The Jack of Souls

by Merlino, Stephen

  “Take no offense, please, Brolli,” said Willard, “but to Arkendians, magic brings weakness. Harric, like any other Arkendian, relies upon himself. I don’t like how comfortable he is with that globe in his hand.”

  When asked what he thought of the spitfires so popular with the Order of the Dragon, Sir Willard was reported to say, “Damned unmusical. Don’t know how they stand to hear themselves work.”

  —Anecdote widely circulated early in the reign of Chasia

  23

  Of Herbs & Hauntings

  Harric tried to stand, but his body had grown so stiff and sore from his recent exertion that he failed miserably, doubling back over in pain. Willard plucked his ragleaf from his mouth and extended it to him.

  “Here. You’ve been roughed up pretty good.”

  Harric smoked till his mouth stung, and it quelled enough pain to get him back on his feet. When he glanced at Caris he saw softness in her eyes, but when he met her eyes she clenched her jaw and turned away.

  Willard said, “How far to the mountain pass you spoke of, girl?”

  “It’s at the head of this valley.”

  Willard grunted. “We could reach it tonight, if we pushed.”

  “There’s a fortification and gate in the pass,” Caris said.

  Harric found that funny. Even if he and Chacks or Remo had packed enough food for their expedition to their grove, they may well have faced a fort wall, too. He must have made an unseemly giggle, because the next thing he knew Willard plucked the ragleaf from his mouth and replaced it between his own teeth.

  “You didn’t mention a guarded fort, girl,” said Willard. “How’d you get past when you came through?”

  “It was unmanned in winter, but I suppose it’s occupied in summer, to protect the harvest.”

  Willard frowned. “We might find the guards sympathetic to our cause, and we might not. Is there no other pass?”

  “I don’t think so. The mountains are awfully rough up there.”

  “Maybe we worry for nothing,” said Brolli. “Night comes, and you camp near the pass while I scout it. Who know? Perhaps the gate is abandon and we worry for nothing.”

  “Unlikely,” Willard said. “The fire-cone represents a lot of revenue for the Queen.”

  The Kwendi grinned his feral grin. “Then I have a way we slip by.” The mischievous twinkle in his eye was unmistakable. Harric guessed he planned to use magic to do it, and delivered the proposal like dropping a gauntlet before Willard.

  Willard grunted and looked away, but Harric believed the old man knew exactly what the Kwendi implied, and tacitly—hypocritically—approved. So, magic is okay if it benefits Willard, and he doesn’t have to acknowledge it. Harric kept that thought to himself, but it might have leaked out in his look, for Willard avoided his glance.

  “Very well,” Willard said. “Stop us a mile from the place, girl.”

  *

  Harric fell into a rhythmic trudge behind Idgit, staring at the trail and seeing only the next spot he’d place his feet. As the sun sank behind them, and his shadow lengthened before him, Harric slowly emerged from his trance, aware of a strange sound around him. At first he thought Caris might be humming or singing. Or perhaps Brolli spoke in some pet voice to Spook beneath his blanket. It didn’t seem to have a direction, or it seemed to come from near him, accompanied by a hollow kind of echo.

  It was a voice. Female. Hysterical. It seemed beside him, a presence at his ear. He flinched, looking about, but saw nothing.

  Little fool! You’ll ruin everything!

  He startled. The court accent and intonation were unmistakable. It was Mother. Warped and strange, but Mother.

  Your destiny is nigh! The familiar, horrible wail that accompanied her worst visions seemed to erupt from the air beside him, setting him staggering to one side, eyes bolting from his head.

  “Stop it…” he gasped. “Leave me alone…”

  Another sound, a hissing and snarling, and she cried, Get away from me! I am last kin! It is my right! I have right of last kin!

  Harric clapped his hands to his ears, but the sound merely erupted into a gabble of voices like crows. It ceased abruptly, leaving him panting, standing in the middle of the trail as if to face an enemy. Around him a soft breeze sighed through the branches, a distant fall of water chattered over stones, and the horses’ hooves plodded heavily on the drum of the packed earth.

