The Jack of Souls

by Merlino, Stephen

  The scenario unraveled itself in her imagination like the ending of a sad ballad: the crossbowmen, lax in their duties, had allowed him to inch out there on his belly until she spoiled it by rousing the bowmen to watch again like hawks. Now Harric dare not move. He’s trapped, and I trapped him.

  She ground her teeth, rejecting the guilt that assailed her. No, this is his fault. This is what happens when he sneaks off without telling me. None of this would have happened if he’d trusted me.

  She peered through a peephole at the tower. Four crossbowmen. Two of them watched her position; the other two continued their sport of sniping at the second corpse. Beside them, a spitfire knight reamed out his weapon.

  Bannus’s horn sounded again, louder. It seemed to come from just beyond the nearest bend below the pass. She shifted her gaze through the peephole in time to see a rider appear around the bend, followed by three others. The first was clearly Sir Bannus on his gigantic Phyros, Gygon. The next appeared to be his squire or some other knight. The last two followed on leads behind the squire, and, judging by their sagging posture, were captives bound in their saddles.

  An answering horn rang out from the siege tower, and Bannus sounded his deep, harsh horn again. He rode past the tents and tower, into the roundabout. “My tor! My castle!” he roared. “You have done well!”

  Caris felt her gut clench at the sight of him. On the gigantic, scarred Phyros he seemed truly a god among mortals. His dark violet skin was as scarred as his Phyros’s hide, but to the point of mutilation—monstrous—over a frame three times the size of a knight, and muscled like ten men. In the segmented black armor he radiated divinity, invincibility. To see him even at a distance, Caris felt herself shrink to a little girl in armor.

  “Wall men!” Bannus bellowed. He reined in before the gatehouse. “Your time is nigh!”

  Atop the battlements, a few tiny heads appeared. He roared with laughter and turned to face his men, who had emerged from their tents, or climbed the siege tower to lean out from the timbered levels. The bowmen on the top, Caris noted, had stopped their sniping, though they still watched the ledge. She chewed her lip, hoping Harric would not choose this time to make a break for the fissure, thinking the bowmen were distracted.

  “I bring you a sign!” Bannus cried. “A sign that the Old Ways have returned!” He gestured behind his saddle to a pair of baskets hung on either side. The basket nearest Caris appeared to be filled with human heads. One head wobbled on top of the basket, a young man’s head, judging by the cut of the hair. Each of the baskets might have been big enough to hold a dozen such heads.

  Gods leave us, has he slain all of Gallows Ferry?

  Bannus reached back and grabbed the hair of the wobbling head and jerked it up.

  And the face screamed.

  He hauled it from the basket, and it appeared to be more than just a head, but she only glimpsed it, for Bannus simultaneously spun Gygon to better display his trophy to the wall men, blocking her view with his massive immortal body. A prickle of horror crawled up her spine. The basket had been too small to hold even half a body. She’d heard the tales of this. With Phyros blood they’d kept the boy alive. The Old One’s greatest weapon was terror, and this their greatest use of it. Who would stand against them and risk capture, if this might be their fate? This is how they enslaved the land for centuries.

  “Behold!” Bannus roared. “This is the fate of all who defy me! Is it not known? Have I neglected this land so long the tales have dimmed?”

  Silence from the battlements.

  Bannus howled with rage, and whirled Gygon to face his own men. Again Caris glimpsed his trophy—eyes rolling in fear, a simple shirt with fluttering sleeves—before Phyros’s body obscured it. Is this what you wish? “Behold! I bring you an eastern bastard!” Bannus bellowed to his men. “Is this not a pretty piece of flesh?”

  The men on the siege tower roared approval.

  “Squires!” Bannus pointed to the ranks of men in the camp. “Come forward! He is yours!”

  At first, the lines of men stood as if stunned. Then a trio of steel-clad squires strode from the ranks, pushing other squires before them. Bright yellow plumes bobbed from the helms of the trio, who must have been brothers. The trio shoved the others across the roundabout to the immortal, all grins and yellow-plumed swagger.

  They converged on Bannus’s trophy, and the immortal released him to their arms.

  “Go!” Bannus commanded. “Let him lick clean your boots! Practice on him as you will.”

