‘Then shouldn’t we be finding them first?’ I asked.
‘Just trust us a little while,’ Enna said, squeezing my hand. ‘You’re here for a reason.’
‘Which is …?’
Durral nodded to where the man in the toga waited, watching our exchange. ‘Savire needs to see you flip the coin. Make it dance.’
I had no idea what that meant, but I did as I was told. The coin spun up into the air, but didn’t float for anywhere near as long as Savire’s had. The coin dancer shook his head at me. ‘Dazi,’ he said. Apparently our conversation was now reduced to half a word. He held up his own coin between two fingers and tapped it against his forehead, then against his chest, and finally against my hand. ‘Castra dazi.’
‘He’s telling you that to make it dance you need to use your mind, your heart and your hands.’
‘How?’
‘How should I know? I’m an Argosi, not some old weirdo who wanders around peddling obscure philosophy and treating coins like they were sacred artefacts.’
Given everything I knew about the Argosi, that statement was pretty funny. Even Reichis chuckled. ‘Heh. Stupid Argosi.’
Durral grabbed the coin from my palm. I thought he was going to show me how to make it float, but when he flipped it in the air it just fell right back down the way it had done for Zavera. ‘I ain’t got the knack for it. Can’t tell you how it works exactly, but it’s like some folks have the touch – they can wake the spirit that lives inside the metal.’ He handed it back to me. ‘That’s how you make the coin dance, and when it does, you can use its abilities.’
‘Like what?’
‘Depends on the coin. There used to be loads of different ones. Sotocastra like this one to open locks, orocastra to help you find water or gold.’ He nodded to the man in the toga. ‘Castradazi like Savire here used to be folk heroes. Some years back the lords mercantile decided they were tricksters and thieves, sent the secret police after them. Now there aren’t but a few left, and probably even fewer of the coins.’
Altariste had said something about the metals needed to make the bird – that no one except for contraptioneers was supposed to possess them. I held up my coin. ‘This is what Janucha’s been using in her experiments.’
‘Could be,’ Durral said, ‘but if you ever want to find out for sure you’d better show Savire here that you can flip the damned thing!’
The old man in the toga seemed to understand more than he’d been letting on, because he motioned for me to watch, and began flipping his own coin over and over. At first I was distracted by the way it would hang in the air for a second, then two, then three, but then I realised I was focusing on the wrong thing: what I needed to do was pay attention to the way he flipped it.
The old man placed the coin on his thumb just so, and twitched his whole hand just a bit before flicking it – almost more on a curve than straight up. He picked the coin out of the air and then gestured for me to try.
While I’d pretty much washed out as a mage among my people, the one thing I’d always been good at was mastering somatic forms. It wasn’t just determination and practice on my part. I’d enjoyed the feeling of it – the art of making your fingers move so swiftly in such complex patterns. In its own way, it kind of was like dancing.
I stopped trying to emulate the other man’s movements and just let my hands do the work, feeling the shape of the coin, its weight and the way it rolled across my palm.
Okay, we’ve been properly introduced now. Let’s see if we can dance.
When I flipped the coin this time, it hung in the air, spinning awhile before ever so slowly beginning to fall. Savire grabbed my wrist and pulled my hand underneath the coin. Its descent stopped entirely. It floated there above my palm, no longer spinning but turning on its axis as if suspended from a string.
‘Castradazi,’ Savire said, though this time in a hushed, almost awed voice.
The day my parents had counter-banded me had taken away any hope I’d had of becoming a mage. I’d figured all my practice at somatic forms – the one thing I was really good at – had gone to waste. So even though all that was happening right now was that a coin was floating a few inches above my palm, I felt better than I had in a long time.
‘Okay,’ Reichis said, tilting his head as he watched. ‘I want my coin back.’
The man in the toga covered my palm with his. He wrapped his fingers around my hand and turned it until we were locked in a handshake. He spoke to Durral in Gitabrian.
‘He wants you to tell him a lie,’ the Argosi said.
‘Like what?’
‘Like anything. Nobody ever teach you to lie, kid?’
