Crownbreaker

by Sebastien de Castell

  “Remarkable,” he said. I’m pretty sure that’s the first time he ever used that word in reference to his son. “Your mind should be filling in those omissions by itself.”

  “Don’t feel bad. I’ve spent more time fending off silk mages than most people.” I reached behind me. My sense of touch insisted there was nothing there, but the tension in the muscles of my hand and forearm told me I was pressing against a wall in the palace. “What happens when someone walking through the halls bumps into us?”

  “They’ll avoid us without even being aware of our presence,” he replied, a little too pleased with himself. “The spell creates a feeling of unease in anyone nearby—a compunction to avoid our location.”

  “Clever,” I said.

  My father hates that word. “A contrivance of your sister’s actually. She’s become quite expert at constructing composite spell forms. A bit theatrical, of course, but the technique has its uses.”

  My ears caught on the word theatrical. Ke’heops couldn’t stand the thought of his daughter’s abilities exceeding his own. “Then maybe you should send Sha’maat to do your dirty work.”

  He gave a twist of his fingers that nearly made me dive for the ground. Figures began to appear all around us, their bodies wrapped in desert linens, heads completely obscured save for their eyes, which gleamed with religious fervour. Half of them carried hook-bladed swords called kaskhan. Others wore tiazkhan—the razor-sharp steel claws over their fingertips that awoke painful memories belonging to the long-healed scars on my chest and back.

  “The Faithful,” I breathed.

  “Spiritual fanatics,” my father said dismissively, though his tone failed to hide an anxious catch in his voice. “Were we truly standing within their terrain, they would already have sensed the presence of my magic. They’d be hunting us even now.”

  I’d encountered the Faithful once before, and had it not been for the ingenious trickery of Ferius Parfax—to say nothing of Reichis’s ferocity—I’d never have survived that first meeting. I suppose it’s worth mentioning that the guy responsible for those lunatics coming after me in the first place was standing right next to me.

  “The Faithful have a new weapon in their spiritual arsenal,” Ke’heops went on. Again his fingers twitched; the linen-garbed warriors knelt down in the sand, praying together in a circle as blood began to drip from their eyes and ears. “It is a kind of… curse.”

  “A curse?”

  In addition to gods, prayer and the merits of public art, my people don’t believe in curses.

  Trickles of blood sliding down the faces of the Faithful dripped onto the sand, becoming thin, sinewy rivers that slithered towards the centre of the circle, coming together there as a single crimson braid that reared up, hissing scarlet steam into the air before launching itself along the ground to come straight for me.

  Don’t flinch! It’s just an illusion so don’t flinch!

  I flinched.

  “We call it ‘the malediction,’” Ke’heops said. “Neither walls nor spells can shield its victims. The sickness it brings is slow, agonising and incurable.”

  I guess that explains why he doesn’t want to send his beloved daughter on this mission.

  Ke’heops seemed to know my thoughts. “You have an advantage no other mage of our clan possesses. The Faithful cannot track those whose magic is too weak to attract their notice.” He gestured negligently to the broad-brimmed frontier hat on my head. “Those silver sigils on that preposterous hat of yours have also proven effective in masking your presence from those who seek you out using other means.”

  That explained why my mother had mentioned having so much trouble scrying me. Even Nephenia, who was a pretty talented charmcaster, hadn’t been able to figure out how the sigils on my hat worked.

  With a flick of his hand Ke’heops made the apparitions of the Faithful fade away, leaving the two of us alone in the vast desert.

  “So let me get this straight,” I said, pointing to the mirage of the luminous city in the distance. “You expect me to travel a thousand miles to Makhan Mebab, evade the Berabesq armies, the viziers and the Faithful, then break into the most heavily guarded temple in the world and assassinate a god?”

  “I do.”

  “Then I think you’ve misunderstood our relationship, Father.” I fumbled in the pocket of my coat and handed him the cards my mother had sent me. “When next you see Bene’maat, be sure to return these to her. I have no use for them.”

