Spellslinger 6: Crownbreaker

by Sebastien de Castell

  The fire-fan isn’t an especially dangerous form of breath magic, but the way it splits apart the licks of flame, shedding them like drops of water into the air above me, puts on quite a show.

  Excellent, I thought, seeing the reaction of the other Argosi. Now all the weapons are pointed at me.

  ‘The marshal’s with me,’ I repeated.

  ‘She shot Ferius in the back!’ the Path of Mountain Storms pointed out. He, even more than Lily or Emerald or any of the others, seemed determined to deliver some righteous vengeance upon Torian. I guess he felt the same loyalty to Ferius I did, on account of her being his maetri.

  ‘Don’t reckon it would’ve hurt any less in the front, Stormy,’ Ferius said.

  That, at least, got a chuckle here and there.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘it’s simple. Our only play is to get him out of the city and to the border where the queen’s been amassing the Daroman army.’

  ‘What good will that do?’ Durral, Ferius’s father, asked.

  ‘In theory, Shujan is the Berabesq head of state.’

  Durral’s brow furrowed. ‘Shujan? Like the game?’

  ‘He asked me to give him a – Look, can we just focus on the plan here? If I can put Shujan and the queen in a room together, explain what’s been going on, they could hammer out some sort of deal.’

  ‘Only if he stays alive that long,’ Ferius said, pointing to the boy. ‘He don’t look so good to me.’

  She can talk, Shujan said in my mind.

  If you have something, you know, useful to offer, now would be the time, I replied.

  He surprised me by pushing himself up from the chair. He managed two steps before he stumbled and fell. Oddly, it was Torian – her reflexes outstripping even those of the Argosi nearby – who caught him and pulled his arm over her shoulder to help him stand. He smiled at her before turning to the others.

  ‘I have recently come to learn that I am not a god,’ he said. ‘Five miracles have I performed, yet none of them were mine to choose.’ The hand that wasn’t holding on to Torian shook as it reached up to pull at the neck of his robes, revealing the unfinished markings inscribed into the flesh of his shallow chest. ‘I will never know what sixth marvel the Arcanists had in store for me.’

  ‘You should sit back down,’ Torian said quietly. ‘Save your strength for—’

  ‘No. Kellen is right. I wish to travel to the border, where in my name the machinations of destiny or distrust seem intent on bringing our war and bloodshed to other nations. I cannot do this alone, and so must one who had believed himself a god beg for the kindness of strangers.’

  Rosie, who’d been silent up until now – which made me incredibly nervous, since I recalled she rarely bothered to announce her intentions before following the Way of Thunder – came closer and asked, ‘You are weak, godling, and death stalks your footsteps. Whatever power you once had flees at his approach. Even if you survived the journey, what could you possibly hope to accomplish?’

  His hand came away from the neck of his robes, falling limp at his side. One ragged breath after another accompanied the stuttering rise and fall of his chest. But when he spoke, he did so with a conviction that silenced us all. ‘I would seek with what little is left of my life to finally perform a miracle of my own choosing.’

  56

  City of Fire

  Makhan Mebab went to hells with a speed and ferocity only possible when the right words are spread like wildfire – whispered, shouted, wept, prayed: They have killed our god.

  Chaos began as a manic, malignant thing. Smouldering anger and outrage, having nowhere else to go, burned inward. Men and women fought in the streets, accused each other of blasphemy, of bringing the end of Berabesq down upon the heads of the pious and the venal alike. Those who worshipped God the warrior blamed those who saw him as a penitent for so weakening their society that a foreign agent of Darome – for that part of the story everyone had clearly understood – had been able to enter the temple and murder him. Worshippers of the clockmaker blamed the militant, however, for their rank stupidity in failing to understand the intricacies of Berabesq’s enemies. On and on it went, and the streets of Makhan Mebab flooded with blood.

  ‘Ain’t your fault, kid,’ Ferius said as she and three other Argosi – the Path of Mountain Storms, the Path of Floating Lilies, and Rosie – guided Nephenia, Ishak, Torian, Shujan, Reichis and myself along connected rooftops, down hidden alleyways and sometimes beneath the streets themselves. ‘This was gonna happen no matter what went down inside that temple.’

