The Jack of Souls

by Merlino, Stephen

  “Have mercy!” the nearest grave spirit cried. It was the grandmother spirit, which had lagged behind the others in the bid to escape him. “Mercy! She forced us!”

  “Cut them all!” Fink cried from atop the boulder. “Before they escape, or they’ll be back!”

  Some of the swifter spirits had escaped the well of tide in which the grandmother was snared. These had retreated to the edge of the fog had turned to watch. Their faces were those of people, not ghouls. Mothers and fathers, the odd child—famine-gaunt, faint, sorrowing.

  “Forgive us,” the grandmother said. “Have mercy!”

  Harric lowered his sword and stepped back.

  “He will not show mercy,” said his mother’s voice. “For mercy is not what I taught him.”

  *

  Caris woke with a start. A noise had wakened her. She sat up, looking around the sleeping area in front of the hearth, to find Harric’s mattress empty. She felt a twinge of annoyance. Was he off on the ridge again, where she’d found him the night before? What the Black Moon was he doing out there?

  She stood and walked over to the door that opened onto the stairs, and found it shut. It might have been that door she heard, which would indicate he’d only just left. But the tall shutters over the east and west windows had also been closed, which was strange. Perhaps the shutters had blown closed, and that was what she’d heard?

  She crossed to the west window, her bare feet scuffing the smooth stone floors, and pushed them open. What she saw below froze her breath inside her.

  Fog. White mist had crept in around the feet of the tower, its fingers creeping up the ridge between the fire-cones. Harric had gone out to face his mother without her.

  “Gods take you, Harric!”

  She ran back to her bed and struggled into her clothes, cursing Harric’s name all the while. She grabbed a lantern from the kitchen and dashed down the stairs, belting her sword as she went.

  The Giants threw fire upon me

  Ice-smiting hammers upon my skin.

  In the War of Creation

  Who could I pray to?

  I found help in my own hands and eyes.

  —Arkus, Patron God of Arkendian Independence, from the Heroic Poem “The First Making”

  34

  No Master, No Slave

  The Lady Dimoore stepped from the fog like an empress in state, clothed not in her old gowns, but in youthful glory—in gathers of her own spirit’s strands, like a robe of glowing ribbons. In the Unseen she was magnificent. Ageless. Radiating confidence and power. This was not the mad mother Harric had known in the last years of her life, nor the mother that haunted his dreams. This was the mother he’d adored when he was young. And the vision took him aback.

  Her eyes regarded Harric with a mixture of pride and cool determination. She spoke now in the calm tones of a master in her prime.

  “The stone is evil, Harric. It devours your soul even now. See how it feeds on your strands? How it plucks them from the Tapestry of Fate?”

  Harric’s eyes followed her gesture to the sky, where indeed his own strands no longer streamed upward to the web of souls in the same abundance as the night before. Many of them bent downward and plunged into the stone clutched in his fist. “Thus it devours your future. I can no longer see your destiny.”

  “That’s normal, kid,” Fink said. The imp flapped down from the boulder to land beside Harric with a snap of leather wings. “And it’s good, too, since it limits her getting her fingers in your strings.”

  Harric looked back to his mother, stunned by her beauty and power.

  Beside her the imp was a scabrous crow.

  How long had it been since she’d been so in life? When he was very young, perhaps. The last ten years of her life her visions had worn her into madness.

  “As long as it devours your strands, you are a man without a role in the grand pageant. An unknown, without destiny.”

  “Like a wild card, right, kid? That’s what you like—Jack of Souls, and all that.”

  Harric looked at Fink. “How do you know about that?”

  Fink’s grin flashed. “Had to learn about the jack that took my nexus before I offered him a contract. Nothing you wouldn’t do yourself.”

  Bright strands flashed from his mother’s arm, lashing toward the imp. Fink cringed behind Harric like a dog that knew beatings, and retreated to the top of the boulder.

