Mazarkis Williams: Knife Sworn

Ten paces brought her to Jomla’s door. It would be locked from within. Meere had given her a vial of acid to destroy the mechanism but she had smelled the stuff at work. It ate metal slowly and released sharp odours that might wake a sleeper. The emperor’s Knife was always on the grand scale a simple solution to a complex problem, or seemingly so. Grada opted for the same direct simplicity on the small scale. She knocked on the door with the hilt of the Knife, three loud raps. A pause then three more. When the muffled query came from inside she simply called in, “Fire.”

A man awake and suspicious would have a dozen questions, not least being where had his night guard gone, but Jomla thick with sleep and focused on the threat of fire came to his own door and unlocked it for her.

With the door ajar between them Jomla blinked at Grada, lifting a hand to rub the sleep from his eyes. Meere had told her she need only kill the fattest man in the house to be sure of Jomla. She could believe the house held no-one more corpulent. Jomla’s chins continued down into the embroidered silks of his night-shirt. She kicked the door wider and lifted the Knife.

Jomla’s eyes widened, “I have gold-” The rest spluttered through a sliced throat, the Knife biting deep to find his windpipe. He fell with a heavy thud, thrashing, refusing to die, rising up spraying blood. Anyone who has seen a pig slaughtered knows how long these things take. The emperor Sarmin would have been appalled. In the stories of valour told to princes death comes in an instant or slow enough that sad farewells might be recorded for posterity.

Grada stepped over and around Jomla, careful of his flailing legs. Oddly they were almost thin, as if he were a great jelly on stork’s legs.

One wife, young and slim, sat in the wide expanse of Jomla’s bed, the silks drawn up around her. The other, an older fatter woman, lay in a separate bed, asleep even now. Grada had thought to find them in separate chambers but Meere had warned that Jomla liked to keep his possessions close.

“I-” The young woman clutched her sheets tighter still as if they might protect her, eyes flitting between Jomla and the Knife. “Don’t hurt me.”

“I won’t,” Grada said, stepping close. The secret doomed the wives, not the Knife. She came to kill the secret, not to kill people. But secrets spread, especially between the sheets. And hadn’t this all sprung from pillow talk?

“Please!” the girl begged, her black hair framing a pale face in curls.

“It’s all right,” Grada said and stabbed through silk into the wife’s heart. “It will be quick.”

For the sleeping wife the end came quicker still.

Jomla’s vizier, Nashan, slept unguarded one floor down, though a guardsman died between the prince’s bedroom and that of Nashan. Like the fat wife, the vizier died without waking. “It’s a kindness to die in one’s sleep. All men should sleep first, then sleep deeper.” She found the words on her lips, perhaps the credo of the assassins who used her back in the days when the Many flowed through her veins and the Pattern Master chose her victims. Did Helmar select her as his Knife for a joke she wondered, an insult, to set an untouchable against the light of heaven and kill him in his sleep? And now Sarmin followed in his relative’s footsteps, putting the Knife in her hands, the lives of the highest and most mighty into her keeping.

Grada found herself outside the heir’s bedroom, the light and shadows dancing across his door. “I never wanted this.”

Her dreams had painted this door for her many times, a butterfly carved into the satinwood. She put her lamp in the niche opposite and set her fingers to the lines of the butterfly’s wings. She glanced to the Knife, a dark drop of blood forming at its point as she looked, dark and gleaming, swelling, pregnant with possibility. She watched it fall. An age passed and it hit the carpet without sound. The pattern it made she had seen each time in her dreaming.

I’m not bound to this. I make the future-not you, Helmar. I am the Knife.

The pattern pulsed around her, echoing in her skin, tracing the invisible scars where once the Pattern Master’s design had wrapped her.

I could do anything. Scream, shout, set a fire, walk away. I am not bound to this dream.

But in the end her hand closed around the handle of the door. This one locked from the outside and yielded to the fourth of the many keys she had gathered on her bloody rounds. The door opened on oiled hinges and a blackness yawned before her. She stepped through on damned feet.

The child lay atop his covers, a boy of seven years, maybe eight, sweat tousled, naked but for a loincloth, thin limbed, pale. Grada sunk to her knees beside the bed, setting down her lamp. Tears blinded her. It didn’t matter that Jomla was dead, he would never have acted alone. Petty satraps and minor caliphs, their lords and generals, would have been lined up behind him and as long as the boy lived, as long as he might be set upon the throne to pardon the treason of those who put him there… they would seek him, seek to own him.

“He’s innocent.” She held the Knife’s blade flat to her lips, whispering the words.

Had Eyul wept as he killed Sarmin’s brothers? He killed a tower-mage too, an island woman, Amalya. Govnan had said the assassin had loved her, but gave her to the Knife when the pattern took hold upon her.

“Gods help me. I cannot do this.” And yet each alternative led to blood. Oceans of it, innocent and guilty, men, women, children as young and as pure as the boy before her. In the game of Settu the push sets the tiles falling, each one toppling the next in branching chains until the work is done and an accounting of the fallen must be made. Grada knew now that the push had been made further back than she had ever known, and that all her life the tiles had been toppling around her, each crashing against the next, a tide that had lifted her and swept her to this point. The old steel trembled on her lips.

A gleam caught her eye. On the table beside the bed, clockwork animals in copper and silver, Mechar Anlantar’s work, two lions, two bears… a cow on its side. Grada swallowed a cry that would become a scream if she let it escape. She set the point of the Knife to the hollow at the base of her throat. “Gods help me.”

“-Be kept a secret. It’s imperative-”

“…been left hollow like so many other-”

“panic in the streets, Azeem-”

“-something you can do?”

“…dangerous to touch him.”

Sarmin rose through a sea of disjoint conversations, fragments, snatches.

Familiar voices, Ta-Sann anxious, Govnan resigned, Azeem insistent. Voices came, and went, minutes chased hours, and still he rose, still blind with the depths of his journey.

“It’s better that he stay here. We can put it about that he’s in seclusion seeking a cure for this plague.” Azeem’s voice.

“Already there are rumours he’s been hollowed.” Govnan, sounding old. “And the outer wall will fall within hours. Moreth gives it strength but it can’t last. The people will see.”

Sarmin sat up. He had been lying on the carpet of his tower room. Only Govnan and Azeem were present and the two men had their backs to him, the door closed. His tongue had stuck to the roof of his mouth and a great thirst consumed him.

“Water.” His mouth too dry for more words.

High mage and vizier both jumped, then turned too fast for any dignity, and stared, Govnan with his mouth open, Azeem with the broadest smile. Sarmin couldn’t remember ever seeing the man smile. He tried to grin back.

They came quickly to his side, Azeem taking jug and glass from a silver tray set on the floor by the wall. It looked like Ta-Sann’s tray, the food taken from it. Sarmin coughed on the water, struggling not to choke.