would be quiet. Peaceful.
But she remembered the apple Hagga had given her, here in the Ways. How it had tasted. How a butterfly looked, fluttering in the sunshine. The empire mother’s perfume and how Daveed felt in her arms, squirming and reaching for her hair. The things that coloured a life.
Daveed. She remembered him, the curl at his temple, his smile. He did not have the choice to go on or to stop. He was helpless in a hall where ghosts moved and illness picked one girl, then another without regard, and where slaves planned their secret rebellion. She had betrayed Beyon but she did not have to abandon Daveed. Fire is the signal. Mylo’s followers were everywhere, perhaps even in the women’s wing. Something precious. She backed away from the edge. Daveed did not have a choice to stop. She had to protect him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Out beyond the city where the sky fell to earth, curving on its suicidal plunge, the blue brilliance of heaven shaded through bars of crimson dawn into a dun haze, and out there, where distant dunes rolled in an endless sea, sky met sand without a join.
From Qalamin’s Deck the whole of Nooria may be seen, spread out in a dirty, sparkling, glorious and shameful carpet of many hues, washing up against the desert walls, twisting in the confusion of the Maze, crowding down to the banks of the Blessing, leaping Asham Asherak’s great bridge and huddling in splendour atop the rock of the Holies. Sarmin stood in the morning sun, the breeze still sharp with night’s chill as it toyed with his silks. Somewhere a child howled. Smoke lifted from innumerable homes, workshops, cook fires, kilns, furnaces, the red heat of industry, thin columns resolute until the wind made mock of their intention and scattered them into haze. Somewhere a child bawled. A baby. Long shadows everywhere, the city reaching beyond its walls, the towers of Knife and Mage throwing dark fingers out across Nooria.
“This is my city.”
White sails on the swiftness of the river, camels clustered in dun clots 260 within the stockyards west, goats beside them in smaller pens, caravans circled within their lots, safe from the desert behind ancient walls. The morning sun found gleams on the swollen turrets of prayer tower and town house, starlings lifted in dark clouds from roofs along the streets of Copper and Brass.
“My emperor.”
The voice came from behind him.
“Ta-Sann? Is that you?”
“Yes my emperor.”
The flat roof of Qalamin’s Deck stood less high than the towers of the Knife and of the Mage, less high than the room where Sarmin grew, but in all of Nooria there was no other place a man might stand and be closer to the open sky. Azeem had asked that the sides be walled. So many of the palace household had jumped to their deaths in the past year, servant and noble. Gravity held no prejudice; it would take them all. Sarmin had told the vizier that a man seeking death would find it easily enough. Emperor Qalamin had watched the stars from this place, mapped the heavens and their progress in minute detail, spent his life at such work when his attention might better have been directed towards the surface across which his rule was spread. Even so, a wall, even a rail, would steal the aesthetic of the place, and save no lives.
The child’s sobbing kept breaking Sarmin’s line of thought. He looked down. The embroidered toes of his slippers inched out over the Deck’s edge. A fall of over a hundred feet yawned below and it seemed to reach up for him. Sarmin took a quick step back, dizzy, suddenly nauseous.
“What am I doing here?” Another step from the precipice. “Ta-Sann?” “My emperor.”
Sarmin turned, feeling for the first time the weight in his hand, and in the crook of his arm. Daveed hung screaming from Sarmin’s right hand, dangling from the breechcloth wrapped about him and knotted in Sarmin’s grip. Nestled in the fold of his other arm, Pelar, sleeping despite the older boy’s howls.
“What?” Sarmin sat heavily, cross-legged, almost a collapse. “Daveed?”
Ta-Sann stood five yards back, his hachirah in hand, aflame with the morning sun. Ta-Sann alone.
“Where are my guard?”
“Securing the stair, my emperor, by your command.”
Sarmin’s arm ached, a throb at once sharp and dull, deep in the muscle. An image came to him. He had been holding Daveed out above that drop. Sarmin drew his brother to him, the child quiet now, trying to crawl away on some or other investigation.
“I was going to drop him.”
“So you said, my emperor.”
With the image and the realisation came a new insight, a taste of the person that had brought him to the roof, that had held the child over that empty drop, trembling with cold rage. One of the Many, not a stranger, but someone within, and so close, so familiar, that Sarmin’s mind shied away from framing their name. The image came again. Of his fingers knotted in that cloth, starting to loosen.
“Why didn’t you stop-” Sarmin closed his mouth on the question. Because I am the emperor and I may do as I choose.
He pulled both boys closer to his chest, Daveed squirming for release. Anger rose from some deep place, a hot tide, tightening every muscle until Daveed squealed, half-crushed in Sarmin’s grip. “Take my brother.” He relaxed his hold and offered Daveed to Ta-Sann. “Return him to my mother. Safely.”
“Ta-Sann took the baby and bowed. If he felt relief that the infant had not been cast over, none of it showed in his face. “I will send Ta-Marn to attend you.”
Sarmin only held Pelar closer and looked away across the city. When Ta-Sann’s footsteps had passed beyond hearing Sarmin spoke to the quiet.
“Beyon?” Again with more command. “Beyon!”
Somewhere behind his thoughts the Many stirred. Their ranks had thinned when Sarmin starred into the nothing within Beyon’s tomb. Hiding in the ranks of the Many had become more difficult as they became fewer.
“Beyon! He is our brother! Would you truly have dropped him?”
He is a threat. Beyon’s voice but spoken from a great distance, robbed of its old richness. A threat to the emperor.
“He is our brother! He’s no threat to me. I command you-leave him be.”
You are not emperor. An anger like ice underwrote the words even as his lips moved to copy them. My son is emperor and you have stolen his throne.
“It was you.” Sarmin exhaled the realisation. “You with Jenni. Did you tell her?… you did! You would have delivered Daveed and me to the Knife!”
My son is emperor and you have stolen his throne.
“What else did you tell her? Did you set her against the envoy?”
A smile twisted Sarmin’s lips, a smile he didn’t own. My son will have an empire vaster than mine. What right do you have to deny him with… peace? Sarmin’s tongue twitched against the word in Beyon’s disgust “You’re not Beyon! Beyon would never kill his brothers. Beyon saved me!”
That Beyon was a child. He saved you and now you steal the throne from his son, the true emperor. It was a mistake to keep you in that tower, a mistake to go against tradition. And within a year of my death that mistake stands revealed. You stole my wife and my son’s throne before I grew cold.
“Mesema was never your wife-”
Traitor!
A numbness stole through Sarmin’s arms and against his will he set Pelar down on the paved roof.
Still we can give my son his throne back…
Sarmin stood, his legs no longer his to command, an emperor not even ruling his own body. On the cold stone Pelar stirred but made no cry. Sarmin turned towards the edge. Two steps brought him to the precipice.
“No!” And some effort of will prevented the next and final step. He held there, trapped between two
