“Aie can also be true?” Sarmin scratched more of his pattern into the wall, scoring the plaster in white lines. “What help is that?” The truth of his own pattern ached around him, each stroke cutting something more substantial than the surfaces about him, a flat light leaking through them to bathe the room in that glow which settles before the worst of storms. “A lie can also be true?” He saw the pattern everywhere now, each exposed brick a mesh of earth symbols, fire symbols, the coded geometry of its construction, the ancient waters where silt settled, the imprints of the men that shaped it. His bed no longer held form but shaped itself from patterns enumerating trees, branching, folded, self-referencing, remembering days when twigs and leaves had danced to please the wind.
For the year since Helmar died on the Knife Sarmin had drawn no pattern, made no study of the magics.
“These enchantments are your heritage, my emperor,” Govnan had told him. “The skill for such seeing is found so rarely-a gift of your blood.”
“What good ever came from Helmar’s work?” Sarmin had asked, and the high mage had no answer.
Sarmin had never craved the power of the Petal Throne, let alone desired to claim still deeper control with patterns new or old. Helmar’s need to rule a nation of puppets, a world slaved to his will… it had always seemed the miserable ember of lost ambitions, of a hope turned sour.
Sarmin closed his eyes, unsteady with exhaustion. He pressed the heel of his hand hard against his forehead. For the thousandth time the image of Pelar swum before him, lying white and unmoving on the flagstones. He shook it away, shook away the pain, opened his eyes to focus on the symbols before him. He’d been wrong; patterns could speak of more than men, but whatever they spoke of they told only a story, not the truth. The pattern of fire held heat and light but the vital essence of fire, the wildness, vitality, endless variety, all that lay too deep for the pattern to catch.
Sarmin found he could write the stories of many things within his patterns, but he could craft no symbol for the nothing. The end of all things lay in the heart of the desert, and now because of Helmar it devoured the palace and threatened everything Sarmin loved. And though the pattern had brought this curse to their doorstep, not in all of its language were there words to speak of what attacked them.
“Gods help me.” He saw Pelar again, still as pale, still as small.
Ta-Sann knocked and entered, a silver tray in hand. Sarmin would admit no servants now. “You must eat, my emperor.”
“Eat?” The tray spilled patterns, fire signs chasing water signs coiling up where steam should rise, the life of a fish written limp across a plate, corrupted with other stories, stories of salt and spice, even the tray itself a dense mesh of symbology speaking of the deep places where ore is mined, the furnace in which the silver sweated from the rock.
“For your strength, my emperor.” Ta-Sann himself glowed with the essay of his life written through him, making a ghost of his flesh, his loyalty, memories, wants, all coded there in threaded lines woven into bones.
“I have no strength.” Only the stone held no pattern, simply a stone, black and uninspired, scooped no doubt from some turn of the Blessing where the river piles up its discarded toys. The stone and the nothing held no pattern, the unwriting from the desert.“Nothing I do here matters.” Sarmin spat the words and rolled back against the wall, shoulders pressed flat against it. “Helmar’s patterns are false. Their language is too crude, too blunt. Men cannot be written into it. Not all of a man. Not the core. Not what matters most. That was not my brother.” He stared at Ta-Sann as if the man had contradicted him. “That was not my brother. Beyon loved me.”
Sarmin had last looked from the Sayakarva window on the previous evening. The nothing appeared as a stain against the eye, a blot on the imagination, seated in a sinkhole of sand and dust, whiter than bone, where once Sarmin’s fathers had lain in their splendour. Soon the outer wall would fall, the courtyard where Eyul killed Sarmin’s brothers would erode into rotten pieces, the nothing would touch his tower and it too would topple. Panic ran in the corridors, djinn haunted each shadow and stole the unwary, empty men and empty women wandered without purpose or will, corrupting all they touched, and slaves ran through it all, blood on their hands, fire in their wake.
“The empress-”
“I cannot go! I will not watch my son drain away. Do you understand that?” He found himself shouting.
“My emperor.”
“I didn’t ask you to say “my emperor”. I asked if you understood what I said.” Sarmin advanced on Ta-Sann, his body alight, rage flaring through him, throwing the shadows of fire signs across the walls. Something in the sword-son’s patience exasperated him-as obdurate in its way as Helmar’s damned stone.
“Does Govnan do anything for Pelar? Are all my mages useless? Every single one?”
He slapped a hand to Ta-Sann’s chest, solid like the timbers of the throne room doors. The sword-son flinched despite himself. Sarmin saw only patterns, this thing, that thing, written out, twisted, coiled, interwritten, interwoven. He could hook his fingers about any piece of it and pull the symbols forth, rob Ta-Sann of some vital part of who he was.
Sarmin spun away with an animal cry, rage, frustration, Helmar’s stone raised high like a weapon, ready to open skulls.
“The food-” Ta-Sann pursued his path with dogged determination.
“Damn your food!” Sarmin spun again, roaring the words, the stone leaving his fingertips before regret could close them. It flew straight and true, with deadly speed, a single black dot, a single point of simplicity in a room of swirling pattern-stuff.
