The Jack of Souls (52 page)

The leer had frozen on Fink’s face. When the white orbs of his eyes faltered away in thought, it occurred to Harric it was
Fink
who was the slave in such contracts, and that Harric had stunned him with an offer of
freedom
. A strange and wonderful vindication rose in Harric as he realized he had just offered that greatest of gifts to another. It felt nobler than anything he had ever done. What better foundation, too, for such a risky relationship?

To free a slave is to earn unstinting devotion,
his mother’s training whispered in his thoughts.
There is no truer ally. You yourself are proof of that.

“Partners,” Harric repeated, extending his hand. “Equals. No more poking holes in my head without asking.”

Fink looked up, grotesque face unreadable. A taloned hand rose tentatively to meet Harric’s, then drew back. Fink’s long black tongue licked the hedge of needlelike teeth, his white eyes darting about. “You see my sisters around?”

Harric saw only trees, but shuddered at the suggestion of the sisters.

“Yeah, I know,” Fink said. “Trade childhoods with me?”

“You wouldn’t offer if you knew my mother.”

Harric glanced at the thickening fog in the trees. For no reason he could see, it did not seem to enter the hollow in front of the boulder, leaving a clear space of twenty paces across, but now the figures in the fog were clear and plentiful.

“Um, actually, there’s something I need to tell you,” Harric said. “She’s here. My mother, that is. This is her fog.”

Fink shrugged. “So?”

“You
know
?” Harric stared in surprise at the imp’s blank eyes.

“I been fighting to keep her away from you since you killed my master and snatched my stone.”

“Is she what your sisters are here to protect me from?”

The imp hissed. “No, kid. We can’t touch her. She has Right of Last Kin. It’s the right of your last kin to protect you in the Unseen, act as your guardian while you’re alive. It’s an ancient rule that we can’t touch last kin.”

“
Protect
me? She wants to kill me!”

“Yeah. Ironic, isn’t it? But rules are rules, kid. We can’t touch her.”

Harric blinked, dumbfounded.

“She isn’t your everyday grave spirit, either,” Fink said, waving a claw through the fog so it swirled between them. “This fog is new. She must have promised someone something for helping to take you down. Probably promised that nexus stone.”

“
Some
one?”

Again the inscrutable hedgerows of teeth. A grin? A grimace? “Some
one
, some
thing
.” Fink shrugged. “Important thing is, it’s here, and it hides her and blinds us in the Unseen.”

“What are they?” Harric said, pointing his sword at the shapes in the fog. “Why do they want to kill me?”

“They’re spirits from a grave island, and it isn’t them that wants you dead, kid. It’s her. She probably forced them. Scared them, or promised freedom from their island if they helped.”

“Grave spirits. You mean people?”

Again the lipless grin. “Sure. All you Arkendians bury your kin on islands so they can’t protect you after death. They get real weak and helpless out there. Easy to push around.” He made a hacking sound that might have been a laugh. “All except you, kid. You didn’t bury you mother on an island. Bet you wish you had.”

From the fog came shuffling and scraping of a dozen or more bodies.

Harric swallowed, and thrust the witch-stone before him like a ward.

Fink crow-hopped to his side. “Fight them with your sword, kid. They can’t hurt you in the Unseen, so they’ll manifest some kind of bodies in the Seen, and you can cut them down. You got the reach on them.”

Harric stood ready. A face emerged from the edge of the fog. Mournful, hungry eyes racked with longing. It might have been someone’s grandmother, only famine-gaunt and desperate, the skin torn and hanging from her face.

“Why do they look like ghouls?”

“That’s how they translate into the Seen; their true form, mad and diseased.”

Harric glanced at Fink, though he could not read the grotesque face. “Why mad? What made them mad?”

“Imprisonment on the island. You people starve your dead. Drives them mad.”

More faces emerged, eyes wild with hunger. Whole figures followed—crooked, hunched, and clawed. They crouched, watching Harric like wild dogs stalking a faun. Harric shifted his feet, his hands sweating as he clutched the stone and sword.

“Here’s how it’ll fall out, kid. They’ll try to knock you out or take that stone, so cut them down as fast as they come. Be fast. Then kill them in the Unseen, or they’ll be back.”

Harric’s heart pounded in his throat. “How the Black Moon do I kill them in the Unseen? They’re all—”

Shapes rushed from the fog, gaunt figures on swift and silent feet, bony hands extended like raptor claws. No time to think, Harric slashed, clipping hands and slicing skin, backswinging across the second rank of limbs and specters that howled and dissolved in snarling agony. Claws tore at his breeches and grasped at his ankles, nearly tripping him up, but he kicked them away. The sheer mass of bodies and limbs came so fast it threatened to overwhelm him.

A heavy blow glanced from the side of his head, sending flashes of light across his vision. He staggered back to win room to swing the blade, only to come up against the face of the boulder.

“Fink!”

No answer. The imp had vanished.

He hacked and jabbed, clipping skulls and jabbing ribs. To his relief he found the space before him clear, giving him more space in which to work the sword.

“Close your eyes!” Fink hissed, his voice weirdly distorted.

“Are you mad?” But the creatures before him had halted and retreated to the fringes of the surrounding fog, beyond reach.

“Close your eyes, kid! Cut the grave lines!”

Harric closed his eyes and plunged fully into the Unseen.

