Knife Sworn

by Mazarkis Williams

  “They say Lord Zell beat her so hard she could barely move.”

  “They’ll kill all of us by the end of it, with their patterns, their beatings, or their ghosts. I tell you…”

  “…waiting in a grave for another…”

  “Excuse me,” said Rushes, and all turned to look at her, eyes narrowed in suspicion. She drew her finger across her chin and they relaxed, nodding and returning to their work. “Who died?”

  “Mina from the Little Kitchen,” said a young woman, hair the colour of the oak door behind her. “She got beaten.”

  “W—What?” Rushes stumbled and turned, her mouth moving with no words.

  “Some silk-clad caught her,” she said, expression going dark with what was left unspoken. “After that they took her to Mirra’s temple but there was nothing to be done.”

  Mina. Dead. Rushes had seen Lord Zell in those passageways, cloaked in black like Herzu himself, hunting girls in the Little Kitchen. Nobody would stop him. Nobody could. Rushes got away, but Mina had been caught. Her chest felt tight, so tight she could not breathe. She wandered, crookedly, her shoulder hitting against the wall, drained of hope, the Longing filling her at last.

  Her mind fell deep into memory—Gorgen, her brother, Emperor Beyon, Mina, Demah—Zell—and her feet went their own way, turning and stepping, following a well-worn path into the Ways. She huddled against the damp stone, smooth from the touch of a thousand hands, some shining and clean, others filthy, bloody.

  She could jump. It was what Demah had chosen, what many others had chosen. It was the easiest way. To just stop. Stop worrying, stop trying. She moved forwards, feeling with her feet for the edge of the stone. She would not be alone. There were bones down there, thousands of them. It would be like being part of the Many, only all would be quiet. Peaceful.

  But she remembered the apple Hagga had given her, here in the Ways. How it had tasted. How a butterfly looked, fluttering in the sunshine. The empire mother’s perfume and how Daveed felt in her arms, squirming and reaching for her hair. The things that coloured a life.

  Daveed. She remembered him, the curl at his temple, his smile. He did not have the choice to go on or to stop. He was helpless in a hall where ghosts moved and illness picked one girl, then another without regard, and where slaves planned their secret rebellion. She had betrayed Beyon but she did not have to abandon Daveed. Fire is the signal. Mylo’s followers were everywhere, perhaps even in the women’s wing. Something precious. She backed away from the edge. Daveed did not have a choice to stop. She had to protect him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  SARMIN

  Out beyond the city where the sky fell to earth, curving on its suicidal plunge, the blue brilliance of heaven shaded through bars of crimson dawn into a dun haze, and out there, where distant dunes rolled in an endless sea, sky met sand without a join.

  From Qalamin’s Deck the whole of Nooria may be seen, spread out in a dirty, sparkling, glorious and shameful carpet of many hues, washing up against the desert walls, twisting in the confusion of the Maze, crowding down to the banks of the Blessing, leaping Asham Asherak’s great bridge and huddling in splendour atop the rock of the Holies. Sarmin stood in the morning sun, the breeze still sharp with night’s chill as it toyed with his silks. Somewhere a child howled. Smoke lifted from innumerable homes, workshops, cook fires, kilns, furnaces, the red heat of industry, thin columns resolute until the wind made mock of their intention and scattered them into haze. Somewhere a child bawled. A baby. Long shadows everywhere, the city reaching beyond its walls, the towers of Knife and Mage throwing dark fingers out across Nooria.

  “This is my city.”

  White sails on the swiftness of the river, camels clustered in dun clots 260

  within the stockyards west, goats beside them in smaller pens, caravans circled within their lots, safe from the desert behind ancient walls. The morning sun found gleams on the swollen turrets of prayer tower and town house, starlings lifted in dark clouds from roofs along the streets of Copper and Brass.

  “My emperor.”

  The voice came from behind him.

  “Ta-Sann? Is that you?”

  “Yes my emperor.”

