Whiskeyjack

by Victoria Goddard

  Boom

  Aiiee—aiieee—ai—ai—aieee—a—a

  Left hand or right? Right seemed to fit better. I turned so my front was to the stone, my right hand in the indentation, my left foot sliding out along what was barely more than a lip of stone. I did not look down to see how far down it was until one reached the water. In normal times it was presumably up here, for there was a line of red scum just breaking over the lip, as if the water had risen to that height and no further.

  Boom

  It was hard to imagine anything being worse than a seventy-foot drop onto knife-sharp limestone pinnacles already handily stained red, but I thought the idea of the smoothly rushing deadly currents of the Strid a bare inch below your foot might do it.

  The narrow ledge lasted only five or six yards before doubling back into the cliff-face in a way that made me very glad I had led with the foot I had.

  At waist height there was a tunnel slanting slightly up and to the right.

  Boom

  Aieee—aiieee—ai—ai—ai

  It amazed me that I could still hear that ululation through the vibrations and the booms and the sound of my own slow movements along the stone and the thundering loudness of the circulation of my blood.

  I had to kneel to fit in the tunnel. It was very dark.

  I stopped there for—I don’t know.

  BOOM

  Aiieee—aiiieee—ai—aiieee—aiaa—aiaa—ai

  Boom

  Boom

  Boom

  AND HAD MY FATHER BEEN afraid, running up the cliff into the face of the enemy?

  Had he been afraid, standing there with the great Sun-in-Glory banner of Astandalas flying over his head?

  Had he been afraid, going into the mountain fastness of the Stone Seekers, not knowing if any of the people he sought were alive?

  Had he been afraid, standing at the top of the Gate of Morning with his sword and his book of haikus and the knowledge that the way home was going to be shut behind him?

  Had he been afraid, turning his oar to foul the movement of the pirate galley?

  Had he been afraid, coming home from the reputed dead for the second time?

  Was he afraid now?

  BOOM

  I WAS NOT MY FATHER. I would never win the Heart of Glory from the hands of the Emperor. I would never win a name for myself as a soldier of Astandalas. I would never be him.

  But by the Lady, by the Emperor, by the bees my mother had so loved: I could, and I would, and I did, act to make him proud.

  Even if I did stupid things like running off without thinking after my uncle.

  I wanted to sit at his feet and learn all that he could teach me by his living presence.

  BOOM

  I CRAWLED INTO THE darkness.

  BOOM

  And then, silence.

  THE OTHER END OF THE tunnel was hidden from full view by a series of stone pillars.

  I came out low, on my hands and knees, and was for a moment dazzled by stripes of white and black. I crouched there, trying to breathe quietly as I caught my breath, trying to listen, trying to ignore the deep vibrations thrumming through the stone into my hands and knees and body until my teeth were shaking from it.

  Boom

  The wind had died down.

  Aiieee—aiieee—aiieee—ai—ai—aiaaa

  I crawled forward until I came to the stone pillars. They marched out from the right-hand side of the tunnel mouth, a double row of them like teeth that grow from the top of a cave and the bottom. I blinked as my vision started to clear.

  The tunnel came out in what was a slightly larger cave whose mouth was obscured by the pillars or stalactites (stalagmites? I could never remember). They were all stained red, which suggested I had somehow descended below the level of the river by climbing upwards, which made my head hurt until I remembered that we were at the place where the river launched itself down a series of falls from Crimson Lake in what was presumably an upper valley to the Magarran Strid in its gorge in the lower. The tunnel must have taken me up into a cave formed by the action of the water going through one of the stages of the cataract.

  The pillars obscured my view; and also protected me from being seen. I crawled forward on my belly, reasoning that this outfit was already ruined and that the action might help me avoid detection.

  If there were anyone on the bridge.

  Boom

  I slithered forward in the cold red scurf left from the drying foam. Once I neared the pillars I discovered they were not nearly so uniform as they had appeared, nor so orderly. There was a definite way forward between them, zigzagging as if on purpose. I kept scratching myself on various protruding rocks broken rather than worn by the movement of the water as I worked to get close enough to see the bridge and the gorge and the gate.

  And then all of a sudden, there they were.

  On the far side of the bridge, too high or too low to do anything, clutches of figures I recognized as Mr. Dart, Master Dart, Ben, Hal, Sir Hamish, the Chief Constable, Inspector Quent, and the two lawyers, Mr. Morres and Mr. Tey. They were all looking down, for a moment I thought at me, but then I realized that between them and me was the bridge.

  It was not what I’d expected. I suppose I’d thought of a proper bridge, or maybe the old humpbacked bridge over the Rag into town. Not a smooth water-worn arc of white stone stained with reddish scurf like all the rest.

  What the red water and the white stone can do ...

  Not the higher bridge, brilliantly white, that stood catching the noon sun another seventy-five or hundred yards upstream, another fifty feet above us, arching between the Horn and the Ivory Tower, the two outcroppings marking the egress of the waters from Crimson Lake down the Strid. High up on the very top of the Horn was something moving, but whatever or whoever it was was only a black spot against the sky from here.

  Not the lower bridge, another twenty yards downstream and ten feet down, which was black.

