The Jack of Souls

by Merlino, Stephen

  The ambassador chuckled under his blanket. “Your people love you so. It warms my heart to see.”

  “They think I’m an Old One,” Willard said.

  The furor rolled down the gulch like a wave, growing and driving the masses before it and emptying onto the dead-end beaches to either side of the dock.

  Willard restrained Molly from bloody pursuit, holding fast to her reins. He’d long since stopped feeling guilt or pity for the terror she caused, but he never let her sate her bloodlust on the innocent.

  Molly tossed her head, stamping sparks from the stones with her massive iron shoes.

  Willard slugged her in the neck, a gesture she barely regarded. “Save it,” he growled. “We’ll have real foes, soon enough.”

  He squinted across a mile of water to the opposite side. There was no river bank over there, only sheer granite cliff for miles in either direction, but somehow the timbermen who founded Gallows Ferry had found a fault at the foot of the Godswall large enough to make a landing. From there they’d built their “Hanging Road”—a path that rose from the water and across the face of the cliffs to Gallows Ferry. The two ferries worked the passage between landings, mere toys in the distance, had just unloaded, and now churned back, wood fires blasting from the chimneys.

  Willard’s spirits rose at the thought that he’d be across before sunset, but sank when he watched another ship emerge from behind a bend only a mile down the opposite shore.

  It was a lord’s ship: sharp-nosed, with three decks of ornate railings and fancywork trimmed in brilliant sapphire paint. A nobleman’s ship.

  “Gods take them,” he muttered. “It’s already gone sideways on us.”

  “What is the troubles?”

  “Sir Green’s master is on that ship, I’ll wager. We’ll beat him to the landing, but not by enough. If we’re to lose them for good, we’re going to need an hour’s head start at least.”

  Molly bared her blood tooth at the ponies she’d herded all day up the road, but the poor beasts were too weary to do more than droop their ears a little more and stagger a step away.

  “We have to break free tonight, Brolli. These horses won’t last another day.”

  “I could ride behind you on Molly, yes?”

  Willard snorted. “She’d try to eat you.”

  “Maybe we find some help in Gallows Ferry.”

  Willard frowned. A mile upstream on the cliffs of the opposite shore, the tiny outpost glowed in the light of the low setting sun, bleached pink on its perch in the cliff face. To Willard it seemed little more than a snag of driftwood hung high in a crack of the Godswall.

  “Don’t count on it,” Willard said. “We might find someone to delay our pursuers for us. But it might be a death sentence to the outpost, and we don’t have enough gold to persuade anyone to take that kind of risk. But we have an expression here in Arkendia, Ambassador: The gods help none, so help yourself. Arkendians live and die by that motto.”

  Brolli laughed. “It’s the ‘die’ part I mis-like.”

  “Be still, now, Ambassador. There are many eyes and ears hereabout.”

  “I am much tired of hiding in the blanket,” Brolli sighed.

  “Get used to it.”

  Willard urged Molly down the road, hoping a change of location might inspire a solution to their problems. Molly picked her way between abandoned handcarts and piles of toppled luggage, herding the ponies ahead. Her movement drew a chorus of fresh screams from the emigrants, who were now trapped beneath the bluffs at the either end of the beach. Many struggled with panicked beasts near the water; several strove knee-deep in the river against a wild-eyed donkey. A pair of herders cried out in vain after a sheep swept away in the current. Most of the emigrants huddled at the foot of the bluffs, wailing like rabbits in a slaughter pen.

  Willard drew in at the foot of the dock, where a knot of peasants stood their ground as if determined to keep their place at the head of the line. Some wise drover among them had put sacks over the heads of their oxen to muffle their senses and keep them still as the Phyros approached. From the peasants came the familiar chorus of fear, but there was something else there, as well—a note of defiance?—that pulled Willard from his thoughts.

  A quick scan revealed the source: in the midst of the group stood a Liberator—a full-blown peasant priest—huge and hairy, and glaring at Willard.

  Willard ground his teeth. The last thing he needed was some bullheaded zealot to throw a stone in the works.

