Shadowblack

by Sebastien de Castell

  Oh.

  ‘Tuvan-eh-savan-teh-beranth,’ I said for the final time.

  I hadn’t noticed the wind picking up until a few grains of sand flew into my eyes, making them water. When I looked back down at the ground, the particles were swirling from the breeze. ‘Kellen?’ Shalla’s face said to me.

  ‘Shalla?’

  The image frowned. ‘How did you …?’ I was about to explain how I’d made the spell work when the image shifted again. ‘Oh, of course. I forgot to close off the spell, so I suppose when you did that amateurish breath invocation, my own casting must have been inadvertently awakened.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, not wanting to get into a fight. I needed information. ‘Shalla, who in our clan could—’

  She cut me off, the shapes of her eyes in the sand suddenly shifting around. ‘Ancestors, Kellen, are you still in Teleidos?’

  ‘I am. There’s something—’

  ‘Get out of there!’ she shouted, the swirling wind picking up in response to the increased magical forces. ‘I told you to leave that place!’

  ‘You did,’ I said, my own voice quiet. ‘You seemed to know exactly when I should leave.’

  A subtle back and forth in the sand told me she was shaking her head. ‘It’s not like that, Kellen. Just … please, just trust me, you don’t want to be there.’

  ‘Why, Shalla? Because there is no shadowblack plague? Because our own people are behind this?’

  ‘This has nothing to do with you, Kellen. Get away from that awful place!’

  This was getting me nowhere, and Shalla had always been more stubborn than I was. ‘Tell me what you know, and maybe I will.’

  She hesitated, the tiny particles of sand oddly still now, despite the breeze. ‘I don’t know much, Kellen, but when I tried my own scrying spells to find the source of the shadowblack, I couldn’t make any sense of what I was seeing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There were … the only word I can think of to describe it is strands, Kellen. Thin strands of ethereal forces stretching all the way from the Jan’Tep territories to the Seven Sands. Then, when I tried to push further …’

  ‘What? What happened?’

  Shalla’s image in the sand took on a strange expression, one I wasn’t used to seeing on my sister’s face: fear. ‘Someone pushed me out of the ethereal plane and knocked me unconscious, Kellen. Someone much more powerful than I am.’

  The mere fact that Shalla had acknowledged that anyone might be more powerful than her told me just how serious this was.

  The sands shifted again, and her face began to dissolve. ‘The spells I created to make it possible for us to communicate are fading, and I can’t risk casting them again in case it draws attention from whoever is behind this. I don’t know when we’ll be able to speak next, Kellen, but now you know everything I know, so do what you promised and leave Teleidos tonight.’

  I didn’t bother mentioning that I hadn’t actually promised anything. Instead I wiped the sand clear with my hand. ‘Stay safe, sister.’

  39

  The Witness

  It was early morning by the time I returned to Seneira’s house. I’d expected to find myself alone since she and Ferius were at the hospital with her family and Rosie was off who knew where. The whole way back I’d been thinking about Revian’s death, and what I could possibly do or say to make it any easier on Seneira.

  It turned out I needn’t have worried about that, because when I got to the house, she and her father were already there, seated at the kitchen table, and something even worse had happened.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Beren said, his skin pale as a ghost’s as he clung to his daughter, and she in turn clutched a child’s cloth horse. Flickering light from the hanging lantern above cast shadows all around them. ‘My boy is dead.’

  A great, wracking sob escaped his lips. He buried his face in his daughter’s hair.

  Seneira sat quietly, reaching out her free hand to pet Reichis, staring off into a distance I couldn’t see and looking for all the world as if she had no idea any of us were there.

  The sound of the door opening caught my attention and I turned to see Rosie enter. She gave Ferius a nod before going back out.

  I felt Ferius’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Come on, kid. Let’s give them time to grieve.’

  Outside we found Rosie standing next to a horse pulling a small, plain cart. A young woman stood nervously nearby, holding the hand of a small boy who looked to be about five years old. ‘She calls herself Adella,’ Rosie said.

