Charmcaster Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  The Spellslinger Series

  Dedication

  The Mechanical Bird

  Discordance

  1. Desert Lightning

  2. Deep Breaths

  3. The Wind Spirit

  4. Polite Conversation

  5. The Fugitive

  6. The Second Talent

  7. Doubt

  8. The Hyena

  The Charmcaster

  Memory

  9. The Charmcaster

  10. The Reunion

  11. The Black Sky

  12. The Chains

  13. The Universal Constant

  14. The Game of Cards

  15. The Tracker

  16. Neither Straight Nor Narrow

  17. The Eight Bridges

  18. The Thieves

  19. The Grand Exhibition

  20. The Contraptioneer

  The Inventor

  Deception

  21. A Mother’s Invention

  22. The Assassin

  23. The Servadi

  24. The Credara

  25. The Daughter

  26. The Third Lie

  27. The Alloys

  28. The Painted Card

  29. The Bridge of Dice

  30. The Forest Walk

  The Path of Shadows

  The Path

  31. The Cure for Anger

  32. The Black Thread

  33. The Man in Red

  34. The Trickster

  35. The Box

  36. The Tower

  37. The Quick Draw

  38. The Delegate

  39. Sibling Rivalry

  40. The Shadowblack

  The Crowned Mage

  The Gaze

  41. The Missing Question

  42. The Onyx Bracelet

  43. The Vessel

  44. The Debt

  45. The Reward

  46. The Crowned Mage

  47. The Prison

  48. The Cell

  49. The Confession

  50. The Mountain

  The Mechanical Dragon

  The Truth

  51. The Spies

  52. The Betrayal

  53. The Noose

  54. The Argosi

  55. The Way of Fools

  56. The Murderer

  57. The Inventor

  58. The Perfect Flaw

  59. The Sacrifice

  60. The Mechanical Dragon

  61. Deaths of Necessity

  62. The Red Mercy

  63. The Shadows

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  THE SPELLSLINGER SERIES

  SPELLSLINGER

  SHADOWBLACK

  CHARMCASTER

  Look out for

  SOULBINDER

  Coming in October 2018

  To Ralph McInerny.

  Some twenty years ago he created a series of cassette tapes

  with the preposterously friendly title,

  ‘Let’s Write a Mystery’.

  He was the best writing teacher I never met.

  DISCORDANCE

  Those wishing to become Argosi must first accept that we are neither prophets nor fortune tellers. Our cards hold no magic. We are simply wanderers and the decks we carry nothing more than maps; each suit represents a different culture and each card the structures of power within it. As people and nations change, so too do our decks. These are the concordances and they reveal that which is.

  But when an Argosi encounters something new – something that should not exist and yet could alter the course of history – we are compelled to paint a new card: a discordance. Each is both warning and clarion call that every Argosi must heed, for so long as the true nature of a discordance remains hidden, the future will be … unpredictable.

  1

  Desert Lightning

  ‘I totally saw this coming,’ Reichis growled, leaping onto my shoulder as lightning scorched the sand barely ten feet from us. The squirrel cat’s claws pierced my sweat-soaked shirt and dug into my skin.

  ‘Yeah?’ I asked, ignoring the pain with about as much success as I was having stopping my hands from shaking. ‘Maybe next time there’s a hextracker on our tail, you could warn us before our horses panic and dump us in the middle of the desert.’ Another thunderclap erupted overhead and shook the ground beneath our feet. ‘Oh, and if it’s not too much trouble, how about a little heads-up before dry lightning starts crashing down on us from a cloudless sky?’

  Reichis hesitated, no doubt trying to come up with a believable explanation. Squirrel cats are terrible liars. They make excellent thieves and particularly enthusiastic murderers, but they’re rubbish at deception. ‘I was waiting to see if you’d figure it out on your own. I was testing you. Yeah, that’s it. Testing you. And you failed, Kellen.’

