We made it past the goat pens and ran towards the thin strip of willows that stood between the village and the road. Brix outstripped me easily, disappearing into the stand of bracken. I halted as soon as I was out of sight of the tavern, grabbed a grease pencil from my satchel and scrawled runes down my forearms. Apprentices travelled in threes, by Guild regulation. There had only been two of them in the tavern stable-yard. If they were smart, they would have tried to leave the third somewhere to cut off our retreat, and with nothing scribed I was unarmed.
I wrote feverishly, waiting for the flurry of noise from the direction of the village that would mean they were turning out to look for us. I had only four characters left to scribe when Brix screamed.
Branches whipped across my face as I bolted towards the sound. I knew terror when I heard it, knew what it was like to catch a spell between your teeth. The other apprentice must have been waiting on the road.
She was close, close enough that even over the roar of my heartbeat I could hear her frightened cries and a man’s angry mutters. He had caught her, and if he killed her my one chance to get into the temple in Ri Dana would be dead. I ran towards the sound, crashing through the underbrush and slipping in the loamy soil as I scrambled up the slope towards the road. I burst out of the trees in time to see the man twist her to the ground with one arm.
Without waiting to think, I stooped and grabbed the only thing I could find, a single round stone. I threw it, as hard as I could.
Which must not have been very hard, because when it thudded between his shoulders he didn’t fall. His head jerked around.
Not a wizard. Pavel, the innkeeper.
‘What in the hells do you think you’re doing?’ I hated the quaver in my voice, but it was the mark of sanity. This was a bad situation. I had no sort of weapon – not a completed spell, nor even another rock, and sprinting uphill had dangerously loosened my brace.
‘There you are.’ He sneered at me. ‘Think a bit of yavad buys you the right to order me around in my own place? I knew you was nothing but a dirty fake. The merchant was too blind drunk last night to remember you, sent those proper wizards in to see me. I knew who they was looking for well enough, even before they showed me the paper.’ His hand tightened on Brix’s arm, and she made a soft, pained sound, her feet scrabbling at the dirt, twisting against his grip without doing any good. ‘I’m not sharing the bounty with anyone. While my wife is keeping those wizards drunk and chasing their own tails, I’ll haul you back to the Guildhouse in Fenwydd. I’ll have that money.’
I needed to knock him down, and keep him down long enough to let Brix get away. I had to keep him focused on me.
‘Then you’ll have to come take me,’ I said, pleasantly. ‘Because the bounty isn’t on her, pigface.’
‘I reckon she’d bring a price, too, if a man knew who to ask.’ He let go of her, though, and advanced towards me. ‘If you was a proper wizard, you’d have ensorcelled me by now. You’re not a wizard. You’re not anything.’
The man was a walking heap of ugly. I hit him.
My knuckles skidded across his teeth. He grunted, and batted my hand away.
‘Shit,’ I said, and his fist slammed into my mouth.
The first blow didn’t drop me, but it made me wobble enough that I accidentally avoided the second one. My knee filled with hot, liquid pain, and I wrenched my weight off of it. How was I going to get through this without falling?
I lowered my head and ran at him, hoping to bowl him over backwards. He hooked a left into my stomach and the air left my body with a pathetic wheezing sound, doubling me over. Before I could straighten, his fist caught me in the face again, and I couldn’t see.
If I went down, he’d kill me. I pulled myself upright, listening frantically to figure out where he was.
A rush of steps. I swung my fist towards the sound and connected with something. Pavel swore. I peered at him through just-returning vision and saw that I’d bloodied his nose. His foot snared my ankle and I stumbled backwards.
Something – it felt like it was at least the size of an ox hoof – crashed into my face. I heard myself grunt and concentrated on not shouting as I hit the dirt. Brix was screaming again, this time at me. I could hardly make out the words.
‘Get on your feet!’ she shouted.
As I struggled back up, over the seething agony in my knee, I found it rather annoying. She needed to stop making noise and get the hells away while she could.
I dragged my swollen eyes open in time to see Pavel draw his arm back one more time. The thin, blue dawn light made his teeth look even more stained as he grinned at me. ‘You should have stayed down.’
