The Jack of Souls (39 page)

“How many guards do you guess in that rock?”

Harric frowned. “A fortification that strong wouldn’t require many. But half the Queen’s income comes from resin sales, so she’s pretty careful with the fire-cone ranges.” Harric studied the walls and drawbridge. He could see another roofline behind the wall that might belong to a living quarters or a stable. “I’d expect about ten men there. Looks like they keep black pigeons in that cote above the tower. See the roosts? If there’s trouble, they’ll release a pigeon and lock themselves in.”

“Ten, then?”

Harric nodded.

“What is this
pigeon
you say? A bird you eat, yes?”

“Not blackhearts. Blackhearts deliver messages over long distances.”

“Messages? You train them to speak?” Brolli dug out his journal.

“No, no. They’re dumb as plugs. But they carry tiny written messages, and they always return to their nest.” Brolli’s wide golden eyes fixed quizzically on Harric. “You raise the birds in one nest,” Harric explained. “Then you take them to some other nest far away. When you want to send a message back to their original home, you tie a note on their leg and release them. They fly home, and someone who takes care of the other nest retrieves the message.”

Brolli smiled. “Your people so brilliant. No magic, and look what they make.” He scribbled in his diary, and Harric glimpsed the characters, which were unlike any he’d seen. “You think these guards fly messages straight to your queen?”

The implications dawned on Harric. “Yes! Or to one of her ministers. If we sent a distress message to her from this gatehouse, she’d send pigeons to a northern earl, who’d dispatch a company to investigate. We have to do it!”

Brolli’s thick canines flashed in the bloody light. “
You
have to do it. I take care of guards. You send pigeons.”

“What do you plan to do to the guards?”

Brolli’s gold eyes sparkled with mischief. “I do not hurt them. They must not know we passed. So I make them sleep deep. I already make the watchman sleep.”

“You mean you’re going to use magic. I know Sir Willard doesn’t want you to tell me, but it’s pretty clear.”

Brolli continued to smile, but offered no more information. The Kwendi tore part of a blank page from his book, and handed it to Harric with his stylus. “What do you write for the bird note?”

“It has to be short, so the note can be small and light.” He tore the page down to a tiny square. “I think we need the Blue Order.”

“The order of knights Willard belonged to,” Brolli said, as if proud of his knowledge of Arkendian history. “Immortals, yes? That is good. I will like to see them.”

Harric knelt and placed the paper against the back of Brolli’s book. He scratched nine words with the stylus.
Willard, Brolli in danger. Sir Bannus. Send Blue Order.

He tore another square and paused, thinking and sucking at his split lip. Ideally he’d send two pigeons, in case one became falcon lunch, but sending too many might tip off the pigeon’s caretaker that someone had been fiddling with his birds. On impulse, he prepared a second identical note; if the guards sent regular dispatches of “all’s well,” he could slip a second note in one of their empty message tubes so that backup message might be sent out with their next dispatch.

“Here is my plan,” said Brolli, when Harric finished and returned him his journal. “We cross to a place where I have a tall log beside the track. You and I carry the log to the wall, and you steady it as I scale the wall and slip into the gatehouse from the other side. When I am up, you retreat and wait for me. Stay clear of the gatehouse then, until you see me open the door beside the big gate. You see it there? The little door? Good. It is important you stay clear until you see me. At least a stone’s throw away—wait, on second thinking, no. I’ve seen you throw. Make that ten stone-throws.” Brolli flashed his feral grin.

“When I’m healthy I throw much farther.”

“After I let you in the gatehouse, you prepare that message, and I fetch Willard.”

“What if they discover me while you’re gone?”

“They won’t.” Brolli grinned. “They will sleep like drugged.” Harric opened his mouth to ask how, but Brolli cut him off with a wave. “I must not discuss.”

“By order of Sir Hypocrite?”

“Hypo-crite? What is that word?”

“It means someone who speaks one thing but does another.”

Brolli chuckled. “Hypocrite. You are right. My people call that
sty-du
, twisted mouth. But truly, Sir Willard has lived long and seen much. He is more comfortable with magic than any other Arkendian I have met. Or was, until I met you.” The Kwendi’s head tilted sideways, his wide eyes shining in the moonlight. “Why are you so unafraid of the moons?”

