The Ghoul King

by Guy Haley

  Slowly, the fog of isolation lifted. It was late afternoon. Noises of townsfolk murmured in the street. The sheriff’s office and courthouse was a solid brick fortress dead center of a town of wooden buildings, many of them still the pale yellow of young lumber. Over the other side of the square was the prince-governor’s house, his flag flying from its modest dome, those of Newtown and the Kingdom of Ohio flapping from the short towers at the end of the wings. The flagpole on the lawn out front bore no king's standard as it should, there being no king since the war. There wouldn’t be either. The angels had planned the mansion, just like they’d planned everything else in Newtown. Jaxon could not figure why they’d bother with a flagpole that would never carry a flag.

  Newtown Cathedral rose in half-finished majesty on the other side of the road from the governor’s mansion, its great stone ribs supported by a bewildering cat’s cradle of scaffolding. From the top of its unfinished spire the banner of the Dreaming City of Pittsburgh snapped in the wind coming off the plains. Their flag was bigger, brighter, and higher than all others around Government Square. Pittsburgh ruled Ohio now. Anyone seeing that flag would know it.

  Between the house of the governor and the house of God, a wide avenue opened up off the square, running alongside the Scioto River like a dog chasing a cart. Huares’s office was high enough up and the avenue straight enough so that Jaxon could see all the way to Old Columbus. The wooden buildings lining the road framed the broken stumps rising from the poisoned lands to the north.

  Jaxon’s eye was drawn from this view of splendid desolation by the tip of Huares’s cigar. Or more precisely, the tremor in it. Huares shook. Imperceptibly, almost, but he was scared. Jaxon’s heart slowed. Huares was unflappable, unafraid of death as any man can be, and once you take death out of the equation there isn’t much left to be frightened of. A fat flake of gray ash fell from his cigar onto the dark leather of the desktop.

  There were the ghouls of course, coming closer to town now they were all riled up. He could hear the shots at night even down in the Cooker. That wasn’t it. Huares needn’t be frightened of ghouls in his prison.

  The sheriff’s eyes twitched to his right.

  Jaxon’s field of vision seemed to stretch outward and a queasy sense of vertigo afflicted him. There was something at the far end of Huares’s desk. A statue next to the table lamp he’d barely registered. With dread Jaxon swung his head to look at it. His animal self anticipated what he’d see, even if his conscious mind lagged in realization, and his head swung wide and slow as a Mississippi trader’s barge grabbed by a river current. The statue was about a foot high, winged. When he saw the statue looking back at him, he knew it had got a whole lot more serious than ghouls running into the farms round town.

  Huares didn’t need to explain what the statue was, but he did anyway.

  “This is an emissary of the Pittsburgh angels, Jaxon, an oracle. I don’t think you need me to tell you what that means.”

  Jaxon couldn’t take his eyes off the oracle. Tiny eyelids rasped over ruby eyes, and it cocked its head at him. Jaxon’s head began to shake uncontrollably, a movement originating in the top of the muscles in the nape of his neck.

  “You have sinned greatly against the Pax Angelica, my child,” said the statue. It had a musical, piping voice, horribly like a child’s.

  Jaxon’s head shook more. He dropped his gaze to his wrists. They were reddened by the chafing of the manacles. The sunlight streaming into the office made his skin shiver. It was a cold warmth, early winter sun. Tears pricked at the corner of his eyes.

  “You are going to have to tell us everything you know about Rachel and her Seekers, Jaxon,” said Huares. There was a pleading note in his voice.

  “If I do that, you’ll kill me,” whispered Jaxon.

  Huares sucked hard on his cigar. It fizzed and crackled as he drew down the ring of orange fire toward his fingers, fraction of an inch by inevitable fraction of an inch.

  “What makes you think I’m not just going to toss you to the next ghoul pack that comes sniffing around for meat? Six kids, Jaxon. That’s how many we’ve lost, and that doesn’t take into account the damage you did to the Pit, nor the dead getting loose, nor the hole in the damned wall!” His voice rose to a shout and he slapped the desk. He looked at the statue apologetically for his blasphemy. It stared unblinkingly back.

