Reichis chuckled then, relaxing on my shoulder. Nothing calms him like a good death threat. “Nice one. Bag me his eyeballs when you’re done with him.”
It was something of an empty threat. Duelling at a funeral? In front of hundreds of foreign barbarians come to pay tribute to the wife of the mage sovereign? That would be a death sentence in and of itself. Still, Tennat looked like he was considering it.
So was I.
Maybe it’s dangerous to renew childhood acquaintances after you’ve spent as much time learning to fight mages as I have. The pulsing desire to punch your former tormentors in the face is almost as enthralling as the taste of magic.
“Enough,” growled a new voice. This one I recognised immediately.
Panahsi had been my best friend growing up. The heavyset, often mocked boy who’d followed me around as if I were someone worth knowing was different now, leaner, with the firm jaw and stern gaze of a war mage. He was called Pan’erath these days, but I’d come to know him as the red mage when he’d beaten me nearly to death a while back. I could’ve forgiven that more easily than the way he’d let his family come perilously close to pressuring Nephenia into marriage with him. The scarlet silk garments he’d been wearing during our last encounter were still strapped tightly around muscles he’d not had as a boy, and that were certainly far more impressive than my own.
“Hey, Pan,” I said.
His eyes flared. I wasn’t scared though. One thing about Panahsi is he always follows the rules. He turned to Ra’ennat and the others. “Go stand somewhere else. I’ll not see these proceedings denigrated by any of you.”
Is it odd that I felt a kind of pride at watching the scions of the House of Ra, who’d all mocked Panahsi back when we were initiates, skulking away at his command?
“Thanks,” I said.
Behind us various delegates of the councils of lords magi were taking their turns singing my mother’s praises. Not literally of course. My people don’t think much of singing. For his part, Panahsi was staring at me with a gaze that could’ve pierced through a steel door.
“They say you’re the one chosen to end the threat of the Berabesq god,” he said.
“That’s what they tell me.”
“Will you do it? Will you fulfil your mission?”
You didn’t need training in arta precis to see the tentative, almost desperate hopefulness in Pan’s eyes. He wanted me to say yes, to speak the same words of duty and loyalty as my father had done. He wanted to believe I’d changed—that I was now the Kellen he’d assumed I would become, back when we were boys and would endlessly recite to each other the stories of the great heroic mages of the past. He wanted us to be friends again. Until that moment I hadn’t had any idea just how much I missed him.
“I don’t know, Pan,” I said softly.
“They killed your mother.”
“Will she come back to life if I murder their god?”
His gaze hardened. My people don’t appreciate a glib tongue. “That’s not how duty works.”
Abruptly the spell my father had been using to turn the sky into his own personal canvas faded and the afternoon sun returned, the light seeming far harsher now than it had before. A different spell broke too, as Panahsi’s expression hardened and he turned away to leave me standing there alone. “Why must you always betray your own kind, Kellen?”
16
The Eulogy
The official ceremony came to a close with my father delivering a flag-waving speech about fidelity and courage that ended with all the mages in the audience raising their fists and sparking their tattooed bands, the eruption of raw magic creating a boorish light show that was lacking only a Zhubanese marching band to bring the whole tawdry affair to a patriotic climax. All of this was entirely in line with Jan’Tep funerary custom and yet felt subtly off-key to me, as if these displays of national pride only served to accentuate how small a people we really were.
Only after the principal rites had been completed were foreign dignitaries invited to approach the dais and deliver their eulogies. Queen Ginevra’s was the best, I thought, striking a nice balance between mournful acceptance of loss and cautious optimism about the future. The phrase “our two peoples” came up a lot. The Gitabrian delegate spoke of peace a great deal, while making a number of not-so-subtle references to advanced military equipment they could provide in the interests of a quick resolution to any conflict—at a price, naturally. This was, of course, directed at the queen. My people don’t debase themselves with weapons when going about the business of killing people.
The Zhuban delegate managed to politely blame my mother’s death on a failure of our nation to follow the ways of philosophy so obviously laid out for all to see in various astronomical phenomena that it really was a shame the rest of us were so stupid. A few others spoke as well, representatives of tiny self-proclaimed nations from the far north and south of the continent. Nobody paid much attention to them. But it was the final speaker who caused me the greatest surprise: a well-spoken young woman come to represent the Seven Sands. She was my age with pale blonde hair and a winding scar around her right eye so faint I doubted anyone but me even noticed it.
“Seneira?” I said aloud.
“Who’s she?” Reichis asked, half-asleep on my shoulder.
“The girl we met in the Seven Sands,” I whispered. “The one we thought had the shadowblack but it was actually an onyx worm that had been implanted into her eye?”
He peered towards the girl speaking on the dais. “Not ringing any bells.”
Squirrel cat recollections of humans tend to be a little vague once they’re done with them.
“Her father was Beren Thrane, founder of the Academy of the Seven Sands,” I said. Sometimes Reichis has a better memory for places and events over people. “The gigantic tower? The arsehole spellslinger, Dexan Videris? The conspiracy to infect all the students so they could be used as assassins against their own families? We nearly died, remember?”
