But in the end her hand closed around the handle of the door. This one locked from the outside and yielded to the fourth of the many keys she had gathered on her bloody rounds. The door opened on oiled hinges and a blackness yawned before her. She stepped through on damned feet.
The child lay atop his covers, a boy of seven years, maybe eight, sweat tousled, naked but for a loincloth, thin limbed, pale. Grada sunk to her knees beside the bed, setting down her lamp. Tears blinded her. It didn’t matter that Jomla was dead, he would never have acted alone. Petty satraps and minor caliphs, their lords and generals, would have been lined up behind him and as long as the boy lived, as long as he might be set upon the throne to pardon the treason of those who put him there… they would seek him, seek to own him.
“He’s innocent.” She held the Knife’s blade flat to her lips, whispering the words.
Had Eyul wept as he killed Sarmin’s brothers? He killed a tower-mage too, an island woman, Amalya. Govnan had said the assassin had loved her, but gave her to the Knife when the pattern took hold upon her.
“Gods help me. I cannot do this.” And yet each alternative led to blood. Oceans of it, innocent and guilty, men, women, children as young and as pure as the boy before her. In the game of Settu the push sets the tiles falling, each one toppling the next in branching chains until the work is done and an accounting of the fallen must be made. Grada knew now that the push had been made further back than she had ever known, and that all her life the tiles had been toppling around her, each crashing against the next, a tide that had lifted her and swept her to this point. The old steel trembled on her lips.
A gleam caught her eye. On the table beside the bed, clockwork animals in copper and silver, Mechar Anlantar’s work, two lions, two bears… a cow on its side. Grada swallowed a cry that would become a scream if she let it escape. She set the point of the Knife to the hollow at the base of her throat. “Gods help me.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
SARMIN
“-Be kept a secret. It’s imperative-”
“…been left hollow like so many other-”
“panic in the streets, Azeem-”
“-something you can do?”
“…dangerous to touch him.”
Sarmin rose through a sea of disjoint conversations, fragments, snatches.
Familiar voices, Ta-Sann anxious, Govnan resigned, Azeem insistent. Voices came, and went, minutes chased hours, and still he rose, still blind with the depths of his journey.
“It’s better that he stay here. We can put it about that he’s in seclusion seeking a cure for this plague.” Azeem’s voice.
“Already there are rumours he’s been hollowed.” Govnan, sounding old. “And the outer wall will fall within hours. Moreth gives it strength but it can’t last. The people will see.”
Sarmin sat up. He had been lying on the carpet of his tower room. Only Govnan and Azeem were present and the two men had their backs to him, the door closed. His tongue had stuck to the roof of his mouth and a great thirst consumed him.
“Water.” His mouth too dry for more words.
High mage and vizier both jumped, then turned too fast for any dignity, and stared, Govnan with his mouth open, Azeem with the broadest smile. Sarmin couldn’t remember ever seeing the man smile. He tried to grin back.
They came quickly to his side, Azeem taking jug and glass from a silver tray set on the floor by the wall. It looked like Ta-Sann’s tray, the food taken from it. Sarmin coughed on the water, struggling not to choke.
“The stone!” Sarmin cast about him. “Where is it?”
Govnan drew the two halves of Helmar’s stone from his robes, the butterfly caught there in crystal and colour, held perfect on both the inner faces. The work that Helmar had wrought with the magics of fire and rock, a picture written within the rock, unseen until the day Sarmin split the stone open. He took the pieces, closing his hands about them.
“How are you-” Govnan shook his head. “We thought the nothing had you, like the rest.”
“How is my son?” Sarmin grabbed Azeem’s wrist, pushing the water glass from his mouth.
The vizier’s smile vanished. Govnan paused, just a moment, before speaking. “I fear little time remains to Prince Pelar…”
Sarmin got to his feet, pulling on Azeem’s arm, almost pulling him down. He staggered once, found his strength, then hauled open the door. “How long?”
“My emperor?” Azeem bowed his head. Ta-Sann stood outside the door, he turned, and for an instant Sarmin caught a flicker of relief on its swift passage across his face.
“How long have I lain there?”
