Soulbinder

by Sebastien de Castell

  “I have a strange feeling you’re going to tell me.”

  “Your grandmother banded you in shadow, denying you the future you’d hoped for. Yet in so doing, look—” he gestured back to the families—“you became the one person who could save all these people.” His gentle gaze went to the winding black markings around my left eye. “Diadera was right. They truly are like the wheels on a lock.”

  “Yeah, only I’m not even sure how they work, and I have no idea why my grandmother banded me with them.”

  He squeezed my shoulder. “A fascinating mystery—one would think a proper enigmatist would feel compelled to solve it one day.”

  I smiled then, not because I shared his optimism, which was, by any standard, completely preposterous, but rather because of the way he’d spoken, how familiar it was, and how even now I couldn’t help but feel clever at having figured it out at last.

  “You’re going with them?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I am … known to many of them. They trust me.”

  “As they should,” I said, genuinely meaning it. “Though I think if you’re planning to lead them on this exodus, they ought to know your proper name, wouldn’t you agree?”

  He looked at me quizzically. “My name?”

  “My first morning in the abbey, after you and Diadera had kept Tournam from killing me, you told me the story of an Argosi who’d come to your city in the north. You said you begged her to make you her teysan but she refused.”

  “What I said was true,” he insisted. “The Path of Skyward Oaks denied me several times in fact, yet she never sent me away either, no matter how long or how far I followed her. And then, after some seven years in her company, I realised something.”

  “Seven years? What was it you only figured out after seven years?”

  He tried to look solemn, but a second later his composure broke into a wide grin. “The Argosi never agree to teach another, just as their maetri never agreed to teach them!” He broke out laughing and without warning he grabbed me in a bear hug, nearly dislodging Reichis. “I am glad we met, my friend. You brought me more hope and laughter than such times as we live in should ever afford.”

  He let me go to set off across the spell bridge, following the mass of people to whom, I suspected, he would need to devote the rest of his life. “Wait!” I called out. “You still never told me your name. That’s hardly fair.”

  He stopped. “If I tell you, will you yourself finally admit to being an Argosi once and for all, and cease the little jokes and jibes you make to hide the truth from yourself as much as from the rest of the world?”

  “I … I guess I’ve never felt right calling myself one.”

  The man I’d come to know as Butelios turned and said, “Then know that the Path of Joyful Tears will always greet you as a fellow Argosi.”

  I smiled back at him, unsure why that small kindness meant so much to me. “And the Path of Endless Stars will always be grateful for it.”

  62

  Vengeance

  Inside the Ebony Abbey chaos and slaughter were gradually giving way to patient, methodical destruction. Barely a third of the massive curtain wall remained standing, most of the cloisters had crumbled to the ground and all but two of the towers had collapsed. None of which reduced my anxiety when the lodestone Nephenia had given me swung like a mad pendulum in all directions. It wasn’t a defect of the device itself; there was simply too much wild magic in the air for such a fragile charm to function properly.

  “Can’t you use that legendary nose of yours to find her?” I asked Reichis.

  He gave no reply, not even a chitter. Maybe he couldn’t even catch a scent amidst all the smoke and carnage. “I really wish you could talk to me,” I said as I ran down one of the covered cloisters. Bolts of ember magic were blasting from all sides, chasing the brief flickers of shadowblack from those few monks still fighting back or just fleeing for their lives.

  Reichis gave a sudden growl and I looked up to see one of the last remaining towers toppling towards us. I ran as fast as my legs would carry us, knowing it wasn’t nearly fast enough. My passing thought was, This is probably not the worst way to die, considering the options I’ve been presented with lately.

  A thousand tons of stone collapsed on top of us, only to stop mere feet above my head. They weren’t frozen in place—but continued their fall so slowly that I could walk between them.

  “Would you mind getting a move on?” Shalla asked, her voice strained. “This is … not as easy as it looks.”

