Mazarkis Williams: Knife Sworn

Sarmin returned to the wall, his fingers exploring the ruination. “You were a slave, taken from the Islands.”

“Yes, my emperor.” A shield of formality raised without hesitation.

“My servant, Ink, is from Olamagh. His true name is Horroluan. He says in that land there are birds brighter and more colourful than peacocks and that they speak like men.”

“Olamagh is to the south, in wild seas where pirates and sharks infest the waters, Magnificence.” Azeem raised his head. “My home was Konomagh, a place of spice trees and old learning. We had no birds that talked.”

“And your name?”

“Was Toralune.” Azeem smiled at some memory.

“Wit and service earned your freedom. My cousin Tuvaini raised you high.”

“I serve at your pleasure, my emperor. If there is some other better suited I would be honoured to return to my former station. I made a better master of house and coin to Lord Tuvaini than I did a vizier. I think perhaps he wanted me near for the comfort of a familiar face rather than for my skills as a diplomat, which are sadly lacking.

“In the Islands, where even children learn to swim, we have a saying. ‘To be out of one’s depth’- it means to lose the seabed before you have mastered swimming. Tuvaini led me into waters deeper than I am tall and I have never learned to swim.”

Sarmin had to puzzle over “swimming.” In the end he recalled an illustration in The Book of Ways, heads and arms amid a sea of waving lines. Swimming. The palace held a deep pool, marble set with gold, where a man might drown, but none swam there.

His fingers returned to the wall. “Did you ever have an imaginary friend, Azeem?”

“I had a real friend, Magnificence, and after he died for many years I imagined his ghost followed me. I would tell him my secrets, and leave him a portion of my food, but he only followed and watched, and could never join in my games.”

“I had an imaginary friend once.” Sarmin raised plaster-white fingers to his face. “Sometimes I think all of my friends have been imaginary.”

Sarmin crossed to his desk and sketched Aherim’s face with a white finger. It didn’t look like Aherim. “Perhaps we can be friends, Azeem?”

The pause spoke the “no” plain enough.

“An emperor cannot afford friends, Magnificence,” Azeem said. In Sarmin’s mind the Many laughed.

The richest man in an empire of rich men and he cannot afford friends.

“Least of all low-born or slave-taken friends. Your flesh is golden, your robe brighter than the sun. The empire requires you that way, needs you that way, and the touch of lesser men sullies you. The touch of the Untouchable-”

“Of Grada. You may say her name.” Sarmin rubbed the chalk face from his desk, an angry motion.

“As high vizier I am little but advice. My advice is to send Grada away, never to return. You have been gifted many concubines-”

Those concubines, gifts from the scheming and nattering lords, might as well have been snakes in Sarmin’s view-no less so for their high status. That was why he had sent Grada to find out about them, Grada whom he trusted. Grada who had carried him with her.“Tell me,” he said, stalking closer to the vizier, “How long did it take the palace to turn Toralune to Azeem? Do you remember when and where we taught the Island boy to despise? When our traditions, dry-born of the desert, replaced the sea-born freedoms of the Isles?”

Azeem let the anger run off him. “Traditions are what hold you in your throne, Magnificence.”

“You would not speak so to Beyon.” Nobody would speak an awkward truth to Beyon. Perhaps that was what killed him. “Go now. I’ll speak to you in the other room.”

Azeem made his obeisance on the gritty carpet and left.

Sarmin had a world of two rooms now. The one room he stood in, and a second larger room that held everything beyond his doorway. Two rooms, one full of wonders, the other full of dust, and sometimes he felt more trapped than ever he had when fifteen and twenty paces had bound him.

In the other room a child was being squeezed into the world, pushed into it in pain and blood. Mesema would be screaming and yet even the emperor himself couldn’t seem to push past tradition, tear through custom, and see her, offer comfort. Or maybe his own fears held him. In the other room a man could drown. Even an emperor could find himself out of his depth.

The house stands in the Holies, up above the reek of the Maze, separated from it by the stockyards, the market, the streets of Leather and Copper, the streets of Salt and Silver. And by the river.

When Uthman came across the empty desert in the longest of long agos he discovered two great outcrops of granite defying both sand and river, channelling the waters between them and resisting the wind. He founded a city there and named it Nooria after Meksha’s daughter, she of the hidden fires in whose deep furnace such rock is forged. On the greater outcrop he built his palace, and in time it grew to devour and conceal the ancient rock. On the lesser outcrop, watching the palace across the swift waters of the Blessing, he set the first shrine, to Meksha, and the second to her child. And among the many shrines that followed, the rich built homes, each according to the changing tastes and prosperity of the times. For what is wealth for if not to let men live among the gods?

This knowing comes to Grada from the pages of a great book, though she cannot read. It can only be that the Many have whispered it to her. She sees the book, its parchment turning beneath blunt and ink-stained hands, at once familiar and strange.

The house stands on a long aisled street where date palms grow in ordered senility, grey with age and fruitless now, awaiting time’s judgement. At one end, Mirra’s shrine, domed in black marble, simple and without adornment. At the far end where the street opens into a sun dazzled square, Herzu’s shrine in alabaster, abalone, and ivory, white in many flavours, carved in deep and complex relief.

The house stands between life and death, pale in the moonlight, and Grada knows with certainty-as sudden as the sun’s departure-that she is dreaming.

It’s cold on that street where the palms whisper in the dark and no one walks. Grada shivers against the breeze and against a deeper chill woken in her bones. The gardens are high walled but it is gesture rather than threat; the stonework is ornate and easy to climb. There are no lights behind the many shuttered windows, no servants at late duties. There will be guards-a rich man cannot sleep without a sharp blade to guarantee his slumbers, but like the walls these guards will be more show, blunted by routine, selected for the peaceful boredom of civilised living.

Grada would rather walk away, let sleeping dogs lie. Instead she waits and lets the poisoned dogs die. The meat she slung over the wall left her hands bloody. She wipes them on the coarse sandstone before her. There will be more blood to come. She can taste it.

This isn’t dreaming. This is memory. Unfolding, piece by piece like a tightwrapped pattern, bound about a dark and rotten truth.

Grada knows this. She knows it as she knows the path her knife cut to Sarmin’s chamber, as she knows the lives she sliced open to reach him. The Many guided her hands that night. Now those same hands find purchase on the carved corner of a garden wall and pull her up. The pattern unfolds a piece more, its secret still hidden. But some offenses are so rank they reek to heaven and nothing can wholly conceal them. There’s a child here. She knows that much.

“Wake up.”

Fingers tight about her wrists. Grada struggled but the grip held. “Wake up!” Rorrin said again, the moonlight caught his face above her. Grada relaxed in his grip, spitting sand.