The Jack of Souls: A Rogue and Knight Epic Fantasy Series (The Unseen Moon - Epic Fantasy Series Book 1)

by Stephen Merlino

  They set to sharing with quiet efficiency then, each of them hiding their loot in boots or in shirtsleeves.

  Harric backed to the desk while they were distracted. His hands were bound at the wrists, but he easily found and unstoppered the bottle of harts-horn and laid it on its side to drain. By the time the stench of it hit the grooms, Harric had sidled away. He waited for the first twitch of nostrils among the grooms, then shouted, “Stupid cobs! You spilled the harts-horn!”

  The face-collapsing stench hit him then, and he choked in earnest. He staggered to the door, eyes watering, gasping for fresh air. “Get me out of here!” he demanded. “Open the door!”

  Third slugged him in the stomach. “Shut up.” Then Third’s hand went to his nose, and he recoiled, momentarily unable to inhale. “Moons!” he gasped. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Let me out, you idiots!” Harric said. “Don’t leave me here!”

  Leader opened the windows, gulping fresh air and peering out at the steep roof on each side, and the yard four stories below. “A right tower prison, this is.” He closed the windows with a laugh, picked up his loot from the bed, and ran for the door. “You’re staying here, Bastard.”

  “No—wait—” Harric choked.

  Third and Tartar piled out the door, followed closely by Leader. “We’ll be on guard at the bottom of the stair,” said Leader, in mock servility. “Do ring if you should need us.” He slammed the door and tromped down the stairs, laughing, as Harric coughed and cursed. On the landing below he heard them arguing quietly about how best to conceal their theft, and whether squire Keeter should know, and if so, if he would demand a share.

  Harric crossed to the bed, choking and blinded by tears. He fumbled the saddle knife from the mattress and, despite the awkwardness of manipulating it behind him, managed to slash his bonds without cutting himself. Staggering to his feet, he threw open the window and gasped in the fresh air. When he’d caught his breath, and the throb of his headache no longer threatened to knock him out cold, he tore the blankets from his bed and smothered the puddle of harts-horn on his desk. That made it much easier to breathe. With a chair from his desk he barred the door. It wouldn’t stop a determined foe for long, but it would grant him the warning he needed to flee out the window.

  From the east window came the sounds of hubbub and trumpets as the prince’s retinue entered the market and stable yard, but Harric did not waste time looking. He went straight for the wainscot and opened the closet to claim his things so he could leave. Hope swelled his heart at the sight of his mother’s travel pack, in which he kept his wallet of savings.

  He threw the saddle knife in his pack, along with his mother’s fur-lined travel cloak and a pair of breeches and shirt he found strewn in the chamber by the hasty grooms. As he stuffed them in the pack, an ornament on a pack string clapped loudly against the siding. Irritated, he grabbed it to pull it off and toss it on a shelf, but stopped as he remembered how it got there.

  When he was ten he’d discovered the ornament in a box in the closet—a spindle of white alabaster about the size of his little finger. He fancied it, and attached it to the pack string, but his mother had snatched it away. “That is the most valuable item in the closet!” she cried. In her madness, however, she said that about everything. When she died, he’d reattached it to spite her, and kept it there even though he found it tacky.

  As a token of his victory that day, he let it remain.

  From the closet floor he picked up his best boots, a little too stiff and new, but better than nothing, and crammed them on his feet.

  Tower prison, indeed, he thought, looking out the window at the Bright Mother setting beyond the scablands. The groom who’d said it clearly hadn’t grown up climbing river cliffs or lodge gables. It seemed almost too lucky to be true: the road from Gallows Ferry glittered with possibilities.

  Moving as quickly as he could, he removed from his sleeve the purse of coins he’d lifted from the squire, poured it onto the mattress, and stuffed the damning purse in a crack in the wall, where it dropped between the laths and was lost.

  The mere sight of the coins made his stomach lurch. How could he have pulled the thing in daylight with a hundred eyes upon him? It broke every rule in his first years of training. The fact that he couldn’t even recall deciding to do it was what galled him the most. It was as if someone else had controlled him. He had to have been witched.

