The Jack of Souls

by Stephen Merlino

  The figure sobbed. That was the sound he’d heard. A boy or girl, he guessed, of some ten years. The child gasped, weaving as if it had run a long way.

  Kogan retreated to the dark beside the barn, and watched. Caution taught him that those who ran in the night were often pursued, and he did not wish to be spotted if the pursuers were his own lordly enemies.

  The boy threw himself against Miles’s door, and pushed into the house as if he knew the place. Crying and sobbing began in earnest. Murmurs of consolation from Miles and Marta.

  Kogan watched the road, waiting and listening. Snatches of the boy’s cries came to him, and he pieced together what had happened at a neighboring farm. Knights had come. They killed the family pig. They made his family serve them. They hurt his sister. Hurt his granny. Not just bad hurt. Horrible hurt.

  Sounds of consolation from Miles. The sobbing dimmed as they took the boy inside.

  Marta scurried from the house and made a beeline for the barn.

  “I’m here,” Kogan murmured from the side. She startled, and rushed to him.

  “O, Father…it’s horrible…”

  “I heard it. Breaks my heart.”

  “You ain’t heard the worst, Father. That Phyros-rider is come at Flaxon’s home. Sir Bannus is there—” she choked, and her hand shot to her mouth as if to hold her insides back.

  “That ain’t possible…” Kogan rumbled. But something cold and black and true as iron crept into his heart when she said it.

  “Flaxon’s boy Dovy’s come just now and told us, and he ain’t no fool, neither. He’d never make that up. But can it be true, Father? Can he really be back?”

  “The boy can’t be right. Lemme talk to him.”

  “Wait, Father, listen,” she said, holding his wrist. “It’s Sir Bannus and some horror of a squire, and they tortures Dovy’s family. My boy let slip to Dovy that you is here, Father, and now little Dovy’s wild that you should rescue them—”

  The boy flew from the doorway and ran against Kogan’s knees. Kogan scooped him up in his blackened arms and held him tight while the boy wept, tiny body convulsing.

  “Will you save them, Father?” Dovy said when he could speak. “Take your ax and chop off their heads?”

  Kogan looked sadly into the boy’s tear-blasted eyes. “Only a one of the Blue Order can do that, Dovy. I’m just a regular man.”

  “But you’re a peasant priest. You have to help them! They’re hurting the bastard boy, Yort, and Granny! You don’t know—I saw it—if you saw, you’d help, I know you would.”

  “Dovy, there ain’t nothing we can do but hope, and wait till they’re gone.”

  “No! I won’t! They—they said it’s you they want. They said if we tell ’em where you is they’ll let my gran and the bastard go. Let go of me!”

  Kogan held him fast in strong, gentle arms. “They’d only hurt you too, Dovy. Come on inside.” Kogan carried the boy kicking and screaming into the house, and sat by the fire with the frantic boy on his lap.

  “You mean they’d hurt you!” Dovy shrieked. “They’d hurt you and let Granny go!” His face contorted with silent weeping, but his eyes screamed innocent accusation.

  Kogan felt the red rage swelling in his skull, roaring in his ears, and he clenched his jaw against it, recalling the Widow Larkin’s wisdom on the night he fled his flock, against suicidal stands against injustice. He held her voice and face in his mind until the red subsided. Tears of frustrated rage welled up in its place. Dovy ceased his struggling and wept, exhausted, despairing.

  “Let me tell you a story of Sir Willard and the Blue Order,” Kogan murmured. He felt as dark and empty as the cellar in which he’d slept. If he could do a bit of good for his gran he’d give his life for her. But it would be worse than futile. They’d merely catch Dovy too, and foist their horrors on him. Or make him watch his sister’s.

  “I’ll tell you, Dovy, how Willard and the Blue Order, in the Cleansing, how they drove the Old Ones from the land.”

  Dovy whimpered. “You don’t know anything. Bannus is a blue man. Blue as sky. I’ve seen him.”

  “All immortals is blue, Dovy. I mean Sir Willard’s order; they calls themselves the Blue Order. They’re the good immortals. Only a member of the Blue Order can face up to an Old One. They did it, too, in the Cleansing, and killed them or drove them from the land.”

  “Where is the Blue Order now?”

  “I don’t know, Dovy. In their castle, I expect. But they’ll bring justice. You can be sure of it. You’ll see. They’ll kill the rest of the Old Ones for good.”

  Marta sat beside them, her own son on her lap. She frowned at the cloud of charcoal surrounding Kogan, but let it go. “Miles is watching the road. If anything stirs, he’ll warn us, and we’ll all run to the forest.”

