The Ghoul King

by Guy Haley

  “And what makes you think I’m going to come with you?” said Quinn. He stayed on his horse. The others were digging about under rotting hay, pulling out bundles wrapped in oilskin. The barn stank of spoiled rutabaga. Bernadini was lying against a pile of sacking, his face pale. Finally, I could get to his wound. He had a nasty cut running down his inner arm from his elbow to just above his wrist. I got out my instruments, trying to be quick without rushing. He hissed in through his teeth as I poured alcohol into the wound and scrubbed it out. The stuff’s toxic, too high a proof to drink, but my nerves were shot and I was tempted to as I splashed it on Bernadini.

  “I’m going into Old Columbus,” she said. “You are coming with me, as our guide and protector.”

  “Why?” said Quinn. His face betrayed nothing, he just crossed his manacled wrists on the back of his horse’s neck and stared down at her.

  “You’re a knight. That means you have been inside a Dreaming City. I can name no one else who has. And you are a killer.”

  “So?”

  Rachel did what she often did, she turned his question back on him. “Why are you here? There’s been no knight come through these parts since the end of the war. Pittsburgh doesn’t like your kind. You shouldn’t be surprised you ended up in the Pit. There are no angels here, nobody for you to serve. You are not welcome.”

  Quinn stared at her.

  “You know what I think?” she went on. “I think you’ve come here because you need something from the city yourself. There’s no other place like Columbus, no other Dreaming City has fallen in all the long centuries of the Angelic Hegemony.”

  Quinn sighed and looked away. “You’re going to get yourself killed. What are you, anyway? Technophiles?”

  “We call ourselves the Seekers.”

  Thomas was unwrapping the bundles, handing out forbidden rifles to all of us. I’d only ever seen the postmen’s shotguns and the muskets the army carry. These were real guns, made with the old knowledge, rifle-barreled with cased ammunition and lever-action repeating mechanisms. There were flashlights and rad-counters and other devices Rachel’s acolytes had made.

  “Technophiles,” stated Quinn, looking at their gear. “That’s a lot of sinful science you got there. How come you haven’t been scooped by the angels yet?”

  Rachel patted the box tied to her belt.

  “I have help.”

  Quinn glanced at the box. “I have no idea what you have locked up in there, lady, but I’ll bet the soles off my boots it is something you do not want to be messing with.”

  “It’s getting light,” Robyn called down from the loft. “Moon’s coming up.”

  “Then we need to move on. Last leg of the race,” she said. “Then we can rest. Knights and eyes and other things of the angels don’t come to Newtown Columbus without good reason,” she said to Quinn, “and that reason is usually the old city. You can pretend all you like, but I know you want to get there. Question is, are you coming with us?”

  Thomas and Fillip went to the barn doors. They looked back and waited until we’d extinguished all our lights before they opened them. The barn interior went from black to blue. The Moon spread its pallor over the sky, Quinn’s milky skin shone in the light like a ghost’s.

  “I need a better reason than you thinking you know what I think,” he said. He was looking at the box again.

  “I know where your gear is. I know where the men who have it are camped.”

  Quinn’s eyes narrowed. “If I go with you, we’re going to need it. But who’s to say I won’t just take it and dump you when I’ve got my things back?”

  “Because I also know where your horses are.”

  This shut him up. He stared at Rachel, waiting on more information.

  “And I won’t tell you until we’re done,” she added.

  “I could figure it out. Can’t be many places in these parts where a man could sell a knight’s mount,” said Quinn. But he was uncertain. Rachel was swaying him. She swayed everybody.

  “There’s not many, but there are a few. You check them all, you’ll be too late. You’ve been in the Pit a week, you haven’t got much time. You come with us, I can tell you exactly where your animals are. You light out on us or refuse to come straight up, then wherever you’re going, you’re going unarmed and you’re walking,” said Rachel. “I reckon you’ve another week before they’re gone forever. It’ll take two days to ride to Old Columbus, we’ll be a day there. Then I’ll tell you and you can do as you damn well please. Thomas!” she said. “Get these manacles and collar off our partner. That is, if he is our partner. If he isn’t, he can keep them.”

