Soul Jar: A Jubal Van Zandt Novel Read online

  “Four to one on Trocar.”

  “Put another three fifty on Trocar to win, then.”

  We spent a few minutes transferring money from my throwaway account to the hwaryna while Nickie-boy watched and pouted.

  The notification that I’d received my ticket popped up on my wristpiece. I checked it for any mistakes. Not that it mattered. When my account shut down in twenty-four hours, all of the fake funds I’d been throwing around today would disappear.

  “Looks good,” I told the hwaryna. “There’s just one last thing. Marinette didn’t bet with you, did she?”

  He tapped the nozzle on his incensor hose against his few remaining smoke-browned teeth. “Can’t be blabbing about my loyal customers now, can I?”

  Hwaryna is a family profession; this guy would’ve been working the odds since he was old enough to count. There was no way he felt loyalty to the new gang in town just because they let him set up shop in their smoke bar. He didn’t have any qualms about selling me non-industry information; he was just trying to make sure I understood that it didn’t come free.

  “Obviously not,” I said, sending him another funds transfer for the total amount of my bets. His was actually one of the cheapest wheels I’d greased in my life. “Was she through here today?”

  He checked the transfer, then grunted with satisfaction. “I’ve ’eard the name, bruv, but I don’t know who goes wif it.”

  Nick inched closer to the table, his expression changing from brooding disapproval to focused concentration.

  “A real skinny girl with a chilly purple undertone to her skin,” I repeated Nick’s description. I nodded at the Employees Only door under the stairs. “You may have seen her going in and out of the back room with paying clients.”

  “You’re looking for the Bwa Chech, then.” The hwaryna crossed his thumb and first finger, then touched them to his forehead to ward off evil. “She comes and goes, but she ain’t been in today. Most of the regulars been away, too. The piggies don’t show when feed ain’t put out, yeah?”

  Meaning this Marinette wasn’t some standard vocor-for-hire in the low levels of the Forsaken; she was leading them. An image of the Forsaken’s antisaint mambo sacrificing a fat black pig flashed through my mind.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Nick was looming over the table now. I leaned back in my seat, retaining the façade of calm in spite of the black energy twisting and popping in my muscle fibers. Inside my sneaks, my toes tapped and twitched.

  “Think she’ll be at the fights tonight?” I asked.

  The hwaryna grinned. “I think you’d have to kill her to keep her away, bruv.”

  FIFTEEN:

  Carina

  After the invocation, Carina tried to get back to the apothecary’s table and return the clay bowl to Yisu, hoping to have a chance to speak to her, but the girl with the aquamarine eyes had slipped away in the noise and confusion of the raiding party riding out. More suspicious behavior.

  Miyo returned to her own home for supper. As soon as Miyo’s mother, Qiva, mentioned retiring for the night, Carina agreed that it had been a long day and said she was going to bed as well. They said their goodnights and parted ways at their bedroom doors.

  When all sound of Qiva’s footsteps in the master bedroom had quieted, Carina padded silently to her window and slipped out onto the porch. She hung over the side, searched until she found the rudimentary floor joists underneath, then clambered over to the tree’s trunk, letting herself down into the swamp.

  Silver moonbeams glinted through the trees occasionally, and fluorescent squares of light from treehouse windows shined on the water, but the combination of leaf cover above and dark, dark water below seemed to absorb most of the light.

  No one was outside tonight save the guards who were on shift, but they weren’t really paying attention. With the alarm systems, there wasn’t any need to. If anything as big as a human crossed Tsunami Tsity’s perimeter before sunup, the whole tribe would hear about it. Miyo passed unnoticed under a trio of them on a porch playing knucklebones for pulls off a bottle of genu.

  At the western side of the village, Carina found the treehouse she was looking for. Even if Miyo’s superimposed memory hadn’t recognized the squat little hut as the home of the apothecary, the young feminine legs dangling off of the porch would’ve given it away.

  Yisu was alone, looking up at the moon through the leaves. While Carina watched, the girl with the aquamarine eyes took a deep breath and sighed.

  “Hi,” Carina said in Miyo’s voice.

