The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One

by Rinaldi, Jared

  “They’re not moving or growling,” Brook said. “Why?”

  The answer had appeared behind them, levitating further out in the ocean. He called to them without word or name, without voice. Brook and Mercer felt him, knew that he was there, waiting for them. They turned, and it was the man in the yellow suit, floating above the waves. His head moved around his neck as though it were an insect beneath the mask, while his body hung limp, save for one forearm draped like a hook over his belly.

  “You have what belongs to me…” Yellow Suit said. He moved his arm away from his stomach, revealing a large tear in the suit through which his gut’s viscera winked out at them like an infected eye. Intestines spilled out into the waves with loud plops as the man levitated higher into the sky. In the same jittery fashion as he had moved his head, Yellow Suit began to tear his protective gear off, revealing pasty white skin covered in thin cuts and wounds. Rather than float away on the ocean’s breeze, the tatters of the yellow suit rewove and reformed themselves into a thick, dirty cloak that draped around the man’s body. Tumors erupted on the lacerated white flesh before the cloak had completely covered it. Soon, only the man’s hands and chin were visible.

  “You…” Brook heard Mercer whisper. He pulled Jai Lin from its sheath, and she followed suit, notching an arrow to her bow. “Plaguewind.”

  Plaguewind seemed to shudder when he saw the blade, but then began to laugh. Brook felt any and all hope die within her.

  “Ah, so you’ve learned my true name? That’s all the better. You can scream it as I have my children peel the flesh from your bones. Now, I’ll be taking the sword.”

  Plaguewind lifted a malformed arm into the sky. In his hand was a metal rod furnished with a large black crystal. Black tendrils erupted from it, up towards the heavens like bolts of lightning. The low-hanging cumulus clouds grew darker as they absorbed the tendrils, and began to whirl about, a vortex around which Plaguewind’s sceptre was the axis.

  The shallows Brook and Mercer were wading in began to be sucked out deeper into the ocean, sinking below their waists, then their knees, until they were standing on nothing but wet sand. Mercer spun around, expecting the dead men to be upon him now that there was no water between them, but still they stood motionless on the beach, watching the events unfold with their vacant eyes.

  “Brook, shoot him! Now!” Brook let loose an arrow, then another, but Plaguewind merely held his free hand up, and the arrows splintered apart in mid-air, falling like matchsticks onto the sand.

  “Such primitive weapons,” Plaguewind laughed. “How far man has fallen in so short a time. A century and a half ago, man had the power to explode the world a hundred times over. We were gods. Now…” he chuckled. “Look at what we’ve devolved into. Primitive cave men with bows and arrows.”

  Primitive cave men with bows and arrows. Mercer had heard those exact words said before, had in fact heard them many times, always from the same mouth. It would always be when they returned from a trip deep into the Karyatim Wild Lands southwest of the Preserve, when they would travel from tribe to tribe bringing medicines and books to the people who lived in the woods and salt flats. They’d return to the house Mercer had grown up in, next to the pond at the bottom of the valley, and after making a cup of coffee and plopping into his easy chair, his father would lament on how man had devolved into primitive cave people with bows and arrows.

  Plaguewind’s voice echoed around in his head. It didn’t sound anything like his father’s voice, but the way he spoke, the things he said…

  “Pa?”

  Brook looked at Mercer, her mouth agape. “Mercer?”

  From under Plaguewind’s hood, Mercer could see the malformed man’s jaw moving, could see silent words forming on his lips. It looked as if he was arguing with himself, for one moment his jaw would be slack and pleading, the next his razor sharp teeth would be exposed in a gnashing snarl.

  Suddenly, the dark tendrils stopped emanating from the sceptre, and the clouds slowed their spin. Plaguewind had become still, his jaw slack.

  “My son…” Plaguewind whispered. “I’m so sorry…”

  “Pa!” Mercer ran forward, his feet splashing through the low shallows. The dead men on the beach were moaning again, but their groans were quickly drowned out by a rumble. The ground was shaking. Behind Plaguewind came the source of the tremors: all the water that had been sucked out further into the ocean was returning, a tidal wave that blotted out the sky. It was like the great waves the Boat People and beachy men said drowned the great cities in the long ago, at least an eye-span high and rushing in at them at breakneck speed.

