MudMan (The Golem Chronicles Book 1)

by James Hunter

  He threw out a brutal kick—one of Cain’s knees snapped with a crack.

  He followed up with a devastating hammer strike—shark teeth shattered and broke away, lodged in the vines.

  He spun, blade sliding through the air with a soft whistle: one of Cain’s arms came away in a spray of blood, then tumbled to the floor.

  For a moment Levi felt the surge of exhilaration. They were doing it, killing the abomination—

  Then, Cain vanished from Levi’s earth sense, disappearing in a blink as he leapt into the air, breaking all contact with the ground.

  Levi found Cain an instant later when a sword blade, long as a man, sliced into his body, entering his left hip and tearing its way to the other side. Levi keeled over, thudding to the ground like a stone, legs cut out from beneath him. The plant guardians shrieked and wailed, trying to wriggle loose from Levi’s body, but unable to do so. With the quartz armor in place, Levi weighed near a ton, and his bulk pinned the already weak plant creatures to the floor. Only a single guardian, wrapped around Levi’s head, managed to worm free and retreat.

  As the dust cloud finally settled, Cain descended in a flurry of blows, thrashing the plants covering Levi’s body until only shreds of vegetation remained.

  Levi stared up at the creature, eyes leaking out thin streaks of golden ichor. He hurt, there was no question about that, but after all the pain he’d experienced since finding Ryder, this was nothing. Not when balanced against the reality of his complete and utter failure. He’d lived through a baptism by fire, ripped off his own hands and feet, and chosen his friends over vengeance, but it wasn’t enough. Not even close.

  The murder god’s face split into a grin the envy of any shark. “You may not realize your potential, little brother, but we are godlings. And I have use of you yet,” he said, voicing buzzing in the back of the Mudman’s skull. With that, the homunculus sidestepped Levi and strode across the warehouse, moving with the grace of a big game cat closing in on a wounded gazelle. With a snarl and a heave, Levi rolled himself over, sprawling onto his stomach so he could, at least, watch the end. Bear witness as he had always done before. Maybe he couldn’t save Chuck, Ryder, or Wilkie, but he could remember them.

  Ryder, her sister, and the professor leaned against one of the pillars. The whole lot of ’em looked to have one foot solidly in the grave, and the professor was unconscious. Chuck stood in front of them, gun raised, though his legs quivered and his hands shook. Levi hadn’t been quick enough. Maybe if he had managed to hold Cain for a few more minutes … maybe Chuck could’ve escaped. The Mudman didn’t care much for the man, not on a personal level, but the halfie had done right by Levi time and again, and he would’ve liked to see him live.

  The Mudman silently muttered a prayer that Chuck would be true to his nature and not play the hero. He hoped Chuck would turn, run, leave everyone to die, and save himself. But no. Chuck stood fast. Stood fast and faced down a resurrected godling that had just single-handedly pulverized Levi and an ancient temple guardian without missing a beat.

  “Stop your ugly ass right there, motherfucker,” he said, voice breaking at the end.

  Cain did stop, though only long enough to laugh—a rumbling boom that reminded Levi of broken glass and screaming babies, high-speed car accidents and artillery fire. Then Cain spoke, his words cold as lake ice. “Die like the insignificant creature you are.” Then he was a blur of red, flashing across the floor, one monster arm sweeping out. A vicious backhand blow slammed into Chuck’s chest and face, swatting the man through the air and into a stone pillar ten feet off.

  Chuck, for all his heroics, crumpled like a sheet of paper, the fight gone out of him before it had even begun.

  “And now for the mage,” Cain spat, stalking nearer. “One. More. Death,” he mused, seemingly to himself, “and no one will ever lock me away again.”

  Ryder pushed herself upright. She wobbled on weak legs, bent at the middle, a mess of blood drooling from the wound in her belly. “I think Chuck already told you, fucktard,” she said softly, words slurred and forced. “Go fuck yourself sideways.” The last was a whisper of pain.

  “Lie down, mother,” the godling said. “Lie down, close your eyes. It will be over in minutes. Go with whatever peace and dignity you can muster.”

