Shadowblack

by Sebastien de Castell

  Two of them. I swore silently to myself. That was why this man wasn’t attacking us directly. He wasn’t some impossibly powerful lord magus who’d sparked all six of his bands – he was just using silk magic to mess with our heads while his partner got in close enough to strike.

  Ferius stayed in constant motion, the sharp steel cards moving in unpredictable patterns, making it hard for anyone to strike at her directly. Except if the other guy is a war mage. Then he’ll just be getting into position to fire off a spell.

  ‘Spread out,’ Ferius said. ‘Don’t let him take more than one of us out with a single spell.’

  Reichis growled at the apparition before us. ‘I can smell them both now. One is nearby, but the other one must be half a mile away.’

  A sudden stab of pain in my stomach confirmed that our other opponent – the one the silk mage was making invisible to our eyes – was using simple iron magic. Which means he’s probably only sparked one band. That would be good news if I could actually see him. A scream tore itself from my lips.

  ‘Kid, duck!’ Ferius said.

  It was easy enough to comply since I was already doubling over in agony. One of her cards flew past my head and a second later I heard a grunt from somewhere behind me. The pain in my guts faded away again.

  ‘Stay down, Kellen,’ Ferius said, sending several more of her cards flying through the air. None of them found their target. Iron magic is good for both attack and defence, and the heart shield is one of the few invocations that can be cast in combination with a second spell.

  ‘Argosi bitch,’ a voice called out. I looked around and saw nothing.

  Ferius groaned and suddenly dropped to her knees, a tight grimace on her lips. She tried to throw another card but couldn’t; her muscles were spasming from the agony the iron mage was inflicting on her.

  ‘You should have taken our deal,’ the silk mage said, the apparition he’d created for himself fading now that the pretence was no longer needed. ‘I really would have let you live, Argosi.’

  Ferius writhed on the ground, her features twisted in anguish, so unlike the cocky, swaggering woman who’d moments before launched herself into danger to protect me. ‘Stop it!’ I screamed into the darkness. ‘I accept your deal. I’m the one in the warrant, not the Argosi or the squirrel cat!’

  The laughter that rang in my ears came from nowhere and everywhere at once. ‘I think not, Kellen of the House of Ke. It’s obvious now that she’s the one who’s been keeping you alive all these months, and that is a sin against our laws and our people. But don’t worry, we’ll get to you shortly.’

  Reichis was racing around in frustration. ‘I can’t find him,’ he growled. ‘Gods-damned Jan’Tep magic!’

  ‘Kid …’ Ferius wheezed, ‘stop talking and listen.’

  ‘I’m listening. What do you want me to—’

  ‘No.’ She gasped for breath. ‘Not to me, stupid. Listen to him.’

  All of a sudden I understood what she meant and why, even as the iron mage was slowly crushing her insides, Ferius was forcing herself not to scream. She was giving me the chance to find our adversary. ‘Reichis, don’t move,’ I said. I closed my eyes and focused my attention on the sounds around me the way I’d seen Ferius do. The iron mage might be invisible, but he still had to breathe. I just had to listen for him.

  I let the desert noises wash over me. Buzzing insects. Burrowing animals. My own heartbeat. The breeze. No … not the breeze. With nothing more than a guess at his location, I pulled powder from both pouches, a lot this time.

  There’s a second variation of my spell that I’d once used to break through a Jan’Tep shield. The red powder in my left pouch still carried some of Reichis’s mother’s blood mixed in it. ‘Carath Chitra,’ I said, and sent the spell screaming into the air before me.

  The fiery blast broke through my enemy’s shield the way Reichis tears through rabbit flesh, but my guess at the iron mage’s position had been off by nearly a foot. His shield fell, but the man himself was unaffected. Before I could try again, he set his gut sword spell on me and the next instant I was in too much pain to recast. I turned my head and saw Ferius lying unconscious on the ground. The iron mage could focus all his attention on me now.

  Five seconds, I thought. If I’d just been five seconds faster, if my spell was just a fraction stronger, if I were just a bit cleverer, my enemy would have been defeated. But I was too slow, too weak and, above all else, too dumb. Now Ferius and Reichis were going to die because of me.

