The Keep Within | Sebastien de Castell

Out beyond the shore of the Western Sea, a great abbey towers above the waves. Tall as any castle, Isola Sombra’s treasures are the envy of princes. Its six colossal spires, armoured in stone walls impervious to the buffeting winds and pelting rains, rise up as if to taunt the gods to which they were once consecrated. The relentless fury of the storms which lately assail the abbey suggests such impertinence has not gone unnoticed. Given those same gods were murdered two years ago, an inquisitive traveller to this once holy site might wonder whose outrage now summons the tempest?

The tiny islet upon which the abbey was built centuries ago is tethered to the mainland by a half-mile-long causeway barely wide enough for two carts to pass each other without one being shoved off the slippery cobbles and into the sea. During the winter months, thick fogs often blanket the causeway, blinding travellers to the unpredictable currents. Anyone foolish enough to attempt the crossing during a squall is likely to find themselves swept away beneath the ocean swells, horses, wagons and all.

Estevar Borros had neither wagon nor horse. He slumped heavily in the saddle somewhat precariously strapped to the mule he’d purchased six months ago at the start of his judicial circuit. He’d named the beast Imperious, though the ostentatious sobriquet wasn’t due to any regal bearing evinced by the mule, but rather for the way its rain-drenched muzzle would turn every few plodding steps so it could glare at its rider and remind him precisely who was to blame for their soggy predicament.

‘The fault isn’t mine,’ Estevar grumbled, his words drowned out by the sleet and rain currently hampering their approach to the causeway. ‘Bring suit against the First Cantor if you’re so aggrieved. It was she who assigned us this gods-be-damned judicial circuit that never ends.’

Imperious offered his own grunt in reply, which Estevar took as agreement that the responsibility did indeed lie some two hundred miles to the northeast with a woman barely nineteen years of age whom fate – and the execrable former First Cantor of the Greatcoats – had placed in charge of the King’s Travelling Magistrates.

Estevar’s ice-cold fingers reached beneath the dripping black braids of his beard to pull up the collar of his muddy crimson greatcoat in a hopeless attempt to protect his neck from the beating rain. Even this small movement drew a groan from him. That damned wound . . . The seven-inch gash just above the bottom rib on his left side showed no sign of healing. This particular ache could not, alas, be blamed on the new First Cantor, but rather on Estevar’s own temper.

Staring into the thick fog ahead of them, he could almost picture that suave, conceited duellist standing there: long and lean, his blade swift as a devil’s tail, his spirit unburdened by conscience. His employer, a wealthy lord caravanner charged with the murder of his own wife, had demanded an appeal by combat after Estevar had rendered his verdict. There had been no necessity to accept the challenge; the evidence had been incontrovertible, and King’s magistrates aren’t bound to cross swords with every belligerent who disagrees with the outcome of a trial. And yet . . . there was that smirk on the too-handsome face of the merchant’s champion, as if no one so wide of girth as Estevar could possibly score a touch against him.

In fact, Estevar had won first blood. His use of an unusual Gitabrian sword bind – rather clever, he’d thought at the time – had sent his smug opponent hurtling to the courtroom floor. A single clean thrust to the forearm with the tip of Estevar’s rapier – hardly more than a scratch – had been precisely the sort merciful and honourable declaration of victory expected of a Greatcoat. When the clerk of the court struck the bell to end the duel in Estevar's favour, he had even extended a hand to assist the man back to his feet.

Arrogance. Sheer, wanton arrogance.

His enraged opponent had pushed himself off the floor with one hand and delivered a vicious rapier cut with the other. Worse, at the instant of full extension, he’d added injury to insult by turning his wrist to add a vicious puncture to an already deep laceration, the sort of wound that invariably leads to infection and rarely heals properly.

The King’s Third Law of Judicial Duelling was unequivocal on the matter: Estevar was the victor. Unfortunately, the local viscount, no admirer of the king’s meddling magistrates, had taken advantage of Estevar’s public humiliation to overrule his verdict. The lord caravanner had ridden away unpunished. His murdered wife was buried in an unmarked grave the next morning, denied both justice and priestly blessings.

Estevar pressed a hand over the nagging wound. There wasn’t so much as a scratch on the leather. The bone plates sewn into the lining would have protected him, had he not been so vain that he’d consented to the duellist’s demand that he fight without it.

‘Surely so redoubtable a physique, one so voluminous in vigour, needs no armour to protect the many, many layers of valorous flesh beneath?’ the tall, sleek fellow had shouted mockingly before the entire court. ‘What use those silly bone plates sewn into the lining of that preposterous garment you “Greatcoats”’ – he’d imbued the word with such irony! – ‘insist on wearing when compared to the blubber straining its seams?’

Fool of a fool of a fool, Estevar’s mother would have chided him – which was nothing compared to the lashing he could expect to receive from the preposterously young First Cantor when this last stop on his judicial circuit was dealt with and he returned to Castle Aramor.

Voluminous, he thought bitterly, pressing even harder against the wound, but failing to ease the sting. Six days and a hundred miles since he’d cleaned and sewn up the cut, but the pain hadn’t abated one jot. Worse, it now felt hot to the touch, suggesting infection. Perhaps if I survive the fever I’ll name the scar ‘Voluminous’ as a reminder to have a thicker skin in future.

‘And now what shall we do, Imperious?’ he asked the mule. ‘We’re under no obligation to heed the abbot’s request for judicial arbitration between his unruly monks. As Venia so reliably reminded us in his letter, Isola Sombra does not consider itself subject to the King’s Laws. Why should we tarry here when we could already be on our way home?’

Despite his optimistic words, Estevar had no illusions about the welcome awaiting him at Aramor once the First Cantor learned that one of her magistrates had lost a judicial appeal he’d been under no obligation to grant in the first place, only to then take a grievous injury due entirely to his inexcusable pride rather than any skill of his opponent. He would be lucky if she didn’t immediately demand he relinquish his coat of office.

Imperious swivelled his sorrel head once again, this time in an attempt to bite his rider’s hand as punishment for bringing him to this hellish place. Evidently, it wasn’t only the First Cantor to whom Estevar owed profuse apologies.

‘Let us away home then,’ he declared, tugging gently on the reins to circle his mount back towards the mainland road. ‘We’ll leave the monks to their quarrels.’

He was about to give the mule’s flanks an encouraging nudge when a voice shouted out from the mists, ‘Hold where you are!’

Man and mule both turned. The grey haze between the mainland and the causeway had thickened, distorting the voice and making it difficult to locate its source. A less experienced traveller might have heard the command of an angry ghost come to exact revenge for some long-forgotten crime. Estevar, however, had investigated many supposed supernatural apparitions during his tenure as a Greatcoat, and quickly decided this one sounded more man than spectre. He patted Imperious’ neck to calm him, but the mule lowered his head and hunched his shoulders, as if determined to leap into battle against their unknown assailant.

‘Who approaches the cursed Abbey of Isola Sombra?’ the hidden figure demanded.

Estevar closed his eyes a moment, allowing the eerie echoes to surround him. The voice was deep, confident, but that gravitas was trained rather than natural. The accent – most notably the rising inflection on the last vowel of the abbey’s name, almost as if he were saying ‘Som–brae’ – suggested a commoner raised in this duchy, not highborn himself, but accustomed to being in the presence of nobles.

He reached back for the oilcloth bag strapped behind the cantle. He’d wanted to protect his rapier from the rain and hadn’t anticipated having to fight his way into an abbey famed almost as much for its hospitality as its wealth. With his fingers chilled to the bone, the knots were proving perniciously difficult to untie. His mind, however, was moving more nimbly, envisioning the unfolding scene from the perspective of the fellow who now sought to block his passage.

He sees only a fat man in a leather greatcoat slouched wearily upon a mule, Estevar thought, someone too slow to present a genuine threat. Someone he can bully as he pleases.

This was, regrettably, a common enough conclusion on meeting Estevar Borros. A magistrate’s first duty being to the truth, he decided it was incumbent upon him to cure this new acquaintance of a potentially fatal ignorance. He coughed briefly before allowing his own deep baritone to rumble across the sandy shore.

‘To you, stranger, is the privilege of greeting Estevar Valejan Duerisi Borros, often called the King’s Crucible. As one of His Majesty’s Travelling Magistrates, the duty of hearing appeals to the King’s Justice throughout the Seventh Circuit of Tristia falls to me. Any fool who stands in the way of that endeavour will soon find himself flat on his back, gazing up at the sky and asking the gods why they cursed him with such poor judgement as to challenge me.’

Not bad, Estevar mused, all thoughts of abandoning the monks to their own devices banished as he drew his rapier. The cadence was a little off, but melodious eloquence is surely too much to ask of a fellow in my feverish state.

At last, a tall figure emerged from the mists. First came the glint of steel, the position and angle suggesting a longsword held in a high guard. Next came the shimmer of a chainmail surcoat partly covered by a hooded cloak of pure white trimmed in silver and emblazoned with three azure eyes across the front.

A Knight of the March of Someil, Estevar reasoned, which explained both the accent and commanding tone.

The chainmail was going to be a problem. Estevar’s rapier was a duelling weapon meant for courtroom trials and back-alley ambushes, not squaring off on the battlefield against armoured knights. Tristian steel came in varying qualities, however, and a Greatcoat’s rapier was as fine a weapon as was ever forged in this benighted little country. Wielded with force and precision, the point could shatter the links of a mail surcoat to find the fragile flesh beneath. That was, of course, assuming its wielder was not already wounded and exhausted.

The wise move would be to fight from atop the mule. The added height afforded a superior position, and Imperious was no shy pony to cower in the face of danger. Should the need arise to flee, being already in the saddle would increase the odds of escape.

But my opponent is a man of war, Estevar reminded himself, trained to slash the throat of his enemy’s mount first to counter his advantage.

He dismounted, hiding his unsteadiness beneath a show of nonchalance. He patted his mule’s reddish-brown mane and whispered into one long, twitching ear, ‘No heroics, my friend. When the first blow is struck, turn tail and run. Find yourself a mare and – well, as I don’t suppose mules can reproduce, just enjoy yourself and think fondly of your old friend Estevar.’

Imperious ignored him, instead issuing a braying warning to the approaching knight. Running away clearly wasn’t the beast’s style.

‘Damned good mule,’ Estevar murmured, bringing his rapier up to a centreline guard suitable for initiating a deceptive flick at the eyes followed by a more powerful – and desperate – thrust to the narrow gap between helm and gorget, which would be his best hope of evading the mail surcoat.

‘Borros?’ the knight called out, coming into full view at last. A handsome devil, you had to give him that. The very portrait of a young chevalier: broad in the shoulder, narrow in the hips, square-jawed and golden-haired beneath a steel half-helm. Even the broken nose lent his otherwise smooth features a determined dignity. No doubt many a lad and lass had swooned over this one. At his side dangled a curved ivory horn. Estevar had known the blare of such instruments to carry for miles across flat terrain. ‘You are truly Estevar Borros, the King’s Crucible?’ the knight asked.

‘The storm is not so deafening that you failed to hear me the first time,’ he replied, widening his stance and raising the blade of his rapier. ‘Now, stop where you are. Inclement weather and poor soil make for arduous grave-digging, and I have more pressing business at the abbey.’

Without warning, the knight rushed Estevar. The fool might well have impaled himself, had not the combination of a magistrate’s quick judgement and a duellist’s quick instincts enabled Estevar to tilt his rapier blade off-line in time to stop the point sliding over the steel gorget and into the knight’s exposed throat.

‘My name is Sir Daven Colraig,’ the young knight declared, hugging Estevar with frantic relief. ‘I am Sheriff Outrider to His Lordship, Margrave Someil. It was he who commanded me to await you here these past seven days.’

‘Seven days?’ Estevar had to suppress a groan when the young man’s exuberant squeezing aggravated his wound. He shoved the fellow away, not quite as gently as he’d intended. ‘You expect me to believe you’ve been out in this storm for an entire week?’

Sir Daven nodded, water dripping from his helm onto the golden locks plastered to his forehead. ‘Indeed, Eminence. The margrave had hoped you would arrive sooner.’

‘My pace was perhaps more leisurely than anticipated,’ Estevar admitted.

Yet why would the Margrave of Someil be keeping abreast of a magistrate’s travels? And why would he make one of his knights camp out in the cold and wet until my arrival?

