9
The Dowager
I had never been through the palace gates before. Inside was a huge expanse, lit by nothing but the stars overhead, walled in by stone colonnades that rose twenty feet from the swept sandy ground. In the centre stood the palace itself, a large single-storey building with seven walls that sloped inwards, making the heptagonal roof smaller than the foundations. I could still see the seven pale lights rising up from the roof and shining towards the stars, a reminder that the clan prince was dead, and that these were dangerous times.
The lone guard who’d delivered the edict walked me right past the palace, leading me instead to the seemingly endless gardens behind. The darkness, the emptiness, made me feel very alone. Was this why my parents had been forbidden to accompany me? With the shadows all around, this would be an excellent place to murder someone.
By now the council would certainly have banned any feuding while the election of the next clan prince was under way, but would Ra’meth really fear their judgment? How much would it cost to bribe one guard into eliminating the son of a rival?
I glanced at the guard, who kept his arms at his sides, index and little fingers of each hand touching lightly. A tribulator, I thought – a mage who specialises in iron and blood magic. If I tried to run or make a move against him he’d have me paralysed in agony in an instant. He raised one arm and I flinched. ‘She awaits you inside,’ he said.
I looked out past the rows of brightly blooming trees and dark rectangular ponds. There was a copse of tall wooden structures that looked like skinny dancing figures, each with many arms. At the end of each arm was a pot with lush flowers of pink and gold. ‘Inside what?’ I asked. ‘All I see are—’
The guard’s eyes flickered annoyance. ‘There,’ he said, pointing more clearly.
Deeper inside the gardens I finally saw the small, darkened cottage hidden among the flora. It couldn’t have been more than ten by ten feet and the walls barely rose to the height of a man.
‘The dowager is in there?’ I asked incredulously.
The guard gave no reply. He just kept standing there, arm pointed towards the cottage, waiting for me to proceed. My father’s words came back to me: There will be a price for refusing her.
Having never been inside the palace grounds, I hadn’t known what to expect – but it certainly wasn’t a ramshackle cottage that looked as if it belonged in the Sha’Tep slums. Unfinished logs supported the roof in each corner, while rough wooden slats made up most of the walls and the ceiling that sloped down on one side, presumably to keep rain from collecting. The inside was clean and reasonably well kept. I saw no signs of mould or filth. Had the cottage been a human being you might have said it carried itself with a quiet dignity, but to me it just looked old and tired. Its lone occupant gave much the same first impression.
‘Is this the obeisance one may expect from the House of Ke?’ she asked.
The dowager magus sat in the cottage’s lone chair, a book in her hand. She wore black from head to toe, the garments appearing to have been made from a single long bolt of silk that she’d wrapped around her arms and body and tied here and there with blue cords to keep it from billowing out. It looked rather a lot like the kind of thing the undertaker dresses a body in for burial. Only her face and hands were visible, and what I saw of them confused me.
‘Forgive me …’ I mumbled, stumbling through a series of bows, realising I had no idea how to do so properly nor how to address her. ‘My … Lady?’
‘You may call me Dowager Magus.’ Then she added, ‘But only if you close the door before I catch cold.’
I quickly closed the door behind me, careful not to turn my back on her. That, at least, I knew would be impolite.
The dowager appeared at first to be my mother’s age, but as the single glow-glass lantern hanging overhead swung back and forth, I would have sworn she aged deep into her seventies and then back again. ‘Distressing, isn’t it?’ she asked.
I cursed myself for staring. ‘What is, My Lady … I mean, Dowager Magus?’
She rose to her feet and folded her hands in front of her. ‘The sight of someone so long past the appointed time of her death.’
She took in a deep breath and her features seemed to shift again, to those of a much younger woman.
I really had no idea what I was supposed to say. ‘You look …’
She smiled. ‘Beautiful?’
Not exactly the word I would have used, but I was a little too nervous to judge. ‘Yes, Dowager Magus.’
She gave a tired laugh that, even though her appearance stayed the same, made her seem much older. ‘I will save you a great deal of awkwardness, Kellen, son of Ke’heops.’ She spread her hands wide and with that gesture I saw lines of energy sliding all around her, glowing beneath the folds of her black silk garment, lighting up her skin from the inside. ‘I am some three hundred years old, held together by nothing more than spells and will. I stopped caring about what a callous boy might think of me roughly two hundred and eighty-three years ago.’
