66
The Grey Passage
I’d always suspected that the Grey Passage – that misty nether-world between life and afterlife where the Jan’Tep dead were met by their ancestors to be judged – was nonsense. A fable. The final remnants of a time when we still believed in comforting superstitions.
So I was rather surprised to find myself standing there, in near-perfect darkness – though I could see just fine – facing an old woman whose features were unfamiliar to me, though I was fairly sure I should have remembered her, given what she’d done to me all those years ago.
‘Hello, Grandmother,’ I said.
She smiled – not a nice smile, mind you. More of an unimpressed sneer.
‘So you figured out who I am. Big deal. You think any of your other ancestors would waste time coming to greet you?’ She took a step closer to me. ‘Come on, boy. Show me you can do better.’
Arta precis, I thought. Lately all anyone seems to want to do is test my arta precis.
‘Well,’ I began, looking first at the black ocean in the distance and then at the shards of onyx beneath my feet. ‘I’m pretty sure I recognise this lousy sewer anyway.’
Seren’tia – the grandmother who’d banded me in shadow as a child – shrugged. ‘Hardly a grand deduction.’
‘And you’re no ghost, nor are you some spirit ushering me to the afterlife.’
‘Obviously,’ she sneered, despite the hint of a more genuine smile appearing at the corners of her mouth.
I tapped the shadowblack markings around my left eye, though I felt nothing when I did. ‘When you banded me in shadow, you embedded a piece of yourself inside me.’
She snorted. ‘Now you’re just pulling guesses out of your arse. Prove it.’
‘The enigmatism. The ability to see into the secrets of others. It’s supposed to unlock when I ask the right questions, only, in my experience it’s been a little … temperamental.’
‘Watch yourself, boy. Best not to make me angry.’
I see where Ke’heops got his temper.
‘Like I care,’ I said. ‘You’re not even real. My grandmother – may she rot in whatever hell her deeds consigned her to – imprinted a sliver of her psyche somewhere in the recesses of my mind. A kind of … mechanism.’
The apparition of Seren’tia made an unconvincing show of looking disinterested. ‘Oh? Why would she do that?’
I walked towards her, got so close I could see the fine lines around her eyes, the patchiness of skin worn by time. She looked as real as anyone I’d ever seen, but when you’ve pulled as many con jobs as me, you learn that the more convincing something appears, the less you should believe it.
‘My grandmother found out about our people’s past,’ I replied. ‘About the massacre of the Mahdek, the taking of the oases. Other things too, I’ll bet. She was a smart woman, I’m told.’
‘And beautiful,’ the spectral figure added, stroking her long grey matted hair.
‘I’m guessing she figured out that our people were in trouble, that the way we bred bloodlines for magic, our entire obsession with it, was going to slowly destroy the Jan’Tep way of life, along with the rest of the continent.’
The apparition shook her head. ‘The rest of the continent? You think I care about a bunch of Daroman barbarians or Berabesq zealots? And the Gitabrians! Don’t get me started on them. Ancestors, we should’ve blasted them from existence long ago. No, boy, I’m a loyal Jan’Tep through and through. It was our culture I wanted to save. Not the rotten, petty parts of it, mind you, but …’
She hesitated, then turned and waved a hand across the onyx landscape. The shards rose up, forming buildings, mages’ sanctums, sigils floating in the air, arranging themselves in complex esoteric geometries that were beautiful to behold. ‘Magic can be wondrous. But it twists much more easily into dark deeds than brighter pursuits.’
‘Then why didn’t you do something about it?’ I asked, my voice rising in pitch in a desperate and rather unflattering way. ‘You were a powerful mage. Respected. Admired. Why didn’t you—’
‘The Dowager Magus was admired too, boy. Look how she turned out – her own husband mind-chained her for three hundred years. Made sure it wouldn’t go away even after he died.’ My grandmother shook her head. ‘No. This wasn’t a problem my generation could solve. Nor your father’s. Too stuck in the past, in the myths of our own glory.’