‘Tiny-pricked son of a goat,’ I croaked. At least it wiped the smile off his face. I wished I could see Brix – I hoped she had taken the opportunity to run.
Crunch.
Warm blood gushed down my face, and I couldn’t breathe through my nose. I went back to my knees, and this time I couldn’t get up. I could see, though. I sat there, panting, waiting for him to kick me. I had one chance left.
‘A lot of trouble,’ he spat, ‘for a little whore.’
He swung his foot at me hard enough that, had he connected, he would have caved in my ribcage. As it was, I caught his ankle and threw myself sideways, using his own momentum against him. With a yelp of surprise, he went down.
I may know nothing about fighting, but I’m good with leverage.
Scrambling forwards, I got a hand on his ear and twisted. ‘Little whore?’ I said. I lifted myself on my knees and brought my elbow, with all my weight behind it, into his chest. He cried out and curled into himself, wheezing.
‘That’s enough!’ Someone grabbed my hair and yanked me away from him. I couldn’t halt my backward progress and found myself sitting in the dirt, staring up at Brix. She stuck her hands under my armpits and dragged me up on my feet. ‘Let’s just go,’ she said. ‘They could have got tired of waiting, and then they’ll be here any second. Don’t waste any more time on him.’
Panting, I forced my sore fingers to bend enough to find the pencil in my bag and finished scribing the spell on my left arm. She was right that we had to move, but I had to deal with Pavel. Before long he’d get his wind back and get up. He’d tell the Guildies which direction we went, set them on our trail like hounds.
‘Gray,’ Brix said, urgent. ‘They won’t stop hunting us if you kill him.’
I walked back to Pavel. I wasn’t going to kill him. I bent, put my hand over his mouth and pronounced the spell. Blue light flowed from my fingertips and into his open, gasping mouth. A ruewrack spell tastes like honey, and the sensation is so cold and so startling that most people swallow the magic before they think about it.
Pavel swallowed. I watched as his eyes went wide, pupils blown out to the edge of the irises, and he scrambled away from me, backwards, like a crab.
‘Stay back!’ His words scratched from his throat, screechy, frightened. ‘Don’t touch me!’ He rolled on to his hands and knees and to his feet. He scrambled back down the hill and into the trees, talking to himself, chased by the hallucinations I’d dumped into his mind.
‘There.’ I winced as the toxicity blossomed in the middle of my skull and shaded my eyes with one hand as I limped back to Brix. ‘It won’t kill him, but with any luck he won’t talk sense for the next eight or ten hours. We can get the hells away from here, hopefully before the Guildies catch on to what’s happened and think to come after us.’ I stopped, nausea surging.
‘You look awful.’ She was massaging her bruised arm. There was also a red mark on her cheek, now that I got closer to her. ‘I’ve never heard of a wizard getting so sick so often.’
‘That’s because most Guild wizards don’t practise like I do,’ I said, with my head between my knees. ‘They either do much less toxic spells and then spend more time recovering, or they dump the toxicity they acquire into other people. They cheat. I don’t.’
‘Other people?’ There was a strange note
in her voice.
‘Slaves, mostly.’ I clenched my teeth and tried to breathe deeply enough to keep my breakfast where it belonged. ‘There are people who can absorb magic toxicity without being hurt. Tirnaal, a folk that mostly come from Genereth, in the south. Guild wizards mark them with runic tattoos for various ostentatious spells – bindfoot, speakfar, that kind of thing. Supposedly they’ve even got unique bodies, can be trapped in bottles, like bard’s-tale djinn. I don’t know that it works the way the Guild says it does, though. You don’t see many Tirnaal – they never become wizards themselves, and—’ I paused, closed my eyes. ‘And I think I’m about to puke, so this seems like a very stupid moment for this discussion.’
‘You could have run away. You didn’t have to help me.’ She almost sounded accusing. ‘Why did you?’
The nausea began to subside a little. I swallowed, straightened and began to walk north as rapidly as I could. Which was not, of course, all that rapid.
‘Answer me,’ she said, keeping pace with me.
