Soulbinder

by Sebastien de Castell

  Suzy threw herself against the shadowblack, her chill freezing it solid before she shattered it into a thousand onyx shards that fell before me. But something was wrong. Instead of returning to my eye, her cloud drifted away into the open sky. I felt the tiniest breeze against the skin of my cheek, and heard a sigh I knew meant farewell.

  “Goodbye, Suzy,” I whispered back to her. “Hope the next guy proves to be less trouble than I was.”

  “Looks like you’re finally out of tricks,” the abbot said. He came to stand before me on the bridge. “It’s over, Kellen, and I’m sorry.”

  “Me too,” I said, and took the card from my pocket.

  The abbot gave a weary smile. “You think you can hurt me with a sharpened steel card when I’m ready for you? Go ahead. Throw it.”

  I spun it at him. He caught it neatly in the air. That’s when he noticed that the card was made of paper, not steel. That’s when he saw the face of his enemy for the first time.

  “Hello, Lord Abbot,” Ke’heops said. “I understand you took time out from poisoning my mages to amuse my son and allow us time to complete our crossing. You have my eternal gratitude, which I will presently convey to you in person.”

  The abbot threw down the card. “You lousy son of a bitch,” he shouted at me. “You never expected to beat me. You were just slowing me down. Giving your father time to kill the ones I’d banded so he could finish crossing.”

  It was then we all heard the roar of dozens of mages running across the bridge, the first syllables of incantations for spells both wondrous and foul whispering on the wind.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the abbot as I ran past him to make for the abbey gates. “But I’m told this is how wars are fought.”

  59

  The War

  It was madness after that. Mayhem and slaughter and the endless screams of the dying. We didn’t take a side, but that didn’t mean we escaped the battle. Nephenia, Ishak, Reichis and I fought back to back, moving inch by inch through the chaos to try to reach the families in their homes.

  For all the training the abbot had given his monks, they broke ranks just minutes after meeting their enemy on the field. It was probably the one thing that saved those wretched few who’d survived. Splitting away to barricade themselves behind crumbling walls and the remnants of fallen towers enabled them to use their shadowblack abilities to pick off a few careless mages not watching their flanks. But no one could doubt the power imbalance. The end would come soon, which left us very little time to keep this massacre from becoming a wholesale slaughter.

  “Where are they all?” I asked as we ran in and out of the smaller apartments within the abbey’s residences. We’d been searching for almost an hour and had so far collected only a few of the abbey’s civilians.

  “They must be hiding,” Nephenia replied. “Which is what we all need to do. It’s not safe out there.”

  It’s not safe anywhere, I thought as we ran outside to scramble past the shattered remnants of a covered cloister. The destruction would only get worse. A quarter of the war coven weren’t even hunting monks. Instead they cast iron and ember spells to bring down buildings and punch holes in the curtain wall. My father wanted to see the Ebony Abbey levelled to the ground, and that’s exactly what his forces would deliver.

  We reached the courtyard, which was blessedly empty save for a few of the dead and dying. The monks having been quickly routed, there was no ground for them to hold. “Down here,” I said, lifting up the grating that I knew covered the entrance to the sewers.

  “What are you doing?” Nephenia asked. “We need to get these people through the abbey gates. Your father—”

  “My father agreed to allow me one hour to round up as many civilians as I could and get them through the gates.” It wasn’t nearly enough time, which was, of course, his intent. He and a dozen of his mages would, after having ceremonially executed the abbot and his personal guards, await us on the spell bridge. I doubted those members of the war coven my father had kept from joining their gleeful comrades in the carnage inside the abbey would be happy standing around waiting on a bridge whose glimmering beauty had been marred by the twisting ebony vines, knowing that each dark strand represented a fellow mage who’d been poisoned with the shadowblack and subsequently executed by the soon-to-be mage sovereign.

