45
The Voice of Fire
The next thing that happened was that Reichis went berserk. The sight of his fellow squirrel cats dead all around the clearing tipped his crazy-but-controlled ferocity into a heedless rage that swept over him so completely that I swear I nearly got caught up in it too.
‘Reichis …’ I warned, seeing the muscles bunching in his haunches as he prepared to attack. ‘Wait. We need to—’
Whatever he growled at me then was too primal. It didn’t have any human equivalent so I couldn’t understand it. I tried to grab at him but he was too fast, kicking up dirt and brush behind him as he raced towards Ra’meth. There was a moment when I thought he might have a chance – his speed and rage propelled him at his enemy like a spell. If he just got his teeth into the mage’s neck before he could raise his arms, he could – but no. Even as the squirrel cat leaped into the air, Ra’meth turned and uttered a single word. Reichis froze, his body swaying in the air as if he were hanging from a rope. ‘They really are fierce little vermin, aren’t they?’ Ra’meth flicked his fingers and the squirrel cat flew through the air before his body crashed into a tree. I heard the sounds of bones snapping.
I should have run. I should have taken off and hidden and tried to come up with some plan to survive this. I simply couldn’t. The sound of Reichis’s broken growls of pain echoed over and over in my ears, deafening me to the sound of the flames, of the trees creaking as they fell, of everything but his pain and my heart beating faster and faster and faster. Finally another sound broke through – a growl that came from my own lips. I dug my hands into my pockets and pulled out more powders than I’d used the other times I’d cast the carath spell. I flung them into the air and made the somatic forms and spoke the word. The explosion lit up the night sky, surrounding Ra’meth in a perfect sphere of fire. It raged on for a second, then another, but finally it faded away. The mage was unharmed. ‘Fascinating,’ he said, taking a step towards me. ‘Do it again.’
There was no fear in him, only in me. There was also no point in holding anything back. I used even more powder this time – so much that I felt it burn the skin on my fingers even before I spoke the word. The explosion followed the line of my index and forefingers right for Ra’meth’s heart. Again my spell struck true, again he shrugged it off.
‘Remarkable,’ he said, as the last trickle of flame faded. ‘And you escaped the thirstfire in the barn. Impressive all round. I take it since you’re here that you also dealt with my sons. Did you kill Tennat?’
‘I figured having you for a father was punishment enough.’
He gave a good-natured laugh. I took advantage of the moment’s distraction to fire the spell again. Even with only a tiny shred of his focus, he could keep the shield up. I wondered for the first time whether maybe Ra’meth had been wrong all these years. Maybe he was more powerful than my father, he’d just never had the courage to challenge him to a duel.
‘That little spell of yours, Kellen,’ he said, head tilted as he looked across the fire-strewn ground at me, ‘it’s just the first-form breath spell channelling the explosion from some sort of chemical powders, isn’t it? Truly ingenious. It reminds me of those old spellslingers who wandered around, combining a few little spells with other tricks to make their way through the world. Quite a romantic notion, don’t you think?’ He cast his own spell then – a minor pain cantrip that ought to do little more than cause an itch.
It felt as if my insides had turned to ice and I screamed.
‘The problem is, however, that there’s a difference between a boy with a spell and a real mage. The true Jan’Tep is complete. He can attack but also defend. He knows how to weaken his opponent’s power while enhancing his own.’ He cast another spell, and this time I was thrown backwards through the air until my back struck the same tree as Reichis had and I found myself on the ground next to him.
I gasped for air, tasting blood in my mouth. Ra’meth ignored my moans. ‘I don’t hate you,’ he said, turning to survey his handiwork. ‘In fact, I admire your daring. You’re a better man than your father, I’ll give you that. All he’s ever done is treat magic like a little castle he builds around himself, brick by brick, hoping to climb its pathetic walls to become clan prince. And for what purpose? None. He would sit back and have us live here like frightened animals, hoping the real predators pass us by in search of better prey.’ He turned, pointing south. ‘I would see us be a great power again, Kellen. I would see the Daroman king begging at our feet.’
