Jinx's Fire (15 page)

Facing the Ice

J
inx had seen that eye before, although not quite so much of it. And there were supposed to be two of them. And there was supposed to be Simon to carry those eyes around.

Carefully, he slipped it into the leather pocket he wore on his belt. Then he searched all around the cavern, in case there were any more bits. But there was no more Simon to be found.

Well, this wasn't enough Simon. So where was the rest?

Where was the last place Simon had been, before this happened to him? The Bonemaster's house, that's where. And there Jinx had seen what had appeared to be a whole
Simon, frozen inside a slab of ice. So Bonesocket was probably the place to start looking.

Except, Jinx remembered, he had an appointment to have his arm eaten off in the Glass Mountains. The thought made his stomach feel as if it weighed ten tons. But he
had
to go back, because if he didn't Elfwyn and Wendell would be killed.

Jinx looked at the Path of Ice. If the Bonemaster was the wick of ice, then did the path lead to Bonesocket? There was only one way to find out. And the Elf Princess had told him he'd have to travel both paths.

After he'd found the rest of Simon—if there was any more to find—then, he thought with a sinking heart, he could go and get his arm eaten. He wondered if they'd eat it while it was still on him.

He looked at the paths. They met here, in this chamber, because of the seal. And Jinx was pretty sure he had just broken the seal.

He took a step onto the Path of Ice.

He looked back at the chamber, and watched it begin to dissolve and sink into the unreality beneath the floor. Probably not a good idea to stick around while that happened.

The path of ice was slippery underfoot. Twice he walked too quickly and skidded, and once he fell down hard, grabbing his pocket to protect the eye.

But the real trouble started when the path began to climb upward. Jinx stepped up onto the slope, and skidded down it again, barely keeping his feet. He tried crawling. It was no good. The cold burned his hands, and he slid down anyway.

There was no way he was going to get up this. He should have taken the Path of Fire.

Fire! That was it. Jinx sent fire into his boots—not much, just enough to melt the ice. He kicked at the path, and made a foothold. He stepped up. Kicked again.

This was too slow. He needed something faster. He sent fire directly into the ice.

There was a crackling sound, and then a whoosh of water swept down the slope, soaking Jinx to the knees. He braced himself and fought to stay upright as he slid back down the tunnel. After a minute he stopped. . . . There was solid rock under his feet. He waited until the water was gone, and then he started upward.

He climbed for an hour or so, stopping to melt the ice every few minutes. The sphere in his pocket was growing warmer, perhaps from all the fire Jinx was summoning. Finally he came to a level space, and was able to walk on without magic.

Well, good. He'd figured that out. Naturally he had. He was remarkably intelligent, after all. Look how quickly he'd been promoted, at the Temple of Knowledge in Samara. He—

He stopped walking. “I know what you're doing,” he said aloud. He thought. “Intelligence is like magic. It's what you do that matters, not what you have.”

That seemed to work. Jinx walked on.

He wasn't sure what he was going to do when he got to Bonesocket. He expected to come up in the dungeon. If he was right, then the mysterious bottle-shaped mass of ghostly ribbons that he'd once seen there was the Bonemaster's lifeforce . . . and connected in some way to the Path of Ice.

It's like a wick, Jinx thought, and was suddenly certain of it. The Bonemaster is the wick of ice but that bottle thing, it's part of the wick too.

Then what was the wick of fire? Besides Jinx, that is? Was there anything that stood atop the Path of Fire and channeled its power?

Of course. The Urwald itself.

The Path of Fire, the lifeforce, was channeled into the Urwald, and the Urwald's power was channeled into Jinx.

Jinx wondered how he had been chosen to have all this power.

The wicks choose themselves.
The words came back to him from somewhere—where? Oh, he remembered now. Neza the elf had said it to Dearth in the forest near Cold Oats Clearing. They'd put a spell on Jinx to make him forget, but he had no trouble remembering now.

So with all this power, he'd go up to Bonesocket,
and—what? Bearing in mind that he knew only a handful of spells and the Bonemaster knew, oh, probably hundreds?

I'm going to have to kill him, Jinx thought. If I get there at night, I can kill him in his sleep. I can do it. If I have to. And I do have to. The Bonemaster needs killing.

In fact, there were a lot of people that needed killing, when you thought about it.

The Bonemaster, of course. That went without saying. The Bonemaster had killed so many people that he could make a bridge out of their thighbones, cups out of their skulls, and line a tunnel with the rest of them. The Bonemaster would go on killing people, and had to be killed himself to prevent it. No question.

And the preceptors. They were evil people who controlled all the knowledge in Samara and kept everyone else in ignorance—except for the Temple scholars, whose knowledge fed the preceptors and made them even more powerful. The preceptors deserved to die. And—

Jinx came to another steep, icy slope. He stopped and looked up. His feet were cold, but that was no problem. He'd send fire into them in a minute, when he melted the ice. What was it he'd been thinking about the preceptors? Oh yes, that they should die. They were threatening the Urwald, that was reason enough. Anyone who threatened the Urwald needed to die.

Take King Rufus of Bragwood, for example. Rufus the
Ruthless. Rufus had put Reven's stepmother into a barrel stuck about with nails and rolled her downhill. Rufus would have to go. And that other king, Bluetooth of Keyland. The one who'd murdered Reven's parents. Obviously he would have to die.

And what about Reven?

Well, there was no question about Reven, really. Reven was invading the Urwald. Reven would have to die. There was no way around it.

The cold had crept up from Jinx's feet now to his knees. He tried to take a step, but his feet seemed frozen to the path. That was okay. He'd melt himself free in a minute. What was it he'd been thinking about? Right, a plan. A plan for what? Oh, yeah, to get rid of unnecessary people. People that needed killing.

