tiles picking out a scene from the Battle of the Well, showing Cerani and Parigols locked in combat.
She moved to go past, but Sarmin stopped her and they almost fell. “I’ve seen this before-this decoration.”
Grada said nothing.
“I saw it,” Sarmin continued, “I was with the Many, and I saw Tuvaini here. And something was given to him-something precious. It was his price for betrayal. His price for opening the secret ways to you.”
Grada frowned. “I remember… almost.”
“He plays Settu, my cousin,” Sarmin said. “We’re tiles on his board. He tried to use me and found that I was not a tool he could turn to his purpose, so he sold me to the Many, and charged a high price for his treachery. He plays the Pattern Master at his own game. Or he thinks he does.”
Grada shook her head and for a moment Sarmin felt himself fade, losing substance, as if he were a memory or an idea ready to be overwritten by new thoughts. The image came to him of cushions black with blood.
“Quickly,” he murmured, “we have to reach the Tower.” They had taken four steps before Grada remembered her robes and retrieved them from the throat of the urn. The sun robes were ill-suited to fighting, but essential to the outdoor life of the Maze. She gasped as she struggled into them, but the rough cloth would hide her wound.
Sarmin retreated to the back of Grada’s mind and watched as they passed a hall where women, old and young, sat at long tables, cutting and stitching with swift fingers and quicker voices. The corridor split and from the left men came, hefting amphorae heavy with sweet-wine for the palace kitchens. They passed without a glance for Grada, who hurried down the passage to the right.
They passed by a well, low-walled and secret in a window-less hall. The air felt strange to Sarmin; it was clammy on Grada’s skin. She took a wooden bucket from a row by the wall. Sarmin found himself listening to her breathing, wondering at the soft strength and strangeness of her body beneath the robes. As she reached for a cover for the bucket Sarmin turned her hand, studying her palm for a moment before she took command again.
The corridors became more crowded, with servants, scribes, craftsmen, all bound for unknown destinations. Grada stepped aside and passed unmarked, beneath notice, a ghost within the machine of government.
A low door gave onto the grand courtyard. As a child Sarmin had left the palace carried within a palanquin, taken through the Elephant Gate, a vaulted portal with doors of spice-teak, tall enough to admit gods. The door before them now was not for gods, or princes, or even merchants. Even so, a palace guard waited, a scarred hand resting upon the hilt of his hachirah. His eyes flitted to the bucket in Grada’s hands and he wrinkled his nose and said nothing. Grada passed through, silent, into the sun. Sarmin could hear the words unspoken: night-soil. Hachirahs meant nothing to the Mazeborn.
The noonday sun bludgeoned the flagstones of the grand courtyard with such violence that none lingered there. Only Grada and a distant patrol of the Blue Shield Guard moved in the heat. Sarmin felt the hot stone through Grada’s sandals and through the slits of her eyes he saw the great expanse of the sky. After fifteen years beneath a painted ceiling the sight robbed him of thought. His scream escaped Grada’s lips and he ran, throwing himself back into her skull, into her mind, into the darkest recesses, diving under the blackness, burrowing “Grada?” A man’s voice in the night of memory.
“Grada? Why are you hiding?” Closer now. “Father always finds you.”
And there, buried from the sun, in a stranger’s nightmares, Sarmin learned of other ways to lose a childhood.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Eyul stood by the burning tent. He watched her funeral pyre through his white sun-mask, Knife in hand. It had taken only seconds for Metrishet to free himself, to blister Amalya’s smooth skin and envelop her blankets in a crackling blaze.
Someone would die for this. He twisted the hilt of the emperor’s Knife in his hand, ignoring the whispers pouring forth in his mind.
There was no point in collecting Amalya’s pots, her spice-sack or anything else that spoke of her. Let the desert claim them, as the pattern had claimed Amalya. Let them be forgotten.
But first, someone would die. Perhaps many.
He mounted his camel and turned towards the city.
The sun in the west hit the white walls of Nooria and filled Mesema’s vision with orange light. She covered her eyes against the brightness, wishing she knew what lay beyond that orange veil. Her stomach twisted with the not-knowing. She wished she could stop the carriage, but it creaked and bounced along, moving inexorably forwards. She longed to turn back, back home, back to the desert, back anywhere but here.
The pattern had not appeared anywhere else on her skin, but remained on her finger, a small dusty-blue moon. Twice she’d slept and twice she’d awakened, frightened and pleading to the Hidden God. One day would be the bad day, the day she’d find those lines and shapes running across her ribs. She hadn’t yet decided what to do on that day.
Sahree sat opposite, her eyes averted; it had been so ever since Mesema’s visit to the emperor’s tent. Everyone thought she was his now, the property of the divine. The other girls no longer spoke to her; they only murmured to each other in awed tones. They did everything for her, without ever meeting her eyes. If she sighed, they fanned her. If she yawned, they offered her plump cushions. If she stumbled, they rubbed her feet and cursed the ground.
For the first time she realised how lonely the emperor must feel. And yet it kept her safe; they looked away from her, away from the blue mark on her finger.
She embroidered a pattern in her head. Somewhere, something burned; the smoke caught in her throat. Mesema tried not to swallow. If she swallowed, Sahree would think she was thirsty, leap from the carriage and cause the whole caravan to stop until the second-freshest water and second-best goblet could be found. Almost there. Loop, stitch, stitch. She kept her bluetinged finger pressed against the cloth at her knee. She missed the feather from Eldra’s arrow. She used to work it in her hand, but Cerani women had no pockets; she kept it in her trunk now, next to the resin Mamma had given her.
After a time, the stench of burning faded and Mesema smelled food, meat with heavy spices, flowers, the stale smell of wheat-brew. She heard chains swinging in the wind, and a baby crying. Why were there no voices? A glance through the window answered her question: mothers, traders, and soldiers all prostrated themselves as the emperor’s caravan passed by.
Sahree held out a piece of sheer fabric. Mesema was to cover herself so that nobody could see her. She had come to know this in the last day. She shook it out and pulled it over her hair and it settled on her cheeks gently, like a butterfly. When she breathed, it pulled against her nose. Everything she looked at turned hazy-white.
A twinge shot through her finger. Beyon approached. She imagined him wending his way between the soldiers and pack-animals, careless on his mount, his eyes hard and tired. No sooner had the image crossed her mind than he leaned in, looking first at Sahree and then taking in her silken veil. She was relieved that he couldn’t see her face.
“We will enter the city soon,” he said.
As if I don’t know! Mesema looked at Sahree, at her veined, thin hands, and wondered how many years Sahree had worked for the palace, how many emperors she had seen live and die.
He didn’t wait for a response but drew away. She could hear him galloping towards the wall; she imagined the common folk dashing out of his way as he charged ahead, arrogant, heedless, as she cradled her finger in her left hand. It hurt now, when he moved far away. Sahree might see the tears streaming down her cheeks and think it was all for love of Beyon; better she not know the truth.
“What- Who am I?” Sarmin didn’t think to ask, “Where am I?” Where would he be? Where had he always been? In his room. Through the blurred slits of his eyes he could see the only sky he had ever really known, the patterned gods of his ceiling.
“You are Sarmin, prince of Cerana. Grada remains in the mages’ Tower. You are separate, again, and whole, or as whole as I can make you.” The deep voice had the crackle of age in it.
