Knife Sworn (4 page)

He saw nothing.

“Zanasta?” Always the last to reveal himself.

Gone. Mesema herself had cast Zanasta out and now he would not help her.

Below the window and to the left an area of the old decoration lay untouched, a tangle of dense calligraphy that had yielded no face in all the long days of Sarmin’s inspection, no voice, only confusion mixed with beauty. He went to it now, set his fingers to the fabric, traced the scroll of the lines written out in black and in deepest blue.

“She comes.”
Sarmin jerked his hand back, fingertips stung. The voice had rung through him, spilled from his mouth. “Who?” he whispered. His hand didn’t want to return to the wall; the ache of it ran in each tendon. Even so he set his fingers to the pattern once more. None of the angels ever spoke with such authority. Not even Aherim. Of all the devils even Zanasta never chilled him so. “Who comes?” Only silence and the defiant complexity, as if the artist had written in knots rather than script. “A daughter? Our child will be a girl?”

“She comes.”
Again the shock but Sarmin forced his hand to maintain the contact. A jagged line tore his vision. Mountain tops. The sun sinking behind serrated ridges of stone.

“Who?” Sarmin demanded it but the voice kept silent. “Who!”

Silence.

A knocking brought Sarmin back to himself. It repeated. He found that he was sitting before the wall with his fingers still pressed to the designs.

“My emperor?” Azeem’s voice from outside.

The door-handle turned. From long habit Sarmin ignored it. His guards had always checked the door, but never entered. Now the hinges creaked and silk rustled as Azeem entered the room. He took silent stock of the ruined walls and the broken window before touching his forehead to the floor.

Sarmin gathered himself before speaking. “How is my wife, Azeem? The child?”

Azeem leaned back, onto the balls of his feet. “I know nothing of the women’s hall,” he said. “I have other news.”

Sarmin paused before the window and looked down upon the courtyard where his brothers had died. “Then tell it.”

Azeem stood now. Sarmin without looking imagined him smoothing the silk of his robe, brushing the plaster dust from its folds.

—He will betray you—the boys, where are the boys?—so much blood—I’m frightened.

—Be quiet, all of you.

After several moments Azeem said, “Govnan’s mage whispers upon the wind: the peace embassy from Fryth draws near.”

“Such magics.” Sarmin turned and met the vizier’s gaze. Azeem looked away, the jewels on his turban throwing out glimmers of the sinking sun. “Such powers exerted that men might talk across miles.” Fryth was the outermost colony of Yrkmir, the closest corner of its empire, and yet still so far.

“Battles can turn on such a thing. Wars can be won because a message was lost, or heard.” Azeem laced his fingers. Perhaps not trusting himself not to fidget.

“And yet when we stand face to face we have so little to say to each other.”

“Even so,” Azeem said, eyes on his hands. He wore no rings on those long dark fingers.

“Let us hope a peace can turn on the right words at the right time.”

Azeem bent his head in agreement. “Indeed we must move carefully. With victory so close Arigu was not pleased to call a truce, and he has many allies in Nooria.”

Arigu’s pleasure mattered nothing. A truce would be had. Sarmin’s messengers had been stopped by snow in the passes, unable to reach Fryth and stop the general from launching his attack. Now too many people had died. Sarmin felt each one as a loss, a shape removed from a pattern, leaving blankness. He spoke the words he had meant to keep behind his lips. “Let us hope my my council understands Arigu better than I, for in truth I don’t know what he sought through bloodshed.”

“It is the doom of good men that they cannot see what evil men desire, and their salvation that men of evil will not believe it,” Azeem said.

Sarmin returned to the wall, his fingers exploring the ruination. “You were a slave, taken from the Islands.”

“Yes, my emperor.” A shield of formality raised without hesitation.

“My servant, Ink, is from Olamagh. His true name is Horroluan. He says in that land there are birds brighter and more colourful than peacocks and that they speak like men.”

“Olamagh is to the south, in wild seas where pirates and sharks infest the waters, Magnificence.” Azeem raised his head. “My home was Konomagh, a place of spice trees and old learning. We had no birds that talked.”

“And your name?”

“Was Toralune.” Azeem smiled at some memory.

“Wit and service earned your freedom. My cousin Tuvaini raised you high.”

