The Jack of Souls (Multi-award winner!)

Chapter 33 - Slavery & Freedom

The Giants threw fire upon me

Ice-smiting hammers upon my skin.

In the War of Creation

Who could I pray to?

I found help in my own hands and eyes.

 — Arkus, Patron God of Arkendian Independence, from the Heroic Poem, "The First Making"

Chapter Thirty-Three

The Lady Dimoore stepped from the fog like an empress in state, clothed not in her old gowns, but in youthful glory — in gathers of her own spirit's strands, like a robe of glowing ribbons. In the Unseen she was magnificent. Ageless. Radiating confidence and power. This was not the mad mother Harric had known in the last years of her life, nor the mother that haunted his dreams. This was the mother he'd adored when he was young. And the vision took him aback.

Her eyes regarded Harric with a mixture of pride and cool determination. She spoke now in the calm tones of a master in her prime.

"The stone is evil, Harric. It devours your soul even now. See how it feeds on your strands? How it plucks them from the Tapestry of Fate?"

Harric's eyes followed her gesture to the sky, where indeed his own strands no longer streamed upward to the web of souls in the same abundance as the night before. Many of them bent downward and plunged into the stone clutched in his fist. "Thus it devours your future," she said. "I can no longer see your destiny."

"That's normal, kid," Fink said. The imp flapped down from the boulder to land beside Harric with a snap of leather wings. "And it's good, too, since it limits her getting her fingers in your strings."

Harric looked back to his mother, stunned by her beauty and power.

Beside her the imp was a scabrous crow.

How long had it been since she'd been so, in life? When he was very young, perhaps. The last ten years of her life her visions had worn her into madness.

"As long as it devours your strands," she said, "you are a man without a role in the grand pageant. An unknown, without destiny."

"Like a wild card, right, kid? That's what you like —  Jack of Souls, and all that."

Harric looked at Fink. "How do you know about that?"

 Fink's grin flashed, inscrutably. "Had to learn about the jack that took my nexus before I offered him a contract. Nothing you wouldn't do yourself."

Bright strands flashed from his mother's arm, lashing toward the imp. Fink cringed behind Harric like a dog that knew beatings, and retreated to the top of the boulder.

"Away from him, you vulture!" she said, sending a strand snapping in the air between them. "This vile creature has invaded your dreams, Harric, hiding in that foul cat [SM1] so I could not protect you. He is wicked. He is envious, and deceitful." She turned her burning gaze on Fink, as if she could pry into him with her eyes. "He needs you, Harric — I see that — but for what I cannot tell, for your fate is now obscured to me." She closed her eyes and rolled her head back, as she did when overcome by visions, only now she seemed not ravaged by the Sight, as she had been in life, but master of it. She frowned, as if frustrated at what she saw, then sighed and turned her gaze again on Harric. "This much I can read in the web: the imp wants you for more than your soul. You are a door to something he craves, and which only you can provide."

Fink hacked a kind of nervous cackle behind. "She's holding herself together pretty good, isn't she, kid? Bet you never saw her like this before. All sane and pretty? She's putting all she's got into holding herself together for this show. That's how bad she wants you as her little puppet again. But test her a little, and she'll crack. I guarantee it. And then hold on to your boots when she does."