Ghilla came stalking towards Nephenia, her mouth open, the shadowblack markings filling her throat ready to blow strangling fog. “Shouldn’t mess with my girl, Jan’Te—”
Nephenia gave a whistle and all of a sudden a scream came from the back of Ghilla’s head. The girl grabbed frantically at her own hair, trying to find the source. “I wouldn’t,” Neph said. Then she turned to face the others. “Listen up, morons. I’m an exiled Jan’Tep charmcaster with no clan and precious few friends. I’m a pretty girl with a valuable talent and that makes me a target all over this continent. I’ve dealt with plenty of scumbags who thought they could take advantage of me. So if any of you wants to take your shot, I promise you’ll soon find out why none of the rest succeeded either.”
“You planted charms on us?” Azir asked. He looked as if his feelings were genuinely hurt.
“Nothing that would ever hurt you, or you’d ever notice,” she replied. “Unless you gave me no choice.” She turned to me. “Come on, Kellen. Time for us to get out of here.”
“What? I can’t! I told you, there are children at the abbey!”
She shrugged. “I told you before—if you really cared about those kids, you’d get them the hells away from that awful place. As for these shadowblacks you’ve taken up with?” She gestured towards Diadera and the others. “I’ve set the charms to each release their spell once I’m a mile away from them. But if they come looking for me? Well, if I have to choose between a bunch of shadowblacks and our own people, it’s no choice at all.”
“Typical Jan’Tep,” Diadera said, though I noticed she wasn’t coming any closer.
“What’s happened to you, Neph?” I asked.
She didn’t answer, and I wondered if maybe I’d missed the obvious: six months had passed since I’d last seen her, and while that may not sound like a lot, every step on the long, hard road of an outlaw changes you. Had life as an exile turned Nephenia cold-hearted?
No, I realised. It’s made her smart. And cunning.
“I thought you were different,” I said. “Your uncle mistreated you. Your own brothers took two fingers from each of your hands, but here you are, still parroting the same Jan’Tep prejudices about how the life of a shadowblack isn’t worth protecting.”
She stared back at me, eyes narrowed. I’d never met Nephenia’s uncle, but I knew for sure she didn’t have any brothers, so what she did next would tell me where we stood. “Says the guy who left his own sister unconscious halfway up a mountain.”
Okay, so we’re in business.
“To be fair, it was only a quarter of the way up, on the eastern slope, so she’ll get plenty of sun if she’s still there in a few hours.” Having gotten that out of the way, I tapped a finger on the markings around my left eye. “Will you do me the same courtesy when these grow a little too big and you decide my soul’s not worth saving?”
“I’d hoped we could find you a cure, Kellen. Before it was too late.” She unslung the pack with Reichis in it and placed it on the ground between us before backing away towards the trees. Ishak got up and loped alongside her. “Guess it was too late before I even met you.”
I let her have the last word. When she was gone, I picked up the pack and checked on the squirrel cat. He was still sleeping, but his fur wasn’t as slick with sweat as it had been earlier. Hang on, buddy. Another day of this insanity and I promise we’ll find you a nice bath and a cartload of butter biscuits.
Tournam came to stand beside me. “Thanks so much for introducing your friend to us, Kellen. She was a big help.”
“She is Jan’Tep,” Suta’rei said. “You can no more ask her to feel sympathy for a shadowblack than ask a mother to empathise with the snake she finds in her child’s bedroom.”
“Oh?” Tournam asked. “And you being one of them, is that how you see us? As monsters?”
Suta’rei closed her eyes, the black markings that covered her lids like the entrances into dark, empty tunnels. “It’s how I see myself.”
52
The Inks
“So how does it work, boy?” Ghilla asked.
I took off my coat. “You do realise you’re the youngest one here other than Azir, right?”
She grinned. “Yeah, but I got me an old soul.”
As I rolled up my shirtsleeve, I pointed to the glyphs on my forearm. “You see these symbols?”
“Jan’Tep bands. Who cares?” But she and the others huddled around me.
I focused my will on the breath band. It was dark enough out that my pathetically dim sparking was noticeable. “This is what happens when a mage draws one of the fundamental forms of magic into themselves.”
“We know how Jan’Tep magic works,” Diadera said. “We’ve all seen Suta’rei do it, and it’s not like most of us haven’t been hunted by one of your people at one time or another.”
“Look at the second band,” I said, showing them my ember band.
Butelios pushed through to look at it closely. I got the sense maybe this was new for him, which was too bad, because it meant his first real encounter with Jan’Tep culture was going to involve seventy-seven war mages. “Those marks,” he said, pointing at the copper glyphs in my ember band while being careful not to touch. “They look … wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Suta’rei asked. “You know nothing of Jan’Tep banding.”
The big man shook his head. “I don’t know. They just look … hurtful.”
“They’re called inverted glyphs,” I explained. “Part of what we call counter-banding. It stops me from ever using those forms of magic.”
“What happens if you try?” Azir asked, coming closer. “I mean, really hard?”