  My father is rarely at a loss for words. He was staring at the cards in my hand, his expression as calm as still water, but the rage in his eyes made me reach for my powder holsters. Shalla had warned me that one day my glib tongue would push him too far.

  Ancestors, let it not be today. I’m not ready.

  I was about to pull powder when he backhanded me so hard I stumbled backwards. When I hit the wall the illusion of the desert made it appear as if I was being held up by the air itself. I couldn’t recall the last time my father had struck me. When you have dozens of spells at your disposal by which to punish an errant child, such a brute physical response seems… crude.

  Instincts developed during the past three years of facing off against enemies who sought to use violence to make me cower brought my arta valar back to me. I smiled up at the mage sovereign of the Jan’Tep people. “Is today the day we dance, Father?”

  Not bad, I thought. You sound almost confident.

  Again he took me unawares, though this time with words that cut deeper than I would’ve thought possible. “Can you even begin to conceive of how much Bene’maat loves you? She raised you, cared for you, bled magic every time she tried to heal you of the shadowblack.”

  “And then she—”

  “She made a mistake!” he shouted. “I made a mistake! No parent should ever have to witness the shadowblack growing upon their child’s face, knowing that every day it brings him closer to the madness that overtook your grandmother and turned her so feral I had to kill her myself!”

  His lips pressed together so tightly I knew he was holding himself back from hitting me again. “We made a terrible mistake. Every day since, Bene’maat has searched for the means to restore your bands to you, even when our entire clan council forbade it. And for this you speak of her with such disdain?”

  Three years of being an outcast, of being hunted by bounty mages and hextrackers—some of whom my own father had sent to kill me—I really didn’t think he had the ability to make me feel guilty any more.

  Guess I was wrong.

  “Keep the cards,” he said, handing them back to me. “They are a gift. Your mother’s way of trying to speak to you in… in your own language. You should treasure them.”

  His shoulders slumped, which I’d never seen before. The proud lines of his cheeks and jaw seemed to sag with such genuine exhaustion that a kinder heart than mine would’ve ached with sympathy. But I couldn’t show weakness. Too often my family had manipulated me to their own ends.

  “I won’t murder a child for you, Father.”

  “You won’t be doing it for me. You’ll be doing it for her.” With another twist of his fingers he conjured up an apparition of Queen Ginevra, kneeling on the ground, terrified eyes reflecting the silhouette of a Berabesq warrior holding his kaskhan blade high. “The viziers will bring their armies to Darome, and the first thing they’ll do after they’ve shattered the gates of the palace will be to behead that little girl you seem to adore so much more than your own family. They’ll offer her remains up as a gift to their god.”

  A cold chill descended over me, but I refused to let my father’s words and illusions cloud my thinking. “Then I’ll find some other way to protect her. The queen would never ask me to murder a child on her behalf. Besides, in case you hadn’t noticed, the marshals and the Murmurers take a dim view of me doing their jobs for them. Why do you think they had Torian drug me and haul me into that room for that pointless trial, knowing I’d try to escape and just waiting to see if
I could…”

  The rest of that sentence died on my lips as the incongruity of my own words hit me.

  Son of a bitch.

  Ke’heops chuckled as he made Ginevra’s image fade. “For a card player, you do a poor job of keeping your hand hidden. Perhaps you should teach me to play that game that so fascinates gamblers one day… What do they call it? Poker?”

  I ignored the jibe. I was too busying reliving every moment of my time inside the Chamber of Murmurs. “They already knew about the Berabesq god, even before you arrived.”

  What a stupid thing to say. Of course the Murmurers had to have known—or at least suspected something big was happening in Berabesq. They have spies all over the continent. Even if the viziers were hunting down foreign agents, some rumours must have gotten out of Makhan Mebab, which only made my father’s evidence more valuable.

