The Emperors Knife (28 page)

He made changes, subtle alterations that might escape unseen. The power came to him as naturally as breathing.

Sarmin could sense the Pattern Master seeking him, and remembered old games, hiding from his brothers, squeezed into closets deep among the silks, and the scent of sandalwood, the sound of footsteps passing close by, the rattle of a hand on the slatted door.
Close now.

A pain beyond any he'd known blossomed between his ribs. He screamed, and screamed again, and opened his eyes to see the gods gazing down upon him from the painted ceiling of his room.

The Knife whispered to Eyul, one voice after another, “Do it fast.”

“Yes, before she turns.”

They were right. Eyul ran the hilt across his lips, a rough metallic kiss, not soft. Not like hers.

“Why do you wait, Eyul, Assassin?”

Amalya murmured in her sleep, a sweet sound that made him grit his teeth.

“Do you want a mage among the patterned?”

“Quiet, now,” he whispered.

Choices.
As decisions went, this one should be easy. He didn't know if Govnan was truly the enemy, or whether to trust Beyon, but a Carrier must die. It was the law.

And yet…

She'd told him to see beyond what was shown. There had to be something more here, something else to find.

“Do it now.”

He remembered holding the Knife to her throat before the nomads came; he should have done it then. He'd been too soft, too hesitant. Eyul touched the shining point to her skin.

Skin was far too easy to breach; a fault in design, like so many others.

Amalya opened her eyes and smiled. Eyul pressed the blade home.

Chapter Twenty-Three

T
he Carrier lay across Sarmin, the pattern on her skin faded. She lifted her head, slowly, as if rising from a deep sleep. Their eyes met. She looked puzzled. Together they turned their faces to the knife in his side. She snatched her hand away from the hilt as if it burned.

“You're stabbed,” she said.

“I know.”

“I'll get help!” She struggled up, glanced left, right. “Where in hell are we?”

Sarmin smiled at her language. He tasted blood.

She ran for the door and pounded on it. “Help! There's a man stabbed!”

Sarmin could see the wound in her back now, where the blade had sliced her tunic open. He saw the pattern, dull reds, dull blues, and the play of her muscles under dusky skin. Beneath the clotting trickles of blood from her cut Sarmin could see the two slight changes he'd made: circle to ellipse, blue triangle to red. It was almost lost in the sweep of her patterning, but enough to free her from the Many.

“Help!” she shouted.

“They're dead.” Sarmin coughed up blood, bright crimson on his fingers, “dead, or ordered away.”

She ran for the window.

“Don't—” It would be a sacrilege.

But she put her fist through it anyway; three blows cleared all but the jagged fragments of alabaster from the frame. The sound took him to back that distant night and a new pain narrowed his eyes.

The Carrier stood motionless, stunned by a view Sarmin had never seen. Only once had Sarmin looked from that window, long ago. He had broken it himself, the night they brought him to the room. Darkness had not hidden the assassin and his bloody work. Years had not softened the memory.

“Come back to me?” he asked.

She did, her steps slow, noticing the richness of the carpet for the first time.

“What did you see?”

“A palace. A whole city—as if we're flying above it.”

“We're in a tower, the tallest in the palace,” Sarmin said. He coughed. His side felt cold now. Before it had been so hot, with the blood flooding down across his ribs.

“It isn't the tallest.”

Sarmin found his hand reaching for the
Book of Etiquette
, but he stopped it. The book told him that a prince does not speak to those of the Maze. The book spoke of punishments for any of her caste who even looked upon royalty. And yet she spoke to him. She contradicted.

He coughed again, then said, “You look touchable to me.” He'd not meant to say the words aloud.

“What?”

“That Tower isn't in the palace. You're looking at the mages' Tower. It's the only spire that overtops the palace,” Sarmin said.

“Mages?” Her eyes returned to the knife in his side. “We should go there. They could help you.”

“I don't think I can walk,” Sarmin said.

The Carrier cast an eye around the room, checking out the door, the window, the ceiling, the narrow entrance to the passages that had brought her to his room.

“Wh— Where am I?” she asked at last. “What are we doing here?”

“Do you have a name?”

“What?”

