In darkness, betrayed only by the moon, Grada climbed the wall. Her fingers found easy holds, a wall built for show rather than security. Below her bushes seethed in the wind, dogs lay hissing and choking on their last breaths, and the grounds stretched out to a moon-pale mansion. Everything as she had dreamed it so many times, even the grass.
She crossed neither fast enough to draw attention nor slow enough to present a lingering target. At the windows she checked first the ones closest to the great stair, then moved along the front of the house trying each in turn. She pulled hard, hoping to force an entrance before she reached the shutter that the dream told her would come free. Nothing gave. She reached the shutter she knew would yield.
“I could leave it, try the next instead. I could walk away, find a caravan, head south for a new life.” The words twitched behind her lips. Duty bound her to the task. “Knife-Sworn are a rare breed,” Herran had told her. “It’s a combination of loyalty that once given goes bone deep, and independent thought that remains unclouded by that loyalty. Either quality is rare and each seems to preclude the other, but still time and again the emperors of Cerana find such servants. The priests tell us it is the gods who send the Knife-Sworn to the emperor in time of need, and I cannot argue.”
Grada pulled at the next shutter and it gave as she had known it would. She clambered through into the blind dark beyond. In the corridor she passed the sleepwalker from the dream, guided only by sound. Grada moved on, trailing fingers along the wall, counting each doorway against the map she remembered from Meere’s papyrus. Meere wrote a number there too, five. Jomla, both his wives, his councillor who like the emperor’s vizier would be privy to all schemes and secrets. That made four. Fifth would be the boy, the heir. Grada wondered if he would have toys now, if Prince Jomla had sent again to the tall houses of the artisans, to Mechar Anlantar, and if his servant returned this time with model soldiers, mechanical acrobats in silver and jet, a drum perhaps. Would she find the child clutching his gift in the depth of his sleep? Herran had said five given to the knife would be enough to cut out the rot, rebottle the genie, kill the secret. But once the cutting started more than five would die, no matter how careful she was. Grada remembered the Pattern Master centred in his pattern of death, corpses laid in dismembered intricacy all around him, thick with flies. And now she was supposed to fill this house with more bodies, bleeding out in the dark, and all because of pillow talk, of secrets whispered into blonde hair by in the aftermath of Sarmin’s lust. It made no sense. Sarmin was not that man, and she had known him to the core. And yet here she was, chasing secrets.
She found the stairs and began to climb the spiral of them. Whispers of moonlight from tiny windows in a high dome let her find the very edge of each step, a habit from the Maze where any stairs are most likely salvaged from old river barges, creaky with rot. Jomla’s stairs were marble and silent, but old habits die hard.
She passed the second floor. More steps. A deeper shadow ahead, one could imagine it a man. It will be a man. In the dream she killed him. And what else can she do now? Whatever plan might come to her, whatever gambit that might avoid slicing the life from Jomla, it couldn’t start with being captured as an intruder. Waking with the emperor’s knife at your throat carries a certain degree of terror with it. Having a woman of the untouchables captured like a thief in your house, coming down to the servants quarters with your guards to view her and congratulate the man who took her… that’s hardly a position of strength. In the dream she stabbed him, took his keys, and the voices of the Many whispered “murderer”. In the dream she was bound to her course.
I have a choice now. The Knife is in my hand. I have a choice, many choices. All of them bad.
This is memory, the darkness holds Grada and this could be memory, the remembering of crimes already committed by another’s hands. It could be remembered… should be…
It was never memory. This house on the Holies had waited for her, held in the fearful symmetry of the Helmar’s pattern, the Pattern Master’s great work reaching both forward and back to capture histories and futures. In the darkness Grada at last allowed herself to understand what she had always known, allowed herself to let hope slip away, a warm tear to slide down across one cheek.
Ahead, at the top of the stairs, the guardsman would be waiting, unseen and unseeing, dozing or patient he waited. Grada’s hand tightened around the Knife. She climbed the last few steps, each of them feeling like a step down, like a descent into some black deed. Her dreams gave the man to her, they wrapped the darkness where he stood into the shape of a man and she moved towards him without pause. An indrawn breath hissed from him and her hand lashed out, the pommel of the Knife striking his forehead. He jerked back and his head striking the wall behind him with equal force. She pinned him to the painted plaster, a faint rattle of keys as he slid to the floor.