‘The Abbey of Isola Sombra is less than half a mile across the causeway,’ Estevar observed. ‘The monks are known for their gracious hospitality to all who arrive at their gates. Why await me here? Unless it was to prevent me from reaching them myself?’

Sir Daven slid a gauntleted hand into his cloak and withdrew a cylinder of black leather roughly eight inches long and barely an inch in diameter. The message sheath was banded in azure and bore a silver wax seal of a wasp shattering a shield: the hereditary insignia of the Margraves of Someil. ‘I know the Greatcoats have oft been at odds with the nobles of this duchy, Eminence, but my lord is no enemy to the new king, nor to his magistrates.’

Estevar eyed the black leather tube warily. Bribing magistrates was a common tactic for those with a vested interest in the outcome of a case. The lord caravanner had offered him a small fortune to avoid a trial. Was this some attempt by the Margrave of Someil to secure a ruling against the Abbey of Isola Sombra, whose legendary obstinance in refusing to pay taxes – either to the king or to the local nobility – rested upon the dubious claim that their tiny island was by tradition a sovereign nation unto itself?

‘Please,’ Sir Daven said, jabbing the message sheath at Estevar’s chest, ‘read my lord’s words and heed them, I beg you.’

Imperious attempted to bite off the knight’s hand. When that failed, he snatched the leather cylinder away from him.

‘Cease, you avaricious beast,’ Estevar growled, yanking the crushed tube from between the mule’s teeth. ‘Save your appetite for the abbey, where we shall shortly be feasted as befits visiting dignitaries.’

He undid the azure ties, unfurled the parchment and read quickly, before the rain smudged the ink, rendering the missive illegible. He checked the half-seal at the bottom of the parchment, comparing it with its mate on the other side, a security device. The rich purple-black ink he recognised as a rare mixture made of the iron-gall from an oak tree and the crushed seeds of a berry found only in this duchy: a concoction so carefully guarded by the margraves that even the finest forgers found it near-impossible to reproduce. All of which suggested the document was authentic, which made the five lines scrawled upon it all the more troubling.

From his Lordship Alaire, Margrave of Someil,

Warden of the March, Defender of the Faith,

To you, my friend, in earnest warning,

As you love life and value your soul,

you will not set foot on Isola Sombra.

A blaze ignited in Estevar’s belly, chasing away the cold and wet, even the ache of his wound. When bribery was deemed unlikely to succeed, the nobility all too often resorted to blackmail and bullying.

‘A threat?’ he demanded, crushing the parchment in his fist as the rain poured down even harder, the thunder in the sky above punctuating his outburst. ‘Your precious margrave would seek to intimidate a Greatcoat into abandoning his lawful mission? Does he so fear what the Abbot of Isola Sombra might reveal to me of his activities that he’d stoop to—?’

‘Abbot Venia no longer rules Isola Sombra,’ the knight said icily, his countenance darkening. ‘He who once defied kings now cowers beneath the covers inside his tower while madness and devilry reigns over that holiest of islands!’

Estevar could barely restrain his laughter. ‘Has the cold and damp frozen that helmet to your head, Sir Knight? You speak of two hundred pampered, petulant monks as if they were an army of invading soldiers!’

Sir Daven shook his head, sending splatters of rain onto Estevar’s face and beard. ‘Not soldiers, sir, but warlocks – heretics who dabble in curses and necromancy, perverting their bodies in unholy orgies—’

Estevar cut him off. ‘Enough. I am a Greatcoat, not some backwoods constable to be frightened off with childish tales of witchcraft. As the King’s Crucible, it falls to me to investigate cases suspected of supernatural intervention. I have witnessed hundreds of occult rituals all across this country – some genuine, most elaborate trickery, but none the preposterous pantomime you’re ascribing to the brethren of Isola Sombra.’ He handed the black leather cylinder to Sir Daven. ‘You call yourself a sheriff outrider? If the Margrave of Someil truly believes some nefarious demon worship to have taken hold of the abbey, surely he would have sent a contingent of his finest knights to investigate, rather than have you wait out here in the rain like an unwanted pup?’

The knight refused to take back the sheath, saying instead, ‘Look inside the cylinder, Eminence; a second document awaits your perusal.’

Estevar cursed himself for failing to notice the smaller piece of parchment tight against the inside of the case. He had to dig it out with his fingernail before unfolding what turned out to be an elaborate sketch of a naked man such as one might find in a medical text. What made it unusual were the strange markings covering the body: esoteric sigils in designs unrecognisable to Estevar despite his years of research into the esoteric traditions of Tristia.

‘My Lord did send a dozen of my fellow knights to investigate,’ Sir Daven said defiantly. ‘When they emerged the next morning . . .’ He paused, visibly shaken by whatever memories plagued him. ‘Twelve braver, steadier men and women I have never known, yet not one of them has uttered a word since their return. They sit in separate chambers within the margrave’s fortress, attended to by his personal physicians – not clerics, mind you, trained physicians – who claim their souls have fled their bodies.’

‘There has to be a logical explanation,’ Estevar murmured, returning the picture and the margrave’s message to the cylinder before placing it in a pocket of his greatcoat. ‘There is always an explanation.’

Steel returned to the younger man’s eyes as they locked on Estevar’s. ‘Theories and conjectures do not fall within my purview, Eminence, nor was I sent here merely to await your displeasure.’ He lifted the ivory horn strapped to his side and jabbed his other hand towards the six stone towers rising from the dense greyness. ‘Should anyone or anything come back across that causeway, my orders are to first raise the alarm, then fend off whatever chaos has been spawned in the cloisters of Isola Sombra until help arrives or death takes me!’

Holding the knight’s gaze, Estevar sifted through what clues he could discern in the younger man’s determined expression. Were the clenched jaw and stiff posture signs of the unyielding devotion to duty so often espoused by Tristian knights, or mere melodrama meant to frighten away one of the King’s Magistrates before he could interfere in whatever schemes were unfolding on Isola Sombra?

Estevar’s fever-addled brain rebelled against him, alerting him instead to the flush in his cheeks and the burning ache in his side. What business did he have setting foot upon the ill-fated isle at the end of that storm-drenched causeway armed with nothing but a rapier, his arrogance and a cantankerous mule?

‘Heed my liege’s warning, Eminence, I beg you,’ Sir Daven said, no doubt sensing Estevar’s wavering intentions.

How strange that only moments before, he’d been ready to abandon this place and ignore Abbot Venia’s plea for him to arbitrate the dispute between his contentious monks. Now that this same dispute had exploded into something far more unsettling, Estevar found himself unable to walk away.

He knew himself to be a ludicrous figure in the eyes of many: a foreigner to these shores who dared demand a place among the legendary Greatcoats; a fat, pompous buffoon who insisted on fighting his own duels when younger and fitter men would have refused; an eccentric who alone among the King’s Travelling Magistrates investigated crimes attributed to witches, demons and sundry other supernatural forces. In short, Estevar Borros was a silly fool, driven by his innate stubbornness as much as his affinity for the law. But there was yet one more failing to which he was ever subservient – the one that, even more than his arrogance, had led him to accept the most recent duel: the persistent, impossible-to-quiet voice that had brought him from his homeland across the sea to this strange, troubled nation. The addiction was more potent than any drug, a nagging need that could overpower even the pain of a festering wound in his side.

Looking towards the abbey in the sea, contemplating what chaos awaited, he murmured, ‘I am curious.’

‘What?’ asked Sir Daven, grabbing his arm.

Gently, he loosened the younger man’s fingers. ‘I thank you, Sir Knight. You have delivered your message, fulfilling this part of your mission. No one could fault your courage or your loyalty to your liege.’ He slid his rapier into the sheath ingeniously designed into the leather panel on the left side of his greatcoat, wincing at the sudden sting that was surely his stitches coming apart.

Sir Daven gaped at him as he if were mad. ‘Look at yourself,’ he cried, his frantic voice bubbling over with scorn and unease. ‘You can barely stand – yes, I see you, attempting to hide whatever injury ails you. But even after what I’ve told you, still you insist on crossing the most perilous causeway in the country during a raging storm while the tide rises? I have told you that death and worse await you on the other side – do you presume the rest of us to be gullible dolts deluded by some petty parlour trick?’

‘I think nothing of the kind,’ Estevar replied, taking the reins and tugging his reluctant mule towards the narrow cobblestone road ahead. ‘You claim the monks of Isola Sombra commit unspeakable crimes, dabbling in forbidden occult rituals and desecrating the oldest holy site in the country. Surely that calls for the intervention of a King’s Magistrate, no?’

‘You’re a fool,’ Sir Daven spat, no longer pretending at admiration, or even sympathy. ‘A mad fool! What will be left of you once the monsters prowling that cursed abbey have peeled away the last layers of your arrogance from your flesh?’

Estevar placed a hand on the mule’s neck to steady himself as the two of them began their crossing. Shouting over the wind and rain he replied, ‘According to my sainted mother? Only more arrogance.’

Picture a wizard. Go ahead, close your eyes if you need to. There he is, see? Old, skinny guy with a long scraggly beard he probably trips over on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. No doubt he’s wearing some sort of iridescent silk robes that couldn’t protect his frail body from a light breeze. The hat’s a must, too, right? Big, floppy thing, covered in esoteric symbols that would reveal to every other mage which sources of magic this moron relies on for his powers? Wouldn’t want a simple steel helmet or something that might, you know, protect the part of him most needed for conjuring magical forces from being bashed in with a mace or pretty much any household object heavier than a soup ladle.

Yep. Behold the mighty wizard: a stoop-backed feeb who couldn’t run up a long flight of stairs without giving himself a heart attack.

Now, open your eyes and let me show you what a real war mage looks like.

‘Fall, you pasty-faced little fuckers!’ Corrigan roared as our contingent of wonderists assaulted the high citadel walls our employer had sent us to bring down ahead of his main forces. ‘Fall so that I can rip your hearts out with my bare hands and feed you to my favourite devil as an appetiser before he feasts on your miserable souls!’

Yeah, Corrigan was a real charmer all right.

Big man, shoulders as broad as any soldier’s. I stood maybe half an inch taller, but in every other dimension he was my superior. The muscles on Corrigan’s forearms strained against the bejewelled gold and silver bands he always negotiated into his contracts. Tempestoral mages of his calibre have no particular use for precious metals or gemstones, but when it comes to selling his services, Corrigan likes to – in his words – ‘Remind those rich arseholes who needs who.’

‘Watch this one, Cade!’ he shouted to me over the tumult of battle all around us. Our employer’s foot soldiers and mounted cavalry were fighting and dying to keep the enemy troops busy while we wonderists did the real damage. Corrigan’s eyes glowed the same unnerving indigo as the sparks that danced along the tightly braided curls of his hair and beard. Tendrils of black Tempestoral lightning erupted from his callused and charred palms to sizzle the air on their way to tear at stone and mortar like jagged snakes feeding on a colony of mice. He grinned at me, his white teeth in stark contrast to the ebony of his skin, then laughed as each of his fists closed around one of his lightning bolts. He began wielding them like whips, grabbing hold of the stalwart defenders atop the walls and sweeping them up into the sky before shaking them until their spines snapped. Several other poor bastards leaped to their deaths rather than waiting for Corrigan to take an interest in them.

‘We don’t get paid extra for making them shit their pants, you know,’ I reminded him, my fingers tracing misfortune sigils in the air so that the volleys of arrows the enemy fired at us missed their targets. ‘Our job is to convince them to surrender, not commit suicide.’

‘Our job?’ The indigo braids of Corrigan’s beard rustled with the same enthusiasm his lightning snakes showed as they destroyed in minutes the gleaming, high-towered citadel that had taken hardworking masons decades to build. ‘Our job, Cade, is to make what we in the trade call an impression.’

I suppose I couldn’t argue with that. Our employer was an Ascendant Prince – self-declared, of course – who’d been having some difficulty convincing the local ruling archons of his divinely sanctioned rule. Sending a coven of mercenary wonderists to wage mayhem and murder (I never lied to myself by calling it ‘war’) wasn’t likely to convince anyone of Ascendant Lucien’s holiness, but as his Magnificence had explained it to me, ‘Kill enough of the brave ones and the rest will pray to anyone I tell them to.’

He might be a complete fucking moron, but Lucien was right about that much, at least.

