Spellslinger 6: Crownbreaker

by Sebastien de Castell

  Ferius gestured to the teeming streets, the men and women begging for food, the press of body against body everywhere we looked. ‘Place like this ain’t built for so many. Gonna see disease run like wildfire through these streets before long. Gonna see blood spill soon after that.’

  A sudden hue and cry caught our attention. A fight of some kind had broken out further up the street. Meanwhile, a contingent of two dozen helmeted men in strapped leather armour, short-hafted spears in hand, pushed through the crowds, walking away from the screams.

  ‘Clerical guards,’ Ferius said. ‘Aren’t they supposed to enforce law and order in the city?’ she asked Keliesh.

  He didn’t reply, but stepped in front of the other commander. ‘You appear to be facing the wrong direction, guardsman.’

  With surprising fluidity – and temerity – two dozen spears lowered to direct their points at Keliesh’s belly. His own men, however, didn’t make a move.

  ‘They will wait for my command,’ Keliesh told the commander of the clerical guards.

  ‘No soldier of the profane armies may draw a weapon in the sacred city,’ the other said. ‘Should even one of them do so, all will be excommunicated, they and their families hunted down and given blasphemers’ deaths.’

  Keliesh showed no sign of fear. ‘That seems … extreme.’ He turned to Ferius. ‘Perhaps I should read this Vizier Sipha after all.’ To the guard commander he said, ‘I still hear screams ahead. If you won’t see to it, then step away and I will.’

  ‘All proceeds as it should,’ the guard commander sneered. ‘Run along now, penitent.’ His eyes lingered on the religious scene of Keliesh’s breastplate.

  ‘Most of the clerical guards follow the clockmaker’s codex,’ Ferius explained quietly. ‘Don’t have much time for those who believe God’s a penitent.’

  Ancestors, I thought. How does a theocracy function if people resent each other’s interpretations of God?

  More sounds of violence reached us; people were racing past, trying to get away.

  ‘Reichis, go find out what’s happening.’

  The squirrel cat sniffed. ‘But these two nutjobs are gonna start killing each other soon, I don’t want to mi—’

  I pointed to the crowded street ahead of us. ‘There’s probably worse things happening up ahead.’

  ‘Good point.’

  The squirrel cat launched himself from my shoulder, landing on the wooden awning of a shop before scrambling up to the single-storey roof. He took off along the roof, leaping into the air, fuzzy glide flaps spread wide to catch the breeze. Soon he was flying above all our heads, making his way to the source of the cacophony.

  The commander of the clerical guards took note of Reichis’s flight. ‘Now even wild beasts infest our city.’ He gestured for one of his subordinates. ‘Begin drawing up plans for a city-wide extermination campaign. I’ll not see the sacred temples covered in the droppings of filthy animals.’

  Well, if I hadn’t already disliked this guy, he was making it easier by the minute.

  The commander must’ve caught my expression, because he started paying attention to Ferius and me for the first time, and said to Keliesh, ‘Why do you bring foreigners into the city?’

  ‘They are pilgrims, and it is right to allow them in Makhan Mebab. Does not Vizier Calipho say, with his customary piercing sagacity, “The poorest pilgrim, stumbling from a foreign land, is the truest citizen of the city of God”?’

  The commander of the clerical guards took that like a slap in the face. ‘You would bleat the ravings of a penitent preacher at me?’

  Keliesh made a show of whispering to me, loud enough for all to hear, ‘Calipho also warns that, to a fool, words of wisdom are as the bleating of sheep.’

  Why is he picking a fight with this guy? I wondered.

  ‘I have no cause to detain members of the army,’ the commander of the clerical guard said. He motioned for two of his own men, spears held out, to come forward. ‘The foreigners come with us to be interrogated. I’ll have no spies in my city.’

  ‘Then we have a problem,’ Keliesh replied. ‘Because these two are my guests, come to witness the glory of God, and –’ he gestured to Ferius, who was now having to lean on me from standing so long – ‘to seek admission within the temple walls to find healing in His presence.’