  Yisu startled, looking behind her first, then at every porch nearby for the source of the greeting.

  “Down here.”

  Yisu followed the direction, then tried to smile. “Oh, hello, Priestess.”

  “Call me Miyo,” Carina said.

  “Miyo. I’m Yisu.”

  Carina nodded. “The apothecary’s apprentice. I remember you. Can I come up?”

  “To be honest, I was wondering why you weren’t up here already.” Yisu scooted over and made room. “I thought priestesses didn’t wet their feet except for ceremonies.”

  Careful, Miyo! You’re in danger of someone finding out that you’re different!

  Yisu is currently Wary of you.

  The rules for the fleshers’ world had been clearly defined so far. No deviation was allowed that couldn’t be made up for by a higher Appearance or Conduct skill. But in the real world, Carina had her own rules for dealing with people who deviated from the norm—either reveal how she was like them or pretend to be like them—and her gut told her that approach was the best one to take with Yisu, no matter what the game’s prompts said.

  “I guess I’m weird then,” Carina said. She climbed up the pole—appreciating again the level of physicality these VR games required and hoping that she would come out of this having regained a significant amount of the muscle she’d lost in that Soam prison pit—and onto the little hut’s porch, settling next to Yisu.

  “So,” Yisu said, looking out into the swamp, in the direction the raiders had ridden off earlier. “What are you doing out at this hour?”

  “Wondering the same thing about you.”

  Yisu scratched at her nose. “Just enjoying the night.”

  “It’s quiet,” Carina said, bending Miyo’s voice to make the statement an agreement. “And dark.”

  “I didn’t used to like it,” Yisu said. “The dark.”

  “I think I always did,” Carina said.

  Minutes passed with only the sounds of swamp insects and the lapping of water against the trees.

  Yisu looked up at the sky again. “Is this what it’s like where Envishtu is? Dark and silent and empty?”

  Carina nodded, then decided to add voice to the answer. “Yes.”

  “Sounds lonely,” Yisu whispered.

  Carina considered this through Miyo’s lens of priestesshood, then said, “Maybe that’s why he chose us. Maybe we keep him company.”

  Yisu’s brows furrowed, but she didn’t respond.

  “Or maybe we’re not enough,” Carina said, looking up at the sky. This was the part where Miyo couldn’t look Yisu in the eye under any circumstances. If she did, Yisu would feel like Miyo was trying to catfish out blasphemy, laying traps rather than truly pondering the same thing herself. “Maybe we can never be enough. Maybe that’s why he craves spilt blood and burning flesh.”

  Carina could feel Yisu’s aquamarine eyes on her, but she kept Miyo from looking over. The silence dragged out until it became uncomfortable.

  Just one more second…

  “Actually—” Carina made Miyo sound a little breathless and nervous. “—that’s stupid. Forget I said anything. Envishtu is mighty. The strong consume the weak because it is his will.”

  Heartbeats passed.

  “How do we know?” Yisu said in a small voice.

  “Because the ancestors told us so,” Miyo said automatically.

  “But who told them?”

 
“I…I don’t know.” Miyo sighed. “But sometimes I wish they hadn’t.”

  Yisu is no longer Wary of you!

  Yisu is now Very Suspicious!

  Carina didn’t let the prompt deter her. In highly guarded people, suspicion was a necessary step. Yisu had to feel suspicious now so that when Carina gained her trust there wouldn’t be a lingering shade of doubt.

  “I noticed you didn’t like the hides,” Miyo said. “When you held the stretcher for the tithing ceremony. You moved your hands as if you didn’t want the blood on them.”

  “I don’t like to get my hands dirty,” Yisu said too quickly. “I-I have to keep them clean so the blood doesn’t contaminate any potions.”

  Miyo glanced down to inspect her own fingers. The blades shined dully in the moonlight.

  “I’ve got swamps of blood on mine,” she said.

  “What Envishtu blesses, he blesses in blood,” Yisu repeated the flesher platitude.

