Knife Sworn Read Online Free Page A

loved him because we had peace and times were good.”
    “It doesn’t sound as if you loved him.” And if not Beyon, did Rorrin love Sarmin?
    “The gods gave us the emperor that we deserved at that time and the emperor we needed at that time. It’s not my place to love the emperor, only to serve him. If the call came I would have laid down my life to obey Beyon with no delay, while the peasants were wondering just how much they liked him after all. The emperor is Cerana. Cerana is the people. I serve.”
    Grada crushed the pods and the mosquitoes left her alone while she pondered. Dawn found them still walking. With the sun still flowing up over the rim of the desert they saw the caravan ahead, circled and camped. Rorrin appeared not to see it and Grada broke her silence.
    “We should hang back.”
    “And look guilty? We’ll walk on by and see them again in Nooria.” He walked on, his pace that had once irritated her with its lack of haste now calling on her strength to keep up.
    “And if they turn aside to some river mansion or local farm?” She almost kept the annoyance from her voice.
    “Meere,” he said.
    Grada looked around, sudden remembrance spooking her. She should have remembered Meere. But wherever he hid he’d done a good job of it.
    Meere. She would remember him next time.

CHAPTER THREE

    SARMIN
    S armin paced, fifteen by twenty, fifteen by twenty. The tower that held him safe for seventeen years offered no comfort. The walls where Aherim and the others once hid now lay pitted, and dust bled from the scars Mesema had left there, covering his old books with a layer of grey. Whorls of ink and shadow had both hidden and revealed the angels who lived in his room, and the demons. It had taken years to find them. Now Sarmin stared at crumbling plaster and broken lines.
    His old bed, stripped down to wood and ropes, did not invite. The mattress, soaked with blood from when Grada stabbed him, had been taken away and burned. Broken plaster bit through his silk slippers. A jagged tooth of alabaster jutted from the window frame. Grada had smashed his window, opened his eyes to the world. The shard threw yellow light upon his right foot, then his left. He came to the edge of the room and turned.
    One room. Seventeen years. Safe years.
    — You were never safe.
    Sarmin squinted at the broken wall but it was not Aherim who had spoken. When the sun fell a sea of voices rose from some dark infinity. The Many he had saved he had returned to their own flesh, and now they shivered lonely in it. The Many beyond saving still rested with Sarmin. Those whose bodies would no longer receive them, their flesh perhaps too torn to hold a spirit, or the spirit too changed to fit in that which had once contained it. At night they raised their voices.
    Sundown had arrived, but a different kind of clock spelled out this day. Mesema had screamed. They tried to shut the door, tried to hush her, but he’d heard it. Her time was upon her; Beyon’s child would be born this night, beneath a scorpion sky. Sarmin had tried to see her, but too easily he had let them turn him away. Women’s work, Magnificence. Women’s work. And an emperor had been turned aside by Old Wives.
    And so he had come here, to search one more time for Aherim. His fingers fell upon the old table, where he’d carved the pattern. Tried to save his brother. None of them had seen this future in the pattern. Had Helmar?
    Women die in childbirth every day. Someone had said that to him as if it were a comfort. The rough-carved shapes writhed beneath his fingers, but they were his to alter and cheat, not to command. That spell had been Helmar’s, and Helmar was dead. Another spare branch of the family tree pruned away, albeit belatedly.
    “Aherim. Show yourself.”
    He searched for a pattern. Two eyes together. A nose and a mouth beneath them. “Will she die, Aherim?”
    He saw nothing.
    “Zanasta?” Always the last to reveal himself.
    Gone. Mesema herself had