Writers of the Future 32 Science Fiction & Fantasy Anthology

by L. Ron Hubbard

An ensign and two sailors burst through the melted compartment wall, glanced hurriedly over the bodies on the bridge and snatched Barnell from the wreckage. They stepped out into space, out of the inferno which was licking through both vessels, and fought free.

  The ships did four circuits of the planet before they crashed. It was long enough for the Memphis to take off thirty wounded from the Constitution and two sailors from the Guerra. They found old Admiral Barnell and the three who had rescued him. Admiral Barnell was dying. His chest had been crushed.

  IRVIN RODRIGUEZ

  But the old man’s dying injunction was messaged back to Earth and has come down to us in our distant time in the form of Article Ten, Naval Regulations, governing the conduct of officers:

  There will be times, as there have been, when political or economic concerns seek to handicap the initiative and performance of duty of officers. It must at all times be remembered that lawless and self-seeking elements among men must be curbed by strong and effective action, often extraordinary in scope, and that whosoever threatens duty or the means to perform it threatens also the security and therefore the existence of mankind. No measure taken, no matter how far beyond the call of duty, which tends to secure to mankind the advantages of safe commerce, should be censured in any officer or man.

  To the Army belong the planets. To the air departments belong their atmospheres. But only to a Navy and its officers can belong the outer marches of absolute zero, the depth, the length and breadth, in all their infinity, of space.

  Provided with guns from the Guerra’s base, equipped with new knowledge and technologies, supported by generous appropriations from an appreciative nation and heralded everywhere by popular demonstrations, the United States Navy, within two years, was competently discharging its duties in space. And after it, and securely founded upon its practices, came the United Continents Navy, the Earth Navy, the Confederated Planets Navy, and through a host of others to our own time when the Intergalactic Department of the Navies regulates for us our own commerce and keeps for us peace among the hundred million worlds.

  Old Admiral Barnell, sleeping in his tomb at Annapolis in the Earth National Monument of Mankind, must sleep very peacefully and content.

  The Jack of Souls

  written by

  Stephen Merlino

  illustrated by

  MARICELA UGARTE Peña

  * * *

  about the author

  Stephen Merlino lives in Seattle, Washington where he writes, plays, and teaches high school English. He lives with the world’s most desirable woman, two fabulous kids, and three attack chickens.

  “The Jack of Souls” is a story taken from his novel of the same name.

  Stephen’s path to writing began at the age of eleven, when he discovered Tolkien and dreamed of writing epic tales of his own.

  In college, when a tenth reading of The Lord of the Rings no longer delivered, he discovered Chaucer and Shakespeare and fell in love with England and its literature. Sadly, the closest he got to England back then was Seattle’s Unicorn Pub (and that was run by a Scot named Angus); it wasn’t until years later that he’d attend grad school in Berkshire to study Shakespeare.

  One day, a professor said of Stephen’s stories, “You should get these published!” and the old dream stirred. Stephen pursued it, and though those stories remain unsold, the journey showed him the world of agents, craft, critique groups, and the value of what Jay Lake called, “psychotic persistence.”

  “The Jack of Souls” and its parent novel are the result of that happy psychosis.

  about the illustrator

  Maricela Ugarte Peña was born in 1986 in Monterrey, Mexico. Maricela, or “Mari” to her friends and family, had an abiding interest in creative pursuits.

  Mari felt deeply inspired by her oldest cousin, Luly, who spent hours drawing chalk unicorns that Mari would collect. Mari went on to copy horse figures and developed a strong interest in creating as she grew.

  Mari’s grandmother, an artist herself, nurtured Mari’s interests. Eventually, she began to develop her work in conjunction with an online community, where she developed many close friends.

  Now, Mari is creating diverse illustrations for games; she is working hard and polishing her art and stories, so that she can develop her original graphic novels.

  The Jack of Souls

  In two hours, Harric would host his own wake.

  By sunrise, he’d be dead.

  The knowledge hung on him like a skin of lead. There would be no shrugging it off or bearing it patiently. There would be wine, and there would be cards. Plenty of both. And with luck, there would be no tears.

