Bone Jack

Back in the library of the Academy, Itzal had liked looking at a book of woodprint panels—some of them colored—of various maritime scenes. Some had been of docks on the coast, somewhere far to the west and north, where ships that sailed on water would moor up and load goods and people on and off.

The difference between docks like those and the docks in Garrison was small. The docks in Garrison had the bustle of the woodprints, and the thin forest of rope-draped masts making line in the clear sky. Some masts hung with canvas sails like clouds, and some—much fewer—hung with the ribbed sails of bamboo and canvas favored by the ships of the far, far east, past the mountains at the far side of the Razorgrass Sea.

Itzal had read books written by authors who’d seen docks like Garrison, looking out at the razor grass, as well as docks that looked out over seas of salt water. The biggest difference they mentioned between the two was the smell and the light. Near seas of water, the light would be cold and blue, where here it was warm like gold. And where a dock on seas of water would smell everywhere of salt, Garrison could do nothing about the smells of hay and of wild flowers (only a few breeds grew among the razor grass) and the dry as wheezing smell of dust.

Looking out from the docks across the rolling foothills toward the endless gold-green of the Razorgrass Sea, Itzal tried to imagine it blue and made of water. He couldn’t manage it.

They’d need a ship. Itzal wondered if Ben had his own that he’d use for shipments, or if he rented space on other freighters or what.

“Ruffians,” Itzal said, watching a pack of gnarled sailors go past. He didn’t say it with derision, but only said it. “I like the sound of the word. Shall I be able to use it a great deal?”

“I hope not,” Ben said. “Can you keep your gawp shut for a while?”

“For business reasons?” Itzal said.

“Yes,” Ben said.

“I shall,” Itzal said.

Ben nodded. He walked toward a man with dark hair and dark nails and dark clothes and pale eyes. He stood like it entertained him to simply stand, and he stood at the dockside of a gangplank that led up to a ship with three masts. It had Riot in white letters on its bow, and its figurehead was of a gargoyle with slavering jaws and bat-like ears.

“Ho, Ben Mouse,” said the man, baring a gold-toothed grin. “You’ve got your notoriety at last. Well done, there. Mayhap you’ll be seeing an increase in business what you’ve never before seen.”

“Like as unlike,” Ben said. “I’ve been evicted and my goods have been seized by the Confederation. That little matters. If that ever stopped a cutthroat merchant of any salt I’ll be slain.”

“Likelier that you’ll have better business than you ever saw instead,” the dark man said.

Ben nodded, not returning the smile. He scratched his cheek, considering how to continue.

“Look, Tyro,” Ben said. “Your skipper had a last shipment of my goods in his keeping. I asked him to keep it for me. Do you know if he still has it?”

Tyro’s smile wavered, just about disappearing. “Will you be needing it, then?” he asked. Ben nodded. “Skipper won’t be happy with you, Ben. That’s stretching the deal.”

“Yes,” Ben said.

“And us just about loaded and off tomorrow early…” Tyro’s words faded off to quiet. “Do you think it could wait for a week? Perhaps two? We’ve only got a quick run-round to Shkemb I Madh. Due back in maybe two weeks—three in bad weather. Skipper will be happier then, with a fat profit fattening his breeches. Give us at the most three weeks—four, just to be safe—and you’ll likelier find skipper happy as rabbits to…as you say, deliver your last shipment.”

“Tomorrow,” Ben said. “I’ll be back for it crack of dawn. Tell skipper. I’ll be back for it.”

“Skipper made a bad deal when he started dealing with you, Ben Mouse,” Tyro said, smile all gone now. “You bring a tidy profit, no doubt, and with light cargo. We like that. Always do with lighter cargo. Makes room for heavier cargo. It does at that. Always runs for you make more trouble than…well, than Tyro likes.”

“Tyro isn’t skipper of the Riot,” Ben said.

“Not now. Not for long time. Probably not never. Not ever either… Maybe you come back four or five weeks instead? After we make tidy profit on goods already stored…”

Ben frowned. His eyebrows raised, rolling all his stubbly head into wrinkles.

