MudMan (The Golem Chronicles Book 1) (3 page)

Except it wasn’t ground that met his back. It was water.

Liquid—frigid and merciless—surged around him, rushing over his face and dragging him toward the bottom. Levi couldn’t swim—his body was too heavy and dense to ever be buoyant, and all his flapping, flailing, and kicking did little to slow his descent. And, despite his resilience to pain and damage, he
did
need to breathe. He didn’t have the full range of human organs—no proper stomach, no kidneys or liver, no intestine zigzagging through his center—but both heart and lungs were present, though they functioned only to redirect and channel his ichor.

The Mudman, a millstone thrown into the sea, drifted down four or five feet before his shoulder blades thudded against the streambed. Hot-blooded panic set in; the rush of water pressed in on his senses, cutting him off from the earth. Even his tenuous connection to the rocky streambed wasn’t enough to sustain him.

This is it,
his mind growled like a bear facing down a small army of gun-toting hunters.
This is how I go.

No,
the cool, logical part of his mind asserted.
Four, maybe five feet to the bottom
,
that was all
. If he could gain his feet and get his head above the water, everything would be fine. He needed air. Even with one bad arm, he could get to the bank and haul himself back onto dry ground. And chances were, the murderous Kobo would be long gone. He needed to stay calm, keep his head, and pull himself from the drink.

Slowly he reached down with his left hand, pressing the mace head into the soil, and hoisted himself into a sitting position. The current buffeted his face and chest, threatening to unbalance him. He ignored the sensation, focusing his mind on the singular task of escape. With ponderous movements he pushed himself back onto his left leg, the knife still jutting out of his thigh. He ignored the spark of protest from the limb, far more concerned with being free of the stream than free of the pain. He could recover from the knife wound, but not so long as he was in the water. His healing, his power, his life was inescapably tied to the earth.

Without the earth, his power was a fragile thing.

With his left leg firmly planted beneath him, he pushed upward and toward the river’s edge. His head broke the surface a moment later, cool air washing over his skin as he threw his left hand forward. He shaped the limb into wicked hook, which he slammed deep into the ground, driving the blade tip down and winching his battered body from the water.
Thank God above.

He spat out a mouthful of bitter liquid and sprawled onto his back, letting his bare skin soak up the strength of the earth below. Without even bothering to look around, he drew on the stone, his senses seeking out his clever adversary. As expected, the creature was, indeed, gone—at least four or five hundred feet away, and moving quickly through the tunnelways, heading further into the Deeps, toward the Kobock high temple. One of them, anyway.

Despite the fact that Levi’s stony heart still thudded out a mad beat in his too large chest, his face split into a grin. The High Temple was his final destination, too. Though the rank and file Kobocks were vastly entertaining to hunt, it was the High Shaman, the
Mung Gal-kulom
, he’d come to kill. But perhaps he’d get a chance to finish off the treacherous underling as well. With a grunt, he pulled the knife from his leg. Levi was not a creature of grand hopes and dreams, but, as he glanced at the pitted blade, he did find himself eager for a rematch with gimpy arm.

First, though, he needed rest. He cast the blade aside with a flick of his fat hand, pulled himself over to the rubble pile, and set to work burying himself alive.

THREE:

Memories

Levi dragged his body from beneath the pile of rubble an hour later. He stretched his flabby arms and prodded at both legs. Better, much better. He flexed his right hand, curling it into a fist, then shifting it into a blunt-faced sledgehammer. He had sensation again. He let the hand revert to its normal shape and rubbed at the knife wound on his left leg. Completely healed. The massive puncture in his right leg was tender to the touch, but still much improved. He’d packed both injuries full of dirt and rock before burying himself beneath a half-ton of stone, letting bedrock strength seep in while his ichor transformed the raw material into supple, living clay.

Alchemic magic.

