Charmcaster

Book 3: Spellslinger

by Sebastien de Castell

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Coming of Age; Humorous Fantasy

Synopsis

Kellen, Reichis and Ferius are on their way to Gitabria, a city where amazing inventions are dreamed up and sold across the land of the Seven Sands. But when the three of them stumble across a tiny mechanical bird, magically brought to life, they quickly realise all is not as it appears. Meanwhile two strange Argosi appear, carrying secrets from Ferius's past, together with an unlikely Jan'Tep ally. And as time ticks on, all the cards in Ferius's deck point to the emerging tides of war ...

Release date: September 18, 2018

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 432

Sample

“I totally saw this coming,” Reichis growled, leaping onto my shoulder as lightning scorched the sand barely ten feet from us. The squirrel cat’s claws pierced my sweat-soaked shirt and dug into my skin.

“Yeah?” I asked, ignoring the pain with about as much success as I was having stopping my hands from shaking. “Maybe next time there’s a hextracker on our tail, you could warn us before our horses panic and dump us in the middle of the desert.” Another thunderclap erupted overhead and shook the ground beneath our feet. “Oh, and if it’s not too much trouble, how about a little heads-up before dry lightning starts crashing down on us from a cloudless sky?”

Reichis hesitated, no doubt trying to come up with a believable explanation. Squirrel cats are terrible liars. They make excellent thieves and particularly enthusiastic murderers, but they’re rubbish at deception. “I was waiting to see if you’d figure it out on your own. I was testing you. Yeah, that’s it. Testing you. And you failed, Kellen.”

“You two recall we’re supposed to be laying an ambush?” Ferius Parfax asked, kneeling a few feet away to bury something shiny and sharp in the sand. A tangle of red curls whipped around her face while she worked. Despite the strange storm raging all around us, her movements were fluid and practised. This wasn’t the first time we’d found ourselves on the wrong end of a hunting expedition.

Hence the need for traps.

Ambushing a Jan’Tep mage is a tricky business. You never know which forms of magic they might have at their disposal. Iron, ember, sand, silk, blood, breath … The enemy could have any number of spells to kill you. As if that wasn’t enough, you also have to consider the possibility of accomplices—lackeys or mercenaries hired to watch the mage’s back or do his dirty work for him. “This might go faster if you let me help you set the traps,” I suggested to Ferius, desperate to keep my mind off the surprising number of ways I might die in the next few minutes.

“No, and quit watching me.” She got up and walked a few yards away before kneeling to bury another spiked ball or fragile glass cylinder filled with sleeping gas or whatever else she was using this time. “The fella chasing us could be casting one of them fancy Jan’Tep silk spells to ferret out our plans. That head of yours is too full of thoughts, kid. He’ll read you easy.”

That bristled. Ferius was an Argosi—one of the enigmatic card players who travelled the continent attempting to … Actually, I still wasn’t quite sure what they were meant to do other than annoy people. Despite not having much hope of ever becoming an Argosi myself, I’d been studying Ferius’s ways as best I could, if only because doing so might keep me alive. It didn’t help that she kept insisting I first had to learn to do stupid things like “listen with my eyes” or “grab onto emptiness.”

Reichis, of course, loved it when Ferius upbraided me. “She’s right, Kellen,” he chittered from his perch on my shoulder. “You should be more like me.”

“You mean without any thoughts in my head?”

The snarl he gave me was barely more than a whisper, but delivered perilously close to my ear. “It’s called instinct, skinbag. Makes it hard for silk mages to read me. Want to know what my instincts are telling me to do right now?”

Another bolt of lightning struck the peak of the dune above us, nearly giving me a heart attack and sending a wave of smoke sizzling up from the sand. Had Reichis and I been better friends, we probably would have been hanging on to each other for dear life. Instead, he bit me. “Sorry. Instinct.”

I jerked my shoulder, shaking the squirrel cat off me. He spread his paws out and the furry flaps that ran between his front and back limbs caught the wind as he glided down gracefully to the ground where he gave me a surly look. It had been petty of me to throw him off. I couldn’t blame him for his reaction to the thunder. Reichis has a thing about lightning and fire and … well, pretty much any enemy you can’t bite.

“How is this guy doing it?” I wondered aloud. A dry storm in the middle of the desert under a cloudless sky? It made no sense. Sure, the sixth form of ember magic creates an electrical discharge that looks a lot like lightning, but it manifests from the mage’s hands, not from above, and they have to be able to see the target to cast it.