  The flat roof of Qalamin’s Deck stood less high than the towers of the Knife and of the Mage, less high than the room where Sarmin grew, but in all of Nooria there was no other place a man might stand and be closer to the open sky. Azeem had asked that the sides be walled. So many of the palace household had jumped to their deaths in the past year, servant and noble. Gravity held no prejudice; it would take them all. Sarmin had told the vizier that a man seeking death would find it easily enough. Emperor Qalamin had watched the stars from this place, mapped the heavens and their progress in minute detail, spent his life at such work when his attention might better have been directed towards the surface across which his rule was spread. Even so, a wall, even a rail, would steal the aesthetic of the place, and save no lives.

  The child’s sobbing kept breaking Sarmin’s line of thought. He looked down. The embroidered toes of his slippers inched out over the Deck’s edge. A fall of over a hundred feet yawned below and it seemed to reach up for him. Sarmin took a quick step back, dizzy, suddenly nauseous.

  “What am I doing here?” Another step from the precipice. “Ta-Sann?” “My emperor.”

  Sarmin turned, feeling for the first time the weight in his hand, and in the crook of his arm. Daveed hung screaming from Sarmin’s right hand, dangling from the breechcloth wrapped about him and knotted in Sarmin’s grip. Nestled in the fold of his other arm, Pelar, sleeping despite the older boy’s howls.

  “What?” Sarmin sat heavily, cross-legged, almost a collapse. “Daveed?”

  Ta-Sann stood five yards back, his hachirah in hand, aflame with the morning sun. Ta-Sann alone.

  “Where are my guard?”

  “Securing the stair, my emperor, by your command.”

  Sarmin’s arm ached, a throb at once sharp and dull, deep in the muscle. An image came to him. He had been holding Daveed out above that drop. Sarmin drew his brother to him, the child quiet now, trying to crawl away on some or other investigation.

  “I was going to drop him.”

  “So you said, my emperor.”

  With the image and the realisation came a new insight, a taste of the person that had brought him to the roof, that had held the child over that empty drop, trembling with cold rage. One of the Many, not a stranger, but someone within, and so close, so familiar, that Sarmin’s mind shied away from framing their name. The image came again. Of his fingers knotted in that cloth, starting to loosen.

  “Why didn’t you stop—” Sarmin closed his mouth on the question. Because I am the emperor and I may do as I choose.

  He pulled both boys closer to his chest, Daveed squirming for release. Anger rose from some deep place, a hot tide, tightening every muscle until Daveed squealed, half-crushed in Sarmin’s grip. “Take my brother.” He relaxed his hold and offered Daveed to Ta-Sann. “Return him to my mother. Safely.”

  “Ta-Sann took the baby and bowed. If he felt relief that the infant had not been cast over, none of it showed in his face. “I will send Ta-Marn to attend you.”

  Sarmin only held Pelar closer and looked away across the city. When Ta-Sann’s footsteps had passed beyond hearing Sarmin spoke to the quiet.

  “Beyon?” Again with more command. “Beyon!”

  Somewhere behind his thoughts the Many stirred. Their ranks had thinned when Sarmin starred into the nothing within Beyon’s tomb. Hiding in the ranks of the Many had become more difficult as they became fewer.

  “Beyon! He is our brother! Would you truly have dropped him?”

  He is a threat. Beyon’s voice but spoken from a great distance, robbed of its old richness. A threat to the emperor.

  “He is our brother! He’s no threat to me. I command you—leave him be.”

  You are not emperor. An anger like ice underwrote the words even as his lips moved to copy th
em. My son is emperor and you have stolen his throne.

  “It was you.” Sarmin exhaled the realisation. “You with Jenni. Did you tell her? ... you did! You would have delivered Daveed and me to the Knife!”

  My son is emperor and you have stolen his throne.

  “What else did you tell her? Did you set her against the envoy?”

  A smile twisted Sarmin’s lips, a smile he didn’t own. My son will have an empire vaster than mine. What right do you have to deny him with… peace? Sarmin’s tongue twitched against the word in Beyon’s disgust “You’re not Beyon! Beyon would never kill his brothers. Beyon saved me!”

  That Beyon was a child. He saved you and now you steal the throne from his son, the true emperor. It was a mistake to keep you in that tower, a mistake to go against tradition. And within a year of my death that mistake stands revealed. You stole my wife and my son’s throne before I grew cold.

  “Mesema was never your wife—”

  Traitor!

  A numbness stole through Sarmin’s arms and against his will he set Pelar down on the paved roof.

