Jinx's Fire (14 page)

“Well, ice, then. I'm not going to have anything to do with . . . ice.”

“Then you will not be able to remove the seal.”

Jinx started to argue, then stopped. “Okay. Fine. How do I, er, remove him?”

“By touching both paths.”

“How do we get out again?”

“If you succeed in removing the seal, you will have already destroyed the Bonemaster's hold on the Path of Fire. Is it to my advantage for you to get out again?” the Princess asked.

“I don't know,” said Jinx. “It's to mine, I know that. And Simon's.”

“Your friend will be without his life.”

“But can't I put it back in him?”

“That depends on what remains of him. You may need to give him something of yourself, and really, why would you want to do that?” She frowned perfectly. “All I can tell you about getting out again is that you can take nothing with you that you did not bring—”

“Can I take Simon at least?”

“—and that it is seldom possible to walk the same path twice.”

“So you're saying I can't get out again.”

“You seem a reasonably intelligent young man. I have told you all that I feel I can. We side with ice, but we do prefer balance.”

She looked up at the distant crystal sky as if listening. “You may go now. Dearth will conduct you to the paths.
Are you sure you wouldn't care for a ruby or two before you go?”

“Something to take out that I didn't bring with me? No thanks,” said Jinx.

“Well, you are slightly cleverer than you look,” said the Princess. “This has been most amusing. Do drop in again in another millennium or so, if you're in the neighborhood.”

“Thanks,” said Jinx. “I will.”

Dearth met him at the edge of the garden, and led him through a maze of tunnels. They met no other elves, though here and there Jinx heard the distant gargle and snarl of the Qunthk language.

Then Dearth opened a door, and they were standing at the edge of—

—a field. An endless expanse of grass. It was somehow not quite grass, because it was missing the ripe green chaos of life (untidy stuff) and all the grass was just the same height as itself, and no wind stirred it, and no bird-shadows skimmed across it. Still, it was definitely meant to be a field.

Jinx looked up, and the sky was white and sunless. Quartz, maybe.

“Your path begins here,” said Dearth.

“Er, where?” said Jinx.

“That I do not know.” The elf looked annoyed. “Aren't
you supposed to know these things? It's your path.”

“Okay, but which direction do I go? You do want to help me, right?”

“The Princess said you were to be helped. The direction is down, if you seek the nadir.”

“Well, the only direction here seems to be across,” said Jinx.

The elf shrugged.

Jinx sighed. “Okay. See you later.”

He started walking.

The grass was deeper than he'd thought. It parted as his feet touched it. Nothing crawled or buzzed in the grass. No insects hopped, no snakes slithered suddenly at his feet, no baby rabbits scrabbled out of his way. Whoever had made this field had missed the finer points.

The grass grew deeper. Soon it was up to his shoulders. But he didn't have to push his way through it—the path kept appearing at his feet.

Jinx thought as he walked. He thought that what the elves meant by balance was not what Jinx meant. To Jinx, balance meant somehow getting all the creatures—the trees, the humans, the other Restless—to acknowledge each other's right to the Urwald. The elves were talking about a balance between lifeforce and deathforce, fire and ice.

What did it matter to elves, anyway? he wondered. It wasn't like life and death were really things they cared
about. A human lifespan—or even a tree's lifespan—must seem awfully brief and fleeting when you were used to farming gemstones.

So why do they bother to steal humans, then?

He thought about the Elf Princess drinking his admiration. Mining it, he thought. They mine us, like we mine iron, salt, and glass. They farm minerals, and they mine life.

He was suddenly very glad to be walking away from them. He walked faster.

Smack into a solid stone wall.

It threw him backward, with a painful shock. It was the same feeling he'd had when he'd touched the slab of ice that the Bonemaster had imprisoned Simon in. Was he getting closer to Simon, then?

He approached it cautiously. The rock was glassy and smooth, like black obsidian. He could feel cold radiating off it.

