The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One (5 page)

“You don’t know anything about me, about what I lost,” Mercer said quietly. It stopped Brook cold. There was a flash in her mind, a vision. She saw the lone cabin at the bottom of the valley, a swarm of summer gnats hovering over its sparkling pond. She saw the slaughtered undead in the kitchen, their rotten innards in an illegible scrawl across the tiles. She saw the piles of stones under which two innocent women were laid to rest for all of eternity. She saw a younger Mercer, just north of childhood, with the same sword in his hand. He was on his knees, crying in front of the stones, his face flush with an unquenchable torment, his sobs as heavy as the stones he had laid atop the loved ones he couldn’t protect, couldn’t save. She saw him make up a small pack and leave the valley, not to return for three long years. Just as quickly, the vision was gone.

“I’m… I’m sorry,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I… You’re right. I don’t know what you lost. It was wrong of me to judge you so quickly. I’m just a little confused and hurt right now from all that has just happened.” Her voice, already quiet, faltered.

She had only ever had a waking vision once before in her life, when she was very young, right after her mother was taken away by slavers. She had seen what the slavers did to her, how they threw her spent body into the Axe Man as if she were nothing but a pile of fish chum, laughing drunkenly as she drowned on the poison water; that vision of the future had been as emotionally draining as this one was of the past. She could feel the tears welling up and her cheeks growing flush.

“Excuse me.” Brook turned and started to walk away from the water, slower this time, so that Mercer knew that she wasn’t trying to get away from him, only that she wanted to be alone.

What had just happened there?
Mercer wondered. He had seen her eyes go wide, had seen her enter into a trance. It only lasted for a few seconds, but he knew the signs: his younger sister did the same thing years ago, when she was still alive. Nina had visions, Nan would tell him. That was why she sometimes had fits, why she would tremble uncontrollably on the floor and once almost bit off her tongue. She had been able to see the past and future, of what was and what could be. Was Brook capable of doing the same?

Mercer caught up with Brook and the two walked in silence. Leo was tired from the day’s events and was panting loudly. Now that they were in the Green Lands, they could hear the call of loons and hoot of the night’s earliest rising owls. With no dead men to prey upon them, wildlife thrived. Over the western horizon was a line of pink and purple, the only colors in the otherwise starry night sky. Just as these colors disappeared with the last of the day, Brook and Mercer found the dirt road.

The road was called 23, though none who travelled it knew why. It was a name left over from the old days, when roads paved in black stone connected every township, every tribe. It snaked westwards through the Green Lands, past the roaring waters of Stag’s Leap, all the way to the Fort at Kingston. If Brook and Mercer followed it back east, they would see it was but one of three prongs that forked from the Mountain Road: Kill Fish Road ran next to the Hud all the way to the Rip in the northeast, while the Mountain Road ran straight north to the Aderon Mountains.

“Before we get to the Black Wing camp, we have to pass through Young Poe’s Keep. We should be coming upon it soon,” Brook said. “Just past these next few hills.”

“Young Poe’s Keep? I’ve never heard of this place.”

“It’s a trading outpost, mainly. It’s so close to the Axe Man and the Hud, as well as to the Mountain Road fork, that they get a lot of travellers passing through with coin to spend. The ruins of an old ghost city are close by it, in the hills. Old Poe’s Keep. Some say there are still treasures to be found in the old shops there, but that they’re haunted by malignant spirits trapped in the city by greed.”

The beginning of 23 ran close to the Axe Man, so it was a relatively flat and easy going. Still, Leo was panting heavily. “He’s tired,” Mercer said.

“We should think of resting for the night in Young Poe,” Brook said. “I know many of the traders. The Black Wings do much business with them.”

“Sounds fine to me.” Mercer was tired too. Slaying as many dead men as he did earlier was taxing work, as was navigating the Axe Man’s River, which he had been doing since early that morning.

