The house stands in the Holies, up above the reek of the Maze, separated from it by the stockyards, the market, the streets of Leather and Copper, the streets of Salt and Silver. And by the river.
When Uthman came across the empty desert in the longest of long agos he discovered two great outcrops of granite defying both sand and river, channelling the waters between them and resisting the wind. He founded a city there and named it Nooria after Meksha’s daughter, she of the hidden fires in whose deep furnace such rock is forged. On the greater outcrop he built his palace, and in time it grew to devour and conceal the ancient rock. On the lesser outcrop, watching the palace across the swift waters of the Blessing, he set the first shrine, to Meksha, and the second to her child. And among the many shrines that followed, the rich built homes, each according to the changing tastes and prosperity of the times. For what is wealth for if not to let men live among the gods?
This knowing comes to Grada from the pages of a great book, though she cannot read. It can only be that the Many have whispered it to her. She sees the book, its parchment turning beneath blunt and ink-stained hands, at once familiar and strange.
The house stands on a long aisled street where date palms grow in ordered senility, grey with age and fruitless now, awaiting time’s judgement. At one end, Mirra’s shrine, domed in black marble, simple and without adornment. At the far end where the street opens into a sun dazzled square, Herzu’s shrine in alabaster, abalone, and ivory, white in many flavours, carved in deep and complex relief.
The house stands between life and death, pale in the moonlight, and Grada knows with certainty-as sudden as the sun’s departure-that she is dreaming.
It’s cold on that street where the palms whisper in the dark and no one walks. Grada shivers against the breeze and against a deeper chill woken in her bones. The gardens are high walled but it is gesture rather than threat; the stonework is ornate and easy to climb. There are no lights behind the many shuttered windows, no servants at late duties. There will be guards-a rich man cannot sleep without a sharp blade to guarantee his slumbers, but like the walls these guards will be more show, blunted by routine, selected for the peaceful boredom of civilised living.
Grada would rather walk away, let sleeping dogs lie. Instead she waits and lets the poisoned dogs die. The meat she slung over the wall left her hands bloody. She wipes them on the coarse sandstone before her. There will be more blood to come. She can taste it.
This isn’t dreaming. This is memory. Unfolding, piece by piece like a tightwrapped pattern, bound about a dark and rotten truth.
Grada knows this. She knows it as she knows the path her knife cut to Sarmin’s chamber, as she knows the lives she sliced open to reach him. The Many guided her hands that night. Now those same hands find purchase on the carved corner of a garden wall and pull her up. The pattern unfolds a piece more, its secret still hidden. But some offenses are so rank they reek to heaven and nothing can wholly conceal them. There’s a child here. She knows that much.
“Wake up.”
Fingers tight about her wrists. Grada struggled but the grip held. “Wake up!” Rorrin said again, the moonlight caught his face above her. Grada relaxed in his grip, spitting sand.
“You shouted in your sleep,” he said.
“Bad dreams,” she muttered, shrugging him off to sit upright. She paused a moment, looking about. The milestone at the roadside, the milky haze of stars above, the sigh of the Blessing slipping past in the night, and in the far distance the glow of Nooria.
Rorrin sat back, a white gleam of teeth in the darkness of his face. “You’re young yet-there are worse dreams to come.” Sloshing as he reached for his waterskin. “Here.”
For a while Grada held silent, the waterskin cool across her knees, its contents sliding as she changed position. Rorrin settled down beneath his cloak once more.
“And what kind of emperor will Sarmin be?” If she fell asleep that house would still be waiting for her, she would find herself straddling that wall with the bushes seething beneath her in the darkness and the sounds of three hounds choking. Better to have Rorrin spin out his opinions and keep her awake.
“We get the emperor we deserve,” Rorrin said. “And clearly we deserve to be punished.” He yawned, wide enough to crack his jaw.
Grada pushed the skin aside, her anger in the sharp gesture. “Sarmin is a good man.” Sarmin the Saviour, they were calling him now.
Perhaps Rorrin shrugged-the darkness hid it. “Better a strong emperor than a weak one, but if the emperor is weak then better he hide in the palace and play his games there. The worst of all is a weak emperor who shows his weakness to the world. Cerana has enemies on every side. It’s the natural order of things-the rich are watched by the poor, always waiting for the chance to turn the tables, to move into their houses, dine from their silver. Neighbour watches neighbour with jealous eye.”
“Being a good man doesn’t make Sarmin weak,” Grada said. She remembered how easy it had been to stab him. How she bore him to the bed and he had offered no fight, only traced his fingertips across her shoulder, and in that touch taken her from the Many.
“This emperor has yet to name a Knife, though seven candidates have been offered for judgement. Only a fool walks the Maze unarmed. Sarmin walks far worse places and thinks he needs no Knife. His enemies won’t see a new way of thinking in his empty hands, they’ll see he represents an opportunity entirely different from the one he thinks to offer.
“His weakness springs from what we did to him. We learn to mistrust as we grow, we come to know the true nature of men, the hungers that drive them. Our innocence dies the death of a thousand cuts. Sarmin spent those years alone, nursing only one wound, a big one I grant you, but even so. He doesn’t understand us, the people outside his rooms, outside his books. Innocence, that is a dangerous state of mind in which to rule. Better a bloody-handed murderer than an innocent on the Petal Throne.”
Grada set her head to her pack and twisted to remake her hollow in the sandy ground. She had no argument for Rorrin. She could say that the emperor had been easy to stab but that his touch saved her. She didn’t think that would ease Rorrin’s mind. She closed her eyes against the light of moon and stars. The garden and the house would either draw her to them or they wouldn’t. There are some truths that can’t be run from.