  ‘It’s over,’ the silk mage said in my mind. ‘You’ve had a good run, Kellen, but no one escapes Jan’Tep justice for long. When you reach the grey passage, beg our ancestors for mercy that they don’t send your soul to the hell it so richly –’

  His words disappeared, cut off somehow. My guts were still being twisted in knots, but my mind began to clear and the landscape all around me became sharper, the colours less muddled. I still couldn’t see the silk mage, but about twenty feet to my right stood a stoop-backed man in a long grey travelling coat, his right hand out in front of him holding the somatic shape for the gut sword. Whatever had caused his partner’s spell to fade hadn’t affected the iron mage. ‘Reichis …’ I moaned, struggling to stay on my feet.

  ‘He’s mine!’ the squirrel cat growled, racing across the dirt. At the last instant he leaped, the strength of his powerful back legs launching him over eight feet into the air. He spread his limbs wide and the thin fur-covered flaps between them billowed out, catching the breeze for just an instant before he descended onto the iron mage. If you’ve never had a squirrel cat fly at your face, the effect is more than a little disconcerting. The mage kept his shield up, but his focus on the gut sword spell wavered.

  I took in a quick, desperate breath, my hands grabbing more powder from the pouches at my belt even as my mind reached for the calm and clarity I would need for the spell. ‘Reichis, get away now.’

  The squirrel cat raced away into the darkness. ‘Light him up, Kellen!’

  The mage turned his attention back to me, but before he could summon up his gut sword again, I had tossed the powders into the air, formed the somatic shapes with my hands and invoked the spell one last time. ‘Carath Chitra,’ I said.

  The twin fires, black and red, ripped at the mage’s shield a second time, tearing it apart to get to him. The flames broke through, surrounding him, biting at him until he screamed in agony. The spell didn’t last long, but neither did the mage. What little had remained of his shield spell had been enough to keep him alive, but I could see the burns on him as he fell unconscious to the ground.

  The sound of my lungs huffing and puffing for air as if I’d been running for miles filled my ears even as tracks of sweat began to drip down my forehead. I forced myself to breathe more slowly, willing my legs to shake off their paralysis so that I could go to make sure Ferius was still alive.

  Reichis ambled over to me, his fur a dirty mess of reds and blacks like the colours of my spell. ‘Nice shot, for once.’

  ‘Thanks. For once.’

  ‘Only we have a problem.’

  ‘Just one?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He gestured with a paw towards the robed man I’d just taken out. ‘If that’s the guy who was casting the attack spells, where’s the one who was messing with our heads?’

  Oh. Right.

  7

  The Traveller

  The two of us stood there in the darkness, waiting for whatever calamity would head our way. ‘Maybe the other guy just had a heart attack,’ Reichis suggested.

  ‘Could be.’

  I rubbed my fingertips together, trying to work away the numbness caused by using my one spell too many times in a row. If I cast it again now I’d just end up blowing my own hands off. Reichis glanced back at the iron mage lying unconscious on the ground behind us. ‘That guy looks pretty old, Kellen. What if the other guy was old too? Magic’s got to be hard on the body, right? Maybe he just keeled over and died.’

  �
�Anything’s possible.’ A few yards away, the dying embers of our campfire cast just enough light where Ferius lay for me to see that she was still breathing. Maybe she was okay. Maybe she was going to stand up any second now, dust herself off and say something that sounded clever but made no sense. ‘We have to get lucky some day, right?’

  Reichis sniffed the air and then pulled at my trouser leg. ‘Kellen?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It’s not today.’

  The sounds of footsteps drifted towards us from down the road. ‘How many?’ I asked, keeping my voice low, still frantically rubbing my fingertips together.

  ‘Three. One male and two females.’ He sniffed again. ‘The male is old. One of the females is fully grown and the other is a pup like you.’

  ‘I’m sixteen. I’m not a “pup”.’

  ‘I call it like I smell it.’

