MudMan (The Golem Chronicles Book 1)

by James Hunter

  Levi shook the memory free before it could carry further—he’d seen it many times before and had no desire to watch the end of that particular story. Ruth and Edith Rublach. Sisters. The first gassed in the chamber known as Red House in Birkenau, the second experimented on and sacrificed in front of a terrible altar with ruby eyes—like Jacob Fackenheim.

  “Fine,” he mumbled. “One call. Only her. And don’t give any details. Nothing. Not where you are, who you’re with, or what you’ve seen. Nothing. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He grunted, nodded. “Sit tight.” He carefully set his arm down on the coffee table before marching off through the kitchen and down the stairs into the basement. A series of metal racks hugged the far wall, burdened with tools and various house supplies. A washer and dryer occupied a space next to the racks.

  The majority of the basement was blank, cold concrete. It held a couple of tables, a manual potter’s wheel, a pugmill—for making clay—a modeling stand, and a bench with his modeling instruments: calipers, scrapers, sponges, rasps, armature wire, and study casts. His kiln, a hulking thing of brick and steel, with a heavy door and a vent shaft, sat in one corner. Next to that stood a cooling rack filled with various projects he’d been working on, all in different states of completion: a drying bust, a wildly abstract vase—all gentle curves and soft flowers—waiting to be finished, and a small army of circular pots he’d been testing different glazes on.

  His gaze lingered on the kiln for a long beat. He used it for firing his pieces, turning soft clay into hard and brittle artwork, ready to ship for the market, but he also used it for purging. Levi hated fire, but unlike water, he didn’t fear it. Rather, he used it to inflict punishment. Self-castigation.

  When he relapsed, like with the Kobocks in the Deep Downs, he’d heat the kiln up and shove his hands into its belly, letting the flames dance over his murdering fingers and bite at the exposed skin on his arms and chest. Levi was no stranger to pain, but even the raw wound in his shoulder was nothing compared to the cleansing torture of fire.

  It burned and charred without leaving a mark; instead it fed on the ichor in his clay-skin like gasoline. God was a consuming fire, and Levi’s purging was an act of communion and contrition with that holy flame, a display of his desire to change. He’d need to purge for today’s bloody deeds, to pay for the deaths of the Thursr and the Kobocks from the Cadillac. But later since he suspected there would be more bloodshed to come.

  So, instead of making for the kiln, he headed over to his workbench and grabbed a bulky sealed Tupperware container filled with slip: thick, mucky clay goo. He stared at his stump. He’d need the slip to make it whole—

  A ball of orange fur seemed to materialize from nowhere, thudded into his shin, then twirled and twisted around his ankle.

  His cat, Jacob-Francis.

  The Mudman bent over and scratched the animal behind one ear with his index finger, which earned him an approving chirp followed by a purr that sounded like a jet engine. The cat loitered only for a moment before shooting off toward his food bowl in the corner. Of course. Levi headed over to the bowl—still full, but not full enough for Jacob—and topped it off. The tabby offered Levi one more chirp, then buried his face in the dry kibble, dismissing Levi with a flick of his tail.

  Ungrateful little beasts, cats. Still, Levi felt some infinitesimally miniscule affection for the creature. He even smiled, but only for the briefest instant.

  Next, he headed over to the only proper room in the basement, an office—his lair—little more than a large storage closet, with a heavy lock on the door.

  The lock was a specialty item, a warded trinket he’d picked up in the Hub, which helped conceal the room from prying eyes. Moreover, the lock was coded to him and would only open in his presence. The interior was a plain affair, especially compared to the lock guarding the door: concrete floor, a few more bookcases holding arcane texts and ancient history tomes, a squat brown desk with a desk lamp and an old computer. The computer he used for taxes, a pain even supernatural monsters couldn’t avoid.

  It was the bulky metal chest in the corner of the room, hidden under a blanket and guarded by a secondary specialty lock, that he wanted. It took only a moment to get the thing open. Inside: papers and phony documents—birth certificates, passports, credit cards, driver’s licenses—everything he would need to start a new life ten times over. Fat stacks of emergency currency, a hundred thousand dollars total. Prepaid cell phones—cheap, plastic, untraceable things. And, under that, stacked along the bottom, gold.

