Spellslinger: The fantasy novel that keeps you guessing on every page

by Sebastien de Castell

  The weary repetitions of Osia’phest’s exhausted voice shook me from my thoughts. The harder I tried to focus on his face, the less I could make anything out. Is it getting darker?

  ‘The preservation spell is fading,’ Panahsi said anxiously.

  ‘I cannot continue. We need the healers. Now.’ Osia’phest’s voice was hoarse and almost pitiful.

  ‘Use a blood sympathy spell!’ Panahsi demanded. ‘Make his heart beat again!’

  ‘I can’t,’ Osia’phest replied. ‘I’d have to link his heart to mine and I’m too old.’

  ‘You’re afraid!’

  ‘Of course I’m afraid, you fool. If I die now, the spell preserving him will disappear completely.’

  Shalla finally spoke. ‘Then I’ll do it. Show me how!’

  ‘You cannot,’ he replied, his voice strained. ‘You … lack the training. I’ll not be … the one to tell your father that … that I …’

  I heard a thump next to me.

  ‘Master Osia’phest?’ Shalla called out, her voice shrill.

  ‘The old fool has passed out,’ Panahsi said. ‘He couldn’t keep up the spell.’

  Perfect, I thought. I’m surrounded by mages and no one’s going to save me.

  Someone was crying now, their sobs sounding like raindrops falling down a deep well. Where’s that soothing music the elders promised? Where are all those voices praising my name?

  I heard the thump-thump of boots coming towards me across the sand. ‘Out of the way, idiots,’ a woman’s voice growled. She made the last word sound like idgits. Her accent wasn’t Jan’Tep at all, but a thick drawl that made me want to giggle. ‘Y’all stay far back unless you want to spend the next week tryin’ to scratch your own damned skin off right through those fancy skirts of yours.’

  Something light and powdery fell on my skin. I wondered if this was what snow felt like. At first it tingled, then it burned, and finally it itched so badly I began to fear that I would go mad.

  ‘Sorry, kid,’ the woman whispered close to my ear. ‘This ain’t gonna be much fun for you.’

  The itching spread to my eyes and for a moment my vision cleared. I could see her now, kneeling over me. Her face was pretty but sharply angular, framed by long red hair with a single lock of white sticking out from under a frontiersman hat – the sort of thing I’d seen Daroman riders wear as they travelled their lands, following herds of cattle. We didn’t see many Daroman in the Jan’Tep territories these days. This particular one wore a soiled white shirt under a black leather waistcoat. She had something in her mouth – a stick with a flicker of red light that generated little billowing clouds of grey fog. A smoking reed? Who smokes in front of a sick person? And gods, why won’t this itching stop?

  There was some kind of scuffle as Shalla tried to take control. ‘Who are you? Get that stuff off of him. He’s—’

  ‘Shove off, girly,’ the woman replied, easily pushing my sister away. She turned her attention back to me. ‘That itch you’re feeling is the powder making your nerves go wild. That idiot spell the old man was mumbling would have left you paralysed and brain damaged.’ Then, almost as an afterthought, she said, ‘Not that all Jan’Tep aren’t at least a little brain damaged.’

  ‘He needs real magic, not some stupid frontier hedge medicine,’ Shalla insisted.

  ‘“Real magic”,’ the woman snorted. She turned her attention back to me. ‘I know it’s uncomfortable, kid, but if it makes you feel any better, this next part is really going to hurt.’

  I felt something slam down onto my chest, as if I were being hammered into the ground. The woman’s hands were bunched into fists. She lifted them up, only to bring them crashing down on me again.

  ‘Stop that!’ Shalla screamed. ‘You’re killing him!’

  I’m pretty sure you already took care of that, Shalla. On the other hand, I was going to end up a remarkably battered and bruised corpse if this kept up. Maybe I could turn this into a story the ancestors might like enough to let me through the gates. There I was, Your Godlinesses, lying on the ground, when a crazy woman started beating the hells out of me with her fists.

  ‘I’ll cast a binding spell on you if you don’t stop,’ Shalla threatened.