  “I don’t think so, you overgrown parasite,” she said, body shuddering. “The professor, he told me what to do. I can hurt you. I can kill you. We’re bound, so as long as I’m breathing, you’re my bitch—not the other way around.”

  “I may be a monster,” he said, backing up a step, “but I have a debt to you and your sister. Your contribution is not insignificant. Just do your part—it is the easiest thing in the world. Die. Die and I will show compassion”—he waved a hand toward Chuck and the professor—“and let these no ones live their short, pathetic, meaningless lives.”

  “They aren’t no ones. And I won’t say it again, go fuck yourself.” She bent over with a groan and picked up the shaman’s ceremonial knife with clumsy fingers. “I’ve been running my whole life.” She paused, breathing labored. “I’ve never taken a stand … because it’s always been about survival. Well, I’m done surviving. I’m gonna die here, but at least I won’t have to live with being a chicken shit coward. So go eat a dick, douchewaffle.”

  As Levi lay there, legs gone, body broken, his mind began to work. If Ryder really could kill Cain, maybe they weren’t finished yet. With a silent grimace he rolled onto one side and jammed his hand into his stomach, fishing out the remaining clay pot. Even after all the hurt and punishment he’d endured, the pot was still, blessedly, intact. With that in hand, he pulled his body across the grit-covered floor, using his bleeding stumps and his free hand to crawl to the last remaining guardian. The one that had escaped. Cain had done a number on the beast—it was little more than a clump of vines and flowers. But it wriggled with life.

  He pulled it into a fist and drew it close. “You alive, Siphonei?” he asked, having to force every word out.

  “Yes,” one of the black flowers hissed. “But not long now.”

  Levi nodded. He could do this. He took the pot and pressed it into the plant’s vines. “I’m gonna launch you at his back. You need to get this pot inside him, then break it. Understand?”

  “Yes,” she whispered again, then fell silent. He pushed himself up onto his bloody stumps. Settling his bulk onto the amputated limbs was like dipping his legs into a pool of magma. But he ignored the pain, pushing it away, wrapping his mind in purpose. After all, he only needed seconds and then … well, then he could give up one way or the other. He hoisted the tattered remains of the last guardian into the air, wound back his arm, then launched the creature with every ounce of strength left to him. The momentum of the throw carried him forward—he thudded to the floor, face smashing up against the stone.

  He watched through hazy eyes as the guardian flew true, colliding into Cain’s back, tentacles shooting out, barbed hooks latching on. And, with a final thrust, Siphonei jammed a broken arm into homunculus’ blood-slick skin, drilling past his muscle and deep into his core. A second tentacle followed the first, shoving Levi’s pot in as far as it would go, then smashing the clay in a blink.

  She’d done it.

  Levi could feel the ichor calling to him. It was inside of Cain, mingling with the homunculus’ blood and fluid, spreading through his limbs like a toxin waiting to kill.

  As Levi’s ichor spread he felt a connection form to the strange beast across the room. Though Levi knew his essence was vastly different than Cain’s, in body, form, they weren’t so different at all. Perhaps only the naturally occurring genetic difference between brothers. The homunculus was built along the same lines as Levi, made from the same blueprint, just constructed from a different medium. Cain was even filled with ichor of sorts, though that too was different from Levi’s. Type A blood compared to type B.

  Levi reached into the ground, his senses penetrating deep into the heart of the earth, a th
ousand feet and more, until he felt what he wanted: a pocket of red hot molten rock, burbling and simmering in a magma chamber. He’d never transmuted ichor into magma, but he found it no more difficult than transmuting ichor to obsidian or gold. It took Levi only a thought and a small effort of will to trigger the change: the ichor, pumping through the homunculus’ veins, went from liquid gold to molten rock.

  Levi watched, a small smile breaking across his face as Cain’s steps faltered, then halted completely. The creature fell to his knees, a shriek rising from his throat as his bloody hide bubbled, pockets of magma bursting through like tiny volcanoes littering his body. He lifted his face to the air, thousand eyes scrunching closed in pain, then his scream cut off as magma splashed from his yawning maw.

