He had his children construct him a palanquin from bone and refuse which they carried him in, four corpses to each pole. Despite his carriers being the most able-bodied of his corpses, their limbs were still rotted, their joints like jelly, so the going was slow. Fortunately, they had come across a group of Karyatim raiders in the southern Borderlands, their gaunt faces painted white, sitting bareback atop their proud horses. His children had made quick work of them, Plaguewind guiding their teeth and claws so that only the torsos were mauled, not the arms and legs he needed intact.
The newly raised Karyatim corpses took the place of his undead pallbearers, making the march up the steep highland hills quicker and less arduous. The sun here was strong, despite winter fast approaching. To keep it off his skin, Plaguewind had hung a curtain of tarpaulin and plastic around his dais. It kept the interior dark, but it also made it as hot as a kiln. The heat was doing strange things to his mind, was making it wander about to places he thought he’d cut from his memory long ago.
Plaguewind looked out through a hole in the dirty plastic. Already, the leaves had shrunk to yellow crisps, the loam leeched of its fecundity. Yes, autumn was almost over, but the land was truly dying, and would continue to do so until it was as withered and dead as the Blight.
“How could you do this?” He asked himself. But… wait, who asked that? Surely it wasn’t Plaguewind, the Undead King…
“Willis Crane…” Plaguewind seethed. “I thought I killed you.”
Willis Crane didn’t answer. In the heat, Plaguewind wondered if his mind was playing tricks on him, if he’d even heard his old-self speak. Had he mistaken the moan of one of his children for the voice of the cosmologist? He closed his eyes, put his cauliflower ear to the tarpaulin, and listened. Underneath his children’s grunts and shuffling feet was the sound of a stream, cool, clear water trickling across moss-covered stones.
He heard a voice in the way the water burbled. “Hello, Willis,” the water said. “We’ve missed you, we have. So sorry you have to be murdering us in such a fashion. Never thought it would come to this, old friend.”
Plaguewind wrung the sceptre in his hands, trying to find a response for the stream. “I’m… I’m not Willis Crane anymore,” was all he could say.
They entered a valley. The Karyatim corpses, their entrails dragging like streamers behind them, carried the palanquin around the edge of a large pond. The water rippled in the soft wind and glowed a dull green, the bellies of trout and smelt like white knobs on its surface. The poison wind had come and everything here was dead or dying.
A smattering of pained croaks wafted through Plaguewind’s plastic curtain. “Why, Willis Crane?” The bullfrogs asked, wracked in their miserable death throes. “Why are you killing us?”
“I’m not Willis Crane!” Plaguewind screamed. Black tendrils erupted out of the sceptre, cutting apart the curtain as they exploded in all directions. The corpses dropped the palanquin, agitated and frightened at their master’s outburst. Plaguewind tumbled out from the litter as it hit the ground, his mind reeling with panic as the sunlight smothered his exposed skin with scorching kisses.
He pulled his robe tightly around his body, then looked around him, his sceptre ready to strike. Everything was looking at him with mournful, accusatory gazes.
“You’re a traitor, Willis Crane,” moaned the withering trees.
“A murderer,” sighed the brittle grass.
Even the hills in the distance had words for him. “None of this will bring Tiara back,” they whispered, their voices echoing through their peaks and valleys. “She’s dead. Her flesh has become the dirt, her heart a nest for weevils.”
“You know nothing!” Plaguewind screamed. “I killed Willis Crane! I murdered that bastard the day he came back to this valley, broke him to pieces. And now, I’ll kill all of you too.”
“Oh, will you now?” The voice was familiar, sad, and came to him from one of the two piles of white rock that stood next to the house several stone-throws away.
“Yes, I will,” Plaguewind said, shuffling his way towards the house. “Then I’ll bring Tiara back, you’ll see. We’ll inherit the new earth together, and we’ll live forever and ever, as we were meant to, before she was taken from me.”
Plaguewind shambled through the high grass until he was between the stone piles and the back porch. His children mindlessly milled about, their tethers loose. Plaguewind’s mind was too rattled, too unhinged to focus on them. Old memories were flooding back to him as he gazed at the stone piles, then at the home he had renovated a lifetime ago with hands his new self would barely recognize. The hands of Willis Crane.
“Oh, my dear, sweet boy,” said the voice from the stone piles.
“Mama?” Plaguewind said, but it was Willis speaking, not the malformed man beneath the cloak. “Mama… I’m so sorry…”
“You didn’t mean it, child,” Nan said. “You loved her so much. Without Tiara, you lost your way. The darkness became too heavy for you to bear.”
“I know, Mama. I know.” Then Plaguewind returned, his teeth violently gnashing, the tumors on his skin bristling at his old-self’s intrusion.
“You’re a sneaky bastard, Willis Crane!” Plaguewind seethed. “I thought I killed you when we came back here those three years ago. You were just hiding all along, weren’t you? Like a worm under a rock.”
