by Guy Haley
The thing had sallow skin, blue-tinged around the lips, and those icy eyes common to all the dead.
“Mom!” I screamed.
Her head whipped round with dismay. The unliving growled at me.
“Abney, no! Get out of here!”
She was distracted by my appearance. There’s no doubt in my mind that what happened is my fault. The dead man sank its rotten brown teeth into the blade of her upturned left hand. The soft flesh there parted like plum skin.
“Mom!” I screamed. She screamed louder.
Seeing my mom in danger like that robbed me of thought, and I flew at the unliving. Literally flew, I couldn’t feel my feet touch the floor, I’ve never moved so fast.
Quinn was faster. He grabbed my shirt, yanked me back hard. I went down heavy, cracking my elbow on a rock. My arm exploded with pain, and I cried out.
Quinn barged at the dead man, sending him staggering. His rush knocked Mom down, but the dead man kept to his feet. Quinn shoved the zombie back with a kick to the stomach. Some distance gained, he swung his falchion viciously at the dead man’s head. The blade bit deep into rusted steel, and it gave with a crunch, but the metal protected it and the dead man did not die again. It lunged for Quinn as he tried to pull his sword free, and the knight danced back, his weapon still lodged in the zombie’s skull.
The dead man tottered in place, its head swinging back and forth between my mom on the ground and the knight. Quinn crouched, circled the dead man.
“Come here! You! Hey!” He clapped his hands together. This drew the monster’s attention away from Mom. Quinn tackled it, mailed arm up in front of his unprotected face. This time the unliving toppled backward. Quinn scrambled up onto its chest, pinning its arms with his knees and holding the mouth shut with the heel of his hand. The thing had some power left to it, and it bucked under the knight. Quinn knocked his falchion clear of the dead man’s skull with his forearm, snatched it up and sprang backwards. The zombie sat upright, bringing its head toward Quinn’s next swing.
The falchion cut clean through the neck, rusted mail, moldy old leather and all. The zombie’s head bounced to a standstill by the side of the hollow.
Black blood welled up from the neck stump and the body fell over. Quinn spat, then spat again. He was covered in rotting blood, and was not wearing his mask.
“Wait there!” he said. “Stay alert, that one’s well fed, been living its death a long while from the look of its gear. There might be more of them.”
He ran from the clearing, leaving me by my mom’s side. She had her bitten hand cradled up against her chest. She was sobbing silently, keeping the pain in check. She was strong that way.
Quinn came back. He had a bottle of spirit and a leather case with him. He uncorked the bottle, swilled his mouth out with it, spitting the spirit away from him, then did it again. He quickly wiped down his sword with a rag, then again with a second soaked in the spirit.
He grabbed my mom, made her look up at him. “You know what I have to do,” said Quinn.
My mom bit her lip. She unbent her wounded arm from her breast, and laid her hand out on a log. The other gripped mine tight. We both closed our eyes.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hollister,” Quinn said.
His falchion blurred down. It made a cleaver’s thwack as it hit my mom’s arm.
She screamed. When I opened my eyes, she had her arm up again, blood pumping from it in such amounts I thought she’d die there and then. Quinn had his little case open displaying needles ready to close the artery and the skin. He tied off her wrist with a tourniquet, then set to work.
On the log her hand remained. The pale brown skin was robbed of life, the red meat at the end a sickening contrast to the moss it lay upon.
Quinn’s Gun
QUINN WAS QUICK, and skilled. He stemmed the bleeding, but Mom lost a lot of blood. She was gray, moaning. Swooning from shock. Quinn picked her up, and hustled me along in front of himself.
“What’s going to happen?” I said, though I full well knew the answer to that.
“If we can get her to Winfort, she might have a chance.” He laid her down, and rearranged the packs on his pony. “You, get up here on Clemente. We’re all going to have to ride. It’s not far, so the horses should take it, but it’s not going to be comfortable.”
