Mazarkis Williams - Knife Sworn

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 them. 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.”

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!”