The Undead Hordes of Kan-Gul

by Jon F. Merz

  If you forgot what the lies were, they had you. They could go back and say, “Well, no, that’s not what you told us at all. You said this. Now, which is it?”

  Then the beatings would start again.

  Ran longed to feel the warmth of the sun on his face. To lie on the sand of the beaches to the south and soak in the seas, letting the healing waters carry away the last vestiges of this nightmare.

  “What clan hired you?”

  But the beaches were a long way away in the forgotten memories of his mind. The punch that followed slammed into his lower jaw, and Ran wondered if they’d cracked some of his teeth. He spat blood on the floor. They got him up into another stress position and made him hold it for three minutes before Ran collapsed.

  “Would you like some water?” He said nothing, so they forced his mouth open and filled it with a spicy herb that set his teeth afire. He retched and spat it out, and they laughed at him.

  More questions. More punches and kicks to his lower back. At one point, Ran felt his bladder go free, and he pissed all over himself. He wasn’t upset, though. The puddle of urine actually warmed him up some. At least until it grew cold and wet. Then it was just as horrible as it had been before.

  They laughed at him when they weren’t yelling or beating him. Since he was naked and cold, the target of their scorn was obvious. They would invite women in and ask them if they’d ever seen one quite so small. The women would laugh along with them and say they couldn’t even see that there was anything between Ran’s legs in the first place.

  Ran didn’t mind those sessions. Anyone who had been cold and naked for as long as he had been would look exactly like he did. As far as he was concerned, their critiques were a fair assessment.

  But that wasn’t the point.

  They were still trying to find a way inside his defenses. They wanted to know what made him tick. When they found out that something didn’t work, they would change tactics and go at him another way. Always trying to find a way in. It didn’t matter how small the hole was; once they found one, they had you.

  So Ran worked to make sure they didn’t find one.

  While they questioned him, he practiced counting. First by ones, then by twos, fives, tens. Sometimes he’d count by hard numbers like intervals of twenty-seven. Anything to distract his mind from the pain at hand and force it to focus on figuring out what came after fifty-four and so on. He tried to create little refuges within his mind that he could escape to. If he could focus his mind there instead of on the pain, then he could hold out longer.

  The problem was he was getting weaker. His lungs spasmed every time he coughed now. He knew he was caked in filth—urine, sweat, spit, phlegm, snot. If they’d caught him with a full stomach, he would have shat himself by now as well.

  Lucky for them or he would’ve had some kind of weapon to fight back.

  It would have earned him a severe beating, but the thought made him smile, and that was almost as good as the real thing.

  “Give us a name.”

  The soft voice had returned. It crept into Ran’s mind like some type of nefarious ear worm. He could feel the syrupy tone of the words snaking their way through his head, nudging aside his desire to remain closed. He knew what was different about it this time, too. It was a woman’s voice. He wasn’t used to this. During this entire time, only men had questioned him. He had fended them off with relative ease.

  But this was something new.

  Her voice was like a warm blanket wrapping itself around his thoughts and hugging them into her bosom. And there, in that moment, a memory of his mother surfaced, bubbling up from the deepest, most protected area of his mind. He saw her face. Felt her embrace, her warmth. Heard her laughter. The soothing touch of her hand on his brow.

  “Just tell me who hired you . . . my son.”

  He had blinked beneath the blindfold. He coughed again and he felt a cloth wipe away the spittle from his mouth. The soft caress of a warm hand against his cold, clammy skin. He felt something then beneath his beaten exterior, under his hardened heart and iron will to outlast them and their questions.

  He felt hope.

  And more than anything, he felt a desire to help his mother—to help her understand what he was and who had hired him.

  If he could just give his mother the answer she wanted, the answer she sought, then he could be with her again. She could hold him and rock him to sleep and tell him everything was going to be all right, that no one would ever harm him again.

  No.

  His mother was dead.

  Years had passed since he’d seen her dismembered corpse bloated and twisted in the wake of the savage attack on his village that had left Ran an orphan. His father’s body had been nearby, in even more horrifying condition. Blood spatters and streaks adorned their simple home. A fire raged in the back of the house and forced him to flee, leaving behind the bodies of his parents. Their home became a funeral pyre. The images of his parents were seared into his brain and locked away. He chose never to think about them for a reason: it brought back too much pain, too much uncertainty, too much of the world that he’d once been a part of before the Shinobujin took him in to become one of their own.

  This wasn’t his mother talking to him now. She would never speak to him again. This was another trick they were trying out on him to see if there was a chance he would crack under the pressure of an ancient memory.

  Ran said nothing.

  “Remove the blindfold.”

  Harsh light flooded his skull and made him wince. He blinked rapidly to acclimate to the abrupt change. He took several deep, rattling breaths and coughed again. Two pairs of hands helped him up and brought him over to a blazing hearth where the warmth was almost too exquisite to endure. A bowl of thin soup was held to his mouth, and Ran greedily drank it down. If this was another tactic, he didn’t care. He would take the warmth and the food and keep fighting them for as long as it took. He would never break.

  “You did well, Ran.”

