The Jack of Souls: A Rogue and Knight Epic Fantasy Series (The Unseen Moon - Epic Fantasy Series Book 1)

by Stephen Merlino

  The scent of spiced perfume reached Harric’s nose. Aconite, also called “witch cloud,” he thought, as if it were one of his mother’s blindfold tests in courtly tinctures. Aconite is an Iberg favorite: mildly stimulating, anxiety inducing if used in incense, associated with magic.

  As if to confirm the correlation, the man muttered something in the rich, round syllables of the Iberg language as he slipped a hand into his shirt, removing it with something clasped in his fist.

  Then he vanished.

  One moment the Iberg was there—the next, he simply wasn’t.

  The old knight cursed.

  Harric stared in astonishment at the spot where the man had been. He’d heard tales of witches using the power of their witch-stones to enact incredible feats of stealth, but he’d never dreamed he’d see it. How vain he’d been to think himself invisible by virtue of his stillness and the man’s ill-adjusted eyes! Harric felt naked and vulnerable, his own tactic rebounding against him with double the force, but remained motionless in hope he had not been spotted.

  “I don’t fear your magic, witch,” the old knight rumbled, suddenly loud in the darkness. “You won’t be the first witch Belle’s tasted, nor the last.” The scrape and chime of steel on steel suggested the drawing of a long and well-tuned sword. A brag, perhaps, but a convincing one: most Arkendian knights would have pissed themselves in the presence of such magic, but the old knight seemed truly unfazed. Harric remained motionless, letting the knight draw the witch’s attention until Harric could pinpoint the Iberg’s location and…what? If he could grapple him, he might find his witch-stone and take it away. That would make him visible, Harric guessed, since it was a witch’s source of magic.

  “I see you,” said a voice with a thick Iberg accent. The voice sounded hollow and distant, as if passed through a pipe, which confused Harric’s sense of its location. “You put us to such troubles today.”

  “I don’t need to see you to kill you,” the old man said.

  “And who is this? Una tricola bambi! Ha-ha! Do you know she follows you? No? You no see her. She is clever. Aha! She try to protect you! So much now come clear.”

  Harric had no memory of tricola bambi from his Iberg lessons, but he saw no sign of anyone else in the stable yard. He felt his heart thumping harder in his chest. Keep your eyes on the old man, he willed the invisible Iberg. Give me a clue where you are, and I’ll have that stone before you even know I’m here.

  Harric’s heart stopped for a beat as another thought crashed through his fears. What if the magic of that witch-stone would keep Mother away? His heart beat faster. You have to fight magic with magic…right?

  The door at the side of the lodge flew open again, followed by an enormous knight in orange silks and cloak, and a torchbearer with a half-dozen young knights. All wore swords, but none wore armor. Harric tensed to flee, but the old man made no move, so he forced himself to stay.

  “There!” cried the torchbearer, pointing to the old knight in the shadows. “I told you I saw him!”

  The orange knight grinned, and flipped a coin to the torch boy, who caught it, beaming, and stood back to watch. Sir Orange drew his sword with a flourish and strolled forward, and his companions followed suit with a chorus of chiming steel.

  The old knight limped back to put the stable doors behind him, and took a stand there as his enemies formed a semicircle before him. Harric remained crouched behind the barrels, only paces from the nearest knight. He discarded the idea of running to open the doors behind the old knight so they could escape inside; if the stable boys had done their duty, the doors would have been barred at sunset. Harric himself could slip into the crack between the stable and the inn at the corner of the yard—a narrow rat run that opened on the other side of the stable on a scaffold cantilevered over the river—but the old knight would never squeeze in the gap, even without his armor.

  “Stay down, son,” the old man muttered. “Brolli, you try to find that witch.”

  Harric had no idea if he’d been spotted by the witch, and the witch had given him no clue of his location.

  The old knight wrapped his cloak around his left forearm as a shield, and raised his sword vertically before him in both hands, hilt at a level with his shoulders. He chanted, his voice flat with ritual:

  “Though you wound me I die not.

  Yet there will be honor in your passing.”

