The Tower Broken(90)

Didryk leaned back on his heels and lowered his hands to his sides. Sarmin had thought him in tears, but his eyes were dry. ‘When you were imprisoned here, you must have felt that your world had been lost – one day you were a boy, playing with your brothers, and the next, here you were, trapped in this room.’

‘And when I came out, everything was different.’

‘I have lost my world, too,’ said Didryk, ‘and my brothers. Even if I go back, it will never be the same.’

‘You meant to die for this.’

‘That was what I expected.’

A slight – though important – difference in meaning. Sarmin noticed Didryk’s black hair shone in the sunlight the same way as Nessaket’s did.

‘I never wanted a war – any war.’ Sarmin stepped forwards. ‘Are we allies, then?’

Didryk held out his right hand in a gesture Sarmin did not understand, but after a moment he grasped it in both of his.

‘We are allies,’ said Didryk. Then his eyes went towards the window and he frowned.

‘What is it?’ asked Sarmin, following his gaze but seeing nothing other than sky.

Didryk stood very still as if listening to a distant conversation. At last he turned back to Sarmin and pulled his hand away. ‘You do not sense the patterns moving? Yrkmir has arrived.’





38



Sarmin


Sarmin stood on the outer wall, the second pillar of empire, a guarantee the ancients had built for themselves with stone and prayer. These ramparts gave the empire the time and leverage to outwait any threat. With the river inside and the enemy out on the sands, Cerana had time to hide, to call for aid, to pick off soldiers with arrow or catapult. Only one army had ever breached the walls and looted Nooria, and that enemy was Yrkmir.

But now the Great Storm threatened too; the northwest horizon had gone, replaced with a blankness that he could look at only from the corner of his eye. He felt its hunger even from this distance.

Sarmin had been out of the palace only a few times since his release from the tower room, and each time had brought sorrow: Beyon’s tomb, dissolving; Pelar growing pale on Qalamin’s deck; the crack in the Tower. Now he stood on the wall and waited for Yrkmir. His gaze fell beyond the market-stalls and the last well, beyond the rise of the great dunes, all casting dark shadows. On his left Moreth crouched, using Rorswan’s senses, and on his right, Mura reached out her arms, her wind-spirit Yomawa seeking any disturbance in the air. Behind him stood Grada. He was never without her now, not since the first austere had shown he could turn anyone, even a Blue Shield, to his will.

Moreth spoke in a voice like tumbling stone. ‘Movement in the sands.’

‘Where?’ Around him the archers readied their bows and soldiers stood by their loaded catapults; everywhere he looked he could see men ready for a fight, their hands set, their eyes carefully turned away from the north. Didryk’s protective wards gleamed from their foreheads. And yet the desert lay smooth and undisturbed before them. Sarmin squinted against the afternoon sun, but still he saw only sand.

Where was Yrkmir?

Mura made a noise in her throat and he lowered the glass. Rivers of blue light ran before the walls, flowing together, dividing and rejoining once again, retreating towards the distant dunes. Shapes of green and red lit and died beneath the sun, and the desert shifted and wove into the shapes of a thousand men with eyes, mouths and noses formed of sand. At first Sarmin thought them golems, but they stepped forwards, shedding their earthly veil and revealed themselves to be men of flesh, wearing uniforms and brandishing weapons.

‘They moved through the sand,’ said Moreth, ‘but they came from the Storm.’ From all parts of the wall Sarmin heard murmurs, his soldiers losing their nerve in the face of Yrkmir’s magic, but he heard their officers too, their voices strict and calm, showing themselves unafraid.

‘Moreth,’ said Sarmin, keeping his voice low, ‘can they travel through our walls that way?’

‘No; they can only move through the desert that way because the sand moves. Stone will not part for them as it will for me.’ He was still speaking with the voice of Rorswan.

And yet they had travelled through the Storm: that meant he knew for certain now that it was possible for a human – not just water or fire – to enter the Storm and not be harmed by it.

An austere stepped out from a line of red-clad soldiers. He was all white – white hair, white robes, white skin – and he took a long look at the walls, considered the men who pointed their arrows his way and turned his face to Sarmin. The moment stretched. The archers’ arms began to tremble. Finally the austere lifted a white flag that had been hidden among the folds of his pristine robes.