Knife Sworn (40 page)

He’s a child, chubby armed, almost chest deep in the longest greenest grass he has ever known, running without direction, chasing butterflies, swinging a thin stick with no hope of hitting. There’s no tiredness in this memory, he runs and runs some more, always laughing. And Sarmin laughs too, he has found Helmar before the austeres of Yrkmir, before the dungeon, before even the tower. Sarmin has days like this walled within the record of his past—someday he will open those too.

Butterflies rise before him in hues too vivid for the world. And then he stumbles. Just a little trip, a snagged foot, a headlong plunge into the lushness of the grass, his stick snapping beneath him. The sky is so blue, as if the heat and brightness of the day has woken its true colours, given them meaning. Motion draws his gaze from the sky, something fluttering but wrong. There in the canyon that his fall scored into the grass is a butterfly, lunging skyward, failing, veering in crazy spirals, battering against the green stems. Is it sick?

This is why he’s here, Sarmin knows it. This is the anchor point, the fractured moment that has defined a life, defined many lives. A child’s stumble, an instant’s thoughtlessness and something beautiful lies broken. A lesson every child learns. Perhaps the first and sharpest truth of all those that slice us through the years, that carve away innocence, make bitter men of joyous boys.

The thing is a frenzy of beating wings, iridescent green slashed with crimson. For a heartbeat it pauses on the ground. A jagged hole spoils the symmetry of its wings, breaks the interwoven pattern of their markings. Some swing of his stick has taken a chunk from the back of both wings. The butterfly rises again in its broken dance. And falls.

Helmar’s hands close around the insect, cupping, holding. The crazed fluttering continues, the beat of broken wings within the darkness he encloses. The feel of it against his palms turns his stomach.

This is the first lesson. What’s done is done. Beauty is too easy to destroy. “No.” Helmar refuses the lesson.

“Let it go.” A whisper from Sarmin’s lips. Madness lies in such refusal.

Deny but one truth, however small, and your world must twist and twist again at each turn through your days to accommodate that lie, until at last there is no hint of truth in any corner of your existence.

“No,” Helmar says again, and opens his hands, just a crack, to study his captive, now resting on the lower palm.

There is a pattern here, boldly stamped in iridescent green, metallic blue, a symmetry of circles within circles, curves and divides. Where the wing is gone the eye fills in what is missing, symmetry demands it, completeness requires that this circle is finished, this line carried to the end.

The child closes his hands again, closes his eyes, tight until the reds and greens a summer day leaves behind the eyelids flare bright as fire. He sees the pattern, the necessary pattern of the butterfly, whole, intact, brilliant in memory. He sees it, he lives it, he prints it into his hands, stamping it with every breath, every beat of his heart.

The pattern is not the butterfly, Sarmin tells him. The butterfly is so much more. The butterfly is whatever mystery of insect blood and insect bone serves such creatures, it is egg and chrysalis, it is dew sucked from grass and nectar from flowers. It is this morning there, that morning here, a close escape, five miles in the grip of a sudden gale. The pattern is not the butterfly.

The child sees the pattern, whole, complete. He believes it. He opens his hands and the butterfly flutters away, gone amongst the floating seeds.

The pattern was no more than a story, a tale of the butterfly, but it showed it the way to be whole once more. It showed the butterfly how to heal itself.

The pattern was a lie. The pattern was also true.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

She crossed neither fast enough to draw attention nor slow enough to present a lingering target. At the windows she checked first the ones closest to the great stair, then moved along the front of the house trying each in turn. She pulled hard, hoping to force an entrance before she reached the shutter that the dream told her would come free. Nothing gave. She reached the shutter she knew would yield.

“I could leave it, try the next instead. I could walk away, find a caravan, head south for a new life.” The words twitched behind her lips. Duty bound her to the task. “Knife-Sworn are a rare breed,” Herran had told her. “It’s a combination of loyalty that once given goes bone deep, and independent thought that remains unclouded by that loyalty. Either quality is rare and each seems to preclude the other, but still time and again the emperors of Cerana find such servants. The priests tell us it is the gods who send the Knife-Sworn to the emperor in time of need, and I cannot argue.”