  He looked up and saw Akimoto, the head instructor for this part of the training, looking down at him. He wore a big smile on his face. “We very nearly got to you at the end there, though, didn’t we?”

  There was no point in lying about it. They knew everything about him by now. They had seen him under the worst pressure they could provide. All of his expressions had been noted. All of his reactions had been catalogued. To lie at this point would have been stupid and pointless. So Ran nodded. “Very nearly, sir. Yes.”

  Akimoto sat down next to him and helped him hold the bowl with his hands. Ran took several more mouthfuls of the soup. It had been days since he’d had any food, but they couldn’t serve him a huge meal immediately or his stomach would vomit it back up after the extreme duress he’d been under.

  “Just remember,” said Akimoto, “that we cannot fully replicate the conditions you will face in the real world. The best we can do is what you have just endured. If you are ever captured in the real world, the torture will be far more horrendous than anything you have just gone through. They will stop at nothing to get the information they seek.”

  Ran coughed, and Akimoto placed one hand on his chest. “You have a bit of a cough there. We will give you a draught that should take away the infection in a few days. You need to rest, obviously. You have been through a terrific ordeal and emerged from it a better student.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you understand why we have done what we did? Why we subjected you to this training?”

  Ran nodded. “I understand.”

  “Then also understand this: everyone has their breaking point. Everyone talks eventually. The key is to hold out for as long as possible and make them work for the information. Death will undoubtedly await you after the torture, so you may ask why prolong the inevitable. But by doing so, you will save lives and hopefully render the information obsolete by the time you do give them what they seek.”

  “Death is a part of the path all men walk,” s
aid Ran. “Shinobujin, especially. I do not fear it.”

  “They will know you do not,” said Akimoto. “So they will do everything possible to keep you from that final release, that final journey toward the darkness that waits us all.” The old instructor paused, a frown creasing his face. “And as many ways as man has to kill, he has an even greater ingenuity when it comes to inflicting suffering on others.”

  Ran looked at him. “What then is your advice, sir?”

  Akimoto laughed. “My advice? The same thing I tell every member of our clan regardless of how long they have been with us. My advice is always the same, because it is the simple unvarnished truth: don’t get caught.”

  Don’t get caught.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  His head hurt.

  Ran reached up and felt the base of his skull. A lump the size of a small teacup protruded and felt tender to the touch. He winced, aware of the memories of his past training that had just replayed in his mind. It had felt like a dream, but the training had been real enough. The final words of his instructor lingered in his head.

  Don’t get caught.

  But he was caught now. Ran wondered why he hadn’t been killed yet. Surely Malkyr wouldn’t want to take a chance with him in captivity. He knew what Ran was capable of doing. He reached down and felt for the inside of his belt. The length of wire Ran had used to pick the lock back at Kan-Gul’s castle was gone. Ran’s weapons were also missing.

  He blinked, trying to find his bearings. The last thing he could remember before Malkyr had attacked him was being on board the raider ship. He was halfway up the ladder when Malkyr had called him back down. Ran shook his head slowly. Damn fool thing to do, he thought. It wasn’t as if Malkyr had been entirely trustworthy up until that point, either.

  Ran sighed and rolled over. His feet bumped into the side of a wall. Wood. Ran looked and saw the bars on a door several feet away from him. He was in a cell of some type, but where? He stayed still and tried to get a sense of his surroundings. He still smelled the ocean, so they must be close to the harbor. And then he felt the sides of the cell shift slightly.

  Ran smiled. He was on a ship. But whether it was the raider or one of the transports, he didn’t know. But something told him he was on the same boat. Malkyr wouldn’t have taken the chance that Ran would wake up and disable the raiders and kill Malkyr if they’d tried to drag him all the way to another ship.

  No, he was still on the raider ship. Ran felt sure of it. His head ached, and Ran felt his stomach lurch. If he’d had anything in it, he probably would have vomited. But not eating turned out to be a small win in this case. Not that he was feeling especially pleased with how easily Malkyr had taken him down. He replayed the moment in his head. As he’d come down the ladder, something in his gut had made him suspect danger.

  But it had been too late to do anything about it. Malkyr hammered him before his foot had even touched the lower deck.

  Foolish.

  Ran sat up slowly and tried to listen to any other ambient noises on the ship. He could hear footsteps above him, probably on the main deck. There were people about now. He wondered if the entire thing had been staged as a trap. Make it look like the harbor was deserted in order to entice Ran down. Malkyr certainly knew what Ran could do, having seen him in action at the castle. Perhaps they wanted him out of the way first.

  Ran wondered if the others had seen him captured. If he was still on the raider ship, it didn’t seem likely. But they probably knew something was wrong; Ran had been gone for a while.

  Kancho would be the first to move, he decided. The older warrior would no doubt sense something amiss, and his sense of honor would get the better of him. They might be moving into position even now. Ran frowned. Although with more people clearly in view, that might not be an option. None of them would be able to scale the rock face the way Ran had. That left the path down as their only option. And Malkyr would send his men to meet them if that happened.

  They could already be captured, he realized.

  If that was the case, then Ran had little hope of rescue.