He looked up. The wall went up further than he could see, into the sunless sky.

One thing was for sure. There was no path through it.

He thought about what the Elf Princess had said.

Y
ou must make your own path.

Through that? Unlikely. Jinx walked along the wall, the grass parting for him.

He didn't get really discouraged till he reached a corner.
The wall turned back the way he had come. He had a feeling that if he turned around and went the other way, he'd eventually run into the same problem. He was boxed in.

So, yes. It appeared he was going to have to make his own path through that.

He stared at the wall's glassy surface. He saw himself reflected in it. During his talk with the Elf Princess it had occurred to him that he had turned into almost the person he wanted to be. He hadn't been fooled by her beauty or tempted by the gems. He'd done nearly as well as someone in a story.

But he didn't look like someone in a story. He looked tired, dirty, cranky . . . and still too short.

He sat down and ate some bread. It was getting stale, which was odd because he hadn't been down here all that long, had he? He put the heel of the loaf back in his belt pocket, next to the golden aviot. He looked at the little bird and wondered if Sophie was watching him through the Farseeing Window.

Well, he had to go through this wall. KnIP? No, KnIP wouldn't be enough, not when he had only his own knowledge to use.

Fire, then?

He reached for the fire inside him. It seemed to have grown a little stronger since his conversation with the Elf Princess. But strong enough to melt stone? He put his
hand out, and sent fire into the wall. The wall melted, a little bit. Rock ran down in solid-looking rivulets. He had made a slight indentation in the wall.

This wasn't going to work. He saw what he would have to do.

He summoned all the fire he could from inside him, and he walked into the wall again.

It hurt. A lot. There was the ice-hot shock, and there was the solid fact of the stone wall. Jinx remained standing with difficulty. He kept sending the fire into the wall. He took a step forward into solid stone.

He could feel things breaking as he moved—ice and stone. The path was forming as he walked, he could tell that from the emptiness behind him, but all he felt in front of him was stone, ice, and pain.

He wasn't sure how long this went on.

Finally he burst out of the wall, onto a plain of ice. He flopped down on it, exhausted.

And began to slide. The slope was slight at first, then it got steeper and he went faster and faster.

Below him, he could see a bridge of ice. And on either side of it, a drop-off. Frantically he hit at the ice with both hands, trying to steer himself toward the bridge.

He could see he wasn't going to make it. He twisted around onto his stomach, trying to swim toward the bridge with his arms and legs. But he was moving too fast. The
cliff edge was rushing toward him.

He kicked furiously, trying to knock holes in the ice. This slowed him down a little, and then a little more. But he was still gliding toward the edge, closer and closer.

He used KnIP and
knew
a hole into the ice, and stuck his arm into it to stop himself. But the rest of him kept sliding . . . over the edge.

He clung to the edge of the cliff, scrabbling furiously at the ice. He was hanging by his bad arm. His hand was freezing, and slipping against the ice. He quickly
knew
a handhold for his other hand. He dangled, hanging over emptiness. He could feel heat rising from below.

He looked down.

Far below him was a river of fire, burbling and flickering red-orange between steep stone banks.

He tried to pull himself up, but couldn't. His bad arm was starting to ache, his hands were freezing, his grip was slipping, and his feet were getting uncomfortably hot. He couldn't work much magic because he didn't have enough fire left inside him . . .

Wait. He knew where there was more available.

Carefully, willing himself not to be sick, he looked down again at the river of fire. And began to draw the fire into himself.

At first it was difficult at this distance, but fire likes to move upward. He kept drawing and drawing, pulling fire
from the river, and adding it to the fire inside him.

Then, with more power inside him than he'd ever held before, he looked down at his own boots, and levitated them.

It worked. He felt himself grow light. Gingerly, he let go of the cliff with one hand. He was floating on air.

He let go with his other hand—and instantly flipped upside down. Gah! Now he was stuck in a position that should never happen to a person who is afraid of heights. He tried frantically to work himself right side up again, but there was nothing to grab—he'd drifted away from the cliff. He hung there.

