Soulbinder

by Sebastien de Castell

  The slapping of sandalled feet close behind. Someone was already on my tail.

  Have to keep moving. The damned cold was already getting to me though. I looked down and discovered that the one thing they’d removed from me had been my boots, and that the sand here was white. It chilled the bottoms of my feet and had an oddly smooth quality to it that I wasn’t at all accustomed to. Just how far had they taken me?

  “Reichis!”

  I listened for his voice. A growl, a moan—hells, even an insult would’ve been welcome. My stomach clenched, whether from fear or the cold or because, perhaps, squirrel cat meat didn’t agree with me.

  Ancestors, if you’ve let me eat my business partner, I swear I will get myself two full pouches of red and black powders and meet you in the grey passage where I’ll pay my respects in a most discourteous fashion.

  “Stop!” shouted my pursuer. “You can’t go out there!”

  I glanced back. Two monks. The Berabesq and another guy.

  Evidently I hadn’t done enough damage to keep Tournam out of the fight. His companion was bigger, wearing a coat with sleeves that covered his arms, but the light from the moon above illuminated a shaved head covered in twisting shadowblack lines that ended in three teardrop-shaped markings below his left eye that almost made it look as if he were crying.

  I kept running, my eyes searching for a weapon in this damned white desert with its cold wind chilling me to my bones.

  “Heed us, you fool,” the big monk yelled. “You’re racing towards your own your death!”

  They were catching up to me already, which meant my odds of outrunning them were not good. Fortunately I’ve had plenty of practice being chased.

  I reached into my pocket for the steel cards. Stopping suddenly, I spun on my heels to face my pursuers even as I slid backwards in the slippery white sand. I flicked two cards at the approaching monks.

  I should point out here that when I say “flicked,” what I really mean is that I sent a pair of razor-sharp rectangular steel blades spinning at a speed that’s almost impossible to dodge and which would slice into my opponents’ flesh as deeply as any throwing knife.

  The monks didn’t even have time to get their arms up to cover their faces as the cards sailed through the air towards them. They didn’t need to. The instant before the blades could reach their target, Tournam’s shadowblack markings unwound themselves from his arms, dancing in the air like ribbons of black ink strewn from a pen, and swatted the cards aside.

  I watched in horrified fascination as the sinuous lines returned their master, wrapping around his limbs to settle once more into the design they’d had before.

  Whenever my shadowblack acts up, it’s either to show me horrible visions of people turning into monstrous apparitions of themselves, or to smother me in darkness. Life is so unfair sometimes.

  “Wait where you are, idiot!” Tournam shouted. The front of his leather coat was burned through where my flames had hit, but the skin beneath was so covered in black markings that I couldn’t tell if I’d even hurt him. I considered trying my spell again, but I was low on powders, which meant I’d need to scrape the sides and bottoms of the pouches for enough to fire the spell properly—something I didn’t have time for. That just left running some more.

  In situations like this, I have exactly five weapons I can use. The first is my powder spell, which requires, you know—powder. The second are the steel cards, which had proven useless against these guys. The third is a wind spirit called a sasutzei that lives in my right eye and who never—and I mean never—helps when I want her to. The fourth are the castradazi coins in my shirt, which I hadn’t yet learned how to use. And the final weapon in my deadly arsenal? A two-foot tall squirrel cat with a bad attitude.

  This would have been an excellent time for him to make an appearance.

  He didn’t.

  “Look, you fool!” the big bald-headed monk called out. “Look where you’re standing!”

  That turned out to be sound advice as I had just reached the edge of a cliff. The confusion of all that empty space below me made my vision blur and my legs go wobbly.

  Who stuck a mountain in the middle of a desert?

  A whole bunch of things suddenly made sense—such as why I couldn’t feel my feet any more, why the sand crunched as I ran on it, and why I was shivering. Oh, and also why I’d been dreaming of whistling white bears.

  If this all makes me sound kind of dumb, I should point out that never in my life had I seen snow before. Neither had I been expecting to, since you don’t usually find snow in a desert.

