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Antioch

  The Circle, Part One

  By William E. Harlan

  Copyright 2012 William E. Harlan

  Cover illustration by William E. Harlan

  License Notes:

  Please share this book with your friends. I encourage you to copy it and pass it around. Even if you don’t like it, it could be a decent topic for conversation and you’ll be doing me a great favor. If you enjoy this book and would like to support me, you can purchase it as a paperback online.

  For Carrie, thank you so much.

  Table of Contents

  1 Paladin

  2 Homestead

  3 Breahg and Bauran

  4 Lost Son

  5 The Grace

  6 Devil’s Mark

  7 Ghost Ship

  8 Wizards

  9 The Golden Rule

  10 The Circle

  11 Crusade

  12 In the Settling Smoke

  13 Andalynn’s Scars

  14 Templar

  15 Faith

  16 Gunders and Greer

  17 Funerals

  18 Milk

  19 Michael’s Wall

  20 Acolyte

  21 The Road to Golgotha

  22 Angelus Bells

  23 Death and Taxes

  24 All the King’s Men

  25 Burying Saints

  26 The Second Pendulum

  27 One Thirty Fivers

  28 The Third Meridian

  29 Mission

  30 The Massacre at Sawmill Proper

  31 Armageddon

  32 A Crucible of Resolve

  1 Paladin

  Ares complained when Michael reined him in. The white stallion neighed and stamped, water bursting from the cobblestones at his hooves. He made a deafening clatter.

  Michael steadied in the saddle, searching the cottages up ahead. He’d ridden through a terrible storm, hoping to arrive before the plague, but the old coastal town of Meroe was as still and quiet as a graveyard. Then, drawn out by the sound of Michael’s mount, a shadow of life emerged from between the buildings.

  The shade limped toward horse and rider in a slow, determined line. More of its kind followed out of the alleys, doorways and broken windows of the broken town. They lurched and crawled like injured soldiers. They smelled like rotten corpses on the wind. Michael stopped counting heads at twenty-four, with still more of them coming. He’d have to cut them all down before he could start looking for survivors.

  He swung over to dismount, landing with a muffled clink of heavy chainmail and leather armor, and then from Ares’ flank took his weapon, a huge sword sheathed in lacquered ash, his caligan. Its wide, double edge glinted as it slid from its scabbard’s throat. In the ancient and sacred script of Michael’s order, the Circle, four vows etched the caligan’s fuller: Silence, Obedience, Chastity and Poverty. Five and a half feet from point to pommel, the handle almost as long as the blade, it weighed thirteen cleaving pounds of steel. It was a devil-slayer’s weapon, built for slaughter more than swordsmanship.

  Michael placed its polished case on the cobblestones and stepped away to wait for the coming of Meroe’s dead. He would face them out there, on the road, to avoid attracting any more than his horse already had. Ares trotted off into the vast, coastal heath.

  They came silently except for the brush of their decaying flesh and clothes. The nearest reached out for Michael, despite the distance, grasping for him desperately with its left hand. Its right arm had been torn out of the socket. Its skin was a pallid bag, swinging loose over the bones and muscles underneath. Smoke trailed gray out of its slack mouth, like it had a coal fire in its chest, and its eyes glittered like black glass.

  Michael raised his weapon and waited. Then, concentrating… he opened the way out of the world. A power he knew as riin, something natural to all living things, blasted into his body in an unnatural amount, giving him unnatural strength - enough to send his heavy edge through a ten-inch pine in one stroke.

  The ghoul came right at him. Michael struck and split it from collar to hip with the short sound of a butcher at the block - whock. Its head and shoulder spun away, spraying a strange, black ink from its spine. Gray clouds rolled out of its opened lungs. Its greater half was a stumbling fountain.

  Michael held his breath. The ghoul’s smoke seared into his eyes as it flowed over him. It was a contagion, the most rapacious by far he’d ever felt, and it took burning root in any opening of the skin. Even so, riin gave Michael more than strength; it healed and drove affliction from the body, glowing with a brilliant, aurous light wherever it did so. His eyes started to blaze like golden gateways to another realm.

