‘Well now,’ Ferius said, dusting herself off and adjusting her frontier hat, ‘looks like we’ve got ourselves a fight.’
62
The Game of Shujan
A tense stand-off held the desert in its grip, the only sound that of anxious breaths as each and every one of us waited for the spark that would set off a wildfire of violence and bloodshed. The sun was just beginning to peek out over the desert horizon, as if rising to see what would happen next.
I found myself taking one of my castradazi coins from the hem of my shirt in my left hand, feeling its weight, the coolness of it, but mostly the way it felt like a prophecy of this moment. Argosi and Jan’Tep. Tricksters and mages. Opposite sides of the same coin. Flip that coin and how would it land?
For once I wasn’t scared. In fact, the moment was … beautiful, in a way. There’s this thing that so many warriors I’ve met in my travels, from soldiers to marshals to Torian herself, talk about with an almost mystical awe. How had she put it?
‘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.’
No. That wasn’t it, not exactly. I remember one night playing dice with a group of Daroman soldiers, asking them if they got scared going into battle. They told me fear was part of it, but if you dug underneath you found this strange sense of wonder. You wouldn’t understand what it was at first, but then your eyes would go to the man or woman on your left, to the one on your right, and without a word being said you’d know that person was going to put their life on the line for you, and you for them. ‘There’s no other way to put it,’ one of the soldiers had said to me. ‘It’s beyond fellowship, beyond friendship or family. It’s like …’
The woman next to him, her face a patchwork of scars, with one eye covered by a worn black patch, said, ‘It’s like walking through the gates of the greatest city in the world. The one that can’t exist because no architect could ever conceive of it. The one you’d never think twice of giving your life to protect, because though you know that once you’ve died defending its walls, your spirit will always be part of it.’
Standing there with Ferius and Nephenia and the other Argosi, with Reichis and his hastily recruited army of squirrel cats, I felt myself standing before the gates of that magnificent city. To fight alongside them would be glorious. A wonder for the ages as a battalion of rag-tag brothers-in-arms battled an implacable enemy to defend a peace that seemed impossible. That would be some kind of miracle.
But then my thoughts turned to a different game – the one I’d played with Keliesh all those nights on the road to Berabesq.
‘Vizier Quozhu advises –’ the quadan began all his lessons as if it were vitally important to ensure I knew any wisdom he offered belonged to someone else – ‘that for all the thousands of strategies written about shujan, there are only two ways to approach the game.’ He held up one of his blue-painted wooden archers. ‘Consider every piece as a living person whose fate is in your hands, or treat every life as if it were merely a piece on the board, to be used and discarded as needed.’
Despite my limited experience with both the game and Berabesq philosophy, I had recently become something of an expert in the ease with which people treated human lives as nothing more than little wooden pieces on a hexagonal board. As I pondered what would happen next, I felt the markings of my shadowblack being to pinch, eager to twist and turn and show me the potential outcomes of this new game. I forced the sensation away though. I didn’t need my enigmatism to know what would happen next.
The Jan’Tep would wield their spells with deadly efficiency, countered by the myriad tricks of the Argosi and the fierce courage of the squirrel cats. Many on both sides would die, their screams eaten up by the vastness of the desert, their bones left to rot in the sand.
Somehow I knew I’d survive.
I’m not sure why I was so convinced of that outcome. I guess it’s just that I’d faced so many terrible odds in the past few years I wasn’t capable of imagining any scenario that didn’t result in me standing there while someone else lay on the ground at my feet in a pool of their own blood.
All except one.
Sometimes life is a roll of the dice, but I’ve always been more of a card player myself.
My father waited, daring me to speak, to defy him. Slowly, taking care to make sure I hadn’t broken any ribs when he’d thrown me to the sand, I adjusted my powder holsters on my belt, made sure the strap holding my deck of throwing cards was secure around my thigh, checked for each of my other four castradazi coins, and only then turned back to my father and uttered the one-word incantation: ‘No.’
63
The Countdown
There had been no magic behind the word I’d uttered, barely even any real defiance, yet it hit Ke’heops as hard as a slap across the face. ‘No?’ he asked, disbelieving.
‘No, Father. No betrayal of your allies. No slaughter of their armies. No great Jan’Tep ascendancy to dominate the continent. No more.’
He gestured to the Argosi all around me. ‘You can’t believe that these wandering desert gamblers and a few nekhek can defeat a war coven?’
‘I honestly don’t know,’ I replied. ‘But I don’t plan to find out.’
‘You seem to think you have some say in the matter.’
He made his bands flare, which struck me as unnecessary showing-off.
‘Yes, yes,’ I said, waving his display of power away, ‘you’ve got all sorts of fancy spells. But I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve and I think you’ll find, when push comes to shove, they’re a lot more effective.’ I stepped back and knelt down to draw a circle in the sand around myself.
An expression of confusion came to Ke’heops’s noble features. ‘You can’t seriously propose to duel me?’
‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘I’ve duelled bounty mages and hextrackers, initiates and lords magi. They all had more power than me, and not one of them ever beat me.’
