Spellslinger 6: Crownbreaker

by Sebastien de Castell

  In fact, my powder blast had missed our pursuers by a mile, in no small part due to the dull numbness in my right shoulder where the blow dart had stuck me.

  Blow darts.

  Who uses blow darts? They’re not nearly as accurate as arrows or crossbow bolts. Don’t have the range either. Also, you’ve got to hit the target just right if you want to pierce anything useful like an artery in the neck or maybe an eye. You know the real reason people use blow darts? Poison. Blow darts are really good for dipping in poison and then killing your prey before they know what hit them.

  So why wasn’t I dead?

  The trio chasing us weren’t wearing the customary pale linen wrappings of the Faithful, but instead the traditional black and silver of Berabesq temple guards. Since we hadn’t even attempted to breach Mahkan’s walls yet, I had no idea why they’d be on our tail. Odder still, they’d hit me three times with the darts already. The first was in the shoulder, messing with my aim and preventing me from retaliating with my powder spell effectively, the second in my left leg, which had given me a stumbling limp that was slowing us all down.

  And the third? The third one had hit me in the arse. That one I’m certain was just spite.

  ‘Turn right,’ Nephenia called out as we approached the end of an alleyway. The voice coming out of her ironcloth mask sounded strange, a mixture of menacing whispers and distant echoes that fit perfectly with the demonic lines adorning the red lacquer features concealing her face. They made it hard to look at her, which might explain why she hadn’t been struck by any blow darts.

  The real question was, why hadn’t our pursuers just hit me in the neck and put an end to me? For that matter, why was the poison so mild? I was pretty sure it wasn’t killing me. In fact, it seemed to be wearing off quickly.

  They’ve been sent to capture, not kill. But why?

  ‘There’s another one coming along the roof!’ Reichis warned.

  I glanced up to see the silhouette of a short woman running nimbly along the rooftop above us. She raised a thin tube the length of her forearm up to her lips.

  ‘I’ve got her,’ Nephenia said, digging into one of the pockets of her coat for what would no doubt be a devilishly clever charm that would quickly dispatch our assailant.

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ I shouted back. I pulled one of the castradazi coins from the hem of my shirt.

  The problem with Nephenia’s charms is that most of them only work once, and we would need every weapon in her arsenal just to get inside the temple. It wasn’t at all because I was irrationally annoyed by getting hit with blow darts all the time and tired of looking like a clumsy idiot.

  The art of coin dancing involves a lot of subtle and precise movements – something not suited to running down an alley with one numb shoulder and a limp. But I’d had a lot of practice over the past couple of years, and besides, the lomocastra – or ‘luminary’ as I’d come to call it – was the easiest to work with. Actually, I’m not sure if lomocastra was its proper name. The guy who’d gifted me with these five coins had never bothered to tell me their names or – and this was the more inconvenient part – how they worked. After a lot of trial and error, I’d figured out a few tricks with them and given each one a name. The warden’s coin, for example, when flipped just right, could bind itself magnetically to an appar-atus and then be used to manipulate it. That made it excellent for picking locks. Conversely, the fugitive coin could be bound to an object in such a way that if I threw the coin, the other object would be yanked along with it.

  I’d considered trying to use the fugitive coin to tear that blowpipe away from my pursuer, but the problem with coins like the fugitive and the warden is that it’s incredibly tricky to make the actual binding work – you have to flip them over and over until you find the exact right motion and angle that aligns it to the target. The luminary didn’t need any of that. Instead, when flipped quickly enough, it would react to light in a rather impressive way.

  The steel tip of a dart clattered against the cobblestones at my feet.

  ‘She’s takin’ aim again,’ Reichis chittered. ‘And there’re two more closin’ in behind us.’

  ‘I’m on it,’ I said.

  Ever tried running with a limp while flipping a coin? It’s exactly as hard as it sounds.

  I tossed the luminary in the air once, twice, thrice, searching for that strange buoyant sensation that signalled it was coming back down slower than it went up, pirouetting in the graceful way that told me the coin was ready to dance.

