Soulbinder

by Sebastien de Castell

  I had no idea what would happen if I passed through that door, but before I reached it, Shalla called out, “Kellen, stop!”

  I turned. “Sister?”

  She came to stand before me, looking considerably less certain than she had before. “I need information.”

  “About what?”

  “The Ebony Abbey. You said two men were taking you there. Was that true? Is it real?”

  Now that was an interesting question. I would’ve thought someone with Shalla’s abilities—not to mention my father’s, since I had no doubt he was the one who wanted to know—could’ve stolen the thoughts from my mind. So either I was too far away or something about this place prevented them from using scrying spells to track me. “Tell me what happened to Reichis.”

  “Oh, for the sake of the Ancestors! I helped him, all right? I helped your filthy squirrel cat. Happy now?”

  It took every ounce of arta valar for me not to break down crying with relief. Instead I hugged her. “Thank you, Shalla.”

  She pushed me away. “I said ‘helped’ him, Kellen. I didn’t say I saved him.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She shook her head. “No, now you answer my questions.” Stepping aside, she motioned to the door. “Or go ahead and walk out of here. The spell will be broken and you’ll wake up in whatever little shadowblack hovel you’ve found yourself in this time.”

  She was bluffing, I was sure of it, and yet I couldn’t risk it. Turns out some people can learn arta tuco without ever meeting an Argosi. “What do you want to know?”

  The slight smile on her face was a reminder of the hundreds of battles of wits I’d lost against her. “Everything, beginning with the abbey’s location.”

  That part she’d almost certainly figured out already. “Far away, on another continent across the ocean.”

  She nodded. “Most likely Inkrissa, in the South Sea.”

  Obscaria, actually, about three thousand miles north of Inkrissa, but I didn’t see any reason to share that with Shalla and thus my father’s posse.

  “How many shadowblack mages do they have?” she went on, rattling off questions one after another. “How many demons do they command? What kind of defences do they—”

  “Shalla, stop! These people aren’t warriors. They’re monks and students trying to keep the shadowblack from swallowing them up. There are families here! Children! They’re no threat to the Jan’Tep.”

  My sister gave a soft snort, then reached out a hand to pat my cheek. “Apparently being an outlaw hasn’t lessened your naivety, brother. The ‘monks’ of this abbey are no doubt shadowmasters, bent on bringing back the forbidden magics for summoning demons. Now, tell me how they plan to—”

  “Sister, please.”

  “What?”

  It took me a moment to figure out what to say. Should I tell her that the people here are the first to suffer when the shadowblack goes astray? That all they want is to live some small part of their lives free from the terror of being hunted down like dogs by Jan’Tep war mages?

  No. None of that would work on her any more than it would my father. So instead I asked, “Why does it have to always be this way?”

  Her eyes narrowed. She thought I was playing a game. “What way?”

  It was a question I could answer honestly, because it was one I’d been asking myself for months. “Why is it that the Jan’Tep have the most wondrous magic anywhere in the world, but all we seem to use it for is to plot and scheme and kill our enemies?”

  Without missing a beat, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, she replied, “We have a duty to protect our people, just as you and I have a duty to protect our house.”

  I took her hands in mine. Even in this dream state I could feel the warmth of the blood on her palms against my skin. “Shalla, you’re the most powerful mage of our generation. One day you’ll surpass everyone, even Father. You’ll be the one to rule our people. All our lives you’ve shown such promise, and yet you wield your power without an ounce of compassion. If you can’t … If you of all people can’t find a way to use your magic for something more than just causing more pain and destruction, then what hope is there for any of us?”

  She didn’t answer. She just stood there, looking down at my hands around hers. I could feel something waver in her. “What would you have me do, brother?”

  I felt a bit like a character in one of those frontier tales who finds a magic candle that can’t be lit by any flame, but if you breathe on it just right your heart’s desire will be fulfilled. But Shalla is, above all else, devoted to our family. Ask her to go against my father’s wishes and I’d lose her. Loyalty is the one thing we both understand. “Can you save Reichis?”

  She didn’t look surprised. “And if I do? If I risk myself for your disgusting pet, will you think better of me, Kellen? When we see each other, will you tell me you love me for who I am, and not always in spite of it?”

  “I …” I probably should’ve lied, but I couldn’t. Not when she was letting me in like this. “I hope so. I want to, Shalla. I swear I do.”

  She gave me a small, fragile smile. “I guess that will have to be enough for now, brother.” She took in a long, slow breath. “The squirrel cat is still in the Golden Passage. I was able to keep him alive awhile, but the spell fades too quickly.”

  “There must be some—”

  “That’s why I met you like this, Kellen.” She glanced around, reflexively, as though she worried someone were listening. “I promised Father I’d get information from you about this Ebony Abbey, but I also summoned you because I think there’s a way we can heal the squirrel cat’s wounds and give him the strength to get himself out of the desert.”

  “How?”

  She gently prised my hands apart and went to one of her columns. Again she passed her fingertips along its surface and the marble dissolved, to reveal yet more shelves filled with jars and boxes. When she came back she was holding a single gleaming blue grain of sand. She gestured and spoke a word. The grain bobbed in the air between us. “Do you remember the saret’kaveth?”