The road was illuminated here and there with soft white lights, technology left over from the old days that miraculously still worked. The lights had black panels atop them and were attached to stakes in the ground, no bigger than one of Leo’s legs. In the middle of the road, two of the lights shining upon it as though they were sentries on watch, was a shapeless pile of meat, maggots thickly squirming in its folds. Leo’s neck bristled and began to growl.

“By the talons of Elon…” Brook’s mouth fell open once she saw what had made the dog stop and snarl. “That’s… that’s a human leg!”

Mercer drew his sword. “I would notch an arrow, if I were you. Something is very wrong here.”

“Is that so, Mr. Scholar?” Mercer cocked an eyebrow and took her in with a side glance; sarcasm had been Nina’s language of choice, her acerbic wit never failing to make him laugh. Mercer smiled.

They walked cautiously into Young Poe’s Keep, which was but a collection of clapboard huts, freestanding or adjoined to preexisting, ruinous houses. The buildings gathered closer together as they moved further along 23, as if conspiring in silent, unseen gestures over what to do with these nighttime nomads.

While the small streetlights kept the path ahead lit, it consequentially blinded them from seeing into the shops and ruins surrounding it. It made Mercer especially nervous. He hadn’t expected there to be so many old houses still standing. Though most of their roofs had caved in and the roots of trees snaked deep into their foundations, the homes had not been razed by vandals or armies passing through as many of those in the Borderlands had been. These were peaceful lands, Mercer had to remind himself, hardly touched by warfare. So it didn’t seem right that things were so
quiet,
and that the homes were so dark. What had happened here? He didn’t have to ask himself; he knew. All the evidence was there but he didn’t want to believe it. Dead men weren’t supposed to come north of the Axe Man, but since when had the world worked as he had wanted it to?

They came to a shop that was attached to an older building by plywood boards and metal siding. Its wood door was covered in chipped red paint and bent at an angle on its hinges. A piece of rusted iron hung outside with crude letters painted on it. It said
blaksmith
.

“This is Darnell’s shop. He’s a metal worker and a good friend of my brother. I hope...” Brook didn’t finish her thought, but Mercer answered her as if she did.

“I hope he’s okay too. Come on, let’s give it a look.” Brook nodded. She reached out to Leo through their mind link, told him to keep watch outside. Satisfied that he had listened, Brook turned to see Mercer trying the handle of the red door, which clicked open effortlessly. They walked into the room, which was ten shades of pitch darker than the outside. Jai Lin caught the little light there was and glowed like a beacon in the gloom.

“Darnell?” Brook’s sotto voice hung in the darkness like a sheet on an updraft of hot, stuffy air. From out of the heavy silence came a terrible moan, and then the crash of a table of glasses and iron tools falling to the floor. The dead man was upon Mercer before he could see him.

“Brook, get out of here!” Mercer yelled as the dead man’s momentum pushed him over and into another table of tools. Mercer dropped his sword, while a heavy wrench from the upended table found the windowpane behind it, shattering it into jagged pieces. A larger shard found the head of the dead man trying to get its rotted teeth into Mercer’s skin. A river of rank blood started pouring from the wound the glass made in the dead man’s head. It was making Mercer’s hands start to slip from the already slick, rubbery flesh around the corpse’s neck. He didn’t think he could hold him much longer.

There was a muffled thunk, and the writhing of the dead man ceased. Mercer found himself holding aloft nothing more than a motionless, albeit very heavy, bundle of putrid meat. He blinked a few times, and saw Brook’s silhouette standing above him. She had found a long awl and stuck its spike through the dead man’s skull. Sticking a blade through a dead man’s brain was the surest way to kill one, some said the only way, and he was glad that Brook knew this.

“Are you alright?” Brook asked him as he pushed the corpse off.

“Yeah, never better.” He was soaked with the stale blood of the dead man and saw that his hands were shaking. He hadn’t been taken by surprise by a dead man in some time, but as he looked himself over and saw no bite marks, no scratches or scrapes, his nerves calmed. As long as the skin wasn’t broken, you wouldn’t turn, his father had always told him as a child. It was why Willis Crane had worn such heavy armor against General Godwin’s army, in the style of the sprocket knights of Ithaca, years before Mercer was even conceived. It was a necessary precaution for all soldiers to wear armor, as Godwin had an army of dead men at his disposal and had been able to make them do his bidding. Godwin had been a z
ombie-tongue
, or so the stories went.

