Page 9 of Fate of the Argosi

She didn’t look surprised, but her expression turned hard as stone and dry as grave dust. ‘They were saving him for last.’ She pointed at the pack in my hand. ‘Did you bring a knife? Something real sharp?’

‘Why?’

Arissa took that as assent, turning to walk with a slow, stiff gait towards the last cell at the end of the tunnel. ‘Find me a blade. There’s somebody down here who needs killing.’

6

Friends in Low Places

Some people, no matter their circumstances, manage to look like they own the place. Dress them in rags and dump them in a palace, they’ll dust themselves off and saunter over to the throne like they’re expecting to be crowned. Find them locked up in the worst prison on the continent? They’ll lean against rusted iron bars, staring at you so smug it’s like every step you ever took had no purpose but to bring you to them. To him.

Long and lean, naked to the waist, he wore the dark copper tattoos across his chest and arms like a king’s vestments – no, not a king: a priest or maybe a holy man. Only there was nothing holy about him that I could see. Long, curly hair the colour of red wine through smoky glass hung down to his shoulders. His eyes . . . well, if trouble was a colour, those eyes gleamed with pure calamity.

From the moment I saw him, my arta precis picked out three discernible facts. First, this guy couldn’t have spent more than a week in Soul’s Grave. He was beat up real bad, but the bruises and cuts were all fresh. Second, there wasn’t a glimmer of a doubt in him that I would keep Arissa from killing him. In fact, he was absolutely certain I was going to set him free. The third thing I sensed about this rangy, feral-eyed swaggerer couldn’t be put into words. It was like staring into the face of a stranger who, looking back at you, sees their own reflection.

‘Give me your knife,’ Arissa commanded. ‘Give me whatever you got that’s sharp and long and you won’t be needing any time soon, because there won’t be any edge left once I’m done carving up his carcass for the sand beetles.’

‘Who is he?’ I asked.

The prisoner didn’t strike me as bothered by Arissa’s macabre intentions. He wasn’t looking at her at all in fact; his eyes were peering so deep into mine it was as if the two of us were alone down here.

‘Don’t let him hold your gaze,’ Arissa warned, though she didn’t turn away herself. ‘This snake can do things with his eyes. The guards wore blindfolds any time they brought him food. Some sort of spell, I think.’

‘That’s no spell,’ I told her as I locked eyes with the prisoner. ‘And there’s no need to fuss over me. Let him stare as long as he wants.’

Some people think the Argosi can work magic on account of the way we can travel just about anywhere we want without fear of the dangers that confine most people to the same seven square miles of the town where they were born. After all, somebody who can face down a mage or a military commander with nothing but a smile on their face and a few cards in their hand has to be magic, right?

It’s not though.‘Magic ain’t the Argosi way,’ Durral’s fond of saying. We’re gamblers. Wanderers. Mapmakers. The only spells we cast are part of an inheritance shared by all human beings: music, dance, games of chance, languages, swagger, patience, charm . . . Heck, one time I saw Durral turn back a dozen armed bravos with nothing but a dirty joke.

It was a hell of a joke.

We’re not the only ones with a bag of tricks though. Take the legendary Daroman marshals service, famous for being the world’s most relentless fugitive trackers. What’s less well known are their skills at interrogation. Some say the first marshals came to study with hermit snake charmers right here in Berabesq. Others claim they travelled up north to learn folk magic from Zhuban warrior-poets who can lure a stag so close they can pierce its heart with an arrow before the beast knows it’s in danger. Wherever it comes from, you find yourself staring down a marshal who’s mastered the art and before long you’ll be spilling every secret you know while polishing their boots for them.

The guy locked behind those rusted iron bars was no marshal, but whatever he was doing with his eyes had to be pretty close. Never in my eighteen years had I felt so small, so powerless and so desperately in love.

Which feels especially weird when you’re not partial to boys in the first place. ‘Go on,’ I told him, drowning in the endless black oil of his gaze. ‘You can do better than that, can’t you?

He held on a few seconds more, then closed his eyes and winced.

‘I hear that when you push that trick too hard it can leave you with a nasty headache,’ I observed casually.

The grimace on the prisoner’s face gave me all the confirmation I needed. He slammed his palms against the iron bars, betraying his lack of emotional control over himself. Happens with people accustomed to controlling others. ‘Arta forteize, I presume?’ He managed to make it sound like a pestilence.

‘Arta forteize is resilience. That wasarta valar.’

His lips twisted into a disbelieving smirk. ‘Dauntlessness?’

‘I prefer to think of it as swagger.’

He chewed on that a moment. Didn’t seem to like the taste. ‘So I had you the entire time! You weren’t resisting my mesmerism at all, you simply hid your submission from me, returning my gaze like some half-witted farm animal!’

I brought the back of my hand to my forehead and pretended to swoon. ‘Darling, you keep talkin’ so sweet, you’re gonna have me fainting.’ I let my arm fall to my side and walked past Arissa to the bars so I could get a closer look at him. ‘What’s lover boy in for, anyway?’ I asked her.

‘His name is Chedran. He murders people.That’shis crime.’ Murder isn’t a word I’d ever heard Arissa shy away from. The way she said it now though was like it woke a whole nest of spiders in her belly.

‘Children?’ I guessed.

‘Twelve of them,’ Chedran confirmed, grinning with a madman’s theatrical delight. ‘Runaways. Stolen from a kindly Berabesq noblewoman who’d given them sanctuary. Throats slit. Bodies bathed in lantern oil and set ablaze in her courtyard until there was nothing left of them but charred bones.’ He made a show of licking one of the bars between us. ‘Then I arranged their skeletons in their beds, under the covers, for the stupid cow to find the next morning.’

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