  Three figures appeared at the edge of the road, barely more than silhouettes in the dim light shed by the half-moon above. I blinked several times until I could make out a few details. The first was a woman, tall, dressed in loose-fitting white and brown linen tied in place with straps of leather, most of her face covered by the same linen fabric as her garments. She carried a skinny man in a filthy white coat over her shoulders like a sack of wheat. A donkey trudged reluctantly after her, ridden by a girl in the sort of trousers and riding jacket common to the borderlands. A single strip of pale cloth was tied around her head, covering her eyes.

  ‘You think she’s a prisoner?’ Reichis asked. He has a thing about captivity.

  I didn’t reply, figuring we’d likely find out the answer soon enough. ‘Not another step,’ I called out. ‘Not if you want to live to see the sunrise. I’ve already set one of my enemies on fire tonight and I’m happy to do it again if you come any closer.’

  It had sounded like a perfectly serviceable threat to me, but the woman approaching us showed no sign of being intimidated. ‘That would be exceedingly unwise.’

  ‘Yeah? Why’s that?’ I asked, doing my best to appear faintly amused.

  ‘Look down at your hands.’

  I did, and saw how badly they were shaking. The problem with nearly dying is that, once you haven’t died, you start trembling uncontrollably. It’s hard to get your body to stop after that.

  ‘Well, I ain’t shaking,’ Reichis growled, hackles up, stalking towards her.

  ‘Kindly ask the animal not to attack until I’ve rid myself of this rather unpleasant-smelling burden.’ The masked woman came to within a few feet of me and deposited the man she’d been carrying on the ground.

  With the silk spells gone, I saw the mage for what he really was: a frail old man with flat, homely features and wrinkled skin that had seen too much sun. Keeping one eye on the new arrivals, I reached down and lifted the sleeves of his coat one at a time. His bony forearms revealed that he’d only ever sparked the silk band and no others. The same was likely true for his partner, who’d been using iron magic against us. These two would have been a running joke among our people; they might even have been outcasts like me, hoping to buy their way back into their clans with the bounty for hunting down a shadowblack.

  The woman gazed down at the unconscious man between us. ‘Such fragile things we are, stripped of our illusions.’ Her expression – what little I could see of it beneath the fabric covering her face – was neither derisive nor sympathetic, merely curious. ‘How odd that a mage should go to the trouble of making himself appear youthful and handsome in our minds. Do you suppose that if he’d spent less attention on his appearance he might have noticed me coming up behind him?’

  Not a question I needed to be concerned with right now, given that my fingers were numb, my hands were shaking and Ferius was still unconscious. What I really needed to know was whether this woman was a danger to us. People rarely answer the question ‘Are you here to kill me?’ honestly, so instead of asking it I called out to the blindfolded girl on the donkey. ‘Are you being held captive?’

  ‘She is in my care,’ the woman said.

  ‘I’d rather hear that from her.’

  The girl on the donkey held up her hands to show they weren’t bound and said, ‘Who lets their prisoner ride while they walk, idiot?’ Her accent carried only a faint trace of the drawl I’d come to associate with borderlands folk, and her diction was more precise – a bit like the Daroman envoys I’d seen pass through my homeland. If I had to guess, I’d say this girl was close to my age, wealthy and probably well educated. ‘Is he staring at me?’ she asked the woman.

  ‘He appears to be.’

  ‘Tell him to stop. It’s impolite.’ She dismounted and fumbled for something attached to the saddle. Once she’d got it loose, I could see it was a thin stick of wood around three feet in length. She held it out in front of her, swinging it back and forth a couple of inches off the ground.

  That explained the cloth covering her eyes. ‘You’re blind,’ I said.

  ‘No, you’re blind. I just can’t see.’ She turned to the woman. ‘What does he look like? He sounds stupid.’

  ‘Forgive my charge; we have been travelling many days now. These have been trying times for the child and she—’

  ‘Seneira,’ the girl said. ‘Not “my charge”, not “the child”. Seneira.’ She strode forward only to have her right foot slip on a flat stone in the sand. Fearing she was about to fall, I instinctively reached out to steady her. Unfortunately for both of us, at that precise moment she shifted her weight to catch her balance. Our foreheads collided with a painful thud, and worse – much, much worse – it’s entirely possible that my lips brushed against hers in the process.

