I was only a few steps away when she called to me. ‘Kellen!’
I turned back just in time to see her tossing something at me.
‘Since you like coins so much.’
I caught it in my hand. Almost instantly I felt that distinct quality of the castradazi coins. But what was Shalla doing with one? ‘Where did you get this?’ I asked.
‘They told you there were only a few of them left, didn’t they? Well, I put a little sympathy spell on this one. I was intending on using it to find out what the Gitabrians were up to, but then you led the secret police to me and I was captured.’
I held up the coin. ‘What do you expect me to do with it?’
‘Find out where it leads. Uncover what the contraptioneer is hiding. Maybe then you’ll finally accept what I’ve tried to make you see ever since we were children.’
‘Which is?’
Her hands traced a sigil in the air. An obscurement spell formed around her and she faded from view. ‘Don’t trust anyone who isn’t family.’
50
The Mountain
We followed the coin or, rather, I let its strange vibrations direct me and the others followed. Mile after mile we walked, yet long after the moon had reached its zenith, still the coin continued to pull me onwards.
‘Where do you think it’s taking us?’ Nephenia asked.
Ferius gave a snort, wiping the sweat from her brow. ‘A better question is how far? For all we know, this fool’s quest your little sister sent us on could be leading us across the sea.’ She chuckled. ‘Actually that would be a pretty good prank.’
‘Kellen, I will kill your sister if this turns out to be a prank,’ Reichis warned, sitting atop my right shoulder. ‘Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I had a bath?’
I sniffed. ‘Pretty sure I do. Now would you shut up about baths so I can concentrate?’ I held my hand out in front of me so that the coin could wiggle and vibrate along my palm to indicate which way to go.
‘Is that where all this talk of bathing is coming from?’ Nephenia asked, staring down at Ishak. The hyena gave a barking laugh, to which Nephenia replied, ‘And no, I’m not going to abandon our efforts to prevent a continental war just to find you butter biscuits.’ She turned to me. ‘What exactly are butter biscuits, anyway?’
‘Something you don’t want greedy, gluttonous animals to acquire a taste for.’ The coin seemed to be drifting along my palm in a westerly direction, up the initial slope of a hill, so I headed that way.
‘You really don’t understand the concept of “business partners”,’ Reichis observed.
Ishak barked. Or maybe yapped. I still couldn’t distinguish between the sounds the hyena made. Reichis seemed to have no difficulty. ‘Her too?’ The squirrel cat gave Nephenia a withering glance. ‘They really are a useless species, aren’t they?’
‘Why is he looking at me that way?’ she asked me, then looked down at Ishak. ‘And what did you mean, “She’s no better”? What was that supposed to mean?’
I explained Reichis’s – and apparently Ishak’s – assessment of our mutual qualifications as business partners.
‘You are not my business partner,’ Nephenia told the hyena. ‘You’re my familiar. It’s an ancient and time-honoured pairing of two souls, not some shallow business transaction.’
The hyena yapped at her for several seconds, then Nephenia punched me in the arm. Hard. ‘Ow! What was that for?’
‘For letting your squirrel cat introduce these ruinous ideas into my familiar’s head about “partnerships” and “equitable relationships”. Do you realise Ishak’s now telling me he wants us to work out a formal contract?’
‘Wait until she hears about the clause he wants on freshly killed meat,’ Reichis whispered into my ear. He started chortling. ‘That hyena’s way more demanding than me.’
‘Don’t think I can’t tell when you’re mocking me, squirrel cat,’ Nephenia warned. ‘In case you’re unaware, there are all kinds of unpleasant charms I can attach to a living being.’
Reichis spun around on my shoulder so he was facing her, the sudden snarl telling me he was baring his teeth at her. ‘Tell the bitch that she’s going to need to charm her eyeballs with a location spell so she can find them in the morning.’
‘Two Jan’Tep exiles, a squirrel cat and a hyena walk into the middle of a war,’ Ferius said. She stopped walking and shook her head. ‘Sounds like the beginning of a joke, but I’m pretty sure none of us are going to be laughing once things get ugly. So could you children please stop nattering at each other? I’m trying to save the world here.’
