Jinx

by Sage Blackwood

  Besides, he had a feeling that the door spell had been cast in the first place with the power from the bottles. He drew on it. This close, it filled him with an oppressive, deathly horror. It felt half dead, half alive, and he could feel it pushing at him, telling him how to use it.

  Jinx spoke the Old Urwish words again.

  The lock snapped open, and the door creaked inward an inch. Elfwyn and Reven gave little murmurs of surprise. Jinx pushed the door the rest of the way open—it groaned loudly. He stepped inside.

  “Wow,” said Reven, beside him.

  “Oh,” said Elfwyn.

  They were in another corridor. Its walls were lined from floor to ceiling with human skulls.

  Real skulls. Jinx saw Reven reach out to touch one and check. Oh, they were real all right. Jinx knew it. Hundreds of them, glowing greenly in the candlelight.

  Jinx started down the corridor, with all those empty eye sockets staring down at him.

  “You think he really killed all these people?” said Reven.

  “Yes,” said Elfwyn. “I think they’re the people in the bottles.”

  The skulls gave way to bones—first vertebrae, and then ribs, and then Jinx stopped looking.

  “It can’t go that much farther,” said Reven. “We’ll run out of island.”

  “I think we’re going down a little bit,” said Elfwyn.

  Oh, they could go down forever.

  Finally the corridor opened into a wide, vaulted chamber. In the center was a table. On the table were two bottles.

  One of the bottles drew Jinx’s eyes immediately. It wasn’t properly a bottle at all, or not that you could see—just a bottle-shape of wraithlike ribbons of glowing blue smoke, wriggling and winding their way around and around.

  The other bottle was like the ones outside—an ordinary green glass bottle.

  Elfwyn and Reven hung back, but Jinx went to the table. He bent down and looked at the green bottle. As he’d expected, there was a person inside it.

  The person was sitting on the bottom of the bottle, its arms wrapped around its knees. When Jinx approached, it raised its head and opened its eyes.

  Slowly, carefully, Jinx reached out and picked the bottle up. It was hard to lift—there seemed to be some force attaching it to the weird smoky bottle-shape on the table, and Jinx had to tug at it.

  The person in the green bottle stood and looked at Jinx, but didn’t seem to see him.

  Elfwyn and Reven drew closer, peering at the bottle in Jinx’s hand.

  “This one is alive,” said Reven.

  “It’s wearing robes, like a wizard,” said Elfwyn.

  “Yes, well,” said Jinx. “This is Simon.”

  The other two crowded closer at that, trying to shine their candles on the man in the bottle. The heat didn’t seem to bother Simon. He didn’t seem to know they were there.

  “I thought wizards were old,” said Reven.

  “It’s alive,” said Elfwyn. “Do you think that’s because he’s alive, and those people in the bottles out there are all dead?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jinx, still staring at Simon. How had this happened, and when?

  “What I mean is that that’s what I think,” said Elfwyn.

  “That’s why he hasn’t come to find you, I swan,” said Reven. “He’s down here in a bottle.”

  “I don’t know if he is,” said Elfwyn. “This might just be his life. Like Jinx.”

  “So is that what you look like, then?” said Reven. “Standing around in a bottle like that? Not hanging like those people out there?”

  “How should I know?” said Jinx.

  “Perhaps he’s down here because he’s in league with the Bonemaster,” said Reven.

  “Or because he’s already come to look for Jinx, and battled the Bonemaster, and lost,” said Elfwyn.

  “This is like a picture in a book that Simon has,” said Jinx. “It’s in a language I don’t know—”

  “There’s a language you don’t know?” said Reven.

  “—and it shows a man trapped in a bottle. Not hanging like those people out there. Alive, like this.”

  “That sounds like a book only an evil wizard would have,” said Reven.

  Elfwyn nodded at the bottle. “You’re going to take it, aren’t you? You can’t leave it here.”

  “The Bonemaster will notice it’s missing,” said Reven.

  “Maybe not before we escape,” said Elfwyn. “Anyway, we can’t leave it here.”

  “Maybe Jinx doesn’t want to take it,” said Reven. “After all, Simon’s keeping him trapped in a bottle.”

