The Deep and Shining Dark

by Juliet Kemp

  You know something’s wrong when the cityangel turns up at your door

  Magic within the city-state of Marek works without the need for bloodletting, unlike elsewhere in Teren, thanks to an agreement three hundred years ago between an angel and the founding fathers. It also ensures that political stability is protected from magical influence. Now, though, most sophisticates no longer even believe in magic or the cityangel.

  But magic has suddenly stopped working, discovers Reb, one of the two sorcerers who survived a plague that wiped out virtually all of the rest. Soon she is forced to acknowledge that someone has deposed the cityangel without being able to replace it. Marcia, Heir to House Fereno, and one of the few in high society who is well-aware that magic still exists, stumbles across that same truth. But it is just one part of a much more ambitious plan to seize control of Marek.

  Meanwhile, city Council members connive and conspire, unaware that they are being manipulated in a dangerous political game. A game that threatens the peace and security not just of the city, but all the states around the Oval Sea, including the shipboard traders of Salina upon whom Marek relies.

  To stop the impending disaster, Reb and Marcia, despite their difference in status, must work together alongside the deposed cityangel and Jonas, a messenger from Salina. But first they must discover who is behind the plot, and each of them must try to decide who they can really trust.

  Book 1 of Juliet Kemp’s gripping new series

  JULIET KEMP

  THE DEEP AND

  SHINING

  DARK

  BOOK 1 OF THE MAREK SERIES

  Elsewhen Press

  The Deep and Shining Dark

  First published in Great Britain by Elsewhen Press, 2018

  An imprint of Alnpete Limited

  Copyright © Juliet Kemp, 2018. All rights reserved

  The right of Juliet Kemp to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, telepathic, magical, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  Elsewhen Press, PO Box 757, Dartford, Kent DA2 7TQ

  www.elsewhen.press

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-911409-24-3 Print edition

  ISBN 978-1-911409-34-2 eBook edition

  Condition of Sale

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  Elsewhen Press & Planet-Clock Design are trademarks of Alnpete Limited

  Converted to eBook format by Elsewhen Press

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, trading organisations, governing councils and events are either a product of the author’s fertile imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, governments, companies, places or people (living, dead, or spirit) is purely coincidental. No angels were harmed in the making of this book.

  CONTENTS

  Map of Marek

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  ONE

  Jonas t’Riseri sat on the river wall, a warm pastry in his hand, idly watching Marek’s early morning water traffic. Downriver to his right, on this side of the river, the ferry was pulling out from the foot of Marekhill, its bow coming round to point towards the Old Market on the other side. Nearly opposite him, a fishing-boat was coming back from the early shift into the small local dock, catch shining silver-blue at the back of its deck; and in the larger section of the docks, little boats darted in and out among the masts of the sea-going Salinas ships.

  He grimaced and looked away. He didn’t want to think about Salina right now.

  To his left, the shallow curve of the Old Bridge was already busy with folk – servants and shopkeepers – headed from well-off south Marek to the wholesale market north of the river, and returning the other way with loaded trolleys and lighter purses. Carts and carriages took the more direct New Bridge, a few streets further upstream; but for anything that could be carried on foot, especially if you were delivering to the narrow streets of the older parts of the city, or Marekhill itself where carriages and carts were forbidden, human-power was still quicker, and most folk preferred to avoid the dusty, vehicle-crowded routes to, from, and over the New Bridge.

  Jonas spotted Tam, one of the messengers he’d met when he first reached Marek, and now a good friend, coming over the rise of the bridge, bare feet skimming across the paving. Messengers were light on their feet; you had to be. Jonas raised a hand as Tam ducked around a porter with a trolley of vegetables and came level with him where the bridge met the river wall.

  “Go safe!” Tam called over without stopping; the messengers’ traditional greeting.

  Tam, and someone else – Jonas couldn’t quite see their face, but there was something odd, something wrong, about the way they moved. The stranger had to duck under the low doorway that short Tam wasn’t bothered by. Both of them walking towards Jonas…

  Jonas blinked, and the flicker was gone, the dim room – had that been evening light from its doorway? – in his mental eye replaced by the bright sunlight of the real morning in front of him. He scowled, the edges of his good mood fading. He’d been having more than one a day, the last couple of days. Definitely more than usual. Not that his flickers were ‘usual’ at all, not for anyone else, and they shouldn’t be for him either. He didn’t want them, and he couldn’t go home with them. That was why he was here in Marek, famous for its magic, finding out how to get rid of them for good. The Salinas did not have – mustn’t have – magic. He had to fix it; but he’d got here and discovered that there wasn’t a sorcerer on every street corner any more. Marek’s sorcerers had almost all been wiped out by a plague a couple of years previously. There were a couple left still, he’d found that out too, but the problem with talking to a sorcerer about his flickers was that it meant, well… talking to a sorcerer, about his flickers. In the season he’d been here, he hadn’t quite brought himself to do it. And then every so often he’d have a longer patch between flickers and think, well, maybe it was just going of its own accord…

