Spellslinger 6: Crownbreaker

by Sebastien de Castell

  ‘Once more, if you please,’ Rosie said.

  I would’ve asked why, but since I knew I wouldn’t get a proper answer, I let myself be guided by the severity in Rosie’s tone and flipped the coin a second time. Tails again.

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  ‘What was that for?’

  She turned back a few yards, and so did the conversation. ‘You asked where I was leading you.’

  ‘Yeah, and …?’

  She seemed irritated by my obtuseness. She hoisted up Ferius a little more in her arms, showing that despite her strength and stamina, she was getting exhausted too. ‘And, given all the things each of us have done since last we saw each other, all the vital knowledge and information we might know, it is strange that your first question to me would be one to which you already know the answer.’

  ‘A travellers’ saloon? That’s where you’re taking us?’

  She strode ahead, narrowly avoiding a cart being pushed along the alley by a man who seemed determined to crash into someone. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Then why are we taking such a winding route?’ I asked, more annoyed than ever. ‘There’s no possible way it can be this complicated to reach a place in a city made up of completely regular arrangements of streets and avenues.’ I glanced around us. ‘In fact, I’m pretty sure we’ve been down this road already.’

  Rosie gave me a raised eyebrow to convey her disapproval. ‘We’ve passed this corner three times already. Has the Path of the Wild Daisy not taught you arta loquit?’

  For some reason, I always hated the way she seemed to refuse to call Ferius by her name, insisting on referring to her by her path instead. ‘What has the Argosi talent for eloquence got to do with walking through a city?’

  ‘Because eloquence does not refer only to languages and music. Arta loquit is for navigation, whether what is being navigated is a conversation, a culture, or a city; it is all the same.’

  ‘Those are three completely different things actually,’ I muttered, but on some level her observation made sense to me. The words of a language had to be memorised to speak it, but they also had to be understood in terms of their relationship to each other, just like places on a map. There were many ways to express any given idea, each with nuances and complications that would affect the outcome, just as there were many ways to go from one place to another, each with their own benefits and dangers.

  ‘Do not reproach yourself,’ Rosie said. ‘Your maetri’s way of teaching is as … unconventional as her path.’

  Her implied criticism of Ferius got my back up. ‘My friend is dying, and you’re bouncing us all over this gods-damned city like a drunk searching for her coin purse. So do you think I care one bit about whether I kept track of the exact number of times you’ve walked us past this same corner?’

  ‘A fair point,’ Rosie conceded, then resumed walking. ‘To answer your question, we have taken this route so that I could ascertain the number and nature of our pursuers.’

  ‘Pursuers?’

  All of a sudden I understood the strange little quirks of Rosie’s behaviour as we’d travelled through the city. The way she’d glanced up in the mirror near the merchant’s cart. Her request that I flip a shiny coin in the air twice in front of her. She’d been using those things to see behind us without being noticed, to secretly observe whoever’s following us.

  I spun around, my mind immediately filled with visions of armoured warriors, feral crowds and angry viziers come to carve my heart from my chest as punishment for some act or other of heresy. Given my conversation with the god back at the temple grounds, the very least I was guilty of was blasphemy.

  ‘Arta tuco, teysan,’ Rosie said, her tone a mixture of amusement and disappointment. ‘An Argosi must learn arta tu—’

  ‘I know what arta tuco means,’ I snapped angrily.

  ‘Then perhaps you could display some of it now,’ she suggested.

  She had a point. While subtlety wasn’t one of my strong suits, I usually had the sense to keep a low profile. Thing was, at that precise moment I didn’t give a damn about being subtle. I unclipped the flaps of the powder holsters at my sides. ‘If someone’s following us, just tell me where they are and I’ll go blast them out of existence.’

  ‘Now you’re talkin’!’ Reichis chittered from above us where he was running along the rain gutter of a shop roof. His fur shifted colours, changing from the subdued tones of the sandstone buildings to take on a fiery red. ‘Been hours since I ate a skinbag’s eyes.’