  “But that’s Simon,” said Jinx. “It’s not like down here.”

  Wasn’t it really, though? How did he know Simon didn’t have a dungeon under his house lined with skulls and bones and full of lives in bottles?

  An image of Simon in his kitchen, surrounded by cats and cooking smells, came into Jinx’s head. It was a world away from this charnel house.

  Jinx remembered Simon saying, Anyone could have power the way he gets it. If they were willing to do the things he’s willing to do. Was this what Simon wasn’t willing to do? He’d certainly done something to Jinx, and it had involved a bottle, and it had been pretty bad.

  But somehow—when? Jinx wondered—Simon’s life had been captured by the Bonemaster, and put down here in this dungeon, and used as a power source for the Bonemaster’s evil magic—things like turning people into bone bridges and skull cups, sucking out their souls and stacking their bones crisscross. For things Jinx suddenly knew Simon wouldn’t do. Dame Glammer could cackle and the Bonemaster could make arch hints, but Jinx knew Simon.

  “You don’t think he’d leave you down here?” said Reven. “If he found you like this?”

  “It doesn’t matter what Simon would do,” said Elfwyn. “What matters is what Jinx would do.”

  Elfwyn was right. And whatever Simon had done to him and to his life, Jinx wasn’t going to leave him here among the bones. He stuck the bottle in his pocket.

  “Very well. At least you’ll be able to keep an eye on him,” said Reven.

  What about the other bottle, though? It had power too. Jinx reached out his hand toward it.

  Blue sparks shot from the bottle, snapping and cracking.

  Jinx drew his hand back, and the sparks subsided. The ghostly ribbons kept winding and diving around it. Jinx reached out again. More sparks, louder. They spattered at him. He reached through the sparks. Elfwyn grabbed his arm.

  “Jinx, I don’t think you should touch that one,” she said.

  “I just want to see what’s in it.” Suddenly he felt he had to see what was in it. He reached out his other hand, and Reven grabbed it.

  “She’s right,” said Reven. “Leave that one alone.”

  “There’s power coming from it,” said Jinx.

  “Dangerous power, I swan,” said Reven.

  “I don’t like the look of those sparks,” said Elfwyn.

  Jinx made another try at reaching for the bottle, but Reven and Elfwyn wouldn’t let him get at it.

  As they left the dungeon, Jinx felt the force that attached Simon’s bottle to the one on the table stretch thinner and thinner, and then break.

  It was the twenty-ninth of August. The day after tomorrow was Simon’s deadline—the day the Bonemaster had said he’d find some other use for Jinx. Jinx had been trying all day not to imagine what other uses the Bonemaster might be thinking of.

  “He’ll kill all of us, I’m sure,” said Elfwyn.

  “There’s no good reason for him to kill you or Reven,” said Jinx.

  “You think he needs a good reason to kill anybody?”

  Jinx did not.

  The three of them were gathered in Jinx’s room. Simon was on the bedside table, pacing round and round in tiny circles on the bottom of his bottle.

  Elfwyn was watching in fascination. “Isn’t it kind of creepy, having him in here?”

  “Yes,” said Jinx.


  “Has he been going round like that for long?”

  “On and off. Sometimes he sits down.”

  “I’d think it would keep you awake at night.”

  “I just throw a sock over him and stick him under the bed.”

  “What do you think would happen if you opened the bottle?”

  “I think that would be a really bad idea,” said Jinx.

  “That’s what I think too,” said Elfwyn. “It was closed with magic, and it has to be opened with magic. And the right kind of magic.”

  Jinx thought of the spell Simon had done on him. What had really made it hard to sleep was thinking about himself, stuck in a bottle somewhere, pacing around in little circles like Simon was. When he thought about that, it almost made him want to take Simon’s bottle and drop it off the edge of the island and watch it smash on the rocks below.

  The other thing that kept him awake was watching the Bonemaster’s deadline creep closer.

  “It’s just lucky the Bonemaster hasn’t gone down to check on it,” said Elfwyn.

  “Maybe he doesn’t go down there much,” said Reven. He’d been sitting and listening to them with a small smile, like someone who has a secret. Jinx was trying not to be irritated by it.

