The Jack of Souls

by Merlino, Stephen

  “Master!” the apprentice cried. The boy yanked a brake that jerked the tooler’s ascent to a halt. The tooler swung back over the road, face red with panic. The boy pulled a lever that dropped another weight and shot another noose upward, before he found the release that dumped his master abruptly to the ground.

  The tooler lay stunned and gasping in the dust beside the cabin.

  When he was certain the man still breathed, Sir Willard turned Molly and led Brolli away.

  “Ah…thank you, Master Tooler,” Brolli said from beneath his blanket. “I think I understand now, how it works. Very nice.”

  Brolli rode up beside Willard, hugging the cliff wall and bouncing in his saddle like an ill-stowed sack of firewood. He twisted around to peer through the hole in his blanket at the tooler, who sat dazed and choking.

  “That was most strange.” He turned back to Willard, chuckling grimly. “It was your hex, yes?”

  Willard nodded, brows pinched in worry. “I’ve never seen it so active.”

  “It is a good sign, though, yes? It still does not strike you. Maybe it will not.”

  “We can hope.”

  “Or maybe that is all it does today?”

  “Oh, no. It’ll strike again,” Willard said. “Once it’s awake, it’s awake till dawn. Near as I can tell, it strikes when I am in danger. In battle, say, or hunted, like we are now. Or when I’m with women—don’t ask me why,” he said, to head off a chuckling response from the ambassador. “I don’t understand it, but it’s so.”

  “Women are danger, then!” Brolli rocked with pleasure. “And women is why you are exiled from court, yes?”

  Willard peered suspiciously at Brolli. “A woman, yes.”

  “The Lady Anna, I think?”

  “How in the Black Moon do you know that, Ambassador? You’ve been among us for, what, a month?”

  “A month in your court was long enough for me to learn of the Sir Willard ballads. ‘Sir Willard and the Queen’s Maid’ was my favorite.” Brolli hummed as if seeking a note.

  “Do not sing it,” said Willard.

  “It is very catchy—”

  “Have I told you how I detest those ballads?” said Willard, trying not to snarl.

  Brolli sighed. “I will not sing it.”

  “You save me much pain. Let’s talk about something more pleasant, shall we? Like our present situation. If my hex strikes me in Gallows Ferry, there are many who could be in serious danger. Especially you, Ambassador. If I am lost, you must race through the outpost and find Father Kogan on the road. Tell him what has happened and have him block the road after you pass, as we’d planned.”

  “Race? I can barely sit a horse when you lead me.”

  “Run on foot, then, if you have to. The next danger is your identity, Ambassador. That blanket must not slip again. If it does, be ready for a lynch mob of Arkendians that will make our treatment of Ibergs look hospitable.”

  The ambassador grunted. “Worse than my reception in your queen’s court?”

  “We’re on the frontier, Ambassador. They hang Ibergs for sport. And Ibergs are human. No telling what they’d do with you.”

  *

  The apprentice crept to the tooler’s side. “Master?”

  The tooler coughed and rubbed his neck as the boy helped him sit. When the man had recovered enough to breathe normally, he stared after the Phyros-rider, lost in wonder. “That was powerful strange,” he muttered. “Don’t hardly know what I just done…”

  The man found himself perspiring, his hands trembling.

  The cabin door squeaked as his brother and nephew emerged and moved reverently to the tooler’s side. “You was witched,” his nephew said, eyes wide and earnest. “You was taken by a god.” The boy reached down and held up the tooler’s sweating, trembling hands, as if in confirmation. The boy’s father nodded sagely.

  “Taken by a god, master!” the apprentice yelped. “You’re lucky she let you go.”

  The tooler snatched his hands away and boxed his apprentice’s ear. “Superstitious fools! Ain’t no such thing. A tooler looks for a better explanation. A real explanation.” He blinked and tried to still the trembling in his hands. “It was the Phyros made me nervous, is all,” he muttered. “People do things when they’re nervous.”

  In the War of Creation, Arkus made the Isle of Arkendia as a bastion for himself and his people, free of magic and slavery and worship. Krato, jealous of his creation, hid altars to himself throughout the west of the isle and corrupted its people with magic and slavery. Arkus severed the west like a rotting limb from the island. Thus in shame was the West Isle born.