  Ten bars of gold, each 400 troy ounces in weight. At two thousand dollars an ounce, the total came in at eight hundred thousand per bar. Eight million for ten bars. He also had a Tupperware container filled to the brim with gold bullion in smaller increments: 20-gram bars, worth seven hundred a piece, and 100-gram bars, which went for three thousand five hundred a pop. A not so small fortune, and going up every day as the price of gold soared. He was an artist, true, but that was only a front. The real source of his wealth was the gold. And the gold came from his ichor: bars of transmuted lead.

  He ignored the fraudulent papers and gold bullion, grabbing a new, prepaid Track-phone and a stack of bills, which he slipped into a pocket. With that done he carefully locked up, rearmed the special wards, and stomped his way upstairs.

  The goopy slip he deposited on the coffee table next to his severed arm, then proffered the phone to the girl on the couch. “Make your call,” he said. “Just the one, mind you—then shut the phone off and leave it on the table. After that, go shower, eat, sleep, whatever. I’ll be indisposed for a couple of hours.”

  He picked up his Tupperware container and limb, turned away, and went out to the backyard—the girl, for the time being, out of mind.

  The back, like the front, showed signs of meticulous care, though it featured even more greenery and artful landscaping than the front. Wild flowers speckled the lawn in every shape and hue, while raspberry and blackberry bushes vied for dominance near the manicured lilac hedge. Around it all towered an extra high wooden fence—one which he’d had to procure a special permit to construct—shielding him from the curious eyes of nosey neighbors.

  Levi ignored all these, trotting over to the gnarled oak squatting in the middle of the yard with a smooth boulder perched in its shade.

  Gently, he set both the slip and his arm on the boulder, then eased himself onto the stone’s surface, warm from the sun’s falling rays. A moan escaped Levi’s lips as the boulder accepted his weight and began to sap away the weariness and pain taking up residence inside his body like unwelcome squatters. The rock, like Levi, was unique in the world. Originally a chunk of rough granite nearly two tons in weight, it was now the world’s largest bloodstone—a martyr’s stone—of dark-green jasper, almost black, with a spattering of bright red circles strewn about its surface. Granite to bloodstone, courtesy of powerful alchemic magic.

  Its surface was littered with glyphs and sigils, seals pilfered from a host of arcane texts—the Sefer Raziel Ha-Malakh Liber Razielis Archangeli, the Picatrix, the Liber Juatus, the Book of Abra-Melin the Mage, the Clavis Salomonis—a few meant to hide the stone’s power from non-initiates, while the rest promoted rapid healing. Bloodstones had an origin story nearly as interesting as Levi’s own. A Christian legend, so old its creator was lost to the ages, held that when Jesus was crucified, his blood dripped upon green jasper embedded in the hills of Golgotha, the place of the skull. The blood stained the jasper with spots of deep crimson, thus imbuing the holy rocks with mystic power. Healing powers.

  Levi didn’t know the truth of such a tale, but he did know the stone, combined with the etched-on runes, did wonders. Perched on his stone, he could heal in hours what otherwise might take days, or even weeks. His healing was entirely dependent on his ichor, and though his body only held so much of the golden liquid at any given point, his beating heart did produce new ichor in time. Just like human blood. The bloodstone radically increased t
he rate he could produce the substance.

  He examined the hole in his shoulder socket. Here on his bloodstone, connected to the earth—with the slip binding his wound together—he’d be good as new in no time. An hour tops.

  Levi dug his fingers into the stump of his shoulder with a grimace, reopening the wound and dragging out a handful of golden ichor, which he casually slapped onto an equally glyph-carved tree trunk in front of him. The sigils were a varied combination of old Nordic runes and Greek script and spiraled around the trunk in looping swirls. He’d also worked a crude, uneven face in a gnarled knot at eye level.

  The ichor flared and disappeared into the trunk, calling out to the spirit of the tree and opening a temporary conduit through which the being could manifest.

  It would take a few minutes for the creature to surface, though, so the Mudman busied himself while he waited. He casually popped the lid off the container scooped a heaping portion of the clammy muck into his palm, and slathered it into his empty shoulder socket. A cool and refreshing ointment against the burning in his flesh. He set his arm across his lap, covered the ragged end in more slip, and crammed it firmly back in place with a silent snarl, his face a mask of agony.

