With the envoy gone, the advisors, and slaves banished, the throne room felt empty. The guards, ever-present, were hard not to consider furniture, so gaudy and so without motion.
From time to time Sarmin would remind himself of the men behind those impassive faces, of the lives he had pieced together across years from scraps of conversation heard with his ear pressed to his prison door and later from the voices of the Many.
The creak of Govnan’s knees as he shifted position brought Sarmin’s attention back to matters in hand. “High mage, Headman.” He focused on the two men remaining at the base of the dais, Govnan gnarled and ancient, fire-hardened Sarmin thought him, tempered in the secret flame, and Notheen, tall, ragged, bony, when the desert finally claimed him there would be little to consume. In many ways, in the ways that counted, they looked alike. Sarmin could believe them father and son. They fit together in some way that could not be seen with the eyes but from a different perspective would be obvious. Lately Sarmin had started to see all those around him as parts of a puzzle, shapes to be manipulated in some high dimensional and abstract space. It worried him.
“Keep watch on my brother’s tomb. If there is alteration, or the Fryth austere comes near it, you let me know.” Sarmin waved them away, his head a sudden single ache as if tidal forces sought to split it along some old faultline. Austere Adam had come with the peace delegation, but if his church truly meant to test its strength in the desert he might well be its forward scout. The possibility could not be ignored.
He watched them go, Govnan and Notheen, through slitted eyes. In his narrow vision the air around them shimmered and it seemed almost that he could see the fault-lines in each man, as if a little effort would divide them into the constituent parts that meshed so neatly to make them whole.
“I will go to my room now,” Sarmin said. “Ta-Sann, your arm, please.”
Ta-Sann offered him an arm thick with gleaming muscle. With the swordson’s help Sarmin stood. Whispers invaded his mind, ideas and emotions bubbling. “I am young to feel so old, Ta-Sann. Perhaps I should train as a son of the sword? Would they take me, do you think?”
“Sword-sons are taught from birth, emperor, sold into the service.” If Ta-Sann felt any discomfort at the questioning no sign of it entered his voice. “Give me your blade, Ta-Sann. An emperor should know about swords.”
Sarmin felt his tongue running away from him, shaping words given to it by someone else. Ta-Sann held out the hilt of his sword as Tuvaini had surrendered his dacarba little more than a year ago. That had been Sarmin’s choice, his act and his alone. Maybe this was too.
Fingers met around the thick hilt. Sarmin struggled to lift the hachirah, a gleam chasing the gentle curve of the blade as it turned in his grasp. With effort he held it high. To their credit not one of the sword-sons flinched when he swung at the air, almost losing both grip and footing. Sweat stuck his silks to him. What am I doing? He could see the necessary parts of the sword interlocked, bright lines zig-zagging through many dimensions to separate iron from chrome, sharp from heavy. It could all come to pieces in his hands, he had only to pull here…
“Take me to my room.” He let the sword fall and the clatter of it set the plumes bobbing on a score of startled imperials stood along the walls. The sword-sons didn’t need to be told which room. Sarmin had a canopied bed of silks and bright tapestries hung around an oak frame within a galleried chamber that dwarfed it. The gold in that room, held in statuettes to many gods and in cunningly wrought birds, jewel-eyed on jade trees, outweighed him. A dozen emperors had slept there, and Sarmin had slept there for a time, but it was not his room.
The sword-sons cleared his path, concubines scattering as their escort returned them to the women’s halls. Ta-Sann helped Sarmin climb the stairs, their footsteps lost beneath the whispers and cries of the Many. “I’m sorry for your sword, Ta-Sann.”
“My emperor?”
“I should have treated it with more respect.”
Ta-Sann, perhaps wisely, had nothing to say to that.
In the quiet ruin of his old room Sarmin bid the sword-sons tie him to his bed. The memory of his ruined book haunted him, with the thought of what else the Many might do with his hands. His guards required no explanation, no excuses, no swearing to silence. Another in Sarmin’s place might not have trusted to their discretion. Ta-Sann and his brothers were human after all, subject to all the temptations of men despite their long years of training, when old methods and magics had been used to purge them of such weakness. Sarmin saw each of the six as part of the next, linked in a circle that could not be broken by small things such as offered wealth or power or the bodies of women. Each of the sword-sons depended upon the others in such a manner that Sarmin had more faith in their loyalty to the oath Tuvaini purchased than he did in his own actions.
“Keep two of your number at my door until sunrise,” Sarmin told them as they left.
The door closed on a quiet moment and some small part of Sarmin believed in that moment that he would be left alone now, that the silence would stretch into blissful infinity. But with the next breath the unguided Many returned to lift him from his flesh, burdened with their memories of times gone, places sketched and shadowed, bodies lost to sword and sickness, flashes of recollection so bright and perfect in their detail that a lifetime’s contemplation might not seek out all meaning from them. And a voice, inside him but not of the Many, said, — She is coming.
“But she came!” Sarmin twisted his head towards the unbroken lines beneath his window. “She brought me the urn.” It remained unopened, a rounded shadow against the wall, threat and promise together.
— She is coming.
“Who? Who!” He strained his ears, but the answer, when it came, rose from within. A vision, a scene remembered through the eyes of one of the Many he bore, one of the dead.
