The years ruined us both in the end. Carried us away from ourselves in a river of days until the past became lost to us and the current left us stranded on new shores, me to be alone with my cowardice and selfishness, Helmar to madness and cruelty. I hold new memories of him now, new understanding. It is better this way, but some hurts cannot be undone, only… stepped away from. You understand?”
“How was he before-when you loved him?” It seemed important to know the man who made that stone, who pressed his secrets into it.
“Bold.” She smiled. “Exciting. Curious. Full of life in all its colours.” She looked at Sarmin without seeing. “I don’t know where the pattern came to him. The Yrkmen had such magics, and they taught him as a child after they had taken him from Nooria, but theirs was magic of a cruder kind, old and learned by rote, a blunt power that could be put in the hands of any fool with half a mind and ten years to study it. The Yrkmen austeres could only destroy, only take a thing apart. But Helmar found new pieces to the pattern, new symbols. He spent fifty years finding ways to build, searching all that time for a pattern that could repair, that could remake broken things. And not just dead things that men had made then fractured, but life, living creatures, men, flesh, blood and bone.”
“I have heard of such magics in Yrkmir. Pathfinders who lead a body back to health.”
Megra spat into the copper bowl, careless of her royal audience. “He taught his captors the rudiments, all that they could follow. But since he left they have lost more of what he taught them than they have discovered with all their schools and academies.”
“But did he succeed?” It felt odd to speak of Helmar, who set the foulest disease on his own people, as a healer, as man who dedicated his youth to enchantment that would do Mirra’s work on earth.
“Close.” The Megra pinched the air with finger and thumb to show how close. “But in the end the puzzle broke him, and he left it all behind.” She shook her head. “It haunted him, that failure. Leaving things behind became a habit. I was just another broken thing left in his wake.”
“But-” Sarmin held the stone between them.
“Don’t think him infallible. He was no Mogyrk walking out of humanity into Godhood. He made mistakes. Time and again, even at the start. He called me his salvation, you know? Me? And here I am old enough to be grandmother to the most ancient hag in Nooria, a bitter thing, and him gone mad and stabbed to death with his family Knife. Where’s his salvation now?” She spat again and set her fingers to her chest as if feeling some old pain there beneath the tunic. She drew a deep breath, as if remembering. “Still. He believed in me. I know that now. I took that from your room. His honesty. He believed in me. That’s something.”
“There’s something here-I feel it.” Sarmin set the stone on the Settu board between them. Pieces rocked and toppled. “I need the key. He called you his Meg and he loved you in his way, loved you before he fell. You know… something.”
“Why? Why must I? Because you need me to? You are young indeed if you still think the world works like that. I had a young… a young friend who thought that way…”
“And?”
“The world rose up and choked him.”
“There’s more here, Megra. I know patterns. In my way I know Helmar. I know his pattern, his grand work. A pattern reaches. In a way that’s all it does. It spreads itself, it reaches, it covers and contains. A true pattern reaches back, roots itself in our histories, and it reaches forward, buries its branches in our future. You are here for a reason. Find the courage to hold to that reason.”
The Megra closed her eyes, shook her head, denial written through her. “I can’t.”
“Your friend, Gallar. What would he say?”
And against all expectation a single tear escaped the Megra’s wrinkled eyelid, tracing a gleaming path down her cheek. “Be brave. He told me, be brave. Helmar’s message to him.” She clasped her hand to her thin chest, heaving in a breath.
“How? How did Helmar speak to your friend?”
The Megra drew the thong from around her neck, slowly, and at its end a golden band emerged from the top of her tunic, making slow rotations. “He made it for me.”
“What is it?”
“A message.” She sealed the band between her hands. “A message for each person who reads it.”
“And what does it say?”
“For me, “you are my salvation”. Something new for you. It’s worthless. I am hardly his salvation. Don’t ask me for it.”
“I must. For a moment at least.”
Without protest, as if she had always known she would part with it, the Megra offered up her prize, and Sarmin took it, drawing a sharp breath at the thrill coursing from the gold through his fingers, swirling in his chest like undirected excitement. He held the ring to his eye, and turned it, reading.
“A lie can still be true.” He looked again, turning the ring, studying the inside and the outside, hunting the edges of its magic. “A lie can still be true? What does it mean?”
The Megra shrugged. “All good secrets are a puzzle.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
GRADA
Those who cross the desert, even its fringes where the dunes are ripples and the hardpan shows like scalp on a balding man, should not be expect to arrive at their destination other than worn and weary, hollowed by their privations. Even the Arak who trade with nomads in the outer wastes, worked-metal for salt, return hunched against the wind, burned through every crack in their paint, sand-coated, the humps of their camels hanging flaccid.
When the first of the White Hats emerged hatless from the desert the Cerani in countless villages along the Blessing thought them deserters. More than one was stoned to death before his dry tongue could shape an explanation. They came first a handful, then in tens, then hundreds, scattered for thirty miles both up and downstream of Nooria, as if a handful of pebbles carelessly launched from Fryth and had showered down around their intended target.
Many, when claiming to be soldiers, were laughed at, so few scraps of their uniform remained to them. Rag-tails, the villagers jeered, flotsam blown by the desert wind, escaped prisoners perhaps, or survivors of ill-fated caravans doomed by their own ignorance and greed. The goodfolk had little patience for beggars, especially those pretending some right to their support and at the same time mocking Cerana’s great army of the White.
As the numbers built, as the same tale spilled time and again from cracked lips, and waggons started to roll in, the horses half dead, the cargo of corpses almost too dry to interest the
flies, a whisper of disaster started to spread along the Blessing’s banks.
Grada saw the first of the great retreat from the west wall. She had taken to jogging from Tewel tower to Maseem’s tower in the early dawn, to stretch the scar where Meere’s knife drove in and to exorcise the tenderness below. Perhaps three hundred yards of dusty red brick walkway lay crumbing between those two watchtowers, and she would jog then stride, then finally stagger the distance five times. Today though she stopped, leaned out, her hands upon the dusty parapet, and heaved one breath after the next, no longer feeling the echo of Meere’s blow with each inhalation. She watched the first units of Army of the White emerge from their own dust clouds, advancing along the river road towards the Gate of Storms.
“Herzu’s Teeth!” An old wall guard ambled from his guard box, as bandy legged and toothless as all the men set to such duty. He came alongside Grada, clutching his antique spear for support as much as for show. “Are they bandits? Should I sound the alarm?”
Grada shot him a dark glance. She wondered at what point she had turned from a woman such men would barely trust to wash their linens to a confidant, a commander almost. Did he even know she bore the emperor’s Knife, or had her station somehow informed her stance and communicated itself to the world by nothing more than surety?
The old man stumped away towards the iron bell, rusting in its great hoop, waiting for the day’s sun to fill it full of heat.
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