Bone Jack

When he came to himself again, he found Itzal Dantzari sitting in a chair near the middle of his office, as if he had set himself up to watch the happening of the day rather than to fulfill his appointment with Mendkovac. Itzal often did that sort of thing. He’d do as told, but in a way that made one wonder what he was doing. Ask him to meet you at quarter past eight in the morning, and he would be there right when asked. But he might come through the window all out of breath and hide in the closet. Or he might deliver the breakfast you were expecting so that you immediately wonder why he’s there when the usual man with the breakfast isn’t. Mendkovac had never known how to cope with it, except to encourage it. To be a Bone Jack was to live at crossed-purposes to the rest of the world. Itzal did that, certainly. If Mendkovac found it strange in his own rules-bound mind, then he had to learn better rather than force Itzal to change. The Academy made social outsiders. That was its point. It should never surprise them to find one of their number inclined to treat appointments as incidents related to location, rather than as the reason for being present.

And so, without announcing himself, Itzal had kept his appointment with Mendkovac. He had brought a chair in from the hall and sat in it, far from Mendkovac’s desk, as if he had come in simply to test the acoustics of the room.

Well, Mendkovac thought “sat.” Itzal perched in the chair, squatting on his toes on the seat, leaning forward, with his fingers in a meditation position.

“Good morning, sir,” Itzal said. “You looked rather lost in a reverie. If I’m in a good reverie, I like to be let to it, if time permits. Thought I’d leave you to it.”

Mendkovac sighed, and he smiled. He did not operate the same as Itzal, but that didn’t mean he disliked Itzal.

“You haven’t the slightest hurry to leave, have you?” Mendkovac said.

“If I’m honest, no,” Itzal said, and his eyes shifted around while he said it. “Home’s here.”

Mendkovac felt a twitch of sad cold in him. Some of them were like this. All Bone Jacks had to leave the Orphan’s Academy, had to go out into the world and be what they were meant to be. They lived for the enacting of a noble cause, and its enacting could not occur from within the walls of the Academy. They did what they could to instill awareness of that into Bone Jacks from a young age, and they almost always succeeded.

Itzal didn’t want to leave. It should not have surprised Mendkovac, but it did confuse him.

“Still,” Itzal said, “Time has come, as the poet says.”

“Which poet?” Mendkovac asked.

“Several, I imagine,” Itzal said. “It’s a fairly mundane thing to say.”

Mendkovac huffed, half laughing half agreeing. “Rather depends on the timing of saying it, I imagine.” Then Mendkovac scratched his chin under his beard, looking past Itzal and thinking. “Did you know that Master Lilywhite is in the Academy? I remember that you and he had rather a close relationship.”

As he said it, Mendkovac wished he hadn’t. The look on Itzal’s face went from mildly cheerful to downcast and discouraged. His eyes dropped and his lips frowned. It only lasted for a moment, though long enough a moment for Mendkovac to see it. Then Itzal’s face smoothed to tranquil.

The moment of expression spoke novels. Itzal had been friends with Lilywhite. That had been clear in those days. But Lilywhite had been gone for several years, and he had left when Itzal was twelve. It had not occurred to Mendkovac how that might have effected someone of Itzal’s temperament. Hells, Mendkovac thought to himself that he had been old for too long and young too long ago.

“Will he be leaving again soon?” Itzal said.

“I think he will,” Mendkovac said. Itzal nodded, without moving his face further. “An old resentment, I see,” Mendkovac said.

“I, um…” Itzal started, paused, began again. “There was a research project. A map. I had to finish it myself. No reason for fretting,” he brushed past it. “Anyway, I hope that he’s had success on his sabbatical. Establishing schools, was it?”

“Originally, yes, I think that was what he went to do,” Mendkovac said. “I think he’s rather branched out since then.”

Itzal nodded, making a fair show of mild interest without seeming to actually want to know more. Mendkovac took the hint.

Clearing his throat, Mendkovac started on a different subject. “I realize this may be a rather late moment to introduce this subject, but I realize that we’ve never talked about your next stage in life.”

“There isn’t much to talk about, is there?” Itzal said. “I must go away. An assignment has opened up that appeals to me. It is time. What conversation should we have about it?”

“We might talk about whether it’s what you want,” Mendkovac said. He didn’t know why he wanted to talk about the subject. He never had with any other graduating Bone Jack, going out on assignment. It wasn’t the done thing.

“Why would we talk about that?” Itzal asked. He seemed nervous. “It hardly seems like it matters. I am a Bone Jack. Do I not have a duty to the Order?”

“We all do,” Mendkovac said.

“Then it is time for me to go on my assignment. It doesn’t matter what I think about it.”

“It does some,” Mendkovac said. “You are allowed to want things.”

Itzal had no readable expression left on his face. He looked wide-eyed and attentive, like a student. “I hardly see the point in that.”

“No?” Mendkovac said.

