The Emperors Knife (11 page)

“Nothing could be alive in here,” she whispered.

Neither of them wanted to test that idea too quickly. They took two more small steps. Sandstone houses lined the road. Square gaps in the walls showed where carved window-screens once had been mounted. Eyul could see nothing but darkness through them. Like Carriers' eyes, they watched their guests with quiet malevolence.

The sun was sinking towards the west, but still it blazed with heat. They wandered, separate from their shade and water. Eyul's leg ached with every step. This was a fool's game. He shook his head. “Let's get our camels and leave this dung in our wake.” They turned in unison, for the first time moving with speed.

A stone wall had risen behind them, ten feet high and scoured by sand. It stretched to either side, curving out of sight in an unbroken arc.

Amalya let out a breath.

“Is there nothing you can do?” he asked her.

She blinked at the wall as if it had slapped her. “I can't touch my elemental here,” she said. “It's as if he's gone.” She said it the same way Eyul would tell her that every well in the desert had gone dry.

I have my Knife.

“Come on,” he said, gripping her elbow and pulling her away from the wall. “They want us here, we'll be here. But it won't be that easy for them.” With his right hand he pulled his weapon free. They turned again and walked up the street, the sun now in their eyes.

At a corner where the road split three ways, Amalya stopped.

“I feel something,” she said. She leaned over and Eyul watched, spitting some fine grains from his mouth, as she ran the sand through her fingers. After a few seconds she said, “This way,” and set off to the left. He glanced behind, then followed her.

They walked a hundred feet more. The road grew narrower.

“Does this look familiar to you?” Amalya asked.

Eyul shook his head before taking another look around. “Maybe.” He wiped the sweat from his face, leaving a layer of sand. They walked some more. The sun slipped further down the sky. At least it would soon be cool.

“I want to get up high and see. If this was a city, there will be a gate.”

“Not a good idea. These buildings don't look sound.”

Amalya turned away, into the nearest building.

“Amalya, no!” Eyul ducked under the doorway after her.

“It's cooler in here,” she pointed out. It was true. The stone remained chilled from wherever it had been hiding beneath the sands, and the sun hadn't yet found its way through the lower windows. Amalya pressed her forehead to a pillar and Eyul leaned against an interior wall.

“I have to find a stairway,” she said, but neither of them moved.

The beating sounded first, a thumping sound like a distant heart. A spilling noise like the fall of a dry river came with it, outside the window to Eyul's right. Two beats later he heard a hissing through the window in the next room. Something or someone approached at a walking pace. He moved arrow-quick, grabbing Amalya by the waist. “Up, up,” he whispered, searching for the stairs as he pushed her in front of him.

They found the stairs in the centre of the building. He was glad for her quiet movements, her lack of questions or fright. At the first landing he turned to survey the gloom below. “Stay to the side,” he warned Amalya, not believing the calm darkness before his eyes. He spread his feet and relaxed, watchful, the emperor's Knife sure and ready in his hand. He was aware of everything at once: Amalya's stillness at his left, the sun's orange invasion through a hole in the ceiling, and the slow but steady approach of whispering sand.

The heartbeat stopped. The silence ached for the missing pulse, and then it came again, smaller, closer, quieter, somehow familiar.
Thump. Thump.
And again, on the stairs, like the bouncing of a ball.

A figure moved through the shadows. Eyul watched it climb the first steps. The red ball emerged into the sunlight first, then the boy's hand that held it. The light caught black curls and a smile, a smooth boy's face. “No,” Eyul whispered. The boy climbed closer, pushing his feet into each stair with force, though the only sound he made was that of sand blowing in the wind.

Eyul forced himself to look into Prince Pelar's eyes. Black and cold, they stared both at him and through him. This was no longer the chubby, laughing boy he'd killed. This was a tormented creature from the depths of Herzu's hell itself. Dread soaked through Eyul's robes like cold rain. At his side Amalya drew in her breath.

“Kill it,” she whispered.

“I can't,” he said.
This is my creation.
Sorrow and horror weighted the Knife in his hand.

