‘What are you playing at, spellslinger?’ Cobb asked, stepping back. I heard the safety catches on several crossbows unlock.
I was now standing in a ring of elaborately painted cards, their rich metallic hues of copper, silver and gold so vibrant they made the street look drab and lifeless by comparison. I turned to the half-dozen well-armed men and women charged with escorting me to jail. ‘Marshals, allow me to offer my sincere apologies.’
‘For what?’ asked one as she raised her crossbow to train it on me.
The cards on the ground shimmered ever brighter, blinding me to everything but the coruscating play of colours that drained the light from the world around me.
‘For the inconvenience of my rescue,’ I replied.
I doubt anyone heard me. The city around me faded to a flat, colourless expanse; the buildings, the streets, even the marshals themselves looked as if they’d been carved out of thin sheets of pale ivory. Reichis slumped on my shoulder and began snoring. A figure walked towards me, a lone source of dazzling colour wrapped in the twisting golds of sand magic, the pale blues of breath enchantments and the glistening purple of a silk spell.
A grandiose entrance of this type is usually accompanied by the disappointed sigh of my sister Shalla – Sha’maat now, I supposed – soon followed by an extensive commentary regarding my dishevelled condition and the annoyances my recent behaviour has caused our noble and much-admired family. Occasionally, though, it’s my father who appears to inform me of the latest crime I’ve committed against our people. That latter possibility was why my hands were now deep inside the powder holsters at my sides.
Ever since I’d left my people, almost three years ago, I’d known the day would come when my father’s grand destiny could no longer tolerate my miserable existence. I’d been asked on many occasions by friends and foes alike if I had a trick – some devious ruse – saved up that could outsmart the mighty Ke’heops before he could kill me.
I did. I just wasn’t sure if it would work.
‘Kellen.’
The voice didn’t belong to my sister or my father. In fact, I hadn’t heard it in such a long time that at first I didn’t recognise her. Gradually, the bands of magical force began to settle, their brilliance diminishing enough that I could finally identify the apparition before me, and found myself standing there, the twin red and black powders I’d normally be using to cast a fiery explosion slipping through my fingers, with absolutely no idea what was going to happen next.
‘Mother?’
The figure gestured at the cards surrounding me. ‘Pick a card, Kellen,’ she said. ‘Any card.’
What is it with people and card tricks lately?
2
The Deck
As a child, I’d firmly believed Bene’maat was the finest mother any Jan’Tep boy could hope for. She’d been an island of patience and calm in the otherwise stormy sea of my father’s unyielding ambitions and my sister’s pugnacious temper tantrums. My mother’s prowess as a mage was widely respected in our clan, yet her fascination with astronomy and healing revealed an inquisitive nature not solely consumed with the pursuit of magic, as Ke’heops and Shalla were. And me, for that matter.
If a parent’s second duty is to love their children equally, then Bene’maat had done so admirably in a society that valued Shalla’s raw talent for magic a thousand times more than my aptitude for clever tricks. And if a mother’s first duty is to protect her children, well, then Bene’maat had done that pretty well too – right up until the day she’d drugged me and then helped my father strap me down to a table so he could inscribe counter-sigils on the metallic tattooed bands around my forearms, forever denying me access to the magic that defined our people as I screamed over and over again for her to stop.
Now the woman I hadn’t seen for nearly three years was standing before me, placidly repeating, ‘Pick a card, Kellen. Any card.’
I considered telling my beloved mother to bugger off, but my family is nothing if not persistent, so I gently settled the slumbering Reichis down on the ground and considered the thirteen cards forming a spell circle around me. I reached for the first one, which depicted architecture in the style of the Daroman capital in which we stood and was titled ‘City of Glories’.
‘Not that one,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
I heard the answer inside my mind a fraction of a second before her lips moved. ‘That is the keystone. Picking it up would break the spell and end our meeting.’
I’d always been a belligerent child. Life as an outcast had done nothing to cure me of that fault. I reached for the City of Glories again.
‘Please,’ the voice in my mind said just before the apparition did. ‘Forgive the awkward fashion in which our conversation must take place, but I’ve been unable to properly recreate your sister’s wondrous spell for long-distance communication. I’ve had to rely on a much older enchantment your grandmother invented before you were born.’
For the third time she repeated the same instruction, exactly as she had before: ‘Pick a card, Kellen. Any card.’
She’s not really here, not even in spirit, I realised. Bene’maat must have used silk, sand and breath magic to record her thoughts and convey them to me within the cards as a series of individual messages, like a bundle of letters tied together with string, the spell encoded with specific responses based on my actions.
The remaining twelve cards fell into four suits unfamiliar to me – which is saying something considering how many decks I’ve encountered. In an Argosi deck, each suit corresponds to a particular civilisation on our continent. In more common sets of playing cards created for entertainment, the suits tend to represent symbols meaningful to the culture that created them. The standard Daroman deck, for example, embodies its people’s obsession with military emblems: chariots, arrows, trebuchets and blades. However, the four suits of this new deck before me were unlike any I’d seen before: scrolls, quills, lutes and masks.
Had my mother devised these suits herself? And if so, what did each one mean?
I selected the seven of lutes, reasoning that no one had ever been blasted out of existence by a lute.
The figure of Bene’maat smiled and an instrument appeared in her hands. She began to play a melody that pulled at my heart so unexpectedly I gasped out loud.
‘You always loved this song as a child,’ she murmured. ‘You used to make me play it for hours and hours whenever you were scared or sad.’
I dropped the card as if it were a spider crawling on my hand.
The figure of my mother nodded, somewhat sorrowfully, as if she’d known I would respond this way.
‘Pick a card, Kellen,’ she repeated. ‘Any card.’
I found one that depicted a man carefully arranging quills on a scale. The caption read ‘Enumerator of Quills’.
My mother’s apparition was now seated at a desk composing a letter. ‘My dearest Kellen. It’s close to three years since last I touched your face. I had never thought such a thing possible. I always assumed you would come ba—’
‘What is this?’ I demanded. ‘Nostalgia? Have you forgotten what you did to me, Mother?’ I pulled back my sleeves to show the foul counter-sigils desecrating the tattooed bands on my forearms. ‘You destroyed any hope I had of becoming a mage like you and Father and Shalla.’