Ta-Sann moved so fast it didn’t seem human-as if his entire life had been spent tensed for this moment, waiting to spring. And even so the stone grazed his ear before hammering into the doorjamb. Plaster and brick dust plumed. The stone fell.
“I’m sorry.” An emperor never apologises. Page six of the Book of Etiquette. “So sorry.”
The two halves of Helmar’s stone slid apart, the split running along the length of it, a finger’s width of the inner surface exposed. All patterns fled, those written in the plaster, the ancient ones still showing in painted ceiling, the patterns overlaying Sarmin’s vision, all of them erased. And the room filled with light. Ta-Sann stepped away as Sarmin advanced, a hand raised to shield his eyes from the glare.
Sarmin reached for the stone. His hand felt the ghosts of jagged edges, emotions bled into him, all of them, from melancholy to madness, joy to rage. He slid the two sides together again, sealing away all but a thread of the light within, and stood, trembling. Then, like a book, like the only book that ever mattered, he opened the two halves before his face.
“A butterfly?” Written there in crystals of many hues, every pattern of its wings, every scale captured, formed with exquisite care from without, melted and reset, melted and reset in the long night of that oubliette so many years ago. Helmar was ever Meksha’s child, a son of rock and fire. “A butterfly.” And Sarmin fell, stricken so suddenly that he never felt the ground.
In a bright summer meadow he’s running with the slope, out of breath but laughing. It’s hot and the heat folds round him, flows through him. The air is full of seeds, floating on their white fluff, swirling in his wake, like the memory of the first snow that falls fat flaked and lazy into the early days of autumn. Sarmin understands he is caught in someone else’s memory. He has only read of snow.
He’s a child, chubby armed, almost chest deep in the longest greenest grass he has ever known, running without direction, chasing butterflies, swinging a thin stick with no hope of hitting. There’s no tiredness in this memory, he runs and runs some more, always laughing. And Sarmin laughs too, he has found Helmar before the austeres of Yrkmir, before the dungeon, before even the tower. Sarmin has days like this walled within the record of his past-someday he will open those too.
Butterflies rise before him in hues too vivid for the world. And then he stumbles. Just a little trip, a snagged foot, a headlong plunge into the lushness of the grass, his stick snapping beneath him. The sky is so blue, as if the heat and brightness of the day has woken its true colours, given them meaning. Motion draws his gaze from the sky, something fluttering but wrong. There in the canyon that his fall scored into the grass is a butterfly, lunging skyward, failing, veering in crazy spirals, battering against the green stems. Is it sick?
This is why he’s here, Sarmin knows it. This is the anchor point, the fractured moment that has defined a life, defined many lives. A child’s stumble, an instant’s thoughtlessness and something beautiful lies broken. A lesson every child learns. Perhaps the first and sharpest truth of all those that slice us through the years, that carve away innocence, make bitter men of joyous boys.
The thing is a frenzy of beating wings, iridescent green slashed with crimson. For a heartbeat it pauses on the ground. A jagged hole spoils the symmetry of its wings, breaks the interwoven pattern of their markings. Some swing of his stick has taken a chunk from the back of both wings. The butterfly rises again in its broken dance. And falls.
Helmar’s hands close around the insect, cupping, holding. The crazed fluttering continues, the beat of broken wings within the darkness he encloses. The feel of it against his palms turns his stomach.
This is the first lesson. What’s done is done. Beauty is too easy to destroy. “No.” Helmar refuses the lesson.
“Let it go.” A whisper from Sarmin’s lips. Madness lies in such refusal.
Deny but one truth, however small, and your world must twist and twist again at each turn through your days to accommodate that lie, until at last there is no hint of truth in any corner of your existence.
“No,” Helmar says again, and opens his hands, just a crack, to study his captive, now resting on the lower palm.
There is a pattern here, boldly stamped in iridescent green, metallic blue, a symmetry of circles within circles, curves and divides. Where the wing is gone the eye fills in what is missing, symmetry demands it, completeness requires that this circle is finished, this line carried to the end.
The child closes his hands again, closes his eyes, tight until the reds and greens a summer day leaves behind the eyelids flare bright as fire. He sees the pattern, the necessary pattern of the butterfly, whole, intact, brilliant in memory. He sees it, he lives it, he prints it into his hands, stamping it with every breath, every beat of his heart.
The pattern is not the butterfly, Sarmin tells him. The butterfly is so much more. The butterfly is whatever mystery of insect blood and insect bone serves such creatures, it is egg and chrysalis, it is dew sucked from grass and nectar from flowers. It is this morning there, that morning here, a close escape, five miles in the grip of a sudden gale. The pattern is not the butterfly.
The child sees the pattern, whole, complete. He believes it. He opens his hands and the butterfly flutters away, gone amongst the floating seeds.
The pattern was no more than a story, a tale of the butterfly, but it showed it the way to be whole once more. It showed the butterfly how to heal itself.
The pattern was a lie. The pattern was also true.