Bone Jack

For a moment after the shadows cleared from his eyes, Itzal thought he hadn’t been unconscious for more than a heartbeat or two. Trouble stared at him. Itzal tried to move, but he was tied by ropes, quite too tight to move. He flexed some muscles to test his range of movement, and found it limited. The only boon he could discover, and it didn’t comfort him much, was that he could tell that he was tied to nothing but himself. The way the ropes wrapped his legs, he thought he could just about stand up. It didn’t cheer him much.

They’d leaned him sitting against a wall. That, at least, felt more solid than lying down.

Trouble crouched in front of him. Trouble emptied a packet of paper into his mouth, familiar to the movement as breathing. It left a little powder on his dry lips. He licked the powder without seeming to notice and stared at Itzal. To Itzal it seemed some renewed brightness kindled at the back of Trouble’s eyes, or a deeper strain tugged at his premature crowfeet.

Itzal couldn’t keep a frown off his face, and a pain thudded in his chest below his throat. He came to be aware of where he was. The room swayed a bit, like a rocking chair in a calm breeze. Silvery moonlight wavered through the windows. Crates and barrels took up one end of the room. A few men stood at the other end. Near them, the doors were slid together and bolted. It could have been any number of places, but Itzal recognized it as one of the gondola lifts that went down from the city to a number of places. He had no easy way of telling where, the gondola carried them. From where he sat on the floor, all he could see out the windows was a misty night barely lit by strangled moonshine. That mattered less than the material point: he sat on the floor of a gondola, kidnapped it would seem, and going away from any path that would go toward his posting at the library.

On reflection, Itzal didn’t care to keep the frown off his face.

“Are you very vengeful?” Trouble asked, to Itzal it seemed, but his tone seemed aimed at himself. He paused but not long enough for an answer. Itzal didn’t have an answer anyway. “I’m not,” Trouble said. “Not in the way most stories would have you understand it. One of us ought to be.” Then, after a pause, Trouble asked, “Oughtn’t one of us to be?” as if the answer troubled him.

A grating voice called out something sharp to Trouble. Itzal didn’t understand the language. It summoned Trouble away.

Itzal could turn his head enough to see the person who’d called Trouble. A taller person, dressed in the same style of black linens. More telling, though, he had the same look to Trouble. No hair—sickly, dry skin—down to a smudge of white powder at the edge of his lips, which he absently brushed into his mouth. Itzal couldn’t judge Trouble’s age because of how sick he looked. That said, this other person looked older, his dark skin traced by deeper lines.

When Trouble stood up he got out of the way of the one spot in the gondola that Itzal hadn’t been able to see. It turned out that’s where Lilywhite sat, tied up at least as tightly as Itzal. The ropes couldn’t tie down the smirk, twitching with the vague satisfaction of one who’s seen something rather funny that he knows only he is in a position to appreciate. Itzal found his already weak resolve to hide his irritation fading. His frown hurt his face.

“Did anyone ever tell you that you’re a bit stupid?” Lilywhite said.

“No,” Itzal said.

“Might tell yourself a few times, get used to the sound of it,” Lilywhite said. He shifted a little in his own bonds. They were tight as Itzal’s. “I tell you, mate, getting copped by sailors’ll severely unmagic your reputation.”

Itzal had to work to keep himself from snapping something. It scratched at his long-standing habit to hold his tongue when he disagreed with his elders.

His silence seemed to be enough of a question for Lilywhite. Raising his wrists the inch or so he could, he indicated he meant the knots. “If you ever take a magic show on the road, make sure to chuck out any sailors in the audience. That’s all I’m saying.”

Understanding now, Itzal sighed. Not necessarily feeling more friendly toward Lilywhite, but at least a bit more inclined to commiserate, he said, “You haven’t had any luck slipping yours either?”

“Not an inch. Fine knots, these,” Lilywhite said. “I’d offer these boys work, if they didn’t look otherwise employed.”

