39
The Hero
It says something about how much I hated and feared Ra’meth that my first reaction was to try to hit him with a spell.
‘Breath magic?’ He looked amused. ‘That’s really the best we can hope for from the son of the great Ke’heops?’ He made a tiny gesture with one hand and whispered a single syllable. I found myself paralysed. The lord magus turned as he gazed at each of the walls in the mausoleum. ‘Absolutely remarkable. This will make my ascension as clan prince an even more memorable accomplishment for our people.’
Reichis sprang into the air, only to collide with something invisible before falling to the ground. The squirrel cat growled, rearing up to launch himself at the mage, but Ra’meth uttered a second spell and Reichis fell unconscious. ‘I really thought we’d killed all those filthy creatures centuries ago.’
‘How is this possible?’ one of the Sha’Tep conspirators asked, straining against invisible bonds. ‘Mages can’t work spells here in the mines.’
The corners of Ra’meth’s mouth rose in a jackal’s grin. ‘I won’t lie to you. It’s not as easy as it looks. The compounds I had to drink have some rather unpleasant intestinal side effects. Nonetheless, they do counteract the effects of close proximity to the ore.’ The lord magus brought his palms together as if in prayer, then turned them so the backs faced each other before intertwining the fingers together. Suddenly we were all falling, tumbling as if the entire chamber were spinning at great speed. I felt myself hit one of the walls and stuck there as if dozens of hands were holding my limbs immobile.
‘You see,’ Ra’meth said to Abydos and his followers, ‘the reason mages do not mine the ore ourselves is not that it’s impossible for us, simply that it’s beneath us.’
‘Jan’Tep bastard!’ Tusks shouted, but for all his anger and size, he was trapped like a fly inside an invisible web.
The trick to resisting a binding spell isn’t pulling against it on a physical level, you have to set your mind against it, willing it to break apart. With every fibre of my being I commanded the spell to shatter, but I might as well have been trying to crush an ocean with my bare hands.
Ra’meth seemed to find my exertions amusing. ‘I’ve seen your father breach much stronger shackles many times, you know. It’s not that hard – just a matter of will.’ He approached me without a trace of fear that I would break the spell. ‘Come, Kellen of the House of Ke. Are you not your father’s son? Show me the strength of your bloodline.’
‘Leave the boy alone,’ Abydos said, struggling against his own bonds. ‘Kellen has nothing to do with this.’
Ra’meth stopped. ‘Nothing? You do the boy a disservice. None of this would have been possible without him.’ He reached down and took hold of my wrist. To me it felt as if thick iron manacles held it against the wall, but Ra’meth lifted it up effortlessly to scrutinise the bands on my forearms. ‘Ke’heops does excellent work. Very precise. I doubt a hundred mages working in concert could break these counter-sigils.’ He looked up at me. ‘Your father must have risked a great deal of his strength in order to so utterly bind you.’
Well, I thought, fighting off the bitterness that threatened to engulf me, it’s not hard to see where Tennat gets his shining personality.
‘I warn you, do not harm him!’ Abydos shouted, straining so hard I could see the veins in his neck sticking out.
A flicker of pain passed over Ra’meth’s features. ‘That is a remarkable calibre of will you have, Abydos. I don’t think I’ve ever felt someone push so hard against a binding spell. You would have made a powerful mage had you been able to spark your bands.’
‘I don’t need your magic,’ Abydos said, pulling against the invisible shackles holding him to the wall. ‘I don’t need any filthy Jan’Tep spells to deal with you. I’m a man! Do you hear me? A man!’
Again Ra’meth flinched, tensing the muscles of his right hand to draw more of the iron magic through his band. ‘Will you stop that? You’re giving me a headache.’
As my uncle tried to fight back against Ra’meth’s binding spell, I racked my brain to see some kind of way out of this. Shalla was still unconscious, Reichis had passed out on the floor and Ferius was as trapped as I was. My experience of life thus far led me not to expect people to miraculously come to save me, so all that was left was to try to talk my way out of this. ‘You’re not seeing the whole picture, Lord Magus,’ I began.
‘Oh, do shut up, boy.’ He made a twisting motion with the thumb and middle fingers of his left hand and suddenly I couldn’t speak.
Guess that leaves hoping for some kind of miracle. My people aren’t religious by nature, having left such superstitions behind generations ago. So probably no miracles either.
‘Don’t you dare silence him,’ Abydos said. ‘Or are you afraid of words now, you coward?’
