The Emperors Knife

CHAPTER Twenty-Two

Eyul stared at the dim canvas roof of the tent. Near midnight, close to the city, they’d stopped and tried to sleep, in an attempt to reacquaint themselves with city-time. Soon they would walk the stone streets in the burning sunlight, conduct their business when it should be time for making love, and sleep when the cool breezes rushed across the sand. Sleep when the stars formed their patterns in the sky, pointing to other destinations, and to the time when they would not be together.

Amalya slept beside him, her breathing even and easy. The Tower comforted her; she harboured no suspicions against Govnan. She had faith that everything would work as it should, and that Beyon would be saved; otherwise, he hoped, she’d have run away with him as he’d asked. He thought once more about the west, and what was said to exist there: an ocean full of fish, islands peppered with fruit trees, and space. Specks of land lost in seas wider than deserts, places where a person might stop and think, even for the rest of his life.

Everything would change after today, with Govnan, with Beyon, and with Amalya. Whatever decisions he made regarding Govnan, things would be different.

Unless Beyon had turned—then everything was already too late.



He rolled to face her. “Are you still awake?” A question for children whispering under the covers.



Amalya pulled her blankets up around her shoulders. “Mmm.”

“Do you think Beyon sent those guardsmen?”

“You said not.”

“But if the pattern has him—”

She sighed and fell quiet until he thought she was sleeping. Then she spoke again. “We won’t know until we see him. But you should give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“Why?”

“Because you never have before.”

“That has no effect on whether or not—”

“It has an effect on you. It matters to you.”

He pressed his lips against her arm. “And you?”

If he could hear a smile, he thought he heard one then.

“Very much. Now sleep.”

Instead he rolled to his other side and looked at his Knife. Something had happened to it in the buried city when he freed Tahal. It whispered. When the sandcat had come upon him, the Knife had kept him from dying. It had helped him kill the guardsmen when he couldn’t see. And yet it spoke with the voice of a child.

He was not even sure it spoke with just one voice.

Perhaps he had gone mad, after all. But he thought not. He’d never noticed madness help a man as much as the Knife had helped him. This was something else; some other magic that was neither elemental nor patterned had infused the Knife.

He reached out to touch the warm blade and he heard it: a child’s voice. “Eyul. Assassin.” It blew over his skin, soft and calm as afternoon wind, and fell still.

“Who are you?” he whispered, but the Knife had nothing more to say.

Sarmin stood by a fountain, its gentle music the only sound in the circular hall with red walls. Oil lamps burned low and smokeless in well-spaced niches. He turned, making a slow survey of the chamber. He couldn’t see a door, but what he could see looked familiar.

“Find the Red Door,” he said. They were his words, but he didn’t own the voice that spoke them.

The fountain room. We have bled here. This is the red heart of the palace of the Cerani emperors. This the pattern. This the price.

Sarmin crossed the hall, seeing the marble fountain in the room beyond, and set his hand to the wall.

Sarmin watched the Carrier’s fingers search until they found hidden studs. A door swung inwards, noiseless, invisible until it began to open. The whispers came again.

The Carrier took an oil lamp and trimmed the wick so low it could barely sustain a flame, then passed through the doorway into a narrow corridor hewn from undressed rock. This building, the whole city, had been constructed about a rocky outcrop where nomads had once found shelter. Hidden pathways ran through the palace, accommodated within walls, making stone-filled voids. Sarmin could feel the rough floor through the Carrier’s slippers, the coolness of the stone as he brushed his fingers along the wall. The Carrier moved with purpose and caution, making turns without pause where the ways split. Left. Turn here. The lower way, Tuvaini said. The fool said. Take the lower way.

An unease grew in Sarmin, an unease he couldn’t name. The Carrier seemed to feel it too. Close. We grow close.

Ahead, flickers described a rock wall, torchlight from around the next corner. The Carrier slowed, pressed tight to the stone now as he moved forwards. From among the Many, several rose to guide the Carrier.

I was a thief; step like this. I was a spy; breathe shallow. I murdered; move in slow.

