The Jack of Souls

by Stephen Merlino

  The circular room was divided in three-by-two walls of wattle reaching from the floor to the peaked ceiling high above. It was the same basic design they used in Gallows Ferry, though on a larger scale, to separate the birds into three groups: outgoing birds that could be released to deliver a message, incoming birds that needed to be transported back to their original nests to be useful again, and newly arrived birds whose messages hadn’t yet been read. The door from the stairwell opened into the side for newly arrived birds. Only one bird occupied the room, and when it saw Harric, it flapped to the seed jars and pecked at the lids. Harric took a handful from one and held it for the bird while he removed its message with the other hand.

  The note read: Next supply with harvest team at full moons.

  Harric put it in the pocket with his witch-stone and slipped his own note into the empty tube. As the new arrival perched on his thumb and devoured seed in his palm, Harric opened the wattle door to the outgoing birds, and put the new arrival inside, closing the wattle behind him. He poured the seed on a ledge for the hungry pigeon, who abandoned his hand for the seed. This newcomer would take the place of the one he would release, so the caretaker would count the same number as before, and assume the incoming pigeon with the message about harvest had fallen to a falcon en route.

  Harric gathered up a sleeping pigeon in a low nest before it could wake and fly to a higher perch. With soft noises and strokes, he calmed it until he could coax one leg out and attach his message. He watered and fed it as much as it would eat, remembering that a hungry bird was more likely to be taken by a predator when it stopped to forage. When it showed impatience with the food, he carried it out through the tower door onto the parapet above the falls, and released it.

  The bird gave two powerful flaps with the signature snap of a blackheart, made one wide arc around the towers, and slanted away south along the ridges.

  Harric closed the door to the parapet and returned to the cote. So far so good. The place was meticulously maintained, however, so he would have to take care not to upset anything, or the caretaker would notice something amiss. The straw in the cote was fresh and neat. The seed jars were covered and ordered on the shelves. Three pre-written messages hung on the first three hooks in a line of six.

  Of the three pre-written messages, Harric selected the third, assuming the meticulous caretaker had been drawing the messages from the right end of the hooks. He took the message out and read it: Horsetail Twr. Qtr. Moons. All Quiet. By that he deduced the next pigeon was scheduled to go out at the next quarter moon, a day hence. Perfect luck. If they’d come a day later the second message wouldn’t go out for a week.

  He slipped his own message in the tube and restored it to its hook. The pilfered note he deposited in his pocket with the witch-stone, where he let his hand linger on the globe’s glassy surface.

  He drew the stone out and held it beside the candle to illumine its depths. Smoky wisps seemed to move in it, but the candlelight banished them like a gust of wind. A nervous thrill rose in his belly as he recalled the words in his dream that made the witches turn invisible. If the dream were true, he could simply speak them and vanish like the wisps in the stone. But then how would he become visible again? The witch only became visible when Brolli grabbed him. If worse came to worst, he could always ask Brolli to jump him the way he’d jumped the Iberg…

  Or maybe if he set down the stone, the spell would cease.

  Nebecci, Bellana, Tryst.

  He itched to say it, and learn.

  Harric moved the candle away, and the wisps swirled in from the sides. In the glassy surface he glimpsed the reflection of a face peering over his shoulder, and gasped in surprise. Whirling, he found no one, but he’d been certain of a presence—as if the air had moved beside him, or he’d heard a soft breath near his ear.

  Urgent whispers sounded in the air around him, so faint he couldn’t be sure of them at all. Fly! Fly! Then the distinct sound of horns and hooves, as through a tunnel, and it seemed he saw the hooves among the wisps in the stone, charging through a campfire.

  “Harric!” Willard called from outside.

  Harric’s lungs nearly leapt from his mouth. He stuffed the stone in the cargo slip of his shirt, and cracked the shutter overlooking the road below. The old knight slumped with his head on one arm across the front of his saddle. Getting into the saddle had taken another toll on him.