‘Sorry, Ferius,’ Nephenia said.
‘Can’t do much with apologies, girl.’ The comment came out terse and a little scathing.
Nephenia’s jaw tightened, but then she took a deep breath. ‘You’re right, so tell me how I can help.’
Ferius took hold of my hand, holding it up. I opened my fingers and let the coin do its thing. Once again it spun, tilting on its axis towards the hill ahead of us. ‘See where the coin’s aiming us? If there’s anything up top that hill worth more than a stray goat, then chances are there’s going to be either people watching for strangers along the way or devices to alert them someone’s nearby – or worse, traps.’ She let go of my hand. ‘I need to get us up there without running into any of those things, which means I need the four of you to go where I go, do what I do, and above all else, keep your mouths shut for more than five seconds at a time.’ With that she took off up the hill, striding past the rest of us, mumbling all the while about why Argosi were meant to travel alone.
Nephenia’s hand touched my arm. ‘She seems worried, Kellen. Do you think she’s—’
‘Being afraid is the price an Argosi pays,’ I replied, following Ferius up the hill.
I just wished it was the only price.
I was limping by the time we reached the top. Ferius had been right about traps. She spotted tripwires and pitfalls that ranged from simple yet elegant to incredibly complex. Most of these we got by, and for a brief time I thought I was getting the hang of identifying traps. That changed when I nearly impaled my foot on a set of spikes buried just under a path of soft earth. Had Ishak not barrelled into me from behind I would’ve speared more than just the edge of my heel on them.
There were sentries and patrols too, of course, which confirmed that we were onto something important even as they made it vastly more difficult to find out what exactly it was. My spells weren’t much help in dealing with them, since setting people on fire isn’t a good way of sneaking into a place. Fortunately, Nephenia had brought a couple of ingenious little bells that acted as confusion charms. Other than Reichis forgetting to cover his ears and finding himself incessantly heading the wrong way, we got by most of the guards without too much of a problem.
Once Reichis recovered his sense of direction, he scouted ahead of us, using the trees that grew along the slope of the hill to spy for any other guards or traps we might not be able to see from the ground. Ishak sniffed along the path, sometimes warning us away from patches of blue and green moss that Ferius said were poisonous even if they just touched your skin. Apparently someone really didn’t want visitors.
The first orange-red glow of morning was creeping over the horizon by the time we neared the top. The coin was beginning to settle itself in my palm. It vibrated even more than it had before, but now the pull seemed to come from everywhere. Our destination, whatever it was, was close at hand.
‘On our bellies now,’ Ferius whispered as we neared the top. She had us crawling on elbows and knees. Twice we had to back up to go around a patch of poisonous moss, making our progress feel dangerously slow.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, when she stopped us just shy of the summit.
‘Nothing,’ she replied.
‘I mean, what do you see?’
She shot me an annoyed look. ‘Nothing. That’s the point.’
The rest of us, ignoring her previous instruc
tions, crawled over to her She’d been right: there was nothing there other than the uneven ground of a wide, flat summit probably three hundred yards across. ‘Could the coin have been wrong?’ Nephenia asked. ‘Or maybe your sister really was sending us off on a wild goose chase?’
‘Doubt they’d post that many guards around a mountain with nothing to recommend it but poison moss,’ Ferius said. ‘No, I need someone to take a look-see.’ She turned to Reichis. ‘Can you do it real quiet like?’
He gave a low, soft growl. ‘Kellen, did the clumsy, unwieldy human just ask if I can move silently?’
‘Just do it,’ I said. ‘This could be important.’
‘There are some bushes ahead,’ Ferius said, clearly unaware of her personal jeopardy at this point. ‘Tell him to stick to those if he can.’
Reichis crawled up right in front of Ferius, getting nose to nose with her. ‘Stop. Telling. Me. How. To. Do. My. Job.’
I started to translate but Ferius waved me off. ‘I get the idea.’ To Reichis she said, ‘Well then, squirrel cat, what are you waiting for?’