“I don’t,” Itzal said. “Do you? Not with the world as it is. There are many Bone Jacks and few requirements for them.”

“We are wider spread and more visible than we ever have been,” Mendkovac said.

“Yes, as novelties. As relics. As reminders of something esoteric and obsolete. We are everywhere lauded and in all places unnecessary.” Itzal said the words with the calm of a long thought and old resignation. But they seemed to surprise him as if he had shouted. His shoulders fell and his gaze jumped from it. “I am sorry, sir. I had not meant to say it.”

Mendkovac hoped he hid his surprise better than Itzal had. He thought he must have. Itzal didn’t seem to notice anything.

Pressing his lips together, Mendkovac stood. He reached into a drawer of his desk. From it he took an envelope sealed with his seal and handed it to Itzal.

“Your marching orders,” Mendkovac said. “Give my best to Venegas and Hiroden and the rest.”

“I will, sir,” Itzal said. “Thank you, sir.”

“Walk with the wind, Mister Dantzari.”

“Walk with the wind, Master Mendkovac,” Itzal said. He took his envelope. Then, as if he could not leave fast enough, he left.

Mendkovac slumped back into his chair. He had far more to think about this day than he found strictly comfortable. The business of lending his hand running the Academy was always rewarding and was supposed to consist entirely of preparing Bone Jacks for a world where they walked outside of the usual bounds of society. Which had almost always consisted of preparing them to be scholars and doctors and architects, and other safe things.

He found himself nervous about things he never feared feeling nervous about before.

He went to a balcony, sat in the wind, and meditated on it.

It would do him no good to find Lilywhite. Itzal knew that. It’d been too many years, and they hadn’t left things in a good place between them.

Itzal knew that.

But Lilywhite would want to see how the map had turned out. Right? Right.

Dressed in the swishing layers of blue linen that young Bone Jacks wore, Itzal swished around the back alleys of town. His soft boots shushed on the cold stones, and his dark blue cloak blended with shadows. His small bag of essential gear bumped on his hip.

Itzal did not know where Lilywhite would go. Not for certain. He did know the older Bone Jack’s patterns. He knew the sorts of places that attracted him. Musing on his knowledge of the city and his instincts about Lilywhite, Itzal padded up the chilly, tall alleys. He passed esoteric shops that sold trinkets and less esoteric shops that sold stimulants, various, and less esoteric little restaurants where the people from nearby streets carried on conversations in many languages.

This was Fighting Top, known colloquially as the Last Toe of the Empire. It was a city that perched and clung to the top of a mountain. At its “back” stood long reaches of mountains, and past them the lands controlled by an empire vast and hardly relevant to Itzal’s day to day life. To the east, on Fighting Top’s “front step,” past the last marching mountains, stretched the Razorgrass Sea. The empire at Fighting Top’s back couldn’t quite gain any significant control of the Razorgrass Sea. Too vast and too unwelcoming. Their consolation was twofold: no one else controlled that territory, and everyone benefited from its myriad richness of resources. Practical resources and resources of luxury, and Fighting Top’s position as the Last Toe of the Empire meant that nearly all the resources came through, shipped via gondolas to the mountaintop and carried to the airship docks on the far side of town to be shipped from there to all corners of the empire.

In the meantime, the inhabitants of Fighting Top got first crack.

Itzal found it interesting, but it had never much effected his life, except in the area of studying languages, and in the diversity of his brothers and sisters. As the farthest-flung Orphan’s Academy, they got orphans in the Fighting Top Academy from more nationalities than many of the Academy’s more central to the empire. Itzal didn’t share his coloration with the dominant type in the blonde, ruddy-faced imperial citizens. His long, dark hair and dark, dark eyes would have made him stand out, if he had been another citizen of the empire.

He wasn’t a citizen of anywhere. No Bone Jack was. People seldom looked past the Bone Jack robes and the Bone Jack bearing.

It was somewhat liberating. No one ever tried to get in a Bone Jack’s way. They always assumed that something official was going on. That meant that Itzal had no trouble wandering around in his back alleys looking for Lilywhite, even when he had to walk through places where they were repaving the streets or building new buildings. No one ever told him that he wasn’t supposed to be there or that he had to go a different way.

Because he had keen ears, he also had to hear all the make snide comments about the “Old Bag of Bones” and “make way for the professor,” and similar. People made those kinds of comments about Bone Jacks these days. Itzal tried not to hear them.

A fair while later, Itzal found Lilywhite sitting at a small table in front of a café, for all the world waiting for someone. Perhaps waiting for Itzal. Her certainly looked unsurprised to see Itzal. Although he never looked surprised at anything. That had always been something Itzal admired about him, which meant it was something that Itzal found immensely irritating about him now.

