The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One Read online

  THE UNDEAD KING

  The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One

  By

  Jared Rinaldi

  Other Works by Jared Rinaldi

  Epic Fantasy/Sci-Fi:

  Bridge Burner Hyperion

  Pyronic Technique

  Short Story Collection:

  Tales From the Mountaintop

  Copyright West Kill Manor Publishing, 2015

  Cover Art by Patrick Leach.

  For design inquiries, e-mail [email protected]

  This is a work of fiction. However, many locations throughout this book are loosely inspired by real places. The names, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual person’s, (living or dead) or events is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  The Wandering Bastards

  Chapter Two

  Young Poe’s Keep

  Chapter Three

  The Black Wings

  Chapter Four

  Solloway

  Interlude

  Chapter Five

  Lothario

  Chapter Six

  The Boat People

  Chapter Seven

  Jompers

  Chapter Eight

  The Apostles

  Interlude

  Chapter Nine

  The Ruins of the Nameless

  Chapter Ten

  Dusty Yen

  Chapter Eleven

  Hope’s Soft Light

  Epilogue

  PROLOGUE

  MERCER WOKE WITH THE BIRD SONG. Sparey bird, chim chickadee, and the needle-billed flier called kingfisher in the long ago that the Karyatim Salt Tribes now hailed as the harbinger of rains, they were all welcome friends, only filling the morning with their songs when there were no dead men about. Still, one could never be too sure. Assumptions like that were good ways to get killed, particularly in the Borderlands.

  Sword in hand, he crawled over to the tent flap and unpinned it. Outside, the sky was gray, the air chill and wet. The high grass was heavy with dew and made a thick woven carpet across the small clearing. No footprints, no bent brush or broken twigs. He was alone, and looked to have been so for the entire evening. Gods, if only he had been able to sleep soundly.

  Mercer had been determined to not go another day with his belly empty. So, even after yesterday’s foraging had proved fruitless save for a handful of bitter roots, he had not stopped at the usual hour to set up camp. He had kept searching, foraging, hunting.

  He had found the blue-striped rattler just as the sun dipped into the highest tree branches, coiled beneath a sun-baked stone. He had lopped its head off before it could strike, its writhing body still engorged with a half-digested mouse in its gut. He then set to work erecting his tent and building a fire. Dusk had already settled over the forest, however, meaning he had no light with which to scour and secure the area.

  What had followed was a restless night’s sleep, where every twig snap or rustle of leaves had him bolting upright and staring blindly into the shadows being cast on his tent from the outside, his ears pricked for the telltale moans of dead men. They had come, but only in his dreams, as they always did, where they had swarmed his camp in numbers too great to count.

  He had woken from these nightmares with hair drenched in sweat and his heart punching his ribs. Wine was the only thing that calmed him on nights like these, but his flask had run dry days ago, so there had been nothing to do but stare into the shadows and wait for the fatigue to become too impossible to resist, which, as always, it eventually did.

  The brambles and thorns on the eastern side of camp had been impenetrable the night before. Now he saw where he could have easily stepped through without tearing his shirt like he had done. The tear wasn’t altogether bad, but Nan would still click her tongue against her teeth and scold him. He was eighteen, nineteen by the next full moon, but Nan still treated him like a child. Not that he minded. Sternness was her way of showing affection, particularly for her grandchildren. She’d roll her eyes and mutter curses that only slavers should know, but Mercer knew that she secretly loved to mend his clothes. It made her feel useful. Her leg had been removed from below the knee decades before, in the war. She was lucky, after having been bit, but she couldn’t walk without a cane, which restricted her chores and activities to those mostly inside the home.

  Mercer folded up his tent and tied it tightly to his pack with his new nylon rope. He had found it in a single-story house with half its roof collapsed, and it was certainly a good bogey, as his father Willis Crane would call it. It showed no sign of age, and was pliable enough to make good, strong knots. With his things packed, he then made sure his sword was sharp. Jai Lin, the longsword his father had used to kill General Godwin in the War for the Green Lands, the Crane crest engraved in the hilt, hairline cracks running through its center. It had hung over the fireplace since his father had traded in his warrior’s life for that of a farmer and cosmologist, almost three decades ago.

  A cloud of confusion passed over Mercer’s face as he inspected the blade, checking it for nicks and or any additional cracks in the steel. “Why do I have Jai Lin?” He silently asked himself. He couldn’t remember why he had taken it down from the mantle, had been carrying it and using it as his own. How long had he had it? How long had he been traveling?

  He re-sheathed the sword and let the perplexities slip away as he had trained his mind to do. With all his things packed and his body stretched out and limber, Mercer took off at a sprint through the woods towards the south. As swift as a hawk, as unfettered as a stream. He could sprint for hours without tiring, without so much as elevating his heart-rate or breath. It was a technique his father had taught him, who had learned it from his father, and on and on. Mercer’s father told him that hawk-stream style could be traced back to before the Time of the Great Dying, since before there was the blighted land and the dead walked the earth.