The crossbowmen atop the walls stopped firing their bolts at us, no doubt tired of watching the wooden shafts splinter against the rocks as the ill-luck spells I’d kept around our division meant each and every one of them missed their mark. Meanwhile, Corrigan and a couple of the others got on with blasting their brethren to pieces with impunity.

Corrigan lightened up on his thunderous assault and motioned for a nearby echoist to spin a little sonoral magic to amplify his voice as he called out to the citadel’s terrified defenders, ‘There now, my little ducklings, no need to jump. Just open up the gates for Uncle Corrigan and we can all have a nice cup of tea before supper.’ He glanced back at me. ‘There. Happy?’

‘You really are a prick, you know that?’ I took advantage of the momentary distraction among the archers to give my fingers a shake before renewing the shield over our squad of eleven wonderists.

Corrigan shrugged. ‘What do you expect? I conjure rampant fucking devastation from the Tempestoral plane for a living so that one group of arseholes can conquer another group of arseholes – and then a couple of years later, that second group of arseholes hires me to kill off the first lot. That can’t be good for the soul.’

Truer words had never been spoken.

‘Enemy wonderists!’ one of our comrades shouted.

Up on those high walls, the tell-tale shimmer of Auroral magic (that being the ‘nice people’ kind) appeared: Archon Belleda had finally sent out her own contingent of wonderists to kick our arses.

When Corrigan got a look at the silk-robed, grey-bearded scarecrows standing up there, he was pissing himself laughing so hard his tendril spell almost collapsed.

‘Look,’ he shouted to the rest of us, ‘real live Auroral mages have come to cast our souls to the pits! Kneel before these noble miracle-workers and weep for mercy, for surely the judgement of the Lords Celestine is at hand!’

The rest of us didn’t laugh. We focused on our jobs, which now included sending those dignified old men and women to their graves. It wasn’t Archon Belleda’s fault her defenders couldn’t beat us. They were locals, patriots fighting for a noble cause, while we were mercenaries, motivated by greed and lousy upbringings, loyal only to the fees our employer had promised us.

The poor bastards never had a chance.

One of the enemy wonderists, a silver-haired woman already dripping with nervous sweat, took the lead. Blood seeped from her eyes as she cast a sorcerous incantation we in the business call a ‘heartchain’, because it pierces right through defensive spells to burst the enemy’s blood vessels. It’s not the sort of thing any of us would use because it’s a conjoined sympathy spell, which means a heartchain also kills the person casting it. I marvelled at the old codger’s redoubtable courage and sacrifice as the thread-like silver tether stretched across the two hundred yards between them to bind her heart to Corrigan’s.

The big brute’s eyes went wide as his thick fingers clawed at his own chest. He turned to me, but no sound came from his lips as he mouthed my name.

Corrigan Blight was a monster, no doubt about it. He killed people for money, and he did it without ever questioning whether such acts could be justified. Any time I’d asked whether perhaps there was a better way to earn a living, he’d slap me across the head and proudly declare, ‘Didn’t make the rules, don’t plan to break them.’ If you stuck him next to the old lady on the wall and asked a hundred people which one of them deserved to live, not one of them would say Corrigan.

Well, except me.

Corrigan was my friend, which was a hard thing to admit to myself and an even harder thing to find in this profession. He’d saved my life more times than I’d saved his, and I know that doesn’t justify the choice I made in that moment, but maybe it explains why, without giving it a second’s thought, I conjured a poetic injustice.

Beneath my leather cuirass, a set of three intertwining sigils etched into my torso began to smoulder, then the sigils appeared in the air before me as floating scrawls of ebony ink, curves and edges glimmering. I could feel the seconds counting down towards Corrigan’s heart bursting in his chest.

He clutched at my shoulder in panic, or maybe searching for a final moment of human connection. I shrugged him off; I needed to concentrate.

I placed my right hand above the first sigil, which looked like a distorted stick figure crowned in seven rays; it represented the enemy spellcaster. When I moved my hand upwards, the sigil followed, and I placed it in a direct line between myself and the Auroral mage casting the heartchain.

The second sigil, a gleaming black circle with a second, smaller half-circle overlapping the top of it, looked almost like a padlock. It moved of its own accord, floating silently up to Corrigan’s forehead, which would have unnerved him no end if he’d not been too busy dying to notice.

The particular forms of magic I work manifest a kind of elementary consciousness within them, which meant that the spell knew Corrigan was the target of the Auroral mage’s heart-rending invocation. I quickly placed three fingers atop the locking sigil, then moved it between me and the enemy wonderists atop the citadel walls, looking for my target.

This is where casting a poetic injustice gets tricky. Altering the binding on someone else’s spell requires finding someone to whom they have an already strong emotional connection, which would usually require time and research, neither of which we had to spare. But these idiots had made it easy for me. Beside the Auroral mage stood a fierce-eyed old gentleman holding her hand. I might not be the world’s most sentimental guy, but even I could sense the love between them. I quickly tethered the targeting sigil to him.

Now for the third sigil. With the thumb and forefinger of each hand, I grasped the two-headed coiled snake, ignoring the ink-black tongues that flickered menacingly at me, pulled the spiral straight and attached a head to each of the other two sigils.

The thin silver thread binding the Auroral mage to Corrigan snapped away from him, whipping through the air with blinding speed before attaching itself to the old man next to her. Even when he saw the heartchain coming for him, he didn’t make a move to abandon her. Maybe he was her husband and such a cowardly thought never occurred to him.

Till death did they part, as no one with a conscience might say.

Corrigan painfully sucked air into his lungs, giving me just the barest nod of acknowledgment, then, smiling with smug self-satisfaction, renewed his attack on the walls with just as much vigour and twice as much pleasure as before.

I had to lean against him just to keep from collapsing to the ground. Poetic injustice spells are hard on the body. And the soul, I guess.

In case I hadn’t made this clear already, we’re not exactly the good guys.

But don’t worry – by the end of this story, me, Corrigan and the five other wonderists who would come to be known as the Malevolent Seven would definitely be getting what was coming to us.

My first mistake was in letting my opponent enter the duelling ring ahead of me. The minute the big man had ducked under one of the frayed ropes tied around six rusted iron posts that marked off the fifteen-foot hexagon inside which we’d be fighting, he took up a position on the western-most corner. In the village of Phan, prizefights began an hour before sunset when villagers returning from their labours could witness the show without having to waste expensive oil for lanterns.

The problem for me was that put the sun in the west and therefore right in my eyes when I faced the six-foot-six man-shaped boulder who now grinned from one misshapen ear to the other as he cracked knuckles that could probably smash through oak planks with ease.

The fight master, a slender, moustachioed wine merchant who wore what I assumed were his festival colours of green and gold, leaned uncomfortably close to me. ‘You’ll have to remove your coat, my lady,’ he said, wiping the sweat and dust from his brow with a dirty rag.

Like a yawn spreading through the crowd of onlookers, the villagers likewise rubbed at faces and forearms in an endless battle with the dust that blew in from the Eastern Desert – the enemy next door that threatened daily to bury everyone and everything beneath its sands. Hard to imagine anyone choosing to live here, but then, dying here wasn’t such a good idea either.

‘The coat stays on,’ I said, nodding to the big lout waiting to bash my skull in with fists bigger than any blacksmith’s hammer. ‘That padded leather jerkin he’s wearing offers no less protection than my coat.’

That part was a lie, of course, but occasionally it works.

The fight master started tapping at the dark grey leather of my greatcoat as he listed off its various offences. ‘Thin, flexible, and nearly unbreakable bone plates sewn into the lining,’ he said, rapping his knuckles against my chest. His hands slid down to my waist. ‘A hundred or so hidden pockets. Spiked caltrops to drop on the ground at your opponent’s feet when nobody’s looking? Powdered amberlight to blind him? Perhaps even a square of that legendary hard candy that gives you Greatcoats unnatural strength and vigour in battle?’ His right hand drifted to the end of my sleeve. ‘I imagine you still keep a few of those inch-long throwing blades secreted in your cuffs, don’t you? Wasn’t that why they used to call you the King’s Thorn? On account of the way you could flick those tiny finger blades into an enemy’s face or sword hand?’

‘You seem to know an unhealthy amount about me,’ I said.

The fight master smiled as he spread his arms wide as if to encompass the entirety of this sad little village by the desert. ‘Oh, we have plenty of history with the King’s Travelling Magistrates here in Phan, my lady.’ He bent forward to whisper conspiratorially in my ear. ’Not a happy history, mind you.’

I pitched my reply loud enough for the crowd to hear me. ‘I told you all before, I didn’t come here looking for trouble.’ I gestured to the small hill less than an eighth of a mile to the north overlooking the village. ‘I came solely to visit the King’s grave. Though why any monarch would choose to be buried in this backwater that lacks for anything worth visiting – even water – remains a mystery to me.’

My diplomatic skills firmly established, the villagers returned my courtesy by hurling clods of sand-filled turf at me, most of which landed on the fight master’s gaudy waistcoat.

‘Our guest seems to be having trouble removing her coat,’ he announced with loud, boisterous good humour as he turned away from me and towards the crowd. ‘Shall we show her our hospitality and assist her in—‘

He stopped talking when he felt the sharpened point of an inch-long blade at the back of his neck.

‘You were right about the finger knives,’ I whispered.

When her time came, the court wardens were forced to drag Janva along the polished marble floor like a squealing calf. The night before, she'd sworn to herself that she would meet her fate with dignity and suffer bravely the hisses of noble Lords and Ladies seated in their scarlet cushioned seats in the gallery above and the jeers and insults of pedlars, minstrels, and even craftspersons like herself from the wooden benches at the back of the duelling court. Janva had failed utterly, and her screams for mercy now echoed throughout the chamber.

No one had prepared her for what it would be like to step inside that massive oval chamber of the Duchy of Luth's Court of Blades, to pass beneath those towering statues of Death and Craft with their cold, unpainted eyes staring down at her without mercy or compassion. Cradled in Death's arm was a huge clock upon which the final minutes of her life ticked away in a relentless drumbeat.

Worse still was Janva's first sight of the six-foot-tall and almost equally wide marble pedestal across the room upon which rested the Magistrate's lustrous oak and silver throne. With his powdered black wig and narrow, colourless face, the man who would oversee Janva's legally sanctioned murder looked like a hunting falcon waiting to leap down from his perch to claw out her eyes.

The thick hands of the court wardens in their black surcoats, grim countenanced, yet with pitying eyes, had been the only things keeping her from collapsing to the floor. One worn shoe now hung off her right foot, the other lost somewhere in the arched passageway that led into the courtroom. The wardens had tried to be gentle with her, but the Duchy of Luth's infamous Court of Blades was no place for kindness.

Three clerks stood behind the Magistrate's throne. One of them, a slender young man with bright, almost playful auburn curls that matched his courtier's smile, stepped down the circular stairs carved into the wide marble column beneath the pedestal to announce, 'Janva Slade, a wheelwright, sentenced to five years for Violence Most Grievous Against a Child.'

Neither the galleries above nor the cheaper rows of benches on the floor were full that day, and those in attendance had clearly paid their visitor's fees in hopes of witnessing more fulsome duels than the one awaiting Janva. On hearing that the victim of her heinous crime was a child, they booed in a sort of weary acquiescence.

Violence Most Grievous Against a Child.

A child? The girl was as cruel a monster as the world had ever spawned. Yet, two days ago, in the Courts Judicial across the street, Janva's testimony against her had been dismissed out of hand by the beatific white-wigged Magistrate. The word of a wheelwright against that of a nobleman's daughter? The verdict had been decided before the case had even been heard.

'Having appealed her sentence with a demand for trial by combat,' the sneering, black-clad clerk continued, 'the accused, Janva Slade-'

Why did he have to keep repeating her name like that - as if she were some notorious child slayer instead of a common craftswoman whose chief crime had been to follow the cries of a terrified boy into the ruins of a broken-down church?

'Janva Slade,' the clerk said yet again, pausing for effect as if to draw to himself the attention of the sparse and sullen audience, 'who will this day challenge her sentence in a duella verdetto and by steel and whatever mercy the Gods grant her be judged!'

If he'd been hoping to arouse boisterous cheers from the audience, he must've been sorely disappointed by their tepid groans.

Duella verdettos were far from the most exciting events at the Court of Blades, or so Janva's fellow prisoners in the jailhouse had informed her. A prosecuting duellist would be selected - someone the Magistrate had deemed a fair match against the accused - and the two of them would fight to first blood. When Janva lost, as was inevitable given she'd never held a proper weapon in her life never mind a duelling sword, her sentence of five years would be doubled to ten, and that would be that.

