Sarmin rolled his head towards the speaker and realised he was lying flat, on his own bed. His fingers sought out the tear in his tunic, and the wound below, but they found nothing, just tenderness, and the crusting of dried blood on silk.
The man stood beside the bed. Sarmin’s eyes refused to focus, giving him only a smeared impression of a figure wreathed in light, alive with the ghosts of flame. Sarmin kneaded his eyeballs and looked again, seeing an old man now, shadowed, with wisps of white hair haloing a bald head.
“I have no skills for healing,” the man spread his hands, and for a second the wraith-fire played across them again, “but I spent thirteen years in the desert, in the Empty Quarter. There is a rock there, a rock that bleeds. I used a little of that blood to knit your flesh and call you back to it.”
“I don’t know you.” Sarmin felt weak. He felt empty. He wanted Grada. “My name is Govnan. I am High Mage of the Tower.”
“You are two pieces. A puzzle of two pieces.” Sarmin still felt lightheaded; he spoke the words without thinking. “Fire and flesh.”
Govnan raised a brow at that and stepped closer to the bed. Sarmin struggled to sit.
“As the slave carried you within her, I too carry another. It is not the same magic, but similar-simpler. Ashanagur is bound within me, and his strength is mine. At one time he danced across the molten sea before the City of Brass where efreet dwell, but now he dwells in me, until the day comes when he consumes me and I will live inside the fire.”
“I remember the Tower. The high mage was Kobar, before… when I was a child. He made us laugh. He knew tricks, made talking faces in stone walls… He touched Pelar’s red ball and it grew so heavy we couldn’t lift it.” Sarmin smiled at the memory.
“High Mage Kobar was rock-sworn. The time came for the earth-spirit bound to his flesh to find its freedom. For ten years I have held the Tower for Emperor Beyon.”
“Beyon.” Sarmin remembered his brother, the patterns on his skin, the dead guards outside the door. “There are assassins-you must save him!”
“Grada came for you, Sarmin. There are no others. Beyon’s enemy seeks to break him. If he fails to break him, he may try murder, but he is not failing. Even with all the protections we have woven around him, the pattern closes in.”
Sarmin stood. His legs felt strange beneath him. He walked on stilts once as a child, and this was not so different. He found himself taller than Govnan, an odd feeling, as he had been sure the mage would loom over him.
“You’re wrong. Broken or whole, Beyon serves his purpose for the enemy. I have seen that enemy.” Sarmin’s blood had turned black and clotted on his silks. For a moment he felt it again, running hot down his side. “I saw him behind the Many, the Carriers: a Pattern Master.”
Govnan bowed his head. He focused his gaze upon his hands, his knuckles large, and whiter than skin should be. “You have the talents of your line, Prince Sarmin. The throne was purchased with such skills in the earliest of days, and the potential runs through your dynasty. Beyon’s potential has helped to keep the pattern at bay. Your potential kept the emperor’s Knife from your throat.”
“ You? You put me here? In this room?”
“No-the Tower spared your life, no more. Envy put you in this room: ambition.”
“How many?” Sarmin asked. “How many boys have lived out their lives like this, under this curse?”
“It is a gift, Prince. Life is always a gift.” Govnan met his stare, and Sarmin could feel the heat of the man. “And there have been no others in my lifetime. There was a child in the time of the Yrkman incursions, but his quarters were sacked when Nooria was overrun.”
“I want Grada.” And as he spoke the words Sarmin knew that he did want her, more than his lost years, more than close-held memories of stolen things, more than his mother or brother.
“Grada is at the Tower, and it is best that she remain there. She has been a tool of the enemy. I will return her knife and-”
“I want Grada.” Sarmin had seen with her eyes, spoken with her breath. He had held her whilst he was dying.
“Even if no taint remains, she is low-born, gutter-kin; she has her place, and you have yours.”
“You are a two-piece puzzle, High Mage.” A cold anger held Sarmin, iced fingers on his neck. “And even if I have no book on the subject, I am nothing if not a man of patterns.”
“Prince, you must calm yourself. I do not understand-”
“No!” They had held him too long; they had schemed in their corridors and towers, painted him into their plans, and at every turn they had thwarted him. Twenty paces, left turn, fifteen paces, left turn “No,” Sarmin said, “I am done with turning.”
He drew two symbols, one with the index finger of his right hand, one with the left, one symbol for fire, one for man, and they hung in the air between them.
“Sarmin, don’t.”
“Your magic is wrong.”
Sarmin moved his hands apart, and the symbols with them. And in that motion, Govnan lit up like lamp oil before the taper. New flame flowed across old skin, pooling, pouring, building, and as Sarmin’s hands parted, so Govnan parted from Ashanagur until the two stood side by side. Govnan was a dark twin to the being of light beside him, standing straighter now, more sound, as if something had been added rather than taken. Ashanagur wore his fire like a cloak, the lithe, long limbs beneath it the color of molten iron. Around his feet the carpet charred, but the fire and the heat did not spread.
“Ashanagur,” Sarmin said, “you are free.”
White eyes sought Sarmin’s and something passed between them, warmth rather than heat. An understanding. There was a sound of cracking, perhaps the stone beneath the carpet, perhaps the foundation stone of the world. A jagged line of incandescence opened between them, and in a heartbeat Ashanagur was gone, leaving only a faint coil of smoke.
The angels and the devils watched from the walls and were silent.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Eyul turned another corner of the Maze. Smoke from the Carrierpyres overlaid the more familiar scents of blood and excrement, the flavours of his old home. The familiarity of the twisting alleys reassured him as much as the Knife at his hip. He felt more surety here than in Tuvaini’s dark passages. The Maze was honest, in all of the ways most people didn’t wish to see.
He moved towards his destination with confidence, memory guiding his feet for his vision was hazy behind white linen. The alley where he’d made his first kill ran alongside the ruins of an old Mogyrk church. These days he doubted anybody could have identified the fire-darkened, crumbling mortar for what it had been, but Eyul remembered from Halim, who knew it from his father. Only memories kept Satreth’s victory alive, though here in the Maze, it hardly felt like a victory. The Mogyrks, Halim had told him in a hushed whisper, had given out food and clothes to the denizens of these twisting streets. The only charity they saw now happened on feast-days, when the palace discarded its old clothing and spoiled food, and expected the Maze-folk to be grateful.
Eyul paused at the final turn, listening to an altercation in the narrow street ahead: two men and a woman, and the woman was screaming. He felt a grim smile on his lips. Don’t let them run from me. He touched his hand to the hilt of his Knife and moved forwards.
“Not this. Go to the palace.” The Knife-whisper, authoritative, for a child.
“Quiet.”
The low-born men turned. He could see the lines of their bodies, their heads turned attentively in his direction: they thought he’d been speaking to them. They had the woman bent over the lip of an old well, one holding her arms while the other was making ready to take his pleasure.
Eyul pulled his Knife free.
“Can you not spare the tin to pay for that?” Eyul’s feet tingled with the pleasure of the upcoming dance.