  Where the hell am I?

  “Do not move one more inch!” the bald monk shouted.

  How long had these guys kept me unconscious?

  “Stay back!” I said, scraping my fingertips into the crevices of my pouches to get at what little of the black and red powders I had left. At the very least it might distract them.

  “Don’t you even think about using that spell on me a second time!” Tournam warned, the ribbons on his bare arms unwinding themselves.

  Well, of course he’d say that. I fired the spell anyway. It made a pretty satisfying booming sound that split the air between us and sent the two monks dropping to the frosty ground.

  Okay, I thought. Now where do I go from here?

  This last question became moot because it turns out there’s another property of snow that no one warns you about when you live in a hot climate. I’d read about snow in books of course, and knew lots of terms like ice frost, blizzard, and even a particularly funny-sounding one: avalanche.

  I couldn’t recall at first what that last one meant, but the question was soon solved when the ground beneath my feet gave way. The ear-splitting crack of the cliff edge coming apart was like being trapped inside thunder itself. Too late I tried lurching back towards my pursuers.

  The monks ran towards me, arms outstretched in what I now knew would be a futile attempt to catch me. The last thing I saw was the two of them shaking their heads at me as I tumbled to the abyss below.

  There are seven different Jan’Tep spells that allow a mage to fly, float, levitate or otherwise defy gravity.

  I couldn’t cast any of them.

  7

  Black Snow

  The first part of the fall wasn’t nearly so bad as I expected. I dropped around twenty feet before sinking into a soft snow bank on an outcropping. Then that broke as well. I slid another hundred feet or so down the mountainside, scrambling to grab hold of anything I could find. Turns out snow makes a poor handhold.

  The sequence of whooshing along then plummeting a short way only to land on another snow bank was oddly pleasant. For about three seconds. I tumbled another fifty feet before I approached the next steep drop and saw that what awaited me below was not another pillowy carpet of snow but jagged rocks.

  “Use your shadow, you fool!” one of the monk’s voices echoed down the mountainside. I swear the sound of it sent even more snow and ice crumbling down towards me.

  Use my shadow how, exactly? Unlike these guys’, my shadowblack had never done anything but torment me. I dug the soles of my feet into the snow in an attempt to slow my descent, but found myself flipping head over heels. Great, now I can land on my head when I hit the rocks. A moment later I was sailing through the open air.

  Please, I thought, begging the black markings around my eye, just once, help me!

  Snow from the avalanche drifted all around me as I fell, the flakes like tiny butterflies dancing in the air.

  I clawed at the empty space around me—a reflex I couldn’t control even though I knew it would do no good. In desperation I redoubled my efforts to awaken the shadowblack markings around my left eye. It felt a bit like trying to give yourself a headache.

  Ancestors, I’m going to die. Shattered against the rocks, surrounded by all this ugly black snow.

  Wait … Black snow?

  In my defence, becoming lost in shadow is a disorienting experience. Everything go
es pitch black, and yet you can see perfectly clearly, as if what normally appears to be the absence of colour actually comes a thousand shades of obsidian.

  I was still falling, but slower now, almost gently, like a leaf carried by the breeze. I was able to right myself and a moment later my feet touched the ground. Gone were the jagged grey rocks I’d seen during my fall, replaced by onyx sands as far as the eye could see.

  I did it! I thought. I shifted into shadow!

  Of course, that raised an important and troubling question: every other time I’d been lost in shadow, my spirit alone had come to this place, while the rest of me remained in the real world. So either I’d gotten very, very lucky and something was different this time, or else my physical body now lay broken and bloody against the rocks at the bottom of the mountain. But if that were so, did that mean my spirit was trapped forever in the shadowblack?

  8

  Onyx Shards

  I stood upon a wide plain, the ground beneath my feet covered in tiny shards of onyx and the sky above my head filled with ebony clouds. If those two sound like the same colour, well, they might be in our world, but not in this place of endless shadows. For that matter, the obsidian ocean in the distance was distinct from the flakes of soot-coloured snow that still fell all around me. Oh, and while there was no sun and thus no way to tell the time, I was fairly sure it was always midnight here.