I looked back up the dune for the thousandth time, wondering when I’d see him coming over the crest, ready to rain seven hells upon us. “Three days this mage has been on our tail and nothing we do shakes him. Why won’t he leave us alone?”

Ferius gave a wry chuckle. “Reckon that’s what comes from having a spell warrant on your head, kid. Whichever cabal of mages implanted obsidian worms in them rich kids can’t be too pleased with us going around destroying them.”

Even with more pressing dangers at hand, just thinking about obsidian worms repelled me. They were a type of mystical parasite. Once lodged inside the victim’s eye, they enabled mages to control the host from afar. Ferius, Reichis and I had spent the last six months tracking down students from the famed Academy who had no idea they were slowly being turned into spies against their own families—or worse, assassins.

“When did it become our job to save the world from the obsidian worms anyway?” I asked, removing my frontier hat so I could wipe my brow with my sleeve. Despite the dry air, I was sweating profusely; wearing a black hat that was too big for my head wasn’t helping. I’d got the hat from a fellow spellslinger by the name of Dexan Videris—payment on account of his having tried to kill me. He’d claimed the silver sigils adorning the band would keep mages from tracking me, but like everything else Dexan had told me, that was turning out to be a lie.

“It ain’t our job,” Ferius replied. “It’s mine. The whole point of bein’ Argosi is to avert the calamities that bring suffering to innocent folks. Since a bunch of idiot Jan’Tep mages assassinating powerful families all across the continent could set off a war, I’d say this situation qualifies.”

The wind picked up without warning and my apparently non-magical prized possession flew from my hand. I almost went running after it but decided not to bother. Stupid thing never fit right anyway. “It would be nice if just once somebody came along who wanted to help instead of everybody trying to murder us.”

Ferius rose abruptly to her feet and peered out into the desert. “Now that don’t look good at all.”

I turned to see what she was talking about. Off in the distance, a wall of sand that must’ve been a hundred feet high had begun to roil in the air.

“Now we’ve got to deal with a freakin’ sandstorm?” Reichis grumbled. He shook himself and his fur changed colour from its usual muddy brown with black stripes to a dusty beige flecked with grey that matched the approaching clouds of sand and grit. Once it got here he’d be able to pretty much disappear into the storm if he wanted—which he probably would if things went badly. Squirrel cats aren’t sentimental.

As the storm approached, I tried to decide whether I’d rather die from being buried under tons of sand, electrocuted by dry lightning or murdered with dark magic. The choices are never pretty when you’re an outlaw spellslinger with a gambler for a mentor, a squirrel cat for a business partner and a long line of mages who want you dead.

Oh, and I was fairly sure it was my seventeenth birthday.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

Ferius, her gaze on the thick clouds of sand coming for us, replied, “Reckon you’d best take a deep breath, kid.”

Whenever the three of us are about to be attacked—which is a lot more often than I’d like—we each have a job to do: Ferius sets her traps, prepares her weapons and uses those crazy Argosi talents of hers to figure out the best tactics for our survival. Reichis does most of the scouting and uses his keen sense of smell to catch any scent of approaching enemies.

Me? My job is to take a deep breath.

While Ferius is a master of trickery, and Reichis is two furry feet of sharp teeth, claws and a total disregard for the consequences of violence, I’ve got one and only one skill that matters in a situation like this: a piece of breath magic that relies on quick hands and the twin powders I keep in the pouches on either side of my belt. I might not have a lot of spells, but I’ve learned to be fast on the draw. Doesn’t matter how powerful a rival mage is if you blast him before he performs his invocations. Trouble is, if my hands are shaking or I’m sweating so much the powders stick to my fingers, I’ll end up with two charred stumps at the end of my arms and an embarrassed look on my face.

So … Breathe.

Relax.

Ignore the lightning and the sandstorm. Use the years you spent as an initiate envisioning your spells to picture your enemy at the top of that sand dune, see yourself blasting him right before he can—

A spike of pain that felt like a blast of ice-cold wind stabbed at my right eye. I slammed the heel of my palm over it in a futile attempt to block the sensation. Usually it’s my left eye that gives me trouble on account of the shadowblack marks around it (which also happens to be the reason why bounty hunters with spell warrants keep trying to kill me). As if the shadowblack weren’t trouble enough, about six months ago my other eye had become home to a sasutzei: a wind spirit who’d decided to take up residence there. I was still new to whisper magic, so getting the spirit under control was next to impossible.

