The Blood Mirror
But Sibéal held her hand up. “Will-casting is a sword. Like any sword, it is meant to cut and kill. It is an implement—mostly—of violence and ugliness. It is a sword we here carry with an appreciation for the dangers of the blade. Surely you warriors can understand this. We do not disagree about how vile are the abuses of this craft.”
“Except the Chromeria says all uses of your craft are abuses,” Cruxer said.
“Cruxer,” Kip said, “you know I love you. But shut your gob. Sibéal?”
She looked down the river nervously, but they were still quite a ways out. “Your Magisterium draws its edicts in such a way as to keep as many people safe as possible. It would ban swords altogether, so as to save us all from those who use swords to rape and steal and kill. But there is a time to kill, and a place to use every weapon at our disposal. Is now the time and place for you, Kip Guile, who said he would lead us to kill and to die?”
“I take it that the Cwn y Wawr disagree,” he said.
“The Cwn y Wawr are liars and hypocrites,” Conn Arthur said, hot. “They claim they abide by the Chromeria’s laws? For generations they’ve sent discipulae to the Chromeria, taken all the education they can get, then failed out on purpose so their contracts could be bought out cheaply. They’ve even trained with the Blackguard, abusing your trust and stealing positions and funds.”
Kip should have been thinking about whether he could bring together ancient enemies without losing everyone. Instead he thought about the Blackguard and its old discrimination against anyone not Parian or Ilytian, first justified because they were the peoples with the darkest skin—a justification made flimsier with every mixing generation.
Those old snubs must have made the Blood Foresters who became the Cwn y Wawr feel justified in stealing what training they could: ‘You won’t be fair to me? Fine, I’ll take your training and leave.’
Those desertions would have then made the Parians and Ilytians feel justified again: ‘See, these people are untrustworthy. They aren’t worthy of being Blackguards.’
Every community is a gull gliding over a sea of spite, eager for carrion, all too ready to steal, and all too quick to squawk when stolen from.
Kip held up his hands, and they all quieted. They actually listened to him. As if he was a real leader. “Some things at the Chromeria are going to have to change. But we’re in no position to change anything until we win. And to win, we need all the allies we can get. We’re in a fight to the death. I’ll pick up any sword I can.”
“Even if it cuts you?” Conn Arthur said. It must have come out louder than he’d meant, because he reddened—Orholam bless that light skin—but he stood fast when he saw the others look at him, suddenly stubborn.
“If it cuts the White King deeper? Absolutely. This isn’t a time when we have the luxury to cast aside help. And I’ll tell them the same thing, when they raise the same objections about you.”
The big muscles went rigid again, and then slowly deflated. Orholam have mercy, but Conn Arthur was big, his muscles and fiery body hair rippling with every move.
“Sibéal, explain will-casting. You have four minutes.”
And, with remarkable concision, she did. The peoples of the deep woods had been will-casting for millennia. And, perhaps affected by the Great River itself, they had always conceived of magic in dichotomies: drafting without casting one’s will into the world making one river, and will-casting making another. Down the will-casting river was another fork: will-casting into the soulless, and will-casting into the souled; then will-casting into the simple souled (small animals, mainly) and into complex souls (larger animals and humans); then will-casting into animal souls and into human souls, and so forth.
The first kind of will-casting—into objects, luxin, usually—was considered safe and almost mundane: it was tiring and usually short lived, but a drafter-archer might cast a bit of luxin into the fletching of her arrow, and then fix her will upon a target.
When released, the arrow would curve to some small extent, seeking its target automatically. These weren’t dramatic effects: the core physics of an arrow’s flight and momentum were still the same. One couldn’t shoot an arrow and have it curve back to hit someone behind you, but a skilled will-caster might curve an arrow a bit over a wall to hit someone taking cover behind it. Or—if she possessed greater skill—she might focus on a difficult target and be able to shoot more accurately than her own mundane skills ought to allow.