“A name, do you remember your name?”

She frowned, and after a moment said, “Grada.”

“Your name is the start, Grada, the corner of a pattern. Think on it, and you'll see the rest.” He met her gaze, but his sight had started to dim. He was glad not to be alone. “You've been sick, Grada. Look at your arms. You're a Carrier.”

“No.” She didn't look, but her voice lacked conviction.

“The mages could help me, perhaps. I need to speak to them.”

“Yes!” Grada's face lit up, as if the prospect of some concrete task were stone amid the sand. “I can carry you. I'm strong. Like the ox, Jenna says.” She reached for him, took his wrist in her hand.

“No—” Sarmin winced at the idea of being thrown across her shoulders, “I would bleed too quickly.”

She frowned. “But you said—”

“You remember the Many, Grada?” Sarmin asked. She shook her head.

“You remember them,” he said, “you carried the Many, and that is how you can carry me. We will be two. I'll guide you to the mages' Tower.”

“No.” She released his wrist but didn't move away.

Sarmin shrugged. It didn't hurt—nothing hurt any more. He smiled and laid his head back. The gods watched him.

“It's my knife, isn't it?” Grada asked, her voice soft.

“Yes.”

Sarmin watched the gods. He thought of Beyon, and of Grada. He was glad not to be alone.

“I will carry you.” Grada leaned over him. “Show me how.” Sarmin released a sigh he'd not known was inside him and set a trembling hand to her neck. Warm flesh pulsed beneath his fingertips. A star became a moon. And they were joined: Grada and Sarmin.

“Grada?” He spoke from inside of her. He could see himself through her eyes, pale against cushions dark with his blood.

“Grada?”

He could hear his breath rattle into shallow lungs.

“Herzu's member! You're a prince!”

“I'm going to be a dead prince unless you start moving, Grada.”

“I'm in a palace and I stabbed a prince!” She was yelling, but her lips did not move.

“Grada!”

She started towards Tuvaini's secret door. Sarmin shared the pain lancing out from her sliced back.

“Who is Tuvaini?”

“Cerani's high vizier, a cousin of mine, I think, if you go through enough genealogy.”

“Genie what?”

“Pay attention, those stairs are steep.”

“The high vizier? Camelspit! The
high
vizier comes to see you?” She reached the bottom of the stairs and paused. She looked out over the bridge.

“Rotram?” she asked. Another memory had escaped Sarmin's keeping into Grada's mind.

“A royal guard. He died here.”

“Died?” Grada asked out loud.

“Was killed.”

“I remember a dream—” Images fluttered through her mind: the hatred on Ellar's face, Rotram falling into the blackness.

Sarmin moved within her and turned her head from the chasm. “Don't.”

“They killed him—
somebody
killed him,” she said, “with my hands.” She looked at them, still rusty with his blood. “But it wasn't me?”

“No.”

“It wasn't me.” Prayer rather than conviction.

Together they made their way across the bridge and through Tuvaini's passages—the secret ways pre-dated Tuvaini by three hundred years, but Sarmin thought of them as the vizier's. Tuvaini, keeper of secrets—what other hidden paths had the man trodden?

Grada retraced her footsteps, bringing them through the forgotten bowels of the ancient palace. A concealed door gave before experimental fingers and she crawled through, emerging behind a patterned urn, man-high, in a dusty corner of a corridor lit by lanterns.

“This is the under-palace?” Recognition thrilled across Sarmin's shoulders, though he had never walked the halls where servants went about their business.

“I thought the emperor must live here when I saw it,” Grada said, “I didn't know there were such places.” Her words carried images of the Maze in their wake: dark rooms, small and dirt-floored, sewer stink, and rot in the gutters.

She found her feet and looked both ways along the corridor. To her left was a low door, and above it brown tiles picking out a scene from the Battle of the Well, showing Cerani and Parigols locked in combat.

She moved to go past, but Sarmin stopped her and they almost fell. “I've seen this before—this decoration.”

Grada said nothing.

“I saw it,” Sarmin continued, “I was with the Many, and I saw Tuvaini here. And something was given to him—something precious. It was his price for betrayal. His price for opening the secret ways to you.”

