The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One (2 page)

“Nan? Pa? Are you guys here? Are you okay?” He could taste the fear in his voice. What had happened here? Slavers? Karyatim raiders? Gods, he hoped they were okay. His father, his sister Nina, Nan, he hoped they had escaped to the Fort at Kingston or one of the other western cities.

The kitchen was in even worse shape than the reading room. Dry blood was on the walls here too, an opaque, muddy lacquer on almost every available surface. Worst of all were the mummified mounds of eviscerated bodies and severed limbs scattered about the floor. Mercer felt his stomach knot up, thought for sure he was about to vomit back up the blue-striped rattler. He ran to the back door, unbolted it as quick as he could, and ran outside to the back porch. Being in the cool air had an instant calming effect for his nausea, until he looked up and saw what was in the yard.

Where once had been a wide-open grassy field where he and his sister had played dead-and-alive as children were now two piles of white stones, spaced evenly apart. Mercer stared at them, and as he did, he began to crack. Despite years of hardening himself to what had happened and trying to bury the memory with all the dirt that a life spent living in the wild in a half-drunk stupor afforded, he could feel it rising up again, exhuming itself like a dead man from the sand, its teeth gnashing, its skin sloughing off in great peels. He began to sob.

Mercer stumbled off the porch and made his way over to the piles of stones. One was for Nina, the other for Nan. Gods, now it was all coming back. He slapped himself, tried to get the tears to stop and make the numbness return, but it was of no use.

He had woken up that day three years ago to the sound of crashing dishes, to Nina’s screams echoing off the farmhouse rafters. He had run downstairs just as one of the dead men tore his sister’s throat out with its black teeth. They had already killed his Nan, had consumed most of her body by the time Nina had come back in from picking berries. It had been so humid that summer morning, his shirt sticking to his body in a hot sweat; he remembered how water droplets had formed on Jai Lin’s cracked blade, how it had called to him from its mount over the cold fireplace.

Once Mercer had taken Jai Lin down, the rest had been a blur. There had been so many dead men, a swarm like he had never seen. But he had killed them all, either lopping off their heads or stabbing Jai Lin through their skulls. When the melee had settled, all had become still, silent. The only movements had been the blood slowly trickling between the wall’s wood paneling and the flies alighting on Nan and Nina’s bodies, deliberately avoiding those of the dead men. The insects had moved in jittery spasms over his sister’s half-masted hazel eyes, eyes they had both inherited from their mother. They had stared back at him, accusations reflected in their unblinking corneas that he’d never be able to answer:
why didn’t you save us, Mercer? How could you let us die?

“I’m so sorry…” He said, his knees meeting the grass, the tears flowing in molten rivulets down his face. Three years later, staring at the piles of white stones, he felt like he had died again. He had failed at protecting them. His father had asked Mercer to look after Nan and his sister when he left for Ithaca, and he had been unable to. He had been wandering for so long but the pain had never gone away. It had been waiting for him to come home again, to pick away its scab, a wound that would never heal.

Chapter One

The Wandering Bastards

“
L
EO!” Brook called out into the thick grove of birch and boxelder that surrounded them. Her sixty pound red nosed pit bull was nowhere to be seen. “Do you see him, Crow?”

“No.” Her brother came up next to her, as silent as if he moved on a set of wings, doing little to conceal the annoyance in his voice. “That crazy dog must have taken off after a squirrel or something. Again.”

“I hope it was just that,” Brook said, “and not a killim.”

“That’s going to happen, sooner or later, if you can’t learn to control him. I’m going to have a word with Old Wren about this when we get back. This is time I could be training, but instead I’m wandering through the Borderlands looking for your stupid dog.”

“By the talons of Elon, Crow, I swear, your head is as full as a bucket bird’s beak sometimes. You know he’s just a pup and that our mind-link isn’t that strong yet. Stop scolding me and just look for_” Brook was cut off by the sound of a piercing scream.

