Soulbinder

by Sebastien de Castell

  “They won’t leave. The abbot won’t back down and his people won’t abandon him.”

  She removed the scarf from her pack and tossed it across her face. It moulded itself to the shape of her skull, once again hardening into the fearsome features of a crimson Mahdek funeral mask. “Then they’ll die alongside him.” I saw her hand slip into the pocket of her coat. “But I won’t let you die here with them.”

  “Wait! Stop!”

  She hesitated, but I knew that in about two seconds she was going to decide the only way to save me was to knock me out and drag me out of the abbey. For someone who used to be so shy and retiring, she’d turned into a real hard-ass. More importantly, knowing Nephenia, she’d probably spent every spare minute constructing an array of charms to break us out of here whether I was willing or not. “I’ll come with you,” I said, putting up my hands in the traditional Jan’Tep gesture of submission to show I wasn’t preparing any somatic gestures for spells. “We’ll leave the abbey.”

  Even through the red lacquer of her mask I could tell she was suspicious. “You’ll come to the village with me?”

  I shook my head. “You said your oath was to get me out of the abbey. Fine. Let’s get as far away from here as humanly possible.” I gave her my most reassuring smile, which is what I do nowadays when a truly terrible plan is taking shape in my head. “Let’s go home.”

  48

  The Long Road

  “I can’t believe I stopped the abbot from killing you,” Tournam said, glaring at me as the eight of us struggled not to slip off the uneven surface of Azir’s onyx road.

  “You have a better plan?”

  “Plan?” Ghilla scoffed. “You call this a plan, boy? We go walkin’ right into the crocodile’s waters.”

  “Will they torture us?” Azir asked, shuffling his feet into the empty space ahead of us, shadows flaking off from the bottom of his feet to form the glassy fragments of the road only fractionally faster than his steps. He was tired, and scared, and no one his age should’ve had to go through this. “If they capture us, I mean. Will they torture us before they kill us?”

  “Nobody’s getting caught and nobody’s getting tortured,” I replied.

  “Kellen’s right,” Suta’rei said, eyes closed as she walked next to Azir. The butterfly wings of her ebony markings fluttered as it flew ahead of us, tracing the path of the Jan’Tep spell bridge through shadow so that Azir could follow. “Our people do not dirty their hands or their dignity with the debased punishments favoured by lesser nations.”

  “See?” I said. “Nothing to—”

  “No, they will instead conjure silk magic to shatter our minds, leaving us drooling wrecks with our own broken fingers tearing the flesh from our skulls to scratch at the bone beneath in a futile attempt to extract the spells driving us mad.”

  “Nice friends you’ve made,” Nephenia whispered, adjusting the strap of her pack. It took everything I had not to keep reaching inside to check on Reichis, to stroke his fur and plead with my ancestors to restore the bond between us so the squirrel cat could tell me how stupid my plan was, how ugly these other skinbags were and just what a mess I’d gotten myself into without him.

  “How much f-f-further?” Azir asked. He was shivering, not from cold or even fear, but from the crippling exertion of navigating us through shadow. His whole body looked hollowed out with the effort of holding the road together. Whatever limits his ability had, he’d gone beyond them even before I’d convinced him and the others to accompany me on this dubious venture.

  “You’ve got this,” Tournam said, putting a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “One foot after the other.”

  Azir shook off his hand. “I’m fine.”

  Ghilla looked back at me, as she’d been doing periodically since we left. It wasn’t because she wanted assurances. No, she’d just lock eyes with me to show that, unlike Azir, she wasn’t scared, and that when all this turned out to be a scam on my part, she wanted to be the one to kill me with that strangling black fog she coughed up on demand. In response, I made sure to pat the pouches at my sides, now full again thanks to the two bags of red and black powders that Nephenia had brought with her. A gift from Ferius.