Holy shit, Kip thought. He’d heard of that in the Blackguard itself. Some of the nunks had sworn they’d seen some of the best archers like Buskin and Tugertent shoot arrows that curved in midair.
No wonder they’d been quiet about doing it—it was utterly forbidden.
No wonder they’d done it anyway—it worked.
This kind of magic was exhausting, Sibéal said, and it usually expired within seconds or hours of being separated from the caster. They could make simple machines, too. Hidden traps whose trigger was something like ‘If touched, ignite.’
The far more dangerous will-casting was into the souled. Whenever they could, they didn’t allow their will-casters to start learning it until they were at least thirty years old—when they had a stake in their community, when they had families, when they had reasons not to go mad.
The simple souled could be given only relatively simple instructions: ‘Go to this place,’ or maybe ‘Go to this place and do this.’ This, Kip realized, was what his father Gavin had done at the Gargantua. He had sent a rat to find the floating fortress’s powder magazine.
The height of the will-caster’s art was working with creatures with greater intelligence—the complex souls, as they called them—the wolves and dolphins and horses and elephants and jungle cats.
“And bears,” Kip guessed. Motherfucker.
“Yes. Bears.”
Conn Arthur gestured to a nearby skimmer to come closer. He turned to Sibéal after he hopped gracefully onto the moving deck of the other boat. “Tell him about it. Go on. I don’t want to hear it, but he needs to know.”
“Conn…?” Kip asked, as the other skimmer separated once more.
“Conn Arthur communes with a giant grizzly,” Sibéal said quietly, looking at the big man’s back.
A giant grizzly. In case a regular old grizzly wasn’t terrifying enough. “I thought the last of those died long ago,” he said.
“There are a few left. The Deep Forest remembers, Lord Guile.”
Wonderful. “Tell me about the dangers,” Kip said.
“With the lower forms of will-casting, we’re not sure why… It doesn’t sap people of their will, like the Chromeria believes. Instead it seems to slowly eat away at their intelligence. We think sometimes the caster forgets to breathe while his will is elsewhere, and his body dies a little. He might come back to himself, but never really be the same. It’s a death by slow degrees. As there are few old drafters, there are few old will-casters.”
“And as with drafters who go wight, there are the reckless among will-casters, too,” Tisis added. She’d been quiet until now. “There are men and women who believe they are wrongly souled. That they are, deep down, wolves or bears or tygre wolves.”
“And what happens to them?” Kip asked.
“Most madness shows up early,” Sibéal said. “It’s part of why we don’t teach will-casting to the young. They get themselves killed. Mauled by wild animals usually, or starved. A man is body and soul, and those who separate the two for long do it to their grief.”
“So if you’re controlling an animal, and it gets killed, what then?” Kip asked.
She glanced at the conn over on his other boat. “Sometimes nothing. Sometimes the caster is made an idiot. Sometimes she simply dies, too. It depends how intricated the caster is.”
“Intricated?”
“Polychromes can more fully take on their host’s body. The different colors connect… differently.”
“Let me guess,” Kip said, stomach sinking. “Superviolet
to understand the thoughts, blue to see and remember, green to feel and to sense how the body should move, yellow to hear and hold the balance of man and animal, orange to smell and process what an animal smells, red to taste and feel the emotions, and sub-red for the passions and the other animal senses a man doesn’t share.”
Sibéal looked at Kip as if he were a rock trout who had just beached himself and started lecturing her on eudaemonic theology. “How…?”
“Lucky guess,” Kip said. The cards. It was the same as the cards. So will-casting was, deep down, connected to the same magical reality that chromaturgy was. It was simply understood differently.
All magic worked by certain laws, but no one knew them all.
But Sibéal wasn’t ready to let go of it. “I would have expected someone who had read up on will-casting to say blue for sight, green for touch, and so forth, probably forgetting sub-red and superviolet. But the secondary connections are not widely known. And you’ve shown no other knowledge of will-casting. Have you been pretending ignorance of all this? Trying to trap me in a lie?”