“Damn it, I’m trying to concentrate!”

Uncharacteristically, the pain faded away. I took a deep breath and again tried to visualise the moment when I’d lay eyes on our pursuer. My muscles relaxed as I imagined myself pulling the powders, tossing them into the air and forming the somatic shapes with my hands just as they collided, uttering the spell and blasting—

“Ow! Stop it!”

“What’s the problem, kid?” Ferius asked.

“This stupid wind spirit in my eye keeps vexing me!”

Ferius came closer, eyes narrowed. “How long has Suzy been acting up?”

“Suzy” was the name Ferius had given to the sasutzei.

“Ever since this damned mage started hunting us. Every time I think about—”

Reichis cut me off with a low growl, muzzle held high as he sniffed the air. His eyes glistened with hungry anticipation instead of the much more sensible fear that any sane animal would’ve felt at a time like this. The corners of his fuzzy mouth rose up in his approximation of a grin. “Time to fight.”

Lightning struck the sand near the top of the dune again—once, twice, then a third time. Wind from the approaching storm buffeted us, sending sand swirling into the air and turning the world into a hazy mess of grey shadows. One of those shadows appeared at the very top of the dune.

Ferius grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down low into a crouch. “Wait till he gets close,” she said, her words barely audible over the storm. “Let the enemy come to us.”

“Stupid humans,” Reichis muttered, but he obeyed for once.

As we huddled there, a slim figure in a long travelling coat stumbled down the dune, face covered against the wind and grit, wearing a beat-up frontier hat not unlike my own. The outfit in itself was rather odd: usually when people come to kill me they like to do it with flair. A four-legged animal—maybe some kind of dog or big cat—limped alongside.

“Hyena,” Reichis snarled, sniffing at the air and baring his teeth. “I hate hyenas.” He sniffed a second time, then tilted his head quizzically.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Something ain’t right. The skinbag and the mutt stink of fear.”

“Of us?” I asked incredulously.

The answer came when the mage reached the bottom of the dune and ran right past us into the deepening storm. A few seconds later four more silhouettes appeared over the crest—men and women clothed in the wide strips of pale linen favoured by the Berabesq, whose lands these were. They wielded curved-bladed swords and flails with spiked balls spinning at the end of their chains, moving with ferocious grace as they pursued the mage across the desert.

“Berabesq Faithful,” Ferius murmured, eyes wide as she watched them pass. Usually most things that come out of her mouth sound like the beginning of a dirty joke, so the awe in her voice was disconcerting.

“What are Berabesq ‘Faithful’?” I asked.

She watched as the mage fled into the sandstorm. “For that poor sucker? The worst kind of death imaginable.”

“Well, problem solved,” Reichis said, shaking himself. The colour of his fur changed to a jaunty orange with gold stripes as he sauntered up the sand dune in the direction we’d come.

“Wait!” I called out.

The squirrel cat didn’t even slow down. “Nope. If we’re not the target, then we got no reason to sit around in this stinkin’ desert.”

Normally I’d agree with him. In fact, given how much I hate the desert, I’d be way ahead of him. But something was bothering me—like an itch I needed to scratch but couldn’t reach. I looked back at the retreating sandstorm. Both the hunters and the hunted had disappeared from view. “These Berabesq ‘Faithful’… Why would they be out in the desert chasing down a Jan’Tep mage?”

Reichis gave me the same look he gives crows when they irritate him. “Don’t know, don’t plan on findin’ out.” He scratched behind one of his ears. “Gonna find me a bath and soak in it until all this sand is out of my fur.”

“What’s he on about?” Ferius asked.

I translated for her.

“The squirrel cat’s got a point,” she said, packing up her traps and tripwires. “The Faithful are some of the coldest killers you’ll ever meet. Magic ain’t no different to devil-worship in this part of the world, and the Faithful, well, they’ve got a nose for it. Once they’re done with the mage, you can bet they’ll be sniffin’ after you, kid.”

That hardly seemed fair. I barely had enough magic for a few paltry breath spells. That was one of the reasons why so many mages were eager to duel me. Now I was going to have a bunch of religious zealots after me too? “Why does the whole world hate me?”

