The Jack of Souls (Multi-award winner!)

Chapter 29 - Foul Fiends & Good Fortune

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

 — Names for the Unseen Moon

Chapter Twenty-Nine

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 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 expectantly 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.

He wandered down the ridge on a path beneath the fire-cones. It was longer than Harric 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 edge to look out upon and 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.