  Kogan told stories to soothe Dovy’s misery, and to stave off his own futile rage. It seemed to still Dovy. Marta’s boy fell asleep on the rug at the hearth, and eventually Dovy dropped into a twitching, whimpering sleep. Kogan laid Dovy gently in Marta’s arms. “Best you keep the boy till Bannus abandons his homestead.”

  She nodded. “It ain’t your fault, Father. You know that. You didn’t wish this on nobody.”

  Kogan nodded, fists and jaw clenched.

  “I set a pack of vittles by the door, Father. You aim to leave?”

  He did not miss the implicit plea in her eyes; he nodded, and was sure he saw relief there.

  “What’ll you do, Father? Where’ll you go?”

  Kogan growled in his beard, something between a sigh and a grunt. “I’ll head east into the mountains. I aim to find that fire-cone tower you told me on. Said there’s an old Iberg there what the Queen lets do her magic?” He spat. “I’ll bring that Iberg the word of Arkus, I will. Let her know magic don’t belong here. And she’s like to have pigeons, too: someone’s gotta tell the Blue Order there’s Old Ones about. But I don’t mean to run oft and leave you with them monsters, mind. After I’m gone a day, you let on to Dovy that I’ve run up that pass, and let him inform on me. They’ll reward him, that way. Least I can do.”

  Marta nodded. “I will. It’s a day on a fresh horse to that fire-cone tower, mind. Take two day afoot, maybe three.”

  “I run good. An’ once they’re in the pass there won’t be nobody to torture but me and an Iberg what deserves it.”

  Night Moon, Soul Moon, Spirit Moon, Fate Moon, Cursed Moon, Dark Moon, Dead Moon.

  —Names for the Unseen Moon

  30

  Foul Friends & Good Fortune

  As Harric crossed the yard beneath the windows of the fire-cone tower, he heard Spook’s familiar mew behind him. He turned to see the cat padding after him, purring and pleading with wide white eyes.

  Harric picked him up to hush him, and carried him past the barns and up a dirt path amidst the long legs of the trees. The path took him over a rocky hump, beyond which he could no longer see the tower behind him, and down the broken spine of the ridge, where fire-cones mingled with massive roots among the rocks. Spook meowed again, but when Harric offered a piece of sheep cheese, the cat ignored it, peering up at him with blank white eyes.

  The night air was cool, and a fresh breeze ran up from the valleys on either side. The stand looked eerily disjointed, cross-lit with the bi-color lights of the Mad Moon and the Bright Mother. As the Mother set in the west, fat and tumid near the horizon, she sent shafts of silver light slanting between the giant trunks. The Mad Moon, on the other hand, had gained on her in their monthly race across the sky. This night he straddled the opposite horizon—a bleary necrotic eye—peering aslant the limbs to stain her silver and slash the trees with strokes of bloody light. On the east side of the ridge, where the Mother could not reach, all was dark and lurid red.

  Harric wandered down the ridge on a path beneath the fire-cones. It was longer than he expected—perhaps several bowshots from the tower in the center to the edge, where the ridge fell off steeply in a rocky cliff. He stopped before the edg
e to look out upon an expansive view of the wooded valleys on either side. The western valleys stood out in bi-lunar color, lit from the west by the Mother’s silver light, and by the Mad Moon from above, so their shadows and the entire eastern side of the ridge seemed bloody, and the west a silvered pink.

  Harric’s heart quickened as he felt inside his tunic and drew forth the witch-stone to examine its glassy surface.

  It looked different than he remembered it. Slick as water. Murky within. Shadows like clouds seemed to move there as he held it in the light of the Mother and Mad Moon. Shadows within shadows. A black fog, swirling in a double dome of nighted sky. It also seemed heavier now that it lay in his hand.

  A link to the Unseen Moon. Was it a part of the moon itself, fallen to earth and collected by some vigilant magus? He had no idea. His mother’s instruction in the natural history of the Black Moon extended no further than common Arkendian knowledge that its path was unpredictable, its period the hours of night, and that, unlike the other moons, it had no effect on the tides.

  Harric located it easily, a vacant hole in the broad band of the constellation of the Cup.

  Nebecci, Bellana, Tryst. The words came unbidden to his mind.

  Visions of achievement paraded before his mind. He saw himself using the trick of invisibility in a dozen different scenarios: invisible, lifting another jack’s loot; invisible, spying on Her Majesty’s enemies; invisible, visiting Her Majesty’s treasury…and personally depositing his taxes with a note. He’d keep his identity secret, but he’d be famous, his services sought by the greatest lords, by the Queen herself, and only the greatest could afford him. He wouldn’t do it for the money, for he’d have plenty of that: he’d do it for the simple joy of it. The pure, unadulterated joy of supremacy, and the Westies would fear him. They’d call him the Jack of Souls, or the Ghost, or the Lynx, and they’d write ballads about him.