The immersion took him by surprise. Instead of peeking through a little window in the top of his mind, he stepped right through into blinding whiteness. In the Unseen, the fog was a wall of dazzling white encircling the little hollow. Before him, in that bleached and shadowless space, the spirits he injured now struggled to move away. Bent double, as if laboring against a violent wind, the spirits clung to taut, glowing lines that extended from themselves into the fog. Hand over hand they hauled themselves toward the dazzling mist, glancing back in terror at Harric. Harric felt no overwhelming wind, but the spirits strained away from him labored against some mighty force. For reasons he couldn’t identify, they weren’t blown back from him, but rather
drawn
to him in some awful and invisible tide.

“The grave lines!” Fink rasped. “Cut them before they reach the fog!”

“Wha—? With my sword? They’re ghosts!”

“Iron cuts in both worlds, kid! Hurry!”

Harric leapt past the nearest grave spirit, unhindered by the Unseen force that pinned it, and swept his blade through its line. He felt a brief tug on the blade as the line severed, then the line vanished, and the spirit tumbled toward Harric—flailing, eyes wide with terror—as if dropping from some fatal height, but sideways at Harric, instead of down. Harric dodged, but the spirit’s trajectory changed with him as he moved. Reflexively, he cast up his hands to ward impact, and the spirit vanished into the stone.

Into the stone?

Harric looked around for the spirit, and behind himself, but saw nothing.

The other spirits grew frantic in their efforts to escape. “Mercy!” they cried.

Harric had moved several paces to the side, and the invisible force that drew the spirits had shifted with him—the stone, he realized. Like the moon from which it drew its power, the stone in Harric’s hand drew the stuff of spirit with its own peculiar gravity. To what end, Harric had no idea, but to judge by their frantic resistance, the spirits sensed it would not be a good one.

Weirdly, Harric felt absolutely no equal or opposite force tugging against the stone. Totally unencumbered, he waved the stone to one side, and the direction of the tug on the spirits shifted with it.
I haven’t the faintest notion what I’m doing.

“Have mercy!” the nearest grave spirit cried. It was the grandmother spirit, which had lagged behind the others in the bid to escape him. “Mercy! She forced us!”

“Cut them all!” Fink cried from atop the boulder. “Before they escape, or they’ll be back!”

Some of the swifter spirits had escaped the well of tide in which the grandmother was snared. These had retreated to the edge of the fog had turned to watch. Their faces were those of people, not ghouls. Mothers and fathers, the odd child—famine-gaunt, faint, sorrowing.

“Forgive us,” the grandmother said. “Have mercy!”

Harric lowered his sword and stepped back.

“He will
not
show mercy,” said his mother’s voice. “For mercy is
not
what I taught him.”

*

Caris woke with
a start. A noise had wakened her. She sat up, looking around the sleeping area in front of the hearth, to find Harric’s mattress empty. She felt a twinge of annoyance. Was he off on the ridge again, where she’d found him the night before? What the Black Moon was he doing out there?

She stood and walked over to the door that opened onto the stairs, and found it shut. It might have been that door she heard, which would indicate he’d only just left. But the tall shutters over the east and west windows had also been closed, which was strange. Perhaps the shutters had blown closed, and that was what she’d heard?

She crossed to the west window, her bare feet scuffing the smooth stone floors, and pushed them open. What she saw below froze her breath inside her.

Fog. White mist had crept in around the feet of the tower, its fingers creeping up the ridge between the fire-cones. Harric had gone out to face his mother without her.

“Gods take you, Harric!”

She ran back to her bed and struggled into her clothes, cursing Harric’s name all the while. She grabbed a lantern from the kitchen and dashed down the stairs, belting her sword as she went.

Ice-smiting hammers upon my skin
.

In the War of Creation

Who could I pray to
?

I found help in my own hands and eyes.

—Arkus, Patron God of Arkendian Independence, from the Heroic Poem “The First Making”

No Master, No Slave

T
he Lady Dimoore
stepped from the fog like an empress in state, clothed not in her old gowns, but in youthful glory—in gathers of her own spirit’s strands, like a robe of glowing ribbons. In the Unseen she was magnificent. Ageless. Radiating confidence and power. This was not the mad mother Harric had known in the last years of her life, nor the mother that haunted his dreams. This was the mother he’d adored when he was young. And the vision took him aback.

Her eyes regarded Harric with a mixture of pride and cool determination. She spoke now in the calm tones of a master in her prime.

“The stone is evil, Harric. It devours your soul even now. See how it feeds on your strands? How it plucks them from the Tapestry of Fate?”

Harric’s eyes followed her gesture to the sky, where indeed his own strands no longer streamed upward to the web of souls in the same abundance as the night before. Many of them bent downward and plunged into the stone clutched in his fist. “Thus it devours your future. I can no longer see your destiny.”

“That’s normal, kid,” Fink said. The imp flapped down from the boulder to land beside Harric with a snap of leather wings. “And it’s good, too, since it limits her getting her fingers in your strings.”

Harric looked back to his mother, stunned by her beauty and power.

Beside her the imp was a scabrous crow.

How long had it been since she’d been so in life? When he was very young, perhaps. The last ten years of her life her visions had worn her into madness.

“As long as it devours your strands, you are a man without a role in the grand pageant. An unknown, without destiny.”