by Juliet Kemp
Eggshell, scattered over the circle. Floor-sweepings, towards the six compass directions. The eggshell shifted a little, and she cocked her head to one side. A pinch of rosemary, and another of powdered rowan-bark, drawing a circle within the chalk. She watched, intently. Nothing happened.
She chewed at a fingernail. Once upon a time, in another place, she would have put a drop of blood into the circle, to connect with the flow of magic. But Marek magic wasn’t supposed to need that. She pulled her finger away from her mouth, and looked at it. Her own hair, and her own nail, that wasn’t blood magic, but it was hers, and she was a sorcerer. It would be enough sympathetic magic to boost the spell.
Still watching the circle she reached out, without looking, for the scissors on her table, and snipped off a nail-paring and a couple of inches of hair. She crouched back down again, and gently tossed them into the circle.
Chaos. She jumped back instinctively, even though the circle was containing it. The components of the spell were whirling around one another, without any rhythm that she could see, flying up and down and around within a dome with the chalk circle as its base. Reb watched, hoping that maybe it was just more complicated than she was used to, that if she looked hard enough she’d see something there, that it was simply a more complex pattern than anything she’d worked with of late – but as the minutes ticked by, nothing resolved.
Her throat was dry. Magic was chaos, yes, at its root; but not here. Outside Marek, when you wanted to tap into the flow of magic, to pull it down, to tame it, you used blood, or you made a deal with a nonhuman, and you took the risks of both of those. Here, in Marek, there was the cityangel, bound to the city since its founding, some three hundred years ago, who tamed the chaos. That was why Marek was how it was; that was why Marek was (had been, had been, and her throat tightened again) the city of sorcerers, all these years. The cityangel was always there; and the cityangel wouldn’t allow anything like this. And yet, here this was.
She looked again at the miniature whirlwind, beginning now to settle as the components burnt out. Was it possible that something could have happened – and if it was, how could it be so – to the cityangel?
k k
Reb shook her head, slowly at first, then more forcefully, as the last of the dust within the circle settled to the ground. No. It wasn’t, couldn’t be, possible that anything had happened to the cityangel. That was absurd nonsense. Marek and the cityangel had been bound together since the city was founded; long enough that for most folk it was just a myth. Marek’s reputation for magic might be common knowledge; the link between that and the cityangel was known only to sorcerers, by now. It couldn’t be anything wrong with the cityangel. She would have known. It had to be her, something she was doing wrong.
Maybe it was just a sign that she should, finally, give up. Just stop trying. Maybe Marek just wasn’t supposed to be a city of sorcerers any more. Maybe the plague had a purpose. It might have spared her, but maybe she should have given up anyway, buried it along with everyone she’d known. She laced her fingers together, and tried to pretend that they weren’t shaking.
The knock on the front door startled her. She stood up hurriedly, her right knee creaking slightly, and went back through to the main room.
“Yes?” she called as she bolted the workroom door behind her.
The front door creaked open, and a skinny lad poked his head around it. His pale hair, tied back in multiple braids, screamed Salinas, though his skin was only a shade or two lighter, and his features only a little more pointed, than the average Teren. Reb frowned – the Salinas famously had nothing to do with magic, so why would one of them come to her? Was it some kind of dare? Then he came right round the door, and she saw that he wore a messenger’s red armband. Her eyebrows went up – she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a messenger who wasn’t Mareker-born, and while Marek had inhabitants from all around the Oval Sea, the Salinas almost never settled anywhere other than their own islands.
“Afternoon,” he said cheerfully.
“Afternoon,” she said.
“You were expecting Asa. They had a message go long, asked me to take over. I’m Jonas.”
That was right. She remembered, now, asking that messenger to come back. For those deliveries that she’d been expecting she’d have ready by then. Dammit.
“What did you want?” he prompted her, after a moment.
Reb scowled. “Well, what I did want was a bunch of deliveries, but unfortunately that won’t be happening. Can I send you to Christie’s, instead? And then I’ll have some notes for when you come back.”