  “You’ve really got blood on your mind,” Miyo said. She nudged Yisu with a friendly elbow. “Because your intellect was Envishtu-blessed? Get it? What he blesses, he blesses in blood; blood on your mind?”

  Yisu replied with a weak smile.

  “I was only kidding.” Carina tempered Miyo’s voice with compassion and soothing. “I didn’t mean to upset you. You’re not even in contact with the blood most of the time. It’s not your faul—job. I’m the one who slices up the weak and serves them to the strong on a silver gambrel.”

  Yisu is no longer Very Suspicious of you!

  Yisu is now Cautiously Curious about you!

  Yisu was looking sidelong at her, testing her for a trap. “The weak cannot oppose us or our mighty god.”

  “The weak cannot.” Miyo tapped her bladed fingers together. Clink clink clink. “But maybe the strong could. Especially if they were blessed by our mighty god.”

  SIXTEEN:

  Jubal

  By the time we left the smoke bar, the rare bit of sunshine we’d experienced earlier had been bludgeoned back into submission by the more familiar gray-brown cloud cover. I adjusted my ventilator and headed in the direction of the hotel, following the layout of the city I’d stored up so far.

  “Why’d he call her ‘the Bwa Chech’?” Nick asked.

  As much as it pained me to, I had to admit, “It’s not a phrase I know. Sounds First-Earthy.” I glanced down at my wristpiece, thinking of the hundreds of thousands of ancient books I could search tonight if I had that text crawler, then shook my head. “I’d say we’re at least safe in assuming that it’s some kind of title within the Forsaken.”

  “That Courten witch said Marinette had old power,” Nickie said.

  I nodded. “Coming from her that probably means we’re talking ancient.”

  “And the hwaryna made the Cryst Rider cross when he called her the Bwa Chech.”

  “Yeah, it’s not good,” I said. “If you were entrusting your life to anybody else, Nickie-boy, I’d say you were screwed. Luckily you’ve got me. Now, obviously, I can’t have you clomping around behind me when I slip into Marinette’s house—”

  “Wait, her house?”

  I shrugged. “Whatever type of dwelling she’s holed up in. It’s not like she’s going to bring your soul jar to the fights. She doesn’t even know you’re coming. So, the plan is we go to the fights, and you keep an eye out for her. Once you’ve identified her, let me know so I can make sure she doesn’t slip out without us, then when she leaves, I’ll tail her back to wherever she’s staying.”

  Nick’s brows pulled together. “By yourself?”

  “Yeah, by myself. You’re about as stealthy as a giant komodo rampaging through a glassblower’s shop.”

  “I can be quiet when I need to,” he said.

  “Not as quiet as I can. Besides, tailing is a one-man job. What I need you to do—” I slipped the throat-pin out of my wristpiece band and stabbed Nick in the tip of his middle finger.

  “Ouch!” He jerked his hand away.

  “—is fork over some of your blood,” I said, making the pin disappear like magic. Then I dug out the chem casing I had obtained from the Ratlines’s resident drughead the night before. “Not that I’m eager to ingest anything of yours—the sheer number of diseases you’ve probably contracted from walking around without a ventilator on in a place like this is mind-boggling—but if Marinette does spot you in the crowd and decides to stir up trouble, I don’t want her to sic you on me. Give me your hand back, you overgrown wimp.”

  “Next time ask first and we can skip the stabbing.” Nick reached into his jacket and pulled out a little red gel capsule. “I made it this morning. It’s the same kind of capsule they put ultra-def cams in for taking holos of people’s digestive tracts. Got eight drops in it. Based on an average volume of blood flow per second, that Courten witch swallowed between eight and nine drops, and she thought it would protect her for at least three hours. I’m not sure whether she thought so because of how long the blood would take to pass through her system or because that was how long my soul would still recognize the blood as part of my body, but either way, we should be good for at least that long.”

  I glared at the capsule. “And you claim there’s only blood in this?”

  “No, it’s a one to one to one emulsion of blood, urine, and semen. I had a busy morning.”

  “I’ll handle the sarcasm, Nicholas,” I said. “Besides, how can somebody like me, who barely knows you, trust you when you’re always going behind your fiancée’s back?”