  ‘Little girl, you’re starting to bug me.’ The woman struck my chest a third time, then a fourth. Then she leaned forward and I felt something soft and wet on my lips. The sensation was strange and gentle. Was she kissing me? The gods have a strange sense of humour.

  Apparently they don’t like being mocked, because a moment later the kissing stopped and the pounding resumed. It didn’t hurt as much as before though, and the itching had gone too. In fact, I really didn’t feel anything. This is it … I’m about to die.

  The elders say that when you reach the end of the grey passage the thunder will strike three times to summon you for judgment. I heard that thunder.

  The first time it sounded like a loud crack, followed by a sudden sharp pain in my left side. One of my ribs had broken.

  The thunder struck again, this time as a loud boom coming from somewhere deep inside me. My heart had just given its first belligerent beat.

  I’m alive, I realised, as my chest expanded in a sudden, agonising rush. I’m breathing! Absurdly, my next thought was to try to think of what I could say when I got up that would make me sound clever and brave. Then I heard the thunder strike its third and final blow – a roar so loud it threatened to shake the whole world apart and send us all tumbling away.

  It wasn’t really thunder, of course, just as it hadn’t been the other times. What I’d heard just then was the voice of my father.

  He sounded very, very angry.

  The gods, it seemed, were ready to pass judgment.

  4

  The Thunder

  What happened next came mostly in flashes – little sparks between the shadows that would envelop me on the journey from the city’s oasis back to my family home. It began with my father lifting me up from the ground and whispering in my ear.

  ‘Do not cry in front of them. If you must cry, hold it in a little while longer.’

  A Jan’Tep must be strong, I told myself. I’m usually not much of a cryer anyway, never having seen any evidence that it does any good. But I was exhausted and frustrated and more than a little scared, so it took a surprising amount of self-control for me to say, ‘I’m not going to cry.’

  My father gave me a small nod followed by the barest hint of a smile. I felt a warmth inside me that made me wonder if he’d just cast a fire spell, though of course there was no way he could have made the somatic forms while holding me in his arms.

  Everyone in the oasis stood stiff and silent, except for Osia’phest, who still lay on the ground, though from the mumbling noises he made I presumed he was gradually regaining consciousness. Panahsi, Nephenia, Tennat and the rest of my fellow initiates just stared at us.

  My father was a big man, over six feet tall with deep black hair – a sharp contrast to the blond colouring that both Shalla and I had inherited from our mother. He kept his moustache and short beard meticulously trimmed and exuded an air of imposing dignity wherever he went. He was strong in all the ways a Jan’Tep was supposed to be: physically, mentally and, above all, magically. Even Panahsi’s eyes reflected a kind of disbelief that I was really the son of someone as powerful as Ke’heops.

  ‘I can stand,’ I said to my father, embarrassed to appear so weak in front of the other initiates. He didn’t let go of me.

  Shalla walked gingerly towards us. ‘Father, don’t be cross with—’

  ‘Be silent,’ he said, and my sister closed her mouth. I watched as my father scrutinised the scene in front of us, his eyes moving to each of the participants in turn. I knew he was reading them as easily as if he could unlock their minds, watching their reactions to his presence, sifting through furtive glances and shifting eyes. I could see him work through recent events by considering and cataloguing each person’s fear or guilt under his gaze. Then his face took
on a slightly puzzled expression. I turned my head and saw him looking at the woman who’d saved my life.

  ‘You. What is your name?’ he asked.

  She took a step closer as if to prove she wasn’t afraid of him. ‘Ferius Parfax,’ she said, and reached out a gloved hand to wipe something from my face. I saw grains of green and grey dust against the brown leather of her glove. ‘You’ll want to bathe him. That powder can start acting up again something fierce when it settles into the skin.’

  My father barely let her finish the sentence before he said, ‘You will come with us now.’

  Ferius Parfax, who, despite the single lock of white sticking out from the red tangle kept in check by her frontiersman hat, looked to be several years younger than my father, nonetheless put her hands on her hips and laughed out loud. ‘Now, see, I thought you Jan’Tep were supposed to know all the magic words.’

  There was grumbling and sharp intakes of breath from my fellow initiates, the loudest coming from Shalla. No one spoke to Ke’heops that way, especially not some magic-less Daroman wanderer. I looked up at my father and saw his jaw tighten just a little, but then he said, ‘Forgive me. Would you please accompany us to my home? I have questions that may be important to my son’s recovery.’

  Ferius looked at me and winked as if she’d just conjured a thunderstorm on a dry day. ‘Surely I will.’

  I felt oddly compelled to contribute to the conversation, so I said, ‘My name is Kellen.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Kellen,’ she said, taking off her hat only to put it right back on her head a second later. The Daromans have weird little rituals like that.

  A commotion nearby drew our attention. Osia’phest, with precious little help from the students standing next to him, was struggling to rise. ‘My Lord Ke’heops –’

  ‘Someone assist him,’ my father said.

  Immediately two of the nearest initiates took Osia’phest by the arms and lifted him to his feet. The old spellmaster took a few awkward steps towards us. ‘If I could perhaps explain more fully the circumstances …’

  ‘Rest,’ my father said. ‘Some of these others will help you home. We will speak tomorrow.’

  Osia’phest looked as though someone had just read out his prison sentence. Ferius gave a snort of disgust. ‘Mages,’ she said, as if the word meant something different in her language than it did in ours.

  Watching the old man having to be practically carried by his students, seeing the way they rolled their eyes at him and the way they glanced back at me, filled me with shame. ‘I can stand by myself,’ I said to my father.

  His eyes narrowed for an instant but he set me on my feet. The sudden weakness in my legs and blurring of my vision were the first clues that I’d made a terrible mistake.

  ‘Never seen a man recover so fast from a stopped heart,’ Ferius said, patting me on the back. Only she wasn’t patting me on the back, not really. Her hand was gripping the back of my shirt as she kept me from falling forwards onto my face.

  My father did an admirable job of pretending not to notice. He took a step forward, blocking the view of the others as Ferius now used both hands to keep me up. ‘The rest of you have homes and families to return to,’ he said. ‘Do so now.’

  It took only seconds for the oasis to clear out. No one stopped to say anything to me. Not Panahsi or Nephenia. Tennat didn’t even bother to insult me.

  When everyone but Shalla and Ferius had gone, my father turned to the Daroman woman and nodded. She removed her hands and I immediately felt myself falling backwards. My father caught me effortlessly in his arms. ‘You should sleep now,’ he said.

  It wasn’t a command or a spell. I could have stayed awake if I’d tried hard enough. But, see, there was this tiny, almost infinitesimally small possibility that if I fell asleep I would wake up later to find that this had all been a terrible, humiliating dream. So I closed my eyes and hoped.

  5

  The Stand-Off

  I woke several times on the journey back home. My father kept a steady pace despite the weight of carrying me. Whenever I opened my eyes I’d see the sky had got darker, only to suddenly blaze with light whenever we passed under one of the city’s glow-glass street lanterns.

  ‘You’re going to blow one of those things up if you don’t keep that will of yours under wraps,’ Ferius Parfax said, leading her mottled black-and-grey horse beside us.

  ‘You question my father’s control?’ Shalla demanded, her voice full of righteous fury.

  My father spoke a single word – ‘Daughter’ – and Shalla’s eyes darted back to the sandstone sidewalk beneath us.

  Ferius gave a little laugh and shook her head.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I asked.

  ‘So many magic words in your language. Who knew the word for “daughter” was the same as the word for “silence”?’

  I felt my father’s arms tense beneath my back and legs. ‘How clever. I take it you must be some sort of travelling entertainer? Should I offer you a few coins for your performance?’

  My father considers actors and troubadours to be slightly less useful than sand lice.

  ‘Why, thank you, Great Ke’heops,’ Ferius replied, either not picking up on his sarcasm or not caring to. ‘But no, I’m more of what you’d call a cartographer.’

  ‘You make maps?’ I glanced back at her horse’s saddlebags, expecting to find the kinds of long wooden tubes my mother uses to protect her fragile charts. ‘Where do you keep them?’

  Ferius patted one of the front pockets of her black leather waistcoat. ‘Right here.’

  There was no way you could keep proper maps inside a pocket. I was about to point this out to her when I noticed that the buildings along the street on either side of us were getting shabbier and shabbier. No longer the three- and four-storey trimmed limestone houses and marble sanctums we’d passed on the Way of Ancestors, these were squat little buildings made from rough timber or unpolished slabs of sandstone. The exteriors had none of the brass or silver finishings typical of Jan’Tep homes, nor statues or any decoration other than the occasional worn shop sign hanging out front. What little illumination leaked out onto the street came from the flicker of mundane oil lanterns through the wooden slats of unevenly cut windows.

  ‘Why are we going through the Sha’Tep slums?’ I asked my father. ‘The Way of Ancestors is faster.’

  ‘This path is … quieter.’

  Quieter. You know you’ve sunk pretty low when your own father is embarrassed to be seen with you in public. My chest felt tight. It made no difference that I’d managed to beat Tennat even without spells of my own. No one thought that I’d been clever or brave, not even my own father. All that mattered was that my magic was weak.

  ‘Guess it makes sense to take the quiet route if you’re looking to avoid trouble,’ Ferius said, reaching into her waistcoat and pulling out a thin smoking reed.

  The comment struck me as innocuous, but Shalla was always sensitive to any implied insult to our father. ‘How dare you suggest that Ke’heops would ever—’

  ‘Daughter!’

  The word had come so fast and forceful that it took me a second to realise it was Ferius who’d said it. Shalla looked stunned and stood there for a moment as if someone had cast a chain binding on her.

  ‘Will you look at that?’ Ferius chuckled. ‘It really works. My very first magic spell.’ She stuck the smoking reed between her teeth and leaned towards Shalla. ‘Give me a light, will you, kid?’

  Shalla gave her a look that made it clear she had no intention of obliging her with even that simple spell. Despite knowing better, I lifted up my right hand and called on the magic of ember to flow through me. I turned the full force of my mind and will to envisioning the gap between my thumb and forefinger igniting in flame. When I was sure I had it ready I whispered the single-word incantation, ‘Sepul’tanet.’

  Nothing.

  This far from the oasis, I couldn’t even make a candle spell work. All I got for my
troubles was a sudden wave of exhaustion and the sensation that the tattooed ember band on my arm was cutting into my skin.

  ‘No need to trouble yourself,’ Ferius said. ‘Got my own magic for this.’ She snapped her fingers and a match appeared between them. She flicked her thumb against the head of the match and it ignited. A few seconds later she was blowing thick rings of hazy red smoke into the air behind us. ‘Someone’s following.’

  ‘No one of consequence,’ my father said, resuming his progress down the street. ‘Probably just some curious Sha’Tep.’

  ‘My father cast a warding spell when we left the oasis,’ Shalla explained. ‘He’ll know if any mage comes within a hundred yards of us.’

  ‘Really?’ Ferius asked. ‘You can do that?’

  Shalla smirked at her. ‘We have spells for everything, Daroman.’

  Ferius took a drag from her smoking reed. ‘I wonder then, oh great and powerful mages, if there might also be a spell that counters those sorts of wards.’ Before either Shalla or my father could answer, she added, ‘Because those people I mentioned are here, and they ain’t Sha’Tep.’

  Voices came shouting from the darkness behind us, followed swiftly by several sets of sandalled feet slapping along the street. ‘Ke’heops! Stand and answer for the crimes of your house!’

  My father set me down on my feet. My legs were still wobbly so I leaned against the rickety door frame of a cloth merchant’s shop. When I looked back down the street, I saw the red flapping robes of Ra’meth coming towards us.

  Like my father, Ra’meth was one of the lords magi of our clan. He was, quite possibly, the only person who disliked me even more than his son, Tennat, who came alongside with his two older brothers.

  ‘Good evening, Lord Magus,’ my father greeted Ra’meth. He nodded to the others and added, ‘Adepts. Initiate.’

  Both the older boys had passed their mage’s trials a couple of years ago. Ra’fan was a chaincaster now, and Ra’dir a war mage. They both appeared calm, almost cordial, which is how you look when you’ve been preparing yourself for spellcasting. This wasn’t going to be good.