“Relax, Jed. The thief had it coming to him. That’s what happens when you steal from a group such as ours, eh?” Solloway chuckled, his eyes locking with Mercer’s. There was something in the old sergeant’s stare, the exact thing Mercer had been looking for earlier, when Solloway was far less drunk. The man was keeping secrets from him, that much was clear. This man said his father had died, but Willis Crane must have gone south long ago, well before Solloway had left Kingston on his journey. How else could his father have twisted into Plaguewind if not for the passage of several years? Solloway must know something, Mercer thought. What sort of game is he playing by hiding the truth from me?
“Is everything alright?” Solloway asked Mercer, a pugnacious tone underlying the drunkenness in his voice. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
“Everything is fine,” Mercer said, though the sentiment couldn’t have been further from the truth. He felt much the same as he did before, when he had hacked a tree to pieces, imagining his father’s malformed face on its bark. What did he really know about Solloway, he wondered. What were this man’s intentions?
He decided to keep with his decision of not telling the others any more of what he and Brook had encountered and learned, both in their dream together and in the church in the hills. Particularly not Solloway. He’d watch the old soldier carefully now, would try and gauge just what the man’s motives were and what secret knowledge he was sitting on. Perhaps more dreams would come, would show him the way forward. Even though they were only a couple of days away from Dusty Yen’s camp, he’d have to be patient and see how things unfolded.
Tim shuffled around the wagon then, the scowl once again set hard in his face. “There be still some hours left of daylight. We leave now, we can make it to the muddy banks of the Esopus, the southernmost of the Seven Streams. It be a wide and peaceful river, with trade barges from Lazarus Township passing down it often enough. Maybe you lot can find a barge that’ll take you to the Hud or a small boat you can commandeer. It’ll be a far faster way of travel than riding in the back of me wagon.”
“Ugh, I hate boats,” Solloway said. “But the quicker we can get to Dusty Yen, the better. Let’s go.”
They quickly packed up their things and piled into the back of the wagon. Just as they were climbing up, Brook and Mercer shared a look. He could see by the way her eyes trembled that she shared the same sentiments he did about Solloway. What is he hiding from us? Mercer wondered, climbing past the crates and barrels and making his way towards the front end of the wagon. What are we being drawn into?
Interlude
THE BEAR STOOD AT THE ENTRANCE to Indio’s audience chamber, its legs straddling the doorway, as defiant as ever.
“What are you scheming, Ursul?” The Lord Commander thought silently to himself, stroking his strong chin with his spider fingers. There had been a time not too long ago when he could hold long conversations with the bear. Now, he detested its company, its prideful emerald eyes. It reminded him too much of unchecked power, of the myriad cracks spreading through the edifice of his rule. It reminded him too much of Solloway.
From his throne, he could hear the grunts of the silent squires sparring and wrestling in the courtyard outside. These sounds were mixed with the commanding shouts of the overseers, ordering their workers to reinforce the walls, the spikes, the pits. Every defense that the Fort at Kingston had was being bolstered, enhanced. War was coming, and the city had to be prepared, not just for the battle but for what was to come after.
Inside the chamber, Indio was alone with the five fingers of the Fist. The statues were evenly spaced around the room, their eyes on the center of the floor where Indio received his guests. To his left stood the stone statues of agility and wit: Crenshaw the hawk-man, his wings tucked behind him, his hands wrapped around his bow, watched with golden eyes that missed nothing, while Stallos the fox had a thumb on the hammer of his rifle and elaborate plans running through his head. To his right stood Astor the wolf and Bo the horse. The deity of discipline, who Indio felt most akin to, held a longsword in his human hands, unyielding obedience to the tenants of the Fort reflected in his raven-colored eyes. Bo, the largest of the statues, held a large shield in his hand, a symbol to his unending fortitude and endurance.