  He didn’t have a smart remark for that, and I wasn’t going to swallow something I hadn’t seen him fill right in front of me. I tossed the alleged blood capsule into a sewer grate, then filled the pill casing I’d brought with verifiable blood straight from the tap. When it was full—eleven drops by my count—I activated the casing’s seal and stored it in my tourist shirt’s breast pocket.

  “There. Now we’re all set for our night on the town.”

  ***

  It was almost four by the time we made it back to the Ratlines. We had three and a half hours before we needed to leave for the dogfights. Nick said he wanted to spend the time meditating and checking over his weapons. I told him he didn’t need to check his weapons because he wasn’t bringing anything that could damage me in any way to the dogfights, but to have at it if the structure of the ritual made him feel a little less insecure in his manhood.

  I decided to spend the time doing some research on our gang friends. Something was nagging at me about the way the hwaryna had described Marinette’s role in the Forsaken. I couldn’t shake that image of putting out the food for the piggies and the way it naturally juxtaposed itself with the image of sacrificing the pig.

  I found what I was looking for in one of the files the Taern’s deep cover Enforcers had provided the Guild.

  The cult worships a single antisaint, a mambo who died during First Earth times. They call her the “Bwa Chech” (language of origin unknown). According to their claims, she traded an island of oppressed First Earthers the victory in a violent revolution in exchange for seven generations’ servitude to Satan, sealing their contract by having them drink the blood of a sacrificial black pig.

  “Hmm.” I prowled the length of my hotel room as I read. “Hmm hmm hmm.”

  If the report hadn’t said that the antisaint claimed the title Bwa Chech, then I could’ve believed this Marinette chick was just the gang’s most recent leader. But an antisaint’s title is sacred. Anti-sacred? Whatever you called it, they weren’t the type to share their antisainthood with mere mortals, no matter how high up in the gang those mortals were.

  I could’ve been tempted to say that this Marinette chick was just a talented vocor posing as the Forsaken’s favorite antisaint for the influence and monetary gain that came with it, but if that were the case, she would’ve had a wristpiece to utilize the money she was scamming from them.

  If she was the original Bwa Chech, that would explain the old power the Courten witch h
ad mentioned, the lack of a wristpiece, and the ancient know-how to trap a soul fragment in a jar.

  The dumbwaiter dinged, announcing the arrival of the beautiful and hearty deconstructed sea dragon and oysterlusk stew I’d ordered up.

  I sat down and dug in, savoring every spoonful while I considered what the odds were that I could get the Bwa Chech to show me how soul jars worked.

  Because I’d told him not to, Nick would undoubtedly follow me tonight as I tailed Marinette, maybe even trace my wristpiece’s location so it would look like he was sticking to the plan right up until he kicked her door down. As if I wouldn’t have thought of that. As soon as she saw him, she would realize why I was there and grab for his soul jar—or maybe activate the jar remotely with some sort of spoken spell, however those things worked—and sic him on me.

  Of course, the attack on me would fail because I would already have Nickie’s blood in my digestive tract. But whatever motions she went through to instigate the attack would give me a basic understanding of how to operate the soul jar. I would watch, listen, and learn.

  I finished off the stew and ordered up a dessert of burnt sugar puffs. I was going to need my energy tonight.

  ***

  After a few of the best burnt sugar puffs I’d had in my life, I headed down to the lobby to meet Nick. He was finishing off the most disgusting Emden roll I’d seen in my life.

  “I hope you didn’t get that from room service.” I wrinkled my nose. “It looks like a bloody shark dick slathered in loogies and wrapped in sandpaper.”

  Nick popped the last bite into his mouth and wiped his hands and face with the napkin.

  “From a pushcart,” he said with his mouth full, jerking his head vaguely toward the lobby doors.

  “Bet it was cheap, too,” I said. “That pride’s gonna kill ya, Nickie. There’s nothing wrong with dining off the room service menu care of your rich pal Jubal. Especially if it helps you avoid stomach scabies.”

  Nick scowled and shoved through the revolving door without trying to come up with a response. I followed him.