  Several hours passed before the trees began to thin and Mercer could see clear sky ahead. His heart quickened, not because of his pace, but because his long-awaited destination was just beyond the rise. Through the trees and down a steep hill was the green valley he had played in and explored as a child, where his father had built a farmhouse from the ruins of an older cabin and brought up a family. He reached the lip of the hillside and finally stopped running. Below, through thick weeds clinging desperately to the dirt and clay, was the place he had grown up. Home.

  A smile crept its way up Mercer’s face without his even knowing. It was a strange feeling. Muscles in his face just shy of atrophying creaked back to life, bringing the edges of his lips up to his earlobes. As if in greeting, an unseasonably warm October wind caressed his face with scents of cinnamon, horse and wood-stove smoke. Mercer took it as a cue and started down the hill.

  With quick, sure feet, he got through the weeds without so much as a snag, and was running up the house’s front steps faster than a moth could flap its wings, his shoes drumming loudly on the varnished wood. It was only atop t
he porch that his smile faltered. The heavy door his father had cut from a colossal set of teak trees hung ajar. Nan liked to keep the dust and flies outside, thank you very much, and thus doors were always shut, even on beautiful autumn days such as this one. Something was wrong here, a voice in his head was saying. Something was very, very wrong.

  He knocked on the heavy wood, his only answer being the sound of the door creaking on its hinges and his raps echoing off the walls. He tried again but the result was the same: all was still, all was quiet. Perhaps they were out foraging, Mercer thought. Still, even if they were, Nan would be here. She couldn’t go far on her one leg, after all. The same voice, which Mercer tried to keep buried in his mind as deeply as possible, was calling to him again, begging for him to pay it heed.

  “You should be running fast from here, Mercer Crane,” it said. “Things are very, very wrong inside this house.” Mercer just shook his head. He had learned to quiet that voice. He had to. It was the only way to stay alive, to keep moving.

  Mercer pushed open the door and walked inside. The part of the floor that had been exposed to the outside was covered in a crust of leaves and dirt. The door must have been open for a long time, he realized. Days? Months? Years? How long had he been gone? The pleading voice seemed to know the answer, but again, Mercer hushed it.

  He walked through the foyer and entered the reading room. Papers covered in his father’s small, flowing cursive were everywhere, while Mercer’s school books on cosmology and medicine were torn from their shelves and thrown about. The floor creaked under his feet as he took slow steps deeper into the room. The air was heavy, stale. His hand instinctively went to the hilt of his sword, his fingers wrapping themselves around the worn leather handle.

  “Pa?” he called. His voice was raspy, almost unrecognizable. When had he last spoke? Again, he wasn’t sure. Then he stopped, his eyes ballooning and his mouth turning to sand. At the foot of one of the room’s many bookshelves was the husk of a human body, the skin leathery and tight around the skeleton beneath. The head was detached from the rest of it, a few feet away and staring back at him with hollow eye sockets and a gaping mouth. The wood paneling next to the bookshelf was stained with alternating splotches of black mildew and dried blood.

  Mercer stared at the corpse for a long time, unsure of what to do. The sprockets in his head had stopped turning, the hoses come loose. To calm himself, his mind reached for the sword, its cold steel a salve for his nerves. With jaunty steps, he started away from the decapitated body and headed towards the back of the house.

  “Nan? Pa? Are you guys here? Are you okay?” He could taste the fear in his voice. What had happened here? Slavers? Karyatim raiders? Gods, he hoped they were okay. His father, his sister Nina, Nan, he hoped they had escaped to the Fort at Kingston or one of the other western cities.

  The kitchen was in even worse shape than the reading room. Dry blood was on the walls here too, an opaque, muddy lacquer on almost every available surface. Worst of all were the mummified mounds of eviscerated bodies and severed limbs scattered about the floor. Mercer felt his stomach knot up, thought for sure he was about to vomit back up the blue-striped rattler. He ran to the back door, unbolted it as quick as he could, and ran outside to the back porch. Being in the cool air had an instant calming effect for his nausea, until he looked up and saw what was in the yard.

  Where once had been a wide-open grassy field where he and his sister had played dead-and-alive as children were now two piles of white stones, spaced evenly apart. Mercer stared at them, and as he did, he began to crack. Despite years of hardening himself to what had happened and trying to bury the memory with all the dirt that a life spent living in the wild in a half-drunk stupor afforded, he could feel it rising up again, exhuming itself like a dead man from the sand, its teeth gnashing, its skin sloughing off in great peels. He began to sob.

  Mercer stumbled off the porch and made his way over to the piles of stones. One was for Nina, the other for Nan. Gods, now it was all coming back. He slapped himself, tried to get the tears to stop and make the numbness return, but it was of no use.