He pushed himself to his feet with a grunt and started forward, angling toward a clear, complete section of wall. He dragged his left hand along the wall’s surface as he walked, drawing out information with every second. Much had happened since he’d taken his short, but necessary, respite: for one, some semblance of order had been reestablished in the Kobock ranks. No longer was it every Kobo for itself. No longer was the subterranean cavern a madhouse of stampeding feet running every which way. Half of the remaining creatures had withdrawn to the High Temple, joining with their unholy shaman, Levi’s real target, barricading themselves behind the temple’s heavy iron gates.

The other half had broken up into hunting parties—four groups of eight—each scouring the intricate and sprawling tunnels, searching for Levi. One of the parties drew uncomfortably close, circling in even as Levi moved, only minutes away at their current speed. For a moment, Levi considered abandoning this expedition altogether, chalking the whole thing up as a failure. It would be a simple task to avoid the hunters, jump ship, and return another night to finish the work, when conditions were more favorable.

He paused, drumming his fingers on the wall, mind thoroughly divided over the prospect. Levi was not dumb, but he was not overly fond of surprises, and thinking on his feet was no easy task for the Mudman.

Still, he reasoned, it was better to put this thing to rest good and proper.

He really
did
want to curb his gluttonous desire for death, and he knew if he left the work undone, he’d be compelled to come back and mop up later. If this was to be his last splurge, as he
swore
it would be, he needed closure. Without closure, without completion, he wouldn’t be able to help himself. Wouldn’t be able to control the urge. Besides, he’d already fallen off the wagon—he’d have to give back his three-month sobriety token at his Thursday meeting—so it was best to get it all out of his system while he had an opportunity.

One last hooray, then he’d start again. And he’d do better next time.

Repent and purge, that was the best way.

With his mind made up, Levi lurched into motion. His tree-trunk legs churned, the ground rumbled at his passing, and his fingers brushed over the wall, guiding him as he moved. The hunting party was closing in on his position, but Levi paid them no mind, heading down the tunnel in the opposite direction. He needed to finish what he’d come here for: the shaman. Mung Gal-kuloms rarely, if ever, ventured from their unholy sanctuaries, so Levi was sure that was where he’d find his target. True, the hunting party would be on him in minutes, but he could gain the temple long before they ever reached him.

He would raid the sacrilegious shrine, kill its profane leader, and disappear, work finished, conscience clear.

Onward he hurtled, moving not with the zippy speed of a sports car, but rather with the steady, implacable strength of a freight train.

He ground to a halt four hundred meters later as the tunnel fractured into three branches: one running straight, one hooking left, the other jutting right and ending abruptly in a yawning chasm. Something here was not quite as it seemed. He squatted down, examining the ground with both hands, willing the cavern to confess its secrets. He grunted and nodded: the right-hand path, toward the cliff.

Cautiously, he picked his way toward the edge of the chasm and glanced down—blackness stretched on forever. A clever lie. He threw his body from the ledge, gusts of air whipping over his bare skin for a moment before he crashed to the ground, loose chips of rock shaking free from the walls. He stood on a narrow strip of land budding from the craggy cliff face, twenty feet down from the drop-off above. A very clever illusion. Behind him, a wide, downward-sloping tunnel bore into the rock face, cutting deeper into the earth. Next to it, a crude set of foot and handholds had been chiseled into the cliff wall, leading back toward the upper level.

The echoing cries of the hunting party drifted along the underground air currents. If he could hear them so clearly, Levi knew they, in turn, must’ve heard the impact from his landing. Best to move on. Forward again he trudged, building up momentum step by ponderous step as he shot downward, deeper and deeper. He followed the path for two hundred meters—avoiding a pair of pressure plates and a spiked death pit—before taking a left at another forked intersection. Levi ran with his fingertips caressing the wall, seeking out the heavy iron gates standing guard at the temple’s entryway. Close now, forty or fifty feet.

The hallway curved, turning into a tight spiral, drilling downward.

He ran, chest heaving, fingers flexing in anticipation.

The Mudman rounded the last bend and nearly ran headlong into the sturdy barrier barring the way to his final stop. A pair of earthen pillars, twenty feet high, flanked either side of the hallway, and in between them loomed a latticed-iron portcullis—a three-ton, drop down gate, common on medieval castles. Though the gate impeded Levi’s entry, it failed to block his view of the temple’s interior.