  —From Arkendian Creation Stories, collected by Sister Cornelia Barti. Found in the Imperial Library at Samis

  7

  Bastard Brains

  On his hands and knees in the back of his cart, Harric raised his head and locked eyes with the priest across the market. The man’s gaze burned into him from forty paces, dark eyes riveted to the curl of green paint on Harric’s forehead. The father’s beard was as huge as an unstrung bale of wool. He towered above his flock, and his already immense size was magnified by a smothercoat of square carpets through which he poked his head, so he looked like a hairy, walking siege tent. The priest drove his people through the market as hunted by hounds, and scowled the hawkers into silence. Yet his eyes never left Harric for long.

  Harric let his hair hide his eyes and risked a glance at Rudy. The stable master stood directly behind him in the cart, railing at the revelers, as several fistfights broke out between them and Rudy’s cronies.

  The priest stopped abruptly at the cart, and though he stood in the mud below, he still towered above Harric. The wind of his personal odor made Harric’s head reel.

  The priest waved his flock on by, but a stout peasant man among them paused at his side with a jar in his hands that he opened to reveal a watery resin. The man winked at Harric as the priest sank his fingers deep in the jar and began stirring a greasy unguent from the bottom.

  The father squinted at Harric’s green cowlick. “That slave paint?”

  Harric nodded. His eyes flicked to Rudy, who now traded blows with a reveler across the porch rail.

  “We only got each other, and no god will help us,” the priest said. It was the opening line of a familiar sermon, and a test, Harric judged, of whether he was faithful to the Three Laws.

  “No, Father,” Harric answered, in the expected response.

  “Do you see gods among us?”

  “No, Father.”

  “That’s right, you don’t. And why? Because they no longer exist, is why. Leastways, hardly anything left of ’em, and what’s left is as mad as a drunk cat and don’t merit worship. No, they spent themselves in the act o’ creation—passed the best part of their divinity into everything you see, including us.” He swept his hand in a circular motion, encompassing all quarters of the world. “All that you see is what’s become of them.”

  “Yes, Father,” said Harric. “So we must worship ourselves?”

  The father peered from under beetled brows, still stirring the resin with his fingers. “That’s the way of a breaker, not a maker, you un-sufferable pup.” A sly smile played in his eyes. “What we must do is at all times create, as they did, and fight the ones who live only to break and enslave.”

  “I will, Father. I do.”

  “I believe you.”

  Without warning, the priest seized Harric by the scruff of the neck. Lifting him into a headlock, he pinned him against the smothercoat. The woolen rugs stank so potently of body stench it seemed to collapse Harric’s head around his nose. Yet the fumes from the unguent were worse. When the priest slapped the stuff on Harric’s forehead it burned out his nostrils like he’d inhaled a compound of goat piss and whiskey.

  Floods of tears welled from Harric’s eyes. “Stop!” he choked. “Enough!”

  The giant scoured Harric’s scalp with fingers like knobs of granite. “Slave paint don’t come off easy,
” he muttered, drubbing Harric’s hair in the smothercoat between scourings. “Just lucky we had some resin left.”

  He released Harric as suddenly as he’d seized him, but kept hold of his collar while he studied his handiwork. Harric staggered and coughed, blinking tears from his eyes. The father frowned and dragged him to the edge of the cart. He scooped up a handful of muck from the road—which largely was goat piss and whiskey, or at least whiskey puke—and rubbed it into Harric’s hair. When Harric thought he could take no more, the priest grabbed the hair on either side of his head and scrubbed the painted locks up and down against a part of the coat that wasn’t yet green from the paint. There was no point in crying out.

  “There,” said the priest, releasing him and nodding approval. “See it don’t happen again.”

  Harric blinked and gaped, unable to speak.

  A portly peasant woman bustled to the priest. “Do you have to rub out every slave mark you see?” she whispered. “We got enough trouble without calling attention—”

  “Ho there!” Rudy called, stumping across the cart and grabbing Harric’s collar. “That paint was the rightful mark of—”

  The priest’s fist was as big as Rudy’s head, but faster. The two collided with a sound of ham dropped on stone, and the impact spun Rudy over the cart-rail to fall flat on his back in the muck.

