My people aren’t known for their clever witticisms.
My captor came a little closer, floating a few inches higher so we were eye to eye. “Don’t you think that if she were looking for you, that little milksop would have appeared before now?”
Truth be told, during the course of this encounter I’d become fairly certain that I’d critically misjudged both my situation and Shalla’s inclination to protect me. I’d just kind of assumed that as soon as I came close enough, a warning spell she’d have put in place would alert her to my presence and she’d come running. But I’d forgotten one of the most important things about Shalla, which I took some small pleasure in revealing to my captor: “The thing about my sister is … she likes to wait for just the right moment to make an entrance.”
The mage stared at me, those unnaturally blue eyes narrowing as my words seeped through all her self- congratulatory pronouncements. Her hands came up in the first somatic gesture for a shield spell. “Soma’eh’pa—”
She dropped like a discarded sack of grain, the lovely azure of her gown making a pretty, though not very practical, silk bed as she landed on hard shale ground.
The air before me shimmered as a second young woman stepped out from a remarkably refined obscurement spell. Golden-haired, with skin that bordered on the luminous, she looked taller than when I’d last seen her. Her garments were an elegant rendition of a war mage’s silver-banded leather armour that kept her arms bare to show off her six sparked bands. She gave me that look of hers that said I was, as always, utterly predictable.
Which was true, I suppose, except that there was an excellent chance I was about to kill her.
50
The Camp
“Hello, Shalla,” I said, waiting until the slow rotation of my body in the air got me upright again.
“Brother.” She invested the word considerable disappointment. Her contempt, however, was reserved for the woman lying unconscious on the cold ground. “Look at her in that preposterous gown. Why Father allowed Essa’jin to be part of the war coven when better mages were refused I will never understand. And air walking? It’s just so pretentious.”
Better mages? So Father denied her a place in the posse.
“Maybe she has other attributes Ke’heops admires,” I suggested, thinking back to the eagerness with which Essa’jin had spoken about the chance to be seated next to him at the celebration for the slaughter of the Ebony Abbey.
Shalla’s cheeks flushed. An angry glare came to her eyes. “Forgive me, brother, it seems I forgot to remove the—what did you call her again?—the floozy’s binding. And here you are floating in the air, quite helpless.” She made a somatic gesture with her left hand and suddenly I was falling, barely managing to avoid crashing head first onto the shale by rolling over my shoulder.
My sister was distracted by her petty victory, and I was back on my feet. I could do it, I thought. She’s a thousand times more powerful, but I’m a split second faster and she won’t be expecting it.
I hadn’t come here to kill my sister, and truth be told, it wouldn’t help. If there was any hope of averting this war, Shalla would play a crucial role. But the anger I felt, the betrayal that she’d tricked me and used me once again, was overpowering. But my hands were shaking now, and that, added to a question I shouldn’t have cared about but somehow couldn’t stop myself from asking, contrived to save her life. “Is it true what Essa’jin implied? Has Ke’heops set our mother aside?”
“Oh, don’t play the prude, Kellen,” Shalla snapped, though I noticed she turned away from me so I couldn’t see her eyes. I followed my musical training and let her be the notes while I provided the silences. “Mother knows how much Father loves her,” she said after a time. “Whatever sacrifice she makes, she does so for our family and our house. As we all do.”
“Except me.” I was goading her, because that, too, is part of our relationship, and if she tried to use a spell to punish me, in that instant my hands would stop shaking. Again she tried to keep quiet, and in such silences one can one almost hear the workings of my sister’s brilliantly manipulative mind. I should’ve kept my mouth shut, but she always did get the best of me. “Shalla, what is it you th—”
She spun back to me, and the sullen girl was banished as the devious schemer took to the stage. “Maybe you have been serving our family, Kellen. All this time.” She took my hands in hers, squeezing them tight. “Please, brother, let me speak.”
The word “please” being so rarely part of Shalla’s vocabulary, I confess it had a certain spellbinding effect on me. “Fine. Say your piece.”