  Standing against the sun-warmed side of the inn, he sipped his wine and scanned the courtyard for a mark to follow into the gentleman’s card hall. Free men crowded the courtyard tables, a throng of road-sore bodies under a square of bright blue sky. These were drovers and wagoneers, all drinking or calling for cider. It was their masters Harric watched for: wealthy lords looking for drink and cards in the company of their peers.

  A gentlemanly hustle would keep his mind off things. It would also buy the wine for his wake.

  The wake.

  Thought of it made his stomach twist. They’ll expect a speech of me. Something brave, gods leave me. He gave a small snort. “We gather tonight to celebrate my nineteenth birthday, which is also my death day. . . .”

  He swallowed a mouthful of wine, and rubbed the Jack of Souls where the card lay in his sleeve. “Send me a fat mark, Jack,” he murmured. “I’m thinking too much.”

  The scent of rose-cider announced the arrival of a reveler at his side, and he turned to find a plague-gaunt free man peering at him from a face like a skull.

  Harric jerked away.

  “Didn’t mean to spook ye,” said the man, in a voice like a wheeze.

  On second glance Harric saw it wasn’t plague that consumed the fellow. He bore no telltale sores, but his flesh had wasted from his bones to the point it seemed a wonder he could stand. His nose had also been removed at some distant time, the mark of a cruel master on a slave. Open nostrils reached halfway up his face, in the shape of elongated pumpkin seeds.

  “You’re the gentleman bastard supposed to die tonight, ain’t ye?” The man gestured with a jug at Harric’s bastard belt and nodded in answer to his own question. “Some kind of witch-curse, ain’t it?”

  Harric looked hard at the man, certain he was being mocked, but the man’s open expression was not that of a joker. The stranger simply must have known that the witch in question had also been Harric’s mother. He gave a curt nod and tugged his shirt over the bastard belt, but the man missed or ignored the hint. Instead, he remained uncomfortably close, grinning like a corpse and tipping his ferryman’s cap to Harric. The cap marked the man as a mate or pilot on the river, but Harric didn’t recognize him as one of the regular crewmen. He’d have remembered such a scarecrow among them.

  “Heard you was buying the free folk drinks tonight,” said the man. “I been free ten year.”

  Ah. He only wants an invitation. “Feel free to join us in the inn after sunset. That’s when we’ll raise our cups in hope that my doom proves swift and painless.”

  The man coughed a thin laugh. Black eyes glinted from sunken sockets. “I thankee. And for that, I’ll tell ye this. Maybe ye don’t have to die.” He leaned close, the stink of cider thick on his breath. “Not if ye can get the attention of a god.”

  There it was. The glib prescription of every sage and know-all in the north. Now he knew he was being mocked; one of the local wags must have sent this walking skeleton to stoke his fears in exchange for a jug of cider. Harric turned on the man, hands tightening to fists . . . but the man’s pitiful condition stole all urge to violence. Fate had dealt the ferryman a harsh lot, too. Worse, in some ways, than Harric’s. On what should such a wretch think
if not death and gods?

  “Leave me with my thoughts, neighbor,” said Harric.

  “Looka there.” The man gestured to the opposite side of the courtyard.

  Harric turned to see a lord and his guards leading a slave girl to the gentleman’s card hall. The girl wore showy saffron yellow from top to toe, marking her the property of the lord, whose saffron silks bespoke his lofty yellow blood rank. Her face and hair shone with matching slave paint, and the dress wrapped her so tight that it too might have been painted on. Though the makeup made it hard to guess her age, the dress revealed her as nothing but willow limbs and ribs, no more than fourteen.

  Harric glimpsed a bastard belt around her waist, and his breath hitched as if from a blow. Only luck made him a free bastard, her a slave; had he been born on the West Isle, he too would wear the paint.

  “That one hasn’t been a slave more than a month,” said the ferryman. “See how she makes him drag her?”

  He was right. Born slaves obeyed habitually; this girl radiated a despondent resistance.

