The Templar Chronicles Omnibus

by Joseph Nassise

  Like it had a heartbeat of its own.

  He didn’t want to think about the implications that thought brought along with it.

  Bishop passed something to the guards at the gate and then pushed his way through the crowd into the city proper, dragging Duncan along with him. His captor had apparently been here before, for he moved swiftly and surely through the crowded city streets, intent on some destination only he knew.

  Weary from their forced march and the pain of his injuries, Duncan was reduced to stumbling along behind him. He knew he should be concentrating on where they were going just in case he managed to find a way to free himself, but the streets all looked the same to his fever-addled mind and it was all he could do to keep himself upright. Bishop wouldn’t stop if Duncan lost his footing; he knew that from previous experience.

  After what seemed like hours of wandering up one street and down another, Bishop entered a large outdoor marketplace and stopped at a stall near the far end. A noxious smell hung over the place and Duncan found it difficult to breathe through the fumes.

  The proprietor was a large man in dark clothing and a rubber apron that stretched from his chest to just above his feet. He grunted a welcome at Bishop, giving Duncan the sense that the two of them had done business together before, and then gave a sharp call toward the rear of his shop.

  Duncan glanced around, taking in the open furnaces in which green-grey flames burned with cold light, the anvils, and the barrels of iron tools scattered throughout the place. Even to his fever-addled mind it was enough to suggest that he stood in some kind of smithy.

  Bishop’s next request confirmed it.

  “Put him in chains,” he said.

  It was enough to rouse Duncan from his fog. He glanced wildly around, trying to gauge where the threat was going to come from, but by then it was too late. The blacksmith’s assistant, having quietly come up behind the trio, kicked Duncan’s legs out from under him and Duncan hit the ground hard enough to knock the wind out of him. As he struggled to suck air into his lungs, the assistant grabbed his arms and yanked them upward so that they lay across a nearby anvil.

  The blacksmith worked quickly, grabbing a nearby barrel and dumping a thick grey substance from its depths onto Duncan’s wrists. The stuff was icy cold, so cold that his heart skipped a beat, but the blacksmith never hesitated, reaching in with his bare hands and sculpting the substance into the shape he wanted.

  Before Duncan even had the chance to object it was over.

  The blacksmith released Duncan’s hands with a satisfied grunt and they fell back into his lap, far heavier than before. In place of the rope a set of iron manacles now encircled each wrist, with a two foot piece of chain dangling between them. Duncan stared at them, repulsed and fascinated at the same time. The metal was cold and where it touched him it seemed to leech the warmth right from his flesh. Even more distressing where the faces in the surface of the metal, faces he kept seeing out of the corner of his eyes, faces with the lost and tortured expressions of the damned.

  But it was the strange keening sound that the metal gave off, as if the dead themselves were bound up in his chains which bothered him the most.

  After all he’d been through this last was too much for Duncan.

  “Get them off!” he screamed in a high, shrill voice. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew that wasn’t a good sign, but he didn’t care. He had to get these things off of him! He pushed frantically at the manacles, first with one hand and then the other, shoving with all his strength, trying to force them over the base of his palms, anything to get them off his skin. The others laughed at his antics, but he didn’t stop until the last of his meager strength was spent and his hands were bloody from his efforts.

  The chains hadn’t budged.

  Help me, Lord. Help me.

  But only his enemy answered him. “On your feet!” Bishop demanded and punctuated his order with a sharp kick to Duncan’s leg.

  The Templar knight climbed wearily to his feet, his morale shaken and his strength all but gone. He could only watch dully as Bishop hooked a longer piece of chain to the length that stretched between the manacles on his wrists. A leather handle had been attached to the other end of that chain. Bishop removed a gold ring from one finger, which the blacksmith accepted as payment, and the handle was given to Bishop, who used it like a leash to drag Duncan along behind him as they left the shop.

  They only traveled a few blocks before Bishop knocked on the door of another establishment. A gruff voice answered and Bishop replied in the same tongue. Duncan couldn’t understand them, but from the tone and the quick responses it was clear that they were haggling over something. Eventually, the door opened and they were ushered inside.

  They were being led down a dark hallway, past open rooms where a variety of creatures stared out at them as they passed. Here a man sat by the window, the decapitated head of his lover resting in his arms, the two of them conversing in low tones. There a woman sat cutting the inside of her thigh over and over again. Each time the blade slashed through her flesh it instantly healed again, which only seemed to drive her to new heights of frustration and deeper cuts of the knife. Each room held some different tableau and in his exhausted state, Duncan wasn’t certain if he what he was seeing was hallucination or reality.

  They came to a rickety wooden staircase that led to the second story and he stumbled up it in Bishop’s wake. Their host, a skeletal old woman dressed in a ragged shawl, brought them to the second room on the right and ushered them inside. Aside from the washbin in the corner, the only furniture was a wooden bed in the center of the room.

  Duncan barely made it over the threshold before he collapsed on the floor and immediately fell into a restless sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “How are we going to get in there?” Riley asked, but Cade could only shake his head. He didn’t have an answer.

