Shadowblack

by Sebastien de Castell

  Well, that made me feel so much better.

  ‘Hey, are we going to fight?’ Reichis said, making for the stairs. ‘Because I was kind of hoping to have a bath, but if I’m going to get blood on my fur I can wait.’

  I gave him a look intended to tell him to go upstairs. He gave the squirrel-cat equivalent of a shrug and settled down on a step to watch.

  Ferius and Rosie stared at each other a long time, saying nothing, not making a move. After a while Ferius said, ‘Best you leave this be, sister.’

  The other Argosi stood, letting her cards fall to the table. ‘I think not, sister.’

  ‘Is today the day then, sister?’ Ferius asked. ‘You really want to wrastle me, what with everything that’s goin’ on around here?’

  ‘What’s “going on”, sister, is a plague – one you and I are duty-bound to put an end to, and yet the Path of the Wild Daisy would prevent me from doing what must be done.’

  Now it was Ferius’s turn to rise, her right hand sliding into the inside pocket of her waistcoat. ‘You put a hand on that girl or anyone else, sister, and your path will lead you to five different countries looking for your fingers.’

  Rosie reached behind her and I could tell she too had some kind of weapon in the folds of her travelling clothes.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, suddenly worried they might try to kill each other right there and then. ‘What are you talking about?’

  Neither of them answered. Then Ferius brought her hand back out of her waistcoat and held it up to show it was empty. The other woman did likewise. ‘A disagreement,’ Rosie said, ‘over what it means to be Argosi.’ She left the table and walked out, pausing at the door to say, ‘I’ve been tracing stories of other victims of the shadowblack, sister. I am close to finding the evidence that will require me to follow the way of thunder. Best that you leave this place before that happens.’

  I waited until Ferius looked calm before I brought up my encounter with the strange girl who called herself Mamma Whispers a second time. Even then, Ferius had nothing to say until I pressed her on the issue. ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘These “threads” Mamma Whispers told me about. If they really lead back to my people then—’

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you not to keep getting distracted by nonsense, kid?’

  That took me aback. ‘I told you about what she did to me, right? Making me hear things that had happened to me in the past? Her magic is real.’

  Ferius leaned back and pulled a smoking reed from her waistcoat, then lit it using a candle from the table. ‘Never said it wasn’t real, only that it was nonsense.’

  ‘You keep doing that,’ I said, irritated. ‘You talk about magic like it’s a joke, but it’s not. Magic is power, Ferius.’

  ‘Kid, one day, if you live long enough, you’re gonna figure out that power is the biggest joke of all.’

  I didn’t know how to answer that. What do you say to somebody who is both impossibly dense and yet somehow always seems to come out on top? I felt a stab of resentment towards Ferius – for how she could outwit the whole world in ways that would just get me killed. ‘Dexan offered to make me his partner,’ I said.

  Reichis looked down from the upstairs banister, something small and shiny and almost certainly stolen in his mouth. ‘Wait, what’s this now?’

  ‘Us,’ I corrected myself, hoping to assuage the squirrel cat’s concern before it resulted in future bite marks. ‘He says he can help me fight off the shadowblack and teach us how to survive in the borderlands.’

  Ferius didn’t even bother to look at me, just let out a smoke-filled breath that became a circle in the air in front of her. ‘Sounds like a good deal, kid.’

  ‘He says I’d have to leave with him tomorrow.’

  Another smoke ring. ‘Best get packing then, I guess.’

  ‘Don’t you care? Doesn’t it matter to you that I’d be gone and you’d probably never see me again?’

  Before she could answer, Reichis padded down the stairs and sniffed at her. ‘She cares all right. She’s going to start bawling any minute now.’

  Ferius waved him away and put out her smoking reed on the plate holding the candle. ‘Kellen, I’m sorry.’

  I thought she was going to say something else, but when she didn’t I asked, ‘Sorry for what?’

  She sighed. ‘I know you’re scared, kid, and you’ve got good reason to be. You want to do the right thing, but your fear makes you look for ways to protect yourself. So you look for more magic, or charms, or for someone to teach you how to fight – someone to show you how to take that anger and channel it, just like you do the explosive powders when you cast those spells of yours.’