These weren't actually his boots. He'd outgrown his own boots and was wearing an old pair of Simon's, which were too big. He felt his feet begin to slip out of them. Desperately he curled his toes, but his feet kept sliding. He reached up and grabbed the boots, and hung on tight.

He tried levitating his clothes. That worked—sort of. Now he was sprawled flat, high over the canyon, unable to move, and cooking slowly. But at least he wasn't in danger of falling anymore. He began to rise up, up, into the sunless sky.

He could see back to the wall he'd come through, but not over it, because it seemed to go up forever. He could see the ice bridge and what lay beyond it—a field of ice, which ended in a faraway mountain.

What he couldn't do was move. He'd never learned to move things sideways. Simon could do it. Elfwyn could. But Jinx couldn't, and he was stuck.

He kept his gaze focused on the mountain. Looking down might bring on the horrible, rocking, black-edged vertigo. And if that happened, he'd lose his concentration and the levitation spell would break and, well, to put it bluntly: splat.

Jinx hung in the air and thought.

The trees had told him that the Listener had roots that went deeper than the roots of the Urwald. Well, he was deeper than the Urwald, that was for sure.

Dame Glammer had told him that half of him was underground. Like a tree . . . But if he went deeper than the Urwald, then surely that was more than half. After all, some of the Urwald's trees were hundreds of feet tall, whereas Jinx was not really gifted in the height department.

Jinx pounded on his head, in hopes it would make him think better. The movement made him spin around in a circle, slowly. He closed his eyes and hoped he would stop soon.

You must recognize when it is time to make your own path,
the Elf Princess had said.
The path you see may not be the path you should travel.

There was really no point in crossing the bridge, even
if he could get to it. The nadir of all things was going to be
down
. Roots went down. Roots, routes. Jinx opened one eye, just for a second, and looked down at the river of fire below him.

Down was down. If Jinx let the spell go, and just let himself fall . . .

No. Not a good idea. This was not a metaphor. This was real, and he would go splat.

He had to lower himself. All the way down. Into the fire.

Jinx began reversing the levitation spell. He remembered Simon teaching him to do this, snapping,
“Down is just the opposite of up!”

Slowly he passed the icy edges of the chasm and descended into it. Heat rose from the river of flames below. The heat was part of the fire, and the fire belonged to Jinx, and he belonged to it. He drew it into himself. It was no good thinking he couldn't draw in a whole river of fire—you can't if you think you can't. Anyway, the nadir of all things was
down
. . .

Jinx was low enough now that he could see the shadows of the flames flickering against the canyon walls—which were now stone, not ice. He kept drawing the fire into himself, and he risked a look downward.

He was about ten feet above the highest of the flames. He felt no heat from them. He went further down, and
the flames tickled against his skin. He passed through the flames, and drew them into himself, and kept going down, and down, and down . . .

. . . through rock and ice and flames . . .

. . . until he found he could go no further. He had reached the nadir of all things.

At the Nadir of All Things

A
t the nadir of all things was a box.

It stood in a small, rock-hewn cavern. How Jinx knew he was at the nadir of all things he couldn't have said. He only knew that using all of his power—and he had so much fire inside him now that he felt he might burst into flame at any moment—he could go no further.

There was no sign of Simon. There was only the box, made of almost-translucent white stone. It stood about three feet high, with a neatly fitted stone lid.

Jinx moved toward the box, and was stopped by something inside him.

It was fear. It hit him like a troll's fist. He'd never been
so frightened in his life—not even when he'd been a small child who was still afraid of the Urwald.

It was hard to even move against the terror, but Jinx fought it, reached out a hand, and touched the lid of the box. Shock ran up his arm. He recognized it as the same shock that had thrown him across the room in the Bonemaster's house, when he'd touched the slab that had appeared to have Simon inside it. It shook him to the soles of his feet, but he didn't take his hand away. Down here at the nadir of all things, he was stronger than he'd been in the Urwald.