  “They weren’t testing you at all,” I said. “They were testing me. Sneaking into the Berabesq lands and murdering a god would need someone knowledgeable about magic, but who can’t be tracked by the Faithful. Someone with an unusual skill set of subterfuge and trickery. Someone loyal to the queen, who isn’t Daroman—a known former criminal who can be easily disavowed when he’s captured, because, succeed or fail, the Faithful aren’t going to let him escape the Berabesq territories alive.”

  My father looked down at me with something akin to empathy. “You chose the life of an exile, Ke’helios. The path of an outlaw. You had to know there would be those who would seek to take advantage of you.”

  And not all of them turned out to be my relatives.

  “The queen would never countenance the murder of a child,” I insisted.

  “Not even to save her people? The Berabesq outnumber the combined populations of Darome, Jan’Tep and Gitabria three times over. Only their fractious religious beliefs have kept them from dominating the entire continent. This god of theirs, real or otherwise, will unite them into an army such as the world has never seen. To the Berabesq viziers, the rest of us are heathens and blasphemers. They will destroy everything in their path.”

  “But why me?” I asked, feeling myself losing the argument and sounding every bit the petulant child my father considered me. “The world is full of trained spies and assassins. Why should I be the one to—”

  “Because you’re far more dangerous than any hired killer, Ke’helios. You’re unpredictable. Your enemies come at you with swords and spells and you defeat them with playing cards and coin tricks. Bounty mages, hextrackers, lords magi… They’ve all met their ends at your hands. In a world filled with killers and connivers you keep finding ways to survive, learning from each confrontation, teaching yourself to become ever more dangerous to your foes, and all with nothing more than a simple breath incantation and exploding powders.” He gripped my shoulder, but his gaze became oddly gentle. “It may not have been your intention, son, but you have made yourself into the most formidable assassin on the continent.”

  Sadly that was the most complimentary thing my father had ever said to me.

  Ke’heops made a somatic gesture with his fingers and the desert disappeared, leaving us standing in the grand foyer of the palace, surrounded by nobles and courtiers going about their business, entirely unaware of the events that would soon overtake their lives.

  My father turned to leave me there, pausing only to say, “Who but a trickster can hope to kill a god?”

  11

  Duty

  The rank of royal tutor brings with it a number of privileges, few of which live up to their lofty-sounding titles. Liberas Mandat, for example, which is Daroman for “Mandate of Free Reign,” refers to the fact that a royal tutor cannot be prosecuted for any crime without the consent of four-fifths of the queen’s court. This is because a monarch who can have her teachers locked up for assigning homework doesn’t do the empire much good. Of course, this has never stopped the marshals service from arresting me (which, as Torian Libri likes to point out, is different from prosecuting me) every time I annoy them.

  Similarly, Consovi Mandat, which grants a royal tutor audience with the queen on demand, doesn’t technically prevent a dozen or so marshals from greeting said tutor outside the throne room and making it clear they’re going to beat him to a pulp if he chooses to unwisely invoke that particular prerogative right now.

  I understood the logic, of course. What the Murmurers—to say nothing of my father—were contemplating was a diplomatic crime of monumental proportions. If the queen never heard about the plan to assassinate the Berabesq god, then it would be that much easier for the empire to deny culpability. That’s why an hour later I found myself trudging along the upper gallery that led to what was informally known as the tutors’ wing towards my private chambers—the one and only privilege of my position that lived up to its reputation.

  The queen had, at last count, seven tutors. Mathematics, philosophy, natural sciences, politics, history, literature and, of course, card playing. Really you could throw out those first six; skill at poker serves you well enough in most situations.

  Except when your political enemies are vastly better at this than you are.

  “Now what’s a no-good, lousy—”

  “You used that one already,” I informed Torian Libri.

  She was leaning against the gallery railing that overlooked the floors below, the easy smile on her lips letting me know there would be no tearful apologies for her having poisoned me. “You didn’t let me finish. I had several complimentary things to add to my list.”