I scrambled up, trying to find somewhere on Clemente’s back where I wasn’t going to fall off. Quinn half helped, half hoisted Mom up onto Parsifal. He mounted up behind her, and wrapped an arm about her waist.
“Okay, son, I’m going to have to go at a fair lick. Hang on! If you fall off, get back on. Clemente will wait for you, and he’ll find me again.”
He spurred his horse into a run. The woods were thick and the slopes uneven. We couldn’t go at a full gallop, but Quinn and the horse wove their way in and out of those trees faster than could have been safe. Clemente followed with no guidance from me. It was all I could do to keep my head down as branches whipped past me, tearing at my clothes and my face.
Parsifal came down off the slope. We were into a shallow valley, heavily forested. Another low hill rose up on the far side. There was a little creek, and a flat shelf cut into the hill above it spoke of a road of the Gone Before. Parsifal went faster, leaving me and Clem a little behind for all that the stallion was carrying two people.
The valley went round a couple of turns, then Quinn drove Parsifal up the other slope, not so high this time. The horse bounded up with its back legs pumping. Quickly we were up and onto the summit, a hundred feet or so, then down the other side.
A wild roaring shook the forest. A tree cracked and fell down with a crash deep in the woods.
The dragon was awake.
Quinn’s horse picked up speed.
We came down into a bigger valley. Thick woods, another flattened space that suggested another road from the Gone Before. They made so many roads. We followed this, and after a time we came out into an area cleared of forest and scattered with sun-bleached stumps. The bed of the road became a road for real, rutted and potholed but clear of vegetation. Parsifal broke into a gallop.
The cleared area became farmland. Farmsteads appeared, all walled with earthen banks topped with palisades and set far back from the wood’s edges close in to the road. The road surface became smoother. Ditches lined either side. Quinn was far ahead of me with my mother, Clemente labored after, each breath a snort.
The valley widened. The cleared area crept up the hillsides, until the forest edge had been pushed back over the summits. Watchtowers, spindly, open things of wooden scaffold with a platform atop each, crowned three of the hills. Pumpkin patches, cornfields, cabbages, and pasture jostled them against one another on the valley floor, each one small and hard by its neighbor.
We were in the lands of Winfort, a tiny strip of habitation on the edge of the great northern Wildlands.
A flash of sun on white stone, and there was the castle itself, with a high keep and long sweeping walls of ashlar. A lower earth wall topped by wicker gabions followed the stone wall about one hundred feet out in front of it, and this was studded with large stakes angled at forty-five degrees. You couldn’t see it from where we were, but there was a deep ditch between the earth wall and the stone.
Furious bellows chased us along the road, faint as distant thunder drawing nearer. We sped toward the castle. People were working the fields. They looked at us with open hostility. A tongue of forest intruded near to the walls from a nearby hill. There was a large rock there, stained black, the ground around it bare. Chains dangled from its front. I did not like the look of that.
They call themselves kings, these men in their high castles who rule countries like Virginia. Men like the emperor, or our current King Jonas, but they can’t control such wide lands themselves. That’s why they need the lords, and why the lords are mostly left to their own business.
I had a mighty bad foreboding what manner of business this particular lord was about.
The passage to the
fort was wide open. No man rode out to stop us, no shot was fired nor arrow loosed. The road was clear of traps, passing through the protective berm via a simple gap. There was no bridge, but an earth causeway lined with logs broke the ditch. This we also crossed, coming nigh to the walls.
Two men pushed the gates closed as we approached. A man leaned over the parapet.
“I am Jebediah Coppergather of the Winfort, castellan and gatekeeper of the fortress of Lord Corn. State your business!” he shouted.
“I am a knight of the Dreaming City of Atlantis! I request sanctuary here as is my right and the order of the angels,” replied Quinn.
“Then where is the badge of your master?”
“I choose not to wear it.”
“You have shamed yourself?”
“I have failed in a duty important to me. I do not display it as a mark of my shame.”