“Choice!” She wanted to shout it. In the dream she stabbed his heart. For the moment it seemed the world around her seethed with pattern, the outrage of the Many echoing around her defiance. But at the end of it the guard lay at her feet and the Knife bore no blood. She savoured the victory.
I am the emperor’s Knife. I cut, and no pattern can bind me. The future is mine to make.
Still the sour taste came to her mouth, hard to swallow. Jomla and the others, the child, none of those problems could be fixed by knocking them insensible. She moved on. Meere had told her the place wouldn’t be a fortress, but even so it seemed too easy. “The rich politic against each other these days, they don’t murder one another in their beds,” Meere had said. “Better to dominate and rob your rivals than to kill them and see them be replaced by some unknown who knows his chance to survive lies in murdering you first. This is what civilisation gave the Cerani.”
Grada set the pommel of the Knife to her chin, thinking. Jomla first. Jomla would be easy. The house reeked of his guilt. Without his ambition, without his dreams of treachery and power, the child would not be here, would not be at risk.
A light burned in the corridor that led to Jomla’s room. Grada eased herself to the corner. In a niche opposite the door to Jomla’s bedchamber an oil lantern sat, its flame dancing. Standing before the door a single guard, tall, tending to fat, but powerfully built and wearing a ring-mail shirt. A slim sword curving at his hip, a knife in his belt, the red glass of the pommel capturing the lamplight.
Grada stepped back and scraped the Knife along the wall, old steel grating on plaster. Properly the guard should wake his master and warn of trouble if he suspected any-if he suspected nothing then he should do nothing. If everyone did what was proper the world would have fewer problems. Maybe none at all. As Grada had anticipated the man came to the end of the corridor, carrying the lamp with him. He turned the corner and Grada stabbed him in the neck. This man though not wary was not unaware and stood too tall to risk a non-lethal stratagem against. The Knife sliced off his protest and bit through his neck bones, halting the progress of fingers towards sword hilt. Grada bore him to the ground, the clatter seeming loud enough to wake the whole household. And yet none stirred. Grada suppressed a grunt of effort as she rolled him across the spilled and burning oil from the lamp, extinguishing the flame. She waited by his twitching corpse listening hard. No sounds of alarm, no boots on marble stairs. She counted twenty beats of her heart then pulled the Knife from his throat and let the blood flow. In death the man soiled himself and smelled rank. Grada had twisted the heads from a hundred chickens in her time-men had no more dignity in death. Emperors may lie in golden caskets within tombs of worked stone, but even they died like any other man, like any other animal. She rolled the man twice more until he lay along the wall where he might be passed by in the dark rather than tripped over. He really had been a big man. Perhaps in his prime he might have stood among the imperial guard. She mouthed a prayer to Mirra for his soul. The words felt empty without sound to give them voice. She filled and lit her own lamp, a small one of fired clay. She would need to see the prince die.
Ten paces brought her to Jomla’s door. It would be locked from within. Meere had given her a vial of acid to destroy the mechanism but she had smelled the stuff at work. It ate metal slowly and released sharp odours that might wake a sleeper. The emperor’s Knife was always on the grand scale a simple solution to a complex problem, or seemingly so. Grada opted for the same direct simplicity on the small scale. She knocked on the door with the hilt of the Knife, three loud raps. A pause then three more. When the muffled query came from inside she simply called in, “Fire.”
A man awake and suspicious would have a dozen questions, not least being where had his night guard gone, but Jomla thick with sleep and focused on the threat of fire came to his own door and unlocked it for her.
With the door ajar between them Jomla blinked at Grada, lifting a hand to rub the sleep from his eyes. Meere had told her she need only kill the fattest man in the house to be sure of Jomla. She could believe the house held no-one more corpulent. Jomla’s chins continued down into the embroidered silks of his night-shirt. She kicked the door wider and lifted the Knife.
Jomla’s eyes widened, “I have gold-” The rest spluttered through a sliced throat, the Knife biting deep to find his windpipe. He fell with a heavy thud, thrashing, refusing to die, rising up spraying blood. Anyone who has seen a pig slaughtered knows how long these things take. The emperor Sarmin would have been appalled. In the stories of valour told to princes death comes in an instant or slow enough that sad farewells might be recorded for posterity.