  Was this what it had felt like for his mother, when her madness started…a gabble of voices in her head? The Sight had come to her at around this age. Had it begun as a trickle, like this, and grown to a mind-consuming torrent she couldn’t control—visions of futures and possible futures slamming into her brain unbidden and torturing her nights?

  Perhaps Sir Bannus had knocked something loose in his head and set the dike to leaking.

  *

  The trail climbed out of the forest up switchbacks along rock faces that stood like teeth along the jawbone of the ridge. From the edge of one switchback they glimpsed the low walls of a gatehouse in a gap between teeth. Caris found a grotto among boulders in which they made their camp. Harric found a nook between rocks that gave him some privacy from the others, and there he rolled up in his bedding and lay with his back to the camp.

  Spook curled in the crook between his neck and shoulder, studying Harric’s face with white, glassy eyes. White eyes. Truly white, it seemed, opaque as porcelain, not merely seeming so in moonlight. Could it be the trait of an Iberg breed he’d never seen? He jabbed his fist in the air before Spook, who flinched as if it saw him clear as day.

  “Sorry, Spook,” he murmured, scratching the cat’s ear with one hand. “Just trying to figure out those pearly eyes of yours.” He couldn’t decide if he thought they were pretty or ugly. Ugly, mostly.

  He teased the witch-stone from his shirt, and held it close to keep it hidden from anyone who peered over the rocks at his back. Spook purred, watching intently.

  The stone had depths that belied its dimensions. Light bent in unexpected ways within it, yet no reflection appeared across its surface. Rather it seemed the dim moonlight directly illumined the vague depths beneath its surface. It was easy to imagine the stone in his hand was not a stone at all, but a hole through which he peered into a misty, starless night. Shapes materialized and faded. His imagination could make them into anything, like shapes in clouds, but they also seemed slightly warped, as if viewed through a bottle.

  Faintly at first, the voices returned. The merest hint of speech, fading in and out. No words discernible. Fear pulsed in his chest, but hope rose with it—hope that it might well be the witch-stone, not the madness in his blood, that brought the voices. But if it wasn’t madness, had he heard spirits? Ghosts of the dead? Did the stone draw them somehow? Could they hurt him?

  He shuddered, and closed his hand around the stone to hide it from his eyes. Though the whispering had stopped, it was only the knowledge that his mother seemed to fear it that kept him from hurling it into the ravine below their trail.

  Spook yawned, baring tiny, sharp teeth.

  A wave of exhaustion took Harric, and he slept.

  *

  He dreamed he and Caris ran off to be married and become knights in the forest, but everywhere they went, mosquitoes and Sapphire grooms plagued them. Then he was alone with only Spook at his side, and the grooms found him and surrounded him. He heard Lyla whimpering, and Mother Ganner crying, “Run!”

  Then a ring of dark-robed witches appeared between him and the grooms, black witch-stones in their hands. Together they chanted secret words and faded from sight: Nebecci, Bellana, Tryst. He didn’t recognize the words, but in the dream, he knew the witch who tried to kill him in Gallows Ferry had spoken the very same syllables to become invisible.

  Speak it! Speak it! the fading witches urged. Nebecci, Bellana, Tryst!

  When the last witch vanished, Harric was alone again, and the leering grooms drew closer. They never reached him, but the dream repeated. Only Spook se
emed slightly different in each dream—sitting in one, lying in the next—watching him intently with his plain milky eyes.

  The peasant priest’s god is Arkus, who has only three commandments: Worship no god, Bow to no lord, and Use no magic. Therefore it is the chief virtue of a peasant priest to deny his god and preach others do the same. A peasant priest is immune to the irony of this. His second virtue is to persecute magic, and the third is to free men from slavery. Scholars disagree on which of these is most hateful to Westies.

  —From Bloody Insanity, by Sir Millifred Doorge

  24

  Father Kogan the White

  Kogan tore a hunk of bread off and chewed experimentally as he found a comfortable spot against a snowy wall. If he imagined it were a ripe old cheese, the mold didn’t taste half bad.

