Knife Sworn

by Mazarkis Williams

  “Herran told you all this?” They sounded like Herran’s words, like his cleverness, not the rough speech of the Untouchable who had stabbed him long ago… or at least it seemed long ago, though the scar was still red.

  “Some of it. Some I have learned this evening.” She spoke with her own voice, changed but hers. They had both changed since they left this room. He wouldn’t recognise himself if he could look back, nor if he could have looked forward from then to now.

  “And Herran has let this stand? Left me surrounded by enemies? Left my son—”

  “We only understood the truth of it yesterday. Herran would have come to you immediately but you had the envoy to tend to, and you have little time for your Grey Service at the best of times.” She shrugged. Herran made that shrug. “The arrests will soon begin, slowly, one girl then the next, so there wouldn’t be panic, rash acts. Jenni will be found. Your son will be kept safe.”

  “But I was—” He remembered waking with Jenni beside him, her sweet smile in the morning light.

  “If Jenni had wanted you dead wouldn’t she have stabbed you while you slept?” She left “together” unspoken. Beyon’s Knife would never have cut across him; Eyul kept his temper sheathed.

  “That wasn’t—” He broke off. The emperor didn’t explain himself. That wasn’t me. Sarmin could explain to Grada, but the emperor didn’t explain, not even to his Knife. The empire rested on his authority and any crack in it would spread, fork and fork again, reaching out until the whole edifice of his power came crashing down.

  “Ta-Sann, Azeem, all those that watch you said you kept your distance from the harem. You told me to watch the slaves from the north. I thought you were suspicious of these women, these gifts.”

  “I was.” Again he did not explain why he had ignored that warning when his body found its pleasure in Jenni. “But my brother—the snake—”

  “You killed that snake yourself,” said Grada, “fortunately.”

  Sarmin had been told of this, though the memory was not his. It was a comfort, at least, to know that some of the Many he carried would commit good deeds as well as bad.

  Grada held the Knife by her hip, turning it this way and that to watch the light slide across the blade. “Why me?”

  He reached for the memory of reading Helmar’s records with his own hands, his own eyes, but another man’s will. “I have been reading Helmar’s history. One parchment fragment held the last words he spoke to his tutor. He talked of patterns and of symmetry. Said that any pattern reaches out to forever, and that just as a grand pattern can hold memory and reaches back to capture and contain the past, such a pattern also reaches forward and does the same to the future.”

  “And what are a sick boy’s ramblings to you?” Only Beyon had ever spoken to him like that. Beyon and Mesema. As if he were just a person, without title or any right to wisdom. Sarmin sensed more value in that honesty than in all the council of the wise, slanted as it was towards hidden goals. “Helmar hated you, hated all of us.” Grada held up the Knife. “You killed him with this!”

  “There was more on that fragment, Grada. My name was there. He called me his brother in captivity. Little of that boy who wrote to me remained by the time he returned here. Maybe just enough to let me stab him. I killed the Pattern Master. But three hundred years ago Helmar, son of an emperor, my ancestor and blood, reached out to me, knowing I would save him from what he became, and offering me peace in thanks.” Sarmin hoped that it was true, that he could heal the damage Helmar had done.

  “And he put the Knife into my hand,” Grada said.

  Sarmin said nothing but held her gaze. He had sent Grada away to spare her the old mens’ judgement. He had never wanted her to take the Knife. And yet here she was, Eyul’s ugly blade in hand, perhaps as damned as any before her.

  “Jenni may know a secret.” The words left him slowly, unwilling. “Something more dangerous to me, to the empire, than any dead envoy.” Sarmin thought of Daveed, saw the baby’s soft arms and balled fists reaching from the basket their mother put him in. If Jenni knew—if he had told her—if one of the Many had spoken of Beyon and Mesema to Jenni, even as he spent himself in her… How long had she waited to tell whoever placed her in the palace? Had knowledge of Pelar’s true heritage brought a snake to the women’s halls?