  He laughed at himself, and hefted the stone in his palm.

  Nebecci, Bellana, Tryst. There was only one way to find out.

  He retreated beneath the protective shadow of the stand until a conjunction of limbs blocked both the Bright Mother and Mad Moon. To the north, the Black Moon still lurked near the horizon, a spy hole in the stars. Harric peered about, making sure no one was near. When satisfied he was alone, he lifted the witch-stone to the cat, as if toasting with a cup of wine. “To trickery!”

  Then he fixed his eyes upon the empty moon, and spoke the words from the dream. “Nebecci, Bellana, Tryst.”

  The air before him opened as if he’d been leaning against a gate in the walls of reality and it suddenly gave way. He pitched headlong into a silent, eerie landscape of spirit and ghostly light, and an indefinable weight fell upon his mind, as if his will alone held the gates ajar. The burden of it was crushing. He gasped. Yet he was also aware of a thousand details around him. The landscape was familiar—the massive trees, the broken ridgeline, the forest below—he was still in the same site on the ridge, but it was altered. Beautifully and gloriously altered.

  From everything there came a faint, internal blue radiance—from rocks and soil, and wood and plants—but it shone brightest in living things. The trees, the grasses, moss and lichens on the rocks; these glowed like ghostly beacons in the pseudo-darkness of the night. Strangest of all was the air itself, which was filled with translucent strands of ghostly light, which rose from the ground like ribbons of blue smoke. The strands floated upward from everything—many as fine as hairs—undulating softly and streaming upward into the sky.

  Collectively, these strands limited visibility to sixty paces. They also seemed to dampen sound. Together these qualities imparted an aura of quiet and tranquility.

  Harric held his arms out before him and gasped in awe at what he saw. He was on fire with the brilliant strands. Swarms of them burgeoned from his hands—brilliant silken threads unimaginably fine and beautiful and multifarious; bright spider webs cast skyward in a breeze. He followed them with his gaze as they rose from the fire of his soul along some invisible current and mingled with the thousand-thousand filaments of everything around him.

  But the sky! The night sky terrified him. Overwhelmed him. To behold it threatened madness, for there it seemed he saw the Web of Fate. The Tapestry of the Gods. And he knew with a certainty that came from part of him too deep to be reckoned, that this was a scene no mortal was intended to behold—pattern of life and rebirth endlessly cycling and complex and sublime.

  Fear ballooned behind his ribs till it filled his chest and he could no longer breathe, but he could not look away.

  The web moved, shifted, glimmered and undulated in a thousand ways too subtle to express.

  Most terrible was the Unseen Moon itself, a noiseless, brooding spider in the center of its web. It was the eye of the spiritual storm around him, drawing all upward to the fringes of the loom, where they vanished in the patterns, or rose onward to its all-consuming well.

  All of this he compassed in a single, eternal moment.

  Then, from the black heart of the moon, eons distant, something acknowledged him. A pulse of spirit slid down the web, swift as a glimmer of light across water to the place where he stood on the earth below.

  Harric recoiled, and something in him collapsed, unable to support the staggering weight of the gate to that world, which once again slammed shut before him.

  He fell hard on his back in the loam beneath the fire-cones, and the silence of the Seen grew suddenly loud around him. Above him the web, the moon, had gone, replaced with the familiar shadows of trees against bright pricks of stars. Breath came and went in gasps from his lungs, as if he’d run a mile at top speed, and each labored breath brought aches to his ribs but he was helpless to stop it. His tunic clung to his skin, soaked with sweat.

  In his hand, the witch-stone lay cool and silent. He stared at it in horror, and swallowed a knot that had come to his throat. Gods leave me…what went wrong?

  That was no simple invisibility. He had entered the Unseen. He had breached the veil between worlds and glimpsed the machinations of eternity, a sight reserved for the dead. How he knew this, he couldn’t say. He simply knew, as he knew gravity, or pain. The knowledge was part of him now, prematurely known, like a return from death itself in one of the ballads.

  He wept. The enormity of reality—the gap between what he’d known before and what he now knew both humbled and terrified him. And yet, even as the tears streamed from his eyes, his memory of the eternal moon slipped away, too large for the canvas of his mind, until its vividness faded to mere impression, and the more he grasped after shreds of it the less he could recall.

  His heartbeat slowed. His mind reassembled the ordinary reality that only moments before had seemed lost forever, and then he wept for joy. The image of the Black Moon fled. Like ice from a deep cave brought up to sunlight—not meant for this world—it melted to oblivion, leaving only the vaguest impression, the memory of memory.

  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 spe
aker. “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.