Constraining an urge to ask Lilywhite why he’d want to hire sailors, Itzal said, “Shall we turn our thoughts to plans for escape?”

“Do you think so?”

“I rather think we ought to consider it.”

“Can you see a way?” Lilywhite asked.

Itzal cast a glance around. Trouble and his friend and the other shadowy men all watched the Bone Jacks. They listened to Itzal and Lilywhite talking. For a moment, Itzal wondered if he and Lilywhite ought to hush their voices. Lilywhite seemed unconcerned. In fact, he answered his own question before Itzal could.

“I can’t think of a way,” he said, not announcing it, but loudly enough to be heard in the far end of the gondola. “Something needs to change. Until something does, we must practice the First Tenet of Tactics. And what is the First Tenet of Tactics, young Itzal?”

“Patience like a stone,” Itzal said.

“Like a stone,” Lilywhite concurred.

Itzal considered it for a second. Then he sighed, and he nodded, and he settled a little more comfortably against the wall.

“You surprise me,” Lilywhite said.

“How?” Itzal said.

“I thought you’d argue—young and fiery-spirited and all that,” Lilywhite said. “Never say die. Do they ever teach you that at the Academy these days?”

“They teach us how to meditate in the face of overpowering reality,” Itzal said. It was a paraphrase of the lessons, which would not have called reality overpowering that way, but Itzal preferred the formation.

It got a chuckle out of Lilywhite.

“So we wait?” Lilywhite said.

“Nothing else for it,” Itzal said through his frown.

At those words, Lilywhite paid no attention to Trouble and the others, but he did it in a way that made Itzal glance in their direction. The older of the sickly-looking men held a quick conversation with one of the other shadowy figures. The content of it put curls of angry concern on the other’s face, like he’d just been landed with the world’s least pleasant job.

Though two nubs of muscle at the outside the person’s clenched jaw, he nodded. Though what the sickly men said to him met with his displeasure, he agreed to it. With no signal of appreciation or acknowledgment, the sickly man led Trouble to the closed door out of the gondola. He opened it, and he jumped out. Trouble followed him.

“How high do you think we are?” Itzal asked Lilywhite.

“Higher than I’d want to leap from,” Lilywhite said. His smirk had gone mild, turned to a smirk of contentment about something.

Itzal held a few words at the back of his throat. He wanted to ask about Trouble and the other sickly looking man, but he couldn’t tell if this moment had space for that conversation. He suspected it’d be a long conversation. He tried dividing what he could tell about them for himself against what he knew about the world and figure them out without asking.

They practiced underhanded techniques. The darker-skinned sickly man had no doubt shot the darts that knocked Lilywhite out. At least, Itzal presumed one had knocked Lilywhite out too. He hadn’t seen it happen, so he couldn’t know for sure. Itzal filed that away under “probably unimportant.” Which brought him to the knots. Lilywhite seemed to think that the sailors had done the knots around them, but Itzal had slipped sailor’s knots before. He knew most knots sailors favored. Every Bone Jack had several months of training only on the knots favored by sailors. How to tie, untie, slip, cut, break, and escape from those knots was a core curriculum, begun for Bone Jacks at eleven and refreshed regularly. Sailors tied tough knots. Of course they did. The ropes tied around Itzal held more securely than ropes usually did. The person who tied them had done so as if they’d taken the Bone Jack escape classes and knew how to counteract the usual tricks. No, these weren’t the usual sailor knots. Because of that, Itzal suspected the sickly men had tied the ropes. Until he had more clues it would be a logical given. If it were the case, that meant the sickly men at least knew how to be cautious around Bone Jacks. Itzal didn’t know what that meant. He knew it made him nervous.

He formed a question to ask Lilywhite, then realized he’d missed something.

“Sorry,” Itzal said. “I didn’t catch that.”

“Quite all right,” Lilywhite said. “I just pointed out that something has changed.”

“Hmm?” Itzal mumbled. “Did I miss that too?”

