The Hammer - Cor Series Book I

The commotion from the rebels faded away as Corvan raced toward the half-dead tree. He figured he could get his bearings from where the statues stood, but the stone figures were nowhere to be found. His ability to see in the dark was waning.

He ran to the other side of the tree and found what looked like the right pathway back to Morgan’s crypt. At the end of the path he found what appeared to be the same large sloppy crypt, but there was no one to be seen. Jorad must still be finding his way in the darkness. Corvan sat against the wall of another low crypt to catch his breath.

The creak of rusty metal turned his head as a faint green line appeared along the lid of the larger crypt next to him. Corvan shrank back. The light grew brighter, and a hand pushed the lid higher. A face rose in the ghostly green light. It was Jorad.

Corvan jumped to his feet, startling Jorad so badly he dropped the lid and knocked himself back into the closed tomb. Corvan quickly pushed the heavy lid up and out of the way on its creaky hinges.

Jorad was rubbing his head and sprawled on top of Morgan’s body, while Kate lay curled up at their feet, pale and still. Her chest rose only a fraction of an inch with each breath. Corvan leaned in and put a hand on her cheek.

“Kate, can you hear me?” She didn’t respond, but the green glow increased.

Resting in her limp fingers was the source of the green light; the disk she had taken from Tsarek. It was smaller than he expected and obviously not the match to a gavel like he had imagined, but its markings were clear and bright: a star-shaped medallion with multiple star points around the outer edges.

Jorad sat up and groaned. “Next time, warn me before you jump out of the darkness,” he said in a low voice.

“Is Kate all right?”

“We barely made it in here before she collapsed.” Jorad moved in close to Corvan and pointed to the glow. “We were fortunate she had that light along. There’s not a speck of lumien light tonight.” Jorad looked at him closely. “How did you find your way here in the dark?”

Corvan shrugged. He did not want to mention the hammer and how it had affected his sight.

Jorad peered into the darkness. “Their leader will send his men out to find us. He believes that he is the promised Cor-Van and that he only he needs a counterpart to make his insane dreams come true. He won’t stop until he finds one. We need to get Kate out of here.”

Corvan reached into the crypt and touched Kate’s hand. It was cool and clammy. “Kate, it’s me, Corvan. Wake up.” He lifted her hand and grimaced as the black band slipped down her arm and revealed a ring of crusty red blisters around her wrist.

“We’ll have to carry her, Kalian,” Jorad said quietly. “Let’s lift her out, and I will get Morgan’s litter out for us to put her on.”

They gently extracted Kate from the crypt and laid her limp body on the rocky ground. She had lost a lot of weight since leaving home, her cheeks sunken and pale. He hoped the bag of cookies wasn’t all she’d had to eat since then. Kneeling beside her, he squeezed her hand and felt a faint squeeze in return. He let himself breathe again.

Jorad was back inside the crypt and muttering to himself as he worked at wrestling the litter out from under Morgan’s body.

Shielding Kate from Jorad with his body, Corvan reach under his cloak, released the hammer from the holster, and brought it down on the black band, just as Kate had done for Tsarek on the Castle Rock. “Release her,” he whispered but nothing happened. He gripped it tighter and looked at the base of the handle. “Please, I … I love her. Please don’t let her die.”

The hammer grew warmer, but there was no glow. Corvan pressed his face next to Kate’s. “Let it go, Kate. You need to leave that bracelet behind.” Her head shook ever so slightly, her eyes fluttered beneath closed lids, and a faint sigh escaped her cracked lips.

“If you let it go, I promise I’ll take you home,” Corvan urged. “I want to see the stars again, don’t you?”

There was a long pause before Kate nodded faintly.

Corvan’s heart leapt and immediately the glow from the hammer’s handle spread over Kate’s body. Touching the head of the hammer to the black band, he held his breath, watching and waiting. The band quivered, a small crack appeared, then it relaxed and fell to the ground.

The litter hit Corvan in the shoulder as Jorad pushed it out of the crypt.