  On the middle bridge the Black Priest stood. His face-mask of polished silver caught the sunlight as he lifted his head back. He obviously could see the watchers, and equally obviously did not care, for he raised his hands and in his right he held the same wicked bone-white knife the priests had used to kill the cow at the Ellery Stone.

  Boom

  He did not have a cow this time.

  Aiieee—aiieee—aiaaa

  On the far bank from me stood my aunt Flora, her eyes wide enough I could see the ecstasy this side of the bridge. She was the one singing, her voice rising and falling, her eyes transfixed, her face mindless.

  On the near side of the bridge, only a few yards from me, Hagwood the factor stood staring at the Black Priest and his victim.

  Boom

  I could not see the source of the booming.

  On the bridge my uncle Vorel knelt with as much passive acceptance as the cow at the Ellery Stone had shown. I could not tell if he was bespelled or drugged or simply shocked.

  Lady Flora wailed out her inner convictions.

  Hagwood shook with horror at his alliances.

  The Black Priest lifted his hands and his head until the sun blazed forth from the mirror-mask as if he were the Sun-on-Earth himself.

  Sir Vorel, trembling visibly, lifted his chin and raised his eyes and I realized with a wrench of pity and wonder that he was not drugged, not bespelled, not even shocked into insensitivity. He was fully aware, and he lifted his chin to meet his fate.

  Where was Red Myrta with her famous archery skills? I thought acridly, and with the thought (sounding so like my grandmother!) I snapped into the world of mortal danger just as the Black Priest cried in a voice like the boom of the drum: “It is time!”

  My aunt wailed.

  My father started to climb down the cliff.

  Hagwood screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

  The Black Priest laughed. He reached for my uncle’s hair with his left hand, jerked hard to tilt his head back until all my uncle’s many chins were visible, and
began to lower the knife with easy assurance.

  I moved fastest.

  Chapter Thirty-Six: The Emperor Card

  I launched myself at a dead run out along the bridge. The Black Priest did not take notice of me at first: he was laughing as he moved the knife left so he could begin the cut across the jugular. I was on him before he began the righthand movement.

  If it had truly been Dominus Gleason I don’t think it would have taken very long.

  It was not, however, Dominus Gleason.

  My three half-seconds of surprise—that anyone was there—that I was there—that I was not yet the restored avatar of the Dark Kings—quickly lost all meaning. I gripped his wrist with my left hand and his other hand with my right and then I stood there squeezing with my stupid sausage fingers as my reflection in the polished silver mask started to do strange things.

  He was muttering, chanting really, in a voice whose pitch moved eerily between pitches and timbres. I caught words and half-phrases of Old Shaian and wished I hadn’t, for the picture they painted was one of madness coiling deeper and deeper into my mind with every syllable.

  Those are just one way of connecting the signs together, I told myself firmly.

  Where was Red Myrta with her arrows?

  Where was the Chancellor and Myrta the Hand?

  —Where, I wondered suddenly just before I stepped backwards onto him, was my uncle?

  He cried out in alarm whose shrillness bespoke far more than the pain of a trodden foot.

  I could not spare the attention to look away from the Black Priest. I did not like the look of the Jemis in the mirrored mask. That Jemis was grinning with unholy exaltation, his face illuminated like a painting of a saint or a devil, his eyes insane.

  Boom went the drum.

  We had nearly deafened ourselves, Hal and I, sitting in the campanile that day we’d broken curfew. We’d fled onto the roofs because we could not bear the vibrations of the sound, the dizzying, deafening, maddening sound like blows to the head and chest. We had lain on the roof-tiles recovering for ages, the sun burnishing me scarlet before Hal looked to see what was going on. Even Hal had admitted to tenderness from the sun, though his skin didn’t show the burn as obviously as mine.

  On the bridge was like being inside the bell as it was rung.

  My hand slipped around the straining wrist, and suddenly the bone knife was pointed straight at my eye.

  Even in the state of mortal danger, or perhaps especially in that state, I knew an impasse when it saw it. I did not let go; but I did not move, either.

  “You have come too early,” said the Black Priest in a low, whispery, almost multiple sort of voice.

  He had spoken to me like that once before, I recalled, the time when drunk on persiflage and an unfinished game of Poacher with the Tarvenol duellist I had dithered at the Lady’s Cross at midnight and been invited to the Talgarths’ by the Black Priest of the old cult.

  That time he had taken me to the back door and told me to put a phial of something into the dessert.

  Later in the evening I had been sent by the wizard who turned out to be the White Priest to the back door of the house, and there I had let the Black Priest over the threshold. He had kissed me—as a gift, he had called it—and made me lose my memory.

  Standing there so close to him, as close as I had been on that dazzled and disturbing evening, I recalled what else he had done between the kiss and the next moment I remembered.

  SO YOU ARE THE CHOSEN one, he had said, walking towards me so I retreated backwards down the hall away from him. You are the one whose magic is calling so loudly. I am glad, for so many reasons I am glad you are the one.

  Why me? I had asked. I was bound by the fascination cast by his presence, by what the wizard upstairs had been doing, by what I had been given to drink and to eat and to do.

