Knife Sworn (9 page)

“In the Redeemer’s Cartodome the maps are written in stone. There is a message there. Guard your borders. Let no man set them aside, but neither push them forward. Cerana is full-grown and now it must earn its bread with honest trade. When stability can only be gained by constant expansion, something is rotten at the core. Cerana will grow, but it will get no bigger. Richer, yes, wiser, yes, but no larger. We have marked out our place in this world. Now it is time to build an empire within those borders, an empire such as the world has yet to see.”

He finished and drew a breath. The two lords stared at him, Jomla moving his lips without speaking and Merkel’s eyes darkening with fury, fingers playing with the ruby hilt of his sword. All gazes were upon the emperor, all mouths silent in the wake of his speech. Even Mesema’s eyes, blue as the sky, pointed his way, her red lips parted in amazement. And then she smiled, and the Faces faded away with the useless swords, the thick robes, the peacock colours. It was just Sarmin, and Mesema, and the little em peror, Pelar. She smiled, and in that moment Sarmin was happy. Notheen stepped forwards, his narrowed eyes sharp in his leathery face.

From among the colourful courtiers he stood plain and unadorned. All he needed to convey could be seen in his stance and his expression, and now, he meant to give warning. The headman had been speaking before Jomla and Merkel brought forth their politics; he had been saying something about the desert. Sarmin searched his memory for the words Notheen had so carefully chosen, and when he found them, the room’s heavy silence pressed against him like prison walls.
An emptiness that devours.

CHAPTER NINE

He retreated to his own room, the place that he knew the best, where his friends had once waited for him to find them. He settled onto the ropes of his old bed and within moments the tide of the Many rose and took him from his own shore, giving his body over to another. And like each time before Sarmin found himself drowning, sinking in the lightless ocean between memory and dreams.

He woke with a start, a sudden convulsion of limbs beneath a coarse blanket. The space around him lay night-blind and silent. He listened, hard, ears straining to manufacture hints from the currents of quietness flowing over, around, and through. Nothing. No noise had woken him, rather the absence of sound, the loss of something so familiar as to be unnoticed until it stopped. No bleating of goats, complaining even in their sleep, no dry susurration of breeze among the palms. Only as Sarmin tried to rise did he remember this was memory. Another man’s memory. And that man had kept still, listening, thinking. Wiser than Sarmin perhaps.

In time though the man reached Sarmin’s conclusion. He rolled from beneath his blanket, hands finding the floor deep with sand and drawing back in surprise. With more caution he reached out again, and came up into a crouch. He stretched out, above and to the side, finding the wall of a tent. A sigh of relief—quickly sucked back as the camel hair came apart under his fingers. A great piece of the tent side collapsed in, tearing from the rest under its own weight, as if rotted. Through the ragged hole above him Sarmin saw the blaze of stars, clustering in multitudes, gathering into the milky river of heaven dividing the sky as the Blessing divided Cerana.

The man crawled to the tent flap. Aharab, his name burst like a bubble at the back of Sarmin’s mind. Aharab’s fingers trembled on the ties securing the flap. He could have stood and looked out through the hole, but something felt wrong with the hole. Everything felt wrong about it. In the starlight the woven camel hair around the edges of the ragged opening looked silver-grey and it almost seemed as if the hole were growing, fraying into dust at the edges.

At last the ties were undone and Aharab leaned out. Sarmin half-expected a scimitar to descend and bring the memory to a sharp conclusion. Instead the sight of a sand-choked oasis awash with moonlight checked Aharab.

“No!” Sarmin felt the man’s lips frame the word, the feeling not unfamiliar, he had been carried before, by the Many and then by Grada alone, but this was memory. Aharab bore no patterns. The pattern waited for him in his future. “Matarai? Jana?” Anxious cries, unreturned.

Half the oasis lay drowned in pale moonlit dunes, palms emerging from their lower slopes. Two ridges of sand braced the waterhole itself, giving way to the hard-baked and stone-scattered ground of the outer wastes. Aharab hurried barefoot towards the dunes, stopping short of the shifting sand. Two guy ropes ran from wooden pegs in the hardpan to be swallowed by the edge of the nearest dune. It looked every bit as if the desert itself had surged forward in the night, devouring everything in its path, tree and tent, goats, even the oasis itself.