  Shujan, for his part, wept endlessly as he witnessed the rabid bloodshed. ‘Could I not … If I revealed myself, pretended to be who they wanted me to—’

  ‘Khata Batab,’ Rosie said, cutting him off.

  Shujan looked horrified.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked, not recognising the term.

  ‘It means “liar’s face”,’ she said. ‘The clockmaker’s codex speaks of a false god who, should the true god be killed, will come to Berabesq to lead the unwitting and the unbelievers down to hell.’

  The Path of Floating Lilies – though I was coming to think of her just as ‘Lily’ – grunted angrily. ‘Bad enough we have to deal with a conspiracy; now we’re up against religion itself.’

  ‘Well, guess that’s what happens when you have so many to choose from,’ Torian said.

  Lily turned on her. ‘You don’t get to talk about this particular disaster, marshal, given it is a crisis of your making.’

  ‘Leave it be,’ Rosie warned. ‘We must be like water now, and flow around the obstacles in our way.’

  Lily snorted. ‘Says the woman for whom the Way of Thunder has traditionally been the answer to all problems.’

  ‘Just keep moving,’ Ferius said, sounding as exhausted from the in-fighting as she was from her malediction.

  It was strange how often the Argosi seemed to rub each other the wrong way. Alone they always seemed so calm, so wise and certain, but anytime two of them got together, it was like tinder on dry leaves, just waiting to ignite.

  Maybe that’s why they travel alone, I thought, remembering back to something Enna – Ferius’s mother – had told me about her and her husband. ‘Durral and I happen to be on the same path. One day, our paths will diverge and I’ll have to say goodbye to him.’

  I looked over at Ferius as she trudged doggedly through the tunnel, ignoring the screams and shouts coming from the streets above, ignoring her own pain. Some part of me had hoped that if we could survive all this, she – along with Nephenia, Ishak, Reichis and myself – would resume our travels together. There had been a brief time when the five of us had been a kind of family. Those memories seemed almost childish now.

  Ferius must’ve known I was staring at her, because she glanced over and flashed me a smile. ‘Get a move on, kid. Can’t carry you all the way to the border, you know.’

  It took us three full days just to reach the outskirts of Makhan Mebab. We had to stop often, waiting for one mob or another to finish bringing whatever wave of destruction best suited their outrage to whichever group they blamed the most. Sometimes we had to turn back because fires had taken over entire city blocks. Our progress was slow, exhausting and heartbreaking.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ Nephenia said one night when we were sitting away from the others.

  ‘Me neither.’

  She didn’t seem to have heard me. Her eyes stared unfocused at the fires outside the broken window of the burned-out shop in which we’d taken temporary refuge. ‘I thought I’d witnessed all kinds of horrors. The onyx worms. The massacre at the Ebony Abbey as the monks and the war coven tore at each other with spells and shadowblack and just pure hatred.’ Her hand trembled as she brought it up to cover her mouth, as though her body were instinctively trying to keep the misery from spewing out of her. ‘The things my father did to me … I used to think he was a monster. An aberration. Now I wonder if maybe he was just like everybody else,
a fragile shell of a human being, just barely holding himself together until one day something cracked the veneer of civilisation to reveal all the cruelty and desire underneath.’

  The longer she spoke, the quieter she became, as if the air was being drawn away from her lungs, leaving nothing but emptiness behind. My attempts at consoling people I care about have a habit of failing spectacularly. A wiser soul than mine would have long ago learned to keep silent.

  ‘Eat?’ I asked, handing her one of the sticks of gristly beef Rosie had provided.

  She took it from me and, after a grudging inspection, bit down on it.

  ‘Do you remember how much it bothered you when I covered up my shadowblack?’ I asked, tapping the markings around my left eye.

  Nephenia gave a mute nod. Jerky is remarkably tough to chew, which made it difficult for her to talk. That was pretty much my plan for getting through this uninterrupted.

