Soulbinder

by Sebastien de Castell

  He smiled. “It’s good that we see eye to eye on some things then.”

  I shook my head. “No, you idiot. There’s a difference between being weak and being helpless, and I already have plenty of enemies, Tournam. Walk away now, or I’ll be more than happy to rid myself of one permanently.”

  I was pretty much out of powders and had no clue how I’d beat him, but I didn’t care. I’d taken on deadlier opponents than this smug bastard. My steel cards were in the leather case sewn to my trouser leg, and I still had my castradazi coins. If that didn’t work, I’d just grab him and rip his throat out with my—

  “Leave him be,” Butelios said, pushing us apart.

  “You should back away, big man,” Tournam warned him. “Do what you do best. Give the new boy a hug and cry about all his pain.”

  “Don’t be a blind fool, Tournam!” he said, more firmly than I’d heard him speak before. “Kellen’s going to kill you. He doesn’t even understand why, but he’ll do it just the same. He can’t stop himself.”

  All of the others stared at me, even Diadera, a sudden tension in their expressions as though I was transforming into a demon before their eyes.

  “It’s not the shadowblack,” Butelios said. He came and stood so close to me that I had to tilt my head back to lock eyes with him.

  “You should step back,” I warned. “Or Tournam will be right and you will be crying.”

  The strangest thing happened then. Butelios did cry. Black, oily tears dripped down his cheeks. I’d seen him do this before, but this time he reminded me of Cressia back in Gitabria, when she’d been suffering the attacks of the obsidian worm in her eye. This was different of course. Butelios wasn’t under the control of some faraway mage. Something else was guiding his actions.

  Diadera put a hand on his arm. “What are you seeing, Butelios? What are the shadows showing you?”

  “It’s Reichis,” he said.

  Just the fact that he had the gall to say that name after he and Tournam had dragged me here against my will, forcing me to abandon my business partner, was enough to make me reach for my steel cards. Before I could, Butelios grabbed my shoulders. He wasn’t squeezing, but even if I hadn’t still been trapped in Tournam’s ribbons, I couldn’t have freed myself. “Your friend’s shadow is upon you. I think you … you feel his bond slipping away, don’t you?”

  The truth of those words hit me harder than any physical blow. The air left my lungs and all I could do was nod my assent.

  “That’s why you’re so angry now, Kellen. The further Reichis’s soul is from you, the more you take on his spirit. This isn’t who you are.”

  “Stop talking as if you know anything about me,” I said, straining against Tournam’s ribbons now. Butelios was right. Something was very wrong with me. I was … bloodthirsty. I wanted to fight something. No. Kill something.

  The big man suddenly doubled over, his forehead smashing into my chin and knocking me back.

  For an instant I thought he’d attacked me. Tournam’s ribbons had loosened their grip, so my right hand reached for my throwing cards. Only then did I notice Butelios grunting in pain.

  “Forgive me,” he said, looking up and offering a wan smile as the oily black tears floated from his cheeks and drifted outwards, forming a line like tiny signal fires that went far away from the abbey, past the mountaintop and into the clouds in the distance.

  “Looks like we have business to take care of,” Tournam said. Abruptly all his ribbons let go of me. He gestured to the younger boy who’d scowled at him earlier. “Come on, Azir. Let’s get a move on.”

  The boy knelt down and removed his boots and socks. His feet were covered in the shadowblack. He stood back up and closed his eyes, forehead furrowing as he stamped his heel on the ground. What looked at first to be flakes of charred skin slid from the tops of his feet. The pieces grew, thickened, even as they arranged themselves like an elaborate puzzle, becoming a road of pure onyx that traced the path of Butelios’s tears before fading a dozen yards away into a dark fog.

  “We’ll have to leave the rest of the introductions for later,” Diadera said to me, the lopsided smile almost, but not quite, hiding the slight tremor in her voice.

  “What’s happening? Where are you going?” I asked.

