The Jack of Souls (8 page)

Worry about them later
, he tutored himself.
Concentrate on nineteen.

The inn’s shadow crept steadily up the cliff wall, marking the downward path of the sun in the west, and still no suitable marks appeared. When the inn and its shadow finally reached an equal height, Harric knew the sun touched the horizon, and he had little time left. To get his twentieth con, he’d have to attempt a courtier.

“Carriage!” a reveler called, pointing to the gate. “Drink!”

A fine carriage trundled through the south gate, brass tokens flashing on the breasts of the lead horses. A knot of doubt twisted Harric’s stomach, as he recognized the tokens as licenses admitting carriages into the court of the Queen.

Harric muttered a silent curse. “You think it’s my doom you send in that carriage, don’t you, Mother? Well, you’re wrong. It’s my Proof.”

“Sir Bastard!” The yeoman leaned across the porch rail to offer a cup of frothing apple wine. “This your magic number? We must toast!”

Harric bowed to the yeoman, never taking his eyes from the carriage. He waved off the wine. “Keep it for after,” he said. “For this I’ll need my wits.”

He bleeds fell Molly, drinks her Blood,

On every moon, he drinks again,

An ageless, wound-less, strength of ten.

—From “Immortality Becomes Him,” a Sir Willard ballad circa early reign of Chasia

Of Debt & Hexes

S
ir Willard followed
the road down a winding canyon toward the river, herding the ponies and the ambassador before him, still concealed beneath his blanket.

If they hadn’t taken a wrong turn into one of the dead-end alleys of the scablands, they should be nearing the Gallows Ferry crossing, where their flight would be over. Once there, he’d board a ferry, cross the river, and force the ferrymen to tie up for the night, stranding Sir Green on the opposite shore until morning. With his crossbow-happy pursuers off his tail, Willard could trade for fresh horses in Gallows Ferry, and still leave with a big enough lead to shake his pursuers for good.

Let’s see you catch me then, Sir Green.

Relief settled in his mind. Brolli would finally be safe, and hope for a treaty with his people would be restored. Moreover, Willard needn’t drink the Blood that would save him—but enslave him—once again, and shatter his oath to Anna.

He grunted, puffing on a roll of ragleaf.
Don’t kid yourself, old man. Something’s bound to go sideways on us. More likely it all ends on the bottom of the river.

From a blind corner, they emerged at the head of a narrow, steep-walled valley that dropped between bluffs to the river and a graveled beach, two stone-throws below him. A wooden ferry dock jutted from the middle of the beach into the current. Beyond the dock and the wide river, the Godswall soared into the blue sky, a curtain of granite capped with sun-bright peaks of white.

He reined in sharply, surprised to see hundreds of emigrants filling the valley below him and obstructing the road all the way to the water. They were mostly simple folk, with their animals; they’d squatted or lain down on the ground in exhaustion, waiting their turn for a ferry.

The nearest travelers looked up at Willard in surprise, not ten paces away. Then their eyes widened in recognition and horror.

“Phyros!” a man screamed. A mule caught Molly’s scent and kicked free of its handler to flee up the side of the gully. In the time it took to suck a breath and yell, the crowd exploded, screaming and fleeing. Goats bolted up the rocks; an ox snapped its tether and ran bellowing for the water, knocking people sideways. Some picked themselves up and fled in its wake, others scrambled up the bluffs to hide in the rocks. Mothers huddled their children for fear of trampling.

The ambassador chuckled under his blanket. “Your people love you so. It warms my heart to see.”

“They think I’m an Old One,” Willard said.

The furor rolled down the gulch like a wave, growing and driving the masses before it and emptying onto the dead-end beaches to either side of the dock.

Willard restrained Molly from bloody pursuit, holding fast to her reins. He’d long since stopped feeling guilt or pity for the terror she caused, but he never let her sate her bloodlust on the innocent.

Molly tossed her head, stamping sparks from the stones with her massive iron shoes.

Willard slugged her in the neck, a gesture she barely regarded. “Save it,” he growled. “We’ll have real foes, soon enough.”

He squinted across a mile of water to the opposite side. There was no river bank over there, only sheer granite cliff for miles in either direction, but somehow the timbermen who founded Gallows Ferry had found a fault at the foot of the Godswall large enough to make a landing. From there they’d built their “Hanging Road”—a path that rose from the water and across the face of the cliffs to Gallows Ferry. The two ferries worked the passage between landings, mere toys in the distance, had just unloaded, and now churned back, wood fires blasting from the chimneys.

Willard’s spirits rose at the thought that he’d be across before sunset, but sank when he watched another ship emerge from behind a bend only a mile down the opposite shore.

It was a lord’s ship: sharp-nosed, with three decks of ornate railings and fancywork trimmed in brilliant sapphire paint. A
nobleman’s
ship.

“Gods take them,” he muttered. “It’s already gone sideways on us.”

“What is the troubles?”

“Sir Green’s master is on that ship, I’ll wager. We’ll beat him to the landing, but not by enough. If we’re to lose them for good, we’re going to need an hour’s head start at least.”

Molly bared her blood tooth at the ponies she’d herded all day up the road, but the poor beasts were too weary to do more than droop their ears a little more and stagger a step away.

“We have to break free tonight, Brolli. These horses won’t last another day.”

“I could ride behind you on Molly, yes?”

Willard snorted. “She’d try to eat you.”

“Maybe we find some help in Gallows Ferry.”