  He’d get round to it eventually. There was time enough yet. He distracted himself with another big bite of his pastry. The rich crackly leaves of the outside dissolved in his mouth, and he relished the sweet fruit inside. Berries from Exuria, at this time of year, which meant they’d be brought in by Salinas ships… Against his will, he looked rightwards again, following the flow of the water moving steadily below him, out towards the mouth of the estuary and into the Oval Sea. The curve of the river blocked his view any further, but in his mind’s eye he looked around the Marekhill cliffs, past the swamps at the estuary’s mouth, and across the Oval Sea towards Salina, invisibly distant. Though, at this time of year, nearly all of his people would be out at sea rather than at ho
me in the villages.

  Behind him an infusion-seller was pushing a clanking barrow and calling their wares. Jonas swallowed the last crumbs of the pastry and counted his coins. Not enough. Time to go looking for the next job. He hopped down off the wall, then hesitated. The Old Market was good for messages this time of day. He had a penny for the ferry over from the far end of Guildstreet, at the foot of the cliff end of Marekhill, and that was quicker than going over the bridge and round the port, but he hated the ferry. It wasn’t a proper ship. And anyway, a penny was a penny. He headed towards the bridge. He’d go the long way. Maybe he’d pick up a job on the way; he wouldn’t get that on the ferry.

  The flicker was still nagging at the back of his brain as he threaded his way through the crowds on the bridge. Who was it that Tam was going to introduce to him?

  His flickers were aggravating, mostly, rather than useful; though he’d won money on a boat race more than once, and he never played dice with people he liked, or not more than once. He sighed. He really did need to get on and track down one of those sorcerers. His mother had been very clear on the matter. Go to Marek, she’d said, barely able to meet his eye, when she’d realised what he was telling her. They have sorcerers there. Go to Marek and fix it.

  He couldn’t just keep letting time slip by, however busy he was earning a living and making friends and exploring this fascinating new city. And however much he hated the idea of talking to a sorcerer.

  He was over the bridge now, passing through the wholesale market that stretched in both directions along the river, sandwiched between the riverbank and the squats that rose behind the big market square. Fish and meat and vegetables and grains all in their separate areas, and all of them thronged with people. One of the vegetable sellers beckoned Jonas over; Jonas spread his hands to sign ‘busy’. Wholesalers always wanted to send you out towards the yard where the carts waited, just outside the city bounds, and you could never get anything on the way back again.

  To his left, carts were loading up to wheel out onto the main road that led through the marshes towards Teren. To his right, there were three smaller roads and half a dozen alleyways. Jonas swerved towards the alley furthest right; always easier to dodge around folk on foot than carts. And that one cut down towards the northern riverbank. River wasn’t sea, but he still liked to be near the water when he could. And the path went through the docks, where ships were moored in tight ranks, and almost all of them Salinas.

  It was too early though today for most anyone to be up, when they were safely in port. The only Salina he saw was a harassed-looking quartermaster overseeing burly dockers removing huge sacks of grain from the ship’s deck. Jonas didn’t recognise her, and she was too busy to notice him. Most times someone would, though; Jonas’ fair hair stood out among the darker Teren dockers, even if it wasn’t as white-blond as most of his compatriots. What stood out even more was a Salina in Mareker tunic and trousers, working on land, and when he wanted a few free drinks, Jonas went down to the drinking dens along the edge of the port, and waited for one of the sailors to ask his story. Sometimes he’d wind up taking someone home for the night, too, one of his age-mates on her first solo tour, or an older woman taken by his cheerful smile. That was fun, too. But he couldn’t explain why he was here; couldn’t talk about his little problem.

  Automatically, he looked up at the masts. He slowed, and his eyes widened. Every Salinas ship was flying the New Year flag. And, now he came to look at them, there were a lot more masts than usual. Almost as if they were coming up to… It couldn’t possibly be New Year already, could it? Could he have lost track of the calendar that badly, here where they named their year the other way around? He started counting weeks on his fingers; swore; counted again.

  Shitsticks. How could he have left it this long? Half a year, his mother had said; half a year to sort it out, and then he could grab a lift home just after the New Year, when everyone set off for Salina before the bad weather set in and they ceased trading for the season. And here he was, could only be a couple of days from New Year, and he’d got nowhere. How could time have passed that quickly?

