She patted me on the cheek with a gloved hand. ‘You’re all of those things, Kellen. We all are.’ She turned and set off towards the apothecary’s stand. ‘But you keep trying to be better, and in my book, that’s not nothing.’
I let her walk a few steps before I said, ‘You’re right.’
‘I’m always right, kid. Wouldn’t still be alive if I wasn’t.’
‘I meant earlier, when you said that trick wouldn’t work on me any more. It won’t.’
That made her stop. ‘Then ask again, Kellen.’
‘Did you know it was my sister in that room? You got there before me, and I’ve never known you to walk into a situation without knowing what’s waiting for you. Did you know Shalla was there?’
‘Sounds to me like maybe you already know the answer, kid, so ask me the real question.’
I hesitated. I wasn’t sure which answer I could live with. Either Ferius had been taken as much by surprise as I had, and so wasn’t the person I thought she was, or she had known, and had let me walk in there ready to kill my own sister. Ancestors, I’d come within a fraction of a second …
When I didn’t speak, Ferius turned and came back to me. She held out her other hand. For a second I thought she wanted me to take it, but when I looked down I saw traces of powdered green leaves. I’m not much of a botanist, but any Jan’Tep initiate would recognise nightbloom, or, by its more common name … ‘Weakweed?’ My hand went to my mouth, reflexively wanting to scrape any remnants off my tongue. My people have an instinctive fear of the stuff as it inhibits our ability to work magic. ‘When you grabbed me in the darkness, I thought it was shock and fear that gave me that bitter taste, but it was you! You shoved weakweed into my mouth!’
She wiped off the traces of powder on her trouser leg. ‘Don’t beat yourself up over not catching on sooner. It’s common enough for your tongue to taste something bitter when you’re scared.’
‘Beat myself up? You poisoned me right as I was about to enter a room full of mages!’
She snorted. ‘Hey, remember that time you spiked my hooch? Let’s not get all high and mighty about a little poison between friends. As to those two bumblers in that room? You can find half-penny mimes on the Bridge of Dice scarier than either of them.’
‘But you asked me … you forced me to be prepared to murder someone in cold blood!’
‘Hot or cold, it’s all red when it leaves the body.’
‘You knew it was Shalla in there! Why would you do that to me?’
Ferius’s expression softened … saddened. She looked almost stricken by my words. ‘I had to know, kid.’
My own blood was boiling. ‘Had to know what?’
‘How dangerous you are.’
‘We’ve been travelling together for a year! You’ve seen me fight people. You’ve seen me ready to kill people befo—’
She shook her head. ‘Not like this. Not the way you’ve been getting lately; walking into a room ready to end a life without being in immediate danger, without a trial or proof? You just up and decided whoever was in there was guilty and you were the one to execute them.’
I was suddenly painfully aware of another card sitting in my pocket: the Path of Shadows that Enna had painted. ‘They were guilty. They were the ones controlling the obsidian worm!’
Ferius let out a sigh so weary it sounded as if she could barely hold herself up any more. ‘We don’t know much of anything yet, Kellen. We never do. An Argosi tries to live by the Way of Water, passing through life without causing harm to any, leaving the world in balance. But some people and events can’t be ignored, so we follow the Way of Wind and seek out discordances. Only when we’re sure – far more sure than you could’ve been in that tower – do we walk the Way of Thunder and take action against others.’
‘So I failed your little test.’
‘It wasn’t …’ The words drifted off. She nodded. ‘Yeah, kid. You failed.’
‘So all that stuff about how me being one of those hundred people on the continent who could become an Argosi – what was that? No, you know what? It doesn’t matter. Because a few minutes after we entered that room, the weakweed wore off and I got lost in shadow again and nearly killed my sister.’
‘Funny, she didn’t look dead to me.’
