Charmcaster

by Sebastien de Castell

  Too late I understood what this was all about – why she and Durral had gone so far out of their way to be nice to me. I pulled away from her. ‘You brought me here to tell me that Ferius is going to leave me?’

  ‘No, don’t you see, son? That’s the problem. The minute Durral and I saw Ferius standing outside that saloon with you, we knew. We knew. She’ll never abandon you, Kellen. She’ll keep trying to defend you from all the people who want to hurt you. She’ll keep trying to teach you even when the learning won’t take inside that head of yours, even if it means giving up the Path of the Wild Daisy.’ Enna put her hands on my shoulders. ‘You have to be the one to walk away from her.’

  Fear and anger competed for space inside my chest. ‘You’re wrong. Me and Ferius and Reichis, we look out for each other!’

  With that soft, patient voice of her she asked, ‘How many times has my daughter nearly died saving your life, Kellen? You said yourself that she prefers peaceful ways. How many times has she had to commit violence to protect you?’

  Too many times to count, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. I couldn’t bring myself to. I took the castradazi coins from my pocket. ‘Is that what this is? Some kind of payment to make me leave? Is that how it works – the Way of Water? You decide Ferius has to be rid of me so you give me some coins in return?’

  Enna looked stung by my words. ‘That’s not our way, Kellen. You ought to know that by now. You really want to find those mages and stop a war?’ She reached into her coat and took out a card that she handed to me. ‘This is the price you have to pay.’

  I took the card from her and stared at it, transfixed by its ugliness. It depicted a road so covered in twisting black markings it looked as if the entire card had been soaked in ink. The title at the bottom read, ‘The Path of Shadows’.

  ‘This is where the path leads, Kellen. This war – and make no mistake, that’s what’s coming – needs someone to walk a road too dark for the rest of us.’ She briefly put a hand against my cheek. ‘You know my daughter better than almost anyone else alive. You know the Path of the Wild Daisy means everything to her. That’s why you have to be the one to decide.’

  ‘Decide what?’

  She took away her hand and tapped the surface of the card. ‘Whether you’ll walk this awful road yourself, or make Ferius walk it for you.’

  With those words the Path of the Rambling Thistle turned away from me.

  And I was left alone.

  THE PATH

  To be Argosi is to accept one’s path without knowing its destination. We take to the road regardless of whether it leads us into brutal heat or bitter cold, through blinding light or unrelenting darkness. We know the journey is perilous. We know the end comes sooner than we would wish. Still the path calls to us, and that is what makes us Argosi.

  31

  The Cure for Anger

  Reichis could tell something was wrong the moment I returned to the Bridge of Dice. He tried to distract me with endless nattering about squirrel cat philosophy as we walked aimlessly back and forth across every one of Cazaran’s eight bridges. Just a few days ago I’d marvelled at the sight of them. Now they seemed petty and garish.

  Reichis started racing around the merchant stalls, popping his head up behind their tables and warning me that he was about to steal something and I’d better start running. When even that failed to get a rise out of me, he decided sterner measures were necessary and returned to hop up on my shoulder.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked irritably when the squirrel cat started patting my head with his paw.

  ‘I’m … comforting you,’ he replied. ‘Isn’t this what humans do to reassure each other?’ His batting of my head intensified. ‘Is this better?’

  ‘Stop it.’

  He sniffed at my cheek. ‘You’re angry with me?’

  ‘No. Just angry. At everything.’

  I felt the fur of his cheek tickle mine as he grinned. ‘You know what I do when I’m feeling angry?’

  ‘Murder things?’

  ‘Exactly! Let’s go find some—’

  Someone shouted my name and the sounds of footsteps followed. I turned to see Nephenia running towards us, her hyena loping alongside. ‘Kellen,’ she said again, sounding mildly infuriated. ‘Finally!’

  ‘How did you find us?’ I asked. Cazaran wasn’t exactly a small city.

