The Emperors Knife - By Mazarkis Williams Page 0,2

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