  “Trouble, Widow Larkin?” said the priest. “What trouble?” He lumbered on, now at the rear of his flock, the matron hurrying beside.

  “Be a maker,” he said to Harric as he passed.

  Harric prepared to leap from the cart and flee, but stopped short when he saw the saffron liveries of Lyla’s ex-master waiting on either side of the market. In their hands they held cruel-looking staves. A quick check of the porch confirmed the location of the two others, short staves over shoulders. He was surrounded. Though the lord’s saffron blood rank wasn’t high enough to legally execute justice on Harric, they did not appear to be above murder.

  A couple of Rudy’s cronies helped the stableman to his feet, where he swayed as if he would faint. When Rudy could focus his eyes again, he glared at Harric. “You go anywhere, lord-boy, and I’ll kill you myself. I swear it. I been deputized, and I got the right.” He stared a general challenge to all the watchers, and with the addition of Lyla’s master’s bodyguards to his posse, no one contradicted him, which puffed him even further.

  He shrugged off his helpers and lurched up the stairs to a bench with a view of the cart. From there he directed his cronies to positions in the market north and south, “to make sure the whoreson bastard don’t bolt, and that Old One skins him proper.”

  Harric ran a hand through his hair. It came away pungent and gritty, but free of paint. The priest had been his first stroke of luck all evening since he’d felt the curse leave him after he’d completed the twentieth con. He’d broken a death curse! Surely he could escape Rudy’s grasp.

  As if in reply to that hope, a noble Sapphire rode in through the south gate with more than a dozen knights in tow, all in full plate armor. The bottom dropped from Harric’s belly. Sapphire was a blood rank more than high enough to execute the judgment against him.

  “Don’t tell me,” he muttered. “He’s come from court.” But this couldn’t be the doom. He’d won. The sun had set.

  The market’s din fell to murmurs at the sight of the noble, for none of so high a blood rank had ever graced Gallows Ferry; nobles as a rule avoided the shore, preferring the comfort of palatial waterwheels on the river. Many on the porch glanced at Harric as if they too saw his executioner in the Sapphire. Rudy chuckled, but dared not hail the nobleman, for the Sapphire’s aspect was grim and his shield emblem covered, suggesting some dark and urgent business of his own.

  The Sapphire signaled his men, and the knights stationed themselves through the market like shining metal rocks in the dirty river of peasants. The Sapphire alone proceeded through the market, studying the stalls as he passed, until he halted in the middle at Harric’s cart. Hard eyes peered at Harric from a fierce, clean-shaven face.

  “You will sell no more grain today,” he said, in a marked West Isle accent. “Pack in your cart and go.” He did not wait to see Harric’s response, but turned to address the market in general. “All of you! You’re done for the night! This market is closed. Anyone trades, and they pay with his life.”

  Merchant heads bobbed up and down the line. Those who hadn’t started packing in at the rumor of a Phyros-rider now set to pulling their wares.

  “Begging pardon, Your Worship,” said Rudy to the Sapphire, “but this bastard’s marked for your judgment, and I’m bound to tell you he’ll run free if you send him out of the market.”

  Harric jerked free, but didn’t dare leave now. “Your Highness, there’s been a mistake—”

  “I see a hint of paint in his hair,” said the Sapphire. “Why is it so faint?”

  “Rubbed off, Your Worship. A peasant priest done it. But the whole market seen this bastard lie to a lady, and seen the lord mark him, too.”

  Harric flushed as the nobleman’s gaze fell to his bastard belt. “Your Highness, I—”

  A stinging slap spun Harric to his knees. “Bastard, be silent!” the Sapphire hissed. To Rudy he said, “We shall stay the night here. Hold him until I call for him.”

  “Yes, Worship!”

  “Phyros!” someone screamed from the south gate. “Phyros!”

  The Sapphire cursed and struggled to turn his horse in the narrow market.

