by P. J. Fox
He turned to the sole decoration on his desk, a skull. A rather ordinary looking skull, except for the decorations carved into its surface. Bone was a notoriously tricky medium, splitting and splintering as it did, but a deft hand had produced this piece: the intricate knotwork patterns had been laboriously etched, and then darkened with repeated applications of a specific kind of ink. Rubbed in and then buffed off, over and over, until the carvings looked like they’d been lifted straight from an illuminated manuscript and the skull itself shone like the world’s most perfect vellum.
“Hello, Justin,” he said.
Two blue points winked to life inside the depths of the skull, floating somewhere back beyond the eye sockets. Two blue points that regarded him with a malevolence he found amusing.
“Or would you prefer Osito, as that was your lover’s name for you?” Osito meant bear in the former catamite’s native tongue. A catamite who, having been freed from his unwanted bondage, had no doubt returned to that land. Father Justin had met the boy during an interrogation, and had offered him a place in his household—and in his bed—in exchange for forgetting about the charges laid against him. Charges of heresy, Tristan vaguely recalled; something about translating the wrong book.
The skull just glared. How it was that a skull should glare, Tristan didn’t precisely know. But there it was. He smiled again, pleased with their respective circumstances. The former Father Justin was of course not pleased. He—it, now—had been pressed into service as a pixie. Not the creatures that children imagined but the true being: a kind of sentient presence that existed without form. There had been a myth, in Tristan’s childhood, that pixies were priests and priestesses of the old religion who resisted the so-called True Church. The church of the evil, conniving Southrons. The more they resisted, the smaller they grew, until they became little more than lightning bugs.
They were, he supposed, damned, but not by the church. He doubted that any in the church possessed such power, apart from the handful of secret necromancers who walked its halls. Pixies were men like Father Justin, or had been; men, and sometimes women, who’d been prevented from moving on as they should.
And they were useful: like a talking encyclopedia, they could be trained, or rather encouraged, to catalogue knowledge for their owners. Tristan could consult his new friend as easily as he could consult a book, and had done so frequently over the past few weeks.
Father Justin, of course, had no say in the matter. Having been introduced into his new home, a prison made specifically for this use, he could not leave without Tristan either dying—and thus severing the bond between them—or purposefully releasing him. Neither of which was apt to happen. “I need to come up with a new name for you,” he mused.
They’d had this conversation before. Multiple times. Tristan enjoyed having it, as it seemed especially tormenting. A reminder, to the priest, of his fallen state. “I think Osito suits you. And I’m sure you were, too; a ferocious bear of a man.
“Unfortunately for you, bear isn’t the compliment in Ispagna that it is in Morven. The bear there is viewed as an ill omen, the term used to connote a man who smells bad.” He patted the skull benevolently. “Of course, I’m certain that you bathed regularly, beneath that coating of pomades and perfumes. Or perhaps he simply meant that you were quite huge.
“At least, in relation to your member.”
Tristan had indeed examined Father Justin’s member, back in Enzie, while the man was lying in state on his makeshift bier. Death often did strange things to the body, giving rise to entirely unjustified tales of vampirism and who knew what else. Hair and nails seemed to grow, as flesh shrank back; the first stages of putrefaction leant a rosy glow to the cheeks, mimicking the bloom of health. And sometimes, depending on the cause and manner of death, the corpse vomited up blood.
But the most common occurrence, for men, was also the most mundane: an erection. Often a truly priapic one, that set in with rigor mortis and lasted through often quite advanced decomposition. Father Justin’s erection had not been priapic, although it had no doubt shown off his member to its best advantage. Father Justin should be perfectly happy in his new home; he had just as much cock now as he had before.
And Tristan had told him so.
“I want to discuss the runes,” he said.
“No.” The pixie’s tone was sour. “Runes are fortune telling.”
Tristan was feeling patient. “No,” he explained, “rune casting is not fortune telling. Runes work deeply with the subconscious.” The rune pouch, containing its host of symbols, represented the complexities of the entire universe. When one posed a question, or at least did so correctly, one’s entire conscious and unconscious mind were focused toward that question—and toward its meaning within the larger world. The runes that were cast and selected, therefore, weren’t truly random but rather represented the choices made by the subconscious. Yet another esoteric art that the ignorant interpreted as “magic.”
“Runes are demonic.”
“As am I.”
“You’re going to Hell.”
“Based on what I’ve heard from those who claim they’re going to Heaven,” Tristan said mildly, “I rather think I’d prefer Hell. Now tell me what I need to know; there’s much I need to accomplish, and not much time. There’s a storm coming.”
THE END OF BOOK TWO
The story concludes in BOOK THREE and BOOK FOUR of The Black Prince Trilogy, THE BLACK PRINCE: PART I and THE BLACK PRINCE: PART II, AVAILABLE NOW from Evil Toad Press. To learn more more about the world of The Black Prince Trilogy, read excerpts from her other work, and keep up to date with her latest projects, please visit pjfoxwrites.com. P.J. also encourages fans to contact her, via her website and via Facebook, and welcomes questions and comments of all kinds.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
P.J. Fox is the author of several novels, as well as the nonfiction writing guide, I Look Like This Because I’m a Writer: How to Overcome Sloth, Self Doubt, and Poor Hygiene to Realize the Writing Career of your Dreams. She published her first story when she was ten. Between then and publishing her first novel, The Demon of Darkling Reach, she detoured to, in no particular order, earn several degrees (including a law degree), bore everyone she knew with lectures about medieval history, get married, and start a family. She realized, ultimately, that she had to make a go of this writing thing because nothing else would ever make her happy. She invites you to visit her at her website, www.pjfoxwrites.com.