  Still we can give my son his throne back…

  Sarmin stood, his legs no longer his to command, an emperor not even ruling his own body. On the cold stone Pelar stirred but made no cry. Sarmin turned towards the edge. Two steps brought him to the precipice.

  “No!” And some effort of will prevented the next and final step. He held there, trapped between two intentions, trembling at the mercy of the wind. “You’re not my brother. Beyon was. . .” And what was Beyon? Brave, cruel, generous, unforgiving, as twisted in his way as Sarmin by the heritage they shared, deformed by the weight of expectation.

  I was what, traitor?

  “More than this!” It came to Sarmin clear and whole, an understanding surfacing from unseen depths. “Beyon was more than this.” He had believed the Pattern Master’s work of symbols, of intricate and infinite complexity, captured all that a man was or could be. But he was wrong. The pattern stole part of a man, and Sarmin had returned that part to the afflicted, but it couldn’t take all a man was, it couldn’t hold all a man is. The pattern could record ambition, sketch memories, but the depths of a man couldn’t be spelled out in symbols, no matter how many or how layered. Love couldn’t be held in a code of circles in circles, in the blue and the red. What controlled him now was a crude caricature of Beyon, ambition, pride, duty, but not the essence of the man—not the love.

  The pattern was a lie.

  Fall, damn you!

  Sarmin’s foot shuddered, aching to obey. He wondered if Beyon’s pattern would have any hold over him at all if at least some small part of him didn’t also want to take one more step.

  A single sharp cry rang out behind them, from Pelar, a sound that had no place in any child’s throat. Sarmin turned, pushed by two wills. Pelar lay naked save for his cloth, having kicked off his wrapping. Sarmin dropped to his knee beside the boy. His skin held the white of plaster dust, his thin limbs lay limp.

  “No!” Sarmin reached for his son, and as he did Pelar’s eyes flicked open. Sarmin’s hand stopped, inches from the boy. He had seen those eyes before, in his dream of the desert, where a child had stood from the crumbling remains of trader’s tent, white dust bleeding from him. He had the same eyes, the colour of forever, empty, holding only nothingness.

  Pelar’s wrappings held a worn and faded look, the colours faint, cloth paper-thin. He watched Sarmin without expression, without blinking. A shadow fell across them both: Ta-Marn come to guard his emperor.

  “Oh, my son.” Sarmin smiled for the boy, his eyes blurring. He knew now that the man in his memory would never have run from that child in the tent if it had been his own boy standing there. He reached for Pelar and in his head the pattern that was not Beyon screamed for him to run. Pain ate into Sarmin’s hands as he gathered Pelar from the flagstones. He held Pelar to his chest and his purple silks went pale where the boy touched them, fragile, tearing as he moved. Each touch ached, and inside Sarmin the Many faded, unwritten by what flowed from Pelar. He stood, finding his son at once both frighteningly light and almost too heavy to be borne.

  “Go ahead, Ta-Marn. Fetch high mage Govnan, fetch all the mages of the tower, every priest, tell the empress. My son will not be taken.”

  “My emperor.” Ta-Marn bowed, and straightened, frowning. “I should carry the prince. He is harming you.”

  “Go!” Sarmin shouted. Then more softly, returning his gaze to the empty child. “Love is hard to capture, harder to unwrite. I will manage.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  NESSAKET

  Sarmin had come at night, cold-faced, surrounded by his swordsons.

  “What do you want?” she had asked, edging in front of the cradle, looking at the pointed swords and blank faces of the emperor’s guard. Saying nothing he pushed her aside and took her son, took his softness and his curling hair and the way he laughed when he saw something new.

  “Where are you taking him?” she asked, her mouth numb with fear, clutching at Sarmin’s arm. Later she would remember that, not being able to let go of his arm, as if she were sinking into sand and Sarmin her only rope. At last his sword-sons pulled her away.

  Nessaket had felt such fear only once before, on the night Tahal died— and it hollowed her again. She fell to the floor, pleading with Mirra—but this was Herzu’s work. And then, a miracle: Ta-Sann returned her boy. The sword-son simply laid him in her arms and left the room without a word. She remained on the floor, holding her son, wondering what intervention from god or man had saved him.

