“To eat?” Sarmin asked.
Silence.
“She wants you to see it, Excellency. She is just a serving girl. She is… disheveled. Perhaps she is mad. I will send her way.”
Again the girl’s voice reached Sarmin. He caught the word “Rushes.” A name? It held a touch of the familiar.
— Send her away.
A whisper at the back of his mind, not his own voice, but not a stranger’s. “Bring her in,” he said.
The door opened and Ta-Sann led the servant through, a second swordson following behind her. When Ta- Sann stepped aside to reveal the girl she was comically small and frail bracketed between the bulk of the two guards. A pretty girl, maybe seven years his junior, gripped by a nervous energy, more bony than slim, her eyes blue and darting, hair the colour of amber. She held a silver tray as if it were her child, wrapped in her arms, its edge tight under her chest, gleaming covers hiding each dish.
“Show me this…” Whispers rose in him, one stronger than the rest.
— Send her away.
The image came to him of a jagged stone, clutched in a man’s hand, both coated with blood, hair, fragments of bone, flecks of brain.
— You don’t want to see.
“No, take her away, Ta-Sann. Tell the kitchens to keep her.” The girl made no move in her dismay and Ta- Sann set a hand to her shoulder to aim her at the door. As he turned her somehow the dish closest to the edge of the tray slipped and fell. The second sword-son had his blade at her throat before dropped item hit the floor. Cover and plate flew apart and something dark shot forth, coming to rest a yard from Sarmin’s feet. A stone, dull black, smooth-edged, a comfortable fit for a man’s hand. A shock of recognition ran through him.
The sword-sons took the girl to doorway, her toes brushing the carpet, body rigid against the threat of the knife by her neck.
“Wait,” Sarmin said.
Ta-Sann stopped and set the servant down.
“I…” Sarmin looked up from the stone to the girl. “Where did you get this?”
She opened her mouth but no words came out. Sarmin stood, waving away the sword-son’s blades. “What’s your name?”
“Rushes, my emperor. Also Red-rose.” With the knife gone she found her voice more easily. Instinct drew her towards the obeisance, but Ta-Sann’s grip kept her upright.
“And where did you get this stone, Rushes-called-Red-rose?”
“It was yours, emperor.” She wouldn’t look at him. Sarmin wondered at which point he’d become something that terrified young women. He turned the stone over in his hand. It held a warmth. He would have said from Rushes’ grip, but she had not been holding it. The stone was as he remembered it. It had seemed important then, back when he dug it from the wall of that cell, and it seemed so now.
“I don’t remember giving it to you,” he said.
“I-you didn’t, Magnificence. Not exactly.” A tear fell from behind the veil of her hair and glistened on her cheek.
“I would trust your memory in these matters more than mine, Rushes. I’m not calling you a liar. Why did I give it to you? What you were to do with it?”
“You told me to take it away. To throw it in the deepest part of the Ways.”
“Then how is it here?”
Rushes shook with sobs now, her words hard to understand. “I kept it. I know I shouldn’t have. But I needed help. I needed-It felt wrong to throw it away. I kept saying I would. I-”
“Did you know, Rushes, that the greatest crime in Cerana is treason? Not theft, not murder, not the slaughter of innocents. A man may go to the Maze and hunt children like rats, use them for pleasure, throw their corpses in the midden, and yet it is a lesser crime than for him to not do what I say. If I were to tell that man to pass the salt at table and he were to tell me no… that would be a greater crime.” Rushes tried to answer but he spoke over her. “I was not myself that day. You’ve done no wrong.”
Rushes lifted her head, enough for Sarmin to see her eyes past the fall of her hair. Sarmin turned the stone over in his hand, turned it again, squeezed it. It felt heavier than it should. “I am pleased to have this back. I have… read… about it. But why have you brought it to me after all these weeks?”
For a moment Sarmin thought he would get no answer. He opened his mouth but the girl shuddered and spoke. “My emperor, there’s an old woman in the dungeons-”
“No! The dungeons are empty.”
“I–I spoke with an old woman, my emperor.”
“I ordered the dungeons cleared!” Sarmin turned to Ta-Sann. “Summon my vizier.”
As Ta-Sann relayed the order to one of his men Sarmin motioned for the girl to continue.
“I wanted to put the stone back in that little cell. I needed to. The stone insisted.” She paused and looked at her hands, turned up as if for inspection, or to catch her tears, though she had stopped crying. Her voice took on a sing-song tone as if she were too deep in memory to remember where she was. “But the cell was locked. An old woman put her face to the window. I wanted to give her the stone, asked her to put it back, but she wouldn’t take it. She said I must take the stone to the emperor and tell him that she knew the man who hid it there in that… she called it an oubliette. Rhymes with forget, that’s how she told me to remember it.”
Rushes’ head snapped up, sudden as if startling from sleep, her hair swung to either side, leaving her face to face with Sarmin, eyes wide and staring into his. “I didn’t want to come to you. I didn’t. I was scared. But it’s important. I know it is.”
“Ta-Sann, have this prisoner brought to me. This old woman.” “Here, my emperor?”
Sarmin thought of having her taken to the throne room, of sitting above his captive in the Petal Throne, lord of all Cerana. “Here,” he said. “This is where it began.”
Azeem entered the room, robes swishing, with Ta-Sann behind him, returning from sending for the old woman. The vizier took in the scene with a quick glance. Rushes, red-eyed, still clutching her tray, and held in turn by a sword-son, Sarmin standing in the wreckage of his former prison. The vizier’s eyes caught for a moment on the stone in Sarmin’s hands, then moved on.
“My emperor has need of me?” He went into the obeisance, and Sarmin let him, counting out his temper while the man kept his face to the dusty carpet.
“Rise.” Sarmin waited while the Azeem got to his feet, traces of plaster on his cheekbones making sharp contrast with the darkness of his skin. Sarmin remembered when they had spoken together of the islands. We are both strangers here. Sarmin’s anger softened. “I ordered the dungeons emptied, but I’m told we keep old women locked there now?”
Azeem bowed his head. “The dungeons were emptied, my emperor, in obedience to your command. Each prisoner was released or executed according to their crime, and each man to die was first taken to the wall where they spoke with priest Dinar of Herzu’s order and saw the sky.”
“The dungeons were emptied… but now they are being filled again?”
Sarmin saw the gap he had left in his order.
“Even so, my emperor. Prisoners from the Fryth campaign arrived during the night in waggons from the front.”
“Vizier, the man I want in your slippers is a man who obeys the intent of my commands not one who contorts around the letter of them. That island of yours…?”
“Konomagh, my emperor.”
“It may be that you should consider a return to it.”
“As my emperor commands.” Azeem bowed lower. “But before I empty the dungeons again may I offer the reasons for placing the Fryth there?”
Sarmin sealed his lips and taking the pause for assent Azeem continued.
“The prisoners arrived after envoy Kavic and Austere Adam, having taken the longer route. They were still being processed when news of the envoy’s death reached me. Many of these prisoners are soldiers, violent men with grievances. To loose such men outside the palace on a night when their envoy had been murdered would have