Grada stepped over and around Jomla, careful of his flailing legs. Oddly they were almost thin, as if he were a great jelly on stork’s legs.
One wife, young and slim, sat in the wide expanse of Jomla’s bed, the silks drawn up around her. The other, an older fatter woman, lay in a separate bed, asleep even now. Grada had thought to find them in separate chambers but Meere had warned that Jomla liked to keep his possessions close.
“I-” The young woman clutched her sheets tighter still as if they might protect her, eyes flitting between Jomla and the Knife. “Don’t hurt me.”
“I won’t,” Grada said, stepping close. The secret doomed the wives, not the Knife. She came to kill the secret, not to kill people. But secrets spread, especially between the sheets. And hadn’t this all sprung from pillow talk?
“Please!” the girl begged, her black hair framing a pale face in curls.
“It’s all right,” Grada said and stabbed through silk into the wife’s heart. “It will be quick.”
For the sleeping wife the end came quicker still.
Jomla’s vizier, Nashan, slept unguarded one floor down, though a guardsman died between the prince’s bedroom and that of Nashan. Like the fat wife, the vizier died without waking. “It’s a kindness to die in one’s sleep. All men should sleep first, then sleep deeper.” She found the words on her lips, perhaps the credo of the assassins who used her back in the days when the Many flowed through her veins and the Pattern Master chose her victims. Did Helmar select her as his Knife for a joke she wondered, an insult, to set an untouchable against the light of heaven and kill him in his sleep? And now Sarmin followed in his relative’s footsteps, putting the Knife in her hands, the lives of the highest and most mighty into her keeping.
Grada found herself outside the heir’s bedroom, the light and shadows dancing across his door. “I never wanted this.”
Her dreams had painted this door for her many times, a butterfly carved into the satinwood. She put her lamp in the niche opposite and set her fingers to the lines of the butterfly’s wings. She glanced to the Knife, a dark drop of blood forming at its point as she looked, dark and gleaming, swelling, pregnant with possibility. She watched it fall. An age passed and it hit the carpet without sound. The pattern it made she had seen each time in her dreaming.
I’m not bound to this. I make the future-not you, Helmar. I am the Knife.
The pattern pulsed around her, echoing in her skin, tracing the invisible scars where once the Pattern Master’s design had wrapped her.
I could do anything. Scream, shout, set a fire, walk away. I am not bound to this dream.
But in the end her hand closed around the handle of the door. This one locked from the outside and yielded to the fourth of the many keys she had gathered on her bloody rounds. The door opened on oiled hinges and a blackness yawned before her. She stepped through on damned feet.
The child lay atop his covers, a boy of seven years, maybe eight, sweat tousled, naked but for a loincloth, thin limbed, pale. Grada sunk to her knees beside the bed, setting down her lamp. Tears blinded her. It didn’t matter that Jomla was dead, he would never have acted alone. Petty satraps and minor caliphs, their lords and generals, would have been lined up behind him and as long as the boy lived, as long as he might be set upon the throne to pardon the treason of those who put him there… they would seek him, seek to own him.
“He’s innocent.” She held the Knife’s blade flat to her lips, whispering the words.
Had Eyul wept as he killed Sarmin’s brothers? He killed a tower-mage too, an island woman, Amalya. Govnan had said the assassin had loved her, but gave her to the Knife when the pattern took hold upon her.
“Gods help me. I cannot do this.” And yet each alternative led to blood. Oceans of it, innocent and guilty, men, women, children as young and as pure as the boy before her. In the game of Settu the push sets the tiles falling, each one toppling the next in branching chains until the work is done and an accounting of the fallen must be made. Grada knew now that the push had been made further back than she had ever known, and that all her life the tiles had been toppling around her, each crashing against the next, a tide that had lifted her and swept her to this point. The old steel trembled on her lips.
A gleam caught her eye. On the table beside the bed, clockwork animals in copper and silver, Mechar Anlantar’s work, two lions, two bears… a cow on its side. Grada swallowed a cry that would become a scream if she let it escape. She set the point of the Knife to the hollow at the base of her throat. “Gods help me.”