The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One (11 page)

The road was taking them up into the hills. Homes had stopped appearing with any sort of regularity, their places taken by oak and maple. Just when Brook thought she couldn’t run uphill any longer, the road leveled off. To its left was a steep ledge that led down to a ravine, while a sheer rock face was to the right. There was no other way forward. The road ahead bent sharply around the hillside, Solloway pulling sharply on Lothario’s reins as he rounded it, the horse rearing up on his hind legs. He set the air alight with a barrage of curses.

“Damn them!” He yelled. “Those bastards blocked the road!”

The town-folk of Young Poe's Keep, at some point in time, had blocked the snaking road with stacks of old carts and useless machines from the long ago. The subsequent wall they had made was double Lothario’s height, at least three carts wide and went from the vertical hillside to the drop-off. While there were plenty of handholds for the humans to grab onto and use to climb, there was no way that Leo and Lothario could get over it on their own.

They could hear the horde of undead snarling up the road after them, just beyond the bend. “We have to climb it,” Mercer said.

“Damn it, I’m not leaving Lothario.” Solloway dismounted and stood between his horse and the oncoming wave. The first few of the horde could be seen, shambling around the bend. “I’ll fight them all if I have to, but I won’t leave him.”

“You can’t!” Brook said. “There are too many of them!”

“Then I’ll go down fighting. I’m a soldier of the Fort. I won’t turn and run like some nancy from Lazarus Township.” Solloway weighed the double headed axe in his hand, saw everything that was at stake mirrored by the flat steel: the smaller blade had reflected in it his stripes and medals, his honor, his pride, while the larger blade, the skull cleaver, was fogged with Lothario’s anxious breaths. It was this side of the axe that called to him now, the side that would not let him turn and run.

He loved Lothario. The stallion had been a wedding gift from his mentor, Paulo Lautrec, the finest axe man the western cities had ever known. Lothario had been through everything with Solloway and was as much a part of him as the legs the sergeant used to walk, a friend he could rely on without question. Solloway would die for the horse, and intended to that day.

Mercer came up next to Solloway, Jai Lin in his hand. “Think of your mission, Sergeant. Think of how important it is to get east of the Hud, to avert the war that is coming to the Green Lands. Today is not your day to die. Too many innocent lives are relying on you.”

Solloway didn’t look at Mercer, but he knew the young man was right.
Damn it, if the kid doesn’t sound just like his father
, Solloway thought. He threw his head back, a scream erupting from his throat that made even the undead hesitate in their mad rush. He knew there was nothing he could do but run.

He turned from the oncoming horde and bolted back towards the wall with Mercer. He stopped in front of Lothario, who snorted and kicked at the dirt, and put his forehead to the Arabian’s. “I’m sorry, old friend. I’ll see you again, in the endless Fields of Gold that wait for us beyond this life.”

Brook was already atop of the wall, loosing arrow after arrow into the tumult of teeth and limbs, always striking true but not slowing the undead in the slightest. Leo scampered around on the ground. He was anxious, despite Brook doing her best to keep him calm through their mind link.

“Grab Leo and hand him up to me!” She screamed to Mercer, who was looking past Solloway at the corpses who were almost on top of them. “Mercer!”

Mercer snapped out of his reverie. He wrapped his arms around the eager pup’s torso and then slung him over his shoulder before starting his way up the wall of carts and twisted metal. He could feel the wall shake as Solloway leaped onto it, the large man wasting no time in climbing. He was past Mercer and to the top of the wall just as the first of the undead got to the horse.

Mercer turned at the stallion’s frightened whinnying, at the percussive thump of hoof on flesh. Lothario was on his hind legs, kicking at the zombies and knocking whole waves of them back. His fight would be in vain, however; there were just too many of them. One eventually got its teeth into the horse’s hind. Blood began to flow, and the circle of undead around Lothario grew more dense, more frenzied. Leo whined into Mercer’s ear, then gave an anguished bark. Mercer had to turn away; the scene below was too terrible to watch.

Mercer handed Leo up to Brook and then climbed over the edge of the wall. Solloway stood as still as stone, while his algae-green pupils flickered with a fiery hatred. He clicked back the hammer on his old pistol, outstretched his arm, aimed.

“Goodbye, old friend,” he said. The gun went off, the burst of a cannon. A spray of blood went up from Lothario’s head, right between the black Arabian’s eyes. The horse went down without so much as a whimper, the pallid, moaning bodies crowding in on Solloway’s now lifeless friend.

No one said anything. They all just watched, the air thick with mastication and the frustrated grunts of the undead who could not get to Lothario’s corpse. Though a direct view of the feast was impossible from their vantage point, Brook felt her stomach start to give, and before she could calm herself, she was ejecting the morning’s meal onto the bent metal and plastic under her knees.

“Are you alright?” Mercer asked, going to her. He brushed some of her hair back behind her ear, not wanting the raven strands to get caught in the spit and mess.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “That was… that was stupid! Why did you have to go look in that building? Why didn’t you listen to us?”

Mercer was caught off guard. “I’m… I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. It’s just how it is sometimes, with the sword. It’s how I survive…”

“What’s done is done,” Solloway interjected. His voice had returned to the same raspy whisper he spoke with before they had been running for their lives. “Lothario died a hero’s death. He’ll have a revered place in the Fields of Gold, and I will see him again. Though you should have been more cautious, Mercer, none of us could have known that there would be an entire town’s worth of undead waiting for us in that building. We wanted to see if there were any survivors, didn’t we? What if, instead of corpses, there had been people hiding in there? But… there weren’t. The undead have come back to the Green Lands, I’ve seen it for myself. Gods…” The soldier started down the other side of the wall, his gun reholstered and the axe back in his belt. “Come. Let us go.”

