He turned to my mother. ‘Clever. The boy seeks always to be clever.’ My father uses the word ‘clever’ the way other people use terms like ‘unsavoury disposition’ or ‘unsightly skin condition’. He walked over to her writing desk and returned with a small glow-glass ball, the kind children use to learn to focus their will. He handed it to me. ‘A Jan’Tep must be strong.’
I held the ball in the palm of my hand. It was burning brightly, but when my father and mother walked to the door, the light disappeared. Not dimmed. Disappeared. I focused my will on it, urging it to light, but nothing happened. Come on, I told myself. You’ve done this a thousand times before. Nothing. The light was dead. Ra’meth’s cold voice came back to me. You will soon find yourself among the Sha’Tep, where even your family knows you have always belonged.
‘A Jan’Tep must be strong,’ my father repeated from the doorway. I looked up and saw that he wasn’t talking to me – he was talking to himself, the way people did when they were preparing themselves for something that was going to be very hard, or very sad. The last days before my sixteenth birthday were upon me and, for the first time in my life, I was truly afraid of my father.
8
Abydos
I spent most of that day in my own room, sleeping, waking and, in between those two states, staring at the little glow-glass ball I still clutched in my hand. I could get the barest glimmer out of it now, just enough that if I pushed myself to the point of collapse I might make it compete with a small candle. Eventually I threw the ball against the wall of my room. It didn’t even have the courtesy to break. One more test failed. No messenger was going to be coming to bring me the gold disc that would symbolise passing the first trial.
I lay in my bed for hours at a time, holding my arms out in front of me, willing the tattooed metallic inks of the six bands to break apart, for the sigils to spark, igniting the symbols of the spells that I should be able to cast by now. It wasn’t fair. My whole life I’d done everything a Jan’Tep initiate was supposed to do. I’d memorised the perfect pronunciation of every spell, mastered every somatic form. I could hold the image of a spell in my mind with perfect clarity even in the middle of a raging thunderstorm. None of it mattered. The bands wouldn’t spark.
At one point I became so consumed with frustration and resentment that, even though I knew it wouldn’t work, I scratched at the bands with my fingernails, breaking the skin until I bled. But no amount of scraping or cutting would bring them to life. Only magic. Only strength. Only the things I didn’t have.
I bit into my blanket, fearing my mother or father – or, worse, Shalla – might hear me crying. I raged silently against the whole world, only to later try to force myself into accepting the fate laid out before me, imagining my life as a Sha’Tep clerk or servant. By evening I came to the conclusion that neither petulance nor subservience suited my temperament.
I needed to do something about my situation. A liar, my father had called me. A cheat. A trickster. Well, if that’s what I was, then I was going to lie, cheat and trick my way to a mage’s power, because there was no way in any hell I was going to stay like this. We had plenty of stories among my people of the Mahdek tribes who stole magic from the gods or spirits, who drank deadly concoctions and performed secret rituals that led them to discover powerful spells. Of course, being thieves, the Mahdek weren’t exactly considered the heroes of those stories. Fine then, I thought, I’ll be the first.
A knock at the door brought me back down to earth.
‘Come in,’ I said, not wanting to see other people but determined not to let it show.
There were no lights in my room so it took a moment for the shadows coming through the door to resolve themselves first into hands, then a tray, and finally Abydos. Uncle Abydos, I reminded myself.
‘You haven’t eaten all day,’ he said quietly.
I was a little surprised at his coming to me with food. My father had a strict policy that meals were to be eaten as a family, and if either Shalla or I ever chose to sulk in our rooms then we could go without. Last night I’d been ill, so it was an excusable lapse. But tonight? ‘Does my father know that you’re bringing me supper?’
Abydos came and set the tray down on the small desk in the corner of my room and sat at the chair that was already too small for me and made him look like a giant. He lifted the red-clay cover from the tray, revealing a plate laden with some kind of roasted lamb dish that smelled wonderful. ‘The family has already been served, Master Kellen. This is my supper and I’m entitled to eat it where I please.’
‘You want to eat in my room?’
‘Do you mind?’
I got up from the bed, my clothes from the day before feeling rough and stiff against my skin, and joined him at the desk. When I looked at the tray I noticed he’d put together a rather large portion for one man. I noticed something else as well. ‘You seem to have two sets of cutlery on your tray.’
‘Hmm?’ He looked down at the extra pair of utensils in mock surprise. ‘Why, I do indeed. How odd.’ Then he looked at the plate of lamb. ‘I also seem to have taken more food than I can eat. I don’t suppose you might …?’
I picked up a knife and fork and grinned, more for Abydos than out of any real sense of pleasure I felt, but even fake happiness was better than sitting alone in my room staring at a blackened glow-glass ball.
At first we ate in silence. I’d never spent much time with Abydos. He’d always struck me as a rather simple person – utterly unlike my father. But now, as I watched him eat with a kind of methodical patience, I could see similarities emerge. They were close in age, Abydos being a year or so younger, and shared the same colouring and powerful build. But my uncle didn’t exude that sense of power, of command, that my father did. He was, I suppose, what a Daroman farmer or a Berabesq soldier might seem like. Unimposing. Unremarkable. Ordinary. And yet, did I see him that way simply because he had no magic?
‘Did you always know you were Sha’Tep?’ I asked, dimly aware of how rude the question was but suddenly desperate to know the answer.
My uncle took it with remarkable grace. ‘I suppose I did,’ he said, his eyes gazing somewhere far away. ‘I could do a little magic, as a child. Most of us can, close to the oasis, but my ability faded as I approached my naming year.’