  The words sent a shiver down Harric’s spine; it was the Salute of the Blue Order, and in the ballads it preceded the death of wicked knights. Several of the younger knights before him seemed also to feel its power, for they paused, eyes darting furtively at their leader.

  The orange-clad knight laughed, white teeth flashing in a well-combed beard. “Words to frighten children! Don’t let his name fool you. This is no ballad knight or champion. This is an old man who can barely stand without a prop. And, boys, you fight beside Sir Yolan!” He thumped his chest with a fist. “And Sir Yolan never bows.”

  The old man grunted. “It’s as a good a night as any to go to the Black Moon, Sir Yolan.” He completed his salute in the old-fashioned hilt-to-forehead manner, but when his opponents failed to return it, he snorted in disgust. “You’re no knights. You’re cutthroats. You’re the reason our queen makes knights of women.”

  Sir Yolan lunged, and three of his companions joined in a simultaneous attack. Steel clashed, and a blade sparked across the old man’s breastplate. One of Yolan’s companions fell heavily. As the others fell back, the old man’s sword pursued for half a beat longer. A young knight yelped and dropped his sword, a finger severed.

  It had happened too quickly to track, yet the old man moved so positively and powerfully that the others seemed like children with wooden training swords. Moreover, what they just witnessed was so clearly at odds with Sir Yolan’s boast that his remaining companions stood stricken, staring as blood pooled around the fallen.

  An eerie voice irrupted from the air beneath the eaves.

  “Nebecci, Destego!” Iberg words, unknown to Harric. The moment he heard them, an icy pain seized his heart, and he fell to his knees.

  “Nebecci, Destego, Raghat!”

  The old knight bent as if kicked in the gut.

  Harric watched helplessly as his protector stumbled into a barrel, one hand clawing at the armor over his heart. Only Brolli remained unassailed by the magic, hiding somewhere in the darkness above.

  “To him!” cried Yolan. Leaping over his fallen companions, Yolan swept his blade over his head and downward in a devastating two-handed blow that the old knight barely parried. Yolan grinned, pressing his advantage, until he retreated and whirled to face a fourth knight, who had emerged from the darkness behind him to haul him away from the old man by the tail of his cloak.

  Harric stared in shock. Caris!

  As Yolan whirled, his blade whirled with him in a hissing head-high sweep. Caris ducked and lunged beneath the cut. With one hand she flipped his cloak up over his blade, while the other guided the tip of her sword to lick beneath his beard. Yolan lurched back, a lock of beard falling to the ground. As he attempted to disengage his cloak from his blade, Caris brought her blade down hard on Yolan’s wrist and sent his sword spinning to the dirt. Yolan roared in pain. With surprising speed, he bent and snatched up his sword, but Caris was quicker. Her blade darted again beneath his beard, and this time it loosed a gush of scarlet like she’d broached a wine keg.

  The eerie voice echoed nearer to Harric: “Destego!” The pain in his heart redoubled. Expecting the invisible Iberg to knife him at any moment, he slung his pack around to his front and donned it backwards as a kind of improvised armor. Unexpectedly, the pain in his chest diminished, as if the pack also shielded him from magic. He took advantage of the temporary reprieve by fumbling it open and drawing out his saddle knife and cloak. With one hand he slashed the knife through the air before him, and with the other he whipped the cloak out in an attempt to reveal the witch’s location. Making no contact, he toppled an em
pty rain barrel to one side, so as to obstruct one direction of approach.

  “Destego!”

  Again the terrible pain in his breast, this time so severe he convulsed and fell flat on his back in the dirt. Above him the dark sky whirled, half star fields, half torch-lit eaves. Brolli’s strange face appeared over the eaves to look down at Harric, round eyes glowing like a cat’s.

  Harric flung his cloak out one last time, and this time it collided with something at his feet and fell there, rebuffed. Brolli launched himself from the eaves, long arms spread for a flying embrace. His descent halted abruptly in the air, where he sprawled and grappled with an unseen opponent, then the Iberg appeared beneath him, eyes white with surprise, and the icy hand vanished from Harric’s heart. In the next moment the witch and Brolli collapsed upon him, and the weight of the two men forced the wind from Harric’s lungs. The witch’s stubbled cheek squashed against Harric’s. In spite of all, Harric had the presence of mind to drop his knife and immobilize the man’s arms in a desperate embrace, but just as he secured them, the witch’s head dashed sideways with a concussive shock and the man went limp upon him.

