The Echoes of Sin (The Kinless Trilogy Book 3)

by Philbrook, Chris

  “That does seem conspicuous,” Mal added. “The Church took a strong interest in this place, and then suddenly the Guild does as well? What is under this mine, behind the door that this dead key-thing opens? It has to be connected.”

  “Dear mother and father,” Umaryn said in a gasp.

  Chelsea drew her sword and Mal matched her. “What is it?” Chelsea asked Umaryn, looking for the threat the woman must have noticed.

  “Look,” Umaryn said, her voice almost struck with grief.

  Ahead of the group the forest thinned and opened up, exposing clear sky and the side of the mountains ahead. The ground had to have fallen away to expose so much. The locomotive that James mentioned earlier sat abandoned on the rails ahead, covered in fallen branches and a sizable coating of rust. Beyond the blessed machine and opposite the end of the forest they walked in could be seen the etched walls of the mine. Terraced levels like steps of torn earth that descended down and down, out of site. The exposed stone with its spidery copper veins stood beautiful, building into the rising peaks of the mountains above. Mountain of rock looked to have roots of metal.

  “Very pretty,” Mal said, appreciating the view they had ignored.

  “Pretty?” Umaryn snapped. “That locomotive predates The Fall. I can’t believe they just left it on the tracks covered in shit. It’s priceless.” She grinned maniacally and took off running towards it. Umaryn had turned back into a little girl again.

  “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sister I grew up with,” Mal said with a sigh.

  When they caught up to her, she stood against the locomotive, her body and the side of her face pressed against the iron of the runty boiler. Compared to the train they’d ridden on to get here, this engine and the small train of cars behind it seemed miniscule. Her eyes were closed and the woman clearly was experiencing a bit of rapture, regardless of the size of the engine.

  “Are you okay?” Mal asked her.

  Her eyes popped open. “This might be the best thing that’s ever happened to me. It’s a piece of history. Ancient and perfect. Whoever left it out here like this should be shanked with a piece of glass and dragged behind a horse for ten miles, but it’s still wondrous. Look at the welding. The rivet work. The smokestack. It’s so amazing to see something so old in such a strange place.”

  “Can you fix it?” James asked her as he ran a gentle hand along the iron and steel. He couldn’t match her enthusiasm and on some level, that explained both brother and sister’s reaction to his faith.

  “I’ll tell you this; I’m not leaving this village until I take proper care of this beauty. Leave me behind if you must. Technically I don’t have the skill to fix something of this complexity. I know the basic idea of how it works, but in a shop at a smithy, I could not make proper repairs. However...”

  “However what?” Mal asked her.

  “I can fix her with The Way,” Umaryn said with reverence, her own bare hand on the weathered iron now. They watched as she closed her eyes and smiled, forging a deep and inner connection to the old metal as if it were a childhood friend, or a family pet she’d been reunited with.

  “How long?” Chelsea asked, touching the locomotive if only to not feel left out of the strange moment.

  “Hard to say. The spirit inside the engine is powerful.” She leaned back and looked at the ore car and small passenger car attached to the train. “The cars look healthy as well. I could get her up and running in fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. She wouldn’t run at a hundred percent, but she’d work for us. Hell there’s even dried wood in the tender. If you guys spare me ten minutes, I’ll pray to her and fix her up, get the fire going. We can ride her back to New Falun. It’d trim half an hour off our trip home. Probably more.”

  “Let’s do it then,” Mal said. “The math makes sense.”

  Umaryn beamed. “I need to make sure there’s water in the boiler. Without water...”

  “I can make water with The Way. Easy enough,” James said.

  Umaryn looked at him, then burst over and hugged him. James looked utterly shocked by her affectionate gesture. This was her second hug just that morning. “Thank you, James. I’ll get you started on that, and then I’ll begin my prayers to resuscitate the engine. Chelsea and Mal, would you be so kind as to help clean her off?”

  “Ladies and gentlemen: my sister,” Mal said as he walked towards the back of the small train to do her bidding.

