Mouth dry, he sent a desperate summons. Toulesh returned a second later, folding in tight. Calm descended. He examined the coin, spinning it again. It landed harps. He tried several more times. It would only land harps now. Was he going mad?
A noise broke the spell. Yemelyan stood there. “You all right, brother?”
Guyen stumbled to his feet. “I think so.”
Yemelyan glanced at the trunk. He beamed. “How did you do that?”
Guyen whipped round. The trunk had popped open, a thin crack now visible. “I don’t—” Suddenly excited, he bent down and lifted the lid. The chest was lined in purple velvet, and contained an unexpected treasure.
Yemelyan groaned. “Books? Is that all?”
The Book of Talents
The Writ of the Six Hundred
Translation from the Sedari Tablets, circa hg.80
In repentance, the Council commands the Six Hundred to combat this Affliction we have unleashed upon the world, this plague of death and madness. Through our misdemeanour did we create our unseen foe, so must we strive to defeat it.
NOTA:
The six hundred Bindmasters lived from the Turn (hg.0) until the death of the last Bindmaster circa hg.178. According to legend, it was they who unwittingly let Faze energy (the unseen foe) into the world when they imprisoned the earth’s divine spirit in the Layer. This Layer was filled with every possible version of every thing, animate and inanimate alike, to be called forth at a Bindmaster’s will.
S.G.
7
River of Portent
As the weeks rolled by, life in Sendal only became more difficult. And it mainly came down to coin. Mother took sewing work, but it was pin money, and Father wasted most of his pay on liquor. The foundry had still provided no wages, docking a month’s pay in advance for getting into a fight on the foundry floor. It had been impossible not to react to the scrag’s bigoted insults. Bust lips all round and the certain knowledge they were both idiots, as well as slaves. If not for the charity of a Krellen merchants’ fund, they’d surely have been out on the streets—Zial certainly couldn’t afford to keep them.
The lack of coin only added to the tense atmosphere back at the cottage, a mood none improved by another visit from labour master Knaxti, who complained Father and Zial had not shown up for work two days straight. The following evening, the next-but-one cottage burned down. The local youths watched on, smirking. What did they care if they made a few more Krellens homeless? It all added to the stress, and a growing unease.
The only good thing, apart from the nifty cocked hat Evgeniya had sewn him, had been the trunk and its contents—five glorious books, one particularly striking example making up for the loss of his previous collection by itself. Beautifully bound in rich brown leather, illustrations adorned the front cover—people at work in the rooms of a tenement block, a cutaway cross-section revealing soldiers, whores, judges, actors, and plenty more mystery occupations. Embossed silver lettering on the spine entitled it The Book of Talents. True to its name, its subject was indeed the Talents, complex tables listing the required skills for each Sendali Assignment. Interspersed passages of folklore, myths and legends added colour. It was the finest book Guyen had ever owned. Fearing Father would make him sell it, he persuaded Yemelyan to keep the discovery to himself.
However, more fascinating than the book was the trunk. It was Yemelyan who’d worked it out. Get the coin to land heads-up again, and the trunk relocked itself. There was no click. Globes! There wasn’t even a lock as far as they could tell, yet the lid wouldn’t budge. When Guyen had managed to get the coin to land on harps again, the trunk had opened once more. He’d experimented that whole first evening, locking and unlocking it, until his head had filled with clamour and he’d become too tired to concentrate. How the magic trick worked was a mystery, but it couldn’t be a coincidence both trunk and coin had come from the dead magician.
For some reason, the silver would only change which side it landed when it was near the trunk, the rest of the time it was stuck one way or the other. And Yemelyan couldn’t get it to switch at all, a peculiarity as perplexing as it was delicious, brotherly competitiveness being what it was. As they trudged back along the clifftop after a hard day at the foundry, Yemelyan tossed the coin in the air, trapping it on the back of his hand. He swore, passing it over. “This thing’s cursed, I reckon.”
Guyen slipped it in his boot. “It’s probably me that’s cursed.”
“Meet a witch down a dark alley, did you?”
“I must have, my luck’s not getting any better. It was probably my fault that poor sod died.” The sod to whom he referred was the unfortunate foundryman crushed by a runaway cart in the furnace that afternoon. It would have been easier to feel sorry for the man had he not been one of the worst to rip into them on a daily basis.
Yemelyan offered a friendly slap on the back. “You couldn’t have known the brake wasn’t working.”
“Everything messes up around me these days.”
“You’re imagining it.”
“I don’t think I am.” The sound of cheering came on the rise and fall of the wind. “What’s that noise?” Guyen asked.
Yemelyan cupped his ear. “Flags?”
Further up the road, a hexagonal-shaped arena sat in a natural bowl in the cliffs. They’d passed the hexium, as it was known, every day on the way to the foundry, getting progressively more curious about what happened inside. According to the foundrymen’s constant banter, Moth Canyon, the local Flags team, were a pathetic bunch who didn’t deserve to wear the colours, not that it stopped them incessantly discussing the sport—Flags was a national obsession, and Assignment to it the highest honour.
As they neared, the hubbub grew louder. Annoyingly, due to the high wall, the only feature visible from the outside was a chrome time teller set on a high tower. Its single hand showed the match three-quarters spent.
“Want to try and get in?” Guyen asked.
Yemelyan looked interested. “What if we get caught?”
“We won’t.” They both knew, as their excited simulacra did, it was worth the small risk. They walked around the ground, waving away moths. The bowl was infested with the critters. Out of sight of the road, the wall ran next to some earthworks. “Reckon we could get up there,” Guyen said.
“Easy,” Yemelyan agreed, and a minute later they dropped into a gap between two blocks of banked seating. The hexium was two-thirds full, half the town at a guess. A small contingent of fans in green occupied one corner.
The rules of Flags were few and simple. Two teams, twelve horsemen and six footmen in each, battling it out on a hexagonal pitch. One of the footmen, the bannerman, carried the flag. Steal it, and you won a point. More like a war than a sport, Flags was decadently violent, the players’ heavy armour essential protection from lances, swords and maces, although there were probably as many injuries from trampling. While the mounted knights harried the opposition, the footmen, or shell team, protected the bannerman with complex shield formations, creating a metal barrier around him while the bannerman’s own shield covered his head. The resulting formations looked like bizarre, bronze turtle shells scurrying about the sandy bowl.