  He had woken up that day three years ago to the sound of crashing dishes, to Nina’s screams echoing off the farmhouse rafters. He had run downstairs just as one of the dead men tore his sister’s throat out with its black teeth. They had already killed his Nan, had consumed most of her body by the time Nina had come back in from picking berries. It had been so humid that summer morning, his shirt sticking to his body in a hot sweat; he remembered how water droplets had formed on Jai Lin’s cracked blade, how it had called to him from its mount over the cold fireplace.

  Once Mercer had taken Jai Lin down, the rest had been a blur. There had been so many dead men, a swarm like he had never seen. But he had killed them all, either lopping off their heads or stabbing Jai Lin through their skulls. When the melee had settled, all had become still, silent. The only movements had been the blood slowly trickling between the wall’s wood paneling and the flies alighting on Nan and Nina’s bodies, deliberately avoiding those of the dead men. The insects had moved in jittery spasms over his sister’s half-masted hazel eyes, eyes they had both inherited from their mother. They had stared back at him, accusations reflected in their unblinking corneas that he’d never be able to answer: why didn’t you save us, Mercer? How could you let us die?

  “I’m so sorry…” He said, his knees meeting the grass, the tears flowing in molten rivulets down his face. Three years later, staring at the piles of white stones, he felt like he had died again. He had failed at protecting them. His father had asked Mercer to look after Nan and his sister when he left for Ithaca, and he had been unable to. He had been wandering for so long but the pain had never gone away. It had been waiting for him to come home again, to pick away its scab, a wound that would never heal.

  Chapter One

  The Wandering Bastards

  “LEO!” Brook called out into the thick grove of birch and boxelder that surrounded them. Her sixty pound red nosed pit bull was nowhere to be seen. “Do you see him, Crow?”

  “No.” Her brother came up next to her, as silent as if he moved on a set of wings, doing little to conceal the annoyance in his voice. “That crazy dog must have taken off after a squirrel or something. Again.”

  “I hope it was just that,” Brook said, “and not a killim.”

  “That’s going to happen, sooner or later, if you can’t learn to control him. I’m going to have a word with Old Wren about this when we get back. This is time I could be training, but instead I’m wandering through the Borderlands looking for your stupid dog.”

  “By the talons of Elon, Crow, I swear, your head is as full as a bucket bird’s beak sometimes. You know he’s just a pup and that our mind-link isn’t that strong yet. Stop scolding me and just look for_” Brook was cut off by the sound of a piercing scream.

  “What was that?”

  “It wasn’t human, whatever it was.”

  “Maybe… Oh no...” Brook didn’t even have to say it. Crow did it for her.

  “Leo got a deer.”

  “Come on, let’s go!” Oriented as she was by the scream, Brook could sense the direction her year old pit was in, yet the dog was so excited it was hard for her to connect their thoughts together. The siblings came into a clearing, and sure enough, there was Leo, the black hair on his scruff bristled, a low growl emanating from his throat. Brook felt the hair on her neck raise too when she saw what was in front of her.

  A young fawn, just past its white winter dots, was being suspended in the air by a thick cord of roots that had burst from the ground. The roots were snake-like in appearance and manner, constricting the deer in a vice-like grip.

  “Leo, to me!” The dog snapped out of his growling stupor and ran back to Brook’s side. “What is that?”

  “I don’t know, Brook,” Crow stammered. “I’ve… I’ve never seen anything like it.” The deer was screaming and its eyes looked ready to burst from the pressure.

/>   “Do something!” Brook yelled.

  Crow acted quick, as befitted the young man the Black Wings expected to succeed Old Wren as clan chief. Crow loosed two knives from his chest sash, both connected to his person by silver strings as thin as spider webbing. They struck deep into the snake-like wood, the roots trembling from the impact, a jaundiced pus spurting from the wounds. The root’s grip on the fawn loosened until it dropped the broken young deer to the ground. Crow pulled sharply on the strings, bringing the knives back to his hand before quickly throwing another, this blade taking off a large chunk of wood and causing the entire root to retreat back beneath the earth. Crow smirked, wishing he had the usual audience of Black Wing girls watching, especially considering how flawlessly he had just executed three-feign technique.

  “Stop smiling, Crow! We have to get out of here! What if it comes back and this time goes for us?”

  “Wait,” Crow said, soundlessly stepping into the clearing where the roots had just been squirming above the loam. The dirt was choppy, the sod an uneven rug. He went up to the fawn, the young deer’s breaths shallow and buzzing, her dark eyes focused on empty space. Some of her ribs protruded from her soft down fur, broken from the pressure of the root’s constrictions. The deer couldn’t have been more than a few months old. So quick for this world, Crow thought, her end punctuated by such pain.

  “Her neck is broken,” Crow said. “I need to finish this.”

  Brook and Leo watched as Crow laid one hand over the fawn’s eyes and with the other stuck a knife deep into its brain. The young deer spasmed, then went still. Crow muttered Elon’s prayer of thanks before putting the limp corpse over his shoulder. The siblings turned their backs on the clearing and headed back the way they came, northwards, towards the camp of the Black Wings.