“He’s beautiful.” The child had tufts of black hair, a pinched in face, the tiniest of hands balled into fists-but he was beautiful. “He will be Pelar third of the name, Pelar Jakar of the House Cotora.”
“Must they stare at us?” Mesema tried to watch his eyes but her gaze kept slipping to the crowd.
Sarmin reached for the baby and took one little fist in his hand. Around him the hubbub of conversation, respectfully hushed, leaving the sounds of important men chewing, the shuffling of feet and swish of costly fabric.
In Emperor Tahal’s day the palace held a menagerie where sandcats and a lone tiger prowled in cages, furred wonders from northern forests lurked in green pools, and crimson scorpions writhed in a glass tank. Sarmin and his brothers had watched the tiger, speaking in whispers for the creature, thin and sunken as it was, awed them with the cool blueness of its stare and the white fangs descending from its upper jaw. Only Pelar had thought to pity it. Now Sarmin understood.
“This is theatre, and we are the players. And yes it is necessary.” Without a sure heir to the throne men of influence and wealth might set to wondering where the power would lie should things change. It is not good for an empire to continue with a single man standing between peace and chaos.
“Now should ill befall me there will be no doubt, no conflict, and all Cerani will know where their allegiance lies,” Sarmin said.
“On the grass the women ride out with their newborn in the second week to show him at each hall and hut,” Mesema said. “They don’t invite the riders in to watch before the blood has dried on their thighs.” “In years to come when these men are far away in their palaces a messenger may come to say there is a new emperor, that Prince Pelar has taken the throne. They will remember then that they stood here and saw him on his name day, the true- born son of the emperor. We’re buying his future.”
Sarmin kissed the boy’s hand and let it go. He raised Mesema’s fingertips to his lips. “You are of the Felt,” he said.
“We carry on.” Mesema sighed and hugged her baby closer still. Sarmin stood, holding his face still against the effort. The Many stole his sleep and left him weak. He turned to the tables and the crowd. If Beyon’s child could have been a girl!
“You have a fine son, Magnificence!” A round man in thinned velvets, purples so dark as to be black, with a neat and pointed beard darker still. “He is strong.” Sarmin nodded. “When he is older I will bring him east, Satrap Honnecka.” Azeem had warned him of this one, sharp despite the blunt bulk of him, with a hunger for more than goose livers and camel-fat.
His gifts of women were set to overflow the women’s wing.
“As handsome as his father, Magnificence.” A taller man, young, hair in greased black ringlets about a sallow face. Gethchen of Arthona: his grandfather ruled a land that now enjoyed the protection of Cerana. “He will grow fierce,” Sarmin said. “A warrior of the horse, like his mother’s people.”
He wanted no such thing for the child. Better a life of peace and books, a wife of his choosing, a future to be discovered. And yet the boy would have none of it. If little Pelar had been a girl Sarmin could have named Beyon as the father. Now the secret must be held tight. As Beyon’s son Pelar was the emperor, no doubt or questions: the true emperor lay suckling at his mother’s breast. Armed with such knowledge Gethchen, Honnecka, and a score of others would rise. The council listened to these men-they would no longer require Sarmin’s permission to return to the ways of the Knife.
Daveed would die first. Sarmin might survive that night, maybe the next, but in time the emperor’s Knife would seek him out. He had been dangerous to keep when hidden in his room all those long years. Out in the light of day he would be seen as a threat to Beyon’s son, and removed. Sarmin stepped out between the tables to walk among his nobles and the men who ruled the empire in his name. The four sword-sons of his inner guard closed around him, sharks slicing through glittering waters. Each guard kept a hand to his knife hilt, short blades of chrome-steel. In a crowd they would trust to the speed of knives over the reach of their swords. “Headman Notheen.” Sarmin approached the only courtier in garb as simple as his own. “How stands the desert?”
Notheen watched him a moment before speaking, eyes slitted against the sun though they stood in lamplight. “The desert stands empty, my emperor.
Wind whispers to sand and the bones of my fathers lie drowned.” He wore deepest blue, new shades revealed as his moved, as if remembering the depths of a lost sea.