  “Horns,” Brolli called up. He dismounted Idgit, and loped over to the postern. “We must open the gate and hurry through.”

  “I’m coming,” Harric called. His heart raced, spurred by the shock that his vision of Bannus was real, and the conviction that the voices that plagued him came not from madness, but the stone, and that they’d tried to warn him of danger.

  All the more reason to trust it.

  Harric ran down the stairs and into the winch room above the portcullis, where enormous chains and pulleys ran out of holes in the floor and onto massive windlasses. There he encountered a worried-looking Brolli, and Caris, who hunched over one of the windlasses with a candle to examine the gears.

  “We have a problem,” Brolli said.

  “Is it broken?”

  “It is locked. Caris, show him the key.”

  Caris stood and displayed an iron key as long as a dagger. Harric squinted at it and picked it up from her hand. “It’s a half-key,” he said, feeling its hemi-cylindrical shaft against his palm. “Where did you find it?”

  “One of the men downstairs wear it round his neck. It is half the key?”

  “Yes. Someone else has the other half. So no one man can open it without the other.”

  Brolli frowned. “These men here?”

  “Not likely. The other half is probably with the men who come to harvest in the fall. That way neither man could poach the Queen’s resin from the grove without the cooperation of the other.”

  Harric knelt with his candle beside the iron keyhole box bolted to the windlass. He slipped the key in, and felt its action in the lock. Without the other half of the key, its action was sloppy. “It probably lifts half the pins, but not the other half.”

  Judging by the sounds and action of the key, it was a relatively simple lock. Straight pins to move a bolt. If the bolt was rusty, it could be hard to move with only half the key, but the mechanism looked fairly clean. He removed the key and counted tabs. Three. Probably another three tabs on the other half.

  “How do you know so much about locks?” said Caris, glaring.

  Harric ignored the bait.

  “I say we just break the lock off,” she said to Brolli. “It wouldn’t be hard.”

  “Not hard,” said Brolli. “But then it is clear someone pass through.”

  Harric stood. “There’s no way to open this without the other half of that key,” he said, letting his worry show. “Maybe one of the men here does have the other half. We’d better look. Then, if there’s no key, we break it.”

  He paused, as if uncertain what to do. He laid his hand on Brolli’s arm, where Caris couldn’t see it. Brolli glanced up, but Harric merely squeezed gently without meeting his eyes. Brolli took the hint and said no more. Impatient, Caris snatched up her candle and stalked from the room down the stairs.

  “I hoped she’d do that.” Harric winked at Brolli, and unslung his pack. Crouching beside the lock box, he felt around in the pack for the tools he’d need.

  Brolli smiled. “There is no other half.”

  “Not likely. But that should keep her busy.”

  Harric found his cloth of tools and laid it open on his pack, while Brolli took the candle and held it up for him. He selected two of the larger hooks, which he held in his mouth, and then his favorite bronze-tipped long pick. With the half-key in the lock, he slid the pick along its length; after a few exploratory probings to confirm his suspicions of the location and number of pins, it was a simple matter of lifting two pins with hooks, and the third with his pick.

  He turned the half-key gently, but the
bolt wouldn’t budge. He double-checked all the pins and tried again. Still stuck. He put as much force on it as he dared, then tried brief pulses of pressure. The bolt moved on the third pulse.

  Harric turned to Brolli without moving his hands. “Would you like to do the honors?”

  Brolli grinned, the teeth somehow more feral when so close in yellow light. “So we tell her I open it?”

  “Precisely.”

  Brolli let out a small bark of a laugh and laid his huge, long-fingered hand over Harric’s to turn the key. The bolt scraped in its channel, releasing the windlass.

  Harric returned his tools to the cloth, and stashed them in his pack. He passed Caris in the stairway as he returned his candle to the kitchen.

  “Nothing.” She glared, then avoided his eyes. “I’m breaking it.”

  He let her pass, and returned his candle to the kitchen. Brolli could tell her.

