A long pause and the Megra nodded, a smile of remembrance softening the hard angles of her face for a moment. Her teeth perfect, just one gone, leaving a black slot. We’re none of us one thing. A hint perhaps of the mountain girl Helmar once met. Then a shrug. He could almost hear the creak of her shoulders. “A passing thing. Love is like that. The Voice in my village, Voice Zanar, used to sing that love came like a cloud’s shadow on the mountain slopes. When you’re in it you don’t see that it’s always mov ing. Just a boy of fifty that Keller, but he had it right.
“I kept that stone. Kept it as my home-stone. Close on two hundred years sitting in the middle of my hut, watching me get old. It’s still there now I expect. Filthy rangers wouldn’t have a use for it. They’d be too busy stealing my copper pans.” She shook her head and made to spit again, before thinking better of it. Her hair hung in grey rat-tails, mottled scalp showing beneath. Dirt crusted on the ragged wool of her dress; she smelled of decay, but still Sarmin felt a resonance between them. Something shared. Perhaps just the knowing that develops in those who have been too much alone. “Tell me about Helmar’s stone. You asked to see me, put a charm on that girl to get your way. What is it you have to say?” He swapped the stone from one hand to the other as he spoke, and her eyes followed.
“It holds a power and a secret,” she said.
“I know. It drew me to his cell, kept me there until I found it. But what power? What secret?” Perhaps it was a key to the pattern, to reversing Helmar’s work, to healing Mogyrk’s wound.
“Ha! If I knew that I wouldn’t have let the austeres destroy my home, or your soldiers lay hands on me.” She paused and looked away from the stone. “I wouldn’t have let them hang that fool boy.”
“What was his name?” Sarmin saw Gallar had meant more to her than she wanted to let show. But sometimes what a person wants is not what they need.
“Gallar. Almost grown but still a boy. We’re none of us one thing-he said that to me. Be brave, he said. Always spouting nonsense. Look inside, he said, as if an old woman needs a child to teach her to see past surfaces.
A foolish child, wasted, hung from a tree. Did you know your soldiers hang men in foreign lands, emperor? Shop-keepers, wood cutters, charcoal men, foolish boys, all throttled on ropes under a tree. That’s the lesson age teaches us. The one about waste.”
“I’ve tried to stop this war. It’s nothing of mine.” But the ache in his throat, the memory of the rope tightening about Gallar’s neck for the last time-that told a different story. Sarmin owned the war as he owned the empire. Responsibility had to lie somewhere, had to be claimed. Sarmin turned the stone over and found no insight. “So all you have to tell me is that it’s powerful?”
“The truth?” The Megra reached out again to the wall. “I wanted to see you. To see what there was of him in you. To see where he had been kept so long. To see you in Helmar’s room.”
“You took quite a risk. The Reclaimer’s line are not famed for their patience.”
Again the shrug of ancient shoulders. “I’m an old woman with no roots left, waiting to die. They brought me a long way to reach Nooria. It didn’t seem so big a thing to travel the last few hundred yards and see Helmar’s heir.”
That sent a shiver down his spine. Helmar’s heir. Sarmin went back to where Aherim and Zanasta had hidden in the detail. He knelt before the wall, careless of the Megra. Had the faces still been there they would have been positioned level with his shoulders, an angel for one shoulder and a devil for the other, to whisper in his ears.
“All this time I spoke to the Pattern Master?”
“To echoes Helmar left behind, yes. Echoes of a young man, much like you, sharing a similar fate.”
“I never killed. I-”
“And yet people died, and you became emperor. As did Helmar. And every day more people die, more throats are cut, more boys hung from branches with a rope about their neck. It’s the way of things, what we do.
People hurt each other. Sometimes good men shed more innocent blood than the bad ones do.”
Sarmin set the stone before the wall. For an instant he saw himself setting the stone down on desert sands, stepping back, stepping away, watching that one dark point dwindle among the white and blinding expanse of the dunes.
“What do you know of the desert, Megra?” The question bubbled up within him and he claimed it as his own, though his thoughts had been very much on what lay before him.
“The desert?” A shrill note entered the old woman’s voice. “You ask a woman of the mountains about the desert?”
“Yes. What do you know of it?”
“You won’t make me go there?”
“No.”
A long pause and then, “Only what Helmar knew. Only that the story of men is being unwritten in the desert. Only that nothing lives there… and that the nothing is growing.”
She looked old. As old as her years and weary with them. Sarmin turned towards the scrollwork by the window, the place where he had found the voice and seen the first steps of the Megra’s journey towards him. “Here,” he said, and pointed. “He still lives here.”
The Megra stepped in closer, tilting her head. “It’s his name.” And Sarmin tilting his head in the same way saw what had eluded his eyes for so many years, lettering reduced to pattern and slanted through a confusion of calligraphic swirls. Helmar.
The Megra reached the wall, knelt, as swift as if she were a child, and set her withered hand to the writing. It seemed that the room released a longheld breath and in that moment each part of the wall stole into motion, the lines the Pattern Master wrote there so long ago flowing and unfolding, drawn like water to a spout. Lines writhed in black and blue across the Megra’s hand, wrapping her fingers, curling up around her wrist, sinking in. In the space of five heartbeats all trace of Helmar’s work had vanished, sunk into the Megra, deep as bones.
Sarmin turned, taking in the blank walls. Only the ceiling retained its panorama of the gods. Without their decoration the walls became alien, a close friend suddenly without a face. “He’s with you, now? In you?” The Megra stood. She smiled. He wondered if she had smiled in his lifetime. “Memories, fragments of who he was, hopes…” She set a hand to her face as if touching it for the first time. “Dreams.”
Sarmin stared at the walls once more and their blankness recalled him to his need, to the nothing growing close at hand, ready to erase more than painted lines. “And the stone, can you tell me its secret now?” “Nothing’s ever that simple.” The Megra shook her head, a dazed look to her where before all had been bitterness and calculation. “Let me think, boy, let me think. I’m full of dreams.”
“Ta-Sann!” Sarmin rose to instruct the sword-son as he entered. “Escort the Megra to high mage Govnan. Please ask him to consider her an honoured guest who must, for now, be watched over until we can establish why she was sent here with the other prisoners from the Fryth incursion. Tell him there may be much to learn from her.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
It was mad to plant a garden while the women’s wing was dying. Five more women had gone pale, the latest named Gala, a merry girl from all reports. Priest Assar only shook his head and gave out phials of poppy-milk: Mirra could be no help in this. And yet Nessaket had ordered plants moved from her temple to be planted here, on the roof. If she waited until Jenni had been caught, or there was no more plague, or for the end of the war, then Siri’s garden would be dead for ever. Let it live one last time. Even if Nessaket had to flee, back to the forested home of her parents or the oceanside manse of Tuvaini’s, she would first see blossoms on this roof.
A few days ago the pika seeds in her pocket had meant everything. Though she had chosen not to use them, Kavic had died anyway. Events had their own way of coming about, as if they had already been written into place and needed only time to arrive there. It made the fluttering of the courtiers seem futile, senseless, the struggles of a butterfly caught in water. The garden gave better results.
Dreshka finished planting the last of the roses and wiped the sweat from her brow with a dirty arm, smearing
