‘It’s not what you might think,’ I said. ‘The life of an exile, of an outlaw, it’s not glamorous or exotic – it’s awful. Most days it’s dull and tiring, except when you’re running, terrified that this time you’re going to end up dead. People don’t like wanderers and drifters – not even here in the borderlands – and from what I’ve heard from Ferius, it’s even worse in other places. It’s not a life anyone would want, Seneira. You spent … what? A few days, and with Rosie watching your back? Imagine day after day, year after year of it.’
She listened patiently to my litany of complaints about the horrors of the road, then said, ‘I’m sure that’s all true, Kellen, but you know what I think?’
‘What?’
She took my hands in hers, and then, as if she were fighting desperately to swim up from the bottom of a deep, dark lake, she kissed me for a long time. ‘I think no life can be so bad so long as you have someone to share it with.’
45
The Hootch
It didn’t take long for Seneira to finish packing. There’s only so much you can carry when you’re travelling the long roads. We could’ve left that very hour if it weren’t that Ferius was still in the throes of the obsidian worm fever.
‘Hey, Kellen,’ she said, eyes half-opening as I walked into her room. ‘Come to rescue me?’ She pulled at her bonds. ‘Mind taking these off so’s I can get a drink? I’m powerful thirsty.’
‘They were just to keep you from hurting yourself.’
‘Silly kid, why would I want to hurt myself when I’ve already got so many other folks tryin’ to do it for me? Now take these restraints off.’
‘You should sleep awhile first. Let yourself—’
‘Let myself what, kid? Get used to this crawler under the skin of my right eye?’ Again she pulled at her restraints. ‘Take them off, Kellen. I ain’t gonna scratch out my own eye. I need it for something first.’
Not feeling as if I could refuse her, I did as she asked. When I was done, she sat up groggily. ‘All right, now where are those boots of mine?’
‘Ferius, I need to talk to you. I need to tell you the plan.’
She smiled in a way I found kind of patronising. ‘The plan? Sure, kid, tell me all about your plan.’
I did, explaining what Beren was intending and what the rest of us would do that night.
‘Sounds sensible,’ she said. ‘Good thinking. Excellent plan. Now, how about those boots, kid?’
Something struck me about her tone. ‘Ferius, you’re coming with us. You, me, Seneira and Reichis are leaving tonight, before—’
‘No, Kellen, that’s your plan, not mine. You and the girl –’ she looked down at Reichis, still curled up asleep on the bed – ‘and the squirrel cat if he wants, you all get out of here fast as you can. Me? My dance card’s got a fella’s name on it that I mean to scratch off once and for all.’
‘Are you crazy? Dexan will kill you!’ I strode over to a chest of drawers and pulled a small mirror from its stand to hold it in front of her. ‘You see that thing around your eye? He can use it to hurt you. If those bracelets he uses have any kind of blood sympathy or iron attraction spells charmed into them, then he’ll know when you’re nearby. You won’t get within fifty feet of him before he ends you.’
She made a show of looking in the mirror and fixing her hair. ‘Reckon that might be so. Probably worth laying some money on it if you can find someone dumb enough to take the bet.’
She wasn’t listening. Ferius was falling back into that stupid habit of pretending everything was some big joke and that she’d just swagger on up to Dexan and trick him into giving up. ‘Come with us,’ I pleaded. ‘The four of us can survive if we just –’
She rose up from the bed, visibly unsteady but not letting me support her. ‘Kid, I’ve been trying to teach you for months what it means to be an Argosi. It ain’t some set of tricks or skills, it’s not even a philosophy. It’s a path, Kellen. That’s what makes a person an Argosi: finding your path and never straying from it.’ She slipped her black leather waistcoat back on and took out her metal flask. ‘And my path runs right through that son of a bitch.’
‘Don’t do this,’ I begged, practically starting to cry. Yeah, I guess I was laying it on a bit thick, but, well, I needed to put on a good show.
