“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.
“Don’t,” she told him, and he stopped. “They’re Cerani. White Hat.”
“No?” The old man returned to the wall, trying to blink the rheum from his eyes. “Arigu’s men?”
“What’s left of them.” A messenger had come in days before. Sunstroke took him before he recovered enough for coherence, but it was clear some great reverse had occurred in the green valleys of Fryth.
Grada nodded. “Arigu’s men.” Would the general be with them, she wondered.
“The gods have deserted us.” A foamy trail of spit made its slow path down the guard’s chin. “The palace haunted, the emperor mad, and now our gods run before Mogyrk!”
“Shut up.” Grada suppressed the strong urge to push the old man from the wall. “Remember yourself!”
The man looked down, jaw working. Grada snorted, glanced once more towards the river road, and hastened towards the nearest stair.
At the Gate of Storms a crowd of hundreds had gathered. Labourers and foremen, slaves and masters, traders and their customers. Grada pushed her way through, breathing in the stale sweat, cardamom, the tang of lotus sap, the stink of sewers sloping to the river. Shouts went up as soldiers set the gates wide, the squeal of ancient hinges rising over the hubbub.
“Look at them! Look at them!” A child in tatters, wild with excitement.
The first of the White Hats came through in ragged order. These had their helms in the main, the cloth covers, the “hats’, as torn as the urchin’s clothes. They kept their gaze to the road, and marched with a remnant of pride, burned black, dusted pale. Those that followed came in a loose rabble, limping, leaning on staffs, hobbling like the old man on the walls.
“Not a wound on them!” A baker hollered it from the crowd. A fat man red from the oven heat.
“What cowards run without a wound?” Some woman lost under cowl and veil, a hysterical edge to her calling.
Grada lifted her gaze above the limp banners of the White Hats to the sky beyond where vultures circled in their wake. “No wounded man would survive the journey.” She spoke to no one in particular.
“Mogyrk has cursed us!”
“Will the Yrkmen come?”
“The emperor is mad. Everyone says it.”
Grada turned away, forged a path through the crowd with sharp elbows. A hundred yards back she paused in the shadows of an awning, the stallholder presumably at the gates, his melons abandoned. She watched more children tear along the street towards the excitement, widows and old men following on with less speed but scarcely less interest. Perhaps all the shouters were right, the Yrkmen coming, the gods fleeing before Mogyrk’s curse, Sarmin mad. Perhaps they were all right. She set her hand to the Knife. It didn’t matter. She would serve. She felt strong, whole, the ache in her chest more habit and imagination than truth. Across the street, above the rooftops, beyond the river, the rock of the Holies rose, hazing in the distance, drawing her gaze. She would serve. As if one act of sacrifice, one act of loyalty would stand against the desert and the Yrkmen both.
It was time.
Flies buzzed around Grada even as she crossed the Blessing, even as she walked the high arches of Asham Asherak’s great bridge where the breeze normally kept them at bay. The meat drew them. Raw and bloody in her pack, cloth-wrapped, the flies could smell it and gave Grada no peace. At least they couldn’t smell the poison that Meere had soaked into the joints. Dogs won’t eat what flies won’t touch, everything else, they’ll at least try.
“You’re sure Jomla keeps dogs?” she had asked Meere. Not out of disbelief but of a desperate hope he might be speaking from expectation rather than observation. The assassin had only narrowed his eyes and continued to poison the mutton.
Already it felt too close to the dream that echoed through her these past months, laced through with the recollections of the Many. Perhaps some god was steering her there, to the house where the Many remembered some sin greater than the rest. Or maybe simple cha
nce aimed her at a place where she herself had once been put to work killing for the Pattern Master. Chance and the crumbled remnants of his prophecy. Chance or the gods. Did Herzu point her at this house to close some cycle of death, or Mirra to heal some wrong? Grada prayed to both that her fears were without grounds and that a different house awaited her with different results.
“Every noble of consequence has a place on the Holies.” Grada set her hand to the Knife. “You’ve cut more throats on that rock than everywhere else put together. You-” She caught herself muttering and sealed her lips tight. A day, a day and she was already talking to the blade.
