Jinx (12 page)

“I just want the boy,” said Simon.

The Preceptress gripped Jinx’s shoulder, to his intense annoyance. Her hand felt like the claw of a large bird.

“You just opened those doors with
magic
.” She made it sound dirty.

“I didn’t break anything. Yet. Give me the boy.”

“We certainly don’t intend to let you harm an innocent child.”

Simon surged down the aisle. The scribes drew back and pulled the hems of their robes close about them as he passed. “He’s
my
boy.”

He grabbed Jinx’s arm, not hard enough to hurt but quite tightly. The Preceptress’s fingers dug into Jinx’s shoulder, and that did hurt. Neither of them was looking at Jinx: they were both staring each other down, their foreheads wrinkled, their eyebrows lowered, their eyes boring into each other. Jinx had a feeling they might rip him in two without even remembering he was there.

Jinx didn’t much like Simon coming in and claiming Jinx was
his
, but he definitely wasn’t the Preceptress’s. On the whole he thought he was his own.

There was a heavy thud of footsteps from the covered walkway, and half a dozen men with swords in their hands clattered into the hall and stopped. They looked from the Preceptress to Simon and didn’t seem to know what to do. Then expressions of alarm appeared on their faces, and Jinx realized Simon had frozen their clothes.

“Your guards can’t hurt me,” said Simon. “Let go of the boy and I’ll take him and leave.”

“You think you’ll be allowed to leave?”

“If I don’t leave, many people will regret it.”

Simon sounded really menacing. The Preceptress’s grip on Jinx’s shoulder slackened just enough that Jinx was able to shrug, duck, and wrench himself free. He and Simon started running at the same moment. The guards came to life behind them—the clothes-freezing spell worked only if you could see the people you were freezing. Jinx and Simon cascaded down the steps and across the courtyard into the marketplace, where the brawl now seemed to involve everybody.

“Let go of me,” Jinx panted.

Simon said nothing but ran around the edge of the crowd, and Jinx was yanked along after him, his feet managing to hit the ground about two steps out of every three. Shouts came from the edges of the fighting crowd—

“Simon! Simon Magus! I told you I saw him!”

“Faster!” said Simon.

The pounding feet of the guards were right behind them. Out of the corner of his eye Jinx saw people from the crowd running toward him and Simon—and a lot of the crowd was ahead of them. In another moment they would be surrounded.

Then Simon fell.

Jinx was too dumbfounded to do anything at first. Simon falling was as unthinkable as a mighty tree falling. More. Simon was vanishing under a pile of guards, and Jinx stood there. Simon had let go of Jinx’s arm, but Jinx didn’t run away. He couldn’t, and leave Simon.

“Get me out of here, Jinx!”

The guards were in a helpless heap, their clothes frozen again, their hands struggling to control the swords that flopped in their unsupported hands. It was a waving mass of swords. Then one by one the swords dropped to the ground as the guards’ wrists gave out.

“They’ve killed him!” someone in the crowd yelled. “The wizard’s dead!”

Jinx grabbed an immobilized guard and tried to haul him off of Simon. The man glared furiously at Jinx and tried to bite him. Hands in the pile tried to grab him. Jinx recognized Simon’s long, thin hand amid the bodies, grabbed it, and pulled.

There was a lot of flailing, groaning, and kicking, and finally Jinx fell backward on the stones with Simon beside him. Simon was still staring at the guards, unblinking.

“There’s people all around us, Simon,” Jinx said, getting to his feet.

“They’d better stay back or I’ll turn them into lizards!”

Simon lifted his head slightly so that his gaze included part of the crowd, and Jinx saw that their clothes had been frozen too. But he could hear the angry mutters of the people behind them, and when he turned around, he realized that Simon was dealing with only a quarter of the people surrounding them.

Looking back toward the Temple, Jinx could see the red-robed people on the porch, watching.

“Get ready to run,” Simon said in Urwish. He stood up slowly without breaking the gaze that held some of his enemies immobilized.

Jinx had never been more ready to run in his life.

He heard a clatter of hoofbeats, and in far less time than seemed possible after the sound, armored men on horses came pouring down a road into the square. The crowd scattered ahead of them. Simon grabbed Jinx’s arm and ran straight toward the onrushing army.

Straight toward the horsemen? That was crazy! Jinx tried not to follow. He tried to drag his feet, but Simon kept pulling him onward, and Jinx didn’t dare fall down for fear of the horses trampling him to death. Then the horses were around him and Simon. There was no smell of horseflesh and nothing touched them.

“Illusion,” Jinx said aloud.

“Shut up and run,” Simon panted.

They ran, and after a minute or two they heard running footsteps behind them. Simon’s illusion of the horsemen hadn’t lasted, or the crowd had realized it was an illusion. They turned down one street, and then another.

Jinx didn’t recognize anything familiar about the street, but Simon ran up to a blue-violet door and opened it. Then they were inside, back in the dusty, unused sitting room, and Simon slammed the door shut and fell against it, and they both stood gasping for breath.

J
inx recovered his breath first. “What was—”

“You idiot!”
Simon was still leaning against the door. “How did you—how did you—” He was too out of breath to continue.

“I’m not an idiot,” said Jinx. “That was the place Sophie comes from. Samara. Where
was
it?”

He knew it was through the door. But now they were back in Simon’s house, which was in the Urwald, which Samara most definitely was not.

“Go. Into the house.” Simon spoke through clenched teeth.

“Can I look at these books?”

Simon didn’t answer, and Jinx decided not to press the point.

He came to the blank wall, reached out for the door, and opened it.

“How did you do that?” Simon demanded behind him. His tight-sounding voice scared Jinx.

“I know it’s there,” said Jinx.