  Following the lead of the trio, the company of squires cheered, and crowded around their new pet. Caris glimpsed the young bastard’s terror as they appeared to taunt him with pinches and jabs. When the trio took the prize for their own and bore him to the tents, the rest remained before Bannus, and cheered them on.

  One of the smallest squires, however, stood apart from the rest. He didn’t laugh, but stared in shock after the whooping trio.

  “Boy!” Bannus’ eyes fixed on the squire. “You have no taste for bastard?” He hoisted a head from the other basket, this one with long woman’s hair and a fluttering shift—and slung her into the arms of the other squires. “Lay her out for him!” Bannus commanded.

  The squires complied and stepped back.

  “Come, boy! Take her here. We’ll make you a man before these walls.”

  The lone squire stood petrified, abandoned by the others He couldn’t have been older than twelve. His arms trembled. His head shook feebly as if to deny this was happening.

  Caris clapped a hand to her mouth to suppress a sob, but unable to look away.

  “Who brought this milk-rag to my battle?” Bannus roared. “He defiles this place! Take her, boy, or you shall be as she, and serve in our tents!”

  A knight strode from camp, a pained grin plastered to his face. The boy’s father? With a gruff hand behind the boy, he guided him to stand before Bannus. The boy clung to the knight’s arm, and when he tried to bury his face in his side, the man struck him. They stood above the woman, whose face Caris could see in a gap between the watching squires. She had flopped on her back, and now panted. Hair stuck to her face, but she twitched it aside with a flick of her head and glared up at them.

  She said something, and Caris realized she was laughing. Harsh, hoarse laughter.

  “See what you’ve brought upon us!” she cried out to the watching knights. “All of you! See what he’s done? And he’ll do it to you! To your sons! See what your insane religion brings upon us?”

  The knight kicked her, but she kept laughing, and the boy pulled away from his father, shaking his head. The father grinned for Sir Bannus and collared the boy, bending low to speak in his ear.

  The boy looked up at Bannus. He swallowed. He dropped to his knees beside the woman, disappearing from Caris’s view behind the wall of squires.

  “Take her now,” said Bannus, “or I will make you my toy.”

  Bannus’s squire rode into the roundabout, his destrier’s hooves clattering loudly in the silence. He still led the pair of horses bearing captives. Dirty, bent, strong: peasant men, Caris judged. Hands bound to the saddle.

  “Sir Titus,” Bannus called, his eyes never leaving the boy. “Bring my ax.”

  Bannus dismounted and loomed over the boy, opposite the boy’s father, who stood motionless as stone. In the gap between squires, Caris saw the boy began to shake violently. The woman had stopped laughing. Her eyes grew soft, and she spoke gently to the boy.

  Sir Titus drew up beside Bannus and handed him an ax. Bannus pointed to one of the peasant men on the horse behind Titus, and then to the ground beside the boy.

  “I wish to show this cob warmer and his father the fate they have earned this day.”

  The father startled. “The father, Your Holiness? Me?” He stepped back from his son. “Surely not I. The boy, yes, but—”

  “You sired this girl,” Bannus rumbled. “You disgrace your steel.”

  Titus motioned to the camp, which ha
d grown silent. Men watched impassively, or with fixed grins like that of the father. As Titus moved, his hood shifted and Caris saw the glint of the red mask covering his face. The Faceless One, she realized. Just as Harric said. Four knights emerged from the ranks beside the tower and hauled one of the captives from a horse. They dragged the man beside the unfortunate boy and father, and staked his limbs to the ground.

  All the while, the woman spoke softly to the boy, and the boy nodded faintly in reply.

  Bannus paid them no attention. He turned to his Phyros and made a quick incision in the beast’s scarred neck. Dark blood gushed from the wound into a bowl he held underneath. Gygon made no movement, and the bleeding quickly stopped. Bannus handed the bowl to the Faceless One, who cradled it in both hands and took it to the side of the staked man.

  “Wall men!” Bannus said, turning again to the gatehouse. “Behold, that you may know your fate of all cowards unworthy of the Old Ways.” He picked up the ax, and made a show of aiming it at one of the staked man’s arms. “Do not offer to surrender, wall men. Do not ask for mercy, for there will be none. When we enter your little fortress, you will beg for mercy, and receive none. Yet you will live, for we shall make shapes of you that men remember. When they see you they will say, ‘There goes one who forgot how to kneel.’”

