Soulbinder

by Sebastien de Castell

  The flicker of a small flame chased the darkness away, emanating from what looked to be a wick stuck to the end of my assailant’s forefinger. She brought it closer to her face, revealing a crimson lacquer mask that glistened in the dim light, its features twisted and terrifying. Thick ridges over the brows narrowed downward as the gruesome smirk of its mouth slowly contorted into an ever wider and more horrific smile. People who tell you to relax should not come wearing Mahdek funeral masks. “It’s only me, silly,” she said.

  Calling me “silly” would normally have meant my sister, Shalla, but she would never use the words “only me” when referring to herself.

  The creature holding my wrist in its teeth gave a faint barking laugh, and in the dim light I made out a particularly ugly-looking dog that wagged its short, ungainly tail for my benefit. “Ishak?” I tried to say. The metal apparatus over my mouth turned the name into an incoherent mumble. That didn’t stop me from looking back up at the Mahdek mask and asking, “Nephenia?” in a barely intelligible garble.

  “I’m going to remove the ironcloth now,” she said. “It might feel weird, so don’t move, and please don’t scream.”

  She was doing a terrible job of reassuring me. The finger with the flaming wick came closer, though I didn’t feel any heat even when she traced a circle around my lips. The oddest part was that I could feel her touch even through the solid gag. The next thing I knew, an almost weightless length of silk lay across my face. Had it always been that way and some charm had fooled me into thinking it was rigid?

  Ishak released my wrist and I removed the cloth before pushing myself up to a seated position on the small bed. Nephenia slid a finger across the surface of her mask and it fell away into her hand as a simple red scarf. “Panahsi taught me how to spell ironcloth back in Gitabria,” she explained, stuffing the scarf into the pocket of the leather pack she carried over one shoulder. “His way of asking my forgiveness for having used that sleep spell on me, I suppose.” The way she said it made me doubt the gesture had quite done the trick.

  “Nephenia, how on earth did you …?” The question died on my lips then, becoming irrelevant as I realised just how badly I’d missed her all these months. Despite my precarious hold on consciousness and sanity, I leaped to my feet. This proved to be a mistake when my balance failed me and I found myself tumbling into her. Only when she’d caught me did I realise that at some point in my two hours of peaceful slumber I’d gotten too warm and had slipped off my shirt and trousers.

  “You really aren’t shy about your body, are you?” she asked with a smirk that Ishak echoed with a barking laugh.

  This was not, regrettably, the first time I’d presented myself naked before her. I scrabbled for my clothes, blessedly finding them right there on the floor. Despite my embarrassment, the second I was dressed I grabbed her in both arms, holding onto her more tightly than was proper in the circumstances, but far less so than I wanted to. She hugged me back. “I’ve been worried about you,” was all she said.

  A dozen clever retorts came to mind, each one, I felt, a witty rejoinder suited to the occasion. My attempt to be charming failed when none of them came out. Instead it was a wracking sob that made my ribs hurt. “Reichis is dead,” I cried. “He died alone in the desert. He was trying to protect me.”

  She started to pull away, but I held on. For a few seconds she relented, then gently pushed me off her. I teetered on stiff legs and fell back down on the bed. For one small instant I’d experienced joy at this unexpected reunion, so much so that all the obvious questions had seemed irrelevant. But that momentary happiness only served to let out my bottled-up grief, and now I couldn’t seem to force it down again. “Why are you here, Neph?” I asked, my voice flat and lifeless.

  She unslung her pack from her shoulder and placed it down on the bed beside me. I watched numbly as she unbuckled the strap at the top and pulled the drawstrings open. The little wick attached to the tip of her forefinger continued to provide light, but not enough to see inside. “Ishak and I thought you might want this,” she said quietly.

  I reached inside the pack, wondering which of my things I’d forgotten when I’d left Nephenia and Ferius outside Gitabria all those months ago. My fingers found something unexpected though: a soft, warm body lay curled inside. My hands drifted along damp fur. A low, rumbling snore vibrated the tips of my fingers. I kept searching until I felt the small head and then a fuzzy muzzle. Without warning, sharp teeth bit into my skin. I recognised that bite.