  Ryder, being smart and savvy, wasted no time. She padded forward, still hunched over and clutching her middle, then with a lopsided grin, plunged the knife square into one of Cain’s ruby eyes. She pulled the blade free and struck again, knife flashing out over and over, stabbing into the homunculus’ face, slicing through his flesh and gouging out his countless eyes. “Go … fuck … yourself,” she said, panting the words, before slamming the blade through the top of his skull, grunting as she muscled the blade down, all the way to the hilt.

  Cain pitched over to one side, body seizing, arms and legs flapping and flailing as more magma trickled out, turning from red-orange to black as it cooled in the air. A final, massive spasm ran through the homunculus—one of its feet shot out and smashed into Ryder, hurling her back in a sprawl of limbs and blood—followed by a clap of thunder, the sound of a sonic boom.

  A portal shimmered into being, an opalescent thing, ten feet by ten feet, which hung suspended high overhead. Through the opal haze, Levi caught a brief glimpse of fire—a place that mirrored the inside of a volcano—blacks, reds, and various hues of gold, mixing and swirling in ever shifting patterns.

  Cain’s jaws distended, breaking apart with a sickening snap of bone, and a bloated beast, big as a whale, long as a city block, and covered with chitinous plates, twitching legs, and ruby eyes, flew up and out like an endless stream of vomit. The creature mewled—an inhuman sound loud as a train wreck—as its body, Cain’s essence, was sucked through the portal and back into the fiery waters it called home. As big as the beast was, the whole process took only seconds, and then the creature was gone, the portal snapping shut behind the godling. Only the broken and decaying form of the empty homunculus remained behind.

  THIRTY-FOUR:

  Second Chances

  Siphonei lay on the floor, body shattered, tentacles hacked off, the last spark of her consciousness fading like the final embers of a spent campfire. She surveyed the room around her: an ugly place that reminded her far too much of her temple prison back in the Sprawl, what with its ruby-eyed altar decorating the wall and those stone pillars with their graphic depictions of the unnatural and profane. Chaos still seethed all around her, the howls of the victorious and the mewling cries of the defeated—sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the two—but those things she put from her mind.

  She’d been alive for the better part of four millennia, and she refused to have her final thoughts be of death, destruction, murder, or that damned Cain. Her prisoner. Her captive. Though she was Cain’s warden, she had also been his prisoner. She’d spent thousands of years confining him and preventing his escape, but his existence, in turn, prevented her from ever leaving that tomb of stone and sand and vines. No, Cain would not claim these last moments of her life, especially not since her mind was clear. Finally her own again.

  Back in the prison complex her programing had clouded everything, but here, so far away from her neural mainframe … she felt … she felt herself again. She stared at the ruined monstrosity of her body, with its green vines, black flowers, sinuous tendrils, and tearing claws. She couldn’t weep, but she wanted to. She’d been beautiful, once, in a different age. Now she was a fading nightmare that no one would ever miss. Everything she’d ever cared about—everyone who had ever cared about her—was long gone.

  But no, she wouldn’t focus on that either. Too depressing. Death was the end, but for her it was more a mercy than a misery.

  Her life had been taken from her, but at least her death would be her own.

  Instead of focusing on any of those things, she remembered. Remembered thoughts of her husband, Marius—dead so long ago, she could hardly recall what he looked like. She couldn’t even remember his proper name. They had a child, a girl, but she couldn’t remember her name either. Not after so many years with the memories stripped away. But she did recall holding the child as an infant: the sweet smell of her dark hair, the way she would fall asleep on Siphonei’s chest after breastfeeding in the night. The thought of her skin—not organic plant matter, but real skin—brushing up against someone else’s sent a shiver running down her spinal column.

  Her appendages, or what remained of them, flapped on the floor in response.

  A death spasm.

  She took a long breath of fresh air, free from the dry, dusty scent of desert winds, and closed her eyes for what she was sure was the last time.

  Except, after a time, she opened them again. Her body was withering around her, unable to repair the grievous damage, nor survive away from her central mainframe—the great flower that held captive her human remains. Surprisingly, the fighting had ceased, and the silence of a graveyard rested over the warehouse. The power was out and the building sat in utter gloom, but she could see easily enough with the thin moon light trickling in from an overhead window.