  Not yet, at least.

  They spent the next hour watching the traffic on the road below them. A good number of travelers came and went during that time and it quickly became obvious that this must not be the only city of its kind in the Beyond. The variety of travelers was staggering, from lone individuals on foot to long wagon-trains full of people and trade goods. More than a few didn’t look human.

  Watching them come and go gave Cade an idea. He explained his plan to Riley, who agreed it was their best chance at getting inside. The first step was to get down to the plain below without being seen.

  A few minutes of searching helped locate a trail leading downward. It was more a goat path than anything else, just a thin, barely visible track, but it was all they had and it would have to do.

  Thankfully it wasn’t too steep. Rather than taking the more direct route straight down, it wound its way around the mountain in a series of alternating switchbacks. They followed it at a slow and steady pace. Eventually they reached the bottom without incident.

  The city was out of sight around the edge of the mountain itself, but the road was only a few yards away. The two of them took up position behind a large outcropping of rock that allowed them to see the approach to the city without themselves being seen by anyone on the road.

  Then they settled down to wait.

  It didn’t take long. About ten minutes after they’d settled into place they heard movement on the road. Cade snuck a glance around the boulder behind which he was hiding and saw three individuals headed toward them. They wore hooded robes and walked with their heads down, preventing Cade from seeing them clearly, but they were of roughly the right size and didn’t appear too imposing.

  They would have to do.

  As the trio came abreast of them, Cade gave the signal. He and Riley slipped from their hiding place and snuck up behind the newcomers. A brief scuffle ensued, but the newcomers were no match for the Templar soldiers and soon the three of them were lying unconscious on the ground.

  The entire confrontation had taken place in silence and when Cade stripped the
robe from the lead figure, he discovered why.

  The newcomer had no face!

  A blank visage confronted him, a smooth plane unbroken by mouth, nose or eyes. It was as if the Creator had gotten distracted and moved on to His next project before He’d finished with this one. The sight was strangely unnerving to Cade and he found he couldn’t look at the other for long without growing uncomfortable.

  Thankfully, he wouldn’t have to. Turning away from the body, he donned the man’s robe while Riley did the same with one of the others. The robes covered their heads and hid their faces from casual view and that was exactly what Cade had wanted.

  They dragged the bodies out of sight behind the rocks. Cade would have preferred to leave them bound and gagged, but he didn’t have anything with which to do so. Hopefully they would be inside the city before they revived or were discovered by other travelers.

  Carefully, they made their way closer to the city gates, trying to keep behind cover and stay as low as possible, not wanting to be seen by any sentries that might be manning the walls. The sun was just setting and the rocks around them cast long shadows, which made their approach that much easier. When they had closed the distance to less than one hundred yards, Cade hunkered down at the base of a shallow gully and called a halt.

  “Now what?” Riley whispered.

  Cade grinned. “Now we wait for the right Trojan horse to come along.”

  It didn’t take long. As the sun set the guards took longer in performing their duties and soon a crowd had gathered in front of the gate, waiting. One of the groups waiting consisted of several wagons and a small group of people. More than a few were dressed in dark robes, like those the Templars had confiscated. As the group began to pass inside the gates, Cade saw their opportunity.

  “Come on!” he whispered to Riley and clambered up out of the ditch.

  They strode swiftly out of the darkness and blended with the crowd. They kept their heads down and their hoods pulled low over their faces. The guards had already passed the group’s leaders through and were no longer examining individual members, so the Templars were able to slip inside as if they were part of the caravan.

  They stayed with the group just until they were out of sight of the gate. As the caravan moved deeper into the city, Cade and Riley slipped down a side street and away from them.

  They were inside the city. All they had to do now was find Duncan.

  They took a moment to examine their surroundings. Cade was brought up short by the strange array of buildings before him. A seventeenth-century homestead stood between two gleaming towers of glass as dark as obsidian that looked as if they were blown rather than constructed. Further down the street a monolithic office building built in the blocky style favored by government contractors in the nineteen-fifties stood opposite a three story tenement that seemed to be straight out of a Dickens novel. And he’d be damned if that white church tower peeking through from the block beyond didn’t look like an exact duplicate of Boston’s Old North Church.

  An occasional streetlamp pushed back the darkness, their green-blue flames dancing and weaving inside domes of fuzzy glass.

  Riley looked around with distaste. “How are we going to find Duncan in this place?”

  “I think our best bet is to just keep moving.”

  Before he could say anything more, shouts erupted from close by. He turned toward the sound, his hand on the hilt of his weapon, and was nearly bowled over when someone dashed out of a nearby alley and slammed into him.

  As he disentangled himself from the newcomer, Cade was astonished to see that it was a young girl. She couldn’t have been more than six or seven, with long dark hair bound up in pigtails. She wore a grey shift that hung loosely on her frame and it was clear, from the mud and food stains upon its surface, that it hadn’t been washed in some time.

  She looked up into their surprised faces and must have seen something reassuring, for she immediately moved to put them between herself and the direction from which she had come and said in a frightened voice, “Don’t let them get me!”