A good question. Since counter-banding is known to be irreversible, I’d never bothered to test it. “Probably nothing,” I said, but for the hell of it, I poured my will into the band. Nothing happened at first, but that wasn’t a surprise. People think of exerting will as if it were like concentrating really hard. My old spellmaster used to joke that new initiates always looked constipated, because they confused exerting will with clenching their buttocks. It’s different, though. Hard to explain—which is why it can take years to learn. Sparking a band requires not so much trying to push or pull at something with your mind. The way of the Jan’Tep is the way of mastery. Control. Dominance. You don’t bend the magic to your will; you demand that it bend before you. That requires, among other things, believing it’s possible.
For the first time since before I’d left my people, I made myself believe I could be a mage. I sent my will pouring through the bands for iron, ember, silk, sand and blood, probing for one that would submit to me. Nothing at first, but when I returned to ember I began to feel a kind of itch, not unlike the one I’d felt the day I’d first sparked my breath band. At that tiny glimmer of hope, I doubled and redoubled my efforts. Had my old spellmaster been there, he would’ve been proud—and surprised—at how perfectly and utterly I exerted control over the ember band. And then it happened. The itch became something else—something that both burned and froze me all at the same time, that hurt so bad I dropped to my knees.
“Kellen!” Diadera said, grabbing at my shoulders. “What’s wrong? Tell us what to do!”
“There’s nothing you can do,” Suta’rei said, an uncomfortable tightness in her voice. “This is what it means to be counter-banded.”
I released my will and the pain began to fade. No magic had come to me, not any I could use anyway.
“Does it still hurt?” Azir asked.
I shook my head. I couldn’t bring myself to speak.
“Then why are you crying?”
“Leave him be,” Suta’rei said.
Tournam—probably still annoyed that Nephenia had failed to fall for his charms—was less sympathetic. “What’s the big deal? You knew you were counter-banded before, right? So you’re never going to be a big mage like your daddy. Get over it.”
Suta’rei put a hand on his chest and gently pushed him away. “He just
learned that had his parents not counter-banded him, he could have been an ember mage.”
“I’m sorry, Kellen,” Diadera said. She knelt beside me and put a hand on my left cheek, her fingers touching the markings around my eye. Do you need some time alone? I can get the others to leave for a while.
No, I replied silently through our shadowblack connection. We don’t have time.
Tournam was right. Nothing had really changed. I couldn’t use ember magic before and I still couldn’t. It was just that little flicker I’d felt—that tiny promise that something more could have been there had I not been counter-banded. It brought back all the broken dreams I’d thought I’d left behind me.
Diadera probed deeper through her touch. Maybe this is a sign, Kellen. Maybe it’s time to finally put those things away. To stop being part Jan’Tep mage, part Argosi, part everything except the one thing you are: shadowblack. She leaned over and kissed my cheek. The warmth of her lips against my skin, the feeling of being so close, not just physically, but bound together somehow. It was confusing and intoxicating. I wanted more.
I rose to my feet and shook myself off. A few hours ago you decided you were in love with Nephenia. Now you’re getting hot and bothered over Diadera. Figure out who you are before you ruin someone else’s life.
“I’m okay,” I said to the others. “The pain was a good reminder.”
“A good reminder of what?” Tournam asked.
I pointed to the bands on my forearm. “The members of the war coven are forging the bridge from an ethereal connection to their own bands. If we start counter-banding the threads of the bridge that are attaching themselves to the abbey, those mages will feel what I felt, only I’m guessing a dozen times worse.”
“Now that I’d enjoy seeing,” Tournam said.
Butelios looked less certain. “Might not such an attack leave your entire people without their most powerful protectors?”
I was struck by his compassion for those who’d happily see him dead, and again wondered at how different he was from the others, but right now I had more immediate issues to deal with. “With luck we won’t have to counter-band many of them. No mage who witnesses it happening to their fellows is going to stick around. They’ll withdraw their magic and the bridge will come apart before anyone can cross it.”
Diadera, Suta’rei, Tournam and Ghilla all shared a glance, keeping it from Butelios and Azir, which confirmed something I’d begun to suspect about this little group. I had more pressing concerns, though. “How far are we from the central Jan’Tep territories?” I asked.
Suta’rei pointed to the east. “About two hundred miles. Why?”
I turned to Azir. “Can you make a road to get us there? There’s something I need from my father’s home.”
The boy looked stricken. “I’m … I’m really tired already, Kellen, and if I have to get us back to the abbey, then—”
“We don’t need banding inks, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Suta’rei said.
I turned to see her removing vials from her pack that I recognised immediately. “What are you doing with—” I stopped myself, because I already understood why. When Suta’rei had fled our people, she must’ve brought the inks with her. She knew one day the shadowblack would start to take her over. She’d end up like that crazed mage we’d fought a couple of days ago. Before she lost the will to fight back, she’d remove some of what would make her a danger to others.
“It’s my duty,” she said to me, quietly, as though the fear and misery in those words was something only the two of us could share.
Tournam punched me in the arm. “Looks like we’ll have a fair fight for once. Knew you’d come through, cloud boy.”
The gesture was friendly, but the nickname only reminded me that the sasutzei had been dormant since the first fight in the abbey. I wasn’t sure if she was even still in my right eye any more. Wherever you’ve gone, you crazy wind spirit, I hope you find a better travelling companion than I turned out to be.
