Bone Jack

Itzal had to do a lot of thinking, and he had no time to do it in. In some ways, he felt in his element, because the circumstances were simple and objective. He was falling, and he would probably die.

First thing he did was right himself. He preferred having his feet down. The wind rushed around him. The greenery looked unforgiving below him. It was far away at the moment but getting closer too fast.

His heart thudded fit to burst. He tried to think his way ahead, but his mind kept slipping and skipping. He focused for a moment, but then a brush of dust on his cheek felt like the sudden stop of the ground and he lost focus. Then he’d focus again and be buffeted by wind and lose focus.

One thought kept thumping through him, as if his mind had already hit the ground, over and over again. It swept out every other thought. It almost soothed him that way, in the same way that deciding to give into a long struggle sometimes can.

The ground would not yield. The inescapability of the thought calmed him.

A little part of him at the back of his mind whispered, “I don’t want to die right now.”

With a long breath, Itzal brought that whisper into the center of his mind. He used the whisper to focus.

Itzal stared at the ground, and he thought about cloud walking.

In half-forgotten times, Bone Jacks had been able to do things impossible for other people. Not magic—not quite—but something more elemental.

It had been many long years since any Bone Jack had been called on to do anything that stretched the laws of credulity. It was a time of discovery and development, and not a time for wonder. The Bone Jacks were, at their deepest, versatile, and they had more uses than most people. The times wanted intellect and innovation, which the Bone Jacks excelled at. While the times changed, the Bone Jacks did too, foregoing mysticism for physics and the sword for the sextant. It had been a long time since they made any show of their odder side. They might have lost the knack for it.

That said, they never stopped passing on hints of it to young Bone Jacks. Cloud walking was one such vestige of stranger times. It was these days a way of walking quietly—useful at many times. Though it had never been described as one of the ancient skills, due a Bone Jack and hidden to other people, Itzal had always felt a hint of it in the half-formed explanations of it.

And Itzal had been the best at it. He had walked with the sound of the echoes of yesterday’s dried leaves caught in a lazy breeze.

He did it just like he had told Lilywhite: By stepping without all his weight. That’s the only way he could explain it, so he explained it that way.

It had given him many a light-headed hour’s meditation to wonder what would happen if he tried to step with none of his weight, although he had never had cause to test it.

Desperate times, eh?

Watching the tree-covered ground come toward him, Itzal evened his breathing. At the most effort he could put into it, cloud walking started in Itzal’s chest, where he could most be like the wind. He summoned that practiced cloud walking center—a calm so familiar—a calm of breath and thoughts, that started like the warmth of sunlit book-dust.

Though it did not stay that way.

A quiet vibration started below his lungs. He stoked it, coaxed it to a soundless and motionless rumble that spun in his chest. It grew to the moving seed of a murmuring whirlwind that promised a storm. All the force of it juddered inside Itzal’s ribs. He stared at the ground, gesturing as if pushing with both hands. Then, with a harsh roar, he loosed the whole force of the storm inside him down toward the trees. And, for one shattered moment, all of him went into that act in one improbable completion of stillness.

And, quite remarkably, it worked. Not only worked: exceeded intention. His fall stopped as if on a billow of warm air, then he felt his progress reverse. He felt himself begin to rise.

It so startled him that he lost focus. The storm feeling dissolved. He started falling again, letting out a little yelp.

It felt like tripping in the air. Itzal stumbled and tumbled again. This time it felt out of his control, and he couldn’t find any solid place in his mind to center his thoughts again. If the moment had allowed him the leisure, he would have been able to see that the trees below him and for a few dozen yards in every direction around the spot on the ground where he would fall wafted for a moment. It looked like a massive gust of air rushed down, rattling the spruce trees. And, more importantly, for a moment Itzal’s body stopped falling altogether.

As a result, when he kept on tumbling through the air, it was only a fall of about a hundred feet more. And before he hit the ground, he would pass the tops of the trees.

His body started reacting by instinct. He snatched out to scrabble at the top of the first bristly spruce tree he came close enough to reach. He couldn’t get a good grip, but it further slowed his fall—with only a few additional scratches. He tumbled through the boughs of the spruce trees, grabbing at some branches, kicking himself away from the thick ones.

