The Jack of Souls (35 page)

The Phyros drew up behind Idgit. “What is it?” Willard asked.

“I don’t know.” Caris’s voice was distant, horse-tied.

Willard rode around for a look, trailing Holly behind.

Harric followed, leading Idgit.

They’d halted at the edge of a wide clearing where two giant torchwoods had toppled in a storm, creating a giant hole in the canopy. The clearing glowed with golden sunlight, and buzzed with a ruckus of sparrows and jays feeding like flocks in the fields at threshing time. But the strangest thing—and that which attracted the birds—was the bareness of the forest floor. Where there should have been an explosion of fresh young undergrowth in the newly sunlit space, there were no plants at all, only a tumult of rich black soil. It looked as though it had been cleared and turned and trampled by the work of a madman’s plow.

“What is it?” said Caris, scanning the new scene.

“A yoab site.” Willard glanced around the riven landscape, brow furrowed. “Don’t see a yoab, though.” He raised a water skin to his lips and drank greedily. Once he’d sucked it dry, he tossed it to Harric. “Give me your skin, boy. I’m burning up.” The old knight’s cheeks shone rosy with fever, but no new blood scored his armor, so Harric let the Kwendi sleep. Harric swapped skins with Willard, who guzzled more, and dribbled some down his back, under the quilting.

“I’ve heard about yoab up here,” said Caris, “but I’ve never seen one.”

Willard grunted. “Imagine a garl bear, only bigger—the size of a twenty-man field tent, say—with a head like a bull toad. Now take away the fur and give it a blanket of moss and grass and such. And instead of clawing up grubs from rotten logs, imagine it chewing down the whole log and the dirt and everything else like a sea whale drinks the sea.”

Caris wrinkled her nose. “It eats the soil?”

“You have it.” Willard nodded. “Giant pests to farmers. A big one’ll eat an acre of wheat and all the topsoil with it in a day. One that’s got whiff of a horse will let out a roar to be heard miles away, and then trample horse and rider or swallow them whole. They love horses.”

“Farmers use resin charges to scare them off,” said Harric. “You don’t have any, do you?”

“Aren’t you listening, boy? We can’t have that thing waking and bellowing out a challenge. Bannus could hear it miles away, and who else would have horses in this wood besides him or us? No. If we see it, we hope it’s sleeping, and give it a wide berth. It’s not here, so we can cross this patch. Lead away, girl, only keep a sharp eye.”

Rag picked her way across the turned soil, and after some exploring located the mule track on the other side. She’d gone no more than a bowshot when fresh bird noise erupted ahead in the forest. Soon, brown and white birds with bills like woodpeckers darted between the trees around them, scolding at their intrusion. Caris plodded by, peering with curiosity at their behavior. The birds concentrated in greatest profusion around a mound of moss and lichens no more than a stone’s throw to one side of the trail. When Willard drew near, the scolding increased, as if it were a nesting colony and Willard had come for eggs. They flew at Molly, and at Holly, who still trailed on her tether, then reeled about their mound. Some flew into holes on the mound as if to guard nests.

Molly snorted and snapped ineffectually at the agile birds. Rag danced sideways. Idgit backed, eyes rolling, until Harric grabbed her bridle.

A muffled curse from Brolli. The Kwendi threw off his blanket, shouting, “Yoab!” before he’d even taken in the scene. “Back away!”

The mound of moss and lichens lurched, scattering birds. Legs like muddy tree trunks levered the hillock to its feet. The beast would not have fit into a
fifty
-man tent. Before Caris could turn Rag or ride past, a fissure at the near end of the mound became a cave, and released an air-riving roar of fury.

–From “Infection of Magic,” banned religious pamphlet, late reign of Chasia

Steel & Magic

T
he horses screamed.
Holly reared, pulling her lead line free of Willard’s saddle. Molly snarled, and Willard’s sword chimed from its scabbard. Caris kept her saddle, but Idgit bit at Harric, and when he dropped her bridle she spun and bolted back the way they’d come, followed by Holly. Brolli toppled from Idgit’s saddle like an ill-tied sack of meal.

“Girl! Get those horses!” Willard bellowed. “Don’t let them run!”

Caris whirled Rag and galloped past Harric.

The mossy hillock shuddered and rose on stumplike limbs. Twigs and detritus cascaded from its peaked back in miniature avalanches. The yoab’s head rose, a mossy boulder, weaving drunkenly, then dropped with a sound like a falling tree. It lifted again. Nostrils the size of badger holes snapped open and closed, gusting and sucking the air.

“Back off, Willard,” Brolli said.

“I’m trying.” Willard cursed. “Molly won’t have it.” He jerked the reins to turn her, but she growled in fury at the notion of retreat.

“Its belly is too full to move,” Brolli said. “Belly dragging. We turn and leave it if it doesn’t”—the monster convulsed, and a wave of blackness surged from its gullet to bury the moss—“vomit. Now it moves.”

Harric backed to Brolli’s side, unable to tear his gaze from the Phyros and her rider, who shrank in comparison to the walking hillside before them.

Brolli drew a pearly globe the size of an apple from his satchel. “Cover your ears!” he shouted. With a straight-armed overhand motion, like a catapult, he flung the globe at the yoab’s head. The globe arched over Willard and Molly and thumped before the yoab, then vanished in a flash and deafening concussion.

Dirt and rocks rained beneath the canopy. Birds scattered.

