King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle)

by Joseph Nassise

  The netting had a natural resiliency that let it bend slightly with her exertions, preventing her from breaking it, and it had a silkiness to it that she had never encountered before. If she could just get a closer look …

  It was hair.

  Human hair.

  The need to scream threatened again and she clamped down on her tongue to keep herself from doing so, for she knew that once she started, she might not be able to stop.

  Closing her eyes, she counted to ten, willing herself to remain calm. In the silence she picked out another sound, just at the threshold of her hearing. It had been there all along, she realized, but her fear and anxiety had prevented her from recognizing it.

  Footsteps.

  Two sets of them, actually, one on either side.

  Someone was walking along behind the cart.

  What kind of person would willingly serve the Angeu?

  “Hello?” she croaked.

  There was no reply.

  She tried again. “Is anyone there?”

  Still nothing.

  She squirmed against the corpses behind her, trying to shift around enough that she could get a different view through the slats in the cart, but even that didn’t work. With a grunt of exasperation, she gave up.

  Time passed.

  Eventually, her exhaustion got the better of her. The rocking motion of the cart, combined with the monotonous landscape, lulled her into a restless sleep.

  She awoke with a jolt.

  It was impossible to tell how much time had passed, as the sky looked exactly as it had before. They must have reached their destination though, for the cart had stopped moving. Maybe now she would get some answers.

  A shuffling sound drew her attention to the rear gate, and she could sense someone approaching the back of the cart. Even as she watched, a pair of hands reached over the top and fumbled with the rope that held the gate closed.

  The hands were covered with dirt and grime, but at least they were human.

  Her pulse quickened and she prepared herself to take advantage of whatever opportunity the situation presented. If she could break free when they loosened the netting holding her in place she might be able to …

  The gate at the back of the cart was lifted away and she got her first look at the two men who had been following along behind them.

  Her mind processed several things at once.

  The coarsely woven clothing that they wore.

  The gray, waxy look to their skin.

  The thick black thread that had been used to sew their eyes and mouths shut.

  As they reached toward her with their dead hands, it all was just too much. Without a sound, she slipped into unconsciousness.

  53

  HUNT

  I found Gallagher in the room they’d assigned to Denise, sitting vigil next to her unmoving form. One glance at the bed was all it took to tell me that there was no change in her condition. Not that I was expecting one; it’s a bit tough to get up and walk around when your soul has been ripped from your body.

  He raised his head and looked in my direction as I burst into the room.

  “We’re not beaten yet,” I told him, but he had already dismissed me and gone back to staring at Clearwater.

  “Go away, Hunt. The city can rot for all I care at this point.”

  “Who gives a fuck about the city?” I replied, matching him tone for tone. “I’m talking about Denise!”

  That got his attention.

  He turned to face me. “What are you talking about?”

  “I know where to find the Angeu. There’s a chance we can still save her! But you’ve got to keep her body alive until I get back or it will all have been for nothing.”

  “What?” he asked, staggering to his feet, as if he intended to join me. “How?”

  “I don’t have time to explain,” I told him, and it was true. Every second I spent talking to him was one less that I had on the other side to search for Denise. And if I took too long, the Preacher wouldn’t be there to send me in the first place. “No matter what, Gallagher, you have to keep the life-support machines hooked up. Don’t let anyone turn them off or take her away. I don’t care what they tell you—don’t let them do it!”

  He nodded and that was good enough for me; I didn’t wait around to hear anything more.

  I found the Preacher waiting for me in the lounge, just as we had agreed.

  “All right, you bastard, let’s do this,” I said, as I stalked over to him.

  “As you wish,” he murmured.

  For all I knew he was going to betray me the second I turned my back, but I was willing to take that risk if there was even a slight chance that I might be able to rescue Denise.

  He grinned his trademark death’s-head grin at me and then stepped closer to the wall beside us. He raised his hands to either side and said something in a language that hurt just to hear it.

  He said it once, twice, three times, and then stepped back and lowered his arms. No sooner had he done so than a section of the wall in front of him split apart with a resounding crack, sending a massive tremor through the room and leaving an opening in the wall wide enough for a man to step through.

  I stepped forward, until I stood just a few feet in front of the opening. I could see nothing but darkness on the other side, darkness so deep that not even my eyesight could pierce its depths.

  That’s when I heard it.

  It was soft at first, just barely audible. If I hadn’t spent years honing my hearing I wouldn’t have even noticed.

  A whisper.

  That single, solitary whisper became ten voices whispering to one another. Those ten became a hundred. A thousand. Ten thousand, until the room was filled with the sound of them all.

  To make matters worse, I recognized them, despite having never heard them before.

  The voices of the dead, whispering to one another.

  I glanced back at the Preacher.

  “You have three days, Hunt,” he told me, the empty sockets where his eyes used to be burning with an unholy light. “No more. Three days. If you cannot find her in that time, our bargain will be over.”

  I knew the sound of a binding when I heard one, but it didn’t matter. I was going to try, no matter what.

