The Jack of Souls (Multi-award winner!)

Chapter 7a - Trapped

In the War of Creation, Arkus made the Isle of Arkendia as a bastion for himself and his people, free of magic and slavery and worship. Krato, jealous of his creation, hid altars to himself throughout the west of the isle and corrupted its people with magic and slavery. Arkus severed the west like a rotting limb from the island. Thus in shame was the West Isle born.

 — From Arkendian Creation Stories, collected by Sister Cornelia Barti. Found in the Imperial Library at Samis

Chapter Seven

On his hands and knees in the back of his cart, Harric raised his head and locked eyes with the priest across the market. The man's gaze burned into him from forty paces, dark eyes riveted to the curl of green paint on Harric's forehead. The father's beard was as huge as an unstrung wool bale. He towered above his flock, and his already immense size was magnified by a smothercoat of square carpets through which he'd poked his head, so that he looked like a hairy, walking siege tent. The priest drove his people through the market as if they were hunted by hounds, and scowled the hawkers into silence. Yet his eyes never left Harric for long.

Harric let his hair hide his eyes and risked a glance at Rudy. The stable master stood directly behind him in the cart, railing at the revelers, as several fistfights broke out between them and Rudy's cronies.

The priest stopped abruptly at the cart, and though he stood in the mud below, he still towered above Harric. The wind of his personal odor made Harric's head reel.

The priest waved his flock on by, but a stout peasant man among them paused at his side with a jar in his hands that he opened to reveal a watery resin. The man winked at Harric as the priest sank his fingers deep in the jar and began stirring a greasy unguent from the bottom.

The father squinted at Harric's green cowlick. "That slave paint?"

Harric nodded. His eyes flicked to Rudy, who now traded blows with a reveler across the porch rail.

"We only got each other, and no god will help us," the priest said. It was the opening line of a familiar sermon, and a test, Harric judged, of whether he was faithful to the Three Laws.

"No, Father," Harric answered, in the expected response.

"Do you see gods among us?"

"No, Father."

"That's right, you don't. And why? Because they no longer exist, is why. Leastways, hardly anything left of 'em, and what's left is as mad as a drunk cat and don't merit worship. No, they spent themselves in the act o' creation — passed the best part of their divinity into everything you see, including us." He swept his hand in a circular motion encompassing all quarters of the world. "All that you see is what's become of them."

"Yes, Father," said Harric. "So we must worship ourselves?"

The father peered from under beetled brows, still stirring the resin with his fingers. "That's the way of a breaker, not a maker, you un-sufferable pup." A sly smile played in his eyes. "What we must do is at all times create, as they did, and fight the ones who live only to break and enslave."

"I will, Father. I do."

"I believe you."

Without warning, the priest seized Harric by the scruff of the neck. Lifting him into a headlock, he pinned him against the smothercoat. The woolen rugs stunk so potently of body stench it seemed to collapse Harric's head around his nose. Yet the fumes from the unguent were worse. When the priest slapped the stuff on Harric's forehead it burned out his nostrils like he'd inhaled a compound of goat piss and whiskey.