“How do you know?” Azir asked.
“I just do.”
“Hells …” Tournam swore.
“Yeah.”
I should tell them it’s my fault, I thought. They have a right to know who destroyed their sanctuary.
“It doesn’t matter,” Diadera said defiantly. “The abbey’s too far away for them to bring their posse or coven or whatever they want to call it. They can’t hurt us.”
“They can if they devise a way to create a bond between each of them and each of us,” Suta’rei said, still locked in her strange embrace with Butelios. “That is how this mage intended to kill Kellen.”
The third set of sigils in the circle came to life, the silhouetted figure of the mage weaving back and forth in a kind of sleepy ecstasy as her arms formed the final somatic shapes. I recognised the spell immediately. Silk and iron magic, mixed with a little blood and a trace of ember. She was going to kill me with a thought dagger.
Take an idea—barely more than a passing fancy, really, but something vile and disconcerting—then drive it deep inside the mind of your enemy, powered by silk magic to keep it alive and imbued with iron magic so it can’t be removed. The sliver of thought spins inside the brain, over and over, relentless in its destruction, until the victim is capable of conceiving nothing other than what the thought commands. Usually that demand is to tear yourself apart. It’s less a form of execution and more a kind of message for everyone else to witness. It would be an excellent way to kill everyone in the abbey, with no need for the posse to travel there themselves.
“Why didn’t Kellen die?” Azir asked. “If the mage had a way to reach him, why couldn’t she—”
Suddenly a new shape appeared and I nearly fell backwards. This one was smaller, maybe two foot tall, and leaped out of nowhere at us.
Diadera caught hold of me. “It’s just another shadow shape, Kellen, part of what Suta’rei is seeing in the past.”
“It’s Reichis,” I whispered under my breath.
The squirrel cat’s silhouette landed on that of the mage. His back paws began tearing at the flesh on her back. Thin strips of shadow flew from her form, as if he were picking her apart piece by piece.
“Damn,” Ghilla said. “That boy’s got spirit in him, don’t he?”
“All the spirit in the world,” I said, the words catching in my throat.
The shadowy form of the mage spun around, trying to grab at the phantom squirrel cat. She fired some kind of spell at him which I couldn’t recognise because it appeared only as a blast of blackness. The whole scene became blurry, as though a breeze were blowing it apart. “Hold it together, damn it,” Suta’rei said.
Butelios was struggling. “They fought a while,” he said. “Minutes. Maybe hours. I can’t tell. It’s all moving too fast now.”
The scene was disappearing in a fog. I could no longer make out what was happening. “Please!” I yelled out. “Please tell me what happened. Did he—”
“Be quiet!” Butelios shouted. It was the first time I’d heard him express that much anger.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Suta’rei holding him tighter. “You can do this, northerner. Just hold to the shadow a little longer.”
The fog slowly tightened again, the silhouettes taking shape once more. “The woman,” Butelios said, “this is how she died.”
The mage’s silhouette had fallen to her knees, hands struggling to get hold of Reichis’s smaller form as his paws gripped the front of her collar, his teeth buried in her neck. With a sudden tug she tore him off her, but he came away with something soft and wet in his mouth. Drops of shadow dripped from his jaws. He had torn out her throat.
The mage dropped to her belly. She managed to crawl just a few feet before she lay still right in the spot where her skeleton awaited us in this world.
“He saved you,” Ghilla said, her voice filled with a kind of awe, and for once not calling me “boy.”
Diadera left me to put a hand on Butelios’s arm. “You can let go know. It’s okay.”
“No!” I said. “What happened to Reichis? Please, I need to know!”
“Hold on a moment longer,” Suta’rei said, her arms tight around Butelios’s chest. It wasn’t clear to me if she was offering him support or preventing him from breaking contact. “I can see the rest now.”