  Above him the table ground against the floor, accompanied by urgent whispers between the yeoman and some family member who’d come in from outside or been hiding in the house.

  It was then he realized he could see. Something glowed before him, like mist in moonlight.

  A ghost. In a fit of anger he realized the yeoman had tricked him into hopping into a grave still occupied by its previous owner. “Just you stay in your corner, ghost, and I’ll stay in mine. I don’t aim to be here long. Then you can have it back.”

  The glow didn’t move, and it didn’t speak, so if it was a ghost, it was a right feeble one. Kogan chewed another hunk of bread off with his teeth.

  As his eyes adjusted further, he realized the glow didn’t hang in the air before him, rather that it was the floor of the place that glowed.

  “I’ll be hung and dyed,” he muttered. “It’s that glow fungus.” He’d heard of such a thing. Gods leave him if they didn’t say it soaked up sun in daylight and shone like the blazes all night. In fact, the only part that glowed was the patch below the hatch where the indirect daylight had fallen while the hatch was open.

  He considered a moment longer how this might affect his plans to limit his travel to the hours of dark after sunset: he was covered with the stuff. At nighttime he’d shine like a man afire.

  The knights entered the house with a rumble of shouts and hard-heeled boots on the planks above. The voice of the yeoman and his family punctuated the din with pleas of innocence and offers of humble hospitality, and pledges to hunt for the stinking priest day and night and report him the moment they saw him. He heard the sound of a second trap door opening. Muffled shouts followed.

  Kogan swallowed the last of the bread, settled back comfortably in his smothercoat amidst the drifts of fungus and rotten stair treads, and slept.

  *

  He woke to a fresh breeze and voices newly loud and clear in his close earthen hole. He’d been aware of muffled thumping and voices from above during his sleep. But these voices were no more muffled than the sound of his own breath.

  “Father? You alive?” a voice called from above. It was the yeoman’s voice.

  “Course he’s alive, Miles,” said a woman’s voice. “Just sleeping.”

  “Should we let him sleep?” Miles asked.

  A child laughed. “Wake him, Pa! I never seen a priest before. Are they all white and powdered like dumplin’s?”

  “Be a hairy bunch of dumplin if they was.”

  They laughed.

  Kogan smiled and opened his eyes. Above him a rectangle of candlelight had appeared in the ceiling of his grave. Three honest, curious faces rimmed the gap: the yeoman Miles, and what Kogan guessed was his goodwife and boy-child.

  “Reckon you sent those lords a-packing?” Kogan flashed his crack-toothed grin.

  The boy squealed with delight.

  Miles said, “Didn’t you hear them stumping around and hollering to beat the wolves?”

  “Might be I did, though I don’t much recall it.”

  Miles gave a sly smile. “Don’t nothing much bother you, do it, Father?” He slid a notched log down the hole, and Kogan climbed out. Outside, night had fallen. No light came through the window skins, but fire burned in the stone hearth, and bread and butter in quantity awaited on the table.

  The yeoman’s wife stood between him and the table, one hand extended imperiously toward the door. “Out! You look like you slept in an ash pit. Hang up them rugs in the barn and wash the rest o’ you in the trough.”

  Kogan chuckled. “You got a good woman, Miles.”

  “Name’s Marta,” she said, hand still extended toward the door. “You know anything about a Phyros-rider come through the north?”

  Kogan’s attention perked. “Sir Willard come through a day past. What’d you hear of it?”

  “These knights asked if we seen one.”

  Kogan grinned. “Old Will gave ’em the slip after all. We done it.”

  Miles and Marta exchanged uncertain looks. “And they named another,” Miles said. “An Old One. Only no one says his name in this house.”

  Kogan shook his head. “Them knights was trying to scare you.”

  “Them knights was scared as we was, Father. Hardly wanted to say his name themselfs.” Miles studied his hands until his wife made a tiny sound of impatience. “We was glad to help you, Father. But now as you’re clear of your trouble, you best be moving on. This valley’s a dead-end trap, so you best get out the way you came.”

  “Or else maybe climb up to that fire-cone pass,” said Marta. “Don’t nobody go there, but there’s a road.”