“What was that?”

“It wasn’t human, whatever it was.”

“Maybe… Oh no...” Brook didn’t even have to say it. Crow did it for her.

“Leo got a deer.”

“Come on, let’s go!” Oriented as she was by the scream, Brook could sense the direction her year old pit was in, yet the dog was so excited it was hard for her to connect their thoughts together. The siblings came into a clearing, and sure enough, there was Leo, the black hair on his scruff bristled, a low growl emanating from his throat. Brook felt the hair on her neck raise too when she saw what was in front of her.

A young fawn, just past its white winter dots, was being suspended in the air by a thick cord of roots that had burst from the ground. The roots were snake-like in appearance and manner, constricting the deer in a vice-like grip.

“Leo, to me!” The dog snapped out of his growling stupor and ran back to Brook’s side. “What is that?”

“I don’t know, Brook,” Crow stammered. “I’ve… I’ve never seen anything like it.” The deer was screaming and its eyes looked ready to burst from the pressure.

“Do something!” Brook yelled.

Crow acted quick, as befitted the young man the Black Wings expected to succeed Old Wren as clan chief. Crow loosed two knives from his chest sash, both connected to his person by silver strings as thin as spider webbing. They struck deep into the snake-like wood, the roots trembling from the impact, a jaundiced pus spurting from the wounds. The root’s grip on the fawn loosened until it dropped the broken young deer to the ground. Crow pulled sharply on the strings, bringing the knives back to his hand before quickly throwing another, this blade taking off a large chunk of wood and causing the entire root to retreat back beneath the earth. Crow smirked, wishing he had the usual audience of Black Wing girls watching, especially considering how flawlessly he had just executed
three-feign technique
.

“Stop smiling, Crow! We have to get out of here! What if it comes back and this time goes for us?”

“Wait,” Crow said, soundlessly stepping into the clearing where the roots had just been squirming above the loam. The dirt was choppy, the sod an uneven rug. He went up to the fawn, the young deer’s breaths shallow and buzzing, her dark eyes focused on empty space. Some of her ribs protruded from her soft down fur, broken from the pressure of the root’s constrictions. The deer couldn’t have been more than a few months old. So quick for this world, Crow thought, her end punctuated by such pain.

“Her neck is broken,” Crow said. “I need to finish this.”

Brook and Leo watched as Crow laid one hand over the fawn’s eyes and with the other stuck a knife deep into its brain. The young deer spasmed, then went still. Crow muttered Elon’s prayer of thanks before putting the limp corpse over his shoulder. The siblings turned their backs on the clearing and headed back the way they came, northwards, towards the camp of the Black Wings.

Leo set the pace, though Brook kept him within a close enough distance with their mind link. It was a skill she was still working hard to develop and had come a long way with since Leo was a tiny pup. It was almost to the point where she could actually put words to what Leo was thinking and not just feel the dog’s emotions, but her skills were far from perfect. It was how Leo had gotten away from her on what should have been a routine foraging trip. It had brought them a good ten or so eye-spans south of the Axe Man’s River, right into the heart of the Borderlands.

“Make sure crazy doesn’t get too far ahead of us,” Crow said.

“Don’t you worry your bucket-beak sized head, big brother. I have him.”

“That’s what you said before, darling sister.”

“That was different. He must have got the fear scent. I’m still trying to work out how to calm him when that happens.”

“Do you think he sensed those roots?” Crow shifted the fawn to his other shoulder. Though it was well into autumn and the air was cool and crisp, Brook’s brother’s long dark hair was glistening with sweat. The long black capes and thick wool vestments worn by Black Wing men might as well have been clay ovens, in stark contrast to the cool cotton dresses the women wore under their cloaks. “Have you seen them before? In a dead dream perhaps?”