‘Gods, it’s not a big mystery.’ My mouth was bitter with the aftertaste of magic. I didn’t much like the flavour of this conversation, either. ‘I can’t run. I can’t even jog most of the time, certainly not after walking so much yesterday. So if I was stuck going slow, Pavel had to be dealt with.’ I glanced at her. ‘Also, you’re supposed to get me into a temple, remember?’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Thank—’
‘Stop thanking me for everything,’ I snapped. ‘It wasn’t a present. I don’t give presents. This balanced our accounts. That’s all.’
And that was all. I couldn’t start caring what Brix or anybody thought of me. Not when I had so little time. What mattered was getting to Ri Dana and finding Acarius’ artefact. What mattered was finding Acarius, before the Guild snuffed him out like a candle. I had to free him. I had to repair the rift between us.
Acarius was my family, and this was my last chance.
Six
We walked north for three days, scrambling off the road whenever we heard hoofbeats, fearful of Guild pursuit. It was Brix who finally caught a cart, a couple taking a load of wool up to Ten Rivers, the next big market town. Brix explained my ruined face with a whispered story about running away from a purchased marriage, and how her arranged bridegroom had tried to kill me – her brother, if you please. The couple agreed to help us, although they clearly believed I was, in fact, a rival bridegroom. I paid out one of my silver coins and spent the next few days reflecting on how uncomfortable it was to pretend to be a brother while two deeply interested men asked you sympathetic questions.
At Ten Rivers, Brix told the next carter that I was her cousin, fallen afoul of moneylenders. We rode with knobby bags of yellow onions up the road to Vasanth, where I spoke up for myself for once and decided to be a cobbler who had got into a barfight.
There was time to talk as we bounced over the roadstones, but we didn’t. Brix seemed content to dangle her feet off the back of the cart during the day and hum low songs to herself at night, never tunes that I recognised. She made noises in her sleep, too, fitful, unhappy little sounds that reminded me of my own dreams.
The country around us changed as we patchworked our way up to the coast, from grain fields to hills, and then to a high, rocky scrub land. Brix kept exclaiming about the different landscapes. I’ve never cared for the look of the scrub land. It’s dry, and the dirt is the wrong colour, pale and chalky and full of strange, gritty seashells. When I said so, she called me stupid. Our relationship, apparently, was getting better.
After about a week we began to smell salt on the air, and then one morning, sharp pinnacles rose on the horizon and we saw Ri Dana.
‘It’s pretty,’ Brix said.
This time I agreed. Almost anything can be pretty from the right distance. From far away, Ri Dana’s slender towers and rounded walls looked like elegant black filigree, as though someone had dropped a wrought-iron crown in front of the white cliffs. I had been all of fourteen last time I had been inside the city, but as I recalled it wasn’t so pretty up close.
Our cart arrived at the wall as evening fell, and Brix and I jumped down before it took its load of apples to be inspected by the duke’s revenue officer. We stood in a string of travellers waiting to pass through the nearest of the city’s seven gates. The line inched along. As we drew closer to the wall, I could hear the bored voices of the pair of militia-men who stood at the gate questioning those entering.
Where are you travelling from? And your business here? Did you see anyone unusual on the road? A man and a woman; the man in a robe, the woman wearing a shirt and trousers stolen from a Temples vestment room. Wanted for the murder of a priest.
‘Step out of the line,’ Brix whispered, at my elbow. ‘Quick, while they’re talking to that woman. Don’t draw attention.’ She turned sideways to walk into the twilight. I followed her.
When we had moved far enough along the curve of the wall to be out of sight of the gate, I stripped off my robe and stood there in just my shirt, trousers and tunic.
‘Maybe at one of the other gates,’ I said. ‘There are six more.’
‘You’re not thinking of still going into that place?’ Brix was looking miserably at her own clothes – which clearly were modified Temples vestments, now that I’d had my attention drawn to them.
‘I don’t have a choice,’ I said.
‘That’s mad. You’re mad.’ She stared at me. ‘They think we killed Halling. They’re not going to listen to your version of the story. If they catch you, they’ll hang you. What kind of book do you think is worth your life?’
