‘And the fee?’ my father insisted. ‘To whom must I grant this pardon?’
‘To Kellen,’ Ferius replied.
I felt a stab of shame. Ferius was trying to purchase my safety at the cost of threatening to leave my sister out there alone. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t—’
‘Don’t move,’ Ferius warned. I hadn’t even realised I’d started towards them.
My father looked over to where I still stood in the shadows. ‘What shameful acts have you brought upon our house now, Kellen?’
‘I …’ I lied to you. I freed our enemy. I fought my own people. I hit the girl I love. Suddenly I was too ashamed to speak.
My father started to walk towards me, but Ferius grabbed his wrist. ‘It don’t matter what he’s done. You want me to find the girl, you grant him your pardon right now. When I get back, if he wants, he comes with me. Out of this town and out of your hair. But either way, you give him your pardon.’
Even in the unlit street, I swear I could see my father’s blue eyes burning the darkness away. I thought for sure Ferius had pushed him too far. My mother must have thought so too, because she got between them and put a hand on his chest. ‘Our daughter is out there, Ke’heops. Our Shalla. Alone. The men who attacked her could be hunting her even now while we stand here arguing.’
My father didn’t even bother to turn to look at me when he said, ‘Fine. I pardon you, Kellen.’ He made it sound like a verdict. Then he turned back to Ferius. ‘Now go, Daroman. Show us these tracking skills you Argosi claim to have.’
‘I want to help find Shalla,’ I said.
‘Sorry, kid,’ Ferius said, her eyes still on my father. ‘You’re too injured and I need to move too fast.’
‘Injured?’ my mother asked. ‘Kellen, what’s happened to you? Come here now!’
I obeyed, feeling like an idiot. My sister might be in danger, but my mother was going to fuss over a few bruises. As I walked into the light streaming from the doorway, I held up my right arm in a desperate bid to win a moment of my father’s approval. ‘Look. I broke the breath band.’
‘By the ancestors … what is that on his face?’ my father demanded.
‘It’s just blood,’ I said. ‘I got hurt, all right? It’s not—’
The forefinger of my father’s right hand gave the slightest twitch. The glow-glass lanterns all around us flared bright as the sun, banishing every shadow, except one that I couldn’t see.
‘No!’ My father’s shout split the night in half.
My mother ran towards me and started rubbing at my left eye, making the bruise on my cheek hurt even worse. ‘It’s all right, mother. It’s just—’
I hadn’t even seen my father move, but now his strong hands lifted my mother out of the way and set her down behind him. He reached out with his left hand and took hold of my jaw so hard I could feel my gums squeezing against my teeth. He leaned over, staring into my left eye.
‘I can see fine,’ I said. ‘It’s not damaged or anything.’
My father didn’t reply until my mother tried to take his arm. He shrugged her off. ‘This cannot be wished away,’ he told her.
I tried to pull away from his grip. ‘I already said it’s just a little blood and dirt.’
With his free hand, my father reached into the pocket of his robes and pulled out the small round scrying mirror. He held it up in front of me. There, in the mirror, I saw my face. As expected, I was bruised and battered, with blood caked on my swollen cheeks and forehead. At first I was so focused on my wounds that I almost didn’t notice the thin black lines curving around the outside of my left eye. They looked like twisting vines, almost like an illustration drawn by a master artist. You might almost have called them pretty if you’d never seen them before, in the picture books meant to scare children and the manuscripts old Osia’phest kept to show initiates the perils of dark magic.
All at once I understood why Ferius had kept me standing in the shadows, why she’d forced my father to forgive me before she’d agreed to look for Shalla. Ferius had been trying to protect me. What a stupid thing to do, I thought. Everybody knows there are some things you can’t protect against. I just kept staring into that mirror, horrified by what I saw, because in those creeping black lines around my eye I finally saw what was wrong with me.
I had the shadowblack.