“A day, my emperor. We feared to move you…”
“I understand. Lead on, Ta-Sann. Take me to my son.”
Ta-Sann inclined his head and set off down the spiral staircase. Sarmin followed, taking the steps two at a time, Azeem at his shoulders, Govnan struggling to keep pace.
“Wait!” Ta-Sann stopped so suddenly that Sarmin crashed into his back, managing to turn at the last instant to keep from breaking his nose. The warrior had anticipated the impact and there was no give in him. Sarmin bounced off, nearly taking his vizier down, his shoulder feeling as though he’d charged a door.
“What-” Sarmin checked himself. Ta-Sann would only command him if his life were in danger.
The sword-son took a step back up the stairs, Sarmin scrambled back to keep from being stepped on, Azeem still supporting him, hands under his arms. Another step back, facing down the stairs, the occasional glimpse past Ta-Sann to the gleam of his hachirah held out before him. Govnan descended around the curve of the stair behind them, and stopped.
“It is one of the hollow-ones. A palace guard,” Ta-Sann said, backing another step.
“Show me.” Sarmin shook Azeem off and moved to Ta-Sann’s shoulder, lifting up on his toes to see over.
The guard had been a young man, Sarmin half recognised him even robbed of colour. He had been young, now he seemed ageless, his flesh marble, hair translucent, and eyes like the nothing itself, promising destruction. His armour had fallen away and what remnants of his uniform remained had been bleached as pale as his skin, hanging in crumbling tatters. He climbed another stair, swaying, hypnotic as any cobra’s dance, and where his fingers trailed the stonework, dust fell.
“How can he be walking?” It made no sense, the nothing emptied, it didn’t add.
The man’s eyes found Sarmin, a sick smile twitching on his face as if the corner of his mouth were tugged by hook and string. He climbed another step and Sarmin retreated as Ta-Sann stepped back.
“I will have to kill him,” Ta-Sann said. “My blade will be ruined though. Best we meet no more such-”
“Don’t kill him.” Sarmin hurried back a few more steps to gain height for a better look. He turned back at Govnan’s side.
“Notheen speaks of the djinn in the empty quarter. The nothing draws such spirits to it, like flies to a corpse, a great gyre about which they swirl.” Both men retreated two more steps. Soon they would be back at Sarmin’s room. “The nomads fear them, for djinn will possess a man and misuse him.”
“The desert’s a bad place to hunt if you’re after men!”
Govnan grunted, steadying himself with his staff. “Loneliness makes a man easier to take hold of, and being alone breeds loneliness. The desert has ever been their domain.”
“And what man is more easily possessed than one who has been emptied?” Sarmin clapped his hands. “They’re vultures to the nothing’s death.”
“You can’t evict this spirit? It worked with Ashanagur.” A touch of old man’s peevishness in Govnan’s voice as he remembered Sarmin parting him from his elemental. Even with the djinn advancing some small part of Sarmin noted that neither Govnan nor Ta-Sann were giving him the honorifics demanded by his station. He rather liked it.
“Patterns are just symbols, their power lies in the minds of men. They’re a key.” Sarmin reached the landing. “The real world, beyo
nd our imagination, is deeper than any pattern that can be drawn. Patterns are lies.” He thought of Beyon and the lie of Beyon that had hidden patterned in his head, an imperfect representation, without love. “Into the room. We’ll lock the door and go by the Ways.”
“But-” Govnan allowed himself to be pulled through the doorway. “But parting the djinn and the man on the stairs. Is that so different from what you did with Ashanagur?”
Ta-Sann followed them into the room, slamming the heavy door behind him. He drew the bolt across, a new addition since Sarmin’s captivity.
“I only have symbols for what I know. No part of the pattern revealed to me has power over the djinn. I know patterns about men, but only men believe the lies men tell. A pattern can divide a man’s flesh, split his bone, but only because first it tricks the mind. And the man on the stairs has been emptied. There is nothing of him for the pattern to deceive. If there were then I might give that part strength to throw off the possession.”
