Bone Jack

Itzal hadn’t too much to do on his hike to Garrison, except brood. He had a talent for brooding. For most of his life he had been told he ought to brood less. It didn’t matter how often he told the professors at school that when he brooded he did it with purpose—that for him, to brood meant to think soberly and carefully. Still, they insisted that he avoid it when he could.

He rarely could. But he did everything he could to avoid what he considered the more grievous error: recursive thought. To think himself into a glum state was a failing, perhaps, but he did that to himself. And if he could think himself into it, then he could think himself out of it. But to think himself in circles, and to think those circles again and again till he grew psychically dizzy, that was unforgivable. It denied the nature of reasoning. He had no patience for that.

While walking to Garrison, he felt dejected. He was forced onto an adventure, and he couldn’t find anything about it that he liked. It was too active. Too varied. Too filled with people. At the moment, his only comfort he had on his midnight blue travelling cloak, since he’d been on his way across the Fighting Top. The pirates had taken all the rest of his meager belongings. They had at least left him his cloak. He walked quietly through the forest.

They turned out to be pirates after all. It seemed far too exciting for his life, too romantic and inviting of faraway adventure.

It turned out, though, that they were pirates. And pirates in service to one of the great Khans as well. Modris Khan no less, the least legendary and most frighteningly realistic of the bunch.

There was romantic adventure to be had in the world, of course. Itzal had grown up hearing stories of conflicts with the Khans, the savage kings of the people who laid claims of prior appropriation to the Razorgrass Sea. They had been there first, and they did not appreciate the general invasion of their land. Many nations around the world wanted their land, though. It was a rich land. It created a lot of opportunity for heroism and villainy, if half the stories had the grainiest measure of truth in them.

Itzal had decided long ago that he’d enjoy those stories as stories. He’d never wanted to be in one.

He sighed. The dusty smell of razor grass dried the night breeze even at this distance. He found himself getting heavier and heavier with unhappiness. Or with anticipation. He could not tell which. He only knew that he gripped the cloth of his sleeves tighter with every passing yard.

After all, he had never intended to see the place.

Itzal felt inclined to be grumpy. He started planning on how he would need to counteract being grumpy. It would not help him in what he expected to need to do when he got to Garrison. Sulking would get him no where, and he needed to accomplish something.

Garrison was a port town. Its gates would open early in the morning to begin letting in commerce, and Itzal would not stand out of the crowd. Not at first. Or he hoped not to.

He trudged on through the forest, trying to ignore his aches. His legs hurt where he’d kicked and been kicked, and his head hurt. Whatever kind of toxin had tipped the dart that knocked him out left his brain feeling squeezed. And his toes were chilly. He had not thought to change into his proper travelling boots. He wore the lighter, all-purpose boots that Bone Jacks wore at the Academy. They were more than sufficient for walking the corridors of the Academy or the streets of Fighting Top. Hiking through a forest at night rather taxed their insulation.

He could just feel the dust of the world seeping through his clothes. It unsettled him. He wanted to assign some of his ill-will to the feeling, but he couldn’t quite conjure it.

Too much world in the world.

When he got to Garrison, he needed to find the smithing district. That presented its own problem. They might not be big enough town for a whole smithing district.

A candle-flame of sun flickered on the far horizon before Itzal reached Garrison. Itzal trudged toward the sunrise.

He walked, after a time, onto a paved road. The King’s Highway, they called it, although it’d been a long time since the fall of whatever dynasty that king had ruled. The moss and grass crawled up through cracks in the Highway, and the periodic shrines beside it bore resemblance to gods and saints familiar in only the obscurest lore. Itzal recognized only a few of the cracked and mossy statues.

The Highway was an easier walk than the forest, and it led right to the gates of Garrison. This early in the morning it hadn’t much traffic. He passed a few camps of traders and travelers on his way. They had camps to pack up, and beyond dismissing Itzal as a threat they paid him no attention. Itzal returned in kind and kept on through the dawn mists.

The spruce trees let way to white-trunked groves of aspen trees with leaves that rattled in the breeze like fortune-telling bones. The trees grew close in either side of the Highway, but none of them grew tall enough to grow far over the highway. Itzal had a clear view to the sky, with its slow-sleeping stars smudging out ahead of a greying line of day shadow that drew pale blue from the east across the sky. The sun had not yet risen enough to warm the air. Somehow the dawn time, with its thin mists and the dew settling on Itzal’s blue cloak, felt colder than the nighttime.

By the time Itzal came close enough to see individual torches on the walls of Garrison, flicking in the distance over the aspens, he quite forgot how he’d been feeling when he landed in the forest.

The gondola would have gotten there much swifter than he had. Still, to his mind, that was the first place to make for. If he were kidnapped by pirates, he’d be hoping for rescue. There had been a time when Itzal would have said that he could guess well enough what Lilywhite would have wanted in a situation like that too. There had been a time when Itzal empathized closely with Lilywhite in general.

It grew likelier by the minute that any such empathy had grown less.