I suppose on some level I’d known this would have to be the case. The recently deceased clan prince had been the same man who’d fought and defeated the Mahdek nearly three centuries ago. He and his wife had never sired an heir, which was why we were about to have our first-ever election for a new prince. I found I was holding my breath just watching her. It’s one thing to hear such stories and quite another to come face to face with them. ‘How do you …?’
‘Stay rooted to this place, foregoing the dubious honour of the grey passage?’ She set aside her book and raised a hand. As I watched, tendrils of force slid along the lines of her fingers. ‘Spells to hold my bones together, spells to make the blood course through my veins, spells to keep my mind sharp, spells to … well, I imagine you get the idea.’
The amount of magic for such effects – not to mention the skill and precision required to work them – was staggering. A thought occurred to me then. ‘With such power, why do you not—’
‘Heal myself permanently? Simply make myself younger?’ She sat back down in the chair. ‘Some costs cannot be avoided, even with magic.’
I shook my head. ‘Forgive me, but I was going to ask why you are not the clan prince now.’
She looked up at me from her chair, one eyebrow arched, and then she reached out a hand. ‘Come here.’ I did, and she took my hand and kissed it. ‘Thank you, Kellen. I find I’m so rarely surprised these days. The heaviest price of a long life is that people become so predictable. One needn’t even ask most of them questions, for their responses are so dependably calculated by the simple equations of self-interest. From now on, you will call me Mer’esan.’
I took my hand back, feeling distinctly uncomfortable at the odd intimacy. ‘Is that why you summoned me, Mer’esan? To ask me questions?’
‘Why? Have you any answers?’
‘To some things,’ I replied, then thought about it for a moment. ‘But probably not to anything that would interest you.’
She smiled again. ‘Good – clever. I like clever.’ She rose to stand in front of me, looking much younger now, perhaps in her late twenties, and beautiful indeed. I wondered if she were truly as unconcerned with appearances as she pretended. ‘I have many questions, Kellen. None of which you can answer, of course, but my hope is that together we might work them out.’ She tilted her head for a moment. ‘Ah, but you are in the midst of your mage’s trials, aren’t you? So it is incumbent upon us to test this mind of yours. Ask me the question.’
A hundred questions bubbled through my mind. Why had she summoned me? Why did she live in this shack in the gardens instead of the palace itself? Why had she given me the gold disc that allowed me to continue in the mage trials? All questions to which I very much wanted an answer; none of which, I suspected, she cared about at all. She had no intention of answering my questions. She wanted to know if I could discern hers.
I worked through the permutations of what I had seen of her so far: she chose not to live in the palace, made no attempt at taking power for herself, and thus had little interest in the machinations of clan politics. After staying out of our people’s daily affairs for decades, she’d chosen to involve herself in something as small as the mage’s trials. Further, she’d taken an interest in me. Why? Because my father was the most likely person to become clan prince? There were others in contention, including Ra’meth. Had she spoken to him, or to Tennat? Looking around the cottage, I doubted she’d had any other visitors here for a long time.
‘Take your time,’ she said, betraying impatience in her voice.
She’s nervous. Concerned. It had to be something else … something that would trouble someone who’d long ago lost interest in either dying or living. Something new. Something her own magic couldn’t answer. I let the possibilities and permutations roll through my mind a while longer until I decided to trust the answer – or rather the question – to my intuition. ‘There is only one question that interests you, Mer’esan. It is the one you cannot answer yourself.’
‘Really? I am a learned woman, Kellen. What is this riddle you believe befuddles me so?’
‘Who is Ferius Parfax?’
There was silence between us for a long time before Mer’esan gave a slight bow of her head in recognition. ‘Well done, Kellen, son of Ke’heops. You have earned that little disc in your pocket.’
Mer’esan walked over to a kettle sitting on a small shelf. ‘I would offer you something to eat or drink, but I’m afraid the things I consume at my age would likely make you quite ill.’ She poured something thick and viscous into a blue glass and took a sip. Finally she looked at me over its rim. ‘Did the Argosi show you her cards?’