She gave me a smile—like the one you give a puppy when it rolls over on command. “A dangerous and daring mission, brother. A young Jan’Tep mage, travelling the world, learning the secrets of our enemies and unwinding plots against our people, reporting only to Ke’heops himself.”
I pulled my hands away. “Have you lost your mind? I left our people, remember?”
“A brave sacrifice, and one necessary to keep the mission secret even from our clan.”
“Mages from our clan have been trying to kill me!”
“That just makes it even more brave.”
I rubbed my fingers against my temples. Her preposterous story was literally giving me a headache. “Shalla, in case you somehow hit your head and forgot the past two years, I have actively worked against our clan. I’ve foiled every Jan’Tep plot I could, and refused to obey every order our monster of a father had the nerve to issue to me!”
“Have you?” She winked at me and began to stroll around me and the unconscious Essa’jin as though we were sculptures in a sand park. “You did uncover a Sha’Tep rebellion and execute their leader, did you not?”
“Ra’meth—not I—killed our uncle.”
She shrugged. “Who remembers such insignificant details? You then prevented Ra’meth from arranging a duel in which he would have murdered our father. You ended the machinations of a rogue spellslinger in the borderlands.”
“Dexan Videris was working for our clan’s lords magi!”
“Perhaps at first, but then he betrayed our trust. And you made him pay for it.”
“I’m not your damned enforcer!”
“And let’s not forget how you discovered the secrets of the Gitabrian mechanical bird and destroyed it and the woman who dared create it.” She twirled theatrically. “But even after such wondrous feats, our young Jan’Tep hero was not done. He did the one thing no mage has been able to do: found the Ebony Abbey so that the threat of the shadowblack could be wiped out once and for all!”
“You do recall that I have the shadowblack, right?”
Shalla came over to me and tapped a finger on the markings around my left eye. “And here, the greatest sacrifice of all: a child, banded in shadow by his grandmother—one of the great mages of our clan. Because she was mad? No, because in those final hours before the shadowblack took her, she realised there was only one way our people could find the source of this evil and wipe it out forever.”
“Not one word of that is true, you realise?”
“Perhaps not.” She patted my cheek playfully. “But, for an exile, one could argue you’ve been awfully useful to our people, don’t you think?”
This is why it’s dangerous to engage in a conversation with my sister about anything more momentous than the weather or what to eat for dinner. Listen long enough and you’ll start to think she might have a point. “What is this really about, Shalla?”
She looked up at me with those pale blue eyes of hers, so full of certainty and affection. The manipulator had taken her bow and now the yellow-haired girl who loved her brother returned. “Kellen, if you’ve secretly been working for our father all this time, then there’s nothing stopping you from coming home. You could take your place at Father’s side! He’s going to be crowned mage sovereign very soon. Imagine, for the first time in three hundred years, our people will have one ruler to lead our nation to greatness!”
I would’ve dismissed her glorifying exuberance, but underneath it I heard a desperate plea; an almost hysterical need for me to go along with this pretence. The anger that had brought me so close to killing her fled. I understood now what this was all about, just as I understood why she’d used me to find the Ebony Abbey. Nephenia’s words echoed back to me: “She’s been manipulating everyone around her since before she could speak in complete sentences. But she does love you. That part is incontestable.”
“Kellen … Brother, please,” she said, taking my hands in hers, “you have played the outlaw far too long. At long last you must choose a side.”
It became clear to me then that Shalla was trying to avoid saying something that should have been obvious to both of us: my life would soon come to an end. My father had run out of ways to avoid my death. If he’d tried to avoid it at all. Now my sister, her pleading with him no longer effective, had concocted this one last scheme to save me—to give Ke’heops the excuse he needed to grant me clemency.
It was, as these things go, a rather generous offer, which made what I did next feel all the more dirty.
