“Greetings, Your Majesty,” she said in Cerantic. “Yes, Your Majesty.” The words felt sharp and unmanageable. But she would learn them.
She turned towards the fields, breathing in the scents of home. A sharp wind came, bending the grass, and Mesema’s hair blew across her face in a dun storm. The grass thrashed, furious before the squall, and in the waving tumult she saw something, or thought she did. She shook her hair out so it streamed behind her and climbed the fence of the horse-pen for a better vantage point. A Red Hoof thrall, shovelling manure, gave her a look, halfsmirk, half-sneer. She turned her gaze away from him.
In the rippling grass, ephemeral amid the seething green, gone and there again, a pattern lay, writ wide from West Ridge to East. Mesema gasped and blinked away the wind-tears. This was different from what she had seen before. Moons, half-circles and pointed shapes spread from one hill to the next, a pattern repeating and expanding in intricate themes, reaching out in all directions. The lines and underscores around the alien signs reminded her of Banreh’s scratchings.
The wind cracked and Mesema fought for balance on the round logs of the horse-pen. A hare ran across the shadowed lines as if they held his path, binding him to a labyrinth. He turned wildly, this way and that, as if beneath the very talons of the eagle, drawing always closer. His brownish fur faded into the darker green. She could hear the rustling of his feet, but could no longer tell where in the pattern he ran.
Though she didn’t understand it, she murmured a prayer to the Hidden God to thank Him for the message. The wind shook her once more, and fell still. Each blade of grass raised its head towards the sun, as if there had never been any message at all.
Chapter Seven
'The supplicant may now approach.”
Tuvaini walked forwards and ran a sour eye across the young Tower mage. Though she kept her face blank, Tuvaini suspected some hidden enjoyment in naming the high vizier “supplicant.”
“I would speak with Govnan.” No titles or honorific from the supplicant.
“High Mage Govnan has been informed of your presence.” The young mage met Tuvaini’s gaze, her eyes the winter-blue of the wind-sworn.
So I wait on his pleasure, do I? Tuvaini held his peace. He craned his head to look up at the Tower. The stonework cut a dark line across the sky; he could make out no detail.
“We so seldom look up.” Tuvaini addressed her in a friendly tone. “We go about our duties in this city that reaches for the heavens, and we so rarely raise our eyes above the first six feet of it all.”
If you don’t draw your enemy out, what have you to work with?
“The wind-sworn are ever watchful of the skies.” Though she had Cerani coloring, something in the curve of her cheekbones, and in the way she clipped her words, suggested her homelands lay on the easternmost borders of empire. It seemed to Tuvaini that hardly a mage among the two-score of the Tower hailed from Nooria. Perhaps the local water left one unsuited to the pursuit of magic, or maybe it wasn’t a calling fit for true Cerani. Either way, the presence of so many near-foreigners in the heart of the city always irked him. Supplicant! The word burned.
“And what have you seen in the skies?” He kept the scorn from his voice. No wind-sworn had flown the heavens in his lifetime, not since the great Alakal. He had always felt his father’s stories of Alakal were tales for children rather than for men.
“Patterns.” The half-smile she offered held a strangeness that silenced him. In the Tower’s courtyard minutes crawled by as if time itself flagged in the heat. The vast enclosure covered some twenty-five acres, and yet the Tower’s shadow still reached the walls, overtopping them and delving into the palace sprawl. Tuvaini didn’t need reminding of the Tower’s reach. He glanced at the young mage again. He didn’t trust her. He didn’t trust any of them. He never knew whether he was speaking to the person, or to the elemental trapped inside.
“High Mage Govnan will see you now.” She turned to face the door, the sudden movement setting her robes swirling around her. The brass door swung open at the touch of her fingertips.
Tuvaini followed her in. He remembered the heavy metal door from his last visit to the Tower. “The emperor does not have such a door at the entrance to his throne room,” he said.
I don’t have such a door!
“We are the emperor’s door, his gatekeepers. There are foes to whom a door of brass is as nothing, and yet we keep them from the emperor.” She led him through the entrance hall, past the statued relics of the rock- sworn.
“Invisible defences against invisible enemies. It puts me in mind of the old fable wherein the emperor buys a set of invisible clothes,” Tuvaini said. He paused at the last of the statues. “Well, well. Old High Mage Kobar. His prisoner finally escaped.”
The mage turned back. If she took offence, none of it reached her face. “All bound spirits seek release.”
Tuvaini shuddered: to have something like that inside, growing and gaining power, until at last it no longer serves, but masters…
The idea filled him with peculiar horror.
“Lead on,” he said.
They reached the stairs. Tuvaini remembered them well; he saved his breath for the climb.
The high mage kept his rooms not at the top of the Tower, but in the middle. Tuvaini had no notion what the upper half of the Tower housed. His escort led him to Govnan’s door, and took her leave with the briefest of bows.
“It’s not locked.”
The voice from behind the door took Tuvaini by surprise. He cast a glance left, then right, to see if anyone had seen him startle, but the corridor lay empty. He straightened the sash of his robe and stepped through.
Govnan watched him enter from his seat, an iron chair set against the far wall. The back rose over him and curled forwards in a vaguely claw-like manner, enclosing Govnan within its grip. He was a wizened ember of a man, but his eyes were bright in a shadowed face. Every Tower mage Tuvaini had met was either a youth or an elder, as though the burden of power stole away their middle years.
“High Mage.” Tuvaini inclined his head by the smallest fraction.
“Vizier.” Govnan waved away formality with an agitated hand. Tuvaini took two steps into the room. It smelled of char. The place lay bare, with no stick of furniture save the high mage’s chair, nor any hint of ornament.
“I come on a matter of the utmost importance.” Tuvaini returned his gaze to Govnan.
“What else would drag you to the Tower?” The high mage’s voice held a crackle of irritation. The flame-sworn were always tetchy. “You have not seen fit to seek our counsel in eighteen years. I am fascinated to learn what has finally brought you to our doors.”
“I am concerned for the health of the emperor,” Tuvaini said. Govnan held silent. He could have been rock- sworn, for all the motion in him.
The silence stretched.
“And for the health of his brother.” There was no way Govnan could know what was happening in the palace, but his gaze unsettled Tuvaini nonetheless.
A tight smile flickered across Govnan’s face. “You never forgave the Tower for his brother, did you, Vizier?”
“You broke with tradition.” Tuvaini let his anger speak. “You broke Tahal’s law, and now we have a madman who might do anything-a raving prince who cannot rule.” Tuvaini smacked fist to palm and strode forwards. “Beyon has no other heir-”
Govnan stood, sudden and unexpected. There was a fire behind his eyes. “If Sarmin is mad, that is no one’s fault but your own, Vizier. The Tower spoke to save the child. It was you who incarcerated him.”
“He had to be held secret. Any fool-”
Tuvaini staggered before a blast of heat. His words dried on his tongue.
Fire blossomed in Govnan’s hands, and they burned as though soaked in oil. His lips peeled back in a snarl from blackened teeth in a mouth stretched so wide that it hurt to watch.