I don’t know if he was waiting for some sort of clever retort from me, but given I could barely breathe, he was going to be waiting a long time.
Finally he turned away again. ‘We were meant to be the rulers of this world, Kellen.’
I looked around and noticed a large outcropping of rock a few feet away. Reaching down, I took hold of Reichis as gently as I could. He groaned from the pain of his broken ribs. At least he’s alive. Now keep him that way. I crawled, slowly, quietly, towards the rocks.
‘I wish my sons were more like you,’ Ra’meth said. ‘For all I’ve given them, they are little more than dull-witted bullies. They giggle and preen like complacent fools, content for others to be weak rather than making the sacrifice to become powerful themselves.’ He turned and fired another spell that struck me in the side. Suddenly I was rolling on the ground, trying to protect Reichis. When the force dissipated, I continued my pathetic, almost instinctive effort to reach the dubious safety of the rocks.
‘I could make something of you, you know,’ he called out as I cowered behind them. ‘You’ve earned that opportunity, with your cleverness and your daring. Besides, our people always love a good story about the brave young orphan boy taken in by the master of a great house. We just need to make you an orphan first.’
How about I make your sons orphans instead? I removed my pack and reached inside for Ferius’s deck of steel cards. Every shield spell has gaps. Maybe if I flung the cards fast enough, at different parts of the shield, one might slip through. The odds weren’t good of course, but I was all out of ideas.
‘I know I should kill you, Kellen. It’s always better to wipe every last trace of your enemy off the face of the earth. We should have done that with the Mahdek centuries ago. Now we jump in our beds at every mention of their name, fearing that somewhere out there lurks one more, waiting for their chance.’
I laid the cards out in front of me. I’d have to time things perfectly, Even then, will it do any good? Ra’meth could just keep his shield spell up until I ran out of cards.
‘But damn it all, boy, I really think you and I could make a go of it. I need an enforcer for my house. Ra’fan hides behind the work of others. Ra’dir has the stomach for violence but not the intellect, and Tennat … well, let’s just say that if you feel you must kill him in order to accept my offer, it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker.’
Who talks about their children this way? I was in serious danger of sympathising with Tennat.
A creeping motion from the shadows caught my eye and I saw a squirrel cat – not Reichis – crawling on its belly towards us. The creature was bleeding from wounds all over its body, and its fur was charred by fire. The poor thing is looking for a place to die, I thought, and picked up one of the cards. Did I have the nerve to give it a quick death? The squirrel cat got close to me and I recognised her as Reichis’s mother.
I reached out a hand to help her reach the protection of the rocks, only to have her sink her teeth into my forearm. ‘Damn it!’ I swore. I was getting tired of being bitten.
‘Forgive me,’ she said in a mix of chitters and desperate gasps for air.
I can understand her, I realised. Maybe it was through breaking the skin, getting their saliva into your bloodstream, that the squirrel cats created whatever bond allowed communication with a human.
‘My name is Chitra,’ she said, and slunk a little closer to Reichis. I understood without her having to tell me that she was using her last moments of life so that she could die next to her son.
‘Well, Kellen?’ Ra’meth called out. ‘What do you think? Let’s do this: you kill your father for me, and I’ll kill Tennat for you. We both win, and the world will be a better place for it.’
Chitra gave a cough that sent blood dripping down her chin. ‘Humans …’ she said as she dragged herself a little closer, ‘… are something of a disappointment, at times.’
I reached out to her. ‘What can I do?’
She nuzzled my hand. ‘Take what I have to give.’
My hand came away bloody. ‘I … I don’t understand.’
‘The red powder,’ she said. ‘Mix my blood in it.’
I pulled the pouches out from my pockets and reached into the one with the red powder. ‘What will this do?’
