‘Break the glass?’ Reichis gave a kind of half-growl to convey what he thought of that idea. ‘Amateur.’ He turned his attention back to the lock. ‘Easy … easy …’
A click, and then a moment later Reichis proudly held up the elaborate brass lock in his paws. ‘See?’ he demanded. ‘That’s how you pull off a proper burglary!’
‘It’s not a burglary,’ I said, for what must have been the twelfth time since we’d snuck into the pawnshop that night. ‘We paid him for the charm, remember? He’s the one who ripped us off.’
Reichis snorted dismissively. ‘And what did you do about it, Kellen? Just stood there like a halfwit while he pocketed our hard-earned coin, that’s what.’
To the best of my knowledge, Reichis had never actually earned a coin in his life. ‘Shoulda ripped his throat out with your teeth like I told you,’ he continued.
The solution to most thorny dilemmas – to squirrel cats anyway – is to walk up to the source of the problem and bite it very hard on the neck, preferably coming away with as much of its bleeding flesh as possible.
I let him have the last word and reached past him to pull open the glass doors and retrieve the small silver bell attached to a thin circle of metal. Glyphs etched along its edge shimmered in the half-light: a quieting charm. An actual Jan’Tep quieting charm. With this I could cast spells without leaving the echo that allowed bounty hunters to track us. For the first time since we’d fled the Jan’Tep territories, I felt as if I could almost, almost breathe easy again.
‘Hey, Kellen?’ Reichis asked, hopping up on the counter to peer at the silver disc I held in my hand. ‘Those markings on the charm – those are magic, right?’
‘Kind of. More like a way to bind a spell onto the charm.’ I turned to look at him. ‘Since when are you interested in magic?’
He held up the combination lock. ‘Since this thing started glowing.’
A set of three elaborately drawn glyphs shimmered bright red along the cylindrical brass chamber. A moment later the door burst open and bright sunlight filled the pawnshop as a silhouetted figure charged inside and tackled me to the floor, putting an abrupt end to a heist that, in retrospect, could have done with more planning.
Four months in the borderlands had brought me to one irrefutable conclusion: I made a terrible outlaw. I couldn’t hunt worth a damn, got lost just about everywhere I went, and it seemed like every person I met found some perfectly sensible reason to try to rob me or kill me.
Sometimes both.
2
The Way of Fists
Getting punched in the face hurts a lot more than you might expect.
When somebody’s knuckles connect with your jaw, it feels like four tiny battering rams are trying to cave in your mouth. Your own teeth turn traitor, biting down on your tongue and flooding the back of your throat with the coppery taste of blood. Oh, and that crack you hear? It sounds a lot like what you’ve always imagined bone breaking would sound like, which must be why your head is already spinning a quarter-turn clockwise, trying to keep up with your chin before it leaves the scene of the crime.
The worst part? Once your legs recover their balance and your eyes flicker open, you remember that the devastating opponent beating you senseless is a skinny freckle-faced kid who can’t be more than thirteen years old.
‘Shouldn’a stolen my charm,’ Freckles said.
He shuffled forward, causing me to lurch back instinctively, my body having apparently decided it preferred the embarrassment of collapsing in on itself over the risk of getting hit again. Laughter erupted all around us as the crowd of townsfolk who’d come out of their shops and saloons to witness the fight began placing wagers on the outcome.
No one was betting on me; my people might be the best mages on the continent, but it turns out we’re rubbish in a fist fight.
‘I paid you for that charm,’ I insisted. ‘Besides, I put it back in the case! You’ve got no cause to –’
Freckles jerked a thumb up to where Reichis was perched on the swinging sign outside the pawnshop, happily inspecting the silver bell on the charm. Every time Freckles hit me, Reichis rang the bell. This is the sort of thing squirrel cats find hilarious. ‘You think I spent all night picking that lock just so you could give the charm back?’
‘You’re a damned thief,’ I told the squirrel cat.
Freckles’s face went an even brighter shade of red; he must’ve thought I was talking to him. I keep forgetting that other people don’t hear what Reichis says – it all just sounds like a bunch of grunts and growls to them.
Freckles gave a yell and barrelled into me. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground with the wind knocked out of me and my opponent pinning me down.
‘Best get back on your feet, kid,’ Ferius Parfax suggested in that frontier drawl of hers. She was leaning back against the post where we’d tethered our horses, black hat dipped low over her forehead as though she were taking a nap. ‘Can’t dodge when you’re flat on your back.’
‘You could help, you know,’ I said. Well, that’s what I would have said if I could’ve got any air into my lungs.
Ferius was my mentor in the ways of the Argosi – the mysterious, fast-talking card players who went about the world doing … well, nobody had yet told me exactly what it was they did. But Ferius was supposed to be helping me learn how to survive as an outlaw and stay clear of the bounty mages who were hunting me. She did this mostly by dispensing such brilliant axioms as, ‘Can’t dodge when you’re flat on your back.’ That one annoyed me almost as much as her calling me ‘kid’ all the time.
‘Told you to forget about the charm, kid,’ she said.
I might have heeded her warning if she hadn’t then started up on some Argosi nonsense about ‘the way of water’ that irritated me so much I’d ended up taking advice from a squirrel cat whose solution to everything – when it didn’t involve ripping someone’s throat out with your teeth – was thievery. So really it was both of their faults that I’d ended up on the ground with Freckles on top of me doing his best to knock me senseless.
One thing I’ve learned about non-magical fighting is that you need to protect your face, which I was trying to do. Unfortunately my opponent just kept swatting my hands away and then proceeded to punch me again. Ancestors, how does this kid hit so hard?
Freckles shifted his hips, shimmying forward as he grabbed my wrist and wrapped one of his hands around my index finger. ‘Everyone knows the price for thievin’,’ he said as he slowly bent it back.
Panic overtook me even before the pain. Every Jan’Tep spell requires forming precise somatic shapes with your hands. You can’t do that with broken fingers.