Well, technically, Freckles, that kid back in the Seven Sands, had beaten me to a pulp. But he was thirteen years old and had no magic at all, so if the mathematics of it all applied, I should be able to defeat Ke’heops easy.
I turned to look at Ferius and all the Argosi around her. I wondered when was the last time so many of them had come to one place, ready to do the one thing the Argosi reviled more than anything else, the very opposite of what they stood for: to wage war. Worse, they were ready to do battle, to die here in this lousy desert, for me.
That thought was the one thing pushing me down this path, the one thing keeping me from falling to my knees and begging my father’s forgiveness. The one thing holding me to the Way of Stone.
The Argosi and the squirrel cats had to live so there would be one final chance to stop chaos and destruction from washing over the continent. That meant this next part – weakening my father’s rule in however small a way was possible – had to be my fight alone.
‘Once it starts,’ I told them, ‘nobody interferes.’
My father shook his head, doing a very good job, I thought, of not looking back at his allies. ‘I do not duel Sha’Tep.’
I held up my right fist, sending my will through the breath band until it sparked with shimmering blue light. ‘I’m not Sha’Tep though, Father; you know that. Despite your best efforts, I still have my breath band. You know why? Because that “filthy nekhek” came and set me free from the table you had me strapped to.’
Ke’heops snorted as if he’d just won an argument. ‘You said you forgave us, and yet still you—’
I felt the urge to sigh then, even despite the pounding drumbeat in my chest that threatened to make my entire body quiver. I was not ready for what was to come. Would never be ready. ‘I do forgive you, Father,’ I said. ‘I swear I do. But I won’t allow you to ruin the world, to desecrate all the beauty I’ve witnesse
d in the lands and people beyond our borders.’
Uncertainty played across his face. Was it simply the natural aversion to beating your own child in plain view of your followers? The embarrassment of even pretending this was a real fight? Or was there some small part of him that wondered whether his feeble, outcast son, who by rights should never have survived a day outside the protection of his clan and yet had taken down almost every man and woman who’d come to kill him, might actually be a threat?
My father, I had noticed, was vulnerable to arta valar.
‘Come on now,’ I said, goading him. ‘The sun’s coming up and I have a busy day ahead of me, unwinding this mess you’ve made.’
He didn’t smile, didn’t credit me with a response to my outlandish words. Somehow it always disappointed me that my father never took any pleasure in the fact that his son defied the odds even when those odds said he would surely lose.
‘Very well,’ he said, kneeling to draw a spell circle around himself in the sand. ‘I suppose it was always going to come down to this.’
As with everything in life, my father proceeded methodically, painstakingly. His circle was a marvel of geometric precision, as though there were some prize for such things. My eyes sought out Shalla, who stared back at me with such anger I almost wondered if she’d kill me before Ke’heops had the chance.
‘Why?’ she asked.
One word, so filled with pain and longing that it felt entirely too big to answer. And yet, answer it I must. She knew she was about to witness the final destruction of our family. We had no other brothers or sisters, no cousins, no uncles or aunts left. Our mother, whom Shalla had adored, admired and, regrettably, emulated in her loyalty to our father, was dead. There was just Shalla, my father and me. Now she was going to be forced to watch as one of us killed the other.
I think Ke’heops understood that something deeper than either he or I understood was about to be broken forever, because he tried one last time to reason with me. ‘It doesn’t have to be this way,’ he said, though the words sounded very far away to me at that moment. ‘I was hasty in my anger, Ke’helios. Let us talk more. Let me show you the calculations I’ve made, explain why my plans are necessary, and why they will, I promise you, lead to a better world not just for the Jan’Tep but for others on this continent. I know you care about these Daroman and Berabesq and Gitabrians. I know you have friends in the Seven Sands. Let me prove to you that their futures can be one with our own.’
‘Just so long as you’re in charge.’
He went silent again. There was nothing left for either of us to say.
‘Would you like to set the countdown?’ I asked my sister.
She shook her head.
‘No countdown,’ Ke’heops said. ‘None is needed. When you are ready, boy, come at me, and learn once and for all what happens when you toss paper cards into the flames of true magic.’
‘Fair enough.’
I closed my eyes for a moment, using this time he’d given me to slow my breathing and steady my hands. A familiar smell came to my nostrils, of road dust and smoking reeds. Ferius. Something else too. A musky scent that went with fur and fury. Reichis.
‘Hey, kid,’ Ferius said. ‘I ever tell you about the seventh form of arta tuco?’
‘Little busy right now, Ferius.’
She chuckled. ‘Fair enough. Let me see your eyes a second then.’
I opened my eyes and looked into hers. They were green, but not the colour of emeralds. More like a field of long grasses, waving in the breeze, telling you the world was a big place and the roads were calling to you.
I wondered what she saw in mine.
‘Yeah,’ she said, a smile crinkling at the corners of her mouth. ‘You’ve got this.’
Reichis, sitting atop her shoulder, tilted his head. He was unusually quiet and I wondered if Shalla – who claimed her presence naturally silenced him – was the cause. But the squirrel cat just gave a sniff and said, ‘Rip his throat out, Kellen.’ Then, as an afterthought, added, ‘But leave his eyeballs for me.’
