The old man dealt me another card, this one bearing the number two and a pair of skulls, which was especially impressive since there is no suit of skulls in a Daroman deck.
“Don’t suppose you’d consider teaching me that trick?” I asked.
“What would be the point?” His fingers twitched and the card went up in flames. “Would’ve thought someone with your reputation could stay better hidden, but my magic led me right to this place. Honestly, boy, I’m so disappointed I feel like I should just kill you right now and be done with it.”
I put up my hands and gave him my best smile. “Hey now, no need to be hasty. I just came in here for a drink and to play some cards. Why don’t you describe this Kellen fellow to me? Maybe I’ve seen him around.”
The mage snickered. “Your height, your build.” He tossed a jack of trebuchets face up on the table. “Your smarmy mouth, your filthy brown hair.” He flipped the card once and now it was the jack of blades.
“That description matches any number of folks around these parts. And besides, I don’t think you should be making too much of other people’s hair being filthy, friend.”
“And of course…” the mage said, and flipped the jack once more in the air. When it came to rest back on the table, it was the same card but now an elaborate black design circled the jack’s eye. “The man I’m looking for has the same disgusting shadowblack around his left eye that you bear, Kellen of the House of Ke.”
I leaned back in my chair and gave him a brief round of applause. “See, now that’s magic. You sure I can’t persuade you to teach me these wonderful card tricks of yours?”
The mage shook his head. “You’re all out of tricks now, Kellen. Oh, you’ve managed to elude a few minor adepts before, built a modest reputation with that little bit of magic you have. No doubt it’s impressive to the hicks in the countryside. Maybe even enough to captivate the imagination of a twelve-year-old girl who calls herself a queen. But you’ve got nothing to match up with a true lord magus, Kellen. So now you die.”
“Like I keep telling you, friend, you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
“You’re going to tell me there’s a lot of men in these parts with the black markings around their left eye?”
I shrugged. “Could just be makeup, you know. Like a new fashion. An…affectation?”
“An affectation? As if anyone in their right mind would want to go around with the shadowblack staining their soul? I take it all back, boy. You’re almost too much fun to murder. Unfortunately, you’ve killed a few mages you shouldn’t have, so I’m afraid letting you live isn’t an option.” The mage gathered up the cards, drew a small pile of them and fanned them out on the table. Eleven cards. All kings. “If the rumours are to be believed.”
“Maybe even more?” I asked, flipping one more card from the deck. It would have been nice if it had magically turned out to be yet another king, but it was the six of arrows.
“Anything’s possible, I suppose.”
I said my next words very slowly. “This Kellen fellow sounds awfully dangerous. Aren’t you the least bit anxious you might get hurt chasing after him all across the country?”
“No.”
I leaned my elbows on the table and peered into his eyes. “You’re really that sure of yourself? You’re really that powerful?”
“Yes,” he said. “But unlike the fools you’ve met before me, I’m also cautious. I made certain preparations in advance, just to be sure.”
“You mean like losing a lot of money at cards?”
He chuckled at that. “In a manner of speaking. The cards were just to keep you in your chair. I enchanted it yesterday with magic older and darker than you can imagine.”
I looked down at the chair. “This old thing? I hate to tell you, friend, but if this is supposed to be killing me right now, it’s not working very well.”
“Kill you? Don’t be silly. I want to do that myself. No, the chair has a sympathetic binding spell on it, Kellen. When a mage sits down on it, it begins to grab a hold of the magic in his body. By now, even the tiny drip of magic inside you is holding you in that chair stronger than oak or steel. Go ahead, try to move. The more you do, the stronger the binding will grip you, until eventually you’ll suffocate from it!”
I thought about that for a moment and then nodded. “That really does sound ingenious. Can’t imagine a way out of such a trap. I wonder why no one tried it on this Kellen person before.”
The old man snorted. “Not many can cast this spell, I assure you.”
“Of course it doesn’t explain why the dozen or so people who sat in this chair before me today didn’t get killed.”
