Soulbinder

by Sebastien de Castell

  He led us along a covered cloister, his heavy stride a sharp contrast to Diadera’s light-hearted steps. Unlike her, he walked not so much with a sense of confidence, but rather importance. Ownership. He never paused or stepped aside for the people we passed along the way—monks walking silently with their hands joined beneath the long sleeves of their robes, craftspeople and labourers, children trudging after their parents. Tournam surveyed them all with a benevolent half-smile and the gaze of a prince who saw himself ruling these people one day, rather than merely living among them.

  Butelios caught my gaze. “Argosi?” he asked.

  It took me a second to understand what he meant. “Not really. Just spent a lot of time around one. Why do you ask?”

  “I met an Argosi wanderer once. She surveyed the world around her much the way you do.”

  “What was her name?”

  He replied with a kind of amused reverence. “The Path of Skyward Oaks. A great big woman she was, almost as big as I am now. Strangest person I ever met.”

  “How so?” I prompted, figuring I may as well learn whatever I could about him in case he, like everyone else here, decided at some point to try to kill me.

  “You must understand, Kellen, my city lies in the far northern reaches beyond Darome, a place too cold in winter for foreigners to travel. Yet this woman laughed at the frozen winds assailing our lands. Called them her truest friends.” He shook his head wistfully. “The skills that woman displayed! I begged her to allow me to become her student, her tey … tey … You know, I can’t remember the word now.”

  “Teysan,” I replied, mindful that pretending not to remember something is a good way to probe someone else for what they know. “And did she agree?”

  “She politely informed me that the way of the Argosi isn’t about tricks, which was all she saw in my desire to emulate her.”

  Those words struck a chord. How many times had Ferius made that same accusation of me—that all I wanted were the Argosi abilities rather than the commitment to follow a path? And yet, she’d let me stay with her and kept teaching me anyway. Until that moment I hadn’t fully realised how precious a gift I’d given up when I’d left her.

  “You’re fooling yourself,” Tournam said, not bothering to look back at us. “The Argosi are spies and infiltrators. She was probably there to kill you for being shadowblack, only once she caught sight of those black baby tears on your cheek she decided you weren’t a danger to anyone.”

  Butelios gave a soft chuckle, more to himself than anyone else. Yet his chin was low to his chest, and it seemed to me he was closing in on himself a little. I couldn’t quite make sense of his reaction. The big man looked like he could’ve picked up Tournam with one hand and chucked him over the abbey’s walls if he wanted. Instead he suffered the jibes without ever pushing back. “You think everyone is a spy,” I said to Tournam. “Have you considered that you might just be paranoid?”

  Diadera laughed, a light, tinkling melody, like when the arbiter of a game taps their bell to ascribe a point to one side. Tournam didn’t seem happy with the referee’s decision. He gestured ahead, through an archway that led into the main courtyard. “Tell me again how paranoid I am?”

  The demon’s corpse was gone, but the bodies of dead monks still littered the ground, their blood being cleaned away by their brethren while others stood by, whispering or chanting prayers of one sort or another. Ordinary men, women and children—relatives, I presumed—performed various rituals upon the deceased. Some anointed pale dead flesh with oils or used coloured paints to adorn it with words and symbols of various religions. The bodies of others were placed upon mounds of wood and then covered in kindling in preparation for a funeral pyre. They’re all from different places, I realised. Different cultures, different religions, different burial practices. The only thing these victims had in common was that they were all dead.

  From the opposite side of the courtyard, a child came running, soon followed by a man and a woman shouting after him. It was only when I noticed his limping gait that I recognised him as the boy I’d set down in the sewer yesterday.

  Guess I really did sprain the poor kid’s ankle.

  “You’re Kellen,” he said in a strong Gitabrian accent I hadn’t noticed before. “The Argosi!”