I gave him a warning glance in the hope he’d get the message that this was the wrong time to get into a pissing match with Ferius. He must’ve decided to take pity on me – or at least defer his outrage until a more convenient time – because he started making his way silently across the ground ahead of us. He got about ten yards before he froze. A second later he disappeared.
‘What happened to him?’ I asked, rising to my feet and ignoring Ferius’s prior injunctions.
She dragged me back down. ‘Stay where you are. He knows what he’s doing.’
‘You didn’t seem to think that twenty seconds ago.’
Every nerve in my body was screaming at me to get up and run over there. Reichis could have fallen into some kind of trap. He could be hurt. I felt Nephenia’s hand on my arm and she motioned to Ishak. The hyena was sniffing the air but didn’t seem concerned. ‘He’s got a very acute sense of smell,’ Neph said quietly. ‘If Reichis were hurt or scared, Ishak would catch it from his scent.’
The hyena’s apparent confidence in his olfactory abilities might have been reassuring, if Reichis didn’t make pretty much the exact same claims and I weren’t dead certain he was lying most of the time. A sudden movement caught my attention, and the squirrel cat appeared from one of the bushes ahead of us and ran back to our position. ‘By all seventeen squirrel cat gods,’ he chittered.
‘I thought you said there were nine?’
‘Nine what?’ Ferius asked.
‘Never mind. What did you see, Reichis?’
‘This mountain ain’t a mountain,’ he replied.
‘What are you talking about?’
He looked like he was struggling to find the words. ‘It’s like a mountain, and I’m pretty sure it’s natural, but it’s hollow.’
‘You mean, like a volcano?’ I’d never actually seen a volcano before, but I’d read about them.
‘A damned inactive volcano,’ Ferius swore. ‘Gitabrians are all so darned committed to building things and inventing things, it never occurred to me they might actually use the natural landscape for something.’
‘Yeah, but for what?’ I asked.
‘Come on,’ Reichis said, returning to the top. ‘There aren’t any guards or traps up top.’
The rest of us followed, warily, still on our hands and knees just in case. We only had to go a few feet before I could see the rim of black rock ahead of us. Almost the entire summit opened up to a massive cavern below. Once we made it to the edge, we could see what was hidden inside – what the Gitabrians hadn’t wanted us to see. Maybe what they didn’t want their own people to see.
The inside of the volcano had been turned into a massive workshop. A good hundred and fifty feet below us were huge racks of tools next to workbenches the size of houses. Dozens of men and women – blacksmiths and labourers, from what I could see – tended forges and shaped metal while a cadre of contraptioneers and their assistants assembled machines. Massive machines. Seventy-foot-long armoured bodies with sweeping metal wings and extended articulated necks that ended in terrifying steel skulls with rows of spiked teeth. They looked like monstrous versions of the silk and paper creatures used at the exhibition to spout the gold-wrapped candies to the crowd, only whatever these things spouted, I doubted it was sweet.
‘Dragons,’ Nephenia said. ‘They’re building mechanical dragons. But … those metals they’re using … they must be alción mistivae – the sacred alloys that Janucha used to construct the mechanical bird. She and Altariste said they were all but gone.’
‘Look,’ Ferius said, pointing to open shafts far below us. Even from here we could see the veins of metal exposed in the rough cavern walls. ‘This whole place must be a mine for the lost metals.’
‘Janucha lied to us?’ I asked.
‘Maybe she doesn’t know,’ Nephenia said. ‘But if the Gitabrians have been building these all along, then they must believe she’s close to recreating the experiment.’
Ferius started easing herself away from the rim of the volcano towards the long journey we’d need to make back to the city. ‘Hey, kid, you know the difference between a tiny mechanical bird and a massive iron dragon?’
‘What?’
‘A little metal and a whole lot of dead bodies.’