  “Reichis?”

  47

  The Promise

  Never in my life had I been so desperate to believe something I knew couldn’t be true.

  “How?” I demanded, practically shouting. “How is this possible?”

  “Shh!” Nephenia hissed. “I’d just as soon not get captured in a nest of shadowblacks.” She pushed back her spiky dark hair to show me a silver bell attached to her ear. “I brought a hush charm with me, but it’s only so effective.”

  A nest of shadowblacks. It was strange hearing the reflexive Jan’Tep prejudice coming from Nephenia. Of course, I’d felt it, too, until I turned out to be one of them. “How did you get past Butelios?”

  She removed a round piece of glass from her coat pocket, about three inches in diameter. When she held it up in front of me, I was suddenly looking at an empty room. “Mirror charm,” she explained. “Sand and silk magic. Doesn’t make you invisible so much as trick the target into seeing their surroundings as they were before you got there.” She stuck it back in her pocket. “It would’ve worked just fine were it not for those weird floating black tears.” She shivered. “Grossest magical wards I’ve ever seen.”

  “What did you do to Butelios?” I asked. Nephenia hated sleep spells, so that only left something more violent, and possibly permanent.

  “Nothing. When his tears touched us, he decided we were okay. He’s still keeping watch outside.” Her expression changed a little. “I wasn’t sure whether to trust him, but—” Ishak interrupted with a little bark and she patted his head. “Yes, dear. You’re an excellent judge of character.”

  I had a thousand questions, but asked none of them. My entire being became focused on two simple tasks: first, making sure this wasn’t a dream, and second, proving to myself that what should be impossible was actually real. As surreptitiously as I could, I pinched my arm hard enough to make me wince.

  Okay, let’s call that a pass.

  Once the animal inside the pack had bitten me, it had gone right back to sleep. The feel of those teeth had been so familiar, and yet the far more logical explanation was that this wasn’t Reichis. Maybe Nephenia had gotten confused and found some other squirrel cat in the desert. Maybe she wasn’t really Nephenia at all and this was a prank for which I would later ensure rivers of blood would be spilled by those responsible. Slowly, tentatively, I reached back into the pack.

  Nephenia put a hand on my arm to stop me. She only had three fingers, but she held on tight. “You shouldn’t wake him,” she warned, but at the look on my face she relented. “Just be careful. He’s still very weak.”

  As though I was holding a bubble of soap between my two hands, I removed the squirrel cat from the pack and set him on my lap.

  He feels too small. Too light.

  “Why is his fur so wet?”

  “He has a fever,” Nephenia explained. “And he’s lost a lot of blood. We’ve been bringing his temperature down with weakweed, giving him as much water as he can take, but he was so far gone when we found him, Kellen. The dehydration alone was enough to kill him.”

  “But how can he be here? Alive?” I couldn’t take my eyes from the strange creature snoozing on my legs. He barely looked like a squirrel cat any more, never mind one as tough and full of life as Reichis. My desperate need to find out the truth set me babbling like a fool. “I found his bones. I brought them here to the abbey, but then when that bolt of light appeared I had to grab Suta’rei and my shirt went over the cliff and I couldn
’t—”

  “Kellen?” Nephenia asked, staring at me as if I’d gone mad. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  Focus, I commanded myself. Concentrate. You can’t make sense of what’s happening until you start talking sense yourself. “In the desert … The Golden Passage. I was there just hours ago.”

  “I know. I saw you.”

  “You were there? But–”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Kellen, how do you think we got here?”

  Okay … Okay … So she was there in the desert, using a charm of some kind so we didn’t see her. Then when Azir made his road through shadow, she must’ve followed.

  “Azir said his road was too heavy. Tournam and the others thought he was just—”

  “I know, Kellen. I just told you Ishak and I were there—remember?”

  The hyena gave a confirming bark.

  She smiled and gave him a scratch behind the ear. “Yes, dear, you were very clever.” She turned her attention back to me. “Now, what we couldn’t hear was what you all were saying back in the Golden Passage. The shrouding charm I was using there blocks the sound in both directions. So would you please tell me why on earth you dug up that wildcat’s bones?”