  Brolli peeked down over the Iberg’s shoulder, round golden eyes like coins in a flat, hairless face. He grinned, exposing huge canines. “Good!” he said, then turned and disappeared from Harric’s view.

  Something leaked on Harric’s cheek from the Iberg’s head. “Moons!” he gasped, “Get him off me!” But no one came. He struggled under a welter of perfumed cape. The pain of his ribs screamed with the effort. When he finally managed to flop one of the man’s arms sideways into the dust, something rolled from the dead fingers and stopped directly before Harric’s eyes.

  A glassy globe the size of an egg, night black, yet oddly luminescent. The witch-stone.

  Harric palmed it.

  By the time he squirmed free of the dead man’s embrace and struggled to his feet, the fight in the yard appeared over. The dead Iberg lay tangled in the blue cape that marked him as “protected” by the Sapphire lord. It had kept anyone from getting the idea to hang him while in Arkendia, but fortunately did nothing to protect against cudgels. The old knight leaned on his sword, breathing raggedly, all his opponents motionless and prone, but for the whimpering torch boy and a squire who knelt before Brolli.

  “Stop crying,” Brolli said, as he bound their hands and gagged them. “Be glad. You live to tell the ballad of Sir Willard and the Foolish Yolan.”

  “What the Black Moon took you so long, Brolli?” the old knight growled.

  Brolli gave another wolfish grin. “I see in night light, but I cannot see into the Unseen. And I only use ma—” He seemed to catch himself. “—my people’s weapons if we are dying, remember? You are not yet dying.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Caris stared down at the inert forms of Sir Yolan and a young knight at her feet, her armor spattered with blood.

  “First kill, son?” the old man croaked, mistaking her sex in the armor. “It gets easier. But that’s the trouble with it, mostly. To whom do I owe my thanks?” No reply from Caris. “Well, you were most welcome here. Damned witch had me falling over with a heart stroke.”

  Caris moaned, and dropped her sword in the dust. Hands on her ears, she fell to her knees and rocked back and forth.

  Harric rubbed his chest, where his fingers inadvertently found a pendant lump of witch-silver the green lord had left behind, and which the Iberg had reached right past to seize his heart. He managed a brief smile at that irony, but it stung his split lip like the jab of a pin.

  Brolli left the captives behind the barrels and loped to the old man’s side. In the light of the single torch, it became quite clear to Harric that the dwarf-man was not even human. No dwarfed human had such long or powerful arms, such eyes, or such teeth. But if not human, what? A thrill of wonder managed to rise above the fog of his pain. A Kwendi?

  “You bleed.” Brolli pointed with a long arm at the old knight’s side.

  “It can wait. I’m more concerned about our young knight here. Son?”

  Caris stopped rocking, and slid her hands from her ears.

  The dwarf-man loped to the burning torch and flipped it into a rain barrel. It hissed briefly, and darkness engulfed them again.

  “Snap out of it, son. No reason to be ashamed. Shows you’re not an animal. I’d rather have one man like you at my side than ten beasts like Yolan. Are you hurt?”

  After a heartbeat, Caris murmured something. Then again, louder, but hoarsely: “I’m alive.”

  “Good man. And where is our unfortunate grain monger, Brolli? He’s still with us?”

  Brolli chuckled. “He is looking worse than when we find him,” he said, in his strange accent. “But he not looking good then, either. Over by the barrels. No, other way. Four pacings.”

  “Harric?” Caris said, reviving. “He’s all right? Harric?”

  “I’m all right. Sort of.”

  She groped her way to him and held him by the shoulders. “I tried to leave,” she whispered, “but—I worried—” Her voice hitched, and Harric cocked his head to hear her better, for it almost seemed she was…what? Choking up over him? “I thought we should travel together,” she continued, with an awkwardness somehow magnified by his inability to see her. “Leave together. For safety.”