  Ghilla wasn’t the only one revealing their thoughts with every glance or glare. The countless hours my Argosi mentor had made me spend in every cheap, dirty watering hole on the continent, studying the unintended revelations of a stranger’s gaze—“Folks talk with their eyes, kid. They don’t mean to, but they do. Just gotta learn to listen is all”—turned out to actually kind of work.

  Suta’rei wanted to know if I really did have a way to circumvent the insurmountable threat of seventy-seven war mages. Azir wondered if today was the day his young life would end. Butelios wanted reassurance that the price he’d pay for supporting me wouldn’t be the trust of his friends.

  Tournam’s sly glances back mostly seemed intent on Nephenia, and whether she might be single, and if so, might she be interested in a well-muscled Berabesq narcissist with a self-satisfied smile and an ego so big he didn’t notice the way she had to stop herself from flinching every time she saw the shadowblack markings on his arms. I guess no matter how far you travel, you can’t shake the prejudices of your upbringing.

  But of all of them, it was Diadera who watched me the closest, and whose furtive glances I found the most difficult to interpret. There was so much there to see. She was worried. She was angry. She was confused. Most of all … she looked hurt.

  For all that she’d pretended our near-encounter at the bonfire had been careless fun, it was the thing she’d said when I’d first arrived at the abbey that kept coming back to me: “I’ve never met anyone whose shadows are so close to my own.” Had that meant more to her than she’d let on? Was the flirtatious Daroman courtier act that I kept interpreting as some masterful manipulation actually just a mask for … loneliness?

  “Focus,” Nephenia whispered to me. She grabbed my arm and held me back a moment while most of the others forged ahead. “You’re free to fall for any girl you want, Kellen, but Ishak and I are risking our lives to rescue you. If we end up dead as a result, I’m going to consider you a very bad friend.”

  “I’m totally focused,” I said.

  I’m also in love with you.

  The thought came unbidden and unexpected. I was utterly unprepared for it.

  I’d convinced myself a while back that my feelings for Nephenia had just been a childhood infatuation—the kind everyone has about that one girl you grew up so near to and yet you knew you could never touch. But fantasies are considered futile distractions for a mage. To a spellslinger, they can be deadly.

  I wasn’t in love with the girl I used to pine over in class when we were kids though. I’m in love with this daring, clever and slightly terrifying woman with two missing fingers on each hand whom I walked away from months ago but who risked everything to save a cantankerous squirrel cat from dying alone in the desert because she knew that if he had, my soul would’ve broken in half.

  “Kellen? Is something the matter? You’re looking at me funny.”

  “I’m fine. Just working through the details of my devastatingly brilliant plan.”

  Ishak gave a bark. Nephenia translated it with nothing more than a raised eyebrow before she went ahead. I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard Butelios say quietly, “Still convinced you prefer girls? Boys are vastly less complicated, my friend.” He walked past me, but for a brief moment I caught him watching Diadera with a tenderness I wouldn’t have expected. Had he been protecting me last night when he kept me from tumbling into bed with her? Or had he been looking out for her as well?

  You should’ve tried harder to convince that Argosi you met up north to make you her teysan, my big friend, because you are just as annoyingly mysterious as any of them.

  “Stop!” Suta’rei called out.

  I ran ahead to catch up with the others, who were now bunched around Azir. His onyx road came to a fractured end in front of hi
m. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He shook his head, and sweat flicked off his brow. “’M’okay,” he mumbled. Tournam was now holding the boy’s shoulders, keeping him upright so he could continue summoning the road without having to support his own weight.

  Suta’rei’s eyes were closed again, her head lilting this way and that as her black butterfly fluttered in the distance. “I can see their encampment now. It is as you surmised, Kellen. They are amassed near an oasis in the Jan’Tep territories.” Her voice caught in her throat. “I’ve never seen so many master mages in one place before.”

  “Wh-wh-wh …” Azir had to stop to catch himself, standing on one foot, the other about to step into empty space. “Wh-where should I g-g-go?”

  They all looked at me. “Can you take us just a little further?” I asked. “Maybe a mile or so away from the camp?”

