Spellslinger (Spellslinger #1)(59)
I saw her hesitate, but finally she nodded. ‘Make sure you honour our deal, master mage. This isn’t the boy’s fault.’
My father gave the slightest hint of a laugh, but it held no mirth, only a desolate pain bigger than any desert. ‘There is no one to blame for this, Argosi, any more than one can blame the lightning when it sets fire to the village.’
I expected some clever reply from her, but none came. I think maybe I blinked from sweat dripping into my eye and then she was gone and my father closed the door and turned to us.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said absently, one finger still tracing the line of my glyphs across my forearm. ‘I only just sparked my breath band and now I have the shadowblack? Why is this happening to me?’
My mother was ushering me into the room when my father abruptly caught her in his arms, holding her close and hiding his eyes in her shoulder. ‘All is not yet lost,’ my mother said to him. ‘With the favour of the gods, the Argosi woman will find our daughter swiftly and safely.’
But what about me?
A few minutes later I was sitting on the silk settee in my mother’s study, my back straight and hands on my knees – as if somehow good posture was going to save me – while she used a small brush to apply a wet, sticky substance around my left eye. ‘Will this stop the spread of it?’ I asked.
‘It’s only mesdet, silly boy,’ she replied. ‘It’s what I use around my own eyes. It will hide the markings for now, in case someone sees you.’
She put down the brush and went to her tall cabinets, filled with tiny drawers and shelves lined with jars and pots and instruments.
‘How long will it take?’ I asked.
She held up a small vial and examined its contents. ‘How long will what take?’
‘For the shadowblack to consume me.’
In the stories, an afflicted mage didn’t become a demon all at once. At first he was no different than before, save for the black markings. But over time the pattern would grow, and slowly the mage would commit worse and worse acts of evil until finally his soul was ready for possession by the demon spirit.
‘Let the concerns of the present be our focus,’ my father said, standing behind her. ‘And let us not paint the future before its canvas appears to us.’ He leaned in to peer at my eye for just a moment as my mother went back to her jars. ‘Perhaps things are not quite as bad as they seem.’
I was so tired and hurt and confused that his words almost made me giggle. The man who, minutes before, had screamed as if he’d watched a thousand devils descend upon the world, was now telling me that maybe things weren’t ‘quite as bad as they seem’.
Outside of stories, I didn’t really know much about the shadowblack, other than what any initiate is taught in his first year of training. Of the fundamental forms of magic, six can be safely wielded by a Jan’Tep mage: iron and ember, breath and blood, sand and silk. The seventh, shadow, cannot. It is the void, the emptiness. It is the absence of living magic and the place where only demonic energies thrive. No Jan’Tep would ever study or seek out its power any more than one would willingly contract the red plague or lung rot. The shadowblack was a terrible disease that only came to terrible people.
People like me.
I remembered back to what my parents had said about my grandmother. Could the disease be passed down from parent to child? Perhaps, like some conditions, it skipped a generation. Why me? I’ve never had enough magic to make a dent in the sand, and now this?
A darker thought entered my mind, like a silk spell, or a snake that slithered under the bedsheets while you slept. It should have been Shalla.
I tried to push the vile feeling away, wondering if, even now, the shadowblack was taking me over. None of the shadowblack mages in the stories were teenagers, I thought desperately. My grandmother had to have been old before it had taken her, so maybe I had years. Maybe I can still have a bit of a life before I become a monster.
‘It is a type of curse,’ my father said, jolting me back to the present.
‘It is a disease,’ my mother corrected.
My parents stared at each other for a moment. It seemed to be part of some longstanding debate between them. But it wasn’t theoretical for me. ‘Well? Which is it? What’s going to happen to me?’
My mother turned back to her instruments and passed a hand over a small brass brazier, carefully raising the forefinger of her right hand until the flame was at the exact height she desired.
‘Your mother is correct, in her way,’ my father said. ‘And I am right in mine.’ He sat down next to me on the settee – an unusually comforting sort of act for him that only made me more uncomfortable. ‘The shadowblack is a kind of disease, but one of magic, not nature. It was brought down on us as a final curse by the Mahdek after we defeated them in the last war between our peoples. It is their corrupting magic that gives it power over us.’
‘The Mahdek are supposed to be dead,’ I insisted. ‘All the masters say so.’ Except you saw a group of them in their demon masks just two days ago. ‘Could they really have come back?’
My father’s eyebrows rose in the centre of his forehead – a sign of despair I’d seen on plenty of people before, just never on Ke’heops. ‘I don’t know, Kellen. Better and truer mages than I have tried to purge this world of the last vestiges of Mahdek magic. If someone out there is trying to strengthen it …’ He let the words trail off. Then, because men like my father don’t shy away from the truth, he said, ‘Some of the greatest mages of my parents’ generation were lost to the shadowblack. It worked its way into their souls slowly but inexorably, twisting their hearts even as the black markings twisted along the lines of their skin. Once the demons took them, all the powers those great men and women had used to protect their people had been turned against us. We nearly lost the clan.’