Jinx (25 page)

Jinx started and knocked the jar of dragon’s blood onto the floor.

The Bonemaster turned around and clouted Jinx on the ear, very casually. He tended to do that a lot. Jinx put his hand to his burning ear and stood staring at the spilled blood and trying to look stupid.

“Really, Jinx,” said the Bonemaster. “It’s hard to believe sometimes that Simon would have chosen you as an apprentice. Even if you were a free life lost in the forest.”

Jinx wished the subject would stay off of Simon. The thought of Simon’s betrayal still hurt. And Simon hadn’t come, which meant he didn’t care what happened to Jinx, which meant the Bonemaster was probably telling the truth about Jinx’s life and about Simon being evil and everything else.

“I wasn’t his apprentice,” said Jinx. “I was just his servant.”

“Whatever you were, you’re a large part of his power,” said the Bonemaster. “Surely he must realize that once you’re dead, your captive lifeforce will be worth much less to him. Why isn’t he here yet?”

“I don’t know,” said Jinx, doing his best not to sound as angry as he was. His ear hurt. He’d forgotten that Simon needed him to be alive—and that was the only reason Simon might come rescue him.

“Are you going to clean up that dragon’s blood or not? Can’t you do one single thing without being told?”

Furious, Jinx levitated the blood from the floor back into the jar.

He hardly had time to realize his mistake before the Bonemaster grabbed him, lifted him off the floor by his collar, and slammed him against the stone wall.

“That was quite a levitation spell for someone who’s not even an apprentice. Using my power source, are you?”

Jinx couldn’t answer—he’d had the breath knocked out of him, and the Bonemaster was twisting his collar tightly around his throat. Things went black and fuzzy at the edge of Jinx’s vision.

“Don’t ever do it again,” said the Bonemaster, squeezing tighter. “My power is my own.”

He let go of Jinx, and Jinx slid to the floor. The Bonemaster loomed over him. Jinx struggled to his feet, raising his fists to defend himself.

“What do wizards need power for?” said Elfwyn quickly.

The Bonemaster turned away from Jinx to beam at Elfwyn. “Ah, my dear, it’s what makes us wizards in the first place. Most people spend their lives being batted about by circumstances. Wizards take control of circumstances. They make things happen.”

He looked at the bat wing that Elfwyn had ground into powder. “Excellent. Now we must let the potion sit for an hour, and it just happens that it’s time for my nap.”

“I’ll go and make a hot posset for you, Bonemaster,” said Elfwyn.

“Thank you, my dear. Clean up this mess, Jinx.”

They left. Jinx pushed himself away from the wall, still gasping for breath. He kicked the stone wall, hard. He hurt his foot. He hated the Bonemaster, and he wasn’t feeling too fond of Elfwyn, either.

He went to the window and glared out it. He couldn’t see Reven, but Reven was probably outside somewhere, exploring. Their plan wasn’t going very well. Reven hadn’t found the bridge, and he hadn’t found a way down.

Jinx found a rag and scrubbed the remaining blood splatters from the floor. Then he put the jar of bat wings back on the shelf, making sure that it was exactly lined up with the other jars. If it wasn’t, the Bonemaster would notice. He believed in everything being very regular and exact. His nap, once it began, would last exactly thirty minutes. “Nothing can be accomplished without a regular schedule,” the Bonemaster always said.

The door creaked, and Elfwyn came into the room.

She hurried over to Jinx and tried to look at his throat. “Are you all right? I wish he wouldn’t hurt you.”

Jinx shrugged her away. “Why don’t you tell him that instead of kissing up to him?”

“Because I have to make him think I’m on his side,” said Elfwyn.

“He could have killed me!”

“Well, I got him to leave you alone, didn’t I?”

“‘I’ll go make you a nice hot posset, Bonemaster!’” said Jinx.

“Oh, be quiet. I have to get him in the habit of taking a hot drink with his nap in case I decide to poison him.”

Jinx stared at her. “You wouldn’t do that.”

“I would if I thought he was about to kill us. Listen, did you really just use his power source?”

“Yeah,” said Jinx.

“You said you couldn’t do that.”

“No I didn’t, I said he’d know if I did.”

“Well, you probably shouldn’t have used it.”

“Yeah, well, I kind of lost my temper. You would too if he knocked you around all the time.”

“So what
is
his power source?”

“I don’t know. Something underneath this room.” He could feel it now. He shivered. “Something cold-feeling.”

“Right down there?” Elfwyn pointed at the floor.

“Kind of off to the left. Anyway, we’ve looked all through the cellars and outside. There’s no way to get down there.”

“Yes there is. Right here,” said Elfwyn. She got down on her hands and knees. “I saw it when you spilled the dragon’s blood. Look, right under the sink here.”

Jinx knelt down beside her. The cracks between the flagstones were filled with dust. But around one stone the crack was clean and black, as if it had been recently moved.

“What, you think that’s a trapdoor?”

“Yes. It’s got to be. Can you levitate it, please?”

“We don’t need to look at the power source,” said Jinx. “I’m absolutely sure it’s down there.”

“But don’t you want to see what it is?”

“We don’t have time—we’ve only got about twenty minutes.”

“Oh, we have longer than that; he only just lay down. Go ahead, levitate it. Please?”

Jinx was curious too. There was plenty of power to draw on—cold, nasty power. He just hoped the Bonemaster was asleep now and wouldn’t sense him doing it—Jinx had no desire to be strangled again. He easily lifted the flagstone. He pushed it aside, uncovering a dark hole beneath.

A smell of cellars and mold came up from the opening.

“Look, there are metal rungs going down,” said Elfwyn. “Come on.”

“Wait.” Jinx got two candles from the workbench and lit them. “Here.”