  “Away from him, you vulture!” She sent a strand snapping in the air between them. “This vile creature has invaded your dreams, Harric, hiding in that foul cat so I could not protect you. He is wicked. He is envious, and deceitful.” She turned her burning gaze on Fink, as if she could pry into him with her eyes. “He needs you, Harric—I see that—but for what I cannot tell, for your fate is now obscured to me.” She closed her eyes and rolled her head back, as she did when overcome by visions, only now she seemed not ravaged by the Sight, as she had been in life, but master of it. She frowned, as if frustrated at what she saw, then sighed and turned her gaze again on Harric. “This much I can read in the web: the imp wants you for more than your soul. You are a door to something he craves, and which only you can provide.”

  Fink hacked a kind of nervous cackle behind. “She’s holding herself together pretty good, isn’t she, kid? Bet you never saw her like this before. All sane and pretty? She’s putting all she’s got into holding herself together for this show. That’s how bad she wants you as her little puppet again. But test her a little, and she’ll crack. I guarantee it. And then hold on to your boots when she does.”

  Black fury rippled across his mother’s features, but vanished as quickly as it came, and she laughed. The sound was a wonderful, musical tinkle that made Harric smile. “When the toad speaks, he shows his black heart.”

  This was the mother he remembered from his youngest years, before the madness had consumed her—a lady, in complete control of herself, unaffected by lesser beings around her. Aches and desires long buried in Harric rose to meet this. But it didn’t match his memory of her in Abellia’s chair, when she’d been half starved, as obsessed and mad as ever. That’s how she translated to the Seen, he thought. How then could she be so whole in the Unseen?

  “You must abandon this wretch,” she said, with another flick of strands toward Fink. “I shall be your teacher, Harric. Free from my madness, I can be the mother and teacher I wanted to be for you. It will be as it was meant to be—as it was when you were small—I have seen it in the web! I have so much left to teach you. Come. Dig up my bones and take me everywhere with you.”

  The oldest of human needs ached in Harric’s heart. If his mother were no longer mad, might she not reveal her true love for him, the love she’d always felt? Might she not explain the mysteries her madness had cloaked in riddles?

  And it made him angry.

  Every detail in the last ten years of his life clashed with that dream, and his heart rebelled against it. Anger blazed to fury, boiling up from his heart into his brain.

  “You tried to kill me, Mother,” he seethed. “How is that not mad? If you aren’t as mad as ever, why the doom on my nineteenth birthday?”

  Her eyebrows raised in surprise. “Must I explain? It should be obvious. It was to drive you out of Gallows Ferry, else you would have stayed there to rot, and wasted all I gave you.”

  He stared, expecting more. “That’s it?”

  “Need I more reason than that? You would have wasted all our labors in an idle life of bitterness.”

  “You killed my friends, Mother! You tortured them with prophecies and killed them in that fog. That was all part of driving me out? They had nothing to do with it.”

  She shook her head sadly. “They would have died that day regardless what I did. It was woven in the web. I simply dressed it in fog to put the fear in you. I assure you, I arranged for a much gentler death than what they would otherwise have experienced.”

  Harric’s fury knotted in his throat as he remembered the misery of his friends. “F
orget their deaths—you poisoned their last years with your predictions, Mother. You didn’t have to tell them the day of their deaths, but you did. That was the worst of it.”

  She pursed her lips. “They vexed me. Silly boys.”

  “They were my friends!”

  “But all of that was before my death, when I was mad. Surely you cannot hold such things against me. And my plan, after all, worked beautifully. Not only did it dislodge you from Gallows Ferry, but it did so in the company of your childhood hero, for which I should think I deserve some thanks.”

  “Horseshit, Mother. I chose Willard, and I made that happen. You meant to kill me, but you failed. I beat you, Mother, and now you’re trying to cover it with a lie.”

  She laughed. The notes tinkled prettily. “Kill you! My dear boy, you make it sound so final. As if I would end your life in this world for all time.”

  “That’s what kill means, Mother.”