Grada pulled at the next shutter and it gave as she had known it would. She clambered through into the blind dark beyond. In the corridor she passed the sleepwalker from the dream, guided only by sound. Grada moved on, trailing fingers along the wall, counting each doorway against the map she remembered from Meere’s papyrus. Meere wrote a number there too, five. Jomla, both his wives, his councillor who like the emperor’s vizier would be privy to all schemes and secrets. That made four. Fifth would be the boy, the heir. Grada wondered if he would have toys now, if Prince Jomla had sent again to the tall houses of the artisans, to Mechar Anlantar, and if his servant returned this time with model soldiers, mechanical acrobats in silver and jet, a drum perhaps. Would she find the child clutching his gift in the depth of his sleep? Herran had said five given to the knife would be enough to cut out the rot, rebottle the genie, kill the secret. But once the cutting started more than five would die, no matter how careful she was. Grada remembered the Pattern Master centred in his pattern of death, corpses laid in dismembered intricacy all around him, thick with flies. And now she was supposed to fill this house with more bodies, bleeding out in the dark, and all because of pillow talk, of secrets whispered into blonde hair by in the aftermath of Sarmin’s lust. It made no sense. Sarmin was not that man, and she had known him to the core. And yet here she was, chasing secrets.

She found the stairs and began to climb the spiral of them. Whispers of moonlight from tiny windows in a high dome let her find the very edge of each step, a habit from the Maze where any stairs are most likely salvaged from old river barges, creaky with rot. Jomla’s stairs were marble and silent, but old habits die hard.

She passed the second floor. More steps. A deeper shadow ahead, one could imagine it a man. It will be a man. In the dream she killed him. And what else can she do now? Whatever plan might come to her, whatever gambit that might avoid slicing the life from Jomla, it couldn’t start with being captured as an intruder. Waking with the emperor’s knife at your throat carries a certain degree of terror with it. Having a woman of the untouchables captured like a thief in your house, coming down to the servants quarters with your guards to view her and congratulate the man who took her… that’s hardly a position of strength. In the dream she stabbed him, took his keys, and the voices of the Many whispered “murderer”. In the dream she was bound to her course.

I have a choice now. The Knife is in my hand. I have a choice, many choices. All of them bad.

This is memory, the darkness holds Grada and this could be memory, the remembering of crimes already committed by another’s hands. It could be remembered… should be…

It was never memory. This house on the Holies had waited for her, held in the fearful symmetry of the Helmar’s pattern, the Pattern Master’s great work reaching both forward and back to capture histories and futures. In the darkness Grada at last allowed herself to understand what she had always known, allowed herself to let hope slip away, a warm tear to slide down across one cheek.

Ahead, at the top of the stairs, the guardsman would be waiting, unseen and unseeing, dozing or patient he waited. Grada’s hand tightened around the Knife. She climbed the last few steps, each of them feeling like a step down, like a descent into some black deed. Her dreams gave the man to her, they wrapped the darkness where he stood into the shape of a man and she moved towards him without pause. An indrawn breath hissed from him and her hand lashed out, the pommel of the Knife striking his forehead. He jerked back and his head striking the wall behind him with equal force. She pinned him to the painted plaster, a faint rattle of keys as he slid to the floor.

“Choice!” She wanted to shout it. In the dream she stabbed his heart. For the moment it seemed the world around her seethed with pattern, the outrage of the Many echoing around her defiance. But at the end of it the guard lay at her feet and the Knife bore no blood. She savoured the victory.

I am the emperor’s Knife. I cut, and no pattern can bind me. The future is mine to make.

Still the sour taste came to her mouth, hard to swallow. Jomla and the others, the child, none of those problems could be fixed by knocking them insensible. She moved on. Meere had told her the place wouldn’t be a fortress, but even so it seemed too easy. “The rich politic against each other these days, they don’t murder one another in their beds,” Meere had said. “Better to dominate and rob your rivals than to kill them and see them be replaced by some unknown who knows his chance to survive lies in murdering you first. This is what civilisation gave the Cerani.”