“Like I told you, it only works on Jan’Tep mages. I thought you’d appreciate it, Kellen. At least now people will have to recognize that you did have a little magic in you.”
“Right, right. Diabolical and considerate. And yet…”
“And yet what?”
I tilted my head back, idly staring up at the ceiling. “And yet, it seems risky to me. Putting so much effort into something like a chair, relying on the other person actually sitting in the right one.”
“Not much risk at all. You’ve been seen here every night for the past week, sitting in that same chair. So I made sure to be in my chair before you arrived, and the bartender made sure no else sat here until you came. Besides, I picked a night where most people are out celebrating the little queen’s birthday festival.”
“Sure, that makes sense, but still…”
“What?”
“Well, this Kellen is supposed to be a genius at escaping his enemies, isn’t he?”
“Genius? No. Cunning, perhaps. He knows a few tricks, certainly.”
I nodded in agreement. “Right. Cunning. Tricky. Well, wouldn’t it be just like a cunning, tricky person to figure out what you were up to and come in the night before and swap the chairs. I mean, he does seem to have a knack for survival, right? What if he just happened to come in here after dark last night and put your chair here and his chair, well, where you’re sitting right now. Wouldn’t that put you in the binding spell?”
The mage’s gaze narrowed. He tried moving his arm and then suddenly opened his eyes wide. He tore at the sleeve of his robe as if it was glued to the arm of the chair. He shifted furiously as he tried to get out of the seat, but to no avail. His movements became more and more frenetic until finally he looked at me with his mouth moving silently, as though his chest were being crushed by the arms of strong men. His eyes closed, and for a moment there was nothing but silence in the room.
Then the old man started laughing.
He rose effortlessly from his chair and spread his hands. “Oh my, the look on your face! I swear, boy, that was priceless! Like a man gone to the gallows suddenly finds the hangman caught in the noose!”
“Well now, that was quite a performance.”
The old man bowed at the waist. “Thank you. Thank you,” he said. Then he sat back down and started giggling again. “I did warn you, Kellen, that I’m just a bit smarter than the other mages you faced.”
“Just a bit,” I acknowledged.
“I didn’t know if you’d find out about my plans, but I took precautions regardless. I made sure that the chairs were checked. So after you came here last night and switched them…”
“Your accomplice switched them back in the morning.” I looked over at the bartender who had a grizzly smile on his face. “Nice way to treat a regular customer,” I shouted.
The mage slapped his hands down on the table between us. “Now then, I’m afraid that while this has been entertaining, it’s time for me to go collect the other half of my fee, which means we have to conclude our business.”
“Don’t you think you should offer me a glass of that wine before you kill me?”
“This?” he said, holding up the bottle. “Oh, no, I’m saving this for later.” He put the bottle back down on the table, pulled out a cloth from his robe and started cleaning the corksc
rew. “This,” he said, showing it to me, “is what I’m going to shove into that black eye of yours to pull the life right out of you.”
I swallowed. “Sounds a bit messy for a mage of your calibre, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“A requirement of my Daroman employers. They felt a desecrated corpse would send a stronger message to their little queen. I don’t mind though. A lord magus rarely gets his hands dirty.” He held up the now gleaming corkscrew. “But twisting this into your eye? Doing something so painful while you sit there screaming in agony yet are unable to move a muscle? Well, let’s just say it’s an idea I find intriguing. I suspect you’ll suffocate from struggling against the binding spell before the wounds take you though.”
“Don’t suppose I can talk you out of it?”
The mage shook his head and smiled one last time with those perfect teeth of his before standing up with the corkscrew in his right hand.
“Well then,” I said. “If this is the day I meet my ancestors, I’d rather do it on my feet.”
Whatever the old man was going to say died when he saw me stand up from the chair.
“That’s not…”
I picked up the bottle of wine and noted its vintage scrawled in grease pen. Probably the most expensive bottle in the place. Must have been a good fee.