Mercer saw that Solloway had managed to grab one of the packs off of Lothario in his dash for the wall. While that was good, there were also many provisions in the other packs that the horse had carried which were now lost under the horde of dead men feasting below. Depending on what was in the pack, they may only have food for a few days at best.

Once over the other side of the wall, they walked in silence along the winding road. More than once, Mercer thought he should say something to Solloway, offer some sort of condolence, but the look on the large man’s face convinced him otherwise. Solloway looked like he was ready to kill something, and Mercer didn’t want it to be him. The sun had descended another hand in the sky before they found a trickling stream. They stopped in the shade of the beech and bum yum trees that surrounded it and took a rest.

“There was a sign back there,” Mercer said. “Most of it was rusted away. It said ‘Now entering Po.’ Someone painted the word ‘Old’ on it too.”

“Old Poe’s Keep must be straight ahead,” Brook said. “The Young Poe townsfolk said the ghost city was haunted. Maybe that’s why they put a wall across the road.”

Solloway grunted, then took a swig from his canteen. His cheeks were flush and his eyes seemed to be swimming. “Good. We need provisions. All that we have in this pack are some dried meats, books and gauze. No more medicine or food. And after this,” Solloway shook the canteen around in the air and chuckled. “No more spirit.”

“You’re drunk?” Brook asked.

“Damn right, girl.” Solloway laid back on the grass and let out a big sigh. “Some of the finest Lazarus Township bourbon right here. They say it can bring the dead back to life, you place it to a man’s lips right after he’s breathed his last. Wish I could have put it to Lothario’s lips.” Solloway chuckled, which did nothing to hide the immense anguish the man was trying to dampen with drink. If anything, it only made it more sad.

Brook took no pains to hide the disgust from her face. Black Wings did not imbibe; it was not their way. She’d caught Crow drunk a few nights, but had never told Old Wren despite her disappointment with her older brother. Mercer was certainly not one to judge; he knew very well how drink could be a panacea for loss. It was only after losing Nan and his sister that he had found liquor’s soothing hand. He soon began to actively search for it, would shuffle for days through the myriad ruins of the Borderlands in a drunken stupor, on the lookout for anything he could drink to numb the pain away.

Brook got up and went after Leo, who was lolling around in the stream, cooling himself off. Mercer could tell that she wanted to be off on her own, perhaps to decompress after all that had just happened. He himself was exhausted and felt he could fall asleep right there in the mulch. He had barely laid his head down upon a pillow of composted leaves when Solloway began to talk to him.

“I saw what you did back there. What the sword did.”

Mercer sat up, confused. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t play dumb, boy. You had the same look your father always had. Like you were
hypnotized.
I’d always ask him about it, and he said he didn’t know what I was talking about. Eventually, I was able to get it out of him. It’s that sword. Don’t tell me you don’t feel it pulling you, guiding you, whenever the living dead are afoot.”

He had never told anyone else about the strange bond between him and the sword, about how it wordlessly communicated with him. “You’re right. It’s like it’s drawn to the dead men. The only reason I turned down that road was because Jai Lin was directing me to that building.”

Solloway sat up. His drunkenness appeared to have evaporated. “I knew it. I saw how you just walked heedlessly along, immune to that lovely little lass calling after you, how you went to killing those corpses with no worry or care.” The old sergeant took Mercer in with his light green eyes. “Let me see the blade.”

Mercer reached behind him to where Jai Lin was resting in its leather scabbard. He brought it around and unsheathed it. Jai Lin was a long sword, with a straight, double edged blade that ended in a sharp tip. The steel always seemed to catch just enough light so that it glowed softly, even in absolute darkness, as it had in Darnell’s shop. Hairline cracks ran through its middle, fractures from the day that his father had run Godwin through and ended the war. Solloway moved closer to Mercer so that the two men were seated only a foot or so apart from each other. The large man nodded to himself.

“Look at the blade’s edges,” Solloway said. “Really look at them.”

Mercer did, knowing what he’d see. Or rather, what he’d
not
see: the sharpened edges of Jai Lin were so sharp that they were a blur to the naked eye, a gnat’s eyelash of nondescript dimension. Mercer had spent many a night in front of a campfire looking at Jai Lin, wondering where the steel ended and the air around it began. “The blade is so sharp that it is hard to see its edges. It blurs.”

Solloway smiled, his teeth like rounded white stones beneath a bale of bristly hay. “Ah, is that what is going on here?”

“What do you mean? That’s not it?”

“No, Mercer. Not if your old man and the cosmologists at Ithaca are to be believed. Do you see how the blade is black along the edges, before it gets blurry?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Have you ever wondered why that is? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because the blade is lined with darkness, with what the cosmologists called
dark matter
. Invisible to the naked eye, but what your father and other smart types at Ithaca believe makes up most of the universe. This sword proves its existence. It can feel out the dark aether that all beings swim through, anticipates how they’ll move. It’s how you can always strike true, how the sword draws you like a magnet to strike here or there. It’s a powerful weapon, made in the long ago by technology that has since been lost. It could prove destructive in the wrong set of hands. Your father therefore made a safeguard against anyone else wielding it. Look at the hilt.”

Mercer didn’t have to, for he knew exactly what he’d find there. “It’s a picture of a crane. My family’s sigil.”

“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.