Soulbinder

by Sebastien de Castell

  “Kellen?” she asked. “Why can’t I see?”

  Iron magic. In his blind panic, the mage had summoned a gut sword or some other iron spell that compressed an enemy’s internal organs. The bones of the skull are usually too thick for iron magic to penetrate, but there’d been no distance between them. He’d put his hand right on her forehead. He’d crushed her brain.

  I laid her down as gently as I could, glancing around for anyone else who might attack. “It’s okay,” I said. “You just need to rest a minute.”

  She must’ve known I was lying, but still she played along. “Weird not being able to see. Is the squirrel cat all right?”

  “He’s fine,” I said. “You saved his life. Now he owes you all the butter biscuits and dead rabbits on two continents.”

  She didn’t laugh. Instead she reached out a hand. “Help me sit up. I don’t want to lie here like this.”

  I did, though I had to prop her up with my shoulder to keep her from falling back. She spread her hands. “Can I hold him, just for a moment?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good—” I started to say, but Reichis crawled up onto her lap.

  She stroked his fur, and it turned from dark grey with red stripes to golden. It was a remarkable gesture of respect, coming from him, but she couldn’t see it. She petted his head, and I saw she was tracing a finger around the ridge of one of his eyes over and over. He didn’t seem to mind, but an itch in my shadowblack markings told me something was wrong. I grabbed him away from her.

  “Kellen?” she asked.

  “What were you doing to him, Diadera?”

  “I was … Is it raining?” Blood was dripping from her eyes down onto her cheeks, which were pale now because her shadowblack freckles had disappeared from her face.

  I looked down at Reichis’s muzzle, horrified by what I found there. “How …? Diadera, what have you done to him?”

  She pulled at the collar of her shirt, tearing off the top two buttons to again show me the abnegation marks she’d carved into her skin. “You were so alone without him,” she said, the deep sorrow in her voice at odds with the girl who’d only hours before told me she had no use for friendship or other illusions. “Even when you got him back, I could tell it wasn’t the same.” She reached out a hand blindly, taking mine when she found it. “I don’t want you to feel alone, Kellen. Now you don’t have to.”

  I pulled away, rising to my feet and holding onto Reichis. Without me to hold her up, Diadera fell back against the cobblestones, her head landing with a soft thump. Blood oozed from her ears. “You had no right!” I screamed at her. “This isn’t what I wanted, damn you! I would never want—”

  “Quit shouting, Kellen,” Reichis chittered, clambering up to my shoulder. “The crazy girl is dead. Let’s ditch this lousy dump before we end up in the same condition.”

  For the first time since I’d left him in the Golden Passage, I’d understood everything he’d said, and while I had no idea how it worked, the cause was as plain to see as the shadowblack markings around Reichis’s left eye.

  No one can love you until you first love yourself.

  —Things girls say to you when they don’t like you that way

  64

  Farewell

  The muddy ground sucked at the heels of my boots like grasping hands trying to pull us down into the muck with the dead. Memories are like that too. They tug at you, holding you back. “You’re not ready to move on,” they whisper. “Just stay here a while longer. It’ll all make sense soon, I promise.”

  Memories are liars.

  It’s something every Jan’Tep initiate learns in their training. Magic requires true envisioning—maintaining esoteric geometry in your mind with flawless accuracy. Those sharp lines and curves with their precise colours and textures are utterly unlike the lazy finger painting of past remembrances.

  That time your spellmaster first told you that one day you might become a great mage? Remember the hint of a smile on the left edge of his mouth? What about his hair? Do you recall if any strands were out of place? How about his right hand—were the fingers just dangling there? Or were they slightly curled?

  You won’t remember such things of course, which means you remember nothing. You’re simply recreating the images, the words, the events themselves, fashioning them to suit how you think you might have felt at the time. Memory is like everything else in the world: the further away you are, the harder it is to see. Only hours had passed since the battle at the Ebony Abbey, yet even now I knew my recollections were flawed.

