It takes six nights to band a Jan’Tep child, one for each of the disciplines of iron, ember, silk, sand, blood and breath. First you must secure the ores from the mines that run deep beneath the oasis. Close proximity to the mines sickens mages, so Sha’Tep are employed for this task. The ores must be quickly transmuted with chemicals and fire into the liquid form used for the inks before separation from the ground renders them toxic. Each banding ink has its own special process, its own complexities and dangers that require the mage preparing them to do so slowly, methodically, without hesitation. Without remorse.
During the daytime I would lie strapped to the table, my mind drifting in a fog from the drugs my mother forced me to drink. I knew they released the straps to bathe me sometimes, because the table underneath me was clean even though I was sure I’d soiled myself several times. At night, with the light of the moon glimmering in through the window, they would renew the work of counter-banding me. I too would begin my work fresh each night, screaming in outrage, begging for mercy. My father and mother would try to make me understand that this was for the best—for our family, our clan and our people. I would call them liars and monsters, and swear vengeance on the world as if the demon had already claimed me.
None of it made any difference. Like a steady water clock we all just kept dripping away the hours. Slowly but surely my father finished one band, then the next. I was fairly sure that the gold band for sand magic was complete, forever denying me the spells for seeing afar or uncovering secret knowledge. The iron band too was done. I would never cast a shield spell to protect myself or anyone else. They progressed one by one, from the strongest form of magic to the weakest. Soon my father would counter-band the silver, taking away forever the breath magic that had been mine for only a few precious moments.
When my voice failed I would lie there listening to the flames of the braziers, punctuated by the tap-tap of my father’s needles as he dipped them into the tiny cauldrons. Sometimes I heard my mother crying over me. One time I think it was my father.
I kept wanting to ask about Shalla and whether Ferius had returned with her. I knew she hadn’t though, because while I hated everyone and everything in the world I somehow knew without the slightest shred of a doubt that if Ferius Parfax had known what was being done to me she would have knocked the door down and set the place on fire. She would have stood there with a smoking reed in her mouth and those razor-sharp steel cards of hers in hand. “Kicking down doors and asses is just what a woman does when a kid’s being tortured,” she would have said.
That was why I knew it wasn’t her coming to save me when I heard the polite, almost tentative knock at the door.
“Do not disturb us,” my father said.
The knock was repeated, followed by the turning of the handle.
“Away!” my father commanded. “The door is locked for a reason.”
A voice on the other side called out, but from where I lay strapped to the table the words were muffled, incoherent. My father and mother ignored them.
Then something odd happened. I heard the sound of something heavy battering at the door. My father looked up, his eyes narrowed in annoyance, then the noise came again. The third time I saw the hinges weaken and my father got to his feet. The fourth time they gave way completely and the door flew open.
“By the crying souls of our ancestors,” my uncle Abydos said, “it’s true. You’re counter-banding your own son!”
“Remove yourself from this room, Abydos,” my father warned. “What happens here is of no concern to the Sha’Tep.” His use of my uncle’s status was intentional—a reminder that he was family by blood but not by rank.
“Don’t do this, Keo,” my uncle pleaded. “You don’t know that this is truly the shadowblack. There are tests you could—”
My father carefully set the needle down on the table. “No one has called me ‘Keo’ for a very long time.” He walked over to face my uncle. I don’t think I’d ever seen them stand quite like that, almost as equals. “I am Ke’heops now, a mage of the Jan’Tep and the head of this house. You would do well to remember that fact, and as you do, to remember your own place in the scheme of things.”
My mother stood. “Please, both of you, stop. This isn’t helping.”
When the Sha’Tep are addressed by their Jan’Tep betters, they almost always look away. In fact, I was fairly sure that I’d never even noticed the colour of my uncle’s eyes because he was always looking down or to the side when one of us spoke to him. He didn’t do that now. “Kellen is my nephew, Bene’maat. I won’t allow you to—”
Out of nowhere my father’s hand rose, the movement far too fast to be a spell. I heard a loud crack and only then realised he’d slapped my uncle in the face. “You won’t allow? It is not your place to allow anything, Abydos. You are a member of this household, not this family.”
“Ke’heops, please, you’re tired,” my mother began. “This is … it’s hard on all of us. Perhaps if you explained to Abydos why—”
My father’s hand rose up again, cutting off the discussion. “The head of a Jan’Tep house does not explain himself to a Sha’Tep servant.”
“Hit me again, Keo,” my uncle said, his voice almost inviting. “Better yet, set aside your great and grand magic. Fight me the way we did in the days before our paths separated. Show me what kind of man you are when you aren’t hiding behind the mantle of a mage.”
My father’s fists clenched. Abydos didn’t move an inch. For the first time, I wondered what my father had been like as a boy. Had he been like me, small and scrawny, trying to survive as best he could as he waited for his powers to emerge? It was hard for me to imagine, and yet here, now, he seemed somehow smaller than Abydos.
I felt my mother shift a little from where she stood behind me. The silk of her sleeves made a soft sound as she brought her hands out in front of her and I knew she was preparing a spell. “Would you fight me as well, Abydos?” she asked. “Shall I set my magic aside and you can strike me with the resentment I see burning in your eyes?”
