Time moves ahead—days or weeks or months, I can’t tell. The scene shifts and I find myself in a place I recognise. A place I haven’t seen for more than two years and which makes me ache in ways I didn’t think was still possible. My home.
Bene’maat is walking through the hall. She’s beautiful, as she’s always been, her grace conveying a kind of strength none of the rest of us possess. But something’s wrong. Something is stilted in the way she walks, as if she’s moving unnaturally slowly as she tries to force her steps to be smooth and precise. A vase on a nearby table falls and breaks. Her bare foot lands on a broken shard. She winces, and only then do a dozen other tiny, invisible wounds make themselves known to me.
There’s a sprain in her wrist that came when she did nothing more than reach for a book on a high shelf; a small cut on her collarbone that appeared out of nowhere but is now infected and won’t heal no matter how many spells she casts; when she walked by a fire, the flames crackled and a burning ember singed the back of her hand.
An endless stream of accidents, a rising tide of inexplicable misfortunes that tear at her will. She has trouble sparking her silk band now. Before that her iron band went dead. Piece by piece these tiny afflictions are destroying her.
“Brother, please,” I hear Shalla’s voice coming back. The markings around my eye are slowly closing again, but not before they curse me with one more vision.
My mother stands before a mirror, putting ointment on the cut on her collarbone, but sees something beneath. She pulls open the top of her robe. There on her skin is a word, inscribed in the Berabesq language. The scar looks old, almost healed, yet it wasn’t there yesterday.
The black sun outside rises and falls, rises and falls. Each time it brings me back to Bene’maat standing before the mirror, witnessing a new word inscribed in scars across the canvas of her body, each one paired with a new accident, some new misfortune that brings her inexorably closer to her end.
The malediction, my father called it.
I try to shut my eyes to avoid seeing my mother this way, but the last traces of the enigmatism reveal the entirety of the text to me. I speak only a little Berabesq, but I can read enough to know that the sinewy lines slowly carving themselves on my mother’s body are words of joy. A devotional. A prayer.
The shadow world faded from view and I was back in the Daroman palace, standing outside my chambers with my sister holding on to me to keep me from falling.
“He killed her,” I said aloud. “The Faithful cast the malediction, but they invoked his power. They did it for him.”
“Who?” Shalla asked.
“God.”
City of Wonders
Home is a feeling. The memory of a warm bed. The voice of your parents calling you to breakfast. Home isn’t a roof or four walls. It’s not a place at all.
Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to find again once you’ve been gone too long.
14
Tantrums
A mile-long caravan of carriages and supply wagons, along with hundreds of horses bearing soldiers, retainers and diplomats wound its way along the gleaming western imperial road with all the elegance of an armoured worm slithering through dirt. Every plodding step of my own horse was a jostling reminder that I was getting closer and closer to the home from which I’d long ago fled and had sworn never to return.
It takes nineteen days to ride from Emni Urbana, the Daroman capital, to Oatas Jan’Xan, the city of my birth. Not a long time, unless God’s first birthday happens to be mere weeks away and the festivities include a declaration of war. So why was the queen—to say nothing of the Murmurers—risking such a lengthy delay just to attend the funeral of a woman none of them had ever met?
“It’s nice, don’t you think?” Shalla asked as she slowed her horse to ride alongside mine.
I’d taken to sticking to the tail end of the caravan, preferring to avoid the angry glares and muttered threats of the mages in my father’s retinue. The queen was perpetually ensconced in private meetings in her own carriage, and her advisors—which these days always included at least one of the Murmurers—were doing an admirable job of keeping me away from her.
“Nice?” I asked.
Shalla gestured to the endless line of horses and wagons ahead of us. “The empire honours our mother with such a large delegation.”
I wondered if she genuinely believed that. My sister is extraordinarily astute about politics and intrigue, but she’s always had a blind spot when it came to our family. Maybe that was why she couldn’t see the obvious: you don’t bring this many mounted soldiers and generals to pay tribute to the wife of a minor foreign sovereign. You bring this many because it’s a convenient way to transfer several regiments of your elite troops closer to the Berabesq border without causing suspicion.
