Spellslinger 6: Crownbreaker

by Sebastien de Castell

  For the third time she repeated the same instruction, exactly as she had before: ‘Pick a card, Kellen. Any card.’

  She’s not really here, not even in spirit, I realised. Bene’maat must have used silk, sand and breath magic to record her thoughts and convey them to me within the cards as a series of individual messages, like a bundle of letters tied together with string, the spell encoded with specific responses based on my actions.

  The remaining twelve cards fell into four suits unfamiliar to me – which is saying something considering how many decks I’ve encountered. In an Argosi deck, each suit corresponds to a particular civilisation on our continent. In more common sets of playing cards created for entertainment, the suits tend to represent symbols meaningful to the culture that created them. The standard Daroman deck, for example, embodies its people’s obsession with military emblems: chariots, arrows, trebuchets and blades. However, the four suits of this new deck before me were unlike any I’d seen before: scrolls, quills, lutes and masks.

  Had my mother devised these suits herself? And if so, what did each one mean?

  I selected the seven of lutes, reasoning that no one had ever been blasted out of existence by a lute.

  The figure of Bene’maat smiled and an instrument appeared in her hands. She began to play a melody that pulled at my heart so unexpectedly I gasped out loud.

  ‘You always loved this song as a child,’ she murmured. ‘You used to make me play it for hours and hours whenever you were scared or sad.’

  I dropped the card as if it were a spider crawling on my hand.

  The figure of my mother nodded, somewhat sorrowfully, as if she’d known I would respond this way.

  ‘Pick a card, Kellen,’ she repeated. ‘Any card.’

  I found one that depicted a man carefully arranging quills on a scale. The caption read ‘Enumerator of Quills’.

  My mother’s apparition was now seated at a desk composing a letter. ‘My dearest Kellen. It’s close to three years since last I touched your face. I had never thought such a thing possible. I always assumed you would come ba—’

  ‘What is this?’ I demanded. ‘Nostalgia? Have you forgotten what you did to me, Mother?’ I pulled back my sleeves to show the foul counter-sigils desecrating the tattooed bands on my forearms. ‘You destroyed any hope I had of becoming a mage like you and Father and Shalla.’

  I hadn’t expected a reply, but I felt an itch in the back of my mind and a moment later she spoke again. ‘I know you’re angry with us, Kellen. You have every right.’

  I was beginning to understand how the magic worked. I wasn’t communicating directly with my mother, but these messages were more than just words scrawled on a page. The spell was made from a more complete collection of her thoughts, capturing a single moment in time during which my mother had bound up all her contemplations on a particular topic and infused them into the card.

  A spectral tear slid down my mother’s cheek. ‘It broke my heart, what we did. We believed we were protecting you, protecting the world from what you might become. We had no idea how wrong our actions were.’

  You should’ve known, I thought bitterly. A mother is supposed to protect her child, not ruin him.

  I didn’t say any of it out loud though. I knew it wasn’t really Bene’maat standing there in front of me, yet still I couldn’t bear to say such hurtful things to my mother.

  ‘I thank you for your gracious missive,’ I said finally. ‘Are we done now? I have an important appointment in a jail cell. So unless you have some miracle cure for—’

  Bene’maat’s arm extended, pointing now to a different card.

  I replaced the one I was holding and picked up the nine of quills. The expression on my mother’s face changed to a look of determination, and arranged all around her were sketches and diagrams and pages upon pages of esoteric formulae. ‘Every day since you left, I’ve tried to find a way to undo the counter-banding. I’ve searched every book of lore in our sanctums, consulted with spellmasters across the territories. I read every scrap of parchment your father brought back from the Ebony Abbey, hoping to find among their knowledge of the shadowblack’s etheric planes the means to repair your connection to the high magics. At times I thought I might be close …’

  She stopped, squeezing her fists in frustration. The image of her fluttered and faded.

  The spell must require perfect focus to imprint the message on the card, I thought. Every time she lost her concentration, she’d had to stop and start a new one.

