“I am Fadil, who died at your hand.” The youngest of them all.
Eyul fell back against the wall, tears filling his eyes. Of course they were-he had known that-he must have known. “Why do you help me?” He moved his lips more than spoke, but the Knife heard him nevertheless.
“You are the emperor’s Knife. Only you can shed royal blood without damnation.”
“You said that.” Had they?
Silence.
Govnan drew closer.
Asham, the eldest, said, “You must see. You are not damned; you are the Knife. You cut both ways and you cut me. But I will help you.”
“I will help you,” said Pelar.
“I will help you,” said Fadil.
“We don’t want the Master to use you,” said Asham.
Eyul’s fingers tensed on the Knife. “Govnan.” A thought more than a word.
Silence.
At last Eyul saw the flaw that had been invisible to him before: Govnan was not the enemy. He had accepted what he was told without thinking of another possibility. But he was learning. Amalya’s trust had not been misplaced.
“You can see.” Pelar’s joyous voice.
“You will not be broken,” Fadil said.
Eyul reached for his linen wrappings, then hesitated. Amalya?
“The Pattern Master took her before you did. She is not with us.” “They are coming.” Fadil, serious.
“Very close.” Asham.
Eyul freed his eyes and blinked away his tears. He was ready. The sun’s dying light trickled through the unseen windows high above him. Standing at the bottom of Sarmin’s tower, Eyul was able to pick out every crack, every pebble on the stair, every grain in the ash-cloud that billowed under Govnan’s approaching feet. He saw everything, and it caused him no pain. He stepped out into the light.
The high mage came around the last curve and peered down just as heavy boots sounded in the corridor. Eyul motioned to him and mouthed “Carriers.” Govnan had burned the tower; he was powerful. Together they could overwhelm the patterned men. But the old man crept back up the stairs and out of sight. Strange.
Five Carriers entered and spread out from the base of the stairs to the wall. Though they still wore the clean blue uniforms of the royal guard with burnished pins of rank on their collars, the marks had taken their sense of decorum. Three had discarded their hats; on two they sat askew, the feathers dragging like those of dead birds. The pattern drew parallel lines across their cheeks and noses and marked their chins with triangles of deep blue.
Their faces looked identical now, but they had once been their own men. One, Eyul recalled, had been a joker who spent his free nights playing dice; another had been in love with a kitchen girl, always finding an excuse to stop by the ovens when he should be on patrol. The one in the middle had been a Beyon loyalist. Eyul had told him about the emperor’s meeting place in Mirra’s garden-but he did not have time to ponder the implications of that right now, because all five had drawn their long hachirahs and were moving forwards. Eyul kept light on his feet, watching their movements, waiting for his opening. The Knife felt warm in his hand.
“Hello,” he said, “I bring peace.”
They did not react, other than to step towards him again, their eyes blank and unfocused, their weapons ready. An assassin must be fast and clean. Above all, fast. He ducked beneath the swinging of two swords, slit the first from hip to shoulder, and cut the second Carrier’s hamstring. Economy of motion, an absence of fear. These are the first pillars of the Grey Path. He rolled away, ignoring the pain as a blade scraped against his chest, and used his feet to knock the fifth one down. Now the Carriers were between him and Govnan.
One of the Carriers spoke, his voice flat. “Where is the high mage, assassin?”
Eyul smiled. “How would I know?” If Govnan had no defence against the Carriers, then he would protect him: he would do it for Amalya, for Beyon, for the empire. He would do it because that was his purpose. Blood seeped from his wound and over his ribs, soaking his shirt. The wound the horsewoman had given him stung like a hot needle.
Four moved forward as one. The last was dragging his leg behind him, and Eyul made a dervish spin to the far right, slitting that Carrier’s throat before he could swing his heavy blade. Be fast, keep close. Knife-work is intimate. The fifth was getting up from the floor; barely pausing, Eyul kicked him again, sending him sprawling on his stomach, and dived backwards, out of range of a hachirah. He was dancing to a tune no one else could hear. This was a game he played well. No dead princes, no mage-girl, just Eyul and a sharp edge with death behind it.