  ‘You two recall we’re supposed to be laying an ambush?’ Ferius Parfax asked, kneeling a few feet away to bury something shiny and sharp in the sand. A tangle of red curls whipped around her face while she worked. Despite the strange storm raging all around us, her movements were fluid and practised. This wasn’t the first time we’d found ourselves on the wrong end of a hunting expedition.

  Hence the need for traps.

  Ambushing a Jan’Tep mage is a tricky business. You never know which forms of magic they might have at their disposal. Iron, ember, sand, silk, blood, breath … The enemy could have any number of spells to kill you. As if that wasn’t enough, you also have to consider the possibility of accomplices – lackeys or mercenaries hired to watch the mage’s back or do his dirty work for him. ‘This might go faster if you let me help you set the traps,’ I suggested to Ferius, desperate to keep my mind off the surprising number of ways I might die in the next few minutes.

  ‘No, and quit watching me.’ She got up and walked a few yards away before kneeling to bury another spiked ball or fragile glass cylinder filled with sleeping gas or whatever else she was using this time. ‘The fella chasing us could be casting one of them fancy Jan’Tep silk spells to ferret out our plans. That head of yours is too full of thoughts, kid. He’ll read you easy.’

  That bristled. Ferius was an Argosi – one of the enigmatic card players who travelled the continent attempting to … Actually, I still wasn’t quite sure what they were meant to do other than annoy people. Despite not having much hope of ever becoming an Argosi myself, I’d been studying Ferius’s ways as best I could, if only because doing so might keep me alive. It didn’t help that she kept insisting I first had to learn to do stupid things like ‘listen with my eyes’ or ‘grab onto emptiness’.

  Reichis, of course, loved it when Ferius upbraided me. ‘She’s right, Kellen,’ he chittered from his perch on my shoulder. ‘You should be more like me.’

  ‘You mean without any thoughts in my head?’

  The snarl he gave me was barely more than a whisper, but delivered perilously close to my ear. ‘It’s called instinct, skinbag. Makes it hard for silk mages to read me. Want to know what my instincts are telling me to do right now?’

  Another bolt of lightning struck the peak of the dune above us, nearly giving me a heart attack and sending a wave of smoke sizzling up from the sand. Had Reichis and I been better friends, we probably would have been hanging on to each other for dear life. Instead, he bit me. ‘Sorry. Instinct.’

  I jerked my shoulder, shaking the squirrel cat off me. He spread his paws out and the furry flaps that ran between his front and back limbs caught the wind as he glided down gracefully to the ground where he gave me a surly look. It had been petty of me to throw him off. I couldn’t blame him for his reaction to the thunder. Reichis has a thing about lightning and fire and … well, pretty much any enemy you can’t bite.
>
  ‘How is this guy doing it?’ I wondered aloud. A dry storm in the middle of the desert under a cloudless sky? It made no sense. Sure, the sixth form of ember magic creates an electrical discharge that looks a lot like lightning, but it manifests from the mage’s hands, not from above, and they have to be able to see the target to cast it.

  I looked back up the dune for the thousandth time, wondering when I’d see him coming over the crest, ready to rain seven hells upon us. ‘Three days this mage has been on our tail and nothing we do shakes him. Why won’t he leave us alone?’

  Ferius gave a wry chuckle. ‘Reckon that’s what comes from having a spell warrant on your head, kid. Whichever cabal of mages implanted obsidian worms in them rich kids can’t be too pleased with us going around destroying them.’

  Even with more pressing dangers at hand, just thinking about obsidian worms repelled me. They were a type of mystical parasite. Once lodged inside the victim’s eye, they enabled mages to control the host from afar. Ferius, Reichis and I had spent the last six months tracking down students from the famed Academy who had no idea they were slowly being turned into spies against their own families – or worse, assassins.

  ‘When did it become our job to save the world from the obsidian worms anyway?’ I asked, removing my frontier hat so I could wipe my brow with my sleeve. Despite the dry air, I was sweating profusely; wearing a black hat that was too big for my head wasn’t helping. I’d got the hat from a fellow spellslinger by the name of Dexan Videris – payment on account of his having tried to kill me. He’d claimed the silver sigils adorning the band would keep mages from tracking me, but like everything else Dexan had told me, that was turning out to be a lie.