Holstering the hammer, Corvan scooped up the black band and held it in his fist. He didn’t want Jorad to see that Kate had been wearing the evil thing.

Jorad climbed out of the crypt, grabbed the litter, and set it alongside Kate. “The light she carried is still in there, underneath Morgan,” Jorad said. “We’ll need it to see where we’re going.”

“I’ll get it,” Corvan said, “while you get her on the litter. Then we can leave.”

Jorad looked up at him, but Corvan was already turning away to get inside the crypt and out of sight. A powerful urge was growing in him. He needed to examine the black band without Jorad knowing about it.

Crouching down inside the crypt, he pushed Morgan’s cloak aside. The glow from Kate’s medallion leapt out at him. He quickly scooped it up with his free hand to hide its light, and as he did, an overwhelming warmth and peace enveloped him. Opening his fingers slightly, he discovered the symbols glowing on it were the same as those on the hammer.

A sudden intense pain cut into his other hand as if the black band had bit him. He raised the band for a closer look and stifled a cry for the hand holding the bracelet appeared withered and wrinkled, just skin on bones like a dead man’s hand.

He tried to drop the black band, but his hand refused to open, and a thought forced itself into his mind: accept it and you will live; refuse it and you will die.

Intense cold crept up the dead hand holding the bracelet, but it was immediately answered with heat moving up from the medallion. The two met at his shoulders, and snippets of thoughts ratchetted through his mind—truth or lies, love or control. He had to choose now, or he would be split in two, just like the tree. He looked at both of his hands and found he could not let either go.

He focused on a memory of Kate’s smiling face, and his one hand closed tightly around the medallion as the one with the black band opened slowly. The black links lay cupped in his hand.

A harsh thump on his shoulder sent the black band tumbling across the crypt. Jorad’s anxious voice broke the silence. “Hurry up, Kalian. Did you find it?”

Corvan held up the medallion with its light leaking past his clenched fingers. He inhaled deeply, allowing the medallion’s warmth to spread down into his chest as he clambered out over the crypt wall.

As Jorad pulled the lid back over the crypt, Corvan caught a glimpse of the black band slithering toward Morgan’s leg, like a glistening snake looking for fresh prey.

The door eased quietly down, and Jorad lifted the first latch.

“Don’t lock him in,” Corvan said. “If he’s already dead, it won’t matter, but if he’s not …”

“I told you before: this is not your business,” Jorad said firmly.

Corvan pointed the medallion hand at him. “I’m part of this, and I can’t walk away again and leave him to die.”

“Not even if he is a murderer?” Jorad asked.

“I heard the High Priest say if you kill someone, you can’t be a priest and you can’t get married. Is making sure Morgan is dead worth it?”

He opened his hand a bit, and the light of the medallion cast a glow on Jorad’s tense features. The man stared into the light for a moment, then he let the latch drop with a soft clank.

Corvan turned away and crouched next to Kate. Jorad had placed her arms alongside her body, and Corvan picked up one hand and put it over the medallion in his own. Kate took a deep breath, and her other hand moved slowly up until both were wrapped around the light. Her body seemed to absorb its light and her face relaxed. Corvan pulled his hand out from under hers and touched her cheek. “It will be okay, Kate. I’m taking you home now.”

He stood to find Jorad standing at Kate’s feet between the poles of the litter with a puzzled look on his face as he stared at Kate’s hands.

Corvan turned around, crouched, and grasped the poles of the litter. Together they lifted Kate up, then moved down the alley and along the wall that separated the City of the Dead from Kadir.

Once they reached the cemetery gates, they crossed over into the dark streets of the city.

A thin, wailing voice from a building off to the right interrupted their shuffling walk. It warbled and settled down to a low cackling laugh.

The tension on the litter poles increased as Jorad urged Corvan on from behind. “Keep in the middle of the street,” he whispered. “Even if they come out, keep moving. I don’t believe the Broken will attack a priest.”