“I don’t think so,” Lilywhite said. He settled himself a bit more firmly against the wall. Then he looked sideways toward the men at the front of the gondola.

“Who are our traveling companions?” Itzal asked. “They look rather a rough bunch. Men of the world?”

“They are that, I should think,” Lilywhite. “They’re sailors. Men of the Razorgrass Sea.”

“Merchants?”

Lilywhite smiled. “Of a sort. They’re marauders.”

“Pirates?” Itzal said, almost laughing at the unlikeliness. The word made Lilywhite smile.

“I think the term would apply.”

“Kidnapped by pirates, are we,” Itzal said, musing on it rather than asking about it.

“A strange twist on the day,” Lilywhite said. Something in his tone implied that he would also have said that it was not entirely unexpected to him. He did seem calm about the whole affair. Itzal began to wonder if he weren’t witnessing some odd plan.

“Itzal,” Lilywhite said, “do you remember the Third Tenet of Tactics?”

“This hardly seems like the moment for a philosophical conversation,” Itzal began to say. Lilywhite took advantage of a brief pause Itzal left to interject.

“And yet I am confident this is the only moment,” Lilywhite said. What is the Third Tenet of Tactics? Come, now, they must have taught you your Kagan.”

“They did,” Itzal said, keeping the impatience out of his voice with effort.

“And you made your translation, I trust,” Lilywhite said.

“Yes.”

“Well, then,” Lilywhite said. “Tell me your translation. Your translation of the First Tenet was economical enough. Perhaps you got more at the poetry as the poem continued. Come, come, sir. The night doeth not await you! As the Prosewright might say.”

Keeping his desire to say that wasn’t how the Prosewright’s line went, Itzal swallowed. “Look around,” Itzal said, quoting his translation of the war poet, Kagan. Every Bone Jack did their own translation. Itzal’s teachers had called his translation “frugal,” and he had never asked them to explain what they meant by that. True, his version was several hundred lines shorter than the original. True, he had occasionally reduced stanzas to a sentence or two. True, his version read more like a series of pithy suggestions than like a meditation. That was all true. But he rather liked his version.

“Look around,” he repeated. “Unless you’re dead, you’ll probably see resources.” He left out the second half of the stanza, which went, and perhaps even then, because his professors had considered it specious and too much of a liberty.

“That’s it?” Lilywhite said. “Really? And they let you pass with that?”

“You know there are no grades at Academy, Lilywhite,” Itzal started saying. Lilywhite interjected again.

“Well, yes, but…cor, they could have made you redo it or something. Whole ruddy stanza full of flowery words about mindfulness and wakefulness and that, and you come up with ‘unless you’re dead, you’ll see resources’?”

“It gets to the point,” Itzal said. He’d made the defense before. Somehow Lilywhite’s words felt more damning than other teachers. “Aren’t we veering an inch or two off track?”

“Ah, right you are,” Lilywhite said. “Blimey. Just…all right, never mind. Moving on. So if that’s the Third Tenet of Tactics, what’s our next play?”

“We’ve none to make,” Itzal said, inclined to be stubborn. He noticed the others—the pirates—listening now.

“Now, you know better than that,” Lilywhite said. “Try again.”

“This hardly seems—” Itzal started.

“Humor the old man,” Lilywhite interrupted.

Itzal fell silent for a moment, wallowing in his frown and wondering how old Lilywhite was. Certainly not that old. Itzal couldn’t make a guess. In that moment it peeved him that he seemed to know of no one whose age he could estimate accurately.

In his mind, Itzal said fine in an impetuous tone. “If this is an exercise in working through the Tenets of Tactics one after the other, then no, I suppose we haven’t assessed yet. At the moment, we are practicing the First Tenet, and we are being patient.”

“Good,” Lilywhite said. It bothered Itzal that the pirates kept an idle eye on the conversation between the Bone Jacks. Like any loitering group of working men without much to do, they watched with the vague interest they might take in a play they’d happened across. That didn’t seem to bother Lilywhite at all. His smirk had taken a cheerful twist. “What’s next?”