Instinctively my hand went up to the pocket that held the deck. Mer’esan caught the motion and held out a hand to me. ‘Give them to me,’ she said. I complied and watched as she spread them face up on a wooden countertop. After a moment her eyes narrowed. ‘This isn’t her true deck.’
‘It is,’ I said. ‘She gave it to me yesterday.’
Mer’esan slid the cards back together and handed them to me. ‘This is, indeed, a deck of cards and I’ve no doubt it belongs to this Ferius woman. It does not, however, contain her Argosi cards.’
‘But what is an “Argosi”? Are they related to the Daroman or the Berabesq?’
‘The Argosi aren’t a people,’ Mer’esan replied, taking another sip from her glass. ‘They’re more like … a collection of outcasts. They wander the world, making their way by doing whatever little services will get them money.’
I looked down at the deck of cards and remembered Ferius’s joke about using them to cast spells that moved other people’s money into her pockets. ‘They’re gamblers.’
‘Yes – but that is, I believe, something of a ruse. In truth, one might think of them as …’ She looked up as if reaching for a word.
‘Cartographers?’ I suggested.
The dowager seemed surprised, but then gave a light laugh. ‘Is that what she called herself?’ She didn’t wait for a reply. ‘I suppose “cartographer” is as good a description as any, but the Argosi do not draw maps of places, but rather of people … cultures.’ She tapped the deck in my hand. ‘You understand the meaning of the suits?’
I nodded. ‘Shields for Darome, spells for the Jan’Tep, chalices for—’
‘Chalices for the Berabesq, yes. But look more closely at the individual cards and you’ll see that the particular design on each card reflects part of the fundamental power structure of that society. They call these the “concordances”.’
I rifled through them, picking up one of the face cards in the suit of spells, and noticed then that it showed a picture of a lord magus on it. Another card, this one in the suit of shields, showed a man in armour, a long red cape flowing from his shoulders. The card was titled ‘General of the Armies’. The ace of spells showed an oasis, while that of shields depicted some sort of siege engine about to strike a great stone wall. So each suit shows the foundation and hierarchy of its culture. ‘Ferius had other cards,’ I said then, remembering the ones she’d stuffed back into her waistcoat. ‘She called them “discordances”.’
Mer’esan nodded. ‘They are trumps, of a sort. The Argosi travel to witness the great events that have the power to reshape the world around us; they watch the people and forces that can build and destroy civilisations. They paint these new cards – the discordances – believing that by creating the truest deck they can interpret the course of history.’
There was a strange, twisted logic to it all. If you had a deck that perfectly mirrored the people and events that shaped a culture, it might help you see where that society was headed. ‘Is that why she’s here? Because the clan prince …’
‘You needn’t protect my feelings,’ Mer’esan said drily. ‘It’s not as if I was unaware that my husband is dead.’
The casual way she spoke caught me off guard. I found myself staring at her, searching for some sign of grief, or anger, or even relief. I guess I stared too long, because when she looked back at me I suddenly felt very cold. ‘Watch where you swim, son of Ke. Men are apt to drown when they dive too deep into unknown waters.’
‘Forgive me, Dowager … I meant no—’
‘I told you to call me Mer’esan.’
‘Forgive me, Mer’esan.’ I decided to keep my mouth shut for a while and see if that worked out better.
The dowager stared at me for what felt like a very long time. I grew increasingly uncomfortable, which I suspected was the point. I think she wanted me to speak again, to say some other foolish thing so she could mock me once more. But I have a stubborn streak sometimes, especially when someone is goading me.
‘Good,’ she said, after what felt like eternity. ‘Now perhaps we can return to matters of consequence.’ She took the cards from me and fanned them out, picking one at random. When she flipped it over it showed the highest face card of the suit of spells: the clan prince.
‘Ancestors …’ I swore. Could Ferius have been responsible for his death? No, Mer’esan would have already cast a scrying spell, sand and ember magic most likely. She’d know if her husband had been murdered. It’s just another test.
‘Better,’ she said, as if she could read my thoughts, which was entirely possible. I doubted even silk magic was beyond the dowager magus. She handed me back the cards. ‘My husband had been declining for decades, and half the world knew he was in his final months. The Argosi’s timing was simply coincidence. She’s here for another reason.’