“I serve at your pleasure, my emperor. If there is some other better suited I would be honoured to return to my former station. I made a better master of house and coin to Lord Tuvaini than I did a vizier. I think perhaps he wanted me near for the comfort of a familiar face rather than for my skills as a diplomat, which are sadly lacking.

“In the Islands, where even children learn to swim, we have a saying. ‘To be out of one’s depth’— it means to lose the seabed before you have mastered swimming. Tuvaini led me into waters deeper than I am tall and I have never learned to swim.”

Sarmin had to puzzle over “swimming.” In the end he recalled an illustration in
The Book of Ways
, heads and arms amid a sea of waving lines. Swimming. The palace held a deep pool, marble set with gold, where a man might drown, but none swam there.

His fingers returned to the wall. “Did you ever have an imaginary friend, Azeem?”

“I had a real friend, Magnificence, and after he died for many years I imagined his ghost followed me. I would tell him my secrets, and leave him a portion of my food, but he only followed and watched, and could never join in my games.”

“I had an imaginary friend once.” Sarmin raised plaster-white fingers to his face. “Sometimes I think all of my friends have been imaginary.”

Sarmin crossed to his desk and sketched Aherim’s face with a white finger. It didn’t look like Aherim. “Perhaps we can be friends, Azeem?”

The pause spoke the “no” plain enough.

“An emperor cannot afford friends, Magnificence,” Azeem said. In Sarmin’s mind the Many laughed.

The richest man in an empire of rich men and he cannot afford friends.

“Least of all low-born or slave-taken friends. Your flesh is golden, your robe brighter than the sun. The empire requires you that way, needs you that way, and the touch of lesser men sullies you. The touch of the Untouchable—”

“Of Grada. You may say her name.” Sarmin rubbed the chalk face from his desk, an angry motion.

“As high vizier I am little but advice. My advice is to send Grada away, never to return. You have been gifted many concubines—”

Those concubines, gifts from the scheming and nattering lords, might as well have been snakes in Sarmin’s view—no less so for their high status. That was why he had sent Grada to find out about them, Grada whom he trusted. Grada who had carried him with her.“Tell me,” he said, stalking closer to the vizier, “How long did it take the palace to turn Toralune to Azeem? Do you remember when and where we taught the Island boy to despise? When our traditions, dry-born of the desert, replaced the sea-born freedoms of the Isles?”

Azeem let the anger run off him. “Traditions are what hold you in your throne, Magnificence.”

“You would not speak so to Beyon.” Nobody would speak an awkward truth to Beyon. Perhaps that was what killed him. “Go now. I’ll speak to you in the other room.”

Azeem made his obeisance on the gritty carpet and left.

Sarmin had a world of two rooms now. The one room he stood in, and a second larger room that held everything beyond his doorway. Two rooms, one full of wonders, the other full of dust, and sometimes he felt more trapped than ever he had when fifteen and twenty paces had bound him.

In the other room a child was being squeezed into the world, pushed into it in pain and blood. Mesema would be screaming and yet even the emperor himself couldn’t seem to push past tradition, tear through custom, and see her, offer comfort. Or maybe his own fears held him. In the other room a man could drown. Even an emperor could find himself out of his depth.

CHAPTER FOUR

When Uthman came across the empty desert in the longest of long agos he discovered two great outcrops of granite defying both sand and river, channelling the waters between them and resisting the wind. He founded a city there and named it Nooria after Meksha’s daughter, she of the hidden fires in whose deep furnace such rock is forged. On the greater outcrop he built his palace, and in time it grew to devour and conceal the ancient rock. On the lesser outcrop, watching the palace across the swift waters of the Blessing, he set the first shrine, to Meksha, and the second to her child. And among the many shrines that followed, the rich built homes, each according to the changing tastes and prosperity of the times. For what is wealth for if not to let men live among the gods?

This knowing comes to Grada from the pages of a great book, though she cannot read. It can only be that the Many have whispered it to her. She sees the book, its parchment turning beneath blunt and ink-stained hands, at once familiar and strange.