  The smile faded, as if it took too much energy to keep up the pretence. “This is what we do, Kellen—what we’re trained for. Butelios can sense when a shadowblack loses themselves to their demon. Azir builds a bridge. The rest of us go and … deal with it.”

  I stared at the black road heading off into empty air. “Wait, you mean he can—”

  “How do you think we got you here, all the way from the other continent?” Tournam asked.

  Ancestors, but I was a fool. I’d been so exhausted and disoriented when I got to the abbey, hit with one horrible revelation after another, that it never even occurred to me to wonder how they’d gotten me to this mountain in the first place. The boy, Azir, had the ability to move through shadow. Not the idiotic, pointless wanderings I’d made, but actual travel across vast distances.

  “Look,” Tournam said with a chuckle. “He’s finally figured it out.”

  Despite his casual tone, I could hear the edge to his voice. The tension in all of them was almost palpable. Butelios had recovered from the initial attack, but the pain in his expression had turned to sadness. Suta’rei, the Jan’Tep girl, appeared lost in thought, but I recognised that, too, as a tell-tale sign of anxiousness among my people. In each of their faces I saw concern over what they were about to do, Tournam even more than the others.

  That was my opening—the weakness in the bars of the cage that kept me locked away in this foreign land. Before Diadera could stop me, I reached out and patted Tournam’s cheek, the way you might a child being sent off to school. “Have fun playing heroes. Try not to piss yourself.”

  I really think he would’ve killed me then, but Diadera grabbed his arm. “We’ve got a mission, remember?”

  His gaze locked on me. “It’s easy to talk tough when you’re here, safe and sound behind these walls. You wouldn’t last ten seconds against the threats we face to keep those walls from coming down.”

  I shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m willing to bet I’ve gotten out of worse scrapes with nothing more than half a deck of cards and—unlike some people—a little more than half a brain.”

  His shadowblack ribbons reached for me. “Maybe I should bring you along and see how well you fare against the enemy.”

  “No!” Diadera said. “The abbot would never allow it!” She glanced back at me. “Kellen, whatever the hell is wrong with you, get it under control before it gets you killed!”

  As it happened, for practically the first time since I’d come to this place, I was perfectly in control of myself. Now it was my turn to laugh. “I thought Tournam here was supposed to be leader of your precious shadowcasters. So who does he take orders from? The abbot, or you?”

  Tournam shrugged off Diadera’s hand and turned to Butelios. “What can you tell me about our quarry?”

  “He’s tough,” the big man replied. “As bad as we’ve ever faced. The shadows tell me he’s a mage of considerable power in his own right, and now his demon has overcome his sanity.”

  “There, see?” Tournam said, smiling at the others. “Maybe what our little troop has really been missing all this time is someone who talks their way out of trouble instead of fighting.” He turned back to me. “Let’s see what you’re good for, cloud boy.”

  He gave a signal and Azir took off at a run along the black path, seemingly unperturbed that he was heading straight off the edge of the cliff. He kept going though, continuing until he vanished into the black fog. Ghilla went after him, then Butelios, Suta’rei and finally Tournam.

  Diadera looked at me, and for once there was none of her usual flippancy or flirtation in those pale green eyes. “Stay close to me. Stay on the road, and when we get to the other side, for everyone’s sakes, stay out of our
way.”

  I nodded, showing just enough trepidation to make it convincing. She needn’t have worried. I had no intention of being in the way. In fact, I had no intention of being there at all. I let Diadera lead me up to the edge of the black road.

  Hang on just a little while longer, Reichis. I’m coming.

  Grieve not the dead. The dead trade the weakness of flesh for spirit boundless and eternal.

  Weep not for lost love. When we weep too long, the light of their memory becomes dimmed by sorrow.

  Laugh. Love. Rejoice. Only then can their spirits shine so bright that, even in the darkest night, they can never be lost to us.

  —Completely useless folk saying

  30

  The Path of Onyx

  “Have you passed through shadow before?” Diadera asked gently.

  My first step onto the onyx road hadn’t filled me with confidence. Though it felt solid enough beneath the heels of my boots, my eyes told me a different story: instead of strong, dependable stone, up close the two-foot-wide path appeared as if cobbled together from panes of broken black glass. Hundreds of misshapen fragments, cleverly arranged to create a track that floated a few inches above the ground. Roughly two yards ahead, the fractured road continued past the edge of the cliff, heading off into thin air, where it eventually disappeared into an ebony fog through which the others had already passed.

  “Kellen?” Diadera was staring at me now. She looked about as confident in my courage as I felt about the reliability of the black road.

  “I’m fine. Just … give me a second.”

  I took another step on Azir’s onyx path, then a third and a fourth. I was now standing over empty space, which would have been less disconcerting had the ground thousands of feet below not been visible through the glass-like panes of shadow. They swayed a little in the breeze, making the whole thing feel less like a road than a precariously assembled rope bridge.

  “Almost there,” Diadera said, prodding me. “Just walk into the fog now.”

  Just walk into the fog.

  Staring into shadow—somebody else’s shadow, no less—is a chilling experience. My first few times entering that hazy netherworld on my own had left me confused and traumatised. The longer I’d spent there, the more even my closest friends seemed to forget me. Lately it had become easier and easier to slip into shadow, and the landscape there was becoming more and more real to me, begging the question, would I one day enter only to find myself unable to leave?

  And was today that day?

  Diadera glanced into the fog. “I’m sorry, Kellen, but I’ve got to go help the others. It’s okay if you want to stay behind. The rest of us have had a lot more practice at this. No one expects you to—”

  “I said, I’m fine.”

  Reichis would’ve already been leaping up into the air, those furry flaps between his front and back legs catching the breeze so that he could glide into danger with a feral grin on his little face, all the while bragging about how even demons feared the deadly fangs of squirrel cats.

  Or maybe he would’ve run off in the opposite direction, reckoning this was a fool’s mission and there was no sense in us both dying. He’d be doing something, anyway, not just standing there frozen as a rabbit staring into a crocodile’s maw.

  “I’m fine,” I lied, for the third time, before I took a deep breath and strode through the fog and into shadow once more.

  The only thing more unsettling than having your entire world disappear is to have it replaced with a much stranger one. The late morning sun over the mountains to the east was gone. In its place a huge black disk hung in the sky, casting a thousand shades of darkness on the landscape below. The unnatural physics of this place meant we could see perfectly, which made the shifting terrain around us all the more unnerving.

  “Cool, isn’t it?” Diadera asked as she walked purposefully ahead of me.

  With every step the bizarre scenery transformed, as though we were in a horse-drawn carriage looking out through the window at paintings hung so close together you could barely make out one before another took its place. One second we were striding through a shrouded valley, the next a forest thick with ebony trees stretched more than a hundred feet above us. Shimmering flakes of black snow drifted down beside us for a few moments, only to disappear as we found ourselves walking beside a roaring jet-black river. The only thing that remained constant was Azir’s road, which cut straight as an arrow through the shadow lands like one of those famed Daroman Imperial highways of old.

  “What happens if we step off the path?” I asked.

  “Oh, you might wind up lost in a canyon somewhere in Gitabria,” Diadera replied lightly, “or trapped inside ice caves in the frozen north. You could find yourself floating alone in the middle of the ocean, or tumbling head first into a live volcano.” She spread her arms wide, untroubled by her own ominous warnings. “The geography here doesn’t map to that of normal space. Azir’s the only one of us who can navigate it to reach the destinations he wants.”

  “What’s there to navigate? The road is perfectly straight.”

  “It only looks straight to us. Our minds can’t deal with all the multidimensional geometry involved.” She glanced back and gave me a grin. “Don’t overthink it, Kellen. Enjoy the ride while it lasts.”

  “And Azir is the only one of you who can do this?”

  “There’s a little girl back at the abbey who shows promise, but the abbot says she isn’t ready yet. We all suspect he can do it a little too. Not even he can travel as far or bring as many people through safely as Azir can though.”

  The boy’s miraculous ability filled me with bitter jealousy. My own journeys into shadow had twisted and turned drunkenly, leaving me more confused and paranoid the longer I remained inside. Think of all the places you could go if you could conjure roads like this one? Imagine travelling wherever you wanted to, leaving your enemies behind, having the entire world at your feet. My fingers reached up to trace the twisting black lines around my left eye. And what did you curse me with, Grandmother? A set of ugly markings that offer nothing but headaches and bad dreams, all so you could use me as your personal oasis one day.

  “We’d better pick up the pace,” Diadera said, breaking into a light jog.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Look behind you.”

  I did, and quickly sped up to match Diadera’s pace. Behind us, the road’s fragments of glassy onyx were beginning to fade, slowly breaking apart into a hissing black mist that evaporated into the empty space they left behind.

  “The road only lasts a little while once Azir’s left it,” Diadera explained.

  A few dozen yards ahead, a patch of fog much like the one we’d entered before awaited us. The closer we got, the more we heard the echoes coming out of it. Shouts. Screams.

  Diadera’s shadowblack freckles left her cheeks, swarming in the air above her. “Sounds like an even worse one than Butelios expected. We have to hurry now.”

  “An even worse what?” I asked, but by then she was already leaping into the fog.

  I pulled up short at the edge of the cloud and drew a half-dozen steel throwing cards from the case sewn onto the right leg of my trousers, unsure of what kind of monstrosity awaited us on the other side, but quite certain I wasn’t going to be happy to make its acquaintance.

  Which was fine, because I had no intention of doing so.

  Diadera and the rest of them thought I’d come along out of some perverse competition with Tournam, but one of the first lessons you learn as an outlaw is that being tough is nowhere near as useful as being alive. Now that I was back on my home continent, all I had to do was make a run for it; find the nearest town and figure out where I was, steal a horse and set off for the Golden Passage. It wasn’t the most tactically ingenious plan I’d ever come up with, but it was all I had right now.

  So why was I hesitating?

  The screams and shouts from the fog were growing louder and I could just about make out
murky shapes through the black haze. Two quick steps would take me through.

  You don’t owe these people anything, I reminded myself. They’re not your friends. They’re strangers.

  I guess Butelios had been nice enough, considering I’d pushed him off a cliff. Maybe he was just more cunning than Tournam though, delaying his revenge until the perfect opportunity presented itself. As for Diadera? Well, yeah, there was a connection between us that tugged at me even now, but the second lesson you learn as an outlaw is that the more appealing a person is, the worse they usually turn out to be.

  The world’s a lot less complicated if you just remember how rotten it is.

  I’d just about set aside my qualms and was about to step through the fog to make my escape when I heard Diadera shouting my name. “Kellen, turn back! It’s a tra—”

  Ah, crap.

  31

  The Fork in the Road

  I backed away from the fog just in time, but the pieces of shadow upon which I stood had already begun to disintegrate under my heels. Spiderweb cracks appeared as the glassy surface hissed, warning me it would soon disappear into mist like the rest of Azir’s road. Given Diadera’s earlier warning about what might happen if I stepped off the road, whatever demon or mage or other monstrosity they were fighting must be pretty awful.

  Okay, so what now?

  On either side of the road I could make out two completely different environments. On the right a snow-covered forest, on the left a swampy marshland. Either looked pretty good right about now.

  I couldn’t hear Diadera’s voice any more. In her place, someone else had taken to shouting my name, along with words like “bastard,” “coward” and “I knew he was a spy!” I’m pretty sure that came from Tournam.