The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One (10 page)

“That will be all,” Plaguewind said. “You may leave me now.” The Apostle seemed taken aback, as if he expected more from his fated meeting with the prophesied final horseman of the Apocalypse. Still, he did as he was bid, and got back up and on his motorbike. Plaguewind watched as the ancient vehicle’s back tire kicked up dirt, the Apostle whipping around and heading back towards the coast. He’d let him get away just far enough, to where the coward would breathe a sigh of relief, thinking he was safe. Then, like a puppeteer, Plaguewind would reach out through the dark tendrils that connected him to all his children, stronger now with the sceptre, and allow them to feast. If the man escaped, so be it; Plaguewind didn’t care one way or another. He got what he wanted. He now had the Sceptre of Jai Lin.

Plaguewind shuffled back into the crooked house and descended the creaky wooden steps that led to its basement. He limped past milk crates of old newspapers and moldering mannequins, to the nest in the farthest, darkest corner of the basement. It was here he could best see the dark tendrils that connected him to all blighted things. Now that he had the sceptre, he could see as far away as Ithaca and the Aderon Mountains and could send his children there. He could command the poison wind to eat away at the Borderlands and make all the fertile land that lay to the north just as barren and cancerous as that which he now resided in. With the sceptre, his power had grown tenfold.

He allowed himself to leave his body and follow the dark tendrils north, to the shuffling, decayed corpses they were connected to. People were dying, the sickness spreading; more of his children were being born than ever before and he held sway over them all.

Ah, but there was one tendril pulling especially hard at him, urging him to follow it. Curious, Plaguewind flew along, lighter than wind and shadow, the tendril’s magnetism growing stronger the further north he went. He passed through the heavily forested Borderlands, vaulted over the Axe Man’s River and went up into the Broke Tooth Hills of the Green Lands. The tendril vibrated with a quake-like intensity as he neared the place where the Mountain Road forked. He was close to the tendril’s source. What dark, blighted thing could have drawn him here so strongly? Though disembodied, Plaguewind still felt a fuzzy lightness, moth wings of anxiety brushing his belly at what he might find.

He almost shouted when he saw what was at the tendril’s other end. Rather than one of his children, there was a young man with the gold eyes of a wolf walking through the Green Lands, two human companions with him, as well as a horse and a dog. On his back was that which the dark tendril was tethered to, that which had pulled on his attention so forcefully. Plaguewind recognized the sword at once. It was the sceptre’s companion, forged in the long ago by warrior monks over a white hot forge. It was what had stopped General Godwin almost three decades prior and the only thing which posed a threat to his takeover of the Green Lands. It was the Sword of Jai Lin, and he wanted it fiercely.

Chapter Five

Lothario

M
ORNING HAD BEEN IN ITS INFANCY WHEN MERCER, Brook and Solloway left the Black Wings camp, so they were already on the outskirts of Young Poe's Keep by mid-day. They had stopped atop a rise in the road where the forest hugging 23 came to an abrupt end. With the sun having burned off the autumnal morning fog, they now had an unfettered view of the trading town below. Lothario, Solloway’s black Arabian, munched on some high grass while Leo chomped after the beetles which lazily flitted through the air. Their animal companions thus occupied, the three human travelers scanned the buildings for signs of movement, living or otherwise.

“It’s possible that you killed all the undead in Young Poe's Keep,” Solloway said, his eyes squinted and unblinking. “The rest of the town could have survived and fled before you arrived.”

“It’s possible...” Brook said, though she didn’t believe Solloway’s theory for a moment. The killim they had seen the night before were fast and dangerous, and the town-folk of Young Poe's Keep were merchants and tradespeople, not warriors. She, Mercer and Leo had a difficult enough time fighting Young Poe’s killim. The town-folk would not have stood a chance. Plus, they moved with a speed and limberness that belied their only recently having turned.

“Look!” Mercer said, pointing down into the town. “There’s someone down there. What do you think? He sure moves as a dead man would.”