  Anger burned behind Harric’s breastbone. “She was a free bastard. One of our own, kidnapped and made a slave on the West Isle. Gods take these West Isle dogs. They mock our freedoms.”

  The lord glided past him on the way to the card hall. Shrewd eyes glinted from a smooth face framed in golden curls. Seething inside, Harric maintained an expression of bland indifference. The lord assessed Harric’s gray silks and gentleman’s long hair, and accorded him a polite nod, which Harric returned.

  Before the lord entered the hall, two of his guard preceded him, announcing, “Lord Iras of Silbrey, West Isle!”

  Iras swept in after them, dragging the girl, and his rear guards followed.

  Harric let out a long breath. The girl’s hopelessness weighed on his heart. “No call for that much slave paint, unless you’re hiding bruises.”

  “Aye,” said the ferryman. “She’s proud. She’ll be broke or dead in a week.”

  Harric’s fingers dug into the palms of his hands. A red haze obscured his vision for a moment. When it passed, his mind came into strange focus. He seemed outside himself, above the chessboard, somehow, with a view of the patterns of fate. Clear as dawn he saw he could do nothing to alter his own fate. But hers . . . hers he might affect, if the pieces lined up right.

  He smiled. Black hells, maybe a god would notice that.

  Draining his cup, he stepped away from the inn, and adjusted the cards in the bands inside his sleeves. The ferryman said something, but Harric barely noticed.

  “You’ll pardon me,” Harric said, and followed the lord into the card hall.

  Harric plunged into the overheated haze of the hall and immediately began to perspire. Smoke from a hundred candles and burning ragleaf stained the air, adding to the reek of a hundred unwashed and perfumed men and women. Lords and knights from every island of the kingdom thronged the hall, each as unfamiliar with the next as they were with Harric. Harric was the only local with enough coin and breeding to brave the place, so no one there knew him but the hall girls he shared his takings with.

  Jostling his way between tables, Harric scanned for Lord Iras among the many games of dice-wheel and tarot poker. Candelabra on the tables made islands of illumination in the gloom. From the dark at the back, orange embers of ragleaf smokers pulsed like the eyes of watching demons.

  He caught sight of Iras taking a seat at a middle table of knights wearing red and umber blood colors. Iras’ saffron blood outranked everyone at the table, and indeed it outranked most everyone who’d passed through the outpost that summer. From across the room, Harric could see his air of superiority as the slave girl sat on a stool beside him. His guards took places behind, at the edge of the candlelight.

  The men at the table grew still as Iras laid out a stake of silver and a deck of tarot. The knight nearest him leaned over and spat on the sawdust floor. “We don’t play for West Isle coin.”

  Iras cut his deck and shuffled. “Pity. It spends as well as any,” he said, in a West Isle drawl. “And it has the advantage of bearing a king’s head, not a Queen’s.”

  Glaring, the men left the table, leaving Iras alone.

  Harric claimed the seat across from him, and sat in such a way as to keep his belt concealed beneath his shirt. He laid silver on the table to show he was in.

  Iras looked up. Laughing eyes, piercing glance. A fox in man’s flesh.

  Beside Harric, a silk purse thumped on the table, followed by a gust of ragleaf smoke. A gentlewoman in riding dress and boots slid into the seat beside him. Lean, and well past middle-age, she had a shrewdness in her glance. Amber highlights announced blood higher than saffron. Her split riding skirt marked her a lady of the Queen’s court, which meant she’d be titled, educated, and accustomed to independence.

  The sight of her sent an ache of remembrance through Harric. She was a living image of his mother, when she’d lived—sharp, independent, a Queen’s Lady, too—before madness banished his mother to the frontier.

  “Ardensi ot billum sincu pras,” said the lady to Iras. Bright is the silver I take from a foe.

  Harric kept his expression blank, feigning ignorance of the words.

  Judging from Iras’ frozen sneer, the lord truly knew no Iberg. “An educated woman,” he said. “How droll.”

  “Does it frighten you?”

  Iras shuffled his cards. “No more than a speaking parrot. Shall we play?” Without awaiting answer, he dealt.