Ta-Sann moved to the secret door to the Ways, less secret now that a small metal knob had been affixed so the door could be opened from inside the room. He pulled it wide and waited for Sarmin to follow. Behind them a light blow sounded against the door.
“Time to go,” Govnan said, glancing back. It wouldn’t be strength that brought down the door, but weakness.
Descending the hidden stair took them through the thickness of the wall, spiralling down, turn by turn. Ta-Sann did not speak of his fellow swordsons, no speculation as to how the empty man passed their guard at the base of the stair. Govnan made a light, a white flame dancing across the back of his hand, like a street magician walking a coin back and forth across his knuckles. Even without Ashanagur imprisoned within him the old mage held an affinity with the realm of fire.
A turn, another turn. Tuvaini had walked these paths with Eyul, a lifetime ago. Last year. Tuvaini had been on that first visit. Bound to open that door for the first time in an age, to open that door and change Sarmin’s life forever. The nothing-that was a door opening too. A door that led nowhere but through which everyone was going to be drawn.
“What did you see?”
Sarmin flinched as Govan spoke behind him. “See?”
“We thought you hollowed. But you went somewhere, in your mind? Somewhere deep?”
Sarmin stumbled and steadied himself with a hand to the rough stone of the wall. “I saw…” A butterfly. Made whole. A lie made true. They came to one of the iron doors that now sealed important junctions. Without secrecy to secure the Ways other methods had been found. Sarmin unlocked it and they continued down. The steps gave out and the Ways took them into the natural rock into which and around which the palace had been built. He paused at the first fork.
“To the left,” Govnan said. The passage would twist, divide, rise, fall, and come at last to the door in the women’s quarters. “The prince is with Empress Mesema in the Forest Room.”
Sarmin took a step that way. Paused. “Wait.” He lifted his hand. His skin ran with the pattern, deep, intricate, circle in circle, triangle over triangle, the red and the blue, layered. “A lie.”
“My emperor?” Govnan peered at Sarmin’s fingers, seeing only flesh.
“Man is more than that. Beyon was more than that.” He shook his head and the pattern-sight left him. “Azeem, go to my wife and son. Make sure they are defended. We will go to the right. Ta-Sann, take me to the tomb.”
“There is no tomb, my emperor.” Ta-Sann watched him. “There are no tombs. Just the nothing. It has taken them all.”
“Even so. We will go there.”
And Ta-Sann set off to the right without further reply. Sarmin envied him his loyalty. Loyalty can remain when even faith has gone, a view so narrow it makes every choice seem simple. Azeem they left, finding his way in the dark.
They crossed the chasm where Grada had fought and killed imperial guards on her way to murder him. Sarmin felt the pull of that drop to either side of the narrow span of stone. Djinn lurked in those depths now, willing him to fall.
From chasm to rough-hewn corridor, next steps, then a long side-ways shuffle following some natural fissure in the rock. Behind them, at the edge of Govnan’s illumination, the shadows seethed. Djinn filled the darkness, following, as if sensing some threat to their feasting.
At last, dry and dirty they reached the long stair that would take them up to a store-room near the door to Satreth’s Plaza where the tombs of the emperors had stood. The Ways would take them directly to several of the tombs but Govnan had reports of collapse in those tunnels.
The storeroom held a musty scent of disuse and rat droppings. Ta-Sann had to force open the door from the Ways, toppling several sacks of millet flour, sliding others across the floor. He moved into the room with hachirah held across his body in a two-handed grip, his shadow swinging before him in the steady glade of Govnan’s white flame.
“Come.”
And Sarmin moved out, Govnan at his back. Ta-Sann opened the door to the corridor beyond, a broad servants’ avenue leading past storerooms left and right on its way to the main kitchens. Shafts of sunlight struck down through skylights along the length of the passage, dust motes caught the light in the shaft closest and Sarmin paused in the doorway to watch. “A pattern.” Some inner engine sought to attach meaning to the motes’ slow swirl, to the brief brilliance given to each, and the obscurity that followed. He drew a deep breath and smelled smoke.
“My emperor?” Govnan trapped behind him. “Sarmin?”
