“Mother?”
Her gaze fell upon him like hard words. No softness there. Young Sarmin had died with his brothers. A ghost inhabited this room.
He dipped one shoulder to her. “Never mind.”
For the slightest moment something tugged at her face. She was, after all, the one who had saved him. “I will send a new book,” she said.
A knock, the creak of hinges, and she was gone.
Alone again as always, Sarmin paced the worn track of his days. He walked beneath the impassive gaze of the gods. He knew better than to ask them what would come, though the question fluttered behind his lips. The gods never answered. The others watched him, hidden, but he would wait for the privacy of full night to summon them forth.
As the window’s glow faded, his slaves arrived: one pale as paper, the other dark as ink, and though ink and paper spoke together in books there was never a word between these two. They were stories untold, tantalising and mysterious.
Paper kept his eyes lowered to his tasks and obeisances. His arms were thin and looked translucent as the alabaster window. Ink’s arms were stronger, and he met Sarmin’s eyes with his own, dark brown and intelligent. Usually it made Sarmin’s breath catch, but tonight he felt immune to such minimal contact.
The slaves carried lanterns.
Sarmin looked to Ink. “No light,” he said.
The two left as quietly as they came, bowing their way backwards to the door. Sarmin noticed how Paper hesitated, letting Ink exit before him. The low voices of the guards in the hallway wafted towards Sarmin like exotic scents. The door closed and the lock turned.
All fell quiet.
The jewelled colors of Sarmin’s room faded into the night, his window lit with moon-glow. Once, this room had been salvation. He had punched through that window and seen his brothers sprawled upon the courtyard stone. They died, and he had been saved, a loose thread held against an unknown future.
“Your father is dead.” She had come at last, days later, and with those words his mother had changed his world.
He thought he had been saved. But he had only exchanged a quick death for a slow one.
Sarmin missed the high laughter of his brothers, the wild chases, the fights: all of it. One night took them all. Five given to the assassin’s knife and one transformed. Beyon, whom he’d worshipped as an eldest brother, now elevated to the Petal Throne. Truly a living god, though surely none adored him as Sarmin had before their father died. How would he seem now, after the slow passage of fifteen years? Sarmin tried to imagine Beyon’s smile on an emperor’s face, but could see only the grim mask their father wore. Even now the memory made him tremble, but with fear or rage he could not tell.
No matter what his mother said, whatever memory of love flickered over her face, his solitude held the truth of it. The old bitterness soothed his mind and he nursed it, letting it sink its fangs deep.
In the dark, the free thing inside him beat stunted, heavy wings. He rolled to his side and searched for the hidden ones. They might answer his questions.
But a noise distracted him. At first, he thought he imagined it. He lay on his side a while longer, studying the scrollwork, but it came again. Below the distant wind-wail of the Tower-wizards, a soft scratching. And again, too deliberate for any mouse, a scrape of steel on stone.
He knew every crack and seam in these walls. How many days had he spent searching for an escape? Would they total a year? Two? He’d have found a trigger the size of a hair by now; of this he felt sure. But when he raised himself on an elbow, eyes searching the gloom, he discerned a quill’s width of flickering light, growing impossibly larger.
An opening.
A man, silhouetted by torchlight, came through the wall. In one hand he held a dacarba; Sarmin recognised the long knife from a picture in his Book of War. It had a narrow blade, sharp enough to slide between the ribs and pierce a man’s heart, made three-sided for extra harm.
Sarmin sat up and slid from the bed to the soft floor. His turn had come around at last. A squeal of a laugh escaped his lips, though part of him despaired. Perhaps he would finally be free.
The assassin leaned against the wall, closing the secret door with his back.
A time to die.
The man must have seen something in Sarmin’s expression, for he grimaced and sheathed his knife. “Please excuse the weapon, Your Highness,” he said. “The door trigger is on the inside, a shaft the length of a dacarba’s blade.”
Your Highness. He was Prince Sarmin, next in line to the throne, and he bent knee to no one but the emperor. If he knew nothing else, held no other power, there was that.
“Who addresses me?” Sarmin summoned the authority he remembered from his father’s voice and made his eyes like his mother’s.
“Tuvaini, my lord. I am Lord High Vizier.” Tuvaini stepped forwards, his face shadowed and indistinct. “I have come to discuss a matter of empire.”
Sarmin laughed again. “Empire? This is my empire.” He swept the room’s span with one arm.
“You remain here because that may not always be true, my lord.” Tuvaini held himself motionless, his face bland.
Sarmin was a spare, a replacement, a contingency plan for other men. He’d known it for years, but to hear the words out loud in this silent place… He looked at his hands, balled into fists, hands that had never touched a real blade.
“Two visitors in a day,” Sarmin said. “There have been months when I had not so many.” He crossed the room to face Tuvaini. The man stood an inch or two taller, and the planes of his face caught the moonlight.
An acid thrill burned Sarmin’s spine. He reached towards the dacarba’s sheath, but Tuvaini put a protective hand over the leather. “Give me your weapon,” Sarmin said.
“My lord, I cannot.” The vizier shook his head. “We have important matters-”
“You walk through my wall. You pass in secret,” Sarmin cut across him. “Would you have me tell my mother of this visit? Would you have me call the guards who sit outside my door?”
“My lord, I come on a mission of great delicacy. What I have to say concerns you deeply. Your future hangs in a balance that I can sway.”
They stared at one another. The moonlight made tiny pearls of the sweat on Tuvaini’s brow. Another second, and he raised his hand from the knife’s sheath.
Sarmin reached for the dacarba and held the triangular blade before his eyes. With the right edge, any tie might be cut, any bond broken. “But what if I pray for death?”
“My lord, please…” A tremble replaced the surety in Tuvaini’s voice.
Sarmin’s skin tingled. The courtier had come to trade in politics, but found a man who dealt in alien currencies. “The dacarba is mine. Your gift to me. A token of the-the bond -between us,” Sarmin said. He set the knife upon his bed. “So, I’ve been remembered? My brother cannot sow the seed of dynasty no matter how fertile the fields, or how many?” Sarmin marvelled at the words flooding from him. The eaters of hashish, the men who drew opium from their hookahs, did they feel like this? And what drug had lit freedom for Sarmin? He glanced once more at the vizier and in that instant knew the answer. For so long he’d lived at the sufferance of others, under the will of silent men. And here in one glorious blaze of circumstance he held power, for the first time ever.
But he knew from the Book of Statehood that there would be a price.
“Why do you seek me out, Tuvaini, and at such risk? If my brother thinks you move against him, it will be the end of you.”
The vizier hesitated, as if gathering strength. “It is not only to please heaven and win an heir that the emperor burns the Patterned.” The certainty entered his voice again. “Your brother carries the marks now. I had it from the executioner who slew the royal body-slaves. The sands run swiftly. The time may come when it is you, and not Beyon or his son, who sits upon the Petal Throne.”
Beyon. Sunlight and wood, laughter and punches; the lost joys came to him unbidden. That price was too high.
