The Court of Broken Knives. Anna Smith Spark

a litter, reclining uncomfortably close to each other behind thin yellow curtains that showed the city beyond like flies in amber, Amlis and Sterne walking before them in the soft blue livery of House Emmereth, knives drawn to clear their path. Sterne’s face was fixed and blank. So my parents once travelled, Orhan thought, to give thanks for my birth. So my father’s parents, before that. The same streets, the same turnings in the road, old bricks and old stone, old as his family were old, old as Sorlost itself. It gave him an odd kind of start to realize how much he was fulfilling the demands of his history, and how much he was betraying it. The child would be an Emmereth in name, if not in blood, he thought. And what does blood matter? What matters is that it will be strong, and healthy, and born at all. He eyed the ripples of muscle across Sterne’s back. Strong …

      They came down the Street of Flowers and turned into Grey Square. In itself unimpressive, not large, its flagstones worn. Not even marble, just cheap soft grey stuff that turned greenish in the rain. Cracked and blackened in places, as though they had once been subject to intense heat. A mighty duel was once fought there between two great magelords, grandmothers told their grandchildren, so powerful the stones were melted in the fire of their hate. But the names and the reasons varied, and the story had no basis in truth that Orhan could ever find. The stones were cracked and blackened simply because the square was old. The marketplace and meeting place of a desert village, untouched since the first days of Sorlost. In itself unimpressive, not large, its flagstones worn.

      But behind it stood the Great Temple. It too was old. Not old like the square was old, but old like the stars are old. Old like the sea is old. Old like the cut of a knife.

      It had stood before Sorlost was a village. It had stood before the desert dried. It had been built by gods, by demons, by dead men quarrying stone with their bare hands. It was vast and terrible, and once a man stared at it he could not stop staring. It gaped like a diseased wound in the centre of the city, holy and blind. If a man left Sorlost for a while, he saw it every night in his dreams.

      The first inhabitants of Sorlost had built it, or found it, or dreamed it into being, and then they had built their marketplace and their houses and their shops around it, as though it was a human thing. Their descendants had taken a village in the desert and built or dreamed it into an empire. Their descendants in turn had lost an empire and retreated into their dreams. But the Temple still stood as it had always stood. It was the most perfect thing in all Sorlost. Perhaps the most perfect thing in all the world.

      A square of black marble, in which blood was shed and the living kept alive.

      The litter stopped. The square was crowded, people milling around, merchants and shoppers, street sellers offering flowers and cakes and skewers of roast meat, beggars, a mendicant magician pulling green fire from a young boy’s ears, a poet with the hatha sores selling little scrolls of his work. Their arrival attracted a general degree of attention, the fine quality of the litter’s silks and the uniforms of the bearers indicating the wealth and status of its occupants even before Bil’s shimmering gown and jewelled headdress caught the morning sun. She, at least, was recognizable to some of the onlookers. Might have been the subject of poems herself, if they were not too cruel to write.

      As they walked towards the Temple, Orhan realized that he had assured his sister only a few days before that Bil was certainly not pregnant. Mildly vexing. She’d be irritated with him, even think he had lied to her. And disappointed, too: at the moment, her snivelling little son was the de facto Emmereth heir. Please let it be a boy, he thought again. A good strong boy with Sterne’s good clean peasant strength.

      They mounted the six steps to the doorway of the Temple, so old and worn that they dipped unsteadily in the centre, ground away by the tread of endless, countless feet. The great door was closed – was always closed – but moved easily on its pivots as Orhan pushed. Taller than a man, taller than two men standing one on the other’s shoulders, but narrow, so that only a single man could walk through at one time. It put one in mind of a great rat-trap, or a blade coming down. Black wood, hard as stone, uncarved, unadorned, the grain dark stripes like animal fur, the knots like watching eyes, like the eyes on Bil’s dress. Three long claw marks ran down the door at the height of a man’s head.

      The door gave onto a long black tunnel, thin and tall as the door itself. Bright light shone at the end of it. The sensation of walking through the narrow dark was stifling, the high ceiling magnifying the sense of oppression, the dead air above a great weight pressing down. Crushing. Drowning. Eating one alive. It could hardly be a long corridor, perhaps ten paces’ walk, but it seemed very long. Orhan shuddered, felt Bil shudder too behind him, walking very close to him.

      This is what it feels like to die, the thin dark corridor whispered, and then they stepped out into the Great Chamber and the light whispered that this is what it feels like to live.

      The Great Chamber of the Great Temple was vast. Its walls and ceiling were lined with bronze tiles, making it shimmer and glitter and burn with light, the light as tangible and oppressive as the dark from which they had come. Orhan thought of the firebox at Eloise’s party, of the mirrored facade of the House of Silver, of his sister’s red silk litter: they had shone and danced with fire; this was fire, like being in a fire, like being burned. The floor was black stone, worn like the steps with a thousand years of reverential footsteps. Thousands of candles made the air sweet. They burned in sconces on the walls, on black stone altars, in trailing patterns like dances across the black floor. Hushed voices muttered prayers, the same words repeated over and over. Like birdsong. Like rainfall.

      ‘Dear Lord, Great Tanis Who Rules All Things, from the fear of life and the fear of death, release us,’ Bil said slowly, bowing her head. Orhan hesitated then took her hand. They walked across the room, their footsteps ringing on the hard floor. A well-dressed young woman kneeling before a small side altar turned and looked at them.

      The Lord of the Rising Sun seen publicly holding hands with his wife in the Great Temple. The news would be around the gossip-mongers of the city in the time it took to light a flame.

      They approached the High Altar. It was closed off from the rest of the room by a bar of iron that glowed red in the light. Behind this, the High Priestess knelt in prayer. Her black hair hung down around her face, veiling her from prying eyes. A night and a day, she must kneel there, before the evening’s sacrifice. She was still as something carved from stone, the only decorated thing in the Temple. Her eyes fixed on a single lamp that burned deep red like a pool of blood. She looked very small and slight, bent on her knees before the great monolith of the altar stone.

      Just visible behind the High Altar was the curtained entrance to the room beyond. The room one did not speak of. The room in which a child would already be lying, waiting to die.

      Orhan turned away. Don’t look. It is necessary. But don’t look. God’s great hunger for lives was a mystery of which he and most other educated men did not speak. As a boy he had thought briefly of volunteering, as all children briefly did. The greatest and most sacred choice, his teacher had told him. But he had known, even then, that to choose it would have been somehow wrong, that his teacher and parents would have been outraged if he did. The greatest and most sacred choice, unless someone you knew made it, when it became something else. Something shameful, although he still could not quite say why. A bad thing.

      Death is a bad thing. What a profound man you are, Orhan Emmereth.

      A young priestess bustled up to them, smiling. ‘My Lord, My Lady,’ she said sweetly, ‘are you looking for something? Would you like to see someone?’

      ‘Yes.’ Orhan fidgeted. They were here now. No going back. ‘My wife and I, we would like … My wife is newly with child. We would like to make a prayer and an offering, and seek a blessing.’ He pitched his voice clear. Loud.

      The priestess smiled more broadly. Happiness in her eyes. ‘It is an auspicious day for it,’ she said, glancing towards the High Altar, and the kneeling figure, and the curtained doorway beyond. ‘I will fetch one of the senior priestesses.’ She slipped away, returned a few moments later with another priestess.

      ‘My Lord Emmereth. Helase tells me that you have great joy to make known to our Lord.’ Bil flushed with pride and happiness