Page 35 of Fate of the Argosi

Out from the barracks, twelve confused Mahdek teenagers raced over to behold in perplexed wonder the behemoth of wood and sailcloth.

‘Anchor dropped,’ Ba’dari mumbled, knees buckling. Sar’ephir had to hold her up, whispering in her ear words that I couldn’t make out from where I stood.

‘Will you make introductions?’ Ala’tris asked. Offering me a precedence I didn’t deserve, she gestured for me to climb over the side and down the ladder. The runaways waiting below were shouting a hundred questions over one another.

‘Let him tell them,’ I said, and pointed to Chedran, who was bounding across the deck. With a pirate’s grin, he leaped up onto the railing, then somersaulted over the side to land with such grace as would put any acrobat to shame. I’d never imagined someone so relentlessly dour could look so happy.

Ala’tris caught my eye, reluctantly acquiescent. ‘I don’t fault your reasoning for deferring to these runaways the decision whether to allow us to proceed to the Mahdek enclave and present our proposal to their elders . . . but they seem so young, Ferius. Given Chedran’s mistrust of us, how can we be sure he’ll convey our intentions in the best light? Wouldn’t it be better if it were you who—’

‘I knelt down to pick up Conch and put him on my shoulder. Whatever his faults, Chedran loves those kids down to his bones. He’d cut off his own hands before he took from them what he believed to be the chance at a better life.’

‘His beliefs are precisely what concern me.’

A fair point, but her sudden anxiousness raised a question in me that I hadn’t considered until now: what would Ala’tris and her coven do if the kids turned down their ‘gift’?

21

Attention

Trying to convince a bunch of kids to sit quietly and listen to a Jan’Tep delegation droning on about some theoretical homeland nobody’s ever seen while a mystical galleon that can sail across any landscape sits half buried outside . . . well, such a task called for my best arta loquit.

‘Everybody shut the hells up!’

Conch leaped two feet in the air, landing with his belly inflated and serving up an indignant glare so I’d know how perilously close I’d come to a well-deserved belching.

‘Sorry, little buddy,’ I whispered to him. ‘Had to make an impression on these kids.’

A clearly unimpressed snort was followed by him turning tail and trotting outside the barracks to go swap Ferius-is-an-uncouth-brute stories with Quadlopo. Pretty sure he farted at me before he left. As for the runaways upon whose shoulders would rest a decision that would determine the future of the Mahdek, they just sort of froze.

Now, I get why, to an untrained observer, ‘Shut the hells up!’ might not seem the most eloquent of responses to their incessant questions, fidgeting and utter failure to stop trying to crane their necks past me, Chedran, Arissa, Ala’tris and her crew to peer out the door of the barracks to catch one more glance of the spellship. But there’s more to arta loquit than words, and not all shouts are made equal. Mine employed a variety of vocal techniques I’d learned from Enna (who’d mastered them in the perpetual pursuit of getting Durral to shut up once in a while). My pitch was carefully tuned to be neither so high as to sound screechy and desperate nor so low a rumble that it might frighten the young ones. I’d kept the grit out but also dropped the softness of the frontier drawl I’d picked up from Durral. My diction had been over-precise, turning each syllable into its own demand for their attention. And all that was just the audible portion of my efforts.

Arta siva, now that’s a different talent. Ask any preacher or politician and they’ll tell you the words are only a fraction of the art of persuasion. The rest is in the eyes, the lips, the movements of your hands, the way you stand and move, whether a little or a lot. Most of all, though, it’s in the heart. To persuade is to open yourself up, find a truth inside you so convincing you believe it yourself. Only then can your arta siva move someone else to agree.

Telling someone to shut up is hardly any different than slapping them in the face. I needed them to reallylisten, to understand that what they were about to hear could change not just their futures, but those of every other Mahdek on this continent. I needed them, even the young ones, to recognise that part of their childhood was about to disappear, and their people needed them to grow up far faster than anyone should have to.

‘We’re listening,’ Kievan said at last. She sat down cross-legged on the floor of the barracks. The other kids joined her, eyes flitting from me to the strange coven of Jan’Tep mages, barely older than themselves, I’d brought with me. Neither group viewed the other as the same species.

Only Remeny, barely twelve, resisted my arta siva. He approached Ala’tris as if she were a crocodile with jaws open, waiting for him to get too close. ‘You’re the one I feel on my skin, aren’t you?’ he asked, fingers brushing aside the hair from his forehead to reveal the labyrinthine silver lines of the spell warrant. ‘You took it over from the other sand mage?’

She nodded. ‘It was the only way we could find you.’ No apology, but something far more characteristic of her: compassion. ‘You shouldn’t have had to suffer such an ordeal even once, never mind twice. Is there a way by which I might make restitution?’

Remeny scratched at the markings. ‘Can you take it away?’

You could see from the pinching at the corners of her eyes that she’d known this question was coming. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Remeny.’

She leaned down so they were closer to the same height. ‘There are two types of spell warrant, Remeny.’ She scooped up a handful of dust from the floor, then held her palm out and whispered a few syllables. The particles of dust floated above her hand, each one like a tiny insect darting this way and that until at last they took on a circular shape whose twisting lines were similar to the ones on Remeny’s forehead. Inside the circle, the specks of dust formed a grey-brown portrait of his face. ‘One type is fashioned using breath and a touch of sand magic. It spreads out through the world like a kind of echo, repeating this shape you’re seeing now for any mage with the right combination of talents.’

‘Like those posters Daroman marshals sometimes nail up in town squares around the frontier when they’re hunting fugitives?’

She nodded. ‘And just like those posters that weather and crumble after a few weeks unless someone keeps putting more of them up . . .’ She blew over her palm and the dust drifted back to the floor. ‘A spell warrant fades over time on its own because—’

‘Because a spell dies out without someone to keep it alive.’ A trembling finger came up to the glinting silver lines on his forehead. ‘But that silk mage, he burned these on me with some kind of liquid metal. That’s why the spell didn’t die with him . . . because the inks are still there.’ The boy was struggling to keep the tears from his eyes. Guess he figured he’d done enough crying already and it hadn’t done him any good.

Ala’tris wiped her dusty palm on her robe before placing it on Remeny’s forehead as if she were checking him for a fever. ‘The inks are made from veins of ore found only beneath an oasis. They’re part of you now, drawing on your own magical potential. I can abdicate my influence over them, but then any Jan’Tep hextracker or bounty mage will be able to follow their call.’

Hearing her words, I couldn’t keep my fingers from digging under the collar of my own shirt, over those near-invisible sigils around my neck. It had taken years for them to fade. Even now, they felt . . . asleep rather than gone.

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