her to want him, needed her to need him. And yet he had left her in the women’s wing to live a life separate from the threats that consumed his time. Had he meant to protect her, or protect himself from the clear insight of her gaze? He watched her as she spoke, waited for her to reach out, to show that she wanted to touch him. But instead she folded her hands in her lap. “They tell me it came from the dungeons. Some old woman brought it to you out of a cell?”
Sarmin sat before her, cross-legged on the carpet. He leaned forward and placed the stone on her lap like an offering. “Helmar made it.”
“The Pattern Master?” Mesema flinched as if he had placed a rat-spider on her legs. “It can be nothing good!” She raised her hands to her shoulders, palms out.
“Perhaps.” Sarmin sighed and retrieved the stone. “But he wasn’t always the creature we saw. He grew here.” He set his fingers to the floor. “Walked my paths, shared my blood. He was a young man full of passions, hopes, ambition, all locked away here year upon year. I can’t hate him, Mesema.”
Mesema said nothing, only looked away to the narrow slot of sky through the Sayakarva window. They sat in silence for a time.
“Gala fell sick last night,” Mesema said.
“Who?”
“Gala! She’s one of your harem. I thought I mentioned her…”
It pulled them apart. How many times had his lips spoken to Mesema with another man’s voice? “Has Assar sent a healer?” Sarmin asked.
“Assar came himself.”
Sarmin blinked at that. “Mirra’s own priest attending a concubine? Was her illness that interesting?”
“Her hair turned white and she won’t speak.” Mesema drew her knees up, hunching in, all of a sudden a nervous girl lost within an empress’ dress. “And, Sarmin, her eyes…” A shudder ran through her. “She’s not the first. Irisa fell ill before her.”
Sarmin stood and went to the window, rising to his toes so he could look down upon Beyon’s mausoleum, a squat, wide building out beyond the palace walls.
“I’m scared, Sarmin.”
“Yes.” The mausoleum’s ceiling had fallen in two days before. He had heard it as distant thunder. Now the outer walls shed their plaster in white clouds, teased away by the wind like funeral smoke, bare and pale brick exposed beneath.
“And the guards speak of ghosts, here and in the city also. Tarub saw one, in the Red Room, a reflection in the fountain. She won’t speak of it. If you ask her what she saw she tells you, “nothing”, but it haunts her. She won’t walk anywhere alone. Willa sleeps with her now.”
The djinn. Notheen had warned of them. Sarmin pressed the stone to his forehead. “The trouble spreads from the tomb.” He turned to face her.
“Beyon’s tomb?” She coloured at that.
“Yes.” At last she knew. He had kept it from her so long. “It isn’t pattern work. Something new, or rather something old, from the desert, bleeding in through the hole Helmar made when you-” He lifted a hand to stop her objection. “When Beyon died.”
“But I have Seen it,” she said, to his surprise, “and never knew-can it be stopped?” Mesema leaned forwards, eyes intent. “How can I help?”
“I don’t know.” Sarmin brought his shoulders forward, trying to shrug off the helplessness. “The mages might…” He let out his exasperation in a long breath. “I don’t know.”
“Will your gods help us?”
Sarmin looked at her and for a moment saw once again the young girl on her horse, trekking the grasslands. The tribes spoke to their Hidden God, and he spoke back. “Our gods in Cerana are not so…” He groped for the word. Real? “They don’t help, only watch.” He gestured to the ceiling where the pantheon crowded amid painted heavens. “If I were to set the priests to healing this wound, and were they to fail, it would erode Cerana’s faith at a time when our people are already flocking to the Yrkman church.”
“What then?” She showed no mercy, and why should she? He was emperor, Sarmin the Saviour, the light of heaven, pattern mage. He was her husband. What mother wouldn’t demand the same when her baby lay in the path of destruction? “What will you do, Sarmin?”
“I… I don’t know.” His hand rose, the black stone filling it. “Perhaps this…”
“But you said pattern magic wouldn’t work, you-”
“I don’t know!” His answer came out louder and more angry than he had intended. He knelt beside her chair, before the shock on her face had time to harden into something else. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. And I’m scared too.”
A dull rumbling rolled across the silence that followed. The wall of Beyon’s tomb falling. There would be no hiding it now. Somewhere away towards the kitchen wing a high wail went up, perhaps another person emptied, perhaps another djinn staring hungry from the shadows. Mesema took his hand, squeezed it, hard. “We’ll find a way. We are Cerani. We carry on.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Sarmin went to the Megra. In the Book of Etiquette an emperor is instructed never to visit but always to summon. The world flows to the feet of the mighty. From the Petal Throne the emperor may see all that concerns him, for he is the light of heaven. Sarmin had spent days upon each page of that fat tome, but a year into his freedom it occurred to him that a man who can have his brothers killed, who can send an Untouchable to kill a prince and find none to stop him should hardly be instructed by a book, however many pages it may possess.
Ta-Marn knocked upon the door then pushed it open. An emperor at least does not wait on permission.
In the bright room beyond, the Megra sat with an old servant woman, one of his mother’s perhaps; she seemed familiar. They sat amid white cushions scattered in abandon, a Settu board between them.
“Who is winning?” Sarmin walked past Ta-Marn. The serving woman sent the board spinning as she fell into her obeisance.
“No one, now.” The Megra gave him half a gap-toothed smile. They had traded her crawling rags for a grey shift from the kitchen staff.
Sarmin rifled through the pages of the Book of Etiquette. Were commoners even permitted to play Settu? Were women? It occurred to him that he didn’t care. “Perhaps we could speak alone. Ta-Marn will escort…”
“Her name is Sahree. You should let her up. She’s an old woman and not well.”
“Ta-Marn will escort Sahree to a seat in some other chamber.”
The sword-son followed his instructions and the Megra scooped up Settu tiles, standing some on the board. At last they both sat facing each other, the light streaming in through high windows.
“Has the high mage found you useful, Megra?” Sarmin asked. He had wondered what Govnan would make of her, that rare individual at once older, more shrewd, and more sour than himself.
The Megra licked the corner of her mouth as if tasting the memory. “I remembered a thing or two that his tower had forgotten. His kind have spent too long looking into the fire, watching the skies, contemplating the deep places. The secrets most worth having are to be found close at hand. Always.”
“Helmar told you that?”
“I told me that.”
“And did these secrets please Govnan?”
“They puzzled him. Good secrets are always a puzzle.” She took the last grape from a copper bowl and set it in her mouth. “His mages seek new accords with their cousins in flame and air. The void has opened on man and elemental alike and fear breeds compromise.”
“You know about the problem in my brother’s tomb, then?”
“You have so many brothers in tombs, emperor.”