It’s pretty much all I learned from my people actually. ‘The Jan’Tep brought the seven forms of magic to this continent,’ I said with absolute confidence.
Durral smirked at that. Savire just watched me. An itch started in the centre of my palm where the coin was pressed between our two hands. The sensation grew stronger and stronger until it was almost unbearable. I tried to pull away but the old man wouldn’t let me. Instead he said something to Durral.
‘Now tell him the truth.’
‘What? Why would …?’ The discomfort was getting to be too much for me. ‘We stole the oases from the Mahdek,’ I said loudly. ‘We took their magic from them and pretended it was ours.’
The pain disappeared as if it had never been there in the first place.
‘Sotocastra,’ Savire said.
‘Soto means both “to open” and “to speak the truth”,’ Durral explained. ‘In anyone else’s hands that coin is just a dead hunk of metal. But a castradazi can use it to unlock doors or tell if a fella’s telling the truth or not.’ He gave a sniff as if the thing were beneath him. ‘Course an Argosi don’t need no coin to do those things.’
‘How many other kinds of these coins are there?’ I asked.
‘Used to be there were twenty-one different sacred coins, if you believe the old castradazi stories. They’ve been outlawed for years now though, so you’d be lucky to find a coin dancer with more than one or two.’
The man in the toga said something else, and then Durral frowned.
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
‘He says the art will be gone soon. Says he’s old and ready to move on.’
‘Can’t he teach someone else?’
‘Dazigenzia,’ the old man said to me, squeezing my hand even harder.
‘The dance isn’t taught,’ Durral explained. ‘It has to be discovered.’ To Savire he added, ‘Which is nonsense, by the way.’
Savire ignored him, using his grip on my hand to pull me closer before kissing me first on one cheek then the other. That earned him an angry hiss from Reichis, who promptly leaped from my shoulder to the lantern post above. ‘Creepy skinbags.’
‘Name,’ the man in the toga said to me in heavily accented Daroman. ‘You name?’
‘Kellen,’ I replied. Then I remembered the way Gitabrians constructed their names, and tried to recall what Altariste had called me. ‘In your language I guess I’d be Magizier Kellen fal Ke té Jan’Tep.’
He shook his head vigorously. ‘No. No. Castradazi Kellen.’ Then he turned my hand over so my palm was facing up. When he removed his own, there was no longer a single coin in my palm. Now there were five.
‘Well, I’ll be a tumbleweed rolled clear across the ocean!’ Durral breathed. He turned to the woman keeping watch. ‘Enna, you ever seen five of these before?’
She smiled at him but stayed where she was. ‘Still an excitable little boy under all that bluster, ain’t you?’
I held the coins up closer to see them better. Each was a different size and colour – from a glittering orange copper, to a blue so deep it was as if someone had found a way to mix steel and sapphire together. They tingled against the skin of my palm, each one vibrating in its own unique way. Savire closed my fingers over the coins. ‘No …’ He struggled, searching for the word. ‘No show, Castradazi Kellen. N
o show.’
‘But what am I supposed to do with them?’
He exchanged a few more words with Durral, who translated. ‘He says the kids here don’t want to be coin dancers any more; they want to be contraptioneers or explorers or merchant lords. He’s tired of the secret police coming around looking for his coins, so now these are yours. Says you gotta keep ’em safe. Take them away from here.’
I looked down at the little metal discs. Had I seen them on any other day, I would’ve thought them rather plain and probably not worth very much. Now it felt as if I held a treasure horde in the palm of my hand. The old man looked at me expectantly, and I remembered that Gitabria was a trading nation. ‘I … I don’t have much money,’ I said, reaching for the small pouch of my own coins. ‘But I can—’
‘Practise,’ Savire said, then he tapped me three times: on the forehead, the centre of my chest and finally on the hand holding the coins. ‘Practice is pay.’
With nothing more than a toothy grin and a wave of his hand, the castradazi turned and walked away.
‘Wait,’ I called to him. ‘I don’t know what the other coins do! You haven’t told me how to—’
‘Practise,’ he said without stopping.
