“Exactly. Your father was able to put what he called a blood lock on the sword. He told me all about it, though I’m not savvy to that sort of talk. Genes and DNA and all that. What’s important, I think, is that you, Mercer, can wield the sword without hindrance or harm. Anyone else who tries to hold it will be shocked, fall ill or be driven insane. So Willis used to tell me, anyways.”
The blood lock. Perhaps this was why Jai Lin had always fit so naturally in his hands, had called to him that day three years before, when he had felled his first dead man.
“What I don’t understand is why it’s drawn to the dead men like it is, why sometimes I feel like I’m asleep and dreaming when I’m fighting them.”
“Stand up, and I’ll show you.” Mercer did as he was bid, following Solloway over to an area that had a wide radius clear of any trees. “Hold the blade up to your face. Yes, like that. There you go.” Solloway put his bear claw of a hand around Mercer’s and guided it into the position he was seeking. When the older man was satisfied, the blade pointed straight up at the sky and Mercer’s forehead was to the chrome sword hilt.
“What is this supposed to show me?” Mercer asked. “I feel kind of ridiculous standing like this.”
“You’ll see. Close your eyes.” Mercer did as Solloway asked. He hoped Brook wouldn’t come back at this moment, when Solloway would fall back on the ground laughing at the prank he had just pulled on the gullible young man. Still, Solloway had told Mercer when they first met that he could teach him things, and perhaps this was one of them. “Now, focus on the sword. Focus on it, and look in the darkness.”
“What am I looking for?”
“You’ll see.” Mercer tried looking around in the blackness behind his closed eyelids, but all he saw were dark purple dots floating through the murk, the same he would see any other time he shut his eyes.
“I don’t see anything.”
Solloway sighed. “Do as I say and keep your focus on the sword, then look.” Mercer tried to keep the feeling of the cold chrome hilt fresh in his mind, tried to meld his skin to the feeling of the sword. He imagined that his skull set roots down into the hilt, that a new set of eyes opened up on the blade’s dark steel. It was as if Jai Lin was helping him look. The same dream-like state washed over him that he had when he was fighting dead men. It was then that he saw it, what he was looking for.
“I… I see something!” Mercer said. “It’s… it’s like a snake, or… some sort of road.”
“That’s a dark tendril. It’s the dark energy that connects all blighted things.”
“Blighted things? Like dead men?”
“Yes, what you and your old man call dead men, what the western cities call the undead or zombies and what the Black Wings call killim are all connected by these dark tendrils, as are all other twisted things that come from the Blight. The sword feels for them and thus draws you to them. You can follow these tendrils and know exactly where undead are, or where they’ll be. It’ll keep us safe on our journey to the lands beyond the Hud, will prevent what happened today from ever happening again.”
Though Mercer heard what Solloway was saying, he was transfixed by his new-found ability. The tendrils meandered across his vision, and he found he could follow them as swift as a bird of prey. They snaked across the landscape, which was projected on the backs of his eyelids as a dark silhouette.
He followed twenty or so tendrils to the place beyond the wall of carts where a thick carpet of undead still milled about Lothario’s picked-clean bones. He followed it further south, to the Borderlands beyond the Axe Man, to where the green grass and twisted brush turned to sand and rock. Then he was in the Blight, flying faster, the tendrils coalescing so closely together that they more resembled a dark ocean than a series of small rivulets. Dead men shuffled about without direction for as far as the eye could see. He was astonished, seeing so many in one place, but still he was drawn further along, as if at the center of this dark ocean was a whirlpool pulling everything towards it.
“Mercer…” He could hear Solloway calling him, but now the man’s voice seemed so distant, so unimportant. There was something else that wanted him, a power within the dark tendrils beckoning him forward. Then Mercer saw what the dark energy spiraled around: it was an old house, the sidewall caved in and its interior a sea of dust and refuse.