They were better fighters now than they had been as guards, but it didn’t matter. Move fast; their boots and heavy blades make them slow. Before the Carrier could raise his sword to swing again Eyul had launched himself forwards and to the left, landing on the prone man’s back and hearing the snap of bone. He ignored his own pain- getting old; pain is for later. He leaped clear and turned to face the Carriers again. Two were left on their feet.
The one on Eyul’s right charged him, hachirah held high. The other, lame, pulled himself forward with some effort. Foolish.
Perhaps the person guiding them had grown impatient. Eyul rolled below the slice the first made through the air and got to his feet so close that he could smell the Carrier’s stale breath. His head struck the man’s chin as he rose to his feet. Teeth snapped together, and part of the Carrier’s tongue fell clear. Knife scraped bone as Eyul stabbed him in the heart.
The last Carrier wrapped an arm around Eyul’s neck, lost his balance and pulled them both to the floor. Eyul held the Knife firmly as he fell. The twisted metal of the hilt was easy to grip, despite the blood. He lay on top, the Carrier cutting off his breath from behind.
Eyul twisted in the Carrier’s grip, found the man’s ribs and stabbed down. Immediately he could breathe again. He rolled over to the last, the one with the broken ribs, and slit his throat.
Only then did he notice that the Knife had been silent. He looked over at the stairs and found Govnan looking down at him. “You didn’t use your fire,” he said, neither accusation nor question.
Govnan smiled. “Prince Sarmin separated me from Ashanagur.”
The mad prince? Eyul stood and sheathed his Knife, surprise taking his words.
Govnan descended the last few steps. “Ashanagur was always able to sense flesh,” he said, “and though he is gone, it appears he has left that echo of himself with me.” He looked out, beyond the archway. “There are more coming.”
“Let’s get to the ways.” Eyul moved to the secret door. He twisted an arrow shaft in the hole to release the catch and together they entered the darkness, tracing their way from memory.
“They are all around,” said Govnan in a low voice, “closing in. They think I have the power to get in their way.”
“You don’t?” Eyul’s thoughts turned to Tahal in the church, to Amalya in her tent. Had all hope been lost? Had it all been for nothing? That didn’t feel right-it couldn’t be right.
“I don’t.” Eyul felt the man’s robes brush against his arm and caught the scents of char and sulphur. “But Prince Sarmin does. His magic is older than anything the Tower can access.”
So, Tuvaini, you missed something in all your scheming. The mad prince, Tuvaini had called him; useless. He had been wrong. The spark in the line of emperors that had begun with Uthman the Conqueror lived on in his descendants. Would the power that vanquished a continent be enough to defeat the pattern?
Eyul tried to conjure an image of the prince. He remembered Sarmin as a young man, quiet and bookish. Tuvaini had described him very differently.
“The magic in your Knife is similar to his, incorporated in metal.” Govnan touched the hilt of the Knife and Eyul jerked away. Another man’s hand on the Knife felt like a violation. Could Govnan hear the dead princes? He thought about them and their brother Sarmin.
Govnan led the way up thin, crumbling stairs. “What were you
doing there, at the bottom of the burned-out tower?” he asked.
Eyul tested each step before giving it his full weight. “I was going to kill you.”
“But you saved me instead.” Govnan reached the landing and turned to face him, the darkness of the ways concealing his expression. “You did kill Amalya, though?”
“Not by choice.” Eyul felt momentarily dizzy and pressed a hand against his tunic, sticky with blood.
Nothing more was said as they crossed bridges and ascended more stairs; Eyul heard only Govnan’s laboured breathing ahead of him and the distant sound of boots. He moved with care. He’d never been to the Tower through the ways and he was unfamiliar with the treacherous twists and narrow bridges in his path. For the first time the smell of rot that rose from the chasm filled him with nausea.
“They can’t enter the Tower, can they?” That made sense to Eyul: in all the years of the pattern-curse, not one mage had been marked or killed by a Carrier-not until Amalya left the Tower’s protections.
“No. Not yet.”
They traversed the blackness in silence. At last the high mage stopped and said, “This is the last stair. Beyond it is one more bridge, then the door to the Tower.”
