The entrance to the mines was marked by weather-worn pillars covered in an unpleasant grey moss that gave off an eerie glow in the darkness. I crouched behind a nearby tree, expecting palace guards to come chasing after us at any moment. The forest all around was silent for the most part, the notable exception being my laboured breathing.
Without any more of the lightning weed, and compounded by everything else I’d been through over the last few days, it was all I could do to keep up with the damned squirrel cat.
Reichis seemed less than impressed with my stamina. “Your people really can’t—”
“Enough,” I said, holding on to my knees as I bent over to catch my breath. “I get it. Humans are useless. Squirrel cats are the greatest hunters, trackers, runners, fighters … Did I miss anything? Poets, maybe?”
He gave a little snorting sound. “You know I can understand sarcasm, right?”
I kept expecting his mother to give him a well-deserved bite as she seemed prone to doing, but somewhere along the road she’d left us. No doubt to return to the rest of the pack.
I glanced back the way we’d come at a barn about thirty yards behind us. We’d made a quick search of it, finding it empty except for a mottled black-and-grey horse that I was pretty sure belonged to Ferius.
Okay. So if Ferius was in the mine, there was a good chance Shalla was too. Which meant all I had to do was sneak through what had to be miles of tunnels, find Ferius and Shalla, free them and get them back out without being seen. Easy.
I glanced down at my forearms, just in case the silk band had sparked so that I could use mind-clouding spells to mask our presence. It hadn’t. Of course it hadn’t, nor would it ever, now that my father had counter-banded me from ever wielding silk magic. Okay, so not easy.
I’d thought about trying to go for help, but Tennat and his brothers were still hunting me. Ra’fan would have me in a chain spell long before I reached the centre of town. Besides, even if I made it home, I’d no doubt end up strapped back down on that table with my father finishing the counter-banding. He wasn’t likely to pay any attention to my incoherent screams about how the dowager magus had revealed to me that our people had cravenly massacred the Mahdek and now somehow the Sha’Tep—who nobody believed were capable of so much as talking back to a mage—had somehow hatched a plot to weaken the magic of Jan’Tep children.
No wonder Reichis hated us so much. It turned out we were pretty rotten.
Which is why it might not be such a good idea to place my life in the hands … or paws rather … of a creature that despises anything that walks on two legs. “Do you really hate our kind?” I asked him.
“I don’t hate all humans,” Reichis replied. “The Mahdek were pretty much the most peaceful types you’d ever meet. Your people, on the other hand?” He gave a dismissive snort. “Basically giant walking turds that try to ruin everything around them.”
“How would you know what the Mahdek were like? They all died before you were born.”
He tapped a paw against the side of his head. “Squirrel cats have excellent tribal memory.”
I started to object and then realised I was coming perilously close to entering into a debate with a creature who most likely greeted other members of his species by sniffing their backsides.
“Enough talking,” he growled, and took off at a run for the mine entrance. “Let’s go save the Argosi and make the world a better place by killing off a few Jan’Tep.”
It was the smell that hit me first. I’d always imagined mines smelled like … well, nothing, really, but this one had the stale, rotten stench of stagnant water. Every time I opened my mouth to take in a breath I could practically taste the rancid air and dust all around us. How could anyone stand to work down here, day after day, extracting the ore to make banding inks that only served others?
And how could we make members of our own families live like this?
Reichis was right. My people really are horrible.
I’d have felt more guilty about my own complicity, but right then I was preoccupied with the small dank tunnel surrounding me. I’d never been this far underground before—which is how I’d managed to reach the age of fifteen before discovering that I was terrified of being trapped in small spaces.
“You okay, kid?” Reichis asked. “You look worse than usual.”
“Shh!” I hissed fiercely. “You want them to hear you?”
“I’m a squirrel cat, idiot. The only things other humans hear from me are animal noises.” He pointed with a paw up at what appeared to be a family of rats skittering along a groove inside the wall above us. “There are always lots of those around, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
In fact, I hadn’t, but I wasn’t about to admit that to him.
Reichis led the way, deeper and deeper into the mine, periodically stopping to sniff at the floor or the walls. He seemed to do it an awful lot, which made me wonder if his sense of smell was really as good as he claimed.
