Knife Sworn (15 page)

“A misunderstanding, then.” Lord Zell leaned back and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I hope you will overlook my error.”

“I will overlook it, this once, if you will leave and allow us the use of this table.”

The legs of Nadeen’s chair screeched against the floor as he pushed it back. He had been so quiet that Rushes had forgotten him.“Blessings of this night upon you, general.” Zell stepped away.

Hazran lowered his head. “And upon you.”

Lord Zell and his friend descended into the Big Kitchen. Hazran sighed and leaned against the water-tub. “Some fresh bread, girl, and wine for our guests.”

He was not angry with her, then. Rushes moved towards the shelves, but flinched when the Fryth man laid a hand on her arm. He touched her gently, but she wanted him to stop nevertheless. “She’s hurt,” He said to the general, “I’ll get the wine.”

She found the envoy’s behaviour strange. One would think him a servant himself and yet they said he was the grandson of the Fryth ruler. It made her wary. A silk-clad could behave any way he liked, but she could not risk appearing lazy. It would not be said of her that the envoy had served himself. As they both moved towards the cupboard she remembered the morning’s wine had not yet been brought up from the root cellar. “I’ll get the wine from below,” she said, “my lord.”

A man with hair as light as the sun pushed his way between Hazran’s men and walked across the room. He looked straight ahead, taking no care of the table and chairs, as if he had been in the Little Kitchen a dozen times before. He wore the robes and patient expression of a priest but held about him also a glint of determination, or else love. It drew Rushes in, wondering which it might be. “No. You need to rest,” he said after looking at her a moment with bright eyes, and under such a gaze she could do nothing but agree. “I will get the wine. I believe that if I keep going down stairs I will find it. Is that right, child?” His Cerantic was good, better than his companion’s. He walked towards the stairs.

“Austere—” said Hazran, but the man had already gone, in the same direction as Lord Zell. He was not the sort of man to be stopped by a word in any case. Five soldiers followed him, three Fryth and two Cerani, a deadly train. She remembered Mylo and the others, possibly still in the cellar, talking about Mogyrk. If Hazran’s men found any slaves there, eating apples or…

Austere.
He was the man Mylo had mentioned. The one who would lead them to greatness. That was what she had seen in him. She looked down into the Big Kitchen, but he had passed from her view.

She turned from the stairs, took the half-eaten bread from the table and laid out a new loaf. Great happenings were not her concern. She would be a slave no matter what else might occur, just as she was a slave before and after the Pattern. She could only hope that if she pleased Empire Mother Nessaket she might end up upstairs, instead of in the kitchen.

Hazran motioned towards the table. “Please, Marke Kavic. Sit.” The Fryth lord sat down, and Rushes retreated to the corner, out of sight. One of the soldiers in the corridor motioned to the general, and Hazran walked out to speak with him.

She looked at the marke and found he was watching her. “You’re a quiet one,” he said, “How long have you been here?”

“Two years, my lord. Maybe three.” She tried to remember how young she had been when Beyon handed her that honey candy. That had been an age ago, viewed through a veil of shapes and blue lines.

“From where in Fryth did they take you? How?” There was something odd about how he said it, an angularity to his words that it took Rushes a moment to recognize. He had spoken in his own language—in her father’s language. She remembered only bits and pieces of her father—the smell of pine, the patches on the knees of his leather trousers, the way he sang under his breath when he thought no-one was listening. And his eyes. They had been blue. Rushes gathered herself and tried to find the Frythian words that would tell the marke she was Clan, from the grass, but at that moment Austere Adam returned.

The priest held a bottle of wine in each hand, the soldiers still trailing behind him. There was no sign they had discovered anything amiss. She rushed to fetch the men a pair of plain, sturdy goblets. The priest accepted them, sat down and spoke to Marke Kavic in a low voice.

“It is as I feared. Our countrymen are still on the road, war prisoners, to be made into slaves.” He motioned towards Rushes and she pressed herself into the corner, wondering whether he had seen Mylo in the cellar after all. As the delivery boy Mylo could talk to people in the city, find out who was on the roads. But why? Adam cleared his throat. “The peace negotiations have not affected Cerani plans in this regard.”