Except that Janva had good reason to believe she would never be seeing the inside of a cell again.

'Please!' she shouted, shrugging off the grip of the court wardens who, in their efforts not to injure her before the duel, had loosened their hold on her once they'd gotten her to the defendant's corner. Janva scrambled across the floor, and made it to the base of the massive stone pedestal before they caught up to her. She had to tilt her head all the way back to see up to the Magistrate. 'Please, Your Eminence! They mean to kill me here and now, right before your very eyes!'

That produced more of a reaction from the audience than all the young clerk's theatrical solemnity. Nobles and commoners alike began to laugh out loud. Even the Magistrate chuckled.

'The accused will cease these hysterics, he intoned, readjusting his powdered black wig. His robes were black as well, save for the scarlet bands across his shoulders, and the scarlet hood he would place upon his head when the first duels of the day began. He leaned forward to gaze down at her. 'Your crime, vile as it was, does not warrant a duel to the death. First blood will settle the issue. I suspect it will not be long in coming once the bell is rung.'

'You don't understand!' she cried out. 'In my cell last night, I received a message.'

Quiet murmurs rose up from the audience, enticed by this prospect of illicit goings-on in the jailhouse.

'A message?' the Magistrate asked. 'What sort of message?'

'A single line, your Eminence, a promise of murder to be carried out here in your courtroom. "First blood will be last."'

The rapier blades clink like wine glasses when the duellists cross swords for the first time. There’s no clanging or clattering, instead, I hear the opening note of an unbearably graceful tune, performed by two masters playing their instruments in perfect harmony. The freshly sharpened edges graze against one another like the fingertips of two dancers passing each other on the stage. Leather-soled boots glide across the marble floor, never stomping, never slipping. Every movement is precise. Assured. Calculated.

The noble families in their cushioned seats by the railings and the rabble clamouring from behind on rough, splintery benches grin and nod at each other, united for once by the perils and prestige meted out within the duelling circle. The spectators jeer and shout at those seated on the opposite side of the court, negotiating wagers with elaborate hand gestures, fingers darting back and forth as speedily as the thrusts and parries of the combatants. So aroused are the audience’s passions that they’ve become blind to all but the flash of steel upon steel. Deafened by the cacophony of their own applause, their ears fail to follow the deadly conversation unfolding inside the duelling circle. This is more than violence; it is poetry, composed in a language that goes unrecognized by the cantankerous crowds of Rijou’s infamous Court of Blades.

I understand it, though. Every word, every whisper.

It makes me sick.

Like all proper young gentlemen of Rijou, I’ve devoted hundreds of sweating, tearful hours inside the fencing halls where the sons and daughters of our city’s notable families train in the ways of the sword. Within those walls, my name has become synonymous with awkward, incompetent bladework. ‘Percevar Tiarren!’ our master will shout, and my fellow students will pause in their own bouts to roll their eyes at my latest gaffe. The admonishments have become so frequent this past year that now whenever one of my classmates stumbles into a failed lunge, their partner will hiss, ‘Don’t percé your attack, silly.’

I’d take offence at this misuse of my name, but doing so would inevitably lead to a duel with blunted foils at midnight, and I get enough bruises in the classroom as it is. As has been pointed out to me many times – often with the tip of the master’s own sword – I am rubbish as a fencer. ‘You’ve learned nothing from me!’ he declares at the end of every lesson. ‘Nothing!’

He’s wrong, though. I’ve learned this language of steel.

I just can’t bear to speak it.

My father, Lord Tiarren is one of the most respected generals in the Ducal army and a highly regarded duellist. Last night he asked me – no, begged me, his own son – to accept the junior officer’s commission he purchased for me and accompany him to quell the border raids. As the second eldest child, tradition dictates that I become our house champion when I turn of age. To me, it will fall to protect my parents as they age, my eldest sister as she leads our house, and my younger siblings as they expand our business ventures. It is for me to fight duels on behalf of our family.

When I refused my father’s offer for the third time, he didn’t hit me with one of those big, iron-hard fists of his; he didn’t threaten to expel me from his house and have my name stricken from our family line. He merely nodded as if he’d known all along what my answer would be, and accepted it as the unfortunate but inevitable consequence of congenital cowardice.

But I’m not a coward. I’m not.

At least, I don’t think I am. I’m just afraid all the time.

The duel inside the courtroom changes tenor, the rhythm accelerating, drawing my attention back to the fighting circle. The combatants’ probing rapiers having uncovered any weaknesses in defence or stiffness of movement, the blades now slither like snakes against each other, searching for an opening. The defendant, Orlo Abradi is a former guard captain to one of the High Twelve houses, convicted of attempting to swap a near-priceless blue romantine gemstone meant for his employer’s anniversary necklace with a mere sapphire.

Orlo is a tall man, broad in the chest and long in the arm. This gives him greater strength and reach than his opponent. When the duel began, the heralds dubbed him ‘Our Lord of the Battering Blow’. Orlo is indeed a formidable figure who’s probably never lost a fight in his life. The loud swish of his blade as he slashes at the prosecuting duellist and the grunt he makes a split-second before his lunges tells me that Orlo should’ve accepted the magistrate’s sentence of seven years for his crime instead of appealing for trial by combat.

A duella damnatio is sometimes called a ‘gambler’s duel’ because every cut the defendant scores against the prosecuting duellist strikes a year from his sentence. Every wound he suffers, however, extends his prison term by a year, and like all gamblers playing at the wrong table, Our Lord of the Battering Blow doesn’t know when to fold on a bad hand.

‘Sixteen!’ The audience shouts in unison as the prosecutor’s point slips under the defendant’s guard to nick his sword arm uet again. Before Orlo can even react, the prosecutor ducks down low and extends his arm in a perfect thrust that drives the tip of a blackened steel rapier a half-inch into the defendant’s right thigh. A tiny spot of blood blooms red against the white duelling breeches. ‘Seventeen!’ The crowd cheers, as if they were the ones who’d scored the touch.

The child raced barefoot across the desert. The cuts on the soles of his feet were staining the sand a madman’s scarlet, but the look in his eyes said that was the least of his problems. Though I didn’t know it then, he was fleeing his father, who loved him more than anything in the world, and was now intent on his murder. The same could’ve been said of my own father, but I’m not ready to tell that story yet.

At first the boy had been nothing but a puff of dust and blond hair in the distance. The sun was beating down mercilessly that day, reminding all living things who was in charge and that deserts were cursed places at the best of times. I had a horse though, which makes all the difference.

‘Reckon that’s trouble ahead?’ I asked Quadlopo, patting his neck.

The horse showed no signs of giving the matter any thought, just swished his tail to keep the flies away. In the five days since we’d fled to the borderlands, Quadlopo had yet to offer an opinion on anything, except perhaps that he would’ve preferred that I’d not stolen him in the first place. After all, it wasn’t like anyone wanted him dead.

The grubby whirl of spindly arms and legs ran up the side of a dune, then lost his balance and came tumbling down the other.

He looked like he couldn’t have been more than seven. An unseemly age to be running around the desert alone. His pale blue tunic was torn to rags, and the skin of his arms and face shone an angry red that spoke of too many days out in the sun with nothing and no one to protect him. He was limping too, but kept on going, which meant whatever was chasing him troubled him more than the pain.

Brave kid.

When he got within thirty yards of me, he stopped and stared as if trying to work out whether I was a mirage. I’m not sure what conclusion he came to, but I guess he’d been running a long time because his legs gave out on him and he dropped to his hands and knees. That’s when I saw the two new figures come shambling through the haze towards us. A tall man and a squat woman, whose unnatural, shuffling gaits made me question whether those labels might be too generous in describing whatever had followed the boy.

For the first time since we’d happened upon this unpleasantness, Quadlopo became restless. He blew hot air out of his nostrils and pawed the sand with his hoofs, trying to turn his head away from the mangled figures lumbering towards the child who was now lying face down in the sand, by all appearances waiting to die.

Most folk in these parts, should they get lost in the desert and run out of either water or the will to live, choose to meet their end on their back, so the last thing they see will be the blue sky above. The boy, though, seemed determined to look away from his pursuers.

Now that I’d gotten a good look at them, I didn’t blame him.

Insanity, as I’d learned in my paltry seventeen years, could take all forms, come in all shapes and sizes. I’d witnessed folks of sound mind condemned as lunatics for the crime of being ugly and eccentric at the same time. I’d met well-groomed, erudite gentlemen of means who hid diabolical madness beneath smooth talk and friendly smiles. Then again, when I saw myself in the mirror, I looked sane too, so best not to pass judgement on such matters without strong evidence.

When two strangers come lurching towards you across the desert, naked as the day they were born except for their hides being caked in blood and dirt and fouler things I preferred not to imagine, when those same souls stare out at the world through eyes open so wide they look set to fall out of their sockets, jaws hanging open but nothing coming out except for a snake’s hiss, well, times like that call for a different sort of prudence.

I reached over my shoulder and uncapped the long black mapmaker’s case that held the smallsword I’d vowed five days ago never again to draw so long as I lived. One of the reasons I’d chosen to flee to the Seven Sands had been to smash the blade into seven pieces and bury each one so far from the others that not even the finest tracker in the whole world could unite them.

The hot desert wind shifted. The blood-soaked pair sniffed at the air like hunting hounds. Their heads tilted to the side like they’d just smelled a vixen for the first time and didn’t know what to make of her. Some sort of instinct took hold of them, and they stopped heading towards the boy and came for me instead. At first they plodded, so awkward I kept expecting them to trip over themselves like puppets caught in their strings. But with each step their bare, blistered feet found surer footing. Faster and faster they scurried, and the closer they came, the more their hisses grew into a nightmare’s worth of whispers that swirled around me like a dust storm.

I drew the sword from its case and slid off the horse’s back, knowing that my oath never again to commit an act of violence, sworn while my foster mother’s blood was still slick on my hands, was about to be broken.

The whispers became howls, and the howls turned to shrieks that sent poor, brave Quadlopo galloping away, abandoning me to whatever fate my bad luck and ill deeds had brought upon us. The two feral, manic creatures that came at me must’ve once been human beings with hopes and dreams of their own. Now their hands curled into claws, and they showed me teeth that had clacked so hard and so long against each other that they’d broken down to ragged fangs. From somewhere deep inside their throats, deranged screeches hid words I couldn’t understand and didn’t want to hear. Words that proved madness had its own poetry.

My hand tightened on the grip of my sword and I breathed in as slow as I could, preparing to make my stand and wondering whether the awful sounds they were uttering would become the elegy I carried with me into the ground.

My name is Ferius Parfax. I’m seventeen years old. This was the day I first heard the Red Scream.

The rapier blades clink like wine glasses when the duellists cross swords for the first time. There’s no clanging or clattering, instead, I hear the opening note of an unbearably graceful tune, performed by two masters playing their instruments in perfect harmony. The freshly sharpened edges graze against one another like the fingertips of two dancers passing each other on the stage. Leather-soled boots glide across the marble floor, never stomping, never slipping. Every movement is precise. Assured. Calculated.

The noble families in their cushioned seats by the railings and the rabble clamouring from behind on rough, splintery benches grin and nod at each other, united for once by the perils and prestige meted out within the duelling circle. The spectators jeer and shout at those seated on the opposite side of the court, negotiating wagers with elaborate hand gestures, fingers darting back and forth as speedily as the thrusts and parries of the combatants. So aroused are the audience’s passions that they’ve become blind to all but the flash of steel upon steel. Deafened by the cacophony of their own applause, their ears fail to follow the deadly conversation unfolding inside the duelling circle. This is more than violence; it is poetry, composed in a language that goes unrecognized by the cantankerous crowds of Rijou’s infamous Court of Blades.

I understand it, though. Every word, every whisper.

It makes me sick.

Like all proper young gentlemen of Rijou, I’ve devoted hundreds of sweating, tearful hours inside the fencing halls where the sons and daughters of our city’s notable families train in the ways of the sword. Within those walls, my name has become synonymous with awkward, incompetent bladework. ‘Percevar Tiarren!’ our master will shout, and my fellow students will pause in their own bouts to roll their eyes at my latest gaffe. The admonishments have become so frequent this past year that now whenever one of my classmates stumbles into a failed lunge, their partner will hiss, ‘Don’t percé your attack, silly.’

