The Jack of Souls (38 page)

“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.”

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

Locks & Magic

H
arric 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.”

“All right. When do we follow?”

“I come back for you when all is ready. In one hour, saddle the horses and pack. Snuff the fire. I come back for you when all is ready.”

*

Harric followed Brolli
out of camp as Caris scrambled to saddle the horses and Willard stared into the fire, the dull eye of his ragleaf pulsing red.

The trail traversed the ridge, rising steadily on a ledge blasted across its rugged face. Much of the pathway was lit by the Mad Moon, but in dark patches Harric followed Brolli by holding to a lead line they’d borrowed from Idgit’s bridle. Brolli steered the line around the worst obstacles, and warned him with a whispered “rock” or “root” when needed. As the Mad Moon climbed the sky, more and more of its crimson light illumined the contours of the rock. In one particularly long stretch of illumined path, Brolli slowed to walk near him, and flashed his toothy grin. “This is a hard few days for you,” he said ambiguously. “I am glad you come with me.”

Harric gave a non-committal nod.

When he offered nothing else, Brolli spoke again. “This Caris, she sleeps so far from you. Why is it so? She wears the love ring, yes? You give it to her, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then I must ask why you sleep so far apart. Is it custom with your people? Perhaps you wait until Willard sleeps and I am away for secret tryst?”

Harric tried to read the alien features of the Kwendi’s face, but found it difficult. He judged from his tone, however, it was a serious question, not mocking. “Well, the first reason is simple,” Harric said. “She’s angry with me.”

“Ah!” The Kwendi laughed. “She cannot stay angry long.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that. I’ve seen her when she sets her mind on something. She’s not like ordinary people that way.”

“She is different. I see that.”

“The second reason is that even if she wanted me, it’s only because she’s got that ring on. One day they’ll come off, right? She might think I’ve been taking advantage of her then, and kill me.”

The Kwendi’s brow furrowed in earnest perplexity. “Because of the rings? Why?”

“Because she’s being
forced
by that ring,” Harric said, more vigorously than he intended, “or altered, or whatever you want to call it. It’d be like taking advantage of her when she was drunk for the first time. It isn’t right.”

The Kwendi stopped and faced Harric in a patch of red moonlight. A mountain breeze sighed across the rock face around them; far below, tumbling water rushed through the darkness. “I thought I watch carefully your mating customs in your queen’s court, but I never notice this ‘right’ you speak of. You have to win a ‘right’ before you mate? Or is it before you marry? Or is marriage itself this ‘right’?” Brolli fetched a traveler’s journal and stylus from his shirt, and jotted some notes.

Harric stared for several heartbeats. When the Kwendi put the book away, Harric laughed. “Are you serious?”

Brolli looked at him. “There is no marriage among my people, so I do not understand why you hesitate to mate.”

“Marriage isn’t about mating, Brolli. It’s bigger than that. It’s for life.”

Brolli’s brows pinched. “Marriage is
not
about mating?”

“Well, no. It’s more.” Harric smiled, bemused. It occurred to him that since he’d never had a father, and since the two women who raised him were unmarried or widowed before he was born, he didn’t know the first thing about permanent male-female partnership. His entire understanding of marriage therefore consisted of nothing more than the vague longing of all bastards for something sacred and unattainable.

“More than mating,” Brolli repeated. He plucked the journal again from his pocket, and scribbled a note. “Yet her looks at you are about mating. Even I see that. Such complicated mating rituals!”

Harric laughed. “Hold on. Are you telling me you have no idea what marriage is, but you decided to make a magical
wedding ring
for our queen?”

The Kwendi’s face crumpled in something resembling embarrassment. He put the journal away and started walking again. “The ring was meant as a gift,” he explained. “She has no husband, yes? We thought, since your people mate for life, that she, all alone and without a mate…well, think she maybe was not so…how you say…
attracting
? With the ring we think she could capture a mate.”

Harric laughed heartily. It hurt his ribs and head, but the ragleaf muted the pain. “I’m sorry. But I can’t believe you survived that gift. A wedding ring for the Lone Queen of Arkendia? Ambassador, our queen is famous in ten kingdoms for shunning marriage and abusing courting princes. She built a career on it. She built modern Arkendia on it.”

Brolli sighed. “Yes. She almost throw us out window. Bad beginning to our talks.”

“My own troubles with that ring seem suddenly small. How did you calm the Queen?”

“I give her instead another ring of my own, just as strong.”

“So, if your people don’t marry, Brolli, may I ask what you do?”

The Kwendi flashed his feral grin across his shoulder. “We mate.”

Harric waited for more. None came. He asked, “And then what?”

Brolli glanced back as if for clarification in Harric’s face. “We mate again? Perhaps I do not see your question.”

“I mean, do you stay with your mate then, for the baby?”

“Ah! No. She raise the baby with her family.”

“You just leave her?”

Brolli apparently sensed something in his voice, for he paused and turned to examine Harric closely. “This is the way of
all
my people. When my sisters and cousin have babies, I help raise them with my family.”

Harric felt a concealing veil lift from his mind to reveal an aspect of life he’d never sensed possible. “You’re a nation of bastards! You have no idea who your fathers are.”

“Why should that matter? The woman determines the family. It is easy to know who is the mother. Hard to know for sure the father.”

“That’s the best thing I’ve heard all year. You know they used to enslave us bastards in Arkendia? Still do in the West Isle.”

“I have heard it. Now hush.” Brolli laid a finger across his lips. “We draw near.”

*

As they neared
the head of the valley, its sides grew steeper and rockier and closer together, until it became a high mountain canyon with steep ridges on either side. The road wound in and out of the outcrops and promontories, sometimes bridging gulfs with crude timber trestles. In the red light of the Mad Moon, the crags of the opposite side of the valley seemed an impassable wilderness of rockfalls and timber. As their road neared the head of the valley, the rush of the river rose louder from the narrow channel below. Harric heard the roar of a sizable waterfall beyond the nearest bend. Its mist rose in the distance, a bloody veil wafting in the moonlight.

When they reached the last outcrop of rock in the bend, Brolli stopped. He jerked his head in the direction of the falls. “From here you see the pass at the end of the valley. Make a long look at the gatehouse.”

Harric peered around the outcrop. A half-mile hence, the valley ended in a V-shaped pass between mountains. A stone fort squatted in the notch of the pass. From the base of its wall, a white waterfall emerged from a frowning water gate, like the tongue from the mouth of a hanged man. Through the gap of the pass beyond, Harric saw open sky, suggesting a wide valley.

The road ended in a wide roundabout before the walls of the fort, on the brink of its boulder-filled moat. The only way across the moat was over a now-closed drawbridge flanked by cone-topped archer towers.

“Ten to one that waterfall is called Horsetail or Maidenhair Falls,” Harric whispered. “Half the falls in the north have that name. Timbermen have no imagination.”