  Michael strode to the next ghoul and cut it in half with an upward stroke that mirrored his first. Again and again his caligan passed in swift, unbroken arcs through their fetid flesh and bone; again and again and again, until corpses littered the path in piles, spilling their disease into the air and their ink onto the stones.

  The wind above the road became a river of smoke. Michael stepped out of it into the tall, wet heath to breathe. The ink marred his habit by then, having splashed across his high-collared, white tabard and the golden circle embroidered at his chest. It was dirty work. He noticed a ghoul harassing his horse nearby and turned to watch, concerned.

  It was no more than a clumsy child to the mighty Ares, though. He scooted away with an irritated snort and a short burst of speed. It persisted, pawing once again at the horse’s brawny haunches and causing another brief dash. Then, the third time it came up behind him, Ares lost patience and kicked it in the groin. The ghoul left its feet, rotating through the air, ejecting feculence.

  Michael was reassured, but he’d also been distracted. A one-eyed, legless fiend had crawled on its belly through the mud, reached up its flayed hand from the weeds and grabbed him. He looked down just as it was lifting its mouth to his leg.

  He blurted out, “God’s Mercy!” and hopped away on one foot, trying to kick out of its grip. It was surprisingly strong. In that moment, in that brief lapse of awareness, Michael backed right into the full mass of the others. His strength was no match for their overwhelming numbers. They dragged him down, burying him in their writhing grasp.

  Though protected by his thick, leather gauntlets, he yanked his fingers away from the crushing pressure of their teeth. He dropped his sword. Their bites could not break his mail, but still pinched and ripped his skin within the links. In the darkness of the squelching heap Michael’s glowing eyes lit a crooked face that gnashed and snapped just inches from his own, held back only by the selfish effort of the others.

  Out on the heath, a peaceful sea breeze flowed over the low, green leaves and tousled Ares’ mane. He tossed his head and stamped the earth like a playful cloud that had left the wide, blue sky to take conquering form on the ground. He worried over nothing. The ghoul he’d kicked dragged its shattered hips through the bushes somewhere.

  Under the weight of the pile, Michael’s chest felt about to collapse. His lungs seized and threatened to breathe as blind, disintegrating fingers groped his head. He wasn’t finished yet, though. He shoved and wormed, pushing with his elbows and heels into the mud until he could turn. Then he wrenched onto his stomach and scrambled out of the mound.

  Michael ran until the light left his eyes - then he gasped for air. Though he could heal the infection, he still needed to breathe and he couldn’t do that if the smoke clogged his lungs. The air was sweet. Any air was better than none, but he’d been in the ghouls’ stink for so long he couldn’t smell it anymore. Behind him, they crawled over each other in slow pursuit. He wanted to lead them away from there. He started jogging through the muddy grass.

  Ares clopped up beside him, easily matching the man’s speed, and, seeing the running as a game, gave him a little bu
mp. That was how Ares liked to play. Michael didn’t see it coming and got knocked flat on his face into the mud again. He jumped up furious, slinging filth and shouting, “No! Bad! That’s a bad horse, Ares! Go away!” The animal obeyed, pitching up turf in a sprint.

  Michael cast an angry glance back at the ghouls. They were far behind. He resumed his long, circular path, returning to where they’d brought him down. Once there, he searched the flattened plants for his sword and found it reflecting the sun.

  With his caligan’s weight in hand again, Michael met the gang of ghouls and gave ground, swinging like a reaper. Rotten limbs and pieces shot from his humming blade’s path. He moved in a backward circle, keeping them in the sword’s arc until none of them was capable of following him. Then he retraced his steps and destroyed the ones he’d merely crippled, making sure to bleed the ink out of their spines.

  ***

  The road was a line of pebbled mortar in the wild, worn more by weather than use. Smoke still spilled sideways from the corpses farther south when Michael returned from the heath.