Willard frowned. A mile upstream on the cliffs of the opposite shore, the tiny outpost glowed in the light of the low setting sun, bleached pink on its perch in the cliff face. To Willard it seemed little more than a snag of driftwood hung high in a crack of the Godswall.

“Don’t count on it,” Willard said. “We might find someone to delay our pursuers for us. But it might be a death sentence to the outpost, and we don’t have enough gold to persuade anyone to take that kind of risk. But we have an expression here in Arkendia, Ambassador:
The gods help none, so help yourself.
Arkendians live and die by that motto.”

Brolli laughed. “It’s the ‘die’ part I mis-like.”

“Be still, now, Ambassador. There are many eyes and ears hereabout.”

“I am much tired of hiding in the blanket,” Brolli sighed.

“Get used to it.”

Willard urged Molly down the road, hoping a change of location might inspire a solution to their problems. Molly picked her way between abandoned handcarts and piles of toppled luggage, herding the ponies ahead. Her movement drew a chorus of fresh screams from the emigrants, who were now trapped beneath the bluffs at the either end of the beach. Many struggled with panicked beasts near the water; several strove knee-deep in the river against a wild-eyed donkey. A pair of herders cried out in vain after a sheep swept away in the current. Most of the emigrants huddled at the foot of the bluffs, wailing like rabbits in a slaughter pen.

Willard drew in at the foot of the dock, where a knot of peasants stood their ground as if determined to keep their place at the head of the line. Some wise drover among them had put sacks over the heads of their oxen to muffle their senses and keep them still as the Phyros approached. From the peasants came the familiar chorus of fear, but there was something else there, as well—a note of defiance?—that pulled Willard from his thoughts.

A quick scan revealed the source: in the midst of the group stood a Liberator—a full-blown peasant priest—huge and hairy, and glaring at Willard.

Willard ground his teeth. The last thing he needed was some bullheaded zealot to throw a stone in the works.

Like the god he both followed and denounced, the man was a true giant. He stood chest and shoulders above the tallest peasant, and a mule’s weight heavier. Also like his god, he was filthy as a boar in a pen, with a mane of beard and braids so matted it might have been a worm-eaten mantle of bear skin. He wore a smothercoat of woolen rugs that further magnified his size, and which stank so fiercely of soured wool that Willard maneuvered Molly to avoid its stench in the breeze.

A verse from “Sir Willard and the Peasant Priest” tripped into Willard’s skull and stayed there long enough to annoy him:

Don’t come so near, my fragrant friend,

Your beard is breeding fleas.

My sword is yours,

Sworn to defend,

But down-breeze, if you please.

“Get behind me,” the priest growled to his flock. The men and women obliged, clearing the space before him to reveal his woolly shins and muddy feet. One of the priest’s hands clutched the haft of an enormous Phyros ax—ancient, double-bladed, too huge for any mortal but a giant to wield. Judging by its design, Willard himself might have used that very ax during the days of the Cleansing to sever the necks of Phyros and end the reign of the Old Ones. To the peasants, and in the hand of this Liberator priest, it would be a powerful symbol of freedom.

In his other hand the priest clamped the throat of a little man in a dockmaster’s uniform. The man’s face had gone purple, and his eyes pleaded with the Phyros-rider for aid, but Willard made no move to acknowledge him. If the man was fool enough to deny a Liberator passage, he likely deserved everything he got.

A barefoot matron slapped at the priest’s arms. “Run, ye fool!” she squeaked. “It’s an Old One! Run!”

“Too late,” the priest rumbled. “Can’t swim.” He thrust the dockmaster to arm’s length and heaved the ax back as if he’d cleave him like kindling. “If I’m going to the afterworld,” he growled to the dockman, “I reckon I’ll send you first, you child-slaving git. And I aim to catch you there, too, and kick your scrawny arse up and down the sky.”

A whisper of hope woke in Willard as he recognized the priest’s voice, and then the face behind the dirty beard. “Brother Kogan.” He raised a gauntleted hand in greeting. “Put your ax down. I require your help in the service of your queen.”

Kogan blinked. He squinted at Sir Willard, then at the gigantic violet Phyros on which he sat, and then at Willard again. “W-Will…?” he breathed. Then louder, laughing: “I’ll be hung and dried, it’s Will!”

“Come here, Brother, if you please. I don’t wish to disrupt your flock any further.”

An exultant grin split Kogan’s hairy face, exposing several cracked and missing teeth. “It’s
Father
Kogan, now, Will. Father Kogan.”

Kogan half carried, half dragged the dockmaster across the beach, grinning like a younger brother with a prize to show his hero. He planted the miserable man under Molly’s nose like an offering, and a dark stain spread down the man’s breeches.

Willard hauled Molly’s head away before she gutted the man, and her fury at this latest denial of her nature was so great she nearly flung him from the saddle. A brief but backbreaking struggle ensued before he calmed her enough to reposition her, several paces removed. Kogan hooted the while, as if watching a bull-baiting. Willard glared at the grinning giant, grinding his teeth against the oaths that crowded to his lips, and the objections of his aching joints. He was never quite prepared for how dense the peasant god’s priests could be. Especially Kogan. It was a factor that could complicate the escape plan taking shape in Willard’s mind, but there were no other allies on that beach. Kogan would have to do.

“It’s been a dog’s age since I seen you, Will,” said Kogan. “Molly ain’t changed a bit, but I hardly knowed you with your armor all blacked. You still on the outs with the Queen?”