a man watching us.”
“Probably just a bandit. They wouldn’t dare attack this caravan, not with so many imperial guards.”
“A bandit?” She didn’t know how to explain his eyes, so she said, “I don’t know.”
“Let me see.” Banreh moved to the window and she pointed. The dune was too far away now, its shadows hard to discern.
“I can’t see him. But we passed him all right, didn’t we?”
“I suppose so.” The man’s gaze had her shaking still. She hugged herself and leaned away from the window.
The time passed; the sun lowered in the sky. Eldra sang little songs to herself about the strange god of her people. The tunes were not of the Felting folk; the rises and falls held the sounds of some distant place. When Eldra finished singing, she pulled a shawl from under her seat and wrapped it around her shoulders.
“Arigu will fetch me soon,” she said, and it was true; the carriage stopped, and the general rode up on his horse. Behind it came Eldra’s own horse, bedecked with bells and ribbons in the Felting way.
“Come now, girl,” Arigu said to Eldra. He made Cerantic sound even uglier than it did already. His eyes were sharp as he glanced around the carriage.
Mesema wanted to tell Arigu about the strange man she had seen, but she was frightened.
Eldra giggled and jumped out of the box. Mesema could hear the horse’s little bells ringing, moving ahead of them. Soon the carriage lurched forwards once more.
“Why does he…?” Mesema let her voice trail off.
“He is a man,” said Banreh.
“And so are you,” said Mesema. Changing to the softer, affectionate tone, she said, “Banreh, before, I didn’t mean-”
“I know.” Banreh moved on the wooden bench, shifting his leg with one hand.
“Will you forgive me?”
He smiled. “As long as you promise to be nicer to Eldra.” She liked his voice when he spoke as family. It sounded soft, like the rustling of the lambskins he wrote on.
The desert had already begun to cool. Mesema took Eldra’s place next to Banreh and put her head on his shoulder. “I will. I want you to be proud of me.”
He turned his head towards hers, so close she could feel his breath blowing against the hairs on her temple. “I am proud of you.” He placed a gentle, ink-stained hand on her shoulder and pushed her away. “We won’t speak of it again,” he said in the formal tone.
We carry on.
Mesema slid across the bench to the other window. The west, beyond the desert, was a place of mystery: cruel fighting men who rode boats like horses, buildings bigger than her whole village, and an ocean so large that all of the Cerani and Felting lands could hide inside it. This was all true, if the traders-who-walked could be believed.
Wind rippled the sand, and Mesema tried to count the grains on her arm. How many questions would she like to ask Banreh? They couldn’t be numbered, and she knew it. There was no way he could answer them all before he returned to her father and his war.
It hit her, as hard as the desert sun: Banreh would be gone, and she would be alone. There would be no intermediary, no protector, no adviser. An image of the dead-eyed bandit arose in her mind.
“Banreh,” she said, still looking out towards the west, steadying one trembling hand on the window frame, “let’s continue our lessons. I want to speak excellent Cerantic.”
Sarmin moved through a darkened hallway. He passed a door to the right, two more to the left. He longed to turn and open one, but his body would not obey him. His feet moved forwards unbidden. Some force held his eyes fixed ahead to where, beneath shadowed tapestries, a man stood in a dim entryway. Above the man’s head, tiles depicted a battle in shades of brown-perhaps the famous Battle of the Well, where the Cerani had defeated the Parigols once and for all. Sarmin tried to judge for certain, but he was too close now to study the tiles. He couldn’t lift his head. Something forced him to look upon the man instead.
Tuvaini. Sarmin would have smiled, but his face paid him no heed. A dream. He left his room so often in dreams, and yet it always took a second miracle to make him realise he was travelling through nothing more substantial than imagination.
The vizier’s lips curled back, revealing small white teeth.
He looked up rather than down at Sarmin, his eyes full of disgust, and held back, as if he thought Sarmin would make him dirty.
Even Sarmin’s fever dreams had never seemed so strange. He’d never dreamed his body to be a traitor to his will-or taller, come to that.
Tuvaini’s manner fascinated Sarmin. If everyone were to treat him with such disdain, he could move through the palace practically unseen. He tried to ask Tuvaini what had caused the sudden change, but his lips held still.
“I did my part; you can hardly blame me that you failed.” Tuvaini held out a clean palm.
To Sarmin’s surprise, he felt himself hand Tuvaini a rolled parchment.
“You’ve put me in an awkward position, to say the least,’ said Tuvaini, tucking the scroll into his robe.
“You have what you wanted,” Sarmin said. His voice felt odd, gravelly.
“So I do. And next I will cleanse your stench from the palace.”
Sarmin involuntarily glanced behind, to where he had started his walk. All lay dark. He turned back to Tuvaini. “I will leave, if it is in the design.”
“In the design.” Tuvaini’s voice mocked Sarmin’s.
For an instant a pattern flashed across Sarmin’s eyes, overlaid on the scene, familiar, compelling and fearsome all at once.
Sarmin tried to reprove the vizier for his tone, but he could not. Instead he turned away, into the darkness, where he felt something shift.
The corridors melted away into night.
“Dada?” A young girl looked up at him with wide eyes, her hair wild with sleep.
Sarmin could see the pattern woven around his arm, spiralling to the hand that held the cleaver. A meat cleaver? Was Sarmin now a butcher in the Maze, chopping goat and mutton to sell in pieces?
“Dada?” the girl asked again. “Are you still sick, Dada?” Sarmin thought the girl very pretty. She was dark, like his sister Shala. He felt the blood from the cleaver running warm and powerful across his fingers. Shouldn’t the man be practising his trade in his shop? But instead he stood in a dim mud-walled bedchamber, crammed with sleeping pallets pushed together. He had been sick. Patterned. Hidden away. Sarmin understood.
The man-Sarmin-both of them-they caught the little girl by the hair and raised the cleaver.
No!
With every fibre of his being Sarmin commanded his hand to drop the blade. The hand, bloody and dripping, hesitated, trembled. A hundred faint voices rose at the back of his mind, a thousand, more:
“The pattern finds no hold on her.”
“The child resists. The wife resisted. The sons.”
“She stands against the pattern.”
“No, she is my child.”
“She resists.”
“Erase her.”
And the cleaver swung, biting home with the wet sound of butchers’ work, a clean cut between the vertebrae.
Sarmin howled, or tried to, but he didn’t own his mouth. He tried to look away, but his eyes watched the meat open and the blood spurt. He tried to leave-with all his being he tried to leave.
Sarmin fell to his hands and knees, feeling sand beneath his fingers. No blood, no child. An unusual smell filled his nostrils and prickled his skin, but he couldn’t identify it, not until he felt sand beneath his fingers. Fresh air. He lifted his head and peered over the crest of a dune. Fifty feet away he saw an older man and a dark-skinned woman, both injured. The man held the woman, who sat with her shoulders hunched inwards.
“Where am I?” he asked, but no sound came forth. The sun rose, fast and faster, and he stood beneath a
