Getting punched in the face hurts a lot more than you might expect.
When somebody’s knuckles connect with your jaw, it feels like four tiny battering rams are trying to cave in your mouth. Your own teeth turn traitor, biting down on your tongue and flooding the back of your throat with the coppery taste of blood. Oh, and that crack you hear? It sounds a lot like what you’ve always imagined bone breaking would sound like, which must be why your head is already spinning a quarterturn clockwise, trying to keep up with your chin before it leaves the scene of the crime.
The worst part? Once your legs recover their balance and your eyes flicker open, you remember that the devastating opponent beating you senseless is a skinny freckle-faced kid who can’t be more than thirteen years old.
‘Shouldn’a stolen my charm,’ Freckles said.
He shuffled forward, causing me to lurch back instinctively, my body having apparently decided it preferred the embarrassment of collapsing in on itself over the risk of getting hit again. Laughter erupted all around us as the crowd of townsfolk who’d come out of their shops and saloons to witness the fight began placing wagers on the outcome.
No one was betting on me; my people might be the best mages on the continent, but it turns out we’re rubbish in a fist fight.
‘I paid you for that charm,’ I insisted. ‘Besides, I put it back in the case! You’ve got no cause to –’
Freckles jerked a thumb up to where Reichis was perched on the swinging sign outside the pawnshop, happily inspecting the silver bell on the charm. Every time Freckles hit me, Reichis rang the bell. This is the sort of thing squirrel cats find hilarious. ‘You think I spent all night picking that lock just so you could give the charm back?’
‘You’re a damned thief,’ I told the squirrel cat.
Freckles’s face went an even brighter shade of red; he must’ve thought I was talking to him. I keep forgetting that other people don’t hear what Reichis says – it all just sounds like a bunch of grunts and growls to them.
Freckles gave a yell and barrelled into me. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground with the wind knocked out of me and my opponent pinning me down.
‘Best get on your feet, kid,’ Ferius Parfax suggested in that frontier drawl of hers. She was leaning against the post where we’d tethered our horses, black hat dipped low over her forehead as though she were taking a nap. ‘Can’t dodge when you’re flat on your back.’
‘You could help, you know,’ I said. Well, that’s what I would have said if I could’ve got any air into my lungs.
Ferius was my mentor in the ways of the Argosi – the mysterious, fast-talking card players who went about the world doing … well, nobody had yet told me exactly what it was they did. But Ferius was supposed to be helping me learn how to survive as an outlaw and stay clear of the bounty mages who were hunting me. She did this mostly by dispensing such brilliant axioms as, ‘Can’t dodge when you’re flat on your back.’ That one annoyed me almost as much as her calling me ‘kid’ all the time.
‘Told you to forget about the charm, kid,’ she said.
I might have heeded her warning if she hadn’t then started up on some Argosi nonsense about ‘the way of water’ that irritated me so much I’d ended up taking advice from a squirrel cat whose solution to everything – when it didn’t involve ripping someone’s throat out with your teeth – was thievery. So really it was both of their faults that I’d ended up on the ground with Freckles on top of me doing his best to knock me senseless.
One thing I’ve learned about non-magical fighting is that you need to protect your face, which I was trying to do. Unfortunately my opponent just kept swatting my hands away and then proceeded to punch me again. Ancestors, how does this kid hit so hard?
Freckles shifted his hips, shimmying forward as he grabbed my wrist and wrapped one of his hands around my index finger. ‘Everyone knows the price for thievin’,’ he said as he slowly bent it back.
Panic overtook me even before the pain. Every Jan’Tep spell requires forming precise somatic shapes with your hands. You can’t do that with broken fingers.
I bucked my hips as hard as I could and desperation gave me just enough strength to throw Freckles over the top of me, sending him face first into the dirt. I quickly flipped myself over and got to my feet. Freckles was already waiting for me. ‘Gonna bleed you,’ he said.
Gonna bleed you. Three words that perfectly summed up the hot, arid hellhole they call the Seven Sands: a patchwork desert that wasn’t much more than an endless dusty quilt stained with backwoods little towns filled with people who were rough, mean and gave up any pretence at being civilised at the drop of a hat. Not that most of them could afford a hat.
Freckles, evidently concerned that I hadn’t heard him the first time, declared even louder, ‘Gonna bleed you real good.’
My hands dropped to my sides – a reflex developed from a life spent learning magic rather than getting into physical altercations: you can’t cast a spell if your hands are balled up into fists like a barbarian’s. I relaxed my fingers, letting them reach into the powder pouches attached to the sides of my belt. Just a pinch was all I needed: a dash of red, a smidgen of black. Toss them in the air, form the somatic shapes with my hands, utter the one-word incantation, and Freckles would get a taste of what he’d been dishing out to me up till now.
