The Emperors Knife - By Mazarkis Williams Page 0,88
about their business.
“I thought the emperor must live here when I saw it,” Grada said, “I didn’t know there were such places.” Her words carried images of the Maze in their wake: dark rooms, small and dirt-floored, sewer stink, and rot in the gutters.
She found her feet and looked both ways along the corridor. To her left was a low door, and above it brown tiles picking out a scene from the Battle of the Well, showing Cerani and Parigols locked in combat.
She moved to go past, but Sarmin stopped her and they almost fell. “I’ve seen this before—this decoration.”
Grada said nothing.
“I saw it,” Sarmin continued, “I was with the Many, and I saw Tuvaini here. And something was given to him—something precious. It was his price for betrayal. His price for opening the secret ways to you.”
Grada frowned. “I remember… almost.”
“He plays Settu, my cousin,” Sarmin said. “We’re tiles on his board. He tried to use me and found that I was not a tool he could turn to his purpose, so he sold me to the Many, and charged a high price for his treachery. He plays the Pattern Master at his own game. Or he thinks he does.”
Grada shook her head and for a moment Sarmin felt himself fade, losing substance, as if he were a memory or an idea ready to be overwritten by new thoughts. The image came to him of cushions black with blood.
“Quickly,” he murmured, “we have to reach the Tower.” They had taken four steps before Grada remembered her robes and retrieved them from the throat of the urn. The sun robes were ill-suited to fighting, but essential to the outdoor life of the Maze. She gasped as she struggled into them, but the rough cloth would hide her wound.
Sarmin retreated to the back of Grada’s mind and watched as they passed a hall where women, old and young, sat at long tables, cutting and stitching with swift fingers and quicker voices. The corridor split and from the left men came, hefting amphorae heavy with sweet-wine for the palace kitchens. They passed without a glance for Grada, who hurried down the passage to the right.
They passed by a well, low-walled and secret in a window-less hall. The air felt strange to Sarmin; it was clammy on Grada’s skin. She took a wooden bucket from a row by the wall. Sarmin found himself listening to her breathing, wondering at the soft strength and strangeness of her body beneath the robes. As she reached for a cover for the bucket Sarmin turned her hand, studying her palm for a moment before she took command again.
The corridors became more crowded, with servants, scribes, craftsmen, all bound for unknown destinations. Grada stepped aside and passed unmarked, beneath notice, a ghost within the machine of government.
A low door gave onto the grand courtyard. As a child Sarmin had left the palace carried within a palanquin, taken through the Elephant Gate, a vaulted portal with doors of spice-teak, tall enough to admit gods. The door before them now was not for gods, or princes, or even merchants. Even so, a palace guard waited, a scarred hand resting upon the hilt of his hachirah. His eyes flitted to the bucket in Grada’s hands and he wrinkled his nose and said nothing. Grada passed through, silent, into the sun. Sarmin could hear the words unspoken: night-soil. Hachirahs meant nothing to the Mazeborn.
The noonday sun bludgeoned the flagstones of the grand courtyard with such violence that none lingered there. Only Grada and a distant patrol of the Blue Shield Guard moved in the heat. Sarmin felt the hot stone through Grada’s sandals and through the slits of her eyes he saw the great expanse of the sky. After fifteen years beneath a painted ceiling the sight robbed him of thought. His scream escaped Grada’s lips and he ran, throwing himself back into her skull, into her mind, into the darkest recesses, diving under the blackness, burrowing—
“Grada?” A man’s voice in the night of memory.
“Grada? Why are you hiding?” Closer now. “Father always finds you.”
And there, buried from the sun, in a stranger’s nightmares, Sarmin learned of other ways to lose a childhood.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Eyul stood by the burning tent. He watched her funeral pyre through his white sun-mask, Knife in hand. It had taken only seconds for Metrishet to free himself, to blister Amalya’s smooth skin and envelop her blankets in a crackling blaze.