Chitra ignored the question, instead collapsing next to Reichis. She extended a paw and placed it on his muzzle. ‘He will be so full of anger, this one. You must be his caution, as he will be your courage. You will teach him when to flee and he will teach you when to fight.’
‘I …’ What could I say to her? We were about to die, and Reichis could barely tolerate me. ‘I will,’ I said finally. ‘I promise.’
She gave a strange little cough, and more blood dripped from her mouth. It took me a moment to realise she’d laughed. ‘Perhaps you should have him teach you how to lie too. You don’t seem to be very good at it.’ The sides of her mouth pulled up a little bit, making a weary smile. ‘You must be firm negotiating with him. He will steal the rest from you, anyway.’
Reichis’s eyes blinked open for a moment, the little black orbs finally seeming to understand what he saw. He let out a moan then, so full of pain and sorrow it pulled me into it, drowning me. I had never known love, I realised then, and now could only watch as it slipped away.
‘Keep him from extortion and blackmail, if you can,’ Chitra went on, her chitters almost inaudible over the crackling of the flames around us. ‘He has many bad habits, this one.’ She lay her muzzle down on his. ‘But every once in a while he makes his mother so very proud.’
My hand wouldn’t stop shaking, even as I tried to mix her blood in with the red powder. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, blinded by the tears filling my eyes as I watched the life fade from her. ‘What am I supposed to do?’
‘The Mahdek believed that magic should be used to give voice to the spirits of the world,’ she said, barely a whisper now. ‘Let yours speak for me.’ Chitra let out one last sigh, in which everything that was left of her settled upon the dying earth. Inside the pouch at my side, the red powder glistened and smouldered with a heat that threatened to set it aflame.
A blast of fire lit the air above my head. ‘I don’t believe you’re taking my offer seriously, Kellen.’
‘No, really, I’m considering it,’ I said. I was lying of course, but so was Ra’meth. This was all a game for him – one last little piece to take from Ke’heops. When he killed my father, he wanted to be able to look down at him and say, ‘See? Your son betrayed you. He was willing to murder you in your own house in exchange for a room in mine.’
I looked down to where Reichis still lay on the ground next to his dead mother. His own breathing was shallow, his eyes flat as they looked up at me.
‘I suppose you’re right to refuse,’ Ra’meth called out, even though I hadn’t said anything. ‘An arrangement like ours would be unlikely to last.’ He sent a blast of flame that lit up the outcrop of rock where I hid. ‘Come then. Stand and face me one last time – one final act of courage before you die. When you enter the grey passage, stand tall before our ancestors and tell them you faced death without fear. This is the greatest gift I can give you, Kellen. A clean death. A Jan’Tep death.’
I reached my hands into the pouches, still feeling the stickiness of Chitra’s blood on the fingers of my right hand. ‘I’m coming,’ I said.
I rose, very slowly, and faced Ra’meth. He glowed with red, swirling magic all around him, an endless ocean cresting and crashing and cresting again. It was like watching a painting of one of the first lords magi come to life. He nodded to me, not unkindly. ‘Good. Good. It’s better this way. You weren’t meant for this world, Kellen. You were meant for—’
My hands came up into the air, the powders floating, glimmering for an instant in the light of Ra’meth’s own magic. I waited, for just an instant, letting the first sparks ignite as the grains of black and blood-red powder collided against each other, then I formed the somatic shapes with my hands and said the words, slowly and deliberately, wanting them to ring out into the night sky. ‘Carath Chitra.’
Ra’meth brought his own hands up, fingers shaping the shield that had so effortlessly protected him from my earlier attacks. He looked disappointed.
The explosion flew at him, the flames ragged, like claws grasping at the invisible barrier of his shield. ‘I told you, boy,’ he said, ‘there’s more to magic than –’
His words were cut off as the two spells collided. The air all around him turned into red and black cinders as if his shield had begun to burn from the inside out. Then another rush, as it collapsed completely, and the fire of Chitra’s life and death raged all around him, the blood-red flames biting at his clothes, his flesh. I heard Ra’meth scream once, then he fell silent in a heap on the ground.