Elfwyn climbed down first. Jinx watched her anxiously. It seemed to be a long way down.

“I’m on the bottom. There’s a sort of passage,” said Elfwyn.

“We don’t have much time.” Jinx lowered himself into the hole.

The passage was solid stone. “I think it’s carved out of the inside of the island,” said Elfwyn.

“Hurry up,” said Jinx.

They went along the passage, their candles a pool of light in the deep darkness. There was a smell of death and sealed tombs. Jinx could sense the power very strongly now.

The passage ended in a locked door.

“Do you know a spell that can get us through there?” said Elfwyn.

Jinx tried
knowing
the door would open. But it didn’t. They were very, very close to the power source.

“Oh, wait,” said Elfwyn. She held up her candle. “There are some shelves against the wall here—what are those? Bottles?”

Hundreds of bottles glinted in the candlelight.

“That’s the power source,” said Jinx.

But even as he said it, he wasn’t sure. There was power coming from the bottles. But the power behind the door was just as strong.

Elfwyn took one of the bottles in her hand. “It looks like there’s a little man inside it. No, a woman. Oh, that’s awful!”

She put the bottle in front of her candle so that the light shone greenly through it. Inside the bottle Jinx could see the tiny figure of a woman dangling from a string. She looked quite dead.

“What is it?” said Elfwyn.

“I think these might be lives,” said Jinx. He felt horribly sad for them.

“They don’t
look
alive,” said Elfwyn.

Jinx wondered if he was dangling in a bottle somewhere in Simon’s house, and if the him that was in the bottle knew it.

“They look dead,” said Elfwyn.

“We really need to get out of here before the Bonemaster wakes up,” said Jinx.

“And leave all of them down here?” She raised her candle so that it shone on the long, neat lines of bottles, each with a dim human figure hanging motionless inside it.

“Yes. Come on.” He didn’t want to look at the sad bottles anymore. He didn’t want to
know
about them.

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

“Yes,” said Jinx. “I mean, no.”

“Is this what Simon did when he took your life?”

“I don’t know.”

“Weren’t you there?”

“Only kind of. There was a bottle. And he put something of mine into it.”

“Why did you let him? I would never have—”

“I didn’t let him!” Jinx snapped. “Look, there’s some power behind this door as well.”

“So Simon
is
as evil as the Bonemaster.”

Jinx didn’t argue. He didn’t know if this was what Simon had done to him. But it looked seriously evil. And he really, really didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Like, ever.

“There’s just as much power behind the door as in the bottles,” he said. He tugged at the door handle.

“Do you think it’s more bottles?”

“It feels different.”

The difference was absolute—like the difference between night and day, or living trees and cold stone.

“How can we get in there?”

“We can’t. We have to go back now.” He was sure it had been half an hour since the Bonemaster had begun his nap. “Put that bottle back.”

“Don’t you want to look at it in daylight?”

“No, I don’t.” He took the bottle from her hand and put it back on the shelf. The sight of all those eerily still figures hanging in their bottles made him shudder.

“You know what I think?” said Elfwyn.

“How could—I mean no, I don’t. Can we—let’s get out of here already.” Jinx took her arm and hurried her back along the passageway.

“I think—quit shoving! I think that those are the lives of dead people.”

They had reached the ladder. “Hurry up,” said Jinx.

She blew out her candle, stuck it in her pocket, and started climbing toward the light. Jinx followed right behind her. He expected to see the Bonemaster standing over the hole in the floor, waiting for them. But the room was still empty.

He grabbed the trapdoor and shoved as hard as he could to get it back into place. It was too heavy. “Help me with this.”

“Can’t you just levitate it?”

“Not now that I’ve seen the power source.” All those little dangling lives.

Footsteps approached in the hall outside. He and Elfwyn shoved the flagstone as hard as they could, and it grated across the floor and dropped into place. The latch on the laboratory door clicked. They both jumped to their feet. As the door opened, Elfwyn ran to the workbench and picked up the mortar full of powdered bat wing, while Jinx turned and grabbed a wet rag from the sink.

“You call this cleaning up?” said the Bonemaster. “You haven’t done a thing, have you, Jinx?”

“He’s been helping me,” said Elfwyn.

“Has he really?” said the Bonemaster.

“Yes,” said Elfwyn truthfully.

“I don’t understand,” Reven said. “Were they very large bottles?”

They were up in the highest tower of the Bonemaster’s castle, looking out an arched window into the darkness. Jinx couldn’t see the forest, and this far away, he couldn’t even sense it. Reven and Elfwyn were standing sort of too close together, and Jinx had the feeling that they wished he wasn’t there.

Figuring people out without seeing their thoughts wasn’t always difficult.

“No, ordinary-sized,” said Elfwyn. “But the people in them were tiny.”

“Dolls,” said Reven.

“They weren’t dolls,” said Jinx.

“They were real people, only they were dead,” said Elfwyn.

“How could you tell?”

“Real people don’t look like dolls,” said Jinx. “Look, the Bonemaster did something to them, all right? That’s how they got that way. He shrunk them and put them in bottles.”

“And killed them?”

“Oh yes, definitely killed them. That was what made them so dead.”

“But you said there were hundreds of them.” Reven looked from Elfwyn to Jinx in confusion.

“About two hundred, I think,” said Elfwyn.

The thought stabbed through Jinx suddenly. The Bonemaster had killed hundreds of people. And Jinx had seen them, or at least some of them. In bottles.

“And how does that give him power?” said Reven.

They both looked at Jinx.

“I’m not sure,” said Jinx. “It’s—well, if deathforce magic comes from a death, then I suppose he captures their deaths in the bottles. So that he can use them.”

He hoped they couldn’t tell he was guessing. Simon had never told him about deathforce magic, and Jinx had never read a single book about it.