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  No reply. Reichis just kept crawling inch by inch to his destination. When he finally lay next to the corpse’s head, panting and exhausted, I worried that perhaps the squirrel cat’s mind was so far gone from thirst that he’d mistaken the dead man for me. With a trembling paw, he reached for the mage’s unblinking eyes that stared blindly up at the darkening sky. That’s when I finally understood what Reichis was up to.

  “Oh, for the sake of all my dead ancestors,” I swore, “tell me you’re not planning to—”

  With the deftness that comes from practice—a lot of practice—Reichis used one of his claws to dig out the man’s eyeball. He then opened his jaws wide, dropped the disgusting, squishy sphere into his maw, and bit down. “Oh …” he said, moaning rapturously, “that’s tasty.”

  “You’re repugnant, you know that?” I’m not sure the words actually came out of my mouth. At that precise moment I was using what little strength of will I had left to keep myself from vomiting.

  “Yummy,” he mumbled between chews, then swallowed noisily.

  What few people know about squirrel cats is that the only thing more revolting than the way they devour their food is their insistence on rhapsodising about it afterwards. “You know,” he began with a contented sigh, “you worry that it’ll be overcooked, on account of this guy’s face having caught fire and all, but it turned out perfect. A little crispy on the outside; soft and warm on the inside.” He reached a paw over to the other side of the dead mage’s face. “You want the left one?” he asked, adding a slight snarl to convey that the offer wasn’t entirely sincere.

  “I’ll pass. Doesn’t it just make you more thirsty? We’re likely to die from lack of water a lot sooner than we’ll expire from hunger.”

  “Good point.” Reichis hauled himself closer to the mage’s chest, where a massive wound from our duel had left a pool of blood. The squirrel cat began lapping it up. He paused when he caught me staring at him in horror. “You should probably drink some too, Kellen. Must have some water in it, right?”

  “I am not drinking blood. I am not eating eyeballs.”

  The squirrel cat served up a sarcastic growl. “Oh, right, because your culinary hang-ups are so much more important than our survival.”

  I couldn’t think of a suitable retort. He might’ve been right, for all I knew, though I had no idea if human beings could actually get enough moisture from blood to make a difference, or if it would just make me sick. Either way, I couldn’t bring myself to find out, so I just lay there for a few minutes with nothing to do but listen to the sound of Reichis’s enthusiastic slurping. When he was finally done, he lay back down on his side and called to me. “Kellen?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I know this is kind of a sensitive topic, but …”

  “What?”

  “Well, when you’re dead, is it okay if I eat your corpse?” Hastily he added, “I mean, it’s better if one of us lives, right?”

  With what little strength I had left, I rolled away from him onto my back, ignoring the pain that exploded from my injuries. I didn’t want the last thing I saw in this world to be the blood-soaked face of a squirrel cat as he pondered which to eat first, my eyeballs or my ears.

  High above, beyond the petty concerns of mortals, the stars began to appear, thousands of tiny sparks coming to life. Though the Golden Passage was an arid, unlivable hellhole, the night sky out here could really put on a show. I took in a breath, only to have my throat spasm painfully—a reflex that I guess must be the result of going too long without water.

  I’m going to die here. The words invaded my thoughts as suddenly and as forcefully as an iron binding spell. I’m really going to die tonight, killed by some arsehole Jan’Tep bounty hunter and my own stupidity. I felt myself starting to cry, and with trembling fingers reached up to wipe at tears that weren’t there.

  I must’ve let out a sob, because Reichis groaned. “Oh, great, cos bawling your eyes out is really going to help conserve water.” Squirrel cats aren’t exactly known for their compassion.

  Usually when I get myself into trouble, my survival depends on the timely arrival of a certain curly red-haired gambler by the name of Ferius Parfax. There I’ll be, on my knees, begging some lunatic who happens to have a thing against shadowblacks, waiting for the blade (or mace, or crossbow, ember spell, or … you get the idea) to come crashing down on me, when all of a sudden she’ll turn up.