She tilted her head as she looked at me, then reached out a hand and ruffled my hair. ‘You’re a funny kid sometimes, you know that?’ She unscrewed the cap of her flask and took a long drink. ‘All right, best you and the girl set off now, Kellen. I’ve got some serious dancin’ to do.’
‘Will you two shut up?’ Reichis groaned. ‘I’m trying to die here.’
‘He okay?’ Ferius asked.
I nodded. ‘Seneira took care of his wounds. She said they were too shallow to do much damage.’
‘Good, that’s good.’ She took another swig from the flask before sealing it up and putting it back in her waistcoat.
‘Nothing will stop you from going after him, will it?’
She smiled. ‘Not a thing, kid. Not one, and if you respect me at all, you’ll understand that …’ She looked confused, then sat heavily back down on the bed. ‘Whoa … who set this room to spinning?’
‘Must be the fever,’ I said.
Ferius glanced over at the night table, and the small vial of sedative that was two teaspoons short of what it should have been. ‘Damn, Kellen … you drugged my hootch?’
I nodded.
‘That’s … That’s just …’ She fell back and I caught her in time to turn her around so her head was on the pillow. Her eyes were already fluttering closed as she muttered, ‘You’re the worst apprentice I ever had.’
Reichis got up and shook himself off, then started inspecting his wounds. ‘So what now? We toss the Argosi in the back of a wagon and run for it?’
I wanted to. More than anything in the world right now the thought of getting away from this place, of starting a life with Seneira, pulled at me like iron magic. But what kind of man would I be, what kind of life could I give Seneira, if I let my friends down? ‘No more running,’ I said. ‘Ferius is right: an Argosi never backs down.’
‘Neither do squirrel cats, but I thought –’
I pointed to the black marks around her eye. ‘It’s a safe bet that if Ferius goes anywhere near Dexan, he’ll know she’s coming, through his connection to the worm. He’ll kill her before she can so much as toss a card at him.’
Reichis stared up at me, then shook himself again and his fur went from grey with silver stripes to black with traces of red. ‘So you and me are gonna …?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah. You and me, partner.’
He looked as if he was trying to decide whether to come with me or just leave me there and go find a business partner who didn’t get himself into life-or-death situations every five minutes. I wouldn’t have blamed him; none of this was his fault. After a minute of watching him I couldn’t stand it any longer. The thought of doing this without him was threatening to make me lose my nerve. ‘Well?’ I finally asked. ‘What’s it going to be?’
He got up on his hind legs and stared down at the cuts on his side, then up at me. ‘I am seriously going to kill that damned crocodile this time.’
46
Whisper Magic
Reichis and I made our way back to the edge of town and returned to the lush swampy forest that should never have been able to thrive in such a dry climate. I’d got so used to the wide open desert of the Seven Sands that the way the foliage grew so thick, with everything closing in around me, felt eerily threatening.
‘So, you’ve come back to talk at my spirits, eh, spellslinger?’
I glanced around, trying without success to see where the voice had come from. ‘I need your help, Mamma Whispers. I need your magic.’
She walked out from behind a tree, a young girl – a child – who had no business looking so at ease in this strange, forbidding place. She gave a shake of her head, almost toppling her ragged top ha
t. ‘I told you, spellslinger, Mamma Whispers doesn’t have no magic. She just whispers to the spirits, and sometimes they listen.’
Reichis chittered on my shoulder. ‘Somebody needs to tell “Mamma Whispers” that she talks like an old lady.’
She tilted her head and then laughed. ‘Well, maybe somebody ought to tell the squirrel cat that he talks like a gap-toothed frontier bandit.’
‘You can hear what he says?’ I’d never encountered anyone other than the Dowager Magus who understood his growls and chitters.
‘I told you, boy, I don’t got no magic. The spirits, though, they tell me things.’
I went to her and knelt down, taking one of her small hands in mine. I had no idea if this was going to ingratiate me to her or get me killed, but I felt like a gesture of some sort was necessary. ‘The man who’s behind the shadowblack plague, I have to stop him, but he’s hidden somewhere and I can’t find him. Could your spirits help me track him?’
