Knife Sworn (16 page)

But tradition would not keep the emptiness from toppling the palace, from filling the city with hollow men and leaving the Blessing as a trail of dust. This matter of distant war had to be resolved and quickly so Sarmin could consider the more imminent crisis.

Sarmin kept the visitors in their obeisance for a minute, and then a minute more. Time enough to gather his wits, time enough to underscore the point for the old men of empire seated two steps below him. Those old men, as much as any other players—his mother, Tuvaini, Beyon—had kept him in that room so many years. Alive and yet not alive, for what is a life that’s lived unseen and unknown? Less than dust.

“Rise,” he said, and waved two palace guards to help the injured man away.

Kavic gained his feet with a wry smile, the priest still venting silent outrage so that in Sarmin’s eyes it almost shimmered about him like the heat around a glowing coal.

“Welcome to Cerana, welcome to Nooria, may the sand take only your sorrows.” Sarmin offered the old greeting.

Kavic tilted his head and gave a stiff shallow bow. “We thank you for your welcome to your court, Magnificence.” He kept any hint of irony from his voice, or perhaps it became lost in translation. Far behind him the injured Fryth guard collapsed onto a bench against the rear wall.

Azeem had counselled that the men of Fryth played a short and direct game when it came to diplomacy, despising the verbal feints and circling so beloved of Cerana’s princes and satraps. Sarmin chose to do likewise. Not so long ago his longest conversations were those conducted with the decoration on his walls, better to reach his point quickly than to lose it in the confusion of small talk.

“My cousin, Emperor Tuvaini, initiated an attack upon the Dukedom of Fryth. I understand he was poorly advised by one of his generals, a childhood companion of his. It was believed at the time that the plague which had taken my brother, Emperor Beyon, from this throne had its roots in Yrkmir and her protectorates.

“The truth turned out to be more complex. In fact the pattern-plague was the work of Helmar, also emperor, a son of this royal house, torn from it and educated in the way of pattern by Yrkmen invaders long ago. The pattern-plague was rooted in both Cerana and Yrkmir and in the conflict between them. Rather than starting a war, those events should have reminded us all of the lingering horrors such aggression leaves to echo down the years. Long after homes have been rebuilt and nations repopulated old grievances survive and work their ill again.

“I came to my throne with that reminder in my thoughts and my first act was to call a halt to the advance of the White Hat army.” Sarmin paused and unlaced his knotted fingers. Beneath his silks sweat ran. “Tell me Envoy Kavic, what word do you bring from the Iron Duke on my offer of peace between us, nation and throne?”

The priest made to open his mouth but Kavic answered first. “My grandfather Malast Anteides Gryffon desires peace also, though the terms and reparations will require consideration.”

Second Austere Adam scowled. A muted rumble rose from the men on the third step: Reparations?

“Good,” Sarmin said. “Then perhaps tomorrow we shall begin such considerations. For now though you must be tired after so many weeks on the road. You will be taken to fitting quarters and shown how welcoming Nooria can be…” Sarmin allowed himself a smile and added, “now that the business of manners has been settled.” He would rather they talked terms and reparations immediately, reached agreement before sunset and moved on to the more immediate matter of the wound their god had made on the world. But in Cerana no agreement reached in such haste would carry respect; instead it would need to be picked over by advisors, the most minor of points argued through, near to death, the documents drafted, drawn, redrafted and redrawn. He wondered sometimes how in such a nation of debaters and nitpickers, the decision that bound him for seventeen years and stole away his youth could have been reached in the scant hours separating his father’s death from the long climb up those stairs to his prison.

Sarmin looked up from his musings. Kavic had made no move into his obeisance and for a moment Sarmin feared that once again it would prove a sticking point.

“My thanks, Magnificence. It has been a… trying journey. I must urge haste, though. I hope we can complete our negotiations tomorrow and communicate the results to Fryth as swiftly as possible. Our friends in the east may be slow to stir, but they will not remain idle forever in the face of Cerani troops on Frythian soil.” He bowed, then remembering himself he kneeled and made his obeisance, Austere Adam, following him down, winced at each stage as if every move cut his honour to the quick.