  Neph tapped a finger on the sigils of my hat. ‘By giving myself a headache, thank you very much. Do you have to wear that thing all the time? No, don’t answer that. We have more urgent things to discuss.’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Just … let me catch my breath.’

  The hyena gave a quick series of yips and barks.

  ‘Ishak says Cressia woke up an hour ago asking for you,’ Reichis informed me.

  ‘Why would she ask for … Oh, hell.’ In all my previous encounters with the obsidian worms, the attacks never came closer than a day apart. There was no way Cressia could survive another brutal assault so soon.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Nephenia said. ‘They’re just … talking.’

  ‘Talking?’

  ‘Negotiating. Janucha is trying to see if she can come to some kind of agreement with them. I was only there for the first couple of minutes before I realised I should come find you.’ She hesitated a second. ‘Kellen, the mages don’t seem nearly as sadistic as you described them. The way they talk is more pompous and arrogant than cruel.’

  ‘They probably think they’re close to getting what they want from Janucha.’ Gitabrians are supposed to be master traders. Maybe she could find a reasonable accommodation with them.

  Yeah. Probably not.

  ‘Why are we standing around here?’ Reichis growled, his fur changing to black with red stripes. ‘Wake up that stupid wind spirit in your eye and let’s hunt them down!’

  ‘How?’ I asked. ‘Even if the sasutzei can find the threads, those mages are thousands of miles from here.’

  ‘How do you know?’ the squirrel cat asked.

  ‘Because the mages …’ I was about to say ‘because they told me so’, when I realised how stupid that sounded.

  ‘I don’t think they can be that far,’ Nephenia said. ‘Janucha was quizzing me on Jan’Tep magic. She thought she could devise some kind of copper or silver barrier to lessen the mages’ connection to the obsidian worm. I told her silk spells are the only means of controlling something with your mind, and nothing weakens silk magic except—’

  ‘Distance,’ I said, interrupting her.

  Damn it. Why hadn’t I figured this out before? Silk magic was like sound: in theory it kept on going forever, but it faded more and more the further it travelled. I’d just assumed the worm had become more powerful because it had lived inside Cressia for so long, but even if that were the case, the mages sending their will needed to be closer to have such perfect control over it.

  ‘Kellen, are you okay?’ Nephenia asked.

  I was too angry to answer. This was why the mages had taunted me the whole time they were tormenting Cressia: to keep me so wound up and convinced everything was my fault that it wouldn’t occur to me to question whether they might be lying about their whereabouts.

  Ancestors, but I was sick of being manipulated.

  I lifted Reichis off my shoulder and deposited him on the ground so I could concentrate. ‘Okay, Suzy,’ I whispered, my eyes closed tightly. ‘It’s very, very important that I find the thread between Cressia and the bracelet that’s got the other half of the obsidian worm.’

  Nothing, of course.

  The reason the Jan’Tep don’t study whisper magic is because my people don’t trust forces that can’t be controlled. They especially don’t like spirits that you have to repeatedly beg for help in the hope that eventually you’ll say something that sparks their interest. ‘This is a good cause, I swear it. Innocent people are being hurt and this whole country could fall apart if we don’t put a stop to it.’

  Still nothing.
<
br />   ‘Maybe the spirit needs to be near Cressia before it can see the ethereal connection?’ Nephenia suggested.

  I couldn’t answer because I needed to keep my attention on the annoying, useless wind spirit that was all too happy to give me headaches when it suited her but never actually helped me when I asked. ‘Look, I’m trying to do the right thing here! You think I want to go chasing after mages who’ll probably kill me?’

  I felt the barest hint of breath on my right eye when I used the word ‘mages’ – light as a feather, almost an expression of curiosity.

  ‘The mages? That’s what piques your interest? You do realise I haven’t got one tenth of the magic of any Jan’Tep who—’

  A stabbing pain – like an icicle being driven into my eye. ‘Ow! Stop it!’

  The feeling subsided, though it didn’t leave entirely. I should’ve figured it out sooner: the sasutzei despised all things Jan’Tep.

