burned low and smokeless in well-spaced niches. He turned, making a slow survey of the chamber. He couldn’t see a door, but what he could see looked familiar.
“Find the Red Door,” he said. They were his words, but he didn’t own the voice that spoke them.
The fountain room. We have bled here. This is the red heart of the palace of the Cerani emperors. This the pattern. This the price.
Sarmin crossed the hall, seeing the marble fountain in the room beyond, and set his hand to the wall.
Sarmin watched the Carrier’s fingers search until they found hidden studs. A door swung inwards, noiseless, invisible until it began to open. The whispers came again.
The Carrier took an oil lamp and trimmed the wick so low it could barely sustain a flame, then passed through the doorway into a narrow corridor hewn from undressed rock. This building, the whole city, had been constructed about a rocky outcrop where nomads had once found shelter. Hidden pathways ran through the palace, accommodated within walls, making stone-filled voids. Sarmin could feel the rough floor through the Carrier’s slippers, the coolness of the stone as he brushed his fingers along the wall. The Carrier moved with purpose and caution, making turns without pause where the ways split. Left. Turn here. The lower way, Tuvaini said. The fool said. Take the lower way.
An unease grew in Sarmin, an unease he couldn’t name. The Carrier seemed to feel it too. Close. We grow close.
Ahead, flickers described a rock wall, torchlight from around the next corner. The Carrier slowed, pressed tight to the stone now as he moved forwards. From among the Many, several rose to guide the Carrier.
I was a thief; step like this. I was a spy; breathe shallow. I murdered; move in slow.
The stone scraped beneath Sarmin’s chest, or rather, beneath the chest of the one who carried him. Hugging tight to the wall, edging forwards by fractions of an inch, the Carrier peered around the corner. Three royal guardsmen waited around a stone span crossing a chasm. Sarmin recognised them all. Over the years he had gathered their names and even sketches of their lives, all sewn from fragments dropped by lips sworn to silence. These men came from his personal guard: Rotram, Ellar and Connin.
None who stood guard by his door was permitted to speak with him, to answer his questions, or even to acknowledge he had ever spoken. Few men, though, can keep their mouths from framing a single word day after day, month through month. Sarmin knew them from hours spent with his ear pressed to the door. Rotram the gambler, Ellar with his visits to the women of the Maze, Connin with his twin girls and, last year, a little boy, born blind and coughing, and dead within the month.
The Carrier set down the lamp and drew a dacarba from a scabbard beneath his tunic. From the host of the Many a single voice spoke out with confidence. A single will took the knife. I was an assassin.
Two of the guardsmen leaned against the rock wall, facing the chasm, looking away from the Carrier’s approach. The third, Connin, straddled the length of stone crossing the void, careless of the blind depths beneath him.
The Carrier waited.
“I hate the tunnels,” Rotram said. The torch in his hand coaxed sparkles from the light mail over his chest and struck gleams from his conical helm.
“They cut throats in the east wing last month,” Ellar said.
“The Carriers who attacked the vizier came through the tunnels. We all know that.”
“So we guard the tunnels,” said Connin. He spat into the depths.
The Carrier pulled back from the corner towards his lamp, the flame a mere glow around the wick. He changed his grip on the knife, making it an extension of his arm. I was an assassin.
“El, isn’t your brother on the rota for the west wing?” Connin asked.
But Ellar had no chance to reply. The Carrier stepped around the corner and in three quick paces reached the bridge where Connin sat with a leg dangling on either side. Sarmin tried to cry out a warning, but no sound came. Connin struggled to rise, but the Carrier caught him across the temple with a rising kick. His helmet flew free and he flailed for a moment. Then, like an inexperienced rider rolling from his saddle, he pitched into space.
The Carrier scarcely broke stride. By the time harsh reunion with the earth had silenced Connin’s screams the Carrier had reached the far side of the chasm and turned, his knife ready.
“Damn!” Rotram pulled his scimitar clear of its scabbard, surprise making him clumsy.
“You filth!” Ellar reached the bridge-stone first. Sarmin had never seen such hatred on a man’s face. It scared him more than the glimmering reach of the guards’ scimitars.
Ellar advanced, his steps wary despite his rage. Each of these men was a veteran, and the training of a royal guard ran deep. The Carrier’s wrist flickered and in an instant his blade was jutting from Ellar’s throat. The Carrier moved swiftly and surely across the bridge-stone, batted away Ellar’s weakened thrust and pulled his dacarba from the guard’s neck before he fell.
Sarmin marvelled that palace guards could be killed with such ease; as a boy he’d been taught they were invincible.
The whispers rose around him. Good kill. Slay the last. Bleed him.
Rotram charged. Rotram the gambler. The Carrier dived at Rotram’s feet and a pain like scalding water ran along the Carrier’s back. Sarmin felt it and cried out, and the Many cried out too. The Carrier’s knife struck out to the left and he rolled to his side and lay prone, his legs extended out over the drop. Rotram carried on for three steps, rolling like a drunkard, the tendon behind his left knee cut.
“Carrier Witch!” Rotram screamed as he fell. His cries trailed off. Sarmin heard a sick, wet crunch, then nothing.
Witch? The pain in the Carrier’s back made Sarmin’s stomach churn with nausea. The Carrier stood, and Sarmin felt hot blood running down his legs.
The Carrier moved on, unsteady, and reached a patterned hand to the wall for support. He moved on, steps up, steep, curving.
“Three palace guards. You did well.” The Pattern Master spoke.
I was an assassin. The will that had held the Carrier retreated back into the Many, its voice growing fainter.
“A pity you could not slay Tuvaini’s servant. Three of the Many to guide against one old man and still you failed,” the Pattern Master said.
He is the emperor’s Knife. Even to cut him was more than could have been hoped for.
“No matter. He works for me now.”
Sarmin stopped listening. The Carrier had climbed a narrow, spiralling stairway to a door of stone. Bloody fingers guided the dacarba’s point into a slot in the lintel. Inch by inch the knife slid home, hilt-deep. Without sound, and by degrees, the door opened. Sarmin saw his room. He saw his bed, and on it a young man sprawled in sleep, sweat plastering black hair to a pale olive brow.
Me!
He opened his eyes and saw her there, framed in Tuvaini’s secret door: a woman of the Maze, her white robes dark with blood around the hips and legs, the pattern-symbols reaching out along her arms, running up along the veins of her throat. She stood at the foot of his bed, dacarba in hand, raised high. And the eyes that watched him were windows to the Many.
Eyul whispered over his shoulder, “What kind of magic would a ghost command?”
Amalya didn’t answer; she was asleep. He rolled towards her and gathered her close. He could feel the beating of her heart, the joy of her firm, soft, curved shape. If they could lie like this for ever… But Nooria’s walls lay close, and things would move quickly inside; it was as if his thinking about the city sped the coming of day. Now, in the dim glow of early dawn, the light did not bother his eyes. Later, he would suffer.
Amalya’s bandages hung loose from her hand. Eyul smiled to himself; she was too fastidious to show dishevelment when awake. He sat up and reached for her pack, where she kept the fresh bandages, and cradled the clean fabric in his lap as he pulled the dirty linen away. Tossing it aside, he lifted her arm and prepared to wrap it up once more.
He leaned closer, his eyes straining in the low light. A bit of dirt, or a smudge, darkened her skin near the old wound. He wet a piece of the fabric and rubbed at it, but it remained, clearer now, three definite lines forming a shape under his thumb.
Eyul let out his breath. He didn’t know how the pattern worked, whether it tattooed itself from the inside or