  “Hello?” I called out.

  Nothing.

  Whenever I’d been lost in shadow before, my friends had been nearby. I’d seen shades of them made from the secrets they kept. Maybe that’s what the shadowblack was all about: our darkest fears given physical form. If so, I wondered what mine were.

  Maybe it’s being trapped alone for eternity.

  I shouted again, as loud as I could, “Hello? Anyone?”

  My voice sounded strange. Too close—as though I were whispering in my own ears. The effect made me feel more alone than ever. Damn it, Reichis! Why aren’t you here to bite me and call me a coward?

  “Kellen?” The faint chitter drifted across the barren black landscape, so faint it could easily have been my imagination.

  “Reichis?”

  Silence for a few seconds, then even more faintly, “Kellen, where are you? I’m hurt, Kellen. I keep trying to get up, but I—”

  Reichis’s voice was cut off. Even in the silence I somehow knew he’d slipped and fallen in the sand. But how did I know he was still in the desert? His voice came again, softer than ever. “I’m tired, Kellen. Gonna sleep for a whi—”

  “Reichis, I’m coming!” I shouted into the endless black landscape. Off in the distance, probably more than a hundred miles away, the twin silhouettes of what might have been the mountain pass that led into the Golden Passage appeared. Waiting for me. Taunting me. It was too far of course, but I didn’t care. I tore off towards them, my feet slapping silently against the onyx shards. Maybe space wasn’t the same here as in the real world. Maybe if I ran fast enough, held Reichis’s image clearly in my mind, I could—The squirrel cat’s voice echoed once again, barely more than a whisper on the breeze. “Can’t wait for you, Kellen. Sorry I never said …”

  Again the broken, chittering voice drifted away. “No!” I screamed. “No, Reichis, hold on!” I kept running, but the mountains were receding further and further into the distance. The ground moved under me, but I never seemed to get any closer. Was none of this real? Was my body lying shattered against the rocks at the foot of the mountain and this was nothing more than the last vestigial thoughts as the blood slipped out of my veins and my brain was starved of oxygen?

  No, I thought. This is real.

  I don’t know how I knew, but I did. Reichis was out there, at the edge of the desert. And I knew more. One of his legs was broken, wounded in a fight with a creature that had attacked when he’d tried to steal one of its eggs for food. He was starving. He’d dragged himself miles and miles, trying to follow my tracks. Now he was dying. Alone. And I couldn’t get to him!

  “Please!” I shouted up at the sky. “Someone help me!”

  If the gods of earth and air that the borderlands folk pray to could hear me, if the ancestors my people worshipped knew of my plight, if the damned Berabesq’s six-faced god was listening, none of them gave a sign.

  “Damn you all! Why are you doing this to me? Why do you make my life so …” No. Stop. This isn’t helping Reichis.

  If Ferius was here, she’d say, “Ain’t nobody doin’ nothin’ to you, kid. Best you start doin’ something for somebody else for a change.” She’d be right too. Reichis was a mean little cuss, but he was my business partner. He’d saved my life a dozen times, because that’s how it worked between us: we’d fight and argue and insult each other, but when the chips were down, he was there for me. Always. Now I had to find a way to be there for him.

  Squirrel cats were hardy creatures, and Reichis was more bloody-minded than most. Could he last another day out there, wounded and starving in the desert, dying of thirst? A proper Jan’Tep mage could’ve used blood and sand magic to lend him the strength to survive a little longer. But I’d only sparked the tattooed metallic band for breath magic before my parents had counter-banded the rest. If I’d been powerful like my sister, Shalla, I could’ve devised some kind of spell to—Wait … Shalla.

  She could do it. She’d sparked all six of her bands. Moreover, she was a genius at concocting new spells. I just needed to get a message to her. I looked around me at this place that wasn’t really a place at all, but something different—something that was both separate and yet attached to the physical world.

  “Shalla?” I called out.