“You shouldn’t worry about me, Shalla. Worry about that collection of deluded half-wits sitting at the top of the mountain, thinking they’re going to somehow travel a thousand miles to wipe out an army of trained shadowblacks in their own fortress. They haven’t got a chance.”
She looked at me wide-eyed, then slapped me. “Are you completely insane, brother?” She pointed to the top of the mountain. “There are more than seventy war mages up there! They’ll have the spell bridge finished in a matter of hours! And when they do, they will storm across it and destroy every black-marked fool in that awful place.”
I chuckled. “Shalla, first off, I know our people. You can’t get seventy-seven mages to agree to anything. Odds are there are a dozen or so adepts up there with maybe a full war mage or two for show. And besides, a spell bridge spanning a thousand miles? It’ll break the instant someone sets foot on it.”
“Kellen, this is real. This is happening. You’ve got to—”
“Have fun playing war coven with the other children, Shalla. One day, when you grow up and see a little more of the world, you’ll stop being so easily fooled by sparking bands and big talk. Until then, let’s just say I’ll believe all these grandiose claims when I see some proof.”
I started to turn away, but she grabbed my face with both hands, her fingertips pressing into my temples. “Hateth’eka, maru’pasha, sovei’e’khan!”
My vision blurred, my head swam. I started losing control of my body and for a second I worried I’d gone too far and now she was going to incapacitate me. But being right has always been of particular importance to Shalla, and soon the silk spell took hold and I saw what she wanted me to see.
I was walking through the encampment, past glorious pavilions and floating palanquins. Sha’Tep servants were preparing meals and feeding fires. I felt awkward—as if I were too short all of a sudden. Then I realised it was because I was seeing through Shalla’s eyes—watching her memories. “This was an hour ago,” she said, her voice distant.
“I never argued that our people weren’t experts at travelling in excessive comfort,” I replied, speaking with her voice—which was especially disconcerting.
“You’re a fool, and I can’t save you unless you pay attention!” The ambling journey continued, past the main camp and towards a sheer cliff down one side of the mountain. There, facing the empty air like a true army, stood all but one of the seventy-seven mages my father had assembled. They held their arms out in front of them, and magic glistened like sweat on their forearms. My breath turned to ice as I finally understood how they would be able to create a spell bridge that spanned the distance between two continents.
The tattooed metallic bands on each and every one of them were extending out from their forearms like ribbons—the way Tournam and some others had learned to do with their shadowblack. They stretched out into the distance, travelling hundreds of miles as they wound around each other, over and over, becoming strands of rope, and those ropes binding together to form the bridge. The colours of iron, ember, blood, breath, silk and sand magic all mixed together, a dance of shimmering light so beautiful I would have cried at the sight of it had I not known its purpose.
“It’s incredible,” I said, because it was important that Shalla hear my admission.
“So you understand?” she asked, so excited she didn’t notice my right hand had drifted into the pocket of my coat. The silk spell began to fade and my eyes took in the mountain slope once again, and my sister standing there with desperate hope that the brother she loved would soon return home.
“Thank you, Shalla,” I said.
I kissed her on the forehead, like one does a child. She hated that, and opened her mouth to scold me. That’s when I stuffed a leaf of weakweed between her lips. Nephenia had brought some to keep Reichis’s fever down and I had reckoned it wouldn’t hurt to have a little at my disposal.
At first Shalla just stared at me, eyes wide, the leaf hanging out of her mouth. Most of the time weakweed just removes a mage’s ability to bring the essential forces into their body. But if you take it just after casting a spell, it also renders you unconscious.
I caught Shalla before she could fall, and laid her gently near a tree. I removed the leaf from her lips and placed it between Essa’jin’s. It wouldn’t do for the other woman to wake before Shalla did.
I should have run then, but I didn’t. I found a few pieces of wood and some twigs for tinder. I used my powders to light a fire so she wouldn’t get too cold. I doubted the courtesy would earn me much forgiveness. “I’m sorry, Shalla,” I said, because it seemed important to speak the words aloud.