Using a levitation spell to help him, he lifted the lid and set in on the floor. Icy steam poured from the box. Jinx coughed. He batted at the steam to clear it.

He leaned over the box and peered in.

The fog kept pouring out; he couldn't see. He reached inside and felt around. The walls tingled his hands unpleasantly. He leaned further in, balancing on the edge and taking his feet off the floor. His hand brushed something, but it rolled away. He groped for it. His hand closed on it. It was a sphere, slightly squishy and very slippery. It slipped out of his hand. He made a grab after it, and fell into the box.

Shocks rippled through his body. He felt around for the sphere. He touched it, but it slithered away, like soap in a bathtub. Frustrated, he grabbed at it again. He . . .

He wanted to smash it.

Where had that thought come from? He shook his head to clear it. The thing might have something to do with Simon, and there was no way he wanted to smash Simon.

No? Hadn't Simon been rather unpleasant to him? Didn't he
deserve
smashing?

What a crazy idea. Simon had taken Jinx in when Jinx would have died otherwise. He'd taught Jinx to read, and to do magic. How did that work out to deserving—

He'd done dark magic on Jinx, though. Magic that used ghast-roots, and how were ghast-roots made? Well, everyone knew that. Ghast-roots were made by
giving
a human life to the forest, and then cutting down a tree in exchange.

“No, everyone doesn't know that!” said Jinx, scrambling to his feet. “
I
didn't know it.”

Terrified, he clambered out of the box.

Something in there had been putting thoughts into his head. He walked around and around the cavern, thinking frantically. Where had those thoughts come from, thoughts he'd never had before?

Except . . . He stopped walking. They weren't thoughts he had never had before. They were thoughts he'd had at one time or another, and rejected.

What about the ghast-roots, though? He really hadn't known . . .

. . . well, yes. Yes, he had. He'd seen something in a book, and the Bonemaster had said something, and Jinx had figured out how it was done. The realization had crept through his mind so quickly and quietly it barely left a memory behind. He'd just chosen not to think about it anymore. Deathforce magic required a human sacrifice. There were ways around everything in magic. Some of them weren't very nice ways. Someone, sometime, had figured out the ghast-roots spell, which exchanged a human life for a tree's life. And the ghast-roots made from one human sacrifice could be used in hundreds of spells. Very efficient.

And Simon had bought some from Dame Glammer and used them to do the bottle spell on Jinx, a spell Simon wasn't even sure he'd be able to do correctly. That thought came from Jinx himself, and not from the thing in the box. Or at least he thought it did. How could he know for sure? He paced furiously around and around the box, not looking down. From here on down there was no reality, so the floor was rather nebulous and springy. It didn't do to look at it too closely.

The box felt like the ice that the Bonemaster had trapped Simon in. These thoughts that Jinx didn't want seemed to be coming from it—coming from the ice. And the Elf Princess had said that to break the seal, he'd have to touch both paths.
As your friend would, and not as you would
.

Very well, he would touch the Path of Ice.

He put his hands on the edge of the box—he still couldn't get used to the slight shock—and spoke down into it.

“I know Simon's not a very nice person,” he said. “I know he's got all that stuff behind a wall in his thoughts, and it has to do with the time he was with the Bonemaster, and he saw awful things and maybe did awful things.”

He paused. Was there anything else? He knew he had to get this right.

“It's not that I don't care what Simon's done,” he said. “It's that whatever he's done, he's still Simon.”

He thought hard. That was the best he could come up with.

He waited. No strange thoughts came into his head. Good. So he'd touched the Path of Ice, he supposed, and overcome it. Cautiously, he stepped back into the box.

He felt around for the sphere again, and found it. It slithered away again. Drat. If only Elfwyn had been here, she would have been able to do a summoning spell. Jinx had never learned that. He . . .