“I recall something about a crocodile,” he acknowledged, then extended a paw towards the dais. “But who’s she?”
I sighed. There was only one way to go about this. “You had your first bath at her house and she gave you butter biscuits.” And she was the second girl I ever kissed, but I didn’t mention that.
“Oooh…” He perked up. “And then later, after I’d murdered the crocodile and saved everyone from the onyx worms, Beren Thrane offered us a job and served up some of that delectable amber hootch of his!” He started sniffing at the air. “You think anybody around here’s got some? I could use a drink.”
As doubtful as it was that anyone attending a funeral was carrying around a flask of pazione liqueur, the last thing I needed was a drunken nekhek stumbling around challenging lords magi to a fight. “Maybe later.”
He turned his nose up at me. “Bath first. You stink.”
“We’ve been on the road for over two weeks—what do you expect?” He stank worse, by the way.
Seneira’s eulogy was brief, with most of the Jan’Tep in the crowd turning away as she spoke. The Seven Sands isn’t considered a legitimate country by the nations bordering it. The Jan’Tep, Berabesq and Daroman see it as a kind of no man’s land whose primary function is to create a buffer between them and, occasionally, a place to wage war. Nonetheless she spoke in that clear, almost haughty way of hers I’d come to know during our time together a couple of years ago.
“We have known a great many wars in the Seven Sands,” she said, coming to the end of her speech. “It is on our lands where the great powers have always chosen to fight. It is beneath our ground where the bones of hundreds of thousands of combatants rest next to those of our own people who never asked for war. As witnesses to so much bloodshed, we have a saying: ‘The greatest debt in any battle is owed to the last soldier who died fighting it.’ Wouldn’t it be the highest honour we could pay to Bene’maat if she were the only casualty of this war?”
Like all the eulogies, Senei
ra’s was filled with kind and admiring words, but underneath it a simple message brought in the interests of her own people. In her case, that message was: “Wage war if you must, but fight your battles away from our lands. We’re tired of picking up the bodies.”
Standing next to the dais, Ke’heops appeared to listen patiently, but his eyes were on me. The look my father gave me carried its own message: Bene’maat couldn’t be the last casualty in this conflict. One more corpse was needed to stop the bloodshed, and it was up to me to provide it.
17
An Overdue Bath
Seven pale shafts of light rose from the clan palace in the centre of the city. The massive heptagonal edifice with its sloped walls rising up to end in a roof smaller than its foundations had always given the impression of a place better suited to incarcerating one’s enemies than housing one’s monarch. Maybe that’s why my father had graciously turned the entire palace over to Queen Ginevra and her retinue for the duration of our stay.
“What a dump,” Reichis said as we wandered the halls with a set of purloined towels in my arms.
I should point out that, by any reasonable standard, the traditional residence of the clan prince was still luxurious beyond the dreams of mere mortals. The squirrel cat had been spoiled by the opulence of the royal palace in Darome—not so much by the furnishings as the number of servants.
“If you think I’m going to dry off my own fur, you’ve got another thing coming,” he warned.
Having never been inside the home of the clan prince before, it took me a while to find the baths.
“Maybe there’s a better one somewhere else?” Reichis suggested.
The chamber was, to my uneducated eyes, perfectly suited to our needs. There were seven different sunken baths. (In case I’ve never mentioned it before, my people have a thing about the number seven.) Each tub was surrounded by an elaborate tiled mosaic depicting the tale of a great Jan’Tep victory over an enemy either mundane or supernatural. The tubs were spelled each morning by charmcasters to ensure the water inside remained perfectly clean, and heated to a particular temperature ranging from tepid to scalding. Reichis, for all his pretensions at ruggedness, insists on a very precise temperature for his baths, one that seems to change daily. I had to stand there waiting as he dipped his tail into each tub before finally narrowing it down to two options.
“Which one do you want?” he asked.
I picked the one I least wanted. He then demanded the other one and waited expectantly for me to haul one of the narrow wooden benches over and place it inside the tub for him.
“Butter biscuits,” he demanded as he began to settle himself inside.
“You ate them all on the way here,” I reminded him.
“What about the ones you hid in that leather bag strapped behind the saddle bags?”
“You found those.”
Reichis’s growl carried the promise of a thousand mortal wounds, hideous mutilations and certain death. The black markings on the fur around his left eye began to swirl and turn. His paws clawed at the air, fangs clacking together as he instinctively mimed the punishments he envisioned for a world that dared deny him his preferred bathing delicacy. All of this would have been slightly more frightening had he not been lying on his back on the bench in the pool, half-submerged in the water. He can be a petulant little bastard at times.
I reached a hand out of the bath to the towel, inside which I’d hidden a small cloth bundle just big enough to hold a half-dozen butter biscuits. I’d had to pay a rather confused-looking servant to carry these all the way from Darome for me. Fumbling with the cords to open it, I took out one of the sugary morsels and tossed it at Reichis. Despite the lack of warning, the squirrel cat still managed to snatch it out of the air with a greedy paw. He began devouring it immediately, pausing only long enough to say, “You can live, I guess,” sending a small shower of crumbs falling around his muzzle into the water. Squirrel cats’ jaws are meant for rending flesh, not nibbling on dainty pastries.
