The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One
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Authors: Jared Rinaldi
THE UNDEAD KING
The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One
By
Jared Rinaldi
Other Works by Jared Rinaldi
Epic Fantasy/Sci-Fi
:
Short Story Collection
:
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
M
ERCER 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 the 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.