  “Wildcat?”

  “The mage’s familiar. I thought you must be planning some kind of tracking spell, but of course you never sparked your iron band, so I couldn’t understand why you’d … Oh …” She inched closer, careful not to disturb the furry bundle in my lap, and wrapped her arms around me. “Oh, Kellen, I’m so sorry. You must’ve thought the bones were Reichis’s.”

  Ishak gave a little yip, to which Nephenia replied with a stern look. “He’s not a halfwit. He was just sick with worry and …” She paused. “Help me out here, Kellen. How, in the name of our ancestors, could you possibly confuse a wildcat’s skeleton with that of your own familiar? You didn’t notice that they have completely different tail bones?”

  “Different …?”

  Okay, this was unfair. I looked down at the apparently not-dead squirrel cat curled up on my lap. “Suta’rei’s shadows, they showed me what happened. I saw Reichis crawling away from the mage. He collapsed right where we found the bones.”

  Ishak tilted his head, staring at me curiously. He gave a series of little barks that of course I couldn’t understand but I felt sure were meant to convey that I was an idiot.

  “Reichis went to eat the wildcat’s remains,” Nephenia explained. “Ishak figures he must’ve finished eating the dead mage’s eyeballs and found her ears too chewy.”

  A chuckle escaped my lips then, and with it some small portion of the grief I’d been carrying. I looked down at Reichis, who was still busily snoring and excreting a rather unpleasant-smelling sweat on my trousers. I lifted him up in my arms and held him to my chest. Resting my head against his wet fur, I whispered, “Tell me it’s really you, partner. Tell me you’re alive so you and me can raise all kinds of hell on everyone who dared cross the brave, heroic squirrel cat and his faithful—if somewhat dense—human sidekick.”

  A sleepy chitter came from the warm fur. I pulled my head away and saw a pair of black beady eyes blinking up at me. He chittered a second time.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Again he made the sound, and again I couldn’t make out what he was saying. The noises coming from his mouth formed no words in my mind. It was no different than hearing Ishak’s barks or the squawking of the birds outside the window. “Reichis?”

  Nephenia put a hand on my shoulder. “Kellen …”

  “Why can’t I hear him?”

  “He … Reichis died, Kellen.”

  “That makes no sense. He’s right here! You—”

  “Stop,” she said, the three fingers of her hand pressing into my shoulder. “Just stop and listen, okay? I know you want answers, and I promise I’ll give them to you, but we don’t have much time.”

  “Time for what?” I was still staring at the ball of fur in my arms, who’d gone back to sleep.

  Nephenia urged me to set him back down on my lap and then took my hands in hers. “Shalla made me swear to get you out of here, Kellen. That was the deal. She’d keep Reichis alive long enough for me to find him, and in exchange I had to come take you from this place.”

  “You’re lying,” I said. The very mention of my sister sparked a burning rage deep in my guts. “Shalla tricked me into sending her the means to find the abbey so she could help my father destroy it. She betrayed me.”

  Nephenia gave me a look that was equal parts sympathetic and scolding. “Kellen, she’s Shalla. What did you expect? She’s been manipulating everyone around her since before she could speak in complete sentences.” She sighed. “But she does love you. That part is incontestable.”

  I needed to steady myself, to shed just enough of the warring emotions inside me to think clearly again. Breathe in nothingness, I told myself, the way Ferius had a hundred times before. “Can’t hear your mind tellin’ you what’s true and what ain’t if your ego keeps shoutin’ over it.”

  A few breaths later I said, “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  “It was about a week ago,” she began. “Ferius and I were buying supplies near the Daroman border. I was picking loaves of bread when all of a sudden your sister’s face appeared in one of the crusts.” Nephenia shuddered. “I may never eat bread again. Anyway, Shalla said you’d reached out through shadow and that your ‘stupid nekhek familiar’ was in trouble. She was keeping him alive with blood magic, but the spell was taking too much out of her. She couldn’t keep it up much longer.”