25
Family
Of all the tales my people tell, of all the great myths of heroic mages casting the most daring and dangerous of spells to save their clans from monsters both devious and diabolical, the very best ones – the most thrilling and terrifying stories of all – are always about the shadowblack.
When the Mahdek sorcerers performed their foulest spells, committing atrocity upon atrocity in order to spill forth perfect pitch-black hatred upon the world, they pierced the thin veil that separates our world from the hundred hells beneath. Some of those sorcerers, their mouths split wide with manic glee, discovered that by emptying their souls of any shred of goodness they created a void contrary to all the laws of magic and nature. Such an emptiness could not last of course, and it was slowly, inexorably filled by something worse than mere evil. A mage who descended those final steps into darkness found the inky marks around some part of their body – an arm, a torso or, perhaps, an eye. Those marks were the sign of the shadowblack taking over.
‘Come with me, Kellen,’ my father repeated. How many times had he said it before he grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me from the street, up the marble stairs and through the wide double doors into our house?
His shout had carried down the street. Already we could hear people coming from their homes, looking to find out what was going on.
‘Into the study,’ my mother said, her voice calm, steady, in control. I couldn’t say the same for myself.
‘You’ve got to fix me, Mother,’ I pleaded. ‘Please … I didn’t do anything! I didn’t ask for—’
She placed one hand on each of my cheeks and gripped me hard, locking my head in place. ‘Listen to me now. You’re scared. You’re hurt. You are still my son.’
You are still my son.
It wasn’t relief that I felt exactly, as she let go of my face and put an arm around me, but it was something. ‘Family,’ my father had always said, ‘is the strong stone on which we stand. It is the beginning and the end of what we are.’ I knew at that moment that he must be right, because what I wanted more than anything in the world was to know that I still had a family.
‘You’ll find my child,’ he said to Ferius, blocking her from entering the house after us. It wasn’t a question.
I saw her hesitate, but finally she nodded. ‘Make sure you honour our deal, master mage. This isn’t the boy’s fault.’
My father gave the slightest hint of a laugh, but it held no mirth, only a desolate pain bigger than any desert. ‘There is no one to blame for this, Argosi, any more than one can blame the lightning when it sets fire to the village.’
I expected some clever reply from her, but none came. I think maybe I blinked from sweat dripping into my eye and then she was gone and my father closed the door and turned to us.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said absently, one finger still tracing the line of my glyphs across my forearm. ‘I only just sparked my breath band and now I have the shadowblack? Why is this happening to me?’
My mother was ushering me into the room when my father abruptly caught her in his arms, holding her close and hiding his eyes in her shoulder. ‘All is not yet lost,’ my mother said to him. ‘With the favour of the gods, the Argosi woman will find our daughter swiftly and safely.’
But what about me?
A few minutes later I was sitting on the silk settee in my mother’s study, my back straight and hands on my knees – as if somehow good posture was going to save me – while she used a small brush to apply a wet, sticky substance around my left eye. ‘Will this stop the spread of it?’ I asked.
‘It’s only mesdet, silly boy,’ she rep
lied. ‘It’s what I use around my own eyes. It will hide the markings for now, in case someone sees you.’
She put down the brush and went to her tall cabinets, filled with tiny drawers and shelves lined with jars and pots and instruments.
‘How long will it take?’ I asked.
She held up a small vial and examined its contents. ‘How long will what take?’
‘For the shadowblack to consume me.’
In the stories, an afflicted mage didn’t become a demon all at once. At first he was no different than before, save for the black markings. But over time the pattern would grow, and slowly the mage would commit worse and worse acts of evil until finally his soul was ready for possession by the demon spirit.
‘Let the concerns of the present be our focus,’ my father said, standing behind her. ‘And let us not paint the future before its canvas appears to us.’ He leaned in to peer at my eye for just a moment as my mother went back to her jars. ‘Perhaps things are not quite as bad as they seem.’
