the same to the future.”
“And what are a sick boy’s ramblings to you?” Only Beyon had ever spoken to him like that. Beyon and Mesema. As if he were just a person, without title or any right to wisdom. Sarmin sensed more value in that honesty than in all the council of the wise, slanted as it was towards hidden goals. “Helmar hated you, hated all of us.” Grada held up the Knife. “You killed him with this!”
“There was more on that fragment, Grada. My name was there. He called me his brother in captivity. Little of that boy who wrote to me remained by the time he returned here. Maybe just enough to let me stab him. I killed the Pattern Master. But three hundred years ago Helmar, son of an emperor, my ancestor and blood, reached out to me, knowing I would save him from what he became, and offering me peace in thanks.” Sarmin hoped that it was true, that he could heal the damage Helmar had done.
“And he put the Knife into my hand,” Grada said.
Sarmin said nothing but held her gaze. He had sent Grada away to spare her the old mens’ judgement. He had never wanted her to take the Knife. And yet here she was, Eyul’s ugly blade in hand, perhaps as damned as any before her.
“Jenni may know a secret.” The words left him slowly, unwilling. “Something more dangerous to me, to the empire, than any dead envoy.” Sarmin thought of Daveed, saw the baby’s soft arms and balled fists reaching from the basket their mother put him in. If Jenni knew-if he had told her-if one of the Many had spoken of Beyon and Mesema to Jenni, even as he spent himself in her… How long had she waited to tell whoever placed her in the palace? Had knowledge of Pelar’s true heritage brought a snake to the women’s halls?
Sarmin looked away from Grada, from the Knife she held, and watched the gods instead, Herzu grim as ever but somehow vindicated. “That secret cannot spread.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Herran stood waiting in the cartodome, hands on the circular edge of great central table. He waited without motion, leaning out towards the blankness where nothing but unadorned marble described the inner desert.
“Tell me about the house.” Grada still thought of him as Rorrin, any other name would feel wrong on her tongue, so she afforded him neither name nor title. Perhaps Rorrin was his true name in any case, and Master Herran the invention. She wondered if that was something the Many had taught her, or just imagination.
“You look different,” Herran said after long inspection.
Grada looked at him, from the toes of his soft boots to the grey of his hair. Some would call it an insolence, not at all how she was raised to look at men of power, but she had stabbed an emperor and this was just Rorrin who crawled in the sand with her that first day. He was older than she had first guessed, closer to seventy than to fifty. Age had its claws in sunk deep.
In the desert, in the unforgiving light of day she hadn’t seen it, but here in the kindness of lamps and shadows, he showed his years. Here he allowed her to see.
“You knew from that first day, didn’t you?” She pushed back her robe to reveal the Knife at her hip.
“I knew from the moment we met.” Herran permitted himself a smile. “I caught you by surprise, alone, vulnerable, and your first words to me were interrogation. Without hesitation you wanted explanation. Focused on your goal. Straight to the point.”
“I’m a labourer. I wash, fetch, carry, clean. I’m not a warrior, not an assassin.” Grada remembered the men by the river. How did she do that?
“You’re a natural, Grada. The still point in the storm, action in chaos. That’s in the blood and as like to be born out in a peasant as a prince. But I had more to go on. We soon learned that any skill worked through a person by the Many left its mark. The Pattern Master housed archers in the bodies of men who had never touched a bow. When the Emperor freed those men they found they could still shoot a sand hare from a river barge. And your hands, Grada, were given to the best assassins in the Many to work the Pattern Master’s will.”
Grada held her hands before her, palm up for inspection. Too broad, too thick of finger, sun-stained, coarsened by hard work. She flexed her fingers, recalling the weight and grip of the Knife.
“They still have that cleverness don’t they, Knife-Sworn?” Herran nodded to himself, not requiring her answer.
“I would rather have had a potter’s skill, a weaver, something honest.” A mother’s touch that remembered softness and babies.
“Feh, and who would buy a pot from an Untouchable? Who would walk on the rugs you wove?” He shook his head. “Now you are the Knife. Chosen of the Emperor. It is given to you to keep this empire safe. As the blood fights infection while the mind leads us through our lives, Sarmin will plot our path, you will keep the body politic healthy. By cutting out the rot.”
“I’d rather empty chamber pots.”
“But that luxury is not yours, Grada.” Again the narrow smile, twisted with regret. “Fifty-three good souls have carried that blade before you. None of them would have chosen to. If they had then they would have been the wrong candidate.”
“Whatever you think, assassin, I am not a killer.”
“Why then did you take the Knife?”
“Sarmin needed me to. He wants a Knife who will serve in a new way. Sarmin is a different kind of emperor. Things will change.”
Herran said nothing, only watched her.
“A Knife that doesn’t slit throats is still useful. A sharp edge can be turned to many purposes.” Had Herran told her that? They weren’t her words. “I’ll find a new way.”
“You will find there is no other way.” Herran shook his head. “The greater good stands upon many small evils. Better to accept that lesson than be forced to learn it.”
Grada turned away, walked the perimeter of the cartodome where endless map scrolls lay stacked in their marble pigeon holes, ordered, capped with turned rosewood, the whole world picked out in inks, captured and stored. They stood among the greatest collection of maps ever assembled and Herran told her there was no other path to find?
“So, tell me about the house,” she said, returning her attention to the assassin.
Herran glanced quickly around the cartodome as if suspicious even of the walls, though the Ways did not reach into these levels. “Prince Jomla owns it. He lives there when he visits the capital, though he entertains at the Yellow Manse on the west side and would have his guests believe it is his home.”
“And who is this Prince Jomla?”
“A man grown rich off trade. His estates sit at a point where the river Xeres ceases to be navigable and caravans out of Hedrin may ford it. Barges from the West Ports unload there. War suits his purpose. Imports will multiply, his coffers grow fatter still with the taxes and duties.”
“The empire has many rich men. Why is this one seeding his agents through the emperor’s harem?” She thought of Jenni, slim and exotic, leading Sarmin to her chamber. The chatter among the servants for month after month had been of the emperor’s disinterest in the women’s wing. Was he sick? Too weak? Was Cerana’s emperor not a true man eager to exercise his rights? One of the royal cooks had said a real man held prisoner for so many years would lock himself in the harem and do nothing but rut for months. Grada had wanted to slap the crone’s last teeth out, but the serving girl chatting with them owned that Sarmin was too in love with the empress to look at his concubines, and that had stung deeper than the old woman’s slander.
“Meere has been following the servants of the house when they leave on errands. One went to the artisans’ district across the Blessing. To the tall house of Mechar Anlantar.”
Grada shook her head.
“A famed maker of toys. Jewelled birds that sing, silver acrobats that tumble on a flat table, driven by coiled springs.”
“Meere might have followed, but I’m not understanding. If this prince wanted himself a gold song-thrush,
