Grada crushed the pods and the mosquitoes left her alone while she pondered. Dawn found them still walking. With the sun still flowing up over the rim of the desert they saw the caravan ahead, circled and camped. Rorrin appeared not to see it and Grada broke her silence.
“We should hang back.”
“And look guilty? We’ll walk on by and see them again in Nooria.” He walked on, his pace that had once irritated her with its lack of haste now calling on her strength to keep up.
“And if they turn aside to some river mansion or local farm?” She almost kept the annoyance from her voice.
“Meere,” he said.
Grada looked around, sudden remembrance spooking her. She should have remembered Meere. But wherever he hid he’d done a good job of it.
Meere. She would remember him next time.
CHAPTER THREE
Sarmin paced, fifteen by twenty, fifteen by twenty. The tower that held him safe for seventeen years offered no comfort. The walls where Aherim and the others once hid now lay pitted, and dust bled from the scars Mesema had left there, covering his old books with a layer of grey. Whorls of ink and shadow had both hidden and revealed the angels who lived in his room, and the demons. It had taken years to find them. Now Sarmin stared at crumbling plaster and broken lines.
His old bed, stripped down to wood and ropes, did not invite. The mattress, soaked with blood from when Grada stabbed him, had been taken away and burned. Broken plaster bit through his silk slippers. A jagged tooth of alabaster jutted from the window frame. Grada had smashed his window, opened his eyes to the world. The shard threw yellow light upon his right foot, then his left. He came to the edge of the room and turned.
One room. Seventeen years. Safe years.
— You were never safe.
Sarmin squinted at the broken wall but it was not Aherim who had spoken. When the sun fell a sea of voices rose from some dark infinity. The Many he had saved he had returned to their own flesh, and now they shivered lonely in it. The Many beyond saving still rested with Sarmin. Those whose bodies would no longer receive them, their flesh perhaps too torn to hold a spirit, or the spirit too changed to fit in that which had once contained it. At night they raised their voices.
Sundown had arrived, but a different kind of clock spelled out this day. Mesema had screamed. They tried to shut the door, tried to hush her, but he’d heard it. Her time was upon her; Beyon’s child would be born this night, beneath a scorpion sky. Sarmin had tried to see her, but too easily he had let them turn him away. Women’s work, Magnificence. Women’s work. And an emperor had been turned aside by Old Wives.
And so he had come here, to search one more time for Aherim. His fingers fell upon the old table, where he’d carved the pattern. Tried to save his brother. None of them had seen this future in the pattern. Had Helmar?
Women die in childbirth every day. Someone had said that to him as if it were a comfort. The rough-carved shapes writhed beneath his fingers, but they were his to alter and cheat, not to command. That spell had been Helmar’s, and Helmar was dead. Another spare branch of the family tree pruned away, albeit belatedly.
“Aherim. Show yourself.”
He searched for a pattern. Two eyes together. A nose and a mouth beneath them. “Will she die, Aherim?”
He saw nothing.
“Zanasta?” Always the last to reveal himself.
Gone. Mesema herself had cast Zanasta out and now he would not help her.
Below the window and to the left an area of the old decoration lay untouched, a tangle of dense calligraphy that had yielded no face in all the long days of Sarmin’s inspection, no voice, only confusion mixed with beauty. He went to it now, set his fingers to the fabric, traced the scroll of the lines written out in black and in deepest blue.
“She comes.” Sarmin jerked his hand back, fingertips stung. The voice had rung through him, spilled from his mouth. “Who?” he whispered. His hand didn’t want to return to the wall; the ache of it ran in each tendon. Even so he set his fingers to the pattern once more. None of the angels ever spoke with such authority. Not even Aherim. Of all the devils even Zanasta never chilled him so. “Who comes?” Only silence and the defiant complexity, as if the artist had written in knots rather than script. “A daughter? Our child will be a girl?”
“She comes.” Again the shock but Sarmin forced his hand to maintain the contact. A jagged line tore his vision. Mountain tops. The sun sinking behind serrated ridges of stone.
“Who?” Sarmin demanded it but the voice kept silent. “Who!”
Silence.
A knocking brought Sarmin back to himself. It repeated. He found that he was sitting before the wall with his fingers still pressed to the designs.
“My emperor?” Azeem’s voice from outside.
The door-handle turned. From long habit Sarmin ignored it. His guards had always checked the door, but never entered. Now the hinges creaked and silk rustled as Azeem entered the room. He took silent stock of the ruined walls and the broken window before touching his forehead to the floor.
Sarmin gathered himself before speaking. “How is my wife, Azeem? The child?”
Azeem leaned back, onto the balls of his feet. “I know nothing of the women’s hall,” he said. “I have other news.”
Sarmin paused before the window and looked down upon the courtyard where his brothers had died. “Then tell it.”
Azeem stood now. Sarmin without looking imagined him smoothing the silk of his robe, brushing the plaster dust from its folds.
— He will betray you-the boys, where are the boys? — so much blood-I’m frightened.
— Be quiet, all of you.
After several moments Azeem said, “Govnan’s mage whispers upon the wind: the peace embassy from Fryth draws near.”
“Such magics.” Sarmin turned and met the vizier’s gaze. Azeem looked away, the jewels on his turban throwing out glimmers of the sinking sun. “Such powers exerted that men might talk across miles.” Fryth was the outermost colony of Yrkmir, the closest corner of its empire, and yet still so far.
“Battles can turn on such a thing. Wars can be won because a message was lost, or heard.” Azeem laced his fingers. Perhaps not trusting himself not to fidget.
“And yet when we stand face to face we have so little to say to each other.”
“Even so,” Azeem said, eyes on his hands. He wore no rings on those long dark fingers.
“Let us hope a peace can turn on the right words at the right time.”
Azeem bent his head in agreement. “Indeed we must move carefully. With victory so close Arigu was not pleased to call a truce, and he has many allies in Nooria.”
Arigu’s pleasure mattered nothing. A truce would be had. Sarmin’s messengers had been stopped by snow in the passes, unable to reach Fryth and stop the general from launching his attack. Now too many people had died. Sarmin felt each one as a loss, a shape removed from a pattern, leaving blankness. He spoke the words he had meant to keep behind his lips. “Let us hope my my council understands Arigu better than I, for in truth I don’t know what he sought through bloodshed.”
“It is the doom of good men that they cannot see what evil men desire, and their salvation that men of evil will not believe it,” Azeem said.
Sarmin returned to the wall, his fingers exploring the ruination. “You were a slave, taken from the Islands.”