  Except me, hopefully.

  I opened my eyes. My vision always gets a little hazy when the spirit wakes. The first thing I saw was Reichis staring at me with his lip curled. ‘Your eye’s gone all milky again, Kellen.’ He turned to Ishak. ‘This is why squirrel cats don’t invite spirits to live inside their eyeballs.’

  ‘Come on,’ I whispered under my breath to the sasutzei. ‘I need this. Just once I need to do something. You hate mages? Me too. So let’s go do something about it.’

  It seemed like nothing at first, but then I looked back at the bridge and there, barely visible in the dim light, floated a twisting black thread that began far off on the other side of the gorge – right where Janucha’s home was carved into the cliffside. I spun around, my eyes following the thread. It seemed to go on forever, winding along avenues, turning here and there like the lazy drawing of a bored child. But there was a definite direction to it: deeper into the south-eastern part of the city.

  ‘What do you see?’ Nephenia asked.

  ‘A trail,’ I said, and then took my first step along the path of the black thread to where I knew my enemies would be. I’ve got you, I thought.

  Nephenia held me back. ‘Shouldn’t we try to find Lady Ferius? She left not long after you did, but if you have something of hers, maybe I can use it to—’

  ‘No,’ I said, removing her hand from my arm. ‘The moment those mages cut off the connection, the thread between the obsidian worm and the onyx bracelet will disappear. We have to do this now.’

  Besides, I thought to myself, I’m going to have to get used to doing things without Ferius.

  32

  The Black Thread

  That night we sped down streets and alleyways and squeezed through the narrow gaps between buildings as we followed the black thread’s winding route across the city. More than once we found ourselves backtracking when the filament split in two. We’d follow one only to find it looping back on itself and fading away only to then become visible once again a few yards away.

  ‘Why can’t you just give me a straight line?’ I asked the sasutzei.

  No reply was forthcoming.

  ‘It must be the amplifying forces,’ Nephenia said, pointing up at a nearby minaret atop a tall building. It stood perhaps a hundred feet high and was capped in bronze – an architectural style popular with the Gitabrians. ‘I bet the thread is going around the top, isn’t it?’

  I nodded. ‘It circles around and then splits in two, one going north and the other south.’

  ‘When you’re making charms, you sometimes use bronze as an intensifier to keep silk spells from fading too quickly. The building materials they use here are drawing the ethereal thread that connects the two halves of the obsidian worm – increasing their strength even as they wind around them. That’s probably one of the reasons why the mages have so much control over the worm here.’

  That made a kind of sense, though the specifics of what she was talking about were beyond me. ‘I don’t remember you being an expert on charm theory when we were initiates,’ I said, jogging ahead to where the thread took a sharp left turn off the avenue only to then float up the side of one building and over to another.

  Nephenia held up her hands. The last two fingers of each glove had been removed and sewn over. ‘The day after this happened I knew I’d need a way to make a living outside of our homeland. I’d always been pretty good at charmcasting, and since I couldn’t form the somatic shapes required for the high magics any more, it was the obvious choice.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, stopping so we could catch our breath.

  ‘Don’t be. I figured out in my first week that self-pity was no defence against the outside world, and looking back can get you killed.’ She grinned at the hyena and reached down to scratch its head. ‘Besides, if I hadn’t been forced to leave home, I never would’ve met Ishak.’

  The hyena barked a reply.

  ‘Yes, dear, of course you’re right; our partnership was fated.’ She rolled her eyes and whispered conspiratorially, ‘He’s terribly superstitious.’

  ‘Hah!’ Reichis said, as if this represented some kind of victory for squirrel cat kind. ‘Stupid hyenas.’

  I got us going again, worried that the sasutzei might get bored if I waited too long and stop revealing the thread to me. I kept glancing at Nephenia though, struck by the confidence in her movements – the way she held her chin up just a little, as if daring the world to get in her way.