On the ground near us, the shadow form of Reichis walked on three legs. One of his front paws dangled. Broken. He stumbled, picked himself up, then kept moving. Each step grew slower, more laboured. I followed him, wishing he were really there, that I could say something to him, make promises I could never hope to keep. The squirrel cat’s shadowy form led a few more steps before collapsing on a small mound of sand and fading into nothingness.
“What happened?” I asked. “Please show me what happened ne—”
I turned to see that Suta’rei and Butelios had separated. She was shaking her head over and over. The big man was crying still, though these were no shadow tears. “Look,” he said to me.
I stared down at the mound of golden sand where Reichis’s shadow form had fallen, and only then did I understand. I dropped to the ground and dug at it with my hands, scattering the sand as fast as I could. It didn’t take long before I found the bones.
39
The Bones
“They’re so small,” I said. “It can’t be him.”
None of the others bothered to contradict me. They saw what I saw, and knew just as well as I did that these had to be Reichis’s remains.
Squirrel cats are small-boned creatures. Stripped of meat and skin and fur, emptied of that indomitable spirit, what was left looked like the skeleton of a house cat. None of Reichis’s bravery and brashness, his thieving nature and loyal heart, remained.
I was too scared to even touch the bones for fear they might crumble into powder and disappear into the storm beginning to rise up around us.
“You should speak to him,” Diadera whispered. She held on to my arm as though worried I too would drift away into the swirling winds. “Tell him what he meant to you.”
Why do people suddenly become so stupid the minute they want to console you? Dead was dead. Reichis was gone, lost to me forever because he couldn’t stop himself from trying to save me even after I’d left him behind.
Desperate to escape the flood of grief that was already up to my neck and rising steadily, I considered Diadera’s words—not because I believed it would do any good, but because they gave me the excuse to retreat into suspicion and callous insight. She spoke with a high Daroman accent, and displayed any number of their mannerisms—even her courtly flirtations. The Daroman culture takes death very seriously; theirs is an imperial people, and so rank and ancestry are recognised in manifold ways. Rituals. Parades. Solemn vigil. Grand oratory.
But they don’t talk to the dead.
Which meant Diadera wasn’t who she pretended to be.
So many lies. Hers. Mine. How were any of us not crushed under the weight of them? I looked into those pale green eyes of hers that pulled me in every time I saw them. She must’ve known her suggestion would reveal to me that she wasn’t Daroman, yet she’d made it anyway. “Why?” I asked.
She answered both sides of my question at once. “Because it will ease your grief.”
A hand pressed down on my shoulder. Butelios. “In the north we sing for the honoured dead. I will sing for Reichis, if you will allow it.”
“I don’t have any incense with me,” Tournam said, his voice quieter, gentler than I would’ve thought possible for him. “But I know the sacred prayers by heart. Ask me and I will entreat God to grant your friend entry into his domain, to let him sit astride his shoulder as he gazes down upon us.”
One after another they made similar offers. Azir. Suta’rei. Ghilla. All our peoples have ways of dealing with death. None would make me feel any better.
I removed my shirt and spread it on the ground next to the little mound. I picked up the desiccated bones one by one and carefully wrapped
them in the linen fabric, finally rolling it up into an awkward bundle. I left behind a playing card, dark red, like blood. A debt had been paid, even if not by me. I shivered. It gets cold at night in the desert.
“We have to go now, Kellen,” Diadera said. “The abbot needs to know what we’ve learned.” She gestured to the bundle under my arm. “We can find a place to bury your friend back at the abbey.”
I pulled away before she could take my arm. Diadera still thought I was going back with them. Neither she nor any of the others had worked out how a mage in the desert had been able to pierce the veil protecting the Ebony Abbey’s location. What I needed to do now was keep my mouth shut, let Azir conjure up his road back to the abbey and then jump off it once the others were too far ahead to come back. It was a good plan. Simple. Sensible.
“It’s my fault,” I said.
I’ve heard it debated whether the most common cause of death among outlaws isn’t getting killed by enemies, like most people think, but suicide. Maybe both sides have it right.
Diadera misunderstood, and made another attempt to console me. “Kellen, you didn’t—”
“I’m not talking about Reichis!” I shouted back at her.
Idiot. Stop talking. Just keep breathing, survive one more day, then another, then another, until you find a reason to live. I couldn’t though. The rest came out in a flood before a saner part of me could prevail. “I mean, not just Reichis. The mage got that onyx shard from me. I sent it to my sister and she must have given it to my father. His name is Ke’heops, lord magus of the House of Ke and the man plotting to become mage sovereign of the entire Jan’Tep people. He’s also the leader of the war coven. In fact, the whole thing was his idea, so when he arrives at your gates and kills everyone you love, you’ll know it was because of me.”
I could see the shock registering on each of their faces. However inconsequential I was to the world, I’d nonetheless developed something of a reputation over the past couple of years. So had my family. The abbot didn’t seem like the type of guy to take someone in without first finding out who they were, but I guess he hadn’t told the others. Or maybe, despite the way I’d treated them, they’d wanted to give me a chance to prove myself.
“Why?” Ghilla asked. She looked hurt—as though until this moment she’d looked up to me and I’d suddenly disappointed her. The irony was almost funny.
I looked at Tournam, expecting the violence would start with him. He was watching me, eyes locked on mine. Then he shook his head. “What a bitch.”
“What?”
“Your sister. What a lousy thing to do.” He gestured to the bones rolled up in my shirt. “I’ll bet you asked her to help the squirrel cat, right? And she sold you some line about how she needed a piece of your soul or his to cast some big spell to save him?”
I couldn’t manage an answer to that. I was still expecting his shadow ribbons to wrap themselves around my throat and squeeze the life out of me.
“Something bonded to both you and the squirrel cat would be necessary,” Suta’rei said. “Healing spells are based on blood sympathies, and those require some token bound to the recipient.”
Diadera stood next to me. “Which made it that much easier to deceive Kellen.”
“Are you all out of your minds?” I demanded. “Did you not hear what I said? It’s my fault the posse knows the abbey’s location! By all the ancestors, how have you people survived this long?”
Tournam gave me a punch in the shoulder. “Not by trusting our relatives, that’s for sure.” He chuckled. “Man, for an outlaw, you sure are gullible.”
Before I could respond, Azir tugged at my arm. He pulled up the right leg of his trousers, revealing an ugly scar several inches long running halfway around his shin. “My father did this. He thought that if he cut off my legs, no one would ever find out I had the shadowblack. It still hurts when I walk.”
“My brothers got to me,” Ghilla said, lifting up her hair to reveal a circular patch of bare skin and an indentation at the back of her head. “Those boys thought they could drain the demon from my skull.”
“You see what idiots you heathens are?” Tournam asked, opening his coat and pulling apart his shirt to reveal the scars of long-healed burns all over his chest. “Everyone knows you can only banish demons with fire!” His burst of laughter set off the others, and soon they were mocking each other’s wounds, boasting about how only their people—their families—knew the secret to banishing devilry from the world.
How could they laugh at this? How could anyone find humour in being betrayed by the people who nature itself dictated should love them? I began to walk away, heading off deeper into the desert.
“Hey,” Azir said, running to catch up with me. “Where are you going?”
“Don’t know for sure,” I replied. I hoisted the bundle under my arm a little higher. “Maybe I’ll take Reichis’s bones back to the forest where his people died. Bury him there.”
I heard the shuffling sounds of the others following us. I turned to find them exchanging glances, but none of them dared deny me. Azir persisted though. “Where will you run to then, Kellen?” He pointed to the vast, empty desert before us, the first hint of early morning light tracing the horizon. “What’s left for you out there?”
“Bounty hunters,” Suta’rei said. “Hextrackers like that mage your familiar saved you from. An entire war coven. Every one of them hungry to make a name for themselves by slaying a shadowblack.”
“Religious zealots,” Tournam added. The softness in his voice made it sound like a confession.