  Closer to thirty minutes later, a very content Umaryn and the rest of the group stood at the edge of the wooden platform that hung out over the chasm-like mine. A dilapidated elevator mechanism connected the bottom levels of the mine to the still sturdy platform. Old tattered ropes and rusted pulleys connected to enormous winches were strewn about, left to the open world to decay in place. Umaryn winced, unhappy about the display of waste. Neglect ate at her sensibility, and this served as a heaping portion of it.

  “Where do you think the cave-in was? Down at the bottom?” Mal asked.

  “No,” Chelsea said. “This mine must have been dug deeper since your parents were separated from your uncle. We’re probably looking for something that’s hiding or obscuring the entrance to whatever they found down there.”

  The four narrowed their eyes and searched the stepped levels of the mine. Each descending layer of earth stood out like the rings of an old oak tree, showing each year of mining progress. They looked at each sloping nook and cranny as they spiraled down into the maw of the hole in Elmoryn. It had to be three hundred feet deep if it were an inch. The lowest level churned with muddy storm water of interminable depth. A drowning pit.

  “There,” James pointed. “Could that be it?” The group looked to the spot his finger aimed at.

  In the dead corner of a level only fifty feet down sat a massive boulder, ten feet longer and just as tall as the locomotive they’d left warming up on the rails behind them. The color of the stone seemed off compared to the others near it, and the oddly round shape of the rock said that it had seen millennia of falling rain, or perhaps it sat in a river. It had a gray pallor, and the rocks around it—sharper and flatter—were more red, or pink in color. The stone didn’t look to have come from where it sat.

  “You see any other large boulders around?” James asked them.

  “A large amount up here,” Chelsea said, indicating the field of huge rocks that had been discarded off to the side of the train line in the trees.

  “Some are large, though that stone down there is larger. Maybe they couldn’t move it?” Mal offered.

  Umaryn squinted, examining the cloud-colored rock from their perch on the unloading platform atop the mine. “No. That’s it. I can’t make it out, but something is written on the stone. Something. Our door is behind that rock,” Umaryn said.

  Mal looked over the edge of the platform by leaning at the waist. He kept his feet from the edge, and his arms and chest far from the wooden railing. He may have command of the dead, but he couldn’t do much against falling fifty feet. “Ropes are junk. Elevator is worthless.”

  “After Graben, I’ll never take another elevator again if I have a choice in the matter,” Umaryn said.

  “Good point,” Mal said as he straightened up and backed away from the precipice.

  “Then we hoof it down?” Chelsea asked. “It’ll be a long walk.”

  “A good walk never killed anyone,” James said as he turned and started to walk towards where the ramped stone and earth began.

  “I’m sure a whole bunch of spirits regret some of the walks they went on James,” Mal said as he started off after the cleric.

  “I’m not sure those that died while on those walks were able to seek the comfort and release of an Apostle to become a spirit, my dear,” Chelsea whispered to him as they all began the long descent down to the hole with the rock covering it.

  “You’re like a rock inside my shoe sometimes,” Malwynn said after a sigh and a smile.

  Above, gray storm clouds once again finished the meal of swallo
wing up the clear blue sky.

  The descent into the mine took far longer than they could’ve guessed. To reach the enormous stone they needed to examine, the men and women had to walk the entire perimeter of the mine, following the gentle, curving slope of each terrace. They couldn’t jump down levels—it was too far a drop—so instead they walked in circles for almost an hour and a half. With each revolution past the stone they got a better look at their destination. When the group got there, they found something they hadn’t expected.

  The foreign boulder wasn’t the same color of gray as the rest of the stone around it. It was predominantly white quartz, with translucent veins running throughout it like the strands of a gossamer spider web. The stone had been covered from top to bottom with black writing in all shapes, sizes, and handwriting, and at the distance they had seen the stone from, the words played with the color, and made it seem darker to the eye. The words and what they said made the stone darker still.

  When they stood beside it, Mal read from the boulder. “Nevermore will the mistakes of the past occur. From our sacrifice comes peace. Blood of the living feeds our justice,” he chuckled morbidly. “This is horrid. What is this written with? Paint? Blood?”

