“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.
Sarmin turned, taking in the blank walls. Only the ceiling retained its panorama of the gods. Without their decoration the walls became alien, a close friend suddenly without a face. “He’s with you, now? In you?” The Megra stood. She smiled. He wondered if she had smiled in his lifetime. “Memories, fragments of who he was, hopes…” She set a hand to her face as if touching it for the first time. “Dreams.”
Sarmin stared at the walls once more and their blankness recalled him to his need, to the nothing growing close at hand, ready to erase more than painted lines. “And the stone, can you tell me its secret now?” “Nothing’s ever that simple.” The Megra shook her head, a dazed look to her where before all had been bitterness and calculation. “Let me think, boy, let me think. I’m full of dreams.”
“Ta-Sann!” Sarmin rose to instruct the sword-son as he entered. “Escort the Megra to high mage Govnan. Please ask him to consider her an honoured guest who must, for now, be watched over until we can establish why she was sent here with the other prisoners from the Fryth incursion. Tell him there may be much to learn from her.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
NESSAKET
It was mad to plant a garden while the women’s wing was dying. Five more women had gone pale, the latest named Gala, a merry girl from all reports. Priest Assar only shook his head and gave out phials of poppy-milk: Mirra could be no help in this. And yet Nessaket had ordered plants moved from her temple to be planted here, on the roof. If she waited until Jenni had been caught, or there was no more plague, or for the end of the war, then Siri’s garden would be dead for ever. Let it live one last time. Even if Nessaket had to flee, back to the forested home of her parents or the oceanside manse of Tuvaini’s, she would first see blossoms on this roof.
A few days ago the pika seeds in her pocket had meant everything. Though she had chosen not to use them, Kavic had died anyway. Events had their own way of coming about, as if they had already been written into place and needed only time to arrive there. It made the fluttering of the courtiers seem futile, senseless, the struggles of a butterfly caught in water. The garden gave better results.
Dreshka finished planting the last of the roses and wiped the sweat from her brow with a dirty arm, smearing her face with soil. “Stupid girl,” said Nessaket, wishing Rushes was here instead—but she had disappeared after giving her warning about Jenni. She hoped the girl had not met an ill fate—she was the best spy Nessaket had found thus far. She rocked Daveed in her arms and looked out over the edge, ignoring the guards who hovered, hands reaching out towards the baby lest she lose her grip.
“Apologies, Your Majesty,” said Dreshka, “I am a stupid girl.”
Nessaket sighed and looked towards Beyon’s tomb. Odd stories had been told about that place. A curse on her son, they said, for bearing the pattern while he sat the Petal Throne. Now ghosts haunted his grave. And that was not the only place. Some of the women insisted the women’s wing was haunted. “Foolishness,” she said aloud, though the sight of the tomb disturbed her. It was more than the fact her son was buried there; she had become accustomed to dead sons. No, something about the shadows there made her uneasy.
Shadows. That would be where Jenni was hiding. The Grey Service hunted the palace for her, the better she did not give warning to her master. But Nessaket was certain she had not left, that she lurked somewhere in these soft halls, waiting to strike. For Jenni’s master could offer her nothing but death now, unless she completed her mission.
Six more guards climbed the stairs, three and three, with Mesema between them, Pelar in her arms. She smiled and gave Nessaket a kiss on each cheek before pushing between another set of guards to settle on the bench. Nessaket sat beside her and together they looked at the new rose bed.
“She has not been found,” said Nessaket,
before the empress could ask. Mesema sighed. “At least we have not been poisoned.”
Nessaket silently agreed. She did not know if she would ever eat normally again, without picking apart her food to check for the crescent-shaped seeds. “I am glad to see you well. This sickness… We may need to leave this place.” “We will survive it,” said Mesema. “Disease has tried to defeat us once before, and failed.” Us. Mesema had named herself Cerani. “We will stay.” But this pale-sickness was not the pattern, and killing its master would not cure. She had lived through other plagues before the blue marks had come, plagues that had killed nearly all the children. She did not feel the empress’ confidence. Her throat felt dry. “Dreshka…” she began, thinking to ask for a cup of fresh water, but a high, keening noise made her turn.