  The boy looked up at Rosie as if waiting for her to give his name. When she didn’t, he said, ‘My name is Yerek Farssus. My father’s name was Junius Farssus, but he doesn’t live with us any more. My sister’s name—’

  ‘Always this obsession with names,’ Rosie said, looking weary. To Ferius she added, ‘Last night I followed a trail of rumours to the town of Lastreida, about twelve miles from here, where these two live. Just over a year ago, the boy began suffering from a terrible fever, followed by the appearance of dark, winding markings around his right eye.’

  I knelt down to peer at the boy’s face. There was nothing there – no markings, not even any scars like Dexan had. Yerek stared at me wide-eyed, and it took a second to realise he was staring at Reichis, who had come out of the house and hopped up to my shoulder. ‘Kitty cat!’ he said excitedly.

  Oh, Ancestors, I swore silently as I grabbed hold of Reichis and stood up before he could maul the boy. He sometimes forgets that children aren’t just short adults and thus fair game for biting when they give offence.

  ‘What was it like when you got sick?’ Ferius asked the boy.

  ‘I got all sweaty and it hurt a lot,’ Yerek replied, nodding his head vigorously as if he needed to make sure we believed the story. ‘I heard a demon talking. It wasn’t very nice.’

  ‘We searched everywhere for a cure,’ Adella said, putting a protective arm around Yerek. ‘Nothing worked … No, it was more insidious than that – everything we tried only made him worse.’

  ‘Almost as if the disease could sense someone trying to interfere with it,’ Rosie said, but she was looking at Ferius.

  ‘Go on,’ Ferius encouraged Adella. ‘Tell us the rest.’

  The young woman nodded. ‘The symptoms were so severe we started to think Yerek might …’ She looked down at her son. ‘We feared the worst.’ A smile appeared on her face. ‘But then a man came to see us, said he’d heard we were looking for a doctor who could cure the shadowblack. I mean, I didn’t even know that’s what it was called, but when he described it, well, it was just what Yerek had.’

  ‘What was his name?’ I asked.

  ‘Soredan,’ she replied. ‘Doctor Soredan.’

  ‘Soredan?’

  Ferius asked, ‘This Doctor Soredan, was he a tall drink of water, dark hair, quick smile?’ She pointed to her head. ‘Wears a hat kind of like mine?’

  Adella nodded. ‘Only his had symbols around it.’

  ‘Dexan,’ I said. ‘It was Dexan.’

  Rosie rolled her eyes as if my statement had been too obvious to warrant saying aloud.

  Over the next few minutes, Ferius patiently got the rest of the story from Adella, with Yerek chiming in every few seconds to make sure we didn’t forget he was the one who’d gone through it all. Dexan, in his guise as this Doctor Soredan, had said the procedure was dangerous and expensive. At first he’d been unspecific about how much it would cost, but after Adella had worked out how much she could get from selling everything of value she had and borrowing what her family could afford, the next day Soredan turned up with a price that was almost exactly that much. A few days later they got the money together and Soredan performed the ‘procedure’ – which sounded a lot like a ritual spell to me. The next morning Yerek was cured.

  ‘Times are hard now,’ she said. ‘We had to sell our shop and now I do laundry work for wealthier folks in town, but it was worth it.’ She pulled Yerek closer. ‘Worth every
penny.’

  ‘I’m glad it worked out,’ Ferius said, her voice calm and light even though I knew she must be as angry as I was. She knelt down and stared at Yerek. ‘Yep. Looks like a regular kid to me. Kinda funny-looking though.’

  ‘You should talk!’ Yerek giggled enthusiastically, reaching out a hand to grab at the white forelock of Ferius’s otherwise red hair.

  Adella gestured to the house. ‘Do you think … I asked your friend to bring us because I’d heard there were others suffering the same illness. I thought maybe they’d want to hear it from me that there’s hope. Maybe they could find Doctor Soredan and—’

  ‘I think they’ve found him,’ Ferius said, glancing back at the house, ‘but it might not be the best time to visit.’

  Adella nodded as if she understood. ‘We’ll go then, but your friend here knows where to find us if there’s anything we can do to help.’

  She picked up Yerek and set him on the seat at the front of the horse cart, then mounted up herself and took the reins. She gave us a brief wave before giving the horse a gentle slap on the hindquarters and setting it into a slow walk, pulling the cart around and back down to the street.

  ‘Convenient how the disease shows up, and a few days later so does the cure,’ Ferius said.

  ‘But didn’t Dexan say that Beren had sent men to grab him up? He didn’t exactly show up at their door.’

  ‘He’s getting smarter, that’s all.’ She nodded to the horse cart headed away from us. ‘You keep pulling the same scam the same way, pretty soon someone will figure it out. So instead he pays a few people to spread the word around town of a spellslinger who can cure the shadowblack. Somebody like Beren, with money and connections, well, he isn’t going to wait around.’

  ‘So Dexan just sits tight and waits to be found.’

  She nodded. ‘Better money when you don’t make it so easy.’

  I looked back at Seneira’s house. ‘But why not cure Tyne? Why let him die like that?’

  ‘Could be the boy’s condition spread too fast,’ Ferius replied. An edge came to her voice when she added, ‘Could be that a dead boy only makes a grieving father willing to pay even more to save his daughter.’ She turned to face Rosie and I saw now that Ferius’s anger wasn’t reserved just for Dexan. ‘Guess that’s that, ain’t it?’

  Rosie nodded. It was only then that I noticed her horse was saddled nearby and she was carrying her pack.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘There is no plague here,’ she replied. ‘Whatever machinations are at play, whatever tragedies are yet to befall these people, it is no plague.’

  ‘So, what … you’re just going to leave?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You can’t be serious! You’re going to abandon Seneira and her father? The other kids at the Academy? They—’

  ‘Whatever is happening to them, it is about them, not the wider world. An Argosi—’

  ‘Don’t,’ Ferius warned. ‘He won’t understand.’

  ‘Understand what?’ I asked her. ‘That the Argosi don’t give a damn unless the “wider world” is about to fall apart?’

  ‘It ain’t like that, kid.’

  ‘You coddle him,’ Rosie said. She turned to face me, not showing a trace of remorse in her eyes. ‘The way of thunder is not to strike at every source of sorrow or suffering. An Argosi must choose carefully in what matters they will interfere. To do otherwise is to court even greater sorrows.’

  There was a sort of cold logic to it: the Argosi didn’t just go around doing good deeds. They looked for events that could change the course of history for the whole world. A plague could do that. A conspiracy to hurt a few teenagers or their families, or even bring down the Academy, couldn’t. ‘Is that what you believe too?’ I asked Ferius.

  ‘The Path of the Wild Daisy has never seen the world quite the way the rest of us do,’ Rosie said. ‘She is … prone to interfere.’

  ‘I am at that,’ Ferius said.

  The two women stared at each other for a long time. I didn’t see hostility there, or even disappointment, just a strange kind of shared uncertainty, as if, despite all the years they must have known each other, they just couldn’t understand the other’s way of thinking.

  Eventually Rosie put a foot in the stirrup and mounted her horse. ‘Goodbye, Kellen of the Jan’Tep,’ she said to me. ‘I hope you find a path that suits you one day.’

  I watched as she nudged her horse into a slow trot and made her way down the road.

  ‘Well, now I don’t feel so bad,’ Reichis said, still perched on my shoulder.

  ‘Bad? For what?’

  ‘I kinda stole a bunch of her stuff.’ He must have been expecting me to berate him, because he immediately added, ‘Not a lot. Just a couple of coins, a miniature carved elephant that looked kind of cool, oh, and that tiny jar of weakweed she kept with her. Never know when that’ll come in handy.’

  ‘What’s he on about?’ Ferius asked.

  I translated, and I guess my utter lack of guilt over his thieving must have come through. ‘No point in hating her,’ Ferius said.

  ‘Yeah? Why not?’

  She sighed. ‘Because hate gets you nowhere. Because it’s not Rosie’s fault. Because she might, in the end, be right about these things.’ Ferius turned and headed back towards the house. ‘But mainly because most days I can hate her enough for the both of us.’