  James read from another area of the rock as distant thunder rumbled outside the steep gorge. “What do you think, ‘heresy against all faiths’ means?”

  “Something that offends both the Guild and the Church of Souls?” Umaryn wondered aloud.

  James agreed. “I think you’re right. I can see several scrawled passages from old Church documents on here, and if I’m not mistaken, these are some of the tenets from the Guild, yes?” He pointed at some of the writing. Umaryn took off her helmet and went around the boulder to see what he pointed at as a fat wet raindrop splattered down on the stone’s hard surface.

  “Principles, not tenets. And yeah, that one there is the first principle. The principle of value.” She read the inscription, “Everything made by hand has value.” She crouched and read more.”What a bunch of hypocrites. They quote the third principle, the one of neglect here. Look around, this entire town is fading away needlessly. It’s practically a temple built for neglect.”

  “Needessly?” James asked. “Perhaps they needed the village to be empty of witnesses so they could keep their secrets.”

  “Maybe the inscriptions were made years ago. Not by the vampires but by who came before them,” Chelsea said.

  “Perhaps,” Umaryn said back. “This is interesting. Someone wrote the sixth principle, but then it was scratched away. Someone tried to erase it.”

  “What’s the sixth principle again?” Mal asked her.

  Umaryn suddenly tilted back, and fell on her backside. Her armor jangled and rattled as her helmet hit the wet ground. Her face looked hurt from the defaced principle. “The principle of research. Innovation is salvation. Whoever scratched those words out didn’t want new ideas.”

  “Do you think there are new ideas behind this rock?” Chelsea asked.

  Mal answered her by producing the black key from a pouch. “I’d wager that this key represents some kind of innovation that got those words scratched out. This key came from behind that rock. This thing is older than everything we’re looking at right now.”

  Umaryn looked over at the dead, lifeless creation in Mal’s hand and scowled. “If that... that thing represents innovation, Elmoryn doesn’t need it. We need souls, not death.”

  “Writing on the rock aside,” James said to break the moment, “how do we get past it? It must weigh ten tons.”

  More rain came from the darkening sky. The clouds had turned the color of soot, and blocked out all of the sun’s warmth.

  Chelsea pointed at the heavy pack on Mal’s back. “Any old gear in there that’ll help?”

  “It’s not that kind of gear,” Mal said. “It could take us hours to dig through the earth here. This is a dead end. We need to find the other exit that Mom and Dad used. The valley to the north of here. We can only hope it’s not as sealed off as this entrance is.”

  “That could take days of wandering in the woods. We’d be a good distance from the consecrated grounds and very vulnerable,” Umaryn warned, getting to her feet and gathering her helmet.

  “So be it,” Mal said. “I don’t know if we have any other choice in the matter. We’d best head back. The weather has turned, and with the clouds we’re risking the vampires coming out early. We’ve an hour and a half just to get back to the train and that’ll be cutting it close if that Aleksi Oathman is as clever as I bet he is. With any luck we’ll kill the rest of the vampires tonight back in the village.”

  “Let’s go then,” James said, and the four turned and left, their journey to the mine a wasted trip.

  Before she left, Umaryn put her hand on the boulder and said a small prayer for whoever wrote the words on it. The strangers from the past needed her thoughts as much as anyone could.

  Less than a mile away as the crow flies, Aleksi Oathman lay beneath an outcropping of stone, judging the harshness of the diffused light that emanated down through the clouds. Thunder struck far off again, telling him the storm swelled.

  “Is it safe?” a young female vampire asked him.

  Aleksi turned to her. The girl’s face still carried the signs of battle. She had mud and blood all over her, and hollow white rents in her flesh from where she’d been struck with a sword or spear the night prior. Still, she looked eager. “So long as the heretics are in the gorge it is not safe. But you speak of the sun don’t you?”

  She nodded fearfully. “Can we brave the light? Kill them when they least expect it?”