The stone scraped beneath Sarmin’s chest, or rather, beneath the chest of the one who carried him. Hugging tight to the wall, edging forwards by fractions of an inch, the Carrier peered around the corner. Three royal guardsmen waited around a stone span crossing a chasm. Sarmin recognised them all. Over the years he had gathered their names and even sketches of their lives, all sewn from fragments dropped by lips sworn to silence. These men came from his personal guard: Rotram, Ellar and Connin.

None who stood guard by his door was permitted to speak with him, to answer his questions, or even to acknowledge he had ever spoken. Few men, though, can keep their mouths from framing a single word day after day, month through month. Sarmin knew them from hours spent with his ear pressed to the door. Rotram the gambler, Ellar with his visits to the women of the Maze, Connin with his twin girls and, last year, a little boy, born blind and coughing, and dead within the month.

The Carrier set down the lamp and drew a dacarba from a scabbard beneath his tunic. From the host of the Many a single voice spoke out with confidence. A single will took the knife. I was an assassin.

Two of the guardsmen leaned against the rock wall, facing the chasm, looking away from the Carrier’s approach. The third, Connin, straddled the length of stone crossing the void, careless of the blind depths beneath him.

The Carrier waited.

“I hate the tunnels,” Rotram said. The torch in his hand coaxed sparkles from the light mail over his chest and struck gleams from his conical helm.

“They cut throats in the east wing last month,” Ellar said.

“The Carriers who attacked the vizier came through the tunnels. We all know that.”

“So we guard the tunnels,” said Connin. He spat into the depths.

The Carrier pulled back from the corner towards his lamp, the flame a mere glow around the wick. He changed his grip on the knife, making it an extension of his arm. I was an assassin.

“El, isn’t your brother on the rota for the west wing?” Connin asked.

But Ellar had no chance to reply. The Carrier stepped around the corner and in three quick paces reached the bridge where Connin sat with a leg dangling on either side. Sarmin tried to cry out a warning, but no sound came. Connin struggled to rise, but the Carrier caught him across the temple with a rising kick. His helmet flew free and he flailed for a moment. Then, like an inexperienced rider rolling from his saddle, he pitched into space.

The Carrier scarcely broke stride. By the time harsh reunion with the earth had silenced Connin’s screams the Carrier had reached the far side of the chasm and turned, his knife ready.

“Damn!” Rotram pulled his scimitar clear of its scabbard, surprise making him clumsy.

“You filth!” Ellar reached the bridge-stone first. Sarmin had never seen such hatred on a man’s face. It scared him more than the glimmering reach of the guards’ scimitars.

Ellar advanced, his steps wary despite his rage. Each of these men was a veteran, and the training of a royal guard ran deep. The Carrier’s wrist flickered and in an instant his blade was jutting from Ellar’s throat. The Carrier moved swiftly and surely across the bridge-stone, batted away Ellar’s weakened thrust and pulled his dacarba from the guard’s neck before he fell.

Sarmin marvelled that palace guards could be killed with such ease; as a boy he’d been taught they were invincible.

The whispers rose around him. Good kill. Slay the last. Bleed him.

Rotram charged. Rotram the gambler. The Carrier dived at Rotram’s feet and a pain like scalding water ran along the Carrier’s back. Sarmin felt it and cried out, and the Many cried out too. The Carrier’s knife struck out to the left and he rolled to his side and lay prone, his legs extended out over the drop. Rotram carried on for three steps, rolling like a drunkard, the tendon behind his left knee cut.

“Carrier Witch!” Rotram screamed as he fell. His cries trailed off. Sarmin heard a sick, wet crunch, then nothing.

Witch? The pain in the Carrier’s back made Sarmin’s stomach churn with nausea. The Carrier stood, and Sarmin felt hot blood running down his legs.

The Carrier moved on, unsteady, and reached a patterned hand to the wall for support. He moved on, steps up, steep, curving.

“Three palace guards. You did well.” The Pattern Master spoke.

I was an assassin. The will that had held the Carrier retreated back into the Many, its voice growing fainter.

“A pity you could not slay Tuvaini’s servant. Three of the Many to guide against one old man and still you failed,” the Pattern Master said.

He is the emperor’s Knife. Even to cut him was more than could have been hoped for.

“No matter. He works for me now.”

