Jinx (28 page)

The other thing that kept him awake was watching the Bonemaster’s deadline creep closer.

“It’s just lucky the Bonemaster hasn’t gone down to check on it,” said Elfwyn.

“Maybe he doesn’t go down there much,” said Reven. He’d been sitting and listening to them with a small smile, like someone who has a secret. Jinx was trying not to be irritated by it.

“I think I might have told the door that I’m its boss now, and he isn’t,” said Jinx.

“Won’t he be able to fix that pretty easily?” said Elfwyn.

“Yeah, probably. And he’ll know we’ve been down there.”

“Anyway, we only have two days left,” said Reven, still with that annoying smile.

“Tomorrow and the next day. One day, really. He might just kill us on the morning of the thirty-first, you know.” Elfwyn sighed. “Although he still talks as if he expects Simon to show up. Do you think he will, Jinx?”

“Doesn’t look like it, does it?” said Jinx. “Look, you guys are just going to have to climb down that cliff and leave me.”

“I’m sure you can do it too,” said Elfwyn, not sounding sure at all. “Well, you have to at least try, Jinx.”

Reven’s smile broke into a grin. “Indeed, he needn’t, my lady.”

He took a small silver box from his pocket and placed it on the bed with a flourish.

Elfwyn lifted the lid. “Oh.”

Jinx leaned forward and saw, folded up on the box’s black velvet lining, what looked like a tiny model of the Bone Bridge. It could have been made of mouse bones, tied together with thread.

Elfwyn picked up a bone between her thumb and forefinger and lifted the bridge by it. As soon as it came out of the box it began to expand. Reven put out a hand to stop her.

“It’s quite difficult to get it back into the box if you let it grow.”

“Where did you find it?” said Elfwyn.

“In a secret compartment in the back of a drawer in the kitchen,” said Reven. “I’ll put it back there tonight, in case he looks. But you can see, it looks as if the bridge is actually made of the bones of something quite small.”

“No,” said Jinx.

“No?” Reven raised an eyebrow.

“You can shrink big things to hide them,” said Jinx. “But there isn’t any kind of magic to make small things big. It’s not possible. Small things just fall apart when you make them bigger. Anyway, we’ve seen that he has no shortage of bones.”

“So now we can get away,” said Elfwyn. “We just have to fix the bridge to the posts—oh. I suppose it has to be attached at the bottom, too.”

“That’s no problem,” said Reven. “I’ll just attach it at the top, and climb down the cliff, and fix it to the anchors at the bottom. There are two more posts down there.”

“Then all we need is for the Bonemaster to be out of the way for a while.” Elfwyn sounded thoughtful.

“He takes a nap every day,” said Reven.

“For thirty minutes,” said Elfwyn. “That’s not long enough to set up the bridge.”

“And get the bottles,” said Jinx.

They both looked at him. “I think if we take the bottles with us,” he said, “then the Bonemaster won’t be able to use their power anymore. At least if we get them far enough away from him.”

“Good. So the Bonemaster can’t send any more windstorms after us,” said Reven.

“I don’t think he can have caused the windstorm,” said Jinx. “But at least he won’t have his power.”

“Besides, it’s
people
in the bottles,” said Elfwyn. “Even if they’re dead.”

“Yeah,” said Jinx. He remembered the feeling of the power he had drawn on when he opened the door. There was something—not alive, exactly, but
real
about that power, and it didn’t deserve to be locked up in the dark, serving the Bonemaster.

“Good,” said Reven. “When the Bonemaster lies down for his nap, I’ll fix the bridge to the top of the cliff, climb down, and fix it to the bottom, while you two fetch the bottles.”

“That will take more than half an hour,” said Jinx.

They thought for a minute.

“You can climb down the cliff before he takes his nap,” said Jinx. “He won’t notice, because you’re always off exploring. Then when he lies down for his nap, I’ll take the bridge out of the box, fix it to the top posts, and throw the rest of the bridge down the cliff—” He had to stop because he felt ill.