  She sighed, gazing down at him. “What a monster you must think me. But your thinking is limited to the present, Harric, to this version of you only. I see the future, my son—all your potential futures and all potential versions of you. Like branches spreading outward from this point, I see them.” She raised her eyes to the infinite web in the sky above them, where some of Harric’s strands still rose to mingle and disappear among thousands of others. “Some of these futures are bright—some of these future Harrics are even glorious!—but others are foul and ignoble, ending badly.” Her eyes snapped back to Harric’s. “When I say I mean to kill you, dear Harric, I do not mean all your potential future selves, only those that do not lead to our best possible destiny. Right now, that means any future involving this vile, usurping creature and its soul-devouring stone.”

  Fink hacked out a laugh atop the boulder. “The stone doesn’t consume spirit, lady. It draws it to the moon, which is where all mortal spirits eventually go. Natural, like the kid said.”

  “Lies,” she hissed, eyes still on Harric. “Cast it away. I will guide your destiny to a glory far above what this wizened impit can offer.”

  Harric shook his head, his teeth bared in anger and pain. But as he’d listened, his anger had clarified his thoughts, burned away all else but the most fundamental truths of what he wanted, what he needed, and what he was. “You just don’t get it, do you, Mother? You never did, and you never will. So let me explain it to you the best I can, once and for all.

  “Sane or insane, you’re still an egomaniac obsessed with redeeming your pathetic legacy in court, and as such you love only one thing: yourself. I know you, Mother. Did you think a pack of pretty lies and hopes would make me forget all the things you put me through? Did you think you could cast them in a rosy light? And there are a few flaws in your logic, Mother. First of all, if you can’t see my fate as long as I have the stone, then how could you possibly know that my fate with the stone would be bad? You can’t. It might, in fact, be glorious, but you can’t see it either way.”

  “Would you gamble with your destiny when I can guarantee it?”

  “I don’t want your destiny, Mother! I don’t want your glorious plan, and I don’t want your help, which I can’t tell from murder. The Old Ones are returning, the Chaos Moon is coming, and all you can think of is redeeming your stupid name. It’s the only thing you love, Mother. So I’ll serve the Queen my way, with this…” He raised the stone before him, and she recoiled. “No Arkendian courtiste has ever had the advantage of invisibility. None of the Queen’s enemies would expect it! None could resist it! With that power and the skills you gave me, I will make a difference for the Queen. I’ll accomplish more than the best courtistes that ever lived. That is a destiny worth seeking, Mother. That is the destiny I choose. I reject your lies. I cast you out.”

  He turned from her, but out of the corner of his eye he saw her stiffen and swell in fury.

  “Ungrateful son!” Her voice cracked with rage. “Turn and look at me!”

  He whirled upon her, his own rage tingling in his limbs, and spat. “There is nothing you can say, Mother. We are finished.”

  Naked fury now burned away her mask of calm. Strands of burning spirit writhed around her like the flames of a pyre. “I warned you,” she hissed. “This blackhearted impit will fat you with lies, use you for his moon, and feast upon your soul. To destroy you now would be a mercy. And indeed, it is better to destroy my masterwork than let its flaws defame me.” Her chin rose so she looked at him down her long, thin nose. “Goodbye, Harric. Your time is at an end. Now.”

  The grave spirits charged.

  Too late, Harric realized he’d left the protection of the boulder, exposing his back, and that while he’d talked, the grave spirits had encircled him and reentered the Seen. They rushed from all sides, but not from directly ahead of Harric, where spirits to either side of his mother had given her plenty of space—all this he comprehended in a single frozen instant, along with his only possible course of action.

  He, too, charged: straight up the gap, and straight at his mother.

  The nearest ghouls blundered past him, groping like blind things, which, he realized, was exactly what they were, since they were in the Seen, and he was still in the Unseen. It seemed by entering the spirit world, he became invisible in the material world of the Seen! Equally clear, however, was the fact that the ghouls, though blind to him, could still feel him and hurt him when they found him, for they rushed the spot where he had been, claws extended for grappling. Harric dashed past them, stone thrust before him at his mother.

