The Jack of Souls (55 page)

Father Kogan trudged
through the dissipating fog, one hand on the cliff wall to keep from stepping off the edge of the gorge. “Another ghost come near me and I’ll cut it in two like the last one. Hear that, ghosts? Reckon you learned your lesson. Such a fog as I never seen, full of whispers and shapes. But I ain’t no fool afraid of no magic. I’m a priest of Arkus and my heart and steel are sound, and it’s a fool ghost that tempts me.”

Almost like stepping through a door, he stepped from the fog and found himself on the road again, still angling up one side of a steep-cut granite valley.

The sound of a horse’s snort drifted up from the valley behind him. He peered back into the receding fog, where the moonlight illumined shadows approaching up the road.

“Blood and brains,” he muttered. The outcrop where he stood was exposed to the moonlight and free of cracks or boulders for hiding, and any moment the figures in the fog would emerge and see him. He dodged around the bend and sprinted fifty paces past to where a wrinkle in the cliff provided a crease of shadow that proved to be a deep crack in the cliff, and big enough for him to squeeze himself and hunker down with a view of the bend. Only heartbeats later, Sir Bannus himself rounded the bend, torch in one hand and an iron-bound horn at his lips. The immortal let go with a bone-rattling blast from the horn that nearly emptied Kogan’s bowels. Phyros ax forgotten, the magnificent Gygon galloped past, followed by Bannus’s shield bearer and pack horses in tow. The blast echoed again from the valley.

“That wasn’t no ghost,” he muttered.

When they were well past, he stood and watched the immortal’s approach to the fort, where cheers from his army echoed in the canyon.

“Gods leave me, Will. I brought the monster right to ye.”

Kogan started to run after them. “But I’ll be there to finish my role, whatever may come. I owe ye that.”

—Attributed to Sir Willard after the defeat of the Old Ones.

Desperation & Despair

A
bell sounded,
clear and loud as a ship’s knell in the dissipating fog.

Caris stirred. Her eyes opened. The bell rang again, and kept ringing from the direction of the tower. “That’s Abellia’s bell. Something’s wrong.”

Harric’s jaw dropped. “Bannus…” In the triumphant struggle with his mother, he’d forgotten what he’d seen in his vision of Brolli at the pass: the siege tower was complete; Bannus would attack the gate at dawn.

“Bannus! Gods leave us!” Caris did not question how he guessed this. She jumped to her feet, hauling him up by the hand. They ran through the trees, the light of her lantern jogging crazily off the trunks. The bell clanged until they reached the tower, where Willard stood in the west window, hauling at the bell rope.

“Blast it, where have you been?” Willard shouted. “Bannus is in the pass and will breach the walls at daybreak.”

“Are we retreating?” she asked.

“No, gods leave us. We should, but Brolli’s still there. He sent Mudruffle to fetch us. The blasted chimpey thinks we can help hold the fort. He has no idea what he’s fighting. Boy! Get up here and help me arm. Girl! Saddle the horses.”

Mudruffle’s horse walked out of the stable, his clay-and-wattle figure still buckled into the saddle. “My harness performed its function as anticipated,” he honked, “but it requires certain adjustments I cannot perform in a timely fashion. Given the urgency of our situation and the straightness of my limbs, might I ask you to cinch up the buckle behind my back, Lady Caris? I—oh! Thank you,” he said, as she tightened and tested the straps.

“You are going back to the pass?” she asked.

“Indeed so, lady. I cannot ride as well as you can, so let your master know I have gone, and that you will pass me shortly on the trail.”

“I will.”

Mudruffle rode off, jouncing ridiculously, and Harric and Caris ran to their separate tasks. In the tower, Harric found Willard struggling with the buckles of his breastplate, while Abellia set out sacks from the kitchen and fretted.

“This is food for some days,” she said, laying the sacks by the door. “I am to be most sad you are going. I am hoping you come back.”

“If we can, we will,” Willard said. “In fact, we
must
; our horses aren’t near enough rested.”

Working quickly and silently, Harric armed Willard. When Caris rejoined them, he helped her as well. The three of them mounted and rode out hard, holding torches to light their trail until the Mad Moon rose; already the clouds in the east burned at his approach.

They passed Mudruffle before they reached the lake.

“Do not delay for my sake!” he called as they galloped past. “I shall catch up, and if you must flee into the wild, I will guide you with my maps.”

By the time he disappeared in the distance behind them, the Mad Moon had cleared the eastern ridge and painted the landscape in blood.

In the hour before sunrise, the three reached the river at the foot of the lake and followed it down through the canyon above the fortress. The growing murmur of the falls drifted to them up the canyon, signaling they neared its end. They slowed their approach. Soon Harric recognized the pile of rocks from which he and Brolli had peered down on the back of the fortress on the first night Bannus roared at the gates. “This is it,” he said to Caris, pointing out the pile. Almost at the same time, Brolli stepped from the shadows at the base of the rocks. They halted beside him.

Brolli’s face was grim. “You could not come more near to the trouble. They wait only for dawn.”

Harric expected Willard to explode in fury for Brolli’s sending Mudruffle, instead of himself, away from danger, but Willard merely gave a curt nod. “What’s the size and comportment of their host?”

Brolli stared at him, brow furrowed. Rather than ask for a translation, he beckoned. “Come see.” He preceded them up the rocks to his viewpoint, but turned halfway up to grab Willard’s hands to pull while Caris helped from behind.

