Jinx's Fire (21 page)

Skeletons and Deathbindings

T
here were footsteps in the distance, and then the creak of a door opening. Heavy, booted feet thudded down the skull-lined corridor. Jinx stood behind the table and braced himself.
He wanted the Bonemaster dead.

The Bonemaster strode into the chamber. “You! How did you get in here?”

Before Jinx could answer, more running feet rang in the corridor. Jinx groaned inwardly as Elfwyn burst into the room.

“Leave him to me!” Jinx yelled.

Elfwyn flung a spell at the Bonemaster that was purple and flashed. Jinx ducked. The Bonemaster fell to the
ground as the flash hit him. Then Elfwyn spread her arms, flapped them, and began running round and round the chamber clucking like a chicken.

The Bonemaster picked himself up. “I did warn you, my dear.”

“Bawk, bawk, bawk!” said Elfwyn, flapping madly. Her head bobbed back and forth as she ran.

Jinx tried to set the Bonemaster on fire, but was too wrapped up in ice somehow to do it. He couldn't find the fire.

Then Sophie came running in, throwing things at the Bonemaster—Jinx saw a clay jar, a candlestick, and a hammer sail through the air. The Bonemaster dodged.

Elfwyn stretched her neck out. “BAWWK! Buckbuckbuck bawk!”

The Bonemaster cast a spell, and Sophie flew to the wall and stuck firmly, struggling like a fly in honey.

“Jinx!” she cried. “Remember what it said in the Eldritch Tome!”

“The Eldritch Tome you assured me didn't exist?” the Bonemaster asked her. “What did it say?”

Jinx tried again to summon fire to throw at the Bonemaster. But Simon had been right . . . the fire was impossibly out of reach now. The ice didn't want fire; fire melted ice.

He tried to think of a language the Bonemaster wouldn't
know—Herwa, maybe? “What did it say?” he demanded in Herwa.

“‘Let death be bound in ice, ever circling. Fly free to the flame when the tie is undone,'” said Sophie, in Herwa, and, in Jinx's opinion, unhelpfully.

“It's discourteous,” said the Bonemaster, in the same language, “to speak a language that everyone present doesn't understand.” He raised a fist to cast a spell at Jinx. “I doubt Elfwyn knows Herwa.”

“Anyway, I don't know what you mean!” Jinx yelled, diving behind the table as the Bonemaster sent a flash of black lightning at him. The bottle on the table rocked dangerously. Jinx looked up at the circling ribbons.

“
Those
are the deathbindings!” Sophie said. “As close to
his
life as possible! But no one can touch them and live!”

“You mean—oh.” Jinx made sure he was still firmly fixed on the Path of Ice. “I think I—” No, there was no time to argue. Hopefully she was wrong about that last bit. He held his breath, and reached out and grabbed a ribbon as it sped past.

He caught it, just for a moment, then it jerked and squirmed out of his grasp and went on circling the bottle. But in the second he'd touched it, an image of Simon came into his head—not a face, but the things that were really Simon, the jagged flashes of orange, the warm blue cloud.

Sophie was right. Each ribbon was a deathbinding. One
of them was Simon's. One was probably his own. Elfwyn and Sophie were sure to have ribbons. Reven would have one . . .

The Bonemaster, meanwhile, had been readying another spell. A green flash hit Jinx, a shock worse than touching ice-glass. It threw him across the room. Jinx hit the stone wall and everything went wavery and gray for a moment.

He was surprised Sophie even knew the words she called the Bonemaster.

“Don't overestimate your value as a hostage,” the Bonemaster told her.

Elfwyn charged at the Bonemaster, neck out, squawking rapidly.

Jinx took advantage of the distraction to get up and stagger back to the table. He grabbed a ribbon and held on tight. Remembering that he wanted the Bonemaster dead—Path of Ice, Path of Ice—he wrenched the writhing, squiggling thing free of the mass.

It leapt away from him, and for a moment they all watched it twist and spin in the air before it burst into blue flame and vanished.

“That was Reven,” said Jinx. “I guess you bound his death to yours when you held us captive.”