  ‘It is not for foreigners to find succour in Makhan.’ The commander raised a finger. ‘And if you quote one more time from the nonsense of the penitent codex, I will arrest you for creating a public disturbance.’ He smiled then. ‘The council of viziers holds a conclave even now, quadan. God’s presence necessitates once and for all the distinction of the true holy texts from the false ones. It is time to purge the faith of chaff.’

  Keliesh smiled back at him. I noted the subtlest twitch in his fingers and a change came over the dozen soldiers who’d accompanied him. ‘I could not agree more, guardsman.’ Keliesh then turned to me. ‘The great temple awaits in the centre of the city. Take your companion there and pray outside the walls for God’s grace.’

  ‘Arrest the foreigners!’ the commander shouted. ‘And the traitor who brought them!’

  ‘Go!’ Keliesh told me. Even before he’d turned back to face the clerical guards, he’d drawn his sword in one smooth motion and brought its point to the other man’s throat.

  ‘C’mon, kid,’ Ferius said, pulling at my arm. ‘The man’s given us a gift. We’d be poor guests not to make use of it.’

  I felt an odd sort of guilt wash over me as I helped Ferius stumble through the crowded streets. Keliesh was a military man and a religious zealot, two things I despised both on instinct and by upbringing. Yet he had spent every night since we met playing shujan with me, teaching me the axioms of his faith and listening to me counter them. Debating, arguing and, just as often, laughing out loud together. Now he was putting his life and those of a dozen of his soldiers at risk for me, simply on the central principle of his beliefs: a penitent pilgrim must be allowed the chance at redemption before God.

  The irony was that, in doing so, he was giving me the chance I needed to murder his god.

  ‘Dirty business,’ Ferius said, noting my expression.

  A dirty business indeed.

  36

  The Entrance

  There’s an art to casing a joint, as Ferius would put it. Reichis would agree. It involves the two Argosi talents at which I’m the least adept: arta precis – perception – and arta tuco – subtlety.

  ‘What’re you seein’, kid?’ Ferius asked.

  ‘Six entrances on the ground floor,’ I replied as we continued our awkward stroll around the low circular wall surrounding the tiny temple city of Makhan. The spire of the great temple at its centre rose high above the other houses of prayer and palaces that housed the high viziers. Only by following the circumference of the surrounding wall could one periodically see through gaps between the other buildings to the lower floors of the great temple itself. Each of the six sides of the huge hexagonal structure bore a phrase in archaic Berabesq, which Ferius translated into a welcome for those who worshiped that particular ‘face’ – or in this case, codex – of God.

  I’d tried to convince her to stay behind and rest, but in a city already bulging with pilgrims, you’d be lucky to find space to sit on the pavement, never mind a proper room in an inn.

  ‘“Enter boldly, those with courage in their hearts and steel in their hands,”’ she read aloud, squinting as she peered over the low curtain wall at the inscription above the arched doorway on the third face of the temple.

  ‘… and then get your head cut off,’ I added, noting the contingent of guards barring entry to the warrior’s door, just as there had been at those of the clockmaker and the gardener.

  Apparently Makhan was usually open to travelling viziers, who would bring their flocks with them not only to pray within the temple, but to converse and debate peacefully with those of other sects. There was an optimism to that idea that appealed to me – tha
t this place was so grand, so beautiful and so imposing that those of contrary views would feel both the impetus to champion their view of the Berabesq god and yet never dare turn to violence within.

  Now though?

  My gaze went up, high up past the hexagonal walls that formed the base of the temple, up the massive spire at its centre, as tall as any tower, taller even than the central tower of the Academy of the Seven Sands, which until now had been the biggest building I’d ever seen. Somewhere inside, near the top, perhaps even now looking down on us from one of the tall, narrow windows, was the Berabesq god. I kept wondering when lightning would strike me down from one of those windows.

  A fight broke out in front of us between two groups of pilgrims. Berabesq is a funny language – I can kind of understand what people are saying most of the time, but when they get angry they talk so fast the words start to tumble out like a raging waterfall and I become lost in it.