Dreshka fell to one side, her arm jerking among the thorns of a rose bush, blood appearing in streaks where the thorns tore her skin. Her head rested on the stone wall, and she held her eyes open with a confused, lost look. At first her legs kicked lazily away from the garden bed, as if she were cooling herself in a pool, but then with more power, her back arching, head finally falling backwards to hit the floor on the other side. Her body twitched between soil and roses, her legs spread scandalously apart, urine running down to pool upon the tiles.
Mesema screamed. Nessaket put out a hand to stay her. She had seen this before.
The guards lifted Dreshka from the bushes and held her down on the tiles, whether from propriety or to try and save her, Nessaket could not guess. She could not be saved. Spittle flew from Dreshka’s mouth as she tried to speak. “Ah—Ah—Ah—”
Lapella had died silently. “Shhh,” said Nessaket, “Don’t be afraid.”
The convulsions had her now, pulling her up into the air as if held by ropes and dropping her again. Her skull made a rapping noise against the roof, rap, rap, rap. “Can’t you stop her head from doing that?” asked Mesema, tears streaming down her cheeks, hiding Pelar’s face so that he could not see.
It would go on like this for several minutes. Nessaket had seen it before and did not wish to witness it again. “Kill her,” she said to the guard at Dreshka’s shoulder. “Stab her heart.” To her credit Mesema made no protest.
The guard drew a dagger and hesitated. “She’ll die anyway,” Nessaket insisted. Dreshka’s chest was heaving so much that the guard struggled. Five of them held her down, two of them sitting on her hips and legs, so that he could do it. The slave-girl jerked once more, then went still.
Nessaket crouched by the girl, careful not to touch the blood with her silks. She examined Dreshka’s dirty hands, checked her pockets and reached inside her robes. There she found it. Linen folded into a square, containing a bit of bread, some half-eaten cheese, and the stem of a candied fig. “The servant’s meals,” she said, “Of course. She wanted to kill the slave who could identify her.”
“But this wasn’t her—”
And Lapella had been barren. “Yes,” said Nessaket, “sometimes things don’t work out fairly.” She turned to the guards. “Take her away.”
Besides her anger and pity Nessaket felt victorious. Jenni had wasted her only weapon. She might still be in the women’s wing, hiding in niches or under beds, but she posed no threat. By doing nothing but planting flowers Nessaket had defeated her. It would not be long, now. She would be found.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
SARMIN
Sarmin held his gaze on the Pattern Master’s stone. A year spent in darkness within that oubliette and Helmar had kept this simple river stone, made a hiding place for it, treasured it. He must have turned it in his hands ten times a thousand times. In the blindness of that place he set his brilliant mind upon this stone and worked wonders. And I can find no single hint of any piece of magic. He had hoped it would free him from the Many, stop the emptiness from spreading out from Beyon’s tomb. That was what Helmar had promised, when he had reached out to him from the past. The stone was the key to the pattern.
He sat alone in his room. Azeem pestered him with messages and with visits, pleading for him to hold court, to be seen in the Petal Throne, to be emperor. Even the priests visited him, clambering up the many stairs to stand before him sweating in their robes and symbols. Dinar of Herzu’s temple, his shoulders as broad as Ta-Sann’s, almost scraping the sides of the doorway as he entered, had talked of duty.
“In time of war the emperor must lead, Excellency.” He held his staff of office tight, skin pale around the black tears tattooed along the arcs of index fingers and thumbs.
“We are still at truce, high priest,” Sarmin had told him. “Herzu is patient—do they not say that of him? He has no need of wars to hurry us through his gates.” Sarmin kept the Pattern Master’s stone in his hands, smoothing it between them as it were his own creation and he was finishing off the final touches.
Assar of Mirra came too, his grim face given colour by the climb, a man ill-suited to sharing out Mirra’s love.
“The empire has been sick with this plague of patterns for generations, my emperor. Even with the agent of the disease removed our recovery is not complete. Such conditions leave scars and the road back to health can be slow. The Longing grips our people and a new sickness emerges. We need our emperor among us, showing our strength and unity. The loneliness of this tower is an illness too, and surely your wife—”
“The empress needs your attentions more than I do, Assar.” Sarmin cut across him, his tone sharp. “And if I am alone here then you are years too late with your company.”
