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Chapter Nine

  1163rd Year of Blaze’s Slumber

  105th Year of the Nazalam Empire

  9th Year of Empress Lasean’s Rule

  Down in the camp just beyond the last crest of denuded hills, horse-drawn carts loaded with wounded soldiers crowded the narrow aisles between the tent rows. All the precise order of the Nazalam encampment had disintegrated, and the air was febrile with soldiers screaming their pain, giving voice to horror.

  Taterztayl threaded her way around the dazed survivors, stepping across puddles of blood in the wagon-ruts, her eyes lingering on an obscene pile of amputated limbs outside the cutter tents. From the massive sprawl of the camp followers’ slum of tents and shelters came a wailing dirge – a broken chorus of thousands of voices, the sound a chilling reminder that war was always a thing of grief.

  In some military headquarters back in the Empire’s capital of Magbalaan, three thousand leagues distant, an anonymous aide would paint a red stroke across the 2nd Infantry on the active list, and then write in fine script beside it: Liet, late winter, the 1163rd Year of Blaze’s Slumber. Thus would the death of nine thousand men and women be noted. And then forgotten.

  Taterztayl grimaced. Some of us won’t forget. The Linktorches harboured some frightening suspicions. The thought of challenging Tynell in a direct confrontation appealed to her sense of outrage and – if the Leading Sorcerer had killed Kalo – her feeling of betrayal. But she knew that her emotions had a way of running away with her. A sorcery duel with the Empire’s Leading Sorcerer would buy her a quick passage to Cowl’s Gateway. Self-righteous wrath had planted more corpses in the ground than an empire could lay claim to, and as Kalo used to say: Shake your fist all you want but dead is dead.

  She’d witnessed all too many scenes of death since she’d first joined the ranks of the Nazalam Empire, but at least they couldn’t be laid squarely at her feet. That was the difference, and it had been enough for a long time. Not as I once was. I’ve spent twenty years washing the blood from my hands. Right now, however, the scene that rose again and again behind her eyes was the empty armour on the hilltop, and it gnawed at her heart. Those men and women had been running to her, looking for protection against the horrors of the plain below. It had been a desperate act, a fatal one, but she understood it. Tynell didn’t care about them, but she did. She was one of their own. In past battles they’d fought like rabid dogs to keep enemy legions from killing her. This time, it was a mage war. Her territory. Favours were traded in the 2nd. It’s what kept everyone alive, and it was what had made the 2nd a legion of legend. Those soldiers had expectations, and they had the right to them. They’d come to her for salvation. And they died for it.

  And if I had sacrificed myself then? Cast my Warenne’s defences on to them instead of shielding my own hide? She’d been surviving on instinct back then, and her instincts had had nothing to do with altruism. Those kinds of people didn’t live long in war.

  Being alive, Taterztayl concluded as she approached her tent, isn’t the same as feeling good about it. She entered her tent and closed the flap behind her, then stood surveying her worldly possessions. Scant few, after two hundred and nineteen years of life. The oak chest containing her book of Ryth sorcery remained sealed by warding spells; the small collection of alchemical devices lay scattered on the tabletop beside her cot, like a child’s toys abandoned in mid-game.

  Amid the clutter sat her Pack of Serpents. Her gaze lingered on the reading cards before continuing its round. Everything looked different now, as if the chest, the alchemy, and her clothes all belonged to someone else: someone younger, someone still possessing a shred of vanity. Only the Pack – the Fetid – called out to her like an old friend.

  Taterztayl walked over to stand before it. With an absent gesture she set down the package given her by Aqida, then pulled out a stool from under the table. Sitting down, she reached for the Pack. She hesitated.

  It had been months. Something had kept her away. Maybe Kalo’s death could have been foretold, and maybe that suspicion had been pacing in the darkness of her thoughts all this time. Pain and fear had been shaping her soul all her life, but her time with Kalo had been another kind of shaping, something light, happy, pleasantly floating. She’d called it mere diversion.

  ‘How’s that for wilful denial?’ She heard the bitterness in her tone and hated herself for it. Her old demons were back, laughing at the death of her illusions. You refused the Pack once before, the night before Ridicule’s throat was opened, the night before Hoofer and the man who would one day rule an Empire stole into your master’s – your lover’s – Grasp. Would you deny that a pattern exists, woman?

  Her vision blurry with memories she’d thought buried forever, she looked down at the Pack, blinking rapidly. ‘Do I want you to talk to me, old friend? Do I need your reminders, your wry confirmation that faith is for fools?’

  A motion caught the corner of her eye. Whatever was inside the bound hide had moved. Lumps rose here and there, pushing against the seams. Taterztayl stared. Then, her breath catching, she reached to it and set it in front of her. She withdrew a small dagger from her belt and began to cut the seams. The object within went still, as if awaiting the result of her efforts. She peeled back a sliced flap of hide.

  ‘‘Tayl,’ said a familiar voice.

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  Her eyes widened as a wooden marionette, wearing bright yellow silk clothing, climbed out of the bag. Painted on its round face were features she recognized.

  ‘Furbolt.’

  ‘Good to see you again,’ the marionette said, rising to its feet. It wobbled and held out artfully carved hands to regain balance. ‘And the soul did shift,’ he said, doffing his floppy hat and managing an unsteady bow.

  Soul shifting. ‘But that’s been lost for centuries. Not even Tynell—’ She stopped, pursing her lips. Her thoughts raced.

  ‘Later,’ Furbolt said. He took a few steps, then bent his head forward to study his new body. ‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘one mustn’t quibble, must one?’ He looked up and fixed painted eyes on the sorceress. ‘You have to go to my tent before the thought occurs to Tynell. I need my Tome. You’re part of this now. There’s no turning back.’