  ‘Is it so wrong to be afraid of the people trying to kill me? To want to be able to defend myself?’

  ‘Fear and anger.’ She leaned back against the chair and rubbed at her eyes as though she was exhausted. ‘Nothing wrong with fear and anger, kid. It’s just not the path of the wild daisy.’

  ‘Then what is?’ I asked.

  She held my gaze for a long time, neither smiling nor smirking. ‘Joy.’

  ‘Joy?’ I had to laugh. ‘How is it “joy” when you let a man three times your size take a swing at you that could leave you crippled or worse? How is it “joy” when you take out those steel cards of yours and face off against mages who could burn you alive with a spell? How is it—’

  Abruptly she rose from her chair. ‘Come on,’ she said, and headed for the door.

  ‘What? Where?’

  She stopped, but didn’t turn around. ‘You keep asking questions, kid, and I keep answering them, but that never seems to work for you. Rosie reckons it’s because I don’t think you’re worth teaching, so let me ask you straight as can be: do you want to learn the path of the wild daisy, Kellen?’

  ‘I … I want to at least understand what it is.’

  ‘Close enough,’ she said, and opened the door and stepped out into the night. ‘Come follow the path with me.’

  34

  The Dancing Lesson

  We rode a few miles out of town, far from the lights and people, far from all the trappings of civilisation. The night air was cool and made me shiver. I was uncomfortably aware of just how quickly I’d got used to hot meals and a soft bed. Of course, not everyone is as easily shamed by an attachment to luxury.

  ‘I want a bath,’ Reichis grumbled, clambering from my right shoulder to my left and back again as if that would somehow convince us to turn back.

  ‘What’s he moanin’ about?’ Ferius asked.

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ I said, trying to spare Reichis the embarrassment. I needn’t have bothered.

  ‘I want a damned bath,’ he repeated. ‘Oh, and butter biscuits. Lots of butter biscuits. And tell Seneira’s father not to short us this time.’

  ‘You do realise they’re their butter biscuits, don’t you? I thought squirrel cats were supposed to be thieves and murderers, not spoiled brats.’

  Reichis went dead silent, and I realised I’d made a huge mistake. He hopped from my shoulder to the front of the saddle and turned to stare at me, his eyes full of deadly intent and his fur suddenly black as night save for menacing grey stripes. ‘Say that again,’ he said in a soft growl. ‘Say it twice, just so I can be sure I heard you right.’

  This was not going to end well. ‘I didn’t mean—’

  ‘Hey, kid,’ Ferius said, catching my eye. Normally she ignores Reichis when he gets like this, but now she was grinning, ‘Want to see something funny?’

  ‘Um … I really don’t think you should—’

  Reichis turned and snarled at her. She ignored him. Well, not exactly ignored.

  ‘My, oh my,’ she said, gazing across from her horse. ‘Will you look at that fur? So sleek and shiny. Why, it’s like watching molten silver flow along a mighty river.’

  ‘Well, obviously,’ he said, now suddenly engrossed in inspecting the claws of his right forepaw.

&n
bsp; ‘And those claws! Each one like a deadly blade forged by a master Berabesq swordsmith!’

  Reichis’s hackles had all but settled down now as he lifted his chin and his whiskers twitched. ‘Well, at least she’s not entirely blind. Guess she can keep her eyeballs for now.’

  But Ferius wasn’t done. ‘And what muscles. Just look at those haunches! Why, I bet you turn the eye of every female in the world when you go by.’

  Reichis seemed a trifle uncomfortable at the insistent praise. ‘Fine, fine. I’m beautiful. Kellen, tell the Argosi to give it a rest now.’

  But she didn’t. ‘And don’t even get me started on that muzzle.’ She leaned over, peering at him. ‘Like a lion, only more handsome. Noble, courageous …’

  Reichis gave a twitch and shook himself. I noticed something odd happening to his fur. The black becoming paler, the silver stripes fading away. ‘Okay, make her shut up now, Kellen.’