That was the first reason the Daroman crown was willing to use up so much valuable time when the Berabesq child god’s birthday was fast approaching. The second reason? Well, that came down to simple arithmetic: Oatas Jan’Xan lies just eleven days’ ride on a fast horse from Makhan Mebab, the capital of the Berabesq theocracy. By the time we’d finished laying my mother to rest, I’d have to either set out to commit my first political assassination or sit back and watch the entire continent go straight to hells.
“Brother?” Shalla asked.
I gestured down at Reichis, who was curled up in front of my saddle. In a minute or two he’d be letting out a rumbling stream of snores, which he’d later deny, and an occasional fart, for which he’d take excessive pride. “Every time you come by, you put my business partner to sleep. He hates that.”
She rolled her eyes. “You think I waste silk magic on a nekhek?”
“They prefer the term ‘squirrel cat,’” I informed her. “How come he turns into a dumb animal anytime you show up?”
“The answer is somewhat… complicated.”
My sister has a habit of forgetting that during our years as initiates I’d been just as diligent a student of magic as she was. I’d mastered all the verbal invocations, developed an outstanding command of esoteric geometries, and nobody could perform the complex somatic forms as precisely as I could. Really, I was as adept in spellcraft as any lord magus in our clan. Except for, you know, the actual magic part.
She caught my expression and sighed. “Fine. All those spells you begged me to cast to keep the nekhek alive back when he was wounded in the desert and you were a captive of the Ebony Abbey? By necessity they involved the use of iron and blood binding spells which… I haven’t been able to fully remove.”
“So every time you’re near him…”
Shalla gazed down at the slumbering squirrel cat. “I believe it’s a form of mystical hibernation.” She held up her forearm to show me her tattooed blood band was glimmering. “A portion of my own strength is drained, while that of the filthy little monster is restored.”
My ears pricked up at the uncharacteristic note of affection in the words “filthy little monster.”
“Why, sister… is it possible you’ve developed a fondness for a dirty nekhek?”
Her cheeks reddened. “Don’t be ridiculous. His species are vile. Disgusting. Greedy. Vicious.”
She paused in her litany of faults and edged her horse closer to mine. With a tentative hand she reached out to touch his fur. “But I am glad that you found him, brother. I dislike the thought of you being alone.”
The unexpected and surprisingly compassionate sentiment was like a warm breeze shared between us. I counted the seconds until she ruined it.
“Which is why—” four seconds, if you’re wondering—“when this awful business with the Berabesq is completed, you must return to our family. Stop playing the bitter outcast and take your rightful place as protector of our house.”
I prided myself on always having a glib reply whenever Shalla brought up the subject of me returning to our clan, but she cut me off before I could try out any of my new ones. “This isn’t a joke, brother. I’ve been negotiat
ing with Father and the councils of lords magi for months. They’re offering a full pardon for your crimes.”
“Generous of them, sister, only I haven’t decided if I’m ready to pardon them for theirs, so why would I care?”
The smug look in Shalla’s eyes told me I’d cut her off before she’d finished making her offer. “Because you’re not the only outcast they’re willing to pardon.”
Now that caught me off-guard.
“Nephenia?” I asked.
“Neph’aria,” my sister corrected. “Yes, brother, your little mouse girl can come home too. The warrant against her for killing her father will be lifted.”
This was the first real concession Shalla had ever made in this ongoing debate of ours. She despised Nephenia, for reasons I’d never understood. The feeling was, I’d been assured, mutual.
I hadn’t seen Neph in over a year, not since she’d come to rescue me from the Ebony Abbey and brought Reichis back to me. The joy I’d felt at seeing her that day had been muted by the confusion of our subsequent parting.
