Page 54 of Fate of the Argosi

‘You’re being childish!’

I squeezed her hand, not hard, just enough to feel how feeble her attempts at pulling away were, and the tremors she was trying to conceal. ‘You didn’t trip because of bad sea legs. You tripped because you’re not accustomed to the muscles in your legs being so weak. You’re sick.’ I glanced around at the lower decks. Hardly anyone had come up here in the past two days. That wasn’t unusual for the passengers, but the crew? I released Ala’tris’s hand. ‘Haven’t seen much of Jir’dan or Gab’rel or Ba’dari lately. They all catch the same cold?’

‘I told you, it’s nothing.’ She rubbed at her fingers as if I’d bruised them, but I saw that for the ruse it was – meant to distract me from pursuing this further.

‘How about you, Sar’ephir?’ I asked our navigator. ‘You feelin’ just dandy too?’

Her skin had been much darker than mine on the continent and even here, where everything was black, that was somehow still true. But when she turned I saw beads of sweat glistening like oil down her forehead. She was smiling, like always, but the upturned line of her lips was tighter now. Determined. Defiant. ‘Tell her,’ she said to Ala’tris. ‘You know the Argosi will keep prying until she finds out.’

Six nights we’d been at sea. Ala’tris had promised the journey would take less than a week, and had repeated that promise several times. I’d assumed she’d been trying to reassure the Mahdek, who were naturally anxious about the duration of the voyage. Looking back, it now seemed to me her gaze had flickered to the members of her own coven just as often.

Gently I took her forearm and raised it parallel with the deck, the fabric of her sleeve soft to my touch. Beneath that gossamer silk, the sigils of three of her tattooed bands had lost their lustre, looking more like patterns of necrotised flesh than metallic inks that could summon the awesome magics of her people. ‘The shadowblack is making all of you sick, isn’t it?’

Ala’tris nodded, and a brittle, wry smile came to her lips. ‘One of the reasons why the island will be an ideal home for the Mahdek.’ She squeezed her fist and closed her eyes. A flash of pain crossed her features before the sigils illuminated feebly. Gold, crimson and purple. The only true colours I’d seen since we’d set sail from the continent: a light sparked not by the physical laws of this realm, but drawn from a Jan’Tep oasis far, far away. ‘The stronger a mage’s connection to the veins of raw mystical ore beneath the oases – what we call theJan– the greater the strain we endure inside the shadowblack.’

‘What about you?’ I asked Sar’ephir.

The galleon slowed, as if whatever invisible wind propelled us through the onyx ocean had dropped. The big woman reached a hand up to the back of her head and tapped a finger against one of the swirling bands on her shorn scalp. ‘My shadowblack markings are more potent than ever. My other sigils however . . .’ She sparked the gold band for sand magic on her forearm and winced. ‘It’s a bit like making passionate love while suffering a blinding headache.’ Turning back to the bow, she raised both arms wide and the ship lurched forward. ‘Now –’ she turned to Ala’tris – ‘tell the Argosi the bad news.’

‘We . . . we are not where we should be,’ Ala’tris admitted. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.

‘We’re lost?’ I glanced out over the port-side railing. The seemingly endless onyx ocean offered no landmarks of any kind. Then I looked up at the pitch-black stars of constellations which had changed any number of times since our departure, but never in a way that would allow someone to plot a course. ‘I assumed you guys had some sort of hocus-pocus navigational spell or someth—’

‘We’re not lost,’ Ala’tris retorted angrily. ‘It’s more that . . .’ She swore under her breath. I only know a little Jan’Tep, so the finer points of their vulgarity are beyond me. ‘You wouldn’t understand, Ferius.’

She was wrong though; I understood perfectly.

Durral Brown was reputed to have the finest arta loquit of any Argosi living, and even he confessed mine might be better. Part of it was my childhood as a refugee, going from place to place with my clan, having to learn all the different ways a person’s words might reveal genuine pity or disguise terrible cruelty. Those skills had been honed by subsequent years contending with the cursed sigils branded around my neck that could turn anyone’s affection to me into murderous hate. Not a pleasant way to grow up, but damned good preparation for learning the Argosi talent of arta loquit.

Every word Ala’tris had spoken, every inflection in her tone, every hesitation, were all part of what she didn’t want to say.

‘We’re not where we should be.’

No mention of travelling too slow or too fast, or even heading in the wrong direction. Just that we weren’t where we should be – like it wasn’t our course that was wrong, but the map itself.

‘We’re not lost. It’s more that . . .’

The obvious correlate of declaring that we weren’t lost, coming from someone like Ala’tris who’s prone to educating everyone around her, would be to follow up with a specific reference to our location. She hadn’t though; she’d equivocated instead with‘It’s more that . . .’She’d trailed off because she couldn’t find the words, which suggested the concept of ‘location’ somehow didn’t apply to our current situation.

And the coup de grace:‘You wouldn’t understand.’

The statement was inherently denigrating, which wasn’t her style – especially towards me. Despite our radically different vocations, Ala’tris saw me an equal, almost a sister, so when she claimedIwouldn’t understand what was happening, what she really meant was thatshedidn’t understand it.

Which left me with the only logical conclusion: when you’re not where you should be, but you’re not lost, and no amount of magical knowledge can tell you where youare, then the problem isn’t that you’re in the wrong place. The problem is that you’re not anywhere.

Ta-da. Where are you, Arissa, when I’m being so darned impressive?

I crossed the deck of the forecastle to stand next to Sar’ephir. The onyx waves rose and fell ahead of us like magnificent sculptures being moulded then flattened by unseen hands. ‘That’s not really an ocean, is it?’

The strain in her smile eased up a little. ‘No, it’s not.’

I shifted my weight to my right heel, made a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn. ‘The ship’s not really moving then, either.’ I returned to where I began and then pointed up at the constellations in the sky. ‘You’re . . . moving space around us, right?’

The tall, broad-shouldered woman pursed her lips in a way I found oddly charming. ‘It is more that . . . we’re all refashioning the space the galleon occupies until that space becomes more and more like the destination we require.’

‘The destination that contains the island.’

She nodded.

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