The Jack of Souls (Multi-award winner!)

Chapter 3c - Madness Revisited

Harric whirled, anticipating murder, only to find her reclining on his bed, by the window.

Regarding him with cool amusement, she said, “Miss me so?”

She looked precisely as she did the day she died, a vision of insanity from his childhood. She wore the same threadbare ball gown she’d fled court in twenty years before, and which she’d worn almost exclusively the last ten years of her life. Scarcely more than a colorless bag now, it hung limp and stinking from her bony shoulders. She smiled, and the mask of thick white makeup cracked in fans around her eyes and mouth. Blue lipstick hung crooked on her lips. Like the dress, the make-up was twenty years out of fashion, and though it had once been a subtle and delicate style, years of madness had turned it lumpen and clownish.

He backed against the door with a thump, heart racing. Hurt and anger battled in his chest, paralyzing his tongue.

She followed his gaze to the gown, and frowned. “This is how you remember me, therefore this is how I appear to you.” She rose from the bed and swirled the skirts about her ankles, wafting the stink of urine. Her nose wrinkled. “Pah! This was a shell I cast off at the grave. The Sight, which made me mad in life, gives me power in the afterworld. If only you could see me as I am now. Try! Look past this memory of madness and see. Do I rave, as I once did? Do I froth and bite my lips? I do not. I see clearly. And I come to offer you life. You needn’t die tonight, my son, if you will follow me and complete your apprenticeship. In the afterworld I am clear-eyed and strong. I can teach you just as if I were alive. You can be as you were meant to be, a true servant of Queen Chasia. In return, I will steer you from your doom.”

Rage welled in Harric. He clamped his jaws against screaming fury and turned from her, forcing himself to breathe evenly. She isn’t real, he told himself. Just a vision. Part of the madness she’d passed on to him, he feared, which he mustn’t engage, lest it worsen and Mother Ganner find him alone and shouting in his room again.

Only don’t turn your back on her, or she’ll knife you herself. Could a ghost wield iron? They fear iron, don’t they? He grabbed up the quill knife from his writing desk and held it between them.

He crossed to his bed and shoved it aside to access the wall behind it.  Keeping an eye on her, he ran his fingers along the wainscot, searching for the latch points of the hidden closet where he kept the things he’d need for his Proof.

His mother let out a careworn sigh. “Alas!”

“Spare me the theatrics,” he growled. “I won’t live as your pawn anymore.”

“Then you know I must kill you. I do not wish to, but I must.”

“So you say.”

“I speak truth, Harric! Without my guidance, you will destroy Queen Chasia and all she has brought to our land! It is woven in the sky! You are fated to destroy the queen you love. I see it! And I cannot let it happen. That is why I cursed you. Either you must follow me that I may guide your path away from harming her, to preserve her I must kill you. Oh, Harric, you break your mother’s heart!”

She gazed up at him, eyes soft and pleading. Tears streaked her makeup, making her even more clownish—the sad clown at some rustic fair—and suddenly the whole thing seemed ridiculous, including her pleading and the longing it stirred in his heart. A rough, bitter laugh escaped him. “You love playing the martyr, don’t you, Mother? But I know it’s all the same lie, your mad attempt to keep me as your puppet. And you’re still jerking my strings.”

“If only that were so!”

His hands found the hidden latch points of the closet, and he depressed the points. The locks clicked. The door swiveled out on hidden hinges, revealing shelves and hangers arrayed with all the tools of courtesan spy. He knew the books on the shelf by heart: manuals of courtly etiquette, treatises on poison, lock-crafting, subterfuge, deception. Bookending them all stood the coded journals of his mother’s secret service to the Queen.

She looked past him into the closet. A scowl cracked more plaster from her nose. “Behold the glories of my arts. How can you bear to look at them, Harric? Every kit, every lock-hook, every tincture in that holy sanctum abides as a burning symbol of the greatness you rejected when you rejected your apprenticeship before it was complete. If you had finished your training, your fate would be different. Of that I am certain.” 

Harric clenched his jaw. He hated himself for listening, hated himself for feeling pain at her words. Why was it that nothing he said affected her as she affected him? And nothing he could do would make her leave.

He picked up his own journal of apprentice “missions” around Gallows Ferry. A wave of nausea rocked his stomach as he glanced at the entries. Cons, seductions, betrayals—each designed to harden his heart and wear away sentiment and petty loyalties. Each a burning icon of sacrificed childhood.

He slammed the book back on its shelf and turned on her. “My only regret, Mother, is that I did not abandon you sooner.”

She retreated as he advanced with steady steps. Hot buzzing filled his mind. He felt the corners of his mouth draw back in a lipless smile. “I beat your doom today, Mother. You failed. I won. Why is that, do you suppose? If all the others died in your precious fog, why did I survive?” 

“If I’d wanted you dead, you’d be dead,” she snapped. “This morning was a warning, that I might offer you one last chance before sunset.”

He laughed. Not at the lie, but at something he glimpsed something in her face. It took him a moment to recognize it behind the cracking mask of makeup, but when he realized it was fear, the spark of hope flared again inside him.

“Do you know why I opened the closet?” he said, gesturing to the open door. “So I could grab my bag of tricks and perform my Proof in the market. Do you know what that means?” 

Her lips pressed in a tight line. “You lie. Queen Chasia forbids magic! In your desperation would you sneer at her?  Would you disgrace and dishonor the land and your queen above all?”

“Don’t try to shame me, Mother. I dedicate my life to the Queen; it’s you I sneer at. And you question me about magic! That was your fog this morning, wasn’t it? The one full of clawed hands and twining snakes?”

Her expression darkened. “Do not judge what you do not understand. In the afterworld my visions are power. I see into the Web of Fate and know its patterns—even weave them! Spirits obey me. That is not moon magic; it is power as natural there as the air is in this world. That little slut’s ‘Proof’ is nothing but West-Isle sorcery!”

His eyebrows rose at the fury in her bloodshot eyes. He began to chuckle. “How could I have been so blind not to see it before? I’ve finally found something you can’t control. Magic! I must fight magic with magic!”

She glared, sunken breast heaving. “You leave me no choice.”

Her eyes rolled back in her head as the vision took hold.

“Stop it, Mother.”

Her jaw went slack. She collapsed to her knees and fell on her back as if a giant invisible hand pinned her like a bug.

“Your doom approaches!” she gasped. “It comes apace! I see it before me! Oh! Flesh and blood from the very court you will one day destroy! It is woven in the sky!”

“Shut up!” he shouted. “You lie. You always lie. And I don’t care what’s woven anywhere. I don’t care about your dooms! I’ll make my own damned future!”

Grabbing the heavy carpetbag of tricks from the bottom of the closet, he heaved it almost savagely at her feet. “My Proof will destroy your doom!”

But the bag merely thumped on the floor where she’d been.

He was alone and shouting at the air again. 

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