  I made my way through the gentle snowfall of crumbling black rock. “Iron magic?” I asked.

  She grabbed me by the arm and took me about a dozen yards away from the wreckage before allowing it to all come crashing down on the courtyard. “Sand, silly. I slowed time down around the falling tower. No one mage is powerful enough to hold back that much weight using iron magic.”

  “Not even you?” I asked, lending as much fake surprise to my voice as I thought was believable. Then, to add insult to insult, I threw in, “By the way, have you misplaced that lovely sapphire dress? Also, please tell me that was part of the illusion and you haven’t left poor Essa’jin at the base of that mountain wearing nothing but her undergarments.”

  She stuck her hands on her hips. “Are you determined to make me cross with you, brother?”

  I grabbed her and pulled her into the longest embrace of our lives. “Always,” I said softly.

  Our reunion was short-lived. I heard a shout and let go of Shalla to pull powder from my pouches. Two Jan’Tep mages were coming towards us, calling her name.

  “My Lady Shalla!” the shorter, stockier of the two called out, only to groan as tracks of blood trickled down from his matted brown hair. He clung to a taller man like a dying leaf to a rotted tree branch. I could see the short one was a tribulator from the way his iron and blood bands glowed, but their light flickered. I thought he didn’t have long to live.

  “Ore’jieq?” she said. “You need help!” She turned and called into the din around us, “I need a fleshbinder here now!”

  “He insisted on bringing you word directly, my lady,” the taller man said.

  “Word of what?”

  Ore’jieq’s eyes went soft. He opened his mouth to speak but then coughed. In any other situation I’d’ve said he was being a little dramatic, but given what appeared to be his impending death I figured I should let that go. “Your father,” he said, so quietly it wasn’t until he repeated it that I could be sure. “Your father … I was next to him when one of the black towers fell. My brethren dug us out, but Lord Ke’heops, he … He’s asked to see you.”

  The glow of Shalla’s victories fled, leaving her pale as the dead. “Oh, no … Ancestors, please no! Where is he?”

  Ore’jieq gestured eastward. “At the other end of the abbey. The remnants of the shadowblacks have amassed there. It’ll be a fight to break through, my lady, but I will do my best to assist you.” He tried to take a step, but even with the taller one holding him, his knees buckled, threatening to take both of them down.

  “Stay here, Ore’jieq,” Shalla ordered. To the taller one she said, “Get one of the healers for him, Shoth’arn, now!”

  “But, my lady, you’ll need—”

  The glyphs of the tattooed bands on her forearms gleamed so bright it became impossible to look at her. “I need nothing.”

  I tried to take her hand. “I’ll come with you. I can—”

  She shrugged me off, pushing her will through the iron band around her right forearm to send me stumbling back. “You’d only be in the way.”

  Shalla left me standing there like an idiot, unsure of what I should do. Ke’heops had brought all this hell upon the world, but he was still my father. If he was really dying, shouldn’t I be by his side? Would he even want me there, given our last encounter involved me blackmailing him?

  I would’ve wrestled with the question longer, but it occurred to me then that Shoth’arn wasn’t calling fo
r any healers, and Ore’jieq seemed to be making a remarkable recovery. The two were watching me, smirking, waiting for me to figure out the obvious. Ore’jieq wiped a hand across his forehead. The blood came away clean, with no sign of any wound underneath. “A worthy performance, wouldn’t you say, Shoth’arn?”

  The other mage chuckled. “We might’ve been half-decent actors, were it not a degrading profession suited only to the basest of fools.”

  “Not the basest,” Ore’jieq corrected. His iron and blood bands were gleaming brightly now, solid as the sun above a dry desert. “The basest of fools call themselves spellslingers and become traitors to their people.”

  “True,” Shoth’arn agreed. His iron and ember bands sparked. “Then they become dead.”