  But he’d been trained for that as well. His instructors had stressed from the very first day of training that the life of a Shinobujin was a solo affair. No matter if the assignment or guise offered companionship, at the end of the day a Shinobujin operated alone. He lived in the murky grays that existed in the world. One day here, one day there. Never able to be pinned down for too long, he left no trail, no history, no past. Blink and he was gone.

  If the unthinkable happened, the Shinobujin was expected to rescue himself. He was expected to find his own way out of whatever predicament he found himself in. No other members of the clan would come to assist him, because that would risk exposing them all to the wrath of the warlords who despised them.

  If rescue became impossible, there was but one option left: death.

  Ran didn’t fancy killing himself. Even when they’d taught him how to choke on his own tongue, or break his own neck, he had filed it away as a useless bit of knowledge that he would never have need for. He knew it was his ego talking when he convinced himself he would never get caught.

  The real world apparently had other ideas.

  Ran squatted and examined his makeshift cell. The door had steel bars set into it and looked solid enough. The hinges were on the outside, though, which Ran considered a silly mistake. It meant he could chamber a kick and bust down the door if it came to that. Further, the lock looked elementary. Ran didn’t have his wire, but he knew other ways to open a lock. Then, the walls of the cell were wooden as well. Ran could effectively burrow through them if he needed to, and if he had a tool of some sort.

  Overall, his predicament wasn’t dire. At least not yet. But the sooner he got out of here, the better. His instructors had always taught him that escaping as soon as possible after capture was always preferable to staying put. The longer you stayed, the harder it would become to escape. Often times prisoners were moved to better and more secure locations. If Ran’s cell was something he thought he could easily deal with, then he didn’t want to take the chance that he might be moved to a stone-walled cell or something even more impenetrable.

  He heard more footsteps overhead and then the sound of someone coming down the ladder. He pulled himself to the back wall of his cell and waited.

  Malkyr’s face appeared at the bars of his cell. “Wide awake are you? Good.”

  Ran stood and faced Malkyr. “That was a damned foolish thing to do.”

  “Why? Because I somehow managed to get the better of you?”

  Ran shook his head. “Because you betrayed all of us. We should have let the sharks eat you back on the beach.”

  “I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful for that. I am. It’s the only reason you’re still alive. Someone very powerful wants you dead, but I’m not so sure I want to hand you back over to him.”

  “Why? Out of gratitude?”

  Malkyr smirked, reminding Ran of a pit viper. “Ran, my good friend, I am a man of few principles. Surely you know this by now. My motivations in life are fairly easy to discern. I don’t adhere to some antiquated code that forbids me the basic liberties and freedom that I adore. My ethics are much more . . . fluid, shall we say.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “I can sell you back in Nehon to the highest bidder. And I’ll make a terribly enormous pile of money off of your head.”

  Ran felt his gut ache. But rather than admit it, he frowned. “Why would anyone pay a lot of money for me?”

  “Well, it’s not so much you. Rather it’s what you are. I’m well aware of the night demons. And you are without a doubt one of the most talented I’ve ever known of.”

  “I’m not a night demon. I’m a blade-for-hire. If I was a shadow warrior, why on earth would I have taken a trip abroad in your horrible boat?”

  “The Aqaria was a good ship,” said Malkyr. “Tragic that she had to be sacrificed the way she was. But then again, that was
part of my deal with Kan-Gul.”

  “What did you say?”

  Malkyr grinned. “Haven’t figured it out yet?” He frowned for a moment. “Perhaps you’re not a night demon, after all. I generally thought they were more intelligent than you seem to be.” He clapped his hands. “No matter. Yes, well, I have a deal with Kan-Gul. You see, he’s had his eye on the young sorceress for some time now. Kan-Gul has eyes everywhere. Dare I say he might even give you night demons a challenge when it comes to setting up spy networks. In any event, he learned that Jysal would be heading off to the temple, and he paid me to bring her to him.”

  “You wrecked your own boat to betray her?”

  Malkyr shrugged. “The Aqaria wasn’t really mine. I won her in a friendly wager with another trader. So I don’t have much emotional attachment to her. She served a purpose and did it well.”

  Ran shook his head. “There was no guarantee that you’d successfully land us in his territory.”

  “Well, I’ll be the first to admit things got a bit unpredictable there toward the end. And that business with the sharks was something I don’t want to have to repeat anytime soon. But all’s well that ends well, as they say. And now, not only do I have the opportunity to deliver Jysal to Kan-Gul and collect on my end of the bargain, but I also have a chance to auction off a real live shadow warrior. Surely the gods have smiled upon me this day.”

  “You won’t be smiling when I get out of here.”

  Malkyr waved that comment off. “We have other things to discuss rather than your dreams of vengeance, which I assure you will never happen. Tell me something: Where are the other members of your party?”

  “I told you where they were. Up at the tunnel entrance.” Ran smiled. “They’re not there?”

  “You know they’re not. I sent men up there to find them and they were nowhere to be seen.”

  “How unfortunate,” said Ran. “I can’t imagine that Kan-Gul will be pleased when he arrives and finds you don’t have his treasure ready for him to take back to his castle.”