Mazarkis Williams: Knife Sworn

“You shouted in your sleep,” he said.

“Bad dreams,” she muttered, shrugging him off to sit upright. She paused a moment, looking about. The milestone at the roadside, the milky haze of stars above, the sigh of the Blessing slipping past in the night, and in the far distance the glow of Nooria.

Rorrin sat back, a white gleam of teeth in the darkness of his face. “You’re young yet-there are worse dreams to come.” Sloshing as he reached for his waterskin. “Here.”

For a while Grada held silent, the waterskin cool across her knees, its contents sliding as she changed position. Rorrin settled down beneath his cloak once more.

“And what kind of emperor will Sarmin be?” If she fell asleep that house would still be waiting for her, she would find herself straddling that wall with the bushes seething beneath her in the darkness and the sounds of three hounds choking. Better to have Rorrin spin out his opinions and keep her awake.

“We get the emperor we deserve,” Rorrin said. “And clearly we deserve to be punished.” He yawned, wide enough to crack his jaw.

Grada pushed the skin aside, her anger in the sharp gesture. “Sarmin is a good man.” Sarmin the Saviour, they were calling him now.

Perhaps Rorrin shrugged-the darkness hid it. “Better a strong emperor than a weak one, but if the emperor is weak then better he hide in the palace and play his games there. The worst of all is a weak emperor who shows his weakness to the world. Cerana has enemies on every side. It’s the natural order of things-the rich are watched by the poor, always waiting for the chance to turn the tables, to move into their houses, dine from their silver. Neighbour watches neighbour with jealous eye.”

“Being a good man doesn’t make Sarmin weak,” Grada said. She remembered how easy it had been to stab him. How she bore him to the bed and he had offered no fight, only traced his fingertips across her shoulder, and in that touch taken her from the Many.

“This emperor has yet to name a Knife, though seven candidates have been offered for judgement. Only a fool walks the Maze unarmed. Sarmin walks far worse places and thinks he needs no Knife. His enemies won’t see a new way of thinking in his empty hands, they’ll see he represents an opportunity entirely different from the one he thinks to offer.

“His weakness springs from what we did to him. We learn to mistrust as we grow, we come to know the true nature of men, the hungers that drive them. Our innocence dies the death of a thousand cuts. Sarmin spent those years alone, nursing only one wound, a big one I grant you, but even so. He doesn’t understand us, the people outside his rooms, outside his books. Innocence, that is a dangerous state of mind in which to rule. Better a bloody-handed murderer than an innocent on the Petal Throne.”

Grada set her head to her pack and twisted to remake her hollow in the sandy ground. She had no argument for Rorrin. She could say that the emperor had been easy to stab but that his touch saved her. She didn’t think that would ease Rorrin’s mind. She closed her eyes against the light of moon and stars. The garden and the house would either draw her to them or they wouldn’t. There are some truths that can’t be run from.

“I have come to see my brother,” Sarmin said.

All other guards had yielded before him without a word, bowing their heads as he paced past, his own picked men silent at his shoulders. Now he faced one who would not stand aside. “Daveed is sleeping,” his mother said, arms folded beneath the swell of her milk-vest.

“Even so, I will see my brother.”

It had hurt Sarmin to deny his mother, to over-ride her authority with his. Back when he slew the Pattern Master and took the throne, Nessaket had been the last to acknowledge his new status, blind to it almost, steeped too long in the ownership she had enjoyed when one room held him. To defy her had been another door to pass through, another transition no part of him wanted, and yet necessary. To surrender any inch of those gains would require the same battle to be fought and won again.

The silence stretched between them until it quivered. Nessaket broke first. “As you will.” Even now forgetting his title, bowing her head more to take him from her sight than in honour.

She stepped aside as he stepped forward. The chamber beyond held four of her personal guard, tight around the child’s crib, as if in accusation. If Sarmin demanded Daveed’s life four guards could no more save him than the trio of nursing-slaves waiting beneath the lamps.

The guardsmen at least had the sense to draw aside quickly, lifting the points of their great hachirahs from the carpet. Sarmin leaned over to watch the sleeping boy.

“He smiles now, they tell me?”

“For two weeks, and he can tug on Dreshka’s skirts, reach for the vases in their niches, burn his fingers on a hot lamp.” Nessaket joined him, a tight smile escaping her displeasure.

The boy lay sprawled in sleep, one pudgy arm reaching a fist above his head, sweat plastering dark curls to his temples.

“Have the council spoken to you again? That snake Azeem?” She flashed Sarmin dark look, eyes hard.

Had she fought so hard to keep him from the knife he wondered, when tradition ordered all Beyon’s brothers dead? That she might think he would give up his brother’s life to those old men’s demands-that hurt him more than her attacks.

When each sun set it was always to draw in the same night, that night of the Knife, that night of slit throats and blood across the courtyard. Sarmin’s mother claimed she saved him from that fate, but Beyon had made the same claim. Tuvaini also, and Govnan of the tower. A good act finds many owners while many a sin goes begging.

“The council speak to me often, mother,” he said. “But I have many councillors and only one brother still living.”

Sarmin reached to touch those dark curls, to feel the warmth of the child’s skin. Beside him his mother startled, as if to seize his arm. The closest of his guards tightened hands on hilts, the blued steel of their scimitars showing above their scabbards. Nessaket fell back and Sarmin circled a finger amid the dampness of his brother’s hair.

“Lift him for me.”

“He’s sleeping,” she said.

“Even so.”

And she drew him from his crib, soft and heavy in sleep.

I need to see him, touch him, feel the living heat rise off his skin.

Time and again the council called for an end to this line. “He is the son of a traitor,” General Hazran had said. Azeem would not speak of Tuvaini but when Nessaket was mentioned he lowered his head. “She schemes. Even with the most generous interpretation and with the utmost humility, it must be admitted, she schemes.” “Daveed is the son of a traitor and a schemer, and next in line to the throne. He cannot live.” Dinar, Herzu’s priest, knew much and more about death. “Put him to the Knife.”

And in a thousand ways, in every way except that which mattered most, they were right, those old men. Sarmin took his brother’s tiny hand, holding it between two fingers and a thumb. Enemies, men with antique grudges, men hungry for power, or for the chances that change might bring, they would all stand behind this boy, seek to own him, aim him. The empire lay cracked and the crack had a name.

“Daveed.” Sarmin closed the fingers of one hand around the baby’s thigh. Soft, and fat, and small.

She thinks to protect him from me, but this, this touch, hearing him draw breath, the scent of him. This is what keeps him alive.

“You forget, mother, Daveed is heir to the throne. My heir. I will not see him harmed.”

“Today he’s your heir. Tomorrow?” She shrugged.