The Jack of Souls

by Merlino, Stephen

  In a shard of light from the moon, the squire’s dead eyes stared accusingly at Kogan.

  “It’s the gods’ war,” the priest said as he stepped over him. “In the name of Krato, you’d have done a sight worse to me.”

  Though life and well-being come only from the Bright Mother, and the Mad Moon gives power to destroy, such is but the endless round of death and rebirth in this sphere. In the Unseen lies transcendence.

  —From the banned Iberg tract “Void of Salvation,” credited to Lupistano Uscelana, Black Moon apologist

  33

  The Unseen

  When the door closed behind Willard, Harric raced across the room and opened the shutters to peer into the forest, which was now splattered with the silver light of the Mother. No fog around the tower, but through the trees he caught glimpses of the valley below, which was bright with silver fogbanks advancing up its sides.

  Harric buckled on his sword and flew down the stairs. Memories of the fog in Gallows Ferry made him tremble as he reached the bottom of the tower. Forcing himself forward, he laid his shaking hands on the bar securing the outer door, heaved it up, and opened the door. Nothing waited in ambush, but a mist seemed to exhale from the ground beneath the trees, where it made a ghostly haze above the roots.

  Spook mewed, emerging from the darkness beside the stable, the fur of his neck spiked and bristling.

  “Stay here, Spook.” Harric drew sword with his right hand and witch-stone with his left, and sprang down the outer stairs for the trees. Up the path he sprinted, stumbling over roots and plunging through patches of darkness and moonlight until he reached the clearing where he’d summoned the imp.

  As if he’d never left, Finkoklocos Marn awaited in partial darkness, hunched and bobbing like a grounded bat.

  “Took you long enough. Where you been?” His voice was that of a lifelong ragleaf smoker, graveled and dry.

  “In the tower. I wasn’t sure you’d be out here.”

  “Where else would I be? I almost came looking for you.”

  Harric’s first urge was to turn and run. The sight of Fink’s needled jaws and plague-boil eyes sent pricks of terror up his spine. It wasn’t enough to banish the thought of his mother’s continued haunting, however. His second urge was to tell the imp his mother was on her way with an army of ghouls, and beg Fink for help. What stopped him was the possibility Fink might fear the fog spirits and abandon Harric to his fate. He had to allow that it was just as possible the imp would help without hesitation, but Harric couldn’t risk it.

  “Let’s find a place farther from the cliff,” Harric said, thinking of the fog spirits’ attempts to cast him from high places. He tried to sound casual, but to his own ears it sounded like a squeak.

  A thicket of needlelike teeth glinted silver in the moonlight. “Sure, kid.”

  Fink stepped into a patch of the Bright Mother’s light, blank eyes turned to Harric, bulbous nose wagging. The creature appeared to be totally hairless, with skin like smooth black leather stretched over skinny limbs, and about the size of a seven-year-old child if you didn’t count his peaked wings. The wings almost doubled his height when folded, and extended a fathom to each side when he flapped for balance, which he did often, as if unused to walking or standing on solid ground.

  Harric started to move, but a movement behind Fink caught his eye, and he stopped. It seemed part of the forest began to move with them. Something huge was there, and very close.

  “HE’S PRETTY.” It was a grating basso voice, so deep it was hardly audible. Its vibrations set his guts thrumming, the hairs on his body on end.

  An answering wind like a giant’s whisper stirred beside it: “Brighter than the last one.”

  “Shut up, Sick, you’re scaring him,” Fink snapped. “Sere! Back off!” He turned to Harric. “Don’t worry, kid. They’re my sisters. Here to protect you.”

  Three gigantic muscled and breasted versions of Fink in varying degrees of deformity grinned down at Harric from the edge of the clearing. They stood at two or three times Harric’s height. He almost gagged at the sight of them. Gaunt, hollow, starved. Eyes like spider eggs in dry sockets peering down at his soul through the aperture in the top of his mind. He felt naked and vulnerable—violated—and unable to stop them.

  Here to protect me, the imp had said. Harric repeated the words in his mind, clutching desperately for their meaning, which eluded him in the face of what he saw. Even in that state of heightened fear, however, he realized his mother could be no match for them.