We sat there in companionable silence before he spoke again. “Kellen?”
“Yeah?”
“Sorry about your mom.”
“Thanks.”
“Did you…?” He hesitated, looking rather as if he were in danger of vomiting into the pool. “Did you want to talk about it?”
Squirrel cats don’t discuss the dead. To them it’s pointless. Death should be followed by swift, murderous revenge and then left in the past. I felt oddly touched that Reichis would offer to listen to me moan and whimper about my mother.
“Thanks,” I said again. “I guess I’m still trying to figure out what it is I’m feeling. It’s like there’s this empty part inside of me, but it’s so cold I can’t seem to—”
“Ugh…” He groaned. After a few seconds he looked over at me. “It’s okay. I can take it. Tell me more about your… feelings.”
This is what happens when an innately selfish creature entirely incapable of sympathy attempts to change its nature.
“Do you ever…?” I began, then thought better of it.
“What?” he asked.
“Do you ever miss your mother?”
It was Chitra who had bound Reichis and me together. “You must be his caution,” she’d told me, that night she lay dying at my side, “as he will be your courage. You will teach him when to flee and he will teach you when to fight.”
I had never imagined in that moment, as a madman rained fire upon her tribe, that Chitra had given me the greatest gift I would ever know in my life. Reichis was more than just a friend. He was my business partner. Granted, one who mostly tended to bite me and steal my stuff, but still…
Reichis snarled and it took only a second for me to realise it wasn’t at me. Before I even knew who was in the room with us, I’d leaped out of the bath and rolled on the floor to grab my deck of steel throwing cards. I sent a pair of them spinning in the air at the figure near the door.
Please let that not be some over-zealous and remarkably quiet servant who just happened to unlock the door without either Reichis or me… Nah. Has to be an assassin.
The grey-haired woman who called herself Emelda but whom I still thought of as the vulture shielded herself behind what looked like a thin wooden case about three feet wide by two feet high. The two steel cards embedded themselves in the wood.
“Knew there was a reason I brought this with me,” she said.
Should’ve known one of the Murmurers would come for me sooner or later, I thought as I mapped out my next move. By now I had my castradazi coins in one hand and a towel in the other. It’s almost impossible to use my powders when my fingers are wet, so I’d need to use one of the coins to distract her while I dried my hands, then grab my holsters and blast her from existence.
“You always this homicidal when you’re naked?” she asked, lowering the case.
I don’t know why I looked down. I really wish I hadn’t.
“No wonder my daughter fancies you,” Emelda said as she pried the steel cards from the wood. “Likes them feisty, she does.”
I grabbed a bigger towel. And my powder holsters. Just because someone makes fun of your nakedness doesn’t mean they’re not planning to kill you. “Something I can help you with, ma’am?” I asked.
She walked over to us, apparently no more troubled by Reichis growling at her than she was by either my nudity or blast powders. When the squirrel cat started stalking towards her, she locked eyes with him and a made a kind of breathy whistling with her lips.
“Don’t waste your so-called ‘marshal’s magic’ on us,” I said. “Me and Reichis aren’t…”
I glanced over and watched helplessly as the squirrel cat went from baring his teeth to resting back on his haunches as he gazed up longingly at her. “So purdy… like emeralds,” he chittered softly, drooling butter-biscuit crumbs all over his furry chest.
“You’re hopeless.”
Emelda chuckled as she set the case down on a stool and undid the latches on
one side.
“Slowly,” I warned.
“Couldn’t kill you even if I wanted to, son. Little Tori went and forced the council to agree to bring no harm to you for at least a year.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your word for it?”
She stepped back. “Go ahead and open it yourself then.”
Realising I could just as easily have set myself up, but unwilling to look like even more of a fool, I knelt down and very carefully opened the case. I’ve got a pretty good feel for the tension caused by springs and trip-wires, but my fingers couldn’t detect anything amiss. With the lid open, I saw what appeared to be a coiled rope made of some kind of ancient braided strands. At one end was a grip wrapped in leather that looked almost as old.
“You brought me a whip?”
“Technically it’s called a scourge,” she said. “But yeah. It’s a kind of whip.”
“And what am I supposed to do with it?”
Emelda reached inside the case and removed the scourge. Some charmed objects give off the sensation of heat or cold, but this was different. It wasn’t so much a vibration in the air as an uncomfortable stillness. “You know much about Daroman magic, Kellen?”
“Only that you don’t have any.”
She laughed. “Well, I suppose that’s true. Magic’s never been something we needed, I suppose, what with our superior military might and vastly more civilised natures. But we’ve always been good at collecting things.”
Stealing them, more like. The museums of Darome were filled with the artefacts of conquered nations.
“Anyway, we’ve never been much for spells and such, but our explorers know items of power when they come across them.” She held up the scourge to me. “And this here? Well, this may just be the most powerful artefact on the entire continent.”
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