“Me, me, me,” Reichis mocked. “Why is it always about you, Kellen? Notice how we never run across other squirrel cats? That’s because most of my kind have been killed by your kind.”

I felt ashamed by that. The squirrel cat almost never brought up the fact that his relatives had died at the hands of a mage from my own clan, but any time I asked if he wanted to talk about the loss of his family, he bit me. Hard.

Ferius offered up a sardonic smile. “Not everybody hates you, kid. There are entire countries full of people who haven’t met you yet.”

“Well, I’m starting to hate both of you,” Reichis grumbled. “And I’m hungry, so unless one of you is planning to feed me one of your ears for supper, let’s get out of this lousy wasteland and find a town with somebody who knows how to make butter biscuits.” The squirrel cat went back to busily—and futilely—picking the sand out of his fur.

“He’s right,” I said to Ferius. “We’re supposed to be in Gitabria right now, saving the last remaining victim of the obsidian worms—someone who hasn’t been hunting us for three solid days. If this mage has got himself mixed up with a bunch of religious fanatics with a burning desire to … well, burn people? Then better him than us.”

It didn’t sound very noble when I said it out loud like that, but the alternative was way worse. I went and picked my hat out of the scraggly bush where it had landed. “Let’s just get the hell out of—”

Pain. I mean, pain.

I rubbed at my right eye to try to get rid of the stinging sensation. “Quit attacking me, you crazy wind spirit!”

Ferius came over and pulled my hand away, peering into my eye as if she expected to find the sasutzei staring back at her. “Sounds like Suzy’s trying to tell you something, kid.”

“Yeah,” I snapped. “She’s telling me to rip out my own eyeball!”

“I get first bite,” Reichis said, then gave Ferius a snarl just in case she didn’t get the message. Unlike me, she can’t turn his little chitters, grunts and growls into words, but she’s been around him long enough to know his particular culinary proclivities.

“It’s all yours once we’re done with it, squirrel cat.” To me she said—of course, “Breathe, kid.”

Since it was becoming clear that the sasutzei wasn’t going to let me leave until I paid attention to her, I did just that.

Whisper magic isn’t like the spellcraft of my people. Our magic is built on summoning the six fundamental sources of power through the tattooed metallic bands on our forearms. Casting a spell takes carefully worded invocations along with precise somatic shapes to match the intricate mystical geometry we envision in our minds. Whisper mages? They basically just … whisper. It’s more like begging the spirits than commanding magical forces—which is probably why my people look down on it. “Okay, Suzy,” I murmured to the sasutzei, “show me what you’ve got.”

I let the air ease out slowly from my lungs, using it like a river upon which I sent little wooden boats made more from emotion than thought, each one carrying a message to the spirit. I’m not sure what words I spoke—it’s hard to keep track when you’re trying so hard not to think, but after a few seconds the pain shifted to a softer sensation, like someone gently blowing on your eyelids. When I opened them, I found the world had split in two. My left eye beheld everything before me—the sand dune, the mountains off in the distance; Ferius, standing there patiently; Reichis looking irritable. My right eye was looking directly inside the sandstorm.

“You okay, Kellen?” the squirrel cat asked. “One of your eyes just went all milky.” His muzzle twisted into a look of mild disgust. “Don’t think I want to eat it any more.”

I ignored him and focused on the visions the sasutzei was showing me. The air that had been so still an instant before was now swirling all around me, sand and dust whipping at my skin, though I couldn’t feel any of it. What I was witnessing was further away, deeper into the heart of the storm where the four Berabesq Faithful pushed through fierce winds as they closed in on their prey. The mage looked to be an inch or two shorter than me and even skinnier. If he couldn’t destroy them with magic, I doubted he’d be able to defend himself physically. “They’ve almost got him,” I said out loud. “The animal with him, the hyena, it’s fallen to the ground. It’s not getting up.”

“Good,” Reichis muttered. “Hope the filthy thing is dead.”

In addition to not being sentimental, squirrel cats also aren’t big on sympathy.

I closed my left eye to focus my attention on what was unfolding inside the sandstorm. “The mage is trying to pick up the hyena, but the Berabesq are too close—they’re starting to … Wait … He’s throwing something at them.”

I watched in fascination as what appeared to be a small wooden box, no bigger than the palm of my hand, fell in front of the pursuers. The instant it hit the ground, it broke open and fire burst out of it, the flames erupting in all directions.

