“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, his hand found the hilt of Tuvaini’s dacarba beneath his pillow. It had become dear to him, the embodiment of all his secrets, new and old, a treasure kept close to which his fingers returned time and again.
“See, I have a knife, too,” Sarmin laughed as the patterned woman closed on him. None of it felt real-or if it felt real, it didn’t feel important.
The woman circled him, looking for an opening. Sarmin knew her caution to be misplaced; the Book of War had taught him nothing of knives beyond their names.
“Tell me, Pattern Master, what am I to you?” Sarmin asked. He thrust his blade at the woman, hoping to buy a little time, and she skipped back, scattering black drops of her blood on the carpet. She moved as if to music, her knife part of her dance. Sarmin saw his death in the moon-gleams it sliced from the air, but the need for answers cut deeper than his fear.
“You’ve sunk your hooks into my brother, so what harm am I to you, here in my hidden room?”
The woman kept her lips pressed in a thin line. She looked young, perhaps five years his junior, hair cropped close, limbs thick with the hard labour of her class. She was the first woman beside his mother Sarmin had seen in fifteen years, and she came to kill him. The patterns drew his eyes though, more than her feminine charms. Patterns like Beyon’s, but different, and more complete.
“Tell me!”
She moved too fast for Sarmin’s eyes to follow. His knife-hand stayed motionless, paralysed by the moment, as the woman twisted beneath it, coming up to catch him in an embrace that bore him to the bed. The weight of her drove the air from his lungs in a crimson spray.
I’m stabbed.
Sarmin felt only astonishment that her knife could enter him without pain. The warmth and closeness of the woman woke memories of lost days. Sarmin lifted a hand heavier than lead to the arm that bound her to him. His precious knife lay lost in the sheets, but it didn’t seem important any more, now that he was dying.
Sarmin felt the woman’s blade twist inside him, metal on bone, a grating sensation between two ribs. Pain brought a sharp cry and another spray of blood from his lips, but he no longer had the strength for agony. He lay with his cheek beside her head. Her short hair was softer than he had imagined.
Even now the pattern drew him. One finger traced the half-moon on her shoulder.
A glow kindled within the assassin’s flesh. Under the idle scroll of Sarmin’s fingertip, blood-light illuminated the symbol and ran like fire beneath the symbols on either side, waking the pattern. It seemed to Sarmin that he was lifted from the silken bed and with another’s eyes he saw the two of them bound together, as tight as a lovers’ embrace, the penetrator and the penetrated, both bleeding.
Sarmin saw his fingers walk a path among the pattern-marks, waking a flood of light as if the markings were cut into a skin beneath which fire burned. His attacker strained, but managed no motion beyond the ripple of muscles. With each symbol brought to life, a memory or image flooded Sarmin, one upon the next, faster and faster, until he could pick just a glimpse here and there from the deluge: Beyon, walking across the sand.
An assassin, older but vital, holding his knife over a young woman.
Felting folk on red-hoofed horses, spying on a caravan, the pattern-marks on the leader, hidden, but calling to Sarmin with the voice of the Many.
Tuvaini, a Settu board before him, a frown on his face.
The Tower, stark against a steel sky, a great nail driven through the city of Nooria to fix it in the world.
The images rushed through Sarmin so fast they left him breathless. More, and more again, and he rose above them, borne on a spike of pain. And in one instant the pattern lay revealed beneath him, awesome in its complexity, beautiful in its simplicity. A pattern of many dimensions, reaching for the past and the future, enclosing, incorporating…
“It is wonderful, isn’t it?” The speaker stood at his shoulder.
“Almost perfect,” Sarmin said.
“Almost?” A tone of reproach.
“There.” Sarmin tried to point, but found he didn’t have arms. He didn’t need them. The Pattern Master saw it too: a dark line cut through the pattern, a wound it sought to seal. Sarmin reached to touch the damage and the glories of the pattern resolved into a single moment.
“You opened a door.” The Pattern Master reproached him.
“Now the Knife stands before your plans.” Sarmin reached along the pattern, back through the weeks, and he saw the ruined city rise from the sands. “You tried to kill Eyul.” I would kill him too, given the chance.
“I failed,” the Pattern Master said without emotion. “It is no matter.”
Sarmin withdrew from the vision, taking in the entirety of the pattern once again. “You no longer wish him dead?”
“The Knife is better broken.”
Sarmin saw it, an epiphany of fearful symmetry. “There are two sides only: yours and the Knife’s. The Knife can never serve you, but broken-”
“That would be perfection.”
No.
Sarmin ran from the Pattern Master. He hid in the details, driving his will along the twists and coils of the great pattern, seeking the symbols that marked his quarry, until, amid the vastness of the grand pattern, among the near infinite variations on the theme of the Many, Sarmin found the individual he wanted.
He made changes, subtle alterations that might escape unseen. The power came to him as naturally as breathing.
Sarmin could sense the Pattern Master seeking him, and remembered old games, hiding from his brothers, squeezed into closets deep among the silks, and the scent of sandalwood, the sound of footsteps passing close by, the rattle of a hand on the slatted door. Close now.