The robe Herran had given Grada was older than her, black and flowing. “Six Knife-Sworn have worn this before you,” he said. Her fingers had found a repair as she slipped into it. Tight little stitches invisibly sealing an inch-long tear on the back. “All of them were skilled. Not all were lucky.” Harran did the fastener about her throat, the clasp made of dull black bone, with nothing to gleam or catch the eye.
Out on the bridge the robe fluttered behind her with the breeze. Few remarked her passing, though she no longer passed unseen beneath the good citizen’s contempt. Perhaps a close inspection would convince them of her heritage, they might see the broad cheekbones, the brown of her eyes, and recoil, “Untouchable!” but for the now she walked among them as an equal with only the flies paying real attention.
The sun dipped behind the great rock of the Holies, still white and fierce as it threw shadow over the Blessing. Grada left the bridge and began the long climb to the mansions and shrines far above. A narrow track for carts wound a still steep but more leisurely path back and forth across the granite slopes of the west side, but Grada chose the steps, nine hundred of them, hand cut into the stone. Bearers passed her, bowed under crated luxuries bound for the nobility above, their legs hardened to the climb by a lifetime of up and down. She reached the top with a little of the day’s light still glowing in the sky, her muscles warm, sweat beneath her robes. The rock plateau stretched out for acres, once bare and wind-smoothed, now encrusted with the houses of Cerana’s great and good. Some even had gardens, the soil shipped down the Blessing from greener lands and carted in sacks up the winding track on the west side.
The taller towers and highest domes caught the reflected crimson of the sun, sinking into the desert out past her sight. She looked once at the directions in her hand, inked onto a scrap of papyrus. Street of Gods, turn left past the Red Manse. The Knife bumped at her hip as she paced. She could walk the length of the Street of Gods, descend the west side and find passage south with one of the nomad caravans that come to trade, make a new life in some distant city. Sarmin would allow no pursuit and her hands would be clean of murder. Or if not her hands then at least her soul. It had been others that used her to kill before. This time it would be her own will behind the blade, her own crime.
Crime or not Grada turned left past the dull red walls of Satrap Honnecka’s manse. Herran had shown her the Book of the Knife before she left, a huge tome kept in its own room in a high tower at the rear of the palace. On the line that joined the towers of the Knife and that of the mages lay the room where she had once stabbed Sarmin. The room where Sarmin had made a pattern of two and bound their lives tight together. Sarmin’s only window had pointed only at the mages’ Tower, though, and he never had a view of where the Grey Service lived.
“The only crime the Knife-Sworn may be guilty of is failing to obey the command of the rightful emperor.” Herran had found the page unerringly and read for her, his fingers tracing the script without touching it. He closed the book with two hands, the cover as heavy and final as a coffin lid.
Grada walked by Mirra’s shrine, the black dome darker than the surrounding gloom. Life comes out of the darkness of “before”, the midnight nothingness that waits behind memory and beyond imagining. Ten more paces and the healing shrine, Mirra’s cradle of birth, lay behind her. A row of ancient palms, dust grey in the twilight, led her on. At the far end of the street Herzu’s shrine waited, a point of light, the alabaster still brilliant, finding and returning whatever radiance the sun left in its wake. Grada kept her eyes on that bright point, taking slow steps along the street. The leaning palms and the high garden walls of great houses gave the feeling of a tunnel. The day’s heat radiated from the flagstones but the air grew colder by the moment. The wind rose and the palms whispered together, sharing old confidences.
In the time it took Grada to reach the gates of the Jomla’s manse the day had gone. She slung her muslin bag of meat over the wall where it dipped lowest, following some artist’s notion of ocean waves. She heard the bag break branches, rustle leaves, then hit ground with a wet thump. Slow steps took her on to Herzu’s shrine. In the east the moon rose and the shrine glowed with the new light, pale as bone. Grada considered entering, but what words had she for gods? Instead she sank against the base of the nearest palm, letting the moon shadows swallow her. She took the Knife from her hip, still scabbarded. The street lay quiet but the glimmer of a blade might catch a hidden eye. Each of these houses would have guards, each a fortress of wealth, though the times when families fought openly here, and factions claimed and reclaimed territory, were long gone, remembered only in the shape and style of the older homes.