  “Looks like you’ve been on the unlucky end of a bad brawl, Mudman,” said a voice, huffy and wizened with age. Where once the gnarled knot had been, now lurked a tremendous face. Bright blue eyes sat in a twisted visage of bark, and a trailing mustache of wispy green moss descended from beneath a large and bulbous nose. Somarlidrel, a greater Leshy and the head Librarian of Glimmer-Tir, the capital of the High Fae of Summerlands.

  Levi inclined his head a few inches. “Somarlidrel, you are well met. Let the water run deep, the sun be ever cool, and the shade of your tree grow long. Thank you for coming.”

  “And you, Levi Mud-Brother,” he replied with a ponderous roll of his too-big eyes. “You’re too formal, Muddy, especially between old friends. No need for such ceremony. No need for it.”

  “You know I don’t like being called Muddy.”

  “And you know I don’t like being called Somarlidrel—it’s Skip, just Skip—but still you insist on formal names,” he said, then sighed, the sound like a strong wind rustling through tree branches. After a moment: “Truly, you look terrible, Levi. Someone accidentally run you through that pugmill of yours?” He chuckled, a hollow boom. Levi didn’t laugh. Nothing funny about having an arm ripped from its socket.

  “Had a run in with a Thursr and a pack of Kobos,” he replied evenly.

  “Truly? A Thursr you say? Haven’t heard about them leaving Outworld in ages. They’re rare you know, nearly extinct. Beasts breed so slowly, can’t keep their numbers up … Though, now that you’ve mentioned it, I seem to recall hearing about a sounder—that’s what they call their packs, sounders …” He trailed off as if he’d lost the train of thought entirely.

  “You seem to recall hearing,” Levi prompted.

  “Right, yes, that’s where I was going with it. I seem to recall hearing about a sounder of Thursrs hiring themselves out as sell-swords. Work for the highest bidder as muscle, that sort of thing.”

  Levi bobbed his head noncommittally. “Could be, I suppose.”

  “Well, what, pray tell, was the beast after?” Skip, just Skip, asked.

  Levi filled him in about his hunting expedition in the Hub, the Kobock temple, the strange altar, the cryptic note, and, of course, Ryder. He reached into his pocket and retrieved his phone, pulling up the picture of the ancient bas-relief.

  “I need to know about this.” He held the phone out, picture toward the living tree. “There’s something more going on here. Could be bad. It also holds a … personal significance.”

  “That so?” Skip replied. “And what might that be?”

  “I’d prefer not to say.”

  “But, I quite insist. We’re friends, Muddy, never doubt it, but neither forget that I’m the head Librarian of Glimmer-Tir, and information is my bread and butter. Might be, I can tell you something about that altar of yours—or, at least, point you in the right direction—but my dear Queen would turn me into firewood if I give away such information without receiving in kind. You know how it is, old boy, a gift for a gift. It is as it has always been.”

  “I gave you the bit about the Thursr,” Levi said. “That should count for something. Probably someone, somewhere, could benefit from that tidbit.”

  Skip frowned, his gnarled face scrunching, lips pulling into a grimace of distaste, forehead creasing with a thousand lines. “Don’t try and hustle me, Muddy, you know the rules. You gave that information freely. What’s more, you know the gifts must be of equal value, at least in the eye of the receiver, and what you’re asking about is important, so it requires giving something of importance.”

  Levi ground his teeth. He didn’t like talking about his past, always best to look to the future. The past was a bloody mess, full of death and violence, even more so than the present. In those long ago days, he’d been more a force of nature, a walking weapon, than a thinking being. “I ought to turn you into firewood, myself,” he muttered under his breath, refusing to meet the shifty tree’s eyes. Skip was a friend of sorts, but how Levi hated striking bargains with the fae, even beneficent ones.

  “You wouldn’t dare,” Skip replied, somehow managing to look down his lumpy nose at the Mudman. “And if you want my assistance, you know what it’ll cost you. Now, are you ready to deal or should I, perhaps, try back at a later time?”