Chitra’s blood had given voice to the rage of her people.
I looked down at where Ra’meth lay on the forest floor. There was an almost perfect circle around him where the shield had kept out most of the blast until right before it collapsed. I waited until I saw the rise and fall of his chest to make sure he was still alive, then I reached into the pouches in my pocket for more powder to finish the job.
Something was wrong with my vision. The forest, or what remained of it, was still right there in front of me. Burnt trees and the charred corpses of men and squirrel cats littered the ground. Nothing moved, and yet, when I closed my right eye and gazed out through my left – the one with the shadowblack marks around it – the violence came to life. Screams of pain, of rage, of dying echoed in my ears. I shuddered, not because the sights made me sick, but because they made me feel good.
‘Intoxicating, isn’t it, kid?’ I turned to see Ferius Parfax walking towards me, leading two horses with her.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I replied, and turned my attention back to Ra’meth.
‘Your sister’s going to be fine, in case you’re wondering,’ Ferius said. ‘Squirrel cat’s alive too.’
It felt as if the marks around my left eye were moving, writhing under the skin, cold and yet burning at the same time. It made me feel alive. Powerful. ‘What about you?’ I asked. The words sounded as if they were coming from someone else. Someone weak and stupid. Someone who was in danger of forgetting that his enemy was at his feet, his life in his hands. My fingertips brushed the powders in my pockets. In a few seconds I was going to end Ra’meth for all time. I wouldn’t fear him ever again.
Ferius rolled her shoulders back, then tilted her head from side to side. ‘I’m a little sore. Nothing I ain’t used to.’ She walked over to stand close to me. Too close. ‘Come on, kid. You proved you’re the big man. Time to go do something real.’
Something real? She still didn’t know when to stop mocking people. I looked down at the man who’d murdered my uncle, who’d tried to take over my clan and tried to kill my sister. ‘I have to end him.’
I felt Ferius’s hand on my arm. ‘You want to end him. It’s not the same thing. Look at him, Kellen.’
I did. Scorched hair and skin showed through the burnt patches in Ra’meth’s robes where the explosion had broken through his shields. He was still unconscious, but I thought I heard him groan.
‘Wait long enough and maybe he’ll wake up,’ Ferius said, practically whispering in my ear. ‘If you’re real lucky he’ll reach out a hand, maybe twitch a finger. You can tell yourself that he was about to cast another spell.’
‘He might.’
Her hand squeezed my arm. ‘No, he won’t. Not with those injuries. It’ll be months before he can work a spell again, and you know it.’
‘Shut up, Ferius,’ I said, my eyes still on the form of the man at my feet. Say something, I begged him. Make a move.
‘You’d be within your rights,’ Ferius said. ‘I’ve travelled the length and breadth of this continent and there ain’t a court anywhere that would condemn you for what you’re about to do.’
‘Then why are you talking me to death?’
She spun me around to face her. ‘Because the Argosi don’t got no country, kid. But we got our own ways, and this ain’t one of them. You have to decide now which road you want to walk.’
‘It’s the shadowblack,’ I pleaded, wishing she would get away from me. I had to force my hands to stay in my pockets even as they itched to come out and toss the powders into the air and put an end to her annoying, self-important, incessant philosophising.
‘The shadowblack?’ She laughed. It was a strange sound, and I knew something about her in that laugh. Ferius wasn’t laughing because she thought this was funny. She wasn’t even laughing because she wanted to. She was laughing because this was how Ferius Parfax told the world she refused to be afraid of it. ‘Imagine if you could just go and catch a disease that meant you could do whatever you wanted, kill whoever you wanted. No guilt, no accountability. Now, wouldn’t that be just fine?’