  “By the talons of Elon…” Brook whispered.

  “Run!” They turned to run, but there was no escaping it. They were but fifteen strides from the place they had been standing when the wave caught up with them, sucking them up into it before crashing on the shore.

  Mercer bolted upright, his hand instinctively going for Jai Lin’s hilt. The sword wasn’t there, his hand alighting instead upon a human-sized sack of flour and some dented metal cans. He always kept his sword next to him while he slept. Where was Jai Lin? Better question still, where was he?

  He pulled his knees to his chest and ran his hand through his sweaty hair. His breath was coming in quick, shallow bursts, like a well-pump pulling water from the earth. It had been the dream, though he couldn’t quite remember its details. There had been dead men aplenty though and that was reason enough for his quickened heartbeat. He felt weak, dizzy, like he had been swimming in a cloud for the past week, and then realized part of that feeling was from how the room was itself swaying back and forth. Was he on a boat? There was a sudden, violent jounce, and his nautical notions were quickly dispelled. He was in the back of a covered wagon, he realized, its wooden wheels having just run over a bump in the road.

  There was a man sitting atop a crate next to him. He had wide eyes and concern was etched into every line in his face. It took Mercer a moment, but he recognized the man as Jompers, the cosmologist they’d come by in Old Poe’s Keep.

  “You’re awake. Oh good, good, good.”

  “How long was I out?” Mercer asked, his voice surprisingly small and creaky.

  “Two days, boy,” a gravelly voice said from the back of the wagon. “Two long, hell-filled days.” Solloway also sat atop a wooden crate, his face silhouetted against the gray sky beyond the wagon’s back flap, a hand rolled cigarette burning between his fingers.

  “What happened?”

  “The damn dog triggered a trap, that’s what happened. You tell them, Jed.”

  The skeletal man with the wide-eyes and blue coat nodded, never looking away from Mercer. “Of course, Sergeant, of course. You see, I planted several traps along the winding road between Young Poe’s Keep and the Mountain Road, just in case some bad people were coming to look for me. One of the traps I set, which Leo haplessly tripped, was a wire I stretched across the road and hooked up to a series of hoses in the treetops. These hoses spewed a hallucinogenic gas once activated, which you and Brook inhaled, particularly heroic doses at that.”

  “Were you affected too?”

  “No, fortunately I had two respirator masks, one for me and one which I threw to the sergeant. Leo got away from the gas fast enough so he wasn’t heavily affected, but you two dropped quickly and fell into delirium.”

  “Delirium…?”

  “Ranting and raving like a bunch of loonies,” Solloway said. “Talking about killim and the Undead King, eyes dilated and looking about like you thought you were in some other place and not with us. Spookiest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty.”

  “Brook? Where is she?” Mercer tried standing, but his head grew light and nausea bloomed in his gut. He made to grab onto a crate but missed and fell back to his knees. “Where’s my sword?”

  Jompers went to him. “Mercer, you really should relax. The chemicals you ingested were enough to put a horse legs-up for a week. You_”

  Mercer br
ushed Jompers’ hand aside and made to get up again. His legs felt like they were two bags full of sand, but he managed to stand and make his way to the back of the wagon. Solloway watched him with a mixture of mirth and concern in his algae-green eyes.

  “Your sword is right there, safe with the other armaments. As for Brook, she’s outside walking with the dog. Has barely said a word to anybody since she came awake a few hours ago.”

  Mercer picked up his sword, sheathed in its scabbard. The crane engraved on the hilt stared back at him with its one red eye. Calmness replaced his nausea, resolution the cloudiness in his mind. He nodded at the older man, then leaped over the lip of the wagon. He tumbled into a heap upon meeting the packed earth, his body still not doing what it was supposed to. Solloway chuckled from above him. Mercer shook off the dust and did his best not to get too heated about the laughter, instead putting his energy into looking for Brook.