  ‘Did he just try to kiss me?’ she demanded loudly, her head turning left and right as she held the stick out in front of her like a sword.

  I backed away quickly. ‘I didn’t! I would never … I mean, you’re blind! I wouldn’t want to …’

  ‘Wouldn’t want to what?’ she asked, her voice suddenly cold as the night air. ‘Wouldn’t want to kiss a blind girl?’

  Ancestors, please just send another bounty hunter to kill me now. I swear I won’t even try to fight back this time.

  ‘If you could see the boy,’ the woman in the linen garb said, ‘you would realise that he is confused, injured and frightened after fighting the iron mage.’

  ‘I’m not frightened,’ I said, but no one was paying attention to me.

  ‘Well, maybe he should keep his hands – and his lips – to himself.’

  The woman sighed. ‘Child, you know perfectly well he was only trying to keep you from falling flat on your face. His obviously poor reflexes and clumsiness are cause for pity, not an excuse for you to torment him.’

  ‘Thanks for sticking up for me,’ I said.

  She ignored my sarcasm and looked past me at Reichis. ‘Is the animal unwell? He seems to be …’

  ‘He’s fine,’ I said. ‘That’s just what it sounds like when he giggles.’

  The girl, Seneira, seemed to come to a decision as to my culpability in our unfortunate encounter. ‘Fine,’ she said at last, letting the point of her stick drop and extending a hand towards me. ‘Let’s start over. I’m Seneira.’

  I took her hand and shook it for the shortest possible time I could. ‘Kellen.’

  ‘Nice to meet you.’ She turned to her guide. ‘See? That’s how people greet each other – normal people, anyway. They have names like “Seneira” or “Kellen” or …’

  ‘Reichis,’ the squirrel cat chittered. Now that he was done laughing at me, he sauntered over to give each of them a sniff followed by a brief growl. ‘I don’t like them.’

  ‘You don’t like anyone,’ I muttered.

  ‘What was that?’ Seneira asked. ‘I heard something growl.’

  ‘That was Reichis,’ I said. ‘He’s my …’ I hesitated. I hate sounding half-witted in front of strangers.

  ‘Say it,’ the squirrel cat snarled. ‘Say it, unless you figure you can cast spells with only nine fingers.’ />
  ‘Fine. Reichis is my business partner.’

  Seneira turned her head this way and that. ‘Business partner? I didn’t hear any other people. Who’s there?’

  ‘He refers to the animal,’ the woman explained. ‘A squirrel cat.’

  The blind girl stood there for a while. ‘Perfect,’ she said, then promptly sat down in the dirt. ‘I’m just going to sit here until the world starts making sense, if that’s all right.’

  ‘You might be waiting a long time,’ I said.

  Despite the linen covering most of the woman’s face, I had the distinct sense that she was smiling when she said, ‘At last, words of wisdom. Seven drops of water in an otherwise dry desert.’

  Seneira rested her head in her hands. ‘Will you please stop talking like that?’

  I felt a touch of sympathy for her. Ferius had used lines like that on me enough times to … ‘Wait a second … Who are you?’ I asked the woman.

  ‘A traveller with no end to my journey. A guide without destination but never lost. A follower who follows none but the road in front of her. I am the Path of Thorns and Roses.’

  I had no idea what any of that meant, but the fact that her reply made no sense told me who she was, or rather, what she was. ‘You’re an Argosi.’

  Without bothering to indicate whether or not I was right, she walked over to Ferius and knelt down to examine her. ‘Ah, sister. Why must you always be such a terrible disappointment to us all?’

  8

  The Path of Thorns and Roses

  ‘Build up the fire,’ the Argosi woman commanded. Very gently, she lifted Ferius in her arms and carried her over to the campfire. ‘We must keep her warm tonight.’

  ‘Is she going to be all right?’ For some reason it had never sunk in for me that Ferius Parfax could really be hurt. She was too quick, too smart, too obstinate to let anyone kill her. Seeing the concern in the eyes of the other Argosi suddenly made me aware that even Ferius could die.