The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One (14 page)

His men nodded and started down towards the Hud, both stopping suddenly at the foghorn that cut through the air. It bellowed once, twice. On its third call, a young slaver, no more than a boy, emerged from the thick underbrush to the north of camp out of breath, a smile plastered on his freckled face.

“They’re here!” The youth cried. “The Boat People are here!”

Crow didn’t know whether his fortune had turned for the better or fizzled out completely. The Boat People were an aloof lot, suspicious of all those who lived on land. Once, on a hunting trip, Old Wren had told him how the Boat People believed crows and ravens to be harbingers of shipwrecks, storms and death. Thus they did not care for the Black Wings, nor the Black Wings for them, as Crow’s people saw the detached nature of the Boat People as cowardice, as a shunning of responsibility. It was no secret that the men and women who traversed the Hud in their great barges remained neutral during the War for the Green Lands, that they stayed on their boats while Godwin ravaged the Green Lands with his army of undead.

The Boat People only came ashore to exchange the goods they’d purveyed from their many trade routes around the world. They knew where there were other pockets of fertile land besides the Green Lands, had maps and charts to guide them. Their men wore ponchos draped over their strong chests, and wide brim hats that often concealed their eyes. The women wore flowing dresses that covered their entire bodies save for their faces, the fabric in the varying hues of water, from the green of a marsh to the opaque gray of a stormy sea.

The children walked about as naked as if they had just been birthed, in keeping with tradition. It was a seen as rite of passage for a Boat Person to take on the garb of adulthood, for them to trade in the caress of the sun and sea for the woven fabrics and discipline of trade and government. Innocence was exchanged for worldliness;  it was said that if a person were to look deep into a Boat Person’s gaze, he’d come to know secrets of the world, ancient knowledge that had been lost for ages, esotericism that could drive a land-dwelling person insane.

Crow watched as half the Bastards followed the freckled boy, Matchless leading the way, the woman with the tree tattoo in tow. This left a gang that included Alain, Tyson and the fat man named Gregory, his hand now wrapped in a bloody linen, to watch over the captives and the precious munitions. Crow decided then that he was indeed lucky, that the men he most wanted dead were standing before him in as vulnerable a position he could hope for.

He wasn’t about to waste any more time. Hugging the wall furthest away from the collapsed side of the building, Crow sidled his way to the door at the far side of the room. It hung slightly ajar, rusted in place. Crow lightly pushed on it; when it wouldn’t budge, he put his shoulder against its red, scabby surface. The door gave way suddenly, the cry of the hinges echoing off the stones and trees. He fell into a heap but immediately got up and ran as silently as he could into the brush. He was sure that the slavers had heard the door.

“Bob?” It was Gregory, from around the building. “Bob, that you?”

Alain hushed him. “Quiet, you moron. That might be the Black Wing.”

Crow could imagine Gregory’s pupils trembling in his too-close eyes, the sweat pooling on the fat man’s brow. The mere thought of the Black Wing who wielded such terrible knives was sure to be sending Gregory into a fearful panic. Crow knew that he wouldn’t hear them speak anymore, that they’d be trying to sneak up on him, but he’d be ready.

As quick and silent as a squirrel, he climbed up the tallest tree in the vicinity, taking with him a fist-sized rock and an arm-length stick. When he was at eye-level with the building’s roof, he threw the rock into the air, aiming it over the trees and towards the river. He hoped that the commotion it caused as it fell would make the slavers think he was actually nearer the water than he was.

“Hey man, you hear that?” It was Tyson, whispering almost right below him. “It was down there, by the water.”

“He probably heard us coming and is trying to get away,” Gregory said, trailing behind Alain as they too passed the tree. “Come, brothers, let’s just let him go. Matchless will skin us alive if we leave all the guns and swords unguarded.”

“He’ll
gut
us alive, we let that Black Wing get away,” Alain said. “Dusty Yen will pay a pretty penny for that boy, and Matchless will want to collect on it. He may even have his eye on a high rank in Yen’s army. I know I would, had I something worth a trade.”