  Like the god he both followed and denounced, the man was a true giant. He stood chest and shoulders above the tallest peasant, and a mule’s weight heavier. Also like his god, he was filthy as a boar in a pen, with a mane of beard and braids so matted it might have been a worm-eaten mantle of bear skin. He wore a smothercoat of woolen rugs that further magnified his size, and which stank so fiercely of soured wool that Willard maneuvered Molly to avoid its stench in the breeze.

  A verse from “Sir Willard and the Peasant Priest” tripped into Willard’s skull and stayed there long enough to annoy him:

  Don’t come so near, my fragrant friend,

  Your beard is breeding fleas.

  My sword is yours,

  Sworn to defend,

  But down-breeze, if you please.

  “Get behind me,” the priest growled to his flock. The men and women obliged, clearing the space before him to reveal his woolly shins and muddy feet. One of the priest’s hands clutched the haft of an enormous Phyros ax—ancient, double-bladed, too huge for any mortal but a giant to wield. Judging by its design, Willard himself might have used that very ax during the days of the Cleansing to sever the necks of Phyros and end the reign of the Old Ones. To the peasants, and in the hand of this Liberator priest, it would be a powerful symbol of freedom.

  In his other hand the priest clamped the throat of a little man in a dockmaster’s uniform. The man’s face had gone purple, and his eyes pleaded with the Phyros-rider for aid, but Willard made no move to acknowledge him. If the man was fool enough to deny a Liberator passage, he likely deserved everything he got.

  A barefoot matron slapped at the priest’s arms. “Run, ye fool!” she squeaked. “It’s an Old One! Run!”

  “Too late,” the priest rumbled. “Can’t swim.” He thrust the dockmaster to arm’s length and heaved the ax back as if he’d cleave him like kindling. “If I’m going to the afterworld,” he growled to the dockman, “I reckon I’ll send you first, you child-slaving git. And I aim to catch you there, too, and kick your scrawny arse up and down the sky.”

  A whisper of hope woke in Willard as he recognized the priest’s voice, and then the face behind the dirty beard. “Brother Kogan.” He raised a gauntleted hand in greeting. “Put your ax down. I require your help in the service of your queen.”

  Kogan blinked. He squinted at Sir Willard, then at the gigantic violet Phyros on which he sat, and then at Willard again. “W-Will…?” he breathed. Then louder, laughing: “I’ll be hung and dried, it’s Will!”

  “Come here, Brother, if you please. I don’t wish to disrupt your flock any further.”

  An exultant grin split Kogan’s hairy face, exposing several cracked and missing teeth. “It’s Father Kogan, now, Will. Father Kogan.”

  Kogan half carried, half dragged the dockmaster across the beach, grinning like a younger brother with a prize to show his hero. He planted the miserable man under Molly’s nose like an offering, and a dark stain spread down the man’s breeches.

  Willard hauled Molly’s head away before she gutted the man, and her fury at this latest denial of her nature was so great she nearly flung him from the saddle. A brief but backbreaking struggle ensued before he calmed her enough to reposition her, several paces removed. Kogan hooted the while, as if watching a bull-baiting. Willard glared at the grinning giant, grinding his teeth against the oaths that crowded to his lips, and the objections of his aching joints. He was never quite prepared for how dense the peasant god’s priests could be. Especially
Kogan. It was a factor that could complicate the escape plan taking shape in Willard’s mind, but there were no other allies on that beach. Kogan would have to do.

  “It’s been a dog’s age since I seen you, Will,” said Kogan. “Molly ain’t changed a bit, but I hardly knowed you with your armor all blacked. You still on the outs with the Queen?”

  “Do you recall a time that I wasn’t?”

  Kogan laughed. “Not in my life. Thought I heard she finally forgived you and let you take your proper colors again. But now I think on it, your armor was always painted black.”

  “Just now I am on a quest for the Queen.”

  “How’s that if you’re out of favor?”

  “Call it a redemption quest. If I succeed, she may welcome me back to court.”

  Kogan grinned. “Back to the Lady Anna, you mean. Better be some quest, Will. Her Majesty ain’t famous for forgiveness.”

  “Just so.”

  Willard quelled the urge to raise his visor to speak; if Kogan saw the mortal change in his flesh, it would shock and confuse him, and there was no time for explanation. The empty ferries were more than half across the river already.

