Tom Sands said, “And there’s another. Right now he’s just walking around the chapel. He’s the one who’s been all around the graveyard for the last month. But there’s something different about him.”
Bod said, “Keep an eye on the man in with Mr. Carstairs—and please apologize to Mr. Carstairs for me…”
He ducked under a pine-branch and loped around the hill, on the paths when it suited him, off the paths, jumping from monument to stone, when that was quicker.
He passed the old apple tree. “There’s four of them, still,” said a tart female voice. “Four of them, and all killers. And the rest of them won’t all of them fall into open graves to oblige you.”
“Hullo, Liza. I thought you were angry at me.”
“I might be and I mightn’t,” she said, nothing more than a voice. “But I’m not going to let them cut you up, nohow.”
“Then trip them for me, trip them and confuse them and slow them down. Can you do that?”
“While you runs away again? Nobody Owens, why don’t you just Fade, and hide in your mam’s nice tomb, where they’ll never find you, and soon enough Silas will be back to take care of them—”
“Maybe he will and maybe he won’t,” said Bod. “I’ll meet you by the lightning tree.”
“I am still not talking to you,” said Liza Hempstock’s voice, proud as a peacock and pert as a sparrow.
“Actually, you are. I mean, we’re talking right now.”
“Only during this emergency. After that, not a word.”
Bod made for the lightning tree, an oak that had been burned by lightning twenty years ago and now was nothing more than a blackened limb clutching at the sky.
He had an idea. It was not fully formed. It depended on whether he could remember Miss Lupescu’s lessons, remember everything he had seen and heard as a child.
It was harder to find the grave than he had expected, even looking for it, but he found it—an ugly grave tipped at an odd angle, its stone topped by a headless, waterstained angel that had the appearance of a gargantuan fungus. It was only when he touched it, and felt the chill, that he knew it for certain.
He sat down on the grave, forced himself to become entirely visible.
“You’ve not Faded,” said Liza’s voice. “Anyone could find you.”
“Good,” said Bod. “I want them to find me.”
“More know Jack Fool than Jack Fool knows,” said Liza.
The moon was rising. It was huge now and low in the sky. Bod wondered if it would be overdoing it if he began to whistle.
“I can see him!”
A man ran towards him, tripping and stumbling, two other men close behind.
Bod was aware of the dead clustered around them, watching the scene, but he forced himself to ignore them. He made himself more comfortable on the ugly grave. He felt like the bait in a trap, and it was not a good feeling.
The bull-like man was the first to reach the grave, followed closely by the man with the white hair who had done all the talking, and the tall blond man.
Bod stayed where he was.
The man with the white hair said, “Ah. The elusive Dorian boy, I presume. Astonishing. There’s our Jack Frost hunting the whole world over, and here you are, just where he left you, thirteen years ago.”
Bod said, “That man killed my family.”
“Indeed he did.”
“Why?”
“Does it matter? You’re never going to tell anyone.”
“Then it’s no skin off your nose to tell me, is it?”
The white-haired man barked a laugh. “Hah! Funny boy. What I want to know is, how have you lived in a graveyard for thirteen years without anyone catching wise?”
“I’ll answer your question if you answer mine.”
The bull-necked man said, “You don’t talk to Mr. Dandy like that, little snot! I split you, I will—”
The white-haired man took another step closer to the grave. “Hush, Jack Tar. All right. An answer for an answer. We—my friends and I—are members of a fraternal organization, known as the Jacks of All Trades, or the Knaves, or by other names. We go back an extremely long way. We know…we remember things that most people have forgotten. The Old Knowledge.”
Bod said, “Magic. You know a little magic.”
The man nodded agreeably. “If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There’s a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.”
“You killed my family for—for what? For magic powers? That’s ridiculous.”
“No. We killed you for protection. Long time ago, one of our people—this was back in Egypt, in pyramid days—he foresaw that one day, there would be a child born who would walk the borderland between the living and the dead. That if this child grew to adulthood it would mean the end of our order and all we stand for. We had people casting nativities before London was a village, we had your family in our sights before New Amsterdam became New York. And we sent what we thought was the best and the sharpest and the most dangerous of all the Jacks to deal with you. To do it properly, so we could take all the bad Juju and make it work for us instead, and keep everything tickety-boo for another five thousand years. Only he didn’t.”