Spit and Song (Ustlian Tales Book 2)

by Travis M. Riddle

  He zoomed past the different doors on his way up the stairwell until he finally burst out into blinding sunlight. Kali loosed a sharp yelp at his sudden appearance.

  “Let’s fuck outta here!”

  “What?”

  He was feeling loopy from the spell and anxiety and exhilaration. He didn’t have the mental capacity to form coherent sentences. He shoved the four books toward Kali, who let go of red-eyed Vosk to grab them.

  Puk removed the dagger from its pocket again then shouldered off the coat and returned it to the ink-black doll. “Sorry for ruining your morning,” he said. “And your coat, too, I guess.”

  Vosk, predictably, said nothing. The thing slipped its arms back through the coat sleeves and pointed to Puk’s head, which was distinctly lacking a hat.

  “In the kitchen,” Puk said.

  Vosk nodded and moved past him, walking calmly away as if nothing out of the ordinary had transpired.

  “Watch out for the snake-man,” Puk told Vosk as the doll disappeared down the invisible hatch.

  “Excuse me?” said Kali.

  “I’ll explain later. Let’s go.”

  “Which of these is the book?” Kali asked, accepting his answer.

  “Don’t know,” Puk replied. “Let’s just go before he wakes Kleus up. I don’t wanna see more of his spells.”

  “Wait!” Kali shouted. “How can you be sure one of these is it, then? Did you search the entire place? What happened?”

  “There’s no time for all this,” Puk said. “I dunno how long he’s gonna be out for, and I don’t wanna be here when he’s back on his feet!”

  He was tempted to just jump over the edge of the ship and take his chances landing in the sand, but he made the smart choice and started toward the main staircase that would lead them back below deck.

  Kali grabbed him by the arm before he got too far. “We need to be sure, Puk,” she said, her voice grave.

  “If you can figure out what any of that shit is,” he said, exasperated, “then be my guest. But I don’t know what any of it means, and I don’t want my bones melted or whatever the fuck it is Kleus wants to do to me when he wakes up. I didn’t see no more books down there, so I say we leave. We aren’t gettin’ another chance either way, so either the book’s in that batch or it ain’t.”

  He let out a heavy, uneven breath. His body shivered, and Kali let go of him.

  “Okay,” she said. “If you’re really sure, then I trust you.”

  Puk closed his eyes a moment, sighed, and opened them again. “Thank you,” he said.

  They shot down the staircase, racing through the different levels of the ship. When they reached the bottom floor again, a chill swept through Puk as he thought about Kleus’s scarred flesh and his terrible magic.

  Bolting through the door and back into sunlight, with the shifting sands at his feet, was a sweet relief. He had never been so happy to feel the sun on his skin.

  It was not a long run from there to the storage room where Bella awaited them. Kali loaded up a sack with the four books, and soon they were navigating the lumbering ayote through the hall and back out into the desert.

  Kali hoisted Puk up onto Bella’s back, then saddled herself atop as well. She double-checked that all of their possessions were either strapped to their bodies or Bella’s, then said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Not a moment too soon.”

  She urged the ayote, and Bella took off like a bullet.

  It was the best ride of Puk’s life.

  CHAPTER XIX

  ONE STEP TOO FAR

  The ride to Weynard felt beautifully short after their multi-day ordeal in Pontequest. Both Kali and Puk were relieved to be done with the village, and Kali was sure that Bella more than anyone was thankful to be out of the confined storage area.

  Kali slowed the ayote down to a more reasonable jaunt once they had fled a great distance from the crashed airship and could be certain Kleus was not in pursuit. Without the wind whipping at their ears, she asked Puk what had happened within the red mage’s lair. His recounting of the spell Kleus used on him horrified her, as did his description of the snake-man hybrid, and she profusely apologized for being topside and unable to lend assistance. He assured her it was fine, but his voice was still somewhat shaky. By the time they reached their destination several hours later, the qarm seemed more like his usual self, albeit faintly more reserved.

  Once again the pair found themselves seeking shelter at The Restful Oasis. The elderly owner, Grace, accurately predicted their preference for the Ayote Room, the inn’s cheapest available lodging. Funds were nearly dried up, so it was a good thing they had successfully obtained Malum.

  Probably.

  After getting settled in their room, the first thing Kali did was scan the pages of the texts that Puk had stolen. All bore unmarked covers, and all contained pages upon pages of spells. None of her family had traveled the path of becoming any type of mage, but growing up in a jeornish household, there was still some amount of magic discussion. Kali hoped that meager knowledge would come to her aid now.

  While Puk relaxed on the bed, a well-earned minor comfort after such a long and challenging day, Kali planted herself on the floor with all four books spread in front of her.

  The first book she went for was the obvious choice, one with a red leather cover. As she flipped through the pages, she was glad that Puk hadn’t made a similar assumption under pressure and solely grabbed it while leaving behind the others, because it was definitely not Malum.