  “You know each other,” the old man observed. “Pairing’s a wise idea, considering your situation. Now, there’s no time to explain, but I gave you the wrong purse today, son. My mistake. I need that trinket I gave you, and I have another purse to make up for your trouble. I think you’ll find it a more than fair trade.”

  “Make up for my trouble?” Harric chuckled. “You can’t afford the trouble I’ve had.”

  “I’m sorry about that. But I’m not stingy, and I know you’re an honorable lad.” He located Harric’s arm and pressed a purse tight with coins into Harric’s hand. “Take this. More than that ring is worth.”

  “What ring? It was a nut—”

  “We want to go with you,” Caris interrupted.

  The old man snorted. “Ridiculous. You have no idea what you’re saying.”

  “We all need to get out of here,” Harric said, taking up Caris’s cause. “We know the area and can help you escape.”

  “I know someone who can hide us,” Caris said. “There’s a stream we can follow west in the next valley—”

  “No time for this, son—”

  “Show us this stream,” Brolli said, in a tone of decision unlike any servant. “We travel together.”

  “Wh—” The old knight choked. “Brolli, we’ve brought them enough trouble.”

  “We can’t keep running, old man. You have wounds. And they know of safe places.”

  The side door banged, followed by the murmur of hushed voices. At the edge of the porch, two housegirls appeared—neither with customers, which was unprecedented that summer. Harric guessed Bannus’s arrival had cast a pall over any merriment in the place. The women bent their heads in worried conference, close enough for Harric to smell their rose perfume, but the two were too self-absorbed and unadjusted to the dark to notice others near.

  When the women slipped back into the lodge, the old man spoke. “Very well. You two fetch your horses from the stable and meet us on the road. We’ll be sure the north gate’s open for you. But I want that ring now.”

  “So you can leave us again?” Harric said. “No deal. Once we’re safe and clear, we’ll settle up.” To Caris he said, “Stay here at the doors, and I’ll unlock them.”

  Before the old knight could protest, Harric slipped his pack to his hand, felt his way along the stable to the corner of the yard, and slid sideways into the rat run too narrow for the others to follow.

  It’s a horrible mess that I have to confess,

  I haven’t a hope of redressing.

  My might is with swords, not with ladies and words,

  Yet I beg you continue undressing.

  —From “Sir Willard and the Mistaken
Lady”

  13

  Unholy Heximony

  Harric’s head pounded in pain, but his spirits rose in spite of it: he lived. And it now seemed he would make it out of Gallows Ferry. For Caris’s sake too he rejoiced, for she had just aided in a fight for the life of the very man she sought as mentor. As long as the old knight didn’t guess in Harric’s absence that it was she who had the ring, he might leave with Caris and the old knight together.

  The rat run was a tight fit. For the last few years he’d had to exhale and sidestep his way to the other side, scraping his chest and back on the rough-sawn planking, whereas in boyhood he’d fairly galloped through for pranks and missions. As he sidled through, the witch-stone he’d stashed in his shirt pressed against his chest, right beside the useless nugget of witch-silver. Without the magic of his nineteenth birthday to keep his mother at bay, he was helpless. Surely the stone was as potent as the Proof…or would he have to know how to use it for it to do any good? The thought chilled him. No one in Arkendia could teach him how to use it. All he could do is hope that merely having the stone in his pocket was enough.

  A gust of cool air greeted him as he emerged onto the west side of the stable and looked down to the black waters far below. The stable itself cantilevered over the void, as space was at a premium in Gallows Ferry, so there was no room to walk on the rim of the cliff. Instead, a narrow maintenance plank rimmed the exterior, and with nimble fingers and feet one might negotiate its length without trouble.

  Gritting his teeth against the pain in his ribs, he stepped out onto the plank and stood with his back to the windy void. When the pain subsided, he clung as close to the wood as he could, lest a gust of river wind pry him away, and sidled his way down the length, keeping his eyes steadfastly on the plank before his feet. Midway, he found what he looked for: a floor-level dung trap left open for ventilation.