Bone Jack

“I need you to find my friend in Garrison,” Lilywhite said.

“When are we making our break?” Itzal asked.

“Never mind that,” Lilywhite said. “Listen, do you know the swordsmith off Clankers Street up in the Fighting Top?”

“The Slandersmith?”

“Yes. Akadhib. You remember him?”

“Yes,” Itzal said.

“He has a cousin in Garrison. Also a Slandersmith. This cousin is receiving some property for me. I need you to get it and bring it to me.”

“Where will you be?”

“On the ramble out there,” Lilywhite gestured toward the glimmering Razorgrass Sea. “Use your reason. I think you will find me.”

“Will we have to fight them again when we get down the mountain?” Itzal asked, glancing at the gondola full of pirates.

“Well, see, I have a sort of thought about that.”

“Will you tell it to me?” Itzal asked.

“You won’t like it,” Lilywhite said.

“I’d prefer not to hear it, then,” Itzal said.

They fell silent. The wind fluffed cold against them. They swayed. The gondola creaked along on its track over them.

“Those sickly, Burner people did it,” Itzal said. Lilywhite started to argue. He interrupted himself with a frown.

“Did what?”

“Dropped from the gondola. Jumped, rather.”

Lilywhite started arguing, then cut himself off with a frown. “That’s true,” he said as if the concession pained him.

“How did they do it, do you think?” Itzal asked, looking at the faraway trees, small and feathery with distance, dark with the shadows of night.

“Do you want to hear a likely answer or a plausible one?” Lilywhite asked.

“What’s the difference?” Itzal asked.

“Stupid question. What happened to our pact? Fine. If you need it made so pitchy, ‘plausible’ means something you can believe, and ‘likely’ means something that actually happened. The one hasn’t necessarily got anything to do with the other.”

“That has a kind of reason to it,” Itzal said.

“It has all the reason to it,” Lilywhite said. “Well, then, the most plausible way that the Burners jumped from the gondola and survived is that they jumped onto something else.”

“But you don’t think that’s what happened,” Itzal said, half asking it.

Lilywhite shook his head. “No. Honestly, I think they just jumped.”

“That would be suicide,” Itzal said.

“I don’t know,” Lilywhite said, and his tone of accepting thoughtfulness surprised Itzal. “That depends how literally you read some of the histories of Bone Jacks.”

“Which histories do you mean?”

“The Battle of the Songs,” Lilywhite said, smiling with fondness for the poem. “Which says that we ‘descended on the battle, light on the air.’ Or the Fall of Fornath Bridge, crumbling into that canyon with Bone Jacks, ‘stepping from stone to falling stone, up as if on stairs.’ Surely, you’ve read your histories.”

“Well,” Itzal said, remembering them. He quite liked his histories. Lilywhite referenced poems that Itzal had always understood to be works in mythological embellishment. Though, come to think of it, except that the histories were sprinkled with improbable events, he couldn’t remember why he had that impression. It just seemed more reasonable than taking them literally.

He was thinking about this and forgot that he had started to say something and stopped. He tried to remember what he was going to say, but Lilywhite started talking before he could get that far.

“The Burners are sort of like reverse Bone Jacks,” Lilywhite said. “The khans, down in the Razorgrass Sea, have been employing alchemists and witch doctors to try to artificially force people to become Bone Jacks. I’m not yet sure what that means, aside from my few brushes with the Burners. It’s been…well, not good.”

“Bone Jacks are just educated orphans, though,” Itzal said. “And then civil servants. Children of the state. Nothing too special about us.”

“I know that you have been encouraged to think that,” Lilywhite said. “It’s safer to think that.”

“Safer?” Itzal asked, now brushing against uncomfortable emotions that he didn’t want to confront.

“Yes,” Lilywhite said. “A time that demands warrior Bone Jacks is a bad time indeed.”

“And I suppose you’ve got no intention of making it any clearer than that,” Itzal said, not even bothering to make it sound like a question.

“You’ve got to see it from a big picture perspective,” Lilywhite said.

“Apparently not,” Itzal said.

“I suppose a big picture perspective is difficult to have except after the adventures are over,” Lilywhite went on, his tone every bit the conversational one appropriate to parlor chatting, rather than hanging from creaking ropes under a slow-moving gondola over a deep green valley on a chilly night. “Oh, but I’m not half light-headed. Getting dizzy. Lost more blood than I thought.”

“Will you be all right?” Itzal asked.