Pretty much everyone that wasn't an Urwalder, when you got right down to it. Except Sophie, of course. He was fond of Sophie. And Wendell, well, he wouldn't kill Wendell, of course. Wendell was his best friend. But other than that—

Jinx, get a grip on yourself.

Jinx started, as if he'd been caught in a nightmare. He blinked and looked around. No one there. And his legs were encased in ice, well past his knees. He tried to move and couldn't. The ice was real.

And the nightmare in his thoughts was real, too.

“Don't start that with me,” said Jinx, aloud. “You can't possibly be getting those thoughts from me, because I've never wanted to kill anybody, not once in my whole life.” He stopped, and thought. Being completely honest was the only way to overcome the ice. “All right, maybe I did want to kill Siegfried, when he was cutting down trees. But he didn't die, he just turned into a tree. And if I've ever thought we'd all be better off if someone or other was dead, well, sometimes that's the actual truth, and—”

With a crackling noise, the ice crept a little higher on his legs. It seemed to form out of the air itself, a little mountain of ice with Jinx stuck in the middle.

“So that's it?” Jinx said. “Wanting someone else's death . . . oh, of course. The Path of Ice is the root of deathforce power.”

He took a deep breath. “I don't want anybody dead.”

Not even the Bonemaster? he wondered. Of course he wanted— Wait. This was important. His feet were numb, and frostbite was undoubtedly setting in, and he had to get this exactly right.

What he
wanted
was for the Bonemaster never to have happened in the first place. Or to have grown up differently, never chosen the Path of Ice, never learned deathforce magic.

And since changing the past wasn't possible, what he
wanted
was for the Bonemaster to stop killing people. Er,
maybe the Bonemaster could, let's see, take up an interest in something else—gardening, say? Or poetry?

Jinx said all this aloud. “That's not going to happen,” he added. “And so something else is going to have to happen. But I don't
want
him dead.”

He tried to send fire into his boots. But nothing happened. He stayed frozen in place.

“And the rest of them, I don't want them dead. In fact, I hope they don't die. That might not be how things work out. We might have to—”

He stopped himself. He had a feeling the words
have to
were especially dangerous when you were talking to the ice.

“Well, it's a war, and we didn't start it—”

The ice crackled upward.

“I'll do whatever will protect the Urwald,” said Jinx. “But I'll do it hurting as few people as possible. Because that's what I choose.”

He tried again to send fire into his boots. This time he felt the sharp, horrible ache of thawing feet. He kicked out and the ice around him cracked. He looked at the slippery slope in front of him, started to melt it, and braced himself for a flood.

The wall of water rushed down, knocking him off his feet. He had to scrabble at the ground to keep from being washed back the way he'd come. He got to his feet—now
his clothes were soaking wet. He unbuttoned his pocket to check on the eyeball.

The sphere had gotten bigger. Much bigger. It strained at the edges of his pocket. Jinx took it out. The aviot was stuck into it like a thorn. That looked painful. Jinx plucked out the little gold bird and stuck it in his mouth, as he needed both hands to hold the sphere, which now had two eyeballs in it. A head was forming around them.

Jinx watched in revolted fascination as the head grew a nose, and then a mouth, and then Simon's twisty brown hair. And then it stopped, while it was a head. There was no more Simon.

“Did you talk to me a minute ago?” said Jinx. “Did you tell me to get a grip?”

The eyes blinked. The mouth worked, trying to speak, Jinx thought, but it was stuck inside this blob of clear jelly.

“Did I make this happen by defeating the ice?” Jinx asked. Then he worried—that sounded conceited, and the ice
liked
conceit. But it might simply be true, he thought. The Elf Princess had said he'd need to give Simon something of himself. What if—

Gently and carefully, Jinx sent a little bit of lifeforce power into the sphere.

The head grew a neck. Jinx fed it more power, and a chest started to grow downward from the neck. Shoulders appeared, and then arms. The sphere was growing heavy.
Jinx set it down on the ground, and fed it more power.

The whole process was really not something you wanted to watch, and yet Jinx couldn't look away. In a few minutes Simon, all of him, was struggling, like a snake trying to work free of its old skin.

The gloop fell away.

Simon coughed, clearing his throat. “You're not the Bonemaster.”

“No, I—”

“You're . . . you're the boy. Jinx.” Simon brushed gunk off his face. “Why on earth did I name you that?”

“You didn't,” said Jinx. “I was already named it when you found me. And now I've found you.”

“Hmph.”

Jinx was enormously relieved to hear the hmph. It was a genuine Simon hmph.

And Jinx had seldom been so happy to see anyone in his life. Simon really
was
one of Jinx's favorite people. Simon was impatient, disagreeable, and always on Jinx's side no matter what. You couldn't ask for more than that.

Jinx could tell from the warm blue cloud around Simon's head that the wizard was extremely glad to see him too. Jinx thought the least Simon could have done was
say
he was glad to see Jinx. But that was Simon for you.

Then again, Jinx thought, I suppose that's me, too.

“Hmph,” said Simon again. “I could use some clothes.”

Jinx fumbled in his pack. “Er, there's this blanket—”

“Give it here.” Simon grabbed the blanket, wrapped himself in it, and got to his feet.

Jinx started to take his coat off, in case Simon wanted that.

Simon shook his head. “You're shivering.”

Jinx hadn't realized he was. “M-my clothes are wet.”

“Dry them off,” said Simon.

“I d-don't know h—” But fire should do it, right? Very carefully, so as not to set himself alight, Jinx sent fire into his clothes. Just enough. Steam rose from him, and a smell of damp wool, and then he was dry.

Simon frowned. “You're older. You've grown.”