  I couldn’t imagine when in the last day he could possibly have had occasion to consume a human eyeball. I decided not to ask.

  ‘Arta eres is a skill best used judiciously and infrequently,’ Rosie said. ‘Save the fight for when the only path forward is the Way of Thunder.’

  ‘Would you stop trying to teach me and just get Ferius to the damned travellers’ saloon?’

  Rosie stopped and handed her to me. For a second I was afraid I’d gone too far and our only ally was about to abandon us. Instead, once I was holding Ferius, Rosie reached out a hand to brush my cheek, her fingers soft as rose petals. The gentle sensation was so at odds with the hardness I associated with her that it was as if she’d become a completely different person. ‘You are filled with fear for Ferius.’

  ‘She’s sick. She needs—’

  ‘You are right to fear for her. The Path of the Wild Daisy has been a long one. Improbably, impressively long. But I fear it comes soon to its final destination, as all our paths must.’

  I looked down at Ferius. ‘You mean she’s dying?’

  Rosie lifted my chin. ‘Argosi are not long-lived. Our paths are dangerous by design. One can be lucky only so many times. It is through skill and ruse that we survive, and eventually –’ she took Ferius back from me – ‘even the best of us runs out of cards to play.’

  Once again I looked around for any sign of pursuit. ‘You’re right,’ I conceded. ‘Let’s just lose whoever’s left and get Ferius help.’

  Rosie nodded as though I’d just given her an order and turned to resume her march through the city. ‘As you command, Path of Endless Stars, so it will be.’

  41

  The Travellers’ Saloon

  We finally stopped at a plain wooden door indistinguishable from the eight others that similarly fronted the row of attached single-storey buildings in this narrow alleyway.

  ‘Didn’t we pass this place twice already?’ I asked.

  ‘Good,’ Rosie said in reply, then stopped herself. ‘No, not quite good, but better. There were still two sets of spies following us when last we came by here.’

  I glanced back again, and saw no one. ‘And now?’

  ‘We left them behind three streets back. This is as safe a time to enter as we’re likely to find.’

  I moved to go ahead of her and open the door, but Rosie, still bearing Ferius in her arms, raised a foot and pushed it open. She wasted no time in entering the building, which turned out to be vastly larger than it had appeared from the outside. What must once have been a row of individual terraced homes had had the walls between them removed, leaving space for a huge common room filled with tables. Only a few of the men and women crowding the place looked to be Berabesq. I wondered how many of them were Argosi.

  ‘What happens if you enter through one of the other doors?’ I asked.

  ‘They are locked,’ Rosie replied.

  ‘And if someone notices that no one ever goes in or comes out and decides there might be something inside worth stealing?’

  ‘Burglary is punishable by death in the Berabesq territories. We Argosi follow the laws of the lands in which we find ourselves.’

  The faces of the men and women around the room suddenly struck me as much more dangerous than when we’d entered. I’d grown so accustomed to Ferius’s preference for avoiding violence. She wasn’t one to follow the Way of Thunder unless there was no other choice.

  ‘Come,’ Rosie said, moving across the room towards the bar
.

  People looked up, but no one barred our way and no one spoke to us, except the bartender, who barely glanced up from pouring ale into mugs to say, ‘Times like these, it’s best to stay indoors.’

  Rosie walked right past the end of the bar towards another door. ‘Times like these, it’s safest underground,’ she said.

  This wasn’t the usual passphrase I’d encountered in other travellers’ saloons. I wondered if the change was for this particular place or for the times we were in. Perhaps the usual phrase was too commonly known, so in times of war those in the know used the other one? I considered asking, but the Path of Thorns and Roses had never shown herself to be forthcoming about such matters.

  She pushed through the door at the end of the bar and waited for me to come behind her. As soon as the door closed, we found ourselves shrouded in complete darkness. ‘Count your steps,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not my first time,’ I said irritably.

  I imagined her shrugging. ‘I find myself often baffled by what things you know and what things you don’t, teysan. It was many years into my training before my maetri first brought me to a hosta pilgri.’