Lilywhite sat with a steaming cup at his elbow and one knee crossed over the other. He wore similar robes to Itzal, but his were in grey linens. Mud spattered them. Their edges frayed. They’d been repaired, sometimes patched, sometimes with cloth and sometimes with leather. His boots were heavy and worn. Even for the road-worn look of him, he looked refined and delicate and in no way out of place. His bored, nigh-impatience, looked out of place everywhere, and therefore it looked wrong no where.

Lilywhite had long, dark hair, like Itzal. Lilywhite’s, though, was thick and wild. His beard was long and wild. He had a few braids in his hair and beard, put there as if to try and keep his hair in some kind of order. It only kind of worked. Mostly the braids made him look more out of place.

He was the kind of figure that looked so odd, but so comfortable, that people always accepted him. Itzal had watched it happen, although he couldn’t say he understood how it happened.

“Haven’t you got your new boots yet?” Lilywhite asked.

That made Itzal trip up in his mind. He hadn’t expected anything in particular, but his boots had been far from his mind.

“I like these ones,” Itzal said, unsure why he felt like he ought to defend his boots.

“Never asked for proper wayfarer boots?” Lilywhite asked. “You can, you know. Proper wayfarer boots will last you on all the roads there are.”

“I may never walk on all the roads there are,” Itzal said a heartbeat before realizing that no one would walk on all the roads there are. Life isn’t long enough.

“Ah, but won’t you feel an awful knob if you get to the end of the last road and your boots are worn away? You’ll look down at your knubby toes and you’ll think to yourself, ah, should have listened to Old Bad News, I should have. Then you’ll remember this moment.”

Itzal felt a powerful urge to nod, as if he’d received some sage advice and it deserved some thinking about. Instead, he shook his head, getting the dreams out.

“Is there some metaphor behind this image that I’m missing?” Itzal said. “I feel like there has to be.”

“That is because you have not walked the roads yet,” Lilywhite said, and he smiled. His smile, although it had a self-satisfied edge to it, made Itzal more easy in himself. “Would you come sit with me a time, Mr. Dantzari? I’m expecting someone, but I don’t know when they’ll arrive.”

Itzal nodded. He began shuffling around in his bag, absently as if for a little money. He came around the cast iron railing of the café porch while he shuffled in his bag. Lilywhite turned away to call out for more tea from the café owner. By the time he looked back around, Itzal had sat in the other chair at the little table. From Itzal’s wide-eyed face, any passerby might supposed Itzal had no idea how he’d gotten there.

It seemed as if Itzal had nothing to say, and it seemed as if Lilywhite had said his piece and would wait till the next event occurred before he contributed anything else.

After a moment of this, Lilywhite noticed that something had been set on the table next to his tea. It was a piece of parchment, oiled and folded like a map. From the look of it, when it was unfolded all the way, it would be a large map.

“Is it what I think it is?” Lilywhite asked without wanting an answer. He picked up the paper and unfolded it part way. He smiled again. “It is what I think. By the Old World Gods and the bells at Hellsgate…”

For a while Lilywhite looked at the map, tracing lines and prodding points with his long, strong fingers. “Have you had any help with it?” he asked. Itzal shook his head. Although Lilywhite didn’t look up, he nodded as if he heard Itzal’s hair brushing in his hood. Itzal’s tea came, as did Lilywhite’s refill. Itzal sipped it—minty and sweet and hot.

“It’s very good,” Lilywhite said. He set the map, partly open to the sky, on the table, and picked up his tea.

Itzal nodded, a calm acceptance of praise for work that had a quality that he knew. It was a map of the Razorgrass Sea. It had begun as a factual map, covered in locations and facts found in many geographical and historical texts from the Academy library. Rather early on, Itzal had started making notes of myths and legends on the map as well, entirely for his own amusement. At first for his own amusement, but then as an academic study. It turned out that the myths and legends had peculiar correlations to “fact,” insofar as Itzal could determine “facts” from the different histories, biographies, and geographical books.

He had spent most of the last six years working on the map by himself. For several months before that, Lilywhite had helped him. Then Lilywhite had left.

“Thought you might like seeing the finished map,” Itzal said. He swallowed. His intentions must be obvious, he figured. He sipped his tea and decided not to speak again.

“Ever gone on a fact-checking mission?” Lilywhite asked. “Looks pretty good, from what I know of that area.”

Itzal shook his head. “I haven’t been any further east than Garrison.”

“Ever wanted to?”

“Why would any of want to?” Itzal asked. “There’s nothing for us out there.”

Lilywhite smiled again, and this time he sighed with his smile. Something caught his eye, something approaching from the alley. “Here’s my appointment, I think.”

A cold, itching sensation pricked the back of Itzal’s neck. He rubbed at it, frowning, and looked where Lilywhite looked, hoping that the sight would have nothing to do with the pricking and itching, and entirely certain that what he saw would only make the sensation worse.

“Here comes trouble,” Lilywhite said.

Before he could stop himself, Itzal asked, “Oh, is that his name?” and he meant it to be sarcastic, but he had not time just then to feel witty.