Bone Jack

In the time he had, Dolf considered the question. He didn’t have long.

Lilywhite screamed. It was an instance where the correct word didn’t come close to the reality. It was a scream, but before the noise started, Lilywhite’s muscles tensed. His shoulders tightened in the ropes around him. Itzal heard the fibers creaking, for that moment sounding like reality stretching around Lilywhite’s gathering effort.

Then, without even a hint of words, the scream filled the gondola car with furious noise.

The sound startled Itzal, and he was behind Lilywhite. It curdled the bile of the sailors, who all juddered from it.

The scream did one other thing: it almost (almost) distracted from the other thing that Lilywhite did. Lilywhite leaned forward. Itzal saw it, but didn’t know what Lilywhite meant for it, not at first. Only two people in the gondola noticed what Lilywhite accomplished. Lilywhite knew, of course, and a slow look of shock pulled at the corners of Dolf’s face. From that, Itzal got a feeling about what happened.

After the scream, the silence felt especially empty. Lilywhite’s deep breath took up some of the cold air. One other small sound plinked in Itzal’s ears. A drop of Lilywhite’s blood splashed to the floor of the gondola. Itzal was probably the only one who saw it.

Itzal resettled himself, ready to get onto his feet. He knew that the explosion of movement would happen next.

Everything that happened next happened quickly.

But, ultimately, two men trussed at the knees, elbows, ankles, and wrists could not accomplish much against six hardened pirates.

With a jolt that felt like getting his legs dislocated, Itzal stopped falling. He swayed from the breeze and the motion of the gondola.

Itzal shook his head, trying to clear the daze from the punches to the head. He glanced up. A about twenty feet of rope hung him by the feet from the door of the gondola. One of the sailors sat in the door of the gondola. Noticing Itzal looking up, the sailor gave a mock salute.

The fight had been short. Itzal would like to say that, for a well-tied and young person, he made a good reckoning of himself. Several of the pirates would be nursing bruises for a while. He felt sure of that.

It had been a doomed endeavor, though. Itzal could not see why Lilywhite had started it.

After a few minutes, the pirates tossed Lilywhite out of the gondola. He swung at the end of his ropes next to Itzal. Lilywhite had hasty but effective bandages wrapped around the stab-wound in his shoulder.

“Odd pirates, these,” Itzal said. “They have no problem abusing us, but they don’t want you to bleed out.”

“Oh, because you’re an authority on the oddities of pirates, ah’ye?”

“Fair point.”

After he stopped swaying too much, Lilywhite snorted with half a laugh.

“Doesn’t seem funny to me,” Itzal said. He worked on his breathing. He couldn’t do much to keep the blood from rushing to his head aside from calm his heart down.

“Can’t you hear them up there?” Lilywhite asked.

“Not really,” Itzal said. He heard voices from the gondola, but no distinct words.

“Oh. You’re not sound dominant?” Lilywhite said. “I thought you might be. Never mind. Anyhow, they’re cussing out the Burners for trying to keep us up there from the start.”

“Burners? What?”

“Those sickly looking fellows—trouble in a fist-fight,” Lilywhite said. “They call them ‘Burners’ down on the prairies.”

It helped a little, knowing what to call Trouble. It didn’t help much.

“Do you know what I don’t like about you, Master Lilywhite?” Itzal said.

“I expect I could make a few educated guesses,” Lilywhite said.

“Your damned reputation,” Itzal said. “There’s nothing to it but bluster. So much ungoverned hot air, permitted to befoul what would otherwise be an honorably filled public view of Bone Jacks.”

“Goodness gracious me,” Lilywhite said, his mock surprise deflating Itzal’s indignation. “Where was this energetic poet when you were making your translation of the Tenets of Tactics?”

Itzal hesitated before replying, feeling self-conscious now.

“There’s nothing wrong with an efficient translation,” Itzal said. “There are thousands of flowery translations of the Tenets. There aren’t a lot of translations that are simple and easy to remember.”

