The Jack of Souls (48 page)

He sat up, cradling his face in his hands.

If that’s the price of invisibility…forget it.

And yet, if he could avoid looking at the moon… Perhaps that had been his mistake. And for all he knew the spell might have
worked.
He might
be
invisible even as he sat there. He climbed to his knees and examined his limbs. They appeared normal. The spell had not worked. Or at any rate, the spell did not cause him to appear invisible to
himself.
The moon cat lay twitching on its side. Its head lolled. Its lips foamed. It seemed the spell had affected the cat as well, and shocked it worse than Harric.

“Spook. Come here, Spook. Can you see me?”

The cat turned its glassy green eyes in his direction. Harric passed his hand in front of the animal’s face, and Spook turned away in irritation, tried to gain its feet to flee, but fell over, panting weakly.

Harric sighed, disappointed. “You see me.”

A raspy, nasal chuckle startled him from behind. “Look who’s the genius.”

Harric pocketed the stone and whirled to face the speaker. “Brolli? That you?”

Pointed teeth gleamed from a low shape hunched among the fire-cone roots. “Nebecci, Bellana, Tryst…” it answered, in the same scratchy nasal. With those words, the dim outline of the figure faded and disappeared. “Say it again.” The voice returned from the same direction, but strangely altered, as if spoken through a culvert or pipe from very far away.

Harric’s eyes widened. His voice came out in a hiss:
“Who are you?
”

“I’m your tryst. You called me, bright boy. Say it.”

“My…? Well, I didn’t mean to! It was an accident.”

An eerie chuckle. “There are no accidents.
Say
it.”

Harric gripped the witch-stone in his fist. He couldn’t run. Who would he run to? They’d all know he’d been stupid enough to
summon
something with a witch-stone.

There was a rustle of dust as the invisible figure moved toward him.

Harric flung his hand before him to ward the creature off. “Wait!” He braced himself. Faintly, without hope, he pronounced the words, “Nebecci. Bellana.
Tryst.
”

This time the Seen disgorged him fully into the spirit world—it left no doorstep of the Seen from which to safely gaze—and the unspeakable weight of the Unseen fell again upon his mind. Above him the web exploded into clarity—the black hole in its center sucking and spitting the ghostlike threads up and away in its cycles of spiritual tide. He groaned, and forced his eyes down to the shadowless version of landscape around him.

The source of the mysterious voice hunkered there in crystal clarity, only paces away. “First time?” it rasped. “Not bad.”

Harric choked and stumbled backward, but his eyes did not leave the figure. Black membranous wings folded untidily behind a horned, hairless black head and a long, bulbous nose. The very image of a trickster sprite from an Arkendian impit tale. Naked legs akimbo, it squatted in the dirt, taloned black hands folded before it, a whiplike tail nestled around its feet. Wide, white, pupilless eyes greeted Harric with a look of cunning and twisted humor above a mouth filled with hundreds of needlelike teeth.

“Go on, you can tell me: you’ve done this before, right? It runs in your family?”

“Wha—no! Who are you?” Harric’s face perspired with effort of supporting the weight upon his mind. By concentration he could hold himself in the Unseen, but only with tremendous effort. He was already gasping for breath as if he’d been holding up a tree.

“Finkoklocos Marn, at your service,” said the creature. It scampered to its taloned feet and stood before him, eyes level with Harric’s navel, and performed a mocking bow. What Harric had taken to be the creature’s smile mutated into a horrible grin. “My friends call me Fink. You and me? We’re gonna be friends, so you call me Fink too.”

Harric groaned and collapsed to his knees. The gate collapsed around him, and the familiar world of the Seen embraced him. Sweat poured from him. Fragments of the brief vision of the Unseen crushed in upon his soul again; echoes of the revelation of the afterworld that he strove to consign to oblivion as soon as they came. His breath came in painful heaves. He wanted unbearably much to seek forgetfulness in sleep, but didn’t dare close his eyes near the monster he’d summoned.

Spook mewed somewhere near him.

In the air before him, the crouching figure of Finkoklocos Marn snapped into leathery clarity. The imp scampered up to Harric. In his exhaustion Harric could only raise his head to watch as it licked the tip of a taloned finger with a long black tongue, and laid it carefully to Harric’s forehead between his eyes. The contact seared like fire, and penetrated inward like a red-hot nail through wax. Harric moaned, but lacked the strength to draw away. He closed his eyes, and in the darkness saw the imp’s talon withdraw from a teardrop-shaped aperture near the top of his consciousness. Through it he saw the world of the Unseen moving silently beyond, as through a high attic window in his mind. Yet his hand felt no such gouge through his skin.

He opened his eyes in dazed surprise. The imp popped into the Seen before him. Its hideous grin widened in satisfaction.

Roaring rose in Harric’s ears. Darkness crowded his vision, threatening to overwhelm him. Somewhere, his mother screamed in rage. Then all went black.

*

The air beside
Fink tore open with a roar of protest as his sisters manifested in the Seen. The three of them loomed above him in the dark beneath the trees, pillars of brooding shadow.

“Sisters!” Fink said, feigning surprise and delight. “How nice of you to visit. How are things in the Web?”

The largest of them, Siq, stirred. She glided forward until she looked down on Harric’s prone body. Fink hid his irritation behind a grin. She wouldn’t dare touch Harric, but he could see by the vagueness of her form that it had been long since she feasted. The same appeared true for Missy and Sere. When Siq spoke, her voice was a faded whisper.
“Will he trust you?”

