Mazarkis Williams: Knife Sworn

“I want to know about the slaves brought in from the north,” Sarmin had said to her. Not in the privacy of the room they once had shared, nor in the secrecy of that link-forged, then broken-that once had bound them, but in the light and space of the throne room. Only distance kept their words from the courtiers moving about the perimeter in a bright and glittering flow; only loyalty kept their secrets within the circle of muscled backs that Sarmin’s bodyguard presented to their emperor.

“Slaves have always come from the north,” she had said. Emperor, she thought, I should have called him, my Emperor. And slaves came from all directions, drawn into Nooria to serve, grow old, die. The roads north brought white slaves, down the river, too pale for fieldwork, exotic girls for the harem, for nobles wishing to show their sophistication, populating their houses with Mythyck’s children.

“I am told that they bear watching,” he had said. Who told him such things, she wondered.

“I will watch them.” She had fallen into her prostration. An Untouchable, the emptier of night-pots, washer of moon-blood from private linen, fallen in obeisance as if she were a man of property and breeding. Azeem had told her of the damage she did, of the poison that spread where she walked.

Grada turned away from the river, along the trail of hard mud beaten to dust, the wheat rising high to either side. A watcher left along the path would know her now, a spy, following along a trail to nowhere. Grada eyed the wheat, swaying in the wind’s half-breath. Best pray they had left no watcher.

A quarter mile along the trail and the wheat had halved in height, an arid taste on the air, irrigation ditches struggling to do their duty. Grada stopped. She wriggled her toes in the dust-sand as much as dust now.

Life at the bottom of a pecking order teaches you to listen and to watch. When any hand can and will be raised against you, it pays to know where those hands are. City sounds are not river sounds, and river sounds are not desert sounds, but a keen ear will learn the ways of each. Grada didn’t hear the approach, but she heard the hidden birds fall silent, the creakerbugs pause and each small thing grow quiet until only the wheat’s rustling remained.

Grada left the trail and pushed in among the crop, careful to part the stalks so they would spring up again behind her. She went in deep enough that she could no longer see the road. Curiosity kills more than cats, and if you can see, you can be seen.

The horses came first, a distinctive clop-clop of hooves on dry mud, the jingle of harness. Grada had seen horses, the first time through the eyes of the Many, watching the empress-to-be travel the sands towards Nooria. But these were not the ponies of the grass-tribes. Rather they were the tall steeds of the west, water-hungry, fierce beasts even less suited to the sands. And after the horses, the softer plod of camels, the creak and rumble of wagons. Not a true caravan: these men had followed the longest paths and skirted the desert. Wheels would not take a traveller across the dunes.

“-wouldn’t think that meat would need seasoning-”

“-water, and feed the-”

“-volunteered to teach them some new tricks-”

And the travellers had gone, taking their conversations with them. Grada waited. Long enough for the creakers to speak and the birds to take up their song again. She emerged, flicking chaff from her robes, and resumed her course.

In half an hour the trail had gone to ruts in sand, a record of the caravan’s passage that would not survive the day. A low ridge took river and its green skirts from view, and Grada found herself on the edge of the desert, as hungry and empty as it ever was. The stone-built house and surrounding pavilions came as a surprise when Grada crested a second ridge. She went flat to the dust and crawled forward, lizard-low. The building lay a few hundred yards off, but with the sun in the west she would catch someone’s eye coming over the incline.

The hot trail scorched Grada’s palms, heat rising from the ground to bake her, gritty sand lifted by a light wind to sit between her lips, irritate her eyes.

“What are you doing here, Grada?” Sometimes she spoke to herself. Since the voices of the Many had been taken, it comforted her to hear her own from time to time. Somehow speaking a thought made it more real, gave it weight.

The gods had plucked her from a life of drudgery and certainty only to replace it with another kind of purpose, a camaraderie of a different sort, the bonds of caste replaced with the pattern. But now? Alone, and with choices outnumbering instructions as sand grains outnumber dunes, Grada felt unmade. A needle with no eye, Jenna would have called her.

A man led a chain of girls from the largest of the pavilions: five of them, walking as if still bound together. Some ties remain, even when cut. Five girls-three blonde, two redheads, exotics from Mythyck and the Scyhtic Isles beyond-still wearing the rags from their homelands.

“See how he keeps them waiting by the school? No care for whether the sun stains them.” A male voice behind her, calm, without threat.

Grada kept very still, ice on her shoulders. If he had wanted her dead he could have killed her already.

“School?” she asked.

“The last girls were here three months. Only two of them. Those two went out with the caravan that brought these ones.”

What would they spend three months doing out in the folds of the desert? Grada didn’t ask. Instead she asked herself what the man wanted. Such questions came as naturally as breathing. Survival as an Untouchable, as a creature whose life was the property of all and any, required that you ask yourself at each turn what every person wanted of you. Grada had been a creature lower than a slave-slaves at least commanded a price, and despite the fact that she had held the hand of the emperor her birth still tainted her, her eyes dark with the sin of her ancestors. He wants me to answer my own question.

“They are training them,” she said.

“Because?”

“Because…” Grada had never seen a skin so pale until the high mage had led her from Sarmin’s room to the Tower, where she saw her first northerner, a wind-sworn mage. She thought to say the girls were in training for the Tower, to serve the empire, but why here? No, they were not mages; one northerner might live in the Tower but many more lived beneath Sarmin’s golden roofs, proof of his power and wealth. “Because only the richest can afford exotics.”

“That’s my assessment of it,” the man said.

Grada rolled to her side, a slow move, so as to provoke no attack. The man squatted a few yards behind her, off the trail, his robes the colour of sand.

“My name is Rorrin,” he said, veiled as the dunes-men are wont to ride, the sun throwing his shadow before him, short and dark.

“Are you here to kill me?” Grada asked. The fear that eluded her between the river and the pomegranate trees now sent sweat trickling, warm from beneath her arms. She sat, shuffling back from the view of the school.

“Do I look like a killer?” The man pulled his veil about his neck and set back his sun hood. Old, maybe fifty, a comfortable face sagging beneath short grey hair.

“No.” She knew killers, the kind who strode the Maze or bore the emperor’s swords. Many wore it openly in the brutal lines of their face. Others hid it, but for those used to looking, their true nature lay revealed-something of steel about them, in the eyes, in the quiet way they held their peace in chaos, waiting to strike.

“Well, then.” He smiled.

Not a killer. A murderer maybe. Murder lies deeper in a man. “Why are you here, then?” she asked.

“To watch, of course. And better to be away from the trail when you watch. You never know who might come up behind you.” His eyes told a story of kindness, dark but warm.