  As far as Kali could tell, it was not actually a spellbook, but rather Kleus’s journal. There were scribblings of spells—their functions, how to cast them, different forms they could take—but those were supplementary to the primary text. The book detailed Kleus’s life on the run, its oldest entry dating back nearly forty years, to when he was studying magic at Allinor University.

  The man had not partaken in daily journaling, but it seemed significant moments of his life garnered entries. Big social events, discovering new magic, things of that nature. Kali skipped around until she found an entry from the spring of 1102, the period in which Kleus and his ally Michio Loz had first stolen the red magic spellbooks from a vast library in an Atluan city called Bral Han. His script was neat, with thin inkstrokes and pleasant, swooping curved letters.

  I’m finally starting to figure out a basic illusion spell. The book starts you off with something small, like making someone think a cup is on a table, then working your way toward turning a room into an enormous desert. I haven’t quite cracked the cup yet, but I’m getting there. I was able to make Michio see an item on his desk, but he said that if he tried to use the misshapen thing as a cup, water would be spilling all over the place.

  These countless attempts at something as simple as tricking someone’s mind into seeing a cup are really taking a toll. I can tell Michio is hurting from his practice, too. Our hands are practically slashed to ribbons with red magic symbols that sometimes take over an hour to stop bleeding. Maybe we’d be able to staunch that if we were studying white magic during the day, but alas. We’ve started wearing gloves to cover up our fresh markings. Letting Professor Nonyai see these would be the end of us.

  Despite the pain, I think we’re both having a ton of fun with the magic. I’m excited to put Michio in that fake desert eventually. I never imagined having power like this. I feel so strong, finally. Even if all I can do so far is make a shoddy cup.

  She needed to figure out which book was the one Haratti sought, their big payday, but Kali found herself fascinated by the man’s notes. She flipped ahead through the years, skimming entries about Kleus and Michio splitting while on the run, how Kleus made his way westward through Atlua and eventually down through Gillus, where he lived for a number of years. All the while he continued practicing his red magic, growing more and more skilled with the techniques.

  By 1115, when Kali was merely a three-year-old puttering around her newly adoptive parents’ home, Kl
eus had mastered the ability to not only trick a person’s mind into seeing something that wasn’t there, but a method in which he could genuinely create something out of nothing. That had to be how he’d created the living quarters Puk spoke of, maintaining the illusion even while unconscious, which Puk had expressed confusion over during his telling of the tale. As it turned out, it was no illusion at all. It also explained why Kleus’s strange servant—whose name she now knew was Vosk—had not suddenly ceased living while she kept ahold of him up on the deck. There had to be some highly complicated spellcraft at work on that doll, stuff far beyond her own limited comprehension.

  Eventually Kleus made his way to Herrilock, and he wrote a small section on the Pontequest’s crash, which was big news when it had happened and quickly spread throughout the country. He later wrote about the rumor of some nomads who were traveling to the crash site to build a home, which sprouted an idea in his mind.

  Kali read through the details of his scheme, which involved entering the newly-formed town and pretending to blow up the ship. Up to that point, he had remained out of the High Mages’ grasp, but his journal was filled with paranoia about being caught as well as anger toward the mages for, as he put it, attempting to “stifle his growth.” He figured his best course of action was to hole up in the airship.

  To remain undetected, he would fake an explosion, which worked twofold: the first benefit was that it would create a rumor to spread through Herrilock, leading no one to bother visiting Pontequest if they believed it to be destroyed and therefore not finding him; the second being it would cause the current residents to not want to enter the place where he’d be shacking up. A life of solitude was his for the taking. Kali scanned through the next few pages to see if the man had written anything about altering the townsfolks’ personalities and how he intended to deal with visitors who did stumble upon the intact ship. Either he never committed those parts to the page, or they were written elsewhere in the book.

  But with all these safeguards in place, Kali failed to deduce how Haratti had discovered Kleus’s whereabouts. The man must have an impressive web of connections. A tingle ran down her spine.

  She was trying to flip around and find an entry about Vosk, to read the origins of the doll, but that thought about Haratti and his connections kept nagging at her, clawing at her focus.

  What does he really want Malum for?

  Kali closed the journal and picked up the next book. It didn’t take her long to deem it a black magic book, and a fairly rudimentary one, at that. Most of the spells discussed within were lower-level versions, with only brief explanations on the complex conjuring required for the more intense flames of Fire or the cyclones of Aero. There was not anything at all for Bio or Demi spells, either, which Kali knew were for more highly advanced mages. She guessed the book was a holdover from Kleus’s hasty exit from school so many decades before, though she could only wonder why he had not discarded the tome long ago.

  The third book’s cover was black leather, faded with age. Kali gently opened it up, and right there on the very first page was the word MALUM.

  She held the book up to show Puk with an exasperated look on her face.

  “You didn’t think to just check the title pages of these?”

  Puk squinted at the page, then shifted his gaze to Kali. He said, “We’ve only known each other a short time, but based on everything you’ve learned about me, do you think I read fuckin’ books? Enough to know that they have ‘title pages’?”