  Before either of them could say anything, her pursuers arrived on the scene.

  There were two of them, big, hulking brutes at least seven feet tall, and they looked like they meant business. Both wore stylized metal masks covering the lower half of their faces and rose up to surround their blood red eyes, masks that appeared to be bolted directly into the skin and bone beneath. Above the masks, their bare scalps were crisscrossed with a web of thick red scars.

  A network of similar scars ran across their bare chests and heavily muscled arms, giving the impression that they had been repeatedly whipped at some point in the recent past. Long armored skirts covered their lower extremities all the way down to their booted feet. Both were armed with large curved blades that resembled oversized scimitars. Despite their brutish appearance, they had an aura of authority that was hard to dismiss.

  If this is what the city was using for law enforcement, Cade would be quite happy to stay on their good side.

  At the sight of her pursuers, the girl cowered.

  Enforcer #1 barked something in a language neither Cade nor Riley could understand. When he saw that he wasn’t being understood, he raised his weapon in a menacing gesture.

  A common language wasn’t needed to understand that message.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Cade saw Riley’s hand drift toward the hilt of his weapon in response. “This isn’t our fight,” Cade said, though he didn’t take his eyes off of the enforcers.

  But even as he said it, Cade knew that Riley wasn’t going to see things that way. He’d never been to the Beyond, didn’t understand that sometimes the most vile creatures were often those that hid under innocent guises. He saw only a defenseless girl being harassed by two bullies, rather than the possibility that the girl, despite her innocent appearance, might actually be the greater danger.

  Enforcer # 1 had apparently had enough. He strode forward and reached out for the girl with his free hand, ignoring the Templar warriors completely, as if he knew they wouldn’t dare defy him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Get up! It’s time to go.”

  The command was accompanied by a swift kick to his already broken ribs and Duncan did what he could to stifle a groan of pain. The thin smile of triumph that graced his captor’s face seconds later let him know he hadn’t been entirely successful.

  Just wait, you son of a bitch, wait until I get my hands on you… But he knew that right now he wasn’t getting his hands on anyone, no matter how badly he wanted to, as they were still bound in the set of manacles that Bishop had slapped on them the night before. He hadn’t been imagining things either; the metal still felt cold and greasy to the touch, just as it had last night, and seemed to squirm against his flesh with a life of its own. It made him sick to his stomach if he thought about it, so he did his best to ignore it and think about other things.

  Like how the heck to get out of here.

  He rolled over, the chains clanking against each other as he climbed to his feet. His legs were unsteady beneath him and he again wondered if his physical condition was simply a result of being here in the Beyond or if Bishop was surreptitiously feeding on him in the dead of night. Either way, it was clear that something was going on. He hadn’t felt this weak in years. His sight was fuzzy, his balance shot, and he couldn’t seem to keep track of his thoughts for more than a few minutes no matter how hard he tried.

  There was a knock on the door of their room. Bishop opened it slightly, looked out, and then said something to whoever was outside. Duncan could make out the quiet murmur of another voice answering him, but he couldn’t understand what was said. Bishop must have been satisfied with the response, however, for he hauled on the length of chain attached to Duncan’s manacles and the captive had no choice but to follow.

  The hallway was empty when they emerged from the room; whoever had been there was gone. They descended to the main floor and passed through
several rooms before reaching another staircase. Unlike the first one, this one descended into the depths of the cellar beneath the structure. No sooner had they reached the bottom of that staircase that they entered a series of tunnels carved from the earth itself, marching ahead into the darkness and quickly leaving the light behind.

  The tunnels were cold, dark, and narrow. Despite the lack of illumination Bishop moved unerringly through their depths, hauling Duncan along with him, unmindful of the fact that the other man couldn’t see. Time and time again Duncan slammed into the walls as Bishop turned into narrow side passages without giving his captive any warning and before long Duncan had lost all sense of direction, the need to keep from smashing his head into an unseen obstacle requiring all of his concentration and preventing him from memorizing the turns they’d taken thus far.

  By the time light from somewhere up ahead began to filter back down the tunnel to them, Duncan was too exhausted to do anything but follow his captor.

  The light grew brighter and it wasn’t long before they emerged from the tunnel and found themselves on a beach of black sand, facing the open sea. Six-foot torches were jammed into the ground in a semi-circle around the cave from which they emerged, their flames burning that strange green-silver color that Duncan had seen back in the camp.

  The sight of the ship anchored out in the harbor brought him to a stumbling halt.

  It was like something out of the history books, a three-masted sailing vessel with high sides and square stern. Gun ports could be seen running along the side facing the harbor and Duncan found himself wondering about the sorts of beings that might be manning those weapons in a place like this. The ship rode low in the water, though whether from the style of its construction or because it was heavy with cargo, he couldn’t tell. It dawned on him that the torches had been set up as a signal for those aboard the vessel and sure enough, a second, smaller light on the water showed them a longboat halfway between the galleon and the beach. It was clearly headed in their direction and upon seeing it, Bishop smiled in satisfaction.