Sarmin stopped listening. The Carrier had climbed a narrow, spiralling stairway to a door of stone. Bloody fingers guided the dacarba’s point into a slot in the lintel. Inch by inch the knife slid home, hilt-deep. Without sound, and by degrees, the door opened. Sarmin saw his room. He saw his bed, and on it a young man sprawled in sleep, sweat plastering black hair to a pale olive brow.

Me!

He opened his eyes and saw her there, framed in Tuvaini’s secret door: a woman of the Maze, her white robes dark with blood around the hips and legs, the pattern-symbols reaching out along her arms, running up along the veins of her throat. She stood at the foot of his bed, dacarba in hand, raised high. And the eyes that watched him were windows to the Many.

Eyul whispered over his shoulder, “What kind of magic would a ghost command?”

Amalya didn’t answer; she was asleep. He rolled towards her and gathered her close. He could feel the beating of her heart, the joy of her firm, soft, curved shape. If they could lie like this for ever… But Nooria’s walls lay close, and things would move quickly inside; it was as if his thinking about the city sped the coming of day. Now, in the dim glow of early dawn, the light did not bother his eyes. Later, he would suffer.

Amalya’s bandages hung loose from her hand. Eyul smiled to himself; she was too fastidious to show dishevelment when awake. He sat up and reached for her pack, where she kept the fresh bandages, and cradled the clean fabric in his lap as he pulled the dirty linen away. Tossing it aside, he lifted her arm and prepared to wrap it up once more.

He leaned closer, his eyes straining in the low light. A bit of dirt, or a smudge, darkened her skin near the old wound. He wet a piece of the fabric and rubbed at it, but it remained, clearer now, three definite lines forming a shape under his thumb.

Eyul let out his breath. He didn’t know how the pattern worked, whether it tattooed itself from the inside or stained a body from the outside, like ink on a page. It didn’t matter. A blue triangle took its place on Amalya’s wrist, its head pointing towards her hand.

Sarmin rose to meet his assassin. She stood at the secret entrance. The Carrier flesh held the Many, each will bent to his destruction. Unbidden, his hand found the hilt of Tuvaini’s dacarba beneath his pillow. It had become dear to him, the embodiment of all his secrets, new and old, a treasure kept close to which his fingers returned time and again.

“See, I have a knife, too,” Sarmin laughed as the patterned woman closed on him. None of it felt real—or if it felt real, it didn’t feel important.

The woman circled him, looking for an opening. Sarmin knew her caution to be misplaced; the Book of War had taught him nothing of knives beyond their names.

“Tell me, Pattern Master, what am I to you?” Sarmin asked. He thrust his blade at the woman, hoping to buy a little time, and she skipped back, scattering black drops of her blood on the carpet. She moved as if to music, her knife part of her dance. Sarmin saw his death in the moon-gleams it sliced from the air, but the need for answers cut deeper than his fear.

“You’ve sunk your hooks into my brother, so what harm am I to you, here in my hidden room?”

The woman kept her lips pressed in a thin line. She looked young, perhaps five years his junior, hair cropped close, limbs thick with the hard labour of her class. She was the first woman beside his mother Sarmin had seen in fifteen years, and she came to kill him. The patterns drew his eyes though, more than her feminine charms. Patterns like Beyon’s, but different, and more complete.

“Tell me!”

She moved too fast for Sarmin’s eyes to follow. His knife-hand stayed motionless, paralysed by the moment, as the woman twisted beneath it, coming up to catch him in an embrace that bore him to the bed. The weight of her drove the air from his lungs in a crimson spray.

I’m stabbed.

Sarmin felt only astonishment that her knife could enter him without pain. The warmth and closeness of the woman woke memories of lost days. Sarmin lifted a hand heavier than lead to the arm that bound her to him. His precious knife lay lost in the sheets, but it didn’t seem important any more, now that he was dying.

Sarmin felt the woman’s blade twist inside him, metal on bone, a grating sensation between two ribs. Pain brought a sharp cry and another spray of blood from his lips, but he no longer had the strength for agony. He lay with his cheek beside her head. Her short hair was softer than he had imagined.