  “Protect me from what?”

  Fink shrugged matter-of-factly. “Seekers. Feeders. All kinds of things in the Unseen.”

  “You’re open, sweet honey,” said the third sister, a skull-and-bone horror with a soft and feminine voice. “Like a soft-boil’ egg with a little open hole at the top.”

  “My—head? The hole. The—”

  “Oculus,” Fink provided. “How do you like it?”

  “Oculus. Ah. Good.” Harric quelled a morbid urge to push himself up through his oculus for a closer view of the sisters in the Unseen. Would they appear differently in the Unseen? Could they look any worse?

  “Yeah, I give good oculus,” said Fink. “The problem with a new oculus is that they’re always stuck open. Sure, it closes on its own in daylight. That’s just reflex. But you don’t know how to close it when you want to, or bar it against intrusion, so any old sprite could reach in there and scoop you out like a dollop of custard. Till you learn to control it, my sisters are here to protect you. And believe me—that means you’re safe. No one challenges my sisters.”

  Turning to his sisters, Fink clapped his hands. “Okay, show’s over, girls. I got work to do, and you’re a distraction. Take your last looks and get lost. Shoo!”

  There was a nasty, hissing growl from the sisters. It seemed they swelled in preparation to pounce on their skinny brother. Then the air imploded with a concussive shudder, and they vanished.

  “See? I take care of you,” Fink said. “We’ll have a lot of fun together, you and me. Now—let’s go find that romantic, secluded spot you mentioned.”

  Harric felt like someone had removed the tendons in his knees. What in the Black Moon were those things?

  Fink’s face contorted. After a moment, Harric thought he recognized a twisted rendition of concern among the teeth and bulging eyes. “They upset you? Sorry, kid. Thought I’d be totally up front with you. Right from the start. No secrets. They scare the gas outta me too, tell you the truth. Lucky for you, they’re with me, see. We got an understanding. And right now you need those three. Believe me. I’m not big enough to drive off a Harrow.”

  Harric nodded. Fog spirits, either. It was down to thirty paces’ visibility. Empty faces formed and dissolved in the fog.

  “Nice weather we’re having,” said Fink.

  Harric followed the imp deeper into the fire-cone stand, gathering his nerves. Fink stopped in a small clearing fronted on one side with a boulder the size of a carriage. Harric put his back to the boulder, and tried to still his slamming heartbeat by calming his breathing. You can do this, Harric. You need this. The first matter he needed to clear up was the rupture in his mind, which the imp had created without asking. Harric had to reach deep beneath his fears, however, to find his anger. “You didn’t ask if I wanted this oculus.” His voice sounded tremulous in his own ears. “You just jumped me and poked it through my forehead.”

  Fink returned his stare, unblinking. “You want me to seal it up?”

  “Could you seal it up?”

  Fink’s leer widened. “I like you, kid. Ask all the right questions. Yeah, I could seal it up; I’m not a Mad Moon tryst that only knows how to break things.” He waited, one hairless eyebrow raised as if in amusement. “Just say the word, and it’s gone forever. But then you give me my nexus stone back.”

  “That’s not the point. I want to know why you did it.”

  Fink shrugged. “Maybe you wanted one. We don’t have a contract y
et, see, and some guys might like a little oculus to help them make such a life-changing decision.”

  A shiver of fear crept up Harric’s spine. The stakes had clearly risen above anticipated levels. But there was excitement in that shiver as well, for the danger also validated the promise of power.

  Visibility was down to twenty paces, and Harric saw whole figures moving in the mist. The imp stared at Harric, apparently unaware of the others.

  “What decision?” Harric said. “What contract?”

  Fink’s grin widened. “The decision of whether you’re gonna keep that oculus and my nexus stone. ’Cause I come with both. No middle ground.”

  “And the contract?”

  Fink shrugged again. “Regular master-slave deal.”

  A short laugh escaped Harric’s lips. “Ah, no. No master. No slave.”

  Fink’s eyebrow rose and stayed raised. “I don’t make the rules, kid.”