“Well, we found Darnell.” Brook was eyeing the corpse Mercer had pushed into the corner. Darnell wore a heavy burlap smock and was a beer keg of a man. Mercer now understood why he had been knocked over so easily. Besides the place where the glass shard had embedded itself in his head, Darnell also had a large wound on his forearm, what looked to be inflicted by a pair of ravenous teeth. “Poor man. He had such a kind heart.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Mercer said, standing up. He took his blood-soaked shirts off and threw them into the corner of the room. He could see more clearly now, his eyes having adjusted to the darkness. The room was in chaos from the melee: two tables had been upended, broken glass carpeted the floor while Darnell’s blood coated the walls like a fresh layer of paint. “Why are there dead men in the Green Lands?”

“I don’t know,” Brook said, her voice sad and distant. She wondered if there had been any of Darnell left in the living corpse she had just killed. Had some of her friend still been in there, a prisoner to a nightmare he had no control over? Or had Darnell died, the killim in his place merely wearing the metalworker’s skin as a vestment for its insatiable appetite? None of the thoughts comforted her.

“Perhaps the Bastards or some other slavers passed through here and left killim behind?” Brook proposed. “Slavers have been known to catch dead men in the Borderlands and keep them as pets. I read that they put their necks in harnesses and attach them to wooden rods so that the dead never get close enough to bite or scratch them.”

“That’s true, but I don’t think that’s what happened here. Slavers are vicious, true, but you saw how the Wandering Bastards were back there. They were absolutely terrified of dead men. No, I think there’s something bigger at play here. I just don’t know what.”

“Where there’s one killim, there’s going to be more,” Brook said. “We should get out of here before any more find…” Her mouth opened and her eyes went wide. “Oh no, Leo! Come on!” There was a sledgehammer with a long handle propped up by the door which Brook grabbed as she ran outside. Mercer followed right behind her, Jai Lin in his hand.

Brook was right to be alarmed. Leo was gnashing his teeth and darting out of the way of a group of five killim. He was unhurt but these dead men were fast and a few swipes of their claws came within inches of the dog’s black fur. They moved as if their joints had not yet grown stiff, as if they had only just turned.

Mercer caught the dead man closest to him off guard, lopping off the corpses head before it could even smell the sweat on his skin. A fountain of blood spurted out from the dead man’s neck, the dark red of a summer sunset. Brook swung the sledgehammer deftly, knocking the lower jaw off the fastest of the killim. It didn’t stop it; the green-skinned woman with fiery red hair turned quickly and was upon Brook before she could dodge out of the way. Leo was quicker though, biting the corpse woman’s leg and dragging her off. Mercer finished what his Black Wing companion had started, finding the dead woman’s skull through her tangle of red hair with one swift movement of his sword.

They were all three back to back in the center of a circle of limbs and unmoving dead bodies when they were finished, panting heavily. “Well, that sure was a nice welcoming party,” Brook said. Mercer grinned despite the taste of blood on his tongue.

“Can we make it to the Black Wing camp tonight?” Mercer asked. Brook reached out to Leo to gauge how her friend was feeling. The battle seemed to have given her pup a renewed energy, her as well. The Black Wings were only a few hours march from Young Poe’s Keep, in a camp hidden in the Broke Tooth Hills.

“If there are killim in the Green Lands, and this close to the camp of my clan, then there’s no time to waste. We have to get there as soon as possible and warn them.”

“Fine by me,” Mercer said. “But first, I need to find a shirt.”

After Mercer had braved Darnell’s house to find a shirt, and came out successfully with a faded denim button-up and a heavy wool cardigan, they continued on 23. Soon, they were beyond the soft-lit road of Young Poe’s Keep and back into the full dark of the night.