  “We’re lucky the angels are merciful, praise the Lord. We’re an inch from a visitation on Newtown. That’s all on you, Jaxon. So, you talk now, starting with the rest of the Seekers, names, places, times, who their leader is. Or you’re going to have a lot worse things than death to worry about, so help me.”

  “I don’t know anything. Rachel was the one in charge. She never mentioned anyone else. She was careful what she said, and she’s . . . she’s gone.”

  “There are more involved,” said the Oracle serenely. “There are always more. Tell us what you know and your sins can be redeemed. Your body will perish, but your soul can be saved.”

  Jaxon shook his head quickly, a childish mix of defiance and petulance. “I don’t know anything. She told me nothing, and the others are all dead.”

  He shrank inside at his lie. There was Robyn. There was Bernadini. Unless they had been caught too.

  Huares drew in another lungful of blue smoke, and sent it out hurrying around his office. Jaxon followed its lazy curls, anything but look at the Oracle. There were books in cases and ancient artifacts behind glass and mementos from the war, everything framed in dark wood and dark leather, so he felt like he were trapped in the dried-out womb of a mastodon, gutted and dead on the plains.

  Then, then Jaxon realized he might be going mad.

  “You were not the only one,” said the Oracle. It walked along the desk, its footsteps hollow and metallic on the leather-covered wood. It stopped in front of Jaxon. Jaxon pulled himself in tighter so as not to look at it.

  “Look upon me, son of man,” the oracle said.

  Jaxon shook. Something intruded into his mind directly, cold as a blade of ice, and forced him to look upon the oracle.

  The statue was of an angel, an impressionist piece rendered in bronze. The sculpture was rough, made from hundreds of small pieces of metal the size and shape of a pad of a thumb. They slid over each other with a sinister scraping noise that set Jaxon’s teeth on edge. As these small scales of metal rearranged themselves, so did the oracle seem to move. It was ugly, imperfect, but deliberately. Nothing but the angels themselves could be perfect.

  “You know nothing of those who have defied the bans of the Dreaming Cities? Those who spread the blasphemous knowledge of the Gone Before?” the angel said.

  Tears streamed down Jaxon’s face. The chains stopped him from wiping his nose and he sniffled.

  “No, your holiness, I don’t,” said Jaxon.

  The angel was silent a moment. The atmosphere in the office became heavy with tension.

  “I suspect you are a heathen, or an atheist,” it said unexpectedly.

  “No, no! It’s not true, I believe, I believe in God and that his son, Jesus Christ, died on the cross to save us from our sins.”

  “And do you believe the angels are His right hand and His left hand upon this Earth, sent by Him to redeem His children from their own folly and heal the wounds they inflicted upon the Earth, God’s uncared-for gift to them?”

  Jaxon peered at the angel. The yes he gave was hesitant. The Oracle’s eyes glowed brighter at the lie.

  “You traveled with a knight. The Knight Quinn, of Atlantis,” it said.

  Jaxon nodded pathetically.

  “Then you will tell us of Quinn. Make record of this,” said the oracle to the sheriff, and some other things besides, but Jaxon did not hear them for the oracle did something to his mind, and the illusion of the present was replaced by the illusion of the past. Nothing was real, all moments were one.

  The oracle prodded something deep in his soul.

  “You will speak now of Quinn,” said
the oracle, from far away and right by his ear. “You will tell us of your journey into Old Columbus, you will omit no detail.”

  Leadenly, Jaxon began to speak.

  The Pit

  THERE WAS FIGHTING THAT NIGHT in the Pit. Living men against the dead. Quinn had been in there a week. It had taken that long for Rachel to formulate her plan. The knight was the star attraction. We had avoided the place until then, but she wanted us all to get a good look at him before the rescue.

  I don’t like the smell in there. Old beer and sweat, and the rot-stink of the dead. As we pushed our way inside, a massive cheer swelled around the arena, a wave of bloodlust that made me sick.

  Rachel went in first with Fillip, leaving me to toss coins into the buckets of the doormen. They scared me, I thought, we are supposed to free a man from creatures like these. They were massive, they didn’t seem quite human. Bald and thick-skinned with the kind of neck that should wear a plow collar. They looked at me like they wanted to kill me.

  I joined up with Rachel and her Seekers to help people, to heal them, not for this. I don’t like violence. That was my first error. Only violence comes from ventures like Rachel’s.

  “That’s him. There.” Rachel inserted herself into a gap between two men and pointed down at the fighting floor. Rachel was good at getting into tight spots. It helped that she looked the way she did. Beautiful. A smile from her would open more doors than a sackful of coins. Fillip craned his neck over her shoulder. Robyn swapped places with Rachel. Bernadini was tall enough to see over the heads of everyone in the way. Thomas was hard looking, no one would mess with him, and he found his own spot. I am neither tough nor tall, and so I couldn’t see anything. I heard a grunting cry and smash of metal on metal. The crowd bayed for blood.

  I hurried on past the others, ducking down and up looking for any gap where I could look. I didn’t want to see, but I had to, Rachel said. Rachel said we all needed to know what Quinn looked like, to fix his face in our minds. A man turned from his spot to speak with someone, laughing and slapping at his comrade. I stole into his place. He scowled at me, but that was that. He was too drunk to care. I was lucky not to be knifed.

  Quinn. That was the first time I saw him, a knight of the angels, a relic of the war. How he came into that place was unknown to me. Rachel knew. She didn’t like to say more than she needed to. I was always in the dark. He wore iron manacles with the chains off, like these you put on me. He had a thick collar on, and that did have a long chain attached, running back to a hole in the wall that payed out when he came forward. None of that slowed him. He was fast. They had given him two short hacking blades, crude compared to his own weapons, as I’d see. Blunt too probably, but he made good use of them.

  There were five living dead in the Pit with him. Three others had already undergone the second death by his hand. Their corpses lay on the ground, their black blood soaking the arena sand. Grandiose term for that place. The arena has the look of a provincial theater, better suited to bad musical concerts and tawdry flesh shows. It is loathsome. The whole place swayed under the pounding and roaring of the crowd. Three tiers of balconies ranged up over the fighting floor. Until a few years ago they used to have the audience down there on the first floor too, before the dead broke through the wall that one time. Now it’s all boarded up, reinforced with iron, so those condemned to fight do so in a pit. That's why they call it the Pit. It’s small. Putting eight dead in with one man should have made for a short bout. Quinn was practically tripping over the ones he’d killed. But he was a knight, and he was winning.

  The dead had been starved. Some of them had their hands replaced by hooks and blades. Their stumps were infected, glistening with corruption. It doesn’t bother the dead. They shoved at each other to get at Quinn. He was a paleskin. I’ve been told back in the Gone Before there were many colors of men in the world, and they all fought and warred and ruined everything, so after God’s wrath cleansed the Earth he mixed up all those left so that there’s only a few shades of skin. I have never seen so pale a man, almost white as a fish’s belly. I didn’t know such men still existed. He was stripped to the waist, and covered in the filth of the dead. Still you could see his weird pallor through it. Some of the women in the crowd were excited by that. I thought he was a monster come out of the past come here to stain us all with his sins. I was only half wrong about that.

  Quinn elbowed one of the dead in the mouth, smashing its teeth down its throat with no care if it bit him. He punched another in the neck, cut a third down with his sword, opening it from neck to belly button. Damn thing stumbled in the mess of its own guts, ripping at its own viscera in its fury to get at him. Of course, it died quick because of that. There were four left. Quinn slashed back and forth with both his blades. I’ve never seen one of the dead take the blindest bit of notice of danger like that when fresh meat was in front of it. Sure enough, one of them lost its arm to Quinn’s sword. Blood pumped out of the stump like soda out of a bottle. Still it came on. The scene made me sick to the heart. These things were once people. It wasn’t their fault they were that way. Making them fight like this is disrespectful to the dead. If the Gone Before was even more sinful than now, like they say, no wonder God punished the world.

  The dead were in a bad way. One-armed collapsed and was still. Quinn opened the throat of the one whose teeth he’d smashed, buried his sword in the head of another. The blade stuck in the skull so when it fell back, it took the weapon with it. Quinn only needed one. The last dead went down to four sweeping blows that took off both its hands, then its head.

  Quinn looked up at me, I swear right at me. His eyes were the lightest blue I have ever seen, like chips of ice, and they stared right through me. His face was a mask of gore. There was nothing human in that man. Nothing at all.

  “Quinn! Quinn! Quinn!” thundered the crowded. The building creaked at the punishment of so many stamping feet.

  The door at the far end of the arena rattled open. Quinn’s head snapped down and he ran right at it. The chain rattled out behind him. A horn sounded, and the chain went taut, yanking the knight off his feet. Five living men came in, all armed with crossbows. They kept their distance, they weren’t stupid, weapons trained on the knight. Hollis Patterman came in and did what his name says, making all oily and smarmy at the crowd.

  “That’s how a knight of the angels fights, folks! That is poetry in combat!” he shouted. “You come back here. Tell your friends. No other fighting pit in any of the fringe kingdoms got anything like this!”

  “Quinn! Quinn! Quinn!” roared the crowd.

  A hand grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back. I expected the man whose spot I’d taken, but it was Fillip.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Right here, watching like Rachel said,” I said. Fillip didn’t like me. He had something burning in his loins for Rachel, and that made him angry with me for some reason, even though I was the last one of all us she might consider sleeping with.

  “Well, Rachel’s ready to go.”

  I looked back into the pit. Quinn was being shepherded out by Patterman’s muscle. All of them kept well out of arm’s reach and their crossbows raised.

  I couldn’t believe we were going to bust that devil out of there.

  Breakout

  THE SUDDEN RELEASE OF energy in an enclosed space is the definition of an explosion. This is one of many things I have learned in my reading. We had two sticks of dynamite, homemade to forbidden recipes. Being in the tunnel with them and Fillip, our self-proclaimed explosives expert, made me nervous.

  “I don’t like this,” I said to him.

  “You’re a goddamned coward, is what you are,” said Fillip. “Hold that lantern steady, or by the angels I’ll split your lip.”

  “There’s no reason to be like that,” I said. “Why are you always getting on at me?”

  “There’s every reason. I get this wrong because I can’t goddamned see, and we both die. You drop that light on thes
e sticks because of your shaking coward’s hands, and we both die. Either way it’ll be your fault.”

  “I didn’t sign up for your abuse. I’m a healer. I deserve respect.”

  “So you keep saying. If that’s the case, why don’t you go ask the angels to raise their ban and let you learn all the medicine you want?”

  He tied the sticks to the props on either side of our tunnel, then he fished about in his pocket, shoved a metal detonator cap into one stick of dynamite, then the other, running the wires coming off them through his hands till he found the ends and joined them together. Then he took a spool of bare copper wire, unwound a foot, and wrapped it around the join. Fillip grunted as he twisted the wire hard closed. He held up the fork he’d made and scrutinized it. “Should hold,” he said. He weighted the twist down with a rock and shooed me back.

  The tunnel dated from the Gone Before. Newtown had been built directly on top of it. I don’t think those above knew of its existence. It was lined with the old concrete. We’d had to smash our way into it through the top, and then dig it out. Rachel told us where it was. I suppose she had maps. She had access to a lot of things I never saw. She was good though, and we dropped right onto the top from the bottom of the house she’d rented. It was full of broken bricks, concrete, things made out of plastic saved from the sun by being buried, most of them I don’t even have names for. Rachel had me digging it out like a common laborer along with Fillip. Thomas was off digging the other tunnel. Bernadini and Robyn didn’t do any of that, of course; they were out all the time on Rachel’s mysterious errands. That night, Bernadini, Rachel, and Thomas were on the other side of the arena. They had the difficult role, I suppose, but it didn’t look that way to me while we were staring down at Fillip’s unstable sticks of explosive.

  Rachel left her precious box with us in the house when we were excavating the tunnel, said she couldn’t risk getting searched by the watch or the deputies, but though it was with us the whole time, I never got a look inside it.