  I shook my head. “I’m no Argosi, just a—”

  “You fought the demon for me. I saw you.” He started gesturing wildly with his hands in what I guessed was a child’s approximation of me throwing cards. After a few seconds of that, he pranced around in what I feared was an extremely accurate portrayal of my arta eres—the Argosi fighting ways. Finally he stopped, out of breath. “You outsmarted the monster.” He tapped a finger on his forehead. “Like a contraptioneer, but with fighting!”

  The couple, who I assumed were the boy’s parents, caught up to us. “Forgive him,” the woman said. “He wanted to make sure you had these.” She handed me the four steel cards I’d left in the courtyard the day before.

  “Thank you,” I said, relieved to have them back, and silently scolding myself for having left them there in the first place.

  The mother smiled. “He talks of nothing but ‘The Argosi! The Argosi!’ ever since you saved him.”

  “Well, I had plenty of help,” I said graciously. “For example, Tournam here …” I let the words drift off. “What was it exactly you accomplished yesterday, oh wise and powerful shadowcaster?” I probably shouldn’t have been goading someone who less than an hour before had nearly killed me, but hey, I don’t get a lot of chances for revenge.

  “You got lucky yesterday,” Tournam said. “How do you suppose you’ll fare the next time, when that little cloud in your eye is too tired to fight your battles for you.”

  “Every Argosi knows a thousand tricks,” the boy told him with rather greater authority than the situation warranted. “Next time he will use a different one.”

  “Get the child out of here,” Tournam said, ignoring the kid entirely to glare at his parents. They shied away, pulling their son with them, but the boy broke free and ran back to me, grabbing at my leg, trying to pull me down to his level. I knelt and looked him in the eye.

  “My friend Joggo says the posse is coming for us,” he said quietly. “But I said, if they came, Kellen Argos would beat them all.”

  If I’d known all it took to become a hero was to let some kid pee on you through the grate above a sewer, I’d’ve … Actually, no, I’d still rather be a disgraced outlaw than be urinated on. “Tell Joggo the abbot will look after you. That’s his job, isn’t it?”

  The boy grabbed me around the shoulders. I thought he was hugging me, but he whispered in my ear. “No. Only the Argosi can protect us.”

  Before I could ask what he meant, the boy’s parents had caught him again. His father hauled him up into his arms and took him away, murmuring the shy, apologetic noises one makes at a time like this. I wanted to stop him, to ask why the boy—who’d no doubt seen what the abbot could do—would think I would have more luck staving off an army of mages than someone with that much power.

  “Hey, hero,” Diadera said, pulling at my arm. “If you’re done preening for your adoring audience?”

  “I wasn’t preening,” I said. Despite her urging that we move on, I couldn’t stop myself from gazing back at proceedings in the courtyard, perversely entranced by the carnage left behind. What must it be like for a child to witness such violence? No wonder he was desperate for someone new to pin his hopes on.

  “Don’t,” Diadera warned. “You’ll make it worse.”

  “Make what worse?”

  She tapped one of the shadowblack freckles on her cheek. “The things on the other side, the ones like the stygian, they can sense the work of their kind. It excites them. Don’t you feel it?”

  It might have been my imagination, but I could’ve sworn the markings around my left eye were prickling me. My pulse was definitely quickening.

  The sound of a wooden cart rolling past us caught me by
surprise. It carried the body of one of the monks. The fellow pulling it whispered some sort of mantra or prayer. Was it for the soul of the dead, or for his own? The sight was oddly compelling. Captivating. I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

  A sharp slap knocked me back a step, shaking me from my reverie.

  “You hit me!” I accused Diadera.

  “You were feeding your demon,” she replied, without a trace of apology. “A physical shock is one of the most reliable ways of breaking contact.”

  I jerked a thumb to the monk pushing the corpse cart. “What about the guys dealing with the bodies?”

  “They are trained in a discipline we have not mastered,” Butelios explained. “It enables them to be close to the destruction left behind by the stygian without channelling any emotional energy to their own demons.”

  Diadera led us to a second covered walkway, outside the main courtyard and beyond the abbey’s main hive of towers. “The training is why we’re all here, Kellen: to give us the means to control the shadowblack so that it can’t be used to hurt others.”