  “The floating compass spell? That’s barely more than a cantrip.”

  “All breath spells are weak, Kellen—you should know that better than anyone.” The old Shalla was back. “Saret’kaveth lets you float an object along the winds. That’s why I need you: send me something that Reichis has touched. Then I can use that connection to send enough healing magic to save him.”

  “Shalla, saret’kaveth sends a pebble on the breeze. I can’t make it fly an object halfway around the world.”

  “Of course not,” she said, clearly irritated even by the possibility that I could accomplish something on that scale—something she herself couldn’t do. “But what if it wasn’t made from normal matter? And what if it wasn’t moving across natural space?”

  “You mean like a thought? Isn’t that what we’re doing now?”

  She shook her head. “No, a thought can’t hold a binding. I’m talking about something else. Something only you can do.” She reached up and touched a finger to the markings around my left eye. Even in the dream world I flinched.

  “You want me to slip into shadow?”

  She nodded. “Like you did before. Distance doesn’t seem to mean the same thing there as it does in the normal world, and shadow matter doesn’t have any inherent physical weight. But it does carry spiritual resonance. So if you were to touch an object there—even a grain of that bizarre black sand—to something Reichis has touched …”

  “Then I might be able to float it to you through the spell you’ve created between us.”

  The esoteric geometries behind what she proposed were insanely complicated. I couldn’t begin to calculate how it all … But that didn’t matter. Shadow never seemed to obey the usual rules of magic. It operated more on instinct than on a mage’s focused will.

  “I don’t even know if I can force myself into shadow,” I said. “Most times it was just a fluke that I w
as able to—”

  Shalla rolled her eyes. “Oh, for goodness sake, brother. Think of where you are. How hard can it be to enter shadow when you’re already in a place with so much of it around?”

  She had a point. “Okay. Okay. Let’s try this. How do we start?”

  Shalla walked over to the door and held it open for me. “Just walk through there and you’ll wake up. Try not to forget that this wasn’t a dream.”

  That hardly seemed an issue at this point. I headed towards the doorway, but stopped for a moment to look back at her. “Thank you, sister. This means … This means everything to me.”

  A weary sadness came to her gaze. “Oh, Kellen. Sometimes I wonder how you survive out there, so utterly alone.”

  23

  The Compass

  I opened my eyes in darkness, no idea how long had passed since Diadera had brought me to the guest room. I was still exhausted though, and found myself drifting back into sleep, wondering if I’d have more of those odd dreams about …

  Crap. Shalla was right. I nearly forgot it was real.

  I forced myself out of the bed, despite my desperate desire for its comforts. The floor was cold, which helped keep me awake, aided by the fact that I was barefoot. More precisely, I was naked.

  I had no recollection of taking off my clothes. So either I’d done it in my sleep, or Diadera had …

  Focus, idiot. Save being embarrassed for later.

  I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, attuning my senses to the black markings around my left eye. Most of the time I ignore the chill they give me, but now I embraced it.

  All right, you useless, foul thing. You’ve made my life hell more times than I can count. Now it’s time for a little payba—

  Something was wrong. I’d expected the usual strain of the shadowblack awakening, followed by the burning agony it sent through the markings. But though I felt none of that, I knew something had changed.

  I opened my eyes. The room was gone.

  “Wow,” I said aloud, though my words had that distant, echoing quality they always had in this strange place. My feet no longer felt the stone of the floor. Instead I stood upon a carpet of tiny onyx shards. What I’d thought of as darkness in the room before hadn’t been, not really, as there had still been a little light from out the window. Here, though, the world was painted in a thousand different shades of black. It shouldn’t have been possible to see, yet I saw with more clarity than I ever did in my own world. Not wanting to press my luck, I set to work.

  The saret’kaveth is made up of the same five components as any other Jan’Tep spell: envisioning the specific esoteric geometry, forming the somatic shape, uttering the invocation, summoning power through the appropriate band and sending it into the anchor. Shalla had said I needed to send her something touched by Reichis, which was going to be a problem.

  The little monster had all kinds of baubles and precious items he’d stolen from one poor sap or another in our travels. Often the sap in question was me. But I didn’t have his little bag of treasures. Even if I did, I couldn’t bring it into shadow with me. Then I realised that I did have a number of things that the squirrel cat had touched: the scars from all his bites.

  I knelt down and picked up a tiny shard of onyx from the ground. I bore the marks of a few different bites on me, but the most recent was on the back of my right hand. One night, in my sleep, I’d accidentally touched Reichis’s fur. He assumed I was trying to pet him and delivered his response with all his customary affection for “skinbags who think squirrel cats make good pets.”

  I pushed the onyx shard into the scar. It hurt, but in an odd, almost emotional, way rather than physically. I took this as a good sign. When I held up the shard, its particular shade of black had changed, glistening somehow. I might’ve just been imagining it, but what else was I supposed to do?

  Most breath magic takes two hands, so I tossed the shard into the air. As it came down, I formed the somatic shapes. They’re actually kind of tricky: middle and ring fingers pressed together in the sign of binding, thumbs pointed down for grounding, and index and little fingers fluttering like the wings of a bird. It’s that last part that’s really hard. Try it. You’ll see.