  I backed away, hands in front of me to show I wasn’t readying an attack. “Ke’heops made an agreement with me, a covenant. He’s mage sovereign, his word is—”

  “His word may well become law,” Shoth’arn said, looming over me, “when this battle is over and he is crowned. Until then, he is merely a clan prince.”

  “Not our clan of course,” Ore’jieq said.

  “No, indeed. And you, Kellen of the House of Ke, traitor to the Jan’Tep, you are nothing more than—”

  A new voice finished the sentence. “My son.”

  A sudden burst of lightning blinded me, then, just like that, Shoth’arn and Ore’jieq were gone. A second before, the two men had been stalking towards me, somatic forms twitching along their fingertips as they prepared to blast me to pieces. The next, all that was left of them was two small mounds of ashes.

  Ke’heops, prince of my clan, soon to be mage sovereign of my entire people, stepped towards me. As he did, the screams of battle around us, the smoke and fog and stench of blood, all of it faded from my mind, as if the war itself parted before him. “You saved me?” I asked.

  “They disobeyed my command. As I have attempted to teach you on more occasions than I can count, there must be consequences for disobedience to one’s lord.”

  My knees were shaking. Hell, my entire body was shaking. “You should’ve dropped something on them or used some other secondary force. Any half-decent silk mage will be able to trace the spell that burned them back to you. Can’t imagine their clan will be too happy when they find out you killed two of their finest.”

  Ke’heops stopped, and smiled at me negligently. “Really? Is that your professional political assessment, Kellen?” He shook his head. “You never seem to understand how these things work.” He knelt down and scooped up a pile of Ore’jieq’s ashes in his hand. “I want our people to admire me, to respect me, perhaps even to love me.” He rose and blew the ashes into the wind. “But none of those things will matter unless they also fear me.”

  Well, I certainly feared him. Problem was, some small part of me, maybe that trace of arta valar that insisted on popping up at times like these, sent a chuckle past my lips.

  “Something amuses you?” Ke’heops asked.

  “It’s just I’ve never heard you so succinctly describe your parental philosophy before.”

  He considered that for moment. “Clever,” he said at last, almost as a sigh. “Always so determined to be clever. Tell me, Kellen, what does that wit of yours tell you I’m going to do now?” He made a show of glancing around us. “There is no one here to stop me from killing you. No one who will second-guess me if I go and find every one of those shadowblack children and their families you blackmailed me into granting passage across the bridge.” He took another step, now so close I could smell the warmth of his breath, the scent of the oils he’d used on his skin since I was a child. It felt perverse that I found it somehow reassuring.

  “You won’t go after the children,” I said. “Matter of fact, I expect you’ll let a few of the remaining stragglers slip through your ranks too. Not many of course, just enough.”

  “Enough for what?” he asked.

  I looked around at the remains of the Ebony Abbey, at this place that could have been a haven of peace, a school, a community, a lifeline for those who so badly needed it. Now it would be a shrine to violence and hatred. “You had a great victory here, Father. The kind of victory that soon becomes legendary. You did what no Jan’Tep leader has done in three hundred years.”

  He tilted his head, still watching me. “I haven’t heard a reason not to complete that victory.”

  I shrugged. “If you eradicated every last shadowblack, what would there be left for our people to fear? What was it you said to me earlier? ‘There are two kinds of leaders men seek: those who rule best in peace, and those who rule best in war.’ I don’t think you see yourself as someone people flock to in times of peace.”

  He stared at me long and hard with eyes so cold and unfeeling it was everything I could do not to cower before him and beg forgiveness. Only when he was sure I would continue to deny him that small, simple pleasure of fatherhood did he smile and ask, “Is this what the Argosi call ‘arta precis’?”

  “It’s as close as I get to it, Father.”

  “And what does this talent of yours tell you about your own fate? After all, I don’t need you to scare anyone for me.” He reached out a hand and got his answer when I flinched, absolutely convinced I was about to become a third pile of ash next to Ore’jieq and Shoth’arn. His expression softened and his hand touched my cheek. “Perhaps you still have something to learn from your father after all.”