‘I’m not imagining this!’ I shouted, wishing I could make her leave before I did something I’d hate myself for. ‘The shadowblack is real. It’s in me!’
She grabbed me by the neck with her other hand, squeezing. Damn, but she had a strong grip. ‘We all got ugliness inside us, Kellen. Yours is worse? Then fight harder. Figure it out. But don’t you ever pretend you don’t have a choice.’
My fists clenched and I felt the powder rubbing against the skin of my palms. ‘You don’t understand! He killed Reichis’s people. He tried to kill my sister. You can’t know what that’s like. You can’t –’
Suddenly she squeezed harder and I was having trouble drawing breath. ‘I can’t understand? Is that right, Kellen, son of Ke’heops, child of the Jan’Tep?’
She’d never referred to me in such a formal way. She’d said it the same way she said everything, as if it were all some mildly curious, sardonic observation about the world around her, as if nothing really mattered. The darkness in her eyes told a different story. I knew now, finally, the secret she’d kept hidden behind her smirks and jokes. Somehow, in that knowing, I felt the dark rage inside me slip away.
Ever since she’d shown up, I’d wondered who Ferius Parfax really was – what she really was. Despite all her claims about being a simple Argosi wanderer, her denials about being a Daroman spy were so feeble that all it did was persuade everyone – me included – that she probably was working for their king. I always wondered why somebody so clever, so full of tricks, did such a bad job of convincing people she wasn’t a spy. Now I knew. ‘You aren’t Daroman,’ I said.
‘Never claimed to be.’
‘And you’re not just an Argosi either.’
‘Sure I am, kid.’ She reached into her waistcoat and fanned out a deck of cards. ‘See?’
‘Show me,’ I said.
She tilted her head. ‘Show you what?’
‘Show me your card. The real one.’
Without her hand moving at all, one of the cards slowly slid up from the others. I took it and turned it over. It was a jack, just like others I’d seen in the deck, but not a septagram for the Jan’Tep or a sword for the Daromans or even a chalice for the Berabesq. This one depicted a black leaf on the top-right corner. ‘You’re Mahdek,’ I said.
‘Now that’s just silly, kid. Everybody knows there ain’t no more Mahdek.’
‘Because my people massacred them. Only … no one can massacre an entire people, can they? Some have to escape. Some wouldn’t have been in the cities when the attacks came.’
Ferius took the card back and packed the deck back into her waistcoat. ‘Oh, they got rid of us all right. There isn’t enough Mahdek blood in the world to bring my people back. What’s left are just … ghosts, I guess you could say.’
‘Did you …?’ I hesitated to ask the question, not sure I could live with the answer. Ferius had changed my life. She’d given me so much, I couldn’t bear to think that she was just as cold and mean as everyone else in the world had turned out to be. ‘Did you come to get revenge? Is that why you’re here? To kill my people for what they did to yours?’
She leaned back against the side of one of the horses and pulled out a smoking reed from inside her waistcoat. ‘Toss a little of that powder together, would you, kid?’
Not knowing what else to do, I did. It created a tiny burst of flame in the air. With the speed of a whip cracking she reached out the reed and the end caught fire. ‘When I was a girl,’ she said, taking in a breath of the smoke, ‘my grandma and grandpa – my folks had died a while before – anyway, they made me swear the same oath they’d taken, the same one my folks had taken and every one of us had taken since the days when that old clan prince of yours and his mages killed off my people.’
‘You swore revenge,’ I said, almost surprised to find there actually was one paranoid fear my people held that turned out to be true.
Ferius nodded, sending twin puffs of smoke from her nostrils. ‘That’s just the way it is sometimes.’ She motioned towards Ra’meth. ‘Blood for blood.’