  “Saret’kaveth,” I intoned, pouring all my will into the word, struggling to hold both the esoteric geometry of the spell and Shalla’s essence in my mind. I heard a scream along the wind as the tiny shard sliced through the air, flying with more speed and force than I’d ever seen with the floating compass spell before.

  I had no idea if this would work—if my little shard would somehow pass through shadow to find my sister, or if the bond from a squirrel cat’s bite would be enough for Shalla to reach him with her healing spells. But it might, and that gave me something I’d been sorely lacking for a while now: hope.

  Reichis, for all his thieving and scheming, for all the bites and insults he’d inflicted upon me, was the best friend I’d ever had. I’d felt helpless since the moment we’d been sep- arated. Everything I’d done so far had failed, only taking me further away from him. There was nothing more to try, no one else to fight, nothing left to sacrifice. If anyone could help him now, it was Shalla.

  I hope this works, Reichis. I hope I get to see you again, if not in this world, then in whichever hell you and me are both bound to wind up in one day.

  Fatigue overtook me then, far more than such a simple cantrip should cause. I fell backwards, slipping out of shadow. My body hit the mattress, which was nice, and my head hit the wall behind it, which was not. I wormed my way under the coverings and leaned back on the small pillow to sleep.

  Traps, I remembered, hauling myself out of bed. Can’t go back to sleep without setting the traps.

  Before I could take my first step, four twisting bands of shadow wrapped themselves around my wrists and ankles. I was being lassoed like an errant calf found crossing onto the wrong herder’s land. The next thing I knew, I was being lifted up into the air several feet above the bed. “Using Jan’Tep breath spells to report to your people?” a voice in the darkness asked. “Should’ve known you for a spy the moment I laid eyes on you.”

  Before I could argue, a fifth ribbon slipped over my head. Not a ribbon, I realised too late, clawing at the shadows helplessly. It’s a noose.

  Three rules every outlaw needs to live by: don’t trust any place that doesn’t charge you rent, don’t go to bed before setting your traps, and never, ever forget about the guy you pushed over a cliff. I would’ve apologised for that last one, but the shadows around my neck had begun to tighten.

  24

  The Interrogation

  My hand slapped at my right thigh, searching in vain for my leather case of steel throwing cards and finding only my own skin, because of course the fourth rule of being an outlaw is: never go to bed naked. Now, in addition to having none of my weapons, I also had to wonder if maybe Diadera had set me up.

  “Looking for these?” Tournam asked, stepping into the dim light shed by the window at the back of the room. He wore his long leather coat, the sleeves cut off to show the taut muscles of his shoulders and reminding me I was outmatched physically as well as magically. Also sartorially, since I wasn’t wearing any clothes. My trousers dangled into view, held aloft by a shadowblack ribbon. The leather case sewn onto one leg was tantalisingly close yet impossible for me to reach with my hands bound. “No fancy throwing cards now,” Tournam said, that insufferable Berabesq accent of his vibrating along the shadowblack noose wrapped around my neck. Another tendril appeared, this one waving my belt with the pouches on either side. “No magic powders either.” A third tendril quivered, setting off a clinking sound. “I even found the little coins sewn into your shirt.”

  My odds had just gone from dicey to downright lousy. As unpleasant as it is to be ambushed by a smug, self-righteous arsehole convinced of his own innate superiority, it’s much more perilous to be taken captive my an enemy who respects you enough to keep track of your weapons. I opened my mouth wide, visibly
struggling to breathe.

  “Something you want to confess, spy?” Tournam asked.

  His fingers twitched, and the noose loosened enough for me to gasp in a tiny mouthful of air. Tournam watched me, no doubt expecting me to either beg for mercy or taunt him with insults. I did consider bringing up the fact that as it was Butelios I’d pushed off a cliff, not him, why was he the one coming after me? But I had better things to do with my breath.

  I parted my lips, allowing the air to trickle out as I silently whispered my need, sending each desperate plea like a paper boat floating down a river until my lungs were empty.

  Okay, Suzy, I thought. You’re up.

  I felt a cold chill in my right eye, but the soft shrieking sound that usually signalled her emergence had barely begun before it faded away again.

  Tournam leaned closer, straining to hear what I’d said. “Is that whisper magic?” he asked. “Because I read up on that cloud in your eye. The abbey has an extensive library of occult works. According to the most authoritative book I could find on the subject, manifesting on our physical plane the way your wind spirit did yesterday comes at a terrible cost. It often takes them days or even weeks to recover.” He reached a finger and tapped the ridge just above my right eye. “No sasutzei to save you today, cloud boy.”

  I guess that explained why I wasn’t getting the usual chill on my eye that accompanied her awakening. I started shivering, and not from the cold air. Being helpless does that to you.

  No. Maybe you can’t move or fight, but that’s different from being helpless. Whenever Ferius got into trouble, her first gambit was to talk her way out of it. Arta loquit. Eloquence. Talk to a person in their own language and you can build bridges to understanding and peace.