Brook was what the Black Wings called a dead dreamer. While she was asleep, she could see the world as it was through the eyes of a person moments before they died and joined Elon in the Dusk. The ability was seen as both a blessing and a curse, for though the Black Wings could learn much of the old ways from them, the subject of the dead dreams often met with a violent death, usually from the teeth of a
killim
, the name the Black Wings gave to the undead that feasted on human flesh. Though she was never more than a mere observer and safe from the dangers the dreams contained, Brook would always wake from the dead dreams trembling under her furs, wide-eyed and out of breath, grasping for her journal to write of what she saw before the visions slipped away.

“It’s very possible I’ve seen the roots in a dead dream before, though I can’t remember for sure. There is something about them that is very familiar, and Leo may very well have sensed them, as he does with things I’ve witnessed in dead dreams. I’ll have to consult my journals when we’re back at camp.”

“Maybe Old Wren will know something about it.”

“Yes, perhaps he will.” The siblings quieted their conversation, instead listening to the sounds of the land around them, on alert for anything that could pose a threat. The Borderlands were dangerous: besides roving bands of brigands, mercenaries and Karyatim wild men, there were also killim, the
undead
, if you were from the western cities. Not nearly as many as in the Blight to the south, but even one killim, its teeth gnashing for your throat, was more than enough.

The dead never wandered north of the Axe Man, the poisoned river that ran between the Borderlands and the Green Lands, or hadn’t since the General Godwin’s war three decades before. They stuck to the plains in the south, to the Blight and the dead cities that lay beyond it.

The trail they followed was an old one and not much used. It had been a road paved in black stone once, when man had driven carts made of steel that drank the black blood from the earth; now it was merely a clearing through the trees, the black stone broken to pebbles and covered by dirt and sod. After several hours of silent marching, the nameless trail finally met with the Mountain Road, a wide strip of tramped earth which ran parallel to the Axe Man before angling north and crossing over the river’s choppy waters by way of the Bridge of Haynes.

“Another half day’s march to camp,” Brook said. “Should we break?”

“Might as well keep on. Evening is coming quick and some may worry we’ve been gone too long. Don’t want to ruffle any feathers, now do we?”

They kept to the woods, walking at the bottom of a ridge just out of sight from the road. Black Wing scouts had recently seen killim in the area around the Bridge of Haynes, stumbling around the ruined and razed buildings that over a century of neglect had reduced to crumbling piles of stone and steel. The undead were drawn to old buildings and relics, but not to the extent they were to humans, whose flesh they had an insatiable appetite for. If there were any killim lurking around the ruins, Crow and Brook would do their best to avoid them. If that proved impossible, Crow’s knives, Brook’s bow and Leo’s teeth would get them through to the other side of the Axe Man and into the Broke Tooth Hills.

They could see the highest spires of one of the burnt out buildings rising above the trees when they heard voices. Crow dropped the fawn’s carcass to the ground and pulled Brook down into the leaves. Leo was close to them too, his snowy blue eyes searching Brook’s face for an explanation of her palpable trepidation.

“Men’s voices,” Crow said in a hushed tone. “Lots of men. It sounds like an army is up there, in the buildings.”

“Are they blocking the way to the bridge?” Brook asked.

“I have the same line of sight as you, Brook, so I can’t see a damned thing. I know that the buildings with the roofs still intact are closer to the bridge, so if they’re setting camp here for the evening, they’ll be right in our way.”

There was a wind coming down from the Broke Tooth Hills, bringing with it the voices of the men camped out in the ruins. “Cat again? Man, I can’t stand cat.” The man spoke with the rasp of a habitual leaf smoker who had yet to grow  a full beard. “If Salty makes cat one more time, I’ll cut his
ouevos
off and make him cook them for our next meal.”

“Ah, shut yer piehole. You know there ain’t nothing but cat round here. All them rotters chased all the other four leggers away.” This man was certainly older and spoke in an accent that neither Crow nor Brook had ever heard before.

“Man, there’s fish in that river, right? We could each of us be eating a big fat grilled fish, that’s all I’m saying.”