I was so tired and hurt and confused that his words almost made me giggle. The man who, minutes before, had screamed as if he’d watched a thousand devils descend upon the world, was now telling me that maybe things weren’t ‘quite as bad as they seem’.
Outside of stories, I didn’t really know much about the shadowblack, other than what any initiate is taught in his first year of training. Of the fundamental forms of magic, six can be safely wielded by a Jan’Tep mage: iron and ember, breath and blood, sand and silk. The seventh, shadow, cannot. It is the void, the emptiness. It is the absence of living magic and the place where only demonic energies thrive. No Jan’Tep would ever study or seek out its power any more than one would willingly contract the red plague or lung rot. The shadowblack was a terrible disease that only came to terrible people.
People like me.
I remembered back to what my parents had said about my grandmother. Could the disease be passed down from parent to child? Perhaps, like some conditions, it skipped a generation. Why me? I’ve never had enough magic to make a dent in the sand, and now this?
A darker thought entered my mind, like a silk spell, or a snake that slithered under the bedsheets while you slept. It should have been Shalla.
I tried to push the vile feeling away, wondering if, even now, the shadowblack was taking me over. None of the shadowblack mages in the stories were teenagers, I thought desperately. My grandmother had to have been old before it had taken her, so maybe I had years. Maybe I can still have a bit of a life before I become a monster.
‘It is a type of curse,’ my father said, jolting me back to the present.
‘It is a disease,’ my mother corrected.
My parents stared at each other for a moment. It seemed to be part of some longstanding debate between them. But it wasn’t theoretical for me. ‘Well? Which is it? What’s going to happen to me?’
My mother turned back to her instruments and passed a hand over a small brass brazier, carefully raising the forefinger of her right hand until the flame was at the exact height she desired.
‘Your mother is correct, in her way,’ my father said. ‘And I am right in mine.’ He sat down next to me on the settee – an unusually comforting sort of act for him that only made me more uncomfortable. ‘The shadowblack is a kind of disease, but one of magic, not nature. It was brought down on us as a final curse by the Mahdek after we defeated them in the last war between our peoples. It is their corrupting magic that gives it power over us.’
‘The Mahdek are supposed to be dead,’ I insisted. ‘All the masters say so.’ Except you saw a group of them in their demon masks just two days ago. ‘Could they really have come back?’
My father’s eyebrows rose in the centre of his forehead – a sign of despair I’d seen on plenty of people before, just never on Ke’heops. ‘I don’t know, Kellen. Better and truer mages than I have tried to purge this world of the last vestiges of Mahdek magic. If someone out there is trying to strengthen it …’ He let the words trail off. Then, because men like my father don’t shy away from the truth, he said, ‘Some of the greatest mages of my parents’ generation were lost to the shadowblack. It worked its way into their souls slowly but inexorably, twisting their hearts even as the black markings twisted along the lines of their skin. Once the demons took them, all the powers those great men and women had used to protect their people had been turned against us. We nearly lost the clan.’
‘Enough, Ke’heops,’ my mother said from her worktable. ‘Don’t scare the boy any further.’ She came back to us with a glass vial held between her hands. ‘There are a few records of mages who showed the signs of the shadowblack one day only to have it disappear the next, never to return.’
I reached up a hand and traced the black markings around my left eye, feeling my way from the cold sensation they brought to my fingertip. ‘It’s not fair. I only just broke my first band. How did I get cursed with a disease that strikes master mages?’
‘I don’t know,’ my father said.
I don’t know. Three words I’d never thought to hear him say. He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘But perhaps in that weakness lies our one hope, Kellen. If the shadowblack truly feeds on a mage’s magic, then the absence in you might prevent the disease from thriving.’
I tried to take some comfort from those words. Perhaps whatever had been weakening my magical ability could enable my mother and father to remove the shadowblack from me. Then maybe, just maybe, I could then build up my power and pass my tests. I hung on to that slim thread of hope the way a drowning man does the last shred of river grass he can reach. Please, all you gods of sun and sky, of sea and earth, please stop making my life so damned rotten.
