Spellslinger 6: Crownbreaker

by Sebastien de Castell

  I laughed out loud.

  My father glanced down at his hand, as if perhaps some flaw in the movements of his fingers had warped the spell. That’s not how the fear snake works, so I was as gratified by his confusion as I was by the fact that what he’d tried to do was throw me off my game – fill me with terror so I’d be too frightened to use any tricks or deceptions.

  He’s afraid of my tricks, I realised then. They violate his sense of how the world works, how it should work.

  ‘Your spell didn’t fail, Father,’ I said. ‘I can feel the fear snake inside me, writhing around, twisting everything into dread and panic.’

  ‘You hide it well,’ he said, though it was obvious he didn’t believe me.

  ‘Don’t you get it?’ I asked, circling him – it’s not like my circle in the sand would do me any good – as I slowly reached into the deck of steel cards strapped to my thigh. ‘I’ve been afraid every day since I left our home. People try to kill me, Father. All the time. I get terrified, I fight, I survive, and most nights I lie awake because I can’t bear the thought that soon, whether the next day or the next week, it’s all going to start over again.’

  ‘Was that your vaunted final trick then?’ he asked. The grey pulse of iron magic wound itself though his hands. ‘Perhaps it’s best this way then. Perhaps you’ve been waiting all this time for someone to release you from your fears.’

  ‘Or maybe I’ve been waiting for the day you stopped taking the coward’s way out and faced me like a man for once.’

  He tried to laugh it aside, but I saw something smoulder in his eyes. ‘You think you can goad me into … what? Exchanging fisticuffs with you?’

  ‘Oh, never that, Father.’ I continued circling him, forcing him to shift his feet to face me. Mages are used to keeping their bodies still – makes it easier to do likewise with the mind, which is rather crucial for spellcasting. ‘Do you remember when you and Mother were counter-banding me?’

  ‘This again?’

  ‘I was thinking of the day Uncle Abydos – the brother you treated as a Sha’Tep servant – burst into your workroom. Do you remember that?’

  ‘Abydos was a traitor.’

  ‘Maybe, but what struck me most at the time was the way he came at you, asking if you’d face him without your magic for once.’

  ‘A lord magus does not soil his hands with—’

  ‘You looked so scared, Father, as if you knew – you knew – that without your spells, you had no chance against him.’

  The iron magic wrapped around Ke’heops’s hands didn’t fade; instead it hardened, almost like actual metal. ‘Then you were mistaken.’

  I pretended not to hear. ‘But then Mother saved you. Do you remember that part? You stood there, frozen in fear of your brother’s wrath, and she stepped in front of you, telling him he’d have to go through her to get to you.’ It was my turn to laugh. ‘The look of relief on your face, Father. I swear, every time I look at you, I can’t help but see it all over aga—’

  Ke’heops gave a growl I’d never heard before and came at me, the magic surrounding his fists like a metal club that would smash the bones of my jaw and silence me once and for all. That is, until his foot hit the patch of glass made when my blast had fused the sand between us. His sandalled foot slid on the unexpectedly slippery surface, and he went down on his arse in front of everyone – his enemies, his allies and his family.

  Nobody laughed. Nobody was that stupid.

  Nobody but me.

  I heard Ferius, in barely more than a whisper, say, ‘Kid …’

  She’s never liked tactics that involve shaming another person, and though when we travelled together she seemed to incessantly talk about me needing to ‘become a man’, the word never carried the sort of backwards, ugly connotations you sometimes found in other cultures on the continent. She’d never have countenanced me trying to make my father feel small by questioning his manhood – not least because it was likely to get me killed.

  ‘Tricks,’ he said, rising to his feet.

  My father was a big man. Strong. Always in control. Now though, those big shoulders of his shook with rage beneath his robes. ‘Always with you it is tricks.’

  ‘Here’s one you’ll like,’ I said. I held up a card – a regular paper one Ferius had given me not long after we’d first met. It depicted a young man, the beginnings of shadowblack markings around his eye and fire in his hands. The title of the card was ‘The Spellslinger’. I turned the card around so he could see it from both sides. ‘Now watch as the Incomparable Kellen makes it disappear!’

