He held the stone to his ear, tapped his fingers to it. “And have you come to urge me to my throne room, Maniloot? To have me scold and chide my collection of wise men, to line up my princes and satraps, generals and governors, and keep the game in order?” He returned Helmar’s stone to his lap, looking for the thousandth time to find any hint of pattern in the vague mottling across its surface.
“No, my emperor. All Settu strategies are the same when the board is burning.”
Sarmin glanced up at the woman. She was even younger than he had first thought. Perhaps as young as him. A child for the priesthood. Her life spent directing prayers to Ghesh begging he ignore mankind and continue his long voyaging between the stars. “You’re worried about the war? The truce-”
“The Fryth are not the threat.” A sharp intake of breath from Ta-Sann. A priestess does not cut across the emperor.
She knew, then. Sarmin felt a hollowness inside, remembering the Megra’s words: the story of man is being unwritten in the desert. He remembered standing in the tomb, feeling the Many flow away from him like water into a crack. “Wouldn’t Ghesh approve of nothing? He’s famed for extinguishing the heavens one star at a time, after all.” The worship of Ghesh had always niggled at Sarmin. He couldn’t find it in him to pray to a god only in the hope of being ignored.
“The void that grows among us, beginning in the deepest desert, is not the emptiness of dark heavens. The darkness is being unwound together with the light, both robbed of meaning. This is not the desert spreading, my emperor. The sand may drift against our walls, the dunes march out and choke the Blessing, but in the heart of the desert sand itself is unravelling, grain by grain, into nothing.”
“And what then do you ask of me, priestess?”
She looked at him, her boldness gone. “Save us.”
And Sarmin, finding he had no more words, no questions or encouragement, let her go.
Azeem returned to press his forehead against the carpet with no mind to the plaster dust that ground itself against his dark robes. He gave off a sharp odour of sweat and worry, unusual for such a fastidious man, and he spoke first in a breach of protocol that had Ta-Sann stepping forwards. “I bear urgent news, Majesty.”
Sarmin waved off the sword-son, sweat trickling down his back as he considered what new disaster might have befallen them. He needed more time-time to invent a story about Marke Kavic, to deal with Jomla’s conspirators, to heal the wound that bled from his brother’s tomb. Time to unlock the secrets of Helmar’s stone. And yet the world does not wait for me. “How stands my empire, high vizier?”
Azeem stood and brushed white powder from his long face. “The empire stands strong, but the White Hat army less so this day. Messengers have arrived in Nooria, sent through the mountain passes from Arigu’s second in command.”
“No word preceded them on the wind?”
“Silence from Mage Mura.” Azeem let that hang in the air a moment. The wind-mage Mura was one of four remaining to the Tower, that cornerstone of empire, the might of Cerana manifest in runes and elemental skill. They had sent her to Fryth to help secure the peace. “We have been betrayed by our horsemen allies. Their new chief-”
“Banreh.” Sarmin had seen him once, through Grada’s eyes, sun on yellow curls.
“Yes. Banreh the Lame, they call him. He and the heir to Fryth-”
“But the heir is dead.” Throat slit. Sarmin remembered the blood, or thought he did, and yet Grada had told him it was Jenni who killed the Marke.
Azeem cleared his throat. “Marke Kavic had a cousin, Majesty, who conspired with the Windreader Chief. Treacherous savages!” The last he spat out with uncharacteristic emotion. “They must have learned, somehow, that Marke Kavic is dead.”
In the time of the Many such information could be shared with a thought. Now, though, it would take weeks. Word to be passed from mouth to mouth, along trade routes, over mugs of beer at the roadside. How could it have happened so quickly?
“And the army?” Sarmin turned the stone in his palm. Even now he wanted to turn away from Azeem, to focus on Helmar’s work.
“The army approaches through the desert, Your Majesty, but without Arigu.”
“Nor the mage?”
“Nor the mage.”
Sarmin passed the stone from one hand to the other, feeling its smooth warmth and the promise of magic shiver against his skin. Cerana’s great general and one of its last mages, missing. Perhaps dead. Whatever the Pattern Master had foreseen of this war, the stone kept hidden. “Keep this quiet for the moment,” he said at last. “I do not wish for the empress to hear of this from anyone but me.”
“Yes, Magnificence. But if you would just come down, meet with council, be seen by the lords…”
“No.” Sarmin held the stone to his lips. He would eat it if he could, crush it between his teeth and taste its secrets like salt against his tongue. “I am not finished.”
Azeem knew when he was defeated; Sarmin liked that about him, at least. His gaze lingered on the stone in Sarmin’s hands for just a moment, and then he was gone.
“My emperor?”
Sarmin looked up from the Pattern Master’s stone. His eyes ached with looking. His mind trembled with half- felt touches of hidden magic.
“My emperor?” Ta-Sann behind the door where once the guards had served to keep him in.
“Yes?”
“The empress requests an audience.”
Sarmin got quickly to his feet, crossed to the door and threw it wide. “The empress is always to be admitted!” Beyond Ta-Sann Mesema waited in silks of pale green, jade about her throat in strings, her hair piled and golden, tamed by ivory combs. Two slaves waited with her, Tarub and Willa, and looming behind them an imperial guardsman, their escort from the women’s wing. “A crowd!” Sarmin made an apologetic smile seeing them all huddled together on the small landing.
Mesema bowed her head and walked on in, alone. She held her shoulders straight and her chin high as she waited for Sarmin to close the door. Once his men and her ladies were shut from the room she said, “You keep too much to this room, Sarmin. Your subjects talk of it. Mad Sarmin in his tower. You haven’t even let them repair the walls.” She kicked dust from the carpet as if to prove her point, and glanced about frowning at the blankness as if aware of a change but unable to say what it was.
Sarmin let himself grin. “Azeem would have taken a week to say all that! He would have circled around what he wanted to say dropping endless subtle hints in the hope I wouldn’t force him to speak plainly.”
“Azeem is not your wife.”
“Maybe he needs one of his own, to teach him new ways?”
Mesema shrugged, glancing about for somewhere to sit. “If he wants a woman he will find one. The Old Wives say he has no taste for girls.” She shrugged again. “When he speaks to you, listen for the message-he is a good man.”
Sarmin watched as Mesema sat in the chair where his mother sat on her visits as she watched him grow, an hour a month, checking on him as a gardener might. Mesema had seldom looked more lovely. She was recovering from her pregnancy, less pale, less thin, her silks pressing against her form. Even so his gaze fell to the stone in his hand.
“Marke Kavic is dead,” she said, “but we may still try for peace if you would only leave this room. Now that Banreh is chief, I know you’ll have the Windreaders on your side. I can help you to convince him.”
Azeem’s news tickled against Sarmin’s lips. He should tell her what Banreh the Lame had done. Soon the dusty, defeated army would trickle into Nooria, cursing the name of her countryman, aiming threats at her people like arrows. And yet he remained silent, turning the stone against his palm. Marke Kavic’s death and the loss of the peace was his failure, one of weakness or madness he did not know; but it was one more thing that would come between them. He did not want her to see him that way, not before he found what Helmar had left for him. Once he had solved the mystery of the stone and saved Nooria, healed the wound, then he could tell her how badly he had failed in Fryth.
“And the people would whisper louder of madness if they knew that you spent your time up here staring at a stone.” Mesema pursed her lips, the compassion in her motherly. In that moment more than any other he wanted