  He divided the coins in three portions on the mattress, then knotted them in socks he found beneath his bed. The greatest portion would go to Lyla for her torn dress and humiliation; the rest he’d split with Caris. Share spoils handsomely, his mother had trained him. Buy allegiance from strangers, and increase love in allies. To her, everything was political. She’d have him share his take with Lyla to “increase love in an ally,” not because it was the decent thing to do. He hated it. In their last months together he’d argued this point on several occasions, and her lecture always ended the same: never throw away gold upon sentiment.

  It gave him some pleasure, therefore, to give Lyla the largest share of silver, for he’d probably never see her again. If he could manage it during his escape, he’d leave it with Mother Ganner in the kitchen.

  As he slipped the socks into his shirt, he found the purse the Phyros-thief had tossed him, and emptied it in his palm: its only content was an odd nut, like an elongated walnut, only larger. He smiled wryly. Cheap old fart. But the nut held his attention, for he’d never seen its sort before. It was brown and wrinkly, vaguely phallic.

  Taken by a sudden inspiration, he crept to his desk and found a near-empty inkwell the grooms had left as worthless. He wet a quill in it and scratched a message to Caris on the nut.

  My Y.

  —Harric

  He blotted it dry, and slipped it into his sleeve with the rest. She always told him his heart was in his pants. With luck, she’d get the joke.

  The sounds of a scuffle broke out among the grooms below. One shouted. A tremendous crash followed, suggesting Leader had laid one of his disproportionate wallops on Tartar. Silence followed. Then someone stumped heavily up the stairs. Tartar, Harric guessed: aching from his beating and coming to take out his frustrations on Harric again. His head and jaw throbbed anew with the memory.

  “Not this time, thank you,” Harric muttered.

  He crossed swiftly to the west window above the stable yard, and hoisted a leg over the sill, just as he had that morning to escape the fog. This time, he wouldn’t halt on the peak of the gable to await his doom; he would scramble across the spine of the main wing to Lyla’s room in the female servant dormers. From there it was but a short hop down the service stairs to the stable yard, and thence to freedom.

  As he swung his legs over the sill and onto the lowest rung of the roof ladder, he heard a light rap and a whisper at his door.

  “Harric? It’s Caris. If you want to live, get over here and let me in. And hurry. There’s no time.”

  Arkendian Fool’s Nexus is a soft, pearl-silver metal found in great abundance on the island of Arkendia. Its distinctive aura of magic is detectable by magi of all three moons, yet efforts to reveal its nature are fruitless. It is therefore much celebrated among Arkendians, who mockingly call it “witch-silver,” and regard it as a national symbol of independence of magic.

  —From field notes recovered from the Iberg Bright Mother Library in Samis

  8

  Father Kogan’s Outdoor Stage Play

  Father Kogan jogged to the head of his caravan as it approached the first trestle on the road. The bridge was a colossal timber affair, spanning eighty or ninety paces over a deep-cleft gorge.

  “That’s the one,” he said, calling the wagons to a halt. “Gather up and listen.”

  The Widow Larkin pushed to the fore. “Tell me you didn’t bargain with that Phyros-rider, Kogan,” she said, as if speaking for them all. “Tell me you didn’t pledge us in some scheme.” His flock clung near, frightened eyes searching his face.
Many frowned and avoided his gaze, as they always did when unhappy with his decisions.

  “We isn’t pledged to mix with no Phyros-lord,” a drover ventured. “I won’t do it.”

  “We ain’t obliged,” another agreed.

  Nods and murmurs passed through the flock until the priest stumped the haft of his ax on the road.

  “So that’s how it is,” Kogan said. “Ain’t obliged. Who was it freed you and brought you here? Who was it won you ’cross the river when you was like to be starved out and sold back to lords?” He glared at the drover till the man dropped his eyes, and raked the others with his gaze. “Everything you got you owes to me. And everything I got I owes that Phyros-rider, ’cause if it weren’t for him I’d be dead and hung this six months gone.”

  Exclamations of surprise at this new intelligence.

  Kogan spat. “Ain’t obliged.” His nose wrinkled above the matted beard. “Time you thought as free men, and stop skulking for handouts. Freedom don’t come easy, and it never stays without you have to fight for it.”