None of them could be sure. The figure was the size of a tick from where they stood, and draped in shadows from the surrounding buildings. It clearly had a limp but could have easily been a person who was hurt.

“There is really only one way to find out,” Solloway said. “We’ll go down there and look for ourselves.” Mercer and Brook agreed. Solloway took Lothario’s reins and they resumed their march to Young Poe's Keep.

The road leveled out when they entered the town. Mercer had Jai Lin drawn, Brook her bow in her hand. Though the thick forest had ended behind them and the sun was blazing, the ruins of old buildings were now crowding the road, and the dead could easily have been hidden in their shadows.

Solloway had his one fist wrapped around Lothario’s reins, the other gripping the handle of a double-bladed axe. Its handle was wood, a gray, sticky tape wrapped around the areas where Solloway regularly held it. No one spoke as they looked for the figure they had seen atop the hill. The silence was so heavy that Lothario’s hooves upon the hard-packed road were like heavy mallets on kettle drums. It was all they heard, in addition to their breathing, until the sound of splintering wood called out to them like a hurt animal in a trap.

The travelers all turned in the direction of the noise, down a side street connected to 23. A building at the far end of the street was the source; more specifically, its large wooden doors, which pulsed in and out, as if the structure was seething at having been discovered. Mercer felt Jai Lin pulling him towards the building. He followed the pull of the sword, Brook and Solloway watching him with curious eyes as he made his way down the street.

“Mercer?” Brook called out, but Mercer didn’t heed her. Jai Lin had a need and he would not deny it, had never done so since taking the sword down from its place above the cold fireplace. He walked faster.

“Wait, boy!” Solloway rasped. He and Brook trotted at a short distance behind Mercer, Lothario and Leo by their respective sides. The tape around Solloway’s axe squealed as he gripped it tighter. “He’s going to get us killed.”

The interiors of the large homes lining the side street were as buckled as an octogenarian under the weight of life, as could be seen through the windows on their still-standing exterior facades. It was as if the homes were too proud to let anyone think that the sun had set on their days, desperately trying to keep up appearances for the newcomers. Sizable front yards acted like a sea of overgrown shrubs and trees between the dusty road and their brick walls.

Some homes still had their signs hanging outside, rusted plaques with names that ended with the letters “M.D.” or “Phd.” Mercer imagined it had once been a community of the old world’s aristocracy or cosmologists, and that this building at the end of the road, the biggest of all, had been a meeting place of sorts for them. Now the homes all stood empty and in ruin, their windows watching silently as Mercer and the rest made their way down the street.

Mercer suddenly halted. Though Jai Lin was urging him forward, what he saw through the crack between the two great doors of the building ahead made him stop.

“My god…” Mercer said. “Those are…”

“Hands.” Solloway had come up next to him. It had been a long time since the older man had seen the living dead, and even when he had, it had been on the field of battle. He had been wearing the heavy armor of a sprocket knight and was surrounded by his fellow soldiers. Then, he had treated the ravenous corpses as enemy combatants and nothing else. He had tried to not focus on the rotting flesh his axe would cut through or the vacant yellow eyes which had stared at him with a pain and hunger he intuited to be fathomless. It was that same pain and hunger which was now clawing desperately to get out of the building, arms upon arms, their skin peeled back and rotten, and there was nothing he could do to avoid or compartmentalize it.

“Someone must have corralled them in and locked them away,” Brook whispered, nodding at the heavy board across the door. The sound that had drawn them to the building was the wood splintering apart from the dead pushing on it from the other side. The air was molasses-thick with moans and the smell of rotten bodies.

Solloway wrung the neck of his axe. “Do you think? Or did they turn while they were behind the door? Many years ago, in the War for the Green Lands, men would fall ill and turn undead without even being bitten. The darkness had somehow taken root in them. It could be this is what happened here.”

Brook and Solloway’s bubble of speculation was popped by another violent crack from the heavy wooden board barred across the doors, piercing the air like a warning shot, like the last desperate click of a clock’s second hand. As thick as the board was, it wouldn’t hold; it was already bulging like a bull frog’s throat from the force of the corpses pushing on it. They wanted the humans that stood outside, desired their living flesh. It was making them ravenous, and they surged against the door with greater and greater strength. Another crack in the wood appeared, then another.