  Two armies fighting a war of spells and shadowblack magic. Black ribbons darting everywhere, grabbing at steely-eyed mages whose metallic tattooed bands shine like strips of starlight as they pierce the encroaching darkness. Chaos and blood. Shouts calling for violence, screams begging for mercy.

  In my mind, endless hordes of mages and monks clashed like the waves of two oceans fighting for dominance. In reality though? My father had led fewer than fifty men and women over that bridge; the rest had died before they’d reached the other side. The abbey had housed perhaps four hundred souls, half of whom we’d helped escape. Others fought, of course, but probably almost as many died simply trying to flee. Any Daroman soldier would’ve told you this was nothing more than a skirmish. No real war at all, merely the first drops of rain in a bucket that was eager to hold so much more.

  Ferius, in one of her rare moments of candour, once told me that the Argosi believed hidden forces within the great nations were driving us towards a continental war—conflict on a scale that not even the most battle-hardened Daroman general has ever seen. The Argosi were going to prevent it, Ferius had said, with the same certainty with which she places her bets in a game of cards. I’d found her swagger reassuring then. Now it just seemed like childish petulance.

  Darome. Berabesq. Gitabria. The Seven Sands. The Jan’Tep territories. They were moving inexorably towards war—one so violent and bloody that I doubted there would be anyone left to remember it, even poorly. Maybe that’s why wars keep happening; they kill off so many people it becomes easy to forget what really happened, and all that’s left is to make up stories about it.

  “So they’re really not coming?” Reichis asked.

  He was perched on my shoulder, as he had been for the past hour, while I trudged through the cloying mud. It would take us all night to walk to the nearest village from the remains of the abbey. From there, days or weeks to reach the coast. Then I’d have to find some way to buy our passage on a trading vessel—assuming any were crossing the narrow ocean between this place and our own continent of Eldrasia. We would see no one but strangers for months. Ke’heops had brought down the bridge the moment his own forces had withdrawn, knowing, I am sure, that I was still on the Obscarian side. I guess he considered this to be a suitable fatherly punishment for my actions, or more likely, my attitude.

  “Nephenia’s going west,” I replied. “Wants to see the world past our own little piece of it.”

  Was that what she’d said? It was hard to be sure, even though it had only been a couple of hours since I last saw her. That tiny lapse in time was enough for me to question whether things had gone the way I remembered.

  “It’s a big world, Kellen,” she’d said with a grin, only I wasn’t sure now if she’d been smiling. Her lips might have been a thin, strained line across her mouth.

  “I could go with you,” I said. “Reichis always likes finding new things to kill. Besides, I’ve heard the Shan make the most incredible steel weapons. Maybe I’ll buy a sword and then sail to Tristia and learn to fence or something. Or we could go south and visit the Peaceful Lands. I’ve never been quite sure whether the name is supposed to be sincere or ironic, so maybe we should pick up the swords first. And butter biscuits. I don’t think Reichis will embark on a sea voyage unless he’s got a big supply. We could find stuff for us too, of course. I mean, what foods do you like these days? All that travel with Ferius—has she tried to make you eat weird snail
s and things yet? She used to do that to me all the time. I was never sure if …”

  Had I really babbled on like that? I’m almost positive I didn’t say half those things, no matter how clearly I remembered saying them. I couldn’t have though, because I distinctly remember Nephenia putting a hand on my cheek.

  “Goodbye, Kellen,” she’d said.

  That part had happened for sure.

  “What? You don’t want me to come with you?”

  It’s not like I expected us to become lovers or something. It’s just … Maybe somehow everything that had happened would make sense if it ended with Nephenia and me together. Foolish? Pathetic? Maybe, but I’d challenge anyone to see what I had seen and not grasp at some small shred of hope that life might not all be hell.

  I think Nephenia had removed her hand from my cheek, because she reached out a finger towards the black markings around my left eye. I’d flinched.

  A test.