I’d take offence at this misuse of my name, but doing so would inevitably lead to a duel with blunted foils at midnight, and I get enough bruises in the classroom as it is. As has been pointed out to me many times – often with the tip of the master’s own sword – I am rubbish as a fencer. ‘You’ve learned nothing from me!’ he declares at the end of every lesson. ‘Nothing!’

He’s wrong, though. I’ve learned this language of steel.

I just can’t bear to speak it.

My father, Lord Tiarren is one of the most respected generals in the Ducal army and a highly regarded duellist. Last night he asked me – no, begged me, his own son – to accept the junior officer’s commission he purchased for me and accompany him to quell the border raids. As the second eldest child, tradition dictates that I become our house champion when I turn of age. To me, it will fall to protect my parents as they age, my eldest sister as she leads our house, and my younger siblings as they expand our business ventures. It is for me to fight duels on behalf of our family.

When I refused my father’s offer for the third time, he didn’t hit me with one of those big, iron-hard fists of his; he didn’t threaten to expel me from his house and have my name stricken from our family line. He merely nodded as if he’d known all along what my answer would be, and accepted it as the unfortunate but inevitable consequence of congenital cowardice.

But I’m not a coward. I’m not.

At least, I don’t think I am. I’m just afraid all the time.

The duel inside the courtroom changes tenor, the rhythm accelerating, drawing my attention back to the fighting circle. The combatants’ probing rapiers having uncovered any weaknesses in defence or stiffness of movement, the blades now slither like snakes against each other, searching for an opening. The defendant, Orlo Abradi is a former guard captain to one of the High Twelve houses, convicted of attempting to swap a near-priceless blue romantine gemstone meant for his employer’s anniversary necklace with a mere sapphire.

Orlo is a tall man, broad in the chest and long in the arm. This gives him greater strength and reach than his opponent. When the duel began, the heralds dubbed him ‘Our Lord of the Battering Blow’. Orlo is indeed a formidable figure who’s probably never lost a fight in his life. The loud swish of his blade as he slashes at the prosecuting duellist and the grunt he makes a split-second before his lunges tells me that Orlo should’ve accepted the magistrate’s sentence of seven years for his crime instead of appealing for trial by combat.

A duella damnatio is sometimes called a ‘gambler’s duel’ because every cut the defendant scores against the prosecuting duellist strikes a year from his sentence. Every wound he suffers, however, extends his prison term by a year, and like all gamblers playing at the wrong table, Our Lord of the Battering Blow doesn’t know when to fold on a bad hand.

‘Sixteen!’ The audience shouts in unison as the prosecutor’s point slips under the defendant’s guard to nick his sword arm uet again. Before Orlo can even react, the prosecutor ducks down low and extends his arm in a perfect thrust that drives the tip of a blackened steel rapier a half-inch into the defendant’s right thigh. A tiny spot of blood blooms red against the white duelling breeches. ‘Seventeen!’ The crowd cheers, as if they were the ones who’d scored the touch.

It’s a strange thing to watch the rise and fall of your wife’s belly as she sits by the fire. With each sleepy breath – hers, not mine – the gentle slope beneath the pale blue cotton shift swells as if any moment now the baby’s going to leap out of her, expecting me to catch it.

And what am I supposed to do after that?

Ethalia exhales, and the moment where I unbuckle my duelling swords forever, shed the long leather coat that has marked me as one of the King’s Travelling Magistrates these past fifteen years to take on the newer and far more terrifying mantle of fatherhood recedes a little while longer.

I can’t decide whether my own breathing comes easier when Ethalia is inhaling or exhaling. I know she’s aware of me, of both my anticipation and my doubts. She’s always known what I was feeling, even before she became a Saint.

A real one. I’m not being metaphorical here: my wife is now known in this troubled little country of ours as Saint Ethalia who-shares-all-sorrows. I’m most commonly referred to as ‘That arsehole Falcio val What’s-his-name’.

Father.

Soon someone will be calling me father, and that will change everything. It will change me.

It has to, doesn’t it?

I lean back in my chair, closer to the wooden-slatted window of this tiny cottage we’ve rented until the baby is born and we’re able to make our way by boat to a little island off the coast of Baern that is Ethalia’s birthright. She tells me it’s beautiful. Peaceful. The folk who live there work out their differences with words over rabbit stew instead of steel inside a duelling circle.

Who knew such strange cultural practices still existed in which violence wasn’t the inevitable answer to every question?

I’m calmer now, and for a moment I tell myself it’s alright; I’m growing accustomed to this impending and uncertain future. But then I notice the reason for my composure: the fingers of my right hand have slipped around the leather grip of the scabbarded rapier that sits across my lap at night when Ethalia dozes and I listen by the window in case any of the thousand enemies this same blade has earned me should come to call. The reassurance I’ve learned to feel when holding a blade is an instinct that’s kept me alive all these years when by rights I should’ve been dead a hundred times over.

Telling someone to stay calm as you're about to drive a white-hot iron needle into their eye doesn't work as well as you might hope. The young Berabesq guy I'd hogtied to the golden supplication chair in the opulent prayer room of his parents' palace certainly wasn't reassured by my soothing words. I couldn't be sure of course, being as how I don't know much Berabesq, but I was basing my assumption on the way he kept trying to head-butt me while shouting prayers to his six-faced god to come and smite my heathen carcass, that he wasn't in the least bit reassured.

'Neither you nor your god are helping any,' I muttered, struggling to hold his head in position with one hand while lining up the needle with the other. It also wasn't helping that the desert sun was blazing down through the prayer room's domed glass ceiling and reflecting off all the gold that covered just about every inch of furniture around us. Religious zealotry is an expensive pastime in these parts.

'Any time now, kid,' Ferius called out amidst the clashing of steel weapons and furious shouting going on behind us. Argosi wanderers like her don't exactly scare easy, or so she's led me to believe in the year since she became my mentor. The fact that I couldn't detect even a hint of a smirk in that frontier drawl of hers made me nervous.'This isn't something I can rush,' I shouted back to her.

Eye surgery is hard - don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Ask any Jan'Tep spellmaster or Daroman physician worth their exorbitant fees: these sorts of procedures require years of training, tremendous skill, and no small amount of luck. One small mistake, even just a slight tremble of the hand at the wrong moment, and you'll blind the patient. That is, if you don't end up killing them outright.

So I really couldn't blame Sajad - that was the name of the poor guy whose right eye was currently swirling with the black trail of an obsidian worn slithering around inside - for wishing that the person about to poke him with three inches of burning hot iron was an actual doctor rather than a seventeen-year-old spellslinger.

'This isn't fun for me, either, you know,' I said.

That only convinced him to scream louder. There's probably an art to keeping a patient calm during stressful procedures. I'll add it to my list of things to learn one day if I survive this one. The problem was, Sajad's desperate struggles were preventing me from holding the sizzling needle at the exact right angle, which itself was the least of my problems because I was going to need my other hand to form the precise somatic shapes required for the spell that would prevent the obsidian worm from burrowing into his brain when I tried to spear it.

'Havin' a hard time convincin' these folks of your heroic intentions there, kid!' Ferius yelled back.

'Not feeling like much of a hero, now that you mention it,' I replied, punching my bound and terrified captive in the face to make him stop squirming.

Sparks erupted where the steel blades met, floating down to the loose hay covering the hall’s stone floor. Were it not for the storm raging outside and the raindrops leaking through the rotted rafters of the roof, the old castle might’ve been set ablaze by the reckless fury of the two brothers.

At least, Estevar assumed they were brothers. Surely two such identically brutish and irredeemably stupid men could not have come from different fathers.

The nearly hundred and twenty townsfolk in attendance had seemed troubled when first the fight had broken out, but now several among them were cheering and whooping the assailants on, slapping the backs of the heads of those who failed to join in.

‘Gentlemen, you will desist,’ Estevar called out impatiently.

The criminally uncomfortable oak and iron Magistrate’s chair in which he’d spent the better part of the day wedged like a hog caught in the fork of a tree root wore on his temper. The stench of too many bodies pressed too close together, of ale and pipeweed snuck inside the improvised courtroom, all of it had been making Estevar’s head swim for hours.

And now this.

‘Who are those two hooligans?’ Estevar asked the girl who’d been serving as his clerk today.

‘Rugio and Raballo, my Lord,’ she replied, half-hidden behind his chair.

‘And what is your name?’

The black-haired waif in the dull and faded grey-green dress stuck her head out from behind the chair. All-day she’d struck him as clever and confident, yet now she was positively terrified by this petty brawl. ‘My name is Abria, my Lord.’

Estevar tugged at the lapels of his dark leather greatcoat to straighten it, as well as to make sure some of the smaller weapons secreted within were in easy reach. If the girl was this frightened over what appeared to be little more than two men having it out with one another, perhaps she knew something he did not.

‘Well, Abria, I am a Magistrate, not a nobleman, and so you may refer to me as “Your Eminence” – though I warn you,’ he said with a wink to keep from frightening her further, ‘I’ll know if you’re commenting on my physique. Alternately you may simply call me Estevar.’

Yes, Your Emin—‘ the girl paused, openly contemplating his girth. ‘Yes, Estevar.’

Wise child.

‘Now,’ Estevar went on, ‘would you kindly explain to me why, given the Town Masters of Sen Trovan requested one of the King’s Travelling Magistrates come all this way to judge cases long overdue, the constables are tolerating an unsanctioned duel in this . . .’ he glanced around at the ruinous condition of the town’s uninhabited castle, ‘. . . delightful cathedral to civility and good government?’

Abria pointed to the two men who continued to swing their longswords at each other wildly as chips of stone and mortar flew from this ancient castle’s walls, coming apart under the onslaught of time, disrepair, and the steel blades of two men who clearly knew nothing about the weapons they wielded so recklessly. ‘Rugio and Raballo are the constables.’

Saint Ethalia-who-shares-all-sorrows, Estevar swore silently.

How had it all gone so badly?

The little boy whistled, and the fire grew. The flames inside the stone hearth danced, though it wasn’t immediately apparent to Estevar whether they were responding to the boy’s tune or from the wind that snuck in beneath the door and the gaps in the wooden slats that served for windows. Either way, the timber-framed cottage was too hot, and sweat dripped down Estevar’s jaw, soaking his elegantly coiffed black beard that was a source of pride to him before sliding down his neck and beneath the collar of his dark crimson leather greatcoat.

The boy wasn’t sweating at all.

‘Are you here to arrest me?’ the boy asked.

‘Have you committed a crime?’ Estevar asked in return.

Still facing towards the stone fireplace, the boy – Olivier the town constables had said his name was – nodded. Thick ginger curls bobbed up and down. ‘I hurt Jovan Guillet,’ he replied. After a moment he added. ‘Jovan is my best friend.’

Estevar glanced around the cottage for a chair that might have some hope of taking his admittedly considerable weight. This house was too small, the clay walls too close and the wooden rafters of the roof too low. The conflicting smells of baked bread and unwashed clothes, of rosemary hanging from the kitchen wall and un-emptied chamberpots in the bedroom upstairs burrowed inside his nostrils like earthworms, choking off his breathing.

The flames crackled as if they found humour in his discomfort. Outside, three clerics chanted prayers like braying sheep being slaughtered. Estevar walked the three steps to the wall furthest from the fire and unbuckled the scabbard from his belt so he could ease himself down onto the dusty stone floor.

‘Is that sharp?’ Olivier asked, turning at last to point at Estevar’s rapier.

Settling himself on his buttocks, Estevar drew the weapon from its sheath and held it out flat so the boy could see it. ‘This part here,’ he said, tapping the thicker steel near the hilt, ‘isn’t sharp at all, for it must be strong so that it can parry an opponent’s attacks and be used as leverage to force their weapon out of the way.’ His finger floated up and along to the middle third. ‘Here, it is sharper, but only a little, so that the edge may grip and therefore control the enemy’s blade.’ At last, he came to the narrowest part. ‘Now here, where the steel is thinnest, it is weak, but also very sharp. With this, I can cut through hide and flesh with ease. With the tip, I can penetrate thick leather and pierce a body with no more effort than you might put into pushing aside the branch of a sapling.’

Without coming closer, Olivier leaned forward to peer at the rapier, green eyes narrowing to slits. ‘Will you stab me with it? If you decide I’m guilty and you have to execute me, I mean.’ The boy rubbed at the left side of his chest. ‘I don’t think I’d like that.’

