The Tower Broken(16)

‘You should paint your room, I think. Trees, perhaps, like the last …’

But the tender moment had passed, taken by his sudden fear, and Mesema took Pelar from his arms. She turned to put him in his cradle and Sarmin did not know how to reach out, how to claim her, as Beyon might have done. The stark room served only to remind him that he was alone. The Many were gone, with Helmar, Ta-Sann and his link to Grada. Mesema did not love him. Pelar was his brother’s son, the true emperor, and he just a pretender. Wife, son, throne: it was all a lie, balanced on the thin edge of power to which he clung.

He turned to the door. ‘I will make the arrangements.’





7



Farid


Farid spoke a few words of Frythian, having met some traders over the years, but his vocabulary was limited to numbers, weights and thank-yous. Nevertheless the Mogyrk Adam spoke to him in that language, now drawing an elongated diamond on the floor and saying something like ‘hiss-nick’. When Farid looked at these pattern-shapes he imagined them in blue, on his mother’s skin. They want to take what I am, she had told him before she died. I won’t let them.

Farid’s gaze shifted to the two guards in the doorway. By their physiques he could see they had been called to fighting rather than trained to it – but then, he was no fighter himself. He had strength from lifting barrels and poling his father’s boat, and he could count on some extra power from wanting his freedom – but against three men, he would not win. Adam himself had the bearing of a soldier and was enough of a match without counting the others.

‘You are not listening,’ said Adam, speaking Cerani at last.

‘Because I don’t want to go to a marketplace and kill everyone.’

Adam frowned as he wiped the symbol away. ‘Nor do I.’

‘Why then do you keep me prisoner? Surely there are others like you who want to learn these things?’

‘There are not. They all were killed.’

‘Cerana kills all its enemies,’ said Farid with pride, making sure to speak loud enough for the men at the door to hear.

‘So they do. Let’s begin again.’ Adam drew another shape on the floor. ‘Shack-nuth.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’ Farid stood, using his height as a form of protest.

Adam smiled. Farid could tell he was less than a threat to the man. ‘It is a Name. Shack-nuth.’

‘I won’t remember it.’

‘I see.’ Adam put down his chalk. ‘How many fruits did you have to sell on the day of the attack?’

Farid remembered exactly. It was something he had always been able to do. ‘I started with fifty-two oranges and thirty-six pomegranates,’ he said, ‘twelve mangoes and just ten apples. I sold twenty apples the day before.’

Adam raised his eyebrows. ‘How much money did you make, then? Don’t check your pockets.’

‘I sold ten oranges at two bits a piece. Five pomegranates – I haggled a bit and got five bits for two of them. Three bits for the others. The mangoes were getting soft – I knocked them down to half a bit and sold five that way. Muad stole an apple – I count that as a loss of two-and-a-half bits. I sold four more for a total of four copper nine bits. But I have more than that in my pocket.’

‘Because of the apple.’

‘Right – but of course now all my fruit is lost because of you.’

‘And you can’t remember this?’ Adam drew on the floor with his chalk. Farid recognised it: Hiss-nick. But he shrugged.

Adam nodded to his men, who came into the room and picked up Farid by his elbows. ‘You may go to your room. Let us know when you are ready to begin again.’

*

That night Farid tossed and turned on his pallet. The Mogyrks had put him in an airless closet. For obvious reasons they offered him no windows or outside doors, and yet he could still hear a baby crying in the house next door. As soon as the child quieted and Farid’s eyes began to close, it started up wailing again. It was no good. He had prayed to Keleb for the air to cool, for the baby to quiet and for the Mogyrks to let him go, but nothing had any effect. He sat up and wiped the sweat from his forehead. ‘Hey,’ he called out to the guard he knew stood on the other side of the door, ‘is there any water?’

He heard the man’s boots, then a silence that stretched until his sweat felt cold upon his skin. Then the door swung open and two hands laid a pitcher on the stained wood floor.

‘Let me go,’ he said, but the man only placed a lit candle next to the pitcher and closed the door.

Farid held the pitcher to his lips, but he found it dry. Reaching inside, his fingers touched upon crumpled paper. ‘Mogyrk filth,’ he muttered, smoothing it open. A pattern had been drawn there, each shape flowing into the next, the web of lines suspending rather than connecting them. He frowned, turning it this way and that in his hands, trying to remember what he had seen in the marketplace. If he ever got free, the Blue Shields would want to know what these patterns looked like.