The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One (23 page)

“Enough, enough,” Captain DeMontaigne said, stepping between the two young men. “We’ve seen enough here. A good show of technique by the both of you.”

The captain looked at his son with a steely gaze that seemed to say ‘you went too far,’ but Oliver was too preoccupied with the praises being lavished upon him by the other Boat People to care much for his father’s silent scolding. Crow felt the captain’s eyes turn to him, but he couldn’t meet his gaze. He was too embarrassed, had made too much a fool of himself. He looked instead for Kara, who wasn’t where she had been when she had silently spoke to him. She had probably been too embarrassed for him to stay.

By Elon’s grace, he had never been so bested in a fight, so thoroughly made a fool of. Oliver seemed to occupy a place similar to to the one he did amongst the Black Wings; it made him realize that he had been nothing but a tree amongst a forest of saplings. And these Boat People, particularly the DeMontaignes, were the mountains he was now standing against. It made him feel small, foolish, naive.

Crow was so lost in his thoughts that he failed to see the largest mountain of all approaching him. Captain DeMontaigne put a firm hand on his shoulder. His steely eyes were kind when Crow looked up to meet them. “Don’t be too hard on yourself, young man. You put up a great fight, and in my view, it was a draw. That my son had to do something so underhanded is proof that you fought well. Besides, you’re not even at your full strength. I hope to see a rematch when you are.”

“Thank you, Captain.” The older man’s words were but a minor salve for Crow’s wounded pride, and the Black Wing felt himself looking anxiously for a way to get away. When he looked down at his shoulder, where the bandage was beginning to be soaked through with blood, he saw his chance. “Looks like I should get this redressed. All that movement must have reopened the wound.”

“Yes, I see that.
Mon Dieu
...” DeMontaigne looked up towards the ship’s central mast as the foghorn’s bellow cut through the air. The lookout in the crow’s nest was calling for all eyes to the starboard side. Quickly forgetting his reopened wound, Crow followed DeMontaigne as the captain rushed over to the base of the mast, calling up to the lookout for more on what he was seeing.

“
Les corps!
” The lookout shouted down. “They are all on the shore! More undead than I’ve ever seen in the Teeth!” The Teeth were where the Hud met the ocean, so called because of the ruins of buildings that rose out of the water in various spots like the jagged molars of a drowned god. There had been a great city here once, some even said the greatest city of all, but now most of it was underwater. The little that still met the air had completely fallen into ruin and posed a grave risk to all ships passing through. The Teeth were infamous for being a graveyard for the reckless.

“Hand me some binoculars! Quick!” The nearest person to DeMontaigne gave him what he asked for. His face grew dark when he saw what had amassed upon the shore.

“What is it? How many are there?”

“Here, Crow. Look for yourself.” Crow took the binoculars from the taller man’s hand, his breath quickening as he peered through the lenses. The killim on the shore were shoulder to shoulder and as thick as the Hud below was deep. Every rotten hand clawed at the air, their gazes focused on the ship and the Boat People aboard it. The waters of the Teeth were wide; the absolute avoidance of any submerged ruinous buildings meant sailing through the river’s middle, which they had been doing since that morning. The shores on either side were mere lines on the horizon, and the dead should not have been able to sense them this far out. It sent a chill down his spine.

“How do they sense us?” Crow asked, handing the binoculars back to DeMontaigne.

“I don’t know. In all my days, in all my travels, I’ve never seen anything like this.” All talk had ceased, as everyone had come to the starboard side to gaze out at the undead, which were but a trembling white blur on the shore without the aid of binoculars. The wind would occasionally carry their grunts and groans to them, making it sound as if the living corpses were underdeck, lurking amidst the barrels of grain and corn meal. After a few minutes, DeMontaigne turned to his people and spoke.