I’d never doubted my father’s ability to convene a war coven. He’s always been the sort of man that others instinctively want to follow, even if they resent him for it. What I’d needed to know was how the bridge worked, and what weakness—if any—it might have. Ke’heops must be in dire need of a quick victory to construct the spell bridge from his own mages’s bands.
And while the Argosi consider revenge even more perverse than grief, there was a cruel but appealing symmetry to what I was going to do to my father’s prized war coven.
51
Discord
“You can’t be serious!” Nephenia repeated for the third time. She hadn’t given me the chance between either of the other two to explain, so I wasn’t quite sure what the point of the third was other than to give her a reason to poke me in the chest even harder. For a girl with two missing fingers, she really knows how to hurt you with the other three.
“What’s the problem, girl?” Ghilla asked. The others had the sense to stay out of it, but whatever culture whisper witches come from, they have precious little sense of self-preservation. “We get some of these metal inks you Jan’Tep are so fond of, go back to the abbey, and then ‘counter-band’—whatever that is—the ribbons coming from the war coven. They lose their powers forever and we don’t have to worry about getting slaughtered. We win.”
“The whole world wins,” Tournam added, leaning against a tree while watching us argue. His eyes spent a lot more time on Nephenia than on me. “You can even stay with us, lovely. Find you some nice black eye make-up and make you an honorary shadowblack.”
“I’d rather be dead,” she replied, which was unusually callous for her.
“Well, the rest of us will be dead,” Diadera said, striding up to Nephenia until they would have been nose to nose, had Diadera not been a couple of inches shorter. “Seems you lost some of your brain along with those fingers.”
Nephenia ignored her and delivered her pronouncement to all of us. “I’m not going to let you destroy the lives of seventy-seven mages. Counter-banding them is like cutting out half their soul.”
The others shuffled about, unsure what to make of this. Suta’rei wouldn’t meet my eyes. She, more than any of the others, understood the perfidy of what I was
suggesting. Butelios didn’t look happy about it either.
Diadera, on the other hand, positively loved the idea. “When we’re done taking half their souls, I’ll find a way to scrape out the other half. Jan’Tep have been murdering my kind for centuries.” The black markings of her freckles flew up from her cheeks and began to swarm in the air between the two of them. “Want to see why?”
This was getting out of hand, but Neph gave a flick of her fingers that I knew meant I should back off. “I wondered how long it would take you to threaten me,” she said to Diadera. “I could see it in those little dirty looks of yours, same as I see the lust in that moron over there.” She gestured to Tournam.
“Hey, what did I do?” he asked, only now taking an interest in the conversation.
Diadera’s firefly freckles drifted closer to Nephenia. “Guess you should’ve done something about it before now, charmcaster. Because if you try reaching into your coat for one of your little trinkets, my shadowblack will tear you to pieces.”
“Are they fighting over Kellen?” Tournam asked Ghilla. “Because that’s just—”
“Shut up, Tournam,” I said.
Something odd was happening or, rather, something that should have been happening wasn’t. Ishak, who on any other occasion when someone dared threaten Nephenia would bare his teeth, was sitting a few yards away, staring disinterestedly into the distance.
He’s not worried about her. Which means … Oh, crap. Neph, what are you doing?
She offered Diadera a smile I recognised at once. It belonged to a certain Argosi who was perpetually teaching people how to get in trouble. “Check your right pocket.”
“You’re bluffing,” she said. “I would’ve known if you put something there.”
“Then go ahead and attack me with those filthy bugs that follow you around.”
Diadera tried not to take the bait, but after a few seconds she reached into the pocket of her long leather coat. Her hand came back with a small metal object fashioned to look like a miniature spider. She tried to shake it off, but Nephenia whispered a single word under her breath and all of a sudden the tiny metal arms became glued to Diadera’s palm. “I’d leave it be,” she warned. “The instant the arms lose contact with your skin or I say the word, you’ll feel a light pinprick. Things will go badly for you after that.”
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