  It didn’t take long. She walked a stone’s throw in front of the donkeys drawing the wagon, her hand grazing the waist-high grass that lined the road. He called to her; if she heard him, she gave no sign. Leo turned, and Mercer was relieved because it meant that his words actually had sound. The dog trotted up to him as he jogged ahead. Why is she not turning? He wondered. Had he uttered something terrible in his sleep that she had somehow heard? He barely remembered the dream he had just awoken from, of the Blight, the dead men and Plaguewind...

  “Hey Leo.” Mercer caught up with them, scratching behind the muscular dog’s eagerly awaiting ears. Fog was rolling in from the hills around them and Leo was like a black fish swimming in it. “Brook? Are you okay?”

  “Mercer…” Mercer stopped when she did. Though she had yet to turn, Mercer heard the rasp in her throat, and knew she was crying. “Mercer, I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? For what?” She faced him then, and whether it was how the shining white fog was reflected in her eyes or how her freckles gleamed like polished stones beneath her tears, she had never looked more beautiful to him.

  “You don’t remember? Where we just were?”

  “You mean the wagon? I don’t remember getting on it at all, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, not the wagon. The dream! You don’t remember the Blight? Plaguewind?”

  “Plaguewind…” In his mind flashed an image of a cloaked man floating above a storming sea, a sceptre with a black crystal raised above his head. He saw it all so vividly, as if he had actually been there.

  Brook saw the dazed look in his eyes and touched her hand to his face. “Do you see?” She whispered. “Do you remember?”

  It was as if the ground opened up under him, pulling him deep beneath the earth where it glowed and shone white hot. He remembered now, all of it. The man in the yellow suit, the horde of dead men running after him through piles of trash and crumbled buildings. He remembered the man who floated above the waves, who wielded a power far beyond anything Mercer had ever encountered, and who spoke in phrases which Mercer had found unsettlingly familiar.

  “It was my father…” Mercer said. He felt his knees growing weak again, felt the blood rushing from his head. “How could this be? It was just a dream. It... It wasn’t real...”

  “It was real, Mercer. I’ve never had a dead dream with another, and never one so vivid or so long, where I was directly involved. I’d always just been an observer, but this…” Brook took her hand from Mercer’s face, the plodding donkeys and their driver, his face like a wart-covered mushroom, passing by with the wagon behind them.

  “How did you do that? How did you make me see?”

  “I… I don’t know…”

  “Don’t mention any of this to Solloway or Jompers,” Mercer whispered to her. “This has to stay between us until I figure out what it was we saw. If Plaguewind is my father, then I have to find out what happened to him. Solloway said he died in an accident years ago. Is he lying, do you think? Does he know more than he’s letting on? Or maybe I’m completely wrong here and Plaguewind isn’t my father at all.”

  “He called you his son, Mercer…” Before Brook could say more, the tail-end of the wagon passed next to them. Solloway hung out from it, a lopsided grin lost amidst the gristle of his beard.

  “What are you two up to out here? Leo hasn’t got his fill of donkey dung for the day?”

  “That’s disgusting, Solloway.”

  “Sorry, Miss Black Wing,” Solloway chuckled. “Manners were never my strong suit.”

  Mercer looked deeply into the older man’s algae-green eyes, but couldn’t tell what the man was hiding. Solloway was not only a closed book, his cover was even written in an illegible script. He couldn’t read him. “You’re in an awfully good mood, sergeant.”

  “Days like today are my favorite, boy. The smell of the damp earth, low lying clouds, and best of all, no hungry rotters about. This Jed guy is really growing on me too. He’s got some of the best leaf I’ve ever smoked, and that’ll put a smile on anybody’s face.”

  Jompers stuck his head out from the wagon, his owl eyes at half-mast and a lazy smile on his face. “How are you two feeling?”

  “Hungry,” Mercer said.

  “Me too.” Solloway jumped from the wagon. “Let’s stop for some grub.”

  They stopped in a clearing of small white flowers, surrounded by old, knobby crab apple trees. Leo ran around, throwing the fallen fruits into the air and catching them in his jaws, while the other travelers sat around a small fire, passing around bread and wine. The wagon driver, whose name was Tim, occasionally stirred the stew that was boiling over the fire but otherwise just stared into the flames and remained quiet. Solloway was doing most of the talking.