  Harric suppressed a smile. If Westies despised anything more than free bastards, it was the Queen and her ladies. There could be no better lightning rod for Iras’ attention during the game, which would make Harric’s game much easier. He filled the silence by introducing himself. Iras followed suit.

  “I am the Lady Bettis,” said the woman.

  Bettis won the first hand.

  As Iras dealt the next hand, Harric glanced at the slave girl. She’d slumped beside her master as if shamed by the presence of one of the Queen’s famously independent ladies. When she noticed Harric’s glance, she met it with a stare so bleak he felt his soul rising to meet it. Unfairly cursed—doomed, as it were, to a living death—her eyes mirrored his own despair.

  This near, he also noticed a swelling above one of her cheeks: a blacked eye under the paint. And when she turned her head, a lump shone through the hair above one ear.

  A week to live, the ferryman gave her? More like a day.

  Helpless anger burned behind his breastbone. Notice, gods, and blush at your inaction.

  Harric picked up his cards, and studied them. Without looking up, he said, “Lord Iras, I wish to buy your girl.”

  A cloud of ragleaf coughed from Lady Bettis. From the corner of his sight, Harric saw her studying him. He kept his eyes down so nothing in them could betray his intent.

  “You mean rent her?” said Iras. “I’ll rent her, if you like.”

  Harric let his eyes wander over the girl. She sat rigid on the stool, eyes desperate.

  “Go see to the gentleman,” Iras told her. “Sit on his lap.”

  When the girl only glared at the floor, Iras slapped her so hard he unbalanced her from the stool. The sound brought a hush to the nearest tables. Heads turned. The hush spread as the painted girl crawled to her feet.

  A dandy bounded from an adjacent table, hand on the hilt of his sword, but when Iras’ guards stepped forward to meet him, he balked, sputtering.

  “Sit down, you drunk ape,” said Bettis. “We don’t have to like it, but the Queen gave Westies their rights. Law’s on his side, and only a fool doesn’t know it.”

  Iras’ bodyguards watched him, hands on the pommels of short brawler swords.

  The dandy flopped back in his chair.

  Jeers sailed in from the spectators, but many directed dark looks at Iras, and the tone of the place went from rough
merriment to an angry grumble.

  Iras stood. He opened his arms to the crowd and spread an amused smile around the room. “We mean no disrespect to the house.” He laid a hand on his breast. “You in the East have forgotten the Old Ways, so they surprise you. Your Queen even freed your bastards. But I ask you, in what way are such lordless vagrants free? Free to starve and freeze in the open air? To rob for their bread?” He placed a fatherly hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Consider instead how I care for Sweetness. How I clothe her and give her labor and purpose. Without me, would she not beg and die with the rest? So do not judge me, good gentles of the East. Raise a glass with me! The West offers counsel if you’ll have it.”

  Harric lifted his cup and drank.

  Iras hadn’t merely needled his Eastern brethren; he’d preached, relying on rank to protect him. And though most in the hall muttered and cast hard glances, it chilled Harric to see how many joined the toast with, “The only good bastard’s a slave bastard!”

  The crowd returned to its games, but Harric felt the burn of angry eyes on his table. A bloody undertone had crept between those who toasted and those who had not.

  Iras sat, and pushed the girl toward Harric. “Go to him.”

  “My apologies,” said Harric. “But I only wish to buy.”

  “I’ll pay double,” said Bettis.

  Iras chuckled. “So eager to be a master? No. You would free her.” He fingered a lock of hair from the girl’s face, revealing a clenched jaw and frozen stare. “Tell you what I’ll do, I’ll add a taste of Sweetness to the pot, gratis.” He tossed a token to the midst of the table. “That stands for a night in the chamber. Go to him,” he said to the girl. “Earn your supper.”

  As the girl maneuvered toward Harric’s chair, the lady clapped a hand to the girl’s wrist and diverted her into the chair on the opposite side of her from Harric. “Sit here.”

  Iras chuckled. “As the lady wishes.”