“Matchless won’t join, man,” Tyson said, his bloom of hair catching on every branch and bramble. “He don’t like taking orders from no one, ‘specially not some wannabe warlord from the east.”

“Wannabe warlord?” Gregory scoffed, his voice almost out of earshot. “They say he has close to ten thousand men under his command, with more joining every day.”

Crow arched his arm back and threw the stick in the direction the slavers were walking. He had originally thought it would come in handy were he to go hand-to-hand with them, but the plan had changed: he had to get them as far from camp as possible if he were to get his knives, and the rock and stick crashing amongst the tree boughs closer to the river would help with that.

Feeling that his slaver pursuers had been sufficiently put off of his scent, Crow climbed out of his tree and ran back in the direction of camp. He kept low in the waist high grass, but his feeling that the slavers could return from their reconnaissance at any second made him anxious, reckless. While he had a perfect vantage point of the tent and the two slavers who were guarding it, he had failed to look on the outskirts of camp and see the guard patrolling it.

He caught just enough movement out of the corner of his eye to avoid getting the full brunt of the blow, his shoulder crumpling under the impact rather than the back of his head as intended. Crow went down, his shoulder screaming in pain. He somersaulted upon meeting the ground, then quickly got back to his feet, turning around to meet his attacker. Standing before him was Salty the cook, his nose as fat as if it had been bludgeoned by the aluminum bat in his hand.

“Well, well, look what Salty found here. A little black hen, flown the coop. Come to Salty, now, there’s a good laddie. Let him take you back to camp. There’s a good chickadee.”

Crow crouched low, doing his best to clear his mind of the pain in his shoulder. The man had snuck up on him with footfalls befitting a Black Wing. He realized then that he had underestimated the slavers, that at least some of them were not just plodding idiots whose only strength came from their guns and numbers. Salty, who moved with the fluidity of an eel in water, was proof of this.

“I found him!” The cook screamed, the phlegm thick in his throat. “Come on maggots! I got the Black Wing right here!”

Even if he could take the cook one-on-one, time was too precious a resource to waste with fighting. Crow turned foot and ran for the tent. Salty called after him, but his voice was receding: the cook wasn’t giving chase.

The slavers who had been guarding the captives and the guns below, however, were coming up to meet him, weapons in hand. The first had a long spear, aimed straight for Crow’s gut as the two rushed towards one another. The hem of his cape in his hand, Crow spun around, catching the spear’s tip with the heavy fabric and deflecting it away from his body. Rolling down the spear’s length, his fist met the slaver’s nose, his knee the man’s groin; it was
eddying leaf technique
, a sleight of the cape. The man crumpled in an unconscious heap and Crow kept running, the slaver’s spear torn from his cape and in his hands.

The only other slaver between him and his knives was standing his ground by the tent, his feet shoulder-width apart. An automatic rifle was in his dirty hands. Crow rolled away from the oncoming bullets, the ground around him erupting in little geysers of dirt from their barrage. Coming up from his somersault, Crow launched the spear at the slaver. It found its home in the man’s chest with a dull thunk. The man fired a few more aimless shots into the sky before he too went down to the ground.

He was almost there. Some of the captives were screaming for him to free them, praising Elon or the five gods of the Fist. Crow thought of hushing them, but knew it would be to no use: Matchless and the rest of his slavers had undoubtedly heard the shots from the fallen slaver’s gun, and were very likely running back to camp. He looked over his shoulder, sure that he’d be staring into Salty’s dark eyes, but he didn’t see any sign of the wiry cook. He didn’t see anyone, actually, just the slaver he had knocked out and the other he had killed.

He made his way inside the open-air tent, his shoulder and lungs ablaze. There they were, gleaming from their place upon the pole: the knives of his father. He reverently took them down, the extent of the aches in his body finally making themselves known now that the object of his desire was in his hands. He smiled at his small victory.

His joy was short-lived, however. The cries of the captives had shifted, from their pleas for release to warning shouts.