  And then she heard a scream. At first she did not move. Screams were not uncommon these days. The women’s hall was filled with ghosts, spies, and the strange illness that crept along the halls, paling one girl and then another. But the scream came again and Nessaket recognized Mesema’s voice. She stood, feeling the ache in her legs from hours on the floor, and made a sling from a piece of silk. Slipping Daveed inside she went to her door and cracked it open, peeking out. A slave girl stood there, a new one, peering down the hall. She looked frightened.

  “What is it, girl?” What more could happen?

  “Something happened in the empress’ room, Your Majesty. The emperor is there, and…” The slave scrambled aside as Nessaket moved forwards, her feet sure and quick on the path to the Tree Room, her thankfulness for Daveed’s health transformed into anger. So her older son’s night was not finished. She would know the cause his strange behaviour, learn why he had taken her boy. In her fury she imagined even the ghosts slipping out of her way like fog.

  A single lantern lit Mesema’s room, giving the tree-paintings a sinister look, tall giants waiting to crush everyone below. The empress stood by a pillowed bench, tearing at her hair, dark kohl running in long streaks down her face. “This was you!” she screamed at her husband the emperor, “This was you!”

  Both of them circled the bed, or what was on it: Pelar, pale, withered, hair gone white. Like Gala, Irisa, and all the others. But where Pelar lay the covers began to fade and crumble, as if they were a hundred years old instead of newly made. “Mirra save him!” Nessaket brought a hand to her mouth. She had never wanted him born, had wished he was a girl, but to see him like this…

  We should have fled, after Dreshka died. Too late, too late.

  Sarmin had done this to him. He had taken both the boys this night, and Pelar… She looked at her emperor son, who spoke in an even voice, his eyes distant. “This is the nothingness, the illness that devours,” said Sarmin.

  “Don’t tell me what it is!” cried Mesema. “You fix it!” She rushed forwards, meaning to pick up the boy. “You fix it!”

  Sarmin held out a hand. “Carefully.” Mesema’s hands slowed, and she gathered Pelar as if he were made of the most delicate glass, hissing as if it hurt her hands. “My sweet boy,” she said, “my darling boy.”

  “I will make him well,” Sarmin said, “I will fix it.” The last he said more quietly: a promise to himself, or
an edict.

  Mesema said nothing. Nessaket wondered if he truly had the power to cure the boy. She watched Mesema’s arms and the child within them, fearing he would break if held too tightly.

  Sarmin left the room, his sword-sons trailing him, gone without another word. He would leave the room bereft, no Pelar cooing in his cradle, no sweet smell from his skin. Only a colourless shell remained of the child. Nessaket chased after Sarmin, treasuring the feel of her own healthy baby, the weight of him in his sling. “I would have a word with my son the emperor,” she said.

  Sarmin stopped and turned, his gaze far away, his mind on patterns and magic.

  “Why did you take the boys? Where did you take them? Why would you do such a thing to Pelar?” As she spoke his eyes copper eyes cleared, focusing on her own, so that she knew he listened.

  He laid a hand on her shoulder, an intimate gesture from a man she had not touched in years. “It was Beyon.”

  “What?” She took a step backwards. Had he learned that Beyon was Pelar’s father? Would that make him kill the boy?

  “It was Beyon,” he said again, his eyes growing distant once again. “Rising up from the Many.” He turned towards the great room, his sword-sons behind him.

  Or had Sarmin gone mad—was it the Cotora family curse come upon them? With no real answer from her son Nessaket returned to Mesema. “Come,” she said, nudging the girl, “Let us go and honour Mirra in Siri’s garden. Mirra might help us.” She helped me earlier. It is possible. Awkwardly she put an arm around the horsegirl and guided her into the hall.

  Women crowded around, trying to catch sight of the stricken prince. Spies might be among them, but Nessaket found it difficult to care. Pelar drew her gaze; she could not discern where his skin ended and his white silks began. Mesema stumbled along, her face nearly as pale as her son’s now, allowing herself to be led. Guards followed them, six, a dozen, and once they reached Farra’s room Nessaket bid them guard the door. Grief was a private affair and they would keep anyone from entering. Farra was absent. They climbed the stairs. Each of them held a bundle, Nessaket’s olive-skinned and kicking, Mesema’s drained and still.