“During our patience, we assess our situation,” Itzal said.

“Very good,” Lilywhite said. “Let us do it now.”

“Shouldn’t we stop making such a show of it?” Itzal said. “I do not know if you noticed it, but we are being watched. They’ll be expecting us to escape, else they’d never have tied us. Even so, would it perhaps be to our advantage to be, perhaps, a little covert?”

“Right you are,” Lilywhite said, making a shift that almost startled Itzal by its suddenness. “Make your assessment in silence, if you please.”

With that, Lilywhite looked around, squinting to make a show of shrewdness. Itzal twitched his eyebrow, unsure how much honesty he would be able to continue putting into his performance of respect toward Lilywhite. Still, it made sense to actually make an assessment of their situation.

Tied up. That was the first and most incontrovertible fact. Hemp rope—stiff and scratchy. Expertly tied. No give. That took care of that.

Itzal reassessed his range of movement, and decided that he still felt confident he could stand and not do much else.

He moved his attention away from himself. Several yards to his right were crates and barrels tethered to the floors and walls. For several yards in every direction, the wooden floor was clear. Though he wasn’t tied to anything but himself and that could go in the “not bad” column, it didn’t go in the “good” column. He didn’t have enough freedom of movement to do more than wriggle, and the pirates would be able to grab him before he got anywhere.

Then he assessed the pirates themselves. This was a freight gondola, so between Itzal and the sailors was nothing but empty, moonlit floor. No cover to duck behind. No straight edges they might saw through ropes with. Just floor space, a bit grimy from many years of industrial use. The only resources were in the hands of the pirates, and clues suggested they would be reluctant to share. If Itzal and Lilywhite had been fit to it, that is to say not tied up, they could probably beat the pirates in a fight. It was hardly a useful fact.

Except the minor comfort that came by the absence of the sickly men—and it was minor—Itzal saw no resources.

He puffed up his lungs to tell Lilywhite so, but remembered Lilywhite had said to do it as a silent exercise. While he started speaking, he swallowed the words, puffing his cheeks out in the effort to keep in the breath to make them. It felt odd and quite familiar. They’d always told him: think before you speak. After many years of getting that hammered into his head, he managed to occasionally remember it. It took him a long time because it sounded strange. After all, he thought all the time. He always thought before he spoke, just not very often about what he meant to say. They never told him to think about what he was going to say before he spoke. That was different altogether.

In his effort to keep himself from talking, he realized something. In specific, he remember that he could. Could talk, that was. They hadn’t gagged him, and they hadn’t gagged Lilywhite. They had their voices still. Itzal forgot to count that as a resource. It was, he supposed. If you said the right things, you could do anything. That was a Tenet of Tactics somewhere too. Or, rather, Itzal’s translation of the Tenet went, “You are as powerful as those you command say that you are. Choose your commands with care; the minds of people are easily changed.”

Itzal frowned again, but this time from thinking. Lilywhite had seemed happy about something a minute or two earlier. What had it been? When the sickly men had left. Lilywhite had said that something had changed.

Indeed, something had changed. Itzal hadn’t thought of it till now, but Lilywhite had skipped the Second Tenet of Tactics. Itzal’s translation of the Second Tenet was, “The reward of patience is that inevitable: change. Changes might be exploited.”

Itzal swallowed his words again. He wanted to say, So Trouble left. What of it? But Lilywhite hadn’t said it was time to talk yet. And, anyway, at this point it occurred to Itzal that Lilywhite had already thought through all this, and he’d made his own assessments.

It only took Itzal a second or two to think through all this. It felt like a long few seconds. He looked at Lilywhite to see what, if anything, he ought to do. Lilywhite, though, looked toward the pirates.

“Tell me what you think, young man,” Lilywhite said to the largest and youngest of the pirates. “My student here is not seeing the lesson.”

At this point the pirates started grinning in the amused and mean way of people with all the power. The big pirate that Lilywhite addressed chuckled.

