Tower & Knife 03 - The Tower Broken (6 page)

Sword-sons trailed him as he walked to the women’s wing. He did not know their names; he had not asked and did not mean to. He missed Ta-Sann. All the time he had been alone in his tower room he had never suffered a loss. Now that he was out of it, there had been too many.

The women’s corridor stretched before him, plain and white. Here, concubines did not display themselves against colourful mosaics for his inspection. They had their own rooms, and knew that he would not visit them. His time with Jenni had been a mistake, a trick played by the pattern. He stood in the empty corridor and knocked on Mesema’s door. Her servant Tarub pulled it open, and set to trembling at the sight of him.

‘Leave us.’ He was greeted by more plain white walls, glaring in the sun from the window-screen. Against the harshness Mesema appeared ever softer, her skin limned with light as she stretched across the bed, hair lit by honeyed fire. Sarmin knew she was no beauty by the standards of the palace, but she moved him nonetheless. Pelar slept beside her on a purple blanket, his eyelashes thick against his cheeks, and she played with his curls as she sang a Felting song. Though music did not move him, Sarmin paused to listen to her voice.

Mesema raised herself on one elbow and smiled; the line of her body beneath a thin layer of silk set his skin buzzing, but his mind explored it no further. Since the pale sickness had struck they had been no more than friends. He sat on the edge of the bed and touched Pelar’s chubby foot. He was so healthy
now that it was difficult to believe he had almost been drained of life.

Pelar was his son in every way that mattered. Though he had come from the joining of Mesema with his brother Beyon, he loved the boy with all his being. It was not so unusual in Mesema’s culture to raise a boy this way; grass-children, they were called: the children a wife had given birth to before marrying her husband. He leaned over Pelar and smelled the baby-scent of him, soap and milk, and something sweeter. Daveed’s face rose in his mind, in that moment sharper and more real than the boy who lay before him, and he feared the memory might cut him.

‘Don’t wake him up,’ whispered Mesema, ‘I just got him to be quiet.’

‘Not even for a moment?’ He longed to see the boy smile, to wash Daveed from his mind’s eye.

‘If you can answer me a riddle,’ she answered, ‘perhaps I will let you rouse him.’

‘All right.’

She sat up against the white cushions, slowly, so as not to jostle the baby. ‘The wound is spreading from Migido, is it not?’

So far this was not a riddle.

‘And soon it will pass over the Blessing.’

Again she was correct. He began to see the nature of her question. ‘So you want to know whether our river will turn to dust,’ he said.

She looked at him.

Govnan had told him there was only one mile to go before the Storm reached the Blessing. Then they would know for certain. ‘I do not know,’ he said, though his suspicions were dark.

That did not sit well with his wife. ‘The river …’ She drew her knees up to her chin.

Sarmin leaned forwards, trying to find words of comfort. Nooria had wells that led to underground aquifers; there were glaciers in the mountains … but in truth it he did not know if the city could survive without the Blessing. It was time to send her away. In the end all he could conjure was, ‘Mesema.’

She blushed and bit her lip. ‘So she told you.’

‘Who? No, this isn’t about anything like that.’ He saw relief in her shoulders and wondered; she knew he did not care about the issues of the women’s wing. ‘This is also about Migido – and the attack. Govnan is sure it was Mogyrk. Yrkmir approaches.’

‘Our scouts have seen the Yrkman army?’

‘No … only, Notheen believes it is true.’
They move through the empty spaces
. He thought about those words. Of course the desert was not an empty place to Notheen: it was his home, crisscrossed by his people, lived in and loved. The headman had meant something else. ‘In any case, it has become too dangerous here. It is time to send you two away, to my mother’s people in the southern forests.’

She wrapped her arms around her knees, and he longed to hold her as she held herself. ‘I understand why you ask. Once I thought nothing would be too dangerous for me, but now I know that I was wrong.’

He breathed a sigh of relief. ‘So you will go.’

‘No. I will not.’ She met his gaze with her sky-blue eyes. ‘You know I will never leave you, not if there is a fight to be had. You promised we would work together.’

‘This isn’t a game of cards!’ He stood and paced to her window. ‘My mother must also go.’

‘She never will, not without Daveed.’ A slither of fabric as she left the bed. ‘Nor will I. Your Majesty.’

‘The skill that allowed me to best the Pattern Master has left
me. I cannot fight for Daveed as I wish.’ He gripped the carved wood of the window-screen. ‘I cannot fight at all.’