  Outside, Harric found Willard where he’d left him. The other horses stood with him, with Rag picketed some fifty paces hence. All of their hooves had been tied up with muffles to mute the sound, though for what reason, Harric wasn’t sure. As long as the guardsmen slept, what did it matter? Perhaps Willard insisted on regular non-magic tactics in spite of their redundancy.

  From farther down the valley came a high-pitched hunting horn.

  Willard didn’t move.

  The winch groaned, chains grumbled as the thick-timbered drawbridge lowered and lay flat, revealing an iron-barred portcullis still blocking the way. Molly tossed her head impatiently, and Willard finally raised his. The ropes of the portcullis groaned, tightening against the winch as Brolli and Caris worked the windlass above. The gate rose a hand’s breadth, then stopped, and as it did, something clanked against the stonework to one side.

  “Wait!” Harric called up. “Let it back down!”

  He ran to the portcullis, unslinging his pack as he went. Brolli and Caris lowered the portcullis, and Harric saw the source of the problem: as he’d suspected, a heavy chain had been threaded through the ironwork and padlocked to an iron ring in the foundation. “Moons, could they be more paranoid?”

  He plunged his hand in the pack and grabbed his pick from the cloth.

  “What is it?” Willard said, looming behind him.

  “A lock. But I think I have the key.”

  “Key?”

  “Found inside,” Harric mumbled. With luck the old knight wouldn’t remember any of this tomorrow.

  Without a candle he had to do it blind, but his mother had hooded him many times in his training. Back then it was always in the comfort of a warm room, with no Old One bearing down, but she’d also taught him to slow his breathing and clear his mind for such things. He groped the surface with his hands, searched for the keyhole, and found in its place a waxen seal.

  Moons! If he broke the seal, it would be obvious someone had used the lock. And there was no time for him to repair it, for it had been applied while hot. Nothing to do but break it. They had to get through. Probing, he found he could lift the edges with a fingernail, and when he applied a little more force, half the seal popped off in his hand. That was good luck. A few seconds later, and another chunk came off, opening a hole large enough for his pick.

  He placed the wax chips between his lips to warm them, and probed the lock with the pick.

  It was big and clumsy, and simple. Fortunately, it was also supple, heavily oiled, and had been spared the ferocious mist-rust on the outside of the lock by the protective wax. A quick tick of two tumblers, and a shake to help gravity move the other, and the lock pulled open.

  “Go!” Harric called.

  The winch groaned, and the portcullis began to rise again as Brolli and Caris labored in the gatehouse above.

  Harric let the chain fall, and retreated with the lock into the kitchen as the gate rose behind him. The thump of muffled hooves on wood confirmed Willard riding through with the horses.

  In the kitchen, Harric relit his candle and used it to warm the chips of wax from the seal. In a few moments they were soft enough to reattach over the keyhole. Close inspection would reveal the subterfuge, but from a distance they’d seem intact.

  Caris ran down the stairs and out the postern. He soon heard the sound of Rag’s hooves on the wood of the drawbridge.

  “Harric! I need you!” Caris called.

  He snuffed his candle and groped his way out with the lock, then trotted after her through the gate. Willard had stopped right inside the gate, but Caris ran Rag fifty paces past him into the canyon that rose up and over the pass behind the fortification. When Harric caught up to her, she pushed the reins in his hands.

  “Move her up the road,” she said between gasps for breath. “A bowshot from Molly.” Without waiting for his response, she turned and pounded back to help Brolli raise the gates.

  “Wait—” Harric began, but he bit off the rest as Rag began to fret the instant Caris turned. Lock still in hand, he jogged Rag up the road, tethered her to a scrubby bush, and sprinted back to the gatehouse.

  A red eye of ragleaf watched him from the darkness of the gateway. “Boy, didn’t you hear that horn?”

  “Lock!” was all Harric gasped.

  When he arrived at the open gateway, he glanced down the mountainside, half expecting to see their pursuers rounding the bend, but the road remained empty. The ropes to the portcullis groaned, and the gate descended.

  “Slowly!” he shouted upward.