“For certain,” he said politely. “Have you a list?”
“Not written,” Reb started, but he was shaking his head.
“No need. I’ll remember it.”
“Well then. A jar each of dried ants, and of hair-clippings – make sure they’re the anonymised ones, not the ones he sells for processing yourself. And a quarter-jar of amaranth horn.” Christie was expensive, but reliably ethical, which the cheaper providers of amaranth horn weren’t at all. “And tell Christie I’ll be around to see him myself later this afternoon.” She turned to the dresser and dug out one of the coin rolls she kept for messenger errands. “Here. That should see you right.”
“For certain,” Jonas said again, and slid himself back out of the door.
Reb found paper, pen, and ink, and wrote notes for the commissions she’d be late on now – which was infuriating. She was never late. After than she swept up the workroom. Jonas wasn’t back when she was done, which meant that there wasn’t anything she could reasonably use to avoid thinking about what had happened.
Maybe she’d messed up. But – well. She was certain that she had done everything correctly. She’d been doing that spell for twenty years. And the idea that she’d suddenly stopped being a sorcerer was both patently absurd, and contradicted by the effect her hair-clipping and nail-clipping had had on the spell. That had to be her own magic acting as mediator.
The idea that Marek, or the cityangel, or both together, didn’t want her to be a sorcerer any more, and that was affecting her magic – that wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility. Part of her hated the idea with a visceral distress that churned her stomach and left her nauseated. The other part was just weary.
She could just leave it. Hope it fixed itself. Hide her head in the sand. She’d been good at that, the last couple of years. Or she could hie herself to the squats to find that little shit Cato, and hope he was sober and prepared to talk. (He would talk. If she told him what she feared, he would talk. When it came right down to it, they were both still sorcerers.)
Neither idea was particularly appealing, and she was still trying to think of an alternative when a knock on the door made her jump again.
When she opened the door, Jonas was barely out of breath.
“You’re fast,” she said, taking back the parcel and her change. He’d already taken his fee out of it, but she took another coin out and handed it back to him. He nodded his thanks.
“That’s me,” Jonas said. “Fastest runner in Marek.”
She flicked an eyebrow. “Do those who grew up here agree?”
Jonas shrugged. “They have the home ground advantage. But I’m catching up. I like moving fast. Reminds me of sailing.” The Salinas were the only ones who sailed the depths of the Oval Sea. They spent most of their lives at sea, carrying trade goods for every city and nation that gave onto it.
“What’re you doing in Marek, anyway?” she asked.
“Oh, you know. Looking around. New experiences, get to know a place a bit better than you do when you’re just trading. Interesting, being on dry land for a while.”
His eyes were too wide and innocent. What he said might be true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. But then, who didn’t have secrets? It was none of her business, after all; she was just making conversation.
“Hey,” he said suddenly. “You’re a – a sorcerer, no?”
He seemed a little
nervous. No wonder, given the Salinas attitude to magic.
“Yes,” Reb agreed.
“Is that something you, like, choose?”
“Well.” Reb considered the question.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” he added hastily, looking as though he thought she might throw a spell at him for the enquiry.
“No, that’s – no, it’s fine. It’s a talent, sorcery. Not everyone has it. I suppose not everyone who has it has to use it.” Not that she could imagine herself having made any other decision, back when she’d discovered it in herself, when she still lived in the Teren village where she’d grown up.
“So you could stop.”
Reb felt suddenly weary. “I could. It would still be there. But I could – do something else.” Could she? “Like you could choose – are choosing, I suppose – not to sail.”
“I’m going back. Soon,” Jonas said, immediately, automatically, but there was an arrested look in his eyes.
“Can you, like, see the future?” he asked, after a moment.
She laughed. “I only wish I could. No, that’s only for fairy-stories, I’m afraid.”