In the mountain dark he stands, shivers by the clan hall. Someone has to take their finds to Her. Someone. And it falls to him. They leave him in the dark with the cloth bag limp in his hand. A dozen white-stars, not much for a day’s work on the high ridges, but the tiny blooms are rare as opals. He watches as Costos hauls open the clan-hall door. For a moment firelight colours the two older boys, strains of “The Peaks of East-March” reach out, scattered notes from Voice Zanar’s harp. The door bangs shut behind them.
He shakes himself, this boy of the mountain clans, this boy whose memories flow in an emperor’s head, shakes himself and sets off. He starts slow and gets slower. No one hurries to see Her. She’ll be pleased with the flowers, the very first in the briefest of seasons. She’ll be pleased and she’ll let him go without looking into him the way she does, the way that leaves people feeling ill-suited to their skin.
No light shows in The Megra’s hut, nothing to lead the boy across the slope of scree-stone. The frost-shattered gravel shifts beneath each step, creet bushes, stunted and long-thorned, try to trip him. The muted sounds of the hall grow fainter and he leaves the village home-stones behind him, coming in time to the walls of Her round-house.
“Megra?” She won’t be asleep. She burns no lights, eats cold, sits wrapped in furs all winter before a cold hearth, but she never sleeps.
“Megra?” Her hut stands away from the village, from the stink from the tanning hall, from the mustiness of goats and the choking richness of composting waste. The wind over the ridges brings the promise of rain and the faint tang of granite.
He sets a hand to the walls of her hut, round like every other save the clanhall and tannery, but built of different stone, older rocks shaped by some lost people and worn beyond corners or edges. The blocks must have been carried at least from Crowspire to build this place, but no-one could say why. Pressing his fingers to the smooth stones it seems for a moment that he can hear an echo of those vanished people, chanting, deep-voiced around the crack and snap of fire. The moment leaves him.
“Boy?” The Megra’s voice through the slit window. To hear her speak you might think her young, or at least a mother with young sons.
“It’s Gallar. I’ve brought the white-stars.” He moves around the curve of the wall to the hide flap that hangs as a door.
“Just Gallar?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Well bring my flowers, boy.”
And he ducks in, pushing the hide away.
“Sit, before you break something,” she says. The darkness offers nothing of her. Gallar doesn’t mind-she looks too old to be alive. When he had been small he would hide behind his mother if The Megra came to their hut. The first time she touched him-when he had the red fever-he screamed. He had thought her fingers would mark him forever, though what with he couldn’t say. He’d recovered though and she had let him see the ring of gold she wore always on a thong about her neck. Too big for a finger, too small for a wrist. He’d run his fingertip along the inner surface and she’d read the words there for him. Different for every person. “Be brave,” she had said. Her face had softened for a moment. “I was sick and you made me better,” he had told her, being of an age that likes to tell such things. “We’re none of us one thing,” she had replied. Wisdom of her own on offer this time. He’d asked who gave her the ring but she left without answer.
A cough reminds him he is not alone in this darkness.
“The white-stars.” He opens the bag half convinced that some glimmer will escape it, but even the whiteness of the stars can’t break the night inside Megra’s hut. He just wants her to take it so he can leave.
“Do you know what’s coming, boy? Have you smelled it on the wind?”
“Rain?” She doesn’t mean rain.
“Something is coming. Something worse than wickedness.”
Gallar imagines her withered lips twitching as that young voice falls from them. Had she stolen it? Roggon said she had. “What’s coming?” he asks, wanting to be gone, wanting to run from her and the bad thing both.
But The Megra doesn’t answer. Instead like any ancient she slips into something new.
“Old Helmar came here once upon a when-did you know that? He was a man grown, with nothing but a century on him, and I ran barefoot no higher than his hip.”
Gallar doesn’t ask who Helmar was. The Megra speaks to people as if they know everything and treats them as if they know nothing.
“Bad things are coming, boy. Helmar could have told you. He didn’t just catch people in his patterns, he caught the past too, and the future.”
The slither of the cloth bag being taken, the wet noise of chewing. Is she eating the flowers?
“Don’t ever eat a white-star, boy. Poisons the body quicker than it opens up the mind. But if you’re hardened to it-ain’t nothing better for seeing. For really seeing. Helmar would have known what’s coming through and through. Me, I have to chew poison just to catch a glimpse of-” She draws in a sharp breath. Another. A low moan. “…empty, the desert is empty, a place without time where the djinn howl in silence and the wind moans-” She sounds in pain. “There’s a hole in the world. A hole that devours and the sands are running through it. There’s a-” She stops, cut off and for a moment he thinks she’s fainted. The sudden sound of a chair scraping on stone makes him flinch.
“I’m leaving, boy. You should too. Yrkmen are coming up the passes, austeres laying their patterns. Rangers with them. Anyone who stays here will be dead by dawn.”
“What?” His mind can’t make sense of it. Yrkmen in the mountains? Fryth was their ally! And they didn’t need to take the high passes… “You were talking about the desert! You never said about Yrkmen!”
“The death of all of us is coming from the desert, boy. That’s for tomorrow though. The Yrkmen are here today and they’ll kill you just as good.”