‘Yeah, but I—’
‘You really think you could’ve stopped yourself if your heart was half so full of darkness as you think it is?’ Ferius bent at the knees just a fraction so we were eye to eye. I’m almost as tall as she is so I find this habit particularly annoying, but she does it regardless. ‘You were a normal kid once … well, normal as any Jan’Tep can be, anyway. Then it all got taken away from you and now you spend every minute of every day looking over your shoulder. You think that comes without a cost, kid? You’re angry and you have every right to be. That anger doesn’t make you a monster, Kellen. It doesn’t make you special neither.’ She reached out and took my hand. ‘You know what does?’
I thought back to what Enna had shown me – the scar from a blade that had nearly taken her life. ‘The fact that I don’t let the anger control me?’
Her eyes softened for just a moment, then she smirked and gave me a gentle slap on the cheek. ‘Nah, kid, you got a terrible personality. But you got excellent taste in mentors.’ She turned and took a step only to stumble off balance. It was only by the sheerest luck that I got to her in time to catch her before she would’ve fallen to the ground. For the next few seconds she just held on to me. I could hear the wheezing in her breath. I felt her heart beating way too fast. ‘How could you let Zavera defeat you?’
I wished I hadn’t said it out loud. I’d promised myself all the way here I wouldn’t bring it up. Whatever the answer, it wouldn’t do either of us any good. Ferius righted herself and straightened her hat before she set off for the end of the bridge and the platforms that would take us to Janucha’s home. ‘See, now that’s not a good question.’
Let it go, I told myself. ‘But how did she—’
‘Zavera whooped me because she’s a better fighter than I am.’ Ferius said it the way you might note the time of day or the fact that one fruit seller’s pears were a penny more a basket than another’s.
I had to jog to catch up to her. ‘What happens if you have to fight her again?’
‘Then I guess she’ll whoop me again.’
The bitter taste in my mouth wasn’t from weakweed this time. ‘How can you be so cavalier about this? Zavera could have killed you, Ferius! She wanted to! I saw it in her eyes.’
‘Nah, she couldn’t’ve killed me, kid.’
‘Why not?’ I demanded, becoming more and more infuriated. ‘Give me one reason why she couldn’t have just kicked you to death right in front of me!’
Ferius stopped, and I wondered if maybe I’d pushed her too far. Then she turned and put her hands on my shoulders. ‘Because you wouldn’t have let her.’
I don’t think I’ve ever seen her cry before, but there were tears in her eyes. She pulled me close and for only the second time since I’d known her, hugged me.
‘Ferius, what’s—’
‘Don’t ever kill for me, okay, Kellen? Just promise me that. I know how bad you want to protect your friends, but don’t you ever walk in shadow for me.’
‘I won’t,’ I promised, because I couldn’t stand the hurt in her voice.
But I’m pretty sure I lied.
42
The Onyx Bracelet
‘Are you ready?’ I asked Cressia.
For a girl who’d spent the last two days in chains, terrified of the twisting creature living inside her eye and all the terrible things it could do to her, Cressia’s poise was remarkable. She arched an eyebrow. ‘That’s the third time you’ve asked, Kellen. Are you ready?’
In theory I was. The flames of three different braziers kept the metal compounds in a molten state. The required needles were cleaned and ready. Though I knew the two breath spells by heart, I’d practised them anyway just to make
sure exhaustion didn’t cause me to drop a syllable at the wrong moment. Unlike most parts of my life, this was an area where I actually knew what I was doing.
Sort of.
The inclusion of the onyx bracelet in the process complicated matters and added to my nervousness. So too did the presence of Janucha and Altariste, who stood a respectful distance behind me and yet I swear I could hear doubt in their every exhale. While the inventors had some experience with charmcasters like Nephenia – who also insisted on watching – the esoteric workings of the obsidian worm seemed absurd to their scientifically bound ways of thinking.
‘Are you gonna puke?’ Reichis asked. He was perched on top of Ishak, sitting like a frontier rider astride a horse. The hyena didn’t seem to mind, but Nephenia sure did.
‘It’s unseemly,’ she whispered to her familiar. He gave her a dismissive yip in reply.
‘Hah,’ Reichis said.
‘Ya’ll want to shut yer respective traps awhile?’ Ferius asked. ‘Can’t y’all see the kid’s tryin’ to concentrate?’