  “Well now, don’t you two look as fussy as two feisty ferrets fightin’ over a fern,” she’ll say. Actually, she’s never used those exact words, but it’s usually something equally nonsensical.

  “Do not dare interfere, Argosi,” the mage (or soldier, assassin or random irritated person) will shout back.

  Ferius will push that frontier hat of hers a half-inch higher on her brow, reach into her waistcoat to pull out a smoking reed, and say, “Far be it from me to interfere, friend, but I’ve grown somewhat accustomed to that skinny fella you seem intent on carvin’ up. Gonna have to ask you to kindly back off.”

  After that? Well, fight-fight-fight, clever remark, certain death, near-impossible daring feat, enemy goes down, one last clever remark—usually at my expense—and then I’m saved. That’s how it’s been ever since I left my homeland on my sixteenth birthday.

  Only now everything’s different. Six months ago I’d abandoned Ferius, my mentor in the ways of the Argosi, and Nephenia, the charmcaster I once loved, on account of I’d learned that my people were never going to stop hunting me and anyone with me, so long as I had the shadowblack. Since the swirling black marks around my left eye showed no sign of fading away, that meant leaving the two people I was closest to behind or risk them being killed by enemies intent on getting to me. As painful as my departure had been, at least it had felt kind of noble.

  For about six minutes.

  The problem with being noble and self-sacrificing is that when you get into a jam—say, like, when the tattooed metallic bands on a Jan’Tep hextracker’s arms are glowing from all the magic he’s summoned to kill you—there’s nobody to get you out of it.

  “Hey, Kellen …?” Reichis asked with an uncharacteristic hesitation in his voice.

  “Yes, you can eat me when I’m dead. Happy now?”

  Silence for a moment, then, “No, I was just wondering if you think that mage was telling the truth.”

  “About what?”

  “When he said he killed Ferius.”

  3

  The Trouble with Spells

  I’d suspected the old scout would betray us the minute she had us in the desert and away from any prying eyes. Reichis and I took turns watching her, day and night, as we trudged up and down one sand dune after another. Our vigilance proved to be misplaced, however, because although she really was leading us into a trap, it wasn’t one she’d set herself.

  Among the many ways the desert messes with you is the way light reflecting off the sand plays tricks with your eyes. Sometimes you’ll see a shimmer in the distance that looks just like a Jan’Tep shield spell. You’ll get ready for the fight of your life, only to have your mean-spirited guide mock you for being “as jumpy as a tadpuddler.”

  I have no idea what “tadpuddlers” are. Apparently they’re quite jumpy.

  Every time I freaked out over a mirage, the old scout would ride up to the glistening haze, holding her hooked knives aloft and shouting, “Have at thee, foul patch of empty air!” She found it all terribly funny, right up until one of those blurry shimmers fired a bolt of ember magic that blasted her into ashes.

  Reichis and I were so exhausted by then that we barely had time to drop to the ground before another bolt came after us. Turned out we weren’t even the target: the ember spell was aimed at our horses. They died a mercifully quick death. Unfortunately, with them went the supplies we needed to survive another week in the desert.

  “How many?” the broad-shouldered mage asked as he stepped out from his obscurement spell. As cloaking conjurations go, it wasn’t par
ticularly impressive, which gave me hope this guy might be relying on a charm and wasn’t particularly powerful himself. Maybe he was just a one-bander like me.

  “How many what?” I asked, rising to my feet and casually reaching for my powders.

  “How many of my fellow mages have you killed, shadowblack? How many of our people have died trying to bring you to justice?”

  I considered the question. “Nine,” I lied, then corrected myself. “Actually, ten now.” I tossed the red and black powders into the air in front of me. Just before they collided, I formed the somatic shape with my hands: index and middle fingers pointed towards my target, in the sign of guidance; ring and little fingers pressed into my palm, the gesture of restraint, and thumbs to the sky, the closest I ever get to a prayer to my ancestors for help. “Carath,” I intoned.

  The explosion shattered the air between us. Twin red and black flames intertwined around each other like snakes as they roared out after my enemy. An instant later, the flames were gone, broken against his shield spell.

  Guess this guy’s sparked more than one band.

