Jinx (27 page)

“Yes,” said Elfwyn.

“Ridiculous. Wizards don’t have wives.”

“Why not?” said Elfwyn, probably to stem the flow of questions.

“For many reasons, my dear. I suppose one reason is because wives and children make such lovely hostages. Is it too much to hope that there are children?”

“I don’t know,” said Elfwyn.

“No children,” said Jinx. Revealing that was probably safe enough. Who knew what the Bonemaster would have done with Simon’s children, if they’d existed? Jinx wondered why the Bonemaster looked so vexed about Simon’s injury.

The Bonemaster took the bird out of his pocket. He stared at it for a moment.

“Simon,” he said. “You have three days. Be here by the last day of August with what you stole from me. If you come later than that, I’m afraid you won’t find Jinx at all.”

There was a small stack of books waiting on Jinx’s bed. Elfwyn must have brought them.

The Bonemaster didn’t own nearly as many books as Simon did. Perhaps that was because he had never been to Samara. Jinx flipped through the books. None of them was in Samaran, but they were all in languages he knew.

He found the door spell in the third book. He read it over carefully, three times.

Elfwyn knocked on the door.

“Come in,” said Jinx.

“Any luck?”

“Yes,” said Jinx. He turned the book around so she could see it.

She frowned at it. “What language is that?”

“Old Urwish.”

“It doesn’t look anything like Urwish.”

“It’s a dead language. I never saw this spell before, but I think it’s the one Simon uses. You have to tell the door who you are, and that you’re in command, and then you tell it who to open for.” He translated the spell into modern Urwish for her.

“So you can tell the door to open for us?”

“If I can do the spell,” said Jinx. Which was a big if. He hadn’t even ever been able to do the ordinary door-opening spell, which Simon said was just levitation pushed sideways.

“Oh, you’ll be able to do it. We’ll take Reven with us.”

Wonderful. A bigger audience to see Jinx fail.

“You said half the Bonemaster’s power is behind that door,” said Elfwyn.

“At least half.” The power behind the door had felt volatile and dangerous.

“We’ll do it tonight,” said Elfwyn. “After the Bonemaster goes to sleep. Oh, I can hardly wait!”

Jinx could. Utterly.

It was long past midnight when the three of them crouched in the Bonemaster’s laboratory, candles beside them, and pried the flagstone up from the floor.

“Quietly!” Jinx whispered as it grated out of the opening. Everything seemed to be making too much noise. Elfwyn’s and Reven’s feet on the iron rungs rang like bells. Jinx followed them down, the spell book tucked under his arm.

They walked along the corridor to the iron-bound door.

“These are the bottles?” Reven picked one up and examined the swinging figure inside it thoughtfully. “Is this what happened to you, Jinx?”

Jinx ignored the question, but he couldn’t help glancing at the bottles. All those dead lives. That couldn’t be what Simon had done to him. It couldn’t.

He studied the page of Old Urwish. “I think you both have to be standing next to me if you want to get through the door,” he said.

Reven set the bottle back on the shelf—even that seemed to make too much noise—and came and stood beside Jinx. Elfwyn stood on the other side of him. Jinx looked at the book and prepared to fail. He read the Old Urwish words aloud.

Nothing happened.

Reven reached out and rattled the door handle. “Didn’t work.”

“Could you make any more noise?” snapped Jinx.

“Oh, he’s sleeping soundly. I looked in,” said Reven.

“Try again, Jinx,” said Elfwyn.

Jinx started to say that there wasn’t any point in trying when he knew he couldn’t do it. Then Simon’s voice inside his head reminded him,
Of course you can’t if you think you can’t
. Right. So he could. Right?

“It’s not working,” said Jinx. “I need more power.”

“There’s power all around us,” said Elfwyn. “Didn’t you say?”

Yes, there was. The deathly power from the bottles, and the wriggly, more alive power behind the door. Jinx tried to reach out for the power behind the door, but it was like trying to catch fish with your hands. It wouldn’t hold still for him.