“I didn't need that young fool anyway,” said the Bonemaster. “Rufus and Bluetooth will take care of him for me. You realize that—”

“None of those kings would have been able to get so far into the Urwald if you hadn't sealed the Paths of Fire and Ice,” said Jinx.

“Precisely so,” said the Bonemaster.

Jinx could feel Elfwyn frantically trying, between flaps and squawks, to undo the spell that held Sophie. She seemed to be doing the magic right, but couldn't match the Bonemaster's vast deathforce power, drawn from the Path of Ice. Jinx felt his way into the spell. But power was giving him trouble. He was used to fire, and it was still
there
, but it was hard to find it through the deathforce ice. And as for the fire inside him, it was barely there at all.

Sophie let out a muffled gasp and began to turn purple. Jinx recognized the spell—the Bonemaster was shrinking her clothes, squeezing the breath out of her. Angrily Jinx reached into the spell and tried to reverse it. The trouble was he couldn't get ahold of the lifeforce power, because he seemed to be stuck in the deathforce ice: The more the Bonemaster hurt Sophie, the more Jinx wanted him dead.

So Jinx used deathforce and undid the squeezing spell.

He was feeling his way into the stuck-to-the-wall spell when the Bonemaster spun around and cast a spell that sent Jinx flying through the air. Jinx hit the wall hard and slid to the floor. He lay there stunned, and watched Elfwyn free herself and Sophie. Jinx frantically tried to use KnIP
to dig a hole under the Bonemaster's feet, but it was too slow.

“Bawkbawkbawkbawk!” cried Elfwyn warningly.

There came a ripping, rending sound from the corridor. Jinx watched, transfixed, as the bones and skulls tore themselves free of the walls and moved toward the chamber, clanking and assembling themselves as they came.

Then the chamber was full of skeletons, hundreds of skeletons, dancing and rattling, kicking and swinging. They were all coming at Jinx. Sophie, meanwhile, was stuck back to the wall.

Elfwyn gave another squawk of warning. There was a swooshing sound, and the Bonemaster's hired ghoul flew into the room, its tubular greenish-white mouth flexing, its huge eyes searching for victims. Ghouls sucked people's brains out through their eyeballs. The ghoul swooped toward Sophie . . .

“Set the ghoul on fire!” Jinx yelled. He couldn't do it himself, he was nearly buried in skeletons and he couldn't find the fire. They clawed at his eyes and encircled his throat with bony hands. Their horrible cold arms and legs battered at him. He punched and kicked, and they flew to pieces, but there were always more coming at him.

Through the crowding skulls and vertebrae, he could see that the ghoul was aflame. Its low, moany wails filled the chamber. The Bonemaster was turned toward Sophie,
ready to cast a spell, and Elfwyn was flapping and squawking and trying to summon a spell of her own.

Jinx charged through the skeletons, sending bones flying everywhere, and grabbed the bottle from the table.

It was like grabbing an armful of ice-cold electric eels. Jinx had to cling to the Path of Ice—plant his thoughts firmly on it—to keep the bottle from sending horrible shocks through his body, and at the same time he had to fight to keep the bottle from wriggling out of his arms.

He kicked over the table. He could see the gaping hole in the floor that led to the Path of Ice. He just hoped the Bonemaster could see it too.

“Hey, Bonemaster!” he yelled. “I've got your life!”

He jumped down the hole.

Jinx hit the ice and slid, clutching the bottle. He grabbed a ribbon of smoke and pulled it loose as he fell, set it free, and watched it flame. It was someone he didn't recognize, a person with soft, bewildered purple thoughts.

He pulled another ribbon loose—where was the Bonemaster? He was supposed to follow Jinx, not stay behind and keep attacking Elfwyn and Sophie—

The ribbon floated free with shocking-pink splashes of joy. Another stranger. The ribbon flamed and vanished. The next ribbon—

Something slammed into Jinx, almost knocking the bottle out of his grip. It was the Bonemaster. Jinx and
the Bonemaster zipped down the slope, tumbling over and over as they wrestled for the bottle. They fought as if they weren't magicians—they kicked and punched, and meanwhile Jinx managed to wrest another ribbon free with his teeth. This one was brown and blue, wreathed in silver—Sophie! So that was one less person he had to worry about. (If you didn't count that he'd left her being attacked by skeletons and a burning ghoul.)