  ‘See those eyes? Full of intelligence. You can see it. And wisdom too. They’re like deep pools of captured moonlight, beautiful as any gemstone. Diamonds really – that’s what those are.’

  Reichis’s fur was shifting colour, the pale grey becoming white, then the white something else … a kind of rosy pink that bloomed all over him. ‘Damn it!’ he swore.

  Ferius broke out laughing. ‘Works every time.’

  ‘What did you do to him?’ I asked.

  She pointed at his coat, which was now almost entirely pink. ‘They can make their fur change colour to match their surroundings, but it also reacts to their moods. This is what squirrel cats look like when you make them blush.’

  ‘Hell!’ Reichis growled, nearly falling off the horse as he kept shifting around to examine his coat. His face was scrunched in deep concentration. He looked like he was desperately trying to go to the bathroom. ‘Go back to black, damn it!’ He glanced back at the still-pink fur on his flanks. ‘I’m iron. I’m a monster. I’m the darkness of endless night!’ He looked up at me helplessly. ‘It’s changing back, right?’

  I considered how best to answer, then remembered that in the months since Reichis had reluctantly agreed to become my ‘business partner’, he’d taken every opportunity to mock me, steal from me and, on more than one occasion, bite me. ‘You’re still kind of pink,’ I said.

  As Reichis frantically tried to make his fur change back, Ferius said, ‘Here endeth the lesson, kid.’

  ‘Lesson in what?’

  She pulled her horse to a stop and dismounted smoothly. ‘You said you wanted to learn the way I walk the Argosi path.’

  I got off my horse and pointed at Reichis. ‘That? That’s the path of the wild daisy?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘So, when somebody decides they want to kill me, I should just compliment them into submission?’

  She grinned. ‘Well, that or dance with them.’ She lit a small campfire and then set off for a flat patch in the desert and motioned for me to join her. ‘Come on, kid. Time to learn the second talent.’

  ‘Rosie said the second talent of the Argosi was defence.’

  ‘Words, kid. You really want to get hung up on words?’

  Okay, that made an odd kind of sense to me. Ferius never did seem to like using the language of violence, so maybe she just had her own terms for the seven talents of the Argosi, the same as she did for things like the ‘way of water’ and the ‘way of thunder’.

  I went over to join her and got into what I figured was a decent enough fighting stance, excited that I was finally going to learn Argosi fighting. Then I saw the smirk on her face and my optimism turned to panic. ‘Wait … You did mean “dance” as a metaphor, right? As in, “Hey, fella, you dance with me, you dance with death”?’

  ‘I mean “dance” as in dance, kid.’

  ‘But …’ Here’s something most people don’t know about the Jan’Tep: we don’t dance. Not ever. There isn’t a single form of dance practised in our culture. A mage has no use for dancing. Besides, it’s unseemly.

  Reichis shot me an evil grin, delighted that now it was my turn to be embarrassed. ‘Oh, this is going to be good.’

  Ferius gestured for me to take her hand in mine and put my other on her waist. ‘Now, you can find hundreds of styles of dance among the different folks on this continent, but they all boil down to one of seventeen basic forms. We’re going to start with the easiest, which is the chadelle.’

  Her proximity made me uncomfortable. The only time one Jan’Tep adult gets this close to another is if they’re about to be intimate. Ferius was probably twenty years older than me and, well, just thinking about this dancing thing was making me exceedingly nervous. I was about to back away when Reichis chittered, ‘He’s going to chicken out!’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said, and clasped Ferius’s hand tighter. There was no way I was going to lose face in front of an animal that greets other members of its species by sniffing their butts. ‘What do I do now?’ I asked Ferius.

  ‘Just follow the music.’

  ‘What music?’

  Ferius gave a whistle, just a single, clear note at first, like a flute player testing their instrument. Then without warning she went into a tune, each note playing up and down a scale that was unfamiliar to me as she steered me around the dusty desert ground. The Jan’Tep have music, of course, but it’s mostly for funerals or court events or things like that. This tune was different. Faster, almost jaunty. I was just starting to make sense of it when I felt myself fumbling and Ferius had to hold me up until I got my feet back under control. ‘Can’t we go slower?’ I asked.

  ‘This is slow, kid.’ She kept dancing even as she paused in her whistling, forcing me to imagine the tune was still playing in my head. ‘Just relax,’ she went on. ‘Let your feet find the movements on their own. The Argosi believe that every dance exists in the body of all living things, just waiting to be allowed out.’

  Reichis chittered gleefully. ‘Hey, Kellen, the only dance I see in your body looks a lot like the death spasm of the long-tailed sand mole!’

  ‘Shh,’ Ferius warned him. She couldn’t have known what he said, but I guess he’s got a certain tone to him when he’s mocking me. ‘One more sound out of you and I’ll tell you a squirrel cat story that’ll make your fur go pink for a month.’

  My furry nemesis temporarily chastened, I turned my attention back to the dance. The problem wasn’t just the movements, but catching the rhythm. I’d always thought of my people as graceful; even as kids we’re taught to stand and walk with perfect elegance, to weave our hands fluidly through the air when we cast our spells. Whenever my friends and I had seen the Daroman or Gitabrian traders who passed through our city dancing outside their caravans at night, we’d always mocked their barbaric gyrations. Panahsi used to joke that we ought to call the healers because our guests were having seizures. But out here? Under the starry sky in a wild and untamed countryside? I was the ungainly one. The dance felt right. Natural. I was just terrible at it.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ I said, pulling away.

  Ferius refused to let go. ‘You’ll find the flow soon enough, you just need to let it come to you. It’s probably no different than those funny gestures you make with your hands when you work that Jan’Tep magic of yours.’

  ‘It’s not the same at all. Somatic shapes let you cast spells.’

  She grinned and gave me a sly wink. ‘Let me tell you something, kid – there’s no better spell a man can learn than how to dance proper.’

  I’m not stupid. I got that she was implying that women like a man who knows how to dance. No doubt in the countries outside my homeland that mattered, but it didn’t do me any good. The only girl I cared about ‘dancing’ with was Nephenia, and she was back in my city, betrothed to my former best friend, learning to become a mage, living the life I’d hoped for myself, probably forgetting about me in the process.

  I pulled away from Ferius and ended up stumbling back several steps before I finally caught my balance. ‘This is dumb.’

 
; ‘What’s the problem, kid?’

  I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t want to tell her that my legs were already tired and my face hurt where Freckles had punched me. I didn’t want her to know that my hands were starting to shake and any minute now I was going to start bawling like a two-year-old who can’t go to sleep because he’s afraid of the dark.

  Except, I was afraid of the dark. I was afraid of who might be waiting for me out there. ‘People are trying to kill me – do you not get that? I don’t need to learn how to dance. I need to learn how to fight!’

  ‘Hit me.’

  ‘What?’

  She took off her hat and set it on the ground. ‘Come on, kid. Hit me.’

  Reichis trotted over. ‘This I’ve got to see.’

  ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘You’ve trained in fighting your whole life. You don’t think I know you’ll just toss me aside?’

  ‘True enough, but I ain’t gonna do anything you haven’t done this past hour.’ As if to prove it, she put one hand up at shoulder height, palm facing in, and the other just above her hip like she was dancing with an invisible partner.

  I was angry enough to take a run at her, but I kept my cool. Instead of rushing in like the clumsy oaf she was planning on turning me into, I pretended. At the last instant, I shuffled to the right, going for her unprotected side.

  Ferius sent me flying like an empty grain sack.

  She was still dancing with her invisible partner when I got back up, whistling that cheerful tune of hers and twirling around by herself. I made myself stop and watch for a few seconds until I could recognise the pattern of her movements. This time when I attacked, I didn’t go for where she was, but where she was going to be.

  I felt the air rush by my cheeks as she sent me sailing past her a second time. When I turned back she still looked as if she was dancing by herself. This didn’t seem like any kind of martial art. Hell, it didn’t even look particularly graceful. ‘How are you doing this?’ I asked.