Ferius turned and walked away to join the other Argosi.
Nephenia came and took her place. ‘Hey,’ she said.
‘Hey. Listen, I appreciate the words of encouragement, but I really don’t think all these Jan’Tep mages are going to wait for—’
‘You know that thing you like to tell people when they’re warning you about taking reckless chances? The one about how you’ve always got one more trick up your sleeve?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You know nobody believes you, right? I mean, your arta valar is usually pretty good, but whenever you pull out that line, everyone around you can tell it’s just bluster.’
‘Really?’
She nodded, then leaned over into my sand circle and kissed my cheek. ‘Except me. I fall for it every time.’ When she pulled back, I saw the tears in her eyes. ‘So would you mind saying it now?’
‘Nephenia?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re going to want to find yourself a spot with a good view, because this last trick, the one I’ve been saving up …? Let’s just say it’s going to be quite a show.’
She smiled, and chuckled, and I really don’t think she believed me. But once she’d moved a safe distance away, I turned to my father, who, despite everything, I found I still loved, still admired, still so desperately wanted to be like, and said, ‘Time’s up.’
With that I flipped the coin in the air between us.
64
The Duel
The coin spun in the air, and though time itself didn’t slow down, it felt as though all of us – my father, myself, Shalla, the Jan’Tep mages at their back and the Argosi at mine – were trapped in that moment; as if how the coin landed, which side came up, mattered in the slightest.
It didn’t.
When it comes to gambling, Ferius likes to say that an amateur plays his cards, an expert plays his opponent’s and a master plays the spaces in between.
I’d been trying to figure out what that meant almost since the day I met her.
Now, finally, I knew. The only problem was, getting to that point – reaching the moment when such things made the difference between victory and defeat, between who lived and who died – that came down to the cards in your hand.
My father had sparked all six of his Jan’Tep bands – a remarkable feat for any mage. He could wield the spells of our people from the most subtle to the most deadly, from the most complex, to the most ruthlessly simple. He could roast me alive before the coin I’d flipped landed on the sand at our feet.
He wouldn’t though, because here, in front of his followers, he needed the illusion of a fair fight. He needed the image of the stolid mage sovereign doing only what he had to, of the reluctant father forced by a cruel world – despite all his own efforts to redeem his son – to save his son’s twisted soul by taking his life.
That meant he had to wait for me to attack first.
The obvious one would be my powder spell. It was the only thing I had that passed for proper Jan’Tep magic, and so the one my father and his posse would expect.
So why disappoint them?
I tossed the powders in the air, formed the somatic shapes with my hands: index and middle fingers pointed straight out, the sign of direction; ring and little fingers pressed into my palm, the sign of restraint; and thumbs to the sky, reminding my ancestors that after all the crap they’d put me through, they owed me a little luck.
Twin red and black flames exploded, channelled by my spell, burning hot enough to melt steel. My father already had a shield up that could’ve taken a thousand such blasts. Of course, he wasn’t the target.
I closed my eyes as the blast struck the coin lying on the ground, the tremendous heat turning the sand to glass. The luminary coin reflected the light of the flames back a hundredfold, making the sun on the horizon look pale and sickly by comparison, blinding everyone but me.
Reflexively, my father struck
out with a simple ember spell – a bolt of lightning that would’ve pierced me through the chest had I not dived to the ground.
All around us, you could hear the mumblings of mages casting variations of blood or sand spells to clear their vision. Shalla had been first, of course, and had seen how our father had nearly killed me in that instant.
‘Both of you, stop, please,’ she said.
Someone grabbed her arm. ‘Do not interfere in a mage’s duel.’
Whoever that was found themselves flying through the air a moment later from Shalla’s iron spell.
My father looked down at me, more irritated than anything else. ‘A clever trick, but you failed to press your advantage. A war mage would’ve evaded the lightning while casting a counter-measure to disable his opponent.’
I rose back to my feet. ‘Little late for lessons in duelling, don’t you think?’
Grim determination set in his mouth. ‘As you say.’ His hands twitched as the next spell came to his lips.
My one advantage was that, despite not being able to cast much in the way of high magic, I’d been an exceptional student at school. I knew almost every somatic form – especially the ones used in duels. And I was a born coward, so I’d developed an instinctive eye for spells that could cause me pain. If none of that sounds particularly impressive, let me put it this way: I knew what spells my father intended even before he could finish casting them.
Also? I may be weak, I may only have a couple of spells, but I’m a damn sight faster on the draw than any lousy Jan’Tep lord magus.
Ke’heops’s index finger wound a weaving circle in the air, his silk band glimmering. A fear snake, meant to induce panic in one’s opponent. I could’ve evaded it, used another powder blast to force him to abandon it in favour of a shield. Instead I let it hit me full on.
My throat clenched, my hands shook. The muscles in my legs twitched in preparation to run as fast and as far as they could before my heart finally gave out.
Spellslinger 6: Crownbreaker Page 35