The yoab charged. It moved with more speed than Harric would have dreamed possible for anything so huge. Molly surged to meet it, but before the yoab could muster its full momentum, she swerved along its left flank and Willard’s sword rang musically off its skull. The yoab roared and spun, clawing a wall of debris that hailed upon Harric and Brolli. Its jaws clashed together with the force of logs in a whitewater whorl. Harric saw no teeth, only bony ridges like continuous molars in a ferocious underbite, and heavy folds of skin like the throat of a pelican. Harric could see no eyes on the creature, only nostrils and jaw.

Molly swerved again and again, and Willard aimed jabs at patches of gray skin amidst the carpet of flora. Willard seemed anything but injured. It seemed as if all the years of Phyros blood in his veins somehow welled up in him in this moment of need.

The knight and Phyros moved as one, with a sureness and power Harric had never witnessed in anything. Willard held no reins, but communicated with his knees and whatever unknowable bond he shared with Molly, wielding the Phyros sword in both hands. In spite of his age—or rather, because of it, because of five lifetimes of battle—Willard moved with grace and precision almost hypnotic to behold. From his thigh, however, bright blood ran in stripes down his armor.

The Kwendi scooped globes blindly from the satchel and lobbed them at the yoab. “Throw!” he said to Harric, spilling some at their feet. Brolli’s second globe bounced from the yoab’s side and burst in a cloud of yellow sparkles. A third split in half and erupted in music like out-of-tune bagpipes. Harric snatched another and hurled. His ribs screamed in pain, truncating the effort, and the globe fell well short, but took a lucky bounce into the yoab’s knee, where it stuck like a wart without further effect.

“Will you stop throwing toys?” Willard shouted. “Do something!”

The Kwendi muttered something then sprinted, foot and knuckle, as if he would run up the yoab’s fern-crested back. Unwilling to remain behind, Harric limped after.

Willard’s sword rang from some bony structure on one of the monster’s forelimbs, then he turned Molly and sped up the mule track away from the others, shouting, “This way, you great worm!”

The yoab ignored the ruse—possibly unaware of where Willard had gone—and instead charged the opposite direction, straight for Brolli and Harric, who almost ran into its mouth. Brolli dodged aside, lobbing a red globe into the bellowing maw before the monster’s passage cast him sidelong into a hump of ferns. Harric plastered himself to a torchwood bole as the beast tore past, flattening smaller trees and shuddering the ground with its passage.

Crimson smoke spouted from its mouth and nostrils and from holes that might have been ears atop its skull. Its roar grew to a deafening squeal as it coughed like a firesaw and redoubled its speed. Blind and raging, it charged down the slope in the direction Caris had gone after Idgit.

*

With every roar
of the yoab behind them, it took almost all of Caris’s concentration to hold Rag’s fragile nerves together enough to keep on Idgit’s trail. But she’d never had such difficulty calming a single horse, and this bothered her. Even more worrying, the equine fear was so potent it began to penetrate her own mind. She’d felt a similar difficulty the night before, when the effort to keep Rag calm around Molly had been almost too much for her. If it hadn’t been for the upsetting matter of Harric and the wedding ring, she’d almost have looked forward to each time they stopped to rest, so she could hobble Rag far from Molly, and re-enter the world of humans.

In all her life she’d never craved the world of humans over her usual escape into horses. Was she changing? And if so, was this a good thing?

The yoab’s noise grew suddenly louder, and then it appeared on the slope above them, flattening saplings like grass, blasting crimson fire from mouth and nostrils.

Idgit veered to one side, and Rag followed. Rag’s fear entered Caris now, and she let it have rein. When she finally regained her senses, she realized the yoab had not veered with them, and was far away. Slowly, she pushed the horses’ fear from her mind, and reestablished calm in Rag. She rode Idgit down and took her bridle, stopped both horses, and dismounted. Nuzzling them both, she comforted them silently for many heartbeats in a quiet copse of dapple-nuts and fern. Gradually their blowing calmed and their eyes ceased rolling.

Safe. Safe,
she told them. She stroked their velvet cheeks, pressing forehead to muzzles, until they all breathed normally together.

Another horse snorted nearby, and Caris looked up to see Willard’s spare horse. Holly? Dolly? The animal gazed at her from across the copse. The tournament hood Willard had kept on her now hung by a mere string, torn from her face in the frantic flight. Caris stared for long moments. When she realized with the certainty of the horse-touched that she was looking at a Phyros foal, she sucked her breath in surprise.

No one had ever seen a Phyros foal in Arkendia. Only grown Phyros were brought to Arkendia from the Sacred Isle, and all those were stallions, with the single exception of Molly.

Caris hobbled Rag and Idgit, and walked, entranced, toward Molly’s miraculous offspring.

Holly tossed her head and trotted across the ferns to her side, peering at Caris intently with pale gray eyes.

How strange that her eyes were not violet. That must be an adult feature, Caris mused, like how an infant human’s eyes are generally black or blue before they settle on an adult color.

Holly snuffed her fingers and let Caris stroke her cheeks. Caris extended her horse-touched senses toward her, probing.

She sensed nothing in Holly like the fierce maelstrom of Molly’s aura. Holly bore some of the inexplicably deep nature of the Phyros that set them apart from mortal horses, but the horrible violence and domination that defined her mother was absent. In fact, the signature presence of Phyros was so soft in Holly that Caris hadn’t sensed it before, or perhaps the distraction of calming Rag—and the overpowering aura of Molly—had prevented it. But now it was palpable.