“No, yes, no, of course not,” Tyro said. He frowned back. His frown had the smallness of a petulant child. After a quick breath made with a huffing sound, Tyro came to a conclusion. His smile came back. “You make plenty trouble, Ben Mouse, no one way and no other way about it. Too much trouble, probably. But, hey, without spices life gets too dull, right? Right. You come back, as you say, early morning. Collect your goods, right?” Tyro nodded. “No need to come back too early. We rise and sail when the dawn star has long taken his starry harlots to bed, right? No need to come early. Go now. Come later, right?”

Ben nodded. Without saying anything else, he turned and went away. Itzal stared for a moment at Tyro. Tyro smiled back.

“You much in for sailing there, squirrel?” Tyro asked.

“Never tried before,” Itzal said.

“You try it. You like it, sure thing,” Tyro said. “Sailing, like flying in most ways, except it hurts less when you fall down.” Tyro laughed at his joke.

“Oh?” Itzal said, startled and serious. “Have you flown before?”

“You daft little squirrel, are you?” Tyro said. “Men don’t fly.”

“Ahem,” Itzal said, clearing his throat and suddenly uncomfortable. “Right.” Unsure what else to do, he gave a nod—more of a twitch of the head than a legitimate gesture—and hurried after Ben.

Ben took Itzal to a tavern nearby. It was full, mostly, of sailors, and the wait staff and entertainers ministering to them. Most of the people in the tavern who weren’t sailors were women with low cut dresses. Itzal had read of and heard of places like these, full of a greasy smell and laughter and stories that deserved adjectives like “raucous” and “lewd.” He didn’t think he liked the word “wench,” but this tavern seemed like the right place to use it.

Shoving his way to a small table near the back, Ben ordered them a pot of strong coffee, a loaf, and whatever they had stewing that day. He took a seat in one of the chairs at the table, and pointedly glanced to suggest that Itzal ought to take the other, which was nearly squashed into the corner. When Itzal sat in it he had a wall against his back and a wall to his right.

As soon as he sat down he crossed his arms on the table and lay his head on them. His eyelids fluttered, though he struggled to keep them open. A deep, earthen slowness had been creeping into his shoulders and his legs and head. He recognized it as his old irritant: fatigue.

Though the room around him clattered with dishes and loud voices and folk bustling, it faded to him. It sounded no more sensible to him than a mountain stream.

“When did you sleep last, Blue Jay?” Ben asked. His voice cut into what was going to be a fitful doze.

Itzal raised his head enough to lean his chin on his arms. He thought about the question for a few minutes. It seemed like a difficult question.

“Does chemically induced unconsciousness count?” he asked.

“No,” Ben said.

“Then…what time would you call it?”

“Three hours after noonday,” Ben said.

“Then I have not slept for thirty-four hours,” Itzal said. He half smiled. “New personal record.”

“You’re going to sleep now,” Ben said through a grim frown. “A bit of stew, then bed. Are there any rooms?” Ben asked one of the “wenches.” She’d just come with the bread and coffee and two gravy-smelling clay bowls that steamed. The girl said that there were—rooms available, that is. After some of the salty stew, Itzal found himself chivvied up a steep and creaking flight of stairs into a room lit only by a narrow window that needed cleaning. He barely had time to note the exits and angles of ambush before falling into the feather bed with its clean if scratchy linens.

He did not fall asleep swiftly after that. As soon as he had a place to rest, his mind began to race.

He had made a wrong turn.

With that thought circling his mind like a buzzard searching for carrion, Itzal lay on his back. He slowed his breathing. He emptied his mind. He let energy seep from his tired limbs, as if the featherbed could wick the ache away. With every breath he emptied himself a little more, passing into a restful meditation, with his mind spreading out from his senses further and further into the dark room. After a time, the room would have seemed empty to anything with a bit of intuition and a convenient shortage of awareness.

And then his breathing deepened, because he eventually fell asleep.

When he could manage it, Itzal made a point of using his dreams constructively. He always knew when he was dreaming, and after a lot of difficult work he had grown capable of navigating through them. Navigating through dreams had never been one of his strengths. He’d always been too distractible. That had been what his friend, Riki, had told him. She’d been the skilled navigator of dreams, and any slight competence he had with dreaming usefully came after a great deal of study with her. She said she could build worlds in her dreams, and that her skills paled next to some of their teachers.