  Sarmin looked away from Grada, from the Knife she held, and watched the gods instead, Herzu grim as ever but somehow vindicated. “That secret cannot spread.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  GRADA

  Herran stood waiting in the cartodome, hands on the circular edge of great central table. He waited without motion, leaning out towards the blankness where nothing but unadorned marble described the inner desert.

  “Tell me about the house.” Grada still thought of him as Rorrin, any other name would feel wrong on her tongue, so she afforded him neither name nor title. Perhaps Rorrin was his true name in any case, and Master Herran the invention. She wondered if that was something the Many had taught her, or just imagination.

  “You look different,” Herran said after long inspection.

  Grada looked at him, from the toes of his soft boots to the grey of his hair. Some would call it an insolence, not at all how she was raised to look at men of power, but she had stabbed an emperor and this was just Rorrin who crawled in the sand with her that first day. He was older than she had first guessed, closer to seventy than to fifty. Age had its claws in sunk deep.

  In the desert, in the unforgiving light of day she hadn’t seen it, but here in the kindness of lamps and shadows, he showed his years. Here he allowed her to see.

  “You knew from that first day, didn’t you?” She pushed back her robe to reveal the Knife at her hip.

  “I knew from the moment we met.” Herran permitted himself a smile. “I caught you by surprise, alone, vulnerable, and your first words to me were interrogation. Without hesitation you wanted explanation. Focused on your goal. Straight to the point.”

  “I’m a labourer. I wash, fetch, carry, clean. I’m not a warrior, not an assassin.” Grada remembered the men by the river. How did she do that?

  “You’re a natural, Grada. The still point in the storm, action in chaos. That’s in the blood and as like to be born out in a peasant as a prince. But I had more to go on. We soon learned that any skill worked through a person by the Many left its mark. The Pattern Master housed archers in the bodies of men who had never touched a bow. When the Emperor freed those men they found they could still shoot a sand hare from a river barge. And your hands, Grada, were given to the best assassins in the Many to work the Pattern Master’s will.”

  Grada held her hands before her, palm up for inspection. Too broad, too thick of finger, sun-stained, coarsened by hard work. She flexed her fingers, recalling the weight and grip of the Knife.

  “They still have that cleverness don’t they, Knife-Sworn?” Herran nodded to himself, not requiring her answer.

  “I would rather have had a potter’s skill, a weaver, something honest.” A mother’s touch that remembered softness and babies.

  “Feh, and who would buy a pot from an Untouchable? Who would walk on the rugs you wove?” He shook his head. “Now you are the Knife. Chosen of the Emperor. It is given to you to keep this empire safe. As the blood fights infection while the mind leads us through our lives, Sarmin will plot our path, you will keep the body politic healthy. By cutting out the rot.”

  “I’d rather empty chamber pots.”

  “But that luxury is not yours, Grada.” Again the narrow smile, twisted with regret. “Fifty-three good souls have carried that blade before you. None of them would have chosen to. If they had then they would have been the wrong candidate.”

  “Whatever you think, assassin, I am not a killer.”

  “Why then did you take the Knife?”

  “Sarmin needed me to. He wants a Knife who will serve in a new way. Sarmin is a different kind of emperor. Things will change.”

  Herran said n
othing, only watched her.

  “A Knife that doesn’t slit throats is still useful. A sharp edge can be turned to many purposes.” Had Herran told her that? They weren’t her words. “I’ll find a new way.”

  “You will find there is no other way.” Herran shook his head. “The greater good stands upon many small evils. Better to accept that lesson than be forced to learn it.”

  Grada turned away, walked the perimeter of the cartodome where endless map scrolls lay stacked in their marble pigeon holes, ordered, capped with turned rosewood, the whole world picked out in inks, captured and stored. They stood among the greatest collection of maps ever assembled and Herran told her there was no other path to find?

  “So, tell me about the house,” she said, returning her attention to the assassin.

  Herran glanced quickly around the cartodome as if suspicious even of the walls, though the Ways did not reach into these levels. “Prince Jomla owns it. He lives there when he visits the capital, though he entertains at the Yellow Manse on the west side and would have his guests believe it is his home.”

