The Tower Broken(122)

‘Your Majesty!’ He looked past him for Azeem, but saw only his sword-sons, each one of them nearly tall as himself and more muscled. Even the woman who normally followed Sarmin like a ghost was not there.

‘You are a physician, Didryk.’

‘Not …’

‘I need you to heal Grada.’ Sarmin motioned to the carriage.

‘What has happened?’ Didryk stuck his head inside and saw the woman laid out across a bench, her robes stained with blood, a hand pressed to her abdomen. She blinked at him, her eyes dull.

Sarmin jostled his arm as he too pushed his head in to look at Grada. It struck Didryk that he cared for her more than an emperor should care for a guard or an assassin. ‘The first austere cut her,’ Sarmin said, his own face pale. ‘We did not defeat him.’

Didryk felt a twinge of fear: so the first austere still walked the city, laying his patterns … he could take one of them at any moment, or worse.

Instead, he concentrated on the task at hand. ‘Get her into the light.’ Ignoring the approaching Storm, he allowed the sword-sons to pull Grada from the carriage and lay her out upon the stones. Gingerly he opened her robes and examined the cut, then looked up at one of the guards, a brown-eyed, thin-nosed young man. ‘Get me needle and thread from that chest.’

‘Do you not have a pattern that will fix it? I would have—’ Sarmin stopped, biting his lip.

‘It does not work that way. It takes time.’

The sword-son handed Didryk his tools and he probed the wound, checking to make sure nothing vital had been damaged. ‘Our main concern here is keeping the wound from turning foul. I will lay what patterns I can—’

‘I could have done it before I lost my ability. I need you to try.’ Sarmin took a stone from his pocket and pressed it into Didryk’s hand.

Didryk turned it in his palm. Set into the stone in tiny crystals was a butterfly, rendered in a rainbow of colours, the patterns of its wings in perfect, patterned detail. Someone had spent months, perhaps years, making this. ‘What—?’

‘It’s the key – the key to healing the wound. All wounds. Show her how to be whole.’

Show her how to be whole. That was what Didryk did whenever he healed. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know how to hold an injury on one side and the healed image on the other.’

‘The truth of destruction and the lie of being healed.’

‘Yes.’ All of this Didryk had learned years ago from his stolen books, though not in those words. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. It dripped down his back and chest and filled his palm where he held the butterfly-stone. The Great Storm had not stopped the heat of the sun, though it obscured the northern sky.

Sarmin tapped the stone again. ‘Try.’ And then, in a lower voice, ‘Please.’ His men looked up and down the street and at one another, hands on the hilts of their weapons, eyes sharp and wary.

Didryk closed his eyes and sent his pattern-sense into the wound, a neat-edged cut across the flesh. If it had been any deeper she would be dead already. He clasped the stone in his hand and imagined her stomach healed – no, smooth and undamaged, as if she had never met the first austere. He looked at the skin around the wound and imagined it whole, imagined how she had looked to him in the throne room, athletic and full of health. But he felt nothing, only the street-stones beneath his feet, leading into those now gone, lost in another, greater wound, their constituent parts of rock and gem and iron unwound and fading into the Storm.

It was all wrong, the coming apart of things. Mogyrk offered on one hand the power to transform and heal, and on the other, destruction and rot. Didryk held them together, the emptiness before him and the street-stones that should exist in its place, and he envisioned the lost houses, the lost carts and boats, the window-screens and bed-ropes, everything he sensed within the void, the scattered pattern-pieces without the lines to anchor them, drifting away towards the Scar. And in the Scar was Mogyrk, caught in the moment of death, His power deep and whole, not described by any pattern but giving life to every one, and every one lashing Him to the earth. In Him lay a riot of colours and thoughts, frayed but alive, sorrow sharp enough to cut. Madness. Shaken Didryk withdrew from the Scar and stilled his thoughts.

Sarmin gripped his arm. ‘It is done.’

Didryk opened his eyes. Grada lay before him, her skin unmarked, undamaged. And he looked north, beyond a long street lined with houses, ovens, carts, and temples, to the horizon, where mountains rose up into the heavens. The Storm had cleared. He saw the distant peaks and his heart lurched. He had missed looking north towards his home. Home. Mogyrk had no home besides the Scar.