  The Widow Larkin wrung her hands. “They don’t mean nothing by it, Father. They’re scared, is all. They don’t know no fighting.”

  “Ain’t asking you to fight,” said Kogan. “I’m asking you to listen and do as I say.” He studied their faces in silence for several heartbeats, and found contrition and grudging resolve where there had been opposition. He nodded. “Listen then, and I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll keep our teams still whiles he rides past. Then we’ll make like the oxen panicked, and block this bridge with flipped wagons and such, so then that follow can’t get past.”

  Kogan put the drovers in charge, and took ideas from the others. When they set to work, he was gratified to see some who had been loudest in opposition were now most vigorous in support. First, they parked the train of wagons as close as possible against the cliff wall, providing the Phyros-rider a clear channel along the edge of the road. Others emptied wagons on the side of the span, and prepared to flip them there. Boys tickled their noses with spear grass and dribbled the blood on their foreheads to feign injury in the wreck.

  When shouts went up that the Phyros-rider approached, they were ready. Mothers held children close. Drovers hurried blankets over the oxen’s heads and fed them handfuls of grain to munch in darkness.

  The Phyros galloped past in a clatter of hooves and rattle of harness, dragging two miserable-looking ponies behind, and thundered across the trestle.

  Uproar—not all of it staged—erupted behind it. An ox nearest the trestle shook free of its drover and plummeted blindly over the edge with its wagon. A pair of mules dashed their cart against the cliff side and broke a wheel. But the priest’s flock stayed calm enough to think. The long line of wagons and carts moved out from the cliff face and jammed awkwardly against each other, blocking the path to the bridge for more than a hundred paces. They flipped a wagon at the rear of the jam, to make an obstacle against the knights if they should think to attack or push the peasants off the ledge. Kogan stationed a dozen men with bow staves in hand, unstrung, but visible, enough to discourage such a ploy. On the trestle itself they flipped no less than four wagons, and piled the place with bodies and beasts and baggage in convincing disarray so there was no hope of the flock moving forward.

  When the Sapphire’s company appeared around a bend, they pulled up at the flipped wagon and blasted their trumpets for passage, but there was nothing to be done. The peasants made a good show of hurrying to restore order, but by jamming so tightly together they’d guaranteed a struggle to clear even a narrow path along the edge for the knights to pass in single file; every ox and mule had to be unhitched and turned or backed along the ledge, and often this resulted in even more tangling of traces and confusion. By the time they managed a path to the trestle and cleared a space across the span, full darkness had fallen, and the Phyros had long disappeared.

  The Sapphire sent a party to give a cursory pursuit, but turned the bulk of his party back. In the torchlight Father Kogan glimpsed lips pressed tight with fury inside the sapphire blue helm.

  “There is a bastard in Gallows Ferry who shall suffer for this delay,” said the Sapphire to his men. “When I am done with him, you may hang what is left.”

  “Though the Bright Mother shower her healing light on the world, and the Mad Moon send tides of war and fire, who knows what the Black Moon brings? Ill luck and fear, I say, and doom to those who view it.”

  —From “Sermons of Hardan, First Priest of Arkus”

  9

  Of Hexes & Wedding Rings

  Willard rode at an uncomfortable trot so the other horses could keep up at a canter. Molly had never had a smooth trot. Sir Beldan once described it as a runaway cart full of boulders on a badly cobbled hill. Of course, it had never mattered when he was immortal. Then, she could have trotted over him, and it wouldn’t have much changed his mood. But as a mortal man, it threatened to shake his teeth from their roots and his eyeballs from his skull. Worst of all was the misery it made of his back, where each jolting stride felt like the blow of a fish-bat in the hands of a mischievous imp: Clop! Clop! Clop! Clop! Clop!

  At least it kept him awake. If he fell asleep now he’d topple from his saddle and fall through twenty fathoms of air before he hit the river.

  He looked back to be sure Brolli was still in Idgit’s saddle. Happily, she had a smooth, rolling canter, and Brolli had learned to stay seated for it. He was hopeless at a trot, for his legs were simply too short to embrace the animal’s sides.