Willis Crane didn’t answer Plaguewind, nor did Nan or the trees or the hills. The valley had grown peculiarly quiet, the only sound the rasp of Plaguewind’s breathing. Perhaps the smallest pieces of his old-self still remained, he thought, the tiniest shards of a man who had broken apart still embedded in hidden places. He didn’t doubt it. Willis Crane had shattered apart so thoroughly, so absolutely, that there were bound to be remnants of the cosmologist that would pop above the surface from time to time.
The shattering of Willis Crane had occurred shortly after Solloway had let him go. He had been walking on foot for several days by the time he had stumbled into the valley, hoping his family would be a panacea for the madness quickly consuming him. The zombie-tongue had still been new, so new that he denied its existence in him. He refused to even try to control it. Instead, creatures of the Blight merely latched on to his desires and made it their own. In this way, he’d unwittingly led many of the undead before him, had sent them in the direction of his home, of his mother, son and daughter.
Plaguewind remembered. Willis Crane had only wanted to rest, to put his mind to right again. But when he saw what the undead had wrought in his house, when he saw the dry blood on the walls and the stone graves where Mercer and Nina used to play, he broke like a glass table. For it was he who had done this, he who had led the dead men to his home. He who had killed his mother, his daughter, and sent his son into exile.
As Willis Crane fell apart, so the Undead King rose from his place just below the surface, an omnipresent dark sea, never given credence but always felt. He threw what he could of Willis Crane’s myriad pieces to the wind. The rest, he buried, hoping to never see again.
Plaguewind knew that Mercer had survived that day, had slaughtered the undead with the Sword of Jai Lin and then fled. Where the boy had gone, Plaguewind had not been sure. He had to take the time to hone his powers, to develop the zombie-tongue, before he could find him, but he would, in time. He needed that sword, and meant to have it before long.
Three years after the death of Willis Crane, and Mercer still had it. Plaguewind had seen it in dreams, had felt the sword’s pull. The boy, now a young man, had become strong, and wielded the blade much as Willis Crane had when the warrior cosmologist fought Godwin in the War for the Green Lands. Only a half-moon ago, Mercer and the sword would have been here, in the Preserve. In the amount of time it had taken Plaguewind to migrate from the Blight, Mercer had already traveled far. He had left the warlord’s camp in the east and was now close to the Aderon Mountains, somewhere in the Seven Streams.
He had missed his chance with the sword, which bothered hi
m to no end. The shield, however, was extremely close. Better still, it was coming right to him, much as the sceptre had. All he had to do was wait.
He had watched through the eyes of his children as the Boat People brought the young Black Wing to the Ruins of the Nameless. This Black Wing was Skalla Ta, the lost raven, destined to find the Shield of Jai Lin and take a stand against the Undead King. When he had still been Willis Crane, and Plaguewind but an ethereal voice speaking to him on the darkest of nights, he had looked for the shield on many an occasion. He knew it was in the Karyatim Wild Lands, but where exactly, he had never found out.
He’d let Skalla Ta find it, then take it from him. He’d break Skalla Ta’s wings and feed his hollow bird bones to his children, before claiming what was rightfully his. That’s what he’d do.
In the meantime, he’d keep calling to his children from the Blight, keep bringing them north into the Green Lands. Soon, they’d be upon the cities to the west and the settlements in the Seven Streams. With the war between east and west, might and mind, about to converge on the land, more men would die, and he’d have more soldiers to raise and rally to his cause. It was all working out so nicely, and all he had to do was wait. He already had the sceptre, and soon he’d have the shield, once Skalla Ta made his way to the Karyatim Wild Lands and found it. Then, all he would need was the sword, and his trinity of dark tools would be complete. Creator, Sustainer, Destroyer...
“Mercer is strong, father,” came a young girl’s voice from the other stone pile. “He won’t let you win.”
“Ah, girl. What little you know of strength.” Plaguewind lifted his sceptre. Two dark tendrils lazily snaked their way towards the white stones. The darkness seeped into the rocks, found the bodies that many seasons had made little more than bone and leathery skin. The tendrils helped move the rocks away, made them as light as dust. A hand reached up through each pile, bony fingers trembling and clutching at the air. Even in their state of decay, they still looked familiar.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read
THE UNDEAD KING
Book One in the Saga of Jai Lin.
If you enjoyed what you read (or are just trying to amass good karma points) I would be immeasurably grateful if you could leave me a review. Reviews help my work get out into the wider world and under the noses of more people who’d enjoy the adventures of Mercer Crane.
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Other Works by Jared Rinaldi
Epic Fantasy/Sci-Fi:
Bridge Burner Hyperion
Pyronic Technique
Short Story Collection:
Tales From the Mountaintop
Jared Rinaldi is the author of The Undead King, Bridge Burner Hyperion and Tales From the Mountaintop: A Collection of Three Short Stories. In addition to writing, he also dabbles in music, acting and adventure. He lives in New York City.
The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One Page 24