  The knight thinned his lips. “I guess I am.” He held out his wrists for Thomas’s tools.

  He wasn’t happy, but he was coming.

  Knight’s Vengeance

  BERNADINI AND THOMAS did the work breaking Quinn out of the Pit, them being the best fighters. Fillip and me had set the diversion. So Fillip overdid it there; part of the wall came down and the dead they had in the basement got out into the street and people got hurt. But it worked. It worked. We were on our way.

  I’m not sorry about the Pit. That place is unholy. I’m sorry about the deaths. The . . . the children. You can’t blame me for Fillip’s incompetence. Take it up with him. His bones are scattered about under Old Columbus. Interrogate those, if you can wrestle them off the ghouls.

  Bernadini had to go. His wound was too bad for him to be of any use, and he was a murderer, though those screams I heard tell me Fillip probably was too. Bernadini told me what had happened. After our explosion took out the corner of the Pit, he, Rachel, and Thomas stormed in. It was empty at that hour. The guards were in disarray, putting out the fire from the explosion and dealing with the dead escaping from the basement. Bernadini got sliced by a guard at the gates, and he’d killed him in return. Good luck catching Bernadini. He’ll be out in the Gulf Kingdoms now, maybe so far south as Mexico, for he went straight for Portsmouth and the boats there. “I knew the risks,” he said when he left. He was stoic like that. A shame he had to go because he was the most resourceful of the Seekers, not counting Rachel. If you’ve not got him already you never will. He’ll be long gone.

  Quinn’s assailants were out to the south of the city. They’d taken him in the east, so he said, though he was not forthcoming about how. I assumed he’d been bushwhacked. I assumed he was just a man. A knight looks like a man. They eat, sleep, shit, and fart like men. His skin was peculiar, but this is an age of wonders, and I have seen far stranger creatures wearing the shape of Adam. So I thought he was a man. And I thought he’d been overpowered like any man would be by a band of robbers. Turns out that was not the case. No bushwhackers could take on someone like him and win. I never found out how they got him.

  We rode out to where Rachel said they were, and left our horses a way back with Robyn and Fillip. Rachel ordered me to come with them now Bernadini was gone. For her usual, unsaid reasons she didn’t like to risk Robyn, and Fillip was a lousy shot. Thomas came because Thomas went wherever Rachel went. We approached the bandits’ camp without being seen, creeping through the grass and brush. They’d made no real attempt to hide themselves but loafed around their camp. The rifle was heavy in my hand. With it, I might soon kill a man and that I did not want. Transgression against that Commandment is the worst sin of all. I know you think I’m responsible for a lot of deaths, but they weren’t my fault.

  “They’re waiting,” said Quinn. He looked at Rachel. “They are waiting for a buyer. You’ve set them up.”

  She affected innocence. Quinn saw right through her with those little chips of ice he had for eyes and she gave in.

  “I told them we were interested in buying. I was vouched for. I am known for my interest in artifacts. I have a reputation for straight dealing, and I’m risking it here, for you. After this, no one will trust me again.”

  “Goddamn,” said Quinn. He looked away, temper flaring. “You sure they have my gear. My gun, sword
s, badge?”

  “They said they did. They made a big deal out of the badge. They know I like that kind of thing. Don’t you trust me?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  Quinn had one of our precious rifles. He checked it over and put the stock to his shoulder, marching forward at the camp without waiting for Rachel’s say-so. Rachel made a strange noise, her eyes bulging. It pleased me to see her wrong-footed. Petty, I know, but she was so high and mighty.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  Quinn walked on. She jerked her chin to the left and right, sending me and Thomas out in a wide sweep to cover him.

  I got a better look. There were three of them. One guy drinking coffee warming himself by the fire. He had a large pistol at his hip, and that marked him for death first because that turned out to be Quinn’s. Another was asleep with his head rested on a saddle and his hat down over his eyes. The third was leaning on a tree and reading a book, a pistol crossbow strapped to his thigh.