  But that was my father’s problem. Mine was that my hour was about to run out, and we only had a half-dozen families with us. “You have to hide them while I go looking for more,” I told Nephenia. “Otherwise—”

  “If you’re looking for passengers,” a coughing voice called out from the sewer tunnel below, “then I believe we have a few down here eager for a voyage to just about anywhere.”

  Before I could even descend to see who was there, the first of them climbed the ladder and crawled out onto the cobblestones, wheezing from the dust and filth filling up the tunnels from all the destruction above.

  “How many are there?” Nephenia asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to block their exit and slow them down.”

  One after another they came, numbers swelling until the courtyard was half full. Mothers and fathers hauled what few personal belongings they could while bigger children shuffled alongside, leading the littler ones by the hand or carrying babes in their arms.

  “Ancestors …” I said, but not because of the growing crowd, but because of the beaten and bloody young man in torn robes who came up last, who, the families informed me, had found them and brought them to safety. He climbed up the ladder and stepped out into the courtyard, wiping a hand over the dust and grime from a bald head and face pale beneath the dried blood, save for the twisting markings that ended in black teardrops on each cheek, and wearing an idiot’s smile so bright it made you want to kiss him. Even if you weren’t into boys.

  “Butelios?” I shouted, grabbing his arm to keep him from falling back down into the sewer. “How come you’re …? Tournam told me he’d thrown you over the cliff!”

  The broad grin became a frown. “I know. I was awake, merely pretending to be unconscious. Of course, by the time Tournam had me in his ribbons, it was too late to do anything but play dead and hope for the best. I do wish people would stop throwing me over cliffs though. I believe you started this trend, my friend.”

  “That still doesn’t explain how you survived.”

  “Ah. Well, it turns out there’s a rocky shelf about ten feet down the cliff, should you happen to reach out desperately enough to grab hold of it. There’s even a bit of a ledge from which to sidle over a few feet and then climb back up on the other side of the gates. Oh, by the way—” He reached into the pocket of his robe and took out a torn and filthy piece of rolled-up cloth. “I found this on the ledge.”

  It was my shirt, and, sure enough, wrapped inside were even a couple of wildcat bones that hadn’t fallen out. Reichis chittered, Ishak barked and Nephenia started to translate. “Don’t bother,” I said. I went over to where Reichis sat on the hyena’s back. “Look, I’m sorry I confused what are obviously disgusting, misshapen wildcat bones for squirrel cat bones, which as any remotely educated person knows are sleek, perfectly formed works of art that evoke the wonders of nature. Now, do you want a souvenir or not?”

  After a certain amount of hissing and growling, Reichis took the shirt from me, sniffed it, removed what appeared to be a rib and then tossed the rest on the ground. That problem solved, I turned to another, much bigger one. “How many people are here with you, Butelios?”

  “Just the children and their families.”

  “I’m seeing a lot of people here who don’t look related,” Nephenia said. “So will the war coven.”

  “And I,” Butelios said, looking at them, “see a great many people who did not ask for war, cannot fight one and need our help.” He turned to me. “Kellen, these are all the ones I could find in time. There are still a few hiding inside the abbey, too scared to come out when I called. Some are children.”

  Neph
enia picked up Reichis and handed him to me. “You go make things work with your father. I’ll take Ishak and start trying to round up anyone else I can.” She turned to the hyena. “And you are going to be cute and cuddly for a change in order to help me convince the young ones not to run away from us.” She turned back to me and pressed something into the palm of my hand. I looked down to find a tiny lodestone attached to a string. As soon as I lifted it up, the lodestone swung towards Nephenia. “I’ve charmed it to seek me out. I’ll find a safe place to hide the children, and you can join me later.”

  If anywhere in this hell hole can be called safe, I thought, but I put the charm in my pocket.

  “Kellen,” she said, looking at the horde I was about to lead through the abbey gates. “With Ke’heops … be the man you want to be, not the petulant son who thinks he deserved a better father.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Ferius, you know that?”

  She kissed me on the cheek. “You say the nicest things sometimes.”

