Spellslinger (Spellslinger #1)(46)
‘What are you doing, standing there in the dark like an idiot?’ a voice called out.
Hells, I’ve been seen. I tried to tense the muscles in my legs and almost cried out from the pain of pins and needles. Move, damn you! Don’t just sit here waiting for him to grab you!
I had just managed to push my way to a standing position when the old man said, ‘I’m just enjoying a little fresh air. Go back to bed.’
It’s just someone inside the house talking. I haven’t been spotted.
The person in the house said something else but I didn’t hear it. The old man replied with a grunt that turned into another bout of coughing. Then he turned and limped back into the house, his pants still halfway down his thighs.
I let out my breath and shifted the bag of food again before stepping out from the shadows, rubbing my thigh with my free hand and doing my best to step around the little puddles of urine as I headed down towards the oasis, cursing Ferius Parfax all the way.
It took only a few minutes more to reach the edge of the seven columns. I stopped to gather up what little courage I could find in myself. I realised suddenly that I was standing under a glow-glass lantern hanging from a pole and felt a flicker of panic that it might light up, making me visible to anyone walking along one of the adjoining paths. I needn’t have worried; the lantern was completely dark. I looked up and, like a fool, reached out with my will and tried as hard as I could to make the glow-glass spark. Nothing happened. There just wasn’t enough magic inside me to bring it to light. I was useless. For once in my life that turned out to be a good thing though, because I soon realised that there were already people at the oasis.
‘Do it again!’ Someone had whispered so loudly that the sound carried the entire distance from the centre of the oasis to the column where I crouched. Tennat! I shuddered at the thought of what he might do to me now that he knew I had no magic to fight back with. He was supposed to be sick, like me. What’s he doing here?
‘Shut up,’ cautioned a deeper and less nasal voice. It was my former friend, Panahsi. ‘Osia’phest will skin us alive if he finds out we’ve been practising blood sympathies.’
‘No one’s going to care, Pan,’ Tennat replied, sounding too excited to be cowed. ‘The council said they were going to use sympathy on the beast anyway.’
‘Yes, but the council will use silk spells to spread it to the other nekhek,’ a soft female voice replied. Hearing Nephenia speak made me shift from my position so that I could see around the corner. Soft light from the small lantern at her feet cast a glow on her pale blue dress. She stood over the boys, who were kneeling in front of the four-foot brass cage the mages had warded hours before.
Inside, the creature that had sent three armed men fleeing for their lives growled its outrage.
I don’t care how innocent Ferius thinks that thing is, I thought. Nekhek or squirrel cat … it looks as if it would tear my face off if I tried to feed it.
The three of them continued their conversation, unaware that I was listening. ‘The point of the sympathy is to make the other nekhek in the hills feel this one’s pain,’ Panahsi said. ‘Then they’ll be forced to come here, and Ke’heops and the other master mages can rid us of them all at once. It’s the only way to protect the clan.’
‘Doesn’t mean we can’t try out a few of our own spells on the creature first, right?’ Tennat argued. ‘Look, if we want to pass the third test, then we need to be able to show a new spell that combines two disciplines, or at least construct a variation of one of the usual ones. No initiate has ever devised a spell incorporating blood sympathy. We’ll have the pick of apprenticeships if we can make it work. When are we ever going to get a chance like this again?’
Panahsi and Nephenia exchanged a hesitant look, but a moment later, they nodded to each other in agreement.
I felt oddly betrayed that my one friend and the girl I never stopped thinking about were here, even after everything that had happened between us. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was one thing to know the theory behind blood sympathies, but actually getting to test them was something else entirely. Blood magic was far too risky to try out on humans or even pets. But something insidious like a nekhek, a creature you didn’t have to feel sorry for, who wouldn’t want a chance to try out magic like this?
‘Here, watch this,’ Nephenia said. They were nearly a hundred feet away from me so I had to squint to make out what was happening. The animal was reaching out with its paws between the bars, no doubt trying to claw at Nephenia. She made a somatic gesture with her left hand, the little finger touching the thumb, and then reached the index finger of her right hand to touch one of the bars. Blue light flickered in and out and the nekhek suddenly flew back from the bars to thump against the back of the cage.
‘How did you do that?’ Tennat asked. ‘That was beautiful!’
‘Lightning,’ she said, looking down as if she were a little embarrassed by his praise. ‘I can’t make much but it’s enough to conduct through the iron bars.’
The nekhek scurried back into the far corner of the cage, away from Nephenia. I took a quiet step back from the edge of the square. I’d seen enough to know that I didn’t want to stick around. It sickened me to watch the way the three of them acted like children, egging each other on as they tormented the nekhek. I’d believed Nephenia and Panahsi were better than that.