Jinx's Fire (20 page)

“Very nice,” said Simon. “But the bottle is in in the Bonemaster's dungeon. And you are not.”

“I'll go there,” said Elfwyn. “He'll let me in. He likes me.”

“Excuse me,” said Wendell. “But you were there for a year, and then you came here. He must know that, surely. What makes you think—”

“No questions,” Satya said. She and Elfwyn seemed to have made up their quarrel. In fact, Jinx had seen them earlier, huddled over a bunch of mistletoe leaves and having an earnest discussion.

“He's not going to believe you this time,” said Jinx. “If you go back, he'll kill you.”

“I don't think he will,” said Elfwyn.

“Could you kill him?” Simon demanded.

“N-no,” said Elfwyn. “But—”

“Why not?” said Simon.

“Because he trusts me! Stop asking me questions.”

“He doesn't trust anybody.”

“He's been kind to me,” said Elfwyn. “And I know he's evil and I know he's done horrible things, and I think somebody should kill him and—and I wish I could kill him.”

“Never wish that,” said Simon.

“Anyway, Sophie's there,” said Elfwyn. “Somebody has to go in and tell Sophie—”

“The Bonemaster's got the Crimson Grimoire now,” said Jinx. “He can bottle your life. All he needs is . . .” Jinx stopped. All the Bonemaster needed was a human to sacrifice. And he had Sophie.

Jinx looked at Simon and decided not to say that.

“The way that werewolves would handle this,” said Malthus, “would be to let the person who had the greatest chance of success, try.”

“And that would be me,” said Elfwyn firmly.

“But we're not werewolves,” said Jinx.

“Excuse me. Some of us are,” said Malthus.

“That's what the Mistletoe Alliance would do as well,” said Satya, with a meaningful look at Simon.

Jinx looked at Elfwyn and saw the grim, green determination that meant there was no point in arguing with her. He looked at Wendell. He looked at all of the others in turn. He saw that everybody had thought about Sophie and the human sacrifice.

“Maybe I could go up the Path of Ice anyway,” said Jinx, “and not get stuck in the bottle, even if it is uncorked. I mean, no one knows for sure, do—”

“Yes,” Simon snapped. “Someone knows for sure. I do.”

“Then we have to let Elfwyn go,” said Jinx.

“What do you mean,
let
her?” Satya demanded.

Jinx shrugged. “Well, she's going to go anyway. We can't talk her out of it.”

“Fine,” said Simon. “Fine. So everybody's going off to get killed by the Bonemaster, in order. Right.” He stabbed the workbench with a finger. “Jinx goes first, down the Path of Fire and up the Path of Ice.” Another stab. “Then the magicians—”

“I go as soon as Jinx does,” said Elfwyn. “So that I can be at Bonesocket and cork the bottle before Jinx gets there.”

“Or get killed in the attempt,” said Simon. “Fine. Jinx goes”—stab—“then you go”—stab—“then the magicians go—”

“How will the magicians know when to go?” said Wendell.

“Wait.” Elfwyn stood up. “Make the plan without me, please. And when you're done, come and tell me, and—”

“Lie to you,” said Wendell.

“Yes,” said Elfwyn. She left.

“The magicians should attack just before Jinx reaches the dungeon,” said Malthus. “Their attack will distract the Bonemaster, enabling Elfwyn—”

“If she's still alive,” said Simon.

“If she's still alive, to go down and cork the bottle, leave some sort of signal for Jinx that it's been done—”

“Where's Sophie meanwhile?” asked Jinx.

“I'll go in and get her while the magicians are attacking,” said Simon.

“But you can't—”

Simon gave him a look, and Jinx shut up.

“It's just that I don't understand how you'll know when Jinx arrives,” said Wendell apologetically.

They all looked at Wendell.

“Oh,” said Jinx.

“Because once you get on the path,” said Wendell, “time is different for you. So unless there was some way for you to send a signal, like through the Farseeing Window, for example—”

“The aviot,” said Satya. “You can have people watch
the window, and Jinx can—I don't know, wave a sock or something when he's arrived.”

“And I was thinking,” said Wendell, “that maybe we could plant some sort of fake truths on Elfwyn to protect her and Sophie?”

“Like that Simon's done deathbindings and tied the Bonemaster's death to theirs,” Satya suggested.

“That's a good idea,” said Jinx.

Satya actually looked at him, and nodded an acknowledgment.

That reminded Jinx. “What about the deathbindings? The ones the Bonemaster's done? All the people that will die when he does. Did you guys find anything about that?”