“That’s not right…”
“Maybe the spell didn’t work?” I suggested.
“Impossible…I…My spells never fail. Never.”
“That is a conundrum.” I held up a finger. “Perhaps I’m vastly more powerful than you were led to believe?”
The old man started mumbling. “But…but everyone knows Kellen of the House of Ke is the weakest of mages…He’s only ever sparked his breath band, but even in that, his magic is weak as a child’s…”
I nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, even I’ve heard that. So if your spells never fail and this Kellen fellow really isn’t powerful enough to break them, then, well, that really leaves only one explanation, doesn’t it?” I took up the cloth from the table and began wiping the makeup from my left eye.
“Ancestors…You tricked me! You’re not…”
I smiled innocently. “Now, be fair, friend. I did try to tell you that I wasn’t this Kellen of the House of Ke. Several times, in fact.”
The mage reclaimed his composure and started reaching into his robes. “Whoever you are, you don’t have any magic to protect you! So now you’ll tell me where Kellen is, or you’ll scream for a merciful death!”
“I’ll tell you for free,” I said, tossing the dirty rag past the old man’s shoulder. “He’s right behind you.”
The mage whirled around. The bartender was unconscious on the floor. The drunk who’d been snoring in the corner was now standing behind the old man, wiping at his own left eye with the rag.
“A trick!” the mage shouted. “A filthy trick!”
Kellen Argos—at least, that’s the name he’d given when he’d hired me—smiled sympathetically at the mage. That strange black pattern circling his eye, which we’d spent hours painting around my own, was now almost glistening in the light. “It’s like you said, lord magus, I don’t have a whole lot of magic. Tricks are all I’ve got to work with.”
Completing my end of the contract, I brought the wine bottle down as hard as I could on the back of the mage’s head. It shattered into a hundred pieces, wine spilling everywhere. The old man crumpled like sackcloth.
Kellen knelt down, listening to the old man’s breath before searching his robes and pulling out a bag of coins. He fished out a few of them, which he stuffed in his pocket before closing the bag and handing the rest to me.
I opened the bag back up. Inside was a small fortune; enough to buy me a title and a mansion if I wanted. Enough to make me suspicious. “What’s the catch?”
Kellen grabbed one of the mage’s arms. “Give me a hand with him.”
We hefted him up and sat him back down in what had been my chair this time.
“See now, that’s just cruel,” I said.
Kellen patted the old man on the head. “No worse than what he had planned for me. Besides, his employers’ll come looking for him. Might even pay to get another mage to release him from the binding spell. In a few days.”
“Why not just kill him? He’ll tell them how you pulled this off.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“So then, what about next time they come after you, or the queen? You won’t be able to use this same ruse twice.”
Kellen Argos looked down at the floor and sighed. We did look alike, I guess—enough to fool strangers, anyway. But he was a couple of years younger than me and looked a lot more…tired.
“Next time? Next time, it’ll cost them a lot more to find a lord magus willing to take the risk.” He sighed. “But they’ll do it. They’ll pay whatever they have to if they think they can get to me, or her.” Then he looked back up at me and smiled. It was a wicked smile that came out of the corner of his mouth like a scavenger sneaking back out of your house after stealing your dinner. “So I guess next time, I’ll have to come up with something else.”
His gaze went to the broken bottle of wine, the liquid spread across the table drowning the cards and slowly spilling onto the floor. “Should’ve hit him with one of the mugs,” he said, clapping me once on the shoulder before heading for the door. “We could’ve shared the wine.”
As he walked out into the night, I could hear the faint sounds of people celebrating in the distance. I picked up the filthy wet cloth from the table and used it to clean off the jack of blades that the mage had made appear with the strange black markings around the eye.
That was the first time I’d ever met the queen’s tutor of cards. Probably would be the last, too, but I kept the jack, just in case.