‘But it’s his life,’ I blurted, and instantly regretted it.
She froze. ‘What?’
My damned hands were shaking again. I wadded my robe into a ball and squeezed it to still them. I had to risk the truth. ‘The Guild arrested my grandfather six months ago. For nonstandard incantations and necromancy and every other charge they could think of. I can’t find him. I can’t help him. But there’s an artefact in the temple of Jaern here that he told me to get, and the Guild wants it. If I can find it before they do – if I have something to bargain with—’ I paused, but the words were already out. It was the first time I had articulated, even to myself, the temptation that had been throbbing like a splinter in the back of my mind since I’d left the inn.
Brix’s eyebrows twitched together. ‘He told you to get it to ransom him?’
People will die.
I shook my head, as though that would clear the memory of the bloodstained cabin and Keir’s smug grin the first time I had seen him, sitting in a Guildhouse office. Fool that I was, I had tried to offer him a bribe. Keir had tried to stuff a shacklebright spell down my throat.
‘They’re hurting him,’ I said. ‘I can’t just—’ I swallowed, frustration burning in my throat. This was pointless. There was nothing to tell Brix that would keep her with me. Nobody ever stayed with me.
Her hand wrapped over the back of one of mine. ‘Think. Let’s just . . . think for a minute. Maybe there’s a way to do this that isn’t completely crazy.’
I looked up quickly, startled. ‘You’re going to help me?’
She fingered the fabric that I held. ‘It would be safer if we change how we look. I could borrow your robe, at least long enough to get into the city. We could go in separately.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Listen to me, talking like this makes sense.’ She took the robe from me and swung it around her own shoulders. It covered her clothes completely, sleeves skimming her knuckles and hem brushing the ground. Instantly, she was a respectable wizard. ‘How did they know to look for us in the first place?’
‘Keir Esras,’ I said. ‘Has to be. Keir’s the only one who has a reason to pin Halling’s death on us, and he’s been hounding me since they took Acarius. He probably sent pigeons to all the nearest major Guildhouses. I suppose it was only a matter of time before he decided to ask for help from the militia.’ I glanced at her. I didn’t want to question
this piece of luck, but I couldn’t help it. ‘Brix, why are you doing this?’
She picked at the uneven thread of a place where I’d darned the sleeve of my robe. ‘I know what it’s like, not being able to help someone that you care about.’
‘Who—’ I began, and then stopped, as a wash of pink travelled across her face. Uneasily, I wondered whether she needed the money for something more important than a ship’s passage. ‘Thank you.’
She grinned. ‘It isn’t a present. I don’t give people presents.’
‘I’ll repay you.’ I was making the promise to myself as much as I was to her. I had to get Acarius safe. Then I’d figure out a way to clear this debt, even if it killed me.
‘That’s a given, wizard,’ Brix said, quietly. ‘But if we’re going to work together, you’re going to have to learn to take my help.’ She made a little shooing motion with her hands. ‘Now, move. Show me which way to go.’
Well, at least that was settled. ‘Let me scribe a couple of spells, first,’ I said.
*
We entered through the fourth gate, which was manned by a single resentful militia-man who seemed to have a bad back and a determination not to work any harder than he had to. He smiled respectfully at wizard-Brix as she crossed under the gate, but was scowling and muttering a saint-chant when I approached a minute or so later.
‘Filthy spelldogs,’ he said, looking in the direction she’d taken. ‘I hate ’em, trailing poison everywhere they go, dragging djinn-bloods into the city. The wizards’ slaves can spoil your luck, you know, just by touching you.’
‘Damn wizards,’ I said, and hurried after Brix. White cobblestones edged with black walls opened before us, blue-plastered buildings crammed along streets that spread from the gate like the spokes of a half-wheel. Above us to the west, the inner wall surrounded the high ground of the city and the roots of the blackstone towers that dominated the skyline. I joined Brix as, around us, people rushed to get home before night fell and it became dangerous to be abroad.
‘What a narrow-minded pig,’ she muttered, as we moved away from the gate.
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