The Emperors Knife (34 page)

The line left the mosaic swirl and crossed two plush rugs, dividing their patterns. Mesema followed it to the doorway, never raising her eyes. Almost in a dream she pushed open the doors and passed between two guardsmen dressed in splendid colors; neither man so much as twitched.

The line led on, along the centre of the corridor. Mesema pursued it, and silence followed in her wake.

The magnificence of the palace should have taken away her breath, but Mesema saw it only from the corner of her eye; the line filled her purpose, a simple constant amongst the lies and confusion, and where it led, none blocked her way. She moved as if she were invisible: as long as she watched the line, no one would watch her. A simple truth.

She passed courtiers, servants, guards, and then more guards, and silk and woven tapestries gave way to bare stone. A spiral stairway took her up, turn after turn promising the sky, and the line grew as broad as a river, as black as pitch, until, suddenly, it was nothing but a crack in the flagstone beneath her slippered feet.

Mesema found herself at the top of the stair, before her not the sky but a door, open just an inch, just enough for her fingers. She pushed it.

Sarmin pulled, and with slow certainty she came, not drawn against her will, but because of it. Sarmin watched the door. Pale fingers, nails painted like blood, glistening with moisture, and then she stood there.

“Hello.” He smiled. He hoped it was the right thing to do.

“Hello.”

She looks so young.

“I'm Sarmin,” he said.

“Mesema.” She glanced around the room then her eyes returned to his. “I don't remember why you're here.” A strange thing to say, and a strange way to say it. She spoke the words with hard corners on the vowels. The oddness of it made him laugh.

“I'm Beyon's brother.”

“His brother?”

Her lips made a circle. Everything about her made him glad.

“His brother.” It didn't sound like an explanation, but it was. She walked into the room. Sarmin watched her, wondering if he looked foolish. She sat upon the bed, so close that if they both reached out, their fingers would touch. He could smell soap on her, and fruit.

He cleared his throat. “I had other brothers, but they died.”

“I'm sorry.” And she was, he could see it in her eyes, a sparkle of tears. No one had ever said they were sorry, not for his brothers. “They were… killed?” She knew they had been. She paused because the words were ugly in her mouth. He could see it. “My brother was also killed.”

Sarmin nodded.

“It was wrong.”

“It was.” He blinked to keep his eyes clear. He didn't want to cry. But it was wrong. “I worry for Beyon. He's sick. I don't want him to die, too.” The notion that he might keep secrets from her was silly.

Mesema looked away. She pressed her cheek to her shoulder and held her hand towards him, fingers extended. A pattern-mark challenged him from a fingertip.
No—not my princess.
In the darkness of his mind he recalled the Pattern Master's mocking voice.

Sarmin took her hand. Her skin felt cool, but fire passed between them.
Mine
. He turned her fingers in his and knew this to be another reason why men fought: the touch of her skin and the way her hair fell over her cheek as she looked at their joined hands. He would not let the Pattern Master have his bride. He spoke over the pounding of his heart. “I can take this mark away,” he said.

She pulled her hand back and fixed him with strange blue eyes. “It copied itself from Beyon when I touched him. My finger was bleeding.” She looked past him, at the carvings on his headboard. “When I touched him again, he remembered things—good things and bad things.”

Sarmin thought of Grada, how she had rushed back into herself. What Mesema described was different and accidental, but somehow the same. “You held Beyon to Beyon. The Pattern Master tries to lift him away, to leave only meat, but you held him within himself.”

“Leave the mark,” she said, with no hesitation.

Something in that stung him. “You love him? Beyon?” An ache opened in Sarmin's chest, a hollowness.
She was to be mine: the horsegirl brought from the grass clans.
She had been his only gift in a million lonely years. Beyon's now.

But she shook her head, her eyes fixed on the broken window. “Not him.”

Someone else, then.
“The— The Master will come soon,” he said. “The pattern is almost made.”
And I will die in this room.

“What will you do?” Again her eyes settled on his.

“What
can
I do?” Sarmin asked. “I don't think I can stop him—I'm sure I can't.”