  Come on … Come on …

  The luminary, already the shiniest of the five coins, began to glimmer as it reflected the moonlight from above.

  There!

  I had to come to a stop because now the coin was resisting returning to earth, briefly floating in the air every time I flipped it. I gave it one more toss, higher this time, and as it spun free I pulled powder from the holsters at my side. My toss was clumsy, thanks to my numb right shoulder, but the powders collided and I managed the somatic shapes and incantation in time to spark the spell. Twin red and black flames shot through the air.

  They missed the coin of course – if I’d been able to achieve that level of accuracy in that moment I’d’ve just blasted my pursuers. Fortunately all the luminary needed was the flash of light.

  ‘Close your eyes!’ I warned Nephenia and the others as I shut my own tightly.

  Even through closed eyelids, the shattering, disorienting explosion of light was blinding. I’d given the luminary its name on account of the way it not only reflected light while dancing, but amplified it back a hundredfold.

  I heard grunts and groans behind me. When I opened my eyes and glanced back, I saw two of our pursuers stumbling blindly in the dark. Up on the rooftop, the woman with the blowpipe missed a step and tumbled over the side. Luckily for her, she bounced off the awning above a shop before hitting the ground at our feet. The loud crack as she landed on her side didn’t sound pleasant though.

  ‘Heh,’ Reichis chittered, squinting down at the unconscious woman. ‘That’s gonna hurt when she wakes up.’

  The luminary coin fell back down to land in the palm of my hand. I pressed it there so it would stick and held my hand out in front of me. Even now the coin was bright enough to use as a lantern, sending a clear beam of light ahead of us wherever I aimed it.

  ‘How long’s that going to glow like that?’ Nephenia asked as we left our temporarily sightless and confused pursuers several streets behind us.

  ‘Hard to say exactly,’ I replied, finally coming to a stop on the narrow, sloping avenue I’d been searching for since we left the saloon. ‘The luminary reacts differently to various kinds of light. If I leave it exposed to the sun all day, it’ll shine most of the night. We’ll get at least an hour out of it from my powder blast, which should give us enough time to find the entrance to the tunnel that runs beneath Mebab and past Makhan’s outer walls.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Nephenia said, catching her breath. ‘There doesn’t appear to be a charm attached to the coin itself, but rather some innate property of its metallic composition.’ She glanced around the innocuous collection of shuttered shops and alley entrances around us. ‘And you’re positive there’s a tunnel here?’

  ‘Positive’s a strong word, but yeah, I’m positive.’

  I figured locating the entrance to the tunnel was just a matter of backtracking to the exact spot where Ferius had first pointed out the vizier who had clearly come from inside the temple and yet hadn’t exited from any of the doors. The only problem was, now that we were here, all I could see was a long row of decrepit single-storey sandstone buildings with white painted doors that all looked the same. I didn’t fancy the idea of picking the lock on some unsuspecting Berabesq family’s door, only to have to explain why two Jan’Tep spies and a pair of wild animals had just busted into their home.

  Ishak and Reichis began sniffing their way along the avenue, the squirrel cat taking great pains to express his lack of optimis
m about finding anything worth stealing here, the hyena giving little barks of agreement.

  ‘Don’t suppose one of your castradazi coins can show us the way to the tunnel?’ Nephenia asked.

  I reached into the hidden hem of my shirt. Aside from the luminary, I had a warden’s coin, a fugitive, one I called the watcher for its eye – open on one side and closed on the other but which I had no idea how to use – and finally the stinger – so named because it stung the hells out of me every time I tried to figure out how to use it. I couldn’t see how any of them could help with this particular task.

  Ishak, who’d been sniffing around at each of the doors in turn, gave a series of yips.

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked.

  Before Nephenia could translate, Reichis chittered, ‘The hyena’s wondering why we don’t just try the door with the dead guy behind it.’

  46

  The Corpse

  I’ve been around a fair number of dead bodies in my time. It’s an occupational hazard, given my profession mostly involves having people try to kill me on a regular basis. But I don’t think I’d ever seen this much blood come out of one person before. The front of the vizier’s white penitent’s robes were scarlet from the deluge of his own blood.