  Harric’s anger at bastard slavery welled up from deep caverns within him. “No slave, and no master,” he said, his lip curling involuntarily. “Not in my contract.”

  Something Fink saw in Harric’s face caused the imp to step back in surprise. He studied Harric. His eyes narrowed, then he seemed to come to a realization that sent a flash of hunger across the grotesque face. “You mean, you want a partnership?” He said it slowly, as if defining a legal term. “As in, equals?”

  A sneer was evident in Fink’s tone, but he waited in silence for Harric’s reply.

  Harric bit back his impatience. “Yes. A partnership. Equals.”

  Fink shook his bald head, long nose waggling. “We don’t do it like that, kid. The Iberg Black Circle sets the rules, and the Black Circle says master-slave.”

  “Well, this isn’t Ibergia, it’s Arkendia. And in Arkendia we don’t have a Black Circle, whatever that is. And we don’t have slaves.”

  The leer had frozen on Fink’s face. When the white orbs of his eyes faltered away in thought, it occurred to Harric it was Fink who was the slave in such contracts, and that Harric had stunned him with an offer of freedom. A strange and wonderful vindication rose in Harric as he realized he had just offered that greatest of gifts to another. It felt nobler than anything he had ever done. What better foundation, too, for such a risky relationship?

  To free a slave is to earn unstinting devotion, his mother’s training whispered in his thoughts. There is no truer ally. You yourself are proof of that.

  “Partners,” Harric repeated, extending his hand. “Equals. No more poking holes in my head without asking.”

  Fink looked up, grotesque face unreadable. A taloned hand rose tentatively to meet Harric’s, then drew back. Fink’s long black tongue licked the hedge of needlelike teeth, his white eyes darting about. “You see my sisters around?”

  Harric saw only trees, but shuddered at the suggestion of the sisters.

  “Yeah, I know,” Fink said. “Trade childhoods with me?”

  “You wouldn’t offer if you knew my mother.”

  Harric glanced at the thickening fog in the trees. For no reason he could see, it did not seem to enter the hollow in front of the boulder, leaving a clear space of twenty paces across, but now the figures in the fog were clear and plentiful.

  “Um, actually, there’s something I need to tell you,” Harric said. “She’s here. My mother, that is. This is her fog.”

  Fink shrugged. “So?”

  “You know?” Harric stared in surprise at the imp’s blank eyes.

  “I been fighting to keep her away from you since you killed my master and snatched my stone.”

  “Is she what your sisters are here to protect me from?”

  The imp hissed. “No, kid. We can’t touch her. She has Right of Last Kin. It’s the right of your last kin to protect you in the Unseen, act as your guardian while you’re alive. It’s an ancient rule that we can’t touch last kin.”

  “Protect me? She wants to kill me!”

  “Yeah. Ironic, isn’t it? But rules are rules, kid. We can’t touch her.”

  Harric blinked, dumbfounded.

  “She isn’t your everyday grave spirit, either,” Fink said, waving a claw through the fog so it swirled between them. “This fog is new. She must have promised someone something for helping to take you down. Probably promised that nexus stone.”

  “Someone?”

  Again the inscrutable hedgerows of teeth. A grin? A grimace? “Someone, something.” Fink shrugged. “Important thing is, it’s here, and it hides her and blinds us in the Unseen.”

  “What are they?” Harric said, pointing his sword at the shapes in the fog. “Why do they want to kill me?”

  “They’re spirits from a grave island, and it isn’t them that wants you dead, kid. It’s her. She probably forced them. Scared them, or promised freedom from their island if they helped.”

  “Grave spirits. You mean people?”

  Again the lipless grin. “Sure. All you Arkendians bury your kin on islands so they can’t protect you after death. They get real weak and helpless out there. Easy to push around.” He made a hacking sound that might have been a laugh. “All except you, kid. You didn’t bury you mother on an island. Bet you wish you had.”

  From the fog came shuffling and scraping of a dozen or more bodies.

  Harric swallowed, and thrust the witch-stone before him like a ward.

  Fink crow-hopped to his side. “Fight them with your sword, kid. They can’t hurt you in the Unseen, so they’ll manifest some kind of bodies in the Seen, and you can cut them down. You got the reach on them.”