  “Why don’t you write them down in a letter?” I suggested as I strode past her. “Then do me a favour and burn it.”

  Several things went wrong then, mostly having to do with reflexes. Torian, not used to being so casually dismissed, grabbed my arm. “Now just wait a second, damn it!”

  A lot of people had laid hands on me recently. I guess I’d had too many brushes with death mixed with too few hours of sleep, and I reacted out of instinct rather than forethought. I spun around to face her, brought my hand up over her forearm and drove my fingers into the crook of her elbow. There’s a cluster of nerves there that hurt like seven screaming demons when you hit them just right. Torian winced.

  “Hells,” I swore. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  The problem with reflexes is that other people have them too. Without so much as an angry glare, Torian’s left fist came up in a roundhouse that would’ve knocked me out cold had I not ducked underneath. As I came back up I tried to create some distance between us by shoving her away. She was too fast for me though, and twisted sideways so that my hands slid by her. She spun back to face me and wrapped both her arms around mine, trapping them to her sides. With just about the nastiest grin I’d ever seen she leaned back and then drove her forehead towards the bridge of my nose.

  As an aside, I quite like my nose. I don’t usually make a thing about it, but it’s very straight, entirely proportional to my face, and, miraculously, has never been broken.

  I threw my head to the right, letting hers crash into my collarbone. Before she could try a second time I clenched my arms around her back. We struggled for leverage and I had the unfortunate suspicion that we looked like a couple of very drunk and incompetent dancers trying to find the music.

  “You guys can do that with your clothes on?” a chittering voice behind me asked.

  “We’re fighting,” I said, my desire not to get beaten to a pulp overcoming my embarrassment at Reichis seeing us like this.

  “Oh, you’ll know when we’re fighting, card player,” Torian growled into my shoulder.

  She tried a couple of tentative knees to my thighs. The pros don’t go for the groin, which both men and women instinctively protect. But there’s a spot on the inner thigh where you can cause just as much pain while also paralysing the leg.

  “Truce?” I suggested after I’d narrowly dodged her third attempt.

  Torian’s muscles tensed even tighter for a second. I thought she was going to try
to throw me, but finally she eased up and said, “Truce.”

  The two of us separated. I immediately ducked just in case she’d been setting me up for another roundhouse. Sure, I probably looked stupid, but I wasn’t in a trusting mood.

  “You two done mating yet?” Reichis inquired politely from behind me.

  “That’s not what mating looks like.”

  Torian winked at me. “Maybe you’ve been doing it wrong.”

  You’d think after the kind of day I’d had that the last thing I’d be doing was blushing like some backwoods hick rolling in the hay barn for the first time, but that’s just what happened.

  Torian looked oddly charmed by my embarrassment. “You know what I like about you, spellslinger? For a reckless, irresponsible, unimaginably awkward card sharp—” she reached out a hand and gently pinched my cheek—“you have a very cute squirrel cat.”

  She turned my chin so I’d look behind me. There, sitting on his haunches in the hallway, was Reichis, wearing a purple velvet Gitabrian merchant’s cap several sizes too big for his fuzzy head.

  “You look like an idiot,” I said.

  Torian brushed past me. “Don’t listen to him, master squirrel cat.” She bent down to gaze at him admiringly. She’s one of the few people in the palace other than the queen who recognises that Reichis is actually intelligent, as opposed to thinking I’m demented for believing he speaks to me. “You,” Torian told him, wagging a finger at his muzzle, “look entirely dashing. I think you should wear this hat as often as possible. Especially when you and the card player go to visit the queen.”

  “So purdy…” Reichis said, tilting his head as he peered into her eyes. He reached a paw into his mouth and removed something that glittered even in the dim light of the gallery.

  “Now what have you got there, little fella?” Torian asked. She reached a hand out to take it from his paw.

  Despite my irritation with her, some last shred of chivalry prevailed. “Don’t!” I warned, trying to grab her before she lost her fingers.