Besides, he had a feeling that the door spell had been cast in the first place with the power from the bottles. He drew on it. This close, it filled him with an oppressive, deathly horror. It felt half dead, half alive, and he could feel it pushing at him, telling him how to use it.

Jinx spoke the Old Urwish words again.

The lock snapped open, and the door creaked inward an inch. Elfwyn and Reven gave little murmurs of surprise. Jinx pushed the door the rest of the way open—it groaned loudly. He stepped inside.

“Wow,” said Reven, beside him.

“Oh,” said Elfwyn.

They were in another corridor. Its walls were lined from floor to ceiling with human skulls.

Real skulls. Jinx saw Reven reach out to touch one and check. Oh, they were real all right. Jinx knew it. Hundreds of them, glowing greenly in the candlelight.

Jinx started down the corridor, with all those empty eye sockets staring down at him.

“You think he really killed all these people?” said Reven.

“Yes,” said Elfwyn. “I think they’re the people in the bottles.”

The skulls gave way to bones—first vertebrae, and then ribs, and then Jinx stopped looking.

“It can’t go that much farther,” said Reven. “We’ll run out of island.”

“I think we’re going down a little bit,” said Elfwyn.

Oh, they could go down forever.

Finally the corridor opened into a wide, vaulted chamber. In the center was a table. On the table were two bottles.

One of the bottles drew Jinx’s eyes immediately. It wasn’t properly a bottle at all, or not that you could see—just a bottle-shape of wraithlike ribbons of glowing blue smoke, wriggling and winding their way around and around.

The other bottle was like the ones outside—an ordinary green glass bottle.

Elfwyn and Reven hung back, but Jinx went to the table. He bent down and looked at the green bottle. As he’d expected, there was a person inside it.

The person was sitting on the bottom of the bottle, its arms wrapped around its knees. When Jinx approached, it raised its head and opened its eyes.

Slowly, carefully, Jinx reached out and picked the bottle up. It was hard to lift—there seemed to be some force attaching it to the weird smoky bottle-shape on the table, and Jinx had to tug at it.

The person in the green bottle stood and looked at Jinx, but didn’t seem to see him.

Elfwyn and Reven drew closer, peering at the bottle in Jinx’s hand.

“This one is alive,” said Reven.

“It’s wearing robes, like a wizard,” said Elfwyn.

“Yes, well,” said Jinx. “This is Simon.”

The other two crowded closer at that, trying to shine their candles on the man in the bottle. The heat didn’t seem to bother Simon. He didn’t seem to know they were there.

“I thought wizards were old,” said Reven.

“It’s alive,” said Elfwyn. “Do you think that’s because
he’s
alive, and those people in the bottles out there are all dead?”

“I don’t know,” said Jinx, still staring at Simon. How had this happened, and when?

“What I mean is that that’s what
I
think,” said Elfwyn.

“That’s why he hasn’t come to find you, I swan,” said Reven. “He’s down here in a bottle.”

“I don’t know if he is,” said Elfwyn. “This might just be his life. Like Jinx.”

“So is that what you look like, then?” said Reven. “Standing around in a bottle like that? Not hanging like those people out there?”

“How should I know?” said Jinx.

“Perhaps he’s down here because he’s in league with the Bonemaster,” said Reven.

“Or because he’s already come to look for Jinx, and battled the Bonemaster, and lost,” said Elfwyn.

“This is like a picture in a book that Simon has,” said Jinx. “It’s in a language I don’t know—”

“There’s a language you don’t know?” said Reven.

“—and it shows a man trapped in a bottle. Not hanging like those people out there. Alive, like this.”

“That sounds like a book only an evil wizard would have,” said Reven.

Elfwyn nodded at the bottle. “You’re going to take it, aren’t you? You can’t leave it here.”

“The Bonemaster will notice it’s missing,” said Reven.