‘I would not willingly choose such an outcome either.’

Outside, the clerics continued their chanting, and though Estevar’s study of archaic languages had largely been restricted to legal texts, still he could make out the horrendous curses accompanying their prayers.

The chamberlain’s corpse danced from a rope looped around a beautiful chandelier in a ballroom surrounded by opulence, stinking of death.

Danced.

At this moment, the movements in question appeared to be a virtuadoré – an especially intricate noble courtship dance that involved a great deal of heel turns and swaying arms.

‘How is this even possible?’ demanded the Viscount of Cajoulac, pacing along the pristinely polished oak boards of his specially sprung floor which made dancing upon it less of a hardship to his guests’ knees.

Not the one hanging from the crystalline chandelier, of course.

‘I mean it,’ the slender, elaborately-attired Viscount insisted, pairing his outrage with a stomp from his emerald green silk with ivory lace shoe against the floor.

‘How can a dead body be dancing – literally dancing without cease even as we stand here watching?’

Estevar Borros, the King’s Crucible, chose not to answer, merely placed his hands over his belly, and allowed his fingers to drum a rhythm against the thick dark crimson leather of his greatcoat. In times past he would instead twist the beaded braids of the neatly trimmed and carefully oiled black beard that came down to the collar of his coat, but given the nature of the conundrum before him, drumming his fingers seemed a more fertile investigative methodology.

‘Well?’ the Viscount asked him.

There were three other people in the room – not counting the small herd of kneeling grey-robed clerics wearing black funerary cowls that bobbed up and down as they chanted disharmonious prayers to any number of Gods real or imagined. Estevar knew the Viscount’s confidants would only speak over him if he attempted to offer an opinion before they had their turn.

‘It is witchcraft, of course,’ concluded the mountainous Sir Galleato, dressed in plate armour despite the unpleasant heat emanating from the ornately carved marble fireplace at the end of the hall as well as the lack of there being anyone with which to do battle. Except, perhaps, Estevar, who he periodically glared at from beneath his steel war helm. ‘Black, bloody witchcraft.’

Blood isn’t black, Estevar thought, as anyone who bothered to stick around long enough after killing a person to see what death looked like would know. But men like Sir Galleato did not remain to witness the results of their actions. They were too busy bragging about them to their fellow knights.

Leave it alone, Estevar told himself. Murders aren’t solved by getting into brawls with armoured thugs.

‘Could it be a trick?’ asked Damina Melisende Jovien. ‘Some kind of . . . pulleys or springs hidden inside the metal shaft of the chandelier descending from the ceiling?’

Melisende was an older woman, grey hair thinning somewhat beneath the gold circlet crowning her angular face. The bright claret, almost pink gown she wore tried too hard to accentuate her bosom, suggesting she was struggling to hold the Viscount’s continued interest. Age was crueller to mistresses than to wives, Estevan had observed more than once.

‘Do not waste our time with the nonsense of whores,’ said Venerati Magni Lazare, pausing in his own loudly chanted prayers to rise up and kick one of his lesser clerics who’d apparently fallen asleep in his duties. The shaven-headed figure looked up and offered a surreptitious rude gesture to the Venerati’s back.
Fourteen days is a long time to put on such vocal displays of piety, even for professionals.

‘This is the work of the Gods themselves!’ Venerati Lazare declared, pressing the back of one hand against the palm of the other and holding them up towards the dangling corpse in a symbol of religious prayer. ‘Only by their hand is such a punishment possible!’

Estevar waited for the Viscount of Cajoulac to reprimand the priest for the insult to Damina Jovien. When the reprimand failed to come, he contemplated doing so himself.

Red lilies.

The sweet aroma woke Ferius Parfax with a start, overpowering the stench of old ale and sweat that otherwise occupied her rented room. She’d never taken much to sleeping indoors, but the Jan’Tep girl – Nephenia, she insisted being called even though ‘girl’ should’ve been sufficient – had caught the chills from too many days riding the dusty roads and too many nights sleeping on cold ground. Trouble enough to teach the hard-travelling ways of the Argosi to a kid raised pampered and privileged among a people who knew everything about magic and nothing at all about life. The teaching only got harder when the poor kid couldn’t stop shivering and shaking. So Ferius had relented, and when they’d come across a half-decent saloon she’d paid the vastly inflated price demanded by the barman for a pair of clean rooms. The plan was to win the money back once she convinced him to let her join his midnight card game, but that was before she’d woken to the scent of red lilies.

‘Do you like them?’ a man’s voice asked. ‘It was murder to find them in this backwater village.’

Ferius was willing to bet that murder hadn’t been a metaphor – no more than was waking her with the scent of the flower traditionally found at the grave sites of Argosi wanderers.

‘Did you hurt the girl?’ Ferius asked, careful not to open her eyes.

‘She sleeps soundly. Who knows? She may even wake up again.’

Ferius ignored the implied threat. Keeping her eyes shut, she took stock of herself, shaking off the last vestiges of sleep and picturing the room as she’d left it the night before: the uneven floor with the broken board near the door; the too-small window at the back jammed closed by paint; two chairs beneath it and a rickety table between them. None of these made for decent weapons or escape routes.

‘I imagine you’ll be reaching for those razor-sharp steel cards of yours,’ the man’s voice said softly. He was wrong, though. The moment those damned red lilies had woken her, Ferius had noticed the absence of the comforting weight of her cards pressing inside her waistcoat. She’d gone to bed fully clothed just in case one of the locals tried to invite themselves into either her room or the girl’s, but now the cards were gone. So was the extensible steel rod she kept in her left pocket. The worst part came as leaned up on her elbows and reached inside her waistcoat. ‘What kind of man sneaks into a lady’s room and steals her smoking reeds?’

The soft chuckle that followed came from the far corner of the room, hidden in the quivering shadows cast by the brazier at the end of her bed that burned the red lilies. ‘Aren’t you rather noted for your insistence that you’re no lady?’

‘Guess you’re right,’ she said, easing herself up to a sitting position and gauging what angle she’d need to kick the brazier to send it into the intruder’s face. The problem was, she was pretty sure it wouldn’t do any good against him.

Представи си за миг, че си постигнал най-съкровеното си желание. Не онова просто и практично нещо, което споделяш с приятелите си, а мечтата, която е толкова близко до сърцето ти, че дори като дете си се колебал да я изкажеш на глас. Предста-ви си, например, че винаги си искал да бъдеш Мантия, един от легендарните Арбитри, владеещи до съвършенство меча, кои-то са пътували от най-малките села до най-големите градове, за да направят възможно всеки мъж и всяка жена, независимо дали са високопоставени или обикновени хора, да са в състоя-ние да се обърнат към Царските закони. Закрилник за мнози-на, а за някои – може би дори герой. Усещаш плътната кожена служебна мантия около раменете си, измамно ниското тегло на вътрешните предпазни плочки, които те защитават като броня, както и десетките скрити джобове, в които са поставени твоите оръжия и секретни пособия, езотеричните ти хапчета и отвари. Държиш меча отстрани на тялото си, знаейки, че като Мантия си научен да се биеш, когато е необходимо, използвайки своята подготовка да се справиш с всеки противник в схватка един на един.
Сега си представи, че вече си постигнал тази мечта – въпре

ки всички препятствия, наложени над света от злонамерени-те действия на подобията на Богове и Светци. И така, вече си станал Мантия – всъщност мечтай по-мащабно – представи си, че си станал Предводител на Мантиите, заедно с двамата ти най-добри приятели, които са винаги с теб. Сега се опитай да си представиш къде си, какво виждаш, какво чуваш, какви зло-деяния се бориш да поправиш.
– Те отново се чукат – каза Брасти.
Насилих се да отворя очи и насочих замъгления си поглед към коридора на странноприемницата, който беше твърде пре-трупан и мръсен и напомняше, че светът най-вероятно е бил ху-баво място някога, но вече е западнал. Кест, Брасти и аз пазехме коридора, възползвайки се от удобството на прогнилите столо-ве, донесени от общото помещение на долния етаж. Срещу нас имаше голяма дъбова врата, която водеше към наетата от Лорд Тремонди стая.
– Не се връзвай, Брасти – казах аз.
Той ми хвърли един поглед, който беше замислен като смра-зяващ, но ефектът не се получи – Брасти просто е голям хуба-вец. Силните му скули и широката уста, обгърнати от червени-каворуса къса брада, подсилват усмивката, която го измъква от повечето сбивания, до които го докарват приказките му. Съвър-шеното владеене на лъка му помага да се справи с останалото. Опита ли се обаче да те разколебае с поглед, той просто изглеж-да сякаш се цупи.
– На кое да не се връзвам, ще ми обясниш ли? – каза той. – На факта, че ми обеща живот на герой, когато ме подмами да се присъединя към Мантиите, а вместо това се оказах беден, об-руган и принуден да приемам незначителни поръчки като те-лохранител на пътуващи търговци? Или може би на факта, че седим тук и слушаме нашия милостив благодетел – използвам термина свободно, тъй като той все още трябва да ни плати ке-лявите пари – но да оставим това на страна, та да го слушаме, значи, докато той оправя някаква жена, и за какво? Пети път след вечерята вече? Как изобщо издържа толкова този мърляч? Имам предвид…

– Може да е от билките – прекъсна го Кест, разтягайки мус-кулите си за пореден път с обичайната грациозност на танцьор.
– Билки ли?
Кест кимна с глава.
– И какво точно знае за билките „най-великият майстор на
меча в света“?
– Преди няколко години един аптекар ми продаде отвара, чи-
ето предназначение е да държи силна ръката, с която боравиш с меча, дори когато си почти умрял. Използвах я, за да отблъсна половин дузина убийци, които се опитваха да ликвидират един свидетел.
– И подейства ли? – попитах аз.
Кест сви рамене.
– Не мога да бъда сигурен. Те все пак бяха само шестима, кое-
то не е особено голям тест. През цялото време обаче имах со-лидна ерекция.
Отзад вратата се чуха стенания, последвани от пъшкане.
– О, Светци! Не могат ли просто да спрат и да си легнат да спят? Сякаш в отговор пъшкането стана по-силно.
– Знаеш ли кое ми е странно? – продължи Брасти.
– Ще спреш ли да говориш по някое време в близкото бъде-
ше? – попитах аз.
Брасти ме игнорира.
– Странно ми е, че звукът, издаван от разгонен благородник,
трудно може да се различи от този, когато го измъчват.
– Много време ли си прекарал в измъчване на благородници? – Знаеш какво имам предвид. Само пъшкане, грухтене и леки
писъци, не е ли така? Неблагоприлично е.
Кест повдигна едната си вежда.
– Как звучи благоприличното чифтосване?
Брасти погледна нагоре, изпълнен с копнеж.
– Със сигурност с повече стенания, издаващи насладата на
жената. И повече говорене. Повече „О, Брасти, само така, точно там! Сърцето и тялото ти са толкова юначни!“ – той извърна погледа си в знак на погнуса. – Това тук звучи сякаш тя плете пуловер или реже месо за вечеря.

– Опитай се да спреш за малко да тренираш сам по цял ден с твоя меч и си легни с някоя жена и ще разбереш. Хайде, Фалцио, подкрепи ме по този въпрос.
– Възможно е, но мина толкова много време, че не съм сигу-рен дали мога да си спомня.
– Да, разбира се, Свети Фалцио, но нали все пак със съпругата ти…?
– Престани – казах му аз.
– Не съм искал да… Имам предвид, че…
– Не ме карай да те ударя, Брасти – каза Кест тихо. Поседяхме в тишина една-две минути, докато Кест гледаше
гневно към Брасти вместо мен, а звуците от спалнята продъл-жаваха с неотслабваща сила.
– Все още не мога да повярвам, че той е в състояние да про-дължава по този начин. – Брасти погледна отново нагоре. – Пи-там те пак, Фалцио, какво правим тук? Тремонди дори не ни е платил още.
Вдигнах ръка и размърдах пръсти.
– Видя ли пръстените?
– Разбира се – каза Брасти – много големи и пищни. Отгоре с
камък във формата на колело.
– Това е пръстенът на Лорд на керван, щеше да го знаеш, ако
обръщаше повече внимание на света около теб. Именно това използват, за да запечатват вотовете си, когато провеждат го-дишната си конференция – един пръстен, един вот. Не всеки Лорд на керван идва за конференцията всяка година, затова имат право да дадат пръстена си на друг, който изпълнява ро-лята на пълномощник във всички важни гласувания. И така, Брасти, колко са общо Лордовете на керваните?
– Никой не знае със сигурност. Те са…
– Дванайсет – каза Кест.
– А на колко от неговите пръсти има по един от тези пищни
пръстени?
Брасти се загледа в собствените си пръсти.