  The gods choose us for their own reasons. They have chosen you. Rejoice: you are the way they will return to the world and reclaim their own. When the time comes you will learn what your rewards are.

  No, I had said, muddled but knowing that this was not anything I wanted party to. No, I don’t want to. I will not—you cannot make me!

  We speak for the shadows. The object has no choice in what he casts. The shadow has choice in what it graces.

  I tell you, no! I will not be party to this!

  You have no choice. You are chosen. It is your fate to be bear the glory of the restoration. It is your fate that you, son of one who slaughtered so many of our children, should be the one who will be vessel when the gate is opened. His shade will writhe with torment to see what his beloved son has become.

  THE LAST MOVE IN THE game of Poacher before the tales were told—or implied—was to turn over the Emperor Card.

  On the Emperor Card—if the players had counted the cards at play properly, if they were able to see from what was kept and what discarded the shape of a story that was not totally dissimilar from the one their opponent actually intended—on the turn of the Emperor Card games were won or foundered or transformed into legend.

  The Black Priest had not been the one to make a semblance of my father’s body. He had neither killed him nor faked his death.

  But he thought he had.

  Time to see what hand the other player actually had—

  I took a deep breath and with all my strength I pushed the knife away from my face and I screamed with all my might, “PAPA!”

  SEVERAL THINGS HAPPENED.

  Halfway down top of the cliff my father cried, “Jemis!” with a voice that opened up every single memory of him I had.

  On the top of the facing cliff Myrta the Hand cried, “Mad Jack Greenwing!” in a voice in which shock and exultation and triumph mingled like a burst of fireworks.

  At my feet my uncle screamed like a little girl, high-pitched and endless.

  And the Black Priest for just the barest moment wavered.

  I was waiting. I brought my arms together and twisted them until the Black Priest’s arms bent around each other and the knife started to bend at an increasingly untenable angle and although he was fighting me again, writhing in my grip and trying to use his feet to unbalance me, I was braced and ready and full of the assurance that I was not going to die today in the sight of my living father, I was going to win and prove myself worthy of being his son—

  And then my uncle scrambled to his feet and tried to run behind us on a stone bridge barely four feet wide and covered with algal scum.

  He slipped.

  I could not help myself. It so instinctive in the face of the helpless terror on his face to want to reach out—

  The Black Priest used my inattention to do what I had just done to him. The twisting was as effective as Dominus Lukel had said it would be, I thought distantly as it was my turn to have my elbows twist against their proper direction. My uncle was not quite over the edge of the bridge. He was holding on to the Black Priest’s leg, which did not distract or discombobulate him nearly enough.

  I supposed I could understand why Red Myrta was not shooting arrows at us now. Even she would be hard-pressed to hit only the Black Priest. I presumed she didn’t want to hit me in the sight of so many witnesses of good character and standing, etc. in the community.

  Boom went the drum again.

  I was looking into the eye-holes of the mask when the sound hit us. The pupils were dilated already with fury and frustration, but I could see a ring of white.

  What did he know I didn’t?

  What was making that booming noise, anyway?

  My muscles were not going to be able to hold on much longer, I thought distantly. Neither was my uncle. With each sway and twist the knife came closer and close to my face. I wondered what happened if the chosen vessel was also the chosen sacrifice? Did the Dark Kings re-animate the corpse?

  Would that be better or worse than being present in your body when they possessed you?

  Boom went the drum.

  I shuddered with the resonance of the
sound. It sounded like the river had when it dropped below me, as I so slowly crossed the tree trunk over the Strid.

  —The river.

  I wished I had made Myrta the Hand or Red Myrta or someone spend thirty seconds explaining to me what exactly caused the Turning of the Waters, and when it stopped happening.

  I dared not look down. I dared not look anywhere but at the white knife so close to my eye I could see it only as a blur of sunlit edge.

  There were plenty of times recently I should have spent thirty seconds finishing a line of questioning instead of rushing off to the next thing.

  My uncle cried, “Jack!”

  Both the Black Priest and I looked not at my uncle but at where my father had just jumped down the final bit of cliff to land on the stone bridge. The Black Priest’s expression was invisible behind the mask. My reflected expression still looked insane, but in a more gleeful way. I wondered with the distance that came with the world of mortal danger whether this was what I did look like just that moment.

  I held on to the Black Priest’s wrists and pushed the knife away from me and waited the interminable three seconds while my father ran down the length of the bridge. I was watching, my mind as clear and certain as it had been facing the dragon or running into the Forest. Unfortunately what I was most clear and certain of was that my muscles were overtaxed and were not going to hold very much longer at all.

  But it was my task to keep the Black Priest from completing the sacrifice, and I would not fail that.

  My father dropped to his knees, grabbed Vorel by the arm, and hauled his brother away from the drop and back towards the safety of the river bank. Others were there now, I saw out of my peripheral vision as I waited to see what would happen next. Several someones were running down the top of the cliff towards the next accessible point, where my father was even now pushing Vorel to go on his own, a flat spot where the line of red scum swirled into a kind of bay, lower than the level of the bridge by a couple of feet.