“What is it?” Ferius asked. “Some kind of weapon?”

“Caged fire, I think. He must be a charmcaster.”

Reichis tilted his fuzzy head at me. “A what now?”

“A charmcaster. They’re like …” How do you explain the arcane distinctions between disciplines of magic to an Argosi gambler and a squirrel cat? “It’s like this: a proper mage can invoke spells at will so long as they’ve sparked the necessary tattooed bands that my people use to create a connection to the raw forms of magic. It’s all about energy and will. A spellslinger like me can only do a little bit of magic, so I have to combine it with other things to make it useful. A charmcaster doesn’t really cast spells at all so much as bind them to physical objects. Some charms—simple ones like warning locks and glow-glass lanterns that don’t require a lot of magical force—can keep working for months or years. Bigger ones—”

“Like freakin’ dry lightning?” Reichis asked.

“Exactly. A storm takes a lot of work to bind, so you could only use it once and it won’t last for more than maybe an hour.” A sudden twinge of pain in my right eye courtesy of the sasutzei brought my attention back to the visions she wanted me to witness. “The caged fire didn’t work. The Berabesq have the charmcaster pinned down now. Three of them are strapping him down with ropes, but …” I hesitated, unable to make sense of what I was seeing.

“What’s wrong, kid?” Ferius asked.

Again I struggled to peer closer at what the sasutzei was showing me. “The way they’re tying him down is really weird. They’ve got ropes around each of his limbs and then they’re tying those to each other so that his hands and feet are all outstretched. It’s almost like the ropes are forming a circle around him.”

“That’s the rite of damnation,” she said grimly. “They use it to cleanse the earth of a heathen’s blasphemy.”

“How?” I asked.

“Slowly, and with a lot of blood.” Her words came out hoarse and gravelly, and were soon followed by the sound of her footsteps in the sand. “Best we get on with it then.”

I opened my left eye to find her setting off in what was decidedly the wrong direction.

“Is that crazy Argosi going into the storm?” Reichis asked.

“Wait!” I called out to Ferius. “You said the Faithful were dangerous!”

“That I did, kid,” she shouted back, still headed for the sandstorm. “Then I recalled something you said.”

“Me? What did I—”

She stopped then, buttoning up her waistcoat and pulling her hat down lower over her eyes against the wind and sand. “You forget already? You said you wished that for once somebody would come along to help instead of always trying to kill us. Reckon that works both ways.”

“Are you kidding me? You expect us to put our lives at risk on account of an idle thought I had in the middle of a lightning storm in the desert?”

Ferius glanced back at me, the smirk on her face at odds with the trepidation in her eyes. “Warned you that head of yours was too full of thoughts, kid.” Then she turned and resumed her steady march into the swirling chaos of the storm, leaving Reichis and I to decide whether to follow or abandon Ferius to almost certain death.

Ancestors, I prayed silently as I jogged after her, ignoring Reichis’s threats to let me charge headlong to my own execution without him. When I come back in the next life, let me carry this one thought with me: next time you meet an Argosi, run away as fast as you can.

Even blinded by fierce winds and pummelled by sand flying in all directions, it didn’t take us long to find the Berabesq Faithful. By a rare stroke of luck, we even managed to do it without them spotting us first. All we had to do now was keep quiet until we could free the mage.

“Nice weather we’re having,” Ferius called out cheerfully to them, completely blowing our cover. “How about we have ourselves a little picnic and a friendly chat?”

Ferius Parfax has many bad habits. I’ve never been able to figure out whether these are an unavoidable consequence of walking an Argosi path or whether it’s just because she has a terrible sense of humour. Whichever way you look at it though, announcing your position to four Berabesq Faithful in the middle of a charmcaster’s sandstorm to suggest a friendly chat is a terrible, terrible idea.

“Totally saw that coming,” Reichis grumbled.

Without so much as a word to each other, the Berabesq came to a joint decision to decline our invitation of tea and polite company. They also settled on a plan: two of them dragged the unconscious charmcaster deeper into the storm, and the other two came for us.

Ferius sighed. “Nobody wants to engage in a free and open exchange of ideas any more.”

“Thank the squirrel cat gods for that,” Reichis said, puffing himself up. His fur had taken on the exact colour of the sand around us once again, which was smart since it made him almost impossible to see in the storm. But the little bugger has an ego bigger than most countries, so of course he had to make his stripes dark red to show he meant business. “Come and get it, skinbags.”