“Sor-” Sarmin caught himself. An emperor does not apologise. He stepped into corridor and the high mage followed. The sound of distant screaming reached them along the passageway, terror, but more than that, shouting too, anger and pain. “I hear fighting?”
“More trouble with the slaves,” Govnan said. “The hollow ones have everyone terrified. It wouldn’t surprise me if half the servants are gone by morning, fled downriver.”
Sarmin shook his head. “None of that will matter unless we can end this. Not the war, not what happens here.” Not even if the palace is burning.
“If you would give me an hour I could assemble the tower mages…”
Sarmin turned towards the door that opened onto the plaza. The wood had a fragile look, pale like driftwood abandoned by the river and bleached in the sun. “Would they help? These… how many mages is it now? Four? They can’t save my son and he hasn’t touched the nothing, just been lapped by its outer waves.” He pointed to the door. “What’s out there is so much worse.”
Govnan shook his head, such a small motion it almost wasn’t there. “What can any of us do? The nothing unwrites the elements, unpatterns, undoes.”
“We can try.” Sarmin managed a smile. “That’s all we can do. Running won’t save Pelar. And, whatever the books might say, an emperor should sometimes apologise. But what he should never do is run-certainly not from his capital. Notheen and his people are an idea set in motion, the nomads carry their world with them. Cerana though, it is an idea fixed around a centre. And if the centre gives, the rest will not hold.
Open the door, Ta-Sann.”
The sword-son reached out for the black iron ring of the handle. It tore free in his grip, the wood crumbling around the fixing plate as if devoured from within by dry mite. He made a tentative jab at the middle of the door with his hachirah and the whole structure collapsed, falling in sections, pieces exploding into dust as they hit the floor.
Through the doorway Sarmin could see nothing, not darkness or light, no hint of the sky, just a space that refused to register on his eye, as if the corridor neither ended nor continued but simply denied inquiry. Along with the sense of an endless fall just waiting to seize him Sarmin felt the nothing’s touch, feather-light, searching for any loose end by which he might be unravelled. Ahead of him Ta-Sann’s huge form seemed diminished, his darkness shaded to grey.
Sarmin advanced on the doorway. He reached up for Ta-Sann’s shoulder and pulled him away. The warrior slumped ba
ck, easily turned, no protest in him.
“No!” Govnan’s cry behind him, too late, as if he too had been spellbound by the nothing, a moth bound to its flame. “No.” Weaker this second time. And Sarmin turned to face his undoing.
Through the Many Sarmin knew what it was to be blind. Staring into the midst of nothing made less of his eyes than those of a man who has never seen, and yet it seemed vision was all that remained to him. The nothing filled and hollowed him, he fell into it, or felt he did, with the unwriting all around him, seeking out stray threads of his life and starting to unwind them.
This is a power that can undo stone, dismantle wind and water, break fire into pieces and devour each part. There is nothing I can do.
The Many had been wiped from Sarmin and yet somehow he knew the voice that echoed in him was not his own. “Out!” and he drove the djinn from him. Impossible or not his task might be, but the spirits would try to stop him, for the nothing sustained them, they would ride its destruction until the last moment of time was devoured and they too found oblivion. They would allow no threat to it, however small.
Sarmin tore his vision from the nothing and glanced back along the corridor. Ta-Sann stood with Govnan, neither of them able to watch him. In the distance figures moved, not with the broken gait of hollow men but with speed and purpose, drawing closer. Closer still and Sarmin saw that some had the pale flesh of the hollowed, temple guards, imperial guard, a concubine, silks tattered and streaming, her white hair wild, others were slaves bearing crude weapons and no sign of the nothing’s touch. All of them ran without cries or threat, eyes fixed on their emperor.
“They’re possessed!” Govnan raised his staff, though it could be small defence against so many.
Sarmin saw it in the same moment as Govnan-the djinn riding on each man’s back, invisible yet somehow made known through the sheer malice radiating from them.
“Stay clear.” Ta-Sann drew his hachirah and stepped forward to block the corridor. He took the heavy blade two handed and rolled his head as if getting the cricks out of his thick neck. The walls to either side allowed for an uninterrupted swing but with no room to spare.
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