  His scabbard’s bright polish and steel were in stark contrast with the rest of him then. His once white tabard, with its high collar and golden embroidery, was a pair of torn and gore-soaked rat tails, dripping under the front and back of his belt. A jigsaw of cracking mud plates coated his mail and his caligan glistened with the ghouls’ ink. He tried cleaning the blade with his filthy garment and then on the muddy grass beside the road, but merely traded muck for muck. Refusing to put the sword into its case that way, he left it unsheathed.

  A rustling in the heath caught his attention. The one-eyed, legless fiend had found him again, that half of a ghoul that had caused him so much trouble. Slower than the others, it had survived the greater destruction and was scrabbling onto the road by itself. Michael narrowed his eyes on it and stepped forward. Then he raised his heavy boot and stomped the ghoul’s head into the cobblestones. It splattered, like a black-gut walnut under a hammer, and the corpse went still.

  Michael stood there, examining it, imagining that monster’s final moments as a man; what horrors he must have gone through before the plague had claimed him. Out of respect for the dead, Michael put down his weapon and knelt. It had been more than thirty years since he’d last prayed. He didn’t know if it would make a difference but there was something his father always said at funerals that seemed… right to say. He mouthed the words first, assembling them from his memory:

  “Please, God, allow these souls peace and rest,”

  “By your side, in your light,”

  “Amen.”

  Ares snorted. Michael looked at him, thinking about the way forward. The town’s narrow lanes would be filled with restless dead. Though unthreatened out in the open, his proud, white stallion could be cornered and overwhelmed in there. Michael went to him, unbuckled the saddle’s girth and left Ares unbridled. The horse could find his way home. Then, picking up his caligan again, and almost sheathing it before he caught himself, Michael walked into Meroe.

  2 Homestead

  A storm gathered in the south as John rode up the farmhouse path. On his pinto filly, he sat head and shoulders over the rusty plants on either side. His hair waved long and iron-gray below his baldness. He was sixty-four years old, paunchy, and his white tabard’s golden circle sparkled in the sun. Far before the house, the horse whined and slowed on its own.

  John patted her neck. “Shh, there’s a good girl. Don’t run. Easy...” He noticed distinct movement in the crops’ tops, about fifty yards out. Clucking at his nervous filly and scratching her mane, he reached down and lifted his caligan from the saddle.

  “Alright, I’ll walk.” He landed with a solid thump on the dry dirt road. The horse pulled against the reins, already backing up. John let go and his eyebrows went up in surprise. She wrenched over backwards and bolted away in a cloud of dust. “Oh, well, that’s fine. At least you let me get down first this time…”

  The field towered over him in two walls of stalks to make a brown, windless corridor. Withering leaves hung from those lengths like dead tongues. John buckled his scabbard’s belt around his waist and called out, “Horace?”

  He heard something coming. Drawing the long-handled sword, he called out again, “Horace?” Then he raised it with a form almost identical to Michael’s and opened the way, ready to strike. Horace would have answered him by then. Any person should have answered him by then. The plants opened and John was shocked.

  A small girl, no more than five years old, hobbled from the field. Blood clotted in her clothes and hair as though she’d taken a swim in it days before. She trailed smoke like a breathless fire. One leg took her weight and wagging steps with its thigh-bone’s broken ends in the meat like climbing spikes. John just stood there as she came, watched her take hold of his leg and bite into the chain. Between his armor and her unnatural strength, her tiny teeth cracked.

  He came to his senses, cursed, “Fwah!” and sheathed his weapon. He unfastened a gauntlet from his sleeve and put his naked hand on the little ghoul’s forehead. His ring finger was missing. She ignored his touch and continued gnawing, the splinters of her teeth snapping in the pulp. The gruesome grinding and popping sounds made it difficult for John to concentrate. He was trying to open the way in her, but he couldn’t find it. She was empty. “What is this? I don’t understand.”

  His eyes began to water and then to burn. He reeled back, choking and coughing, having taken a full breath of the smoke that had collected around him without the wind to blow it away. Golden light burst from his eyes, nose and mouth and his throat glowed red from within. He stumbled out of the lingering haze with the monstrous child still clinging to his leg.

  In the clean air, the light faded from his face. The decision was hard but quick. John drew his caligan again. With his bare hand on the grip and his armored hand on the blade, he placed an edge against the back of her small neck. She ignored what was coming just as she had ignored his healing touch. He pulled until the edge bit metal. She collapsed, decapitated.

  John turned away and flung his caligan into the ground. He stood muttering and shaking his head as he refastened the gauntlet. He hadn’t come home to the farm in more than eighteen years. He didn’t know who the little girl had been, who she’d been to Horace… who she might have been to him. Without looking at the body, he snatched up his filthy cleaver, shoved it into the scabbard and started jogging toward the farmhouse.

  The old building’s thatched roof showed over the plants before the corridor opened into the front yard. The door was ajar. A tilted, wooden cart, piled with hay, blocked John’s view of the adjacent barn. The wind in the yard, cool from the coming storm, had a savage stench. The boots of a man on his back stuck out from behind the cart.

  John hurried around and found a slender corpse. A garden spade was driven into the earth just above the lower jaw. The rest of the head was gone. Bulbous, black flies boiled in the smoke between the blade and the throat. A wide, dark stain surrounded the wound on the ground and an intermittent pattern of ink led from there to the barn.

  John didn’t recognize the body. Trying to make sense of the scene, he thought, Horace wouldn’t have been so slight. No, he’d have been the one with the shovel. He shouted, “Horace!” and waited, listening to the field and the flies. If Horace did this, he’d have taken in the sickness. John could only guess at how long a man could withstand the smoke without being able to open the way.

  He followed the black trail through the barn’s gate, where the wind died and dust hovered in slanted sunlight. There, a thirty yard toss from the body, on its cheeks and teeth beneath a bench, the severed head seethed with insects. Dull, gray eyes stared from the scuttle. John’s mouth was dry when he tapped it with his fingers to chase the bugs away.

  It wasn’t Horace. He looked around. Dark little footprints nearby became more defined as they walked backwards into a broad pool of dried blood where a dead pig was tied by a rope around its neck to the slaughter
post. The animal had been bled, but not by any method John knew. Its skin was torn open in sheets.

  Flies lifted from the carcass when John approached. He found a funnel, a long knife and a pail on the shelf above. They were clean and sharp, ready for a blood-letting. He put them down and headed for the farmhouse.

  The front door screeched under the weight of its planks. It was dim, cool and quiet inside. John shouted, “Horace!” over and over as he searched the old house, the house that had once belonged to him. He was afraid of what he’d find behind each door that he opened. There was a man’s room with the mounted skull of a giant elk. Antlers spanned twelve feet from wall to wall. There was a boy’s room with a bit of fishing tackle and then, saddest of all, a girl’s room with a ragdoll and some little dresses. He went into the kitchen.

  The back door’s light cut the silent, windowless space in two. It was a disaster. Clay jugs and jars had been smashed everywhere. The table had been overturned against the fireplace. Clumsy tracks sketched through the flour, soot and blood that caked the floor. He saw little footprints again and also a much larger set made by a very large man. Those led outside, passed a raised, stone well and headed into the woods behind the house. John followed them, still calling his son’s name.

  3 Breahg and Bauran

  His father struck him hard in the mouth and Daniel tumbled out of the kitchen into the night. From his hands and knees in the dirt Daniel screamed, “I hate you!” Tears, blood and spit trembled from his lips with the words. “I hate you!” He stood, wobbling like a frog on its hind legs, and then stumbled over to the well for protection, peering out from behind the winch.

  Horace stepped into the doorway, six foot-three, three hundred and fifty pounds of muscle, fat and hair. His mass eclipsed the kitchen’s light, returning the back yard to darkness. He paused there to put the small hole of his pot-jug deep in his beard and took a good swig of huckleberry whiskey. Then he started circling the well. Daniel scurried to keep it between them.