Mazarkis Williams: Knife Sworn

Azeem told him Mesema had gone to the ladies’ garden to find relief from the flames and then had never left it. Sarmin had forgotten the garden, where he had once played as a boy, Kashim’s mother Siri watering the blooms as the children pushed around her. How bright those days had been. He passed through Old Wife Farra’s room, charred and stinking, and climbed the stairs to the roof.

The garden had changed. Once, a riot of colour burst from roses, honeysuckle and clematis and green things grew in every bed. He remembered Mother Siri, holding her jug of water-but today it was Mesema he saw, and only a few weak seedlings pushed forth from the soil. His wife knelt beneath the statue of Mirra, Pelar’s silks laid out on the ground before her. As he approached she moved to pick up the boy, to protect the child from him, her sky-coloured eyes angry and cold. He stopped a man’s length from where she sat and held out a hand, his eyes drawn to Pelar, pink and squirming in his makeshift bed. Cured. Tears stung his eyes. “Azeem says you will not come downstairs.”

“There is nothing but death and lies downstairs,” she said, “give me a tent and let me live outside in the air.”

“You are Cerani now. Remember? You took my hand. You said, “We are Cerani. We carry on.” Did you not mean it?”

“How could I mean it when I didn’t know what it meant? When my own husband keeps the truth from me…if you had told me that you Carried Beyon I would not have let Pelar go.”

He knew that more than Beyon stood between them. There was Jenni, too. Sarmin looked again at the boy. He longed to hold him, to smell his skin. Daveed and Pelar both had a stubborn curl at their temples, just like Beyon’s, inherited from some ancestor they no longer remembered. Daveed! His heart split into two like Helmar’s stone. “You are the empress,” he reminded her. “There are duties, especially with my mother fallen. Your clan-”

“My clan has betrayed you. Have you not heard of it? I heard it from the concubines as we huddled up here, waiting out the fire. Concubines, Sarmin, told me that Banreh slit our soldiers’ throats in the night. What could drive Banreh to such treachery other than Cerani madness, the same madness that drove you to infect Pelar?”

“It is gone,” he said, risking a step closer. “And even so, you have duties.” A flash of blue caught his eye. Behind her, a butterfly searched for a blossom.

“You instruct me like a servant,” she said, pushing yellow curls from her eyes, “because you do not need me. Leave me to the garden and to my mothering. Once, we defeated the Pattern Master together, but now, you pursue your own fascinations, make your own assaults against the dark without me. This victory was yours, and I was there only to witness the destruction that came with it. I could have been at your side…”

“You could not have helped. I needed… protect…” The words left him. He remembered when Mesema had smashed the urn, just as he had smashed the stone. That, and the day he first saw Pelar, when she smiled at him across the room, were the last happy days that he could remember. Before Jenni, before the envoy. He had wanted to need her, to feel that closeness he felt with Grada, bone to bone, the intimacy he had pushed away when he handed Grada the Knife. But Mesema offered something else.

“Please,” he said, kneeling, looking into her eyes, “we are friends, are we not? From the first moment when you came to me in my room, you were my friend. My only friend, now.”

She met his gaze, lips trembling, with tears or a smile he could not tell. “I would like a friend too.”

It was a start.

Sarmin had thought that sealing the pattern wound would kill him. He had thought the effort would sunder him and the dead god’s doom would consume them all. In the end all that had broken was his magic. The world no longer presented him with patterns-perhaps it never would again. The loss troubled him only when he thought of the other wounds where Mogyrk’s loss echoed out, consuming all around, and of the great wound centred in the desert, dwarfing the five made by Helmar’s work. But those threats lay far away, and Nooria would carry on.

Sarmin had also thought that somehow saving the city, saving the empire, would leave it a better place, a world with new priorities where petty concerns no longer drew men down into childish squabbles. And yet here he sat once more, lofted above his subjects in the Petal Throne, whilst lords squabbled on the dais steps, entreating for advantages so slight or obscure as to be ridiculous were in not for the fact that lives depended from such matters.

Now though talk turned to Mogyrk’s faith riddling Nooria like a disease, and to the rebellion that had seen slave turn against master in the very halls of the palace. Sarmin’s own mother had been struck down by a mere delivery boy-they spoke of it with alarm-and yet they did not know her son had been taken, hidden among Mogyrk traitors passing through the Ways, lost in the sea of people that was Nooria. His heart called out to his brother. I will find you.

“These slaves must be taught their place,” Lord Zell raised his voice and his hands, each to the barest fraction below the level at which the guards might strike him. With Ta-Sann gone that level lay lower than before, the surviving sword-sons on edge, haunted by their failure to be at his side that day.

“And how should such lessons be taught?” Satrap Honnecka from his seat on the third step.

“In blood!” Lord Zell jerked his hands down, and Ta-Marn flinched a hand towards his knife. “In blood. Hang them from their guts in the streets, boil them in the squares. Would we not break a knife that turned against us? Strangle a dog that bit its master? Can any Cerani tolerate defiance among his properties?” Spittle flew from Zell’s thin lips. Sarmin wondered how it felt to be such a man’s property.

Away, across the crowds of lesser nobles, Old Mothers come to court, concubines, entertainers lined and ready for their turn, the great doors of the throne room opened a crack to admit a single figure, clad in black. Sarmin let Zell’s ranting flow around him, robbed of meaning, as he watch his Knife draw closer. For the longest moment he thought Eyul approached, so grim and lined the face above that black collar. Dark circles surrounded Grada’s eyes, the whites red with broken veins. She walked with that brittle step that speaks of warrior’s tension, held herself taut, her whole body a simple threat to cut away any hand that might be set upon her. Where she walked people fell silent, stepped back. On the dais Zell held forth, facing Sarmin, head raised to stare at his emperor, his mouth wide and red and full of complaint.

“A slave is property, no more. I can use my property as I will, and do so. If I blind a girl for missing a discard garment on the floor, if I cut out a man’s tongue when I find it too sharp… what then remains for punishment of crimes like treason? I say horror. We must show them true horror and-”

Grada came up behind Zell and slit his throat, pushing him aside to sprawl down the dais steps. She held the Knife dripping before her and all held silent.

“I was wrong, Sarmin. You were wrong.”

Ta-Marn and his three brothers drew their blades. The lords leapt to their feet, clamouring, the spell of silence broken.

Grada barked a harsh laugh at them. “I stand Knife-Sworn, it is not given to you to interfere with my purpose.”

Sarmin stood from his throne. “Let her approach.” He waved the swordsons away.

Grada climbed the last two steps. “We were wrong. This Knife cuts just as all the others. I am just as damned.”