“This does not change anything,” he boomed. “We are still bound for the Ruins of the Nameless.
Les Corps
do not venture out into the water, as we all know. It is one of the reasons we as Boat People thrive, while those on the land live in fear of the shadows that move in the night. There will be no undead to worry about in the Ruins of the Nameless. It is an island, lest we forget, and we should be arriving there within the hour. I need all crew to man their stations and prepare for our disembarkment. Hurry now.”

The captain turned and marched straight for his quarters, barking a word or two at people as he passed, snapping them out of their reveries. He left Crow without so much as a parting word. Crow looked around; there was not one Boat Person without anxiety carved into his or her face. It seemed to him like none of them wanted to be here, in the Teeth, that they were all grudgingly performing a job they were conscripted into against their will. Boat People only ventured into the Green Lands for business; their home was in the north, beyond the Aderon Mountains, where DeMontaigne said they lived in houses on stilts built in the middle of shining lakes. They tried to stay as far away from killim, what they called
les corps
, as possible.

So why were they coming this far south? What was in the Ruins of the Nameless that they so desperately needed to attend to, and with so many people? Kara had said there were people who wanted to meet him - who were they? Posing these questions at various times over the past few days had only yielded cryptic responses. Perhaps the Boat People didn’t even know why they were going to the Ruins. It would explain their reluctance, their trepidation.

As he got his shoulder repatched, Crow thought about Kara and her strange powers. How was she able to speak to him with no movement of her lips? It was as if she had a mind-link with him, the same his sister had with Leo. Yet, Brook said she was only able to communicate feelings between her and her pup, not actual words. Kara’s voice actually resonated in his head, as clear as if she was speaking right next to him.

What also amazed him was how the Boat People tiptoed about the young woman with ribbons in her hair and oak tree tattooed on her back. It reminded him of how some of the older Black Wings interacted with the clay statues of Elon, whispering and bowing and lighting sage in the corners of the longhouses where the alters were built. The Boat People revered Kara as though she were divine, and perhaps she was. Crow hadn’t seen anything to think otherwise.

“All hands on deck!” DeMontaigne called from above, his thunderous voice enhanced by the use of a large horn. “Prepare to dock!” The ship’s medic finished her bandaging and gave Crow a smile.

“You were very brave out there today. Not very many would go toe to toe with Oliver.” Crow mumbled thanks, the embarrassment from earlier rearing its head again. He grabbed his cape and ran above deck. He stopped in his tracks atop the steps, his mouth slack and eyes wide at what the ship was slowly approaching.

There were around a dozen metal towers rising from the Hud’s sloshing waters, the glass on their surfaces brightly gleaming in the sun of the late afternoon. Vines and grasses grew on the metal framework, flowers in brilliant hues like rainbow quilts draped over their girths. Ropes and nets snaked from building to building, forming a wall of canopies and bridges. Crow saw people hanging from them, watching as the large boat approached. They looked much like Kara, at least in how they were dressed, with only a modest amount of fabric to cover their sexes. These were the Nameless, while the collection of buildings were the ruin they called home.

Kara stood at the bow of the ship, her toes hanging over the lip of the deck. She silently watched her people, and they did the same of her, until she threw her arms in the sky and screamed a high-pitched warrior’s cry. The Nameless spread out through the ruins of the buildings returned her shout with a collective one of their own, washing over Crow like a tidal wave. He looked among the Boat People; if they were not busy with fastening hatches or pulling ropes, they stood in reverential silence, their hands clasped together, watching the Ruins of the Nameless approach. Some even had tears in their eyes or wept freely.

There was no dock that jutted from the buildings, just an aerial bridge which was at the same height as the deck of the ship. It was next to this bridge of hemp rope, wood and steel that the Boat People expertly anchored. The engines quieted, a sound and vibration that Crow had grown so accustomed to that the silence that followed was unnatural, unsettling. It was a quiet he had never known, not even in his many solo sojourns through the forest. He felt it was without depth, that to give in to it and go as deep as it beckoned would unravel his mind. He couldn’t resist it though, and felt his ear plumbing the silence for the secrets it contained. There was a rhythm beneath it, drumming and chanting…

“You hear it, do you?” DeMontaigne said, coming up next to him. The man’s presence calmed his nerves and brought him back from his reverie. “Your ears don’t deceive you. There is a ceremony going on in the middle of the ruins. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know what it was about, or who it was for.” Crow didn’t need to look at the mountain of a man to know he was referring to him.