‘Drink,’ my mother said, holding out the vial.
I looked inside. A blue-and-green mixture swirled around of its own volition. ‘What will it do to me?’ I asked.
My mother’s eyes narrowed even as she gave me a faint smile. ‘A lifetime of mastering medicinal spells and now I must answer to you?’ She reached out a hand and tousled my hair. ‘It’s to heal those horrible cuts and bruises, all of which will, I promise you, be a topic of further discussion once the present crisis is over.’
The fact that I was going to be in trouble later was oddly reassuring. Having to face a flogging and house arrest – hells, even having to become a Sha’Tep – didn’t seem so bad any more.
‘You’ll need to be strong, Kellen,’ my father said, rising to stand by my mother. ‘You’ll need to be brave.’
I looked up at my parents. They looked like the painted portraits of the heroic mages of our past, when our people were feared and admired throughout the civilised world. You need to be strong. You need to be brave. I took the vial and drank it down. ‘I can do that,’ I said.
Both the words and the potion made me feel a little better. I was still young, and the shadowblack marks had only just appeared. My mother was brilliant, my father one of the most powerful mages in our clan. I could tell just by looking at them that they had a plan to fix this. Things were going to be okay.
The first tear slid lazily down my mother’s cheek, and with a sleepy impulse I reached out as though I could wipe it away. My father’s eyes were dark, stricken but hard. I watched the world grow hazy and felt my head become far too heavy to hold up. That was when I knew that things weren’t going to be okay.
My mother had drugged me.
26
The Bands
I woke up screaming.
My body was slick with sweat, every part of me on fire. I had dreamed that I’d been strapped down on a table as vile Mahdek mages with black lacquer masks drove red-hot needles into my skin, burning the shadowblack into my face, down my shoulders and arms. I had awoken at the moment when they’d begun piercing the skin around my forearms.
It was just a dream, you idiot, I told myself. Stop screaming.
The concoction my mother had tricked me into drinking had left my mind in a daze. I couldn’t seem to move,
even to open my eyes. After a few moments I realised that the reason I kept screaming was because the pain I felt in my forearms was real. The bands. Something’s happening to the bands …
Instinctively I tried to raise my arms, but I couldn’t. Despite the thick fog in my skull, I managed to shout for my parents and force my eyes open. That was when things got worse.
I was no longer in my mother’s study lying on her settee. This was my father’s private chamber. I was bound onto his worktable, thick leather straps holding my wrists and ankles. My father stood over me, one hand pressing down on my chest as the other pushed something sharp into my forearm.
‘Father? What are you doing? Why does this hurt so much?’
He withdrew the needle then, but didn’t answer me. He just moved his hand and dipped the needle into a tiny metal cauldron sitting atop a brazier that burned with a fierce heat. When the needle came back out, it held a single drop of molten silver. I saw then that there were other dishes sitting on top of other braziers, each one a different colour, holding a different molten metal. Copper, brass, gold, iron … They were the metal inks used to tattoo the bands on Jan’Tep initiates as children, to connect us with the fundamental forces of magic. But when I looked down at the band for ember, I saw the reverse sigils burning there, dark and ugly, forever severing my connection to the magic of fire, of lightning, of energy.
‘Father, please, stop! Don’t counter-band me!’
When a child is banded, it’s done with only the tiniest amounts of the ink – so small you can barely see the drops on the needles. But my father was using much, much more. He was doing to me what he’d threatened to do to Shalla: counter-banding me permanently. Once he completed the process, I would never again be able to wield my people’s magics, not even the feeble cantrips that a Sha’Tep servant can still perform near the oasis. He might as well cut off my hands and tear out my eyes.
‘Don’t do this, Father,’ I begged. ‘I’ll do anything you ask, but please don’t—’
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