“Hold these.” I intended to leave this library looking as untouched as possible when we left. The longer it took for Carnelian Silkstar to realise he had been robbed, the better.
I leaned closer. The curse was a work of beauty, one of Silkstar’s own creations, I was sure. It would take an accomplished mage to create something so delicate. Your average curse cast by someone untrained in magic might work, but it would be an unstable mess. This one would never break spontaneously.
“Speed it up, mate,” Benny hissed. “I can hear someone in the outer office.”
I swore under my breath and focused on the lace-thin net covering the book. Benny had uncanny hearing, and I had learned to trust him.
If I’d had more time, I could have figured out exactly what kind of curse this was — warts, an unpleasant seepage from unnamed orifices, a swarm of enraged bees, whatever. It was always nice to know what you were in for if you got it wrong. But time was one of the many things I didn’t have.
“Here goes,” I whispered.
There were people who thought that being a mage was all about talent. You were born a mage or you weren’t. If you had the talent, they would tell you, everything else was easy. The truth was more mundane. Yeah, you needed the ability, but on its own, talent was nothing. The hard bit was the training.
The first year of mage training sucked. Literally. The unfortunate trainee mage — me, to take a random example — spent every day learning to suck in the raw magic around them and release it again, over and over, until it became as automatic as breathing. When he (still me) had finally mastered it, he would move onto the really difficult part: shaping and transforming the raw magic into spells that actually did something.
That was why it took so long to become a mage. A trainee could spend years learning to shape magic through concentration and willpower, peering at (or listening to, smelling, touching, you take your pick) magic, then trying to replicate it, like building muscle memory, until it was instinctive, repeating the Hundred Key Forms (there were more than a hundred key forms; that was something they didn’t tell you, either, when you started), and then learning to combine the forms into ever more complicated structures.
The magic I needed to break the curse was one of the basic key forms. The Sharpness of the Sun, my tutors had called it. They did love their stupid names. Me, I called it a scalpel. It was a very fine, very sharp extrusion of magic perfectly controlled. Usually I wouldn’t worry too much about using careful work on a curse. A quick burst of magic, and it would be gone. But we were in Carnelian Silkstar’s palace. If I used more than a trickle, he would detect it, and we would be finished.
I licked my lips, drew in a tiny amount of raw magic, then reached out with the thinnest scalpel I could manage.
I wasn’t the most powerful mage out there, but to compensate, I had developed the kind of fine control that some more potent mages never did.
I was sweating, my hands were shaking from the tension, but I didn’t let the scalpel of magic waver as I slid it into the net and carefully sliced one of the strands of the curse.
For a moment the curse held, glistening whitely around the ledger. Then it collapsed, falling in on itself, and was gone.
I let out a breath, settling back on my heels. I had done it. No one had noticed. I started to grin.
And that was when the booby trap went off.
Chapter Three
For a moment, everything was black. Then sensation washed back over me like a storm wave crashing over the harbour wall. I was on the floor. It was hard, wet. My head pounded. Nausea clung to my throat.
“Get up! Get up, Nik, you stupid bastard!” The words struggled through the ringing in my ears.
Fuck! Why was I lying on the floor?
Even with my eyes squeezed shut, everything seemed to be swaying around me.
“Get up!” The voice came again, dull and distant.
I shifted, and bruises I didn’t know I had flared. The air smelled of smoke and burned lavender. My mouth was full of that taste of chalk and garlic that said someone had hit me with magic, and not too long ago.
I forced my eyes open.
A thin, weaselly, smoke-blackened face with a scraggly beard and moustache stared down at me from just a foot away.
“Benny,” I croaked, and turned my head away.
Now I could see why the marble floor felt so wet. I had thrown up on it. Or at least I hoped I had. If I was lying in someone else’s vomit, I was going to be really pissed off.
Benny grabbed my face and pulled it back around.
“What,” he said, carefully picking out every word, “the bleeding fuck was that?”
“I was hoping you would tell me,” I muttered. My voice sounded like footsteps crunching over seashells. I tried to moisten my mouth, but all I got was more of that chalky, sharp taste.
I levered myself up onto one elbow and peered around.
We were still in the library, or what was left of it. Books had been torn from the shelves and tossed across the marble and rugs. Red-painted shelves had toppled and splintered. The ceiling was shrouded in slowly coiling smoke. The wood-framed window had been blown out, showing the painfully bright sky beyond. Something was dripping down the walls. In the centre of the room, the heavy cedar desk looked like it had been stamped on by a giant foot. It had split and collapsed right across the middle. Scattered, charred papers surrounded it, along with fragments of black and red pottery.
I had broken the curse on the ledger and then… Then something had exploded. Something big and magical. Depths!
“Never mind.” Benny shook his head. I hoped I didn’t look half as cooked as he did. “We need to get out of here. Now. Half the city will have heard that.”
He was right. You wouldn’t have had to be sensitive to magic to feel the eruption. You’d just need a pair of ears. We needed to get out of here, or we were going to be in so much shit.
Grimacing, I pulled myself up.
Why in the all the Depths had I let Benny talk me into this? We were going to have words if we got out of here. Leaning on Benny’s scrawny shoulder, I staggered towards the door.
We were too late.
Just before we reached them, the doors burst open and a dozen guards piled in. Two of them were holding muskets, one a flintlock pistol, and the rest swords. All of them had their hands and faces smeared with thick, white Ash.
I felt the magic drain from the air around me.
Fuck, I thought. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. There really was no way this could have gone worse.
The Ash Guard had arrived.
To understand what was so terrifying about the Ash Guard, you had to understand magic, and to understand magic, you had to know where it came from.
When an animal’s body decayed — or a human body, for that matter — it leaked all sorts of disgusting smells and dubious liquids. It rotted. I had seen it, and it wasn’t nice. When a god died in the mortal realm, much the same happened, except that the stenches and oozing liquids from a rotting god’s body were what we called raw magic. It permeated the air and the ground and the water wherever a god was worshipped or feared, and where the god’s body lay. Those of us who could use that raw magic were called mages. This was the dirty little secret mages didn’t like to talk about. We were earthworms, dung beetles, tiny, unnamed, crawling, squirming microscopic organisms of the godly soil. We didn’t have magic of our own. We fed off the decaying effluent of dead gods.