  “Did you really expect that to work?” he asked.

  “No, but I’m ready for you now, and you can’t cast another ember blast without dropping your shield.” I let my hands drift back down the pouches at my sides. “Care to see who draws faster?”

  “Heh,” Reichis chuckled.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing. It’s just funny when you try to sound tough.”

  “Not helpful.”

  My opponent watched me closely, taking my measure as I took his. He was young, as mages go, not much older than twenty. Usually that means I can count on them to take up my challenge, but he didn’t bother with another ember spell. Instead he flicked copper-coloured hair out of his eyes and kept up the somatic gesture for his shield with one hand while raising the other so I could see that one of his fingers had an unnaturally elongated nail. With a slow, deliberate motion, he pushed the nail into the skin of his wrist and drew a sinewy line about six inches long, leaving behind a trail of crimson.

  Reichis sat up on his haunches, licking his lips. “Isn’t making him bleed supposed to be our job?”

  “Blood magic,” I whispered, cursing my lousy luck. “Why did it have to be blood magic?”

  If the guy had been Berabesq, I might’ve confused him with one of their crazy faith warriors who use their own blood to conjure shields, but he was Jan’Tep, like me, which meant this was something much worse.

  “Would you like to know how I found you, shadowblack?” he asked.

  Definitely Jan’Tep. My people always feel a burning compulsion to talk you to death before they actually kill you. “I must be sparking the sigils for sand magic,” I replied, “because I’m having this premonition that you’re about to tell me.”

  “We heard rumours of an outlaw spellslinger travelling the length and breadth of the continent in search of a cure, which is ridiculous, of course, since everyone knows there’s no cure for the shadowblack. But I was positive the fool in question was none other than Kellen of the House of Ke, the most notorious traitor in our people’s history.”

  That hardly seemed fair. I couldn’t have been more than the second or third most notorious. “So you figured you’d get your own name in the history books?”

  “It wasn’t easy.” He gestured towards the silver glyphs around the brim of my black frontier hat. “Those veiling charms are remarkably effective.”

  Well, that was good to know. I’d stolen the hat from a fellow spellslinger named Dexan Videris as partial compensation for his having tried to kill me. I was never sure how reliably it warded off tracking spells.

  The mage tapped a finger on his temple. “Then it occurred to me: an exiled shadowblack fleeing Jan’Tep justice, knowing his luck had to run out sooner or later—could desperation lead such a one in search of that preposterous old legend about an ‘Ebony Abbey’?” He laughed at the name. “Didn’t it ever occur to you that if such a place had ever existed our people would have long ago destroyed it?” He glanced at the dusty yellow desert all around us. “Well, you’ve found your mythical sanctuary. This is where so-called ‘scouts’ bring the afflicted. They slit their throats and leave them here to die so that their flesh will be consumed by scavengers, their bones scoured clean by the wind, sinking into the sand to make room for the next poor fool.”

  “What did I tell you?” Reichis growled at me, then muttered, “Gullible moron.”

  Still maintaining the somatic form for his shield with one arm, the mage turned over the other and squeezed his fist until drops of blood fell to the ground, turning the golden sand at his feet a deep crimson.

  “What’s he doing?” Reichis asked.

  “I think he’s summoning a blood-shaping,” I replied.

  “That sounds bad. How do we fight it?”

  “I’m working on a plan.”

  The squirrel cat’s fur changed to match the red of the sand spreading towards us, making him blend in with our surroundings. The muscles on his hindquarters bunched. “So I should probably run away?”

  “Yeah.”

  Reichis took off as fast as his legs would take him. I didn’t resent him for it. As he frequently reminds me, it’s inevitable that one day our luck will run out. No point in both of us getting killed. I would’ve run too, but by then the mage’s blood had gone deep into the sand. With a few esoteric syllables, he completed his invocation. The spell came to life and so did the desert all around me.

  The bloodshaper—because that’s definitely what he was—raised his bleeding arm and reached out for me. Thousands of pounds of sand rose up from the ground, taking the exact same shape as his arm only about a hundred times larger. As his fingers grasped the air in front of him, his sand form mirrored the gesture, grabbing me and lifting me ten feet above the ground.