– Не зная – четири… пет?
– Седем – каза Кест.
– Седем – повторих аз.
– Това означава, че той би могъл… Фалцио, какво точно ще се
гласува на тазгодишната конференция на Лордовете?
– Много неща – казах аз небрежно – Обменни курсове, такси,
търговски политики. А, също и сигурността.
– Сигурността ли?
– След като Херцозите убиха Краля, пътищата се занемариха.
Херцозите не отпускат средства и човешка сила дори за безо-пасността на търговските пътища, а Лордовете на керваните губят цяло състояние за лична охрана по време на всяко от пъ-туванията, които осъществяват.
– Нас това какво ни интересува?
Аз се усмихнах.
– Тремонди ще предложи Мантиите да станат Надзиратели
на пътищата, което ще ни донесе авторитет, уважение и сносен живот в замяна на опазването на техните скъпоценни товари от ръцете на бандитите.
Вниманието на Брасти се изостри.
– Ще ни позволят да съберем отново Мантиите ли? Значи ли това, че вместо да си прекарвам живота с етикет на изменник, подложен на гонения във всеки пренаселен град или забравено от бога село по цялата дължина и ширина на страната, аз ще обикалям търговските пътища и ще бия бандити и дори ще ми плащат за това?
Аз се засмях.
– След това ще имаме много по-добър шанс да изпълним кралските…
Брасти махна с ръка.
– Моля те, Фалцио, той умря преди 5 години. Ако до сега не си открил тези проклети „Кралски чароити“ *, за които между другото никой все още не знае какво представляват…
– Чароитът е скъпоценен камък – каза Кест спокойно.
– Както и да е. Мисълта ми е, че вероятността да намерим тези скъпоценни камъни, без да имаме каквато и да е представа

къде могат да бъдат, е толкова голяма, колкото Кест да убие тук Светеца на мечовете.
– Но аз ще убия Светеца на мечовете, Брасти – заяви Кест. Брасти въздъхна.
– Вие сте безнадежден случай, и двамата. Както и да е, дори
и да намерим Чароитите, какво точно се предполага, че трябва да направим с тях?
– Не зная – отговорих аз. – Но тъй като алтернативата е Херцозите да изловят Мантиите един по един, докато не из-мрем всичките, аз мисля, че предложението на Тремонди ме устройва.
– Добре тогава – каза Брасти, повдигайки имагинерна чаша във въздуха – браво на теб, Лорд Тремонди. Продължавай до-брата работа там вътре!
От стаята отново се чуха стонове, сякаш в отговор на него-вия тост.
– Знаеш ли, мисля, че Брасти може и да е прав – каза Кест, докато се изправяше и се протягаше, за да достигне един от ме-човете от неговата страна.
– Какво имаш предвид?
– Първоначално звукът наподобяваше правене на любов, но започвам да си мисля, че не виждам разлика между тези звуци и онова, което се чува, когато измъчват някого.
Аз се изправих внимателно, но моят очукан стол изскърца шумно, докато се навеждах към вратата, опитвайки се да под-слушам.
– Мисля, че сега спряха – измърморих аз.
Мечът на Кест издаде едва доловим шум, когато той го из-дърпа от ножницата.
Брасти долепи ухо до вратата и поклати глава.
– Не, той е спрял, но тя продължава. Той сигурно е заспал. Но защо тогава тя продължава, при положение че…?
– Брасти, отдръпни се от вратата – казах аз и стоварих рамо-
то си върху нея.
Първият опит се провали, но при втория ключалката под-
даде. Първоначално не можах да видя нищо нередно в кичозно

подредената стая, декорирана по начин, за който собственикът дълбоко вярваше, че съответства на стила на една Херцогска спалня. Дрехи и зарязани книги бяха разхвърляни по някогаш-ните скъпи килими, които сега бяха проядени от молци и най- вероятно приютяваха паразити. Прашни кадифени завеси вися-ха от дъбовата рамка над леглото.
Точно започвах да се придвижвам бавно из стаята, когато една жена изскочи иззад тези завеси. Непокритата ѝ кожа беше изпоцапана с кръв и, въпреки че не можех да видя чертите ѝ през прозиращата черна маска, която покриваше лицето ѝ, аз знаех, че тя се усмихва. В дясната си ръка държеше голяма но-жица като онези, който касапите използват за рязане на месо. Тя протегна към мен лявата си ръка със затворен юмрук, държей-ки дланта си обърната нагоре. След това я приближи до устата си и изглеждаше сякаш ще ни прати въздушна целувка. Вместо това тя подухна и във въздуха се образува облак син прах.
– Не дишайте – извиках на Кест и Брасти, но вече беше късно.
Каквато и магия да се съдържаше в праха, тя не се нуждаеше от вдишване, за да заработи. Светът изведнъж спря да се вър-ти и аз се почувствах сякаш съм заклещен между зациклилите тиктакания на стар часовник. Знаех, че Брасти е зад мен, но не можех да извърна глава, за да го видя. Кест влизаше в полезре-нието ми – в ъгъла на дясното ми око, но трудно можех да го махна оттам, тъй като се бореше като демон да се освободи.
Жената наклони глава и ме погледна за миг.
– Прекрасно – каза тя нежно и тръгна небрежно, дори мудно, към нас с ножица в ръка, издавайки ритмично звука клъц-клъц. Усетих ръката ѝ отстрани на лицето си, след което тя прока-ра пръсти надолу по мантията ми, насилвайки кожата, докато не промъкна ръката си вътре. Сложи дланта си на гърдите ми за момент, галейки ги нежно, след което се спусна надолу към
корема и под колана ми.
Тя се повдигна на пръсти и приближи маскираното си лице до ухото ми, притискайки голото си тяло към моето, сякаш щя-хме да се прегръщаме. Клъц-клъц се чу от ножиците.

– Прахът се казва „аелтека“ – прошепна тя. – Много, много е скъп. Беше ми необходима само една щипка от него за Лорда на керваните, но сега вие ме накарахте да използвам целия запас.
Гласът ѝ не беше нито ядосан, нито тъжен, а звучеше сякаш просто прави безпристрастно наблюдение.
– Бих ви прерязала гърлата, Дрипари такива, но сега поне мога да ви използвам за нещо, а аелтеката няма да ви позволи да запомните нищо, свързано с мен.
Клъц-клъц.
Тя отстъпи назад и се завъртя театрално.
– О, ще си спомняте за една гола жена с маска, но теглото, гласът, извивките на тялото ми – всичко това ще ви се изплъзва. Тя се наведе напред, сложи ножицата в лявата ми ръка и стегна пръстите ми около нея. Опитах се да я пусна, но пръсти-те ми не помръдваха. Положих възможно най-големи усилия да запаметя формата на нейното тяло, ръста ѝ и чертите на лицето ѝ през маската – каквото и да било, което би ми помогнало да я разпозная, ако я видя отново, но образите избледняваха още докато я гледах. Опитах се да обърна думите, с които я описвах, в рими, които имаше възможност да запомня, но и те ми се из-плъзваха моментално. Можех да се взирам директно в нея, но всеки път, когато мигнех с очи, споменът изчезваше. Аелтеката
със сигурност бе ефикасна.
Мразя магии.
За кратко жената отиде пак в леглото със завесите, след кое-
то се върна с малка локвичка кръв, която държеше внимател-но в дланта си. Тя отиде до стената срещу нас, натопи пръст в кръвта и написа една-единствена дума на стената. Думата, от която се стичаха капки, беше „Мантии“. Тя се върна при мен още веднъж и усетих целувка по бузата през ефирния плат на ней-ната маска.
– Почти е тъжно – каза тя спокойно – да гледаш личните Ман-тии на Краля – неговите легендарни Арбитри, паднали толкова ниско, че да се прекланят и раболепстват пред един дебел Лорд на керваните, който е само едно стъпало над обикновените улични търговци. Кажи ми, Дрипар, когато спиш, представяш

ли си се как все още яздиш из страната с меч в ръка и песен на уста, носейки правосъдие на бедните, окаяни хорица, смазани от ботуша на капризните Херцози?
Опитах се да отговоря, но въпреки усилията едвам успях да накарам долната си устна да потрепери.
Жената вдигна пръст и намаза с кръв бузата, която преди миг бе целунала.
– Сбогом, любими мой Дрипарю. След няколко минути аз ще бъда само един мъгляв спомен. Но не се притеснявай, аз ще те запомня много добре.
Тя се обърна, тръгна небрежно към гардероба и взе дрехите си. След това отвори прозореца и без даже да се облече, изчезна навън в ранния сутрешен въздух.
Около минута стояхме като три пъна, преди Брасти, който беше най-далеч от праха, да успее да размърда устата си доста-тъчно, за да каже: „Мамицата му“.
След това се опомни Кест, а аз бях последен. Веднага щом се размърдах, се затичах към прозореца, но жената естествено от-давна бе изчезнала.
Отидох към леглото, за да изследвам прогизналото от кръв тяло на Лорд Тремонди. Тя се бе отнесла с него като хирург и бе успяла някак си да го поддържа жив дълго време – най-вероят-но това беше друго свойство на аелтеката. Работата с нейната ножица бе оставила завинаги знака на варварството върху тя-лото му.
Това не беше просто едно убийство, а послание.
– Фалцио, погледни – каза Кест, сочейки към ръцете на Тре-монди. На дясната му ръка бяха останали три пръста, другите представляваха кървави остатъци. Пръстените на Лорда на керваните бяха изчезнали, а заедно с тях и нашите надежди за бъдещето.
Чух шума от изкачването на хора по стълбите, а равномерно-то потропване на стъпките им показваше, че са градски стражи.

PRIMA PROBĂ

Există trei cerinţe pe care trebuie să le îndeplineşti ca să câştigi statutul de mag printre Jan’Tep. Prima este forţa, ca să îţi aperi familia. A doua este abilitatea de a mânui magia care protejează neamul nostru. A treia este pur şi simplu să ajungi la vârsta de şaisprezece ani. Mai erau câteva săptămâni până la ziua mea de naştere când am aflat că nu voi face niciunul din aceste lucruri.

Magii vârstnici spun că magia are gust. Vrăjile de ambră sunt asemenea unui condiment care îţi pişcă vârful limbii. Magia suflată este uşoară, aproape răcoroasă, asemănătoare cu senzaţia pe care o ai atunci când ţii o frunză de mentă între buze. Vrăjile de nisip, mătase, sânge şi fier… fiecare are propria-i aromă. Adevăratul adept – acel mag care poate face vrăji, chiar şi în afaraoazei – le ştie pe toate. Eu? Habar nu aveam ce gust aveau vrăjile supreme, şi tocmai din acest motiv aveam necazuri. Tennat mă aştepta mai încolo, în interiorul celor şapte coloane dinmarmură care înconjurau oaza oraşului. Soarele care strălucea în spatele lui îi arunca umbra lungăpe drum, înspre mine. Alesese, probabil, locul tocmai pentru acest efect, iar asta dădea roade, pentru că aveam gura la fel de uscată precum nisipul de sub tălpi şi singurul gust pe care îlsimţeam era cel al panicii.
– Nu face asta, Kellen, m-a rugat Nephenia, grăbind pasul ca să mă ajungă din urmă. Nu este preatârziu să renunţi.
M-am oprit în loc. Briza caldă dinspre sud se juca printre florile rozalii ale copacilor de tamarixcare mărgineau strada. Petale minuscule pluteau în aer, lucind în soarele după-amiezii ca nişteparticule de foc magic. Mi-ar fi prins bine focul magic în acel moment. Sincer, m-aş fi mulţumitcu orice fel de magie. Nephenia a observat că ezit şi a adăugat, neajutorată:
– Tennat s-a lăudat prin oraş că te va schilodi dacă te va prinde.
Am zâmbit, mai ales pentru că era singura cale prin care puteam împiedica să mi se citească pe faţă acel sentiment de teamă pe care îl simţeam în stomac. Nu mă mai duelasem până atunci cu un mag, însă eram aproape convins că nu era o tactică prea eficientă să apari cuprins de groază în faţa adversarului tău.
– Nu voi păţi nimic, am spus eu, continuându-mi liniştit drumul către oază.
– Nephenia are dreptate, Kel, a spus Panahsi, gâfâind în timp ce se chinuia să ţină pasul. Braţullui drept era înfăşurat într-un strat gros de bandaje, care-i ţineau coastele laolaltă. Nu trebuie să

te lupţi cu Tennat din cauza mea. Am încetinit puţin ritmul, abia abţinându-mă să îmi dau ochiipeste cap. Panahsi avea tot ce trebuia ca să devină unul dintre cei mai pricepuţi magi ai generaţieinoastre. Ba chiar ne-ar fi putut reprezenta clanul în instanţă într-o bună zi, ceea ce ar fi fost onenorocire, având în vedere faptul că trupul său bine clădit din naştere era contrabalansat demarea lui slăbiciune pentru tarta cu mure galbene, iar trăsăturile lui, altminteri frumoase, eraupocite de afecţiunea de piele care era rezultatul inevitabil al tartelor amintite. Neamul meucunoaşte multe vrăji, însă niciuna care să vindece de grăsime şi de ciupitul de vărsat.