  40

  The Kiss

  That night I awoke to the sound of crying outside the door to my room, so quiet I thought at first I’d dreamed it, but eventually wakefulness took hold of me and I knew it wasn’t my imagination. I moved Reichis as gently as I could so that I could get out of bed, and then put on my shirt and trousers. When I opened the door, I found Seneira outside, sitting there, arms wrapped around her knees.

  ‘Seneira?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, seven kinds of pain filling her voice. ‘It hurts so bad right now.’

  I knelt down next to her. ‘The markings?’

  She nodded, and even in the near-darkness I saw the black lines swirling beneath the skin surrounding her eyes. ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ she sobbed. ‘I came to ask you for help, but then I couldn’t seem to bring myself to knock, and I couldn’t leave either. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Why did this happen to us, Kellen? Why did they kill Tyne and Revian? What did I do to—’

  ‘It’s not you,’ I said, anger rising up in me. I forced it back down. Anger made my own attacks worse, so it wasn’t likely to help Seneira. But I’m coming after you, Dexan, and I’m going to make you talk.

  ‘Are you hearing the voices?’ I asked more calmly.

  Again she nodded. ‘They’re so loud, Kellen. They just keep laughing at me. They … They like hurting me. I can’t shut them out. It’s like … It’s like they’re playing with me. I can feel them, like their fingers are scraping at the insides of my mind.’ Her fingers clenched, hard, and I had to prise them apart to keep her nails from digging into her palms. ‘Make them stop, Kellen, please!’

  ‘I don’t know how,’ I said, feeling more useless now than I ever had in my life.

  ‘Please!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Seneira! I’m so sorry but there’s nothing I can—’

  ‘Kiss her,’ Reichis said.

  I turned and saw him sitting on his haunches behind me, his eyes glinting in the half-light. ‘Not now!’ I yelled at him.

  ‘I’m serious this time, Kellen. Whatever’s happening to her, you need to break the connection, shake whoever’s digging around inside her before—’

  ‘What do you know about magic?’ I demanded. ‘Nothing. You’re a damned squirrel cat. All you know is killing and thieving and—’

  ‘Listen to me,’ Reichis growled, his hackles rising. ‘I’m telling you, I can smell them on her. It’s the markings around her eye. They’re using them to get to her, feeding on her misery and her fear. You need to shake her out of it.’

  ‘I�
�m not going to k—’ I stopped myself just in time.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Seneira asked, her fingers digging into her hair now.

  ‘Nothing. He’s an idiot. Just try to relax.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, rocking back and forth now. ‘Please, if there’s anything you can do … some spell or trick … I need to make it stop!’

  I glanced back at Reichis. I knew he was serious about what he’d told me because for once he wasn’t threatening retaliation for me insulting him. Reluctantly I told Seneira what he’d said.

  ‘Is this …? Is this some kind of … No, you wouldn’t joke about that. You’re not like that.’ She doubled over again as the attack worsened. ‘Oh gods of earth and air …’

  Suddenly she reached out with both hands and grabbed my face, pulling me close until our lips came together, too hard and too fast to be sensuous, too anguished to be anything but dire need.

  I fell into that kiss, holding on as best I could, trying to find a way to give her some tiny shred of solace from the sickness that assailed her. I could feel the tension in the muscles of her face, the clenching of her jaw. It was an odd way to experience what was, in fact, only the second real kiss of my entire life.

  Slowly, very slowly, the pressure eased a little, and the shaking stopped. I tried to pull away, to ask if the pain was subsiding and the voices fading. Seneira hung on though, her hands still on the sides of my face, my arms around her waist.

  I heard Reichis wander off, leaving us alone.

  Seneira looked at me, and I saw the markings around her eyes had stopped moving and the lines in her brow had smoothed. I saw something else in her face too, something I knew was mirrored on my own. We kissed again, this time for a very different reason than we had before.

  What had started in despair and anguish became something new, and for the next few hours we just sat there together on the hallway floor, sometimes kissing, sometimes talking about the people she’d lost and what they’d meant to her. Sometimes we just held on to each other, bound together by the strange black markings around our eyes, by pain and heartache and the desperate need to find something to replace them.