  Aleksi caressed her cheek and smiled, his fangs slipping down from anticipation. “Of course we must brave the light my dear. Our oath calls us to do no less. All we must do is suffer a little bit of pain.”

  —Chapter Eighteen—

  THE PURPOSE OF GOOD MEN AND WOMEN

  Sergeant Dunwood hunted in the flame edged darkness. Dawn neared but the night still held firm, and there would be hours before the blue touched the horizon outside of Ockham’s wall. He had to find Peiron Fitch and find him fast. The apostle somehow, impossibly, was up to fell deeds in the village and the sergeant had to stop him. Question him, and discover what the truth of it all was. No matter how many times the veteran told himself it couldn’t be, the feeling wouldn’t go away.

  And if Dunwood discovered that Peiron was in fact a traitor in the process, then Dunwood would dish out a little payback for Corporal Beckett. Happily, and with a clear conscience.

  But first, he had to hunt.

  The alley where he had discovered the darkened dirt and the smudge of blood on the wall led on for a hundred feet. If it were wider the alley would challenge the longest straight stretch in the entire village for biggest. Alcoves to his left and right in the structures threatened violence at every opportunity, and Dunwood couldn’t help but approach each black hollow with his sword and shield at the ready. Barrels filled with rainwater and gardening tools were the biggest threats he found in the shadows. It slowed his progress, but prevented a lethal ambush.

  Dunwood walked the gauntlet of evil places as flame tipped arrows soared overhead, casting orange light and shaking the shadows, jarring his eyes. He tried to gauge the orange glow and black smoke of the flames nearby to see if the house on fire had receded since he left one of his men with the fire team there, but the chimneys and walls of the homes at his side were too steep to see over. He had to hope that the lack of light meant a lack of fire.

  When he exited the alley’s end, a black smear of darkness could be seen on the edge of a corner paving stone. He knelt and dragged a gauntleted finger across it as more arrows flew over above. He sniffed the wetness on the finger and the coppery scent of blood appeared up his nose. Fresh blood, thickened by the air for no more than half an hour. One at the most. Steps away, two parallel trails of scuffed dirt led away. The tracks of heels being dragged. A trot down the wider street led him to an alley opposi
te where a bloody handprint could be seen only a foot below a wall mounted torch. Dunwood held his shield to the east where the arrows came while he looked at the red palm print below the flickering flame. The hand was small. Not Beckett’s if Dunwood had to bet. This came from someone else.

  Fitch had small hands. Delicate hands. I’m a moment away from running the man through with my sword and I’ve no idea if he’s even to blame. I need to think clear. I can’t afford to make a mistake about this. Fitch is our most experienced Apostle now. We need him.

  The jolting clang of a fire-tipped arrow careening off his steel shield sent him down into the far narrower alley than the prior. He stopped to ensure the deflected arrow hadn’t landed on anything flammable, and when he saw it embedded in the dirt, he continued.

  The darkness of the alley swallowed him whole, causing his vision to fail. Looking at the hand print below the flame ruined his night vision and he had to pause for his eyes to adjust. The pace of his heart quickened and his breath matched. He felt vulnerable.

  Scraping sounds came from the depths of the alley ahead.

  “Who goes there?” Dunwood challenged, bracing his shield and bringing his sword to point for a forward lunge, his only offensive option. Sweeping slashes would be impossible in the cramped space. Perhaps from over the shoulder, at the head...

  More scrapes were heard, this time a few feet closer, and with shorter spaces of time between. Something was coming. And it moved faster with each step. Dunwood narrowed his eyes to a squint and blinked hard, trying to get the darkness to focus. Illuminate somehow. Damn it all. Uncle Scott wherever you are, give me light.

  The prayer to his ancestor spirit yielded immediate fruit and Oberyn was thankful. The diagonal descent of a burning Empire arrow in the street beyond the alley backlit a large man moving in his direction down the center of the corridor of sorts. Dunwood couldn’t see the approaching figure’s face, but he had a strong feeling who it was, and braced for the worse.