Most Jan’Tep mages have bigger and better spells than I do, but I make up for my lack of ability with fast hands. I’m what my people derisively call a spellslinger – a mage who combines whatever paltry magic he can muster with every trick he can learn to stay alive. In my case that means a bit of breath magic mixed with a touch of exploding powders. Individually they don’t amount to much, but put them together with perfect timing and you can create a blast that’ll tear through an oak door like it was wet paper. So yeah, Freckles was about to get the surprise of his life.
‘No magic, kid. Remember?’ Ferius said.
Oh. Right.
The reason I’d wanted that quieting charm in the first place was that every time I cast a spell, it sent out a sort of mystical echo that let hextrackers – mages who specialise in hunting down other mages – follow our trail. Since avoiding them was kind of my life’s ambition at this point, Ferius had insisted I stop relying on magic to get myself out of trouble. Problem was, Freckles was coming at me again, fist cocked and ready to send me to my ancestors.
‘You win,’ I said, putting up my hands and backing away. ‘I’ll give you back the charm and you can keep the money.’ Possibly not my proudest moment.
‘Gonna take the charm, gonna take the money,’ Freckles said. Then he gestured to where Reichis was perched on the sign. ‘Gonna skin that animal of yours too. Make a hat out of his fur or maybe just light him on fire and watch him run till he can’t run no more.’
Those words sent a cold, hard knot twisting in my stomach. Not long ago I’d witnessed a mage using ember magic to set fire to Reichis’s tribe. That image was still burned into me, and so was the look of glee on the killer’s face. It was a lot like the one Freckles wore right now.
Ferius says fear and anger are two sides of the same coin. Freckles had just flipped mine.
A stabbing pain started to build in my left eye, like a headache, only a lot worse. I tried blinking it away, but the ache kept getting stronger. The morning sun faded, but the shadows remained, grew, became bloated as the world darkened all around me, the way it does when dreams drift into nightmares. Only I was fully awake.
‘Get a hold of yourself, kid,’ Ferius warned. She’d seen this happen to me before, but her warning came too late, because now her voice sounded as if it were coming from far away, like she was just a memory of someone I once knew.
Freckles’s laugh, on the other hand, kept getting louder and louder in my ears. His smile got bigger and bigger, contorting his appearance. When I get like this, all I can see are the ugly parts of people. The mean parts. It was as if I were watching Freckles turn into the worst version of himself he could ever become: the one who liked to hurt things, the one who would giggle as he set fire to Reichis.
The rage inside me got so bad I stopped feeling the pain in my eye and didn’t even notice that I’d dug my hands back into the pouches at my sides until I saw the particles of red and black powder floating in the air in front of me. Just before they collided, my hands formed the spell’s somatic shape: bottom two fingers pressed into the palm in the sign of restraint; fore and middle fingers pointed straight out, the sign of flight; and thumb pointing to the heavens, the sign of, ‘Ancestors, please don’t let me blow my hands off.’
‘Carath,’ I said, my lips perfectly enunciating each syllable. A fiery bolt of rage and fury shot out – not enough to kill, but more than enough to hurt. The red and black flames entwined in the air like two angry snakes and flew right past Freckle’s shoulder, scorching the outer wall of the pawnshop. It would have been an impressive display of power if that had been my target. Turns out that getting hit in the head is really, really bad for your aim.
The pain in my eye disappeared all at once, and the dark visions assailing me faded, leaving behind the plain, dusty street and the dismayed faces of the onlookers. The attacks come and go quickly like that, leaving me shaken and stumbling – not exactly the best condition to be defending yourself.
Whatever shock and outrage Freckles had felt, he quickly set it aside. Before I could get my arms up to protect my face, he delivered a sharp right hook just above my left cheek. His fist came away with a trace of blood on it. His look of smug self-satisfaction turned to confusion when he noticed smudges of pale beige mesdet paste on his knuckles. He glanced back at me, and I guess that’s when he saw the black markings encircling my left eye like twisting vines made from pure darkness.
‘Shadowblack,’ he whispered.
The word spread through the crowd like fire on dry leaves.
‘The demon plague!’ one of the onlookers declared.
Most of them drew back in horror, but Freckles was evidently made of sterner stuff. He didn’t even sound scared when he said, ‘Figures a thief would be devil-cursed.’
If they’d given me a chance to explain, I could have told them that the shadowblack wasn’t actually a plague or even a curse, but more of a mystical disease that afflicted a small number of my people and wasn’t, to the best of my knowledge, contagious. I would’ve left out the parts where it gradually drives you insane with maddening visions until your magic becomes a danger to everyone around you and that any Jan’Tep mage who crossed my path was duty-bound to kill me.
None of that mattered though, because by then Freckles had grabbed me by the throat with both hands. I yanked at his wrists, desperate to break free, but his grip was too strong. My throat spasmed, fighting for breath. The world started to shrink around me. It occurred to me then that there’s probably an ingenious way to get out of a chokehold.
I should really learn it sometime.