  “Never got to thank you proper for holding that bridge on the West Isle whiles we escaped,” said Kogan. “Thanks to you, we liberated two-score from slavery that day and lived to brag it.”

  “It was a fortunate meeting—”

  “So is this one.” Kogan shook the dockmaster by the neck till the man’s false teeth flew from his lips. “You see this louse-bit, jack-a-pizzle ferry maggot?”

  “Has he displeased you in some way?”

  “He ain’t a maker, Will, he’s a breaker. Says he don’t ferry lordless peasants. Aims to make us wait on this side till we run out of grub, and then sell us back to some West Isle lord—mothers, babes, and all! I was fixing to drown him like a rat when you come, but I reckon a word from you would set him straight. That’d save me from becoming a wanted man in these parts.”

  Willard nodded. “I’ll see to your dockman. In return, you can help me.”

  Kogan glanced at the bound and blanketed ambassador, and cracked a conspiratorial grin. “You steal yourself a damsel, Will?”

  Willard laughed in spite of himself. “Indeed not. Queen’s business. A brace of knights follows me on this road. Another awaits me on that ship.” He pointed to the Sapphire’s ship churning up the opposite shore. “Those aboard hope to beat me to the landing.”

  Kogan scratched at his neck. “Don’t know how I could help with that, Will. But you say the word and I’ll try it; you know I owes you one.”

  “You owe me three.”

  Kogan grinned. “I always forget them first two.”

  The thump of the waterwheels on the first returning ferry had grown louder during their conversation. It was a simple, flat-decked vessel, with twin engines and wheels amidships on either side, and the control booth on a raised bridge spanning the deck between. It appeared the pilot had fairly raced the boat across the channel, so its chimneys glowed red, belching flame as well as wood smoke as he eased it alongside the dock. Dockhands tossed lines to deckhands. Ship bells rang, and the wheels reversed, frothing the green water to foam.

  Across the river, the Sapphire’s ship battled against the current, still three-quarters of a mile below the landing.

  Willard leveled a finger at the dockmaster. “I shall board one ferry, sirrah. Father Kogan and his flock will board the other. You and your men will speed his loading.”

  The dockmaster nodded weakly.

  The priest released him. “There now, Docky. That weren’t so bad, were it?” The dockmaster retrieved his teeth from the mud, and slunk away. Kogan waved to the matron who’d urged him to flee. “Load ’em up, Widow Larkin. Docky here’s gonna help.”

  She nodded, but her eyes scowled, avoiding Willard. “Don’t you make no bargains, Kogan. You got a flock now and can’t take no fool errands.”

  Commotion erupted at the head of the valley above them. Six knights emerged from the canyon from which Willard had come, and bulled their way through the emigrants who had regrouped there. Once clear of the emigrants, the knights drew up within easy bow range on the slope above. Sir Green rode once again to the fore, and surveyed the scene below him. Molly snarled and pawed the gravel, sending ripples of distress through Kogan’s beasts as his people struggled to wrestle them onto the ferry. Sir Green signaled, and a squire in red armor stepped his horse forward and discharged a spitfire into the air. The brilliant blue signal flare arced over the valley and water. Moments later, an answering flare rose from the Sapphire’s ship across the river, confirming Willard’s suspicions.

  Willard kept Molly between the ambassador and the knights on the bank, his eyes wary for crossbows, but none appeared. Indeed, Willard glimpsed bowmen among the squires, but Sir Green did not give the order. He simply watched Willard, as per his original strategy of waiting for his Old One. Green doesn’t dare take shots now that he knows I can be slain by a stray bolt, he realized. I’ll wager there’s an Old One who’s given the order that I am for him alone, or that I must be taken alive.

  Sir Willard leaned down and beckoned to the priest. “Listen close,” he said, his voice low. “This night is our last chance at escape. I need you to hold a bridge for me, as I did for you on the West Isle. Not with arms, mind. With wagons. Stage an accident after I cross it. Jam your vehicles at the foot, so it’s impassable. I need time to escape them.”

  “What bridge you got in mind?”

  “First bridge on the Hanging Road past Gallows Ferry.”

  Kogan nodded, but his forehead creased in concern. His gaze wandered up past the riverbank toward the setting sun, then down to his toes.