The two hunters loped gracefully towards us. The woman was broad-shouldered and slid a sword from the scabbard at her back as she approached. The blade was about three feet long, curved along its length with a tip that ended in a sharpened hook. “That’s a kazkhan,” Ferius said. “Try not to get cut, okay?”

“Why?”

“Because it’s sharp, kid.”

“Right. Helpful advice as always.”

“Also,” Ferius went on, “the Faithful like to coat the inside of their scabbards with a venom from one of the local snakes. Stings like the devil when it gets under your skin.”

Well, I suppose I hadn’t really been planning on letting myself be stabbed anyway.

The slender man had darker colouring than his partner and didn’t look as if he were carrying a weapon at all until he got within twenty feet of us. That’s when I caught the reflection off the metal sheaths attached to each of his fingers that ended in glinting points.

“Tiazkhan,” Ferius said. “Don’t let him hit you with those either.”

“Let me guess: poisoned?”

“Strangely, no—at least not with anything that makes you sick.”

“Then what—”

“Ours is a gentle God,” the man called out. “Even to heathens. So it is that I must offer you a chance at life.” He spoke to us in Daroman, though with a heavy accent. I guess with Ferius and me wearing frontier travelling clothes, we must’ve looked as much like Daroman herders as anything else.

“May he grant you serenity and peace to all you love,” Ferius called back, an unusual formality to her voice. She does that sometimes: switches from sounding like a drunken gambler to enunciating with the precision and eloquence of a court diplomat.

“And peace, in turn, to you,” the man replied with a note of surprise in his voice. “Indeed, peace may be cheaply purchased.” He gestured to the ground. “You need only kneel and bow your head that God may see you are merely lost, and not come here to interfere in His work.”

Ferius gave an apologetic shrug. “Forgive me, most worthy one, but when I bow, my eyes cannot see the path ahead, and when I kneel, I cannot walk where my heart dictates.”

This too seemed to bewilder the two Berabesq Faithful, but only for a moment. “Argosi,” the woman said at last. Well, spat is more like it.

Ferius grinned at her. “A common and most sensible reaction, faithful one.”

The man grew impatient. “Ask your questions then, wanderer. We do not seek a quarrel with the Argosi.”

Ferius took a step forward and made a show of looking around. “You are far from your temples and cities, most worthy ones—closer to the Gitabrian border than your holy places. What crime has this mage committed that brings you on such a long chase?”

“Heresy,” the two Faithful replied in unison.

Ferius whispered to me, “It’s always heresy with these guys.” She then turned back to the Faithful. “There are seven hundred and seventy-seven heresies, most worthy ones, could you be more specific?”

The man seemed mildly impressed. “You know our ways, so I will answer: the crime of witchcraft.” Before Ferius could respond, he held up a hand, the metal points of the sheaths attached to his fingers reflecting the hazy light that permeated the storm. “Before you ask, of the eighteen forms of devilry, this one is a forsaken warlock.”

“Dang,” Ferius muttered under her breath.

“Why is that bad?” I asked. “I mean, any more than the seven hundred and seventy-six other heresies?”

“The Berabesq hate mages, but most of the time they avoid risking war with their neighbours just for the sake of killing one. A forsaken warlock is someone they’ve been given permission to execute without reprisal.”

“Clearly nobody wants to save this guy,” Reichis said irritably. “I mean, what kind of filthy reprobate has his own kind telling their enemies to go ahead and kill him?” He looked up at me with what I assumed was the squirrel cat’s expression of mild embarrassment. “Other than you, of course.”

Ferius locked eyes with the Faithful. “You follow a dark path, most worthy ones. To conduct a rite of damnation without even a trial? What proof have you that this mage—”

The woman started to object, but her partner held up a hand. “Ease your conscience, Argosi. The heretic was foolish enough to give his name to any who would listen in a town not three days’ ride from here.” He gestured nonchalantly behind them to where his fellow zealots had carried off their prisoner deeper into the storm. “The one we are about to sacrifice is none other than the notorious Jan’Tep fugitive, Kellen of the House of Ke.”

“Okay, I admit it,” Reichis said as we found ourselves squaring off with the two Berabesq Faithful. “That I didn’t see coming.”

“You’ve made a mistake, worthy ones,” Ferius said with the same calm, almost jovial tone as befo