‘You can be quiet too,’ Ra’meth replied, and cast the same spell on Abydos.
It’s incredibly difficult to keep multiple spells working at once, so I supposed one hope was that Ra’meth would over-extend himself and one of us could attack. He glanced around the room. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I need to figure out how it all happened.’
Ra’meth turned to the man who’d worn the one-eyed mask. ‘Right. You were doing something … unseemly to poor Shalla when, in a burst of desperation, she broke through the terrible drugs you gave her and hit you with a –’ he looked over at me – ‘lightning spell? Does that sound like something your sister might do? Never mind.’ He turned back to Paetep, the man who’d lost his wife in a cave-in. ‘Everyone likes a good lightning spell.’ With a snap of the thumb and little finger of both hands he sent a bolt of white-and-yellow light that struck the man through the chest.
Static crackled, accompanied by the smell of charred flesh. Paetep was dead.
Breaking through the silencing spell, Abydos unleashed a bellow of pure rage.
‘You really are a strong fellow,’ Ra’meth said, momentarily touching a hand to his brow. ‘Now, what’s next?’ He turned to Sephan. ‘Right. You, my fine and loyal servant, died during an act of sublime courage. Realising you’d done wrong by your house, you tried to stop Abydos from wreaking more havoc on our people. Alas, he strangled you.’
Ra’meth touched the fingers of both hands to his lips and then reached out with them. Sephan writhed, his body sliding slowly up the wall, legs shaking and jerking beneath him. Ra’meth closed his hands into fists and I heard a cracking sound as Sephan’s neck broke.
‘You bastard,’ Abydos said, once again defying the silencing spell. Once more he set himself against the invisible shackles of Ra’meth’s binding spell. With an inner strength I could scarcely fathom, he took a step forward.
‘Stop,’ Ra’meth commanded.
Abydos took a second step. ‘You shouldn’t have come here alone, Lord Magus.’ The air was practically shivering around him, as if the wind itself were trying to hold him still, but Abydos wouldn’t stop. ‘But what mage ever thinks he might need help to kill a Sha’Tep?’ A third step.
‘You will not come closer,’ Ra’meth said, pouring more of his will into the spell. He’d made a mistake though, by binding so many of us; he didn’t have the focus to cast defensive spells.
Step by step, inch by inch, Abydos pushed forward.
‘How is this possible?’ Ra’meth asked, struggling now. ‘You have no magic.’
‘No magic,’ Abydos repeated. Blood began to seep from the corners of his mouth, then his ears, and finally from his mouth. This was killing him, and yet he kept going, his arms now outstretched, reaching for Ra’meth’s throat. ‘Just a man. One Sha-Tep man who is tired of your coward’s magic.’
‘No!’ Ra’meth said, trying to move away even as my uncle’s hands wrapped around his neck.
Suddenly the shackles were gone, from all of us. The binding spells that had continued holding up the bodies of the dead men fell away, and they slumped to the ground. Now that I could move and speak again, I rushed to help Abydos.
My uncle’s eyes were now filled with blood and I knew he couldn’t see me, but as he squeezed the life from Ra’meth, he smiled. His face beamed with so much pride that he looked like the statue of an ancient hero come to life. That smile was still on his face as Ra’meth’s own eyes closed. It was still there too as a half-dozen knives, flying through the air like a flock of birds, struck Abydos in the back, lifted him in the air and carried him away from Ra’meth.
I shouted my uncle’s name and tried to run to him, but a new binding spell was upon me. For a moment he hung suspended. His eyes blinked away the blood. He turned his head to me and said, ‘If I’d had a son …’
I tried to reach for him but my limbs wouldn’t respond. All I could do was watch in horror as the blades slipped out of Abydos’s body and he fell to the ground, eyes staring up at the ceiling. One by one the knives drove down, impaling each of his hands, his feet and finally his chest.
I screamed then, and kept screaming even after a silencing spell prevented any sound from escaping my lips.
For most of my life I had thought my uncle a simple, contented servant, then a vicious traitor to our people. Only in the final seconds of his life had I seen him for the complicated, indomitable man he really was.
A man in blue robes entered the room, ahead of another mage in white. ‘Are you injured, Lord Magus?’ he asked.
Ra’meth rose to his feet, his hand rubbing at his neck. ‘A little bruised, but wiser for it.’ He looked down at my uncle’s broken body. ‘You were right, Abydos. It would have been terribly arrogant for me to come here alone.’