  “What’s wrong, Kogan? Worried about what your woman said?”

  The priest grimaced. “Widow Larkin ain’t no trouble. She listens to sense. Still…she got me thinking, Will, or wondering, I guess, whether you still got that night hex on you…”

  A stone of guilt sank in Willard’s belly. Kogan knew his curse. He’d seen it that night in West Isle, so there was no denying it or playing down its hazard.

  Willard nodded. “It’s with me.”

  “Guess I knew that. No offense, Will, but I can’t have my flock around you when the sun sets. That’s a whopper of a hex, and it ain’t nothing I can cast out—you know I tried—so it’s some other kind than the sort I know.” He made the sign of the heart in the air between them. “It’s just that we don’t need no more trouble than we already got.”

  “You know I don’t wish to endanger you.”

  A chuckle from behind the knotted beard. “You never want it, but it happens anyway.”

  The Widow Larkin called. The flock had filled their ferry and now huddled between the houses under the control booth on the bridge. Father Kogan acknowledged her with a wave, then shrugged to Willard. “I owes you, Will. So I’ll help you. That’s that. But no man can slow the sunset. I reckon this oughta be worth all three what I owes you.”

  Sir Willard grinned in his helmet. Was that all he wanted? To bargain away his debts? “Done,” Willard said. “I can count on you?”

  Kogan hooted with laughter and strode to the dock, bare feet slapping the mud. “Be a maker, Will!” he called. He laid a good-natured smack on the dockmaster’s back and vaulted onto the deck of the ferry. “We’re going to the Free Lands!” he bellowed. “Free land and freedom for all!”

  The tooler in the control booth sounded his bell. Bells answered from the engine houses, and the great waterwheels stirred to life, churning the river against the shore in turbid green waves. The vessel dragged from the bank and swung into the current, smoke plumes boiling from its chimneys like the wings of a mounting swan.

  *

  Willard herded the ponies onto the open deck of the remaining ferry. The shouts and scurries of its deckhands choked off the moment they sighted Molly and knew it was their fate to carry her across the water. Several retreated to the dock, while
others hid in nooks behind the engine rooms; the woodmen dumped a hurried load of firewood in the holds and departed as soon as Molly’s hooves drummed past them to the foredeck, where Willard reined her in with his ponies and mysterious passenger. At Willard’s signal, the pilot rang his bell, the toolers engaged the engines, and the ship set out at full steam in Kogan’s wake.

  A glance back at shore confirmed that Sir Green and his company descended the valley for the dock.

  Ahead of him, Kogan’s ferry plowed along, heavy in the water with peasants and beasts. Their boarding had been rushed, or Willard would have given orders for them to follow him across. He hadn’t expected Kogan to signal the departure.

  Willard shouted to the pilot above the din of the wheels. “Pull ahead! I must land first.”

  The pilot’s pale face appeared above the bridge rail; he nodded once and disappeared into his booth. A bell rang. More bells answered in the engine rooms, and the rhythm of the engine beams increased, churning the wheels even harder. The ferry drew up on the stern of Kogan’s vessel, which labored low in the water, then veered to pass on the downstream side. As Willard’s boat drew abreast, a spine-ripping shriek erupted from its starboard engine house. Brilliant steam burst up through its roof, splintering planking and blasting it into the air.

  The starboard wheel halted. The ferry swerved downstream, staggering Molly and the ponies sideways. Thankfully the ponies were too weary to spook, but Molly whirled and snarled and pawed the planks.

  Bells rang, men shouted, toolers ran from one engine house to the other as the ferry lost its thrust against the current, and whirled downstream among the shoals.

  The pilot managed to slow the port wheel and correct with the rudders enough to halt the spin and turn it upstream. By the time he had matched speed against the current, however, they held position many boat lengths down the river, and Kogan’s ferry was far ahead and nearly at the harbor landing.

  Willard’s pilot appeared before him on the deck, hat in hands. He bowed from a respectful distance. “Begging your pardon, Your Holiness,” he said, voice trembling. “A hot-pipe blew. Lucky the whole kettle didn’t go. That would’ve done for us all. We’ll make it across, I reckon, but only just.”