‘Hush,’ she said, as if she were speaking to Pelar. ‘Listen. The pattern lies. Do you not think it can also lie through its absence?’

‘It is not hiding; it is gone. And so must you be, or—’
Or I will lose you
. He could not say the last aloud. They did not speak to one another with such emotion.

She touched his shoulder and he turned to look down into her eyes, wide now with growing sadness. ‘You are a fine emperor without magic,’ she said, ‘and I will not leave you.’

‘But Pelar must.’

She blinked back tears. ‘Yes, Pelar must.’

‘We will send him on with his nursemaids and guards. Gods willing, we will see him again.’ Sarmin stood, leaned over the bed and gathered the babe to his chest. Pelar stirred in his silk wrappings. His mouth was small and round, like Mesema’s, but his dark hair and honeyed skin spoke of Beyon. The pattern had failed to capture Beyon; it had taken his memories and formed a cruel shell of what he had been. The true legacy of Sarmin’s brother lay in his arms, so small a bundle to matter so very much. ‘Here is the true emperor,’ Sarmin said, watching the rise and fall of his little chest.

Mesema glanced towards the door and whispered, ‘Do not say such things, my husband.’

‘Sometimes I must speak the truth.’ It was impossible at court – complicated even with Mesema.

Mesema said nothing, only stared at Pelar with grief in her eyes.

Sarmin placed a kiss on Pelar’s forehead. ‘What shall we do then, you and I?’

For once Mesema did not have an answer. Instead, she wrapped a bejewelled hand around his elbow and leaned over to give Pelar a slow kiss on the cheek. So the three of them stood, in an embrace of sorts, breathing in the baby’s scent, in the plain white room: his family, surrounded by a deafening blankness. An emptiness. The idea took his breath and he stepped away, Pelar still in his arms. Mesema’s hand dropped down to her side and her eyes fell into shadow though the room was sunny.

‘You should paint your room, I think. Trees, perhaps, like the last …’

But the tender moment had passed, taken by his sudden fear, and Mesema took Pelar from his arms. She turned to put him in his cradle and Sarmin did not know how to reach out, how to claim her, as Beyon might have done. The stark room served only to remind him that he was alone. The Many were gone, with Helmar, Ta-Sann and his link to Grada. Mesema did not love him. Pelar was his brother’s son, the true emperor, and he just a pretender. Wife, son, throne: it was all a lie, balanced on the thin edge of power to which he clung.

He turned to the door. ‘I will make the arrangements.’

Farid spoke a few words of Frythian, having met some traders over the years, but his vocabulary was limited to numbers, weights and thank-yous. Nevertheless the Mogyrk Adam spoke to him in that language, now drawing an elongated diamond on the floor and saying something like ‘hiss-nick’. When Farid looked at these pattern-shapes he imagined them in blue, on his mother’s skin.
They want to take what I am
, she had told him before she died.
I won’t let them
.

Farid’s gaze shifted to the two guards in the doorway. By their physiques he could see they had been called to fighting rather than trained to it – but then, he was no fighter himself. He had strength from lifting barrels and poling his father’s boat, and he could count on some extra power from wanting his freedom – but against three men, he would not win. Adam himself had the bearing of a soldier and was enough of a match without counting the others.

‘You are not listening,’ said Adam, speaking Cerani at last.

‘Because I don’t want to go to a marketplace and kill everyone.’

Adam frowned as he wiped the symbol away. ‘Nor do I.’

‘Why then do you keep me prisoner? Surely there are others like you who want to learn these things?’

‘There are not. They all were killed.’

‘Cerana kills all its enemies,’ said Farid with pride, making sure to speak loud enough for the men at the door to hear.

‘So they do. Let’s begin again.’ Adam drew another shape on the floor. ‘Shack-nuth.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’ Farid stood, using his height as a form of protest.

Adam smiled. Farid could tell he was less than a threat to the man. ‘It is a Name. Shack-nuth.’

‘I won’t remember it.’

‘I see.’ Adam put down his chalk. ‘How many fruits did you have to sell on the day of the attack?’

Farid remembered exactly. It was something he had always been able to do. ‘I started with fifty-two oranges and thirty-six pomegranates,’ he said, ‘twelve mangoes and just ten apples. I sold twenty apples the day before.’