The creature smiled then, a skull-grin, and raised its arm towards the west. As it pointed with one finger, the red ball fell and bounced down the steps.

“Kill it!” Amalya had found her fright.

Eyul threw. A sound like grinding pebbles filled the stair. Sand swirled and stung for an instant, and fell before him, leaving only a scattering of stone and black grit.

“What— Was that real?” he asked Amalya, who crouched and ran her fingers through the dark grains.

“I don't think I saw what you saw,” she said.

“What did you see?”

“Brannik of the Tower. Rock-sworn—or would have been; he died during the ceremony.” She wiped her hands on her robes. “It wasn't him. He couldn't—”

He pulled her back from her memories. “Amalya, back at the camp you said the enemy put us here. Who is the enemy?”

She looked at him and placed one hand on the pendant that hung from her neck. “The creature pointed west. Should we go to the roof and see what's there?”

Sarmin sat, and the light ran from his blade. The dying rays slid across the east wall. He waited, enduring Aherim's silence until Zanasta came. It took more effort today, as if the devil had been hiding himself even deeper in the detail.

“Zanasta, show yourself.” Sarmin furrowed his brow, squinting at the chaotic swirls where some long-dead artist had styled a rose from a froth of curling strokes.

“Show yourself.”

And the devil smiled. Zanasta always smiled.

“This pattern is a key. Will something open when I set the final stroke?” Sarmin asked.

“I speak for the dark gods.” Zanasta hated to answer questions.

“I know. What will happen?”

“I speak for Herzu, who holds death in one hand and fear in the other.”

The light grew crimson as the sun plunged towards the dunes. Soon Zanasta would be hidden and silent.

“Tell me.” Sarmin set his blade to score the last line.

“I speak for Ghesh, clothed in darkness, eater of stars. I speak for Meksha, mother of mountain fire.”

“And they watch us now. Speak, Old One, or have the gods found a new Mouth?” The wood splintered under Sarmin's knifepoint. He began the line, his eyes on Zanasta.

“No!” The devil's smile vanished.

“Tell me.” Sarmin cut half the distance. His hand trembled.
Zanasta always smiles.

“A door opens. A door to everything. More than you can know or want. Hell and heaven.”

The light fled, and Zanasta with it.

Sarmin held still, a hair's breadth from finishing. Mother had opened one door, Tuvaini another, and Beyon yet one more. He knew the things he wanted could not be reached through such doors. He wanted lost moments, fragile-feeling half-remembered old joys, Pelar bouncing his ball. He wanted to know what to say when people came to speak with no reasons. He wanted to know how to make a horsegirl smile.

He finished the cut.

For a moment there was nothing, only the thickening of the silence into something too heavy to bear. Sarmin stood. His knees ached. He could sense an approach. He felt it rising from unknown and unknowable depths, fast, then faster still, rushing at him. The hair prickled on his neck, the chill touch of anticipation reached down to the small of his back.

“No!” He spun, whirling, his knife held ready.

It hit.

The room rocked, then held still. Sarmin fell to the bed, clutching his blade. A pattern spread across the walls, the pattern he'd copied, but larger and more complex, deeper, carved in slashes from which a light bled, like that of dying suns, painting him with glowing symbols laid one atop the next. It lifted him. He stood transfixed, pinned, skinned in bloodlit patterning. His knife fell from a hand that seethed with alien geometries.

Chapter Eleven

E
yul picked up his Knife, sheathed it and followed Amalya, his heart still beating a coward's rhythm. She reached the top before him and turned a circle before the red sky. He wondered at her calm and grace. He cleared the top step and automatically checked for safety; the shadows grew long, but he saw no threats in them.

“Look,” Amalya said, pointing, “a wizards' Tower. This city is laid out like ours.”

“There's the palace,” he agreed. Were there silhouettes moving through the dusk of the courtyard? His hand closed around his Knife's hilt.

“This would be Stonecutters' Row.” She turned to her left.

“This city has no river, though. And look—” She pointed westwards. “The large building, there—is that the tomb our emperor is building? It's in the right place.”