  “Fine,” Levi growled, waving his good arm through the air. “The altar, it’s tied to one of my earliest memories. My earliest memory, even. The details of my creation are still unclear to me”—he shrugged, which hardly hurt at all now—“but I remember the altar. Only in a distant way, though. Hazy. Like a dream … but it’s stuck with me all these years.

  “I remember opening my eyes for the first time. It was dark, the moon a thin sliver of light in the sky. Rain drizzled down, falling into my open mouth. The smell of turned earth and musky decay. Then ozone and smoke. The harsh sting of lime biting at my nose—the Nazis used the stuff to mask the scent from the graves, you know that?”

  “And the altar?” the Leshy asked.

  Levi held up a hand, patience. “We’ll get there, yet, but if you insist on hearing this, then I insist you hear the whole story. I was born in a graveyard. Well, not a graveyard, too kind a term. A mass grave, an open pit. That’s where I opened my eyes for the first time. The first thing I ever saw was bodies stacked up beside me like cordwood. The first thing I ever felt”—he tapped a finger at his chest—“was the searing pain from the brand on my chest. Anger, blind rage, pushed me up out of that pit. My first emotions.

  “Once I pulled myself free, I saw a building nearby, a squat concrete box, just through the trees. Looked like a bunker. An underground lab is what it was, I think. That’s where I saw the altar, or at least something like it. Hard to say because the memory, it’s muddled in my head. But I think it was the same.”

  He pressed his eyes shut and held them closed. “If I close my eyes and call up the memory, I can almost see it in front of me. Can almost reach out and run a hand over it. An altar with ruby eyes, surrounded by dead bodies, maybe fifty waiting to be buried. Some shot outright. Several missing body parts. A handful stitched together with animal pieces and chunks of halfies. There were soldiers there, too. A few Wehrmacht, a couple of scientists, but mostly Schutzstaffel …before that, after that? I dunno.”

  He glanced up at the tree. Now Skip wouldn’t meet his eye. “I’m sorry,” the Leshy said after a while. “I’ll tell you what you need … and”—he faltered—“and I’ll keep what I’ve heard to myself. Such a story is yours to tell, I think, and no one else’s.”

  Levi bobbed his head and looked away, kicking lazily at the lawn with one foot. “It is what it is,” he said. “No reason in keeping it secret, I suppose. Not from you anyway. So what about the altar? They’re doing something bad down there and I’d like to kno
w what. Besides, I figure it might clear some things up about me.”

  “Aye, aye.” The Leshy looked thoughtful. “I’ll wager it is bad, but I can’t tell you much about it. It’s Kobock workmanship, a religious artifact—”

  “Don’t be crude,” Levi interrupted, slapping his good hand down on the surface of the bloodstone. “Don’t call what those monsters do down in the dark religion.” He imbued the word with scorn. “They’re monsters, Skip. Barbaric creatures who glorify death and murder. Who worship sin. True religion ought to call out the better parts of our nature, but Kobocks? They have no better nature. Their religion is a mockery. A perversion. The only thing those beasts really believe in is survival, murder, and hunger.”

  “Say what you will,” the old tree replied, “but I can quite assure you, Levi, they do have their religion and it informs every aspect of their lives and culture. It’s at the heart of why they do the things they do. They worship old things, dark gods of death long banished by the Great White King, but worship it is, all the same. I’ve talked to a Kobock shaman or two in my day, and they’re much more intelligent and thoughtful than you’re giving them credit for. And their blood magic—it’s crude, but brilliant.”

  Levi slammed a foot against the ground, sending a tremor rumbling through the yard, ripples wriggling across the surface of the pond in the far corner by the fence. “Enough. The shamans are the worst of the lot. I’ve seen the fruits of their hands.” He pulled the phone back out, brought up the photo of the fleshy, malformed golem, and thrust it toward Skip. “There’s filthy blood magic at work. There it is. Nothing brilliant about it.”

  “As you say, Levi,” the tree responded, his tone one a parent might use with an unruly child. “I’ll let it go, but you’re really in no position to cast stones. Need I remind you that your power is blood magic, too. Not terribly different from the shamans. This conversation is irrelevant either way, though, since no Kobock shaman is likely to sit down and give you a lesson in comparative religion.”