He couldn’t resist the tendril’s pull, found himself uncontrollably drawn to it. He was pulled into this house, through a splintery wood door and down creaking wood steps into the basement. There was just enough light to make out the bowed shape of the ceiling, which looked ready to collapse at any moment. Mercer’s eyes adjusted as he was pulled further along, past a pile of mildewy papers, broken toys and naked mannequins, until he suddenly stopped. Before him, at the center of the dark vortex, was the man who had beckoned to Mercer across the countless eye-spans of burnt chaparral and dry riverbeds, from the Green Lands all the way to the Blight.
Mercer felt a chill seize his entire body as he took in the figure before him. The man was draped in a torn and dirty cloak, his arms held out like those of a scarecrow, clusters of tumors traipsing up and down his exposed, translucent skin like piles of spider eggs. He was sniffing at the air, and Mercer could see the crags and crevices around the man’s mouth, the only thing visible under his hood. His head stopped moving and he smiled, his teeth missing save for four or five that were razor sharp.
“I’ve got you…” The man hissed. Dust rained down through the slats in the ceiling and the house began to shake. Mercer tried to wrestle away, tried to fly swiftly back to his body in the Green Lands, but the dark tendrils had wrapped around him, were keeping him suspended in place.
“You have what belongs to me…” The man hissed. “You have the sword… It belongs to the Undead King…” The man reached his spindly fingers towards Mercer’s face. He wanted to scream, but no sound would come out. He felt the breath being choked out of him, felt the dark tendrils squeezing out every last bit of resistance he had. The man laughed, and the sound was death…
“No!” Mercer screamed, falling out of the trance and into Solloway’s arms. Brook was back from the stream and crouched next to the grizzled military man, watching Mercer with lines of worry etched in her face.
“What was it?” Solloway asked. “What did you see?”
“I was in the Blight… I saw… a house… I saw...”
“Out with it, boy! What did you see?”
Mercer felt so weak, like he had been in a race with the wind since morning’s first light. Exhaustion made itself known in all his muscles, but he dared not close his eyes again, dared not allow the darkness to show him its terrible secrets.
“Dusty Yen is the least of our worries,” he said, taking a breath and steadying himself. He suddenly remembered what his sister said, in the dream he had the night before. “There was a man in the Blight. He called himself… the Undead King. We don’t have any more time. He’s coming. The Undead King is coming.”
Chapter Six
The Boat People
IF CROW HAD GLEANED ANYTHING from his short time as a captive, it was that the Wandering Bastards did not pull their punches.
His face was a hot, swollen egg from all the stony knuckles it had met in the day since his capture. These slavers loathed a boisterous captive almost as much as they did marching; they took out their frustration from the latter on the former, relentless in their effort to pound Crow’s pride into something resembling fish chud. Knowing that struggling against his ropes was getting him nowhere, Crow had finally shut up and let them prod him along the Kill Fish Road at their discretion. If he was going to escape, he needed to let his mind clear, which meant no more punches to the head.
“Dinner, you maggots!” Salty, the cook, called to the rest. “Come and get it while the stew is still stewing and not hardened to jelly!” They had marched much of last night and almost the entire day before stopping to take a proper rest. Now, an eye-span away from a pair of ruinous buildings
with crumbling chimneys reaching desperately into the gray sky, they had set up camp, nothing more than a few open-air tents of varying sizes, their mules and carts arranged around the perimeter. Crow sat with the other captives under the watchful eye of a few slavers while those of higher rank went to eat.
“Man, I’m so hungry, I could eat my hair.” The guard who spoke was around his age but had a seasoned, raspy voice that Crow recognized from the day before, when it had drifted up on a breeze from the slaver camp by the Axe Man. If Raspy did in fact eat his hair, Crow imagined the man would most likely be very full, as it bloomed out from his head like a dandelion puff, its color the malty caramel of the beer Crow and some of the younger Black Wings sometimes snuck into the woods to get drunk on.
“Shut it, boy. You’ll eat soon enough. Just keep your eye on these ones, ‘specially this Black Wing right here. He ain’t broke yet and still bucks wild like a young neigh.” The older man who spoke reminded Crow of Old Wren, at least in how tightly coiled his muscles were and how agile he appeared despite his advanced age. He had the narrow eyes and copper skin of what Old Wren called a Shiner Man, and wore his silver hair up in a tightly wrapped bun. Crow recognized the shiner man’s grizzly voice as the other that had traveled on the breeze the day before, the one that had warned of the Axe Man being a poisoned river.
