The Jack of Souls

by Merlino, Stephen

  “Welcome back to the Isle of Heroes, Titus, Bastard of Pellion,” Jamus murmured.

  The figure remained motionless, but the candlelight now illumined him fully, allowing Jamus to study him. The mask was carved of wine-red alabaster, the traditional material, for the coolness of the stone was said to soothe the heat of the scars. The mask’s expression was mild and serene, its features of idealized male beauty—cleft chin, cut jaw, delicately sculpted lips and nose—and with an air of dreamy, almost sleepy repose.

  “You see my devotion to His Holiness,” Titus gasped through the mask. He convulsed slightly with the effort of speech.

  Jamus’s nostrils flared. “Is that what your master calls it? Devotion?”

  “All is discipline. All is will. The body nothing. Pain unreal.”

  Jamus regarded him for several heartbeats in silence. He exchanged a grim glance with Ellentane. Then, as if his bastard brother were no longer present, he turned crisply, and seized the handles to Bannus’s chambers.

  One of Titus’ gloved hands flashed to Jamus’s wrist. His breath came in strangely hissing rasps. “His Eminence does not wish to be disturbed.”

  The prince did not look at the Faceless One, nor did he remove his hand from the door. “Is he sleeping?”

  “Resting.”

  “Is he with company?”

  “Alone.”

  “Will he…punish you, if I enter?”

  “He”—there was a strange, dry-throated swallowing behind the mask—“left orders. None enter.”

  Jamus quirked a tiny smile on one side of his mouth. “He makes you immortal with the Phyros blood? Heals you with it?” Titus said nothing, but his breathing was harsh and gurgling. He released Jamus’s wrist, and stumbled from the stool to face the prince on one knee. Red-rimmed eyes pleaded mutely within the mask. Jamus snorted in disgust. “So refreshing to see the—what did you call it? Devotion?—to the Old Ways, Titus.” Then, sadly, “You could have stayed with us, you know. Our father didn’t offer immortality, but his sort of devotion paid well in other ways. You would have found it so.”

  Titus stood. He straightened his cloak around him and sat back on his stool, still and erect. Once again a carving of a man. “All is discipline. All is will…” he chanted, as if the princes had left him.

  Jamus met Ellentane’s gaze. Beneath his brother-in-law’s stern aspect, Jamus sensed horror. “Ellentane,” Jamus said, softly but firmly. “Worse than this lies beyond these doors.”

  Ellentane nodded curtly.

  “Under no circumstance must Sir Bannus sense your fear, or it will send his wildness past recovery. Remember this: an Old One is half god, half rabid beast, but he respects one thing above all else—royalty. Which we must appear to be, or he will tear us and our titles to pieces.”

  Jamus laid his hands on the doors in preparation for heaving them inward. “I should probably tell you, too, that he is also likely quite insane. The most ancient of the Old Ones usually are, which is why they’re so unpredictable.”

  This time Ellentane’s face remained an undisturbed shell of indifference. “Ah, well,” he said lightly, “who isn’t a bit mad these days?”

  “Steel yourself,” Jamus warned, and heaved the doors inward.

  *

  Twelve men had been evicted from the room Sir Bannus commandeered, and all dozen beds lay stacked against the walls. Their mattresses had been heaped in the middle of the room like a hedge boar’s midden, at the foot of which lay a clutter of grease-streaked platters, stripped ox bones, and discarded mugs of blood drafts.

  The immortal Sir Bannus sprawled across the summit of this mountain like a drunken god, as gloriously nude as a court painting of some West Isle scene in the days before the Cleansing. His body was a shocking topography of popping veins, impossible muscle, and quantities of ropy purple scars: the wounds of twenty lifetimes in battle, all healed with the Blood of the Phyros. It was a scene few in Arkendia had witnessed since the Cleansing, but one quite common before it—a glutted god, his blood rage cooled with flesh and drafts, sated, half fallen, half reclining, like a sleeping lion.

  Pieces of outlandish Diurn armor adorned the edges of the room, and against one wall stood the monstrous Phyros sword, Basilisk. A lacy bit of white cloth concealed Sir Bannus’s face, draped there, perhaps, as a scented souvenir of the innkeeper’s girl.

  A faint suck of breath from Ellentane. He closed the doors quietly behind, and remained in Jamus’s shadow as if he’d disappear there.