My uncle looked so shocked it was as if my mother had struck him twice as hard as my father had. “Bene’maat … Kellen is your son. Surely there is some other way to—”
“There is only one other way,” my father said. He looked back at me. “Either I finish banding Kellen, sealing in his magic so that the shadowblack can never feed on it, knowing that I must then send him into exile forever, to wander alone far away from those who would recognise the disease and try to hunt him down, or I can kill my boy with my own two hands in order to protect our people.” He turned back to Abydos. “Which would you have me do, brother?”
My uncle hesitated for a moment, and I saw all his rebellious strength drift away. His eyes returned to the floor, where they remained when he next spoke. “I will prepare something to eat. Kellen will need to regain his strength after you’re done for the night.”
For the third time, Abydos was going to break the rule regarding meals being eaten at the family table. This was, in its own small way, my uncle’s last line of resistance.
As though nothing had happened, as if order and civility had somehow returned to the world, my father said, “That would be most welcome, Abydos. Thank you.”
Then he returned to the worktable, where I lay held down by leather straps that bit into my skin whenever I struggled against them, and continued the careful, methodical destruction of my future.
Sometime the next morning I woke groggily to sunlight streaming through the window, and a voice floating up from the gardens below.
“Kellen?”
The voice was female. Ferius? I thought. No, too young. Shalla? No, not nearly arrogant enough. Since there really weren’t very many women in my life, I should have figured it out sooner, but in my defence I was quite heavily drugged and, really, who would have thought she’d ever speak to me again?
“Nephenia?” I asked, my voice a raspy wheeze that probably hadn’t carried as far as my teeth, never mind the fifteen feet below the window to where she must have been standing. I tried again but still couldn’t produce anything so grand as a moan, never mind a shout.
“Kellen, it’s … me.”
There was a lot of weight in that “me,” I thought. I had no clue what it meant of course, but it was somehow nice to feel that I warranted that long a pause just for such a simple word.
“Kellen, I know you’re angry, but …”
I think she said something else but I got stuck at “you’re angry.” What was I supposed to be angry about? Had Nephenia drugged me and then tied me down to a table in my mother’s study only to start jabbing me with needles night after night?
Copper. The word came out of nowhere. Copper for ember. Copper for fire spells, for lightning. Last night my father had finished the copper band around my left forearm, forever cutting me off from one more form of magic.
“… Ferius,” Nephenia said.
What about Ferius?
I tried to concentrate on what she’d been saying during the time I’d been ruminating about copper magic.
“… masks, but no one is …”
Someone had seen Ferius attacked by a group of men in masks outside the city—that was what it was. Unless I had just made that up? Damn it. Why couldn’t I think straight?
Mother’s potions, stupid. You can’t think straight, so stop trying.
“… Two days since …”
Okay, no focusing, no thinking straight. What did that leave? Think sideways. Nephenia was outside my window. She wouldn’t be there if she knew about the shadowblack, so my parents had kept that quiet. She was calling from outside, in the garden, which meant she must have already tried to visit me but had been turned away from the front door.
“… when are you and Shalla going to …”
Damn it, what had she just said about Shalla? Something about Shalla and myself, which meant Nephenia thought she must be here, so my parents must have told Osia’phest that they were keeping us both home from our lessons.
Unless Shalla really is back?
No, no way that was possible. She would have come to see me somehow. Even if she agreed with my parents’ decision to counter-band me, she’d have found a way to sneak in and tell me this was all my fault and I just needed to try harder somehow.
Okay, what have we got?
Shalla was still missing and my parents had kept it secret, just like they’d kept secret both the fact that I had the shadowblack and that they were counter-banding me. Somebody had reported seeing Ferius attacked and taken away by men in masks, which had to be connected to the men who’d attacked Shalla and me in the forest when we’d tried to summon familiars.
Not bad for someone who’s completely dazed and drugged, I thought. Not bad at all.
Except that I was also pretty sure that nobody would be looking for Ferius and nobody would care that she’d been captured.
“Nephenia?” I called out, my voice a little stronger now.
No answer came, which struck me as very rude until I noticed that the bright yellow sunlight was gone, replaced by the purple-grey of dusk.
Hours had gone by. I had nodded off. Darkness felt like a blanket being pulled over me. Soon my parents would come back into the room and start on the next band. Would it be blood magic this time? Or maybe breath? Were they down to the last and weakest band already?
Despite the dull thud of the drugs that kept me docile and the leather straps that held me down, I felt an overwhelming desire to do something, anything, to hurt my parents. Lacking the ability to actually commit any act of violence, I started crying, and in between my feeble sobs I said, “You aren’t my father any more, Ke’heops. You aren’t my mother, Bene’maat. You’re just two horrible people who strapped me down and took my life from me. I’m going to kill you both one day. I’m going to kill everybody in this stupid rotten town.”
Even as I spoke the words, I knew this was nothing more than the wasted utterance of a child lashing out at everyone around him. That was why I was so surprised when a fuzzy brown-and-black face suddenly appeared at the edge of my window and, in a chittering, growling little voice, said, “Kill everybody in town? Now you’re talking my language, kid.”