  “And who is this Prince Jomla?”

  “A man grown rich off trade. His estates sit at a point where the river Xeres ceases to be navigable and caravans out of Hedrin may ford it. Barges from the West Ports unload there. War suits his purpose. Imports will multiply, his coffers grow fatter still with the taxes and duties.”

  “The empire has many rich men. Why is this one seeding his agents through the emperor’s harem?” She thought of Jenni, slim and exotic, leading Sarmin to her chamber. The chatter among the servants for month after month had been of the emperor’s disinterest in the women’s wing. Was he sick? Too weak? Was Cerana’s emperor not a true man eager to exercise his rights? One of the royal cooks had said a real man held prisoner for so many years would lock himself in the harem and do nothing but rut for months. Grada had wanted to slap the crone’s last teeth out, but the serving girl chatting with them owned that Sarmin was too in love with the empress to look at his concubines, and that had stung deeper than the old woman’s slander.

  “Meere has been following the servants of the house when they leave on errands. One went to the artisans’ district across the Blessing. To the tall house of Mechar Anlantar.”

  Grada shook her head.

  “A famed maker of toys. Jewelled birds that sing, silver acrobats that tumble on a flat table, driven by coiled springs.”

  “Meere might have followed, but I’m not understanding. If this prince wanted himself a gold song-thrush, what of it? How does it explain him?”

  Herran spared a quick glance to the blank heart of the desert as if it worried him. “Meere robbed the servant on his return. He had toys for a child, not toys for a grown prince. Jomla has many wives but no children. And his tastes do not run to them. If he is keeping a child in his secret town house then the reason should concern us.”

  “Everything about that man should concern us,” Grada said.

  “The child could be an heir to the Petal Throne, some lost shoot like the Pattern Master was, a branch that should have been pruned by a Knife of yesteryear. Why else would Jomla hide a child so well? None of the lesser servants know the boy is there. It must be a boy. I’ve had agents follow every member of that household, try all their tricks to get a placement, to befriend even the lowest scullion… nothing. It took crude robbery to get even a hint.”

  “If he has an heir then why set his spies to murdering envoys? Kill Sarmin, kill Daveed, kill Pelar, and the throne can be claimed for any petitioner whose blood will satisfy the Tower. One snake is all they have sent against them.”

  Herran shook his head. “The royal babies are very well guarded; the emperor’s brother has as many or more guards than even his own son! And harem girls have no contact with them. As for the emperor himself, well, he doesn’t visit his harem.”

  Grada knew better, but perhaps Sarmin’s visits to Jenni had been few, or even singular. Perhaps he had visited only her, only once. Perhaps. She found her hand on the hilt of the Knife, wanting the edge to sharpen away such foolishness.

  “So what then?” she asked.

  “Spying. Secrets are more valuable than diamonds. Jomla must have thought that one of his beauties would catch Sarmin’s eye in time. And if none of them did… well, that in itself would be a secret worth having. And to stir up trouble between Daveed’s mother and Pelar’s…

  “In any event, before this business of the envoy a clever man might have thought to play Settu with these pretty pieces, to turn one of them perhaps, or if a piece could not be turned—feed it lies, the kind that might choke Jomla and teach a subtle lesson to those who watch him.”

  “Jomla knows a secret.” Grada set her fingers to the dark stone in the Knife’s pommel, its surface cold with whispers.

  Herran tilted his head. “What kind?”

  “The worst.” The killing kind. “Meere should take the Grey Service and see that it never spreads.” She had known when she took the Knife that throats would have to be cut, all the voices between Jenni and her unknown master silenced. Now though a hollow nausea grew in her stomach.

  For a long time Herran said nothing. He stared at the map of empire, tracing a fingertip along the course of The Blessing.