She took her hand away. ‘Spirits don’t belong to nobody but themselves. You want their help, you gotta learn to ask real nice.’
‘Can you show me?’
‘Well now, I don’t know.’ Suddenly she twirled around and her voice rose to a loud bellow. ‘Any spirits here want to talk to this spellslinger? He ain’t a bad one, I think, just stupid sometimes.’
Not the most hearty endorsement of my virtues.
‘Well?’ she shouted again. ‘I asked if any spirits want to take pity on this boy. Maybe show him a better path through this nasty world?’
‘Could we—’
She cut me off with a wave of her hand and a dirty look, so I shut my mouth. With her arms outstretched like the arrow on a weather vane, she kept spinning around, alternately whistling and whispering into the night air. ‘Ah, ah, ah,’ she said at last, bobbing her head. ‘I hear one now. Yes, yes. A strong spirit. Bold. A touch foolish though –’ she opened her eyes and glanced at me – ‘but maybe that’s to be expected.’
‘Uh … thanks?’
She came closer. ‘Now we gotta teach you how to talk to them, yeah? Have to show you how to whisper, whisper, whisper to them.’ She grabbed my forearm and looked down at one of the bands there. ‘You work some breath magic, spellslinger?’
‘I do, a little.’
‘That’s good. That’s real good. This here spirit, she’s a sasutzei: a wind spirit. They like the breath magic best – better than the other nasty kinds you Jan’Tep mess with.’ She looked up at me and her eyes narrowed. ‘But you gotta learn to make the whispers just right, you understand? What we do, it ain’t just words. Anyone can make words. We make whispers – totally different thing. You think you can do that?’
How was I supposed to answer a question I could barely understand? I had a sense that my answer mattered, to her and to this sasutzei spirit. ‘My friend is hurt,’ I said. ‘Other people are hurt too. I think … I think there’s something very bad happening out there and I need to know what it is so I can put a stop to it.’
Mamma Whispers shrugged. ‘So what’s that mean to me?’
‘It means I’ll do anything it takes to help my friend, so stop wasting my time and teach me the damned spell.’
Her eyes went wide for a moment, then the young girl who called herself Mamma Whispers leaned her head back and laughed up at the heavens. ‘Ah, the spirits gonna like you, spellslinger. I think you gonna whisper real good.’
For all her backwoods mysticism, Mamma Whispers was right about one thing: whisper magic was nothing like the Jan’Tep incantations I knew. The spell – if you could call it that – wasn’t made up of words or syllables, but almost impossibly subtle movements of breath, through the mouth, passing by the lips, sometimes whistling through the front teeth.
‘You’re doing it wrong,’ she said.
‘How? I’m trying to do it exactly like you showed me.’
She shook her head impatiently. ‘That’s the fool’s way. Stop trying to be like everybody else. Let the whisper come from your belly, from your need, from your promise to do what you say you’ll do.’ She wagged a finger at me. ‘The spirits don’t like liars, so stop trying to lie to them by pretending to be me.’
Okay, that made sense.
No, of course it didn’t.
‘Just tell her,’ Mamma Whispers said, her voice gentler now. ‘Tell the sasutzei what you want. That’s the spell.’
‘I need to know where the obsidian worms are,’ I said to the night air around us. ‘I need to see where they come from.’
She slapped my arm surprisingly hard. ‘Not with words, with whispers.’
‘But you said—’
‘I said, you said … Stop saying! The spirits, they don’t like loud things. That’s why they come out here where it’s quiet, where no people are. They don’t need you talking at them, just whisper!’
If it had been as simple as just whispering the words, that would have been easy. But it wasn’t, as I discovered when she smacked me again. ‘That’s just talking quiet.’
Finally I tried something else. I tried to just think of my need – not as words in my head or even pictures, but as the need itself, the simple desire, to understand the obsidian worms, to be able to see them. As I did this, I found my breathing changed, and I let myself whisper without making the words, letting my need speak for itself.
‘Ah,’ Mamma Whispers said, ‘that’s good. That’s real good, spellslinger.’