“There's only this,” said Malthus.

Jinx peered at the Qunthk words, folded inside each other.

Let death be bound in ice, ever circling. Fly free to the flame when the tie is undone.

“The usual cryptic stuff,” said Simon.

Jinx nodded.

It all seemed settled, then. Except for his part, which he wasn't sure he understood all that well. The Paths, he ought to be able to handle those okay; he'd done it before. But—

“What am I supposed to do with the bottle once I get ahold of it?” he asked.

Malthus, Satya, and Simon looked at each other. They looked at the books spread out on the workbench. They looked at each other again.

“That,” said Malthus, “is what we're more or less relying on you to figure out.”

Captured by Elves

J
inx was back on the Paths of Fire and Ice. They looked nothing like they had before, but he'd expected that. The Elf Princess had told him he couldn't travel the same path twice.

He had walked for what seemed like forever. He'd stopped to eat several times. He passed through subterranean caves and caverns, fields and mountains, and skirted around the edge of a lake full of glowing silver mist. Nothing lived in it. Nothing lived anywhere.

He was lost.

Before, getting somewhere on the Paths had ultimately turned out to be a matter of knowing where he was going.
But now, even though he was perfectly well aware of his destination—Bonesocket—nothing he did seemed to take him there.

There was no use fighting it any longer. He was going to have to ask directions.

Getting himself back to the Eldritch Depths was easy, and he was once more ushered into the presence of the Elf Princess. This time she sat on a throne made of pink quartz and studded with emeralds.

“Has a millennium passed already?” she asked, amused. “You've kept rather well, for an organic creature.”

Jinx explained his problem.

“Ah,” said the Elf Princess. “You cannot reach Bonesocket because you cannot travel the Path of Ice. I'd have thought you'd have realized that.”

“But I traveled it before!”

The Princess put a finger to the corner of her perfect blue mouth. “If you traveled it, it was the Path of Fire.”

“But I touched the ice!”

“Touched it, perhaps. But if you want to travel the Path of Ice to its end, you must embrace the ice.”

“What, you mean do deathforce magic or something? I'm not going to do that.”

“What happened when you touched the ice?” she asked.

Jinx looked down at the floor, which was tiled in
alternating squares of jade and carnelian.

“You'd rather not say. You humans like to think that evil is something outside of you, don't you? But evil is right . . . here. . . .” She pointed.

“In my stomach?” said Jinx.

She flickered blue annoyance. “In your heart.”

“That's my stomach.”

“
Anyway
,” said the Elf Princess. “Whatever happened when you touched the ice, you must embrace it, or you cannot walk the path. And that, dear human, is all the help I intend to give you. It's far more than I've given most humans—”

“Well, you kill most humans, right?” said Jinx. “If you meet them, I mean.”

“Not always,” said the Princess. “In fact, before you go, there's something you ought to see.”

The Princess was burbling amusement. Jinx felt a sudden cold terror.

They left the throne room and crossed an agate floor to a deep lake of green glass. Beside it was a crystal waterfall, icy and unmoving. On the shore, amid a thicket of beryls and sapphires, sat Simon.

Jinx stared. “What are you doing here?”

Simon scowled under a lavender cloud of embarrassment. “Ask her.”

“You let yourself be captured by elves?” Jinx demanded.

“You wait till it happens to you,” said Simon. “Then tell me how much ‘let' there is about it.”

But I haven't lost my magic, Jinx thought. And you have. And now you can be captured by elves, just like . . . anybody. It was an awful thought.

“I only just left you—” Jinx began, and stopped. Time was different down here. “I only just left you, and you've already gone and gotten yourself stolen by elves! You . . . you . . . you idiot!”

“Don't you call me names, boy!” Simon struggled to stand, and Jinx saw that the wizard's feet were completely encased in the outcroppings of gems.

Jinx looked closer. “Are you stuck to the floor or something? Hold on.” He started to feel his way into the spell.

Only there wasn't a spell. There was only rock. Jinx tried to send fire into the gems, and Simon yelped in pain.

“Your magic won't work,” said the Princess. “Not without damaging that person.”

She was right. He couldn't melt the rock without burning Simon's legs off. Of all the— “I just can't believe you went and got yourself captured again!” said Jinx. “As soon as I turn my back! You know what your problem is? You think you can do anything!”

“
I
think I can do anything?” said Simon. “I'm not the one who thinks he can traipse up the Path of Ice into Bonesocket!”

“I don't walk out of the house and get myself captured
by elves when people are counting on me!” said Jinx. “You—” There just wasn't a word strong enough to express his frustration. Not in any language.