You want to know what’s hard? Removing a disgusting, slithering, esoteric monstrosity from someone’s eye. Doing it when you’re exhausted and can’t count all your bruises any more doesn’t help. But having an audience watching you? That’s definitely worse.
‘Okay,’ I said, taking the silver needle in hand and dipping it into the spelled copper solution melting over the brazier on the tray. ‘Okay. Okay. I’m sorry, Cressia, but this is going to—’
‘Stop telling me that.’ She looked back at me with more sympathy than I could possibly have deserved. ‘I think this may hurt you almost as much as it does me, Kellen.’
Not damned likely, I thought, but what I said was, ‘That’s what comes from being a philosopher, I guess.’
She chuckled, not because it was funny, obviously, but because she was incredibly brave.
‘Is there no alternative to this barbaric ritual?’ Altariste asked for what must have been the fifth time. I had my back to him, so I couldn’t see for sure, but I’d have bet all the money I had that his hands were twitching with a desperate desire to drag me away from his daughter.
Janucha began to reassure him but it was Cressia who cut him off. ‘I am Étuza Cressia fal Ghassan,’ she said, ‘daughter of a nation of explorers. We travel the world unfettered and fearless, and whether in life or in death I will be free of this thing.’ Her gaze returned to me. ‘Now, Kellen. Now.’
Truth be told, I could’ve used a few more minutes to settle my nerves, but Cressia had made her choice so I did as she asked. With the onyx bracelet around my left wrist, I used the thumb and forefinger of that hand to hold her eyelid open.
The first problem was to draw the worm out. I did this with a mixture of breath spells and, of course, the burning-hot needle whose tip I now pressed against Cressia’s eyeball. The trick – what an inexcusably casual word for something as awful as this – was to make contact with the silver without actually piercing her eye. All the while I had to alternate between two different breath spells – one to keep her eye from burning and the other to cause the copper compound on the needle to forcibly summon the worm.
Simple.
Cressia’s whole body shuddered as she screamed so loudly I thought my ears would bleed. Black oily tears began to drip down the dark skin of her cheeks, unleashing a hissing sound that could be heard even over her cries of agony. Slowly, resisting all the way, the obsidian worm began to crawl out onto the needle. Cressia stopped screaming, but her shaking got much, much worse. Ferius came behind and held her head in place.
‘She’s dying!’ Janucha shouted, her stoic demeanour breaking at last. ‘The procedure is killing her!’
She wasn’t wrong. Shalla had warned me that the worm had been in Cressia too long; the shock of removing it might destroy her mind. That’s where this revolting ritual – which at least I’d performed a few times over the past six months – turned to something new.
You will leave her, I said silently, pouring my will into the onyx bracelet on my wrist. Your place is inside the bracelet.
The worm continued its slow progress along the needle, but something didn’t feel right.
‘I don’t think she can take much more of this,’ Nephenia warned. ‘You have to get it out faster, Kellen.’
Even as the creature oozed from her eye, Cressia’s breathing became shallow and laboured. ‘He is killing our daughter!’ Altariste yelled. ‘We have to put a stop—’
‘Don’t interfere,’ Nephenia said. ‘You have to let him—’
‘Get out of my way, damn you!’
An altercation broke out behind me. Altariste and Nephenia were in some kind of struggle. I heard a bark followed by a cry of pain. I think Ishak must’ve bitten him. Then a thud and a yipping sound, and then Reichis’s distinctive growls as he threatened to kill Altariste any number of artful ways if he tried to kick the hyena again.
It was all going to hell very quickly.
Cressia’s whole body convulsed. I could see her pulse in the vein on her neck. It was racing far too fast. The worm resisted the summoning and my control began to slip. ‘I can’t do it!’ I cried out. ‘It’s not—’
‘Kellen,’ Ferius said. She’d spoken so quietly it was surprising that I’d even heard her. ‘Look at me now.’
I did, and the first thought that came into my head was, How can she be so calm?
‘You got this, kid. The whole history of your life and hers brought you together. Here. Now. Every bad day you survived, every tough choice you’ve had to make, they made you both who you are. You hear me?’