“And the boy, and the woman?”
“They are under my protection. This woman, Mrs. Hollister, has kin here, a cousin.”
Words were exchanged. My mom’s head lolled on a weak neck.
“The name of this cousin?”
I spoke up, my voice sounded reedy compared to those of the men. “He’s Matthew. Matthew Scout. Please let us in!”
More words. Precious minutes trickled by, carrying my mom’s life on with them. The bandages on her wrist stump were wet with blood.
A man came to the parapet, peering down. He had prematurely white hair and wore the smock of a smith.
He looked at my mother, then said something inaudible to the armored man.
“Mr. Scout cannot see the woman’s face,” said Coppergather.
Quinn delicately lifted up my mom’s head by her chin. She moaned.
“Could be her,” I heard Matthew say.
“She got a letter from you, sir, a letter from you to her.” I got off Clemente, and walked up to the wall. Crossbows took a bead on me.
The man, my cousin, looked down from that distancing height. I might have well been appealing direct to the angels themselves. I was about as afraid.
“What’s your name, boy?” asked Matthew.
“Abney Gleaner.”
“And where are you from?”
“New Karlsville. Or we were. It’s gone now, overrun by a plague of the dead. That’s why we come here. You’re our only surviving kin, Mr. Scout,” I was gabbling, trying to get my words to outpace my tears.
“Your father?”
“Robart Gleaner.”
“Stepfather?”
“Old Gern Hollister.”
The man drew back. He spoke hurriedly, we could only hear some of what was said. “It is my cousin . . . her boy . . . can we . . . there’s . . .”
From the forest came a faraway roar.
By now a crowd of people from the fields had gathered around our back. Half of them were curious, the other half looking back over their shoulders at the woods.
“What happened to my cousin?” said Matthew.
“They roused the dragon!” shouted one. Murmurs went through this meager crowd, their hands tightened on their tools.
“Leave them be!” shouted Coppergather. “Let the boy answer!”
Quinn gritted his teeth and spoke for me. “She was bit in the hand. I took it off. She could be okay, if you open the gates. She needs help.”
Coppergather shook his head regretfully. “We cannot let her in. The boy, yes, and you yourself knight may enter, but the woman cannot come within. Neither can she stay outside. She has the sickness, and must die.”
My mom moaned again, shook her head jerkily. “No,” she said. “No.”
Painfully, she lifted her face up. Her chin was wet with thick saliva, her eyes crusted at the corners. The guards on the gate shouted at these signs of the sickness. The crowd behind us backed away.
“That you, Matthew?” she said. Her voice was a croak, every word cracked.
“I’m here.”
“It’s good to hear your voice again. Your letters have been a comfort.”
“I am sorry I have not been able to write you for so long, but we have become cut off.”
My mother laughed weakly. “So we see.”
Matthew laughed with her, quietly though, appalled at what was occurring. “She’s my kin alright,” he said, more loudly this time. “For the love of Jesus, let her in!”
“We cannot let her in. She cannot stay. She is afflicted,” said Coppergather. “Sir knight, my prior offer stands. Decide quickly, the dragon may come here.”
Mom slipped from the horse. She’d already made her mind up then, I think, that she wasn’t going inside. I don’t know where she was trying to get to. Wherever it was, she didn’t make it. She kneeled down, straight from standing. It must’ve hurt, falling on her knees like that, but her body was all knotted up and she couldn’t get down no other way.
I ran to her side. She reached into her bodice with shaking hands and pulled out a neatly folded letter, then her purse, heavy with her bride price.
“T-t-take these. You . . . Safe here,” she said. “Matthew is a good man.”
Her face was puffy and pale, drenched with sweat. Gluey saliva had collected at the corners of her mouth.
The people of the wall looked on.
“Mrs. Hollister,” said Quinn softly.
“You got us here. You’ll get your money.” She spoke through her teeth, pained and angry.