“You care about him very much, don't you?” The Elf Princess sounded merely curious.

Jinx looked away, furious. Urwalders didn't say things like that. “Let him go.”

“When you embrace the ice,” said the Elf Princess, “you may like it.”

“Let Simon go,” said Jinx.

“If you found a way to embrace both fire and ice together—”

“It's not possible,” said Simon.

“—then you would become very powerful. You would reign supreme. We don't want that. Therefore, we engaged in a very crude, human sort of ploy.”

“Jinx, just go,” said Simon. “Sophie and Elfwyn are at Bonesocket.”

“But—”

“And you have a chance to defeat him,” said Simon. “Just make sure that, if you touch the bottle, you're embracing the ice when you do it. I've been thinking about that. It's very important.”

“How do I embrace the ice?” said Jinx.

“What happened when you touched the ice?” said Simon.

“I . . . It . . . I . . .” Jinx didn't want to say.

“You wanted to kill people,” said Simon.

“It made me
think
that I did,” said Jinx. “I don't really.”

“Very admirable,” said Simon. “Get over it. To get to the Bonemaster's dungeon, you're going to have to want to kill him.”

“And then,” said the Princess, “you will have ice and be within reach of fire. You could become all-powerful.”

“That's not true,” said Simon. “To embrace the ice, you're going to have to let go of the fire.”

Jinx shrugged. “Okay. All I want is to defeat the Bonemaster and—”

“And seize his power?” said the Princess.

“No!”

“But the temptation will be there,” said the Princess. “It is the nature of organic beings to want more, when they already have enough. When I see that you have done as you say, and given up the power of ice, I will return this person to you.”

Jinx turned to Simon. “I can come back here with an ax—”

“Beneath the gems is adamantine,” said the Princess. “Unless you intend to chop off this person's legs, it will avail you nothing.”

“Just go,” said Simon. “Remember what I said. Let go of the fire. And hurry up! He's got Sophie, Elfwyn, and the Crimson Grimoire. And who knows how long this
little conversation has really lasted?”

Oh. Right.

“Okay. But don't eat anything,” said Jinx anxiously. “And don't drink anything. And—”

“You think I don't know that?” said Simon. “Go.”

Right. Jinx stood on the path, and looked up a steep slope of ice. He felt as if he'd gazed at hundreds of these in the last few—days? Hours? Months? There was no way of knowing. He had more than enough fire in him to melt it, as he'd done the others.

Instead, according to the Elf Princess, he had to embrace it.

“All right,” he said. “I don't want the Bonemaster to take up rose gardening or needlepoint. I don't want him to develop other interests and get out of the skull-and-bones business.”

He took a deep breath.

“I want him to die.”

And he began climbing.

It was easy. His boots gripped the ice as if it had been granite.

It seemed like only a few minutes later that he was staring up at the end of the Path of Ice.

He could see the underside of the table that stood in
the crypt under Bonesocket. And, weirdly, as if he were seeing two things at once, the table was both there and not there, and through it he could see the bottle.

Ribbons of smoke writhed around the bottle, as if in pain.

He couldn't see if there was a cork in it.

But he could see, lying under the table, a red hooded cloak . . . Elfwyn's signal. She'd corked the bottle.

Either that, or the Bonemaster had forced her to tell him what she was doing. In which case the signal was a trap.

Jinx took from his pocket a red-and-blue-striped sock. He waved it around. He waved it up, he waved it down. He went on waving it, until it suddenly occurred to him that he had no idea how much time was passing for the people peering into the Farseeing Window. He had to assume that whoever was watching had seen the signal and relayed the message, and that the magicians had leapt through the new doorpath Jinx had made, onto Bonesocket Island, and were attacking.

Jinx climbed up through the floor, and crawled out from under the table. He was standing now in the cavern under Bonesocket. It smelled of mold and graves. He looked up the corridor that was the other entrance to the chamber. It was lined with the bones of the Bonemaster's victims.

Remember that.

Hundreds of victims. Maybe thousands. Over how many years, and in how many places?

Anyway, enough to keep Jinx on the Path of Ice. He had to keep wanting the Bonemaster dead, or he wouldn't be able to touch the bottle.

He turned around and faced it.

The ribbons twisting around it slithered and jerked like snakes in agony. They looped over and under each other; they squirmed. They flailed. They went round and round the bottle in a mad, wriggling orbit.

He was just about to reach for the bottle when he heard the distant grate of stone on stone.

He knew what it was. Someone was opening the trap door that led from Bonesocket to the crypt.