“Man, you always calling me boy. My name is Tyson. You should know that by now.”
“Aye, and you’re always calling me man. My name a’int man, it’s Alain.”
Crow saw his chance. “Hey, Tyson, Alain, you think you guys could get me a drink of water?” Crow’s tongue was like moss on a stone and his head was pounding. He wasn’t sure if the slaver guards had heard him, so he slowly turned his aching neck around to face them when everything went black and the next thing he knew he was face down in the mud.
“You get water when we decide to give you water, pendejo.” Tyson sounded as though he were calling to Crow from one shore of the Hud to the other. A hotness had begun to bloom at the place where he had been kicked, and with it, anger.
If only he could get to his knives, he’d cut the throats of these slavers faster than a hiccup, going just deep enough that the men wouldn’t die from their wounds but from choking on their blood; it would give them just enough time to ruminate on their miserable lives and grow heartsick with regret. If only the blades his father had proudly worn in the War for the Green Lands had not been given to an oafish Bastard, so fat he had to adjoin a hemp rope to the belt in order to fit it around his body.
Crow’s vision cleared and from where he lay sprawled on the ground he could see directly into the mess tent, where the slavers laughed and ate the slop that Salty served. He hated them all and silently made a vow to himself that he’d kill every last one, Tyson first.
Alain picked Crow up and roughly put him back to back with some of the other captives. Most were men of varying ages with loose jaws and defeated faces, with two older women who could have been sisters, both with strong arms and sad eyes. Soon, two slavers with full bellies came up to relieve Alain and Tyson of their watch so they could go down and get some food. Crow watched them go, his eyes most focused on Tyson. He’d never seethed as hotly as he did right now, had never hated someone so thoroughly. He felt as if he was about to boil over and run headlong into the tent when his eye caught something in the mess tent that made all his anger evaporate away.
Staring straight back at him were a pair of eyes, the gray of the fog that hugged the valleys of the Broke Tooth Hills. She was young, just north of girlhood, but her body was softly curved and lithe. Her guise left little of her body to guesswork: she wore a series of colored ropes wrapped tightly around her delicately muscled body, covering her breasts and womanhood at their most proximate borders. Her hair was long and wavy, brown and gold, with ribbons of the same bright colors as her ropes braided into it. She had bracelets around her wrists and ankles and wore necklaces of linked gold, silver and platinum, but Crow barely saw any of this. It was those eyes, those gray eyes that never wavered in their gaze. Why was she watching him? What did she want?
Then the leader of the Bastards, the one they called Matchless, grabbed her around the arm and pulled her to him, breaking her eye contact from Crow’s. When she turned, Crow saw the tattoo which covered her entire back, from top to bottom of her spine. It was a tree, an old oak, if his view from this distance could be trusted, surrounded on all sides by smaller figures in varying poses.
“Don’t get too lusty for Matchless’s whore, henpecker,” one of the new slaver guards said to him. Henpecker was an acid-tinged term for a Black Wing, one which Crow knew well despite his never having been addressed as such. The anger he thought had dissipated roared to life with a new vengeance. “Oh, did I get you mad? Look at him, Skrim. His face is turning red. You going to turn into a rooster on us, are you, henpecker? I’d like to see that trick.”
Skrim, the other slaver, just laughed. “You going to be awful sorry, Bob, should this Black Wing become a slaver like us. He’ll kill you first chance he gets.”
“I’d never become a slaver. I’d never debase myself so low,” Crow said, forgetting the swelling in his face and the ringing in his head for a moment. The slavers merely looked at him, then both broke out into laughter.
“What do you think? Should I go and dunk him?” Bob asked.
“Sounds like a right good time to me, Bob. Best do it before them Boat People come. Matchless says they no like the softening techniques we slavers employ.”
“Employ? What does that mean, Skrim?”
“You know, what we use or do. Something like that.”
