losing its contents. Long ago someone had placed it beneath a painting on the rock wall, together with other now- mouldering objects. He leaned in towards the painting and made out a woman, outlined in red and brown, with both hands held up to the sky. She looked rather like Mirra, and he remembered the hermit’s words: what had become of these ancient worshippers? He picked up the old jug and replaced it beneath the goddess. Do not take from the gods what is theirs.
He heard a shuffling on his left and twisted towards the sound, one hand at the ready by his sheath.
Eyul smelled fire, and Island herbs. Amalya, clothed in white, from her robes to the bandages around her arm, cut out from the darkness like a star. He willed his feet to stillness. “How… how is your arm?” he asked, rooting his shoes into the rock.
“Better.” Amalya turned to the painting. “The hermit makes a great deal of these.”
“I respect the gods,” said Eyul, “but it doesn’t do to think overmuch about them.” Tuvaini’s words. “Why does he frighten you so?”
She swallowed. “Do you think he believes in them?” She looked sideways at him, more at his shoes than his face.
“If anything, this shows that Mirra has ruled these lands for more than an age.”
She touched the painting, drew her fingers across the figure’s bare breasts. “I thought this was Pomegra, mother of the wise.”
“As I said, it is not prudent to think too much about them.”
“It makes you uneasy.” She turned towards him, and he remembered holding her up on the camel, and the feel of her hair against his chin. “It makes me uneasy, too.”
“The gods should make anyone uneasy.” The cave came alive with orange light as the sunset spilled its color over the cliff face.
Amalya drew closer. “I didn’t mean the gods. I meant choosing. You’re a man who follows orders, but now that you’ve had a choice-” She grabbed his left hand, and for a moment he couldn’t move for the feel of her soft palm squeezing his knuckles.
“You’re wrong.” He stepped back, and she wrapped her hand around her bandaged arm instead. “Choosing was easy.”
“You bargain with death too readily,” she said. “We need to be careful.”
He could have told her then about Govnan, but instead he moved deeper into the cave, avoiding the sun’s light. Amalya stood where he’d left her. She was brave. She wouldn’t be frightened for long.
She took a breath and asked, “When do we leave?”
“They are readying our camels now.”
“And who-?”
“Later.”
Her fingers worried at her bandages. “Eyul… Thank you.” That was what he needed to hear. He turned his eyes towards the darkness.
Sarmin lay on his bed. Moon-glow from the Sayakarva window picked out a corner here, an edge there, enough to hint at the room. Sarmin filled in what he couldn’t see from memory. Hints and memory, mortared with faith, the raw materials from which a man might construct a palace, or a prison, or both.
When the pattern-magic had washed over Sarmin, dreams had swept him away: strange dreams, where he saw with eyes that were not his own. In their wake he felt burned-out, empty, and sleep would not come.
Sarmin closed his eyes and again the pattern hung before him, an afterimage in red and green. The longer he kept them shut, the tighter the focus became-and more: he felt the Many. He felt them crowd about him like old ghosts, and their silence pressed on him. They drew closer still, standing beside him, whispering in his ears, flickering at the edge of vision.
The Many murmured in the darkest recesses of his mind, a multitude of distant voices, one laid over the next, and overlaid again. He felt the Many as a burden on his shoulders, scores of them, hundreds, maybe even thousands. He carried them all.
Without warning the pattern flared, and once more a dream took him in its jaws. Sarmin moved through the hollow of a mountain. Light showed at the end of his path, the bright colours of sunset. He lowered himself from the cave-mouth, balancing his feet on a narrow, rocky ledge. Below him a big man and a dark-skinned woman stood by a pair of camels, their heads bent close together as they talked. The man wore cloth around his eyes. Sarmin watched them mount and move away from him. Their camels were sluggish and loud.
Sarmin realised that, like the Many, he too was an observer, watching from behind eyes he didn’t own. Carried.
Sarmin didn’t recognise the sleeve that covered his arm, but he recognised what emerged as the cuff slid back along his wrist: triangle, half-moon, diamond within square, square within diamond “The pattern!” Again the voice that was not his spoke his words, softly, and with the accent of the low-born. In answer, whispers rose around him, like sand lifting before the storm.
All see what one sees. All know what one knows. All want what one wants. All live what one lives. This the pattern. This the price.
And then through it all came a clear voice, cool as a river in a desert: “Is there a stranger here? One who is not the Many?” It was a man’s voice, redolent with age and wisdom and power. The Pattern Master had found him. “I have felt you, stranger. You opened a door that should have remained closed.”
Sarmin held silent.
“Show yourself!” The command brooked no refusal.
Sarmin shrank into himself, imagining himself a dot, a mere speck amid the bulk of a dune.
“Beyon? Is it you? Have you joined us at last?” the Pattern Master asked.
Sarmin heard amusement bubbling beneath the words. He fought back the outrage that rose in him, as hot as it was unexpected.
“Hide, then.” The slightest ripple of anger swirled in the current of the voice. “You serve me, no matter what you think you choose. The pattern will be complete: one pattern, one future. There will be one to whom all will bow.”
Sarmin kept his peace, silent and hidden among the multitude. More than anything, the lack of imagination in the Pattern Master’s ambitions irked him. If I were Master I’d want… Sarmin wondered what he would want. He needed more than bended knees, less than that, too… Many patterns. That’s what I’d want, many patterns.
A sound came behind him: pilgrims on their way to worship. He crept down the ledge and dropped to the sand, running into the shadow of a rock.
Amalya lifted the ladle from the stew and motioned towards Eyul, who sprang to service. She’d done everything with one arm except pour the water from the well, and he had been waiting for a chance to help. He put a bowl on a rock beside her and held it steady while she poured, then did the same with the second bowl.
When both were filled he handed her one and squatted down to eat. “Smells delicious.”
She gathered her next bite. He could see that she smiled.
“It’s nice to have a full night between us and the cliffs.” Amalya nodded as she chewed, bent over her next spoonful.
She moved her bandaged arm freely, and there was no sign of the fever that had plagued her.
But she remained gaunt; Eyul could make out the sharpness in her cheekbones and the hollow of her throat. She looked up, and Eyul busied himself with his stew. He felt a fool, to be staring. Part of him wished this trip to be over; it was far easier to follow Tuvaini through dark corridors, listening to his thoughts on everything from warcraft to the supremacy of coastal olive oil…
Easier, but less interesting, perhaps.
She was still watching him, not moving, her hand on her knee. “I trust you, Knife-Sworn.”
Eyul put down his spoon and spent a few seconds balancing his bowl between two curved rocks next to the fire. It gave him some time, but he still couldn’t think of a response other than, “Pardon?”
“At one time you frightened me. But not any more.”
“Now the hermit frightens you.” He focused on the flames, her flames. Her magic.
“I feel great power in the hermit, though he can’t do the simplest tasks of a Tower mage,” she said. “I don’t understand it, and it frightens me. Metrishet hides from him.”
“Metrishet?”