  Harric stood ready. A face emerged from the edge of the fog. Mournful, hungry eyes racked with longing. It might have been someone’s grandmother, only famine-gaunt and desperate, the skin torn and hanging from her face.

  “Why do they look like ghouls?”

  “That’s how they translate into the Seen; their true form, mad and diseased.”

  Harric glanced at Fink, though he could not read the grotesque face. “Why mad? What made them mad?”

  “Imprisonment on the island. You people starve your dead. Drives them mad.”

  More faces emerged, eyes wild with hunger. Whole figures followed—crooked, hunched, and clawed. They crouched, watching Harric like wild dogs stalking a faun. Harric shifted his feet, his hands sweating as he clutched the stone and sword.

  “Here’s how it’ll fall out, kid. They’ll try to knock you out or take that stone, so cut them down as fast as they come. Be fast. Then kill them in the Unseen, or they’ll be back.”

  Harric’s heart pounded in his throat. “How the Black Moon do I kill them in the Unseen? They’re all—”

  Shapes rushed from the fog, gaunt figures on swift and silent feet, bony hands extended like raptor claws. No time to think, Harric slashed, clipping hands and slicing skin, backswinging across the second rank of limbs and specters that howled and dissolved in snarling agony. Claws tore at his breeches and grasped at his ankles, nearly tripping him up, but he kicked them away. The sheer mass of bodies and limbs came so fast it threatened to overwhelm him.

  A heavy blow glanced from the side of his head, sending flashes of light across his vision. He staggered back to win room to swing the blade, only to come up against the face of the boulder.

  “Fink!”

  No answer. The imp had vanished.

  He hacked and jabbed, clipping skulls and jabbing ribs. To his relief he found the space before him clear, giving him more space in which to work the sword.

  “Close your eyes!” Fink hissed, his voice weirdly distorted.

  “Are you mad?” But the creatures before him had halted and retreated to the fringes of the surrounding fog, beyond reach.

  “Close your eyes, kid! Cut the grave lines!”

  Harric closed his eyes and plunged fully into the Unseen.

  The immersion took him by surprise. Instead of peeking through a little window in the top of his mind, he stepped right through into blinding whiteness. In the Unseen, the
fog was a wall of dazzling white encircling the little hollow. Before him, in that bleached and shadowless space, the spirits he injured now struggled to move away. Bent double, as if laboring against a violent wind, the spirits clung to taut, glowing lines that extended from themselves into the fog. Hand over hand they hauled themselves toward the dazzling mist, glancing back in terror at Harric. Harric felt no overwhelming wind, but the spirits strained away from him labored against some mighty force. For reasons he couldn’t identify, they weren’t blown back from him, but rather drawn to him in some awful and invisible tide.

  “The grave lines!” Fink rasped. “Cut them before they reach the fog!”

  “Wha—? With my sword? They’re ghosts!”

  “Iron cuts in both worlds, kid! Hurry!”

  Harric leapt past the nearest grave spirit, unhindered by the Unseen force that pinned it, and swept his blade through its line. He felt a brief tug on the blade as the line severed, then the line vanished, and the spirit tumbled toward Harric—flailing, eyes wide with terror—as if dropping from some fatal height, but sideways at Harric, instead of down. Harric dodged, but the spirit’s trajectory changed with him as he moved. Reflexively, he cast up his hands to ward impact, and the spirit vanished into the stone.

  Into the stone?

  Harric looked around for the spirit, and behind himself, but saw nothing.

  The other spirits grew frantic in their efforts to escape. “Mercy!” they cried.

  Harric had moved several paces to the side, and the invisible force that drew the spirits had shifted with him—the stone, he realized. Like the moon from which it drew its power, the stone in Harric’s hand drew the stuff of spirit with its own peculiar gravity. To what end, Harric had no idea, but to judge by their frantic resistance, the spirits sensed it would not be a good one.

  Weirdly, Harric felt absolutely no equal or opposite force tugging against the stone. Totally unencumbered, he waved the stone to one side, and the direction of the tug on the spirits shifted with it. I haven’t the faintest notion what I’m doing.