Others came, last of them a pale young woman, a native of Kreshta, south beyond even Yrkmir, and newly appointed priestess of Ghesh—Sarmin had been introduced briefly at Pelar’s birth feast but couldn’t recall her name. She strode in past the sword-sons with such purpose that Sarmin imagined they would have stood nose to nose but for Ta-Sann’s intervening arm. Her passage blocked, the priestess came to a halt, diaphanous robes in blackest silk swirling about her like smoke.
“I bring you the blessings of Ghesh, my emperor.” She made the bow that the holiest may offer in place of obeisance.
“Ghesh, clothed in darkness, eater of stars,” Sarmin smiled at her seriousness. “Zanasta used to speak of him often.”
“I—”
“Remind me of your name,” Sarmin interrupted her. Better to put her on a new course than explain Zanasta. Perhaps though Ghesh would approve of his having been raised by demons.
“Maniloot, my emperor.” She had no accent. Perhaps she had been raised in Nooria despite her looks and the strangeness of her name.
He held the stone to his ear, tapped his fingers to it. “And have you come to urge me to my throne room, Maniloot? To have me scold and chide my collection of wise men, to line up my princes and satraps, generals and governors, and keep the game in order?” He returned Helmar’s stone to his lap, looking for the thousandth time to find any hint of pattern in the vague mottling across its surface.
“No, my emperor. All Settu strategies are the same when the board is burning.”
Sarmin glanced up at the woman. She was even younger than he had first thought. Perhaps as young as him. A child for the priesthood. Her life spent directing prayers to Ghesh begging he ignore mankind and continue his long voyaging between the stars. “You’re worried about the war? The truce—”
“The Fryth are not the threat.” A sharp intake of breath from Ta-Sann. A priestess does not cut across the emperor.
She knew, then. Sarmin felt a hollowness inside, remembering the Megra’s words: the story of man is being unwritten in the desert. He remembered standing in the tomb, feeling the Many flow away from him like water into a crack. “Wouldn’t Ghesh approve of nothing? He’s famed for extinguishing the heavens one star at a time, after all.” The worship of Ghesh had always niggled at Sarmin. He couldn’t find it in him to pray to a god only in the hope of being ignored.
“The void that grows among us, beginning in the deepest desert, is not the emptiness of dark heave
ns. The darkness is being unwound together with the light, both robbed of meaning. This is not the desert spreading, my emperor. The sand may drift against our walls, the dunes march out and choke the Blessing, but in the heart of the desert sand itself is unravelling, grain by grain, into nothing.”
“And what then do you ask of me, priestess?”
She looked at him, her boldness gone. “Save us.”
And Sarmin, finding he had no more words, no questions or encouragement, let her go.
Azeem returned to press his forehead against the carpet with no mind to the plaster dust that ground itself against his dark robes. He gave off a sharp odour of sweat and worry, unusual for such a fastidious man, and he spoke first in a breach of protocol that had Ta-Sann stepping forwards. “I bear urgent news, Majesty.”
Sarmin waved off the sword-son, sweat trickling down his back as he considered what new disaster might have befallen them. He needed more time—time to invent a story about Marke Kavic, to deal with Jomla’s conspirators, to heal the wound that bled from his brother’s tomb. Time to unlock the secrets of Helmar’s stone. And yet the world does not wait for me. “How stands my empire, high vizier?”
Azeem stood and brushed white powder from his long face. “The empire stands strong, but the White Hat army less so this day. Messengers have arrived in Nooria, sent through the mountain passes from Arigu’s second in command.”
“No word preceded them on the wind?”
“Silence from Mage Mura.” Azeem let that hang in the air a moment. The wind-mage Mura was one of four remaining to the Tower, that cornerstone of empire, the might of Cerana manifest in runes and elemental skill. They had sent her to Fryth to help secure the peace. “We have been betrayed by our horsemen allies. Their new chief—”
“Banreh.” Sarmin had seen him once, through Grada’s eyes, sun on yellow curls.
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