  ‘It ain’t our job,’ Ferius replied. ‘It’s mine. The whole point of bein’ Argosi is to avert the calamities that bring suffering to innocent folks. Since a bunch of idiot Jan’Tep mages assassinating powerful families all across the continent could set off a war, I’d say this situation qualifies.’

  The wind picked up without warning and my apparently non-magical prized possession flew from my hand. I almost went running after it but decided not to bother. Stupid thing never fit right anyway. ‘It would be nice if just once somebody came along who wanted to help instead of everybody trying to murder us.’

  Ferius rose abruptly to her feet and peered out into the desert. ‘Now that don’t look good at all.’

  I turned to see what she was talking about. Off in the distance, a wall of sand that must’ve been a hundred feet high had begun to roil in the air.

  ‘Now we’ve got to deal with a freakin’ sandstorm?’ Reichis grumbled. He shook himself and his fur changed colour from its usual muddy brown with black stripes to a dusty beige flecked with grey that matched the approaching clouds of sand and grit. Once it got here he’d be able to pretty much disappear into the storm if he wanted – which he probably would if things went badly. Squirrel cats aren’t sentimental.

  As the storm approached, I tried to decide whether I’d rather die from being buried under tons of sand, electrocuted by dry lightning or murdered with dark magic. The choices are never pretty when you’re an outlaw spellslinger with a gambler for a mentor, a squirrel cat for a business partner and a long line of mages who want you dead.

  Oh, and I was fairly sure it was my seventeenth birthday.

  ‘What do we do now?’ I asked.

  Ferius, her gaze on the thick clouds of sand coming for us, replied, ‘Reckon you’d best take a deep breath, kid.’

  2

  Deep Breaths

  Whenever the three of us are about to be attacked – which is a lot more often than I’d like – we each have a job to do: Ferius sets her traps, prepares her weapons and uses those crazy Argosi talents of hers to figure out the best tactics for our survival. Reichis does most of the scouting and uses his keen sense of smell to catch any scent of approaching enemies.

  Me? My job is to take a deep breath.

  While Ferius is a master of trickery, and Reichis is two furry feet of sharp teeth, claws and a total disregard for the consequences of violence, I’ve got one and only one skill that matters in a situation like this: a piece of breath magic that relies on quick hands and the twin powders I keep in the pouches on either side of my belt. I might not have a lot of spells, but I’ve learned to be fast on the draw. Doesn’t matter how powerful a rival mage is if you blast him before he performs his invocations. Trouble is, if my hands are shaking or I’m sweating so much the powders stick to my fingers, I’ll end up with two charred stumps at the end of my arms and an embarrassed look on my face.

  So … Breathe.

  Relax.

  Ignore the lightning and the sandstorm. Use the years you spent as an initiate envisioning your spells to picture your enemy at the top of that sand dune, see yourself blasting him right before he can—

  A spike of pain that felt like a blast of ice-cold wind stabbed at my right eye. I slammed the heel of my palm over it in a futile attempt to block the sensation. Usually it’s my left eye that gives me trouble on account of the shadowblack marks around it (which also happens to be the reason why bounty hunters with spell warrants keep trying to kill me). As if the shadowblack weren’t trouble enough, about six months ago my other eye had become home to a sasutzei: a wind spirit who’d decided to take up residence there. I was still new to whisper magic, so getting the spirit under control was next to impossible.

  ‘Damn it, I’m trying to concentrate!’

  Uncharacteristically, the pain faded away. I took a deep breath and again tried to visualise the moment when I’d lay eyes on our pursuer. My muscles relaxed as I imagined myself pulling the powders, tossing them into the air and forming the somatic shapes with my hands just as they collided, uttering the spell and blasting—

  ‘Ow! Stop it!’

  ‘What’s the problem, kid?’ Ferius asked.