  “He’s obviously exhausted,” Nephenia said. “Can we risk it?”

  Ghilla gave a snort. “You don’t know nothing about shadow-walking, do you, girl?”

  Nephenia looked at me. “Did that child just call me ‘girl’?”

  “Focus,” I replied.

  “I can do th-th-th …” Again Azir paused, taking a slow, wheezing breath. “I can do this. Another mile is just a step.” To prove his point, he lifted his foot and set it down a little to the right, stamping it on the emptiness. Suddenly a dense fog came up from his heel, like black steam. Just beyond it I could make out a thinly forested slope. He walked through, and the rest of us followed. A moment later he collapsed in the tall grass.

  “It’s okay,” Tournam said, lifting him up in his arms. “He’s just not used to so many trips so close together.”

  “Where are we?” Nephenia asked. “We need to get our bearings if we don’t want to get caught unawares.”

  Suta’rei whispered something to Ghilla, who looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded. Then the black wings of Suta’rei’s shadowblack butterfly separated, each one covering one of Ghilla’s eyes. She bent over and coughed noisily. I thought she was throwing up, but what came out was a small pool of shadowblack. On the ground at our feet it took shape, becoming a miniature rendition of a mountain between two valleys, with little rivers and forests.

  “We’re here,” Suta’rei said, pointing to a spot near the base of the mountain. “In the southern end of the Jan’Tep territories, near the Berabesq border. Near my home.” She didn’t sound happy about it.

  The first rays of the morning sun had been glinting off the abbey’s black cobblestones when we’d set off. We couldn’t have walked for more than an hour in shadow, yet now it was full dark, the moon hanging brightly overhead. At some point I needed to find out how all this shadow travel worked. Assuming I lived long enough.

  “What now, cloud boy?” Tournam asked. He gave us all a grin. “Time to go kill some mages?”

  “Only if you want to die,” Suta’rei said. “They’ll have protective wards in place. We won’t get within a hundred yards without being struck by lightning or bursting into flames.”

  “Make camp as best you can,” I said, pushing through the brush to what looked like a reasonable path up the mountain. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  “Where are you going?” Diadera asked. “You heard Suta’rei’s warning. If you get too close, those mages will kill you without a second thought!”

  “No, it’s like she said—they’ll capture me and use silk spells to rip my mind apart for any secrets I have about the abbey. Then they’ll make me torture myself for a while just in case I was able to resist some part of the spell, but mostly just for fun. Then they’ll kill me.”

  “Then why would you—”

  I started the long walk up the mountainside, saying only, “Because I’ve got my own spy on the inside.”

  49

  The Informant

  The ground was mostly loose shale, which made every step precarious. The sense of impending doom was only magnified by the possibility that any second now I might walk into a hextracker or chaincaster. Suta’rei was right that the posse would have set wards around their encampment, but mages are paranoid by nature. Any number of them might also have set their own traps to give themselves advance warning of an attack.

  That, of course, was critical to my plan.

  See, I didn’t exactly have an ally inside the war coven. I mean, what are the odds that out of seventy-seven mages even one of them would be working with an itinerant spellslinger? What I did have, however, was a sister who thought I was a bumbling reckless idiot.

  Two years of surviving as an outlaw with no end of enemies at my back had done nothing to convince my family—especially Shalla—that I was anything other than a clumsy, ham-fisted boy who couldn’t cast a proper spell if he fell down the stairs and his hands happened to twist into the right somatic shape. My sister was all too aware that I’d gotten myself tangled up with the Ebony Abbey, and since no sane person would ever try to sneak into a war coven’s encampment, she’d be absolutely convinced that I would do exactly that, and would thus set wards further out than the other mages to alert her when I came.

  See? Simple.

  “My, my,” a feminine voice said soothingly. “What have we here? Has the rabbit come to hunt foxes?”

  A strange lightness came over my bones, and soon I was floating a few feet off the ground, the earth having apparently lost interest in me. I found myself turning head over heels, very slowly, like a porcelain doll being examined for flaws. I drifted helplessly for a few seconds until the face of a slim young woman came into view. “You’re not Shalla,” I said, which made me sound precisely as stupid as I now felt.

