“Yes. Banreh the Lame, they call him. He and the heir to Fryth—”
“But the heir is dead.” Throat slit. Sarmin remembered the blood, or thought he did, and yet Grada had told him it was Jenni who killed the Marke.
Azeem cleared his throat. “Marke Kavic had a cousin, Majesty, who conspired with the Windreader Chief. Treacherous savages!” The last he spat out with uncharacteristic emotion. “They must have learned, somehow, that Marke Kavic is dead.”
In the time of the Many such information could be shared with a thought. Now, though, it would take weeks. Word to be passed from mouth to mouth, along trade routes, over mugs of beer at the roadside. How could it have happened so quickly?
“And the army?” Sarmin turned the stone in his palm. Even now he wanted to turn away from Azeem, to focus on Helmar’s work.
“The army approaches through the desert, Your Majesty, but without Arigu.”
“Nor the mage?”
“Nor the mage.”
Sarmin passed the stone from one hand to the other, feeling its smooth warmth and the promise of magic shiver against his skin. Cerana’s great general and one of its last mages, missing. Perhaps dead. Whatever the Pattern Master had foreseen of this war, the stone kept hidden. “Keep this quiet for the moment,” he said at last. “I do not wish for the empress to hear of this from anyone but me.”
“Yes, Magnificence. But if you would just come down, meet with council, be seen by the lords…”
“No.” Sarmin held the stone to his lips. He would eat it if he could, crush it between his teeth and taste its secrets like salt against his tongue. “I am not finished.”
Azeem knew when he was defeated; Sarmin liked that about him, at least. His gaze lingered on the stone in Sarmin’s hands for just a moment, and then he was gone.
“My emperor?”
Sarmin looked up from the Pattern Master’s stone. His eyes ached with looking. His mind trembled with half-felt touches of hidden magic.
“My emperor?” Ta-Sann behind the door where once the guards had served to keep him in.
“Yes?”
“The empress requests an audience.”
Sarmin got quickly to his feet, crossed to the door and threw it wide. “The empress is always to be admitted!” Beyond Ta-Sann Mesema waited in silks of pale green, jade about her throat in strings, her hair piled and golden, tamed by ivory combs. Two slaves waited with her, Tarub and Willa, and looming behind them an imperial guardsman, their escort from the women’s wing. “A crowd!” Sarmin made an apologetic smile seeing them all huddled together on the small landing.
Mesema bowed her head and walked on in, alone. She held her shoulders straight and her chin high as she waited for Sarmin to close the door. Once his men and her ladies were shut from the room she said, “You keep too much to this room, Sarmin. Your subjects talk of it. Mad Sarmin in his tower. You haven’t even let them repair the walls.” She kicked dust from the carpet as if to prove her point, and glanced about frowning at the blankness as if aware of a change but unable to say what it was.
Sarmin let himself grin. “Azeem would have taken a week to say all that! He would have circled around what he wanted to say dropping endless subtle hints in the hope I wouldn’t force him to speak plainly.”
“Azeem is not your wife.”
“Maybe he needs one of his own, to teach him new ways?”
Mesema shrugged, glancing about for somewhere to sit. “If he wants a woman he will find one. The Old Wives say he has no taste for girls.” She shrugged again. “When he speaks to you, listen for the message—he is a good man.”
Sarmin watched as Mesema sat in the chair where his mother sat on her visits as she watched him grow, an hour a month, checking on him as a gardener might. Mesema had seldom looked more lovely. She was recovering from her pregnancy, less pale, less thin, her silks pressing against her form. Even so his gaze fell to the stone in his hand.
“Marke Kavic is dead,” she said, “but we may still try for peace if you would only leave this room. Now that Banreh is chief, I know you’ll have the Windreaders on your side. I can help you to convince him.”
Azeem’s news tickled against Sarmin’s lips. He should tell her what Banreh the Lame had done. Soon the dusty, defeated army would trickle into Nooria, cursing the name of her countryman, aiming threats at her people like arrows. And yet he remained silent, turning the stone against his palm. Marke Kavic’s death and the loss of the peace was his failure, one of weakness or madness he did not know; but it was one more thing that would come between them. He did not want her to see him that way, not before he found what Helmar had left for him. Once he had solved the mystery of the stone and saved Nooria, healed the wound, then he could tell her how badly he had failed in Fryth.
“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 ea
rth.
“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.
Knife Sworn Page 27