Jinx managed to wrap himself around the bottle. The Bonemaster's fists and feet hammered every part of Jinx that they could reach. Jinx was able to free two more ribbons—both strangers to him—as he kicked back.

He tried to set the Bonemaster on fire. But it was impossible—not a flicker of flame came to his call. He was too firmly on the Path of Ice. And he didn't dare leave it while he had the bottle in his hands.

He felt a squeezing sensation—the Bonemaster was shrinking his clothes. Jinx undid the spell, and turned it back on the Bonemaster. The Bonemaster undid it, and slammed Jinx's head against the wall.

Jinx saw stars and black flashes. He could feel the Bonemaster tugging at the bottle. Jinx kneed him, hard, then kicked him away with both feet. The Bonemaster slid until he reached a flat space in the corridor.

Put up a ward, you idiot, Jinx told himself, and did so . . . a quick, messy ward that stayed with him as he slid.
He skidded down the last of the slope and bowled ward-first into the Bonemaster. The ward knocked the wizard flying.

The Bonemaster picked himself up. He stood there for a moment, his thumbs twitching, and Jinx could see from the whirring and slashing of the knives in his thoughts that he was working up a big spell.

Standing inside the ward, Jinx frantically grabbed handfuls of ribbons and threw them into the air. Colors and lights twisted and flashed in the air, then flamed out. One of the ribbons was orange and jagged on one side, warm and blue on the other—Simon. He'd freed Simon and Sophie from the deathbinding curse. That left only—

The Bonemaster threw the spell at Jinx.

It was a whole storm of spells. The first one froze the ward and shattered it, sending shards of magic flying everywhere. The second froze Jinx so that he couldn't move. It wasn't the clothes-freezing spell; it was Jinx himself, cold and frozen and unable to blink or breathe. He could see, though—the Bonemaster's tight, pleased smile. And he could hear—a crackling sound as the ice of the corridor grew inward, from the ceiling and walls, toward him. And he could hear the thud of his own heart, which hadn't stopped yet, but would soon, and the swish of something coming down the steep slope behind him—

Which smashed into him, hard. If he hadn't been
frozen, he would have dropped the bottle. He crashed into the Bonemaster, and they zoomed the length of the flat space.

“BAWK! Buckbuckbuck BAWK!” cried Elfwyn, flapping her arms and stretching her neck. The three of them skidded and screeched down the next slope, Jinx frantically working his way into the spell the Bonemaster had cast on him. As soon as he'd undone enough to move his hands, he tore wildly at the last few ribbons on the bottle. He got Elfwyn's ribbon free—it was green woven through with blue. That was everyone he knew who'd been held captive by the Bonemaster, except himself. There were four ribbons left, and then three, and two, and one—

The last ribbon, deep green with angry red streaks, zipped free of the bottle and burned out in a bright green flash.

Jinx hadn't seen his own ribbon, which meant the Bonemaster had probably deathbound him somewhere else, in some other way. Drat!

Elfwyn pointed and clucked wildly.

The Bonemaster, fighting to regain his feet as he slid, was readying another spell. There was no time for Jinx to worry about his own deathbound life. Killing the Bonemaster was likely to prove fatal to Jinx.

So was not killing him, though.

There was nothing else for it. Concentrating hard, he
did three things at once.

He let go of the ice and reached for the fire, hard. He threw the bottle at the Bonemaster, harder still. And he sent all of the flame, all of the vast lifeforce of the Path of Fire into the bottle with all his might.

The bottle burst into flames and shattered into a million pieces.

Blue, ice-cold smoke washed over Jinx and Elfwyn
.
Flames filled the corridor—red flames, pale blue flames, deep green fire that crackled and rippled over Jinx's skin.

When the smoke cleared, Jinx saw the Bonemaster engulfed in an ice-blue column of fire. Then water from acres of ice came rushing down the path, sizzling. The flames around the Bonemaster fizzed and spat.