alongside them, quarrelling like brothers.
We have blood ties stretching back longer than memory. My own cousin is in Mondrath; my brother married a daughter of the House Sharth.” “You’ve come to seek mercy for them?” It seemed unlikely; the general’s face had nothing of compassion in it, handsome but cold.
“Only to set our claims before you, Magnificence. I have scrolls with me, from the time of your grandfather and his father, that speak of Highrock’s borders before the second Yrkmen incursion. I have papers that show my own father’s inheritance of three manses in Mondrath city and wide tracts of land to the south along the River Mern.”
“And it may be,” Prince Jomla added, his voice high and sweet as any girl’s, “that your Magnificence will require men of good breeding and independent means to govern these new and barbaric regions of empire. Men who would not call on the royal purse in order to establish taxation and impose social order.”
“Gentlemen.” Sarmin held up his hand, a silence rippled out across the room, broken only by the faint sound of Pelar sucking.
“Tuvaini was emperor for two weeks, unjustly, for Helmar was the emperor by right. And Helmar’s wrongs took him from the throne just as Beyon was judged wrong.
“An emperor unjustly on the throne for two weeks unleashed my army of the White Hat like a spear thrown at the people of Fryth. And for what?
Lies about a Mogyrk assassin, greed for lands so distant he was never likely to set his feet there. These are not things to spill blood for, my lords. Since my empress came to Nooria I have shed my own blood to the knife and killed an emperor with this hand. It is no small thing to kill a man. Better reasons are required than to satisfy memories held only on parchment, or to move boundaries on a map.
“In the Redeemer’s Cartodome the maps are written in stone. There is a message there. Guard your borders. Let no man set them aside, but neither push them forward. Cerana is full-grown and now it must earn its bread with honest trade. When stability can only be gained by constant expansion, something is rotten at the core. Cerana will grow, but it will get no bigger. Richer, yes, wiser, yes, but no larger. We have marked out our place in this world. Now it is time to build an empire within those borders, an empire such as the world has yet to see.”
He finished and drew a breath. The two lords stared at him, Jomla moving his lips without speaking and Merkel’s eyes darkening with fury, fingers playing with the ruby hilt of his sword. All gazes were upon the emperor, all mouths silent in the wake of his speech. Even Mesema’s eyes, blue as the sky, pointed his way, her red lips parted in amazement. And then she smiled, and the Faces faded away with the useless swords, the thick robes, the peacock colours. It was just Sarmin, and Mesema, and the little em peror, Pelar. She smiled, and in that moment Sarmin was happy. Notheen stepped forwards, his narrowed eyes sharp in his leathery face.
From among the colourful courtiers he stood plain and unadorned. All he needed to convey could be seen in his stance and his expression, and now, he meant to give warning. The headman had been speaking before Jomla and Merkel brought forth their politics; he had been saying something about the desert. Sarmin searched his memory for the words Notheen had so carefully chosen, and when he found them, the room’s heavy silence pressed against him like prison walls. An emptiness that devours.
CHAPTER NINE
At lanterns’ turning Sarmin returned to his tower room, legs aching with each step. Mesema had earned her rest, guarded by six sword-sons and the Little Mother. The perfumed lords had been settled into luxurious guest rooms, where they still might convene over trays of wine, whispering of their ambitions. Azeem sat at his desk, as always, sorting through the business of the day. It seemed the man never slept. But Sarmin must.
He retreated to his own room, the place that he knew the best, where his friends had once waited for him to find them. He settled onto the ropes of his old bed and within moments the tide of the Many rose and took him from his own shore, giving his body over to another. And like each time before Sarmin found himself drowning, sinking in the lightless ocean between memory and dreams.
He woke with a start, a sudden convulsion of limbs beneath a coarse blanket. The space around him lay night-blind and silent. He listened, hard, ears straining to manufacture hints from the currents of quietness flowing over, around, and through. Nothing. No noise had woken him, rather the absence of sound, the loss of something so familiar as to be unnoticed until it stopped. No bleating of goats, complaining even in their sleep, no dry susurration of breeze among the palms. Only as Sarmin tried to rise did he remember this was memory. Another man’s memory. And that man had kept still, listening, thinking. Wiser than Sarmin perhaps.
In time though the man reached Sarmin’s conclusion. He rolled from beneath his blanket, hands finding the floor deep with sand and drawing back in surprise. With more caution he reached out again, and came up into a crouch. He stretched out, above and to the side, finding the wall of a tent. A sigh of relief-quickly sucked back as the camel hair came apart under his fingers. A great piece of the tent side collapsed in, tearing from the rest under its own weight, as if rotted. Through the ragged hole above him Sarmin saw the blaze of stars, clustering in multitudes, gathering into the milky river of heaven dividing the sky as the Blessing divided Cerana.
The man crawled to the tent flap. Aharab, his name burst like a bubble at the back of Sarmin’s mind. Aharab’s fingers trembled on the ties securing the flap. He could have stood and looked out through the hole, but something felt wrong with the hole. Everything felt wrong about it. In the starlight the woven camel hair around the edges of the ragged opening looked silver-grey and it almost seemed as if the hole were growing, fraying into dust at the edges.
At last the ties were undone and Aharab leaned out. Sarmin half-expected a scimitar to descend and bring the memory to a sharp conclusion. Instead the sight of a sand-choked oasis awash with moonlight checked Aharab.
“No!” Sarmin felt the man’s lips frame the word, the feeling not unfamiliar, he had been carried before, by the Many and then by Grada alone, but this was memory. Aharab bore no patterns. The pattern waited for him in his future. “Matarai? Jana?” Anxious cries, unreturned.
Half the oasis lay drowned in pale moonlit dunes, palms emerging from their lower slopes. Two ridges of sand braced the waterhole itself, giving way to the hard-baked and stone-scattered ground of the outer wastes. Aharab hurried barefoot towards the dunes, stopping short of the shifting sand. Two guy ropes ran from wooden pegs in the hardpan to be swallowed by the edge of the nearest dune. It looked every bit as if the desert itself had surged forward in the night, devouring everything in its path, tree and tent, goats, even the oasis itself.
“There was no storm!” Aharab stamped in protest and spun back towards his tent. Whatever decay got into the walls had now spread, the tent collapsed, kept aloft here and there by leaning poles, and unknown objects, pots and pans perhaps, draped in the fragmenting remnants of the densely woven camel hair fabric. And revealed by the collapse, a second tent behind, a ten-pole pavilion, black in the moonlight.
For a moment Aharab stood still. The silence wrapped him. The air held no scent but dry. Even as Aharab watched, a spot of grey appeared among the tent’s black, spreading out like a drop of water soaking into hardpan, ripples on oasis waters… like fire.
“Al-Tari! Al-Tari!” Sarmin had no desire to get closer but Aharab’s memory sent him straight towards the tent at a run.
Perhaps Al-Tari was a sound sleeper, for no answer came. The night swallowed Aharab’s shouts and the grey spot grew, the changed cloth becoming weak, pieces falling away, unweaving themselves as they dropped so that only silver hairs reached the ground, brittle like sticks burned all to ash yet holding their shape.
“Al-Tari!” Aharab stopped two yards from the tent’s dark porch, his shout loud enough to wake every djinn in the deep desert.
The grey edge of a second diseased area passed into view over the ridge of the tent. Without warning the back half fell in on itself, a pole, maybe two, breaking with that dull noise that comes from snapping wood half- eaten by dry mite.
Aharab turned and turned again, an older memory painting itself over the sand, their arrival, with the boy, Jana, herding the goats ahead, switch hand idle now as the scent of water led them. The camels followed at the