“Perhaps it would be best if the lady fixed the bridge to the top of the cliff.”

“And you can be stealing the bottles at the same time, Jinx,” said Elfwyn.

“It still seems like it will take more than half an hour,” said Jinx.

“That won’t matter,” said Elfwyn. “Because of the posset that I’ll give him before his nap.”

“You’re going to poison him?” Jinx felt a little uncomfortable about this in spite of the skulls and all the times the Bonemaster had hit him.

“No, I’m going to make a sleeping potion.”

“You know how to make a sleeping potion?”

“Not exactly. But I found a recipe for one in one of the Bonemaster’s books. And I’m sure you can help me figure it out.”

“We’ll have to do it tonight,” said Jinx.

There wasn’t much time left.

They made the potion at midnight. The castle was silent when they snuck downstairs.

Reven stayed in the great hall, hidden in the shadows, keeping watch. At the first sign of the Bonemaster, he would cough to warn them, and they would do what, exactly? They weren’t sure. Besides the door, there was no way out of the Bonemaster’s laboratory.

“We could hide down in the dungeon with the bottles,” said Elfwyn.

But neither of them liked the idea.

“We start out with dragon’s blood the size of a hen’s egg,” said Elfwyn, looking at the book. “Mixed in with nixie’s eyeballs—oh, that’s not very nice!”

“They don’t sell the eyeballs till the nixies are already dead,” said Jinx, climbing up the stepladder to get the jar. “From natural causes. Or anyway, you know—other causes.”

Dying of natural causes wasn’t common in the Urwald.

“The dragons too?” said Elfwyn.

“The dragons aren’t dead. They just make a little slit in their underbellies and—”

“Who does?”

“I don’t know. I think the dragons do it themselves.”

“They sell their own blood?” said Elfwyn.

“Why not? It’s their blood.” Jinx fetched down the other jars, one by one: grated gryphon claw, bat wings, werebear hair, and dried leaves of night-blooming bindweed.

Elfwyn had already started the dragon’s blood heating in a retort over a lighted candle and was pounding the nixie’s eyes and bindweed leaves together in a mortar. Jinx leaned against the workbench and watched. It didn’t seem fair that she was so much better at this stuff when he’d spent half his life in a wizard’s house. Still, he had to admire how neatly and skillfully she did it.

“Are you listening for Reven?” said Elfwyn.

“Yeah,” said Jinx, who had forgotten all about it.

“Good,” said Elfwyn. “I keep forgetting to.”

Smack!
Something hit the window, hard. Jinx whirled around and saw a white-green, rubbery creature clinging to the outside of the window, its skinny limbs splayed against the glass.

It stared at them with yellow bubble eyes. Its mouth was a tube protruding from its face, with pale white lips working back and forth, as if they couldn’t wait to start sucking someone’s blood out through their eyeballs. It emitted a long, groaning howl.

“What
is
that?” Reven was in the doorway.

“The ghoul,” said Jinx.

“Come on, into the kitchen,” said Reven. “The Bonemaster will hear that.”

Elfwyn blew out the candle and they hurried out into the hall and into the kitchen, where they crawled under the table and waited, listening. The ghoul howled again. It sounded like the wind on a stormy night. In fact, Jinx realized, he’d heard it before and had thought that was what it was. They waited for the sound of the Bonemaster’s footsteps on the stairs, in the hall.

Time crept past.

“He’s not coming,” said Elfwyn at last.

“I’ll go look,” said Reven.

He left the kitchen, moving so quietly that Jinx almost couldn’t hear him. Several minutes passed. Finally he came back.

“He’s snoring,” he reported.

Jinx and Elfwyn went back to the laboratory, and Reven went back to standing guard.

The ghoul came twice more while they were working. It stared at them with its big yellow eyes and worked its mouth hungrily, and Jinx wondered how strong the glass in the window was.

“Hold this over the candle and agitate it, please,” said Elfwyn, handing him a glass phial in a clamp.