Harric shrugged. “My mother traveled as a diplomat overseas. She saw a lot, too, and taught me the moons are natural. Arkendians are the only people who fear them.”

Brolli chuckled. “Perhaps you and Sir Hypo-crite are more alike than he admits.”

Carrying the log strained Harric’s aching body, even with Brolli at the heavier end. But stalking to the edge of the curtain wall was easy because of the roar of the falls. Nothing stirred in the gatehouse. No smoke from the chimney. No candle behind shutters.

“For carrying the log, you drank the ragleaf tea,” said Brolli.

“I’m going to need a lot more when we carry it back.”

They planted the log at the juncture of the wall and the rock of the mountain, and lodged it upright for Brolli to climb. Harric had seen him climb twice before, but it was just as fascinating a third time. It almost looked like he walked up the trunk, his feet pressing against the front of the pole while his long arms reached around and pulled it toward him, keeping pressure on his feet. Hand over hand, step by step, he went up until he reached the top. Once there, he hoisted himself up to stand on the end, from which he transitioned to a much slower rate of climb up the juncture of the cliff and the wall. His strong fingers seemed to find niches and crannies on the cliff face, while his flat feet braced in cracks or against the wall.

Once he reached the top, he swung onto the crenellations and motioned for Harric to retreat. He pantomimed throwing a stone, reminding Harric of the appropriate distance, then disappeared behind the parapet.

Curiosity tempted Harric to stay near to see what would happen, but he decided to retreat and wait it out. He’d barely caught his breath before the small door beside the main gate opened, and the distinctive figure of the Kwendi emerged, trotting in that peculiar knuckle-lope toward Harric.

“The log,” Brolli said when he reached him. They returned to the log and lugged it back to where they’d found it, Harric’s ribs grumbling.

“Now I get Willard, and you send bird.” Brolli waved and loped back down the road until he disappeared behind the bend. As Harric watched the Kwendi recede in the distance, he felt a powerful sense of gratitude that Brolli had entrusted him with this service. After Caris’s scathing rebuke that day, it felt a bit like redemption.

Hiking back up the narrow track to the gatehouse, he studied the wall and the turnabout more closely. The builders had left only enough room for a wagon between the foot of the wall and the edge of the cliff above the falls; for fifty paces on either side of the gate, any attackers would be exposed to defenders above and the long fall below. A dry moat had been carved from the rock at the foot of the wall and filled with jagged boulders, and the postern could be approached only by a narrow ledge above the falls, so there could be no space for a ram.

The familiar thrill of entering a forbidden place shivered Harric’s senses as he clambered across the dry moat and sidled across the ledge to the open door. A candle would have been nice, he reflected as he peered into the darkness within, but the Kwendi wouldn’t have thought of it. He groped along a straight, plastered wall, and found a corner and a stairway, where he barked his shins on the bottom stairs.

Beyond the opening to the stairwell, the wall continued toward a doorway outlined by a very low light as from the embers of a fire. Crossing to stand in the doorway, he heard snoring within what he discovered to be a small kitchen. A big, worn table stood in its midst, with a kettle and pot beside the fire, and bunches of herb hanging from the ceiling. Three cots lay with their feet to the fire, each with a sleeping man as old as Willard. Another ten slept in the room adjacent.

What the Black Moon did Brolli do to them?
Nothing, apparently. They looked unscathed.

He rummaged around the hearth and found a tallow candle, which he lit in the fire. Then he left the kitchen and made a quick ascent of the stairs, which took him to a door at the level of the parapet. Above that he found the pigeon cote, its door unlocked. He slipped inside to the familiar scent of pigeons, and the low cooing of one that seemed wide awake and hungry, as if newly arrived. As he’d expected, they were blackhearts. Big, sleek long-distance flyers.

The circular room was divided in three-by-two walls of wattle reaching from the floor to the peaked ceiling high above. It was the same basic design they used in Gallows Ferry, though on a larger scale, to separate the birds into three groups: outgoing birds that could be released to deliver a message, incoming birds that needed to be transported back to their original nests to be useful again, and newly arrived birds whose messages hadn’t yet been read. The door from the stairwell opened into the side for newly arrived birds. Only one bird occupied the room, and when it saw Harric, it flapped to the seed jars and pecked at the lids. Harric took a handful from one and held it for the bird while he removed its message with the other hand.

