Page 26 of Fate of the Argosi

I’d never witnessed anything so brutal before in my life.

16

Unforgivable Crimes

‘Thirteen,’ Chedran said. ‘I was barely thirteen. Small and weak for my age.’

‘Old enough to butcher men and women who were parents to children far younger,’our captor countered, the words discordant and painful as a church bell ringing in our ears even as the silk spell stripped away any discernible characteristics of tone and pitch that might’ve offered some clue as to the identity of our jailor. I’d assumed it would be the lord magus, but in both tone and emotional intensity, this sounded like someone far younger.

On the curved inner walls of the tower, Chedran’s crime of long ago played out in startling detail. Over and over, the narrowed point of the chiselled rock in his scrawny fist came crashing down, an endless storm of merciless lightning strikes that tore through the mage’s robes, darkening silver and white silks a glistening oily red. Ragged pleas for mercy gave way to a wheezing struggle for breath, lost in the sobs of the boy who kept hitting him again and again as his own tears mixed with the blood of his victim.

When at last exhaustion caused the rock to slip from the boy’s hand, he got up off the dead mage and rose to his feet, stepping back to survey his handiwork. The image torn from Chedran’s own memories stilled, frozen in time as if it had been painted on the tower wall years ago, waiting only for someone to come and witness the bloody vista he’d left behind. It hadn’t only been the one mage he’d killed. Three more Jan’Tep lay dead on the ground around his feet. Two of them were women. One showed a swelling at her midsection that strained against her blood-soaked robes.

I turned to Chedran, the broad-shouldered man who’d once been that skinny, terrified boy. He wouldn’t meet my eyes, just kept staring straight at the wall. ‘I won’t be judged by you any more than I will by them,’ he said quietly. The look on his face was grim, but not the least bit sorry. There was pride in the flat line of his lips. ‘Those four mages killed sixty-eight Mahdek men, women and children. The pregnant one? When the little boys and girls of my clan threw themselves at her feet, begging her to spare them, she placed a hand against her belly and, with the placid smile of an expectant mother, rained ember spells upon the children.’

In his darker moments, when Durral worried I mistook his teachings for cunning tricks and facile frontier philosophy, he’d remind me that the Argosi talents are an awakening from which there’s no return to the peaceful slumber of ignorance. There’s a price for learning about people. All people.

‘She was thinking of her unborn baby,’ I said – mumbled really.

‘What?’ Arissa asked. She’d heard me though.

On the tower wall, the image of the dead pregnant woman haunted me. ‘That mage Chedran killed. When she was massacring all those Mahdek children, she was thinking of her child, and how she’d do anything to give it a safer future.’

Chedran barked a laugh, a hyena circling its prey. ‘What do you suppose she was thinking when I killed her?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, instead tilting his head all the way back to shout at the whirling grey mist seeping through the gaps in the tower roof. ‘Would you like to know how I tricked her coven? How a boy –’ a sob slipped past the iron bars of his pride – ‘achildconvinced your fellow lords magi to take him into their camp and make him their plaything?’ He jabbed a finger towards the wall. ‘Why not show usthatmemory? It shouldn’t be hard. It’s as fresh in my mind as the night it happened!’

The silence lasted a long time. Arissa and I stared at each other, uncertain what comfort either of us could orshouldoffer him. When I looked back at the image staining the wall, all I could see was a trail of cruelty and murder passing from one generation to the next with no end in sight.

‘It’s over then,’the reply came at last. No denial, no outrage, only . . . resignation.‘Fate will have us all. Blood will beget more blood, and a three-hundred-year war continues until the last Mahdek’s bones bleach beneath an unforgiving desert sun.’

‘It doesn’t have to be that way,’ I called out. ‘You sent for us! You could’ve used that spell warrant to hunt down those kids any time you wanted, but when you sensed me reaching out to you, the lines became a map leading us to this place!’

‘And you came with murderous intent, proving what our elders have warned us our entire lives – that the Mahdek heart is filled with hate from the moment of conception.’I felt a blast of nausea so thick I couldn’t stop choking long enough to deny the accusation.‘So be it. Sleep, little Mahdek. Dream of sweet sailings upon an ocean of my people’s blood until thirst and hunger return you to your ancestors.’

Chedran’s and Arissa’s eyes started to blink closed, my own vision began to blur. Another favourite of silk mages? Sleep spells.

‘You’re making a mistake!’ I shouted, drawing on every ounce of my arta forteize to stave off unconsciousness. ‘Drop the cage and let’s talk like civ—’

‘Like “civilised folk”?’the voice mocked.‘Again you speak of civility with a frontier drawl reminiscent of a man who was, indeed, civilised. A man determined to prove to his mortal enemy that nothing she could do would make him hate her, who instead taught her that the only real cage that binds any of us is the past, and we all have a duty to help each other escape those bars.’

‘Wait, that sounds like my papp—’

‘Enough! We offered the Mahdek a peaceful invitation. In return, they sent a thief, a killer and a monster whose thoughts are so infected by rage and madness that I cannot even see your face through the miasma of hate and violence that shrouds your mind!’

They can’t see me through the Scarlet Verses. Whoever’s behind this doesn’t know who I am because my mind’s so messed up . . .

Probably wasn’t the best time to be ruminating on the perceptual limitations of mind cages, because they hit me with a second sleep commandment, pouring more of that damnable silk magic into the spell.

‘Sleep, now, Mahdek. Until the end comes, may slumber grant you peace from the insanity that infects you.’

Arissa and Chedran had already fallen unconscious to the floor, and I was fading fast. No way could I resist a third time, which left me with precisely one option for busting out of this prison.

The mage must’ve sensed something shifting within my mind, because their next words sounded awful nervous.‘Why have your thoughts begun to still? Before, they swirled and spun, as if the words in your mind were an ever-shifting maze seeking to confine the madness within you, but now—’

Part of me wanted to try to negotiate with our captors one last time, but Enna, she taught me that the Way of Water can only carry you so far when someone’s pouring sand down your throat.

‘It’s like this, friend: since I can’t get you to listen to reason before one of your sleep spells takes me down, and you seem so powerful concerned about the monstrous insanities rattlin’ around inside my skull, how about I give you a taste of what’s gonna happen if I let ’em out?’

A second later, the tower echoed with the mage’s scream.

---