That entertained Lilywhite. His smirk was back.

“What was the point of this?” Itzal said. He took another deep breath. His head felt all full of smoke and blood and heat.

“To get us down here,” Lilywhite said.

“Why is that any good?”

“Unless you haven’t noticed, we are far less supervised than we had been.”

“Perfect. Now we can collude more overtly,” Itzal said.

“You have the measure of it.”

“I meant to be sarcastic,” Itzal said.

“Did you? Ah. Well. Quite. It might also be interesting to you that I am not tied as well as I had been. They did rather a hasty job retying these.” Lilywhite held out his wrists.

“I shall try to harness my amazement. Will you be so kind as to share when your plan has a step in it to deal with all this?” Itzal gestured at the huge amount of empty air around them and the long drop to the ground.

“I will,” Lilywhite said. “Before I do, I need to give you a brief lesson in the sociopolitical landscape of the Razorgrass Sea.”

“This hardly seems the time,” Itzal started.

With unusual harshness, Lilywhite interrupted. “Will you be quiet,” he said. “This is the only time. How is your memory? Still sharp? I seem to recall that you had a keen memory.”

“It is still sharp,” Itzal said. He hesitated, then he said, “Do you have something that I can keep? It will help me remember whatever it is.”

“Your trinkets,” Lilywhite said. He procured something and handed it over to Itzal. Itzal clutched it in his hand, and he listened.

“There is a minor Khan called Modris,” Lilywhite said. “Do you know what a Khan is?”

“Yes. A tribal leader of the population indigenous to the Razorgrass Sea.”

“And you know of their old malcontent with their lot,” Lilywhite said.

“The newspapers always try to make it out to be the small movements of drunken barbarians,” Itzal said.

That made Lilywhite smile. “You sound like you don’t think so.”

“I imagine that the newsmen don’t have a good grasp of the realities. They never do.”

“Your guess is right,” Lilywhite said. “They’re a civilization old and dangerous, and they’re belittled at all of our peril. I don’t have time to explain why, but I am currently in some business dealings with Modris Khan. There is some property that I told him that I would procure for him. I am currently being delivered to him of a purpose to deliver up the goods.”

Itzal nodded, clutching the thing in his hand from Lilywhite. It has sharp edges. He imagined that Lilywhite must have been up in the mountains to get the property.

“I don’t have the property.”

“I see,” Itzal said, concealing his nerves at the thought.

“On the bright side, I know where to look for the property. And, boon of boons, you are here.”

Itzal nearly sight from exasperation. He would have, but it he didn’t feel quite capable of it, with all the blood rushing to his head.

“I suppose you think you’ve got a way to send me for it,” Itzal said.

Even in the dark, Itzal could see Lilywhite’s self-satisfied smirk. He could, in fact, almost hear it.

The gondola went in one, long, slow angle down from the city of Fighting Top. It carried them, high above a green and steep-sided valley. The gondola sank out of cloud cover and into clear sky. In a slow growth of larger and larger emptiness, the Razorgrass Sea expanded from a sliver past the end of the valley. It grew into the whole horizon, silvered in moonlight and starlight.

Itzal had seen this scene before. A Nighttime View of the Razorgrass Sea from the Long Gondola was a famous painting. It hung in the atrium of the Academy. Itzal had walked past it most days of his life. He knew the locations of the guard towers on the Razorbacks—the craggy hills at the edge of the Razorgrass Sea. He imagined what sights and smells he’d find in Garrison. The port town at the bottom end of the gondola was a cluster of yellow in the painting; in real life, the cluster of yellow-glinting lanterns looked almost the same as the lifeless paint had looked. At a much younger age, he spent hours staring at the painting, wondering when he would have a chance to see the place in real life. In some ways, that had been the beginning of the study that had resulted in drawing his map.

With the wind buffeting him around under the gondola, Garrison coming closer by inches, the feeling going cold and hard in his chest was far from the child-like yearning he remembered.