Itzal did not have that skill. His subconscious still commanded his dreams for the most part. (Which, on a philosophical level, frightened him, because it forced him to wonder about the nature of identity. He tried not to wonder about the nature of identity too often or for very long.) That meant he could not decide where he dreamed. He’d come to himself in his dreams in whatever place that deeper part of him determined. He also had no direct power over who joined him in his dreams. That, too, came from the deeper part of himself. Through disciplined labor, he had managed to organize his dreamscape into a reasonable shape, or at least nearly reasonable. His constructed version of the Academy abutted his dreaming version of a painting of the Realm of Cloudwalkers2, which overlooked a forest which did not exist except in Itzal’s dreams but which mixed features of forests he’d seen while awake, though without much care for blending.

In his dreams, no matter where he came to his senses, he could nearly always walk wherever he liked in his now organized dreamscape. Sometimes he could ride. He had dragons there, and two or three of them were tamed. And if he wished to talk to particular characters in his dreamscape, he could usually find them someplace if he looked hard enough. He’s checked to see if any of the versions of people in his dreams who he knew in the waking world had any memories of interacting with him in their dreams too. They never did. Riki told him they wouldn’t. “There might be some way that we’re connected in our dreams,” she had said. “If there is, no Bone Jack I’ve ever heard of knows it.” Itzal sometimes couldn’t find the characters he wanted in his dreams, which he put down, again, to that deeper part of himself making decisions.

The long and the short of it was, it had been a long time since he’d felt any bewilderment from his dreams. He knew all the places. He’d met most of the characters. He had thoroughly plotted his dreamscape.

This dream startled and frightened him.

He came to himself in a dim, cold room, huge as the looming atrium of the Academy, but with its ceiling and walls gone in faraway darkness. He could only tell it had ceilings and walls from the echoes of whispers shimmering to him through the cold air. Shaking blue-white light cast dim against columns, and none of the columns were any too near to him. The whole space had that unshakable feeling of an underground cavern. The floor had runes and sigils carved into it.

The blue-white light and the wordless whispers came from the same place: insubstant things that floated in the air, like fish in water, and, like fish in water, occasionally zipping along at greater speed. When Itzal looked closer at the things he found they were made of more runes, written in light on the air. He didn’t know the letters.

The blue-white runes moved in a sphere, as if caught in the surface of a bubble ten feet across. Their light shimmered too dim to do much for the room so big that their whispers echoed only just. In the middle of all the floating runes, the blue-white light glowed and without shadow.

On a stone in the center of the light sat a man in a grey cloak, his long beard white and pointed. He looked at Itzal, though his hood hid his eyes.

“You should not be here. Not yet,” the man said in a voice that all but rumbled from the ground.

“Oh?” Itzal said.

“Or I’m late…” the man said as if to himself.

“Well…” Itzal said, deciding whether he ought to make an attempt to be helpful, or if this was one of those mystical experiences he ought to be quiet for. It certainly seemed ethereal enough to be one of those mystical experiences.

“Careful what you say here, Bone Jack,” the man said. “You’re like as not to speak out of turn…. How did you find the way in? Or have you been brought here…curious…”

“Is…um,” Itzal said, holding up a finger, prepared to gesture. He could think of no useful gesture. He lowered his finger. “I’m awfully sorry, but was there a question there…that you want an answer to perhaps?”

The man, who had looked away while he thought, looked back at Itzal. By the movement of his beard, he seemed to be frowning.

“I am not wanted there,” the man said. “Leave me to my dotage. Leave well enough alone. Do not raise the dead, Bone Jack. We are too tired.”

Itzal gave a hint of a salute. Then he felt the familiar befuddling of senses that accompanied waking up. He perceived the old man and dim cavern at the same time as he began to take note of the smell of goose down bedding and a knocking at his door.

“As it should be,” said the old man. He said it with more sadness than with anger. “Go back to your light. Leave us to our tomb.”