Grada frowned. “I remember… almost.”

“He plays Settu, my cousin,” Sarmin said. “We're tiles on his board. He tried to use me and found that I was not a tool he could turn to his purpose, so he sold me to the Many, and charged a high price for his treachery. He plays the Pattern Master at his own game. Or he thinks he does.”

Grada shook her head and for a moment Sarmin felt himself fade, losing substance, as if he were a memory or an idea ready to be overwritten by new thoughts. The image came to him of cushions black with blood.

“Quickly,” he murmured, “we have to reach the Tower.” They had taken four steps before Grada remembered her robes and retrieved them from the throat of the urn. The sun robes were ill-suited to fighting, but essential to the outdoor life of the Maze. She gasped as she struggled into them, but the rough cloth would hide her wound.

Sarmin retreated to the back of Grada's mind and watched as they passed a hall where women, old and young, sat at long tables, cutting and stitching with swift fingers and quicker voices. The corridor split and from the left men came, hefting amphorae heavy with sweet-wine for the palace kitchens. They passed without a glance for Grada, who hurried down the passage to the right.

They passed by a well, low-walled and secret in a window-less hall. The air felt strange to Sarmin; it was clammy on Grada's skin. She took a wooden bucket from a row by the wall. Sarmin found himself listening to her breathing, wondering at the soft strength and strangeness of her body beneath the robes. As she reached for a cover for the bucket Sarmin turned her hand, studying her palm for a moment before she took command again.

The corridors became more crowded, with servants, scribes, craftsmen, all bound for unknown destinations. Grada stepped aside and passed unmarked, beneath notice, a ghost within the machine of government.

A low door gave onto the grand courtyard. As a child Sarmin had left the palace carried within a palanquin, taken through the Elephant Gate, a vaulted portal with doors of spice-teak, tall enough to admit gods. The door before them now was not for gods, or princes, or even merchants. Even so, a palace guard waited, a scarred hand resting upon the hilt of his hachirah. His eyes flitted to the bucket in Grada's hands and he wrinkled his nose and said nothing. Grada passed through, silent, into the sun. Sarmin could hear the words unspoken: night-soil. Hachirahs meant nothing to the Maze-born.

The noonday sun bludgeoned the flagstones of the grand courtyard with such violence that none lingered there. Only Grada and a distant patrol of the Blue Shield Guard moved in the heat. Sarmin felt the hot stone through Grada's sandals and through the slits of her eyes he saw the great expanse of the sky. After fifteen years beneath a painted ceiling the sight robbed him of thought. His scream escaped Grada's lips and he ran, throwing himself back into her skull, into her mind, into the darkest recesses, diving under the blackness, burrowing—

“Grada?” A man's voice in the night of memory.

“Grada? Why are you hiding?” Closer now. “Father always finds you.”

And there, buried from the sun, in a stranger's nightmares, Sarmin learned of other ways to lose a childhood.

Chapter Twenty-Four

E
yul stood by the burning tent. He watched her funeral pyre through his white sun-mask, Knife in hand. It had taken only seconds for Metrishet to free himself, to blister Amalya's smooth skin and envelop her blankets in a crackling blaze.

Someone would die for this. He twisted the hilt of the emperor's Knife in his hand, ignoring the whispers pouring forth in his mind.

There was no point in collecting Amalya's pots, her spice-sack or anything else that spoke of her. Let the desert claim them, as the pattern had claimed Amalya. Let them be forgotten.

But first, someone would die. Perhaps many.

He mounted his camel and turned towards the city.

The sun in the west hit the white walls of Nooria and filled Mesema's vision with orange light. She covered her eyes against the brightness, wishing she knew what lay beyond that orange veil. Her stomach twisted with the not-knowing. She wished she could stop the carriage, but it creaked and bounced along, moving inexorably forwards. She longed to turn back, back home, back to the desert, back anywhere but here.

The pattern had not appeared anywhere else on her skin, but remained on her finger, a small dusty-blue moon. Twice she'd slept and twice she'd awakened, frightened and pleading to the Hidden God. One day would be the bad day, the day she'd find those lines and shapes running across her ribs. She hadn't yet decided what to do on that day.