The court watched in silence as the visitors departed, no word spoken until the great doors closed behind them.

“Speak then,” Sarmin said. “You are here to advise me.” Marke Kavic had spoken of the Yrkmen. Had it been a threat or a warning?

The courtiers before him stood, some stiff and rubbing their posteriors, some quick to their feet, all of them stepping down from the dais before turning to face their emperor. Sarmin had expected the sharp-tongued Satrap of Morrai, Honnecka, to be first to share his opinions but the ragged Notheen spoke into the pause, his voice low, persuading his listeners to silence, and speaking words of which only Sarmin and Govnan understood the full meaning.

“The priest knows war is coming, whether this marke wishes it or no. The church of Mogyrk has decided to test its strength in the desert. That much is plain enough.”

A longer pause and then the babble of outrage as the high and the mighty competed to pour scorn on such defeatist talk. Sarmin settled back into the Petal Throne and let his advisors advise, but the words flowed over him leaving little mark.
War is coming
. Those words stayed. Those words stuck.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

From time to time Sarmin would remind himself of the men behind those impassive faces, of the lives he had pieced together across years from scraps of conversation heard with his ear pressed to his prison door and later from the voices of the Many.

The creak of Govnan’s knees as he shifted position brought Sarmin’s attention back to matters in hand. “High mage, Headman.” He focused on the two men remaining at the base of the dais, Govnan gnarled and ancient, fire-hardened Sarmin thought him, tempered in the secret flame, and Notheen, tall, ragged, bony, when the desert finally claimed him there would be little to consume. In many ways, in the ways that counted, they looked alike. Sarmin could believe them father and son. They fit together in some way that could not be seen with the eyes but from a different perspective would be obvious. Lately Sarmin had started to see all those around him as parts of a puzzle, shapes to be manipulated in some high dimensional and abstract space. It worried him.

“Keep watch on my brother’s tomb. If there is alteration, or the Fryth austere comes near it, you let me know.” Sarmin waved them away, his head a sudden single ache as if tidal forces sought to split it along some old faultline. Austere Adam had come with the peace delegation, but if his church truly meant to test its strength in the desert he might well be its forward scout. The possibility could not be ignored.

He watched them go, Govnan and Notheen, through slitted eyes. In his narrow vision the air around them shimmered and it seemed almost that he could see the fault-lines in each man, as if a little effort would divide them into the constituent parts that meshed so neatly to make them whole.

“I will go to my room now,” Sarmin said. “Ta-Sann, your arm, please.”

Ta-Sann offered him an arm thick with gleaming muscle. With the swordson’s help Sarmin stood. Whispers invaded his mind, ideas and emotions bubbling. “I am young to feel so old, Ta-Sann. Perhaps I should train as a son of the sword? Would they take me, do you think?”

“Sword-sons are taught from birth, emperor, sold into the service.” If Ta-Sann felt any discomfort at the questioning no sign of it entered his voice. “Give me your blade, Ta-Sann. An emperor should know about swords.”

Sarmin felt his tongue running away from him, shaping words given to it by someone else. Ta-Sann held out the hilt of his sword as Tuvaini had surrendered his dacarba little more than a year ago. That had been Sarmin’s choice, his act and his alone. Maybe this was too.

Fingers met around the thick hilt. Sarmin struggled to lift the hachirah, a gleam chasing the gentle curve of the blade as it turned in his grasp. With effort he held it high. To their credit not one of the sword-sons flinched when he swung at the air, almost losing both grip and footing. Sweat stuck his silks to him.
What am I doing?
He could see the necessary parts of the sword interlocked, bright lines zig-zagging through many dimensions to separate iron from chrome, sharp from heavy. It could all come to pieces in his hands, he had only to pull here…

“Take me to my room.” He let the sword fall and the clatter of it set the plumes bobbing on a score of startled imperials stood along the walls. The sword-sons didn’t need to be told which room. Sarmin had a canopied bed of silks and bright tapestries hung around an oak frame within a galleried chamber that dwarfed it. The gold in that room, held in statuettes to many gods and in cunningly wrought birds, jewel-eyed on jade trees, outweighed him. A dozen emperors had slept there, and Sarmin had slept there for a time, but it was not his room.

