The Emperors Knife - By Mazarkis Williams Page 0,1

soft covers around his chin at bedtime.

But that was two lifetimes gone, and other things occupied her now. She came seldom, even in the day.

Sarmin settled on the edge of his bed and reaccustomed himself to his mother’s face. Save for some spidery lines about her mouth, she could be as young as he. Hair dark as calligraphy fell around her bare breasts. They proclaimed her two sons, born alive. Even if Sarmin had perished with the others, she would have the right to show where he once suckled.

The idea of such intimacy seemed absurd to him now. Her eyes wrote a story of ruthless choices, her pupils the quill-tips. Yet she spoke humbly, as befitted a woman. “I am concerned for the emperor.”

The emperor. There was something yet unbound within Sarmin after all. He felt it stir beneath his ribs. “What ails my brother?”

A flicker at the edge of her mouth. “None of his wives has quickened. We have prayed and sacrificed, and yet there is no heir.” A wrinkle of her kohl-thickened eyebrows. “I am frightened for him.”

Sarmin imagined Beyon’s wives scurrying through the palace with both breasts covered, the scorn of the Old Wives heaped upon them. The free thing inside him twisted again.

“Then I am concerned as well, but I know nothing of medicine.” Sarmin spoke the truth. He knew only this room and the five books it contained. Those books held everything he would need to know if his brother died: the histories, the gods, how to eat roast pimicons with a tiny spoon. But that was not the reason for his reply. His soft room didn’t fool him into thinking the palace had no sharp edges.

She watched him. He laid his hands on the cool fabric of his sheets and waited.

“I have found you a wife,” she said.

His hands curled around the silk.

To everything there is a season. A time to be born, and a time to lie still in the courtyard with your blood draining through a slit throat. A time to pace. Fifteen by twenty, fifteen by twenty. Time enough to pace, to walk off youth, to count away a hidden lifetime. A time to marry.

“My son?”

My son.

“If it is time, then I will marry. Emperor willing.” The last he said with emphasis.

It made no difference to her. “I will make the arrangements.” She stood, whip-thin, one eye reproving him. “Do you not stand when the Empire Mother stands?”

Sarmin hastened to his feet. Etiquette. It was a small title for a most heavy book, the largest of his five. He even knew the page, four hundred and eleven, two hundred and six pages beyond the eating of pimicons: “Rarely is it seemly for a noble man to notice a woman at court, but when a woman ranks sufficiently high above one, even the nobly born must offer courtesies.”

She turned from him and went to the door. There had once been warmth at partings, in a time before the world shrank to this single room. He remembered softness and enfolding arms as one remembers a taste or scent. Maybe it had never been so. In many empty hours he named everything “before” a false dream, the delusion of a sick mind. But now…

“Mother?”

Her gaze fell upon him like hard words. No softness there. Young Sarmin had died with his brothers. A ghost inhabited this room.

He dipped one shoulder to her. “Never mind.”

For the slightest moment something tugged at her face. She was, after all, the one who had saved him. “I will send a new book,” she said.

A knock, the creak of hinges, and she was gone.

Alone again as always, Sarmin paced the worn track of his days. He walked beneath the impassive gaze of the gods. He knew better than to ask them what would come, though the question fluttered behind his lips. The gods never answered. The others watched him, hidden, but he would wait for the privacy of full night to summon them forth.

As the window’s glow faded, his slaves arrived: one pale as paper, the other dark as ink, and though ink and paper spoke together in books there was never a word between these two. They were stories untold, tantalising and mysterious.

Paper kept his eyes lowered to his tasks and obeisances. His arms were thin and looked translucent as the alabaster window. Ink’s arms were stronger, and he met Sarmin’s eyes with his own, dark brown and intelligent. Usually it made Sarmin’s breath catch, but tonight he felt