Eyul heard the sound of metal touching metal and caught the stink of lamp-oil. There was a sizzle, then the old man’s face was lit in shades of red. In the play of flame and shadow, Eyul remembered Metrishet and felt lightheaded.
Govnan replaced the lamp on the wall. “There are Carriers ahead and behind.”
“I will clear your way,” Eyul said, steadying himself on his feet.
“They think I am the one who works the old magics.” Govnan met Eyul’s eyes, and Eyul understood what was left unspoken: They don’t know Prince Sarmin is alive.
Eyul would keep the secret. He would defend Govnan as if everything depended upon it, as if no one else mattered. He fingered the hilt of his Knife and spoke silently to the young brothers. “I could use your help.”
The Knife was silent a moment, and then Eyul heard Asham say, “We will help. It is almost the end.”
“The end of what?”
“The end of us.”
In the low light Eyul could see a crowd of Carriers, eight of them, standing at the foot of the bridge. Four held hachirahs. Two had daggers, and the others clutched makeshift weapons: a lamp-pole, a sack filled with something heavy-rocks, perhaps. Eyul felt his own blood sticky against his stomach.
Make it good, Knife-Sworn.
Eyul ran at them like a bull, and the first Carriers fell into the dark.
“Good,” said Asham.
That’s two. Eyul steadied on his feet and gripped his Knife.
Govnan had left for the Tower long before, leaving a burlap bag full of bread, dried meat, and olives. It was Sarmin’s first food since Ink and Paper stopped coming, but he was not hungry. The screaming women in the courtyard had brought back the memory of little Kashim, both his cries and the terrible silence that followed. They had brought back his loss and his pain and his futile anger. And just as on that terrible night so many years ago, Eyul the assassin had done the killing. Govnan had called it a mercy, but Sarmin would not hear it. He knew the truth. It is always wrong.
He leaned back against the pillows and felt the blood sinking into the courtyard tiles. And there was more: somewhere below him a battle had been fought, and the blood of many pooled into one. Govnan? He reached out with his mind, tried to guess who had died, but he could not.
Everywhere blood fell he gathered it to him. There was too much, far too much, and yet not enough to make his own design, to write his own will into blood and pictures and oppose the Master.
An anticipatory silence had fallen over the Carriers. The Master’s hand drew their threads taut. He altered his pattern, tightening and twisting the threads until Sarmin felt the breath rush out of him. The spaces and ways he travelled stretched and narrowed; there was nowhere to hide. Sarmin lay trapped, a fish in the Master’s net-unless and until he could step out of it and into his own design.
He thought he would lose this game. He had seen the Master’s work. He had copied it, passed through it, admired its beauty. But now, when he was so close, and the need so strong, he doubted that he could create such a masterpiece of his own. He needed to learn more about the writing of a red pattern, a blood pattern. Grada’s desert journey would help, if enough time remained. Perhaps in that Mogyrk church Grada would find the key.
The pattern writhed around its axis, the centre, where the Master sat spinning his web. They were approaching the endgame. The Master’s power was overwhelming; his plan was without fault. Except that he hadn’t seen Sarmin. And the emperor’s Knife remained unbroken. There was hope. A hidden piece could spoil the Push.
Sarmin opened his eyes and searched for the hidden ones in the wall. “Will he find me, Zanasta, before I make my own pattern?” The moonlight slid over the calligraphy, a soft hand silencing any mouths that might respond. “Aherim?”
Silence. They had turned their backs on him. He was friendless in his soft prison.
“Grada?”
Grada followed the road from Gemeth west along the banks of the River Blessing, passing rice fields and reed beds, villages, river ports, and the holiest of temples at the Anwar Quays. She had walked twenty miles on the first day, twenty-five the second. Days passed, and she kept on. The dust coated her legs to the knee and her skin looked almost as pale as Sarmin’s. She thought of the prince often as she walked, and when she lay beside the road at night, wrapped in her cloak, she thought of nothing else.
“ Grada? ”
“Sarmin? Are you with me?” She huddled deeper into her cloak and coiled in the sand.