Jinx shook the potion over the flame, gently, just enough to stir it. “It would be easier to just poison him,” he muttered.

“You said we couldn’t do that.”

“Oh, no, we can’t,” said Jinx.

“It would make us as bad as him,” said Elfwyn. She was cleaning up the workbench.

“I know,” said Jinx. “I just said it would be easier, that’s all.”

“Well, we can’t, because he asks me if it’s poisoned.”

“He what?”

“When I give him the posset, he sometimes asks me if it’s poison.”

“Oh.” Jinx thought about this. “Won’t you have to tell him about the sleeping potion if he asks you, then?”

“No, because a sleeping potion isn’t poison,” said Elfwyn. “And he’s never asked me if it’s a sleeping potion. I think it’s done.”

Jinx took the potion off the flame. It smelled like rotting slime. “You think he’ll actually drink something that stinks this much?”

“Oh, yes. The posset will hide the smell and the taste—I’ve been making it extra strong on purpose.”

She held out a bottle, and Jinx carefully tipped the contents of the phial into it. The ghoul smacked against the window again, but they were used to it now. They didn’t even jump.

Jinx was in the laboratory alone. He had his backpack, and Elfwyn’s and Reven’s backpacks, and an empty gunnysack from the kitchen. It was time to steal the bottles. Reven had climbed down the cliff already. Elfwyn had given the Bonemaster the potion and gone outside with the Bone Bridge in her pocket.

Jinx had to draw on the power in the bottles beneath him to lift the stone trapdoor. He hated doing it.

He took Simon out of his pocket and set him on the floor—he didn’t want him falling out of his pocket when he climbed. He threw the backpacks and sack into the hole and then clambered down after them. In the cold silence of the passage, he felt completely alone in the world.

In the yellow flickering candlelight the tiny people were just shadows of themselves through the curved glass. Jinx tried not to look at them as he put them into the bags, one by one. He could feel the power reaching for him. Trying to use him, maybe.

The bottles rang when they touched each other. Jinx worked as quickly and quietly as he could. He knew he had more time because of Elfwyn’s potion, but he couldn’t quite make himself believe it.

At last all the bottles were in the bags. Jinx picked up his own pack and put it on his back. He put his arms through Reven’s pack and wore it on his chest. Then he picked up Elfwyn’s pack in his left hand and the sack in his right—
clank
. He took a step.
Clank, clank
. Another step, carefully. The bottles rattled and clunked. Jinx stopped and set the bags down.

He looked at the beam of light from the trapdoor. It wasn’t just the noise—how was he going to climb back up the ladder laden like this?

Then he heard footsteps in the laboratory overhead.

He froze. The trapdoor was open, plain to see. And Simon in his bottle beside it.

The footsteps came up to the trapdoor, and the light beam was broken by something moving across it. Someone was coming down the ladder.

“What’s taking you so long?” It was Elfwyn.

“The bags make too much noise,” he said.

“So levitate them.”

“I can’t. I can’t use the power, it’s all evil-filling. I’ll end up like him.”

“No you won’t. Not from a levitation spell. It’s just till we get down from the island.”

Jinx didn’t like it, but he didn’t see any way around it. He drew on the power in the bottles—the cold from it seemed to fill his bones. But evil wasn’t the right word for it, he realized. It was more like the power had been … wronged. Twisted. He levitated the bottles.

“Now just float them up through the trapdoor,” said Elfwyn.

“I know what to do,” said Jinx. “You don’t have to tell me.”

The bags were weightless now, and he pushed them along the passageway on a cushion of air, making very little noise. When he reached the light beam, he sent them up it to the trapdoor. He sent them up higher still, out of sight—he’d never done magic out of sight before. He had to draw more of the cold, dead-alive power to do it.

Elfwyn came behind him, carrying the candle. They climbed up the iron rungs. The four bags were waiting for them, floating three feet above the floor. Jinx picked up the bottle of Simon he’d left by the trapdoor.