The four fingers that flanked the room were his allies, but the one that stood furthest from him was not: the bear, Ursul. It was the finger of the fist that the axe men worshipped with fervent abandon. Strength, power, courage, Ursul embodied it all; he saw it shining in the bear’s eyes, felt it emanating from the razor sharp axe in his stony hands. Indio loathed that weapon more than any other and felt threatened by the soldiers who had taken it for their own. They would be the biggest threat to his plans, the only barricade to the future. His future.
They called Solloway Old Bear, Indio thought. He even has the same green, staring eyes as the statue. I can still feel the weight of that man, even with him gone for quarter-moons now. Damn him.
The Lord Commander was of average height and thin, with corded muscles from years of swordplay and drills. His face was cut from stone, his brow forever furrowed, as though it were a tent’s tarpaulin heavy with pooled rain. He was a man loved by few and feared by many, sentiments he felt both strengthened and vindicated by. A proper ruler’s life, at least in his view, was solitary and not to be understood by those he commanded. It was one of the reasons he identified most with Astor the wolf, the lone swordsman championed by the silent squires and silent knights, the ranks of whom Indio had climbed to become Lord Commander.
Yet, despite his allegiance to Astor, Indio’s mind worked more like that of the technickers and scions who revered Stallos the fox as their deity. Indio was a schemer, a brewer of cold calculations. Everyone knew it was he who had orchestrated the poisoning of the wells at Ithaca some six years prior. The knowledge had become so widespread that these days Indio didn’t even take pains to deny it. There had been no retaliation by the cosmologists, no firing of great missiles or charge of sprocket knights on the Fort. They had merely retreated further into their domed city, licking their wounds and growing as quiet as a cemetery.
But Indio knew that they were still working on their terrible engine, what his technickers called a reactor. Some vile relic from the long ago, a machine capable of splitting the smallest of all things and creating vast amounts of energy and power. Such technologies had been what had made the old cities so great, before the Time of the Great Dying, but also what had led to their downfall. These machines had bled the world, had spread the Blight, and Indio would do anything in his power to keep the cosmologists from doing the same to the Green Lands.
There was a knock at the doors. Indio looked to where the shadowed point fell on the wall, the sun-dial telling him that his guest had arrived exactly on time.
“Enter,” he called, his powerful voice booming around the chamber. The two doors beneath Ursul’s legs opened, four silent squires in step behind one silent knight. The squires walked in box formation, an old man in a black cap and a bright orange suit between them. A bruise the color of spoiled meat ran from the old man’s temple down to his cheek.
“Old Wren,” Indio said. “Welcome to the Fort. So good to finally meet you.” Indio nodded to the silent knight who had led the small group in. “Thank you, Mandrake. You and the squires can wait just outside the door. I’ll call to you when you’re needed.”
Mandrake the silent knight, wearing the traditional white cotton long-sleeves of his station, raised his fist in the air. “For the Fist. For the Fort.”
Indio stood, put his fist in the air. “For the Fist. For the Fort.” The knight called to the squires, and they left the room in double file, leaving Old Wren in the center of the room. The Lord Commander could see the old man’s body trembling within the thin fabric of his suit.
“I trust you’ve been made most comfortable since arriving,” Indio said as he made his way down the steps between his throne and the floor. “You found the prison cel
l beneath the Fort to your liking? Not much different than the snake’s nests you Black Wings have under the earth, I imagine.”
“You’re every bit the bastard I’ve heard you were,” Old Wren spat. “You killed my people, my family. Elon’s justice will be swift with you, of that I’m sure.”
“Now, now. I didn’t kill all the Black Wings. Some got away from my soldiers, miraculously enough.” Indio approached the older man and saw how much four days of little food, light and rest had taken from Wren. His eyes were wild, like two eggs sunken in the sand, and his hands shook like seaweed beneath the waves of Lake Ma’Attica.
“The orange suits you nicely,” Indio quipped, inspecting the Black Wing’s outfit closely, a wolf circling his prey. “Much better than black. You know why we put our prisoners in clothes this color?”
“When those at Ithaca learn of what you did to my people, to my clan, they’ll_”
“They’ll do nothing, Wren. Ithaca is a ghost from the old world, an undead corpse walking in the shadows of what once was but will never be again. I fully intend to put a spike through their head and put them out of their misery.”
Old Wren waited until the Lord Commander had come full circle around him, then hocked a thick gob of spit into his captor’s face...
...Or at least attempted to. With the reflexes of Crenshaw the hawk, Indio moved his head to the side just enough to let the spit sail wide. His fist came up and cracked Wren in the jaw, sending the old man to the ground in a heap. Indio calmly stepped over him, the grin on his face like a fissure in stone.
“The bright orange is a color we at the Fort associate with weakness, though garbing you like this was hardly necessary. You Black Wings are just as weak as the sprout-eating nancies from Lazarus Township, and have been since the war. Now get up. I want to show you something. You had better follow me, too. Or else I could get the squires to help you along.”
Old Wren struggled to his feet and took staggering steps after the Lord Commander. Indio walked through an archway and out onto the open air balcony that overlooked the entirety of the Fort at Kingston. The view never failed to impress him.
The balcony was ten stories above the ground, wrapped around the topmost floor of a stone citadel, its walls fifteen hands thick. It was at the center of five concentric walls, each in the shape of a pentagram, each with men working busily atop their battlements, building them higher, thicker, stronger. Beyond the furthest wall, 23 snaked southwards through the Broke Tooth Hills, surrounded on all sides for several eye-spans by sharp stakes. The Aderon Mountains rose in the distance like lamprey teeth.
“Look upon our works, Wren,” Indio said when the old man had caught up to him. “The defenders of the Green Lands, of humanity. Is it not spectacular?”
“Why did you do this to my people? What did they do?”
“What did they do? Don’t play coy with me, Wren. Your people suffered the fate they did because of your actions. My soldiers followed Roderick Solloway’s trail straight to your camp. We know you fed him, clothed him, aided and abetted him.”
“I did. And what of it? He is a soldier from the Fort, is he not?”
“They should really call you Old Wren of the Black Tongues for the way you so easily lie. You knew Solloway had gone AWOL, was wanted for crimes committed against the Fort.”
“I knew… I knew no such thing.”
Indio smiled. He knew the Black Wing would deny any knowledge of conspiracy, would probably do so up until his execution. Fortunately, there had been others who had been more easily pliable.
“I see that the view of the Fort doesn’t impress you. Well, come walk this way, Wren. I’d like to show you something else, something I know without a doubt will get a rise out of you.”
Old Wren shuffled after him, his wide eyes hardly masking the fear gripping his heart. He was on the verge of shattering apart, despite doing everything in his power to keep his composure. If Elon was good, he would be taken to the Dusk soon, allowed to join with his brothers and sisters in the warrior god’s embrace...
Indio led Old Wren around a corner, a cruel smile carved into his face. “Remember I told you I didn’t kill all the Black Wings? That some escaped? Well. I lied.”
Old Wren’s bony knees met the balcony’s hard stone, a groan like the earth tearing open escaping from his throat as he saw what was hung from the battlements before him.
“No. No, no, no…”
“Yes, old man, yes. Look at them! Look at what your hubris has wrought!” Indio grabbed Wren’s head between his calloused hands and made him stare at the bodies strung up from the flag staffs. Rainfall, Robin, Swiftfoot, Starcarrier and Thrush, Black Wings all, their bodies naked and pocked with stab marks. The latter three had been scouts that had accompanied him and Solloway in the search for Brook and Crow. Save for Robin, who was his elder by several years, Old Wren had watched them all grow from children to adults, had taught them to hunt, to read, had nurtured them in the ways of the Black Wings. This was exactly what he had wanted to avoid, since the war, since he had seen so many of his brothers and sisters die pointless deaths. It was why he had traded in the sword for the plough, had led the Black Wings along a path of peace. It had all been for naught, as death and misery had found them regardless.
“It didn’t take my soldiers long to locate them. Your people tried hiding in the trees. No doubt you taught them that. My men are well-trained in the battle techniques of the different tribes and clans in the Green Lands, so we knew to look up in the branches for any capes.
“It may ease your mind to know that not one of them died quickly. The old woman was especially long lived. It took thirty stabs with the spear before she finally bled out and died. But before any of them breathed their last, they spoke. They told me everything, what Solloway confided in you. You knew the Old Bear was on the run, that he was heading east. Yet you still helped him. Not only that, you let him get away with Willis Crane’s boy, and the Sword of Jai Lin that he carried.”
Old Wren barely heard him. His mind had shaken loose, had shattered to pieces on the ramparts below. He could only look at the ravens picking at the bodies, at the sinew hanging from their beaks. The birds had already plucked out the eyes of his brothers and sisters, of those he thought had escaped, would rescue him...
“War is coming to the Green Lands, Old Wren, and you have already chosen the side you are on. Unfortunately for you, it is the side which must lose. Mandrake!” The silent knight appeared, as suddenly as if he had been waiting just inside the audience room. “Take Wren back to his cell. But first, I want you and your squires to parade him around the Fort. Get the boys riled up. It’ll be good for morale.”
Mandrake raised his fist, then called his squires. They ran in, silent on their bare feet, and resumed their box formation around Old Wren. The Black Wing didn’t seem to notice them. His eyes had glossed over and his cheeks glowed beneath a sheen of tears. He was mouthing silent words, teetering on his knees like a dead tree in the wind.
Indio felt pity for the man, as he did for all old, useless things. If he could rewrite the rules of the world, he would have done so long ago. And perhaps, one day soon, he would have that power. For now, however, the future belonged to the strong, to those forged of earth, fire and iron. The weak, those who clung to the old ways, would be plucked like a tick from an otherwise healthy host and crushed between the fingers of the Fist. It was the only way the Green Lands could survive. Indio was convinced.
The squires picked Old Wren up by his skinny arms and took him away. The soldiers of the Fort would get great pleasure at seeing the old man paraded around in his orange suit, the broken sole survivor of a once proud warrior people. Indio was sure he’d hear whoops of mirth from all the way atop his balcony, and he was glad for it. Soon, his men would be consumed by war, many of them never to return home again. The many inevitable deaths were not a burden he bore lightly, but he knew that such a sacrifice would usher in a glorious future.
“For the Fi
st. For the Fort,” he muttered, staring out to the east, to where the Hud cut through the Green Lands like a muddy wound, and then south, to the Borderlands and Blight beyond. Everything was about to converge. He would be ready for it.
Chapter Nine
The Ruins of the Nameless
CROW WAS PANTING HEAVILY, his coffee-colored skin glazed with sweat. In stark contrast, the young Boat Person who stood adjacent from him was as calm as the cloudless azure above. He still wore his heavy poncho and wide-brimmed hat despite the heat and humidity of the southern climes, but not even a trickle of sweat was on his clean-shaven face.
“Do you like this dance, mon ami?” The rakish Boat Person asked, his voice a calliope. He had two hard clubs in his hands, each as long and thick as a humerus bone, tethered together by a small chain. The Boat People called this weapon nunchaku, and in their hands it was especially lethal.
“It’s taking me some time to feel the rhythm of it, Oliver,” Crow said, testing the weight of the two knives he held in his hand. “I’ll like it better once I do it better than you.”
“I don’t think that will be any time soon, Black Wing,” Oliver laughed. He was a head shorter than his father, Captain DeMontaigne, but still towered over Crow and all the Boat People who had assembled in a loose circle at various places along the deck to watch the battle.
The air was abuzz with a melange of good humor, fascination and a competitive spirit. He was the first Black Wing many of these seafaring people had seen, after all, and they certainly were an inquisitive bunch, wanting to know everything about him and the ways of his people. This was all contrary to the aloofness he had been taught to believe they had. Instead, he found that his hosts were gracious and with a warmth of demeanor that was not unlike that of the Black Wings. He felt at home amongst them and immensely grateful for their rescuing him from the slavers when they did.
The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One Page 16