  With that, she and Ishak took off past the throngs of terrified children and their parents who were waiting for me to tell them whether they were going to live or die. “Okay,” I said at last, turning to head back through the abbey gates to the spell bridge outside. “Let’s go see what sort of mood the future mage sovereign of the Jan’Tep nation is in.”

  60

  Renegotiation

  My father, as it turned out, was in a magnanimous frame of mind when we found him with his personal guard of a dozen war mages standing in their brightly coloured armour upon the spell bridge.

  “You may choose half,” he said, walking with me further along the bridge to keep our discussion private.

  “Half?” I nearly sent Reichis flying from his perch on my shoulder, which earned me a hiss and a nasty nip on the ear. I barely noticed. All my anger was reserved for my father. “Has that crown been pinching your skull too tightly? We had a deal!”

  So far my attempts at being lovable were going swimmingly. I swear, if I ever saw Ferius again I was going to have her revise every single lesson in arta siva I’d ignored the first time around.

  Be charming, I reminded myself.

  “These people are no threat to anyone,” I said quietly.

  Ke’heops had remained remarkably composed during my entreaties, but now his mouth twisted into a look of disgust. “They are shadowblack and the conspirators who shelter their kind. No, Kellen, I gave you an hour and you exceeded that. I agreed that a modest number of innocents could pass unharmed and you bring me this misbegotten horde. I will not have you embarrass me in front of mages who risked their lives on this mission and who have lost comrades to the abbot’s foul machinations. Now make your choices from among this rabble, or I will choose for you.”

  “You’d murder them in cold blood?” I demanded. “Why am I even asking? Of course you—”

  Stop. Don’t make it personal.

  Butelios shuffled past the dozen mages of my father’s honour guard, offering them friendly smiles as he went. “Kellen?” he whispered to me when he was close enough. “We need to do something quickly. Our charges grow more fearful by the second. I’m afraid they might bolt or worse yet try to storm the bridge. If that happens …”

  I looked back to the clifftop at the end of the bridge where two hundred skittish souls looked very much like horses trapped in a barn that’s beginning to catch fire. If they tried to rush the bridge, my father’s mages would have all the excuse they needed to slaughter them. “Go back and keep them as calm as you can,” I said to Butelios. “This won’t take much longer.”

  “It certainly will not,” my father said, overhearing. “I won’t stand out here all day debating with you while the rest of my war coven does all the fighting within the abbey. Make your choice, Kellen.”

  Think, damn it. He’s your father, not some raving lunatic. Reason with him.

  I struggled to come up with some rational point of principle with which to persuade the mighty Ke’heops to do something so fundamental to human decency that merely trying to explain why it was the right thing to do seemed impossible. Nor could I think of any flattery or personal offering that would sway him to my side. This was a day of reckoning he’d promised his war coven, and they wanted blood. Most of them, in fact, looked like they’d settle for mine. The pompous, preening jackasses in their preposterously ornate mages’ armour and … ballgowns?

  Even as the tiny details and clues began to rearrange themselves in my mind, I felt the subtle shifting of the shadowblack rings around my eye. I banished the question before they could unlock.

  Pretty sure I don’t need help with this particular mystery.

  “Kellen?” my father asked. “Have you made your—”

  “A moment if you please, Father.”

  Don’t make it personal? No. Make it entirely personal.

  “You look well, Essa’jin,” I said to the woman in the sapphire dress with the unnaturally blue eyes and somewhat preposterous azure hair.

  She glided towards me, floating a few inches above the bridge’s surface, though I noticed her steps seemed less practised than when I’d first met her, outside the war coven’s encampment. “Son of Ke,” she said. An interesting mode of address, as it’s one conventionally used as a reminder of duty to one’s house. “A nekhek,” she said, noting Reichis on my shoulder. “I see you have found company worthy of your stature. Is his health … that is to say, he appears to be a most ill-favoured animal.”