“I’ve a good mind not to play along with you, mate,” the big pirate said.

“Aw, go on, Dolf,” another said. “Ain’t nothing he can do to you, and it’s a long night in this motionless tub ahead.”

The others murmured their agreement, urging Dolf to help with their boredom. Dolf rolled his eyes, smiled crooked, and agreed with them.

“Won’t be a long exercise, no matter how much willingness you’ve got,” Lilywhite said. “There’s only one possible answer. Well, three, but two of them hardly account, so they’ll be easily discarded. Come a bit closer so you can make a fair assessment of our situation. The light is so poor, you can’t see more than a yard or two.”

“Ain’t coming close enough you can reach me,” Dolf said, taking a few steps toward Lilywhite.

“No. I would not expect you to,” Lilywhite said. Itzal could hear something in Lilywhite’s voice. A touch of relief perhaps added the barest drawl to the cheerily sharp words.

“What’s the puzzle, then, Bone Jack?” Dolf said.

“Simple enough. If you were the lad there—tied up and captured—what would you do?”

“Try not to remember how imaginative they get with torturin’ down east the Razorbacks,” Dolf said. The other sailors chuckled.

“See? Make a note of that, lad,” Lilywhite said. Itzal did, but not a note about torturing. Lilywhite hadn’t meant that—Bone Jacks tried to avoid dwelling on torture. He’d meant the note about the direction: east of the Razorbacks. The pirates headed for the Razorgrass Sea. Lilywhite looked back at Dolf. “What else, then, eh? How would you react then?”

“I would pray not to get too bored,” Dolf said. “Our lad ought to work on not crying. That’s my summary.”

“You’d resign yourself to the calamity, then?” Lilywhite asked.

“Aye, that’s about the measure of it,” Dolf agreed.

“We’re agreed then,” Lilywhite admitted. “We can’t think of any way out of it either.”

A silence followed the statement, as if the sailors expected something else. Nothing else happened, though, and the silence turned dry.

“Oh, but here’s the rather uncomfortable truth—the wretched and contradicting reality that renders us all uncomfortable,” Lilywhite said in a tone that, to Itzal, sounded like it implied satisfaction in a well-timed punch line. Itzal wasn’t given to rolling his eyes, but he considered it.

Lilywhite didn’t leave time for the sailors to ask about the rub. He went on to say, “We are Bone Jacks, and we change things.”

Then, with a deftness that belied his bonds, Lilywhite got to his feet. None of his ropes or knots seemed any looser. Partly bracing against the wall, and partly in an exercise of clever balancing, he got to his feet.

The speed and the posture he took startled the pirates. They reacted like he had made an aggressive advance, and as if the ropes didn’t limit his movements. A clatter and a jangle had out all of their weapons, and with several muttered curses they pointed the sharp ends toward Lilywhite. Any smiles disappeared. All boredom let way for alertness.

Smiling, Lilywhite stared Dolf down, stared past the perfectly still blade of his heavy sword.

“What now, Dolf?” Lilywhite said. “Something has changed. Does it change what you see?”

“You’ll want to back off there,” Dolf said.

“Whatever for?” Lilywhite asked. “Am I less tied up? I can barely stand here. Any sudden lurch of the car will knock me over, saying nothing of all you boys and your weapons. How could I worry you?”

“No closer, Bone Jack,” Dolf said. A lurch of the gondola car or something in his imagination, perhaps, or a trick of light made Lilywhite look like he had moved closer to Dolf. From Itzal’s angle, it looked like Lilywhite leaned forward on purpose.

“There’s not an ounce of logic to your concern, Dolf,” Lilywhite said. “Am I right?” He directed the question to the other pirates, their weapons all pointing at him. “Well, unless I do something stupid,” Lilywhite said.

He left the silence hanging. Like the creeping of a frost, Itzal almost heard the thought crinkling through the imaginations of the sailors. He might do something stupid…

“Tell me, Dolf,” Lilywhite said. “Do you value your life?