My will was stripping apart like strands of rope holding too much weight. ‘It’s too strong!’
‘I ever tell you what the word Argosi means, kid?’
‘Wha— What?’ I stuttered, barely hanging on. The inside of the onyx bracelet swirled as the other half of the worm writhed and twisted. It was suddenly so heavy that my wrist began to drift down.
Ferius gave me one of those smiles of hers that make it seem as if the sun itself came out just to shine down on her teeth. ‘It’s an old Daroman word. Means “wandering hero”. Ain’t that a thing?’ She locked eyes with me. ‘That’s what you are, Kellen. You’re an Argosi. Don’t matter what me or anyone ever tells you. Your name is Kellen Argos. Let me hear you say it.’
‘I’m … Kellen Argos.’
‘You didn’t ask for any of this. You’d have travelled the Way of Water, not making trouble for anyone, but the Way of Wind brought you here, to this place and this brave girl who needs your help right now. Even though you’re scared, the Way of Thunder made you strike against that thing in her eye. Now it’s time for the fourth way. Make your will unbreakable, Kellen. Show them all why we call it the Way of Stone!’
Sweat poured down my forehead and tears down my cheeks. My hands shook so hard that it was all I could do to keep hold of the needle. If I could have spoken I’d have told Ferius that she was wrong. I didn’t have the Way of Stone in me. It wasn’t my will that was unbreakable. It was something else.
I looked into Ferius’s blazing green eyes, almost blinded by the faith I found there. Whatever else happened to me, however many people tried to tell me otherwise, I was her student. Her teysan. And no matter what it cost me, I would become the person I saw reflected in her eyes.
I reasserted my will through the onyx bracelet. The worm resisted me, its own bottomless strength pulling back. Mine, it said to me. This body is mine. Alive or dead, it will ever be so. A moan broke through Cressia’s chattering teeth, then turned into a kind of hissing sound. The death rattle, the creature said. She dies now. Will you kill her to be rid of me?
No, I replied silently. But you won’t hurt her any more.
Slowly, agonisingly, inexorably, the end of the obsidian worm slipped from Cressia’s eye onto the needle. No! it pleaded. I will die without her!
Inch by inch, the creature slid along the silver needle towards its other half in the brace
let. Cressia stopped thrashing in Ferius’s arms and her breathing began to settle.
‘Keep it up,’ Nephenia said from somewhere behind me. ‘You’ve almost got it!’
I realised then that I could no longer hear the sounds of fighting. Oddly, I couldn’t hear anything else either. The room had become completely silent, and the light itself began to disappear, replaced by …
‘No!’ I screamed.
Too late.
The skin around my left eye burned with a gleeful heat. The obsidian worm gleamed like a twisted beam of black sunlight. It stopped its progression towards the onyx bracelet and reared up, bloating in size, drawn by a new voice, to a new home.
To me.
Come, little one, said the shadowblack. There is so much fun to be had …
43
The Vessel
The obsidian worm slid right past the onyx bracelet to wriggle underneath the sleeve of my shirt. Coaxed by the shadowblack, the creature travelled along my arm to the top of my shoulder before slithering up my neck. I batted at the worm with my hands, but here in this place of shadows my fingers passed right through it. When it slithered along my jaw to the ridge of my left eye, terror overwhelmed me, and I opened my mouth to scream. What came out was laughter.
Who are you fighting, little spellslinger? Never before had the shadowblack spoken to me.
Stop, I answered back. I don’t want this!
The worm will be a fitting addition to our family, Kellen. A useful tool for me, and I promise you’ll hardly know it’s there after a while.
Desperately I summoned all my will and turned it against the worm, forcing it to stop. The creature hesitated, its tiny head weaving back and forth blindly. Dozens of tiny slits that took the place of eyes opened and closed like the mouths of hungry birds waiting to be fed.
Hurry, little one, the shadowblack urged. Why let yourself be trapped in the cold stone of onyx when what you really want is so warm and plentiful in here? Come and feed and feed and feed.
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