She looked at him, waiting.

“I do have a kind of magic,” Sarmin admitted. “I can see the Pattern Master's plans. I can see how much power he has, how he holds everything in his hands. He scares me.”

“You can see his plans, and you say that you can remove his marks.” Mesema held up her index finger. “Doesn't that mean you can stop him?”

“I'm like an eagle that can fly over the city and see it whole. Then I can squawk about it to the mice who see only the walls around them.”

“And the marks?”

“I can change only one person at a time. There are too many.”

“Beyon—”

“I can't help him.” He spat out the truth like a bitter pit. The Master had known it when he told Sarmin there was no hope. “I would have to remove Govnan's protections, and the Master is always watching, waiting for that to happen.” He saw now that he had almost opened the way for the Master. Mesema had saved Beyon by raising his memories; it was her voice Sarmin had heard that night.
Can she use patterns, then, as I can, as the Master can?
He looked at her again. How did mages identify one another? The High Mage travelled the empire every few years, searching for children with talent. How young were they? Younger than Mesema, surely. Once identified, they spent the rest of their lives with the Tower.

Sarmin felt a sudden panic. He'd worried Beyon would take her, or the pattern, but he hadn't thought of Govnan. Govnan had already taken Grada away. He might take Mesema, too, and still call Sarmin fortunate. He made fists in the covers.
If I could leave here…

“What would he do then?” Mesema asked her question as she studied the calligraphy on the wall.

Did she see the faces hidden there? “Govnan?”
If I could leave here, then I would give orders to these old men instead of taking them.

“The Pattern Master.”

Sarmin reached back in his mind to their previous conversation. “I think the Master would be happy to see Beyon dead. Once he hoped to control the emperor, but now he has waited too long, and I sense he is a vengeful man.”

“A vengeful man makes mistakes,” Mesema said. Her words sounded wise, but Sarmin couldn't imagine the Pattern Master making a mistake. The only fault he could think of was one of omission: if there was something the Master didn't see or couldn't see…

“Listen. I've seen the pattern,” Mesema said, “in grass, and in sand. A hare ran through it in secret paths.”

Sarmin said, “I've seen the pattern, too. I've run through it, lived in it. But it doesn't help. His pattern is perfect.”
As are you.

“You're sure?” She pinched her lips together.

Sarmin winced. Remembering the flaw made his stomach turn, like nails on chalkboard. The emperor's Knife. The pattern—the whole pattern—was not drawn on parchment, or written on Carrier skin; it was bigger than that. The whole pattern was written through every
thing
and every
one
.

Except the Knife. Only the Knife remained as a taunt to the Master, inside the pattern, yet not part of it.

“First he must break the emperor's Knife. Then it will be perfect.”

“Beyon's knife? But surely—”

“Not Beyon's knife, not the one he carries, anyway—it's more than that, much more. The Knife is both holy and unholy.” She turned to him, her eyes flashing with a new idea.

“Sarmin, listen. In the desert, the pattern led us to a church of the Mogyrk One God.”

One god, one pattern, one way. He looked past her lovely face to the gods on the ceiling. Many gods for many choices: could this be what the Master was missing?

Mesema touched his hand, calling him back. “Do you think the Pattern Master believes in the One God?”

He spoke, trying to make his consonants soft and his vowels hard, as she did, “I don't know. Surely it is how he sees himself—one Master, with all powers—but he needs others as much as I do. The Carriers.”

“If he needs them, we will stop them.” She thrust her chin out, just a little.

“Is this how all your people are?” Sarmin asked. “Ready to fight? No surrender, even when your horses are gone?”

Mesema grinned. “Yes, we're famed for it. That, and for speaking out of turn. We are the Felt.”

“I imagined you, when Mother told me you were coming. I wondered how I could make you happy.” Sarmin felt the blood rise in his cheeks.

“Fight him. Fight this Pattern Master and his plague. That would make me happy.” She looked fierce now. Sarmin had never imagined her more lovely.

“Then I shall,” he said.

“And me?” Mesema pointed her finger Sarmin's way, and his soft brown eyes turned to the moon-mark there.