  “Why do you do that?” I’d asked. “Why do you think it’s okay to humiliate me like that?”

  “Because I keep hoping that one day I’m going to touch those markings and it’s not going to bother you. Maybe you’ll have stopped thinking of yourself as defective.”

  “So what? That doesn’t change the fact that I care about you. Nephenia, I lov—”

  In my memory, she shook her head over and over and over. “You can’t love someone until you love yourself.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure I can, because—”

  She cut me off. “Kellen, don’t tell me how you feel about me. Tell me how you feel when you close your eyes and it’s just you there.”

  I didn’t even try. I’ve never been suited for honesty. My talents are in deception, trickery and, most of all, distraction. “You make out as if the shadowblack was just some blemish that embarrasses me. It’s not. It’s real and it’s deadly and most of all it ruins the lives of everyone around me. And before you shake your head at me, Nephenia, remember that I saw how disgusted you were when you saw Tournam and Diadera and Azir and the others. I saw how you looked at me when I was with them. I saw.”

  I can’t remember the expression on her face then, which is strange, since I’m positive I was looking carefully. “I wasn’t disgusted by their shadowblack markings, Kellen; I was disgusted by how they revelled in them. Couldn’t you see that? When you came to this awful place, didn’t you notice how excited they all were by the power they could wield? Didn’t you realise it was the same look of hunger, of desire, that every Jan’Tep initiate has when they discover they can use their magic to wield power over those without? How could you not have seen that?”

  I hadn’t had an answer then. I didn’t have one now. Whatever clever retorts had been trying to work their way through my brain had faded to nothingness when Nephenia had pulled me close and briefly pressed her lips against mine. One kiss. A reminder? A promise? Another test?

  “How come you get to kiss me whenever you want, but I never feel like I can kiss you?”

  “Because you won’t risk being rejected, so instead you keep hoping some lucky accident will make it happen for you. Falling in love isn’t the same as tripping into it, Kellen.” Her fingers brushed my hand. “Besides, you have no idea how often I’ve wanted to kiss you only to stop myself at the last second.”

  “Why stop yourself?”

  She smoothed the hair away from my face, her fingers lingering on my cheek. “Because I think I love you Kellen, but I won’t know for sure until I meet the man you’re going to be once you finally get tired of being the boy you once were.”

  She kissed Reichis’s fuzzy head too, just above the ridge of his left eye. He growled at her. “Don’t be like that. I think it looks cute.” And then she and Ishak left, and that was that. The strange girl with the three-fingered hands who’d thrown everything aside to come and save me had walked out of my life again.

  Either I was unimaginably inept at love, or the whole thing was just another con game.

  “You got a mirror?” Reichis asked, shaking me out of my thoughts.

  I turned my head to discover he’d worked his way to the top of my pack and was digging around inside, sticking his butt in my face. “Do you mind? What would you need a mirror for anyway?”

  He hopped up and spun himself around to face me. “I want to see what my markings look like. I bet they’re fierce.” He leaned his muzzle towards me, so close all I could see was a patch of fur. “Come on. They’re cool, right?”

  “Cool?” I stopped walking, letting the mud get a stronger hold on my boots as I stood there. “Are you out of your mind? Cool? Reichis, you’ve got the shadowblack now! Do you have any idea what that means?”

  He looked troubled. “You’re saying they don’t look cool?”

  “Reichis, there’s a damned portal on your face that’s connected to an etheric plane that will slowly feed on your worst, most vile thoughts. Those markings will only get bigger over time, and eventually those thoughts will become a demon who will take over your entire being.”

  By this point he’d flipped around again and was digging in my pack.

  “Are you even listening to me?” I demanded.

  He came back up with a butter biscuit in his mouth. Apparently at some point in the midst of all the people dying and buildings falling, either he or Ishak had managed to loot the abbey stores of its supply of biscuits. “Sorry, what?”