  ‘What do you mean, “close”?’ I asked. ‘Are you saying there might be a cure?’

  A different card began to glow brighter than the others. The peddler of masks. I picked it up.

  ‘So much of what I’ve been told has turned out to be lies, Kellen. False promises. Supposed secret methods for inscribing new sigils that resulted in nothing more than temporary illusions.’

  ‘Then it’s hopeless?’

  I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. Of all the things I lost when I left my people, the one I knew I could never get back was my magic. I’d learned to live with that fact. With my one breath band, my blast powders, my castradazi coins, and all the other tricks I’d learned along the way, I sometimes even prided myself that I could outsmart my enemies without spells. But I still woke up in the middle of the night sometimes with every inch of my skin glistening with sweat, my fingers twitching through the dozens of somatic forms I’d practised thousands of times for spells I would never cast, so desperate for the taste of magic that no food or drink could satisfy me.

  Like all my people, I was an addict. My addiction was inscribed in tattooed metallic inks around my forearms. I could never sate that desire. I doubted it would ever leave me.

  The apparition of my mother gestured behind me, and I turned to see the thief of masks rising above the other cards, beckoning me to take it. When I did, her voice became a whisper.

  ‘There might be a way.’

  I spun back around to see her, still standing where she’d been before. There was an uncertainty in her gaze though, as if she were afraid someone might burst into wherever she’d been when she’d created these messages for me.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  She looked as if she were struggling to get out the words without losing the concentration required to continue imprinting her thoughts onto the card. ‘Our people have been … wrong about magic, Kellen. So very wrong, and at costs we’re only now discovering. The fundamental forces are vastly more complex than we assumed and can be fashioned in ways we never imagined. There are traditions as old as our own, spread out across the cultures of this continent. Much of the knowledge has been lost even to their own peoples, but I’ve found traces of it within old songs and stories.’

  No wonder she was having so much trouble holding the spell. To hear a Jan’Tep mage admit our people weren’t the only ones who could perform high magic was a kind of sacrilege that even I found troubling.

  ‘There is a place far from here where I believe I might acquire the means to rectify the crime your father and I committed against you, to give you back the chance to become a true mage of the Jan’Tep.’ The look of determination I’d seen in her so often as a child appeared in her features. ‘I swear to you, my son, there is no price I will not pay to buy back your future.’

  I swallowed. My breathing was quick, my heart beating faster than it should. The prospect of what my mother was suggesting … But I’d travelled the long roads of this continent, seen and heard just about every kind of con game there was, performed half of them myself. Not everything is fake in this world, but nothing of value comes free.

  I reached for the card depicting two figures exchanging goods as they stood beneath an open scroll. My people don’t use scrolls for spells or messages. We use them for contracts.

  ‘Come home,’ my mother said, her voice more a plea than an opening bid. ‘Come back to us. Your father is mage sovereign now. He has lifted the spell warran
t against you.’

  ‘Too bad he didn’t mention that to the lord magus who just tried to kill me.’

  The apparition of my mother gave no reply. She couldn’t, of course. She would’ve had no knowledge of this latest attempt on my life. Besides, it was a fair bet this guy had been hired by Daroman conspirators rather than my own people.

  ‘Come back to me,’ Bene’maat repeated. ‘Even if I fail to return your magic to you, still I can give you a home.’

  Home. Such a strange word. I wasn’t sure I knew what it meant any more.

  ‘I’ve been scrying you when I could, though you’re very difficult to track,’ Bene’maat said. ‘Not spying on you, I promise, but I needed to see you sometimes, through a mother’s eyes and not through the recounting of your sister and others.’ In the haze behind her, pictures formed and faded, images of events in my life since I’d left my homeland. Scenes of violence, of pursuit, of me sitting alone after a fight looking far more miserable than even I remembered. ‘The brave face you put on for those around you, this trickster’s guise you’ve taken on, it’s not you, Kellen. You weren’t meant for this life. You aren’t happy.’