  “They’re an ugly and ill-tempered breed,” I replied, ignoring the squirrel cat’s angry chitters, “though this one in particular has had some difficult times of late. Fortunately help came from an unexpected source, and I am grateful for it.”

  “Yes, well, whatever,” she said, visibly uncomfortable. “As you say, an ugly creature.”

  I smiled at that, and at the fact that Reichis, for once, didn’t hiss back. “Truer words were never spoken. You, on the other hand, continue to be the most beautiful woman ever to bear the title of mage. I am glad to see you here. I wanted to apologise for my untoward behaviour when we last met.”

  “For what?” she asked.

  “When you said you would sit next to my father, I insulted you, and so beg your pardon. Truly, Ke’heops would be lucky to have you at his side, even more so than my mother, Bene’maat, who after all, has always been a bit—” I leaned in to whisper conspiratorially—“second rate.”

  Essa’jin’s eyes blazed. “You prattle like a child, and seek to mock me.” Before I could deny it, she held out a finger. “Utter one more veiled insult to me and I will send such nightmares as will cause you to prise your eyes open with spikes for fear of falling asleep.”

  I gave her a short bow. “I’ll take my leave then.”

  My father was looking at me curiously when I rejoined him. “You know Essa’jin?”

  “Very well, in fact. Now, I know you’re keen to get inside the abbey and finish destroying it, so just let these poor souls pass and we won’t delay you any further.”

  “Have you gone mad? I told you—”

  “Yes, yes. Choose half. Only I think I’d rather you made the choice.”

  He shook his head, visibly disappointed in my gambit. “You think I won’t do my duty? Kellen, I will execute each and every one myself if that what is required.”

  “And to avoid looking weak in front of your mages?”

  “In order to show that the commands of the mage sovereign will be obeyed! Damn it, boy, can you not understand the simplest principles of leadership?”

  “Oh, I understand them fine. Once you give an order, it’s important for everyone to see it’s carried out. Like, for instance, the command you gave forbidding your daughter from joining the war coven.” I leaned in a little, though it wasn’t necessary given how far the others were from us. “I hope you haven’t been ogling Essa’jin as you both crossed the bridge, Father, because that would be entirely shameful.”

  “Don’t be …” His ey
es went wide, first with surprise, then with a kind of despair to which he was clearly unaccustomed and, I confess, kind of fun to watch.

  “Choose, Ke’heops. One way or another your troops will see one of your iron-clad dictates bend just a little. Either out of compassion for the innocent, or because you can’t even tell when your own daughter is masquerading as a floating fashion disaster in an ugly blue dress.”

  His jaw tightened, and the effort it cost him not to turn and look at the girl in blue was visibly painful to him. “You would use your own sister against me?”

  It was hard not to laugh at that, but I managed it, mostly because the question actually made me sad. “It’s what we do, you and I, isn’t it?”

  61

  The Path of Tears

  Twelve very angry mages stepped aside so that what no doubt appeared to them as a horde of vicious shadowblacks could escape across the very bridge those same mages had risked life and magic to construct for the sole purpose of exterminating their kind once and for all. Of course, to anyone who wasn’t insane with bloodlust and drunk on their own self-importance, those who passed were frightened souls forced to leave the one place that had promised them safety in exchange for an uncertain future back on the continent they had fled to get here in the first place.

  “Without the abbey, this land is too harsh,” Butelios said, standing with me on the spell bridge. “Better they return to the continent of their birth and build new lives there.”

  “How much of a life can it be?” I asked, the weight of everything I’d learned at the abbey crushing any sense of triumph I might have felt at getting these innocents away from the battle. “Even if they escape their enemies, the shadowblack itself will always find them.”

  Butelios shook his head and smiled. “You had more in common with Diadera and the shadowcasters than I ever did, my friend. Like them, you are convinced that the shadowblack is a curse. But what if those demons we fear come not from some darkness beyond our control, but from the darkness we allow to infect our own thoughts?” He tapped his chest. “I choose to believe that the shadowblack can be something different. Something good. Do you know why?”