  “Welcome back to Arkendia, Sir Bannus,” the prince murmured. “It has been…eighty years, has it not? Before my father’s birth.”

  The immortal remained, lolling magnificently, horribly, arms thrown wide, face turned to the rafters. After what seemed like an eternity, the graveled basso finally welled from the massive chest like a cataract of grief. “Liar. You lie. This is not Arkendia. This is some other land. Ruled by women, peopled by dogs. I do not know this land.”

  “It has indeed changed in your absence.”

  “This is not Arkendia. In Arkendia, my order is revered. Our will is law. We are worshipped with fear.”

  “Gone now. All has changed.”

  The immortal clutched his head with both scar-knotted hands, as if trying to hold his mind together, or keep out an unwanted truth. “Are there none left now?” he cried in anguish. “None of my order? Is it possible? All slain? All hiding? And do the peasant priests strut openly, unchecked like wild dogs? Arkendia! O, father of gods, where have you gone?”

  “Arkendia is not gone, Sir Bannus, only weakened, as with a disease. But the source of the disease—their queen—is weak also, which gives us hope, and opportunity.”

  The Phyros-rider lifted the lace from his face and peered from one eye at the grandson of Jormus Mont Pellion, his one-time liege lord. Jamus recognized immediately the signs of madness. The visage was a wreckage of scars. Not the scars of battle—even the battles of twenty lifetimes would not account for this, if one bothered with a helmet—this was gratuitous scarification. Self-mutilation.

  Jamus had seen it in his grandfather, the last immortal of his family. In ten years he’d fallen from incisive intellect and sound, reliable judgment to morbid meditations and self-dismemberment. At banquets, he removed fingers and displayed them on forks. “Am I not still I, without this?” he would ask. Ears came next, and his nose, and, most horribly, his eyes and left hand, discarded in odd places around the palace, and left for others to find, like the leavings of a molting serpent. “If I remove my face, am I not still I? Is there any meaning in this vessel at all? This world?”

  Yet his grandfather had enough sanity left to sense his own end, and prepared to offer himself in sacrifice. He constructed a blood throne of complicated troughs and runnels, according to an inner knowledge. On it he opened his veins, and from the paths the Blood chose in the runnels he made a powerful augury.

  Sir Bannus’s face suggested that he, too, had progressed well into similar madness. He had no ears, and now that he knew to look for it, Jamus noted pruned fingertips, amputated toes, and ritual scars meandering heel to crown. Such madness did not bode well for Jamus’s hopes of winning the immortal’s loyalty back to his family, but it was not wholly unexpected.

  “Do the true immortals hide?” Bannus rumbled. “Are all lost? Is there only the Abominator, whom I track?”

  “Helsig and Gravens remain in the West Isles.”

  “Two. Send for them. Tell them I have returned.”

  “I have already done so, Sir Bannus. As you may remember, it was I who called you back for a purpose.”

  “You?” Bannus’s eyes narrowed. A strangled laugh clattered from his throat. “I see a rouge of dried Phyros blood in your cheeks,” he sneered. “You take it in your wine, to paint your blood as if you were an immortal. Behold! A Sun of Arkendia paints his blood like a woman paints her face. You do not drink the Blood from your family’s Phyros, as your grandfather did. You are weak in the Old Ways. Unfit for t
he Brotherhood.”

  “Of what use is this Blood to the Brotherhood if it cannot be controlled? Tonight we lost six good men to Sir Willard. Yes, he was here while you lay feeding your bloodlust in bed. Outside these very walls. And unmounted. Such disorder is the reason Willard and his Blue Order triumphed in the Cleansing.”

  Bannus did not rise to this barb. He stared at the prince, still mocking. “Pretty painted prince. You are the image of your great-grandfather at your age. Which son are you? Second? Third? They would not send the eldest to me.”

  Jamus closed his eyes and performed a hint of a nod. “I am the third son of the first son of your lord, my grandsire.”

  “As I thought. Disposable.” Sir Bannus sat and met Jamus’s gaze. His scar-ripped nostrils flared. “Then let us come to the point, painted one—to the only matter between us: it was your grandsire who betrayed me, who abandoned Arkendia to the weak-blooded Abominator, Sir Willard. The same, traitorous blood flows in your veins. Give me a reason I shouldn’t spill it here, in vengeance.”

  “It was Sir Willard and the Blue Order that killed your order—”

  Bannus roared, veins popping from his face and eyes. “It was Pellion, your grandsire. Pellion who betrayed me to die. Pellion who ran me from the land.”