The house stands on a long aisled street where date palms grow in ordered senility, grey with age and fruitless now, awaiting time’s judgement. At one end, Mirra’s shrine, domed in black marble, simple and without adornment. At the far end where the street opens into a sun dazzled square, Herzu’s shrine in alabaster, abalone, and ivory, white in many flavours, carved in deep and complex relief.

The house stands between life and death, pale in the moonlight, and Grada knows with certainty—as sudden as the sun’s departure—that she is dreaming.

It’s cold on that street where the palms whisper in the dark and no one walks. Grada shivers against the breeze and against a deeper chill woken in her bones. The gardens are high walled but it is gesture rather than threat; the stonework is ornate and easy to climb. There are no lights behind the many shuttered windows, no servants at late duties. There will be guards—a rich man cannot sleep without a sharp blade to guarantee his slumbers, but like the walls these guards will be more show, blunted by routine, selected for the peaceful boredom of civilised living.

Grada would rather walk away, let sleeping dogs lie. Instead she waits and lets the poisoned dogs die. The meat she slung over the wall left her hands bloody. She wipes them on the coarse sandstone before her. There will be more blood to come. She can taste it.

This isn’t dreaming. This is memory
. Unfolding, piece by piece like a tightwrapped pattern, bound about a dark and rotten truth.

Grada knows this. She knows it as she knows the path her knife cut to Sarmin’s chamber, as she knows the lives she sliced open to reach him. The Many guided her hands that night. Now those same hands find purchase on the carved corner of a garden wall and pull her up. The pattern unfolds a piece more, its secret still hidden. But some offenses are so rank they reek to heaven and nothing can wholly conceal them. There’s a child here. She knows that much.

“Wake up.”

Fingers tight about her wrists. Grada struggled but the grip held. “Wake up!” Rorrin said again, the moonlight caught his face above her. Grada relaxed in his grip, spitting sand.

“You shouted in your sleep,” he said.

“Bad dreams,” she muttered, shrugging him off to sit upright. She paused a moment, looking about. The milestone at the roadside, the milky haze of stars above, the sigh of the Blessing slipping past in the night, and in the far distance the glow of Nooria.

Rorrin sat back, a white gleam of teeth in the darkness of his face. “You’re young yet—there are worse dreams to come.” Sloshing as he reached for his waterskin. “Here.”

For a while Grada held silent, the waterskin cool across her knees, its contents sliding as she changed position. Rorrin settled down beneath his cloak once more.

“And what kind of emperor will Sarmin be?” If she fell asleep that house would still be waiting for her, she would find herself straddling that wall with the bushes seething beneath her in the darkness and the sounds of three hounds choking. Better to have Rorrin spin out his opinions and keep her awake.

“We get the emperor we deserve,” Rorrin said. “And clearly we deserve to be punished.” He yawned, wide enough to crack his jaw.

Grada pushed the skin aside, her anger in the sharp gesture. “Sarmin is a good man.” Sarmin the Saviour, they were calling him now.

Perhaps Rorrin shrugged—the darkness hid it. “Better a strong emperor than a weak one, but if the emperor is weak then better he hide in the palace and play his games there. The worst of all is a weak emperor who shows his weakness to the world. Cerana has enemies on every side. It’s the natural order of things—the rich are watched by the poor, always waiting for the chance to turn the tables, to move into their houses, dine from their silver. Neighbour watches neighbour with jealous eye.”

“Being a good man doesn’t make Sarmin weak,” Grada said. She remembered how easy it had been to stab him. How she bore him to the bed and he had offered no fight, only traced his fingertips across her shoulder, and in that touch taken her from the Many.

“This emperor has yet to name a Knife, though seven candidates have been offered for judgement. Only a fool walks the Maze unarmed. Sarmin walks far worse places and thinks he needs no Knife. His enemies won’t see a new way of thinking in his empty hands, they’ll see he represents an opportunity entirely different from the one he thinks to offer.

“His weakness springs from what we did to him. We learn to mistrust as we grow, we come to know the true nature of men, the hungers that drive them. Our innocence dies the death of a thousand cuts. Sarmin spent those years alone, nursing only one wound, a big one I grant you, but even so. He doesn’t understand us, the people outside his rooms, outside his books. Innocence, that is a dangerous state of mind in which to rule. Better a bloody-handed murderer than an innocent on the Petal Throne.”