We stayed there a little while, giving Azir as much time to rest as we could. Ghilla wondered why we couldn’t just use the spell bridge, since it would’ve been faster. Suta’rei gave an exhaustive and rather morbid account of what would happen to us the moment the mages sensed intruders on their bridge, which put an end to that discussion. Eventually Azir stood up, closed his eyes and forced a shadowblack road into existence. The lines on his pale face made him look as if he was burning up something inside him that could never fully be replenished. Tournam had to carry him as we travelled, the muscles on his arms shaking as he held Azir upright the entire way, so the boy’s feet could create the road ahead of us without him having to support his own weight.
I followed the others. None of them watched me to see if I might betray them or questioned my loyalty. They’d watched Nephenia abandon me, so to them I was shadowblack through and through now. With each passing step, I wondered if I’d ever be anything else.
53
The Soulbinder
By the time we returned to the abbey a kind of giddy optimism had infected the others. Tournam announced to anyone who would listen that we’d brought the means to defeat the Jan’Tep posse. The abbey’s inhabitants, thirsty for salvation, drank up every tiny drop of hope he offered them. In the desert, so many become fooled by mirages that you often find corpses with sand in their mouths and smiles on their faces.
I’d expected the abbot to be dubious about what we’d learned, if not enraged at us for having left the abbey without his consent. Instead he was jubilant, practically bellowing with joy as he pounded a heavy fist on the desk inside the private room atop his tower. Sheaves of paper went flying, many covered in sketched fragments of my shadowblack markings. He leaped up from his desk and hugged each one of us. “If ever I’d hoped for proof that the world can be just, that this place we’ve built matters, and that the gods—assuming there are any—can love even a pack of reprobate shadowblacks like the seven of you, this is it!”
“It’s only a theory right now,” I warned him, uneasy at just how far there was to fall from the heights of his exuberance.
“It’s a damned certainty!” He snatched up half a dozen sheets from the desk before hauling us out of his office and down the spiral stairs.
It wasn’t long before we were outside the abbey’s gates and at the cliff’s edge where the spell bridge had first appeared. The sight of it was daunting. Ten feet wide now, the smooth surface shimmering as the ribbons of light from which it was made danced in the breeze. They became solid as stone when you touched them however, and that was enough to bring Tournam and the others back down to earth.
Not so the abbot.
“Jan’Tep bands,” he said, kneeling on the end of the bridge to peer at them. “You’re sure?”
Though the ribbons of raw magical force shifted and became entwined around each other in constant flux as they fought to warp the very laws of physics, the strands were stable where they had anchored themselves into the cliff face. There you could easily make out the distinctive colours and textures of the six forms of Jan’Tep magic: iron, ember, breath, blood, silk and sand. All of them were represented, each individual band stretching a thousand miles to the forearm of its owner. Ghilla produced a short, sharp blade from inside the sleeve of her coat and stabbed it into one of the bands, then made a show of listening to it before shaking her head. “Too bad. Would’ve been nice to hear one of those boys scream.”
“It’s not the actual band,” I said. “It’s more like a tether to the mage’s ability to summon the six raw forms of magic.”
“But the connection is there?” the abbot pressed. “The individual mages are tied to them somehow?”
I nodded. “The bond between a mage and their bands is more than just the metallic inks on their skin. Those are just the physical aspects, infused by years and years of an initiate’s training in each form of magic. In theory, if we imprint counter-glyphs on the strands of the bridge, we’ll disrupt their abili
ty to draw on those forces.”
“It’ll hurt them too, right?” Azir asked.
He’d insisted on coming up the tower with us, despite Tournam’s urging that he get some rest. But the boy looked withered, his skin pale and his lips almost blue. He couldn’t walk unsupported and he shivered uncontrollably. The demands of so many trips had broken him. I’d expected to see a look of eagerness in his eyes—that he wanted to hurt the enemy who would ruin his home and had, perhaps, already ruined his life. Yet all I saw was concern. “Maybe we could just do it a little,” he said. “Just enough to make them go away.”
“Have you forgotten who we’re talking about?” Diadera asked, her tone icy.
“I h—”
“Azir is right,” Butelios said, coming out the gates. “Mercy can deliver greater victories than brutality.”
“That’s the exact opposite of how life works, boy,” Ghilla said.
I’d wondered why Butelios had disappeared when we’d first come back. Now he handed me a small packet of folded cheesecloth. “You haven’t eaten in some time, my friend. If you are to save all our lives, you should at least have a little food in your belly.”
In fact Nephenia had forced a few strips of dried jerky into me, but I was touched by the gesture. When I opened the cloth, I broke out laughing.
“Do you not like them? I merely thought they’d be a convenient—”
I unslung my pack and set it on the ground next to me before waving the contents of Butelios’s package in the air. A sniffing sound was soon followed by a little black muzzle pressing against the narrow opening at the top of the pack, followed by growls and a rather frantic attempt to chew his way through the drawstrings tying it closed. Loath to lose my fingers, I tugged the pack open and then dropped half the contents of Butelios’s packet inside.
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