The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One (15 page)

“You’re also the most I’ve ever been paid for a
slave
, henpecker, I can assure you that!” Matchless’s quip got the slavers roaring again. The captain’s face became even harder, but he didn’t say anything.

“Crow.” He didn’t even see her approach. One moment, he was holding everyone at a distance with the knife in his trembling hand, the next, she was the air that enveloped him, as intimate as a breeze upon his skin. It was Matchless’s whore, though he knew she was anything but that. She spoke his name in such a hushed whisper that he thought he may have dreamed it, reverberating through his body like the soft ripples of a stone tossed into a pond. Her gray eyes stared into him without wavering, quieting him. He hadn’t realized just how much fear had consumed him, how much his hatred for the slavers and need to escape had driven him to a place where his humanity had crumbled, leaving a desperate, frightened animal in its place.

“It will be alright. We are going to a good place.”

Crow felt half-asleep. “You’ll be with me?”

“Of course. I’ve come here just for you,
Skalla Ta
.” She took his hand and led him out of the tent. The crowd parted as he and the young woman passed, Matchless spitting at their feet as they walked by. The woman with the ribbons braided in her hair and the tattoo of the tree on her back paid him no mind, but Crow did, at least in part. He felt like he was splitting in two, that half of him wanted to remain in the hate-filled vortex he’d been spinning around in for the last day, the other half wanting only to go wherever this woman was leading him.

When they had walked well past the tent, the Boat People trailing close behind, Crow turned to look back at the slavers. The anger churning within his gut, which just before had only made him shake and fight harder, was now bringing tears to his eyes.

“I want to kill them all…” Crow whispered, his hand trembling around the knife he still clutched tightly. “I want to hurt them and make them suffer, and then to gut them all, one by one…”

The woman who had led him away from the camp, who Bob had called Matchless’s whore, put her hand on his shoulder. Crow shook it away. He was far from home, had allowed himself to be captured, had left Brook all by herself in a place the slavers insisted was teeming with killim. How had everything fallen apart so fast? How had he failed so thoroughly in such a short amount of time?

“It’s okay, Crow,” the young woman with the gray eyes said. “Do not worry.”

“How do you know my name?” He asked. “Who are you?”

“I am Nameless,” the woman said, her stare like mirrors reflecting the light that cuts through storm clouds. “But you may call me Kara.”

“Kara…” Crow let the name dance on his lips. He was so transfixed by her that he didn’t notice the tall captain of the Boat People with the face carved from a mountainside and voice of thunder coming up to them, gesturing ahead through the thick underbrush.

“The boat is a little ways beyond here,
mes amis
. You can rest well when we get to it. Come.” Crow allowed himself to be led again, leaving his desire for revenge behind him for another day.
And there will be another day,
he silently vowed.

After a few moments of brambles catching on their clothes and moving aside the thin twigs of trees, a clearing before a dock came into view. The largest boat that Crow had ever seen bobbed in the Hud’s choppy waters, tied to the stone pillars at the dock’s terminal point. It was painted red, with a large mast sticking straight up from its center. A gangplank led up from the dock to the ship’s deck, where Boat People were unloading various barrels and wooden boxes of cargo. There were two slavers overseeing the entire operation, huge smiles plastered on their faces. They nodded at Crow as he walked by, as if in thanks for all they were receiving in exchange for him and the woman.

“Where are you taking me?” Crow asked the captain.

“Far away from these vile people,” the tall man said. “We are going south. There are people waiting for you, Crow. People who would very much like to meet you.” Crow didn’t have the energy to inquire any further. He had never felt so drained, so exhausted, and allowed the Boat People to lead him aboard their barge.

Chapter Seven

Jompers

“
T
HE UNDEAD KING, EH?” Solloway grunted, his flask emptied and his speech slurred. “Well then call me the prince of daisies, if we’re handing out titles so freely.”

They were walking again, having rested a few hours by the stream’s edge. Mercer had told them all of what he had seen after following the dark tendrils to the Blight, of the malformed man who referred to himself as the Undead King.

