Page 18 of Fate of the Argosi

I’d never seen a spell warrant up close. You could blame my disinterest in the mechanics of Jan’Tep magic on the tribulations I’d suffered at the hands of its practitioners, but that would be a half-truth at best. All those incantations, conjurations, bindings and bewitchments, awesome and deadly though they might be, never filled me with any sense of wonder.

The Argosi talents, on the other hand? Those are nothing more nor less than a birthright that belongs to all of us: music, dance, language, daring, insight, even plain old stubbornness. Taken further, though, studied and elevated to their full potential, those simple, human gifts become far more wondrous than petty hocus-pocus spells.

The Argosi aren’t stupid though. As soon as I recognised what the silver scrawls on Remeny’s forehead must be, I pulled out my deck of ruse cards and rifled through them in search of a countermeasure. Regardless of our attitude towards magic, the Argosi keep track of all the different tools of violence and subjugation wielded across this continent. We paint cards as a record of the tricks others have used to escape those traps. My own deck was based on Durral’s, and contained gambits to counteract iron-binding hexes and silk mind chains, blood crown summonings and ember cataclysms. What I lacked was a card to suggest how I might break a Jan’Tep spell warrant.

‘It’s . . . it’s almost beautiful,’ Kievan murmured, unconsciously reaching out a slender finger towards the entanglement of silver lines shimmering across the boy’s forehead. ‘Like a magnificent labyrinth that can only be walked in a dream.’

I batted her hand away. ‘This ain’t no corn maze, sister. It’s a cattle brand, plain and simple. Permanent as scorched iron burned into a steer’s hide. With this, any Jan’Tep mage worth the name can track Remeny across this whole continent.’

A scream of pure, blinding frustration exploded behind us. Chedran was in a rage, his vehemence so personal you’d think this was a prank that had been pulled on him alone. ‘This cannot be!’ he shouted. ‘I killed those mages myself! Four of them, all dead at my hand!’

I tried to ignore him, having more urgent problems to contend with than his pride. Maybe that’s why he grabbed me by the shoulder and swung me around so hard it was all I could do not to let my arta eres get the best of me and punch him in the throat.

‘I killed the mages!’ he repeated helplessly. ‘I saved us all!’

I should’ve listened deeper to the disconsolate notes beneath his outrage, but I was too focused on our tactical situation. I have a bad habit of giving my arta tuco free rein at the wrong times. ‘Did you bury the bodies? Haul the corpses at least a hundred miles from any Jan’Tep oasis?’ I asked, pelting him with questions to which I already knew the answer. ‘Did you drag the dead down a tunnel or into an underground cave deeper than Soul’s Grave?’

‘What? Of course not! I had twelve terrified runaways to sneak across the border. Why would I waste time on—’

‘Sand magic, you idiot.’

I shouldn’t have belittled him. Chedran was as confused as everyone else in that rotting mining barracks, too bewildered by the intricacies of Jan’Tep magic to understand the danger. Everyone except me.

I settled myself some. ‘When those Jan’Tep sentry mages failed to report to their commander, hex trackers would’ve been dispatched within hours. Plenty of adepts have sparked their tattooed bands for iron and blood magic, but all that would do is lead them to the bodies. Figuring out how they died would require a mage who’d sparked the sigils for sand magic. Probably took a lord magus to sift through the passage of time until they could latch on to the killer’s echo.’

‘Is this lesson in Jan’Tep mysticism intended to frighten me?’ Chedran demanded. ‘Let them send all the hextrackers and bounty mages they want. After I’m done with them, I’ll toss their ashes to the western wind and send them back to their families as a gift.’

Bluster, I thought.Not daring, not arta valar. Nothing but hubris drowning out reason and common sense.

‘You’re not thinking this through,’ I told him. ‘Jan’Tep spells require an anchor to bind them to a target. In the case of sand magic, the anchor has to exist both in the presentandduring the events the mage is witnessing. A corpse is only a shell that once contained life, not the life itself.’

‘Doesn’t that mean we’re safe?’ Kievan suggested. ‘If the mage who branded Remeny with this spell warrant is among the dead, then there’s no way for anyone else to track us through it.’

I tugged down the collar of my shirt once again to show her the fading sigils around my throat. ‘The metallic inks they used on me and Remeny are no different from the ones tattooed around the forearms of initiates to help them draw on the magic of their oasis. These inks don’t just mark the skin; they seep all the way into your bones.’