  Revelers on the porch pointed down the Hanging Road beyond the south gate. “There!” Murmurs of fear rippled through the market as a rider in black came into view through the gate, climbing the road upon a gigantic wine-black destrier.

  Like a sudden wave in a sluggish river, emigrants fled away from the south gate, abandoning carts and belongings. A gust of wind must have brought the Phyros’s scent along the cliff and into the outpost, for several oxen shied, bashing into people and toppling a grocer’s table. A mule jerked free from its master and galloped for the tiny gap behind the Sapphire’s stallion, and ended up crashing into the tinker’s wagon across from Harric. Pots and tongs and toasting forks flew through the air and scattered in the mud, like caltrops.

  “Back!” the Sapphire called to his men. “Back to the wall! Let him pass!”

  Harric saw his chance to flee, and stepped forward to spring, but the Sapphire’s stallion jinked sideways into his cart, toppling him hard onto the feed sacks, knocking the wind from his lungs. He struggled to his feet, gasping, but by the time he regained his breath, the immortal horse had entered the gate, bearing directly for Harric’s cart.

  It halted before him, violet eyes glaring, tusklike blood tooth bared.

  Harric froze.

  A Phyros in Gallows Ferry.

  Impossible. Sir Willard and the Blue Order had slain every Phyros during the Cleansing or else driven them back to Phyrosi. The only Phyros left in Arkendia were those of the Blue Order, but this rider was not one of them. His armor was black, not blue.

  But there was no mistaking one of the beasts of the Sir Willard ballads. Its scars were thicker and wilder and more violet-black than the ballads sang them. Centering around the eyes, the scars radiated outward in a mask of forking rays along the paths of veins beneath the skin. Thick as fingers, they clutched at nostrils and lips, probed like roots around the throat, and fell upon the chest like a shower of lightning. This was the work of an immortal rider skilled in the mysteries of blood drafts, and yet the scars were so numerous it was difficult to imagine where a new incision might be made.

  Harric raised his eyes to the rider, expecting a blue-skinned giant—a youth-eternal, transformed by the Blood of the Phyros in his veins. What he saw instead was a bull-necked man of some three-score years, with a bald head and gigantic salt-pepper mustachios.

  The knight was huge—there was no denying that. Plated arms as thick as cordwood. Chest like a steel barrel. His hawkish gray eyes glinted with the quiet confid
ence of power. But this was no immortal. Though his skin bore the traces of blue that suggested blood painting at one time or another in his life, it was nowhere near the deep violet of the true immortals described in the Willard ballads.

  Purpled from the Mad God’s veins.

  Blue-black blood, and skin the same.

  Moreover, his breastplate had been punched to accommodate a substantial belly, and his armored legs seemed so comparatively scrawny they might have belonged to his tailor.

  Harric stared as the old knight swabbed his sunburned pate and fished out a fat roll of ragleaf from a saddlebag.

  “Think you could find me a spark around here?” said the knight, in a voice hoarse and weary. “Might as well have a quiet smoke while I can.”

  Hawkers and emigrants who hadn’t fled out the gates or crammed the already crowded porch now peered from crannies between stalls or from rooftops of the sturdier booths. Heads massed in windows above, drawn to the sudden silence in the market. The air became eerily still, as all ears strained for the conversation at the cart.

  Before Harric could move to fetch the old knight a flame, Caris emerged from the crowd on the porch, a burning spitfire punk in hand. The rider raised a bristled eyebrow at the sight of her, apparently taken aback by her size or unfeminine clothes. Nevertheless, when she halted at his stirrup without fear or flattery, he leaned down to receive the flame.

  The creak of his leather harness pierced the stillness. “Much obliged, girl.”

  The old knight puffed his ragleaf to life, and sighed. He sat back and regarded the Sapphire and his men where they now stood across the market at the south palisade, blocking his retreat to the ferry. It seemed they expected him to continue north on the Hanging Road, as they did not block the north gate. The Sapphire returned the rider’s gaze, unmoving.

  Since the old man was not an immortal, Harric reasoned, he must have stolen the Phyros. The Sapphire, in turn, probably intended to steal it from him, or why else would his company travel with identities concealed?