The Emperors Knife by Mazarkis Williams Page A

A pause. “To broker a royal marriage and pick a bloodline for the empire’s heir…”
    He sets his sights too high for your liking, Tuvaini. He looks upon my mother. Sarmin stared at the vizier and felt the stirrings of common feeling with him. They both had been denied the feel of her arms. Before he could stop himself, he laughed.
    The vizier paid no notice. He waited, his face bland.
    â€œAnd who would you have me marry, Vizier?” Sarmin asked after rubbing his lips. “Wherever there is objection, there is alternative.” From the Book of Statehood . Page two hundred.
    For the first time Tuvaini managed a smile. “I would have you choose your own bride, Highness. From the Petal Throne.”
    Sarmin took his hands from the table as if it burned them. More treachery, and beneath the canopy of the gods, no less.
    â€œHighness, hear me.” Tuvaini leaned in, intimate across the smallness of the table. “Beyon has the marks. Within the month the patterning will kill him—or, if it does not, all who see him will know him as a Carrier.”
    In the drawer beneath the tabletop Sarmin’s fingers found the dacarba. The steel felt cool to his touch. He recalled the despair that gave him the strength to take it. He ran his thumb along the top blade. “I don’t believe you.”
    Tuvaini’s eyes wandered to the window. “The emperor sent his royal body-slaves to the Low Executioner. He said they were marked. And yet their skin was clean when they stripped for the pyre, and each slave swore that it was the emperor himself who bore the pattern: from each man, the same story, until the Low Executioner brought me to bear witness.”
    â€œThen I would speak to the Low Executioner.”
    Tuvaini shook his head. “That man speaks no more.”
    â€œAnd the slaves?”
    A whisper. “Burned.”
    Murdered. All murdered. Sarmin felt the blood drip from his hand. “Beyon is my brother.”
    â€œYou had other brothers, Highness.”
    Sarmin remembered them all, their chubby, laughing faces: Kashim and Amile, one too young to walk, one not yet talking. Asham, Fadil, and Pelar especially. Pelar and his red ball. He bounced it in the courtyard, in the tutor’s room, and in the kitchen. He bounced it against his brothers’ backs and his sisters’ legs. Sarmin closed his hand around the dacarba, felt the flesh of his palm giving way. “Tell me of the man who killed them.”
    Tuvaini startled. “It was Eyul’s duty. He carries the emperor’s Knife.”
    Consecrated by my brothers’ blood.
    Sarmin didn’t know how long he clutched the blade, thinking of the assassin Eyul, of the look he gave that dark night. One more for the Knife? He only heard Tuvaini saying, “My lord… my lord… ?”
    Sarmin shook himself back to the present. “Carrier or not, Beyon is still the emperor.”
    â€œNo,” Tuvaini pressed on, eager to explain himself, “the Carriers are not what you remember, Highness, wandering the Maze and staying to the low places. They become bold, attacking even on palace grounds. They serve some purpose, some other enemy we cannot see. A Carrier cannot sit on the Petal Throne, Highness.”
    The main door rattled; the handle turned, and Tuvaini almost knocked over the table as he stood. “I must go.”
    It took a moment for Sarmin to understand his urgency; the guards changed at the same hour every night, and at every changeover they turned the handle to confirm that the door was locked. It was a pointless tradition in Sarmin’s view; not once had the door ever opened to their test.
    â€œBetter run, Vizier.” Sarmin laughed again, though more quietly this time.
    Tuvaini hurried for the secret door.
    The last Sarmin saw of him were his jewelled fingers pulling at the stone. “Next time, Tuvaini. Next time.” Sarmin spoke the words to the narrowing crack,