Adam raised his eyebrows. ‘How much money did you make, then? Don’t check your pockets.’

‘I sold ten oranges at two bits a piece. Five pomegranates – I haggled a bit and got five bits for two of them. Three bits for the others. The mangoes were getting soft – I knocked them down to half a bit and sold five that way. Muad stole an apple – I count that as a loss of two-and-a-half bits. I sold four more for a total of four copper nine bits. But I have more than that in my pocket.’

‘Because of the apple.’

‘Right – but of course now all my fruit is lost because of you.’

‘And you can’t remember this?’ Adam drew on the floor with his chalk. Farid recognised it:
Hiss-nick
. But he shrugged.

Adam nodded to his men, who came into the room and picked up Farid by his elbows. ‘You may go to your room. Let us know when you are ready to begin again.’

*

That night Farid tossed and turned on his pallet. The Mogyrks had put him in an airless closet. For obvious reasons they offered him no windows or outside doors, and yet he could still hear a baby crying in the house next door. As soon as the child quieted and Farid’s eyes began to close, it started up wailing again. It was no good. He had prayed to Keleb for the air to cool, for the baby to quiet and for the Mogyrks to let him go, but nothing had any effect. He sat up and wiped the sweat from his forehead. ‘Hey,’ he called out to the guard he knew stood on the other side of the door, ‘is there any water?’

He heard the man’s boots, then a silence that stretched until his sweat felt cold upon his skin. Then the door swung open and two hands laid a pitcher on the stained wood floor.

‘Let me go,’ he said, but the man only placed a lit candle next to the pitcher and closed the door.

Farid held the pitcher to his lips, but he found it dry. Reaching inside, his fingers touched upon crumpled paper. ‘Mogyrk filth,’ he muttered, smoothing it open. A pattern had been drawn there, each shape flowing into the next, the web of lines suspending rather than connecting them. He frowned, turning it this way and that in his hands, trying to remember what he had seen in the marketplace. If he ever got free, the Blue Shields would want to know what these patterns looked like.

In the light of the candle he could now see another pattern scratched into the wall. He stood to look, but soon realised great spaces had been left empty, as if the carver had been interrupted. He held the paper up to it: these shapes formed a different spell. The finished one drew his eye, the lines having found their natural ends, the shapes having reached a pleasing balance.

Before she grew too old for such things, Farid’s sister used
to take their father’s twine and wind it between her hands, her fingers spinning a complicated web. He would tease her by pulling on the lines, watching the empty spaces shrink and expand at his will, creating tension in her fingers until at last she cursed him and pulled free, leaving the twine a slack pile upon the floor. He ran his fingertips along the ink, remembering the feel of the rough string.

Adam had shown him some of these characters:
shack-nuth, hiss-nick
. Nonsense.

And yet, this design spoke of water to him. It waited somewhere in this collection of shapes and threads, caught like dew on a spider’s web. He needed only to free it. He found the line he needed and
pulled
.

The pattern flashed, crescents and half-moons painting the ceiling in blue light, and a fiery glow wound his hands and arms in a design that reached further than the one in plain ink. It retreated into smaller and smaller lines upon his skin, so deep he thought he might fall into it, and a memory came to him of leaping off Asham Asherak’s great bridge at full dark, the water an unknown black beneath him and the warm stone under his toes, before the light bled away, shimmering one last time in the distant reaches of the pattern before leaving him alone, bereft in the tiny room.

Water soaked the centre of the paper, spreading outwards. The pitcher! It was too late, but he caught some of it in his hands and slurped, ran his wet hands over his face and neck, then settled against the wall, his heart beating fast.
What had he done?
The light, the water … he ran a cool finger against his lips. He had used the pattern, the tool of the enemy, the poison that had killed his mother, and what he felt was … joy.

The men of the council spoke of the city as Tower and wall, palace and temple, landmarks of power that reflected their own standing in the world. Yet from where Mesema stood in Siri’s rooftop garden, the city might have been two great hands cupping the life-giving river. Without the Blessing, there would be no Nooria, no palace, no great Cerani empire. It carved a path from the mountains to the southern province and fed the crops that in turn fed the city. From the roof of the palace the river looked like a wide blue ribbon laid between domed roofs and sand-coloured streets – but Sarmin had given her a great treasure: a tube, with glass on either end, that made all things look closer. It had been a gift from the astrologers of Kesh; now Mesema held it to her eye.