  Kogan opened his snowy arms to display the carpets of his smothercoat, white as linen in sun. “Expect me to hide out when I’m painted like a snowman?” He batted the carpets on his chest, and a few flakes fell to the floor, but most clung like greasepaint.

  Miles stepped closer with the candle, squinting at the stuff and frowning. “That all shining too?”

  “Glow fungus,” Kogan said.

  Miles and his wife exchanged guilty glances. “Gods leave us, Marta. We can’t let him go out like that. He’d be a lit up like a signal fire saying, ‘Here I is, come and get me!’ We has to keep him till we can wash that out.”

  “Glow fungus don’t come out overnight, fool,” Marta muttered. “Gonna have to scrub him up with boiling water more days than we got before that Phyros-rider come sniffing round.”

  “I don’t mind no glow fungus,” Kogan said, puffing his chest. “I’ll be on my way and bring no more danger to this house.”

  Marta snorted. “You ain’t going nowhere. No priest leaves my house looking like a sheet ghost. Get to the barn and scrub yourself with straw and water till it don’t come off no more. Then come back for some bread, and we’ll talk about you earning room and board while you’re here. First thing you can do for us is to dig the fungus out of that cellar. I reckon you’ll be hiding down in that hole again before too long, and we can’t have you coming out looking like a puff cake again. Soon as we get you cleaned up, you’ll leave us. I aim to be rid of you in less than a seven-night.”

  The existence of the blood-arch is traditionally attributed to moon sprites, woodwives, gods, and witchcraft, but it is the task of a tooler to quash such superstition. As our Master Toolers show us, the colors of the blood-arch have nothing to do with such hokum, and are easily created with light through a simple prism of glass…

  —From First Tooler’s Prentice Manual, Vol. I, Master Erkan of Wend

  25

  Locks & Magic

  Harric woke, and peered groggily around him. Spook lay panting beside him, green eyes glazed and twitching in the firelight. His pink tongue licked foam from his whiskers.

  “Shut up that cat, boy!” Willard growled from his blankets.

  Brolli beckoned Harric to the tiny fire, where he boiled water in a kettle. “I have tea.”

  Harric shook his aching head in apology. He felt as though he hadn’t slept all night.

  “Ragleaf,” Brolli whispered. He indicated the kettle. “Drink. Before I rouse Willard.”

  Harric almost groaned with gratitude. “Gods leave you.” He rolled to his knees and
gingerly clambered to his feet.

  “I have selfish reasons,” Brolli said, handing Harric a mug. “I want your help tonight.”

  Harric drank, expecting explanation to follow, but Brolli said nothing more. As soon as he’d drained the cup, he felt his body relaxing and warming, the bands of pain that held him fast loosened and fell away. Brolli filled the mug again for Willard, and delivered it as he roused the others. When all gathered at the fire, he told them what he’d found at the pass.

  “The gate is shut and the guardhouse occupied,” he reported. “It’s not a huge building, but its wall spans the pass. I think the gate is run by a machine inside the walls.”

  Willard twisted the end of one mustachio between thumb and forefinger. He looked groggy and weak, but his fever seemed to have broken. “You’re sure the pass is the only way? There’s no other way across these ridges?”

  Brolli shook his head. “Caris is right. The toolers took the easiest way when they blast their road through the pass. But I have a plan to cross without notice.”

  Willard raised one grizzled eyebrow. “Something in your bag of tricks?”

  Brolli nodded. “Unless you have another idea.”

  “Go on.”

  “In some ways it is better the pass is watched,” said Brolli. “Then they tell our hunters the pass is secure. No one has come through. One thing only I need for this, and that is assistant; I wish Harric goes with me.”

  Willard frowned. “Remember what we said about magic and this boy’s values.”

  “He does not touch a bit of magic. That I promise.”

  “He can’t see a lick in the dark, Brolli.”

  “He does not need to. We set out when the Mad Moon is high, so he sees enough to follow to the gatehouse. Once we get to the wall, all will be lit by the Mad Moon.”