I considered running after him, but Durral grabbed my shoulder. ‘Let him be, kid. This is how it is for his folk.’
I felt a strange kind of awe at this gift – and not just for the coins themselves. I was keenly aware that without Savire’s kindness and Durral’s machinations to bring me here, I would never have known they existed. ‘Thank you,’ I said to Durral.
The Argosi shrugged. ‘Just had a feelin’ about you. Saw how your hands moved back at the saloon and Enna reckoned you might have the touch for it.’
‘Thank you,’ I repeated. ‘I mean it.’
‘Well, you might want to save all those thank-yous for someone else.’
He led me by the elbow across the bridge to where Enna waited, no longer looking out at the gorge or watching the bridge for police. Her eyes were on me now. ‘You know the Argosi Way of Water, Kellen?’
‘Sure,’ I replied, ‘it means …’
A sinking feeling came over me. The Way of Water means a lot of things: balance, never interfering in the path of another, and providing fair exchange in all trades. But it also means something else: making restitution when you’ve done wrong to another. Balancing the scales. Durral and Enna, the Path of the Rambling Thistle as they called themselves, had just led me to a gift that was already more precious than anything I’d ever owned. So how do you balance that?
‘Let’s take a walk across the bridge together,’ Enna said.
30
The Forest Walk
Cazaran’s Forest Bridge spans just over three thousand feet as it crosses the gorge. The only reason I knew this fact was that it was the first thing Enna said to me as she led me there.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ she asked as we walked between rows of thirty-foot trees that grew from roots deep inside the thick deck of the bridge itself.
It was, and I said as much.
‘And a pleasant evening,’ Enna went on. ‘Air’s warm, breeze is soft, and the company, well …’ She patted my arm. ‘It’s not so bad, is it?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘So nice to be in the presence of a proper gentleman for a change,’ she said, stepping away to give me a little curtsy. She held out her hand. ‘Now, I believe you have something for me.’
I took the discordance card from my pocket, but found parting with it wasn’t easy. I had trouble reconciling the delicate painting with Ferius’s swaggering personality. Letting go of it felt like giving up a chance to better understand my Argosi mentor.
‘Oh,’ Enna said as soon as she took it from me. She held it between both her hands and a terrible sadness found its way to her otherwise inscrutable expression.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘What does the card mean?’
The Argosi slid the card into the sleeve of her coat. ‘It’s fine, Kellen. Just fine. I miss her painting, that’s all.’
She took my arm and we resumed our walk. I found it hard to break the silence between us, but a question had been plaguing me since the travellers’ saloon. ‘Ferius is your daughter, isn’t she?’
‘Durral and I are her foster parents,’ she admitted. ‘Found her when she was just a little thing. Her own blood, well, like so many of the Mahdek, they wanted to get their revenge on the world. Can’t blame them, of course, but it’s a sure path to a short life.’
‘What was she like? Ferius, I mean.’
‘Angry, mostly. Angriest child you’ve ever seen. The minute she learned how to make a fist, she beat a boy bloody. Stole herself a throwing knife when she was seven. Practised every second she thought we weren’t watching. You ever see her use a blade? I mean, like a proper Shan sword or a Tristian rapier?’
‘Never seen either,’ I replied.
‘She was fast, boy. Oh, was she ever fast! Could’ve made her living walking across this continent killing for money. She wanted to, you know. Thought the way to make peace with her dead was to send as many Jan’Tep after them as she could before some mage or other got to her.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Durral saw something in her. Wanted to make her his teysan. Ferius, though, she didn’t take to it. I mean, sure, she wanted to learn the talents. The tricks. Begged us to teach her all the forms of arta eres and arta tuco. I warned against it, but Durral’s always had a soft heart.’
‘Really? Because I think maybe he left it somewhere.’
She gave my arm a little squeeze. ‘Now don’t you start. Anyway, Ferius went on getting in all kinds of trouble. Every time she ended up in a jam, me or Durral would have to get her out of it. But she hated having debts. Kept trying to give us things – things she’d stolen. So Durral, he started giving her the pledge cards. You know what those are?’
