Lynas and I had shared a Gift-bond, something that would have had me imprisoned if the Arcanum ever discovered we’d broken that age-old taboo. Nobody liked their heads being messed with, magi least of all, and in the dawn days of human history those with my rare Gift had carried the darker name of tyrant, and enslaved magi and mageborn through an enforced Gift-bond, a permanent linking of magical Gifts that allowed the tyrant unfettered access to their minds. But I wasn’t them, hadn’t enslaved people, and didn’t deserve the black looks other magi aimed my way – well, not for that reason anyway. As a full blown magus I could have mentally forced Lynas to do as I wished, but I never had, and never would. Lynas and I had been true friends and it had been no burden to bear, nor a thing to fear between the two of us. Instead it was something beautiful. We could always find each other in a crowd or come to the other’s aid when they were hurting. He shared my confidence and resilience and I his hope and conscience, while still respecting the privacy of his deeper thoughts. There was nothing we wouldn’t have done for each other.
Charra spent the time telling me all she knew of the Skinner murders, and bringing me up to date with notable events of the last ten years. I already knew that Krandus had become the new Archmagus after my mentor Byzant’s disappearance – him being the most powerful person in the world made that sort of knowledge widespread – but it was difficult to get specific details way out in the hinterlands. I was in mixed minds about Krandus’ ascension. I’d never warmed to the man: far too cold and controlled, too inhuman to be likable, not like Byzant at all.
I actually stumbled over my own feet when Charra told me that Cillian Hastorum had recently joined the Inner Circle of the Arcanum and was now one of the seven most powerful people in all Setharis, and the world.
Charra savoured my reaction. “Probably shouldn’t have been such a rotten cur to her, huh?”
You couldn’t argue with that. We’d had a “thing” once, Cillian and I, back when we had both been lowly initiates. She’d been slumming it so far beneath her lofty station when by rights I should have only been visible with an eyeglass. It never would have worked out between us. At least, that’s what I told myself. After we went through the final rite of the Forging and were acknowledged as proper magi, it had quickly become clear that she was better off without a wretch like me dragging her down. People had a bad habit of getting hurt around me.
“You two fought like cat and corvun,” Charra added. “And as I recall, she usually won.” All that earned was a grunt from me.
We approached a group of grubby youths, mostly girls from what I could tell, huddled in a doorway that stank of the heady aroma of sour wine and piss. Scarified smiles running up their cheeks marked them as Smilers, a street gang that had been in Setharis as long as anybody could remember, and with magi that was a very long time indeed. Their initiation ritual was to stick a blade into a supplicant’s mouth and cut up at either side to give them a permanent smile. Nobody ever left the Smilers breathing, not unless they could find their way out of Setharis to some godsforsaken hole that didn’t know what the scar-sign meant.
It would have been nice to think that my glower was enough to scare them off but they barely looked at me, their predator eyes fastening on Charra. The girls ceased lounging against the walls and slunk forward to meet us. Damn the Night Bitch, if they wanted a fight I was happy to oblige.
My hand slipped beneath my coat, wrapped around Dissever’s hilt. Its hunger was infectious. Bloodlust bubbled up inside me and I felt a manic grin growing.
Their demeanours changed as we drew closer. They smiled – a disturbing sight – in genuine pleasure.
“Hey Charra-doll,” the oldest girl said, a tall youth with bone hoops through her ears, eyebrow, and nostril. “What you two be doin’ down the Warrens tonight?”
A stocky girl with greasy hair and a pockmarked face favoured me with a lewd grin. “You lookin’ for a little somethin’-somethin’?” She flicked her cut-throat razor open and closed. “I likes ’em rough.” She took a pull from a jug of wine, belched, and then looked me up and down in such a filthy, lecherous way that it made my skin crawl. Was this how women felt when drunken arses like me leered at them?
Charra rolled her eyes. “Not tonight, Tubbs, him is with me.” Her accent dipped back into the rough patois of the Warrens. I was sure the girl’s sort of “play” would not be my idea of fun. Charra turned to bone-face. “Hey, Rosha, good to see ya. Me and him got business down Bootmaker’s Wynd.”
Smiles died and hands dropped to hidden weapons. They shuffled a little closer together. “Bad business that,” Rosha bone-face said. “Not the Blinders or the Scuttlers either. That was magic, that was.” She shrugged, then looked me up and down, sneering. “Sure this piece o’ shit enough fer you, Charra-doll? Doesn’t seem like much of a man. He couldn’t make ye scream, so how’s about we make him a woman fer’ye? With that arse he’d look good in a dress. Shame about the face.” The Smilers broke out in raucous laugher.
The urge to ram Dissever into her guts flooded through me, to plunge it into soft flesh and slowly work my way up. I prised my fingers off the hilt. The desire to kill faded. Mostly.
Instead of gutting her I smirked, prodding her in the chest, skin to skin. “You shut your flapping fish-hole,” I said. “You’ll never be half the man your mother was.”
Her instant of confusion was all I needed to slip magic into her through the skin contact, minimising the danger of detection by any sniffer who might be passing, as vanishingly unlikely as that was in the Warrens at night. Her mind opened up to my Gift like a ripe corpse swollen with gas. It wasn’t all rot though. Far from it.
She slapped my hand away and squared up to me, thrusting her chest out and her shoulders back as she stared me straight in the eye and stepped in close, knife in hand, preening in front of her gang.
I leaned in so nobody else could hear. “Haven’t told them where you get the coin for all that extra food, have you? Working side jobs with bent wardens is bad for the reputation. And my, my, rutting with him too. How do you think that will go down?”
She went still for a second and then backed off with a flicker of fear blooming in her eyes. “Who are you, man?”
“I’m nobody worth knowing,” I said with a shrug.
Charra snorted. “We don’t have time to spend jawing with you lot.” She grabbed my sleeve and pulled me onwards past the gang. “Be seeing you later, girls.”
As we neared our destination, that nagging, throbbing itch in blood and bones progressed into a full-blown body-ache, my head pain into piercing agony. My hands shook as I trailed fingers down the grimy wooden walls of the buildings lining Bootmaker’s Way. The smell of leather lingered in the air even though the dozens of small workshops had closed their shutters hours ago.
Finally she stopped. “This is the place.” Her eyes glistened, but I knew she wouldn’t cry. Charra had used up a lifetime’s worth of tears long ago. She once said that an ocean of tears had never solved anything for her, and that a stolen knife in the dark of a grubby backroom had. Over the years she had hunted down everybody that had once harmed her. She had blood on her hands, but then so did I.