  “Bannus!” Willard’s voice rang out over the battlements, and the sound of it made Caris jump. “You pathetic dog raper. Do you yet live? Time I remedy that.”

  Caris switched peepholes and found the old knight standing on the battlement.

  If possible, the silence that followed was deeper than that which Bannus had engendered with his horrors. The ax froze. Bannus’s mutilated head tilted as if listening. He lowered the ax. He turned toward the gatehouse.

  Willard had chosen a spot out of view of the crossbowmen, but in full sight of Bannus. To Caris he looked pathetically small and vulnerable compared to the swollen, rippling immortal.

  “I would know that voice if it were removed a thousand years from my hearing,” Bannus rumbled. “It is the voice of the Abominator. But I see only this pitiful old woman on the wall. Where is the Abominator? Let him show himself.”

  “You grow slow in your dotage,” said Willard. “I am here. I do not fear your gaze.”

  Sir Bannus stepped toward Willard, and stepped again. It seemed to Caris, by his expression, that he was drawn to the aging knight as if to some horrible wonder. He stopped below Willard, and his laughter boomed from the walls. “Can it be true? He is aged! He has forsaken the Blood! This old woman is the great and mighty Sir Willard? No. I shall not let that stand. I shall not let you escape into death, Sir Willard, for you must pay for your crimes. When I take you I shall force the holy Blood through your lips and until you are reborn—a rebirth you never earned—then I will defeat you in equal combat and make a trophy of your trunk. You will spend eternity as an ornament in my hall, Abominator, the price of your treachery.”

  “The price of justice, that would be,” said Willard. “But it is my choice whether I take the Blood, Sir Bannus, and I choose to die. As should you. This Blood—this borrowed divinity—mads you, though you call it holiness.”

  Bannus stepped closer, seething. “You never deserved your mount. I should have slain you the day you came begging to the Sacred Isle.”

  “Molly chose me. Do you doubt the divine judgment of the Blood?”

  Bannus howled. The sound of it shocked Caris, and sent her ears ringing. “Speak not of the Blood!” he roared. With the swiftness of a striking snake, Bannus flung the ax. The weapon was nothing more than a blur and a clash of steel as Willard vanished from her view.

  Roaring rose in Caris’s ears as she stared at the empty battlement. Willard! Had he ducked? Had he been hit? If he’d ducked, why hadn’t he reappeared? The roaring rose to a deafening volume. She put her hands to her ears to block it out, but it did no good. It never did any good. The roaring grew louder behind her hands and she felt the familiar darkness coming, terror rising and buckling her knees, driving her into a ball on the stairs.

  Not now! You have to do something! Harric lives! Act! Move!

  She staggered to her feet, shield in hands, and stumbled onto the ledge.

  *

  The sound of a large waterfall grew as Kogan jogged toward the final bend in the cliff road. When he stepped around the bend, he saw the end of the valley: a V-shaped pass only a half-mile hence, with a squat stone fort plugging the gap in the pass. Outside the fort walls stood a crude siege tower and the winking campfires of a small army. Will must be in that fort.

  Kogan chewed at his beard. The report of spitfires drifted to him on the breeze. “So it starts,” he muttered. “I wish you was here, Widow Larkin, to counsel me. I’m only one man against an army, but you’d know what to do. You got a head for puzzles.”

  Torches began moving down the road toward him. Two torches. Soon the sound of trotting horses drifted down the valley.

  He cast about for a squat hole, but found that side of the bend bright with moonlight and bare of hiding holes on the one side, and too sheer a drop without ledges on the cliff side.

  Two riders. He could take them, maybe. But since they moved at a pretty good trot, one could easy get away and sound the alarm, and that wouldn’t do. The only advantage he had was the fact the enemy didn’t know where he was.

  He retreated around the bend and found a crease in the cliff with a pile of boulders at its base. Squatting in the crease, he made a little more room for himself by shoving boulders away onto the road.