“There was no storm!” Aharab stamped in protest and spun back towards his tent. Whatever decay got into the walls had now spread, the tent collapsed, kept aloft here and there by leaning poles, and unknown objects, pots and pans perhaps, draped in the fragmenting remnants of the densely woven camel hair fabric. And revealed by the collapse, a second tent behind, a ten-pole pavilion, black in the moonlight.

For a moment Aharab stood still. The silence wrapped him. The air held no scent but dry. Even as Aharab watched, a spot of grey appeared among the tent’s black, spreading out like a drop of water soaking into hardpan, ripples on oasis waters… like fire.

“Al-Tari! Al-Tari!” Sarmin had no desire to get closer but Aharab’s memory sent him straight towards the tent at a run.

Perhaps Al-Tari was a sound sleeper, for no answer came. The night swallowed Aharab’s shouts and the grey spot grew, the changed cloth becoming weak, pieces falling away, unweaving themselves as they dropped so that only silver hairs reached the ground, brittle like sticks burned all to ash yet holding their shape.

“Al-Tari!” Aharab stopped two yards from the tent’s dark porch, his shout loud enough to wake every djinn in the deep desert.

The grey edge of a second diseased area passed into view over the ridge of the tent. Without warning the back half fell in on itself, a pole, maybe two, breaking with that dull noise that comes from snapping wood half-eaten by dry mite.

Aharab turned and turned again, an older memory painting itself over the sand, their arrival, with the boy, Jana, herding the goats ahead, switch hand idle now as the scent of water led them. The camels followed at the rear, muttering disdain and belching, nine of them, four belonging to Matarai, three to him, two to Al-Tari and his son, each with its load swaying on high, tight-folded tents, pressed dates, urns of cooking oil, deflated waterskins, and most precious, the salt-blocks stacked and wrapped, white gold to the cities strung like pearls along the Blessing. The memory shredded, vivid greens swallowed by pale sand. Back where he had seen the ropes of a buried tent, a dune slumped forward, a noiseless avalanche flowing over one of the last palms.

“Al-Tari!” And with that last shout the tent folded in on itself, grey sections falling to powder.

“Dear Mirra, save us!” Silence. The cold of the desert night and silence. Where were the goats, the camels? “Where—” Something rose among the folds of Al-Tari’s tent and stole any other words from Aharab’s mouth. The shapeless form writhed and struggled. Aharab took a step back, the nightcold running like a blade along his spine. “Mirra!”

Tent fabric tore and fell, and stepping from it came Al-Tari’s boy, Tomra, grey with dust. Aharab struggled to speak and failed. The boy walked forward, dust rising around each footstep. Aharab took a step back for each step of Tomra’s approach, retreating across the hardpan, away from the desert, away from the oasis, away from the child.

Tomra held a hand out, dust sifting from his fingers. Where the pale dust left him, the flesh beneath lay more pale still. Duty and compassion made Sarmin want to go to the boy, even if Aharab’s memory screamed that this was no longer Tomra, not all of him.

“W—what are you?” Still Aharab fell back. A djinn had entered the child, surely, for he didn’t move like Tomra but like an old man forgetting how to walk.

The boy opened his mouth, his lips moved, but nothing came save the hiss of sand over sand.

“What are you?” Aharab screamed the words.

The hiss again and a single reply. “Hollow.”

Sarmin’s desire to help the boy came of duty but the thanks he gave when Aharab turned and ran sprang from older and more primal source.

“I have brought you something, Magnificence.”

Sarmin stumbled back over smooth tile, terror echoing in his throat and limbs.
Tomra! Tomra?
But the desert had disappeared, replaced by painted walls and a high, cushioned bench. He turned around in the reception room, empty now, but still fragranced by fish and perfume.
How did I get here?
Sarmin’s hand wavered, and light from his lantern danced across a woman’s face. A priestess’ face.
Not hollow.
She moved forwards, jangling with charms and bracelets, arms wrapped about a clay urn, then crouched to place it on the tiled floor. Her loosely-tied robes opened to show where necklaces swayed between her breasts.