Mesema loved Prince Sarmin's voice, the first Cerani voice too soft to scratch against her ears. Nothing about Sarmin had edges. The emperor had made her ears hurt; the wind ran around him like a storm. Sarmin's voice rose and fell with the rhythm of Tumble's tether-bells. She closed her eyes and imagined lying next to him under his blanket. His window had been broken, and the cold desert night gripped the room.

Now he took her hand as he had before, his gentle touch reassuring. “Your blood made that mark—or you marked yourself. I think that makes a difference.” He looked at his own hands. “Blood must be the key to the pattern. It's how I freed Grada.”

“Grada?”

“She was a Carrier.”

“You love her?” She didn't know why she said it, but she knew there must be a truth to it. It made her sad.

“She's from the Maze.” When she looked at him, not understanding, he went on, “She's low-born. She helped me, but I can't be with her, not like that.”

Mesema knew the explanation didn't reveal everything, but then maybe he didn't know everything. He looked away, and she studied his face in profile. At first, shyness had kept her from doing so, then she grew so comfortable with him that she forgot to look. But now his face drew her eyes.

Olive tinged Sarmin's skin, and yet still he looked pale. Sweat plastered his dark curls to his temples, and she remembered the smell of vomit outside the room. Her hand crept out over the silk blanket that covered him. She meant to touch his face, to check for fever, but her fingers met something cold and sticky first. Of course: the other smell she hadn't identified when she entered. Blood. “What's that? Are you hurt?”

Sarmin didn't answer. Night darkened the room, and light came from only one lantern, far away in the corner. Mesema feared what she might see, but forced herself to walk to it anyway, her footsteps slow and dragging. She studied the red stain on her hand with a cold certainty. “You're bleeding.”

“Not any more.” Sarmin's big brown eyes creased at the edges when he frowned. He looked like his brother the emperor, but with finer features. He would have been as handsome as Banreh if he weren't so thin and wasted.

“Do you have a wound? I know how to sew—” She had done much sewing of flesh during the war. Sometimes it helped. Other times the wound only festered. You could never tell…

But he waved her off. “You should go. People might be looking for you.”

Mesema frowned. Only Beyon would look for her. She realised with a start she hadn't told Sarmin about her vision; she'd put it from her mind, and therefore kept it from him.
No secrets from my prince.
She opened her mouth, but Sarmin's eyes had already closed.
Another time, then.

“You need your rest. I'll be back,” she promised, but he didn't respond. His chest rose with a slow breath. She crept towards the door.

“Wait.”

She turned. Her prince reached under his pillow to draw out a long dagger. It had a three-sided blade, and the hilt sparkled with red gems. “Take this dacarba. I don't need it any more.”

Mesema stepped forwards and lifted the weapon. It felt light and cool in her hand. She'd held her father's sword once, when he wasn't looking, and her brother's boning-knife; they'd both had been heavier than this. She wrapped her fingers around the hilt, feeling the sharpness of the gems against her palm. She shut her eyes and thought of Beyon.
I will not kill him. I won't!
“No. I can't take this,” she said.

“I command you. Take it—keep safe.” Sarmin closed his eyes again. His head drooped back upon the silk. He slept.

“I don't want it,” she whispered, though he couldn't hear. She crept to the door, dagger in hand, and began her descent to the palace.

Eyul pushed in the eye of Keleb and stepped through the wall into the hidden corridors. He guessed that Beyon had chosen these dark passageways—he would have, in the emperor's place. He carried no lantern; better that he come upon the emperor unawares. When he had finished with the emperor, he would come back for Govnan.

A rustling sounded above him and to the right. He smiled to himself and crept towards the spiral staircase. Beyond that would be the bridge. It wouldn't do to send Beyon's body into the chasm; it had to be burned in the courtyard, before witnesses. He'd wait until Beyon had arrived safely at the other end.

At the top of the stairs he crouched, listening. Somewhere ahead, Beyon breathed. Clever for the emperor to stand on the bridge. He knew the law better than anyone.