Grada set the pommel of the Knife to her chin, thinking. Jomla first. Jomla would be easy. The house reeked of his guilt. Without his ambition, without his dreams of treachery and power, the child would not be here, would not be at risk.

A light burned in the corridor that led to Jomla’s room. Grada eased herself to the corner. In a niche opposite the door to Jomla’s bedchamber an oil lantern sat, its flame dancing. Standing before the door a single guard, tall, tending to fat, but powerfully built and wearing a ring-mail shirt. A slim sword curving at his hip, a knife in his belt, the red glass of the pommel capturing the lamplight.

Grada stepped back and scraped the Knife along the wall, old steel grating on plaster. Properly the guard should wake his master and warn of trouble if he suspected any—if he suspected nothing then he should do nothing. If everyone did what was proper the world would have fewer problems. Maybe none at all. As Grada had anticipated the man came to the end of the corridor, carrying the lamp with him. He turned the corner and Grada stabbed him in the neck. This man though not wary was not unaware and stood too tall to risk a non-lethal stratagem against. The Knife sliced off his protest and bit through his neck bones, halting the progress of fingers towards sword hilt. Grada bore him to the ground, the clatter seeming loud enough to wake the whole household. And yet none stirred. Grada suppressed a grunt of effort as she rolled him across the spilled and burning oil from the lamp, extinguishing the flame. She waited by his twitching corpse listening hard. No sounds of alarm, no boots on marble stairs. She counted twenty beats of her heart then pulled the Knife from his throat and let the blood flow. In death the man soiled himself and smelled rank. Grada had twisted the heads from a hundred chickens in her time—men had no more dignity in death. Emperors may lie in golden caskets within tombs of worked stone, but even they died like any other man, like any other animal. She rolled the man twice more until he lay along the wall where he might be passed by in the dark rather than tripped over. He really had been a big man. Perhaps in his prime he might have stood among the imperial guard. She mouthed a prayer to Mirra for his soul. The words felt empty without sound to give them voice. She filled and lit her own lamp, a small one of fired clay. She would need to see the prince die.

Ten paces brought her to Jomla’s door. It would be locked from within. Meere had given her a vial of acid to destroy the mechanism but she had smelled the stuff at work. It ate metal slowly and released sharp odours that might wake a sleeper. The emperor’s Knife was always on the grand scale a simple solution to a complex problem, or seemingly so. Grada opted for the same direct simplicity on the small scale. She knocked on the door with the hilt of the Knife, three loud raps. A pause then three more. When the muffled query came from inside she simply called in, “Fire.”

A man awake and suspicious would have a dozen questions, not least being where had his night guard gone, but Jomla thick with sleep and focused on the threat of fire came to his own door and unlocked it for her.

With the door ajar between them Jomla blinked at Grada, lifting a hand to rub the sleep from his eyes. Meere had told her she need only kill the fattest man in the house to be sure of Jomla. She could believe the house held no-one more corpulent. Jomla’s chins continued down into the embroidered silks of his night-shirt. She kicked the door wider and lifted the Knife.

Jomla’s eyes widened, “I have gold-” The rest spluttered through a sliced throat, the Knife biting deep to find his windpipe. He fell with a heavy thud, thrashing, refusing to die, rising up spraying blood. Anyone who has seen a pig slaughtered knows how long these things take. The emperor Sarmin would have been appalled. In the stories of valour told to princes death comes in an instant or slow enough that sad farewells might be recorded for posterity.

Grada stepped over and around Jomla, careful of his flailing legs. Oddly they were almost thin, as if he were a great jelly on stork’s legs.

One wife, young and slim, sat in the wide expanse of Jomla’s bed, the silks drawn up around her. The other, an older fatter woman, lay in a separate bed, asleep even now. Grada had thought to find them in separate chambers but Meere had warned that Jomla liked to keep his possessions close.