  “I think I might have told the door that I’m its boss now, and he isn’t,” said Jinx.

  “Won’t he be able to fix that pretty easily?” said Elfwyn.

  “Yeah, probably. And he’ll know we’ve been down there.”

  “Anyway, we only have two days left,” said Reven, still with that annoying smile.

  “Tomorrow and the next day. One day, really. He might just kill us on the morning of the thirty-first, you know.” Elfwyn sighed. “Although he still talks as if he expects Simon to show up. Do you think he will, Jinx?”

  “Doesn’t look like it, does it?” said Jinx. “Look, you guys are just going to have to climb down that cliff and leave me.”

  “I’m sure you can do it too,” said Elfwyn, not sounding sure at all. “Well, you have to at least try, Jinx.”

  Reven’s smile broke into a grin. “Indeed, he needn’t, my lady.”

  He took a small silver box from his pocket and placed it on the bed with a flourish.

  Elfwyn lifted the lid. “Oh.”

  Jinx leaned forward and saw, folded up on the box’s black velvet lining, what looked like a tiny model of the Bone Bridge. It could have been made of mouse bones, tied together with thread.

  Elfwyn picked up a bone between her thumb and forefinger and lifted the bridge by it. As soon as it came out of the box it began to expand. Reven put out a hand to stop her.

  “It’s quite difficult to get it back into the box if you let it grow.”

  “Where did you find it?” said Elfwyn.

  “In a secret compartment in the back of a drawer in the kitchen,” said Reven. “I’ll put it back there tonight, in case he looks. But you can see, it looks as if the bridge is actually made of the bones of something quite small.”

  “No,” said Jinx.

  “No?” Reven raised an eyebrow.

  “You can shrink big things to hide them,” said Jinx. “But there isn’t any kind of magic to make small things big. It’s not possible. Small things just fall apart when you make them bigger. Anyway, we’ve seen that he has no shortage of bones.”

  “So now we can get away,” said Elfwyn. “We just have to fix the bridge to the posts—oh. I suppose it has to be attached at the bottom, too.”

  “That’s no problem,” said Reven. “I’ll just attach it at the top, and climb down the cliff, and fix it to the anchors at the bottom. There are two more posts down there.”

  “Then all we need is for the Bonemaster to be out of the way for a while.” Elfwyn sounded thoughtful.

  “He takes a nap every day,” said Reven.

  “For thirty minutes,” said Elfwyn. “That’s not long enough to set up the bridge.”

  “And get the bottles,” said Jinx.

  They both looked at him. “I think if we take the bottles with us,” he said, “then the Bonemaster won’t be able to use their power anymore. At least if we get them far enough away from him.”

  “Good. So the Bonemaster can’t send any more windstorms after us,” said Reven.

  “I don’t think he can have caused the windstorm,” said Jinx. “But at least he won’t have his power.”

  “Besides, it’s people in the bottles,” said Elfwyn. “Even if they’re dead.”

  “Yeah,” said Jinx. He remembered the feeling of the power he had drawn on when he opened the door. There was something—not alive, exactly, but real about that power, and it didn’t deserve to be locked up in the dark, serving the Bonemaster.

  “Good,” said Reven. “When the Bonemaster lies down for his nap, I’ll fix the bridge to the top of the cliff, climb down, and fix it to the bottom, while you two fetch the bottles.”

  “That will take more than half an hour,” said Jinx.

  They thought for a minute.

  “You can climb down the cliff before he takes his nap,” said Jinx. “He won’t notice, because you’re always off exploring. Then when he lies down for his nap, I’ll take the bridge out of the box, fix it to the top posts, and throw the rest of the bridge down the cliff—” He had to stop because he felt ill.

  “Perhaps it would be best if the lady fixed the bridge to the top of the cliff.”

  “And you can be stealing the bottles at the same time, Jinx,” said Elfwyn.

  “It still seems like it will take more than half an hour,” said Jinx.

  “That won’t matter,” said Elfwyn. “Because of the posset that I’ll give him before his nap.”