The tunnels were a more worrying concern though. We hadn’t brought a light source with us, but thick patches of the glowing grey moss revealed just how rotten the wooden beams were that supported the sides and girded the roof above us. More than once we had to turn back because a passage was blocked by a cave-in.
We had another problem too.
“You sure you’re all right, kid?” Reichis asked. “You look—”
“Don’t say it.”
He ambled over to me and sniffed. “No, I’m serious. I think you might be sick or something.”
“Just tired,” I said, leaning a hand against the wall to support myself. The sudden wave of nausea was so strong that I had to force myself not to throw up. I couldn’t remember ever feeling this awful, and I had a lot of experience with feeling awful. I looked down at the palm of my hand and saw red blisters beginning to form. When I looked back at the spot where I’d put my hand, I saw a thin vein of ore running like a crack in the wall.
“We must be getting close to the centre of the mine,” I whispered. “Jan’Tep mages get sick down here. Master Osia’phest said the more powerful the mage, the worse it is in the mines.”
“So what do we do?” Reichis asked.
Ancestors … If it’s bad for me, Shalla must be dying down here.
“We keep going.” I set off down the tunnel. “I’m not much of a mage. Let’s hope that’s a good thing for once.”
It took us about twenty minutes to find out where they were holding Shalla and Ferius, and for me to discover that feeling nauseous was going to be the least of my problems.
“Three men,” Reichis said, scampering back to where I waited around the corner. “They’re wearing masks like those morons I chased away last time.”
“And you’re sure Ferius and Shalla are there?” I kept my voice as low as I could, barely even a whisper.
He nodded, which looked disturbingly odd in a squirrel cat. “The Argosi is there for sure, tied to some kind of post. There’s a second human female on the ground, unconscious. I got a decent sniff off her from the air outside the room. She smells young, definitely Jan’Tep. Also, really arrogant if you ask me.”
“You can smell arrogance?”
He tilted his head at me. “You can’t?”
I couldn’t tell whether he was making fun of me. Reichis seemed to have an entirely inappropriate sense of timing when it came to cracking jokes and being in mortal danger.
I got down on my hands and knees and crawled as silently as I could to the end of the passage so I could peer around the corner.
There wasn’t much to see in the dim light—their oil lanterns didn’t add much illumination to what was already provided by the patches of grey moss. The men in the carved-out room didn’t seem concerned about being discovered either. Two of them sat on chairs, laughing to each other, while a third appeared to be cooking something with several small braziers and metal pots. All three wore elaborate black lacquer masks like the ones I’d seen the night Shalla and I were attacked.
Ferius Parfax hung limply from one of the support beams, ropes at her wrists forcing her arms above her head. A second figure lay unconscious on the ground. I couldn’t make her out in the shadows, but I was sure it was my sister.
“Well?” Reichis asked.
I crawled back around the corner and tried to think up a way to get Ferius and Shalla out of there. “I’m thinking.”
“What’s to think about? We go in there, kill the people we don’t like and rescue the people we do. Simple.”
“There are three strong men in there, probably with weapons. What are we supposed to do with them?”
“Eat their tongues?” he suggested. “Two for me, one for you?”
It was rapidly becoming apparent to me that, whatever his virtues, Reichis had a lousy sense of self-preservation. On the other hand, there was something oddly infectious about the little monster’s excitement at the prospect of getting into a fight. Also, I was acutely aware that he was trying to greedily ensure more guards for himself.
What’s wrong with me? When did I start looking for fights?
I realised then that something was changing inside me. Maybe it had been for a while now. It could have been an after-effect of the lightning weed, or the strange connection I was forming with the squirrel cat. Maybe it was just because I now knew without a doubt that I was never again going to feel like a part of my clan or my family. My entire life I’d just assumed that, because of my parents, I was destined to be a great mage—a Jan’Tep hero like the ones in the stories I’d grown up on. Only I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t special.
I was just really, really angry.
“Come on, kid,” Reichis chittered. “Those sons of bitches aren’t going to eat themselves.”
Sure, I thought. No problem. Well, one problem. “I don’t have a weapon,” I whispered.
“Just use your teeth,” was Reichis’s remarkably unhelpful advice.
As we crept towards the room, I reached down and picked up a fist-sized rock from the tunnel floor.
Stick with what you know, I guess.