  ‘I used to think the shadowblack meant I was irredeemably broken – that some day a demon would take possession of my soul and turn me into a monster. Then a year ago, when I was first in Darome, a monk they called a “white binder” managed to control me through the markings. I discovered then that there are worse things to fear in this life than having a demon take your soul.’

  I shuddered at the memory. Still to this day the visions it brought back made me sick to my stomach. Colfax had sworn to me, as his last breath was leaving him, that it had all been a set-up. A performance. The girl herself had written to me months later. She’d discovered the truth of why he’d hired her and hated having been a part of what the marshal and the white binder had done to me. I’d written back, thanking her for that kindness, but my self-hatred had remained. I hadn’t been intimate with anyone since.

  ‘Kellen?’ Nephenia said, a hand on my arm. ‘Are you okay?’

  I almost laughed then. I’d been trying to devise a way to make her feel better, knowing it probably wouldn’t work. But you don’t fight despondency with inspiring words. With someone like Nephenia, you need to give her the opportunity to rescue you.

  ‘Are you laughing at me?’ she asked.

  ‘Not you precisely,’ I said.

  ‘Then who? Because it certainly looks like you’re laughing at—’

  I leaned over and kissed her on the lips. She seemed surprised but didn’t pull away, so neither did I.

  Every kiss we’d ever shared had stayed with me throughout my travels. The first was just as she was about to face her final mage’s trial, after my entire clan had seen that I was shadowblack. The next was when Ferius and I had found her in the desert, hunted down by the Faithful because she’d disguised herself as me to draw away their pursuit. Then there was that time outside the Ebony Abbey after my father’s war coven had destroyed it. I’d wanted to follow Neph to wherever she was going next, but she said that while she thought she loved me, she’d never know for sure until she met the man I would become once I finally stopped being the boy I’d once been.

  So had I at last become that man? I couldn’t say for sure. But, ancestors, I’d been trying.

  I pulled away from her at last. She smiled at me, but the impenetrable sorrow of what we were witnessing all around us was still there. ‘The world’s full of darkness, Neph,’ I said. ‘Depredations and degradations and devils of every kind walking about in human form.’ I took her hands in mine. ‘But it’s also got you, so really the scales are just about balanced, as far as I’m concerned.’

  Not my best poetry, but it wasn’t meant to be. I hadn’t reached the punchline.

  Neph raised an eyebrow. ‘Because I’m still the pretty little flower upon whom you pin all your lovelorn hopes?’

  ‘Because you’re my hero.’

  Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak.

  Every once in a while I get the words right.

  After a pause, she leaned towards me, resting her forehead against mine. ‘Kellen?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’ve missed you a lot.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Me too.’

  57

  City of Sorrow

  I could have lived the rest of my life in that moment. In fact, I’m pretty sure we’d both started to drift off when a long, wailing scream pierced the darkness, coming from somewhere down the street outside our burned-out hideaway. It wasn’t the first we’d heard that night. It wouldn’t be the last.

  ‘How long do we have to stay in this damned place?’ Torian called out angrily. She’d been stewing by herself in a corner on the other side of the shop, between a pair of fallen shelves, their wares looted before the building had been set afire.

  ‘Awhile yet,’ Ferius said, her own attention still focused on the game of cards she was playing with Rosie and the Path of Mountain Storms, trying to discern a new pattern in the evidence we’d uncovered from the stolen Arcanists’ books. I’d told her about seeing my mother’s handwriting in the drawings describing their spells. She hadn’t seemed surprised, which troubled me all the more.

  ‘Why do we wait?’ Torian demanded. ‘Are we just sitting here so you can keep staring at those idiot Argosi cards.’

  ‘Gotta learn to feel the rhythms, girl. We walk outta here now, we’ll be swept up in the chaos. We wait a little longer, the thirst for blood will ease and we can make our way through the mobs without bein’ noticed.’

  That seemed to settle the matter, but a short while later Nephenia took hold of my chin and turned my head to where Torian was sitting. ‘You’d better go talk to her,’ Neph said.