He lost track of where he was for a while, having fallen into a reverie. Itzal liked a good reverie. He felt like he got more done in a reverie—more thinking anyway, and there was nothing more satisfying than thinking through a puzzle. A loud, wooden cracking sound interrupted him. He looked up to see, and found himself in the middle of a shanty town. Carts and camps crowded an open plain on either side of the Highway. The Highway itself led to a tall wall of thick tree trunks. The wooden cracking sound had come from the drawing of the latching mechanism of the heavy gates. With an aching creak, the gates drew open.

As if taking it as a signal, the camps on either side of the Highway began to break. Barrels of old water were emptied over fires, which whooshed into steam. Those who cared about the mules and horses drawing their carts were combing them down. Others hitched carts to animals without the extra attention. Among them Itzal was the only person watching the gate open. Everyone else went about their preparations with the inattentive purpose of old routine.

Itzal kept on walking toward the gate. For a few minutes yet he had the Highway to himself. After a few minutes, the travelers breaking their camps started to crowd in. Before Itzal reached the gate, he was jostling for space.

The whole situation discomfited Itzal. He had never been in a crowd so thick before. At first he tried to find a line and push through it. That attempt failed; the hole in the crowd closed when a goat carrying a high pile of sacks found it before Itzal could. Before long, Itzal decided he couldn’t do much but allow himself to be dragged along. Pulling his cloak tight around his shoulders, he moved past the open gates and into the larger space beyond. The crowd dispersed, everyone going about different business.

Some of the people went no further than the open, stone-paved space inside the gate. They began setting up stalls and stands. Theirs only added to an already busy marketplace, filled with smells of roasting pheasant and sounds of the first hagglers of the day. At the sight of the crowd pushing in, merchants started shouting to attract attention for their various wares.

Itzal smelled sautéed onions and gravy. It made his stomach tighten. But he had no money, and he had a purpose. Setting his teeth and quashing his desire to at least look, Itzal hurried past the shops. Glancing up once to check the direction of the gondola cable—a black line hanging over the town like a slash across the bluing sky—Itzal followed it toward the landing.

He took the King’s Highway most of the way through town. The road was more ancient than the town. It had been here long before the wooden structures that crowded it on both sides. Some old empire had built it many centuries earlier. It had led through the mountains, though it had fallen into disrepair there. In the hills leading to the Razorgrass Sea, the Highway’s grey-black stones lay like the old bones of a strong society long dead. The civilization that built it had been able to carry stones from quarries on the faraway coast, on into and through the mountains, and kept building till the great plain of the Razorgrass Sea. Itzal suspected they had done that, instead of using local stones, to keep the look of the thing consistent.

The Highway had signs that its builders tried to cross the Razorgrass Sea with it too. They had failed. The grey-black stones led past Garrison, past the Razorbacks, and cut a line for a few miles across the Foot Hills—the tamer, rolling hills that acted as a bit of a suggestion of what the Razorgrass Sea would be. When the razor grasses really began, when the buffalo grass and the sage brush were choked out, the Highway cracked. It faded swiftly to rubble, and more swiftly was swallowed under the gold stalks of razor grass, where the Sea really started. The Sea swallowed everything—man, ship, and horizon—unless it was treated with care.

Almost immediately, Itzal got lost. He turned into an alley, and the meager morning sunlight fell to cold shadows. The alley had a foul-smelling building on one side and a building that smelled of flour on the other. Both stood tall and were made of heavy wood planks with no windows. The alley ended in a similar wall.

Frustrated, Itzal turned around and wondered what to do next. He turned right. That was the way he had been going. It occurred to him that one of the citizens of Garrison would have a better idea where to go than him. When the professors had brought Itzal with a group of Bone Jacks to Garrison the locals had been fairly helpful and proud of their town.

“Pardon me,” Itzal said to an old woman with a pipe sitting in a doorway.

“Want to keep your tongue, Bone Jack?” she said without looking at Itzal. “Then hold it.”

That so surprised Itzal that he didn’t know what to do for a few seconds. He stood and looked at the air between him and her. Pipe-smoke puffed into the air he breathed.

“Beg pardon?” he said.

“I can assure you, pup, you’ll be getting kinder words from me than most in this town,” she said, this time glancing at him. Her grey eyes held no love. “And I say to you, find your fodder elsewhere. You and your kind looking down on us from your great mountain. Leave well enough alone, Bone Jack. Keep yourself far from us here in reality.”

“I’m…” Itzal felt like saying he was sorry. He couldn’t think what to say sorry for, though. He shook his head. “I just wanted information.”

“So you say,” the pipe-smoking woman said, blowing a cloud at Itzal. “Do you know what happens when a wounded coyote walks into a henhouse full of fighting cocks?”

“Message received. Leave it be,” Itzal said, beginning to walk away.

“Leave it be. Leave it be, he says,” the woman said, and she started to laugh. “Hear that?” she raised her voice. Passersby could hear, and they slowed down to watch the sport. “The Bone Jack’s advice: leave it be. Leave well enough alone, he says, as if he could take that advice himself. Ain’t that a lark?”

She laughed more. Some in the street didn’t join in, but some did. Itzal pulled his hood over his head. He resisted the urge to hide.