  I flicked the card in the air, sending it spinning towards him, only it wasn’t the same card any more. I’d substituted it with one of my razor-sharp steel cards. A cut three inches long appeared on Ke’heop’s right hand, leaving behind a line of blood and a whole lot of anger.

  Again I could hear Ferius say my name. She knew this wouldn’t work. Usually if you can make a mage lose control of themselves, their spells fail them. But Ke’heops wasn’t like other mages, nor even lords magi. He was the head of our house, always in control, and as deadly a war mage as the Jan’Tep ever produced.

  His iron and blood bands flared. He closed his bleeding fist, uttered a single word – ‘Bimei’ayda’ – and then spread his fingers apart, as wide as they would go.

  Suddenly all four of my limbs were outstretched as if four horses had taken hold of them and were determined to tear me apart.

  ‘Father, no!’ Shalla cried out.

  Damn, I thought, as I found myself lifted up in the air, spreadeagled like a sacrifice waiting for the blade. He’s even better at this than I thought. My father had not only remained in control of himself, hadn’t simply kept hold of his magic – he’d actually used the bleeding caused by my steel card to create a blood sympathy between us. So the more he spread his fingers out, the more I felt the pull on my own arms and legs.

  ‘How do you like my trick?’ he asked as he came closer.

  Arta valar, I told myself. It all comes down to arta valar now.

  ‘Always wondered where I got my propensity for deception,’ I said, my voice calm as still water on a windless day. ‘Mother never had need of such things, so I guess it had to come from somewhere.’

  He pulled me to him with his spell. I was floating off the ground, eye to eye with him for the first time in our lives. ‘I am nothing like you,’ he said. With his free hand he slapped me so hard across the face it took me a second to be sure my jaw hadn’t come right off. ‘And you are nothing like me.’

  Still using his magic to hold me up, he began squeezing his hand closed. My arms slammed into my sides, my legs pressing together, my ribs creaking as my own body began to crush itself. I tasted blood, considered spitting it in his face, then thought better of it. ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Father,’ I wheezed, forcing out what air I could to be heard. ‘We’re exactly the same, you and I. Don’t you see it?’

  ‘Are you mad? I am the Mage Sovereign of the Jan’Tep! The first in three hundred years! You are an outcast. An exile with nothing but a few card tricks and an endless desire to betray his father!’

  I shook my head, which was hard to do as my skull, too, felt as if it was being squeezed by the hand of a giant. ‘I never wanted to betray anyone. I wanted to be the hero. The one from the stories who saved his people from demons and devils, who brought them from the darkness into a brighter future.’

  A grim laugh escaped his lips. ‘You have an odd way of showing it.’

  ‘Because I’m not a hero, Father, and neither are you. That’s the one thing we’ve got in common. The two of us have spent our entire lives desperately wanting to be the chosen one of the stories, yet deep down we both knew the real chosen one was always meant to be someone else.’

  The fury of his reaction couldn’t have existed without him knowing what I’d just said was true. I whispered the next part, forcing him to lean forward.

  ‘What did you just say?’ he demanded.
r />   ‘Shalla was meant to be our people’s saviour, Father,’ I repeated, loud enough now for everyone to hear. ‘It’s always been Shalla. Never me. Never you. Always her.’

  65

  The Final Spell

  My father would have killed me then, were he not even in his rage a man always in control of himself. He knew how it would look: I tell him his daughter is the real future of our people and then he kills me? Even in the middle of a mage’s duel, with death the only outcome, it would look … weak.

  So instead he took in a breath, composed himself and laughed.

  ‘And there it is,’ he said at last, shaking his head. ‘The final trick. Only it’s the same one you’ve always used, isn’t it? Hiding behind your mother’s skirts as a child when you were due to be punished. Letting the Argosi woman fight your battles for you. And now, finally, trying to set your own sister against her father.’