The view of the scene below was much as Harric had seen it in his vision: huge fires blazed beyond the walls of the fortress, illumining the completed siege tower that stood back from the walls, awaiting dawn. Torches burned on the tower’s upper levels. Crossbowmen manned the top, watching the narrow ledge that ran across the cliff and into the fissure behind the leaning tower of rock above the turnabout.

Harric noticed the bodies of two defenders now lay on the ledge. The one he and Brolli had seen on their first night in the pass had made it two-thirds of the way to the fissure; the other, who had apparently tried the feat since then, had made it only halfway. Feathered quarrels jutted from his corpse like the quillions of a porcupine.

On the fortification wall below, there was very little movement. A few heads moved behind the battlements, but by Harric’s count there would only be ten men left to defend it. Enough, perhaps, if Sir Bannus were not among the attackers.

“At dawn they’ll overrun the place,” Willard said. “I suppose you think we can stop them if we reach that leaning column of rock, but at that range those crossbows on the tower would pierce our armor and their spitfires would cook us before we got halfway across that ledge. I don’t see how this could be done.”

“
With magic
,” Brolli said. His owlish eyes flashed. “Maybe I destroy the tower.”

Willard ground his teeth as if biting back his anger. The muscles of his jaw bulged. When he spoke, it was in low, measured tones. “You put yourself in danger—you put us
all
in danger—to prove a point about magic?”

Brolli did not rise to the bait. “I am tired of running. Better we fight them. And my magic is certain.”

“It is not certain! You said yourself
maybe
you destroy the tower.”

“You misunderstand me. My magic may not destroy the tower, but it
will
knock down the bowmen. While they are down, we run to the rockfall.” With his hands before his wolfish grin, Brolli pantomimed the rock tower toppling. “You see? If my magic destroys tower, good. But even if it does not, it knocks bowmen down and we run to the rockfall. You see?”

“None of this takes into account what Bannus might do, or how you employ your magic in front of a dozen magic-fearing Arkendian guardsmen on the wall. They might tear you to pieces before you got off your spell. Far too risky—not at all certain—”

Harric did not hear the rest. While they argued, he’d slipped back down the rocks and away down the dark road beside the river. Hugging shadows at the base of the rock pile, he slipped past his friends and ran, counting on their argument and the burning fires to distract them until he came to the stairs that climbed to the foot of the ledge. He found the first stair in the shadow of the fortification, cut into the cliff, and rose steeply under the cover of shadow for half its ascent. As he’d noted the first time he and Brolli came through, the builders had erected a low stone wall to hide the stairs from eyes below, providing plenty of cover for a crouching climber. Harric crouched and climbed.

Brolli’s plan had seemed daring to Harric, but there was another way that Harric alone could accomplish, and without so much risk to the ambassador.

At the top of the stairs, some four fathoms above the top of the battlements, the cover of the wall ended. He stopped behind the last bit of wall to catch his breath, his thighs burning from the climb. Before him, the bare ledge forged ahead, rising slightly as it cut across the face of the cliff. It was just wide enough for a large man to walk without turning sideways, and stretched perhaps sixty paces to where it ended in the fissure. Halfway across lay the body of the first guardsman; beyond that, the second. The siege tower stood even with the second corpse, its top three fathoms below and its crossbowmen watching the ledge.

Harric drew the witch-stone from his shirt. Its slick surface felt cool in the palm of his hand, but sweat prickled on his neck as he contemplated what he was about to do. He’d only entered the Unseen without help once before, and in the brief time he’d been there it had sapped him like he’d run a mile at full speed up a mountain. Indeed, he’d passed out from it. Without Fink’s help he feared he might pass out and fall off the cliff or suddenly become visible to the crossbowmen.

Far above him, a few high clouds paled with the approach of dawn.

It’s now or never.
Harric closed his eyes, and peered into the Unseen through the oculus at the top of his mind. The landscape lay before him like a dreamy, underwater reflection of itself. Filaments of spirit rose from everything around him, clouding the air with luminescent strands. So beautiful it now seemed. Had he feared it before? Once more he felt the strange sensation of standing on the bottom of a slow-moving river amidst a forest of wavering strands, like water grasses. Because of these filaments it was difficult to see beyond a hundred paces or so.
A slow, gloriously bright river
, he amended. In contrast, the fires of the siege tower made dense points of flickering blackness.

Harric strained his consciousness up at the oculus. He imagined he was climbing out through that high window in his mind. A thrill of danger shot through him as it began to open above him, and then pulled him through. He found himself standing fully in the Unseen, his body alight with pale filaments flickering into the sky.

The weight of his entrance into the Unseen staggered him. He gasped, felt himself growing faint. He tottered and threw his hands out for balance, but knocked his cheek against the cliff before he steadied himself.

I can do this. I have to do this.

He walked out onto the narrow ledge, eyes on the luminescent stone before him, hand on the cliff to his right. In three steps, his head was pounding with the effort. In ten paces he crossed above the battlements, his lungs heaving, burning as if he carried his horse on his back. Panic scattered his thoughts as he realized it was too difficult to maintain.
I’m going to pass out and drop into the Seen!
He staggered toward the body of the first guardsman, which lay midway between the wall and the siege tower.
Too far! I can’t make it!

Dimly he recognized how ironic it was that he should get no farther with magic than the first defender had without. His vision went black; the roaring became a high, hissing shriek, and he could bear it no more: his knees buckled as he fell into ringing blackness.

*