Spellslinger (Spellslinger #1)(74)

Just past the gardens, the great palace stood proudly before us. The seat of our clan’s governance. A place we hadn’t even built ourselves. ‘Did we create nothing of our own?’ I asked.

Mer’esan gave a small, bitter laugh. ‘Of course we did. The Mahdek were always few in number. This city, for example, is far too small to house our entire clan. So we built—’

‘The slums,’ I said. ‘The Sha’Tep slums.’ Ill-made structures of rough wood and unshaped sandstone. ‘Three hundred years, and all we made ourselves were hovels.’

‘Our people never set out to be architects or builders, Kellen. Magic is our vocation, the one endeavour we prize above all others.’

I thought about the illness that had overtaken some of the other initiates, and of Shalla. ‘I have to find my sister,’ I said. ‘Someone is trying to hurt our people the same way we hurt the Mahdek. They’re destroying children so that—’

Mer’esan cut me off. ‘Is that what they’re doing? Destroying children?’

I wished for once that she wouldn’t turn everything into an enigmatic question, but then I realised I already knew the answer. When the men in Mahdek masks had attacked us the night we were trying to summon familiars, they hadn’t attempted to kill Shalla, they’d tried to make her bond with a sick animal. They had simply tried to permanently weaken her magic. Which is exactly what’s happening to the other initiates.

‘Who would want our people to survive, but to lessen our magic?’ I asked.

Mer’esan shrugged. ‘A reasonable question, but not the right one.’

I closed my eyes, trying to envision all the pieces of the puzzle, arranging them in my mind the way I would the complex geometries of a spell. ‘You said before the war, we didn’t have as many Jan’Tep mages as we do now, and they weren’t as powerful as the ones today.’

‘Yeah,’ Reichis said, giving a snort. ‘We call those “the good old days”.’

I’d got so used to not thinking of him as a nekhek that I’d forgotten that the squirrel cats saw us as enemies.

‘Hey, don’t look at me,’ he said, catching my stare. ‘If my people were after yours we’d just sneak into your rooms at night and rip out your—’

‘Eyeballs. Yes, I get it.’

Mer’esan tapped me on the forehead. ‘Focus.’

‘So the real question is, who has the most to gain by our mages being weaker?’ No, that’s still not it. This was just like casting a spell – you had to get every element exactly right for it to work.

All of a sudden, I had it. ‘Who suffers most when those with magic become too powerful?’

Mer’esan smiled. ‘Good. Clever. Now that you have the question, I believe you also have the answer.’

I did too. How many times had I sat in my room, panicking over what would happen if I couldn’t spark my bands … getting more and more resentful every time Shalla or one of the others became more powerful? Because I knew they’d lord it over me that much more, laugh at me, expect me to be their servant. Because that’s what you do to people who don’t have magic of their own.

‘Those who suffer most when magic becomes too powerful are those without it,’ I said. ‘The Sha’Tep are the ones attacking us.’

Mer’esan nodded. ‘As our magic grows, the gap between us becomes wider and wider. Every generation the Sha’Tep become more like slaves.’

‘What’s a slave?’ asked Reichis. The other squirrel cat chittered at him, and after a few moments he looked up at me. ‘Humans are disgusting.’

‘Go,’ Mer’esan said. ‘If we are correct and the conspirators are Sha’Tep, then they will have taken your sister and the Argosi to the place that gives us our magic but where we ourselves cannot tread.’

‘The oasis? But we go there all the time. It’s where we learn to work our magic in the first place!’

‘Is it the wellspring, or merely the fountain?’

‘Stop testing me!’ I said. ‘My sister and my friend are in danger!’ I looked down at the bands on my forearms, wishing I’d broken the silk band that might let me perform scrying spells before my parents had counter-banded it. Only Mother said she’d already tried to find Shalla that way and couldn’t. The wellspring or the fountain … ‘The mines … You’re talking about the mines. The oasis is the source, but it’s the ore from the mines that lets us create the inks for our bands.’

‘So what?’ Reichis asked.

‘Mages can’t enter the mines without getting sick from the raw ore. That’s why the Sha’Tep have to extract it for us so that we can be banded with the six fundamental magics.’

Mer’esan reached out a finger and touched the top of my cheek just below my left eye. The sensation felt odd … like the vibration in the air when lightning is in the sky. ‘Seven. There are seven magics, Kellen.’

In all the excitement of helping the dowager magus break the mind chain, and in the revelation of what my ancestors had done to the Mahdek, I had managed to forget the shadowblack that banded my eye and marked me forever, placed there by my own grandmother. ‘Why did she do this to me?’

‘Who can say? Perhaps it was madness, perhaps the disease had eaten away at her mind.’