  He flung his hand, and I went tumbling onto the sand. I heard something that felt important crack in my side. Shalla ran to Ke’heops. ‘Please, Father, it’s enough. Look at him! He can’t harm us any more!’

  Ke’heops pushed her away. She’d unwittingly made things worse – both for him and for me. ‘How dare you interfere in a mage’s duel! Or have you perhaps been swayed by his words, daughter. Would you seek to challenge me for our people’s crown?’

  ‘No, Father, no!’ she said, horrified.

  ‘Then obey your sovereign. Obey the head of your house. Obey your father.’

  Shalla stepped back, still watching me, trying and failing to keep herself from crying in front of our father and his war coven.

  ‘Rise,’ he commanded me. ‘Rise and face the judgement you’ve evaded for so long.’

  Without his spell holding me together, I came to realise just how badly damaged I was now. I had to cough out the blood in my mouth to keep from choking on it. Several of my ribs were broken. I could barely move my arms, and only by a supreme act of will was I able to stagger to my feet.

  ‘Ke’helios of the House of Ke,’ he intoned, like a magistrate preparing to deliver a verdict, ‘for the betrayal of your family, your house and your people, I now—’

  ‘One second,’ I said, spitting out more blood.

  Ancestors, I think he’s really killed me this time.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No more tricks now.’

  With considerably more effort than I would’ve thought possible, I held up my right arm. ‘A spell then. A proper spell. Ember magic.’

  He seemed almost amused by that. ‘Ember magic? That would indeed be a fine trick without having ever sparked your ember band, and with all but one of the counter-sigils still in place.’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s going to be easy.’

  ‘Even before we were forced to counter-band you, you were never able to spark your ember band. As a boy you sat there staring at it, giving yourself nosebleeds from the sheer effort of trying to bring it to life. So determined, even though anyone could see it wasn’t possible.’ He paused for a moment, then said, ‘You made me proud trying though.’

  ‘Then let me make you proud one last time,’ I said. I coughed up a little more blood. Something inside me was bleeding. I didn’t have long.

  He stepped back, shaking his head all the while. ‘Very well then, Kellen,’ he said. I wondered if he was even aware he’d called me by my childhood name. ‘This is as good a way to end it as any.’

  I spread my feet apart, shoulder width. Squared my shoulders. Faced my father one last time. ‘I wish you were the man you pretend to be,’ I said, my voice cracked, broken like the rest of me. ‘I wish you could’ve seen the truth that I’ve seen, recognised that magic can be wondrous but it can also be foul, learned that there’s more to our people than just spells and incantations. That you didn’t have to betray half the world just to protect our little corner of it.’

  ‘And again you lie to me!’ he shouted. ‘I offered you this last chance to prove yourself, to die at least trying to be a Jan’Tep, and yet you—’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got a spell, Father.’

  He started to speak again, but I cut him off.

  ‘A real spell. An ember spell.’ My arm was shaking from the effort of holding it up, but I forced it to steady. ‘A bolt of lightning, Father. Not a metaphor, not an illusion. With true magic will I shake these sands, with thunder and lightning I will strike you down.’

  ‘Then do it, boy!’ He almost sounded like he wanted me to succeed, as if my breaking the chains fate had set upon me would at last unshackle his own grand destiny. As if the two of us were linked by a bond greater than the one we’d both betrayed so many times, that of father and son.

  I stared at the copper sigils of my ember band. All but one were dead, broken by counter-sigils. I focused my will into them anyway, commanding them to draw upon the primal force of ember magic. Ignoring their blunt refusal. Pushing more and more of myself inside them until I could’ve sworn I felt the band constrict tighter and tighter around my forearm.

  I felt something drip onto my upper lip. Blood from my nose.

  ‘Kellen, stop this,’ Shalla said. ‘Father, please—’

  ‘Silence,’ he replied. ‘Let him have his moment.’

  Oh, Father, I thought. Why couldn’t I have been the son you wanted? Why couldn’t you have been the father I so badly needed?