  Could it really be that easy? Was I about to finally find a use for the cursed black marks around my left eye?

  Nothing. Not a word, not a sound. I closed my eyes and willed myself closer to her, hoping that would somehow manipulate the ethereal physics of shadow to reach out to her. Nothing happened.

  It made sense, in a way. I loved my sister, but the world doesn’t give a damn about love. Reichis and I shared a bond. All his little growls and chitters became words in my mind. Whatever made that connection work, I didn’t have it with anyone else.

  A soft, wheezing sound reached my ears. It was Reichis’s ragged breathing. I could feel him out there, far from this damnable mountain where those bloody monks had dragged me, waiting to die.

  I pushed panic aside. I may never be an Argosi like Ferius, but I’d follow their unrelenting Way of Stone if that’s what it took. What I needed was a spell like the one Shalla had used to communicate with me back when I was travelling through the Seven Sands. Sometimes her face would appear in a patch of sand or a bowl of water and she’d start berating me over one thing or another. Once she even appeared in the clouds overhead. That had been particularly unsettling.

  Focus, idiot.

  I couldn’t cast a spell like Shalla’s, but maybe I didn’t need to. I knelt down on the ground, my hands smoothing the tiny onyx shards. Shalla had only had to cast her spell the one time, and afterwards could awaken it through will alone whenever she wanted to talk to me. The magic had weakened over time, but the ethereal threads might still be there. One of those threads was made from breath magic. I stared down at the pale blue metallic band around my right forearm, sending my will through it, urging it to spark. If I could activate even that small part of Shalla’s spell, maybe she’d notice and use her own considerably greater powers to do the rest.

  The breath band shimmered, its blue light pushing back against the black of the shadow lands. I passed my hand over the shards of onyx and filled my mind with Shalla’s essence. People aren’t just a name or a voice or a face. They’re not just memories either. They’re bigger than all of that—so big that it’s almost impossible to conceive of a human being in their entirety. Yet that’s precisely what I had to do. With a finger I traced the line of Shalla’s face in the shards, pulling more and more breath magic through my band. It stung like hell, which wasn’t us
ual for me. I ignored it and kept drawing Shalla’s features, the slant of her eyes when she’s looking at me like I’m an idiot, the hint of a smile when she’s gotten the better of me. The pain got worse and worse, becoming almost unbearable. But I’d been in pain before, and besides, I knew however much it hurt, it was nothing compared to what Reichis was—Stop. Pity and despair won’t help.

  I turned my thoughts back to my sister: the precocious girl, more talented than any other member of our clan, even our father. The sister who always believed I could be better, even if that meant trying to kill me. The … No, you have to see all of her, not just the good parts.

  Shalla was a temptress. She loved the way all the boys in our clan looked at her, tried to impress her. She cared about me, sure, but she’d betrayed me more than once. She was every good and bad thing you can imagine in a person, but more than anything else, she was complicated. Too damn complicated!

  The wind was swirling all around me now, whisking away the shards I was so carefully trying to compose into her features. It was as if the air itself was resisting me. A sudden pinch in my band drew my gaze. I was bleeding drops of black blood. The pain was making me lose hold of Shalla in my mind.

  No. Whatever you are, you won’t beat me. I will walk the Way of Stone. I will not bend. I will not break.

  I closed my eyes, drawing Shalla’s face in shards once more, this time from memory. I let thoughts of her fill me up, allowing my feelings about her to overwhelm everything else. I loved my sister. I hated her. I admired her. I resented her. I needed her.

  “Kellen?”

  I opened my eyes. “Shalla?”

  The winds had only gotten worse, but though the onyx shards were swirling all around me, trying to cut into my flesh, there, on the ground, thousands of them resisted, taking on the shape of my sister’s face. The eyes narrowed as if squinting up at me. “Kellen? Where are you?”

  “Shalla, I need your help! Reichis is hurt. You’ve got to—”

  The shards making up her left eyebrow rose. “The nekhek? You interrupted my studies to prattle about that foul nekhek?”