  Long, lustrous hair an impossible azure colour travelled down past stunningly high cheekbones to drape over a blue gown that shimmered as if it were made of sapphire. Her steps as they approached were slow, unhurried and, most troubling of all, a few inches off the ground. Now, if you’re wondering about the virtue of a spell that lets you walk less than a foot in the air, the answer is that it kept the extended train of her dress from touching the dirt and scrub. All in all, it struck me as a lot of effort to make just to look stylish.

  “There’s a prize, you know,” she said, turning her hand just a little and causing me to rotate upside down. With her free hand she reached out a finger and tapped the markings around my left eye. “First shadowblack kill will be awarded a seat beside the mage sovereign at his coronation.”

  You would think at a time like this, having just been captured and with a great deal of agony in store for me, I’d have better things to do than defend the dignity of my lousy family. Maybe the blood rushing to my head was addling my brain. “First of all, lady, if anyone’s going to be sitting next to the mage sovereign, it’s going to be Bene’maat. His wife. Not some tarted-up flying floozy who goes off to war wearing a ballgown.”

  Tarted-up flying floozy? Did I really just say that? Ferius Parfax, what have you done to me?

  “Second,” I went on, determined to do better on my next volley, “Ke’heops just happens to be my father. So I suggest you release me at once before I get irritated and inform him that you assaulted his favourite son.”

  I’m his only son of course, and the word “favourite” has no place in our relationship whatsoever. Also, why was I sticking up for my mother? She’d helped him when he counter-banded me, stealing any chance I’d ever have at sparking anything other than my breath band.

  The mage’s glittering eyes—which were a dazzling blue, of course—widened with surprise. “You are Kellen? Son of Ke’heops?”

  I nodded, which is actually harder to do upside down than you’d think.

  She clapped her hands excitedly. “Excellent! That means I also win the prize for eliminating the black stain from the House of Ke. I’ve always wanted a sanctum of my very own!”

  A sanctum? My father had placed a bounty on my head that would pay for an actual mage’s sanctum? Evidently ours was a richer family than I remembered. Also, appar
ently he hated me even more than I’d thought.

  “Well, come along,” she said, beckoning me with her finger. Powerless to resist, I started floating in her direction.

  “Could you turn me right side up?” I asked. “I’m getting a headache.”

  She stopped and sighed theatrically. “I suppose it can’t hurt.”

  Very slowly I began to rotate in the air. I let my hands drift closer to the pouches at my belt, now full of the red and black powders and thankfully sealed up tight. In about three seconds I was going to be upright. I would unbuckle the straps, flip open the tops and blast this cheerful, elegant psychopath to the very same hell she no doubt had planned for me.

  “Oh wait,” she said, and turned to face me. “That would let you use that pathetic powder spell of yours, wouldn’t it?” She gave me a self-satisfied smirk. Usually my best chance with mages is that they think spellslingers are so weak they’re not worth defending against. This one twisted her hand and I went spinning, over and over. I couldn’t tell which way was up until I vomited and the results fell back down on me. By the time she stopped I couldn’t see straight, never mind aim. “There. That’s better, isn’t it? Shall we go now, or are there any other threats about your dear papa you’d like to mention?”

  I threw up again. I tried to get some on her, but I missed. Even that small and petty act of vengeance was denied me. “I shouldn’t have brought up my father,” I admitted. “Ke’heops wouldn’t lift a finger to save me.”

  “Oh, poor little Sha’Tep boy, so full of his own sorro—”

  “My sister, on the other hand, is going to kick your ass.”

  “Shalla? That little daddy’s girl?” The mage laughed. It was a very pretty laugh, as maniacal giggles go. “Your sister runs after your father like the tail on a puppy. It’s all very amusing. There’s a running joke among our people that Shalla wags every time Ke’heops takes a shit.”