“I think I love you, Kellen, but I won’t know for sure until I meet the man you’re going to be once you finally get tired of being the boy you once were.”
How can something so painful to hear sound inspiring at the same time?
Shalla misunderstood my look of uncertainty. “I’m offering you a life, brother. A real life. Not this bizarre frontier folk tale you seem to be trying to enact.”
I nodded ahead of us to where, somewhere half a mile down the imperial road, the queen’s carriage rolled along, with her discussing important matters of state with just about everybody but me. “I already have a job, thanks.”
Shalla gave me one of those imperious, reprimanding looks only little sisters are capable of. “Your skills—and yes, I’m admitting you have skills, brother—are owed to your family. Not wasted guarding some little barbarian queen who only keeps you around because you amuse her.”
Then she did something that froze the blood in my veins: she reached up and traced a finger around her left eye and said, “Unless there’s some other reason you’re so loyal to this foreign queen.”
What did she mean by that? I searched frantically within those light, lilting, mocking words for the real meaning underneath. Arta loquit, I thought. Where’s my damned arta loquit when I need it?
There were two possible interpretations of Shalla’s jibe. The first was that she was ridiculing me for believing the Daroman court, with its armies of doctors and physicians, might one day be able to devise a cure for my shadowblack. The second was much, much worse: what if Shalla—and therefore my father—knew that Queen Ginevra herself had the same affliction?
When the queen turned thirteen, by bizarre Daroman custom she would have to appear naked before her people, not to mention every foreign dignitary on the continent. Unless she could either find a cure or a way to hide the disease—a gambit that would be sure to fail in the most cataclysmic way imaginable if my father chose to reveal the truth—it would be the end of her reign. To keep her secret, Ke’heops could blackmail her with just about anything he wanted.
Maybe he already had.
Was this why she was keeping me away?
“Brother?” Shalla asked. “Are you quite well?”
Again I tried to sift through the syllables of her words, searching for notes of sarcasm. But I couldn’t find any. Maybe she didn’t know anything. Maybe it was just another of her games.
“I’m sorry, Shalla,” I said. “I won’t be a pawn for—”
“Sha’maat,” she corrected, cutting me off, her tone becoming strident. Angry. “Our mother was Bene’maat. Our father is Ke’heops and you are Ke’helios. Why must you persist in taunting me with a child’s name? Does it please you to imagine that I am not truly her daughter and you are not his son?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I only know that no matter what happens, you’ll always be my sister.”
It had sounded good in my head. Unfortunately, the sentiment struck entirely the wrong chord with Shalla. “Then stop forcing me to choose between you and Father!”
Heads turned. People stared. I doubt I could’ve come up with a more uncomfortable phrase for my sister to shout at me in front of all these soldiers and marshals and retainers.
Shalla never swears. She considers profanity as much a sign of immaturity as my insistence on using our birth names. So I guess it really meant something that when she kicked her horse to ride away, she left me with, “And stop being such a fucking child, Kellen.”
15
The Funeral
People say that when you return to the place of your birth after a long time away, everything looks smaller. Once you’ve visited faraway empires, strolled the avenues of magnificent capital cities, trekked across majestic landscapes and experienced cultures far different to your own, home becomes a quaint little word that can stand for any number of different things, but mostly youthful nostalgia.
Sometimes I wonder who the idiots are who come up with these sayings.
Oatas Jan’Xan, the city where I’d spent the first sixteen years of my life until one night I’d left with nothing but a sleeping squirrel cat and a cocky attitude, wasn’t quaint. The sight of the seven gleaming columns surrounding the oasis didn’t fill me with sentimental longing for my youth. The perfectly still silver sands and the low stone pool filled with the raw, shimmering magic my ancestors first named the Jan pulled at my soul with all the raging force of a dozen horses.
You’ll never hear one of my people admit it, but magic is a drug.
“Do you feel it?” my sister had asked as we’d entered the city. The exultant smile on her lips, the almost wide-eyed delight, reminded me that I wasn’t the only addict. No wonder exile is considered almost as harsh a punishment as death among the Jan’Tep.