The note read:
Next supply with harvest team at full moons.

Harric put it in the pocket with his witch-stone and slipped his own note into the empty tube. As the new arrival perched on his thumb and devoured seed in his palm, Harric opened the wattle door to the outgoing birds, and put the new arrival inside, closing the wattle behind him. He poured the seed on a ledge for the hungry pigeon, who abandoned his hand for the seed. This newcomer would take the place of the one he would release, so the caretaker would count the same number as before, and assume the incoming pigeon with the message about harvest had fallen to a falcon en route.

Harric gathered up a sleeping pigeon in a low nest before it could wake and fly to a higher perch. With soft noises and strokes, he calmed it until he could coax one leg out and attach his message. He watered and fed it as much as it would eat, remembering that a hungry bird was more likely to be taken by a predator when it stopped to forage. When it showed impatience with the food, he carried it out through the tower door onto the parapet above the falls, and released it.

The bird gave two powerful flaps with the signature snap of a blackheart, made one wide arc around the towers, and slanted away south along the ridges.

Harric closed the door to the parapet and returned to the cote. So far so good. The place was meticulously maintained, however, so he would have to take care not to upset anything, or the caretaker would notice something amiss. The straw in the cote was fresh and neat. The seed jars were covered and ordered on the shelves. Three pre-written messages hung on the first three hooks in a line of six.

Of the three pre-written messages, Harric selected the third, assuming the meticulous caretaker had been drawing the messages from the right end of the hooks. He took the message out and read it:
Horsetail Twr. Qtr. Moons. All Quiet.
By that he deduced the next pigeon was scheduled to go out at the next quarter moon, a day hence. Perfect luck. If they’d come a day later the second message wouldn’t go out for a week.

He slipped his own message in the tube and restored it to its hook. The pilfered note he deposited in his pocket with the witch-stone, where he let his hand linger on the globe’s glassy surface.

He drew the stone out and held it beside the candle to illumine its depths. Smoky wisps seemed to move in it, but the candlelight banished them like a gust of wind. A nervous thrill rose in his belly as he recalled the words in his dream that made the witches turn invisible. If the dream were true, he could simply speak them and vanish like the wisps in the stone. But then how would he become visible again? The witch only became visible when Brolli grabbed him. If worse came to worst, he could always ask Brolli to jump him the way he’d jumped the Iberg…

Or maybe if he set down the stone, the spell would cease.

Nebecci, Bellana, Tryst.

He itched to say it, and learn.

Harric moved the candle away, and the wisps swirled in from the sides. In the glassy surface he glimpsed the reflection of a face peering over his shoulder, and gasped in surprise. Whirling, he found no one, but he’d been certain of a presence—as if the air had moved beside him, or he’d heard a soft breath near his ear.

Urgent whispers sounded in the air around him, so faint he couldn’t be sure of them at all.
Fly! Fly!
Then the distinct sound of horns and hooves, as through a tunnel, and it seemed he saw the hooves among the wisps in the stone, charging through a campfire.

“Harric!” Willard called from outside.

Harric’s lungs nearly leapt from his mouth. He stuffed the stone in the cargo slip of his shirt, and cracked the shutter overlooking the road below. The old knight slumped with his head on one arm across the front of his saddle. Getting into the saddle had taken another toll on him.

“Horns,” Brolli called up. He dismounted Idgit, and loped over to the postern. “We must open the gate and hurry through.”

“I’m coming,” Harric called. His heart raced, spurred by the shock that his vision of Bannus was real, and the conviction that the voices that plagued him came not from madness, but the stone, and that they’d tried to warn him of danger.

All the more reason to trust it.

Harric ran down the stairs and into the winch room above the portcullis, where enormous chains and pulleys ran out of holes in the floor and onto massive windlasses. There he encountered a worried-looking Brolli, and Caris, who hunched over one of the windlasses with a candle to examine the gears.