  It’s possible there was something I could’ve said that would have brought us closer together, but even had my enigmatist’s markings revealed it to me, I wasn’t ready to say it.

  He took his hand away. “I won’t kill you, Kellen. There’s no need now. As you have noted, I have won the victory our people needed. Soon I will be crowned mage sovereign.”

  “Is that the only reason you haven’t killed me, Father?” I asked.

  I could see in his face that, like me, he hesitated to say the words out loud. But maybe he was a better man than I am because finally he shook his head. “No, Kellen, that is not the only reason. You live because, as I have tried to tell you many times, I am your father and I love you.”

  Without waiting for a response, perhaps not trusting what I might reply, he turned and walked away, striding towards the last bitter hours of the battle. I managed to find my voice in time to call out to him, “But that’s not enough, is it?”

  He stopped then. I couldn’t say for sure, but I would’ve sworn his shoulders sagged just a little. “No, it’s not. You live because you have been useful to me, Kellen. Useful to our house. Even when you rebel, even when you resist, even when you try your very best to spite me, your every act has been precisely what I needed, even if it hasn’t always been what I desired.” He turned back and looked at me, just for a second, his eyes narrowed as though he were trying to make sense of me. “Our fates are something of a mystery, aren’t they?”

  63

  The Mahdek

  Reichis and I set off in search of Nephenia again, but we couldn’t find her. The lodestone had stopped working entirely, and all I could do was hope that she’d either made it out of the abbey already or was holed up somewhere safe—something I ought to be considering myself, given how many of my father’s mages probably still wanted to see me dead.

  “Kellen!” a voice shouted.

  I looked up to see Diadera coming towards us. Her shadowblack freckles surrounded her, ready to strike at her command. Apparently it wasn’t just the Jan’Tep I had to worry about.

  “Don’t come any closer,” I warned, reaching for my powders. “I don’t know how you survived the posse, but quit while you’re ahead. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “I came to—”

  I didn’t get to hear what she was going to say next. Reichis growled so loud the roar in my ears was overwhelming. He sprang down from my shoulder to the ground and then raced towards Diadera. “Reichis, no!”

  My warning came too late. Everything happened far too quickly after that. Ther
e was a mage behind Diadera—that’s what Reichis had seen. The squirrel cat leaped up, back legs barely touching her shoulder before he launched himself at the mage. A scream of pain tore through the air as the squirrel cat’s claws tore out the man’s eyes. He lashed out, fingers contorted into a first-form ember spell that made flame burst from his hands. Reichis screamed as his fur started to burn. I ran for him, fast as I could, but it wasn’t enough. The mage was hanging on to him, determined to burn him alive.

  Diadera struck out with her shadowblack, the tiny sparks of shadow stinging the man’s face. He let go of Reichis and fell to the ground screaming. Still I kept running, throwing myself on the squirrel cat to put out the flames. He scratched me bloody trying to get away. Fire has always made him crazy. Finally it was out though, and the mage who’d attacked us lay dead a few yards away, the white bone of his skull showing through the ruins of his face as Diadera’s fireflies returned to her cheeks.

  I checked over every inch of Reichis’s fur for any remaining smouldering bits. He wasn’t too badly burned, all things considered.

  “He saved me,” Diadera coughed. She was standing over us. “Why would he do that?”

  “He …” I was about to tell her the truth—that Reichis was probably protecting me or that his usual bloodthirst for Jan’Tep mages, especially their eyeballs, had taken over. “We look after each other,” I said instead.

  She smiled and knelt down next to us. It was then that I saw that the whites of her eyes were gone, replaced by a red mess of burst blood vessels. She put a hand on her forehead as if she were checking a fever. “That mage, he touched me. Right here. Why would he do that? It doesn’t even hurt.”

  “Oh, ancestors, no …” I reached out to catch her as she tumbled forward.