  “Glorious!” Brolli called, seeing the knight turn. He gestured with a long arm across to the glittering ribbon of the Bright Mother’s moonlight on the river below. His huge night-owl eyes were wide with excitement. “And this road! Cut through the mountains that separate our people for so long.”

  “Blasted, actually. Our toolers cleared the river in the same way. Used to be logjams as big as islands and older than I am. Now open and clear for waterwheel traffic.”

  “Magnificent! Your toolers have their own kind of magic, I think.”

  “Not magic at all. That’s the point of toolery. And just wait till you see the cliffs of the Giant’s Gorge. That road will make this seem a garden path.”

  Already they’d come a mile past Gallows Ferry across the sheer cliff face, the river on one side, a mile-high wall of soaring granite on the other, the wild wind in their faces as if they were hawks gliding above the moonlit waters.

  Far behind them Willard could see a long stretch of the road, and still no sign of pursuit. Kogan’s ruse had worked beautifully. Ahead he could see an eastward bend in the cliff marking the place where a tributary river valley joined the Arkend from the east. As they rounded the bend they gained an expansive view of the eastward valley, dark with forest into which the Hanging Road dipped and disappeared. The road crossed the valley, beneath the trees, to the opposite side, where the cliffs of the Arkend rose again, even higher, and the road rose above the trees once again, etched into the cliff face and continuing north.

  The Bright Mother illumined the confluence of the rivers. Willard reined Molly in and strained his eyes upon the water, searching for a waterwheel ship at anchor.

  Brolli halted behind him.

  “I can’t see any ships, Brolli.”

  Brolli surveyed the new vista. “There are none. I am sorry. That would have been best for your rest.” Willard grunted. “But we can hide in there,” Brolli said, pointing to the forested valley to the east. “I will find a place.”

  “Moons, I’m tired of camping and roads.”

  “Try to think of it as an adventure.”

  Willard waited for the quip about it being a Sir Willard ballad, but it didn’t come. It seemed the ambassador was learning. “We have no maps of this area, Brolli. I doubt if any exist except for the surveys the toolers made originally. We have no idea where to go in that valley.”

  “We have no choice.”

  “True enough.”

  “A stra
nge expression, True enough. Do your people see truth as something that can be mixed with untruth, as the teller sees fit?”

  Willard waved him off. “I’m too tired for philosophy, Ambassador.”

  “For a later time, then.” Brolli urged Idgit to walk up beside Willard on the cliff side of the road. He extended a hand up to Willard, his thick canines flashing in a grin. “Now that I am awake, it is time for me to take over the lead, and time for you to give up the wedding ring for safe keeping.”

  Willard grunted. “And good riddance to them.” He slipped his hand into the saddle purse on the front cantle, found the purse by touch, and drew it forth. He tossed it to Brolli. “So much trouble over so small a trinket.”

  Brolli threw the purse back. “This is not my ring, old man.”

  Willard frowned. He slipped a finger in the purse and found two coins. A stab of cold fear pierced his middle. This was the coin purse he’d meant to give the bastard in Gallows Ferry. He searched the saddle again, this time pushing his whole hand in the pocket, but a moan of despair filled his chest even as he did it, for there were only ever two purses, and one of them he’d given to the bastard.

  “What is wrong?” Brolli’s voice was sharp. “Sir Willard. What is wrong?”

  Willard bowed his head. If he weren’t so weary he’d weep. “I told you we would rue it if my curse struck me. Well, it did. In the market, in Gallows Ferry.”

  “I don’t understand. What happened?”

  Willard turned to Brolli, his heart full of lead, all hope of rest and quiet flown. “I’ll tell you what happened: I gave your cursed magic ring to the bastard.”

  …Before the War of Creation, the goddess Vanya sent Himpi, the trickster, to steal Krato’s immortal stallion. When Krato found his stables bare, he sought a mortal horse mighty enough to bear him, and from all earth chose one hundred—the swiftest, strongest, fiercest—and rode them into battle. One by one they fell, until only one remained—the mare called Imblis, which means both first and last—and Imblis bore her lord to the edge of victory.