been unwise. Moreover discussions in the throne room touched on the possibility that the envoy never arrived in Nooria but was attacked by bandits and slain along the borderland trails on his way to your palace.”
“Herran did suggest that,” Sarmin agreed.
“Such a fiction would be hard to maintain if freed prisoners from Fryth were allowed to wander, perhaps picking up news of the envoy’s arrival in the city, or even rumours of his fate.”
“An emperor is not allowed to apologise.” Sarmin set a hand to Azeem’s shoulder then turned away to look at the wall where his councillors had once lived in the scroll and detail of the decoration. Had he been mad?
Had he projected parts of his own personality onto imagined faces? Or had he summoned the wisdom of spirits living behind what men took for real?
He touched his hand to the broken plaster, rubbed the powder between his fingers. Aherim had spoken to him from the pattern written here, the sternest of the angels, cautious in his council. Zanasta too, oldest of the devils, and given to secrets. They had bound him to this room more securely than locks and guards. Mesema had given him his freedom when she destroyed them. I miss them.
Sarmin wiped his hand across his robe. “Sometimes I sound like my brother. A man with the lives of five hundred thousand and more in his hands should not be quick to anger, nor quick to take offence, nor slow to forgive.”
“Emperor Beyon was a great man.” A girl’s voice.
Sarmin turned in surprise and found Rushes covering her mouth as if scared of what words might escape next. “I loved him too, Rushes.” He smiled. “And I can see where you got your name. Perhaps that’s why he liked you. Both of you led by the heart. Rushing in.” Sarmin met Azeem’s eyes, pleased that the vizier didn’t look away but watched him closely.
“Good men, great men, men of the heart, all of them can make bad emperors.” Sarmin’s gaze returned to the stone, so ordinary in all respects and yet somehow fascinating. “So tell me, Azeem, how many prisoners do we have in the cells?”
“Two hundred and six, my emperor. General Arigu’s report indicates over three hundred departed his camp in Fryth. I understand there were many casualties along the route. Privation and disease led to high rates of attrition.”
“And how many old women are among them?”
“I believe there are twenty women, my emperor, I was not informed of their ages.” From the expression that passed across Azeem’s face Sarmin judged it physically pained the man to be found wanting in information. A knock and one of the sword-sons entered at Sarmin’s permission. “The prisoner is being helped up the stairs, my emperor.”
“Would this be the old woman you alluded to, my emperor?” Azeem tilted his head in question.
Sarmin held up the stone, not quite a perfect circle, not quite smooth, not quite black. “What can you tell me about this?”
“I-”Azeem blinked. “Nothing, your Excellency.” Again that look of acute unhappiness.
“Well our guest claims to have more knowledge, so I have extended her my invitation.”
It took less time that Sarmin anticipated for the knock announcing the prisoner. Fryth bred its old women tough it seemed. Perhaps the mountains there made the two hundred steps of his tower feel like nothing. Govnan had once told him that mountains, like the sea, must be seen to be believed, and lived in to be understood.
She walked in behind the largest of the sword-sons, at first obscured by his frame, then revealed. He knew her in that moment and the sight of her took the strength from his limbs. For a moment he stood once more in the gloom beneath innumerable trees with the deluge shedding cold across his shoulders. Stick thin, ragged, gristle and wrinkles over old bones, but somehow she radiated a strength that made the island warriors look frail in comparison. The Megra looked to the stone first, then to Sarmin, her eyes hard, the colour of flint. Sarmin had seen her through Gallar’s eyes and now she stood before him in the place where he had watched her from without and from within.
“I never thought to see another.” Her words, dry with age, wrapped in the harsh accents of the east.
Ta-Sann motioned to his brothers that they should put the woman into the obeisance. She must have been instructed, but like all these northerners she would rather break than bend.
“Leave her.” Sarmin waved his guard back. Beyon would have had her legs broken. That or swept her into his arms, calling her Grandmother and laughing at her audacity. Either one a possibility depending on his mood.
“I am the emperor Sarmin. What is your name, madam?” Sarmin had no desire to admit his knowledge of her, a stolen glimpse tarnished by the act of theft, though he had not been the one to steal it. He wondered what the Megra thought of his own stiff formality. She looked to have seen a hundred summers but two hundred would be closer to the mark. Did a hundred summers bring wisdom, and if so, what did the wise think of Sarmin? “They called me the Megra.” She shook her head. “A Yrkman pattern killed all the people that knew my name. All save one. A boy escaped, and your soldiers strung him from a tree.” She extended a finger towards the stone. “It wasn’t chance that put me in that cell. I knew a man who spent a year in it, lifetimes ago. I could taste him still, on the air, in the darkness.
I helped the guards select that one for me. That man called me Meg. His Meg.” She made to spit, as if a moment of sweetness had turned sour on the instant.
In Sarmin’s hands the stone grew suddenly warmer, more heavy. “Tell them to leave.” The voice came from behind him, not from within, not from the Many. A stern voice remembered from a thousand nights alone in this room. “All of them but Meg.”
“Aherim?” Sarmin wanted to laugh.
“My emperor?” Azeem looked surprised. None of them had reacted to Aherim’s voice, only to Sarmin speaking the angel’s name.
Aherim! Always so stern! “Leave me. All of you. Only the Megra is to stay.”
Sarmin clapped his hands to startle them into action.
Ta-Sann led his brothers from the room, ushering Rushes with them.
Azeem followed, a worried frown but saying nothing. As the door closed Sarmin whirled to face the wall beside his bed. He’d half expected to see Aherim’s face written back across the broken plaster, half expected that the scrolling decoration that concealed and revealed him would be spreading out across the wall once more like vine tendrils growing as he watched. “Aherim?” he asked.
“I heard a voice too.” The Megra spoke behind him.
“You heard Aherim?” Sarmin glanced back at her.
“I heard a voice.” She nodded. The Megra took six steps and set her bony hands to the wall beside the door where the decoration remained. “There used to be many voices here. Angels and devils. But you had to hunt for them. It took years to find some of them,” Sarmin told her. “They kept you here?” She didn’t wait for his agreement. “They kept him here too. Year after year. He grew up here, until the Yrkmen brought their war into the desert. His brother hid him in the dungeon then. For safe keeping. In an oubliette. To forget.”
“Who?” But Sarmin knew the answer.
“Helmar.”
“The Pattern Master.” Sarmin’s hand remembered how it had felt to thrust the Knife into Helmar’s chest.
The Megra traced a single line through the complexity of the scrollwork.
“He told me they brought him to a bare room. He was too young to understand, but he grew into it. They let him paint the walls. He would spend months at it, then rub it all away and start again.” Her nail ended its path where one of Mesema’s blows had cratered the wall. “This is all his work.
He wrote himself here.”
“My angels…” Sarmin hunted for his next breath.
“Echoes of Helmar, reflections of him, aspects and fragments.” The Megra turned her flint eyes towards him. “We’re none of us one thing. Someone told me that once.”
Sarmin held the stone up, his arm trembling with the effort. “Then this is his? The Pattern Master’s stone?”
“Helmar’s.” She nodded. “He made one for me, back when I was young, and he was… less old.”
“She loved me.” Aherim’s voice, from the walls, pulsing at the edge of hearing.
“You loved him?”