  “You’re going to poison him?” Jinx felt a little uncomfortable about this in spite of the skulls and all the times the Bonemaster had hit him.

  “No, I’m going to make a sleeping potion.”

  “You know how to make a sleeping potion?”

  “Not exactly. But I found a recipe for one in one of the Bonemaster’s books. And I’m sure you can help me figure it out.”

  “We’ll have to do it tonight,” said Jinx.

  There wasn’t much time left.

  They made the potion at midnight. The castle was silent when they snuck downstairs.

  Reven stayed in the great hall, hidden in the shadows, keeping watch. At the first sign of the Bonemaster, he would cough to warn them, and they would do what, exactly? They weren’t sure. Besides the door, there was no way out of the Bonemaster’s laboratory.

  “We could hide down in the dungeon with the bottles,” said Elfwyn.

  But neither of them liked the idea.

  “We start out with dragon’s blood the size of a hen’s egg,” said Elfwyn, looking at the book. “Mixed in with nixie’s eyeballs—oh, that’s not very nice!”

  “They don’t sell the eyeballs till the nixies are already dead,” said Jinx, climbing up the stepladder to get the jar. “From natural causes. Or anyway, you know—other causes.”

  Dying of natural causes wasn’t common in the Urwald.

  “The dragons too?” said Elfwyn.

  “The dragons aren’t dead. They just make a little slit in their underbellies and—”

  “Who does?”

  “I don’t know. I think the dragons do it themselves.”

  “They sell their own blood?” said Elfwyn.

  “Why not? It’s their blood.” Jinx fetched down the other jars, one by one: grated gryphon claw, bat wings, werebear hair, and dried leaves of night-blooming bindweed.

  Elfwyn had already started the dragon’s blood heating in a retort over a lighted candle and was pounding the nixie’s eyes and bindweed leaves together in a mortar. Jinx leaned against the workbench and watched. It didn’t seem fair that she was so much better at this stuff when he’d spent half his life in a wizard’s house. Still, he had to admire how neatly and skillfully she did it.

  “Are you listening for Reven?” said Elfwyn.

  “Y
eah,” said Jinx, who had forgotten all about it.

  “Good,” said Elfwyn. “I keep forgetting to.”

  Smack! Something hit the window, hard. Jinx whirled around and saw a white-green, rubbery creature clinging to the outside of the window, its skinny limbs splayed against the glass.

  It stared at them with yellow bubble eyes. Its mouth was a tube protruding from its face, with pale white lips working back and forth, as if they couldn’t wait to start sucking someone’s blood out through their eyeballs. It emitted a long, groaning howl.

  “What is that?” Reven was in the doorway.

  “The ghoul,” said Jinx.

  “Come on, into the kitchen,” said Reven. “The Bonemaster will hear that.”

  Elfwyn blew out the candle and they hurried out into the hall and into the kitchen, where they crawled under the table and waited, listening. The ghoul howled again. It sounded like the wind on a stormy night. In fact, Jinx realized, he’d heard it before and had thought that was what it was. They waited for the sound of the Bonemaster’s footsteps on the stairs, in the hall.

  Time crept past.

  “He’s not coming,” said Elfwyn at last.

  “I’ll go look,” said Reven.

  He left the kitchen, moving so quietly that Jinx almost couldn’t hear him. Several minutes passed. Finally he came back.

  “He’s snoring,” he reported.

  Jinx and Elfwyn went back to the laboratory, and Reven went back to standing guard.

  The ghoul came twice more while they were working. It stared at them with its big yellow eyes and worked its mouth hungrily, and Jinx wondered how strong the glass in the window was.

  “Hold this over the candle and agitate it, please,” said Elfwyn, handing him a glass phial in a clamp.

  Jinx shook the potion over the flame, gently, just enough to stir it. “It would be easier to just poison him,” he muttered.

  “You said we couldn’t do that.”

  “Oh, no, we can’t,” said Jinx.

  “It would make us as bad as him,” said Elfwyn. She was cleaning up the workbench.

  “I know,” said Jinx. “I just said it would be easier, that’s all.”

  “Well, we can’t, because he asks me if it’s poisoned.”