Hours later, standing among the throng as Bene’maat’s funeral rites were being performed, my skin still tingled with the simple proximity to the oasis. My boots practically vibrated from the rapturous power in the veins of ore winding under the ground beneath my feet. From these raw metals came the inks used to tattoo the sigils of the six fundamental forms of magic around my people’s forearms, the means by which Jan’Tep initiates learn to cast the spells that define us.
Those of us who haven’t been counter-banded by our parents, of course.
“Duty is the lesson Bene’maat sought to teach all of us,” Ke’heops intoned. He was standing over my mother’s perfectly preserved body—tastefully attired in two diaphanous strips of purple silk that granted the barest modicum of modesty. One of the perks of blood and iron magic is that the flesh doesn’t decay as quickly as it should. The skin hardens instead into a lustrous marble-like sheath. That Bene’maat’s corpse was so perfectly preserved even a month after her death was a testament to her strength as a mage and my father’s arrogance in wanting to make sure everyone saw her like this.
I was distracted by Reichis sniffing the air for the fifth time since we’d arrived.
“What are you doing?” I asked quietly.
“Can’t smell any other squirrel cats.”
“Were you expecting any?”
His furry shoulders rose and fell in his rendition of a shrug. “Would’ve figured they’d have taken over this lousy city by now. You know, snuck in one night and murdered all your people in their sleep on account of that time a bunch of these skinbags tried to burn everyone in my tribe with fire spells?” He raised his snout and sniffed again. “Talk about a lack of leadership.”
“You don’t think a full-scale massacre is a little excessive?”
“I think it’s our gods-damned duty.”
“Duty to family,” Ke’heops droned on. “Duty to her people.” He spread his arms wide, performing the somatic gestures he’d used with me back at the palace. The sky above us, clear and bright from the early afternoon sun only seconds before, darkened even as it filled with stars. “And at the end,” he said in a whisper that somehow w
e all heard, “duty to the entire world.”
Far above us, the stars shifted and moved, taking on the shapes of places and people, retelling the story of how Bene’maat had travelled deep into Berabesq territory, where she had uncovered the existence of their new god and the monstrous plans of the viziers, and brought them at the cost of her own life back to us.
“Cool trick,” Reichis chittered from his perch on my shoulder as he leaned back to gaze up at the sky, apparently having completely forgotten his plan for the utter destruction of my clan. “You should learn that spell. Then you could put on little magic shows detailing my exploits.”
“Silence the nekhek, traitor,” a voice muttered behind me. “Or I’ll burn the filthy creature alive.”
Even before I turned to face him, I’d plastered a big grin on my face. “Is that my old pal Tennat I hear?”
“I am Ra’ennat now,” he said, eyes blazing. “A true Jan’Tep mage.”
Back when we were both initiates, Tennat had been just about the cruellest, most despicable bully I’d ever known. He was standing between his two brothers, Ra’fan and Ra’dir, who were just as bad. Of course, since they were all sons of Ra’meth, the man who’d tried to kill my family and frame the Sha’Tep for it all, I suppose that was only natural.
“Right, right,” I said, pushing Reichis’s face back with my right hand to stop him from leaping at Tennat. The little monster was snarling up a storm. Nobody else was paying attention to us, thankfully, because I was about to do something stupid. I extended my free hand to Tennat. “My name is Ke’helios.”
Tennat—Ra’ennat, I suppose I should say—spat on my palm. “You’re no mage, just an outcast spellslinger with a few tricks.”
I wiped the spittle on my trouser leg. “True, but then… Eleven.”
“Eleven?” Ra’fan asked. “Eleven what?”
“Eleven lords magi,” I replied. “That’s how many I’ve beaten, battered and left for dead across the continent.” I leaned closer and whispered, “So unless one of you would like to be number twelve, I’d suggest you back the hells off.”
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