– Nu-i asculta, Kellen! a strigat Tennat când ne-am apropiat de cercul de coloane albe dinmarmură.
Stătea pe nisip, în mijlocul unui cerc lat de un metru, cu braţele încrucişate peste cămaşa lui neagră din pânză. Îşi tăiase mânecile ca să se asigure că toată lumea vedea că făcuse să strălucească nu una, ci două dintre benzile sale. Benzile metalice tatuate începură să lucească şi să freamăte sub pielea antebraţelor lui când el invocă magia de răsuflare şi de fier.

– Mi se pare adorabil că eşti pregătit să renunţi la viaţa ta ca să aperi onoarea prietenului tăugras. Ceilalţi iniţiaţi chicotiră în cor. Cei mai mulți dintre ei stăteau în spatele lui Tennat, foindu-se nerăbdători. Toată lumea asista bucuroasă la o bătaie bună. Mă rog, mai puţin victima.
Deşi Panahsi nu semăna cu figurile strălucitoare ale magilor războinici din trecut, sculptaţi pecoloanele din faţa noastră, era de două ori mai puternic decât Tennat. Nici în ruptul capului nuar fi trebuit să sufere o înfrângere atât de crâncenă în timpul duelului. Chiar şi acum, după mai bine de două săptămâni de zăcut în pat şi cine ştie câte vrăji de vindecare, Panahsi abia reuşea să ajungă la lecţii.

I-am oferit adversarului cel mai frumos zâmbet al meu. Tennat era convins, la fel ca și ceilalţi, că,din nesăbuinţă îl voi înfrunta la prima mea probă. Unii dintre iniţiaţi bănuiau că o voi face ca să îl răzbun pe Panahsi, care era, la urma urmei, singurul meu prieten. Alţii credeau că pornisem înmisiunea nobilă de a-l opri pe Tennat să nu-i mai chinuiască pe ceilalţi ucenici sau să nu îi maiterorizeze pe servitorii Sha’Tep, care nu erau înzestraţi cu puteri magice și nu puteau să se aperesinguri.

– Nu îl lăsa să te întărâte, Kellen, a spus Nephenia, punându-şi mâna pe braţul meu.

Пустыня — лгунья.
О, конечно, издалека эти бесконечные просторы золо- того песка выглядят манящими. Стоишь на вершине песчаной

дюны, теплый бриз смягчает палящее солнце и манит к ожида- ющим внизу чудесам. Все, что пожелаешь — невообразимые сокровища, спасение от врагов, возможно, даже лекарство от извилистых черных линий, которые не перестают расти вокруг твоего левого глаза, — какой-нибудь дурак поклянется, что все это ожидает тебя по другую сторону пустыни.

«Опасное путешествие? Возможно, зато какая награда, па- рень! Подумай о награде…»

Но давайте рассмотрим поближе — я имею в виду, по-насто- ящему близко — скажем, находясь примерно в дюйме от само- го песка. Это легко сделать, когда лежишь на нем лицом вниз, ожидая смерти от жажды. Видишь, как уникальны и неповтори- мы все до единой песчинки? Они разной формы, размера, цве- та… Единое совершенство, которое ты видел раньше — просто иллюзия. Вблизи пустыня грязная, мерзкая и злая.

Как я уже сказал, она вонючая лгунья.
— Это ты вонючий лгун, — проворчал Рейчис.
Я резко вскинул голову. Я даже не осознавал, что говорю

вслух. С большим усилием я повернулся, чтобы посмотреть, как поживает мой так называемый деловой партнер.

Я не очень далеко ушел: сказались недостаток еды и воды. Проклятые синяки, оставленные чарами недавно скончавше- гося мага, чей смердящий труп гнил на жаре в нескольких футах от меня, тоже не помогали. Итак, я собираюсь потра- тить остаток жизни на то, чтобы просто сердито глядеть на сварливого двухфутового белкокота, умирающего рядом со мной?

— Сам ты вонючка, — ответил я.
— Хе, — хихикнул он.
Белкокоты не очень хорошо осознают свою смертность. Од-

нако у них большая склонность сваливать вину на другого.
— Это все ты виноват! — просвистел он.
Я перевернулся, надеясь дать облегчение онемевшему хреб-

ту — только для того, чтобы раны на спине протестующе заво- пили. Боль исторгла сиплый стон из моей пересохшей глотки.

— Не пытайся это отрицать, — сказал Рейчис.
— Я ничего не отрицаю.
— Нет, отрицаешь. Ты хныкал, и я услышал: «Но, Рейчис, от-

куда я мог знать, что веду нас в смертельную ловушку, расстав- ленную моим же народом? То есть ты, конечно, предупреждал меня, что эта болтовня о тайном монастыре в пустыне, монахи которого могут вылечить меня от Черной Тени, — жульничест- во, но ты же знаешь меня, я идиот. Идиот, который никогда не слушает своего более умного и куда более красивого делового партнера».

На тот случай, если вы никогда не видели белкокота — во- образите сердитую кошачью морду, слегка пузатое тело, непо- корный косматый хвост и странные мохнатые перепонки меж- ду передними и задними лапами. С помощью этих перепонок он может планировать с верхушек деревьев, убивая свою добычу. «Красивый» — не то слово, которое приходит на ум, когда на него смотришь.

— Ты разобрал все это из хныканья? — спросил я.
Пауза.
— У белкокотов отличная интуиция.
Я сделал неровный вдох; жар песка обжигал мне лег-

кие. Как долго мы тут пролежали? День? Два дня? Я потя- нулся к нашей последней фляге с водой, подтащил ее ближе и собрался с силами, сознавая, что мне придется поделить- ся остатком воды с Рейчисом. Говорят, без воды можно про- жить три дня, но это только если пустыня не высасывает из тебя влагу, как… как чертов белкокот! Во фляге не осталось ни капли воды.

— Ты выпил нашу последнюю воду? Рейчис раздраженно ответил:
— Я сперва спросил.
— Когда?

Еще одна пауза.
— Когда ты спал.
Очевидно, пустыня была не единственным лгуном, с кото-

рым мне приходилось спорить.
Мне семнадцать лет от роду, я изгнан своим народом, меня

преследовали все маги-ищейки и наемные маги с двумя закли- наниями и плохими манерами, и остатки моей воды только что украло существо, больше всего походившее на друга.

Меня зовут Келлен Аргос. Некогда я был многообещающим посвященным и членом одной из самых могущественных се- мей на территориях джен-теп. Потом вокруг моего левого гла- за появились извилистые черные отметины загадочной болез- ни, известной как Черная Тень. И теперь люди называют меня изгоем, предателем, изгнанником — это когда хотят проявить вежливость.Единственная характеристика, которую я никогда не заслуживал, — везунчик.

— Конечно, я знаю место, — сказала старая разведчица.

Ее разные глаза — светло-коричневый и зеленый — не отры- вались от пыльного кожаного кошеля с медными и серебряны- ми безделушками, который лежал между нами на столе. Кроме нас на нижнем этаже таверны для путешественников никого не было, если не считать пары вырубившихся пьянчуг в дальнем углу и одного печального парня, который сидел в одиночестве и снова и снова перекатывал пару костей, плачась своему элю, что он самый невезучий на свете.

Что ты знаешь о невезении, приятель.

— Вы можете отвести меня туда? В этот монастырь? — спросил я, выкладывая карту на стол картиной вверх.

Разведчица взяла карту и прищурилась, на изображенные на ней темные башни.

— Хорошая работа, — сказала она. — Ты сам это нари- совал?

Я кивнул. За последние шесть месяцев мы с Рейчисом пере- секли полконтинента в поисках лекарства от Черной Тени. Мы здесь и там собирали улики, короткие каракули на полях неяс- ных текстов, упоминающих о тайном убежище, слухи, которые бесконечно повторяли пьяные в тавернах вроде этой.

Аргоси рисуют карты важных людей и мест, дополняя ри- сунки обрывками любой собранной информации в надежде, что получившиеся изображения явят свое скрытое при других обстоятельствах значение. Я и сам занялся рисованием. Если я погибну в поисках лекарства, всегда есть шанс, что карты по- падут в руки аргоси, а потом — к Фериус Перфекс, чтобы она поняла: можно не трудиться, разыскивая меня.

Старая разведчица швырнула карту обратно на стол, словно делая ставку.

— Место, которое ты ищешь, называется Эбеновым аббат- ством, и — да, я могла бы отвести тебя туда… Если бы мне за- хотелось.

Улыбка натянула обожженную солнцем кожу на ее выпу- клом лбе и вокруг глаз. Лицо разведчицы напоминало карту давно забытой страны. Наверное, ей было далеко за шестьде- сят, но куртка без рукавов демонстрировала похожие на ве- ревки мускулы на плечах и руках. Вкупе с ассортиментом но- жей в ножнах на портупее, пересекающей грудь, и арбалетом, пристегнутым за спиной, эти мускулы говорили, что разведчи- ца скорее всего прекрасно может постоять за себя в бою. Из-за того, как она продолжала пялиться на мешок с безделушками на столе, не обращая на меня особого внимания, становилось яснее ясного, что я не произвел на нее схожего впечатления.

До сих пор поиски чудодейственного лекарства не были осо- бо выгодным предприятием. Все до единого монеты, которые я заработал в своих путешествиях как меткий маг, ушли тор- говцу змеиным маслом, продававшему вонючие отвары; из-за них меня несколько дней потом тошнило и рвало. Теперь моя износившаяся в дороге рубашка свободно болталась на тощем теле, с лица и груди еще не сошли синяки и царапины, оставши-

еся после последней встречи с парой наемных магов джен-теп. Так что я понимал, почему мой вид вряд ли мог внушить развед- чице трепет.

— Она думает о том, чтобы избить тебя и забрать твои день- ги, — сказал Рейчис, поводив носом у меня на плече.

— Эта тварь не кролик, так? — спросила разведчица, бросив на него настороженный взгляд.

Ее народ не понимал посвистывания, рыков и временами — пуканья и других штучек, с помощью которых общался Рейчис.

— Я все еще пытаюсь это выяснить, — ответил я.
Белкокот издал низкое рычание:
— Ты же знаешь, что я могу запросто вырвать твои глаза из

глазниц и сожрать, пока ты будешь спать, верно?
Он спрыгнул с моего плеча и направился к двум пьянчугам в углу — без сомнения, чтобы проверить, удастся ли обшарить

их карманы.
— Спроси тех, кому ведомы истории, — начала разведчица

напевным голосом, — и тебе расскажут, что никто, кроме семи чужаков, никогда не бывал за стенами Эбенового аббатства. Пятеро из них мертвы. Один, пристрастившийся к сонной тра- ве, не смог бы найти обеими руками собственный нос, не гово- ря уж о тайном монастыре, укрытом в пустыне.

Она потянулась к небольшому кошелю, в котором лежали все оставшиеся у меня ценности.

— Значит, есть только я.

Я завладел кошелем первым. Может, с виду я и не очень, но у меня проворные руки.

— Мы еще не договорились об условиях.

Впервые разномастные глаза разведчицы встретились с мо- ими. Я попытался ответить на ее сердитый взгляд таким же . . .