  “It was lucky we ran into Tim when we did. After Leo set the trap off, Jed and I had to carry the two of you the rest of the way to the Mountain Road. Tim came along early the next morning. Coming back from Young Poe’s Keep, were you?”

  The driver grunted an affirmation. He was the oldest person Mercer or Brook had ever seen, his face covered in small warts and his mouth bent downwards in a permanent scowl. “Aye, was coming back, though I never set a foot in the town. Twas skin eaters walking about. Saw ‘em with my own eyes. Skin eating trees, too. Felt their roots snaking around under the ground, just like in the time of Godwin. I turned right around and came back the way I came.”

  “Wish we had acted as wise as you, friend. I’d still have my horse if we did.”

  “Are you a merchant?” Brook asked.

  “Nay, just an old wagon-man. Been one for the River Tribes all my life. First time in thirty years I’ve had to turn around with a cart still full. At least we’ll be eating good tonight. The fruits are just about overripe and I wouldn’t want any to go to waste.”

  Jompers felt his mouth watering. He had wondered at the crates in the back of the wagon but didn’t want to seem rude in inquiring about them. “Fruits? What sort of fruits do you have sir, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Aye, there be prickly pines, bloot berries, reeky kwats. Think I have a crate of oranges in there too.” Mercer tensed, his thoughts going back to his father’s greenhouse and the orange saplings that were once neatly arranged on its south-facing shelves. They had grown so slowly, mere sprouts even after his father had been gone for several years. Just when had he left Ithaca and gone south? Mercer wondered. When had he gone from Willis Crane to Plaguewind? Brook felt his tension and squeezed his hand, but neither said anything.

  “Reeky kwats? Oh, those are my favorite. Would you mind if I got a few as a snack before our stew?”

  “Wouldn’t mind a lick, Jed. You lot paid me a pretty purse for picking you up. Almost made up for the silver I lost on this wagon-run, so take what you want. Just try and leave some of the less-ripe fruit. Might be able to sell them out east.”

  Jompers thanked him and trotted excitedly over to the wagon. Solloway poked a stick at the embers in the fire. His face had grown stern. “You plan on going east? You know that there is an army marching wes
t, with something close to 10,000 men?”

  “Aye. Dusty Yen’s army. They be camped just across the Rip in the Ferik Marshes. Marching any day now, me thinks. But they’ll need to eat, and will maybe pay a good price for the fruit I have left.”

  “Yes, or just take it by force,” Solloway said. “I wouldn’t trust this Dusty Yen character or his army of marauders for a second_”

  Suddenly, there was a shout, followed by the thunderous boom of Jompers’ blunderbuss. Tim’s eyes popped open, as did his scowl, revealing a few round, stonish teeth within gray, lumpy gums.

  “By the grace of Elon, what’s he shooting at?”

  “Undead!” Solloway rasped, jumping up from his log and running towards the wagon, his axe in his hand. Leo was right at his heels, Mercer and Brook not far behind. “Jed! Jed, you alright?”

  Jompers was writhing on the ground close to the wagon, softly moaning. Smoke trailed up from the barrel of his gun, his hand loosely draped over its wooden butt. “It was a… man in furs… he was going through the wagon. Hit me… in the head…”

  Brook held the cosmologist’s angular face in her hands, inspecting it. “Well, I can see where he hit you. You’ll have a bump but I think you’ll be okay.”

  Solloway had gone in the wagon. His shout from within rivaled the boom of the cosmologist’s blunderbuss. “Gods! He took it!”

  “What? What’d he take?” Mercer asked.

  “The purse of silver that Old Wren gave me to barter for Crow with. It’s gone!”

  Brook leaped into the wagon and frantically started tearing through things, looking for the leather purse. A crate of prickly pines tumbled over, their pungent aroma filling the wagon as Brook stepped on them in her search.

  “Are you sure? Solloway, it must be here!”

  “I’m telling you, I had it in the one pocket on my pack, and it’s gone.”

  “Then we have to go after whoever took it.” She grabbed her bow and quiver. “Come on!”