Elaborate columns carved with profane scenes of inhuman perversion—men and women doing unnatural carnal acts—ran along the length of a wide center aisle. Enormous, wrought-iron sconces decorated each column, each holding orange and yellow fire, which cast lurid, flickering shadows over the whole scene. He spied none of his Kobock prey—they must’ve been in another part of the temple complex—what he could see, however, was more than enough to stoke the furnace of his wrath.

At the end of the sacrificial chamber lay an altar or shrine of some sort. An ancient bas-relief, featuring a frightfully rendered wyrm: a writhing centipede with a thousand legs sprouting from its chitinous body, a head covered with distorted eyes—each filled with uncut rubies the size of a robin’s egg—and a cavernous maw of jagged, obsidian spikes. The scene depicted the dread-beast writhing in a lake of fire, closed away from the world of men and monsters alike. Banished to the great abyss by God above.

“
And they will go out and look on the dead bodies of those who rebelled against me; the worms that eat them will not die, the fire that burns them will not be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind.
”

A wyrm of the Great below. One of the elder gods of the Deep, then, though Levi didn’t know which.

Placed methodically before the altar were bodies, corpses. Once human, but now
altered
, changed
in terrible ways.

Here: what had once been a man, was now a creature with ropy, purple tentacles where arms belonged and the head of a great dire
wolf affixed to his shoulders. Another: a woman, breasts hacked away, a flamingo’s dainty legs protruding from her belly, growing out of her abdomen like a tree. A third: A halfie boy with leopard-spotted skin—fifteen, perhaps—with his legs ripped off and replaced with a set of mechanical limbs. And those were only a few of the victims. Twenty or more, equally brutalized and desecrated, dotted the ground in front of the blasphemous statue.

The vile scene tickled at the back of Levi’s mind, familiar somehow, as though he’d seen this gruesome tableau before. He pushed away the curious sense of déjà vu, instead letting murderous rage fill him up. He had work to be about.

Monsters,
he thought,
the whole lot of them. Guilty.

He just needed to get inside.

Levi inched forward, running his hands over the thick metal, inspecting it for flaws or areas of vulnerability. Though the Kobocks were a crude breed of creature, this gate, at least, had been painstakingly constructed and maintained. Well-crafted metal, free from rust and reinforced with powerful magical wards to prevent tampering. He bent down, wedged his hands into the latticework gate, and stood, back flexing, thighs bulging, biceps shaking from strain as he tried to force the gate.

The iron groaned and shifted an inch or two, but no more—

A spasm of movement near the altar caught his eye. A girl, pasty white, with limp cotton-candy pink hair, streaked through with splashes of purple, lay on an elaborately carved stone table, her body cinched down with leather straps. Her clothes, what remained of them, were dirty tatters at best, and revealed long arms and shapely legs liberally covered with colorful tattoos.

He’d taken her for dead. An easy mistake to make, given both her appearance and the company she kept. Her eyes were closed, and a savage slice ran the length of her middle. Her skin was corpse pale, too—especially in the dancing firelight. On closer examination, Levi saw her chest rise and fall. A minuscule movement.

Levi’s eyes flitted to the stainless steel gurney next to the girl; a wide array of medical implements covered its surface: bone saw, surgical scalpel, pliers, bloody gauze, a cloudy brown bottle of alcohol, a needle, and rough catgut sutures.

His gaze flickered back and forth between the desecrated bodies lying in front of the strange altar and the woman on the table with the slash running up her abdomen. Experimentation. Like back in the camps.

Animals
.
Rabid animals
.

The only thing rabid animals were good for was extermination. A mercy, really.

Then, before Levi could stop it, the memory came—floating to the surface, unbidden.
Unwanted
. It was a rude and demanding guest, but one Levi couldn’t ask to leave. The memory wasn’t Levi’s, not exactly, and though he didn’t want it, neither could he refuse it. It was as much a part of him as his hands or legs or eyes, and he was forbidden to forget. His purpose was not only to slay the wicked, but to stand and remember: