Shadow and Storm

by Juliet Kemp

  Never trust a demon…

  …or a Teren politician

  Although the city-state of Marek is part of Teren, the Thirteen Houses and Guilds have long been protective of their de facto independence. So Marcia, Heir to House Fereno, expects the annual visit for the Council opening by the Teren Throne’s representative, the Lord Lieutenant, to be nothing more than the usual symbolic gesture. But this year the Lieutenant has been unexpectedly replaced by Selene. As Marcia is showing her the view from the top of Marekhill, she suspects that Selene has her own agenda. After all, Teren has politics too, just like Marek.

  In Marek, magic is mediated by the cityangel. But elsewhere in Teren magic is enabled by bloodletting. A Teren magician will invoke a demon to do their bidding and bind them with blood. But demons are devious and will take advantage of any flaw or loophole to avoid being bound. An unleashed demon is dangerous and sure to create havoc, and the Teren way to stop them involves the letting of more of the magician’s blood – often terminally. But if a young magician is being sought by an unleashed demon, their only hope may be to escape to Marek where the cityangel can keep the demon at bay. Probably. Once again Reb, Cato and Jonas must work with Beckett to deal with a magical problem, while Marcia must tackle a serious political challenge to Marek’s future. But of course magic and politics never seem to remain separate for long, especially when Teren politics are involved.

  BOOK 2 OF THE MAREK SERIES

  Cover artwork by Tony Allcock

  JULIET KEMP

  SHADOW

  AND

  STORM

  BOOK 2 OF THE MAREK SERIES

  Elsewhen Press

  ALSO BY JULIET KEMP

  THE DEEP AND SHINING DARK

  BOOK 1 OF THE MAREK SERIES

  Shadow and Storm

  First published in Great Britain by Elsewhen Press, 2020

  An imprint of Alnpete Limited

  Copyright © Juliet Kemp, 2020. All rights reserved

  The right of Juliet Kemp to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, telepathic, magical, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  Elsewhen Press, PO Box 757, Dartford, Kent DA2 7TQ

  www.elsewhen.press

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-911409-49-6 Print edition

  ISBN 978-1-911409-59-5 eBook edition

  Condition of Sale

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  Elsewhen Press & Planet-Clock Design are trademarks of Alnpete Limited

  Converted to eBook format by Elsewhen Press

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, trading organisations, governing councils and events are either a product of the author’s fertile imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, governments, companies, places or people (living, dead, or spirit) is purely coincidental. No angels or demons were harmed in the making of this book.

  CONTENTS

  Map of Marek

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  ONE

  When Jonas opened the door – cautiously, because he still felt far from comfortable with this room and what it represented – Cato was lying full length on his bed, propped up on a couple of pillows, hands behind his head. It was an unseasonably warm day for autumn, and one of the windows was open to catch the breeze. The room was, as usual, a mess, with clothes flung over the end of the bed, oddments piled on the dresser, and half-a-dozen books on the floor. The only neat area was the table and shelves containing Cato’s magical equipment. The chaos grated on Jonas, brought up living in close quarters at sea, where stowing everything away when not in use was both necessity and habit strictly enforced by his sea-captain mother and his shipmates; and grated worse because Cato obviously could keep things neat if he chose. At least the open window meant the place smelt clean today.

  Cato stretched a little and scrubbed a hand through his close-cropped brown hair, looking eminently at ease. Much more at ease than Jonas felt. This was the fourth of these practice sessions and it had been nearly two months since the whole debacle at the Salinas embassy, after which Jonas had chosen to miss his ship back home to Salina in favour of learning about what Cato maintained was ‘his magic’.

  Not that there was much magic going on, as far as Jonas could see. Flickers, yes, he was still having those, same as he had since he was a child, but actual deliberate magic? That, not so much.

  And he’d stayed in Marek for this. He felt a familiar pang of homesickness.

  “Hm. That whole foreign and interesting thing you have going on,” Cato said, in apparent response to absolutely nothing. “You can definitely play that up.”

  Jonas stared at him. “Play it up?”

  Foreign? Interesting? He supposed that his fair hair did stand out among mostly dark-haired Marekers, although his skin was much the same light brown as Cato and his sister Marcia. Cato in particular was distinctly pale for a Mareker, possibly because he rarely bothered to leave his room in daylight.

  Cato shrugged. “You need a thing, right? If you want to get work. A reputation. Sulky, immoral, mysterious past isn’t going to work for you, not with that honest face. Anyway, that’s my thing.”

  “So you’re just making it up?” Jonas said. “It’s all a pretence?”

  He wasn’t sure how he would feel about that. On the one hand, Cato’s behaviour in the embassy – working for the rogue sorcerer Urso in his attempt to overthrow Marek’s government and forcibly replace Marek’s cityangel – had suggested that he did, once you got right down to it, have a small quantity of moral backbone. Cato had backed out, after all; had, with Jonas’ help, disrupted Urso’s magic. Beckett, Marek’s cityangel, was back in their proper place. On the other hand, Cato had been willing to work with Urso and his fellow plotter Daril b’Leandra in the first place, mostly because they’d paid him and without troubling himself over-much about what their plans were. On the other other hand, he’d offered to teach Jonas how to use magic. Which would be more of a mark in his favour if Jonas had been wholly sure that he wanted to be able to use magic. He’d stayed in Marek to do it, right enough, but…

  “Well. I am immoral,” Cato said, with a shrug. “And often sulky. My past – anyone’s past – is only as mysterious as people try to make it, but they seem to like making it more mysterious, who knows why. The lure of the dramatic, I suppose. It’s a good image, in any case. It works, you know?” He paused. “Debonaire. I missed out debonaire.”

  Jonas found himself doubting, again,
whether all this had really been a good idea. The magic, to start with; but also working with Cato, rather than, say, Reb. Reb was certainly more irritable than Cato and Jonas was slightly scared of her, but she was straightforward.

  Cato was looking at him narrowly. “Look. You’re my apprentice, right? I’m not going to be dishonest with you. And that includes the, ah, trimmings of this as a profession, not just the mechanics of it as sorcery. You can’t do sorcery part-time. It’s a full-time endeavour, and that means you need to make a damn living at it, unless you’ve got a private income you’ve not yet mentioned, and that means you need clients. And sometimes, maybe, you need to be a little bit economical with the truth when you’re dealing with them. They’re hiring a sorcerer. Not Cato, nor yet Jonas. Nor Reb, come to that, though I’m not sure she’d see things quite this way. They want a sorcerer of a particular type. And that means you need to make sure you’re giving them that. So’s to be sure they fuckin’ pay you, you understand me?” His Marekhill drawl had dropped for a moment into the tones of the squats that both he and Jonas now lived in. “Because magic can do some interesting things, but it can’t put bread on the table nor yet be exchanged for a flask of wine.”

  “You can’t create things,” Jonas said, finally on slightly firmer ground. Cato had given him a brief theoretical run-down at his first lesson.

  “That’s it. No concrete effects, more’s the pity.”

  “But look.” Jonas’ frustration erupted. “It doesn’t matter if I can’t create things, because I’m not doing any magic. It’s not happening.”

  “Patience, dear boy,” Cato started, then he caught Jonas’ eye, and sat up with a sigh. “Fine, I know. It’s frustrating. But honestly, I’m sure you have it in you. I’m not sure what it is that’s blocking it.”

  He tilted his head on one side and looked Jonas up and down, assessing.

  “Not sure I do have it in me,” Jonas said.

  “You were contributing to that shitshow of Urso’s at the embassy,” Cato said, with absolute conviction. “I would stake my worldly fortune on it.”

  “For what that’s worth,” Jonas muttered.

  Cato beamed cheerfully at him. “What’s money for if not for spending?”

  Cato had only collected half of the money that Urso and Daril had promised him, but he’d blown through almost all of it within three weeks. “And I needed all those ingredients.”

  “And the wine?” Jonas asked.

  “You are a most impolite apprentice,” Cato complained.

  “A magical apprentice who can’t do magic.” Jonas folded his arms.

  “You can,” Cato insisted. “Look. Have you had any more of those flickers of yours lately?”

  Jonas absolutely hated talking about the tiny snippets of future-vision that he referred to, when he had to refer to them at all, as his flickers. He looked away.

  “Have you?” Cato demanded. “I’m not asking for the fun of it. If you want to do this, I do need a little honesty. Or openness, if you prefer.”

  “Two,” Jonas said, still staring at the shelf of ingredient-jars.

  One had been the very-near-future sort, where the flicker barely ended before the thing it predicted. They made Jonas dizzy, but they were handy when playing dice, and they weren’t too bothersome. This one had shown him paying for his beer a second or two before he handed over the money, and had led to him dropping coins all over the bar, but that was nothing worth fussing about. The other, though, had shown Cato and someone Jonas didn’t recognise, talking quietly in the corner of a bathhouse, Cato looking almost affectionate; and it had come with the ringing in his ears which usually meant something important.

  “Oh yes?” Cato said. He leant forwards a little, his eyes alight. “What about, then?”

  “None of your business,” Jonas said. He wouldn’t have told Cato about his flickers at all, for choice. He certainly wasn’t providing any detail. And he felt a bone-deep reluctance to tell Cato that he’d seen anything of Cato’s own future. His flickers didn’t seem like the sort of thing he should share with their subjects.

  “Oh, come on,” Cato said. “Surely as a good apprentice…”

  “I said no,” Jonas said, more loudly than he’d intended.