Fink shrugged. “Too soon to tell.” Taunting her, he scooped a few of the cat’s soul-strands, and slurped them through his teeth like noodles. “But this little catty gives me a good shell to hide and watch his dreams, learn about him. He’s an odd bird. I think he’ll trust.”

The cat rolled to its feet and rubbed against his leg. He reached down to scratch it behind the ear, but on seeing the talon of his forefinger, thought better of it.

“We question your choice of form.”

“You don’t like it?” Fink extended all five talons of the hand, admiring his handiwork. “I’m an impit, from his fairy tales, see? They talk this way and everything.”

“We are not pleased.”

“Yeah? Well, it pleases me,” he said, emphasizing the vulgarity of speech he’d found in Harric’s memories of impit tales. “And anyway, that’s why I go in the cat. But this kid’s sharp. If I show up like a feathered angel he’ll smell the lie.”

A low murmur from Missy. “You take to the impit form naturally. Almost, it seems, it is your true form.”

Fink displayed the forest of needles in his jaws. “Maybe I
am
an Impit, Missy. Now unless you have a token from Mother, expressing her doubts, buzz off. I need some space.”

The three brooded above him, silent and menacing, then vanished, the air sucking upon itself with a vicious clap.

Fink scampered to Harric’s side, enjoying the nimbleness of the form, but tipped over when he stopped, as he’d neglected to fold his left wing in. He studied Harric, his bald head cocked to one side, scowling. He’d spent long hours in Harric’s dreams and memories. Siq could question all she wanted. He’d chosen the right form.

“Harric?”

Fink’s head snapped in the direction of the woman’s voice. He arranged Harric’s arms to look as though the man slept, and vanished with a pop into the Unseen.

“Harric!” The big girl strode into the clearing, a lantern in one hand, a huge iron sword on her hip. She stood over Harric, a look of perplexity on her face, then knelt at his shoulder and shook him. “Harric, what are you doing? Wake up.”

He did not awake.

The cat padded over to her, mewing. The girl’s brow furrowed.

Curious, Fink manipulated a few of Harric’s strands so he would not wake even if she burned him with her lantern. When he did not respond to a more vigorous shaking, she let out a broken cry of pain, and half fell upon, half embraced him.

“Harric!” She laid her cheek to his lips and froze there, feeling for breath, Fink guessed. Panic growing, she shifted her ear to his chest, and froze again. At last, she sighed, tears welling in her eyes, and embraced him, weeping quietly.

When she recovered, she raised her face to his. “Moons take you, Harric. What are you doing here?” She glanced around the clearing for clues.

She frowned, and stared at his inert face for so long Fink considered leaving. Then, without warning, she kissed him hard and full on the lips, like a horse sucking water at a stream. When she came up for air she gave a guilty look around, blushing (Blushing! For
that
!
),
then laid another on him that might have been twice as long as the first.

The cat directed a bored look at Fink in the Unseen, and began licking itself.

Bored, Fink moved to tweak Harric’s strands to see if he could wake him, but she came up for air first, and he decided to see what she’d do next?
Climb on top?
He grinned.

“That’s what you get for giving me this cursed ring.”

She wiped her lips on a sleeve, studied him as if she might lay another, even longer, then she shook herself and stood. Muttering a curse, she lifted him in arms twice the size of his and carried him back toward their tower.

—From
Heretical Maunderings
, Master Tooler Jobbs

A New World

H
arric woke to
something nudging his shoulder. His hand drifted over to push Spook away, but found instead a boot. He opened his eyes to see Willard standing over him beneath the timber ceiling of the tower.

“Get up, son. You’ve got work to do.”

Harric sat up and looked around. He found himself on a fat woolen mattress before the hearth. Outside the window, dawn still slumbered, a mere lightening of the eastern sky.

He had no memory of how he got there. The last thing he remembered from the night before was the forest in the bicolor light of the moons, and…

A lance of fear smote him as images of the creature he’d summoned flooded back to him. He closed his eyes, terrified of what he might find in the dark of his skull, only to have his fears confirmed by the sight of the tear-drop aperture the imp had poked through the veil of his mind; beyond it he saw the ghostly world of the Unseen, with its floating strands and eerie glow.

Gods leave me, what have I done?

Harric opened his eyes and watched Willard toss sticks on the fire. He imagined telling the old knight of it, but shame and pride killed the impulse. Brolli might understand; perhaps he could confide in the Kwendi when he returned from the pass. But not Willard. Not Caris. And surely not Abellia.

Until Brolli returned, he was alone in this.

Caris rose from an identical mattress nearby, and pulled a heavy tunic over her shirt. She squinted at Willard, who crouched by the hearth with no apparent pain.

“You’re well?” she asked, voice rough with sleep.

Willard turned from the fire. “Surprised?” The old knight’s eyes blazed as if with suppressed fury. His cheeks looked pink and healthy, his gaze clear and bright, and no bandage wound about his waist. “Hardly a mark where that wound was, today.” He slapped his hip to illustrate. “Seems it closed on its own last night. I’d give the credit to good old Arkendian avoidance of magic, but I’m no fool. Our hostess healed me.” His gaze drilled into Caris, who dropped her eyes and busied herself with her boots.