“Let’s go,” Solloway grunted. “Before it’s too late.” Just as the sergeant and Black Wing turned, the board broke apart and fell to the ground. Without it, there was but a small chain, which was already coming lose as the dead pushed harder and harder on the door. Rays of slanted sunlight fell on their rotted teeth and jaundiced eyes, focused on the travelers who stood just a few short spans away.

Then the chain came lose enough that one crawled through the door, then another and another. Lothario went wild as the dead men approached, their teeth gnashing and high-pitched screams escaping from their throats. Solloway had to use all his strength to get his horse under control.

Mercer didn’t hesitate. Even if he wanted to, it was as if Jai Lin imbued his body with a powerful urgency. He ran up, the sword’s blade trailing behind him, until he was a breath away from the closest dead man. He brought the sword up, and what had once been a middling man with wild gray hair and a belly like a buoy fell under Jai Lin, his decapitated head somersaulting through the air with an arc of spiraling blood ribbons trailing it. The next, a short, fat woman with blood caked around her lips, Mercer cut in half, from head to waist, putrid viscera spilling out.

“The chain is going to give!” Brook cried, firing an arrow into another frenzied killim that had escaped from the building. Whether it held the door together or not, it made no difference: more and more undead were getting free of the door, flooding the street like water from a burst pipe. There was no end to what the building contained. “Mercer! Mercer, we have to get out of here!”

Mercer barely heard her. The hypnosis had fully taken hold of him, the same that always did when he was fighting dead men. Despite the blood and gore, despite the physical exertion required by his swordplay, the same tranquility he’d have upon waking from a satisfying sleep would come over him, a calm that made his body limber and Jai Lin always strike true. He wanted to cut them all down, was fascinated by the myriad ways their bodies could come apart. He could go on like this forever, he could…

...wait. Was someone calling him? Was someone trying to wake him up?

“Mercer!” Brook ran up next to him, was shaking his shoulder. He turned quickly on her, his sword arcing through the air, aimed for her arm. He stopped within inches of her skin, the fear he saw in her eyes snapping him out of his trance.

“What’s wrong with you?” She spat. “We have to go!”

Mercer looked around, suddenly aware of just how many dead men there were running towards them from the building. Without a moment’s more of hesitation, Mercer turned and ran after Brook, back down the street of the opulent facades. The snarls and growls of the zombies that chased after them echoed off the buildings.

Solloway was mounted atop Lothario at the junction in the road, the horse nervously stomping at the ground. “Let’s go!” He yelled, his voice with a power and resonance that neither Brook nor Mercer had heard since meeting him. It was the voice of a commander to his troops in the thickness of battle.

They all ran further down 23, deeper into Young Poe's Keep. As they passed by more homes, particularly the few that had newer clapboard additions, the undead would stagger out, some naked, some covered in blood, all drawn to the noise and scent of the humans and animals.

“There are so many of them!” Brook said. Indeed, it seemed as if the entire town trailed after them, choking the street for as far as they could see. Where had all these killim been the night before, she wondered, when she and Mercer had passed through? Had they all really been locked away in that building, an entire town’s worth of cannibalistic corpses?

“By the Fist!” Solloway yelled, as Lothario neighed and reared up. There was no going forward. Staggering towards them from the other direction was another horde of undead, impeding any forward progres on 23.

“Up this way! Quick now!” Solloway yelled. He pointed with his axe up a narrow road that winded its way away from 23 and up a tree-lined hillside. It was a way out of town, but meandered north, away from the Mountain Road fork. Mercer and Brook were both gasping for breath, but nodded and followed in the dust cloud Lothario made as he galloped up the road. They could hear the undead tearing through the buildings and detritus in the streets behind. Though their lungs burned and their vision had become blurry, any slowing down would mean certain death by tooth and claw.