  “How was that even possible? Not two days ago Shalla told me she needed something connected to Reichis in order to heal him from a distance.”

  Nephenia shrugged. “To me she said something about having a piece of his fur she’d found in your family’s home.”

  “But Reichis and I haven’t been there in almost two years. Where would she have …” Of course. Shalla hadn’t suddenly discovered a scrap of Reichis’s fur just in time to save him. She’d found it ages ago, back when the squirrel cat had first rescued me from my father’s study and kept it in case it would ever be useful to her. She hadn’t needed the shard of shadow I sent her for him. That part was all a ruse.

  Breathe. Just keep breathing, slow and steady.

  “Go on,” I said at last.

  “That’s pretty much all there is to it. From the moment you first contacted her through shadow, she had me racing on every horse Ishak and I could buy, borrow or steal to get to the Golden Passage before it was too late.”

  “What about Ferius?” I asked. “Is she …?” I realised part of me was expecting her show up then, kick in the door and offer up her usual frontier philosophy and Argosi nonsense. But the door stayed shut, and no such pronouncements came.

  Nephenia looked down. “Ferius, she … She wanted to come, Kellen. So badly. But she couldn’t. Shalla’s demands were specific, and the Argosi don’t allow themselves to be …” She seemed to be struggling to find a nice way to end that sentence.

  “The word you’re looking for is ‘blackmailed.’”

  Nephenia’s hands curled into fists, the pair of missing fingers on each one making them look even deadlier. “Shalla made me swear an oath not to interfere in the war coven’s work. I’ve vowed to do whatever it takes to get you out of here alive, Kellen. That’s it. In exchange …” She nodded down at Reichis, and some of the anger went out of her. “She saved his life, Kellen. The spells she used, they were hard on her, but she kept him alive as long as she could.”

  I thought back to that night—was it only a day ago?—that Shalla had magicked me into her dream. The blood dripping from her hands … She was risking herself to help Reichis, to give Nephenia time to find him.

  I hated my sister. I loved my sister. I had no earthly idea how to feel about my sister.

  “Why can’t he talk?” I asked.

  “He was already so far gone when I got to him, Kellen. I think his heart
had stopped more than once. Shalla’s spells kept bringing him back, but something … The bond between you, I think it’s gone now. Ishak can still understand him a little, but he says Reichis is different. Quieter.”

  Very carefully I lifted him back up to my chest and held him there, resting my head against his fur to hear the flutter of his heartbeat. “I don’t care if he can’t speak to me any more,” I said, determined to make those words true. “Reichis is alive. You saved him and that’s all that matters.”

  Nephenia watched me hold him for a while, then she reached up a hand to my face, her thumb very gently wiping a tear from my cheek. “It’s hard not to love you sometimes, you know that?”

  I could’ve been okay in that moment. If that had been my whole life, sitting there on that little bed with Reichis in my arms and Nephenia telling me I was hard not to love—hell, even with Ishak making funny hyena faces at me—I would’ve been okay with how my life had turned out.

  Except life doesn’t work that way.

  “Neph …” I began.

  “Don’t,” she said, taking her hand away.

  “You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

  She took Reichis from me and set him on a little bundle of blankets inside the main body of the pack. Now that he was semi-conscious, I would’ve expected him to bite and claw at anyone trying to stick him in a bag. But he just made sleepy noises and nestled himself deeper into the blankets. Nephenia closed up the pack and carefully slung it over her shoulder. “I’m getting you and the squirrel cat out of here, like I promised.” She motioned for the hyena to hop off the bed. “Ishak scouted a village about five miles from here. We’ll hide out there until we can book passage on a ship. Whatever is going on between the Jan’Tep and the shadowblacks is going to have to play out on its own.”

  “There are children in the abbey, Neph.”

  “Then tell their families to take them and go. Seventy-seven mages are coming to destroy this place, Kellen, and nothing you or I or anyone else can do will stop them.” She motioned for Ishak to hop off the bed. “Once your father has his grand victory, he won’t care about a bunch of kids and their fam-ilies hiding out in the mountains.”