  “Ho, now, here’s an idea!” he said aloud. “How if I make a little rock farm on the road, Widda Larkin, so them horses has to slow? Then I could pick ’em off as they slow, grabbing rats at a rat hole.” He shoved another boulder out, then tossed another. He could hear no hoofbeats yet, but he wasn’t sure the sound would carry well around the bend; they could make the turn with almost no warning. He tossed chunks of rock as fast as he could, spreading them out, and soon he had a goodly garden of the treacherous crop spanning twenty paces of the road. Pleased with himself, he returned to his squat hole and laid his ax across his knees. “Widda, you’d be proud. Using my noggin. And it ain’t no small help to cut off Bannus’s message lines. Widda sweet, I am Willard’s rearguard surprise.”

  The riders reined up at the treacherous spread of boulders. “Careful,” one said. “Bit of a rockfall.”

  Side by side, the two navigated the rocks, but it was slow work, and the horses balked at it.

  “What the Black Moon’s that smell?” said one.

  Kogan pulled them over the backs of their saddles and slammed them onto the boulders. “That,” he growled, as one drew a blade and slapped it against the knees of his smothercoat, “is the smell of justice, ye perfumed cob.” He launched the blade wielder over the cliff with a shove of his boot. The other, dazed from his landing, flew after without struggle.

  Kogan peered over the edge. Too far down in shadow to see where they landed. “Rearguard secure, Will.” He frowned. “Wait a shake. That wasn’t using my noggin. Shoulda pumped ’em first for information!” He slapped his head, then dismissed the criticism with a wave. “Bah! That ain’t my way. The information won’t get where it was headed, and there’s an end.”

  He took a wine bottle from the saddle of one of the horses, and retrieved his ax from the squat hole. From the bend he peered back at the fort. No more riders.

  He took a deep draft of the wine bottle. Then took another, draining it, and tossed the bottle after its late owners. Still no riders for the rearguard. But with Bannus there, the army would not be still. To be a useful rearguard, he’d need to advance.

  “Ain’t my way to wait for crumbs from the table, neither,” he said, resuming his jog. “Rearguard advancing, Will. I aim to do you such service that this time it’ll be you what owes me.”

  Bannus fled, fleet Giggon ran,

  Arkus’ hallowed isle.

  Revenge he vowed

  O
n Willard proud

  Who bested him with guile.

  —From “Bannus’s Bane,” Arkendian heroic song, late reign of Walren III

  36

  Sir Bannus

  Harric heard the crossbows fire—two, three, four at once—and the sound of hissing bolts. None of them struck the corpse beside him or anywhere near him; they’d gone hissing down at some target near the head of the stairs to thump dully into wood or crack off the cliff.

  “Run!” Caris yelled.

  Harric twisted his neck to the side to see Caris crouching well behind him on the ledge, sidestepping in his direction with a quarrel-riddled shield held in both hands before her.

  “Run!” she yelled. “They reload!”

  A spitfire popped, and Caris dove forward to crash on her armored belly on the stone. A gout of white fire sprayed across the wall and ledge where she’d been. “Run!”

  Harric ran. Five running strides—almost halfway to the fissure before someone on the tower cried, “There!”

  He concentrated on placing one foot before the other on the ledge, for his legs felt so weak he feared they’d fail to respond quickly enough, and he’d stumble. Six, seven strides, and still the crossbowmen loaded their weapons. Then a bolt cracked against the wall only a handbreadth before his nose, spraying rock fragments into his mouth and eyes. He cried out in pain, blinded, and stumbled, his arm scraping along the cliff. His boot caught the stone and he fell hard to his knees. A bolt hissed by and slammed the rock above his head. He scrambled blindly on hands and knees. Tears flooded his eyes as he tried to blink out the shards.

  Pounding boots behind him.

  “Run!” Caris yelled, and the sound of her voice was loud in his ears. She bumped his back hard with an armored knee. He heard her grunt as a bolt hissed into a wooden thunk beside him. She shoved him in the back with her knee. “Run! You’re almost there!”

  Before him, the blurry fissure rose like a sanctuary. He scrambled forward and threw himself on his belly, then rose again onto hollow-sounding planks. As an eye cleared enough to see he’d made it, he dove into the farthest reach of the fissure.