  “Meere believes Jomla keeps an heir to the throne in that house. Someone in the line of succession who could be placed on the throne should a sickly young man die, a couple of babies cease to breathe.” He tapped a nail on the legend, Nooria, set in stone. “Jomla is no fool. If he has a candidate for the Petal Throne he will have evidence, genealogy. He will have strong reason to expect this person’s blood to prove royal under the Tower’s inspection.”

  “Meere could—”

  “Only the Knife-Sworn may take a royal life, Grada. If he has an heir then only the Knife can cut a path to peace.”

  “Bring Jomla and whoever is with him to the palace. Put them in the dungeons. Have the high-mage test these claims and theories.” Don’t send me. Don’t let me find that this house in the Holies lies on a street of palms between the shrines of Herzu and Mirra.

  “Would Sarmin have you cut the child’s throat if you asked him?”

  Grada didn’t answer. To put words around that question would be dangerous. Whether it came to her as a stain left by the assassins who used her body to kill, or was simply a lesson from the streets of the Maze, Grada knew better than to seal away options before she absolutely had to. Choices were the key to survival, even if all of them were bad.

  “Would he have the child taken to the dungeons and thrown into an oubliette?” Herran asked.

  Grada said nothing. Sarmin had all but emptied the dungeons, and set free any man whose crime could no longer be recalled.

  “Perhaps our emperor is more kind and would set the child in more salubrious surroundings, secure, secret but dressed in silk, maybe with some books for company?” Herran proved relentless. Sarmin would never subject a child to the fate he had suffered alone in his tower.

  “He would have the child as an honoured guest, free to roam, guarded for his own security.” Grada nodded as she said it. “He would defy his council and each day some new plot would grow from the mere fact of the child’s existence. Some plan to steal him away, raise a rebellion around him.”

  “Ta-Sann would never ask Sarmin permission to block a sword swinging at the royal neck. He wouldn’t canvas Sarmin’s permission before he stepped in front of a spear thrust to save him. As the emperor’s Knife you may act in his defence without seeking permission. And you may do so in the long game. Ta-Sann acts in the split second. The years are given to you. That privilege is given to no other. If the emperor orders against a course of action, however, you will of course obey.”

  “You’re sending me to Jomla’s manse.” Grada bit her lip, tasting the blood.

  “You are not mine to send or to tell, Knife.” And Herran bowed to her. Nothing this day had scared her more, except perhaps the pity in his eyes before the
bow took them from view.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  SARMIN

  Sarmin sat back upon the frame of his old bed. Grada’s footsteps on the stairs had passed beyond hearing, and Ta-Sann and the sword-sons kept their silence behind the door. Only the distant wail of a tower-wizard could be heard beneath the muted hubbub of Nooria rising over palace walls. Even the Many within him held their peace. He had taken them in, refugees from the Master’s pattern, hundreds without bodies to return to, and it had cost him, but dozens had flowed into the nothingness in Beyon’s tomb like water through a crack in the world. After that a voice left him each day, fading into whatever the future held. Soon the Many would be the Few, and perhaps in a year Sarmin would be alone in his thoughts once more. Trapped in the bony prison of his skull.

  He thought of the oubliettes deep in the dungeon, of the skull he’d found there, picked clean by rats, and the stone hidden in a crevice between the great blocks of the wall. Would he taste the loneliness of that cell when the Many left him? He would miss them, even though they plagued him, used his body, spread his secrets. In the streets of Nooria those who had been patterned and then set free fought the Longing and Sarmin would join them in that battle. Set adrift without the sickness of the Many they felt lost, like men from whom a hand has been taken, reaching out to touch with missing fingers. Azeem told him many such sought new comfort in the secret churches where men praised Mogyrk, perhaps believing that the faith of the Yrkman, the code preached by their austeres with stories of the one dead god, would return to them something that had been taken.

  “My emperor?”

  Ta-Sann’s voice at the door jerked Sarmin from his thoughts so suddenly that he nearly fell into the bed ropes.

  “Yes?” More harsh than he had intended.

  “A slave-girl has come with a tray of food.”

  “Send her away.” His stomach contracted around the thought of eating.