The Emperors Knife - By Mazarkis Williams Page 0,84

scabbard, surprise making him clumsy.

“You filth!” Ellar reached the bridge-stone first. Sarmin had never seen such hatred on a man’s face. It scared him more than the glimmering reach of the guards’ scimitars.

Ellar advanced, his steps wary despite his rage. Each of these men was a veteran, and the training of a royal guard ran deep. The Carrier’s wrist flickered and in an instant his blade was jutting from Ellar’s throat. The Carrier moved swiftly and surely across the bridge-stone, batted away Ellar’s weakened thrust and pulled his dacarba from the guard’s neck before he fell.

Sarmin marvelled that palace guards could be killed with such ease; as a boy he’d been taught they were invincible.

The whispers rose around him. Good kill. Slay the last. Bleed him.

Rotram charged. Rotram the gambler. The Carrier dived at Rotram’s feet and a pain like scalding water ran along the Carrier’s back. Sarmin felt it and cried out, and the Many cried out too. The Carrier’s knife struck out to the left and he rolled to his side and lay prone, his legs extended out over the drop. Rotram carried on for three steps, rolling like a drunkard, the tendon behind his left knee cut.

“Carrier Witch!” Rotram screamed as he fell. His cries trailed off. Sarmin heard a sick, wet crunch, then nothing.

Witch? The pain in the Carrier’s back made Sarmin’s stomach churn with nausea. The Carrier stood, and Sarmin felt hot blood running down his legs.

The Carrier moved on, unsteady, and reached a patterned hand to the wall for support. He moved on, steps up, steep, curving.

“Three palace guards. You did well.” The Pattern Master spoke.

I was an assassin. The will that had held the Carrier retreated back into the Many, its voice growing fainter.

“A pity you could not slay Tuvaini’s servant. Three of the Many to guide against one old man and still you failed,” the Pattern Master said.

He is the emperor’s Knife. Even to cut him was more than could have been hoped for.

“No matter. He works for me now.”

Sarmin stopped listening. The Carrier had climbed a narrow, spiralling stairway to a door of stone. Bloody fingers guided the dacarba’s point into a slot in the lintel. Inch by inch the knife slid home, hilt-deep. Without sound, and by degrees, the door opened. Sarmin saw his room. He saw his bed, and on it a young man sprawled in sleep, sweat plastering black hair to a pale olive brow.

Me!

He opened his eyes and saw her there, framed in Tuvaini’s secret door: a woman of the Maze, her white robes dark with blood around the hips and legs, the pattern-symbols reaching out along her arms, running up along the veins of her throat. She stood at the foot of his bed, dacarba in hand, raised high. And the eyes that watched him were windows to the Many.

Eyul whispered over his shoulder, “What kind of magic would a ghost command?”

Amalya didn’t answer; she was asleep. He rolled towards her and gathered her close. He could feel the beating of her heart, the joy of her firm, soft, curved shape. If they could lie like this for ever… But Nooria’s walls lay close, and things would move quickly inside; it was as if his thinking about the city sped the coming of day. Now, in the dim glow of early dawn, the light did not bother his eyes. Later, he would suffer.

Amalya’s bandages hung loose from her hand. Eyul smiled to himself; she was too fastidious to show dishevelment when awake. He sat up and reached for her pack, where she kept the fresh bandages, and cradled the clean fabric in his lap as he pulled the dirty linen away. Tossing it aside, he lifted her arm and prepared to wrap it up once more.

He leaned closer, his eyes straining in the low light. A bit of dirt, or a smudge, darkened her skin near the old wound. He wet a piece of the fabric and rubbed at it, but it remained, clearer now, three definite lines forming a shape under his thumb.

Eyul let out his breath. He didn’t know how the pattern worked, whether it tattooed itself from the inside or stained a body from the outside, like ink on a page. It didn’t matter. A blue triangle took its place on Amalya’s wrist, its head pointing towards her hand.

Sarmin rose to meet his assassin. She stood at the secret entrance. The Carrier flesh held the Many, each will bent to his destruction. Unbidden,