The Jack of Souls (Multi-award winner!)

Chapter 6c - A Hanging

The tooler peered sidelong at Willard as if noting his lack of immortal features, then returned his attention to Brolli. "What we seen just now on this road was magic," he said, in an accusatory frontier drawl. "You bring us a witch to hang, Your Holiness?" Willard couldn't miss the tone of irony in the title.

"It was no magic," said Willard. "Just an ordinary resin charge, like those your brother toolers used to blast the Hanging Road."

The tooler squinted down the road to where a spitfire's spray still smoked and smoldered on the rock. "Might be," he said, returning his scrutiny to Brolli. "But a resin charge big enough to toss a horse will leave a soot patch twenty times that size. The charge I seen left nothing."

Brolli moved beneath the blanket. The hole through which he peered had been trained upon the tooler. Now it shifted upward to gaze at the massive gallows with its complex of cables and pulleys, and the massive wheel blocks supporting man-sized counter-weights.

The tooler sprang back, pointing at Brolli's long-fingered foot, which now poked beneath the hem of the blanket. Brolli had inadvertently raised the blanket when he lifted his head to view the gallows. He jerked the blanket back over his foot too late.

The tooler aimed the spitfire squarely at Brolli. "What in the Black Moon is you?!"

"He is a Kwendi," Willard said, turning Molly toward the tooler. He did not wish to kill the unfortunate man, but he couldn't let him harm Brolli. If the truth might calm his hex-maddened zeal, it was worth a try. The man was too far from the outpost for the information to do any harm. "He is under my protection, Master Tooler, and under the express protection of the Queen. Indeed, she has licensed his magic in cases of self-protection."

Willard held his breath, gripping the haft of his sword and readying to prompt Molly to lunge.

But the tooler relaxed. His face smoothed in wonder, and he took a step backward, as if better to imagine the figure under the blanket. "A Kwendi," he breathed. "Well, send me to the Black Moon itself! It's on account of you, Master Kwendi, that these Ibergs is swarming across the water. Every one of these witches want the secret to your magic. They're mad to get their hands on it, and it's on account of you my gallows is in business. I owes you my gratitude."

"This gallows is yours?" Brolli said, peering up through the hole again at the complex of cables and pulleys. "To me, it is all confused ropes and trees. I do not understand it."

The tooler returned his spitfire to his shoulder, and grinned proudly up at his contraption. "Pity I don't have a witch today to show you how she works." Then his face lit with inspiration. "But we don't need no witch! I can show you myself!" He set his spitfire aside and grabbed his cowering apprentice, who all this time had seemed near fainting, and dragged him to the control board at the cabin. "You watch, Master Kwendi," he called, stringing a ready noose around his own neck. "You'll see how she does it!"

The apprentice gaped, petrified.

"Show him how we hang 'em," said his master, giving him a kick in the shins. "I said show him, you lazy runt!"

The kicks grew fiercer until the apprentice jerked a lever and a massive counterweight plummeted from above. The tooler launched skyward. All enthusiasm had vanished from his face, however. He gripped the noose under his chin, eyes bulging and his legs flailing as he swung over the river like a boy on a rope swing.

"Master!" the apprentice cried. The boy yanked a brake that jerked the ascent to a halt. The tooler swung back over the road, face red with panic. The boy pulled a lever that dropped another weight and shot another noose upward, before he found the release that dumped his master abruptly to the ground.