  ‘I guess we’ve both changed a lot, haven’t we?’ I asked.

  She looked as if she were about to reply, but then bit her lip.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing. You’re tracking the thread. Now’s not the time.’

  ‘I can do both. What were you going to say?’

  ‘It’s just, I don’t think you have changed, Kellen. I mean, you’ve got your spells and your skills. You lead this insane life, but underneath it all?’ She laughed. ‘Just look at what you’re doing: striding off to duel some mage who you know – you know – is going to be way more powerful than you. I bet even now you’re trying to devise some trick or ploy so that you can scam your way to victory. Being here with you now? It’s just like that day I came to the oasis to watch you duel Tennat.’

  Only this time we could all be killed. But her words had struck a chord in me. ‘Am I really no different?’

  ‘Hey,’ she said, putting her hand on my arm, ‘I didn’t say it was a bad thing. It’s who you are. A ridiculous frontier hat and a few scars haven’t changed that.’

  ‘I could say the same thing about you, you know. Exiled charmcaster or not, you’re still the same person underneath.’

  She stopped me there in the middle of the street. ‘No, Kellen. I’m not. It’s important that you understand that I’m not the girl you knew.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘No, listen to me. Before I was exiled, I did some things that … I had to make a choice. I had to decide whether to hate myself for what I’d done, or believe that this was exactly who I was meant to be. No apologies to anyone. You want to know what makes us different?’

  She removed one of her gloves and reached a finger up to the twisting black marks around my left eye. I flinched. ‘That’s what makes us different.’

  ‘The shadowblack?’

  ‘No, the way you let it make you feel – as if you’re broken somehow.’ She held her hand in front of my face. ‘You see a girl with missing fingers. I see my hand.’ She put the glove back on. ‘When I look at your face, I see my friend. But when you look in the mirror I bet all you see are shadows.’

  I don’t think her words were meant to make me feel small, but that’s exactly what they did. Bad enough I had to go around with a curse hanging over me, with spell warrants out for my head and people telling me I had to get used to the idea of being alone. Now it was my fault because I didn’t share Nephenia’s cavalier attitude about life?

  I should’ve kept my mouth shut. I still carried around the card Ferius had given me with the two of thorns imprinted in bloo
d-red ink – a reminder not to hurt other people without cause.

  ‘I guess you’re right,’ I said, picking up the pace. ‘We are different.’

  ‘Hey!’ Nephenia said, grabbing my arm. ‘Just because I’m not the same girl you remember, doesn’t mean the person I am now isn’t worth knowing.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that,’ I said.

  She took my hand. ‘And just because you’re still the same schemer who thinks he can trick the whole world, doesn’t mean I don’t want to know you better. You don’t have to act like you’re all alone even when I’m right here with you.’

  ‘Oh, great squirrel cat gods,’ Reichis muttered to Ishak. ‘Please keep me from puking.’

  I was about to remind him of an assortment of embarrassing things I could bring up about him when a blast of ice-cold wind chilled my right eye. ‘What?’ I demanded of the sasutzei. We couldn’t have found the mages yet because the black thread continued far off into the distance.

  I heard a soft thump behind me, then another. Nephenia’s hand fell out of mine and I saw her fall to the ground. ‘Neph?’

  I knelt down to see what was wrong. She was breathing, but unconscious. I tried shaking her but nothing roused her. Reichis and Ishak were in the same state. The sound of approaching footsteps brought me to my feet, and too late I understood the sasutzei’s icy wind. She hadn’t been trying to tell me we’d found the mages. She’d been warning me that someone had found us.

  Someone who wanted me alone.

  33

  The Man in Red

  It was the first time I’d seen the man in red up close. The experience didn’t agree with me.

  He was only a little taller than me, but a lot broader in the shoulders. Leather straps wound around the red silk covering his upper arms to trace the lines of his muscles. Every inch of him was covered in crimson silk except his forearms. Six metallic tattooed bands glistened in the darkness.