  ‘I think she wants to be alone.’

  ‘Then your arta precis needs work.’

  Reluctantly, I rose and walked to the shadows on the other side of the shop. Only then did I see that Torian had been weeping silently this whole time.

  ‘Is this my fault?’ she asked when I sat down next to her.

  ‘How could it be?’

  ‘I shot your friend, slowed you down. Maybe if you’d gotten here sooner, or if she’d gone to the temple with you, or if—’

  ‘We were set up,’ I said, cutting her off. ‘All of us. It’s as simple as that. Even if you hadn’t come along, we’d still be in the same boat right now.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’ She shook her head. ‘My whole life I’ve refused to follow any order I didn’t believe in. Told my mother a hundred times to go to hell – that I’d never join the Murmurers like her and become some spy or assassin, killing off the empire’s enemies without ever letting them see my face. But this time I was so sure she was right. One death to stop a hundred thousand others? I knew you wouldn’t make that trade. You’re not built for it. I used to think I wasn’t either.’ She looked over at Shujan, who was slumped against one of the walls, one hand wearily petting Ishak, who sat next to him, keeping him warm. ‘I never believed he was God,’ Torian said. The words seemed to wrench at her.

  ‘Why should you? The Daroman are no more religious than the Jan’Tep. None of us—’

  ‘I never believed he was God, which meant he was just a boy. And I was going to kill him anyway. I was willing to take that scourge from you and wrap it around his throat and watch him choke to death.’

  ‘None of us knew what—’

  ‘You did,’ she said. ‘Right from the beginning, you refused to believe that assassination could be the path to peace.’

  ‘Guess I’ve never seen it work out that way before, so why would it now?’

  She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes, staunching the tears. ‘I have. Every time I’ve hunted down a fugitive, whether it ended with me dragging him back in irons or leaving him drowning in his own blood, the end result has been a safer world for everyone else. A better world. It’s not like I enjoy killing people. I mean, I love the fight. I love that look in a man’s eyes when he’s sure – right down to his bones sure – that he’s going to break my pretty little face apart, only to find himself flat on the ground looking up at me and wondering if today’s his last day on earth. But I’ve never kil
led unless I had to, unless there was no other choice.’

  Over her shoulder I saw Ferius signalling quietly that it was time to leave.

  ‘That’s the problem with death,’ I said, rising to my feet and extending a hand to Torian. ‘You never really know if you have a choice until it’s too late.’

  By the time we finally reached Makhan Mebab’s massive outer defensive walls, a change had come over the city. What had begun as chaotic, frenzied violence had gradually transformed into something far more dangerous. The council of viziers, with the help of the clerical guards and military commanders, had, step by step, block by block, taken control. Now the people of Makhan Mebab, whether followers of the warrior, the gardener, or any of the other faces of God, were united in one purpose: to bring the enemies of Berabesq to justice.

  ‘Well,’ Ferius said as we made our way through one of the less-travelled gates out of the city, ‘we sure stepped in that one.’

  Her old student, the Path of Mountain Storms, looked back at the walls of Makhan Mebab with a despair I’d never seen on the face of an Argosi. ‘Every foreigner will be suspect. They’ll be rounded up and interrogated.’

  ‘They’ll be killed,’ Rosie said. ‘The Way of Thunder rules this place now, and the lightning will strike a great many before the storm passes.’

  The young man winced at her choice of metaphors, and I wondered whether perhaps this had something to do with her opinion of the particular path he’d named himself after. ‘I saw every deck of every Argosi at the saloon,’ he said. ‘Played every one of my cards to every one of theirs. None of us saw this pattern emerge. Not until it was too late.’

  ‘We don’t always get it right, kid,’ Ferius said. ‘Sometimes no matter how you count the cards, they all add up to war, and there ain’t no play to make ’cept to save what few you can.’

  I felt an odd jealousy at hearing her refer to him as ‘kid’. I tried to shunt that away. ‘It’s not over yet. That commander we met, Keliesh, he wasn’t a warmonger. If he—’