  ‘This stupid wind spirit in my eye keeps vexing me!’

  Ferius came closer, eyes narrowed. ‘How long has Suzy been acting up?’

  ‘Suzy’ was the name Ferius had given to the sasutzei.

  ‘Ever since this damned mage started hunting us. Every time I think about—’

  Reichis cut me off with a low growl, muzzle held high as he sniffed the air. His eyes glistened with hungry anticipation instead of the much more sensible fear that any sane animal would’ve felt at a time like this. The corners of his fuzzy mouth rose up in his approximation of a grin. ‘Time to fight.’

  Lightning struck the sand near the top of the dune again – once, twice, then a third time. Wind from the approaching storm buffeted us, sending sand swirling into the air and turning the world into a hazy mess of grey shadows. One of those shadows appeared at the very top of the dune.

  Ferius grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down low into a crouch. ‘Wait till he gets close,’ she said, her words barely audible over the storm. ‘Let the enemy come to us.’

  ‘Stupid humans,’ Reichis muttered, but he obeyed for once.

  As we huddled there, a slim figure in a long travelling coat stumbled down the dune, face covered against the wind and grit, wearing a beat-up frontier hat not unlike my own. The outfit in itself was rather odd: usually when people come to kill me they like to do it with flair. A four-legged animal – maybe some kind of dog or big cat – limped alongside.

  ‘Hyena,’ Reichis snarled, sniffing at the air and baring his teeth. ‘I hate hyenas.’ He sniffed a second time, then tilted his head quizzically.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Something ain’t right. The skinbag and the mutt stink of fear.’

  ‘Of us?’ I asked incredulously.

  The answer came when the mage reached the bottom of the dune and ran right past us into the deepening storm. A few seconds later four more silhouettes appeared over the crest – men and women clothed in the wide strips of pale linen favoured by the Berabesq, whose lands these were. They wielded curved-bladed swords and flails with spiked balls spinning at t
he end of their chains, moving with ferocious grace as they pursued the mage across the desert.

  ‘Berabesq Faithful,’ Ferius murmured, eyes wide as she watched them pass. Usually most things that come out of her mouth sound like the beginning of a dirty joke, so the awe in her voice was disconcerting.

  ‘What are Berabesq “Faithful”?’ I asked.

  She watched as the mage fled into the sandstorm. ‘For that poor sucker? The worst kind of death imaginable.’

  3

  The Wind Spirit

  ‘Well, problem solved,’ Reichis said, shaking himself. The colour of his fur changed to a jaunty orange with gold stripes as he sauntered up the sand dune in the direction we’d come.

  ‘Wait!’ I called out.

  The squirrel cat didn’t even slow down. ‘Nope. If we’re not the target, then we got no reason to sit around in this stinkin’ desert.’

  Normally I’d agree with him. In fact, given how much I hate the desert, I’d be way ahead of him. But something was bothering me – like an itch I needed to scratch but couldn’t reach. I looked back at the retreating sandstorm. Both the hunters and the hunted had disappeared from view. ‘These Berabesq “Faithful” … Why would they be out in the desert chasing down a Jan’Tep mage?’

  Reichis gave me the same look he gives crows when they irritate him. ‘Don’t know, don’t plan on findin’ out.’ He scratched behind one of his ears. ‘Gonna find me a bath and soak in it until all this sand is out of my fur.’

  ‘What’s he on about?’ Ferius asked.

  I translated for her.

  ‘The squirrel cat’s got a point,’ she said, packing up her traps and tripwires. ‘The Faithful are some of the coldest killers you’ll ever meet. Magic ain’t no different to devil-worship in this part of the world, and the Faithful, well, they’ve got a nose for it. Once they’re done with the mage, you can bet they’ll be sniffin’ after you, kid.’

  That hardly seemed fair. I barely had enough magic for a few paltry breath spells. That was one of the reasons why so many mages were eager to duel me. Now I was going to have a bunch of religious zealots after me too? ‘Why does the whole world hate me?’