  A shot cracked out. I instinctively ducked, thinking we’d been spotted. I don’t like fighting. But it was Quinn who fired, not the gang. The coffee drinker fell dead across the fire, spilling his coffee. Quinn flipped the lever forward and chambered another round. The sleeping man jumped up like he’d got a hot coal in his pants and ran off the moment he clocked Quinn. The second dropped his book, drew his pistol crossbow from his leg mighty quick, and sent a bolt hissing at Quinn’s head. It was a good shot but Quinn moved his head aside and it hissed past his ear. Quinn aimed and pulled the trigger. The bullet flared in the chamber, shooting out firework flames from the ejection port without going off properly. The man was surprised to still be alive and grinned evilly. Quinn worked the lever. The gun had jammed; not everything we make works. Maybe we should have told him that before we attacked. He threw the useless gun down and ran at the bandit.

  The man was fumbling another bolt into the groove on his crossbow. Bad idea. Quinn tackled him in the middle, and bore him down to the ground. I expected him to punch or throttle him into submission, but he plucked a rock from the ground and smashed that man’s face right in with three wet blows. Caved it in all the way. Blood splashed over the knight.

  The other man was running for the bush. Even though he had a fifty-yard head start Quinn caught him like a lion bringing down a sick bison calf. There was a brief, one-sided tussle. Quinn threw him to the floor, got on the man’s chest, and pinned him down. I ran to catch up. I had to pass the man the knight had killed with a rock. His face was a red pulp, and my gorge rose.

  “Where are my horses?” Quinn said.

  “We got your gear, mister, you can have it all back! It’s all there in the camp! All of it!” said the man. He was as mean and dirty as you’d expect a bushwhacker to be.

  “Horses!” he said. He slapped the man hard across his face, so hard it dazed him. The man began to cry.

  “Molo took ’em, said he’d sell ’em far away out on the prairie edge, out past the reach of the angels. That he’d get a good price for the white from the plains dwellers. That white’s a chief’s horse, that’s what he kept saying.”

  “He’s my horse,” said Quinn, grabbing the man’s shirt in his hands and slamming him into the ground three times. “Where did Molo go?”

  It’s a weakness, affection for animals. I warmed to Quinn a bit. He was in anguish, I could tell.

  “I dunno!”

  “Think! Think. Tell me, and I’ll let you go.”

  Quinn relaxed his grip. The man went slack, all fight gone. He swallowed hard and nodded, the whites showing all the way round his eyes.

  “He’s got a couple of places. We sell to the Shawnee mostly, they got their villages closest. Most times if he’s dealing with them he goes out to—”

  Another shot rang, punching a neat hole in the man’s temple. Quinn turned to look at me, wild-eyed, his face dripping with blood. The man’s hands twitched. Rachel advanced, gun up, the barrel smoking.

  Quinn got off the dead man and walked at her until her gun pressed into his chest.

  “You killed him because he was going to tell me where my horses are.”

  “He was,” said Rachel evenly. “And that would have made my information worthless.”

  The knight took another step forward.

  “Ah ah!” she said, pushing back with her rifle. “Quinn. Quinn! Think. I know exactly where they will be. Exactly.”

  “We have to go now. Get them back. If anything happens to my animals . . .”

  “The city first, then we go, that’s the deal.”

  They stared at each other over the gun. Rachel didn’t give, neither did Quinn.

  Thomas approached, hands out like he was calming a roped mustang, belts and weapons dangling from them both. “I got your gun, got your swords. The rest of your gear is over there.” With one hand he held out the knight’s weapon swords, wrapped up in a battered-looking belt that must have been very fine once; in the other he had the gun belt and its holstered weapon. He pointed at the bandits’ camp. The corpse of the man Quinn had shot was beginning to smoke. “If I’d not pulled this cannon out of the fire, you’d have nothing. I did it because we got a deal.”

  “Once you’ve got your gear, we can get into Old Columbus,” said Rachel. “I can get what I need, you can get what you need. Then I’ll tell you where your horses will be.”

  If looks could kill, Rachel would have been a smoking crater.

  “Fine,” said Quinn. “But you will tell me before you die. God and all his angels won’t help you if anything has happened to my horses.”