  “Agreed!” I shouted over the cacophony that filled the room and then turned to face the entrance once more. I knew if I waited much longer I’d lose my nerve, and there was no way I was going to allow that to happen.

  Taking a deep breath, I stepped into the rift.

  54

  HUNT

  There was a moment of intense cold and impenetrable darkness, a moment of being wrapped in the frozen, dead emptiness of space itself, and then I staggered through the other side of the rift and collapsed onto the dusty earth at my feet.

  For a long time all I did was lie there and catch my breath. My heart was pounding like a runaway drum; I hadn’t been alone in my passage through that darkness, and the things that I’d heard and seen in those split seconds would forever be imprinted on the back of my mind. It took me a bit to shake them off.

  I sat up and cautiously opened my eyes, expecting to see nothing but white everywhere I looked, and so I was surprised to find that I could see just as well as I could in the old days. Not that there was much to look at. A dusty plain stretched out before me and as I turned my head, I could see that it extended as far as I could see in every direction. No trees, no bushes, no signs of life. Nothing but rocks, dirt, and dust all the way out to the horizon where a sky the color of angry thunderclouds came down from above to meet them.

  I climbed to my feet and turned in a slow circle, considering my options. Somewhere in this desolate place, Denise’s soul was being held captive by the Angeu. I had three days to find her and bring her home. Trouble was, without anything to guide me, one direction seemed as good as any other. I wasn’t even certain I was in the right place; the truth was that the Preacher could have sent me to the ass end of nowhere rather than to
Annwyfn and I wouldn’t have known the difference.

  Nothing to do but start walking.

  Picking a direction at random, I set off, kicking up little clouds of dust with every step.

  I hadn’t gone more than twenty feet before I slowed and then came to a halt altogether.

  You’re going the wrong way.

  It was just a feeling deep in my gut, a sense of wrongness that grew with each step in the direction that I’d originally chosen. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I carried a piece of Denise’s soul bound up with my own. I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I needed to trust that feeling.

  I turned in another slow circle, but this time I listened to what my soul was telling me.

  Denise was … over there.

  Without giving myself too much time to think about it, I turned and headed off in that new direction.

  At first, it wasn’t too bad.

  I was eager for a confrontation with the bastard who’d stolen her away from me, and I wasn’t going to give up until I found him. Each step brought me closer to my destination, and I found a certain bounce to my step that I hadn’t expected.

  But then the general bleakness of the place began to wear upon me. There was no sound but the crunch of the gravel beneath my boots with each step. There was no sunshine and no darkness, just that ever-present twilight that seemed to go on forever, mimicking the endless plain on which I walked.

  Gradually my thoughts turned from strategies for how to confront the Angeu and rescue Clearwater to simply wishing he would show up and end this farce so that I wouldn’t have to continue walking.

  Minutes turned to hours, hours felt like days, and still I trudged on, step after step.

  Nothing changed. There was no sign of the Fortress of Glass.

  No sign of anything, really.

  Just the same dim sky and the same dusty plain.

  But still I continued.

  Despite the passage of what felt like a considerable amount of time, I grew neither tired nor thirsty from my exertions. Like the situation with my eyesight, the normal rules of physical reality didn’t seem to apply. Which was fine with me; this place was bad enough without stumbling around blind with a raging thirst to boot.

  Of course, being able to see didn’t stop me from nearly stepping off the cliff when I finally reached it.

  I’d been walking at a steady pace for hours, my head down, my mouth closed against the dust my steps were kicking up, thinking about how I was going to get Denise away from Death himself when my next step ended in midair rather than on the rock-strewn ground.

  I teetered there for a moment, one foot firmly on solid ground, the other hanging into nothing but space, and then fell backward on my ass, gasping at my narrow escape. When I had myself back under control, I crawled forward and peered over the edge.

  The ground fell away before me, a sheer, dizzying drop of hundreds of feet before it met the valley floor far below. The valley itself was like a giant bowl carved into the earth; cliffs surrounded it on all sides, creating an unbroken circle around the center.

  I knew there had to be a way down, for in the center of the valley floor rose a gleaming bastion of shimmering crystal.

  I’d found Caer Wydyr, the Fortress of Glass.

  55

  HUNT

  The stairs were cut right into the face of the cliff, each step worn and weathered by the passage of time. How much time, I didn’t know, but something about them felt ancient, primordial.

  I began a slow descent to the valley floor, taking each step with care and watching where I put my feet, knowing that one wrong step would mean not only the end of my life, but Denise’s as well. The stairs were cracked and eroded in more than one place, and if there had been even the slightest breeze I would have been in real trouble: a good gust would have plucked me right off the tattered ledges of rock and sent me tumbling to my death. Thankfully the air was as dead as the land appeared to be.

  Step by step I made my way downward.