  The mage sauntered towards me with the sort of casual self-assurance of one whose carefully planned ambush has now reached its conclusion. “That’s odd,” he said, glancing around theatrically. “Shouldn’t a certain Argosi meddler be coming to your rescue right about now?”

  “Give her a minute,” I said. A bluff couldn’t hurt at this point. “When we saw your pathetically obvious obscurement spell, Ferius went to get the rest of her Argosi friends. Apparently they’re playing a hand of poker to decide who gets to kick your arse first.”

  The mage reached into the folds of his robes with his free hand and pulled out a playing card. Dark red lines flowed elegantly along the painted surface: a hand with seven thorns in its palm. I recognised this instantly as one of Ferius’s debt cards—the ones she keeps as reminders of each of the obligations she’s accrued over the years. Only this one was marred by splotches of something darker. “The Argosi’s blood made my little souvenir terribly sticky. I’m afraid the rest of the deck was ruined entirely.”

  “You’re bluffing,” I said, struggling in vain to free myself from the giant sand fist holding me prisoner. “Ferius Parfax is way too smart to get caught by a stupid—”

  The mage cut me off with a tut-tut sound. “Don’t be so hard on your dead friend’s memory. Not even she could be expected to outwit all seventy-seven of us.”

  “Seventy-seven …” That number stole the breath from me. Or maybe it was just the sand fist crushing my lungs.

  The mage gazed up at me triumphantly. “Tribulators. Chaincasters. Lightshapers. War mages. Sightblinders. Seventy-seven of us, Kellen. A true war coven.” He smirked. “Though I think the Argosi called it … What was that funny little name she gave us? A ‘posse’?”

  Posse was exactly the kind of word Ferius would’ve used. “Now I know you’re lying,” I said. “There hasn’t been a war coven in three hundred years. No clan prince has the influence to …” Even as I began to say it, I knew I was wrong. While getting Jan’Tep mages to agree on anything is like herding a bunch of angry, spell-wielding cats, there was one person who could probably pull it off: the newly asce
nded prince of my own clan; the one man whose scheming and manipulations might just be enough to unite seventy-seven lords magi to his cause.

  The bloodshaper must’ve caught the awakening despair in my expression. “Ke’heops,” he confirmed, “Lord of the House of Ke. Your father.” A thin-lipped chuckle. “You really have been a terribly disobedient son, haven’t you?”

  “He wouldn’t do this! Not just to kill me!”

  “What’s the old saying? ‘A father’s love is only ever exceeded by his wrath.’”

  I’d never heard the quote, but it described Ke’heops perfectly.

  “If it makes you feel better,” the bloodshaper went on, “this isn’t just about you. Lord Ke’heops petitioned the clans to name him mage sovereign of our entire people, but they are, as yet, unresolved on the matter. So he asked for seventy-seven mages to join him on a great quest. He seeks to prove his worth by hunting down every remaining shadowblack on the continent.” The bloodshaper raised a finger, and part of the massive hand construct reached up to gently touch the black markings around my left eye. “Starting with his own son.”

  He kept looking at me, as if waiting for some reply, but when I tried to speak he closed his fist a fraction tighter and the breath fled me. “You should be proud of him, Kellen! Not since we rid the world of the infestation of the Mahdek tribes have our people been so united.” The mage paused before adding, “Well, I suppose we missed one or two stragglers here and there.”

  Ferius, I thought. He knows Ferius is Mahdek!

  “She died for you,” the bloodshaper said softly, almost soothingly. “A dozen of us spread word that you’d been captured not far from here and that members of your clan were gathering to hold a trial for your execution. The Argosi reasoned that she had to free you before the others arrived. She walked right into our trap. That’s how we captured her, Kellen. That’s why her corpse lies rotting even now. Unburied. Awaiting the carrion eaters to rid the world of her stench.” He came close and flicked the card at me. It struck my cheek before falling to the ground. “A clever trick, wouldn’t you agree, shadowblack?”