  Ferius and I slipped out of the way, pulling back a few yards to resume our route around the circumference of the tiny walled city.

  ‘So, six doors on the ground floor,’ I said. ‘Every one of them too thick to blast through and barred from the inside, so no locks to pick.’ I glanced up again. ‘Windows too high to reach, walls too sheer to scale.’

  Normally none of this would’ve been a problem. My usual technique for getting into a place is to let Reichis glide in through a window – sometimes a chimney, which makes for some hilarious moments as he stumbles out covered in soot, right up until he starts biting me for laughing at him – and then unlock the door from the inside to let me in. Problem here was, the bars were made from solid iron and it took two guards to move them.

  ‘I think I might be able to lift one,’ the squirrel cat said, perched on my shoulder. A vizier was being allowed past the guards through the clockmaker’s door, which allowed us to see the heavy bar inside.

  A hundred squirrel cats all working together – something that, so far as I can tell, is an impossibility – wouldn’t be able to budge one of those bars. I didn’t bother pointing that out though.

  ‘Best we find another way inside,’ I suggested.

  ‘Six doors,’ Ferius said. ‘That’s all you see?’

  Most of the time we’d been casing the temple, Ferius hadn’t even bothered to look at it, which made me find it hard to believe she’d spotted a seventh entrance that I’d missed. ‘You see another one?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Nope.’

  ‘Then how—’

  ‘What’s the third lesson I taught you in arta precis, kid?’

  ‘Was it, “Go get me another beer”? Because as I recall, those were the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh lessons you taught me in arta precis.’

  Like all things Ferius, as absurd and frustrating as the experience had been, there had been a point to it: she’d wanted me to notice that the bartender was refilling the glass higher each time, because I’d flashed too valuable a coin and he’d decided to get us drunk and then have a few of his serving staff mug us when we tried to leave. By the last refill, I’d spotted him putting drops of something black and viscous into our drinks.

  ‘The third lesson of arta precis,’ Ferius said, leaning on me to steady herself, ‘is never look where everyone else is looking.’

  ‘Even when you’re trying to case the entrances to an otherwise impregnable temple?’

  ‘Especially then.’

  I looked around the packed courtyard that surrounded the temple. ‘So what have you been looking at?’

  Ferius pointed behind us, down one of the streets that radiated outwards from the temple grounds. A man in exquisite vizier’s robes was walking away, accompanied by a smaller man who looked like some sort of assistant and four guards in glittering armour with designs on their cloaks that matched those on the robes of the vizier.

  ‘Tell me about him,’ Ferius said.

  He was already a good way away from us, but I’d seen enough to have an impression. ‘Rich. Dresses to show it. Doesn’t trouble himself to look at any of the pilgrims. Doesn’t seem bothered by any of the suffering around him.’

  ‘Didn’t ask you to judge the man. Where you reckon he’s headed?’

  ‘No idea. Into the city, I guess.’

  ‘Fair enough. Where’s he coming from then?’

  ‘How should I …?’

  It occurred to me then that, of course, he had to have come from inside the temple. Only something was bothering me about that very logical inference.

  ‘Which door did he walk out of?’ Ferius asked.

  Every time a vizier had come out of one of the doors and then through the gates in Makhan’s surrounding wall, there was a great hue and cry from pilgrims rushing up to them, begging for blessings or miracles or pelting them with questions about the god within the temple. Even accompanied by guards, by the time they’d gotten past the crowds, they’d all ended up looking like they’d narrowly escaped being lynched.

  ‘His robes weren’t rumpled,’ I said quietly.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘His robes – they were perfectly orderly. And the way he walked was relaxed. Calm. Not the gait of someone who’s just had to press their way through a mob.’

  ‘And where did he come from again?’ Ferius asked.

  I turned back to stare past the wall at the great temple. There were six doors. In my travels I’ve been to some pretty strange places, seen all kinds of bizarre architecture, including doors that have no handles and almost no visible seam around them. This building only had six doors. I was sure of that.