I flipped through the cards. If the Argosi always made sure their decks represented the true state of the world, then wouldn’t a new clan prince be important to them? I sorted through until I found the card titled ‘The Clan Prince’. It showed a man in a crown with a septagram behind him, the sigils of all seven forms of magic glowing. ‘Whether we have an old clan prince or a new one, it’s still the same card, still the same deck.’
I hadn’t intended to speak aloud, but Mer’esan smiled and reached out to put a hand on my cheek. The gesture was far more affectionate than I would have expected. ‘Better, son of Ke. Much better.’
It seemed the degree to which the dowager liked me was entirely dependent on whether the last thing I said was clever or not. ‘You said the Argosi only painted their other cards … the discordances … to represent people or events that could change the world. You believe that Ferius Parfax is here because something dangerous is coming. Something that could …’ How had she put it? ‘Something that could build or destroy a civilisation.’
Mer’esan nodded. ‘Try and sleep with that thought burrowing around your head.’ Her shoulders slumped and her eyes looked sunken in their sockets. ‘Finish now, Kellen of the House of Ke. This conversation is the longest I have suffered for more than twenty years. I grow tired.’
I was about to suggest that it could have gone a lot faster if she hadn’t kept testing me. Unless that was the point. She wanted to know if I was clever enough, but clever enough for what? I reached into my pocket and dug out the gold disc that the dowager magus had sent to me. ‘You want me to spy on Ferius Parfax.’
Mer’esan turned away from me, suddenly busy with arranging her glass and her book and her kettle. She’s ashamed, I thought. Ashamed of what she’s asking me to do. ‘The Argosi are full of secrets,’ she said. ‘This one seems to have taken an interest in you. You will do whatever is required to maintain that interest. You will do so without revealing my request to her or your father or to anyone else.’
So, spy on the woman who saved my life. ‘And in return you’ll ensure I stay in the mage’s trials,’ I said, the words already sounding like a betrayal. ‘But won’t the trials be suspended until the new clan prince is selected? Doesn’t the council have better things to do than decide who gets a mage’s name?’ Mer’esan turned back to me and gave me a hard look, but I was getting tired of being made to perform for her amusement. ‘No, just tell me this time.’
I think she might have blasted me with a spell then and there if she hadn’t been so exhausted. ‘The trials are more important now than ever. They are all that matters.’
‘But why?’
‘Because I never gave my husband an heir,’ she said, her voice barely a whisper and yet so full of … what? Sadness. Regret. Guilt. And something else. Determination. ‘What matters more than the strength of a mage, Kellen?’
I thought back to Ra’meth’s words the night before. ‘The strength of his family.’
Mer’esan nodded. ‘There is no mage left powerful enough to hold our people together solely on his own strength. Others could try to kill him and thus take the crown for themselves. So the next clan prince must have a powerful bloodline. A family too strong to challenge. A dynasty.’ She gave a wry shake of her head. ‘Besides, by using the trials to determine the strongest bloodline, those cowards on the council needn’t fear voting against the mage who might become their ruler. Their hands are kept clean.’
It wasn’t hard to imagine Ra’meth using his new position to punish those who’d failed to support him. He’d been ready to try to murder my father just to improve his chances. Hells, what if he keeps coming after us?
‘You needn’t fear Ra’meth, if that’s what’s creasing your brow. The council has made its decree – no vendettas until the new clan prince has been given the crown.’
‘What happens then?’ I asked, my rising voice betraying my fear. ‘What happens to my family if Shalla and I don’t … if my father isn’t selected?’
‘Exile,’ she replied. ‘Not by the new prince of course – that would be a terrible way to start a reign. No, if Ra’meth becomes prince, the council will banish the House of Ke.’
Exile. A Jan’Tep family wandering the world with no allies, no clan and no access to the oasis. Over the years even my father’s magic would weaken. It was nothing less than a death sentence for all of us.
Mer’esan looked at me for a moment, an expression of sympathy on her face that made me feel even worse. ‘We are a people of magic,’ she said quietly. ‘We cannot afford a mages’ war between houses. Better one quick and brutal injustice than decades, perhaps even centuries, of blood feuds fought with spells and murder and mayhem.’ She reached out and closed my hand over the tiny gold disc. ‘I suggest you find your magic quickly, son of Ke.’