He nodded, looking almost stricken. What on earth did he think sorcerers were? Of course, though any Marek child knew exactly what sorcerers could and couldn’t do, Salinas children were presumably told only to stay away from it.
“There’s seers will tell you your future in the cards or your hand,” Reb offered, “but…”
“But that’s just trickery, I know that,” Jonas said, brushing it aside. “That’s not what…”
He stopped suddenly, and Reb wondered again what he was really after. This didn’t quite seem like just a casual chat.
“There’s stories about the cityangel,” Reb said, calling it suddenly to mind. “That the cityangel can give visions to those who need them, if Marek needs that. Eli Beckett saw visions, so the story goes, or they’d have turned back before they even got here. And Xanthe Leandra – you’ve seen the statue by the south side of the Old Bridge? She was supposed to have been given a vision of the invaders. Though I can’t think you’d please the Leandra these days by suggesting it might happen again.” She laughed, then shrugged. Jonas was watching her intently. “Mark you, I don’t think there’s many would really believe in the cityangel now, even if they recite their charms and the rest.”
She could feel what had happened earlier itching at the back of her throat. It was true enough. It was only sorcerers, really, knew different, and really now that meant her, and Cato. People believed in magic – hard not to, when you could see the results – but they didn’t know the why of it.
“Salina don’t believe in such things, either, do you?”
“Believe in them?” Jonas said, a little scornfully, though there was still something else lurking in his expression. “Spirits? Of course we believe in them. Hard not to, when we see them, often enough, out there.” He gestured towards the wall, in the direction of the estuary and the open sea.
Reb blinked. She hadn’t thought the Salinas would know about spirits. Most Marekers treated them as half a story – spirits didn’t come into Marek, as a rule. The cityangel scaring them off, was the prevailing theory. But of course there’d be spirits out at sea, water-spirits, like the earth-spirits she’d grown up with in Teren, though those weren’t always treated as whole-truth, either, by folk who hadn’t met one.
“We just don’t have anything to do with them. Unreliable.” Jonas grinned suddenly at her. “Like magic generally, saving your presence.”
Well; it was true enough today, Reb thought, feeling her face twitch, before she summoned up a smile for Jonas.
“Never heard tell of cityangels, though, other than here.”
“It’s only Marek has a cityangel,” Reb said automatically, then shook her head. She didn’t want to be in this conversation any more. “But I must get on.”
She handed him the notes and another couple of coins. “Deliver these, if you could?”
He nodded, pocketing the coins and pulling a stick of charcoal out to scrawl his initials across the seals of the notes before she ushered him to the door. He hesitated on the threshold for a moment, and she thought he was about to ask something else; then he was off down the road like a hare. She shrugged, and turned to shut the door behind her.
There couldn’t be any problem with the cityangel. The cityangel just was; that was the deal that Rufus Marek and Eli Beckett had made, three hundred years ago, the deal that bound Marek-the-city and the cityangel together, that created Marek’s magic. The cityangel must be fine. There must be another explanation.
Dammit. There was no way around it. She really was going to have to go to that grotty squat of Cato’s and talk to him. She scowled, and sighed, rubbing at her eyes. Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow would be soon enough, and maybe she’d feel up to it by then.
TWO
The Reader banged their staff on the polished ironwood floor of the Council Chamber, signalling the end of the session, and a buzz of conversation arose around Marcia as the Chamber began to empty.
“Well,” her mother Madeleine said, her irritation visible even beneath her formal face-paint. “That was a waste of time.”
Whether Madeleine meant the expedition itself, or this meeting to announce its failure, or indeed both, Marcia was unsure. It wasn’t like the failure was news to either of them; as funder of the expedition, House Fereno had had a report from the captain yesterday morning, before the Council had been convened.