“Maybe not before we escape,” said Elfwyn. “Anyway, we can’t leave it here.”

“Maybe Jinx doesn’t want to take it,” said Reven. “After all, Simon’s keeping
him
trapped in a bottle.”

“But that’s Simon,” said Jinx. “It’s not like down here.”

Wasn’t it really, though? How did he know Simon didn’t have a dungeon under his house lined with skulls and bones and full of lives in bottles?

An image of Simon in his kitchen, surrounded by cats and cooking smells, came into Jinx’s head. It was a world away from this charnel house.

Jinx remembered Simon saying,
Anyone could have power the way
he
gets it. If they were willing to do the things
he’s
willing to do
. Was this what Simon wasn’t willing to do? He’d certainly done
something
to Jinx, and it had involved a bottle, and it had been pretty bad.

But somehow—when? Jinx wondered—Simon’s life had been captured by the Bonemaster, and put down here in this dungeon, and used as a power source for the Bonemaster’s evil magic—things like turning people into bone bridges and skull cups, sucking out their souls and stacking their bones crisscross. For things Jinx suddenly
knew
Simon wouldn’t do. Dame Glammer could cackle and the Bonemaster could make arch hints, but Jinx knew Simon.

“You don’t think he’d leave you down here?” said Reven. “If he found you like this?”

“It doesn’t
matter
what Simon would do,” said Elfwyn. “What matters is what Jinx would do.”

Elfwyn was right. And whatever Simon had done to him and to his life, Jinx wasn’t going to leave him here among the bones. He stuck the bottle in his pocket.

“Very well. At least you’ll be able to keep an eye on him,” said Reven.

What about the other bottle, though? It had power too. Jinx reached out his hand toward it.

Blue sparks shot from the bottle, snapping and cracking.

Jinx drew his hand back, and the sparks subsided. The ghostly ribbons kept winding and diving around it. Jinx reached out again. More sparks, louder. They spattered at him. He reached through the sparks. Elfwyn grabbed his arm.

“Jinx, I don’t think you should touch that one,” she said.

“I just want to see what’s in it.” Suddenly he felt he
had
to see what was in it. He reached out his other hand, and Reven grabbed it.

“She’s right,” said Reven. “Leave that one alone.”

“There’s power coming from it,” said Jinx.

“Dangerous power, I swan,” said Reven.

“I don’t like the look of those sparks,” said Elfwyn.

Jinx made another try at reaching for the bottle, but Reven and Elfwyn wouldn’t let him get at it.

As they left the dungeon, Jinx felt the force that attached Simon’s bottle to the one on the table stretch thinner and thinner, and then break.

It was the twenty-ninth of August. The day after tomorrow was Simon’s deadline—the day the Bonemaster had said he’d find some other use for Jinx. Jinx had been trying all day not to imagine what other uses the Bonemaster might be thinking of.

“He’ll kill all of us, I’m sure,” said Elfwyn.

“There’s no good reason for him to kill you or Reven,” said Jinx.

“You think he needs a good reason to kill anybody?”

Jinx did not.

The three of them were gathered in Jinx’s room. Simon was on the bedside table, pacing round and round in tiny circles on the bottom of his bottle.

Elfwyn was watching in fascination. “Isn’t it kind of creepy, having him in here?”

“Yes,” said Jinx.

“Has he been going round like that for long?”

“On and off. Sometimes he sits down.”

“I’d think it would keep you awake at night.”

“I just throw a sock over him and stick him under the bed.”

“What do you think would happen if you opened the bottle?”

“I think that would be a really bad idea,” said Jinx.

“That’s what I think too,” said Elfwyn. “It was closed with magic, and it has to be opened with magic. And the right kind of magic.”

Jinx thought of the spell Simon had done on him. What had really made it hard to sleep was thinking about himself, stuck in a bottle somewhere, pacing around in little circles like Simon was. When he thought about that, it almost made him want to take Simon’s bottle and drop it off the edge of the island and watch it smash on the rocks below.