“Then we will ask for their return.”

The austere opened a bottle of wine and poured before speaking again. “What about all that you said on the road? The pain of a few for the freedom of the many. Sacrifices for the peace…”

“Whatever I said before, now I say that we will ask for all we discussed. The prisoners. Reparations. Everything.” Kavic took a gulp of wine.

Adam said nothing, but he gave a chilly, mocking smile, as if he had won a game against someone he did not like. Where before he had looked a kind and capable priest, now his expression resembled Lord Zell’s. She pressed herself even further into the corner, but as she watched the austere’s face transformed again, became the same calm, patient mask she had seen when he first entered the room. Empire Mother Nessaket would want to know about this man. She would be the one to tell her.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Should I always suffer on the rack that tradition has set out for me?” Sarmin had asked him. “Seventeen years forgotten in a small room were not enough? Now I must put any stray heir to the Knife,
and
twist about in a chair made to be easy on the eye rather than on the behind?” Azeem offered nothing to displease him and yet the man grated on Sarmin, despite or perhaps because of the fact that the vizier’s personality came closest to his own of all the court. The key to it though was of course Azeem’s view of Grada. Honest or not Sarmin would hear no more of those opinions.

The throne room held the usual ensemble of place guards, sword-sons of Sarmin’s personal guard and courtiers who attended him. He had picked for this meeting not men he liked, or in some cases even knew, but men used to the politicking of empire, men who commanded troops or governed regions at a level that required their close and daily attention. They sat in a row on the third step of the dais, tradition dictating an uncomfortable afternoon for them too.

Among the nine advisors, Satrap Honnecka with his many soft chins and single sharp beard to hide them. Close by, the equally corpulent Prince of Jomla, and General Merkel’s narrow frame, absent his sword, sandwiched between them. At the far end the nomad, Notheen, perched in his tightwrapped robes, a sinister air to him. Azeem had counselled against allowing one of the desert at the audience, but Sarmin had said the desert was the heart of empire. He had insisted, in part to contradict Azeem, if only to show that the man could be wrong, but also because perhaps that disquiet the nomad brought with him from the empty reaches of the desert would speak louder to the man of Fryth and his priest than any threat or show of force. Their reactions to him might reveal whether they knew about that which grew through the sands, eating all in its path.

A gong sounded beyond the throne room doors, another closer at hand, and then the ponderous opening as six men set their weight to the left door and six to the right. Such a weight of wood might mean little to men from the green lands of Fryth but at least they would know that entering the throne room of Cerana should not be taken lightly.

The court herald announced the visitors—an Island slave trained for the purpose—the mellow voice that rolled forth a poor match for the oiled immensity of him, his vast girth held in with bands of purple silk.

“Lord Kavic Syr-Griffon of Fryth, grandson to the Malast Anteydies Griffon, the Iron Duke.” He drew breath. “And Adam, Second Austere of Mondrath.”

Two Fryth guardsmen preceded the envoy, disarmed but still fearsome in their size, both as tall as any man in the palace guard and heavily muscled. They parted to reveal their charges, the envoy in dark cloth, cut and stitched in strange shapes as if the tailor sought battle with every natural fold. The austere beside him wore robes much as every other priest Sarmin had seen, his hair close-cut, his demeanour more warrior than cleric. To Sarmin he carried the air of a man more likely to burn books than to study them.

Before the doors closed Sarmin spotted high mage Govnan slipping through the narrowing gap. The old man had been called to sit in counsel on the fourth step, where the priests of Mirra, Herzu and the rest would sit. In the end Sarmin had not summoned the priests. Matters would likely prove tricky enough without letting the Mogyrk priest insult or be insulted by Cerana’s gaggle of holy men.

The envoy, Kavic, moved to the fore. He halted two yards before the first step of the dais. One of Azeem’s men would have coached him in this. Azeem’s man would have coached the visitors in the obeisance as well, and yet they stood, all four of them, as if their legs would sooner break than bend. Sarmin felt the tension rising in his guardsmen. The sword-sons remained calm; protocol was nothing to them, but they noted the danger of escalation and stepped closer to the throne.