  ‘Why slit his throat and hold him here until he bled out?’ Nephenia asked, sounding more than a little ill. She generally manages to get through life without witnessing as many murders as I do. ‘Was this some kind of ceremonial killing?’

  ‘More likely the killer wanted to keep him from calling for help.’

  I swallowed my own revulsion at the grizzly scene and knelt down to see what else I could find. Usually to slit someone’s throat, you grab them from behind. Given the lack of any spray of blood on the narrow walls of the passageway in the direction the vizier was facing, that suggested he’d been attacked just after the door had closed behind him.

  So had someone been waiting for him? No, because this wasn’t an ideal spot for an ambush. Too easy to be spotted as soon as the victim opened the door. ‘I think whoever did this was looking for the same tunnel we are. They followed the vizier until he led them to it, then killed him.’

  ‘How long has he been dead?’

  I gestured for Reichis to come closer. The squirrel cat sniffed at the corpse a couple of times before scrunching up his muzzle. ‘Four hours.’

  Ishak wandered over and inspected the body for a moment before giving a terse yip.

  ‘Four,’ Reichis insisted.

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. He’s a stupid hyena.’

  ‘Six hours,’ Nephenia translated.

  Reichis scowled at her. He gets a little jealous of Ishak’s superior olfactory abilities sometimes.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, trying to make sense of the scene before us. I could make out several sets of footprints smearing the vizier’s blood, all of them headed towards the outer door. Much harder to discern was the fact that one set of boot marks went in both directions – stepping in the blood on the way out, but avoiding it on the path leading deeper into the tunnel.

  ‘What are you seeing?’ Nephenia asked.

  ‘After the vizier died, the killer led those temple guards we ran into on a merry chase through the streets of Mebab – probably near enough the saloon that, after they lost him, they waited around for him to reappear.’

  ‘Which is why they chased the first foreigner they saw leaving the saloon, which happened to be you.’

  I nodded. ‘Only by then the real killer had already circled back to enter the tunnel.’

  She looked down the darkened passageway ahead of us. ‘So there’s a new player on the board. What do they want?’

  My gaze went to the body on the ground. Most killings are sloppy; even professionals make little mistakes here and there. Yet the assassination of the vizier and subsequent infiltration of the tunnels had been masterfully executed. How many of those Argosi back at the saloon had wanted to take the scourge from me and go end the threat of the Berabesq god once and for all? The words spoken by the Path of Mountain Storms came back to me: ‘If it were down to me? I’d forget everything Ferius ever taught me, give up any claim I would ever have to call her my friend and go kill whoever I had to in order to save her life.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said, turning to the sloping passage that would take us underneath the walls protecting the temple city of Makhan. I held up my luminary coin and followed its beam to begin the descent down slippery stones into the darkness.

  ‘Wait,’ Nephenia said as we reached the first bend in the passage. ‘Where are Reichis and Ishak?’

  She started to turn back, but I took her arm and led on down the tunnel. I was pretty sure I knew what the squirrel cat was up to anyway. ‘They’ll be along in a minute,’ I said. ‘You probably don’t want to see what they’re doing.’

  ‘Don’t put this on me,’ the squirrel cat called down from the entrance to the tunnel, mangling his words as he chewed noisily. ‘If somebody had fed us back at the saloon, we wouldn’t need a snack now.’

  As it turned out, the lack of appropriate snacks turned out to be the least of Reichis’s gripes.

  ‘Never thought I’d end my days stuck in a maze,’ he grumbled up at me. ‘Had a more noble death planned, you know?’

  ‘Yeah? Like what?’ I asked, shining the rapidly diminishing light of the luminary coin ahead into yet another dank passageway.

  Ferius and I had been wrong about there being a simple tunnel to the temple. Beneath the meticulously designed streets of Mebab were the remnants of a much older city whose citizens had no doubt died from starvation after getting lost in the labyrinthine avenues that seemed to turn back on themselves every few blocks. Worse, with everything in ruins, we’d get a few dozen yards down one passage, only to find the way blocked by wreckage. We’d turn back in search of a way around it, only to hit yet another dead end.