In the darkness at the base of the tree Grada counted out the path that had led her to this place. A path not of choices but of being chosen. What had the Pattern Master seen in her to send her as his weapon into the palace? Helmar had been a royal, emperor by right when he chose her as his Knife and sent her to kill Sarmin - the first royal blood she spilled. Helmar had been emperor enthroned when she had stabbed him amid his bloodpattern in the desert past Migido, he had been attested ruler of all Cerana. And still she killed him there. It had been her right. She was Helmar’s Knife. Now she was Sarmin’s. But why had Helmar chosen her? The Pattern Master had so many choices, and if he had wanted an Untouchable, he had a thousand and more among the Many, among the dirt and squalor of the Maze. But he took her. Without allowing her a choice. Perhaps he sensed he was not the first to do so.
When Sarmin made a pattern of two parts from himself and her, Grada had no say in it. He had invaded every part of her life without invitation, without permission. Only that he lay dying and that her hand had delivered the wound made it forgivable, this and the way they had fitted together, each weakness countered by a strength, each strength by a weakness. Herran had chosen too, Meere offered no choices. And Govnan left her in that room, left her with Sarmin in the room where she shed his blood, and while the emperor said please, and while she knew he would accept her refusal, there was from the moment he held the Knife’s hilt towards her, no choice.
With the moon full risen Grada rose too, retracing her steps along the street of palms. She might have nothing to say to the gods, but it seemed they spoke to her, laughed behind their hands even as they laid out for her the same night she remembered from her dreaming with the Many, the same street, the same house.
“That is all that will be the same though.” She spoke the words silently to the Knife, the cold pommel stone against her lips as she walked. “That was memory. This will be choice.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
RUSHES
Rushes saw them everywhere, Mylo’s followers, identified by their secret signal, a finger across the chin. They gathered over simple meals and work-tables in every place where marble changed to plain tile, where silk tapestries gave way to white-washed walls, and where the silk-clad did not venture. They whispered and planned though their Fryth austere had disappeared, likely into the dark oubliettes where Rushes had first found the Megra.
Rushes was hiding from Beyon, from his wrath at her betrayal. She kept herself hidden in plain sight, among other female slaves, far from the women’s wing or the Little Kitchen. She found that if she walked back and forth in Nessaket’s livery nobody questioned her. Nevertheless her eyes scanned for threats, and she walked on the balls of her feet, alwa
ys ready to run towards the Ways.
The whispers ran along the corridors like a rustling in the wind; Irisa was dead. The physician had left the women’s wing, his satchel clutched at his side, all the herbs and potions within it useless when it came to a girl who had lost all colour and will. At the end of her life the concubine had at last been given a room of her own, the bed high, the walls painted with birds. But it was said she did not notice, that her eyes stared straight ahead, at nothing. And now more fell ill, not just concubines but slaves too, and some of the silk-clad. When people spoke of the sickness they used the word “catch,” as if a person reached for it like a ball. Instead Rushes believed that the sickness was trying to catch her, and so by always moving, she tricked it.
Lanterns were lit day and night, reflected in the gleaming doorknobs and bright mosaics, but the brightness did nothing to keep the ghosts away; they drifted through the halls, formless, but threatening all the same. They watched, and waited—for what, Rushes could not tell. When frightened Rushes thought it was best to proceed normally, completing tasks as if she noticed nothing amiss, but sometimes, she felt a coldness sliding along her skin and she knew that a ghost had passed by too closely.
So when Kya, who carried the silk runners to and from the administrator’s hall, grabbed her arm and whispered, Rushes screamed—but it was only one of Mylo’s secret messages. Every few days she received a new one, usually instructions to appreciate Mogyrk’s blessings or to pray for strength, but this one was different. “Fire is the signal. You must bring something precious to the courtyard.”
“What?” But Kya was gone, her arms wrapped around her purple bundle. Rushes did not see how fire could be a signal. Fire burned everywhere, in the lanterns and the ovens, all day and all night. And what was meant by something precious? She spied a group of slaves standing around a table polishing silver candlesticks, their voices low, so she came closer, pulling a bit of silk that she used to polish Nessaket’s comb from her pocket.
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