“Don’t know what it is with these zombie-tongues, they all seem to get this idea of being world conquerors. Happened to Godwin, and now we have this so-called Undead King to worry about,” Solloway hiccuped. “This all couldn’t wait until I retired. Gods...”

Brook looked from Solloway to Mercer, her eyes doing little to hide her anxiety. “Does this change things?” She asked. “Are we still on our way to the lands east of the Hud? To Dusty Yen?”

Solloway grew serious, despite his drunkenness. “Of course. What would the three of us do against an army of undead anyways? Quashing war in the Green Lands before it begins is objective number one. We have to stop Dusty Yen, plain and simple. Besides, an army of flesh-hungry corpses seems like a good enough reason for both sides to stop their warmongering and focus on the bigger threat. It’ll make Dusty listen to me, at least.”

Brook breathed a sigh of relief, pleased that their trip hadn’t changed course. Even if they did not overtake the Wandering Bastards, they were at least all headed to the same place: Dusty Yen’s encampment. They still had a quarter-moon’s journey ahead of them before they came to the Rip, the bridge that spanned the Hud from the Seven Streams to the Ferik Marshes on the other side. It was the only safe way across, and would lead them directly to Dusty’s camp, or so Solloway said. Brook would rescue her brother soon enough.

First things were first, though: they had to replenish their supplies, and figure out where the road they were on was taking them. They hoped to satisfy the former task in the ghost town of Old Poe’s Keep, whose crumbling buildings and twisted towers they could see just beyond the trees. The latter task, however, of knowing where it was they were headed, could only be found out by walking the road. There was no turning back, not with the undead horde in Young Poe’s Keep. It was a silent hope shared amongst all that not only would the road they were on take them to the Mountain Road but ultimately past it, to the Kill Fish, the most direct route to Dusty Yen.

The day was getting on, with only a few hours left before dusk. The road at the mouth of the ruins was overgrown with brambles and stunted trees, completely reclaimed by nature, and would be invisible were it not for the crumbling buildings that lined it, alluding to its shape. Old shops unblinkingly watched the travelers with their broken storefront windows and dark interiors.

“If there was anything of value here, it was taken long ago,” Solloway said, his double-headed axe swinging like a pendulum at his side. “These stores seem to be more like costume shops anyways, not the vendors of food or medicines. Let’s look through them, but be quick about it. Night is coming, and we should be well past this haunted place before it does.”

The three travelers split apart, looking within the shops for signs of anything they could use. So focused were they on their search that none felt the pair of eyes watching them from atop the charred clock-tower at the center of the town.

The watcher brought the old pair of binoculars down from his denim-blue eyes and clicked his teeth together. His name was Jedediah Jompers and he was a wandering cosmologist, a learned man from the domed city of Ithaca who traveled the Green Lands with wisdom to share. He had come to Young Poe’s Keep in winter, a full nine moons prior, and had been taken in gladly by a town brimming with ailments and useless machines. He set to work almost immediately, surgically removing Alphonso the miller’s impacted tooth, teaching Darnell the blacksmith how to write his name, and even soldering the corroded copper wires for the solar lights lining the main road through town.

He had fixed what he could, both of body and tool, and then tirelessly pondered over the problems that still remained elusive to him. The residents of Young Poe had given him a sprawling home in gratitude, on the same road as an old hospital, the halls of which were full of long neglected instruments that he knew could put to good use.  The most prized thing Jompers was given by the townsfolk, (from Nolan the simpleton, no less) was a spherical ball of glass that the cosmologist recognized from a book he had read in his studies as a young man. It was a ball of lightning, a source of fascination and wonder.

It took a quarter-moon’s time, but eventually Jompers got the power from his solar panels to run through the ball of lightning. He fascinated the entire town with the crackling blue arms of ‘lectric that went from the glass sphere to the four man-sized metal poles he had evenly arranged around the room’s perimeter. He was slowly bringing the old ways back to the wider world, as was the aspiration of any wandering cosmologist, and he’d been most happy in Young Poe’s Keep doing so. It was not to last, however: all his efforts were to quickly go to ash once the dead men came.