“I’ll have to be. Nothing else for it.” Lilywhite closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He went into a partial trance, slowing his heart as much as he could. While he did it, his face went calm. “Mm, now that idea does not rankle. Hmm,” he said as if responding to his own thoughts. He opened his eyes again.

“Itzal, know what you’ve done that most people never manage?” Lilywhite asked. “Something amazing. Something improbable.”

“Do I really want to know?” Itzal said, hoping that Lilywhite would keep it to himself.

“You’ve instilled a little doubt in me, that’s what,” Lilywhite said. It made him give a couple triumphant barks of laughter. “I had almost forgot how that felt. By the nonce, it’s invigorating!” Smiling with a long-lost savor, Lilywhite paused to enjoy it for a moment. “I am not sure how you did it—some sort of rhetorical trickery. Since you have, know what that makes you?”

“Regretful I’m so poor at keeping my thoughts to myself,” Itzal said. “I don’t want to hear where this is going.”

“It makes you the ideal proxy to set the plan in motion. That it does,” Lilywhite said. “Ha! This little hitch in the plan looked like it would, in fact, be the end of the plan. You can imagine my distress.”

“I know how distress feels,” Itzal said.

“And here’s you, ideally knitted together with all kinds of rhetorical manipulation techniques. Got me to doubt myself—ha! That’s one for the books. Do you know how lucky that is?”

“Not terribly,” Itzal said. “I suffer the same hitches as you do, forgive the pun.”

“I think they’re knots, not hitches,” Lilywhite said, looking at the ropes around his wrists. “A hitch wouldn’t do the job right.”

“Beside the point, Lilywhite,” Itzal said.

“Sorry,” Lilywhite said.

“Hitches, bends, or knots, we are caught and not getting away easily. We are constrained by our addiction to living a little longer.”

“Or…” Lilywhite said in a tone of deepest profundity, “are we?”

“Are we?” Itzal repeated, unable to keep the disbelief from swallowing his words.

“Do you understand the task? It’s critical that you understand. Get my property from the man delivering it to Modris Khan.”

“I understand that’s what you want me to do,” Itzal said. “And it still does us no good because of these damned hitches.”

“Knots. Sorry. You are right, though…. Is it…are you touch dominant, then?”

The shift in subject took Itzal so much by surprise that it took him a few seconds to answer. “Touch dominant? I am, yes.”

“I figured when you said that you weren’t sound dominant that it must be touch dominant,” Lilywhite said. “That’s good. Then you’ve got the secret in you.”

“Um…” Itzal said. “Have I?”

“Did you ever teach anyone how to do cloud walking?” Lilywhite asked.

“I taught most of the class how to,” Itzal said.

“Had a natural knack for it, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Itzal said. “Professor Vendimtar said I got the hang of it faster than anyone he ever saw. What’s that got to do with it? Cloud walking’s just walking stealthily.”

“That’s one of its best applications, yes,” Lilywhite said. “But what do you actually do to do it? And don’t tell me how you taught other people how to do it. How do you do it?”

“I…” Itzal said, weighing what he had to say. He’d explained what he did to the other students once. It hadn’t made much sense to them for the first round, so he modified his explanation under layers of description till they understood. It took him a moment to remember how he’d described it to himself. “I step lightly… I don’t step down with all my weight.”

“So scale it up,” Lilywhite said. He was working at the knots around his wrists.

“Scale what up?”

“Cloud walking,” Lilywhite said. He had his hands untied. He put the rope under his arm. “I’m pretty sure that’s what the Burners did.”

“Pretty sure?”

“Quite sure, let’s say. Are you ready?”

“Let’s talk about this—” Itzal started.

“That sounds like an awful idea, if I ever heard one,” Lilywhite said. “Think fast.”

“I always do, but…steady on—what are you doing?” Itzal said. Lilywhite had untied the knots around Itzal’s wrists, then bent to reach up to the knots around Itzal’s ankles.

Before Itzal could so much as think of anything to say, he dropped from the loosed knots.

He dropped for a moment long enough to suck the breath from him, then halted with a wrench. His already sore leg jerked. Lilywhite’s big hand caught hold of his ankle. Itzal looked at his smirk, glinting in the night, and hardly had the breath to wish for the energy to shout something witty and stabbing at him.

“Remember, come rescue me,” Lilywhite said. “Walk with the clouds, Itzal. Dance with the shadows.”

Then Lilywhite let go.