“No. And we don’t have time to quibble now,” Kip said. “What happens if the man is killed while he’s controlling the animal?”
“No, how did you know about the colors’ connections?” Sibéal insisted.
Kip said nothing, and they stood eye to eye. Or more accurately, eye to belly, but the pygmy didn’t let the height differential affect her in the least. She was flushing, skin turning bluer by the moment.
“Lord Guile… sometimes just understands things about magic,” Tisis said, trying to spread oil on the waters. “He’s kind of irritating that way.”
Sibéal went silent, and her grinning mouth threw Kip. He was still learning to look around the corners of her eyes and to ignore the mouth. “Conn Ruadhán Arthur’s twin, Rónán, was killed while he was fully intricated in his bear, not two months past. Ruadhán had to go kill the bear himself. The animal that held the last living remnants of Rónán’s soul. It tore Ruadhán’s heart out to kill it. But kill it he did.”
“And what happens if you don’t kill the animal?” Kip asked.
“Kip!” Tisis scolded.
“I have to know,” he said.
“It goes mad. Tries to return to its people—its human people. But the magic fades, and it reverts to animal, and the man-soul dies at last. But all too often, it gets violent, for it’s been changed, been violated. They kill people. We have many stories of attempts to save the soul-trapped, Lord Guile. None of them end happily.”
“The Briseid?” Tisis asked. “Tamar and Heraklos?”
“Indeed. Though perhaps told quite differently than you remember. The Chromeria has ways of crushing knowledge, but some truth always leaks out.”
“Not… The Seven Lives of Maeve Hart?” Tisis asked.
“That, too,” Sibéal admitted uneasily.
“No wonder the Chromeria forbids it,” Tisis said.
“What’s that?” Kip asked. He’d only heard of the last one. “Briefly.”
Tisis said, “A woman flings her soul into a hart and flees when soldiers storm her home and burn it to the ground, killing her body. Her husband Black Aed hunts the men to their homes one at a time, and murders their wives, and puts his Maeve’s soul in their bodies. But it never works, because every woman already has her own soul, so he slowly loses her, her soul slipping away, until he comes to the queen herself who had ordered the burning. And with her body, the magic works or seems to work, for she is soulless. But one night he has a foul dream, and on seeing his enemy’s face leering over him, shaking him, he strangles her. And upon seeing what he’s done, he kills himself, throwing his spirit into the stones of the old castle. He haunts it to this day.”
“Lovely,” Kip said. “I can’t wait to hear more uplifting tales from your homeland.”
“The story is actually… somewhat darker even than that,” Sibéal said. “But that’s beside the point.”
“I agree,” Kip said, not willing to answer more questions, which she seemed poised to ask. He wasn’t telling her about the cards. “So it seems like, to put it in your dichotomies, we’re talking about two different things: will-casting and… what?”
“Soul-casting.” Sibéal looked up the river. “Do we really have time for this?”
“I’m afraid we don’t have time not to do this,” Kip said.
“Have you not read the Philosopher? Before you understand anything, you must understand physics—what is in the corporeal world. Upon that you build your understanding of the metaphysics, what is beyond the simple corporeal: emotions and thoughts and so forth. From those two, you derive your ethics, how one is to act properly in accord with the facts, above that, politics, how bodies of individuals are to act toward each other, and then rhetoric and the arts, the poetics. We and the Chromeria disagree about our metaphysics, and it affects everything above it.
“If, as they believe, you tear off a piece of your soul when you will-cast, you’re doing fundamental harm to yourself every time you do this magic. It would be akin to magic powered by murdering someone—it wouldn’t matter if you did good with the magic, because at base, the action empowering that good is itself evil. Thus, the good we do they discount, whilst every ill effect that comes from our magic they say obviously springs from the corrupted nature of the whole. We can’t win, because we argue politics—the regulation of magics—when our dispute is about metaphysics.”
“This is… very complicated,” Tisis said.
