“I know.”
“I’ll get help!” She struggled up, glanced left, right. “Where in hell are we?”
Sarmin smiled at her language. He tasted blood.
She ran for the door and pounded on it. “Help! There’s a man stabbed!” Sarmin could see the wound in her back now, where the blade had sliced her tunic open. He saw the pattern, dull reds, dull blues, and the play of her muscles under dusky skin. Beneath the clotting trickles of blood from her cut Sarmin could see the two slight changes he’d made: circle to ellipse, blue triangle to red. It was almost lost in the sweep of her patterning, but enough to free her from the Many.
“Help!” she shouted.
“They’re dead.” Sarmin coughed up blood, bright crimson on his fingers, “dead, or ordered away.”
She ran for the window.
“Don’t-” It would be a sacrilege.
But she put her fist through it anyway; three blows cleared all but the jagged fragments of alabaster from the frame. The sound took him to back that distant night and a new pain narrowed his eyes.
The Carrier stood motionless, stunned by a view Sarmin had never seen. Only once had Sarmin looked from that window, long ago. He had broken it himself, the night they brought him to the room. Darkness had not hidden the assassin and his bloody work. Years had not softened the memory.
“Come back to me?” he asked.
She did, her steps slow, noticing the richness of the carpet for the first time.
“What did you see?”
“A palace. A whole city-as if we’re flying above it.”
“We’re in a tower, the tallest in the palace,” Sarmin said. He coughed. His side felt cold now. Before it had been so hot, with the blood flooding down across his ribs.
“It isn’t the tallest.”
Sarmin found his hand reaching for the Book of Etiquette, but he stopped it. The book told him that a prince does not speak to those of the Maze. The book spoke of punishments for any of her caste who even looked upon royalty. And yet she spoke to him. She contradicted.
He coughed again, then said, “You look touchable to me.” He’d not meant to say the words aloud.
“What?”
“That Tower isn’t in the palace. You’re looking at the mages’ Tower. It’s the only spire that overtops the palace,” Sarmin said.
“Mages?” Her eyes returned to the knife in his side. “We should go there. They could help you.”
“I don’t think I can walk,” Sarmin said.
The Carrier cast an eye around the room, checking out the door, the window, the ceiling, the narrow entrance to the passages that had brought her to his room.
“Wh- Where am I?” she asked at last. “What are we doing here?”
“Do you have a name?”
“What?”
“A name, do you remember your name?”
She frowned, and after a moment said, “Grada.”
“Your name is the start, Grada, the corner of a pattern. Think on it, and you’ll see the rest.” He met her gaze, but his sight had started to dim. He was glad not to be alone. “You’ve been sick, Grada. Look at your arms. You’re a Carrier.”
“No.” She didn’t look, but her voice lacked conviction.
“The mages could help me, perhaps. I need to speak to them.”
“Yes!” Grada’s face lit up, as if the prospect of some concrete task were stone amid the sand. “I can carry you. I’m strong. Like the ox, Jenna says.” She reached for him, took his wrist in her hand.
“No-” Sarmin winced at the idea of being thrown across her shoulders, “I would bleed too quickly.”
She frowned. “But you said-”
“You remember the Many, Grada?” Sarmin asked. She shook her head.
“You remember them,” he said, “you carried the Many, and that is how you can carry me. We will be two. I’ll guide you to the mages’ Tower.”
“No.” She released his wrist but didn’t move away.
Sarmin shrugged. It didn’t hurt-nothing hurt any more. He smiled and laid his head back. The gods watched him.
“It’s my knife, isn’t it?” Grada asked, her voice soft.
“Yes.”
Sarmin watched the gods. He thought of Beyon, and of Grada. He was glad not to be alone.
“I will carry you.” Grada leaned over him. “Show me how.” Sarmin released a sigh he’d not known was inside him and set a trembling hand to her neck. Warm flesh pulsed beneath his fingertips. A star became a moon. And they were joined: Grada and Sarmin.
“Grada?” He spoke from inside of her. He could see himself through her eyes, pale against cushions dark with his blood.
“Grada?”
He could hear his breath rattle into shallow lungs.
“Herzu’s member! You’re a prince!”
“I’m going to be a dead prince unless you start moving, Grada.”
“I’m in a palace and I stabbed a prince!” She was yelling, but her lips did not move.
“Grada!”
She started towards Tuvaini’s secret door. Sarmin shared the pain lancing out from her sliced back.
“Who is Tuvaini?”
“Cerani’s high vizier, a cousin of mine, I think, if you go through enough genealogy.”
“Genie what?”
“Pay attention, those stairs are steep.”
“The high vizier? Camelspit! The high vizier comes to see you?” She reached the bottom of the stairs and paused. She looked out over the bridge.
“Rotram?” she asked. Another memory had escaped Sarmin’s keeping into Grada’s mind.
“A royal guard. He died here.”
“Died?” Grada asked out loud.
“Was killed.”
“I remember a dream-” Images fluttered through her mind: the hatred on Ellar’s face, Rotram falling into the blackness.
Sarmin moved within her and turned her head from the chasm. “Don’t.”
“They killed him- somebody killed him,” she said, “with my hands.” She looked at them, still rusty with his blood. “But it wasn’t me?”
“No.”
“It wasn’t me.” Prayer rather than conviction.
Together they made their way across the bridge and through Tuvaini’s passages-the secret ways pre-dated Tuvaini by three hundred years, but Sarmin thought of them as the vizier’s. Tuvaini, keeper of secrets-what other hidden paths had the man trodden?
Grada retraced her footsteps, bringing them through the forgotten bowels of the ancient palace. A concealed door gave before experimental fingers and she crawled through, emerging behind a patterned urn, man-high, in a dusty corner of a corridor lit by lanterns.
“This is the under-palace?” Recognition thrilled across Sarmin’s shoulders, though he had never walked the halls where servants went about their business.
“I thought the emperor must live here when I saw it,” Grada said, “I didn’t know there were such places.” Her words carried images of the Maze in their wake: dark rooms, small and dirt-floored, sewer stink, and rot in the gutters.
She found her feet and looked both ways along the corridor. To her left was a low door, and above it brown