  Jamus kept his face impassive, though a cold fire of fear burned steadily behind it. Of all men in Arkendia, Jamus knew what it meant to treat with an immortal, and how to survive the encounter. He had been raised with his immortal grandsire, who used several techniques to test, overawe, and intimidate, which Jamus now saw in Bannus. There was only one valid response to any of these techniques: calm, patience, and mild superiority. And even that could fail.

  Jamus closed his eyes and allowed himself a tiny sigh. “I see the Blood is still wild within you, and you have lost the power to reason. I haven’t the time to return, so I’ll speak slowly in hope you hear some of it. The reason you will not kill me is that you need me.”

  “I need only to slay the Abominator, and I don’t need you for that.”

  “True. I can’t help you kill Willard. But you need my family to return your order to power.”

  “There are other Suns of Arkendia, Pellion. They can serve that turn as well as you.”

  “There you are mistaken, Sir Bannus, or misled. Only House Pellion survived the Cleansing intact, and only because of my grandsire’s wisdom, which you call betrayal.”

  The immortal howled, his rage shuddering the windows. “Wisdom! Witness, Arkendia. See how dishonor is become wisdom, treachery become faith.” The immortal rose slowly from his bed, towering over Jamus like a blue-skinned colossus. “I served your family for centuries, and your lord grandfather honored me and my order with betrayal. He hunted us like dogs with Sir Willard. And now a poor three of us left. Three! He sided with the Abominator—O vile allegiance!—and lent him strength and men.” Sir Bannus foamed at the corners of his mouth, panting, wild-eyed, the blood rage returning. He threw back his head and howled again, a deep, unearthly furor that curdled the skin on the spine.

  Ellentane stirred, and the baleful eyes snapped to him, a mad wolf scenting fear.

  “Sir Bannus,” said Ellentane, his voice faint but unwavering. “My family salutes you.”

  A blur of motion from the giant, and something flew across the room to crash against the door beside Ellentane.

  A beef bone.

  Jamus raised an unimpressed eyebrow at the missile, but didn’t dare turn enough to see Ellentane, lest Ellentane mistake him for leaving and lose his resolve. To his relief, he could see Ellentane peripherally, standing unflinching.

  “Thank you, my lord,” said Ellentane. “But I have dined.”

  The Phyros-rider glared as if his gaze might set fire to Ellentane’s skin. Abruptly, he laughed. He threw back his head and sank back on his mattresses. Jamus breathed a private sigh of relief.

  “Your family salutes me,” Bannus sneered. “Your family is dead. First of the Suns to fall to the Abominator, and all heirs lost but a girl.” The torn lips twisted into what might have been a sneer. “You married a Pellion, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question. The immortal could see it as clearly as the clenching of Ellentane’s jaw and the flush of blue in his cheeks. Bannus’s laughter was hoarse and broken. “To salvage your beggared blood, House Ellentane married Pellion. You’re a slave now, Ellentane. You and a hundred generations of your get. The Purity Laws require you marry your own sister, not his.”

  He flicked another bone to rattle at Ellentane’s feet. “There is only one true Sun left in Arkendia, and that is House Dremousi. I have spoken with them,” he said, measuring the lord’s reaction with his eyes. “Yes. Even since I returned. They too, have plans.”

  “Oh? You are sworn to them?” Jamus allowed himself a wry smile. “Let me attempt to guess their plans. Could they be planning yet another assassination attempt of the Queen? What original device will it be this time? A poisoned hairpin?”

  “The Old Ways still work, Pellion, though you have forgotten them. The Dremousi remember. They tell me you are no better than the Abominator himself. That you soften the Old Ways, so the Brotherhood grows weak. That you love peasant priests and compromise to win favor with the Bitch Queen. They say you walk with her, share counsel with her, that she trusts you.”

  Jamus let his scorn show openly. “Shall I be openly against her, like the Dremousi brothers? Shall I earn exile from the court, as they have? In exile they remain ignorant of her schemes, and she forbids trade with them, so their coffers are hollow. I, on the other hand, am in her counsels, and my coffers are full. More importantly, my blood is pure for one hundred royal generations, while the Dremousi are broken and fallen to a pair of exiled bastards, raised on the milk of foreign lands.” Jamus snorted softly. “House Dremousi is an incompetent ally. And if they sit the throne, they make mockery of Blood Purity in Arkendia.”