Chapter Two
The Seventh Arrest
Nothing stinks like a capital city in summer. Streets already crowded with courtiers, craftspeople, lords and labourers begin to burst as endless caravans of merchants, foreign delegates and those impoverished by bad harvests or foreign raiders roll through the gates in search of profit or safety. Upon a gleaming white arch at the city’s entrance an inscription bearing the capital’s motto beckons visitors with the promise: “Emni Urbana Imperitat Omna Vitaris.”
From the Imperial City Flows Prosperity.
Also, sewage.
That’s the thing about great cities: they can solve hunger with more food, security with more soldiers and almost everything else with more money, but there’s only so much shit you can swirl around before the very flagstones begin to reek.
“This place stinks,” Reichis chittered above me.
The soft flutter of fur-covered gliding flaps heralded a light thump against my shoulder as the squirrel cat made his landing. My two-foot-tall, thieving, murderous business partner sniffed at my face. “Funny. You don’t smell dead.”
“I’m fine.” We’d had a lengthy argument about me going off to deal with the mage alone.
Reichis sniffed a second time. “You smell worse than dead, actually. Is that whisky?” he asked, sticking his muzzle in my hair and sounding more than a little intrigued.
Six months living in the capital of Darome had afforded Reichis the opportunity to expand his list of unhealthy addictions, which currently consisted of butter biscuits, overpriced amber pazione liqueur, several vintages of Daroman and Gitabrian wines—the expensive ones, naturally—and, of course, human flesh.
“Did you bring me the mage’s eyeballs?” the squirrel cat demanded.
“He wasn’t dead.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
This is where having a squirrel cat perched on your shoulder, perilously close to your soft tasty human ears, gets dangerous. See, squirrel cats, with their tubby feline bodies, big bushy tails, coats that changes colour depending on their mood and furry flaps that stretch between their front and back limbs, enabling them to glide from treetops (or “fly as well as any gods-damned falc
on” as Reichis would insist) can—if you stare at them squinty-eyed, from a distance and preferably through a thick fog or drunken haze—look almost cute. They’re not though. Dogs are cute. Bunny rabbits are cute. Poisonous Berabesq sand rattlers are cute to somebody. Squirrel cats though? Not cute. Evil.
“Reichis…” I began.
His breath is surprisingly warm when it’s less than an inch from your earlobe. “Go on…Say it.”
Ancestors, I thought, noting in the periphery of my vision that Reichis’s shadowblack markings were swirling. A year ago, he’d wound up with the same twisting black lines around his left eye as I have around mine. Unlike me, though, the possibility of one day becoming a rampaging demon terrorizing the entire continent didn’t trouble him at all. The idea frankly delighted him.
Rescue from possibly fatal squirrel cat gnawing came in the form of a half-dozen pairs of heavy boots clomping up behind me, soon followed by the tell-tale click of a crossbow’s safety catch being released. “Kellen Argos, by order of Lieutenant Torian Libri of the queen’s marshals service, you’re under arrest.”
I sighed. “This again?”
The first, tentative rasp of the crossbow’s trigger sliding against its iron housing. “Get those hands up high, spellslinger.”
I hadn’t even noticed my fingers had drifted to the powder holsters at my sides. Reflex, I guess. Though by now, you’d figure I’d have gotten used to being arrested on a weekly basis.
I raised my arms and slowly turned to find a half-dozen marshals wearing broad hats and long grey coats facing me, the usual assortment of short-hafted maces and crossbows at the ready. “Would you like me to read the warrant?” Sergeant Cobb Faustus asked. Short, scrawny, narrow-shouldered and years past his prime, you’d think he’d seem almost comical next to his younger and more vigorous subordinates. Unfortunately, my personal experience with the queen’s marshals has taught me that age does nothing to diminish how dangerous they are—only how crabby they get when you resist.
Me? I was eighteen, wearier than my years ought to allow, my shirt still soaked from the booze I’d used to disguise myself back at the saloon. I was starting to get a little crabby myself. “What’s the charge this time?”
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