Free Knife Sworn by Mazarkis Williams

the women ride out with their newborn in the second week to show him at each hall and hut,” Mesema said. “They don’t invite the riders in to watch before the blood has dried on their thighs.” “In years to come when these men are far away in their palaces a messenger may come to say there is a new emperor, that Prince Pelar has taken the throne. They will remember then that they stood here and saw him on his name day, the true-born son of the emperor. We’re buying his future.”
    Sarmin kissed the boy’s hand and let it go. He raised Mesema’s fingertips to his lips. “You are of the Felt,” he said.
    “We carry on.” Mesema sighed and hugged her baby closer still. Sarmin stood, holding his face still against the effort. The Many stole his sleep and left him weak. He turned to the tables and the crowd. If Beyon’s child could have been a girl!
    “You have a fine son, Magnificence!” A round man in thinned velvets, purples so dark as to be black, with a neat and pointed beard darker still. “He is strong.” Sarmin nodded. “When he is older I will bring him east, Satrap Honnecka.” Azeem had warned him of this one, sharp despite the blunt bulk of him, with a hunger for more than goose livers and camel-fat.
    His gifts of women were set to overflow the women’s wing.
    “As handsome as his father, Magnificence.” A taller man, young, hair in greased black ringlets about a sallow face. Gethchen of Arthona: his grandfather ruled a land that now enjoyed the protection of Cerana. “He will grow fierce,” Sarmin said. “A warrior of the horse, like his mother’s people.”
    He wanted no such thing for the child. Better a life of peace and books, a wife of his choosing, a future to be discovered. And yet the boy would have none of it. If little Pelar had been a girl Sarmin could have named Beyon as the father. Now the secret must be held tight. As Beyon’s son Pelar was the emperor, no doubt or questions: the true emperor lay suckling at his mother’s breast. Armed with such knowledge Gethchen, Honnecka, and a score of others would rise. The council listened to these men—they would no longer require Sarmin’s permission to return to the ways of the Knife.
    Daveed would die first. Sarmin might survive that night, maybe the next, but in time the emperor’s Knife would seek him out. He had been dangerous to keep when hidden in his room all those long years. Out in the light of day he would be seen as a threat to Beyon’s son, and removed. Sarmin stepped out between the tables to walk among his nobles and the men who ruled the empire in his name. The four sword-sons of his inner guard closed around him, sharks slicing through glittering waters. Each guard kept a hand to his knife hilt, short blades of chrome-steel. In a crowd they would trust to the speed of knives over the reach of their swords. “Headman Notheen.” Sarmin approached the only courtier in garb as simple as his own. “How stands the desert?”
    Notheen watched him a moment before speaking, eyes slitted against the sun though they stood in lamplight. “The desert stands empty, my emperor.
    Wind whispers to sand and the bones of my fathers lie drowned.” He wore deepest blue, new shades revealed as his moved, as if remembering the depths of a lost sea.
    “A curious turn of phrase, my lord.” The nomads from the inner desert went so long without speaking to strangers that they made an art of their words and spent them with misers’ care. Sarmin decided he would see the desert himself. Notheen carried a strangeness with him that made him more alien than even the Yrkman girls in the harem with their milk-skin and golden hair. “I would like to climb the dunes. I am told they stand higher than my palace.”
    Again the pause, as if Sarmin’s words must first settle in the man’s head.
    The nomad towered over Sarmin, stick-thin, sand-robes rucked around him like a wrinkled hide, though these had never seen the desert, fresh from his