“What do they want from me?” Crow asked, as some of the Nameless came across the bridge and dropped onto the boat. He had felt safe and secure in the care of the Boat People, but the ruins were jarring a voice in him that said his chances may be better jumping overboard and dealing with the killim on the shore.

DeMontaigne put his hand on Crow’s shoulder. “No harm will come to you. I give you my word as captain of this ship. The Nameless believe you have an important part to play in the events that are unfolding in the Green Lands and the world beyond. What part that is, your guess is as good as mine. All I know is that those who live amidst these ruins are a mystical people, who occupy a place between waking and dreaming. Time to them is like a lake they can swim through rather than the fast-moving river which the likes of you and I are caught in. It is why we respect and protect them the way we do. Their powers are great and strong, and they’ve helped us thrive as a people, but they are not warriors. Be strong now, Crow. They approach.”

Three Nameless had crossed the bridge. Kara met them when they jumped to the boat’s deck, touching her forehead to theirs one after the other. She gestured in Crow’s direction, and they all turned, as did the heads of all the Boat People gathered. It wasn’t so much the amount of gazes on Crow that made his face grow hot, but rather the eyes of the Nameless, which, though of different hues, still shone with the same lucidity and knowledge that Kara’s did.

She approached him, her gray eyes afire. “Come with us, Crow. There are those who have been waiting for your arrival for sometime, and they wait inside.” She touched him, and he felt an intense calm wash over his body. He found himself wondering how it was she could do that, but the thought was quickly swept away. There was no need for fear or doubt when she touched him.

“Okay.” His voice sounded to him as though it were packed away in a hemp sack of millet or barley. He was tired, he realized, feeling as if he could fall asleep standing there. He felt like he was sleepwalking, half-awake. There was a magnetism that permeated his body, something that was not only keeping him up but also drew him after the Nameless as they climbed back up the ropes and began their way back over the bridge. He swung deftly up after them and followed their dexterous footfalls, his sleepiness fading the further he got away from the boat, replaced by an anxious excitement.

Feeling more lucid, Crow realized he hadn’t said goodbye to any of the Boat People. He turned his head, and the first set of eyes he fell on were Oliver’s. Beneath the young man’s thin mustache was a frown, in his dusky violet eyes the trembling conviction that it should have been him being escorted into the Ruins of the Nameless, that he was the one who was meant to have a destiny beyond that of being a Boat Person.

It’s not as if I chose this,
Crow thought, but knew that he had always wanted more than what life as a Black Wing afforded, particularly in the years after the War for the Green Lands, when his people had shifted from being nomadic warriors righting wrongs throughout the land into a tribe of hunter-gatherers. He had wanted the same thing Oliver wanted now, and would be burning with jealousy if he and the young Boat Person exchanged places. Oliver nodded at him, then smirked. It was as if Oliver was saying,
you may have this, Black Wing, but I’ll best you again. You’ll see.
Crow smiled back, the challenge accepted.

“Watch your step Crow,” Kara said, as they neared the end of the bridge. The ropes and cables were tied around large steel columns which rose out of the water and acted as the frame for the entire building. The floor of the room was covered in sod, out of which grew various grasses and plants.

The drumming had stopped. Nameless slinked out of the shadows, their fiery eyes never wavering from the Black Wing. They moved slowly as they approached, cautiously, as if the ground below their feet could disappear at any moment, which Crow figured was very possible, considering how old the building must have been.

“This is
Skalla Ta
, the lost raven?” The Nameless who looked Crow up and down was ancient, with burning eyes beneath his matted, straw-like hair. Tattoos of stars and constellations, the ink as old as the man himself, dotted his body. “He looks no older than twenty winters.”