  “What about the ones you don’t find until it’s too late? Or maybe don’t want to be recruited into this ‘training’ you and the abbot keep talking about?” I asked, noticing for the first time how the long leather coats that Diadera, Butelios and Tournam wore gave them the appearance of soldiers rather than monks.

  It was Tournam who answered. “We take care of our own.” His eyes locked on mine, and his expression made it clear that no matter what Diadera said, he still considered me a threat. “When a shadowblack becomes a danger to this abbey or to the world outside, we hunt them down and kill them.”

  27

  Training and Tribulation

  I’d always understood monasteries to be secluded religious communes where reverent brothers and sisters sat around praying, chanting or otherwise wasting a great deal of time. The only appeal I could envision in such aesthetic pursuits was the possibility of living in quiet—and, above all, peaceful—solitude. That impression changed the moment Diadera left me alone at the edge of abbey’s training grounds, where four onyx spires connected by gleaming black walls demarcated an area large enough to hold a Daroman jousting tournament.

  “Gonna kill you good this time, boy!” a pale-skinned girl with strangely braided hair and blackened lips shouted at her prey. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old, far too young to be chasing Tournam, who grinned as he spun to face her. A half-dozen shadowblack ribbons lashed out, striking at her like serpents.

  Far from being afraid, the girl opened her mouth wide, revealing white teeth that gleamed like stars against the endless night of her throat. Smoke erupted from her mouth, a wafting black vapour that seemed to vibrate in the air as it encompassed Tournam’s snake-like ribbons. He laughed at first, but when he tried to retract his tendrils, he found them caught inside the black fog. “Beg for mercy, boy, and maybe I let you keep one of them arms.”

  There were others in the training square practising with their own shadowblack, their abilities as varied as their colouring and clothing. It seemed exiles from every corner of the world found themselves at the abbey.

  There were regular folk too—those not cursed with the markings. They fenced with regular weapons, from battered steel swords and iron-shod staves to crossbows and even a pair of twelve-foot-high trebuchets that required three people working in concert. Many of them were older men and women in their sunset years. Most of the rest were just kids of ten or twelve. I even saw a few younger ones playing with wooden practice swords and shouting bizarre challenges at each other. The abbey struck me as a terrible place to raise kids, though at least these ones had the sense not to face off against Tournam.

  The Berabesq’s brow was furrowed in concentration. His ribbons whipped and tugged, but only became more ensnared in the girl’s shadowblack cloud as it became more and more solid. “That’s enough, Ghilla,” he said. “Release me before I grow cross with you.”

  “‘Cross’?” she mocked. “Oh, spirits in the earth and spirits in the sky, whatever shall I do? The boy is threatening to be ‘cross’ with me!”

  She should’ve taken the threat more seriously, because Tournam had been wise enough not to use all his ribbons in his first attack. While she laughed at his apparent torment, another black tendril unwound itself from his arms and slithered across the ground unnoticed, making its way underneath her feet. But it was the look in his eyes that made me worry for her. “Watch out!” I shouted at her.

  Look, I’m not stupid. I know interfering in the fights of others is a sure-fire way to make enemies. I just hadn’t expected the pair of them to gang up on me.

  “What you think you doin’, interferin’ in our game, boy? You think you some kind of hero?” the girl demanded. She paused what I felt sure would be a lengthy tirade to suck the shadowblack vapours back into her mouth.

  Tournam, now freed from Ghilla’s cloud, decided to be chivalrous for a change and save her the trouble of berating me further. “Don’t be silly, Ghilla. Kellen here just wants his turn in the ring.” He sent two of his ribbons weaving through the air to wrap themselves around my wrists. They tightened until I could feel a prickly, numbing sensation in my fingertips.

  “Making friends already, I see,” a deep voice said from behind me. Abruptly Tournam’s ribbons released me. I turned to find the abbot standing behind me, arms folded across his broad chest as he took a wide stance. “Since everyone’s feeling frisky, who wants to go a few rounds with the old man?”

