The Jack of Souls (41 page)

Harric appreciated the guardsman’s savvy. A quaver in his voice showed he was sincerely pissing himself with fear, but he also kept his head enough to maintain a difficult balance of deference and innocence so as to appear cooperative, which might mean he’d survive the ordeal.

“Open this postern, then,” Bannus croaked.

“I wants to, sirs. On my life I do. But my queen’s a harsh mistress. That iron door is locked as fast as the gate, I tell you. Living here’s like living in a prison: all locked and nowhere to go.”

“You dog of a man. I will tear your guts from your belly and feed Gygon your liver.”

“I hope not, great sir. But if you’re hungry, might be we could send some vittles across the wall. Not what you’d call fine fare, a’course, but you say the word and I will, only I can’t open no doors.”

Silence then, but for the roar of the falls beyond. Then the men on the wall ducked, and the familiar pop of spitfires sounded. A pair of fiery tails streaked above and arced into the rocks across the canyon, where resin wads made torches of bushes.

Harsh laughter from beyond as more spitfires popped and fire sprayed across the roof tiles of the cote and in several pigeon loops. The slate was impervious, but the timbers within caught fire, and soon the flames blazed in the loops like the fires of a furnace.

A man cried out inside. A blackheart flew from a lower loop. Spitfires sent streaks of fire across the bird’s zigzagging path. More of the fiery comets sprayed along the parapets, sending the two men ducking and crawling.

Bannus’s laughter rang above the noise. “There is no priest here, only dogs. But I shall return with men enough to scale your puny walls. And then we shall see about keys. Talbus! Make camp here on the road. Make certain no one leaves.”

A knight in orange armor responded by saluting, fist to chest, then shouted orders to make camp at the foot of a massive pillar of rock at the far end of the turnabout.

On the cliff above the turnabout, Harric saw movement.

Brolli pointed to the spot before Harric could indicate it. “You see it, yes? It is a guardsman. He creeps along a ledge above Bannus’s position.”

Harric shielded his eyes from the growing glare of the fires and attempted to scrutinize the dark face of the cliff. After a moment, he picked out a small figure creeping across the sheer face above Bannus’s position. A guard from the fort. The ledge he traversed originated somewhere behind the wall and slanted up across the cliff high above the roundabout. The man crouched a dozen fathoms above his enemies—if he dropped a pebble it might
plink
off Bannus’s helmet—but the ledge on which he stood spanned no wider than a stout man’s shoulders, so he was completely exposed if anyone chanced to look up.

As Harric watched, the guard halted midway across the cliff and stood frozen against the cliff. Harric soon realized why: though the darkness had kept him invisible to that point, the tower conflagration now illumined his position with increasing brightness. His shadow had begun to darken and dance across the cliff before him; he froze lest his movement betray him and his enemies feather him with arrows.

The fires also illumined the man’s destination above the far end of the roundabout. There the ledge disappeared into a vertical crack in the cliff that had formed when a massive tower of rock split away from the rest to lean drunkenly over the roundabout. The tower was as big as the fort itself, but leaned so severely it seemed a finger’s nudge could topple it.

“Is that another trail around the mountain?” Brolli whispered. “Another path we have missed? Maybe he thinks to escape on it.”

Harric shook his head. “I think they cut that path to get behind that pillar of rock. See how the ledge disappears into the crack behind it? I’ll bet they’ve packed that gap with blasting resin as a failsafe against attack. If that guard can reach it, Bannus is in for quite a surprise.”

The Kwendi’s eyes widened. “That is good!”

“It will be, if he can get there without being noticed. I bet he wishes he and his comrades had thought to build a cover wall along the ledge.”

Brolli grunted. “They start one, I think.” He pointed to the first ten paces or so of the ledge where it emerged above the fort wall. In the growing light, even Harric could see a stub wall of stacked rocks providing cover to that portion of the path. Brolli made a critical
tsk
. “They not finish it. But look! He tries.”

The man had begun to slide along the cliff with one hand against the cliff. As the flames of the tower grew taller, his shadow rippled across the cliff face, and Brolli made a little sigh of dismay. “He should lie and wait for the fire to die.”

As if on cue, a cry rang out among Bannus’s men.

The guardsman sprinted for the cover of the crack.

“Shoot him!” Bannus roared.

Crossbows thrummed. Bolts cracked against the stone around the running guardsman. One caught him in the leg, and he fell to his hands and knees. Before he could rise, another caught him in the ribs and buried itself to the feathers. He fell from the ledge, out of view.

Murmurs of dismay from the men on the parapets.

“Reload!” a knight cried. “Watch that ledge! Spitfires, get some light up there!”

A spitfire popped, then another, sending brilliant resin streaks across the night to splash white fire on the ledge.

“They never reach it now,” Brolli said. “That is shame.”