“Well, no matter if they like our employ or not, they sure like the finished products, don’t they?” Bob spit in the dirt by the feet of the captives; Crow could see that there were but a few teeth in his mushy face. Here was a man whose entire life had been one of hardscrabble survival, a man who had probably never known the feeling of a hot shower or how it was to sleep in clean sheets, nor cared to. It was the sort of man who was particularly dangerous, because to him life was cruel, merciless and without grace. Mercy was a stranger to him precisely because it had never come into his life.
“Watch the rest of them, Skrim. Let’s go, henpecker. We’re going to the river.”
Bob loosed Crow from the post he had been tied to and prodded him along. Crow itched all over but couldn’t do anything about it as he still had his hands tied behind his back. As they came closer to the mess tent, the other slavers waved, and asked where Bob was going.
“I’m bringing this henpecker to the Hud for a dunking!” Bob yelled, excitedly. Some of the other slavers cheered. The girl with the back tattoo watched, as did Matchless, his arm around her waist. On his mountainous back was strapped his bastard sword, while the gun he had shot into the air the evening before was propped up against the table next to him.
“You come back quick, Bob. You hear me? I don’t want the Boat People seeing you dunking our product. They’ll turn around and buy from another group of slavers downriver.”
“Yes sir, Matchless, sir. I’ll be back right quick. Just got to cool this henpecker down.” Bob pushed Crow, so hard that he almost fell. The slavers all laughed, the loudest of all being the fat oaf who had Crow’s knives. He tottered on his stumpy legs, drunk on whatever the slavers were drinking with their slop, and had one of the sharp knives in his hand. Crow watched as the fat man turned and threw one of the knives at a goat that was tied to a stake and weakly bleating. The knife embedded itself in the creature’s hide, adding to the other wounds that marked its body. The goat fell to the ground and exhaled its last breath while the fat man cheered his easy sport.
Crow felt his insides wrapping around themselves and his cheeks growing hot at his father’s knives being used for such a disgusting game. The fat man pulled on the thin silver thread that was attached to the knife’s hilt, bringing it back to him. His hands were too clumsy, though, and he was off in catching it. The saus
age-link fingers wrapped around the blade, and the whole camp filled with a howl of pain. Blood began to pour from the fat man’s hand. Crow smiled to himself in silent triumph, hoping that the fat man would throw the knives back in the munitions cart and take up a spear or gun in exchange.
“What you smiling at, henpecker?” Bob asked, roughly pushing him again. The hill was sloping down to the shore of the Hud, the grass giving way to a sandy mixture of clay and stone. The squat stone ruins surrounded them on both sides, and what had once been a fence made of linked metal wire was now trampled into the mud, small islands of criss-crossed highways in a sea of dirt. The river Bob was pushing Crow towards was brown and violent from the autumn rains. Driftwood floated by in regular intervals, gulls watching them pass disinterestedly from their perches atop the buildings.
“Let’s go!” Bob said when they got up to their thighs in water. “Down on your knees!”
“You should just let me go, Bob. Or else I’m not only going to kill you, but every single person in that tent. And it won’t be a quick death, oh no. I’ll_” Bob cracked Crow in the back of the head with the butt of his spear, then put another well-placed hit to the back of Crow’s knees. Crow dropped, his head now ringing with a high pitched screech.
“You shut your hole, henpecker, before Matchless stitches it up for you. Don’t think he won’t. I’ve seen him do it to slaves less bothersome than you. Now, stick your head in that water there, and don’t bring it up until I tap you on the back. You hear me?”
“Yeah… I… hear you…” That last hit on the back of his head had been a hard one, and his head wasn’t clearing as quick as it had before. The ringing wasn’t going away.
“If you hear me then do as I say! Quick! Before I give you another crack!” Crow did as he was told, gulping down a big breath of air before dipping his head underwater. The water was cold as winter, but was just what was needed to shake the fuzz from his head and quiet the ringing. He didn’t think this was what the dunking would be like. He had pictured more of a wrestling match, where Bob would wrap his grubby fingers in Crow’s hair and plunge his head under the water, bringing him to the verge of drowning before he’d bring him back up. Under, out, under, out, until Crow’s spirit was broken. That’s how Crow envisioned it, but this way, well, it wasn’t so bad, was it?
The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One Page 9