Simon didn’t answer, and Jinx walked fast to the kitchen, wanting to get away. Simon hardly ever got really angry at Jinx, not like this. Usually he was just cranky.

Out in the kitchen, Jinx was headed straight for the front door when Simon said, “Jinx, come here.”

Something in his voice didn’t sound right. Jinx stopped and turned around. Simon was sitting on the stove steps.

“Take a look at this and tell me how bad it is,” Simon said.

Jinx had a sudden cold wave of dread, as if he’d just swallowed ice. There was a steady line of dark-red drips along the floor from the passageway to the step where Simon sat. Jinx went over to Simon, who was trying to point to a spot on his back just below his shoulder. Reluctantly, fearing what he would see, Jinx looked. There was a spreading stain on the back of Simon’s purple robe.

“I—can’t tell. You’ll have to take it off,” said Jinx. His voice sounded as loud and strange as it had inside the Temple of Knowledge. Reality seemed to have been sucked out of the room.

“Pull this sleeve for me.”

Jinx pulled on the sleeve, helping Simon out of the top of his robe. The shirt he wore underneath it was drenched with blood.

“I—I guess I should cut your shirt off,” said Jinx.

“Press that sleeve against the wound first. See if you can stop the bleeding.”

Jinx wadded up a sleeve of the purple robe and pressed it against where he thought the blood was coming from, right under Simon’s left shoulder blade. Jinx had seen pictures of the insides of people in one of Simon’s books. Did wizards have hearts in the same place as normal people?

“Press harder,” said Simon.

Jinx did. Blood was soaking through onto his hand. He wanted to go back to the beginning of today and start over and have it all go differently.

“You said those guards couldn’t hurt you.”

“Lied,” said Simon succinctly.

“Simon!”

Jinx was enormously glad to hear that voice.

Sophie burst into the kitchen, a wave of fury. “What on earth were you thinking of, coming to Samara! Are you insane?”

Her fists were clenched. She looked ready to hit somebody, and Jinx wasn’t about to tell her that Simon had gone to Samara looking for him.

“Stirring up the Temple, stirring up the populace—it’s lucky no one was killed!”

Sophie’s raging seemed to draw reality down into the room again. Jinx was relieved to have it back. Simon’s face was getting paler, and the look he was giving his wife was a funny one. Jinx had no idea what he was thinking.

“I—I think Simon might’ve gotten killed,” Jinx said.

“What?”

“He’s—” Jinx nodded at his hand, which was still pressed as hard as he could against the seeping blood.

Sophie pushed aside the bloody sleeve, Jinx’s hand, and Jinx with the same motion. “Get some dittany, Jinx. And boil some water.”

Jinx ran to the workroom to find the herb. Then he pumped water into a kettle, swung it over the fire, and used the bellows to puff the fire to life. After that he ran for other things Sophie wanted—a white sheet, and more herbs, and then a needle and thread, which he was supposed to boil. Then he spread a blanket on the floor and helped Sophie help Simon to lie facedown on it.

Sophie ripped the bloody shirt down the back. The blood had stopped pouring and was only welling up slowly now, from a jagged purple cut. Jinx felt sick.

“Bring me more candles,” said Sophie. “And get these cats out of here.”

Jinx found all the candles he could and set them burning around Simon, stuck into bottles and candlesticks. It looked too much like a funeral, especially since Simon’s eyes were closed and he’d stopped talking. Sophie was doing something with wet cloths and dittany, but Jinx couldn’t stand to look. He gathered up armloads of cats and dumped them in both wings of the house, closing the doors on them and locking the cat flaps.

“What should I do now?” Jinx asked.

“Go away,” said Sophie, not looking up.

It had to be very bad for Sophie to speak to Jinx like that. He went, wanting to help but not knowing how.

He went through the door into Simon’s part of the house. He looked at the wall that was really a door into Samara. Then he went into the workroom. The
Knowledge Is Power
book was lying open on the workbench. Jinx must have left it there. That was how Simon had known to follow him. Jinx slammed the book shut and stuck it among the other books on the shelf, shoving it as far back as he could. He wished he’d never seen it.

Except that he was glad he’d been to Samara. Even though he hadn’t found his magic there, the world was much bigger now than it had been. He wanted to go back, to explore it some more. He walked back to the hidden door. There was a bloodstain on the floor, half covered by the stone wall. Jinx reached through the stone and touched the door.

He went back into the workroom and started putting away the things he’d disturbed while he was fetching herbs for Sophie.

The door to the kitchen creaked; there were footsteps in the hall. “Jinx?”

Sophie came into the room.

“Oh, there you are,” she said.

Her hands were covered with dried blood. She looked exhausted. Jinx waited for her to tell him.

“What happened, Jinx?”

“Is he dead?”

“No,” said Sophie. She went over to Simon’s stool and sat down. “No. If he has a heart, they missed it.”

“So he’s going to be all right?”

“I don’t know. There are”—she paused and shook her head—“a lot of things that can happen. If only we could take him back to Samara. There are physicians there—”

“Can’t we bring them here?”

“No,” said Sophie. Her voice shook, and Jinx had a horrible feeling that she was going to cry, which he wanted to see even less than he had wanted to see all that blood.

“I’ll get you something to drink,” said Jinx, getting out of there.

When he came back with a mug of cider and a wet towel for her hands, she had gotten control of herself. Jinx was relieved. She wiped her hands clean and drank the cider. After that she looked a little better.

“What happened today?” Sophie asked again.

“Oh. Er, what did Simon say happened?”

“He didn’t say anything, Jinx. He’s unconscious.”

“We—well, we went to the Temple and then the guards chased us, and he fell down and got stabbed, and then we ran back here.”

“Why on earth would Simon take you to Samara?”

“Well, he didn’t. I sort of went. Where is Samara?” he asked, to change the subject.