“No, that's something else.” Eyul had seen such a construction before, though Amalya was probably too young to remember; Emperor Beyon's great-grandfather had torn down all the temples to the Mogyrk faith and destroyed the heresy of the One God in Cerana. He couldn't remember if there had been a temple exactly like this one. It was square in shape and as large as three courtyards. Its tower rose into a point towards the heavens, as did each of its windows. He strained to see more, but the sun lingered on the horizon, cloaking the building in shadow.

“What is it?”

“Nothing good,” he said.

They stood and watched, and the sun sank beyond the dunes. Myriad shapes lit up around the temple: triangle, line, half-moon. Eyul couldn't count them all; they were without number or end, with more appearing, forming a bright net around the dark building. Beside him, Amalya drew in her breath. The shapes lingered for a moment, prolonging the crimson light of day's end, before sinking into the sand and stone, disappearing like rain.

A tingling spread between Eyul's fingers and the twisted hilt of the emperor's Knife. “That's where we need to go.”

Amalya turned towards the stairs without a word. They made their way down, stepping over the sandy remains of the demon that had worn Pelar's face. The street outside had fallen into a purplish gloom, but Eyul still felt uncomfortably hot. He passed Amalya his waterskin. “Be ready to duck into one of these buildings,” he warned her. “Who knows how many of those creatures are loose?”

She said nothing as she took a drink from the skin and passed it back.

“This way,” he said, leading her around one turn and then another. He kept his ears open for the telltale sound of shifting sands, but no more demon princes appeared and after a few minutes they were close enough to see the dark tip of the temple's tower. The next street would be under its shadow.

Amalya slowed to a stop. “I feel something,” she said.

“Power?” He paused, still on the balls of his feet and ready to move on, but when she didn't stir he settled his heels in the sand.

“Yes, power. But it's all wrong. I can't go in there.”

“But I have to go in there.” As he said the words, Eyul knew it to be the truth. “I don't think we should separate.”

“I can't go in there. I just can't. Try to understand—would you go into a place of—” Amalya's voice rose and broke off.

Eyul frowned. “A place of what?”

Amalya didn't respond, but cringed away, folding her arms over her chest.

“I don't get to choose.” He drew his Knife and looked up at the Mogyrk steeple.

Amalya took a step backwards, raising one arm protectively over her face, and it hit him like a sword in his gut: she didn't trust him—and not only that, she thought he was capable of slitting her throat, right here, under the rising moon, for no other reason than her refusal to go into the temple.

And he could; in another situation, he would. The thought sank through him.

“Oh, by Herzu,” he swore, turning his back on her. His feet felt heavy, but he walked on with determination.
What is this power, that allows me to leave a woman alone in a nest of demons?
He felt childish and cruel, but he discarded the idea of turning back. He was certain the answer to their escape was here, in the dark Mogyrk temple. He would come back for her—by then she would be scared enough to welcome his return.

He stopped just before turning the corner that would take him out of sight as a more familiar feeling washed through him: self-disgust. If he made her wait, made her wonder if he was coming back, she would despise him even more, and rightly so. He reached out and tapped the building to his left. “Get up on this roof so I can see you,” he called out. “If something happens, scream for me. I will come.”

He walked on, the sweat on his skin feeling clammy in the cooling air. When he looked back, he could see Amalya's white robes shining in the starlight.

She had no power against a sand-demon. He would have to hurry.

The temple's face rose before him, three storeys of carved stone. The One God of the Mogyrk faith looked down from his place above the mammoth door. The god who had been destroyed by his enemies, as Eyul understood it. A frail god of flesh, whose followers preached weakness, yet behaved savagely.

In the Cerantic pantheon there was a place for charity and love, and also a place for justice and righteousness. The empire could not have survived without the favour of its many gods. Therefore, with the Mogyrk madness defeated, Tahal's grandfather had wiped the empire clean of its monotheism. He brought down the Mogyrk temples and killed the worshippers. The religion persisted elsewhere, to the north and east, especially among the Yrkmen; but no more of their priests came to the empire.