Reichis growled. ‘Something’s happening. What’s going on?’
‘You be quiet now, mister squirrel cat. The spirits got no troubles with you.’
‘I don’t feel any different,’ I said, but all of a sudden my right eye – the one without the shadowblack – started to itch. At first it was nothing; like a light breeze blowing on it, but then the sensation increased in intensity until it felt like someone was melting ice on the surface of my eyeball. ‘What’s happening to me?’
‘You asked to see, and now the sasutzei is trying to show you.’
I blinked furiously, trying to get rid of the sensation, but then suddenly the pain went away and I saw the grey-green of the trees and grasses again, only … I saw something else too: a thin black strand, like a spider’s web, glimmering in the air before me. It travelled from far to the east of us, from somewhere in town, all the way through the air to the west until it faded into the distance. ‘What am I seeing?’ I asked.
‘You wanted to follow the black worms, so the sasutzei, she’s showin’ you the thread that connects each half together.’
‘So I can … I can trace it, follow it to find where it leads?’
‘Maybe,’ Mamma Whispers replied, ‘but maybe you need to stop looking so close.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look around you, spellslinger. Look all around.’
I did, and then I realised that there wasn’t just one black thread. There were dozens, everywhere, passing through us, above us … ‘How could Dexan have implanted so many worms into his victims? There would be a massive panic!’
A dark look passed across Mamma Whispers’s young face. ‘They’re too clever, the ones behind these dirty tricks.’ She tapped me on the temple. ‘They let you see one or two of the victims to make you and the Argosi believe you know what’s goin’ on, but they use nasty magic to hide the other infected so you never see how far their evil work has already spread.’
So this wasn’t just about blackmail schemes or even revenge. Whatever was going on, Dexan’s clients had something much bigger planned. ‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘I have to follow these threads to find the man responsible.’
‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘You carry a spirit now.’ Mamma Whispers chuckled as she tapped first my left cheekbone then my right. ‘Now you got the shadowblack in one eye and the sasutzei in the other!’
Reichis sniffed at my face. I pushed his snout away. ‘How long will the … sasutzei stay with me?’ I asked, not sure how comfortable I was having some strange spirit take up reside
nce in my eye. I had enough trouble with disturbing visions already.
‘Oh, she stick with you as long as you keep her interest, boy. Whisper to her once in a while, and maybe she show you what others don’t see. Just be careful you don’t ask for the wrong things, spellslinger. The sasutzei, she gets powerful angry sometimes.’
Great, because all I’d needed to make my life complete was to have an angry spirit inside my eyeball.
‘Go on,’ she said, pushing me away with her small hands. ‘Go on to your noisy world with your noisy troubles. Go be a hero.’ She glanced around as if searching for something. ‘Or maybe a dead man. I don’t know which.’
47
The Threads
‘What are we doing here?’ Reichis asked as we stood outside the tall central tower of the Academy.
It had taken me several hours to follow the threads out of the deep forest into town and finally back to this place. Most of the time I couldn’t see the threads at all, but then if I stopped and whispered my need, the sasutzei spirit in my right eye would give me another brief glimpse of them. I counted more than a dozen of the black gossamer filaments leading here.
‘What could Dexan’s clients possibly want with the Academy?’ I asked aloud.
Reichis clambered up my leg, then leaped up to perch on my shoulder. ‘Maybe they want to shut it down. Though why not just kill Beren instead of wasting time infecting a bunch of dumb kids?’
‘The people who come to study here aren’t dumb,’ I said somewhat defensively as I thought back to Cressia, Lindy, Toller and the others. ‘They’re smart and ambitious. They come from some of the …’
Reichis poked at my cheek with his paw. ‘What? What is it?’
I’d been about to say that the students here came from the best families from across the continent, but that wasn’t precisely true; what their families had in common was that they were all rich and influential. Daroman courtiers, Berabesq clerics, Gitabrian merchants … ‘Ancestors … I had it backwards: the Academy isn’t where the threads lead, it’s where they begin.’
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