“A curious turn of phrase, my lord.” The nomads from the inner desert went so long without speaking to strangers that they made an art of their words and spent them with misers’ care. Sarmin decided he would see the desert himself. Notheen carried a strangeness with him that made him more alien than even the Yrkman girls in the harem with their milk-skin and golden hair. “I would like to climb the dunes. I am told they stand higher than my palace.”
Again the pause, as if Sarmin’s words must first settle in the man’s head.
The nomad towered over Sarmin, stick-thin, sand-robes rucked around him like a wrinkled hide, though these had never seen the desert, fresh from his wives’ looms no doubt. He wore his face bare, veil pinned back perhaps for the first time in years, his cheeks stained dark by the dyes his people prized in their cloth.
“The desert is an ocean, my emperor, wider and more deep. Where the storms gather, the dunes over-top your tower of mages. I would be honoured to show you these places. Even to the Cliffs of Sight.”
Sarmin had seen the Cliffs marked, in the cartodome on one of the maps set in many colours of stone into the tops of marble tables. On those maps the desert accounted for more than half his empire, though not one in a thousand of his people dwelled there. The Cliffs of Sight lay on the margins.
Even the cartogramme, where each hill and stream bore a legend, offered no name for the desert, and in the centre amid the sandstone used to indicate the margins, only the plain white marble of the table, suggesting nothing. “What of the interior, Headman? Do I rule there too?” The blank whiteness of the map-table filled his mind and for a moment the whispers of the Many rose to cover Notheen’s reply.
“…survive. That place is not for men, my emperor. It is an emptiness that devours.” The Headman bowed and took a half-step back, as if he had no more to say.
Honnecka pressed close enough to make the sword-sons loosen their daggers. He cleared his throat, a deep unhealthy sound. Flanking him to the left a man of similar girth, his belly hitched up in bands of scarlet silk, rings on each of his fat olive fingers, many set with gems as large as eyeballs, a discordant display of wealth that owed nothing to beauty or balance. To the right a warrior in plates of fire-bronze, each stamped with the eagle of Highrock. His beard reached almost to his chest, showing hints of red in the dark curls.
“Satrap Honnecka,” Sarmin said. “And…” Azeem’s schooling failed him. “Prince Jomla of Westla.” He indicated the man in silks and rings. The name Sarmin remembered. Grown fat off river trade and a monopoly on caravans out of Hedrin, richest of the West ports. “And General Merkel from the Fort of Ax in Jalan Hills.” Of this one Sarmin knew nothing. “Magnificence.” The General bowed at the waist. Not a general with Cerani legions under his command, but less ornamental than many of his fellow Faces. Azeem called them Faces, the men named as generals and called to the palace so that nations with only a generation or two under the Cerani yoke could save face and name themselves allies and protectorates rather than mere outlying regions of the empire.
“General Merkel.” Sarmin made a smile for the man. “You’ve come a long way. There can hardly have been time for news of the empress’ condition to reach the north-marches and for you to journey south from Highrock. You must have left immediately!”
“Indeed I would have, Magnificence, but I had already embarked on the ride before any such tidings reached us.” The light gleamed from one plate of armour then the next as he shifted.
“What then set you on so long a journey, General?”
“War, Magnificence.” Merkel’s hand slipped towards the ruby-set hilt of his blunted sword, and then away as the sword-sons tensed. “The White Hat army-with its glorious men-at-arms and the fabled horsemen, the battle- strength of the plains-all passed within a spyglass’ view of Fort Ax on their way to the grass. They shouted out the name of Emperor Tuvaini as they carved a red path to Mondrath. And this man at their head, Arigu, told us they were to press on into Yrkmir lands.”
“And so you came to petition my cousin Tuvaini? Seeking what?” Sarmin asked. Merkel must have heard of the imminent peace, and with his ambitions nearly frustrated he would attempt to carve some benefit from it.
Prince Jomla watched them with fascination, switching his allegiance as each spoke, as though he watched the ball in a game of slap, his cheeks wobbling each time he turned his head.
“As you know, Magnificence, the people of the Highrock have long fought against those of Fryth, and fought