*

Harric and Brolli
crept back along the cliff road, hugging the shadows when possible. When out of view of the burning tower, they jogged until they found Willard and Caris with the horses.

“What news?” Willard asked.

Brolli related the incident. When he finished, Willard seemed already unconscious, slumped forward against the front cantle of his saddle. “You know this Jamus?” Brolli asked. “He is the same that come to Gallows Ferry with Bannus?”

Willard opened one weary eye. “His grandsire joined me…in the Cleansing. Switched sides and saved his hide. Too shrewd by half. Jamus too. The Queen trusts him.”

“It seems our ruse at the gate succeeds, old man,” said Brolli. “Bannus turns about.”

Willard closed his eyes and sighed. “Gods leave that guardsman for his boldness. He’s likely trembling now, with no recollection of it at all.”

The Kwendi’s eyes glimmered in the moonlight. “I thought of it too. Your curse.”

Willard grunted. “This time it favors us well.”

“And Harric does nothing with magic there,” Brolli added. “In fact, he is good Arkendian. Sends pigeons from the cote and finds keys.”

Caris looked back over her shoulder at Harric, and then the Kwendi, as if she were uncertain whether Brolli were deceived or deceiving.

“Sent birds?” Willard’s eyes opened. “That’s it, boy. That’s what makes us strong.”

*

Harric followed on
foot, now last in line behind Willard. The old knight’s hypocrisy galled him. On the one hand Willard reviled the use of magic, citing the Third Law. On the other he turned a blind eye if he benefited.

The case of the yoab was a clear emergency, as worthy of that blind eye as the situation at the pass had been. And yet Willard barely batted an eye at Brolli’s reliance on spellcraft. If they’d put their minds to it, could they not have found an
Arkendian
way past the gatehouse? Harric himself could have devised a sleeping drug from some of the roots in the region. Wouldn’t that have resulted in the desired outcome of making them stronger? And didn’t this reliance on magic therefore make them softer and weaker?

He studied the old knight as if he could read an answer in his posture. Willard slumped forward, and Harric realized with a shock that he looked as bad as any wounded man he’d ever seen in saddle. He might topple at any moment.

Harric called for a halt, and limped up beside Molly. Brolli joined him, and found Willard unresponsive. They coaxed the old man to drink some water, then Caris bound him between the fore and aft cantles with a spare lead line.

“That won’t hold him, but it might slow his fall.” Her strong hands put finishing touches on the knots.

When they started moving again, Harric’s anger at him passed, replaced by worry. The old knight was farther gone than he’d let on.

And perhaps it wasn’t hypocrisy but necessity. In cases of great import—such as when the Queen’s safety was at stake—perhaps survival trumped the Third Law.

Now there was a thought. He laid a hand on the witch-stone thumping his chest with each stride. If that were true, wouldn’t the knight’s reasoning justify the magic of invisibility in emergency service of the Queen? And didn’t the Queen live in a
constant
state of emergency?

Harric smiled. Possibilities glittered in his imagination. To serve the Queen as a courtier spy with the power of invisibility in his pocket. It had been such a thrill to slip into that dovecote on a true quest for the Queen; how much more so to slip past alert guards with true invisibility…like the Jack of Souls, the wild card, who tips a strong hand to certain victory. Even Willard would have to admit that magic was a potent tool for the Queen.

Voices whispered at the edge of consciousness—the witch-stone, Harric imagined, calling to him. The sound no longer frightened him, as it had when he thought it came from madness. Back in the dovecote, the stone had tried to help him, to warn him of danger. How then, could that be evil?

Nebecci. Bellana. Tryst.

He’d take it out that night, as soon as he could get away from the others, and speak the words to the spell. After that, even Brolli wouldn’t see him.

—From “Virtue Undermined,” banned pamphlet, late reign of Chasia

The Witch

B
y the time
the Mad Moon set, the soft gray light of dawn was enough to reveal the path along the river’s course. The walls of the canyon became less sheer, and the roads that had been cut into its walls gave way to a dirt path along the water’s edge. The trail led them along a wooded lake into a bowl of rocky peaks. In the middle of the lake was a bare grave island, with crude monuments erected by timbermen or trappers. At the foot of the lake stood a tall, crooked stone like an old man’s thumb. They stopped there for a brief rest, during which Brolli dubbed the aged stone “Willard’s Finger.”

“See what yours looks like after seven lives of battle,” Willard growled.

“The lake I name Willard’s Tub. May you live to make a soak in it.”

Beyond the lake, the mule track climbed a saddle of granite between peaks to descend into the adjoining watershed. A young forest of spoke-limb and ash trees greeted them on the other side, crowding the path with exuberant growth and limiting visibility to sixty paces. Ancient blackened stumps stood like rotten teeth amidst the riot of green, testament of fire in years past.