‘The ones with the blood-red ink? Ferius says they carry an Argosi’s debts.’
She nodded. ‘Wasn’t too long before she had a whole deck of them. Still nothing changed. So much anger in that girl.’
‘But Ferius is the least angry person I’ve ever met! She never fights when she can avoid it, never hurts anyone more than necessary. Four Berabesq Faithful nearly killed us in the desert and she used up all our medicine saving them!’
At first Enna didn’t respond to my defence of Ferius, but then she stopped, and looked up at me. I saw the first hint of tears in her eyes. ‘It makes me happy to hear that, Kellen. It is a very fine gift. Thank you.’
Her words carried a finality to them that told me she wanted to stop there, but I couldn’t let it go. ‘If Ferius was so violent before, what changed her?’
Enna opened the first few buttons of her coat. She pulled the neckline of her dress down to just above her breastbone. The scar was old, but not fully healed. It couldn’t have been more than an inch from her heart. ‘Durral got to me in time,’ she said. ‘But it was awful close.’
‘That’s not possible. There’s no way that Ferius would do something like that.’
‘Says a boy who’s never seen a mother and daughter go at it. Tell me, if Durral showed you a scar like mine and told you he got it when his son lost his temper, would you believe him?’
‘I guess so, but—’
‘She didn’t mean to do it,’ Enna went on. ‘Truth be told, it was my fault as much as hers. I wanted to prove to her that no matter how quick you think you are with a blade, there’s always someone just a little faster.’ She chuckled. ‘Turns out I was the one who needed to learn that lesson.’
‘Is that why you won’t talk to her? I know she misses you. I saw it in her face at the saloon, and then again when she sent me here with the discordance card.’ The more I talked about it, the more excited I got, or maybe panicked. ‘Let me take you to her right now. Or if you can’t come, I’ll bring her to you. You could see her again, just let her know you aren’t angry with her.’
‘Are you done now, son?’ Enna asked, not a trace of meanness in her voice. I knew then that nothing I said was going to convince her. She pointed towards the end of the bridge ahead of us. ‘How far you reckon we have to go?’
I glanced back to see how far we’d come. ‘Maybe another seven hundred feet?’
‘Sounds about right to me.’ She took my arm again and resumed our walk. ‘I’ve enjoyed meeting you, Kellen, more than, well, more than most. But when we reach the end of this bridge, for all that I might wish it otherwise, I’m going to say goodbye to you. Chances are this will be the last time you and I ever see each other.’
‘Why? What did I do?’
‘Nothing at all. But I’m an Argosi, and we walk our paths alone.’
‘But you and Durral—’
‘Durral and I happen to be on the same path. Have been for close to forty years now.’ She gazed off towards the Bridge of Dice where we’d left him. ‘One day, our paths will diverge and I’ll have to say goodbye to him.’
‘Why? Why would anyone want to live that way? Always giving up the people you care about?’
We’d reached the end of the bridge. Enna almost stepped off then stopped herself and turned to me, taking my hands in hers. ‘You came here tonight because you want to find those mages so they don’t kill that poor girl and start a war. Those are fine things to want, Kellen, but are you willing to pay the price?’
‘You think I don’t already know I could get killed?’
She shook her head. ‘Any fool can throw away his life. I’m talking about something bigger. The way of the Argosi … It’s not just a bunch of fancy cards and tricks, Kellen. We follow our paths because they take us where we need to go so we can protect the people we love from the terrible things that sneak up on the world when no one’s watching. War. Oppression. Genocide.’
‘You mean like the Mahdek. Like what my people did to them.’
She nodded.
‘Then why didn’t the Argosi prevent it?’
‘Because we aren’t grand mages, Kellen. We’re not kings or emperors. We don’t have armies. Just our cards and a few tricks up our sleeves. Sometimes we fail because we’re on the wrong path.’ She reached out a fingertip to flick away a lock of hair that had fallen over my left eye. It fell right back into place and that made her smile. ‘Sometimes we’re on the true path but someone comes along who makes us want to stray from it.’
Charmcaster Page 15