  ‘Ferius does things differently,’ I said, not bothering to mention that she’d never told me the Argosi referred to travellers’ saloons as ‘hosta pilgri’.

  Twenty-seven steps down the carved stone stairs we reached the end, and Rosie pushed open a final door that led us into what I’d come to think of as the real travellers’ saloon, the upstairs being little more than a front.

  From what I’d gleaned during my travels with Ferius, these sanctuaries could be found everywhere on the continent, from Gitabria in the south-east to Zhuban in the far north. Who had first built them, and to what purpose, was a mystery I doubted even the Argosi could answer. This one was much like the others I’d visited: a cavernous space below ground, carved into a stone chamber big enough that you could hide a small army down here. Lanterns hung from chains mounted into twenty-foot-high ceilings, lighting mismatched sets of tables and chairs, but leaving many a shadowy nook for secret conversations to take place and to mask the two or three exits that would lead to tunnels that provided escape, should the place get invaded. Far to the back were curtained-off sections – alcoves really – where greater privacy could be found, along with the occasional comfort artisan.

  Unlike the crowded common room above, only two tables down here were occupied. The first by a man sitting alone, boots up on the wooden table, his eyes hidden beneath a frontier hat much like the one I was wearing. It didn’t hide his smile though, or his resemblance to Dexan Videris – a fellow spellslinger and outlaw who had almost as much cause to kill me as I had him. Fortunately, when he raised the brim of his hat enough to reveal his face, I saw he was a little younger than Dexan, though just as irritatingly handsome. He made a gesture of tipping his hat towards me before reaching over to grab his mug to take a drink.

  Now that I could relax enough to remove my hands from my powder holsters, I noticed Rosie was leading us towards the second occupied table. A man and a woman sat there, leaning in close as they spoke quietly. When they saw us coming, they turned, and even in the dim light I recognised them: a grey-haired, grouchy-faced fellow by the name of Durral and a woman of the same years but considerably more gracious bearing, named Enna. Ferius’s foster parents.

  ‘Bring her to the couches,’ Enna said, pulling a leather case from under the table as she rose to take charge of the situation.

  Durral came over to us, his arms out. ‘Give her to me, Rosie.’

  ‘I am the Path of Thorns and Roses,’ she said as she gave over Ferius.

  ‘Yeah, well today I’m the Path of I Do Not Give A Crap.’ He carried his foster daughter to one of the curtained booths and laid her on a couch there.

  ‘Heh,’ Reichis chittered at Durral’s comment. ‘Gotta remember that one.’

  Enna opened up her leather case and pulled out an elegantly carved object that appeared to be made of two different polished woods. A dark one, almost mahogany black, shaped like a tiny bowl or jar, and, attached to it, a tubular stem made from what appeared to be cherrywood. It took me a second to understand what it was.

  ‘A pipe?’

  ‘Don’t get too close,’ Enna warned as she set down the pipe and removed a tiny satchel from inside the case. ‘Breathe too much of this in without the requisite preparation and you’re liable to end up running through the streets of Makhan Mebab flapping your arms like a bird and wondering why you can’t fly.’

  She pulled the top of the satchel open and began tapping out a portion of its contents into the pipe’s bowl. I counted four different kinds of powdered leaves inside. Two were green, though different textures. A third was brown the shade of manure – it might have been manure for all I knew. The fourth looked as if it was made from tiny, translucent shards of some kind of blue-green crystal. She carefully fished out one of the shards with a fingernail, depositing it back in the satchel and muttering, ‘Don’t want too much of that,’ as she pulled the drawstring tight. ‘Gonna need you to light this for me,’ she said.

  ‘Me? You want me to light a pipe with a spell that’s got a decent chance of blowing up the pipe, your hand and half your face?’

  ‘Need a little of your magic,’ she said calmly, though I was sure I noticed the pipe quivering in her hand. ‘The herbs, see, they’re a … conduit, of sorts.’

  ‘A conduit for what?’

