Spellslinger (Spellslinger #1)(58)

My father didn’t even bother to turn to look at me when he said, ‘Fine. I pardon you, Kellen.’ He made it sound like a verdict. Then he turned back to Ferius. ‘Now go, Daroman. Show us these tracking skills you Argosi claim to have.’

‘I want to help find Shalla,’ I said.

‘Sorry, kid,’ Ferius said, her eyes still on my father. ‘You’re too injured and I need to move too fast.’

‘Injured?’ my mother asked. ‘Kellen, what’s happened to you? Come here now!’

I obeyed, feeling like an idiot. My sister might be in danger, but my mother was going to fuss over a few bruises. As I walked into the light streaming from the doorway, I held up my right arm in a desperate bid to win a moment of my father’s approval. ‘Look. I broke the breath band.’

‘By the ancestors … what is that on his face?’ my father demanded.

‘It’s just blood,’ I said. ‘I got hurt, all right? It’s not—’

The forefinger of my father’s right hand gave the slightest twitch. The glow-glass lanterns all around us flared bright as the sun, banishing every shadow, except one that I couldn’t see.

‘No!’ My father’s shout split the night in half.

My mother ran towards me and started rubbing at my left eye, making the bruise on my cheek hurt even worse. ‘It’s all right, mother. It’s just—’

I hadn’t even seen my father move, but now his strong hands lifted my mother out of the way and set her down behind him. He reached out with his left hand and took hold of my jaw so hard I could feel my gums squeezing against my teeth. He leaned over, staring into my left eye.

‘I can see fine,’ I said. ‘It’s not damaged or anything.’

My father didn’t reply until my mother tried to take his arm. He shrugged her off. ‘This cannot be wished away,’ he told her.

I tried to pull away from his grip. ‘I already said it’s just a little blood and dirt.’

With his free hand, my father reached into the pocket of his robes and pulled out the small round scrying mirror. He held it up in front of me. There, in the mirror, I saw my face. As expected, I was bruised and battered, with blood caked on my swollen cheeks and forehead. At first I was so focused on my wounds that I almost didn’t notice the thin black lines curving around the outside of my left eye. They looked like twisting vines, almost like an illustration drawn by a master artist. You might almost have called them pretty if you’d never seen them before, in the picture books meant to scare children and the manuscripts old Osia’phest kept to show initiates the perils of dark magic.

All at once I understood why Ferius had kept me standing in the shadows, why she’d forced my father to forgive me before she’d agreed to look for Shalla. Ferius had been trying to protect me. What a stupid thing to do, I thought. Everybody knows there are some things you can’t protect against. I just kept staring into that mirror, horrified by what I saw, because in those creeping black lines around my eye I finally saw what was wrong with me.

I had the shadowblack.





25


Family


Of all the tales my people tell, of all the great myths of heroic mages casting the most daring and dangerous of spells to save their clans from monsters both devious and diabolical, the very best ones – the most thrilling and terrifying stories of all – are always about the shadowblack.

When the Mahdek sorcerers performed their foulest spells, committing atrocity upon atrocity in order to spill forth perfect pitch-black hatred upon the world, they pierced the thin veil that separates our world from the hundred hells beneath. Some of those sorcerers, their mouths split wide with manic glee, discovered that by emptying their souls of any shred of goodness they created a void contrary to all the laws of magic and nature. Such an emptiness could not last of course, and it was slowly, inexorably filled by something worse than mere evil. A mage who descended those final steps into darkness found the inky marks around some part of their body – an arm, a torso or, perhaps, an eye. Those marks were the sign of the shadowblack taking over.

‘Come with me, Kellen,’ my father repeated. How many times had he said it before he grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me from the street, up the marble stairs and through the wide double doors into our house?

His shout had carried down the street. Already we could hear people coming from their homes, looking to find out what was going on.

‘Into the study,’ my mother said, her voice calm, steady, in control. I couldn’t say the same for myself.

‘You’ve got to fix me, Mother,’ I pleaded. ‘Please … I didn’t do anything! I didn’t ask for—’

She placed one hand on each of my cheeks and gripped me hard, locking my head in place. ‘Listen to me now. You’re scared. You’re hurt. You are still my son.’

You are still my son.

It wasn’t relief that I felt exactly, as she let go of my face and put an arm around me, but it was something. ‘Family,’ my father had always said, ‘is the strong stone on which we stand. It is the beginning and the end of what we are.’ I knew at that moment that he must be right, because what I wanted more than anything in the world was to know that I still had a family.

‘You’ll find my child,’ he said to Ferius, blocking her from entering the house after us. It wasn’t a question.