  “You need me, Prince, but I don’t need you. Your house played me false once, and now you try it again. I ride for the Old Ways. I ride for Dremousi.”

  Bannus made a show of examining an ox bone for a bit of stray meat. But whatever he had once been, this Old One was no longer a closed book. His soul seeped through the cracks in his sanity, where Jamus saw clearly the immensity of his grief at the perceived betrayal by his immortal liege, Jamus’s grandsire.

  Jamus shifted his tone to signal an end of argument and beginning of parley. “My grandsire did not betray you. When he appeared to join the Abominator in seeking you, he put them on false trails and exulted when he learned you escaped to the Immortal Isle. He loved you. He longed to recall you, his greatest ally. But it was not time, nor did the time come while he lived. He watched for generations, for a time when Arkendia would grow soft and forget, and that time is now. I said I called you back, but truly it was he that called you. And you must know that, or you wouldn’t have answered the call.”

  “I answered no call. You merely woke me from a dream, and I came for revenge. For the Abominator. To pay him for his treachery. And to see…” Bannus halted, mid-snarl, hesitating.

  “And to see my grandsire,” Jamus finished.

  Bannus’s scarred jaw twitched, and Jamus knew he had the giant’s attention.

  “Unfortunately, no one can grant you that wish, Sir Bannus. Not even my grandsire. Lord Jormus of Pellion joined our god this winter when he chose the blood throne, and augured Krato’s will from his own mortal wounds.”

  Sir Bannus’s eyes widened, and naked hope peered from behind them. Battered allegiance, aching for explanation. “The blood throne?” His voice was a ragged whisper. “He took the blood throne? He died in augury?”

  “It was from his dying words that I took the instructions to call you. He left prophecies to raise the blood of every Sun and immortal in Arkendia.”

  The immortal clambered to his knees, violet eyes wild with new hope. Before he could doubt again, Jamus drew forth a folded, blood-addled parchment, sealed with the mark of Jormus Pellion, and
held it for Bannus to see.

  “Here you will read for the words he left for you alone, scribed himself in his dying blood upon the bleeding throne. In his canon to my eldest brother he instructed us join in marriage to Ellentane; therefore we are bound to trust the union. In his canon to you he surely repeats that Willard must be slain and the Blue Order destroyed. He hints as much in the canons to his grandsons.”

  Jamus laid the stained seal gently in Bannus’s hand, like a butterfly lighting on a talon. “This should suffice to convince you I am not a shadow of the former world, but an agent of the former world itself, and that Pellion is as close in Krato’s will as any have ever been.”

  The giant’s body grew still and taut, bunched and focused on the fragile parchment. His knotted fingers broke the seal, and he read the contents greedily.

  Jamus concealed his disappointment that Bannus could read, but watched the immortal carefully, and counted the lines of text from the motion of his eyes. It soon became clear that the prophecy and instruction given to Sir Bannus was substantial indeed, easily as long as his own, which, until that moment, he had thought the only lengthy canon. Doubt sprouted in Jamus’s mind. Until then it had appeared his grandsire trusted Jamus with the greatest burden of the prophecy. Even his elder brother, the object of their ambitions for the throne, had but a few uncomplicated lines, and Jamus had seen them all. Jamus’s canon was detailed and dynamic, with contingencies and layers—like a master plan—for he was the smart one, the clever one, the subtle one, the patient one.

  But this canon to Bannus threw all into question. Had his grandsire told the immortal anything he had not told Jamus? Would he play them off each other for some purpose of his own? Terrifying as it was, it seemed clear now Jamus was not the highest pinnacle of his grandsire’s designs.

  Bannus lowered the parchment, and met Jamus’s gaze with something like peace in his violet eyes. In that moment it seemed the cracks in his sanity drew up and sealed tight, and he peered now from a cunning, secret mind. He folded the canon. “It seems by this that the Brotherhood of Krato yet lives. Your grandsire sends me to slay the Abominator, as you say. And he gives me the title of Lord High Executioner, first held by Gristhi, and after him Marlank at the time of the Cleansing. And I am to name the Justicar…” He halted, eyes flashing to Jamus. He raised a finger in the air between them, mocking Jamus’s façade of indifference. “There are other things, my painted prince, but they concern true immortals. Helsig and Gravens shall have titles and orders.”