She flipped over the card so that it was face down. The back had returned to the unremarkable pattern I’d seen before. ‘I have said nothing, son of Ke. We are merely playing at cards.’
My fingers trembled as they rose up to meet the cold skin around my left eye. ‘The shadowblack … When our ancestors found they didn’t have the power to defeat the Mahdek, they … we … called forth demons to destroy them. First we attacked their families to break their spirits, then we killed their mages.’
Mer’esan’s expression was flat, though the tears still flowed down her cheeks. ‘That would be a sound strategy, if you were trying to win the game at all costs.’
‘But that’s just it … the cost … The Mahdek didn’t curse us with the shadowblack; we infected ourselves when we used the magic of the void to summon demons.’
Mer’esan let out a long, deep breath that sounded like a sigh and wiped the tears from her eyes. The mind chain was broken. ‘History is written by the victors,’ she said, ‘but the truth has a way of revealing itself.’
I heard a low growl and looked down to see Reichis’s mother glaring up at the dowager.
‘What did she say?’ I asked Reichis.
It was Mer’esan who answered. ‘She says that it is not in the proper way of things that a parent should let their child suffer for crimes they had no part in.’
I felt something hard and cold in my stomach. ‘Tell her she doesn’t understand the Jan’Tep then.’
Slowly and carefully, Mer’esan picked up the cards from the table and handed them to me. ‘Every society has atrocities in its past, Kellen. Do you think the Daroman empire was built on nothing but courage and military brilliance? Or that the Berabesq viziers worship their six-faced god with nothing more than prayers and celebrations?’
‘How can you be so calm?’ I demanded. ‘Your own husband cast the spell that kept you from revealing what he and the others had done in the name of our people!’
‘He wasn’t an evil man,’ she said. ‘He looked at what lay ahead for our people – from the Daroman empire reaching out from the east to the Berabesq in the south who would happily commit genocide against us for what they saw as our devil magic. To survive we needed to strengthen our spells and train more young mages than ever before. The Mahdek knew the secrets of creating the oases within their cities, making their spells more powerful and enabling their young to learn the ways of magic more easily.’
‘Would the Mahdek have destroyed us?’
‘It didn’t matter. We couldn’t take the chance. We had to take the oasis in this city from them, as we had to take all the others.’ She rose from her chair and walked away from me. ‘Those are the rules of the game, Kellen.’
‘Wait … Where are you going?’
She stopped, just for a moment, her hand on the door. ‘The chains that have bound me for almost three hundred years are gone. I think I would like to go outside now.’
When I joined Mer’esan in the cool night air she was staring into the darkness blanketing the gardens. I wondered how long ago they’d been planted here, and who tended them, and whether the dowager magus had ever even seen them up close before. None of these questions though were the ones that mattered.
Just past the gardens, the great palace stood proudly before us. The seat of our clan’s governance. A place we hadn’t even built ourselves. ‘Did we create nothing of our own?’ I asked.
Mer’esan gave a small, bitter laugh. ‘Of course we did. The Mahdek were always few in number. This city, for example, is far too small to house our entire clan. So we built—’
‘The slums,’ I said. ‘The Sha’Tep slums.’ Ill-made structures of rough wood and unshaped sandstone. ‘Three hundred years, and all we made ourselves were hovels.’
‘Our people never set out to be architects or builders, Kellen. Magic is our vocation, the one endeavour we prize above all others.’
I thought about the illness that had overtaken some of the other initiates, and of Shalla. ‘I have to find my sister,’ I said. ‘Someone is trying to hurt our people the same way we hurt the Mahdek. They’re destroying children so that—’
Mer’esan cut me off. ‘Is that what they’re doing? Destroying children?’
I wished for once that she wouldn’t turn everything into an enigmatic question, but then I realised I already knew the answer. When the men in Mahdek masks had attacked us the night we were trying to summon familiars, they hadn’t attempted to kill Shalla, they’d tried to make her bond with a sick animal. They had simply tried to permanently weaken her magic. Which is exactly what’s happening to the other initiates.
‘Who would want our people to survive, but to lessen our magic?’ I asked.
Mer’esan shrugged. ‘A reasonable question, but not the right one.’
I closed my eyes, trying to envision all the pieces of the puzzle, arranging them in my mind the way I would the complex geometries of a spell. ‘You said before the war, we didn’t have as many Jan’Tep mages as we do now, and they weren’t as powerful as the ones today.’
‘Yeah,’ Reichis said, giving a snort. ‘We call those “the good old days”.’
I’d got so used to not thinking of him as a nekhek that I’d forgotten that the squirrel cats saw us as enemies.
‘Hey, don’t look at me,’ he said, catching my stare. ‘If my people were after yours we’d just sneak into your rooms at night and rip out your—’
‘Eyeballs. Yes, I get it.’
Mer’esan tapped me on the forehead. ‘Focus.’
‘So the real question is, who has the most to gain by our mages being weaker?’ No, that’s still not it. This was just like casting a spell – you had to get every element exactly right for it to work.
All of a sudden, I had it. ‘Who suffers most when those with magic become too powerful?’
Mer’esan smiled. ‘Good. Clever. Now that you have the question, I believe you also have the answer.’
I did too. How many times had I sat in my room, panicking over what would happen if I couldn’t spark my bands … getting more and more resentful every time Shalla or one of the others became more powerful? Because I knew they’d lord it over me that much more, laugh at me, expect me to be their servant. Because that’s what you do to people who don’t have magic of their own.
‘Those who suffer most when magic becomes too powerful are those without it,’ I said. ‘The Sha’Tep are the ones attacking us.’
Mer’esan nodded. ‘As our magic grows, the gap between us becomes wider and wider. Every generation the Sha’Tep become more like slaves.’
‘What’s a slave?’ asked Reichis. The other squirrel cat chittered at him, and after a few moments he looked up at me. ‘Humans are disgusting.’
‘Go,’ Mer’esan said. ‘If we are correct and the conspirators are Sha’Tep, then they will have taken your sister and the Argosi to the place that gives us our magic but where we ourselves cannot tread.’
‘The oasis? But we go there all the time. It’s where we learn to work our magic in the first place!’