One of the other runaways, a boy of maybe fifteen with grey-green eyes like mine but hair an even darker red than Chedran’s, stepped forward and smoothed the front of a ratty grey side-buttoned marshal’s shirt two sizes too big for him. ‘Forgive me, Lady Ferius, but would not the inks in the dead mage’s bones serve only to link back to the oasis, therefore preventing any sand spell from reaching us?’

Something about the way that he called me ‘Lady’ really got my goat. Not literally, of course, since Conch was curled up on one of the bunks, snoring loud enough to wake the dead. Regardless, being addressed as if I was some highborn noblewoman with smooth skin and painted nails, who’d never set foot outside a palace, made my teeth ache. I was an Argosi, damn it. I wore the scars of my travels. ‘Ain’t no lady, kid,’ I snapped at the indecently mannered boy. ‘If I look one to you, then best you wipe the stupid from your eyes.’

A couple of the other children giggled nervously at that. The kid glanced at Kievan for support. ‘Elozek was merely being courteous,’ she said, giving him a quick smile to show that she had his back before serving up a glare at me so I’d know I’d overstepped. ‘We found a box of old Daroman shield romances beneath an upturned ore cart. We’ve been using them to help teach the younger ones to read. Elozek became fascinated by the protocols of courtly etiquette.’

Mahdek teenagers learning manners from a bunch of Daroman knight’s tales. Now I’d heard everything. I bent down to pick up a tattered bit of rope from the dusty floor. I held it up for them to see. ‘Look, Jan’Tep bands aren’t just a tether between the mage and the oasis from which they draw their magic.’ With my thumbnail, I pushed apart the frayed strands from each other. ‘It’s like a web of filaments that stretches between their tattooed bands and any spell they cast that hasn’t faded yet. Some of those spells persist awhile, even after death.’

I saw a lot of confused looks from Kievan and the others. Remeny, though? That poor kid was staring at the frayed end of my rope like it was a coiled snake about to strike.

‘One of those mages took you aside, didn’t he, Remeny?’ I asked. ‘At night, maybe? When the others were still unconscious from a sleep binding, someone came to rouse you?’

The boy nodded, cheeks red with tears as his hand came up reflexively to cover the spell warrant with his hair again. ‘He was younger than the other three, but he said he was already a proper silk mage. He had brown hair like me and his nose was flat like mine. He said I was special, and he smiled like . . . like he wanted us to be friends. But then pushed me down and sat on my chest. His knees pushed into my arms and it hurt really bad. I started crying, but he didn’t care, just took this long silver needle from his robes and . . .’ Remeny’s hand had strayed up to his hair again. He brought it back down to his side. ‘It only took a few seconds. There wasn’t even any pain until he was done. He laughed like it was all a big joke, then grabbed me by the hair and dragged me back to the others. He put me to sleep again, and when I woke, I thought it had all been a bad dream until I saw what he’d done to me.’

Kievan was staring curiously at the spell warrant. She frowned. ‘But these markings are so elaborate, so detailed. They must have taken hours.’

‘What does it matter?’ Chedran roared as he stalked towards the boy. ‘Remeny knew he’d been marked and he hid it, putting all of us at risk. He betrayed his own people.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said, and got between them. Chedran was terrifying the boy and making my card-throwing fingers twitch. ‘It didn’t look like anything at first, did it, Remeny?’ I turned to him, lifting his chin so he’d look at me. ‘I’ll bet those marks were so tiny you figured they couldn’t be important, right?’

‘At first,’ he admitted. ‘The symbol was so small and . . . pretty. I felt kind of special when I looked at it. But then the silver lines got bigger and longer. Every time I saw my reflection on a piece of metal or in a bowl of water, the markings had grown. They kept getting more and more complicated. Like a word that turns into a poem, then a song, then a whole story.’ He touched the markings once more and let out a heaving sob so full of terrors I wondered how he’d held them back this long. ‘I don’t think it’s got a happy ending.’

Chedran’s voice was cold, not so much angry as defeated. ‘You’ve given every Jan’Tep bounty mage on the continent the means to find us wherever we go.’ I heard a sound, like a hand brushing leather. Neither Kievan nor any of the other kids reacted. I guess none of them had noticed Chedran draw the short curved dagger from behind his back. ‘They’ll be able to follow Remeny as long as he lives.’

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