  The sight before her was enough to rob her of breath:

  The homunculus was near. A monstrous body, all long limbs and tearing teeth, but she knew its body was malleable and took its shape based on the essence occupying the shell. This shell had been vacated, and recently. From all outward appearances, the body—which had housed Dibeininax Ayosainondur Daimuyon—was dead. Burned, scarred, mutilated, decaying. But she saw true. The body was dying, quickly. Without a host to give it form and essence, the homunculus would spoil like an overripe fruit fallen from a tree branch.

  But dying wasn’t dead.

  With the miniscule strength left to her, she pulled her ruined remains toward the empty vessel. Perhaps this wasn’t the end after all ...

  THIRTY-FIVE:

  New Day

  The sanctuary buzzed with the quiet hum of men and women sharing words, the greeting of peace before worship began. Light filtered in through the stained-glass windows, splashing bright patches of red, gold, and blue over the cross hanging above the pulpit. A beautiful morning, with everything in its proper place, just as it should be. Levi stood, church face plastered in place, red hymnal—the binding nearly shot—in one palm.

  Though he was far from being back to normal, after four days of constant recuperation, he was feeling almost human again, or at least as close as he ever came to feeling human. The fact that he’d survived at all was cause for celebration, especially considering the tremendous damage he’d endured after freeing himself from Hogg’s manacles and battling Cain. Even more miraculous, Ryder, her sister, Jamie, Professor Wilkie, and Chuck had all managed to survive the ordeal as well. Not undamaged, obviously—everyone sported their fair share of breaks, scrapes, bruises, and emotional scars—but alive was alive.

  Levi didn’t remember much after Ryder had repeatedly stabbed Cain in the head. He vaguely recalled watching Cain’s essence—a big, nasty, bloated thing—being sucked back into the pit where it rightfully belonged, but everything after that was fuzzy. A blur of sight and sounds and darkness. Chuck had been kind enough to fill Levi in once he finally became coherent. Apparently, after Ryder had finished Cain off, Chuck had taken charge of the situation: routing the last of the Kobocks and Thursrs—almost single-handedly, of course—then using Levi’s ichor to stabilize Ryder and Jamie until he could get them to a hospital. Somewhere in there, someone—though Levi wasn’t precisely sure who—had dropped
him off at his home.

  At least that was the way Chuck told things. Levi trusted the halfie’s recollection of events about as much as he’d trust a politician running for office. He suspected Chuck’s account was more than a little embellished and likely designed to squeeze out a bonus for his “heroics.” He suspected the Black Shillelaghs had played a much more substantial role, but Levi didn’t particularly care to press the issue. Everything had turned out more or less okay, so the exact how of it all wasn’t nearly as important.

  He’d met with Chuck again last night, over at the Lonely Mountain.

  It’d been the first time in days he’d felt physically capable of dragging his mangled body off the bloodstone in his backyard. He’d met both to pay the man the gold he was due and to square away all the nitty-gritty details that remained. Levi had defeated Hogg—in a manner of speaking, anyway—and stopped Cain, but there was still clean-up work to be done: Compensating the mercenaries he’d hired. Disposing of all those bodies so the authorities would be none the wiser. Razing that heinous laboratory to the ground so Hogg would have to start again from scratch.

  There was also Ryder to see to. Her and Jamie, the sister.

  “So,” Chuck had said, lounging in a booth, spinning a tacky diamond-studded gold ring that hugged his middle finger. “My money.”

  Levi waved the question away and plunked a USPS box down on the table. A nondescript package, which would draw little notice. Unless, of course, someone picked up the tiny box. At over fifty pounds, Levi was sure the package would raise a few questions in the wrong hands.

  “How is she?” he asked Chuck without preamble. “Her and her sister?”

  Levi would’ve taken the pair in, but he hadn’t been in any kind of shape to deal with those two. He’d barely been able to care for himself, which was saying something since caring for himself amounted to sleeping on a rock and not moving for four days straight. Besides, someone needed to actively look after them—to watch for any possible side effects from the botched ritual.