Reichis and I made our way back to the edge of town and returned to the lush swampy forest that should never have been able to thrive in such a dry climate. I’d got so used to the wide open desert of the Seven Sands that the way the foliage grew so thick, with everything closing in around me, felt eerily threatening.
‘So, you’ve come back to talk at my spirits, eh, spellslinger?’
I glanced around, trying without success to see where the voice had come from. ‘I need your help, Mamma Whispers. I need your magic.’
She walked out from behind a tree, a young girl – a child – who had no business looking so at ease in this strange, forbidding place. She gave a shake of her head, almost toppling her ragged top hat. ‘I told you, spellslinger, Mamma Whispers doesn’t have no magic. She just whispers to the spirits, and sometimes they listen.’
Reichis chittered on my shoulder. ‘Somebody needs to tell “Mamma Whispers” that she talks like an old lady.’
She tilted her head and then laughed. ‘Well, maybe somebody ought to tell the squirrel cat that he talks like a gap-toothed frontier bandit.’
‘You can hear what he says?’ I’d never encountered anyone other than the Dowager Magus who understood his growls and chitters.
‘I told you, boy, I don’t got no magic. The spirits, though, they tell me things.’
I went to her and knelt down, taking one of her small hands in mine. I had no idea if this was going to ingratiate me to her or get me killed, but I felt like a gesture of some sort was necessary. ‘The man who’s behind the shadowblack plague, I have to stop him, but he’s hidden somewhere and I can’t find him. Could your spirits help me track him?’
She took her hand away. ‘Spirits don’t belong to nobody but themselves. You want their help, you gotta learn to ask real nice.’
‘Can you show me?’
‘Well now, I don’t know.’ Suddenly she twirled around and her voice rose to a loud bellow. ‘Any spirits here want to talk to this spellslinger? He ain’t a bad one, I think, just stupid sometimes.’
Not the most hearty endorsement of my virtues.
‘Well?’ she shouted again. ‘I asked if any spirits want to take pity on this boy. Maybe show him a better path through this nasty world?’
‘Could we—’
She cut me off with a wave of her hand and a dirty look, so I shut my mouth. With her arms outstretched like the arrow on a weather vane, she kept spinning around, alternately whistling and whispering into the night air. ‘Ah, ah, ah,’ she said at last, bobbing her head. ‘I hear one now. Yes, yes. A strong spirit. Bold. A touch foolish though –’ she opened her eyes and glanced at me – ‘but maybe that’s to be expected.’
‘Uh … thanks?’
She came closer. ‘Now we gotta teach you how to talk to them, yeah? Have to show you how to whisper, whisper, whisper to them.’ She grabbed my forearm and looked down at one of the bands there. ‘You work some breath magic, spellslinger?’
‘I do, a little.’
‘That’s good. That’s real good. This here spirit, she’s a sasutzei: a wind spirit. They like the breath magic best – better than the other nasty kinds you Jan’Tep mess with.’ She looked up at me and her eyes narrowed. ‘But you gotta learn to make the whispers just right, you understand? What we do, it ain’t just words. Anyone can make words. We make whispers – totally different thing. You think you can do that?’
How was I supposed to answer a question I could barely understand? I had a sense that my answer mattered, to her and to this sasutzei spirit. ‘My friend is hurt,’ I said. ‘Other people are hurt too. I think … I think there’s something very bad happening out there and I need to know what it is so I can put a stop to it.’
Mamma Whispers shrugged. ‘So what’s that mean to me?’
‘It means I’ll do anything it takes to help my friend, so stop wasting my time and teach me the damned spell.’
Her eyes went wide for a moment, then the young girl who called herself Mamma Whispers leaned her head back and laughed up at the heavens. ‘Ah, the spirits gonna like you, spellslinger. I think you gonna whisper real good.’
For all her backwoods mysticism, Mamma Whispers was right about one thing: whisper magic was nothing like the Jan’Tep incantations I knew. The spell – if you could call it that – wasn’t made up of words or syllables, but almost impossibly subtle movements of breath, through the mouth, passing by the lips, sometimes whistling through the front teeth.
‘You’re doing it wrong,’ she said.
