I bucked my hips as hard as I could and desperation gave me just enough strength to throw Freckles overtop of me, sending him face first into the dirt. I quickly flipped myself over and got to my feet. Freckles was already waiting for me. ‘Gonna bleed you,’ he said.
Gonna bleed you. Three words that perfectly summed up the hot, arid hellhole they call the Seven Sands: a patchwork desert that wasn’t much more than an endless dusty quilt stained with backward little towns filled with people who were rough, mean and gave up any pretence at being civilised at the drop of a hat. Not that most of them could afford a hat.
Freckles, evidently concerned that I hadn’t heard him the first time, declared even louder, ‘Gonna bleed you real good.’
My hands dropped to my sides – a reflex developed from a life spent learning magic rather than getting into physical altercations: you can’t cast a spell if your hands are balled up into fists like a barbarian’s. I relaxed my fingers, letting them reach into the powder pouches attached to the sides of my belt. Just a pinch was all I needed: a dash of red, a smidgen of black. Toss them in the air, form the somatic shapes with my hands, utter the one-word incantation, and Freckles would get a taste of what he’d been dishing out to me up till now.
Most Jan’Tep mages have bigger and better spells than I do, but I make up for my lack of ability with fast hands. I’m what my people derisively call a spellslinger – a mage who combines whatever paltry magic he can muster with every trick he can learn to stay alive. In my case that means a bit of breath magic mixed with a touch of exploding powders. Individually they don’t amount to much, but put them together with perfect timing and you can create a blast that’ll tear through an oak door like it was wet paper. So yeah, Freckles was about to get the surprise of his life.
‘No magic, kid. Remember?’ Ferius said.
Oh. Right.
The reason I’d wanted that quieting charm in the first place was that every time I cast a spell, it sent out a sort of mystical echo that let hextrackers – mages who specialise in hunting down other mages – follow our trail. Since avoiding them was kind of my life’s ambition at this point, Ferius had insisted I stop relying on magic to get myself out of trouble. Problem was, Freckles was coming at me again, fist cocked and ready to send me to my ancestors.
‘You win,’ I said, putting up my hands and backing away. ‘I’ll give you back the charm and you can keep the money.’ Possibly not my proudest moment.
‘Gonna take the charm, gonna take the money,’ Freckles said. Then he gestured to where Reichis was perched on the sign. ‘Gonna skin that animal of yours too. Make a hat out of his fur or maybe just light him on fire and watch him run till he can’t run no more.’
Those words sent a cold, hard knot twisting in my stomach. Not long ago I’d witnessed a mage using ember magic to set fire to Reichis’s tribe. That image was still burned into me, and so was the look of glee on the killer’s face. It was a lot like the one Freckles wore right now.
Ferius says fear and anger are two sides of the same coin. Freckles had just flipped mine.
A stabbing pain started to build in my left eye, like a headache, only a lot worse. I tried blinking it away, but the ache kept getting stronger. The morning sun faded, but the shadows remained, grew, became bloated as the world darkened all around me, the way it does when dreams drift into nightmares. Only I was fully awake.
‘Get a hold of yourself, kid,’ Ferius warned. She’d seen this happen to me before, but her warning came too late, because now her voice sounded as if it were coming from far away, like she was just a memory of someone I once knew.
Freckles’s laugh, on the other hand, just kept getting louder and louder in my ears. His smile got bigger and bigger, contorting his appearance. When I get like this, all I can see are the ugly parts of people. The mean parts. It was as if I were watching Freckles turn into the worst version of himself he could ever become: the one who liked to hurt things, the one who would giggle while he set fire to Reichis.
The rage inside me got so bad I stopped feeling the pain in my eye and didn’t even notice that I’d dug my hands back into the pouches at my sides until I saw the particles of red and black powder floating in the air in front of me. Just before they collided, my hands formed the spell’s somatic shape: bottom two fingers pressed into the palm in the sign of restraint; fore and middle fingers pointed straight out, the sign of flight; and thumb pointing to the heavens, the sign of, well, somebody up there help me.
‘Carath,’ I said, my lips perfectly enunciating the one-word invocation. A fiery bolt of rage and fury shot out – not enough to kill, but more than enough to hurt. The red and black flames entwined in the air like two angry snakes and flew right past Freckle’s shoulder, scorching the outer wall of the pawnshop. It would have been an impressive display of power if that had been my target. Turns out that getting hit in the head is really, really bad for your aim.
The pain in my eye disappeared all at once, and the dark visions assailing me faded, leaving behind the plain dusty street and the dismayed faces of the onlookers. The attacks come and go quickly like that, leaving me shaken and stumbling – not exactly the best condition to be defending yourself.
Whatever shock and outrage Freckles had felt, he quickly set it aside. Before I could get my arms up to protect my face, he delivered a sharp right hook just above my left cheek. His fist came away with a trace of blood on it. His look of smug self-satisfaction turned to confusion when he noticed smudges of pale beige mesdet paste on his knuckles. He glanced back at me, and I guess that’s when he saw the black markings encircling my left eye like twisting vines made from pure darkness.
‘Shadowblack,’ he whispered.
The word spread through the crowd like fire on dry leaves.
‘The demon plague!’ one of the onlookers declared.
Most people drew back in horror, but Freckles was evidently made of sterner stuff. He didn’t even sound scared when he said, ‘Figures a thief would be devil-cursed.’
If they’d given me a chance to explain, I could have told them that the shadowblack wasn’t actually a plague or even a curse, but more of a mystical disease that afflicted a small number of my people and wasn’t, to the best of my knowledge, contagious. I would’ve left out the parts where it gradually drives you insane with maddening visions until your magic becomes a danger to everyone around you and that any Jan’Tep mage who crossed my path was duty-bound to kill me.
None of that mattered though, because by then Freckles had grabbed me by the throat with both hands. I yanked at his wrists, desperate to break free, but his grip was too strong. My throat spasmed, fighting for breath as the world started to shrink around me. It occurred to me then that there’s probably an ingenious way to get out of a chokehold.
I should really learn it sometime.