. . . wasn't as good at magic as Elfwyn. In fact, he was lousy at it. She was probably telling Wendell, right now, how hopeless he was. They were probably both laughing about it. Figured. Elfwyn thought she was better than him. Despite the fact that he was better at languages, and
much
more powerful. It was just the way Elfwyn was.

And Wendell, well, Wendell would be agreeing with her because she was a girl, and Wendell naturally thought girls could do no wrong. Even if they'd done really horrible things like give a copy of the Crimson Grimoire to the Bonemaster. What an idiot Wendell was. And Elfwyn was deceitful. In fact, it would probably be a blessing to the Urwald if Jinx
didn't
go back to the trolls and they ate . . .

But Jinx was already scrambling out of the box.

He began pacing again. Right. These thoughts were
not
coming from the Path of Ice. Well, they were, but they were his thoughts, nonetheless. He'd had them. Not exactly like that. Not as loudly as that. He'd kicked them away, most of them, anyway, as soon as he knew he was thinking them. But he'd certainly never thought the trolls should eat Elfwyn or, for that matter, anybody. No, he'd never thought anything remotely like that.

He walked around and around the chamber and thought. The things the ice was using were starting with him—little annoyances, little worries—but the ice was twisting them into something lethal.

He stopped, and grabbed the edge of the box, and spoke.

“Right, okay, listen. Wendell probably is kind of stupid about girls. But I think he's learning. He's really smart, even though he thinks he isn't. He's . . .” This was difficult,
and he had to take a deep breath and steel himself to get it out. “A lot smarter than me. And . . . and it's true Elfwyn is better than me at magic. It comes easier to her. That's just how it is.”

He paused before he climbed into the box again. Who was next? Sophie? He'd gotten annoyed at Sophie sometimes, it was true, but there was nothing big, nothing the Path of Ice could use. Not that he could think of, anyway. Well, he'd soon find out.

He knelt down in the box and groped around for the sphere. His hands closed on it and he quickly clamped his fingers to the floor, trapping it. Right. Now the trick was going to be lifting it. Slowly, he moved his hands together and knitted his fingers together underneath it. It still hadn't escaped. Good. He picked it up. He had it now.

A strong thread of power attached the sphere to the box. It reminded Jinx of the time that he'd taken Simon's bottled life from the dungeon under Bonesocket. There had been a thread of power holding the bottle in place.

Jinx stood up. He pulled the thread until it broke.

The box trembled. The whole chamber trembled. Then it shook so hard that Jinx thought the ceiling would collapse. He fell to the floor of the box, still clutching the gloppy sphere.

Things quaked and swayed. The chamber seemed to have come free from the rest of the world and to be
swinging in space. It felt as if great ropes had been unbound and were whipping around like angry serpents. Jinx could hear them smacking into things in the distance. He heard a crash like broken glass, and then the crunch and rumble of breaking rock, and then the roar of fire. He closed his eyes tightly.

The shaking and roaring went on for a long time. Then it ended, and Jinx was still there. He opened his eyes and saw nothing but white fog.

The mist cleared. The chamber was still there, but the box was gone.

Two tunnels appeared, opening out of the chamber in opposite directions. The one Jinx was facing was a hole bored through blue-white ice. He turned around and looked down the other tunnel, which was ringed in flames from top to bottom, as far as the eye could see.

Which was suddenly very, very far. Jinx wasn't sure how it happened, but somehow he found himself able to see both paths, as though from a great distance, winding and twining their way back up to the world. The paths twisted and turned and wove around each other, and sometimes they seemed to be the same path for a while, and then they split again.

“I'm going to have to tell Malthus about this,” said Jinx. “He got it all wrong.”

If he ever got out again, that was. He looked down at
the slimy thing in his hands. It was a clear, sloppy blob, like a giant frog's egg. Only instead of a little black dot of tadpole, it contained, at the center, an eyeball. An oddly yellow eyeball.