‘How? I’m trying to do it exactly like you showed me.’
She shook her head impatiently. ‘That’s the fool’s way. Stop trying to be like everybody else. Let the whisper come from your belly, from your need, from your promise to do what you say you’ll do.’ She wagged a finger at me. ‘The spirits don’t like liars, so stop trying to lie to them by pretending to be me.’
Okay, that made sense.
No, of course it didn’t.
‘Just tell her,’ Mamma Whispers said, her voice gentler now. ‘Tell the sasutzei what you want. That’s the spell.’
‘I need to know where the obsidian worms are,’ I said to the night air around us. ‘I need to see where they come from.’
She slapped my arm surprisingly hard. ‘Not with words, with whispers.’
‘But you said—’
‘I said, you said … Stop saying! The spirits, they don’t like loud things. That’s why they come out here where it’s quiet, where no people are. They don’t need you talking at them, just whisper!’
If it had been as simple as just whispering the words, that would have been easy. But it wasn’t, as I discovered when she smacked me again. ‘That’s just talking quiet.’
Finally I tried something else. I tried to just think of my need – not as words in my head or even pictures, but as the need itself, the simple desire, to understand the obsidian worms, to be able to see them. As I did this, I found my breathing changed, and I let myself whisper without making the words, letting my need speak for itself.
‘Ah,’ Mamma Whispers said, ‘that’s good. That’s real good, spellslinger.’
Reichis growled. ‘Something’s happening. What’s going on?’
‘You be quiet now, mister squirrel cat. The spirits got no troubles with you.’
‘I don’t feel any different,’ I said, but all of a sudden my right eye – the one without the shadowblack – started to itch. At first it was nothing; like a light breeze blowing on it, but then the sensation increased in intensity until it felt like someone was melting ice on the surface of my eyeball. ‘What’s happening to me?’
‘You asked to see, and now the sasutzei is trying to show you.’
I blinked furiously, trying to get rid of the sensation, but then suddenly the pain went away and I saw the grey-green of the trees and grasses again, only … I saw something else too: a thin black strand, like a spider’s web, glimmering in the air before me. It travelled from far to the east of us, from somewhere in town, all the way through the air to the west until it faded into the distance. ‘What am I seeing?’ I asked.
‘You wanted to follow the black worms, so the sasutzei, she’s showin’ you the thread that connects each half together.’
‘So I can … I can trace it, follow it to find where it leads?’
‘Maybe,’ Mamma Whispers replied, ‘but maybe you need to stop looking so close.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look around you, spellslinger. Look all around.’
I did, and then I realised that there wasn’t just one black thread. There were dozens, everywhere, passing through us, above us … ‘How could Dexan have implanted so many worms into his victims? There would be a massive panic!’
A dark look passed across Mamma Whispers’s young face. ‘They’re too clever, the ones behind these dirty tricks.’ She tapped me on the temple. ‘They let you see one or two of the victims to make you and the Argosi believe you know what’s goin’ on, but they use nasty magic to hide the other infected so you never see how far their evil work has already spread.’
So this wasn’t just about blackmail schemes or even revenge. Whatever was going on, Dexan’s clients had something much bigger planned. ‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘I have to follow these threads to find the man responsible.’
‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘You carry a spirit now.’ Mamma Whispers chuckled as she tapped first my left cheekbone then my right. ‘Now you got the shadowblack in one eye and the sasutzei in the other!’
Reichis sniffed at my face. I pushed his snout away. ‘How long will the … sasutzei stay with me?’ I asked, not sure how comfortable I was having some strange spirit take up residence in my eye. I had enough trouble with disturbing visions already.
‘Oh, she stick with you as long as you keep her interest, boy. Whisper to her once in a while, and maybe she show you what others don’t see. Just be careful you don’t ask for the wrong things, spellslinger. The sasutzei, she gets powerful angry sometimes.’
Great, because all I’d needed to make my life complete was to have an angry spirit inside my eyeball.
‘Go on,’ she said, pushing me away with her small hands. ‘Go on to your noisy world with your noisy troubles. Go be a hero.’ She glanced around as if searching for something. ‘Or maybe a dead man. I don’t know which.’