  Quinn had quite a lot of gear. He spent time changing into his own clothes, pulling faces at what the bandits had done to his stuff. Some of it he threw away there and then. Soon enough he was dressed in mail with metal-chased leather shoulder guards. Around his neck he hung a pair of goggles of unscratchable glass that might have been a thousand years old, fastened on his pouches and belts with clips the like I’ve never seen. When he was done, he looked like a knight. Two swords on his left hip, one set over the other, a longsword and a falchion. One for the living, one for the dead.

  A knight’s other weapon is his pistol. Quinn’s was a huge, brutal-looking thing far better engineered than our rifles from finely tooled blue steel. He checked it, reloaded it, oiled it, all while Rachel made impatient faces.

  “You want to get on, or do you want to get dead?” said Quinn, spinning the cylinder of the revolver. Finally, when he was satisfied, he reholstered it on his right hip, frowning at the stiffness of the leather. Then went through the remainder of his bags. He shook his head when he counted his bullets. So far as I could tell, he didn’t have that many rounds left. Forty, maybe. Then he took up his fancy saddle the second man had been using as a pillow, chose one of the bandits’ horses that were hobbled and grazing nearby, a rangy skewbald, and saddled it up. The one he’d ridden in from Newtown he put to work bearing his packs.

  Twenty minutes later, he was ready. By the mercy of the sweet lord Jesus, I was frightened of him before, but in all his knight’s gear, battered and soiled as he was, he was terrifying. Maybe if his mail had gleamed and his leather shone, he’d have been a sight less intimidating. But I’d seen him kill two men without pausing for breath. In his dirty armor, atop that mongrel horse, he looked like he could slaughter a hundred.

  “I’m ready,” said Quinn. “I hope to God you are.”

  Plains of Glass

  TO GET TO THE NORTH and the old city there, we were forced to make a wide detour around Newtown’s farms, following a path that curved round the new city hinterland a half mile within the poisoned grounds of the fallout zone. Our radiation counters ticked and buzzed like a field full of crickets. The noise they’d make would swell and swell until we were checking the dial every ten seconds, before suddenly falling off. For all our jumpiness there they never registered anything high enough to do permanent damage, leastaways, not if we weren’t going to grow food there and eat it. The few times we ha
d to pass from the poisoned lands to those cleansed by the angels the tickers dropped to silence, just like that, like we passed over an invisible wall. On one side, corn and wheat and potatoes grew in healthy soil, on the other, scrubby, sickly woodlands. The angels had come down and decreed this side shall be healthy, this side poison. You could draw the division onto the world with a pencil. But you know what? There are a lot of plants and trees that grow there. The church says they should be warped by the devil’s wickedness, but the place is full of life. It’s only when you pass someplace where your counter clicks fit to burst that you might notice a pine with a corkscrewing branch, or a stunted oak with leaves that are the wrong shape. Otherwise it’s healthy, verdant. Deceptively so. Living there would shorten a man’s allotted years. There was cancer in that soil.

  We were well past Newtown. The broken towers of Old Columbus grew on the horizon. The radiation hit its highest point yet. That was the way the plume had gone when the Pittsburgh angels had dropped their bombs upon the city. I remember, because I was there. I saw it. I watched it from my parents' place. We must’ve rode within spitting distance of the old place, now I think on it, but the farmsteads and hamlets that once were there had been razed and the wild had swallowed them up. Back then I saw the angels fighting in the sky. I saw the columns of men going to the battlefield. From our home you could hear the boom of the cannons and the distant shouts of soldiers, going on throughout the day and night. And I remember the bombs.

  I was playing outside when the bombs fell. My mother was two feet away from me, or I would be blind. She knew what was coming. The spectacle of the lights in the sky had bored me, but she saw something up there, where beings of light dueled in the sun. I heard her breath draw in, and she grabbed me and pressed me into her dress. She bent over me. “Don’t look, don’t look, sweetie. Keep your eyes closed.”

  I screwed them up so tight, I heard the fear in her voice. I was enclosed by her enfolding arms, her smell, but a mother’s embrace can’t keep you safe from the wars of angels. Behind me the world was being torn apart.