  Tournam and Ghilla managed to disappear faster than a sightbinder who’d just sparked his silk band. The abbot looked mildly disappointed in all of us, but me most of all. “You really have a remarkable talent for pissing people off, don’t you?”

  I shrugged. “It just takes practice. I’m sure even you could learn if you tried hard enough.”

  I’m not sure why antagonising the abbot came so effortlessly to me. Maybe it was all that intelligence, strength and self-assurance exuding off him like a bad smell. He gestured to a small, squat building at the far end of the training grounds. “How about you come with me and we’ll see if we can find you a more practical skill?”

  The structure wasn’t much bigger than a cottage of the kind you might find in any village, but its outer stone walls were curved like a miniature tower and its roof was a dome made from dozens of individual panes of black glass.

  “What’s in there?” I asked. I’ve learned to be suspicious of any place that looks like it could serve as a particularly secure prison cell or possibly a ritualistic torture chamber.

  “We call it the cauldron,” he said. The name didn’t strike me as being even remotely reassuring. The abbot gave me a shove in the direction of the iron-gated front door. “Time to see what you’re made of, kid.”

  28

  Revelation and Regret

  “Try to relax,” the abbot said.

  This is precisely the sort of thing people tell you right before they do something that, despite the old adage, hurts you much more than it does them.

  He’d had me sit on a stiff wooden chair behind an apparatus made up of a dozen brass-fitted glass discs of various sizes and thicknesses, each one suspended on its own metal arm. These the abbot moved about in different configurations as he peered through the lenses at the shadowblack markings of my left eye.

  “Stay still now,” he warned. He repeated that every few minutes when he paused to make sketches in a little notebook that he’d return to the pocket of his robes before readjusting the lenses on the apparatus.

  With nothing else to do but await either the diagnosis or—more likely—some form of intolerable agony, I watched the abbot at work. He was a strange man to look at; shadowblack markings covered more of his body than anyone I’d ever met. Not only that, his markings seemed … deeper, somehow, almost etched into his flesh. And yet, his markings also had a kind of flow to them. A balance. Maybe I was getting used to the sight of people who shared my disease
, but still, he wasn’t nearly as disgusting to look at as I would’ve expected.

  “Enjoying the view?” he asked.

  His smirk reminded me of Diadera. So did the way he paraded his self-confidence to make me feel awkward. “Just trying to decide if you’re ugly and slow because having so much shadowblack ruins one’s features and intellect, or whether it all happened naturally.”

  He laughed at that, even as he continued adjusting and repositioning the many lenses of his apparatus. “You know, Kellen, eventually you’re going to realise that I was on your side the whole time. One day you might even miss me.”

  I started to rise. “How about you let me go so we can test that theory?”

  He pushed me back into the chair. “Quit wriggling around.”

  “What are you looking for anyway?”

  He brought one of the lenses—a very thin one, barely the size of a small coin—right up to my cheek just below my eye, so close I could feel the coolness of the glass. “Have you ever looked really closely at the shadowblack?”

  “Only every day.”

  “I don’t mean stared at it blankly in the mirror while moping about how unfair life is.”

  “There’s a different way to do it?”

  “Funny. Think you’ll ever find a way to use that wit to make people like you instead of wanting to punch you in the face?” He held up a hand. “No, don’t answer that. Just listen for a change. To the untrained eye, the shadowblack looks like a sinister, unnatural discolouration of the skin. Almost like bruises or burns that have turned black from the necrotising flesh underneath.”

  “Can’t imagine why anyone would mope about that.”

  “What matters is that we’re so horrified by the sight of shadowblack that our minds don’t allow us to truly see how much more is there.”

  “What do you see?” I asked.

  He answered with an almost hushed reverence. “I see a fluid grace in the lines, Kellen. I see complex patterns in the markings. Words in each swirl. I see a language written in shadow.”