“Behind you!” One of the captive men said, but it was too late. A searing pain shot through Crow’s shoulder, the same that Salty had bludgeoned, a spray of blood misting the tent’s off-white tarpaulin. His knees buckled as the pain shot through his body. The only sound was an echoing boom, and it filled him, as though he had just swum under a waterfall and his eardrums had burst.

He turned around, not believing how slow his body moved, how heavy his limbs were. From a few paces beyond the tent, his one eye lined up with the sight on the rifle in his hands, was the slaver who had tried to run Crow through with his spear.

“Do it…” Crow whispered, staggering back to his feet. He pulled one of the knives from its sheath and started towards the slaver, his feet dragging on the ground. It was then that Crow saw the other slavers making their way out of the brush to the north of camp, their weapons at the ready. Salty and the three men Crow had drawn away from camp were with the returning group, as were a dozen or so new additions, their wide-brimmed hats and clean fabrics in marked contrast to the grubby fatigues worn by the slavers. Boat People.

“Stop! Don’t shoot him!” It was Matchless, the annoyance in his voice at odds with his orders. “He is no longer our property. He belongs to these people now. Gun down! Now! Do as I say!”

The man finally heeded his leader’s advice, though the anger remained in his eyes. Crow watched as the throng of slavers and Boat People came within a stone’s throw of the tent. He weighed the knife in his hand. He could feel the warm wetness of the blood from his shoulder trickling down his arm and chest, felt how it seeped into his clothes, but he wasn’t about to let them see he was hurt. He wasn’t anybody’s property. He was Crow, heir to the chiefdom of the Black Wings, and he would go down fighting before he allowed himself to be sold into slavery.

The throng stopped outside the tent and gazed at him with wide eyes and mouths like wires, as though he were an exotic animal in a cage. Matchless turned to one of the Boat People, a man who stood a good head taller than even the Bastard leader, and said, “Are you sure you want to pay such a steep price for this one? He’s as unbroken as a feral wolf cub. I’m sure Dusty will find him useful, but I don’t know what good he’ll be scrubbing_”

“Friend Black Wing, are you alright?” The tall Boat Person said, ignoring Matchless completely. Crow looked into the man’s eyes and saw nothing but cold, brown mud. He then looked around the rest of the circle, at all the gazes that were locked on him. Some of the boat women had pursed lips and furrowed brows, but most of their people betrayed no emotion whatsoever, their faces taciturn and grim. The slavers were another matter: Salty was chuckling silently to himself, while Tyson did little to hide his disdain for the entire situation, fidgeting nervously and muttering curses under his breath.

The tall Boat Person took a few slow steps closer to Crow, the pity in his eyes turning to a fierce anger as he took a closer view of the young man. “By the old laws, what have you done to him?” He seethed.

“Just a little softening up, that’s all. All could have been avoided, he just did as he was told and stayed quiet. You know how this business is, Captain. My auntie used to say, it takes a few broken eggs to make an omelet_”

“Bring him,” the tall man said to his people. “We’re going back to the boat. Now.” Two men with strong arms and ponchos of dyed blue wool approached Crow and made to grab him, but the Black Wing jumped back, brandishing his knife.

“I’m not going anywhere with you! Get away from me!” The two men put their hands up and looked back to their leader, whose lips had disappeared into his stony face. Salty slapped his knees and bent over, his cackles like a wet log popping in a fire. His laughter was contagious and spread to the rest of his comrades

“You’re the luckiest henpecker around for these
fine
people coming when they did,” Matchless said, his veiled disdain for the Boat People obvious in his saccharine deference to them. “If it was up to me, we’d tie you up and take turns cutting you until you died from slowly bleeding out. After what you did to Bob, you deserve_”

“Enough!” The tall Boat Person, who Matchless had called ‘Captain,’ said. His voice was thunder and hushed the crowd, even Salty. “You’re coming with us, friend. I know you’ve been through much, but we have medics aboard our ship and salves to treat your wounds. You’ll be amongst friends, of that I can assure you.”