The fishermen were the first to encounter the dead. It had been an especially hot spring night, and both men had been drunk on dandelion wine by the pond to the south of town, their hooks waiting for the hungry mouths of bass or stagfish. Three undead had stumbled out of the woods, ravenous for flesh. The two fishermen had nothing but a couple of dull pairing knives between them, but had still managed to smash in the heads of their attackers. They had run back to town, where Jompers saw that they were both covered in scratches and bites. Despite the cosmologist’s best attempts, the wounds had festered, and both men had died by sun’s first light.

So great was the town’s fear at there being dead men in the Green Lands and their grief at having lost two of their own so senselessly that no one seemed to notice that many people were quickly becoming sick. In the next two days, most of the town had developed fevers and were bed-ridden by aches and pains. Jompers seemed to be one of the few who was immune. He and some of the more able-bodied men had brought as many of the infirm as possible to the hospital, where the best was done to help them. It was to be of no use: the people of Young Poe’s Keep, it would seem, were all carriers of
bad blood.

In his studies at Ithaca, Jompers had read much about bad blood, about how a great many people had died in the long ago, before the oil had run dry, because their blood was not immune to whatever poison had been released into the air. Some of Jompers’ peers were convinced that the same thing that now made the dead rise from their slumber and crave human flesh was also what had killed so many in the past and driven the old world to ruin. Breathing in this poison air, which leaked from the pores of the undead, was akin to gulping down a death sentence for those with bad blood, which, for whatever reason, was the case for many in Young Poe’s Keep.

Had the forebears of this town survived the fall of the old ways by some fluke? Had their bad blood been isolated from the plague that had killed so many? Or had the ensuing one hundred and fifty years since the Time of the Great Dying bred within the small community the propensity for bad blood again? Jompers was not sure.

He did what he could, but in the end, all hope withered, died. He had no choice but to chain shut the doors of the hospital and leave the dying to their fate. He wasn’t about to release an entire town’s worth of undead into the Green Lands, and hoped that, once they turned, the corpses would destroy each other before any could break their way free.

Before he left, he had watched some of the sick townspeople turn. They had violently struggled against their leather straps to get at him or to the sick townsfolk who lay in pools of sweat and body fluids on the adjacent gurneys.

Some of the more cognizant had called to him: “Free us,” Ezra the cobbler said, the sclera in his eyes burst, his tongue purple and lump. “Please, Jompers... Save us...”

Others cursed him, blaming him for bringing the illness to the town or doing nothing to stop it. He had apologized profusely, but his words had sounded hollow in his ears, empty of empathy. He remembered wanting only to be as far away from Young Poe’s Keep as possible, to forget that any of this had ever happened.

He ran from the hospital, the screams of the townsfolk following after him as the first of the turned tore into their flesh. Even when he got far from town, even when he got as far as Old Poe’s Keep, he could still hear their bones being crunched between teeth, the crash of glass and screech of the rusted gurney wheels as they were knocked around the room.

He fell asleep each night thinking of their faces, of their looks of wonder as he touched the blue ‘lectric that emanated from the ball of lightning. He’d wake and vomit, his body rebelling against him and the decision he had made. As his stomach clenched, he felt something in him shatter, as if he had swallowed the ball of lightning and its jagged pieces were now churning around in his gut.

He had taken refuge in the old clock-tower at the center of the ghost town. He had always loved clocks, was fascinated with how they worked, so it seemed like a logical place for him to stay. He cleared out a space underneath some rusted sprockets in the topmost part of the tower where he laid out his bedroll. He found a dusty wooden table and set it up with the glassware he found in the ruins of the shops. The days filled with the making of explosives and alchemical potions; Jompers hoped that the focus required for the work would quiet the voices of the townsfolk that still echoed around in his head.