“Not really,” Sibéal said. “We say the will is the breath of the soul. Like your body needs breath and will die without it, your soul needs will. But we can inspire an animal—literally, ‘in-breathe’—to do something. Of course we need to recover afterward, like you need to inhale every time you exhale. Like you breathe hard after running. You need recovery time. And yes, if you go too long without breathing, you die. Or if you deprive another person of their breath, it’s killing. This is murder if it’s a person, but the animals we inspire can also be killed thus if it’s done wantonly or clumsily or for too long, and we regard that as a serious offense, too. Will-casting with the higher souled is a profound partnership. And the animals we partner can tell if it is done with violent or disrespectful intent. And the will-caster feels their terror, too, if the partnering is done poorly or meanly. We know and love our hosts to a degree that one who has never will-cast cannot fathom.
“Soul-casting is different. Forbidden. Soul-casting is when the soul of an animal is blotted out and replaced. Its body may live for days afterward, but its vital spark is extinguished. It damages the caster, too, in more insidious ways.”
“It can be done to men?”
She nodded grimly. “Which is why to us soul-casting is a black magic. Damned magic. Always forbidden, always disastrous, as the stories of the living dead and of wolf men tell. Loathed and despised.”
“And mostly moot, because only a full-spectrum polychrome can soul-cast,” Kip said. It was partly a guess.
She looked stung. “That’s right.”
“Ruadhán and his twin Rónán, full-spectrum polychromes?” he guessed.
“Yes.”
“And Rónán soul-cast himself?”
She licked her lips with a small blue tongue. “While dying. Doubtless it is a unique temptation for those with such great power. And now you know Ruadhán’s shame.”
“No,” Kip said, “now I know why he swore fealty to me instead of taking the lead himself.” The big man had the respect of his people, and the intellect and fierceness to lead, but at the word of some prophet he had given up the lead and sworn himself to Kip? Why would a man do that?
Kip had only hatred for his own half brother, but he’d seen what a big-hearted man will give for his brother. And he said a silent thanks to Tremblefist and Ironfist for that. For here, though different in culture and color and circumstances, he saw a mirror of their love. And what Tremblefist had taught him might just save his life.
 
; Why would Conn Arthur not lead?
Not because he was ashamed of his brother, who had done something desperate as he died. There was little shame in that. Conn Arthur wouldn’t lead because he was ashamed of himself.
Because there was no way in hell he’d killed Rónán’s bear Lorcan, because that would have meant killing his brother. Rónán was out there, somewhere, trapped and going mad in the body of that bear, and nothing could stop him but death. Conn Arthur bore the responsibility to his people and to his brother to kill the animal, but that would mean admitting Rónán was dead. It would mean killing the last remnant of his brother with his own hands.
His love was his shame. But if he wouldn’t confront that on his own, Kip was going to have to make him do so before someone got killed.
But how do you reveal a man’s deepest secret shame, accuse him of heresy and cowardice, and not destroy him?
A commander couldn’t. Maybe a friend could. Kip had to give Conn Arthur time to deal with it, had to pray the forest was big enough for one crazed grizzly.
Time was up. The island was coming into view.
“What are you going to do?” Sibéal asked.
It all seemed abstract—a philosophical difference about the best uses of magic. That was, until the skimmers beached on the island and Kip saw the sudden fear in the Cwn y Wawr men’s eyes at the sight of Sibéal and at their sudden comprehension of who these people were.
The Cwn y Wawr, these hardened magic-using warriors, were terrified of the will-casters. Terrified through ignorance, partly, sure. But when you live in the forest, and you know the creatures there well, how scary is the idea of someone who can turn any one of those creatures against you, with the capabilities of the animal but the mind of a human? How terrifying is it that a person might take over your own body? How terrifying is it to actually meet the kind of people responsible for all the tales of the living dead and wolf men and worse?
To them, the name ‘Ghosts’ wasn’t a sarcastic reference to how ephemeral and helpless these homeless, bereaved wanderers were. To them, the Ghosts haunted the darkness of the forest, ready to turn nature or even your fellow man or your dead against you.