Sarmin watched her, allowing his breathing to slow, his heart to resume a normal rhythm. Aharab was fading but this too could be a dream.

—
She is of Meksha
. A young woman’s voice rose from his mind’s depths, awed and respectful. Meksha’s temple perched against the rocks of the Kofka mountains, a place where the blood of the earth rose burning from the fractured rock. If she were truly here then she had come a long way. The earth beneath Sarmin’s feet was long dead, cold against his slippers.

He cleared his throat. “What have you brought me, priestess of Meksha?”

“Magnificence, I have come from the temple deep in the mountains where fires melt and rocks flow, water burns and air chokes. I come from the place where Meksha sings, at the heart of the world where all things are possible and all things can be seen.” She spoke in a low voice, gravelled by smoke, as she made a slow circuit of the urn. Her golden toe-rings glimmered in the lantern light. “Meksha bid me bring you this,” she said, “It will help you through the coming storm.”

—
An emperor does not wait for an answer!
An outraged voice, one he had not heard before, but familiar all the same.

“What is in the urn?” he said, folding his arms behind his back with a frown.

“Something that goes beyond the bickering of armies and the struggle for a throne,” she answered, beginning another circle. Her hair had been drawn into a complex arrangement and he found himself struck by the pattern it made from pins and twists. “Hundreds of years ago Meksha granted magic to Uthmann for the founding of the Tower. And so it was Meksha’s priests who tutored Helmar Pattern Master when he was held here, like you, my emperor, against an uncertain future, as grain buried in clay urns, sealed against the threat of failed harvests.” She met his gaze. “These are the records of those times.”

Sarmin looked into her eyes. The Pattern Master had written marks upon the skin of thousands, making each person a small part of his grand design. Together they had been the Many. The pattern was broken, the Pattern Master dead, but the Many had left its mark on the empire. On the emperor, too. He touched a finger to his forehead. To open the urn would be to find another brother, the one who had been hidden away, forgotten, as he had been. They had both been held in the same tower room, hundreds of years apart. He hoped this was not a dream. “Open it.”

The priestess bent over the urn, her necklaces swinging forwards and clicking like teeth. “It does not open, Magnificence. It is sealed by signs and magic.”

“Then how—”

She smiled. “I do not know. But if Helmar sealed it, you, Magnificence, can surely open it.”

Sarmin did not know whether challenge or faith lay beneath her words but it was the stout urn and its handled lid that commanded his attention. “You are dismissed,” he said, and listened as the clacking of her beads grew faint. Sarmin had killed the Helmar, Pattern Master but a different Helmar was hiding inside of this clay.
No, not hidden. Forgotten
. He pulled on the handle, but as he expected the lid was sealed tight. A puzzle to open. The Many moved inside Sarmin, jostling against one another.

—Don’t open it—the horsegirl is—it was cakes and lemon slices and I ate them, oh I ate them—don’t—I had a comb, it was silver with mother-of-pearl—

—Silence, all of you!

Sarmin woke in his room beside the unbroken calligraphy, the cold desert air on his cheeks. Had he been dreaming, then, of both Aharab and the priestess? But the urn was at his side, its seal intact.
Not dreams, then
. He touched the blue ink on the wall, fingers against dry paper. “Is that who was coming? The priestess?” he asked.

Silence.

He would look in his
Book of Histories
. The middle book, neither large nor small, containing little of knives or instruction, had always been his least favourite. Written in a tiny font and beginning with a long geneaology, it described Cerana from Uthmann’s time, when Meksha had been the patron of the land, gifting Nooria with the Tower. It ended with the trimphant story of Satreth the Reclaimer and his victory over Yrkmir. Over the course of long nights Sarmin had inked in his own additions—his father’s name, Beyon’s name, the births and deaths of his young brothers—and just recently, he had pulled the book from the dust and written at a bottom of one page
Daveed, son of Tuvaini
, and
Pelar, son of Sarmin
.

It was for that book that he reached now, hoping to find some reference to priests of Meksha tutoring a young prince. Helmar was not included in the histories, he knew that already—but perhaps some remnant had been left behind, some mention of a boy and his priest.