The sword-sons cleared his path, concubines scattering as their escort returned them to the women’s halls. Ta-Sann helped Sarmin climb the stairs, their footsteps lost beneath the whispers and cries of the Many. “I’m sorry for your sword, Ta-Sann.”

“My emperor?”

“I should have treated it with more respect.”

Ta-Sann, perhaps wisely, had nothing to say to that.

In the quiet ruin of his old room Sarmin bid the sword-sons tie him to his bed. The memory of his ruined book haunted him, with the thought of what else the Many might do with his hands. His guards required no explanation, no excuses, no swearing to silence. Another in Sarmin’s place might not have trusted to their discretion. Ta-Sann and his brothers were human after all, subject to all the temptations of men despite their long years of training, when old methods and magics had been used to purge them of such weakness. Sarmin saw each of the six as part of the next, linked in a circle that could not be broken by small things such as offered wealth or power or the bodies of women. Each of the sword-sons depended upon the others in such a manner that Sarmin had more faith in their loyalty to the oath Tuvaini purchased than he did in his own actions.

“Keep two of your number at my door until sunrise,” Sarmin told them as they left.

The door closed on a quiet moment and some small part of Sarmin believed in that moment that he would be left alone now, that the silence would stretch into blissful infinity. But with the next breath the unguided Many returned to lift him from his flesh, burdened with their memories of times gone, places sketched and shadowed, bodies lost to sword and sickness, flashes of recollection so bright and perfect in their detail that a lifetime’s contemplation might not seek out all meaning from them. And a voice, inside him but not of the Many, said,
—She is coming.

“But she came!” Sarmin twisted his head towards the unbroken lines beneath his window. “She brought me the urn.” It remained unopened, a rounded shadow against the wall, threat and promise together.

—She is coming.

“Who? Who!” He strained his ears, but the answer, when it came, rose from within. A vision, a scene remembered through the eyes of one of the Many he bore, one of the dead.

In the mountain dark he stands, shivers by the clan hall. Someone has to take their finds to Her. Someone. And it falls to him. They leave him in the dark with the cloth bag limp in his hand. A dozen white-stars, not much for a day’s work on the high ridges, but the tiny blooms are rare as opals. He watches as Costos hauls open the clan-hall door. For a moment firelight colours the two older boys, strains of “The Peaks of East-March” reach out, scattered notes from Voice Zanar’s harp. The door bangs shut behind them.

He shakes himself, this boy of the mountain clans, this boy whose memories flow in an emperor’s head, shakes himself and sets off. He starts slow and gets slower. No one hurries to see Her. She’ll be pleased with the flowers, the very first in the briefest of seasons. She’ll be pleased and she’ll let him go without looking into him the way she does, the way that leaves people feeling ill-suited to their skin.

No light shows in The Megra’s hut, nothing to lead the boy across the slope of scree-stone. The frost-shattered gravel shifts beneath each step, creet bushes, stunted and long-thorned, try to trip him. The muted sounds of the hall grow fainter and he leaves the village home-stones behind him, coming in time to the walls of Her round-house.

“Megra?” She won’t be asleep. She burns no lights, eats cold, sits wrapped in furs all winter before a cold hearth, but she never sleeps.

“Megra?” Her hut stands away from the village, from the stink from the tanning hall, from the mustiness of goats and the choking richness of composting waste. The wind over the ridges brings the promise of rain and the faint tang of granite.

He sets a hand to the walls of her hut, round like every other save the clanhall and tannery, but built of different stone, older rocks shaped by some lost people and worn beyond corners or edges. The blocks must have been carried at least from Crowspire to build this place, but no-one could say why. Pressing his fingers to the smooth stones it seems for a moment that he can hear an echo of those vanished people, chanting, deep-voiced around the crack and snap of fire. The moment leaves him.

“Boy?” The Megra’s voice through the slit window. To hear her speak you might think her young, or at least a mother with young sons.