  Happy? I’d spent the past three years facing every mage, mercenary or monster this continent had to offer. I’d survived them all. Saved a few decent people along the way. Wasn’t that enough? Was I supposed to be happy now too?

  My mother’s fingers were outstretched, reaching towards me, a desperate hope in her eyes. ‘Come home, son.’

  The card in my hand felt heavy. Clammy against my skin. I sank to the ground and before another could glow or rise or otherwise demand my attention, I shuffled them all together, fully breaking the circle and ending the spell. The cards became dull and flat once again, and the world around me came back to life.

  Goodbye, Mother.

  ‘Move real slow now, spellslinger,’ Cobb said.

  I heard the marshals shuffling behind me, fingers on the triggers of their crossbows. They seemed neither concerned nor even aware of the cards that had floated here and that I now held in my hand. I suspected barely a second had passed for them and this whole event had taken place solely in my mind.

  ‘Hey,’ Reichis growled from where he was curled up on the ground. ‘Why’d you dump me down here?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said to both him and the marshals, stuffing my mother’s strange herald cards into my pocket. I picked up the squirrel cat and settled him back on my shoulder. ‘Let’s get a move on. Time for Torian Libri to lock us up again.’

  The marshals chuckled at that, and we all resumed our march to the palace.

  ‘You know where you went wrong with the lieutenant?’ Reichis asked.

  ‘Don’t start,’ I warned.

  There are only three solutions his species have to offer regarding the resolution of conflicts between humans: kill them, rob them blind, or – and this is the one where Reichis derives the most pleasure from devising elaborate and intensely nauseating suggestions – bed them.

  ‘Shoulda mated with her the day you met her,’ the squirrel cat said earnestly.

  ‘Mating works better when the other person doesn’t despise you,’ I countered.

  A couple of the marshals following behind me broke out laughing. Reichis took their mirth as encouragement – not that he needed any. ‘Nah, that Torian female desires you, see?’ He tapped a paw against his fuzzy muzzle. ‘Smelled it on her the day the queen introduced you two. I swear on all twenty-six squirrel cat gods, Kellen, the marshal’s in heat for you.’

  It was, most assuredly, not true. Also, it’s highly doubtful that there are twenty-six squirrel cat gods. Times like these though? It’s best not to contradict the little monster.

  ‘Now, here’s what you oughta do …’ Reichis tried – and failed staggeringly – to stifle his chittering laughter. ‘First, you’re gonna take off your trousers. Females love that. Next, you turn around and wiggle your bottom at her. Then all you have to do is drop to your knees and start making this sound …’

  I’m not going to describe the noise he made. Suffice it to say that it was exactly as disgusting as you might imagine. He kept making it all the way to the palace.

  3

  The Lieutenant

  The Imperial Palace of Darome had been my home this past year, a significantly more luxurious place to lay one’s hat than the string of seedy roadside taverns, flea-infested campsites and cramped jail cells that constituted an outlaw’s customary abodes. That didn’t make it any more comfortable though.

  The outlandish opulence of palaces, with their gilded halls, stunning portraits and majestic statues, make them wonderful places to visit. But unless you were born in one? Living in a palace makes you feel small. Shabby. An intruder whose presence tarnishes the otherwise pristine perfection of their surroundings.

  It was enough to make a man reconsider whether he belonged there at all.

  ‘Now who let a lousy, no-good outlaw loose in a fine, upstanding establishment like this?’ Lieutenant Torian Libri asked.

  Don’t pick a fight, I reminded myself. Let her drag you off to a cell and by morning the queen will have ordered your release. After that … I sniffed at my armpit, a very long bath is in order.