  Discovering her mistake, she screamed. “Stop!” She backed into the fog, but he kept advancing, and the proud flames of her spirit strands bent and distorted. Several of the nearest strands sucked toward his stone and dove into its blackness like strings down a drain. She tried to escape, but the closer he got, the more forcefully the stone sucked her strands into its black mouth, until it had swallowed so many it dragged her backward out of the mist.

  “Harric! Stop this!” she screamed. “You don’t know what you do!”

  Harric pulled, and she jerked toward him. Real terror seized her, and she thrashed. More and more of her strands succumbed to the tides, cascading into the stone until he seemed to have her by the hair, and the only thing restraining her from flying wholly down the vortex was her grave tether, a taut ribbon of spirit straining back through the forest to her Gallows Ferry grave.

  In his right hand Harric raised the sword above her tether.

  “Stop!” she shrieked. “You don’t understand!”

  “I don’t have to understand. I know you, Mother. And you’ve played me for the last time.” Harric gripped the sword tighter in preparation for the blow—tried to end it, to set himself free—but his anger somehow did not extend so far as the destruction of the mad soul before him. If anything, he felt pity.

  “Take him!” she shouted to the grave spirits, who had reentered the Unseen, and watched from beyond the reach of the stone. “If he slays me you will have no reward! What are you waiting for?”

  The spirits only cringed further away, apparently fearing the stone more than her wrath—or perhaps they sensed their tormentor was about to be destroyed, and they watched in revenge. She cursed them, shrieking in humiliation, naked and stretched between stone and tether. “This is your doom!” she spat at Harric. “You have thrown away your destiny!” Whatever golden glory she’d appropriated for the night had abandoned her; she was now as gaunt and hollow as the grave spirits.

  Harric’s sword arm dropped to his side. He turned again to Fink.

  “What are you doing, kid? Don’t you want to be free?”

  “I do. But not like this.”

  Fink stared with blank white eyes. “What do you want to do?”

  Before Harric could reply, Fink’s already horrible mouth distorted into a hideous snarl, and his mother’s laughter erupted behind Harric. He whirled around and found her standing with both feet on the ground, her previous helplessness somehow overcome, or else faked from the o
utset. With a quick motion she gathered in a broad sheaf of her strands, looped them over his head, and twisted them into the fountain of strands soaring upward from his spirit. When he tried to free himself, his strands evaded his fingers like smoke.

  Her laughter filled the clearing, no longer musical, but strident and cruel. “I knew you couldn’t do it.” With a sneer of disgust, she pulled her strands taut, drawing his along with them, and plunged them into the stone. One by one, the rest of his strands began to follow, whipping past his head into the stone, and the more strands that fell in, the more he felt the insistent draw of the stone in his hand. Very soon the force of the draw became so strong it was difficult to hold the stone away from himself without using both hands.

  “Fink!” he cried.

  “Hold on, kid!”

  One of the plunging strands brushed the edge of Harric’s oculus, sending a weird buzzing through his body, and all at once he exploded into the air. It seemed the strand had hooked his oculus and flung him from his body. Fathoms below, he saw his stunned body standing vacant in the clearing, mouth agape, as Fink pounced upon it like a crow on a carcass.

  His mother’s eyes followed Harric’s progress upward, glittering in triumph. She reached out to the strand that had snagged him, and plucked it like a harp string. The vibration sent him whipping away along the strand like a bead on a string. Whirling, disoriented, he sped through ghostly fire-cones, farther and farther away from his body.

  He tried to scream, but he had no voice.

  Then stillness.

  He found himself standing in the fog amidst the silent trees. Caris stumbled past him, her soul as bright as a signal flare, sword and lantern in her hands.

  “Harric?” she called. She tripped on a root, caught herself, and continued.

  A violet strand from Caris swung past him, and suddenly he whipped along its glowing length, dodging fire-cone limbs, until he stood beside Willard in the tower. The old knight brooded at the west window, as if he’d been unable to sleep, sipping a mug of Abellia’s honey wine. Abellia, too, had risen for a nightcap, and sat near him at the table.