Marcia glanced down at where the expedition’s captain, scrubbed and pressed for the occasion but still bearing the signs of the retreat down the mountain, was taking her leave of the Reader. Perhaps she ought to go down and speak to the woman again, reassure her of the House’s appreciation even if the outcome had not been what they wanted. It had been under Marcia’s control, this expedition; the captain was working for her directly and arguably deserved that. On the other hand, Madeleine would surely point out that such public acknowledgement would remind the other Houses that House Fereno had sponsored this and it was thus Fereno’s failure.
The captain bowed stiffly to the Reader and turned to limp out, making the point moot. Marcia could hardly run after her; that was certainly below the dignity of Fereno-Heir. She gritted her teeth. It was infuriating that this first solo venture had gone so badly; but she had known the risk and judged it worthwhile. It had been worthwhile, even if it hadn’t paid off as she’d hoped, with a full overland trading route. Knowing that there wasn’t any such was useful in itself. She just hoped that Madeleine saw it that way.
“Come, then,” Madeleine said, and rose to leave their wooden pew, in the second of the concentric partial rings that rose around the central circle.
The Chamber managed to be both imposing and oddly intimate. The corridor into it ran under the banked seats, coming out by the front of the stage with its dais. The wall behind the stage carried the coats of arms of each of the Houses arranged around the central pair of the arms of Marek itself and the arms of Teren. The rows of seats stretched upwards in a three-quarters-circle, facing the stage, each row sufficiently higher than the one in front that no one’s view would be impeded. Right at the back was the newer wood of the Guild pew, added ten years ago when the Guild representatives were finally, after decades of wrangling, admitted to the Council. The argument over where the Guild arms should be displayed was still ongoing.
At the opposite side of the circle, grumpy Gavin Leandra-Head, was levering himself up from his place at the opposite side of the circle. He was, of course, alone – Leandra still had no Heir. Marcia’s mind skipped neatly, well-practised, over the rest of that thought.
Since being confirmed as Fereno-Heir two years previously, Marcia had become more than sufficiently familiar with the Chamber. Before that, even, she remembered sitting with her twin up in the visitors’ balconies above the circle, when they were kids; knowing that one day she would be Heir, and then Head, down in these carved pews. And then
they’d become teenagers, and her sister Catya had become her brother Cato, and everything else that had happened that year they were sixteen; but right enough, here she was. She bit back a sigh. What she hadn’t expected was how little she actually had to do.
Cato wouldn’t have been surprised. Cato had always been the cynical one. Maybe that was why he’d left.
When her mother was Marcia’s age, her father, Marcia and Cato’s grandfather, had nearly reached the end of his twenty-five years, and was preparing to retire. Madeleine was already taking over more and more of the running of the House. As a child, even in her early teens, Marcia had expected the same treatment. Then, the same year the Guilds finally won representation, the Council had voted to abolish the twenty-five year limit and allow the Head to retire when they saw fit. And now, Madeleine clearly had no desire to hand over her power any time soon. Nor did any of her age-mates. Madeleine had been more prepared than some of the other Heads to let Marcia take responsibility, but even that might change after this debacle.
She scowled at her mother’s back as they began to leave the Chamber. The expedition had been Marcia’s idea, after the Salinas put their trading and carriage prices up again. There had, once, been an overland trading route between mainland Teren and neighbouring Exuria, up and through the mountain passes. Its increasing unreliability (for which read, ‘tendency for large rocks to fall on people at regular intervals’), just over three hundred years ago, had been what drove Rufus Marek and Eli Beckett’s expedition into the swamps, seeking a route around the mountains. What they’d found was the outlet to the Oval Sea, which had seemed to them nearly as good and possibly better – after all, who else might be there across the sea? Could Teren now trade directly with Exuria’s overseas partners?
Just as Marek and Beckett were considering how to go about turning their swamp-going barges into something sea-worthy, along came the Salinas, with their ships, their extensive trading partnerships around the Oval Sea, and their very reasonable carrier prices. Prices which would make trading profitable, and which made independent voyages look much less appealing to finance, especially when the Salinas smilingly made clear their opposition to any such trips and the steps they were willing to take to express that opposition.