  ‘Gonna die here,’ Reichis mumbled.

  Ishak gave a perky yip.

  ‘Shut up,’ the squirrel cat replied, then added, ‘stupid hyena.’

  I pulled out the card the Path of Mountain Storms had given me, hoping that somewhere on his intricate little map there might be some clue as to where the secret passage entered the temple, but nothing in those tiny lines suggested a hidden entrance.

  ‘Kellen, are you okay?’ Nephenia asked. ‘You’re sweating.’

  ‘I’m fine. Great, really. Having the time of my life.’

  Shortly before I’d left my home three years ago, I’d found myself in the mine shafts beneath our city’s oasis. That’s when I first discovered that I really, really hate enclosed spaces.

  ‘Them walls don’t look stable,’ Reichis said, scratching at one with his claws. ‘Won’t be long before one of ’em falls on us.’

  ‘Stop doing that,’ I said.

  He inhaled noisily. ‘Air’s stale down here. We’ll probably suffocate first.’

  ‘Shut up, Reichis.’

  He sniffed again. ‘Pretty sure I smell rats. Lots of them. Bet they’ve got crocodiles down here too.’

  One of Ishak’s stranger attributes is his ability to mimic anything he hears. He chose to display it now by perfectly repeating, ‘They’ve got crocodiles down here too.’

  Reichis jumped as if a pair of fang-filled jaws was snapping at his tail. By the time he landed again, all his fur was sticking straight up.

  ‘You’re really not helping,’ Nephenia chided the hyena.

  Ishak responded by making a series of laughing yip-yip sounds as he paraded around Reichis.

  ‘Could everyone please be quiet?’ I asked, wiping more sweat from my brow. ‘I’m trying to find a way into the temple.’

  I kept staring at the card, scrutinising it again and again for something I was already pretty sure wasn’t there. My vision was blurry and my lungs had to work harder than they should to draw in breath. The others seemed fine though, which meant it was just my claustrophobia getting the better of
me. Unfortunately, when I get like this, Reichis gets confused and starts looking for reasons to explain my anxiety.

  ‘Stinks of rot too. Stinks of skinbags. Stinks of sewa—’

  ‘Would you stop?’ I whispered furiously. ‘I’m trying to figure out a way to find the route those other “skinbags” took when they—’

  ‘What is it?’ Reichis asked, unnerved by the look of surprise on my face. ‘Did you see somethin’? Was it a crocodile?’ The squirrel cat’s head spun left and right, convinced he was about to be snapped in half.

  ‘What’s wrong with Reichis?’ Nephenia asked.

  I knelt down and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck to get him to pay attention to me. ‘You said you smelled skinbags, right? How many?’

  The squirrel cat snarled at me, then gave a shrug. ‘Just the remnants of a couple of scents. Guess they don’t have too many that come down …’ His beady little eyes seemed to light up as a grin came over his fuzzy brown muzzle. ‘Say, Kellen?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’ve just devised a brilliant plan.’

  ‘Is it to use your keen squirrel cat sense of smell to follow the freshest trail of skinbag stench until it leads us right into the temple?’

  ‘No, dummy. Squirrel cat noses are way too refined to track skinbags with all this stench around.’ He sauntered over and hopped up onto Ishak’s back. ‘But hyenas don’t mind the stink.’

  47

  The Maze

  The luminary coin had lost all its light before we found the entrance to the temple. Reichis was riding on Ishak’s back, and the hyena’s sense of smell guided them unerringly past the obstacles all around us. The two of them had the advantage of being lower to the ground. Nephenia and I, on the other hand, having neither light nor particularly useful noses, kept bashing our heads repeatedly into low-hanging beams from the broken-down buildings of the ancient city. This, I thought, provided an excellent excuse for me to hold Nephenia’s hand and take the lead. For Reichis, my chivalrous impulse was a source of great mirth.