I shook my head in disgust. ‘Ancestors! No wonder there’s never been a Sha’Tep conspiracy before. You people are terrible at this.’
‘Don’t,’ Abydos warned. ‘Don’t mock these people and the risk they take.’
Okay, time to see how gullible you are, Uncle. ‘One of them has betrayed you.’
‘What? Who?’ the older man asked.
‘No one,’ Abydos said. ‘He’s just trying to stall.’
I took a chance and pushed back. ‘How can you be so stupid? Of course I was bluffing before – I was hoping Shalla would wake. But then I realised just how careless you’ve all been.’ Now that I thought about it, they really had been careless, which made it all the more easy to make my ploy sound believable. ‘Ra’meth knows! You haven’t launched some grand rebellion. All you’ve done is to turn over power to our family’s greatest enemy!’
‘What are you talking about?’
I started to weave recent events into my story. ‘The day after Tennat and his brothers attacked Ferius, Tennat showed up at the oasis and his magic was weakened. He couldn’t cast any spells.’
‘We got to him just like we got to the others,’ the big man said proudly.
‘Except that the next night he was casting blood sympathy spells! And just hours ago he was using silk and iron magic to track me! Don’t you see? Ra’meth figured out what you were doing and caught the Sha’Tep who was poisoning Tennat.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Abydos said. ‘Sephan here –’ he indicated the young man with the sandy hair – ‘is Ra’meth’s personal servant. He’d know if anyone in the House of Ra had found out.’
I leaned back against the wall, letting my exhaustion show through. ‘You know, Uncle, all my life I thought that the main difference between you and my father was that you didn’t have magic. Now I know it’s that you’re incredibly dumb.’ I pointed to Sephan. ‘Ra’meth put a mind chain on him. His will is bound and he can’t even do anything that would let you see that he’s been caught.’
My uncle and the others looked over at Sephan, who looked back at them in confusion. ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about. I’m fine. I couldn’t get any more of the compound into Tennat’s food that night. Everything will be fine.’
‘Except you’d have no choice but to say that if you were mind-chained,’ the big man pointed out.
I had to hold back my sigh of relief. I’d given, I thought, an excellent performance. The fear and then the anger on my face had been believable, and my lie was just credible enough to create doubt in their minds.
My deception had only one flaw, which had already started to squirm around in the back of my mind. There was a reason why my story was so convincing.
It turned out to be true.
‘Well, well, well,’ a voice said from down the corridor in the mausoleum. ‘This all sounds positively dire.’
It was Ra’meth.
39
The Hero
It says something about how much I hated and feared Ra’meth that my first reaction was to try to hit him with a spell.
‘Breath magic?’ He looked amused. ‘That’s really the best we can hope for from the son of the great Ke’heops?’ He made a tiny gesture with one hand and whispered a single syllable. I found myself paralysed. The lord magus turned as he gazed at each of the walls in the mausoleum. ‘Absolutely remarkable. This will make my ascension as clan prince an even more memorable accomplishment for our people.’
Reichis sprang into the air, only to collide with something invisible before falling to the ground. The squirrel cat growled, rearing up to launch himself at the mage, but Ra’meth uttered a second spell and Reichis fell unconscious. ‘I really thought we’d killed all those filthy creatures centuries ago.’
‘How is this possible?’ one of the Sha’Tep conspirators asked, straining against invisible bonds. ‘Mages can’t work spells here in the mines.’
The corners of Ra’meth’s mouth rose in a jackal’s grin. ‘I won’t lie to you. It’s not as easy as it looks. The compounds I had to drink have some rather unpleasant intestinal side effects. Nonetheless, they do counteract the effects of close proximity to the ore.’ The lord magus brought his palms together as if in prayer, then turned them so the backs faced each other before intertwining the fingers together. Suddenly we were all falling, tumbling as if the entire chamber were spinning at great speed. I felt myself hit one of the walls and stuck there as if dozens of hands were holding my limbs immobile.
‘You see,’ Ra’meth said to Abydos and his followers, ‘the reason mages do not mine the ore ourselves is not that it’s impossible for us, simply that it’s beneath us.’
‘Jan’Tep bastard!’ Tusks shouted, but for all his anger and size, he was trapped like a fly inside an invisible web.
The trick to resisting a binding spell isn’t pulling against it on a physical level, you have to set your mind against it, willing it to break apart. With every fibre of my being I commanded the spell to shatter, but I might as well have been trying to crush an ocean with my bare hands.
Ra’meth seemed to find my exertions amusing. ‘I’ve seen your father breach much stronger shackles many times, you know. It’s not that hard – just a matter of will.’ He approached me without a trace of fear that I would break the spell. ‘Come, Kellen of the House of Ke. Are you not your father’s son? Show me the strength of your bloodline.’
‘Leave the boy alone,’ Abydos said, struggling against his own bonds. ‘Kellen has nothing to do with this.’
Ra’meth stopped. ‘Nothing? You do the boy a disservice. None of this would have been possible without him.’ He reached down and took hold of my wrist. To me it felt as if thick iron manacles held it against the wall, but Ra’meth lifted it up effortlessly to scrutinise the bands on my forearms. ‘Ke’heops does excellent work. Very precise. I doubt a hundred mages working in concert could break these counter-sigils.’ He looked up at me. ‘Your father must have risked a great deal of his strength in order to so utterly bind you.’
Well, I thought, fighting off the bitterness that threatened to engulf me, it’s not hard to see where Tennat gets his shining personality.
‘I warn you, do not harm him!’ Abydos shouted, straining so hard I could see the veins in his neck sticking out.
A flicker of pain passed over Ra’meth’s features. ‘That is a remarkable calibre of will you have, Abydos. I don’t think I’ve ever felt someone push so hard against a binding spell. You would have made a powerful mage had you been able to spark your bands.’
‘I don’t need your magic,’ Abydos said, pulling against the invisible shackles holding him to the wall. ‘I don’t need any filthy Jan’Tep spells to deal with you. I’m a man! Do you hear me? A man!’