  Too late, the massive portcullis clanged on the stone like a hammer on a bell, echoing in the valley. He stepped forward and found the chain by touch, looped it in the bars, as he thought he remembered it had been before, then fastened it with the padlock. A gentle touch of his thumb on the wax confirmed the seal remained in place.

  As Brolli and Caris resumed winding the windlass in the gatehouse above, the chains jerked and the timber bridge began its ponderous ascent. Harric sprinted around the back of the gatehouse and in the back door, where he groped his way up the stairs to help. He found Brolli and Caris hard at work, one at each windlass, straining and sweating against the levers. He attempted to help, throwing his weight against the spokes where Caris toiled, but the act brought stabbing pain to his ribs, so he ran the window instead, and peered at the road—still empty—below.

  “How much farther?” Caris gasped.

  “It’s halfway up,” Harric replied. “Keep going!”

  When it was nearly shut, it got much easier, and the two spun the windlasses more rapidly, but when it thudded in place and they’d returned the locking blocks to the gears, both Caris and Brolli were panting and soaking with sweat.

  The words “well done” had hardly escaped Brolli’s mouth before a horn blasted from the nearest bend in the mule track. Harric looked out the window to see riders rounding the bend.

  “Quickly!” Brolli motioned to the door. “Out!”

  *

  Caris and Harric flew down the stairs and out the back door, but Brolli did not follow them out. Harric paused, letting Caris lumber up the hill for her horse, and peered back through the door in time to see the Kwendi slip into the kitchen.

  “Brolli!” he called.

  The Kwendi’s head reappeared in the dim light from the kitchen. “Must not still sleeping,” he said, then vanished.

  Willard rode Molly and the two other horses up the road into the canyon, muffled hoofbeats thrumming from the walls.

  Harric left through the back door and followed, only to meet the pungent stink of Phyros dung on the air. He cursed. A dark pile lay in the midst of the road like a “Willard Went This Way” sign.

  He gritted his teeth and scooped the steaming clods in both hands, and tossed them into the hungry river running beside the road.

  Brolli loped up with a chuckle. “They say Phyros shit give special power.”

  “Yeah. Makes your crap immortal.”

  Hoofbeats clattered beyond the wall. A dozen riders, perhaps. A harsh, deep-throated horn blasted and reverberated from
the rocks.

  “Bannus,” said Harric. “That’s the sound of Krato’s Moon.”

  He ran with Brolli to a vantage on the road above the fortress. Together they climbed a boulder to peer back. Their vantage was about even in elevation with the tops of the gatehouse wall, which was high enough to see some of the turnabout, but not high enough to see Bannus on Gygon before the gate. The sound of the falls was a faint grumble at this distance, but moon-pinked mist still rose beyond the parapets.

  Movement on the walls. The parapet door opened and a handful of men appeared, hiding behind crenellations and peeking out at the commotion below. At least one, Harric guessed, was on his way to the pigeon cote to pen an urgent message.

  Bannus’s gravel voice sounded beyond the wall. “Open these gates! Open in the name of Prince Jamus, Royal Sun of Arkendia, House Pellion, last of the True Kings in this broken land.”

  Pellion, Harric thought. So Pellion is Bannus’s master again. His mother’s mnemonics sprung to mind.

  House Pellion Lingers

  Last Sun to Shine

  Turned Coats in the Cleansing

  Preserving Their Line.

  Immortal Lord Jormus

  Grandsire of That Stock,

  Sir Bannus’s Master

  In Pellion Rock.

  Jormon His Son

  Fathered Three Princely Lords

  Joff, Jothry, and Jamus,

  One daughter called Jordes.

  It was the third grandson, then—Jamus—holding Bannus’s leash. Jamus would be the prince that came to Gallows Ferry the night he fled, and the one Mother Ganner told him of.

  “Greeting, Great One,” a guard called down to Bannus. “What service can we render ye?”

  “You can open your bloody gates, you dog. We seek a peasant priest, and a Phyros-rider, to face the justice of their peers.”