  Torian was leaning nonchalantly – some might say disrespectfully – against a statue of Hephantus IV, the famously ill-tempered Daroman monarch who founded the royal marshals service more than a century ago. In life, Hephantus had broken with tradition by foregoing ostentatious royal vestments in favour of a rather plain grey leather coat better suited to concealing the knives and garrottes he relished employing on would-be assassins. To this day that same dull grey garment remains the customary uniform of nearly every marshal in Darome, save for Torian Libri, who’d dyed her own long leather coat a deep crimson.

  Hides the bloodstains better, she claims.

  ‘Miss me, spellslinger?’ she asked with a wink.

  At this point I should mention that, as merciless enforcers of the law went, Torian Libri was the most beautiful woman I’d ever met.

  How beautiful?

  ‘So purdy …’ Reichis murmured.

  The squirrel cat was perched on my shoulder, one paw resting on top of my head as he gazed wide-eyed at the lieutenant. Now, I know what you’re thinking: why would a squirrel cat – especially one who claims to find human faces so ugly that every time he tries to count their eyeballs he ends up vomiting before he gets to two – be mesmerised by this particular skinbag?

  ‘Purdiest eyes I ever saw,’ he chittered wistfully.

  Imagine the brightest indigo you’ve ever seen – brighter than the azurite ores in the blue desert region of the Seven Sands. Deeper and richer than the waters off the coast of Gitabria that the locals call the Sapphire Sea. So captivating that more than one amateur poet among the palace courtiers had been known to rhapsodise about the ecstasy of drowning in those eyes.

  Me? I generally avoid drowning.

  Best as I’d been able to uncover, Torian was only a couple of years older than me. A string of successful manhunts against some of the deadliest outlaws in the Daroman empire had enabled her to rise up the ranks far faster than her fellow marshals – a fact which irritated them no end.

  I’d met one of her captives once. The guy swore to me – right before he was dragged off to be hanged – that he’d witnessed Torian take down six highly trained killers all by herself, pursuing them high up into the border mountains. He figured she’d only left him alive to make sure there would be someone left to tell her story. ‘Had my crossbow aimed right at her,’ he repeated over and over. ‘But those eyes … Gods of sea and sky – one look and I just couldn’t bring myself to fire.’

  There’s something particularly pathetic about a man awaiting execution bewitched by the beauty of the marshal who’s sent him to the gallows.

  But when Torian Libri flashes that smile at you … When those high cheekbones rise even higher and that long black hair shimmers like onyx as it drapes down a neck so smooth yo
u could stare at it all day long even when you weren’t contemplating how much you’d like to throttle her …?

  And yeah … Those eyes.

  ‘Like sapphires,’ Reichis purred.

  It’s worth noting that squirrel cats don’t purr.

  Lieutenant Libri gave the six marshals escorting me a curt nod and they left me in her charge. No back-up, no handcuffs. That’s because Torian liked to remind me that she was faster on the draw than I was and could easily bury one of those finger-length throwing knives she favoured in my throat before my hands ever reached my powder holsters.

  ‘We can’t keep meeting like this, card player,’ she began, sliding her arm through mine to lead me through the grand foyer as though I were her escort to a royal ball rather than a prisoner headed for the palace dungeons. She leaned her head against my shoulder. ‘People are going to start thinking we’re sweet on each other.’

  Her absurdly affectionate behaviour drew the attention of nobles and courtiers cockroaching their way around the palace in search of opportunities to advance their interests and frustrate those of their rivals. Reichis, convinced by all the stares that people were admiring him, shook himself, causing his fur to change colour from its natural brown to a rich silver accented with blue stripes almost the hue of Torian’s eyes.

  ‘Well now,’ she laughed. ‘Aren’t you the handsome rogue?’

  A blush of pink bloomed across the silver of Reichis’s coat. Nearby, a pair of Gitabrian merchant lords, looking especially splendid in their jaunty purple hats, went to the trouble of whispering loudly in the Jan’Tep tongue of my people to ensure their insult wouldn’t be lost on me. ‘Did you see the animal that just slunk into the royal palace?’ the first asked. ‘The filthy creature’s coat is probably full of fleas.’