To not give the obeisance was unthinkable. Even to Sarmin the instinct ran so deep that the mere fact of their disobedience paralysed his thoughts for a moment. Of the five books that kept his company for his long imprisonment it was the
Book of Etiquette
that held most of his attention. In that room they fed and watered him, but they had starved him of human contact, and so a book dealing only with the business of the interactions between one man and the next, however dry and formal its writings, proved more of a window onto the world he had lost than did the arch of stone and alabaster which admitted only light. And in that book the obeisance lay time and again, writ large in black letters that recognised no doubt or leeway, the act that more than any other defined an emperor. But these men had not read the
Book of Etiquette,
and Sarmin had not read their books. Truly, nothing about the garb or faces, the weapons or skin-tone of these men of Fryth so clearly marked them out as alien than that their understanding of the world came wrapped in different covers.

Soon one or other of the palace guards would snap and take the head from priest or envoy, ready to sacrifice his own life for acting without orders rather than to endure the affront to the emperor a moment longer. Sarmin only sat and clutched the arms of the throne. He couldn’t excuse them, couldn’t show such weakness before the men he had gathered to welcome the envoy. Surely these men of Fryth didn’t understand what they were doing by standing there stiff necked and angry. Azeem should have explained it to them himself…

A gleam from polished steel as one of the palace guards closest to the envoy began to draw his blade, his face a mix of incredulity and cold rage. High Mage Govan moved in a swirl of ash-grey robes, the heel of his iron staff striking the behind the knee of the leftmost Fryth guard. The man fell helpless, landing on the injured leg, the armour casing around the joint hitting the floor with a loud retort. Govnan’s staff took the guard in the back of the neck, driving him into a crude approximation to the obeisance.

The high mage stood for a moment, heaving in a breath, and it seemed the air about him rippled with heat. “I recommend you follow the example of your escort.” He addressed the envoy and the Mogyrk priest above the fallen man’s agonised grunts. “I had hoped the palace officials would have educated you in our ways—but if you require further instruction…” He lifted his staff an inch or two.

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary, high mage,” Sarmin said from the throne. Even without his elemental there was clearly fire in the old man yet. And well directed. His outburst might succeed in overcoming the impasse with a broken knee in place of a severed head.

“In Fryth a man kneels only to Mogyrk or to his liege lord.” The priest spoke, a man of middle years, white-blond hair gleaming in the lantern light, an intensity around his dark blue eyes. His voice held calm, carrying only sight accents, but his skin flushed in a crimson scald from neckline to cheekbones.

Sarmin spoke to pre-empt hot words from Govnan. “You are not in Fryth, priest.”

“There is a reason for that! We—”

“Peace requires negotiation—negotiation requires manners.” The envoy cut across the words that would have been the priest’s last had they escaped his lips. His Cerantic reminded Sarmin of Mesema’s way of shaping the sounds when she first came to the palace. Perhaps the envoy too had learned the language en route.

Kavic began to lower himself, making his intentions clear so his companions could kneel before him. The guardsman went quickly, first kneeling, then pressing his forehead to the marble. The priest hesitated, a snarl twitching at his lips, but he could hardly stand when the envoy knelt, and at last he followed the guard’s lead, with Kavic following.

A breath Sarmin had not known he was holding hissed past his teeth. The Mogyrk priest was right; they were here only because Cerana’s armies had invaded Fryth, but being right would not have kept him alive. Indeed it might have brought ruin to his homeland. The priest’s insolence had been destroying the only thing preventing the destruction of his nation—the peace rested on Sarmin’s ability to command the men between them, the lords that ruled the many pieces of Cerana in his name. And that obedience, as Azeem often pointed out, rested on tradition. If showing obeisance to the emperor was a tradition that no longer had to be observed, what else might follow? As a nation of Settu players the people of Cerana knew all about how one falling tile can topple every token on the board.