The Jack of Souls (Multi-award winner!)

Chapter 7b - Phyros Thief

"Phyros!" Someone screamed from the south gate. "Phyros!"

The Sapphire cursed and struggled to turn his horse in the narrow market.

Revelers on the porch pointed down the Hanging Road beyond the south gate. "There!" Murmurs of fear rippled through the market as a rider in black came into view through the gate, climbing the road upon a gigantic wine-black destrier.

Like a sudden wave in a sluggish river, emigrants fled away from the south gate, abandoning carts and belongings. A gust of wind must have brought the Phyros's scent along the cliff and into the outpost, for several oxen shied, bashing into people and toppling a grocer's table. A mule jerked free from its master and galloped for the tiny gap behind the Sapphire's stallion, and ended up crashing into the tinker's wagon across from Harric. Pots and tongs and toasting forks flew through the air and scattered in the mud, like caltrops.

"Back!" the Sapphire called to his men. "Back to the wall! Let him pass!"

Harric saw his chance to flee, and stepped forward to spring, but the Sapphire's stallion jinked sideways into his cart, toppling him hard onto the feed sacks, knocking the wind from his lungs. He struggled to his feet, gasping, but by the time he regained his breath, the immortal horse had entered the gate, bearing directly for Harric's cart.

It halted before him, violet eyes glaring, fang-like blood tooth bared.

Harric froze.

A Phyros in Gallows Ferry.

Impossible. Sir Willard and the Blue Order had slain every Phyros during the Cleansing or else driven them back to Phyrosi. The only Phyros left in Arkendia were those of the Blue Order, but this rider was not one of them. His armor was black, not blue.

But there was no mistaking one of the beasts of the Sir Willard Ballads. Its scars were thicker and wilder and more violet-black than the ballads sang them. Centering around the eyes, the scars radiated outward in a mask of forking rays along the paths of veins beneath the skin. Thick as fingers, they clutched at nostrils and lips, probed like roots around the throat, and fell upon the chest like a shower of lightning. This was the work of an immortal rider skilled in the mysteries of blood draughts, and yet the scars were so numerous it was difficult to imagine where a new incision might be made.

Harric raised his eyes to the rider, expecting a blue-skinned giant — a youth-eternal, transformed by the Blood of the Phyros in his veins. What he saw instead was a bull-necked man of some three-score years, with a bald head and gigantic salt-pepper mustachios.

The knight was huge — there was no denying that. Plated arms as thick as cord wood. Chest like a steel barrel. His hawkish gray eyes glinted with the quiet confidence of power. But this was no immortal. Though his skin bore the traces of blue that suggested blood painting at one time or another in his life, it was nowhere near the deep violet of the true immortals described in the Willard ballads.

Purpled from the Mad God's veins.

Blue-black blood, and skin the same.

Moreover, his breastplate had been punched to accommodate a substantial belly, and his armored legs seemed so comparatively scrawny they might have belonged to his tailor.

Harric stared as the old knight swabbed his sun-burned pate and fished out a fat roll of ragleaf from a saddlebag.

"Think you could find me a spark around here?" said the knight, in a voice hoarse and weary. "Might as well have a quiet smoke while I can."

Hawkers and emigrants who hadn't fled out the gates or crammed the already crowded porch now peered from crannies between stalls or from rooftops of the sturdier booths. Heads massed in windows above, drawn to the sudden silence in the market. The air became eerily still, as all ears strained for the conversation at the cart.