Page 60 of Fate of the Argosi

O, ye of little faith.

I rode a few seconds more, just until we’d reached the last of the obsidian arches. There I pulled on Quadlopo’s reins and turned him back around. He snorted a sort of‘What now?’at me. My arta loquit doesn’t extend to horses, but he sounded doubtful to my ears. Conch, perched on my shoulder, added his own nervous bray to the conversation. Heck, even Durral got in on the action.

‘You sure you can pull this off, kid?’

‘Now, Pappy? Now’s when you start doubting me?’

In that shadowy haze, I could almost see Durral standing there, a few feet away, tilting the brim of his frontier hat up a little as he surveyed the landscape between us and the galleon that was beginning to capsize beneath the onyx ice.

‘Ain’t doubtin’ you, kid,’Durral said.‘But what you’re aimin’ to do, they ain’t gonna give it to you for free.’

He was right of course. There would be a price for this.

I was eighteen years old. I’d spent most of those years hunted, hungry and haunted by so many different kinds of misery I didn’t know enough words to describe them all. Finally,finallyI’d found my Argosi path, and before I could even take my first step along that road to joy and wonder, this was where it ended?

Well, as Enna might say,‘Whining ain’t the Argosi way. You either do a thing or you don’t.’

Wise woman.

‘You fellas listening?’I asked silently to those darkest and most foul of voices that lingered in my skull like a fever that never goes away.

They didn’t answer. Maybe they wanted to fool me into thinking they were asleep. But they couldn’t hide their glee at finally having a taste – just a taste – of what they’d been craving since the day they’d wormed their way into my mind, implanted inside me by nothing more than a handful of stanzas.

‘You want another shot at enslaving me? Now’s your chance . . . but first, you’ve got to do something for me.’

Again the silent treatment. Most of the time I can’t get the little chatterboxes to shut up. I wasn’t troubled though; once I let the verses out and stopped dancing from their grasp, they’d be ready to play.

I cupped one palm and placed it to the side of my mouth, lifting my chin as I shouted across the necropolis: ‘Whatever spells you need to sail the ship through the shadowblack, best get ’em ready!’

I couldn’t see Ala’tris or the others any more. The black fog of the necropolis was too thick now. Maybe I was too late, and the mages had already killed one another over whose ghastly plan was the most noble. Didn’t matter to me now though. I knew what I had to do.

The problem was simple enough: Sar’ephir couldn’t propel the spellship through the shadowblack while the fatalism of its passengers anchored it to this graveyard of their own making. No one, not even a coven of Jan’Tep mages, with all their mental discipline and training in esoteric geometry, could overwhelm the despair of so many. The raw, unshakeable will required to break through such desolation would be . . . well, it would be pretty much indistinguishable from madness.

Which I happened to possess in plentiful supply.

I nudged Quadlopo to a gallop back among the black arches separating us from the galleon. Soon we were nearing the first of those grave markers. I tightened the straps of my imagined armour, the arta valar forged from all the wild, wonderful moments I’d accumulated during my short life.

I’m not the toughest Argosi out there. Rosie now, she’s tough. The Path of Thorns and Roses, she calls herself. More thorns than roses, if you ask me. Durral and Enna surpass even Rosie for toughness. Those rambling thistles are almost unbreakable.

Let me ask you this though: what’s tougher than a wild daisy, sprouting from dead soil in a place where even weeds ain’t supposed to grow?

Let’s find out, shall we?

Okay, you little rat bastards,I told the Scarlet Verses, reaching a hand up to my brow so I could pull my non-existent helm’s visor down over my face.Let’s find out who wins in a war between madness and despair.

34

Bad Bargains

The deal was dead simple, and neither party required a contract. The Scarlet Verses were, in essence, a language plague. Once heard, the words and syllables from which the verses were composed began restructuring the brain, tearing down the feeble, crumbling edifices of our moral foundations and sense of self. In their place, towering new architectures of malevolence arose that were as impervious to pain and physical weakness as they were to the victim’s pleas for mercy. They also had a lousy sense of humour.

‘Come on, fellas,’I urged the Scarlet Verses as I began my hell ride through the necropolis on Quadlopo’s back.‘Not even a little joke?’

Silence. Which wasn’t to say they weren’t busy: with me no longer dancing around the twisted, loathsome meanings with which they’d tried so many times to imprison me, the verses were now erecting pillars inside my mind with carefully chosen words.

‘Resolve. Spine. Testament. Doggedness. Tenacity. Single-mindedne—’

‘Nuh-uh, sorry, fellas,’I told them, pirouetting around that last one. Tricky though, because it had so few inherent meanings.Single-mindedness . . . Single-mindedness . . . Ah, there we go!

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