Even now the pattern drew him. One finger traced the half-moon on her shoulder.

A glow kindled within the assassin’s flesh. Under the idle scroll of Sarmin’s fingertip, blood-light illuminated the symbol and ran like fire beneath the symbols on either side, waking the pattern. It seemed to Sarmin that he was lifted from the silken bed and with another’s eyes he saw the two of them bound together, as tight as a lovers’ embrace, the penetrator and the penetrated, both bleeding.

Sarmin saw his fingers walk a path among the pattern-marks, waking a flood of light as if the markings were cut into a skin beneath which fire burned. His attacker strained, but managed no motion beyond the ripple of muscles. With each symbol brought to life, a memory or image flooded Sarmin, one upon the next, faster and faster, until he could pick just a glimpse here and there from the deluge: Beyon, walking across the sand.

An assassin, older but vital, holding his knife over a young woman.

Felting folk on red-hoofed horses, spying on a caravan, the pattern-marks on the leader, hidden, but calling to Sarmin with the voice of the Many.

Tuvaini, a Settu board before him, a frown on his face.

The Tower, stark against a steel sky, a great nail driven through the city of Nooria to fix it in the world.

The images rushed through Sarmin so fast they left him breathless. More, and more again, and he rose above them, borne on a spike of pain. And in one instant the pattern lay revealed beneath him, awesome in its complexity, beautiful in its simplicity. A pattern of many dimensions, reaching for the past and the future, enclosing, incorporating…

“It is wonderful, isn’t it?” The speaker stood at his shoulder.

“Almost perfect,” Sarmin said.

“Almost?” A tone of reproach.

“There.” Sarmin tried to point, but found he didn’t have arms. He didn’t need them. The Pattern Master saw it too: a dark line cut through the pattern, a wound it sought to seal. Sarmin reached to touch the damage and the glories of the pattern resolved into a single moment.

“You opened a door.” The Pattern Master reproached him.

“Now the Knife stands before your plans.” Sarmin reached along the pattern, back through the weeks, and he saw the ruined city rise from the sands. “You tried to kill Eyul.” I would kill him too, given the chance.

“I failed,” the Pattern Master said without emotion. “It is no matter.”

Sarmin withdrew from the vision, taking in the entirety of the pattern once again. “You no longer wish him dead?”

“The Knife is better broken.”

Sarmin saw it, an epiphany of fearful symmetry. “There are two sides only: yours and the Knife’s. The Knife can never serve you, but broken—”

“That would be perfection.”

No.

Sarmin ran from the Pattern Master. He hid in the details, driving his will along the twists and coils of the great pattern, seeking the symbols that marked his quarry, until, amid the vastness of the grand pattern, among the near infinite variations on the theme of the Many, Sarmin found the individual he wanted.

He made changes, subtle alterations that might escape unseen. The power came to him as naturally as breathing.

Sarmin could sense the Pattern Master seeking him, and remembered old games, hiding from his brothers, squeezed into closets deep among the silks, and the scent of sandalwood, the sound of footsteps passing close by, the rattle of a hand on the slatted door. Close now.

A pain beyond any he’d known blossomed between his ribs. He screamed, and screamed again, and opened his eyes to see the gods gazing down upon him from the painted ceiling of his room.

The Knife whispered to Eyul, one voice after another, “Do it fast.” “Yes, before she turns.”

They were right. Eyul ran the hilt across his lips, a rough metallic kiss, not soft. Not like hers.

“Why do you wait, Eyul, Assassin?”

Amalya murmured in her sleep, a sweet sound that made him grit his teeth.

“Do you want a mage among the patterned?”

“Quiet, now,” he whispered.

Choices. As decisions went, this one should be easy. He didn’t know if Govnan was truly the enemy, or whether to trust Beyon, but a Carrier must die. It was the law.

And yet…

She’d told him to see beyond what was shown. There had to be something more here, something else to find.

“Do it now.”

He remembered holding the Knife to her throat before the nomads came; he should have done it then. He’d been too soft, too hesitant. Eyul touched the shining point to her skin.

Skin was far too easy to breach; a fault in design, like so many others.

Amalya opened her eyes and smiled. Eyul pressed the blade home.