“It ain’t about the money.”
“I didn’t mean . . .” she swallowed painfully. Her teeth ground. “The fever. The fury rising in me. The devil . . . He’s taking me places I don’t want to go.”
“Mom! No.”
“Look into my eyes.”
She held up her face. The irises of her eyes, once a pretty hazel, were shot through with veins of clear blue. She was turning, my own mother becoming a monster.
“It won’t be long until she’s gone,” said Quinn.
“Finish me. There isn’t anything they can do. Before it’s too late.”
Quinn looked at me.
“Boy,” he said steadily. “Go back to the horses and look away.”
“Mom?” I said.
“Do as he says, Abney!” she roared at me, hardly coherent. It was the sickness talking. It always makes them rage before it takes their voices away forever.
“Mom!”
She tried to smile but it came out a snarl. Her teeth clacked, but she fought back the thing rising up in her and looked right at me. “You’re a man now, Abney. You’ll do fine, just fine, my baby, my son.”
“Get to the horses,” said Quinn.
I hesitated.
“Go, boy, now!”
“Abney, go! Can’t . . . I can’t . . .” Her head jerked.
I took a step back, but couldn’t look away.
My mother’s arms snapped hard to her sides. She lifted her head up and let out a long, screaming shout at the sky. It was the worst sound in the world, the sound of someone’s soul dying. She tried to speak, but her mouth got stuck on the words, one particle of speech clicking in her throat over and over. “Ng, ng, ng, ng . . .”
“I have to do it now.” Quinn’s hand went to his gun. He looked at me, but I wasn’t going anywhere. That made him sorry, I think. He couldn’t do nothing but what he did next.
He drew his gun and pointed it at my mother’s head. Her eyes were running with tears, mouth with spit. She was already losing what made her her. Her eyes rolled. She was panting, sharp, animal noises.
Quinn cocked his gun with his thumb.
“God keep you, Mrs. Hollister.”
“My name,” she grunted, “is Sarah.”
The gun boomed out the end of my childhood.
That was the one time I saw Quinn use his gun.
My mother fell sideways into the dirt, blood pooling around her. Red shot through with gray and sticky black.
When I saw her dead like that, my mother, who had bore me and raised me and sacrificed everything in the end, then I kne
w what she said was true.
I was a man.
Blood Sacrifice
QUINN LEFT ME STARING at my mother’s side. I couldn’t take me eyes off her. Her face was locked in a savage grimace. The bullet hole in her forehead was neat as a stitch, the back of her head hollowed out by its exit. Pale brains spread over the dirt. I felt sick, my knees shook so hard I should have toppled over there and then. But I didn’t, nor did I throw up. I just stood there. I couldn’t take my eyes away. Such terrible power in the hand of one man. I became afraid of Quinn then. The boy that I was had been carried up by the stories I’d heard, the fact that he was a warrior of the angels. But though I never stopped liking or respecting him, the man I was becoming knew to fear him.
I heard Quinn shouting up to the castellan through a fog of grief, distant but clear.
“I have done as you asked.”
“Show your seal, then we will let you within.”
I didn’t see the marvelous and awful angel trapped in the seal. All I saw was my mom’s dead face, the mouth open, eyes halfway to unliving blue. I hoped it hadn’t been too late, that her soul would find its way to heaven, and God would permit her bliss.
Quinn was calling me.
“Son!”
I lifted my head. It was heavy as lead.
“Come on.”
“My mom . . .”
Coppergather shouted down. “We shall deal with the body. We have the correct rites, and a place of resting for all good Christian souls.”
“She was a good soul,” said Quinn. “See you treat her with respect.”
The gates groaned outwards, and we were permitted inside. Five men in matching livery held us in the gate until Coppergather came down from the tower.
Coppergather had the same, hard way of looking at things that Quinn had. He shook Quinn’s hand. “I am sorry about the woman.” He looked at me. “There was no choice, boy.”