Mazarkis Williams: Knife Sworn

A storeroom slave, blooded from some other combat, slid along the wall to flank Ta-Sann, and found the end of Govnan’s staff rammed hard into the side of his head. The djinn-born cunning left his eyes and he toppled in confusion.

With a roar of effort Ta-Sann divided a hollow man, his hachirah given no pause by the decaying armour. Dulled by the corrupting nothingness lacing the hollow men’s blood the scimitar’s work became harder from each moment to the next-and such a battle is counted in moments.

Twenty men, more, thirty, ranked back along the corridor, slowed only by those before them. “Sarmin!” Govnan risked a glance back at him. “He can’t last!” Even as the high mage spoke a slave woman threw herself onto Ta-Sann’s shoulder in the moment his scimitar bedded itself in the body of a Herzu temple-guard. The sword-son launched himself into a wall, crushing the woman between his body and the stone. The abandoned hachirah fell with his last victim, tripping another man. Two glittering knives appeared in Ta-Sann’s hands and he bellowed at his foe with such a voice that even the hollowed paused for half a beat. “Sarmin!” Govnan cried again.

Turning his back on Ta-Sann’s last extravagant stand felt like all kinds of betrayal, but still Sarmin turned. He held the two halves of Helmar’s stone before his face, let his eyes wander the brilliance and intricacy of the pattern, then lowered both and looked once more upon the nothing.

The stonework about the empty doorframe crumbled now, falling into dust, swirling into memory. Sarmin felt the skin of his cheeks, his forehead, lips, start to respond, to unwind and flow towards the nothing.

This is the death of god. The one god of whom all others are shadows. The end of all things. Let it take you.

“No.” And Sarmin looked again. Looked for the edges rather than the centre. The nothing was a wound, a rip in the fabric of the being. Helmar had broken the butterfly then made it whole. And centuries later that same boy in his wrath had broken the world, pierced the stuff of eternity to anchor his grand pattern. The last of his anchor points he sank through Beyon’s tomb, through his death, through that moment, that day. Before that there had been Migido, before that three others. Five was ever the number of the Pattern. But before five comes one, and long before Helmar’s puncturing work Mogyrk died in the desert, a wound in creation that had made Helmar’s attacks seem pinpricks. And now Mogyrk’s death infected the wounds Helmar made, spreading the terror of the deep desert into the heart of Nooria. As a pebble can start an avalanche, Helmar’s self destruction had brought the dead god’s suicide crashing down upon them all.

Sarmin saw it, he looked with new eyes, even as those eyes were unwound from the business of seeing, and he beheld the nothing as a jagged hole punched through existence, a blankness in the complex, breathtaking, beautiful, dirty world. A world deeper and more real than any pattern, as far beyond description by mere language as the wings of a butterfly.

Surrender to it. Lay down the burden of your days, Sarmin Tahal-son. This is the end. Your life has been only lies, nothing but rumour that Mogyrk now unspeaks.

Sarmin walked in the dream, in the green of the grass, the blue of the sky, he held the butterfly broken in his hands. This was not his memory. A lie. And yet he could taste it.

“A lie can also be true.”

The memory of Helmar opened his hands and the butterfly stood remade. The pattern of the world might yet show creation how to be whole again. Show the nothing how to be something.

“You are my salvation.”

The Megra brought Helmar’s past with her, seasoned with the bitterness of experience. Sarmin reached for the edges of the nothing with unwritten fingers, with the memory of them, intention. To draw those edges together would tear him apart. Helmar gave him the magic, wrote it in stone, and with it he could heal this wound, and the act would be Helmar’s salvation. The boy who had shared his room, shared his fate, twisted by circumstance and years, twisted beyond recognition into the thing that was the Pattern Master. Was he born to craft the magic that might save the world? Yet Sarmin was afraid. He wished Beyon were at his side. “I don’t want to die.” Vanishing hands remembered the softness of his son, Pelar so warm and heavy in the cradle of his arms.

“Be brave.” The face of a boy, mountains behind him rising higher than Sarmin’s imagination would ever have painted them. Was this Pelar? The boy Pelar would become? White flowers in his hands glistening like stars, dark hair wind-swept across his brow, his grin so wide, no trace of fear in him. “Be brave.”

Sarmin took hold of the wound. Everywhere the pattern ran through the world, the story of things, the tale of each grain of sand, each breath of wind, the threads of being. “The pattern is not the thing, it is the story of the thing. Neither lie nor truth.” And as Helmar had once let the pattern of a wing guide the stuff of the world — the unseen vitality of shape and form that burns in each grain of that which is-as Helmar had let the necessary pattern of the butterfly lead the world back to the place where a butterfly sat perfect on his palm, the injury he did it now a lie, Sarmin let the deeper pattern of his city rewrite all that had been lost, filling in each stolen brick, each lost moment, even down to his brother’s bones and the hidden decay of his dead flesh. With all the strength that ran in him he strove to draw the edges of the wound together. And it hurt.

Crimson dots. Lines of crimson dots on white. Some large, some small, arcs of them, as if spattered on a canvas by the careless lash of an artist’s overladen brush. Crimson and white. He tried to make sense of it. A pattern here, but what pattern, what meaning.

Crimsons dots. He had a name once. Crimson and white. The “S’ hissed on his tongue, begging the remainder of his name. Arc crisscrossing arc. “Sarmin.”

He woke beneath bodies, an arm across his face, and pain — an ocean on which he floated beyond sight of land. Above him on the plastered ceiling of a corridor arcs of crimson spatter made abstract testimony to the violence wrought below.

Sarmin sat, the arm that was not his own slid away, other arms, a man’s leg lacking a body. The effort and agony of that movement ground his teeth together but he could give it no voice, it lay beyond words. Bodies lay everywhere, slaves, guards, an Old Mother, her face turned away. Four yards of the fallen lay before the doors to the courtyard, closed and solid. The gore and ruin pooled and ran, it stunk, of burning and a hot abattoir stink catching at Sarmin’s throat, but though the dead might lie broken, not one of them lay pale, not one of them hollowed.

And with a groan Sarmin lay back among the dead and let dreams take him.

The guards closed the doors behind Sarmin as he entered the women’s wing. Soot coated the walls that had once been painted with images of Mirra and Pomegra. The carpet consisted of ashes mixed with long, bright threads. Doors twisted from their frames, scorched and broken. The stink of fire reminded him of the smell of his room, after Govnan raised the elemental and burned the stairs. Bitter and heavy. Women and guards had been found along this floor, red with the death that smoke bestows and black with the kind offered by fire. Traitor guards had barred the doors, trapping them all inside.

He had declared the empty wing, the wing where Beyon had once hidden with Mesema and his Knife, the new house for the women. Nessaket was there now, side by side with her slave-girl, Rushes, both of them unconscious, struck down by blows to the head. Neither had woken since the night of the slave revolt. The same man had hit each of them: Mylo. Sarmin had never heard of him before, a delivery boy, purchased a year ago from a satrap’s estate. Murmurs and confessions allowed the story to be pieced together. The boy had been a follower of Mogyrk, and had colluded with Austere Adam through a network of priests and worshippers. Neither of them had been found, nor had Sarmin’s brother Daveed. He had been spirited away as had Helmar so many years ago, taken by followers of Mogyrk. Daveed. Flesh called to flesh and he ached for his brother, his round face, his curls. I will find you.