  Durral gave a grunt. ‘You an expert on healin’ ways now, kid? Reckon we need your approval before we try to save our daughter?’

  ‘Don’t bite the boy’s head off, Durral,’ Enna scolded. To me she said, ‘It’s a little complicated, Kellen, and truth be told, none of us can be sure exactly what pieces of the puzzle work and which don’t make no difference at all. But the long and the short of it is, this malediction those viziers put on Ferius can’t be fought off with regular medicine. It takes … Well, I guess you’d say it takes spirit.’

  ‘Spirit?’

  ‘I expect that must sound a little strange to a former Jan’Tep initiate.’

  Strange? The idea was bizarre, superstitious and almost childish. To my people, magic was science. Forms of raw power existed everywhere in the world. The dangerous ores that clustered together underground beneath an oasis provided the means for an initiate to be banded in them. With the right training and talent, a Jan’Tep then used the language of somatic forms, esoteric geometry and syllabic intonations to channel those forces into a spell.

  What Enna was describing? Nonsense.

  Even whisper magic made more sense: disembodied but conscious spirits occupying planes close to ours but invisible to us could be communicated with, and, should they choose, they might perform various tasks that worked upon the laws of their planes and manifested as magical effects in ours.

  ‘Sometimes you’ve got to trust a little, Kellen,’ Enna said gently.

  I reached into my powder holsters, taking out infinitesimally small pinches of the red and black powders. ‘So, just light the herbs inside the pipe bowl?’

  ‘You’ll need to focus your will.’

  ‘I always have to focus my will,’ I replied testily. ‘Can’t cast the spell without it.’

  ‘I mean you need to do that and think about Ferius. It’s like … It’s like you’re calling out to her. Like she’s buried behind a rock fall, and the breath magic in your spell is a tiny straw passing through the rubble. You need to call to Ferius through that straw.’

  I felt Durral’s thick fingers clamp down on my shoulder. ‘And not miss.’

  Reichis gave him a growl on my behalf.

  ‘You think I ain’t wrastled a squirrel cat or two in my time?’ the old man asked.

  ‘The Path of the Rambling Thistle grows prickly in its old age,’ Rosie said.

  Her jibe brought back her earlier words about the Argosi not being long-lived. From the set of his jaw, Durral didn’t much appreciate the reminder of his advancing years. />
  ‘Don’t you get him started,’ Enna warned. She waved them all off. ‘Go on, the three of you, shoo. This is between me and Kellen and Ferius.’

  Reluctantly, Durral and Rosie took a few steps back. Reichis gave them each an extra snarl to make it clear to all concerned that he had won the stand-off, then hopped off my shoulder and set off towards the other occupied table. ‘Gonna go pick that guy’s pockets.’

  Enna reached out a hand and placed it on my forearm. ‘It’s okay, Kellen. You don’t have to believe. This business of maledictions and curses is its own kind of mess.’

  ‘Will this save Ferius? I mean, if we get it right?’

  She gave a weary shake of her head. ‘No, son, it won’t. But it’ll ease the symptoms. Give her a little strength so she can fight the malediction off awhile longer.’

  She took away her hand and I looked down at my fingertips. I had only a few grains of the red and black powders on the callouses of my thumbs and forefingers – just enough to cast the spell and send flame into the bowl of the pipe. I’d have to snap my fingers just right to get the grains to collide in the air between them and then channel the fires just right – all the while somehow pushing my own will into the spell to call out to Ferius.

  A straw through the rubble.

  I had to take another step back. It’s harder to aim when you’re too close to the target. Once I was sure I had the angles right, I snapped my fingers. The instant before the powders touched I shifted my hands into the somatic shapes and uttered the one-word incantation.

  ‘Carath.’

  Two thin threads of fire, red and black, spun around each other as they shot out. I realised too late my angle had been just a fraction off. Somehow Enna saw this in time and moved the pipe the half-inch needed so the flame struck the contents of the pipe bowl.

  ‘Back away now,’ Enna said. ‘Don’t want you breathing this in.’