  “Alright, fair enough.” She hadn’t thought to check the title page of the first two books either.

  The two both groaned with relief at confirmation the book was in their possession at last. All they had left to do was transport it to Haratti.

  The title was not intricately drawn with large, fancy lettering like in many books she had read. It was simple, small, and in the precise center of the yellowed page. Totally unsuspecting for anyone who stumbled upon the book and was unaware of what horrible spells it contained.

  Kali’s curiosity got the better of her.

  Like Kleus had described in his journal, the first few spells in Malum were relatively tame, but they wasted no time ramping up. She read about the spell for conjuring a cup—both tricking a person into believing they were seeing one, and also genuinely creating one out of thin air—which was the most incomprehensible jumble of words she’d ever read. It seemed to her like one of the most difficult spells to pull off, and yet Kleus’s home was filled with items and amenities he had crafted for himself out of magic.

  The man is clearly powerful. Or at least he was in his youth, anyway. Puk got off lucky. That plan of his was a stroke of genius.

  The book then detailed transmogrification, and given that such a horrific practice was merely the second or third spell taught in the book, Kali shuddered at the thought of what else the illicit volume contained. She imagined Puk’s body morphing, his limbs disappearing into the flesh of his body. Such a terrible thing to inflict on a living being, and yet it was evidently a simple task for Kleus. No more effort than cracking an egg.

  Only fifteen or twenty pages later was a spell that allowed the user to choose a target and manipulate the most basic foundations of its tissue. In other words, the spellcaster could gesture with their hands and instruct a person’s arm to separate from their torso.

  Kali was starting to feel nauseous and did not want to know what other foul secrets the book held. She had no interest in learning how the man had conjured some sort of monster to attack Puk. She slammed the book shut, awash with guilt for merely having it in her possession.

  Puk looked up from his duraga, which he had spent the last few minutes tuning, and asked, “You okay?”

  She shook her head.

  He set the instrument down on the bed’s rumpled sheets and asked, “What’s wrong? Read something messed up in there?”

  “‘Messed up’ is putting it lightly,” she grimaced. “Obviously spellbooks are structured going from the least complex spells to the most, and in less than thirty pages this one is teaching you how to rip a person’s head off their neck. Can you imagine what the last spell in the book could be?”

  “Maybe attaching their head again?” the qarm offered.

  Kali rolled her eyes. Usually she enjoyed Puk’s jokes, but the pit in her stomach soured her mood. “I’m being serious,” she said.

  He apologized, then went on. “I mean, it’s bad shit. We knew it was bad shit. That’s why it was outlawed however long ago. That’s why the mages want that thing destroyed,” he said, pointing dumbly at the book before her.

  She nodded. Of course she’d known red magic was vile, but getting a chance to see it for herself made it all the more real. Before, it was only an abstract concept. She was kept at enough of a distance to separate herself from the reality of it.

  But now the book was here, in her hands. Tangible.

  Her thoughts returned to Haratti and whoever his unknown employer was. If they possessed the resources to find Kleus Saix after being in hiding and eluding the most highly-trained mages in the world for thirty-eight years, there was no telling what else they were capable of.

  Doubt pierced her.

  She said, “I don’t know if we should do this.”

  “Do what?” Puk had just been about to pick up his duraga, but moved his hand away from the slender neck again.

  It felt stupid, but she had to say it. “Give the book to Haratti.”

  Puk laughed, bending his eyestalks backward before shooting them up straight to glare at her. “The hell are you talkin’ about?” he demanded. “I just told you the story, but maybe you need a refresher on the bullshit I went through this morning to get that book. The reason I did that was so we could give it to Haratti for a lot of money. I need that money.” His skin was still slicked with sweat from their hasty retreat.

  “I know. Trust me, I know. It’s my money that we’ve been using for this whole trip, in case you need a refresher. But…readin
g this shit, doesn’t it make you uneasy? Knowing that we’d be handing off such a powerful, nasty resource to someone so shady?”

  “His boss might not be shady. We don’t even know who it is.”

  “That’s what makes them shady.”

  “Well, either way, we don’t know what they wanna do with it. Maybe they’re some sort of weird pervert who wants to add it to their personal library. Or maybe they just wanna sell it too, for an even bigger profit. Who cares?”

  “Yeah, that might be what they’re doing, but who are they selling it to? That’s what we should care about!” She realized she was shouting, and quickly lowered her voice. “Remember those Varedan ships we saw docking in Myrisih? There have been rumors floating around of Vareda trying to start a war, sinking ships and shit. What if Haratti’s selling the book to them? I bet they’d be willing to pay a giant mound of crescents for a book like this. It would be a pretty solid investment to help themselves win a war, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t think nothin’,” said Puk. “I don’t know what the Varedans are doin’, I don’t know what Haratti and his goons are doin’. All I know is what I’m doin’, and that is going the fuck home.”