Spellslinger (Spellslinger #1)(73)

But the Mahdek had never tried to take the oasis from us.

We had stolen it from them.

They hadn’t launched a war between our peoples.

We had simply massacred them in their sleep, beginning with their families, their children.

We had looted their future for ourselves.

‘How could this happen?’ I asked.

Mer’esan, tears streaming down her face, turned one of the cards in the circle back over, sending the others flipping face down again. The pattern on the back of the cards was gone, replaced by solid black, the colour of shadow. There was only one kind of spell that called on the power of the void.

‘That’s not possible,’ I said. ‘The Mahdek were demon summoners, our people would never—’

A sob escaped Mer’esan’s lips, the last links of the mind chain slowly breaking apart. ‘Do you propose to tell me the rules of the game?’

I looked at the cards representing the ancestors I had venerated my whole life, the ancestors whom I now knew had summoned horrors with which to murder the children of our enemies, in order to weaken their mages. ‘Then … that’s how the war ended? Through assassination and dark magic?’

‘Ended?’ She picked up the cards from the oasis and held them in her hand. ‘No, Kellen of the House of Ke. Once a game like this has begun, it is never ended.’ She placed the cards face up on the table, one on top of the other, with increasing speed. The illustrations went by so fast that I had trouble making out which cards they represented, but I thought I saw something …

‘Stop!’ I said. ‘I can’t see what’s happening.’

‘You never can,’ she said, stopping at last as she placed one final card on top of the stack.

A young man stood surrounded by six books, each one displaying a septagram. The card was called ‘The Initiate of Spells’, and I had seen it before, both when Ferius had shown me her deck and when Mer’esan had played it during the game. Only now something had changed.

The figure facing us bore the same studious expression as before, but now I saw black markings twisting around one of his eyes. Just like mine.

‘This can’t be … What are you telling me, Mer’esan?’

She flipped over the card so that it was face down. The back had returned to the unremarkable pattern I’d seen before. ‘I have said nothing, son of Ke. We are merely playing at cards.’

My fingers trembled as they rose up to meet the cold skin around my left eye. ‘The shadowblack … When our ancestors found they didn’t have the power to defeat the Mahdek, they … we … called forth demons to destroy them. First we attacked their families to break their spirits, then we killed their mages.’

Mer’esan’s expression was flat, though the tears still flowed down her cheeks. ‘That would be a sound strategy, if you were trying to win the game at all costs.’

‘But that’s just it … the cost … The Mahdek didn’t curse us with the shadowblack; we infected ourselves when we used the magic of the void to summon demons.’

Mer’esan let out a long, deep breath that sounded like a sigh and wiped the tears from her eyes. The mind chain was broken. ‘History is written by the victors,’ she said, ‘but the truth has a way of revealing itself.’

I heard a low growl and looked down to see Reichis’s mother glaring up at the dowager.

‘What did she say?’ I asked Reichis.

It was Mer’esan who answered. ‘She says that it is not in the proper way of things that a parent should let their child suffer for crimes they had no part in.’

I felt something hard and cold in my stomach. ‘Tell her she doesn’t understand the Jan’Tep then.’

Slowly and carefully, Mer’esan picked up the cards from the table and handed them to me. ‘Every society has atrocities in its past, Kellen. Do you think the Daroman empire was built on nothing but courage and military brilliance? Or that the Berabesq viziers worship their six-faced god with nothing more than prayers and celebrations?’

‘How can you be so calm?’ I demanded. ‘Your own husband cast the spell that kept you from revealing what he and the others had done in the name of our people!’

‘He wasn’t an evil man,’ she said. ‘He looked at what lay ahead for our people – from the Daroman empire reaching out from the east to the Berabesq in the south who would happily commit genocide against us for what they saw as our devil magic. To survive we needed to strengthen our spells and train more young mages than ever before. The Mahdek knew the secrets of creating the oases within their cities, making their spells more powerful and enabling their young to learn the ways of magic more easily.’

‘Would the Mahdek have destroyed us?’

‘It didn’t matter. We couldn’t take the chance. We had to take the oasis in this city from them, as we had to take all the others.’ She rose from her chair and walked away from me. ‘Those are the rules of the game, Kellen.’

‘Wait … Where are you going?’

She stopped, just for a moment, her hand on the door. ‘The chains that have bound me for almost three hundred years are gone. I think I would like to go outside now.’

When I joined Mer’esan in the cool night air she was staring into the darkness blanketing the gardens. I wondered how long ago they’d been planted here, and who tended them, and whether the dowager magus had ever even seen them up close before. None of these questions though were the ones that mattered.