  ‘Part of what?’

  Furbolt made no reply, having broken his uncanny stare. He lowered himself down to his knees. ‘Thought I smelled a Pack,’ he said.

  Sweat ran in cold rivulets under Taterztayl’s arms. Furbolt had made her uneasy at the best of times, but this … She could smell her own fear. That he’d swung his gaze from her made her grateful for small mercies. This was Senior Magic, Dlaruk Nialag, if the legends were true, and it was deadly, vicious, raw and primal. The Linktorches had a reputation for being a mean crowd, but to walk the Warennes closest to Disorder was pure madness. Or desperation.

  Almost of its own accord, her Ryth Warenne opened and a surge of power filled her weary body. Her eyes snapped to the Pack.

  Furbolt must have sensed it. ‘Taterztayl,’ he whispered, amusement in his tone. ‘Come. The Fetid calls to you. Read what is to be read.’

  Profoundly disturbed by her own answering flush of excitement, Taterztayl reluctantly reached for the Pack of Serpents. She saw her hand tremble as it closed on it. She shuffled slowly, feeling the chill of the lacquered wooden cards seep into her fingers and then her arms. ‘I feel a storm raging in them already,’ she said, trimming the Pack and setting it down on the tabletop.

  Furbolt’s answering laughter was eager and mean. ‘First House sets the course. Quickly!’

  She turned over the top card. Her breath caught. ‘Chevalier of Black.’

  Furbolt sighed. ‘The Master of Darkness rules this game. Of course.’

  Taterztayl studied the painted figure. The face remained blurred as it always did; the Chevalier was naked, his skin jet black. From the hips up he was human, heavily muscled, holding aloft a black two-handed sword that trailed smoky, ethereal chains drifting off into the background’s empty darkness. His lower body was draconian, its armoured scales black, paling to grey at the belly. As always, she saw something new, something she had never seen before that pertained to the moment. There was a shape suspended in the darkness above the Chevalier’s head: she could only detect it on the edge of her vision, a vague hint that vanished when she focused on the place itself. Of course, you never give up the truth so easily, do you!

  ‘Second card,’ Furbolt urged, crouching close to the playing field inscribed on the tabletop.

  She flipped the second card. ‘Nano.’ The two-faced Clown of Luck.’

  ‘Cowl’s Hex on their meddling ways,’ Furbolt growled.

  The Woman held the upright position, her male twin’s bemused stare upside down at the card’s foot. Thus the thread of luck that pulled back rather than pushed forward – the thread of success. The Woman’s expression seemed soft, almost tender, a new facet marking how things now balanced. A second heretofore unseen detail caught Taterztayl’s intense study. Where the Master’s right hand reached up to touch the Woman’s left a tiny silver disc spanned the space between them. The sorceress leaned forward, squinting. A coin, and on the face a male head. She blinked. No, female. Then male, then female. She sat back suddenly. The coin was spinning.

  ‘Next!’ Furbolt demanded. ‘You are too slow!’

  Taterztayl saw that the marionette was paying no attention to the card Nano, and had in fact probably given it only sufficient notice to identify it. She drew a deep breath. Furbolt and the Linktorches were tied up in this, she knew that instinctively, but her own role was as yet undecided. With these two cards, she already knew more than they did. It still wasn’t much, but it might be enough to keep her alive in what was to come. She released her breath all at once, reached forward and slammed a palm down on the Pack.

  Furbolt jumped, then whirled to her. ‘You hold on this?’ he raged. ‘You hold on the Jester? The second card? Absurd! Play on, woman!’

  ‘No,’ Taterztayl replied, sweeping the two cards into her hands and returning them to the Pack. ‘I’ve chosen to hold. And there’s nothing you can do about it.’ She rose.

  ‘Bitch! I can kill you in the blink of an eye! Here and now!’

  ‘Fine,’ Taterztayl said. ‘A good excuse for missing Tynell’s debriefing. By all means proceed, Furbolt.’ Crossing her arms, she waited.

  The marionette snarled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have need of you. And you despise Tynell even more than I.’ He cocked his head, reconsidering his last words, then barked a laugh. ‘Thus I am assured there will be no betrayal.’

  Taterztayl thought about that. ‘You are right,’ she said. She turned and walked to the tent flap. Her hand closed on the rough canvas, then she stopped. ‘Furbolt, how well can you hear?’

  ‘Well enough,’ the marionette growled behind her.

  ‘Do you hear anything, then?’ A spinning coin?

  ‘Camp sounds, is all. Why, what do you hear?’

  Taterztayl smiled. Without answering she pulled aside the tent flap and went outside. As she headed towards the command tent, a strange hope sang through her.

  She’d never held Nano as an ally. Calling on luck in anything was sheer idiocy. The first House she had placed, Blackness, touched her hand ice-cold, loud with the crashing waves of violence and power run amok – and yet an odd flavour there, something like salvation. The Chevalier could be an enemy or ally, or more likely neither. Just out there, unpredictable, self-absorbed. But Nano rode the warrior’s shadow, leaving House Black tottering on the edge, suspended in a place between night and day. More than anything else, it had been Nano’s spinning coin that had demanded her choice to hold.

  Furbolt heard nothing. Wonderful.

  Even now, as she approached the command tent, the faint sound continued in her head, as it would for some time, she believed. The coin spun, and spun. Nano whirled two faces to the cosmos, but it was the Woman’s bet. Spin on, silver. Spin on.

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