‘So all of this … saving my life—’
She cut me off. ‘My grandparents died when I was still too young to fend for myself. We’re not a long-lived people, I guess. Life without a land of your own is hard. I wandered the long desert roads for a while, not knowing what I was doing. Pretty soon I was at the end of my rope. Starving, dying of thirst, covered in a dozen wounds from one scrape or another. I was pretty much done for.’
I tried to imagine what that would be like – to be completely alone in the world. ‘The Argosi,’ I said. ‘They took you in.’
She chuckled. ‘What a bunch of weirdos. Everything is cards with them. Cards for this, cards for that. But they saved me that day. Kept saving me too, every time I’d run off and nearly get myself killed. Every time they did –’ she reached into her waistcoat and pulled out her deck of blood-red cards – ‘they made me take one of these.’
‘They’re debts? For saving your life?’
She nodded. ‘Every one of these is a life I have to pay back.’
I reached into my own trousers and pulled out the dark red card she’d forced me to take the day she’d gone on about debts. ‘And this is a life I have to pay back.’
‘Yep.’
‘So … you just gave up on revenge for your people?’
Ferius looked up at the night sky, where the flames still burning around us lit up her face, making her suddenly terrifying. ‘No, kid, I just figured out that no matter how many Jan’Tep I killed, I’d never be able to bring my own people back.’ She dropped the smoking reed and stamped it out with the heel of her boot. ‘The Argosi believe that the world hangs on a delicate balance. Some things – like the way your people abuse magic, like the way the Daroman roll over the rest of the world with their empire – those things bring us closer to destruction. Other things, sometimes just little things, they help push us the other way. Reckon if I can’t bring my people back, least I can do is save the world.’ She reached out a hand and held my arm, just for a moment. ‘Feel like helping?’
I reeled back, as much from her words as her unusual gentleness. How could anyone live that kind of life? How could she sit back and let the people who had murdered her tribe just keep living in the same cities they’d stolen from them? I looked down at Ra’meth and remembered the look on my uncle’s face as the bolt of fire had burst through his chest. ‘I don’t think I’m like you, Ferius.’
‘Never asked you to be.’ She walked over to where Reichis lay on the ground and very gently scooped him up and placed him in a bag that she slung over her shoulder. ‘Tough little bastard, isn’t he?’ She looked over to me. ‘You’ve got a decision to make, kid. There’s a little shack a few miles out of town. Fella there knows some healing ways. Figure he can help the squirrel cat. He also brews up some kind of drink that makes a sane person’s head spin round and round. It’s a safe bet that I’ll be there a few hours. If you want to learn the Argosi path, come find me.’ She put a foot into the stirrup and got up on the horse. ‘If not, well, then I reckon that’s one less card I have to worry about.’
She started turning the horse around and I was struck by the thought that I might never see her again. ‘Wait,’ I said, struggling to find some excuse to make her slow down. ‘The card I saw you painting at the oasis … the dowager magus thought you were here because there was something that you believed could make civilisations rise or fall. Was she right?’
She turned back. ‘Canny old bird, wasn’t she?’ Ferius reached a hand carefully across her chest so as not to disturb Reichis and pulled a card from her waistcoat. ‘Finished this while I was waiting to make sure your sister would be okay.’ She flipped the card through the air at me and I caught it in my hand.
‘You’re giving this to me?’
‘Depends. If all you’re planning on doing with your life is killing Ra’meth, then you might as well tear it up for all I care.’
‘What if …? What if I don’t kill him? What if I come find you?’
She grinned. ‘Then make sure to bring the card with you, kid, cos I’ll need it for my deck.’
‘Why?’
She kicked her horse and started down the path. ‘Because that card might just change the world.’
As Ferius disappeared from view I turned the card over and finally saw what she’d been painting ever since she’d come to town. It was, as Mer’esan had predicted, one of the discordances. The inscription at the bottom said ‘Spellslinger’. It was a painting of a young man standing in front of an open road with a squirrel cat sitting on his shoulder and fire in his hands. The figure looked just like me.