  Even as I pushed more, felt the pressure in my mind building, found it harder and harder to draw breath into my lungs, I found my gaze going to Ferius Parfax. She stood there, leaning on Rosie for support, dying herself from the malediction whose source I was now sure was not some foreign god, but my own father. She must’ve realised it too, and yet I saw no rancour in her. No desire for revenge.

  The Path of the Wild Daisy.

  I love you, Ferius Parfax, I thought, feeling more and more blood dripping down my face. It was coming down my cheeks now too. I was bleeding from my eyes. You taught me to laugh at the world. To search for light even in the shadowblack itself. To find something inside myself more precious than magic.

  She looked back at me, an uncertainty in her gaze. She didn’t understand what I was doing. I almost laughed at that. Maybe now, at the end, I’d finally pulled a trick even she couldn’t see coming.

  Reichis was on her shoulder, waiting for the moment, convinced that any second now I’d give him the signal and he’d leap into the air, spread his limbs so his furry glider flaps would catch the breeze and launch him onto our enemies, tearing at them with tooth and claw.

  Best business partner an outlaw could ever hope for.

  Someone was calling my name, but the sound was muffled. I think there was blood in my ear canals now.

  And still the band wouldn’t spark.

  ‘Kellen, stop!’ Shalla screamed. ‘You’re killing yourself!’

  My sister has never been one for hyperbole, which was apt, because I was, in fact, killing myself.

  ‘Enough, boy,’ my father said, so gently I was surprised I’d heard him. ‘Let it go now. The Grey Passage awaits. Tell our ancestors that you gave all you had. Without shame. Without dishonour.’

  A better son would’ve taken that with some grace. Me though? ‘Tell them yourself, you arsehole.’

  The copper sigils of the ember band around my forearm were still flat, lifeless, all but the one my father had repaired. But of course there’s no spell that can be cast with only one sigil. Still I pushed harder.

  ‘Stop it, Kellen,’ Shalla pleaded. Even through the blood seeping from my eyes I could see her steeling herself, her own magic swirling around her forearms. ‘I won’t allow this.’

  ‘Then stop me,’ I said. ‘You’ve got the power. It’s always been your choice to make.’

  She looked uncertain at first, but then a creeping realisation came to her and finally she understood.

  My last trick. The one that had taken me years to pull off. The one I hadn’t even known I was preparing.

  Ever since I’d left our people, all the thousan
ds of miles I’d travelled, the things I’d learned, the secrets I’d unearthed, they had never been for me. Not really. Like I’d told our father, I wasn’t the hero of the story and neither was he.

  Turns out everything I’d gone through had been so I could offer my sister a choice, to show her a path that could only be seen from outside the world we’d grown up in. All those conversations we’d had when she’d use her scrying spells to appear to me in a pool of water or a patch of sand, listening to my pronouncements about the secrets I’d learned about our people, about the lands and cultures outside our home. Always Shalla had been pulled between the simple truths that had guided us since childhood and the far more troublesome ones that had cost me my innocence to discover, between the father she so badly wanted to emulate and the brother who, despite all his manifold flaws, she loved just the same.

  Always she’d avoided a choice she must have known was waiting for her, delaying the inevitable moment when she’d either defy our father irrevocably, or watch me die.

  Two paths, for a nation, for a family. For the most powerful young woman in the world, who just wanted her father and brother to love each other, as she loved them both. Two destinies, utterly irreconcilable.

  Now that time was up.

  I felt my legs beginning to give way beneath me, my consciousness crumbling apart. I tried to take in a breath, failed, and realised I’d pushed so hard I’d actually stopped my heart. With the last of my flagging strength, I extended my arm towards my father, and with the last bit of air inside me said the magic word as an explosion shook the air all around us.

  ‘Ta-da.’

  City of Shadows

  Why should we believe the dead languish in shallow graves beneath the ground? Does not every building cast its own shadow? Perhaps it is to such places that those for whom the city of the living no longer has a purpose are, in the end, granted admission.