  When I reached the bottom I stopped and stared out across the intervening space at the tower for several long minutes. It was more a fortress than a tower, really, though one spire did rise taller than the others. It seemed to be as empty and as deserted as the rest of this place, but something about it made me uneasy. It almost seemed like the building itself was watching me.

  Get a grip, Hunt. She’s counting on you.

  The direction-finder in my gut was calling me again, pulling me toward the tower, and I had no choice but to follow it.

  Where the surface of the plateau above had been hard and rock-strewn, the ground here was covered in some kind of whitish yellow sand. Walking in it was difficult, and as I trudged my way along, my feet slipping and sliding to one side or another with every step, I fervently hoped that Denise and I wouldn’t have to retreat in this direction in any kind of a hurry because it would probably prove to be near impossible.

  The feeling of being watched intensified as I drew closer and I kept waiting for an alarm to be raised, for the Angeu’s minions to come charging out of the central gate spoiling for a fight. But that didn’t happen; I was able to march across all that open ground and right up to the entrance to the tower without being hailed or challenged in any way.

  As I let my gaze drift along the wall nearest the door, I realized that what I had taken from afar to be a type of glass or crystal was in fact something vastly different; the Fortress was not constructed of glass, as its name implied, but from the souls of the dead themselves!

  They had been collected and packed together, one atop another, until their wan, insubstantial forms began to take on a semblance of solidity simply from the sheer weight of their numbers. Countless generations of the restless dead had been pressed into service by the Angeu, and now those closest to the surface stared out at me from within the structure of the building itself, their gaunt faces full of pain and misery and a longing for release that hung in the air around us with a weight all its own.

  I was sufficiently horrified by what I was seeing, but that didn’t compare to how I felt when I realized that not only did I need to walk on these poor lost souls in order to search the Fortress for Denise, but that there was a strong possibility that Denise’s soul had already been pressed into service as well.

  The latter didn’t bear thinking about.

  It couldn’t be; it just couldn’t. The Preacher never would have sent me here if there wasn’t some way to rescue her. Without that possibility, our bargain would be worthless, and if I knew anything it was that the Preacher desperately wanted me to be in his debt. No, she was still safe. All I had to do was enter this place and find her.

  Steeling myself, I grasped the handle of the door, pulled it open, and stepped inside.

  I moved quickly through the maze of hallways and rooms, searching for the central staircase that would take me upward. My instincts told me that Denise was being held in the central tower, the one that rose higher than the others, so that’s where I was headed; thus far, my instincts hadn’t been wrong.

  The staircase spiraled around the central core of the tower, and I climbed it swiftly but cautiously. I knew the clock was ticking away, and after that seemingly endless trek across the landscape I really didn’t know just how much of the Preacher’s three-day deadline remained. For all I knew time operated differently here; I might be days ahead or days behind already. The narrowness of the staircase made it an ideal location for an ambush, so I kept my eyes and ears open as I climbed higher into the tower. The last thing I wanted was to stumble into a nest of Sorrows or a group of angry ghosts.

  At the top of the stairs was a single door, fashioned of wood and bound with iron. To my surprise, it was unlocked. With a pounding heart, I opened it and stepped inside.

  The size of the room surprised me; it seemed much bigger inside than out. But the moment I laid eyes on what it contained, I forgot all about its shape and size.

  The floor was littered with the souls
of the dead.

  Dozens of them.

  Men. Women. Children.

  And my gut was telling me that Denise was among them somewhere.

  I had to find her and set out to do just that. But as I moved among the dead, I realized the situation was far worse than I’d realized.

  I knew in the back of my head that I was the only one who was actually present here in physical form, that the “bodies” in front of me weren’t actually bodies but were just the physical representation of what was left of that person’s soul after the Angeu claimed it as his own. It only took a few minutes of observation for me to realize that each soul was in the process of being broken down and consumed by the floor beneath my feet!

  In some cases the person’s soul was intact and whole. In others, very little remained beyond the edge of a face or a portion of a limb jutting out from the floor. Each soul that was consumed added to the solidity of the Fortress overall, making it that much stronger.

  Even as I looked on, the body closest to me, that of a pretty blonde, settled nearly a half inch deeper into the floor around her. What made it so horrible, though, was the fact that she seemed fully conscious and aware of what was happening to her. She couldn’t move, her arms and legs having sunk more than halfway into the surface beneath her, but her eyes were open and rolling around in her head like a panicked mare.

  I had to find Denise and I had to do it fast.

  Fuck being careful.

  “Denise!” I shouted. “Denise Clearwater!”

  Commotion off to my left pulled me in that direction.

  I hurried over and knelt beside her.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She didn’t say anything, just stared up at me, her body rigid and unmoving. Her eyes were full of fear and had that round, panicky look that told me she was on the verge of losing it.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

  But when I tried to help her sit up, I discovered that I was too late: the Fortress had already laid claim to her. It wasn’t much, maybe an eighth of an inch or so, but that was enough. No matter how hard I tugged, pushed, or pulled on her, I couldn’t get the Fortress to relinquish its grip.