  ‘Is it magic?’ Reichis asked. He started sniffing the air all around us – he claims he can smell magic, though that doesn’t explain how we’ve been ambushed by mages so many times.

  ‘Why’re you starin’ at that ugly old building, kid?’ Ferius asked.

  Because that’s where we want to go, I thought. Because that’s where everybody’s looking.

  Ferius’s third lesson of arta precis: never look where everyone else is looking.

  My eyes went to the sandstone courtyard beneath our feet, searching for any signs, but of course I wouldn’t be able to find them.

  ‘What’re you lookin’ for now, kid?’

  I glanced back at the vizier disappearing into the city with his entourage, the man with the unrumpled robes and casual stride. ‘There’s a tunnel,’ I said. ‘A tunnel beneath our feet that lets the most powerful viziers enter and exit the temple unseen.’

  Ferius clapped me on the shoulder. ‘See, kid? Knew you’d get there eventually.’

  Her smile stayed intact even as the last drop of colour drained from her skin and she collapsed into my arms.

  37

  The Wrong Direction

  Crowds of men, women and children buffeted us like ocean currents too powerful and capricious for such a feeble vessel as that which carried Ferius Parfax. Life at the royal palace of Darome had afforded me a period of steady meals and decent rest that had given me a little more muscle than I used to have, but already my arms were near exhaustion and we’d barely made it two blocks away from where Ferius had fainted.

  ‘Get out of the damn way!’ I shouted at people, so angry and terrified that I realised I was speaking in Jan’Tep and not the language they would understand. It didn’t matter. When they caught sight of my eyes they pressed aside regardless.

  ‘Where we goin’?’ Reichis asked.

  ‘We have to find a travellers’ saloon.’

  They called them ‘pilgrim’s respites’ in Berabesq of course, but travellers’ saloons were dotted all over the continent. Places where Argosi and others in the know could meet in secret, trade information, barter for some of the more exotic supplies, and recuperate in peace and safety from whatever ailed them. We wouldn’t find a cure for the malediction there, but at least Ferius would be protected while I went and figured out how to blackmail a god into saving her life.

  Only problem now? How to find the damned place.

>   ‘Ferius?’ I said, shifting her weight in my arms as I leaned against the outer wall of a shop to give myself a moment’s rest. ‘Ferius, wake up. You need to tell me where the travellers’ saloon is!’

  Damn me. I should’ve made her take us there the second we’d entered Makhan Mebab. But she’d insisted we case the temple first.

  ‘Ferius?’

  ‘She’s unconscious,’ Reichis said, craning his head down from my shoulder to sniff at her. ‘Deep.’

  ‘Ferius, wake up,’ I repeated, panicking now. ‘You’ve got to tell me—’

  Her eyes fluttered, only to close again.

  ‘Ferius, please!’

  Her lips parted, just a little. She mumbled something I couldn’t hear over the noise of the crowds. I leaned in closer. ‘Say it again, Ferius. Tell me how to find the travellers’ saloon.’

  Like the whisper of a fading breeze, she said, ‘Arta precis, kid. Always … arta precis.’

  ‘She’s out again,’ Reichis said.

  ‘No!’ I shouted, practically screaming into her unconscious face. ‘Not another stupid test! Not now!’

  But it was no good. Ferius was alive, breathing, but nothing more. I had to find the travellers’ saloon without her.

  Arta precis.

  Ancestors, but I was even more exhausted from trying to be ‘perceptive’ all the time than I was from carrying Ferius in my shaking arms. Why couldn’t the Argosi ever just answer a simple question? Why was everything a mystery? Was it really so hard to just help a person when they asked?

  Only … I hadn’t asked.

  Arta precis. Look where others aren’t looking. Ask the question no one else is asking.

  Here we were, in the city where a god waited high up in the spire of a great temple, his rapidly approaching birthday the spark that would set off generations of war and strife. The Argosi didn’t like war. If they had any purpose in the world that I could discern, it was to prevent them from starting.

  So, the question nobody was asking: how likely was it that Ferius would be the only Argosi in Makhan Mebab right now?