“Always. We are two and one. It is like the Many.”
Grada shuddered. “It is not like the Many. The Many was-”
It was rape. . “The Many… You know when the blowfly bites you and lays its eggs under your skin, and you have to let the maggots grow and crawl around inside you before it’s safe to cut them out?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, the Many was like being bitten by a thousand blowflies, but knowing you’ll never get the maggots out, no matter how big they get.”
Sarmin felt the crawling of blowfly maggots. He had never been bitten, but Grada’s memories were there in his head and on his tongue as he lay on his bed fifty miles away in Nooria.
“I’m sorry.”
“But this-” Grada shaped the thought in bright colours, “the two of us, together, it’s… grapes and honey, flowers, cool water.”
“Better.” Sarmin put a smile on her lips.
“Better.”
Eyul thrust out his leg and sent the fourth Carrier spinning into darkness. Asham’s voice murmured, giving warning and advice, a soft and weary comfort in Eyul’s bloody work. He could hear Govnan behind him, his breath quick. Eyul ducked under the bag of rocks and rolled to the side, coming to the very edge of the platform, almost losing himself in the chasm. He pushed himself up again, and his Knife sliced the artery it sought.
As he turned to the sixth Carrier, he heard the twang of a bow.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Mesema sat with her back against the wall, cradling Beyon’s sleeping head in her lap. She tried to move her numb legs, to regain some feeling without waking him. She had passed hungry and passed tired. She had even passed beyond embarrassment when, a few hours ago, Beyon showed her where she could urinate into a chasm in the secret ways by straddling two slender bridges. When she was finished, he did the same.
As they waited for Eyul, Beyon fell into a restless sleep.
Above her reached the scaffold used by the artists who had been working Beyon’s face into the vaulted ceiling of his tomb. Either fear or orders had caused them to abandon their trowels and picks and leave the tomb in disarray. Disembodied eyes and the bridge of a nose stared down at her in shades of topaz and amber. Though unfinished, it was a good likeness.
Beyon’s coffin
lay before her, as big as two horses and worked in gold and silver. It was the twin to the tomb of Satreth I, behind it. Stairs rose beside Satreth’s tomb, for the common people to view the body of the Reclaimer. At the foot of Beyon’s tomb, workmen had placed the first marble step.
She wanted to leave this place.
Eyul had not returned. Perhaps he had tried to rescue the women. Her idea to kill them had been cruel, but the assassin must have seen the necessity of it. He could not have been so foolish as to risk himself.
She shivered at the trail of her own thoughts. Hours ago Beyon’s wives had been laughing and talking-though they were childless and trapped in the women’s wing, their lives of no significance to the empire, still they had had meaning to themselves and to their gods. They did not deserve to die like that; it was wrong to let them – but so much was already wrong, and she could not change the cruel ways of the palace. Beyon should understand that; he walked those ways himself. Nevertheless, he had been strange with her ever since they left Eyul.
But I can understand if he is afraid of me. I am afraid of me too.
Beyon stirred and sat up. He met her eyes, then turned away. “Eyul?” he asked, and when she shook her head, he said, “Then we should go to the desert. My men are waiting. I don’t know how many…” His voice trailed off. He stood and straightened his robes.
She wondered how many men had stayed faithful after hearing of Beyon’s marks. Her father had always had to remain strong; he could never betray any doubt or any hint of illness if he wished to maintain his Riders’ respect. She wondered if even Banreh would stay by his side if he showed himself to be weak.
Some of those waiting in the desert could be twice-treacherous, pretending to betray the new emperor, but instead turning upon Beyon. That would be the best way to kill him-to gain his trust, get in close.
Just as she had. The vision reappeared in Mesema’s mind, tracing Beyon’s lifeless form in sand and blood, putting the knife in her hand. It would come to fruition, and soon. She had the feeling of running downhill, speed overtaking her, compelling her feet to rush headlong. She almost turned her arms in a pinwheel to slow down, but instead, through long practice, she calmed herself by counting stitches. Beyon pulled a pouch from his belt and shook the contents into one hand.
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