Diadera came ahead of the others, standing close to me as she placed her hands on my chest. “The abbey is your home now, Kellen. And we’re your family. Maybe not the one you chose, but the one waiting for you.”
Ghilla came and gave me a gentle kick in the shin. “We ain’t so bad, boy. You’ll see.”
What do you do in the face of something you’ve never earned but always wanted? I held the bundled shirt with the bones inside it under my arm tightly, as if doing so was somehow an act of resistance against their kindness. It didn’t work though, because after a few moments my traitorous mouth opened, and I said, “Take me home.”
A king rules not for himself, but for his people. Thus can he not be bound by conscience, but must instead be guided by every deed necessary for the survival of his realm.
—Platitude frequently used by arseholes to justify their actions
40
Across Shadow
Ferius Parfax once told me that grief is considered perverse by the Argosi. “Don’t bring the dead back to life. Won’t change the past, the present, nor the future.”
If you’re wondering how any of that makes grief “perverse,” I’d asked that same question.
“Life is for the livin’,” was her terse reply. “Losing yourself in grief over folks you can’t help just means abandoning those you can. An Argosi focuses on the road ahead, kid. Never the one behind.” From there she’d gone on to describe the seventh form of arta forteiza—resilience—and a number of exercises designed to enable an Argosi to set grief aside. The whole idea had struck me as cold and callous at the time. Now, though, I wished I’d paid more attention.
Reichis.
The bundle of his bones felt far too light under my arm. I held tight to it as I followed the others along Azir’s onyx road, looking behind me every few steps in case something had fallen out from the rolled-up shirt. There was nothing there though. Nothing but shadows.
Diadera and the others spent the journey debating how best to inform the abbot that his abbey’s most precious secret—its location—had been revealed to the Jan’Tep posse. The entire war coven would be searching for a fast ship by now, already mapping out the ways that seventy-seven mages could manipulate breath and iron magic to reduce a voyage of months to mere weeks.
All thanks to me.
Well, to my entire family really.
My father had assembled the posse to further
his political ambitions. No doubt my mother had lent her considerable support; she’d always had more respect than him among the other clans. But it was Shalla who’d been the key to all this. She’d tricked me into giving her the means to locate the abbey. In return, she’d abandoned my friend in the desert to die alone.
I had forgotten the obvious truth that had always governed both our lives: there was nothing my sister wouldn’t do to earn our father’s praise. I hope I never see you again, Shalla, because if I do, one of us will die, and I don’t know if I have it in me to kill you.
“Your scheme will only make things worse!” Suta’rei insisted to Tournam, the irritation in her voice pulling me from my dark musings.
“Why not?” he argued, the heels of his boots clacking against the glassy fragments that made up Azir’s onyx road.
“Because, unlike you, the abbot isn’t a fool. He’s made a study of Jan’Tep magic and he’ll know there’s no such thing as a ‘really big sort of mind-reading spell’ that somehow searches the thoughts of millions of people at once to find out if any of them happen to know where the abbey is.”
“Then what’s your answer, girl?” Ghilla asked.
“Maybe we’re all jumping at shadows,” Diadera suggested. “I mean, what if the spell actually failed? Just because that mage thought she’d tracked Kellen, doesn’t mean it worked. Maybe the posse doesn’t even know where …”
I ignored the rest of the floundering discussion. They were grasping at straws, all their brave words and clumsily constructed plans masking something troubling underneath that played across their faces.
Tournam’s jaw was clamped so tight that you could see him anxiously grinding his teeth even as he insisted that he could “handle the abbot.” Ghilla made some snide remark about how Tournam would likely start by licking abbot’s boots and then move northward until he was kissing his arse. For all her brash words though, you could hear the slight tremor in her voice.
Diadera, putting on that sly, courtly pose of hers, claimed she could sway the abbot to forgive me. Suta’rei snorted at that suggestion and offered her own theory on just what Diadera’s diplomatic efforts would entail. Like the others, she too exposed a nervous tic, through the way she blinked too often as she spoke.
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