THE TRUTH
When the nature of a discordance has been uncovered, then does the work of the Argosi truly begin. Guide the discordance if you can. Destroy it if you must. Should all your efforts fail, should the talents and tactics of the Argosi prove insufficient to contain the threat, then will you learn the most painful truth of all: just because you can see what’s coming, doesn’t mean you can do anything about it.
51
The Spies
We hid in a cave about a quarter of a mile from the mountain. Evading the patrols and sentries would be too risky in broad daylight. Reichis grumbled, Nephenia and her hyena slept, and I sat there shaking from the cold while Ferius Parfax painted another card.
‘How can you do that?’ I asked, watching as her brush travelled in smooth strokes across the surface of the card. ‘There’s barely any light in here.’
‘You blind, kid? There’s tons of light.’
‘We’re in a cave, Ferius. If it weren’t for what little was coming from the entrance, it would be pitch black in here.’
She leaned towards me to show me that her eyes were shut. ‘Then just imagine some more.’ With that she turned back to her card and resumed her work.
‘You’re painting with your eyes closed? How is that even possible?’
She chuckled. ‘Kid, I was painting Argosi cards blind by the time I was eleven years old.’ She dipped her brush into one of her little glass jars. ‘It’s easier, actually.’
‘Easier? How?’
She drew a single curved line on the card, then pulled the brush away. ‘There’s a lot that goes into making a discordance card. Painting something, well, that’s the easy part. It’s imbuing it with what you know about the subject, what you suspect might be happening, colouring it with evidence and shading it with uncertainty, that’s what’s hard.’
Colouring with evidence and shading with uncertainty. No wonder so many people can’t stand the Argosi. The discordance cards, on the other hand, were finally beginning to make sense.
I sat with my back against the cave wall and closed my eyes. I pictured myself holding all the discordance cards I’d seen together as if they made up a single hand of poker. One of the few benefits of having spent my childhood training to be a mage was a particularly good recall of images. Try casting a spell without the precise esoteric geometry in mind and you’ll soon learn the reason for the old Jan’Tep saying ‘A forgetful mage is a dead mage.’
Individually, the discordance cards were just a bunch of enigmatic pictures, cryptic symbols and unseen allusions. Together they told a simple, if tragic, story. The Mechanical Bird: a wondrous discovery. The Contraptioneer: th
e genius with the ability to turn that discovery towards whatever purpose she chose. The Path of Shadows …
When Enna had given that card to me, I’d thought it represented my destiny. Maybe she had too, but the Argosi aren’t fortune tellers. I understood now that what the card really signalled was that all of us – maybe the whole continent – were being driven by fear and uncertainty down a road that led into darkness. For all the talk of exploration and invention, the fact that Gitabria afforded its secret police so much power meant the nation itself was far less secure than it pretended.
The Crowned Mage – even if it wasn’t a proper discordance – told me what would come next. The Jan’Tep clans, fearing a newly militarised Gitabria, would for the first time in centuries unite behind a single ruler. Darome, Berabesq, even the Seven Sands would make preparations as the idea of war changed from an occasional threat between belligerent nations to an inevitability for the entire continent.
The cards vanished from my mind as I opened my eyes. ‘Ferius?’
‘Yeah, kid?’
‘If Janucha solves the flaw in her design … If she can bring those iron dragons to life …’
Ferius paused in her painting. ‘Seven kinds of hell, kid. Seven kinds of hell.’
‘So will you …?’ I stopped myself. Will you kill her to prevent it? Even asking the question would force her to step too close to a line I knew she didn’t want to cross. ‘Forget it,’ I said.
‘See? That right there is why we’ve got to make you a better poker player.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘So you’ll learn that no matter how bad your hand looks, all it takes is the right card to change the odds.’ The sound of her brush moving across the surface of the card resumed. ‘Now, you mind, kid? All that fretting you’re doing is blockin’ my light.’
I got up and headed deeper into the cave to get some sleep. ‘You know that nothing you say ever makes sense, right?’
Her laugh was small and bright, and as it reached my ears it made even the darkness shimmer. I stopped for a second, holding on to that laugh. It contained everything I loved about Ferius Parfax, and everything about her that made me crazy.
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