‘Then why not Shalla? She’s the one with the power.’
‘Exactly.’
I waited for her to explain. When she didn’t, I said, ‘You know you didn’t actually answer my question, right?’
‘Even as a babe, you could see the raw potential for magic in her. She was so … perfect. The perfect Jan’Tep baby, waiting to become the most powerful mage in generations. But power – and here’s the lesson you get for free, boy – power without humility is an arrow that destroys everything in its path, piercing one life after another until only at the very end does it return to slay the archer who fired it.’
The apparition of my grandmother reached out a hand then, and touched my cheek in a gesture so gentle it took me aback. ‘I loved watching you as a boy. So determined to be a mage like your father, like your mother, and yet, I think even then some part of you must have sensed that it was never to be. Oh, you might have managed to pass your Jan’Tep trials and become a lesser mage of some sort. A lightshaper, had you sparked iron and ember; more likely a mere far-talker, with that breath band of yours. You would never have found joy in such things, Kellen, no more than had you attained your deepest desire to be a lord magus. Instead you became someone much more … interesting.’
‘An outcast spellslinger?’
‘A spellslinger. An outlaw. An Argosi. A trickster. But more than all those things, something I began to despair would disappear from our people forever.’
‘What’s that?’
She patted my cheek. ‘A decent human being.’
I thought about that. It wasn’t exactly the loftiest title I’d ever heard, but I could live with it.
Or not.
‘What happens now?’ I asked.
The image of Seren’tia shrugged. ‘The future of our people is up to Sha’maat. That little gambit you pulled worked. She blasted your father to oblivion – with a lightning bolt no less.’ She shot me a raised eyebrow. ‘You really have a fascination with the theatrical, don’t you? All that “watch me cast my mighty spell” nonsense, waiting for your sister to finally make her choice.’
‘Always thought maybe I’d become a wandering actor when this was done.’
She made a face. ‘Filthy profession. Anyway, Sha’maat will name herself Mage Sovereign now. She can’t afford to do otherwise. She’s seen what her father became, and he was the man she admired most in all the world. She won’t let one of those other arseholes take charge.’ She smiled. ‘So be happy. You stopped a war, saved your people, and while no one’s going to be singing songs about you, still you acquitted yourself well for a one-banded spellslinger.’
She turned as if to go, and I finally summoned up the courage to ask the question I’d been avoiding until now. ‘And what about me? Am I dead?’
She stopped and turned back to me. ‘Mostly.’
‘Mostly?’
‘Well, let’s just say, your father’s iron magic almost killed you, and that stunt of trying to force ember magic from your band to prove to Shalla that you were willing to kill yourself in the attempt took you the rest of the way. Anyway, do you really want to live? Seems to me it’s a pretty lousy life out there for an outlaw, and not likely to get any better, what with all the enemies you’ve made. Besides, you know the world has no use for a trickster after the final trick is played, right? Once things are settled, people like us just get in the way.’
‘Good point,’ I said, and made to go off into the distance, to let myself drift away into that endless sleep.
‘You’re not fooling anyone,’ she said.
‘Neither
are you. “Do you really want to live?” I’m a coward, Grandmother. Of course I want to live.’ I came back to her. ‘So what do I have to do?’
The grin she gave me was just about the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen. ‘Give granny a kiss.’
‘A kiss?’
She nodded. ‘A kiss.’ She tapped her mouth. ‘Right here on the lips, otherwise it won’t work.’
‘You’re making this up.’
‘Nope. You have to accept the kiss. That’s the only way.’
Ancestors, I thought. You really enjoy screwing with me, don’t you?
So I did it. I leaned in to kiss the apparition of my dead grandmother. I tried to do it lightly though. Just a quick peck on the lips – enough to satisfy whatever idiotic magic was behind this but not enough to make me gag. But Seren’tia grabbed the back of my head, holding me there, lips pressed against mine, her breath pumping into my mouth even as I tried to push her away.
‘Now there’s gratitude for you,’ an entirely different voice said. This one was winded, exhausted.
‘Ferius?’ I gasped aloud.
My eyes opened, blinded by the light above me, the blurriness slowly resolving into the face I’d first seen in precisely these same conditions.
‘We gotta stop meetin’ like this, kid,’ she said, that smirk of hers firmly in place, almost, but not quite, hiding the concern in her eyes. ‘Folks are gonna think you’re sweet on me.’
Instinct had me searching for a clever response to that, but somehow I found my hand reaching for hers, ignoring a stab of pain in my shoulder – guess my father had broken something there too – and squeezing as hard as I could manage. ‘Folks would be right.’
‘Well now,’ she said, then repeated herself. ‘Well now.’
Ancestors, I thought. Ferius Parfax at a loss for words. We really must be in a new world now.
Something heavy thumped onto my chest, and a fuzzy face with beady eyes stared down at me. ‘You done lyin’ there yet? I’m hungry.’
‘Need a second,’ I said, struggling to take in a breath.
‘Get off him, ya danged squirrel cat,’ Ferius said, shooing him away. ‘You think I sat here pumping air into his lungs just so you could smother him?’
He gave her a growl that was surprisingly fierce, even for him.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
‘Argosi bitch won’t let me kill any of these skinbag mages. Won’t even let me eat your daddy’s eyeballs.’
Ugh. Squirrel cats have no sense of propriety whatsoever.
I reached for some sense of regret, of guilt over my father’s death. It was there, I was sure of it, but an outlaw learns to survive by staying in the present, not looking to the past. And that meant there was someone else I was a lot more worried about right now. ‘Shalla?’ I asked, trying to push myself up to my elbows.
‘Best leave her awhile,’ Ferius said. ‘She ain’t ready to talk none yet.’
She meant Shalla wasn’t ready to talk to me. I’d forced her to choose between her brother and her father, to decide which one of us would live and which would die. Nobody should have to make that choice.
‘Did I do the right thing?’ I asked Ferius.
‘Ain’t no way to tell for sure, kid.’ She removed her frontier hat and wiped her brow with the sleeve of her shirt. ‘Probably stopped a war. Saved a lot of folks from dyin’ for a lie. But then, maybe your daddy was right. Maybe we’d all get along better with one country, one ruler, deciding for everybody how they’re gonna live their lives.’
She reached into her black leather waistcoat and for once didn’t take out a smoking reed. Instead she made a deck of cards appear. ‘The Argosi don’t believe in divination, kid. These cards don’t tell the future – only what exists in the here and now that might shape it. All we can do is read ’em best we can, and then follow our path wherever it leads.’
I thought about her words. ‘Ferius?’ I asked eventually.
‘Yeah, kid?’
‘Would it kill you to just tell me I did the right thing?’
She smiled, made the deck of cards disappear into her waistcoat and, sure enough, pulled out a smoking reed. ‘Reckon it might, kid. Reckon it just might.’
67
The Future
Those next weeks moved slow as frozen molasses. I’ve never tasted molasses, nor do I have any idea at what speed it moves when frozen, but Ferius assured me that was the right way to describe the pathetic crawl at which my health begrudgingly improved. Turns out getting your insides crushed isn’t good for you.
Some of the mages in my father’s war coven were assigned to keep me floating using breath magic as the lot of us – Jan’Tep and Argosi alike – made our way north-west to my homeland. None of my escorts gave me any trouble, though a few looked like they wanted to. I guess Shalla had made it clear there would be repercussions for anyone who caused me further damage.
There were negotiations apparently. A deal was struck between the recently crowned fifteen-year-old Mage Sovereign of the Jan’Tep, the twelve-year-old Queen of Darome, and the not yet one-year-old Living God of Berabesq. In two simultaneous acts of unusually poetic justice, the treaty was bound using the unwound strands of what was previously a rather nasty whip, and witnessed by my friend Seneira, formal emissary of the newly declared sovereign nation of the Seven Sands. It seems they were getting a little tired of people treating their land as the plaything of great powers who, it turned out, weren’t nearly so great as they’d pretended.
I’m told that when his armies arrived, Shujan stood before them, proved himself their god through the performance of miracles and handed down two edicts. The first was a divine command to abide by the peace treaty. The second was a revelation: that a deity, like the people who worship him, is far too complex an idea to be described by any one book, or even six. Then Shujan, the six-faced god of the Berabesq, their ruler, my friend, fell to the ground and died.
He never saw his first birthday. I never said goodbye to him.
After her formal coronation, Shalla assembled all seven of the clan princes and their councils of lords magi. She presented them with the irrefutable facts of the slow decline they’d all noted in their own clans but had hidden from each other, not realising our entire nation was suffering the same failings. Then she’d allowed several of them to challenge her claim to the crown of the mage sovereign. She was gentle with them. I’m told all but one will recover, eventually.
‘Our way of life is over,’ she bluntly informed the great houses of the Jan’Tep. ‘No longer can we afford to see the rest of the world as lesser than ourselves. No longer can we define our people solely by our magic. Instead, we must trust that there is something deeper within us, within our culture, something that survives beyond the limits of our spells.’
There was a lot of consternation at those words, and a burning question: what next?
‘A school,’ she announced. ‘Founded on the same principles as the Academy of the Seven Sands. A place of inquiry that welcomes those with a talent for magic regardless of where they came from. We will bring students here, to my own clan’s oasis, where they will learn from us, and we from them. And perhaps together we will discover if there is indeed something to be proud of in the name Jan’Tep.’
No one cheered. No one applauded. But they listened and, in the end, they agreed.
And, just like that, my people took the first step towards a different future than any of them had imagined.
The Path of the Humble Mage.
She never spoke to me during that time though, not even at our father’s funeral which by her own directive I was forced to attend. Afterwards I was handed a letter by one of her attendants. It said nothing of Ke’heops’s death, nor of the terrible choice I had forced upon her. Instead it listed the duties I was to perform as the first Chancellor of the Academy of the Oasis.
The gift of a good life. Perhaps even a noble one.
I left her a carefully worded note politel
y declining the position.
Other offers followed, most of these delivered in person, which was the part I liked. Refusing them was a little harder.
Seneira asked if I would consider coming back to Teleidos to help her and her father as they fought those within and without the Seven Sands who would try to undermine that newly declared nation, to prevent it from instituting a new form of government. Beren Thrane had come up with a perverse and preposterous system that involved – get this – every citizen voting for representatives who would then form the country’s leadership for a limited time before being forced by law to step down so others could be voted in.
You can bet I declined that nightmare pretty quick. Even I’m not that big a sucker.
I convinced Seneira to hire Butelios for the job, since he’s the only person I’ve ever met so preposterously idealistic that he might actually be able to make it work. He, in turn, extorted from Seneira the promise of a home and citizenship in her bizarre new country for the tribe of shadowblack families he’d rescued from the ashes of the Ebony Abbey.
I suspect I may have inadvertantly added to the list of countries where I’ll be hanged if I ever show my face again.
I got to see Keliesh again, which was nice. We played several games of shujan. Unfortunately, being half dead doesn’t do much for your game. I could have lived with losing every match, but having to listen to the collected thoughts of Viziers Quozhu, Calipho and – believe it or not – Sipha (Ferius had kindly gotten him a set of her writings), soon threatened to disrupt my recovery. He politely, almost sheepishly, asked if I might like to convert to the penitent religion and join his army. Apparently it’s hard to find willing shujan players – even among your own troops – when you spend half the game lecturing them.
The hardest of the offers I had to decline was that of Queen Ginevra. She thought my refusal was due to the discovery of her duplicity. It took me a while to convince her that knowing she would never have to suffer from the shadowblack – and that I wouldn’t have to throw myself in front of a bunch of her enemies when it was revealed – more than made up for any irritation I felt at the deception.
Spellslinger 6: Crownbreaker Page 37