After what felt from the flurrious movement like a long time, but what was only a second or two, Itzal whirled past the last scratchy branch. Making an almost smooth turn in the air, he landed feet first in the thick cover of old spruce needles on the loamy soil. Then he slipped on the slanted ground and fell onto his back.

He slid a few feet. Then, at long last, came to rest. Dried needles from trees and dirt skittered around him. A few green needles fluttered onto him. The world stopped reacting to his passage and went back to its usual nighttime shushing, as if nothing exciting had happened.

High past the fluttering tops of the trees, the lantern light in the windows of the gondola floated through the night sky. Aside from the lantern light, the gondola looked like nothing except a place where the white stars didn’t shine. Itzal couldn’t see Lilywhite, hanging like a caught fish under the gondola.

For a little while, Itzal felt too tired to so much as stand up. He just lay in the spruce needles and breathed the cold forest air, made rich with the smell of loam and old needles.

He pretended to be a fern. Ferns had it good. He wanted the life of a fern.

Which worked out fine until Itzal thought the thing through. The altitude—too high—and average rainfall for the area—too low—would not support wild ferns. The thought left him feeling sad.

It also left nothing else to do but to face the world. Which he did. He slowly sat up and took in his surroundings.

A forest of spruce trees. No thick undergrowth, but uneven ground and occasional jutting boulders. In the daylight his line of sight would be long. The trees were widely-enough placed that he knew he’d be able to see for at least a mile in most directions, if the ground didn’t rise or drop too suddenly. It no doubt rose and dropped suddenly in every direction.

In the light, that is. In the dark it was black as a shadow with a silvery limning. He had never been in this particular forest before, but he’d been in enough forests like it to know what to expect from it.

The forests of the mountains all felt sleepy and distractable to Itzal. They felt like they were waiting for something, but they’d forgotten what, so they kept waiting but without expectation. He explained it that way in his more whimsical moments, though he usually cut off those moments before he could make a whole thought out of them. There wasn’t much use in whimsy—not in the life he’d lived so far.

It wasn’t that cold. Misty and a just a few thin breaths of wind colder than comfortable. A bat or two chittered somewhere. The long spruce needles rattled in the breeze with a sound like a river. Anyone who ever said that nighttime in a forest was calm and quiet has never spent nighttime in a forest.

Itzal looked up the valley, in the direction of Fighting Top. The ground rose, steep and covered in needles. The trees were thick enough he couldn’t see even the brightest torch in the highest tower of the city. The Fighting Top-Garrison Long Gondola was an eighteen mile journey—with a few transfers at towers in the valley, where the cables couldn’t stretch any further or the valley turned sharply and made a straight-shot impossible. Eighteen miles was far, but Itzal could hike it. If he started now, he might not have to make any stops for supplies. He’d be hungry soon, but he could make eighteen miles without meals if he needed to do it.

Besides, from here it was more like sixteen miles. He felt a tugging desire to start the climb.

He turned around to look into the shadows towards Garrison. That way, the torches and lamps of the town made an orange smudge on the black sky, just visible through a few gaps in the trees. The way looked easier. It was down hill, for one thing. He always preferred walking down hill.

In a fit of practical thinking, Itzal also considered that, once in Garrison, he could hitch a ride on a gondola heading back up the mountain valley, back to Fighting Top. He had no money, and usually it cost something to take the gondola. That he could deal with when he got into Garrison. That is to say, if he went that way.

A thought kept niggling at the back of his mind about his line of reasoning. His small attempts to quash it had not done anything to stop him from thinking it. The thought, in an annoyingly reasonable tone, pointed out that in no part of his evaluation of choices had he considered Lilywhite. Lilywhite still hung under the gondola, apparently bound for hazard and possible death, and had asked Itzal to help.

Itzal appreciated this new quiet around him. It had no Lilywhite chuckles—no Lilywhite hemming and hawing nor following unfathomable trains of thought that led so frequently, it seemed, to uncomfortable situations for Itzal. No Lilywhite anywhere to be seen.

Itzal felt glad for it.

But he did not wish death on Lilywhite, no matter how much he wished permanent muteness on him.

Itzal, sighing, half thoughtless about it, tied the sharp object from Lilywhite to a braided end of a thin bit of his dark hair. It bobbed there against his chest when he walked.

With another sigh, but not another thought of hesitation, Itzal started the hike toward the port town of Garrison.