  “I was trying to explain to you that you’ve got—”

  “I heard you. Vile thoughts. Demon. Big, ugly, evil thing. One day I’ll get transformed into one?”

  I nodded.

  Reichis pulled the butter biscuit out of his mouth. “I’ll become this monstrous killing machine that terrorises everything in its path?”

  “Most likely.”

  Reichis sat down on his haunches on my shoulder. He took a bite from the biscuit and chewed noisily for a while, then said, “Cool.”

  “You’re an idiot,” I said.

  He closed his paw into the squirrel cat equivalent of a fist and rapped it against the top of my head. “Is being a whiny little skinbag a symptom of the shadowblack?” he asked. “Because that would explain a lot.”

  Before I could reply he wriggled back into my pack. “We should’ve brought more butter biscuits,” he said, digging around frenetically and tilting me off balance. “Also, why are you wasting valuable butter biscuit space in your pack with this letter?”

  “What letter?”

  He re-emerged and held a creased and dirty envelope between his paws. “It says, ‘To Kellen the idiot skinbag, from some other idiot skinbag.’”

  Reichis can’t read. Thankfully.

  I took the envelope from him. The only thing on it was my name, written in a hand almost breathtakingly elegant—at odds both with the sorry state of the envelope and with the temperament of the person who’d sent it. “It’s from Ferius,” I said, tearing it open. “Nephenia must’ve slipped it in there.”

  “Well?” Reichis asked. “What does it say?”

  65

  Two Letters

  Kid,

  I must’ve written this letter a dozen times since that night out on the Gitabrian border when you took it in your head to leave. I wrote a new one when the girl (who insists I call her “Nephenia”—have to rid her of that habit) nearly got me and the hyena killed running into a burning building. No screaming kids inside, you understand—just the fool who’d set the fire.

  Anyway, I wrote a different one a few weeks after that, when we came across the Path of Whispering Willows. You ain’t met her yet, which is to the good, because when she talks she makes no sense, and she talks all the time. Who can get any peace with all that nonsense frontier philosophy rattling around you all the time?

  Wrote a couple more letters a month ago after we had a fine time with a Jan’Tep bounty hunter. Fella thought he could set a trap for me to get to you. I ask you, kid, what is it about a little magic that makes a boy so foolish? Made him take one of my deb
t cards in exchange for not whoopin’ him like he deserved. Maybe he’ll find some wisdom in it. Kinda doubt it though.

  Well, after all that, the girl (Nephenia, I mean) sees your sister’s face in a loaf of bread and tells me we’ve got to run off to the Golden Passage to rescue a squirrel cat. Felt as dumb as it sounds. Still, glad we got to the little fella in time. You should’ve seen the trail of bodies he left behind. Me and Nephenia got into a fight after that. We have a lot of those. Worst teysan I ever had—never questions the Argosi ways like you did, just nods her head like she understands and then goes off and does the opposite. I tried to tell her you’d chosen your path and that you’re near as good getting yourself out of trouble as you are getting into it. But she took off anyway. Hope you understand why I couldn’t come. It’s not the Argosi way. Still, since I couldn’t seem to stop writing and rewriting the same letter over and over, I reckoned I’d best have her give this one to you. I threw out all the other ones, except the first, so you’d see that all my wandering thoughts eventually came back to the same place.

  To you.

  I took the second letter out from behind the first, my fingers fumbling with it awkwardly. I hadn’t been prepared for the strange intimacy of seeing words written in the hand of my mentor. The joy of holding something she had made just for me only sharpened the terrible reminder that she was a thousand miles away, that I might never see her again, and that it had been my choice that had made things so.

  “You gonna read the rest or what?” Reichis asked.

  “Don’t know,” I replied. “Haven’t decided yet.”

  “Read it out loud. You’ll feel better.”

  “Why would I feel better reading out a private letter in front of you?”

  The little bastard bit my ear, and hung on to it while murmuring, “Because then I’ll stop doing this.”

  “Fine,” I said, and read the second letter to him.

  Kellen,