  Today. He had to find a damn sorcerer, today, and sort this thing out. That was all there was to it.

  k k

  Reb handed the messenger a penny tip, shut the front door after them, and unwrapped the parcel from the grocer. A bag of floor-sweepings, and another of powdered eggshell. Floor-sweepings from a busy shop were about the best thing going for getting the feel of the city. All those feet, in and out, bringing dirt with them from every corner of the place. Eggshell was just a substrate, but Reb hated powdering it herself. The local grocery was sufficiently busy for her purposes, and the grocer considered bagging his floor-sweepings and powdering his eggshells to be well-worth the honesty-charms she exchanged with him for it.

  Not that many people bothered with honesty-charms any more. She’d turned a lot of folk away, just after the plague, wrapped up in her grief and guilt. With no one else to go to any more – it was hardly the sort of work that brat Cato would do, even if respectable shopkeepers were prepared to go to his part of the squats – people had found ways to do without magic.

  When she’d started working again, there was still enough business to keep her afloat, and she hadn’t raised her rates, but it seemed like she hadn’t that many repeat customers these days. She remembered, once, being friendly with her customers. Those who still came to her didn’t seem so chatty these days.

  That suited her fine.

  She took her parcel into the inner workroom, automatically bolting the door behind her. Her jars of ingredients were lined up on shelves above the workbench. As she took down the eggshell and sweepings jars to top them up, she ran her eyes over the shelves, gauging the levels of each ingredient. She’d pay a visit to Christie’s later. Mid-Year was coming up, and going by last year, even now sorcery was less popular that would still mean a boost in trade – beforehand, for protection during the festival time, and afterwards, for fixing any little problems that people might have acquired while they were celebrating. She stared at the shelves. Once, she would have been run off her feet already, and complaining of it with her colleagues. Once, she had had colleagues.

  She shook her head, sheering away from the thought. Soot she was fine for and could scrape off her own hearth anyway; a couple of the herb jars were low but culinary from the grocery did just as well as the stuff Christie sold, and with a lower markup. Shame she hadn’t known he’d be sending the eggshell and floor-sweepings, or she could have sent a message for the herbs too. Dried ants she was low on, and hair-clippings; it was worth paying Christie’s markup on hair-clippings for the guarantee that they’d been anonymised already. The anonymisation process didn’t need magic, but it was tedious. The big question, of course, in the long run, was whether Christie was going to carry on stocking any of it. Christie had always been a source of all unusual things, not just magic ingredients – but. Well. Two years on, how long would Christie continue providing something for only two people? If Cato even bought from Christie’s; perhaps it was just her. Who knew what Cato got up to. (She should know. She should still be keeping track. Should.)

  And if that did happen, what could she keep doing, with just what she could get from regular shops and suppliers?

  How much did she care, any more? Fewer folk were coming to her, after all. There were only two sorcerers left. Maybe magic was just… fading away from Marek. She ought to care. Once, she would have cared. A lot had changed since then.

  She found herself glancing upwards, to the small leather case on the top shelf that contained her blood-magic instruments, relic of the days before she came to Marek; then she looked away. Blood-magic was illegal here. She’d promised Zareth when she apprenticed. Then she’d broken that promise, in desperation, during the plague, and it hadn’t made a blind bit of difference.

  She sighed, and pushed the heel of her hand into that painful point in her forehead that always seemed to be there these days
, trying to concentrate again on what she was doing. She had what she needed for the simple charms that were all she had commissioned for today. (Or any other day. No one wanted anything more complicated, even if she had the heart for it.) And plenty of time to manage them; even if that charm for the grocer had taken far longer than she’d expected the other day. She was getting more and more out of practice. She should get on with it.

  Half an hour later, she was swearing without restraint. Two crucibles lay in shattered pieces on the bench, and the shards of the third were scattered across the room. Blood was oozing down her cheek from where a piece had shot straight at her, and she dabbed at it with her sleeve while she swore some more.

  This couldn’t possibly just be her making mistakes. Even when she was learning Marek-style magic, when she’d first come to Marek and apprenticed to Zareth, she’d never been clumsy enough to screw up three different charms in succession at all, never mind this badly. Something else was going on. Something was getting in the way of her pulling down the magic.

  She bent, slowly, to pick up the pieces of crucible from the floor. If only there was someone else to talk to about this. If only she wasn’t on her own. Her throat tightened in a grief that hadn’t abated in the last two years.

  Of course; there was always Cato.

  She scowled. She wasn’t at that point yet. First of all, she could try something even more basic. Something that didn’t involve flying crockery if it went wrong. She took down a handful of jars, then looked at them for a moment, chewing at her lip. Carefully, she took a pinch of each and dropped it onto the edge of the table, in a neat row of tiny piles. She re-stoppered the jars and put them in their places behind the protective ledges of the shelves. She cupped her left hand and reached towards the first pile with her right, then stopped, eyeing the remains of the crucibles. Instead, she crouched down on the floor, drew a neat chalk circle on the boards, then reached again towards the piles.