Spellslinger (Spellslinger #1)(60)

‘Enough, Ke’heops,’ my mother said from her worktable. ‘Don’t scare the boy any further.’ She came back to us with a glass vial held between her hands. ‘There are a few records of mages who showed the signs of the shadowblack one day only to have it disappear the next, never to return.’

I reached up a hand and traced the black markings around my left eye, feeling my way from the cold sensation they brought to my fingertip. ‘It’s not fair. I only just broke my first band. How did I get cursed with a disease that strikes master mages?’

‘I don’t know,’ my father said.

I don’t know. Three words I’d never thought to hear him say. He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘But perhaps in that weakness lies our one hope, Kellen. If the shadowblack truly feeds on a mage’s magic, then the absence in you might prevent the disease from thriving.’

I tried to take some comfort from those words. Perhaps whatever had been weakening my magical ability could enable my mother and father to remove the shadowblack from me. Then maybe, just maybe, I could then build up my power and pass my tests. I hung on to that slim thread of hope the way a drowning man does the last shred of river grass he can reach. Please, all you gods of sun and sky, of sea and earth, please stop making my life so damned rotten.

‘Drink,’ my mother said, holding out the vial.

I looked inside. A blue-and-green mixture swirled around of its own volition. ‘What will it do to me?’ I asked.

My mother’s eyes narrowed even as she gave me a faint smile. ‘A lifetime of mastering medicinal spells and now I must answer to you?’ She reached out a hand and tousled my hair. ‘It’s to heal those horrible cuts and bruises, all of which will, I promise you, be a topic of further discussion once the present crisis is over.’

The fact that I was going to be in trouble later was oddly reassuring. Having to face a flogging and house arrest – hells, even having to become a Sha’Tep – didn’t seem so bad any more.

‘You’ll need to be strong, Kellen,’ my father said, rising to stand by my mother. ‘You’ll need to be brave.’

I looked up at my parents. They looked like the painted portraits of the heroic mages of our past, when our people were feared and admired throughout the civilised world. You need to be strong. You need to be brave. I took the vial and drank it down. ‘I can do that,’ I said.

Both the words and the potion made me feel a little better. I was still young, and the shadowblack marks had only just appeared. My mother was brilliant, my father one of the most powerful mages in our clan. I could tell just by looking at them that they had a plan to fix this. Things were going to be okay.

The first tear slid lazily down my mother’s cheek, and with a sleepy impulse I reached out as though I could wipe it away. My father’s eyes were dark, stricken but hard. I watched the world grow hazy and felt my head become far too heavy to hold up. That was when I knew that things weren’t going to be okay.

My mother had drugged me.





26


The Bands


I woke up screaming.

My body was slick with sweat, every part of me on fire. I had dreamed that I’d been strapped down on a table as vile Mahdek mages with black lacquer masks drove red-hot needles into my skin, burning the shadowblack into my face, down my shoulders and arms. I had awoken at the moment when they’d begun piercing the skin around my forearms.

It was just a dream, you idiot, I told myself. Stop screaming.

The concoction my mother had tricked me into drinking had left my mind in a daze. I couldn’t seem to move, even to open my eyes. After a few moments I realised that the reason I kept screaming was because the pain I felt in my forearms was real. The bands. Something’s happening to the bands …

Instinctively I tried to raise my arms, but I couldn’t. Despite the thick fog in my skull, I managed to shout for my parents and force my eyes open. That was when things got worse.

I was no longer in my mother’s study lying on her settee. This was my father’s private chamber. I was bound onto his worktable, thick leather straps holding my wrists and ankles. My father stood over me, one hand pressing down on my chest as the other pushed something sharp into my forearm.

‘Father? What are you doing? Why does this hurt so much?’

He withdrew the needle then, but didn’t answer me. He just moved his hand and dipped the needle into a tiny metal cauldron sitting atop a brazier that burned with a fierce heat. When the needle came back out, it held a single drop of molten silver. I saw then that there were other dishes sitting on top of other braziers, each one a different colour, holding a different molten metal. Copper, brass, gold, iron … They were the metal inks used to tattoo the bands on Jan’Tep initiates as children, to connect us with the fundamental forces of magic. But when I looked down at the band for ember, I saw the reverse sigils burning there, dark and ugly, forever severing my connection to the magic of fire, of lightning, of energy.

‘Father, please, stop! Don’t counter-band me!’

When a child is banded, it’s done with only the tiniest amounts of the ink – so small you can barely see the drops on the needles. But my father was using much, much more. He was doing to me what he’d threatened to do to Shalla: counter-banding me permanently. Once he completed the process, I would never again be able to wield my people’s magics, not even the feeble cantrips that a Sha’Tep servant can still perform near the oasis. He might as well cut off my hands and tear out my eyes.