  Cato’s eyebrows went up, as if he were genuinely startled, then he gave a more theatrical eyeroll and shrugged gracefully. “Well, if it’s that sore of a subject, then by all means, keep your strange secrets. It might help me to work out what’s going on here,” Jonas didn’t believe that for a second, “but I have no intention of insisting. In any case, if they’re still happening, then you can’t have burnt yourself out with that farradiddle of Urso’s.”

  “Could that happen?” Jonas asked. “Could it have happened, I mean?” He had a horrible feeling that he sounded hopeful. He had an even more horrible feeling that he didn’t know whether he was hopeful or not.

  “I have no idea,” Cato said. “The flickers mean that you’re coming at this from an unusual angle. Lacking previous data of that specific type, I can’t be sure. But there’s no records of any other Marek sorcerer burning themself out, so I think no, it’s not likely.”

  Jonas nodded slowly. His own people, the sea-faring Salinas, didn’t hold with magic of any sort. Originally, Jonas had come to Marek to look for a sorcerer who could take his flickers away, so he would be able to join a ship. Cato had convinced him – no, that wasn’t fair; Jonas had chosen – to stay in Marek and try to work with his magic instead. He’d second-guessed that decision at least once a day since, but there wouldn’t be another Salinas ship in the harbour now until the storm season was over.

  Another couple of weeks, and he could hop a ship, if he wanted. Any Salinas ship would take him on for the rest of their voyage and then home. As long as they didn’t know about the flickers, that was.

  “I can still try to take it away, if you want,” Cato said, sounding surprisingly gentle.

  “Thought you said it wouldn’t work,” Jonas said.

  “Well, it most likely wouldn’t. Not entirely. I could probably teach you to suppress it, but if you’re going to do that, you might as well learn to use it first. It’s all much the same skill.” He looked slightly shifty. “Arguably,” he added. “So. If you’re not going to tell me about these flickers,” he paused very slightly, and Jonas glared at him, “we may as well try the summoning spell again.”

  Jonas sighed and picked up a pigeon-feather from the desk. He didn’t see why it was likely to work now if it hadn’t before, but Cato was right; if he was here, he might as well keep trying. He took a pinch of ground ginger, placed it into his cupped left hand, and mixed it with a pinch of wood-shavings.

  “Now,” Cato said, peaceably, lying back down on the bed. “Focusing your mind on what you wish to achieve. And holding the charming Beckett in mind as you make your request.”

  With the tip of the feather, Jonas began to flick the ginger and wood mixture, a little at a time, out of his hand, changing the direction he swept it in each time. He thought of the pigeons outside the window, going about their business; thought of the squats as they looked from the roof, as the pigeons must see them. He thought of Cato’s window frame, and where it was in the building, and where the building was in Marek, imagining the city as a pigeon would see it from on high, the river winding through the middle of it, to the south of where he currently stood. He envisaged one of the pigeons flying down towards the building, in towards Cato’s windowsill. He placed Beckett, the cityangel, the spirit that looked to Marek and made its magic work, in the Marek of his imagination, permeating the city as a half-real half-imagined presence; and for a fraction of a second, he could have sworn he felt Beckett’s grave unmoving regard, saw Beckett in his mind’s eye as Jonas had first met them, confused and part-human in a pub.

  And at the back of it, he felt a great frustration boiling in his skull. A frustration with his flickers, and with his apparent inability to do this thing that Cato had said he could. It wasn’t fair t
o have one and not the other, not when Cato kept telling him that they were connected. A frustration with Beckett, who had brought him to the attention of sorcerers and dragged him into a magical and political confusion that he was still surprised he’d come out of in one piece. A frustration with Cato, lying on the bed watching him with a faint and unconcerned smile. A frustration with this whole damn city, and with the Salinas ships whose welcome would sour if they knew what he could do. He clenched his teeth as it built, still thinking of the squats and the city and the pigeons, and flicked the last little bit of the mixture out of the palm of his hand.

  There was a great fluttering of wings, and pigeons began to pour into the room through the open window. Five, ten, dozens of them crowding into the room, as Jonas stared open-mouthed. Cato, shocked out of his lethargy, sat up just a little and mouthed what was undoubtedly a swearword. Pigeons were flapping around his head, feathers everywhere, a claw tangling in his hair then ripping away, and he felt the beginnings of panic. He’d done this, hadn’t he? How had he done it? How could he undo it?

  There was a roaring in his head, a tightening across his skull, and then…

  … someone tall, and travel-stained, climbing out of a window, a Marek window, Jonas knew with inescapable certainty, with a bag over their back, anxiety around them like a cloud, and the scent of danger…

  He staggered and almost fell with the dizziness that always accompanied a flicker, just as Cato stood up on the bed, batting pigeons aside with his hands. Through the storm of wings, Jonas saw him make a gesture with one hand, then the other, saying something that Jonas couldn’t hear through the noise of the birds. The fluttering died down even as he was saying it, the birds funnelling back out through the window as quickly as they’d come in, until the room was silent again.