Another wail came from up the street, and it was answered by two more behind them. The voices were close, but even with his keen night vision, Corvan could not detect any movement.

“Turn right,” Jorad urged as he pushed harder on the poles. They began to jog as if the haunting voices were pushing them forward. Jorad was directing him from behind, but it seemed to Corvan that the unseen cries were herding them on through the narrow streets.

Rounding a corner, Corvan found the way ahead of them blocked by a massive pile of rubble. Long ago, the cavern wall had collapsed and smashed the front portico of a great building. Tall, fluted columns of rock were piled like a giant’s game of pick-up sticks. There was no choice but to turn into a square tunnel cut into the stone wall.

It was a dead end.

Jorad swiveled them around just as a metal gate rumbled across the opening and cut off any chance of escape.

“I am a priest of the Cor,” Jorad shouted as the gate clanged shut. “I bring no harm and seek only your peace.”

As his echo faded away, a small door in the side wall next to Corvan opened inward. A gentle push from behind signaled Jorad’s intentions, and they walked inside. Corvan heard the door slam shut behind then.

Jorad stopped pushing, and Corvan listened to the reverberations of an immense space before them. As silence fell, Jorad pushed on. They walked out of the darkness into a dimly lit great hall dwarfed by massive pillars that soared high above them. The air was dense with mold and a familiar outhouse stench.

Ahead, in the center of the circular room, a steady light shone. They moved toward it, past heavy stone tables piled high with stacks of rotting scrolls. Each table was presided over by small versions of the lumien lamp stands Corvan had seen in the square. The rings at the ends leaned over the scrolls like empty eyes.

The glow ahead turned out to be from four statues on short pedestals, each holding a fire stick out in front of it. In the area bounded by their lights, a heavy round table squatted on a single carved column.

“Let’s put her down on the table.” The thick air of the huge room swallowed Jorad’s words.

After sliding the litter onto the stone surface, Corvan turned around to look down into Kate’s face. Holding his fingertips near her lips, he felt a faint wisp of breath.

The band of gems she had been wearing in the clearing with the rebel soldiers had fallen from her hair onto the stretcher. Corvan put it into his pocket. Kate liked pretty things, and it would cheer her up later. He pushed away the thought that she might not live to see it again while brushing a few strands of hair from over Kate’s eyes and swallowing his fear. It would be his fault if she died in this terrible place. He never should have let her use the hammer.

At that thought, he unclipped the cover of the holster. Jorad was occupied with looking about the room. Was this a good time to try using the hammer to heal Kate? He shook his head. Since Kate had chosen the black band, the hammer might hurt her, like it did in his room when he had chosen to lie to his dad. She was far too weak to risk it. He snapped the cover back into place.

A shallow breath rattled from Kate’s lungs. The power of the hammer might be too much, but the comfort of the medallion seemed to help her. Opening her limp hands, he laid its glowing face down in the open neck of her tunic and waited.

Kate took a deeper breath, and her hands moved up to cover the medallion. In that pose, she appeared more dead than alive. “Please let Kate live,” he whispered, raising his eyes and looking overhead.

His words floated up to the vaulted ceiling, where large painted faces gazed down in rapt attention. Although blackened by smoke, their eyes were focused on the center of the room. All around the faces were smaller paintings of people and animals. Most were obscured by the dark smudge, but off to the sides, some of the murals were clearer. Was that a blue sky and a golden sun? Corvan stepped back to get a better view, stumbled on a loose brick, and fell backward onto a pile of damp scrolls piled against a statue’s pedestal. Getting to his feet, he came closer to the stone face. It gazed back at him in unblinking silence.

A hand grabbed his arm and pulled him to one side. Jorad looked fiercely into his eyes. “Don’t touch anything. They are watching every move we make.” The man turned away, and Corvan could clearly see that he was not taking his own advice. He had cleared off a nearby table and spread out a large scroll, which he now studied intently.

Corvan stared at it. The markings looked like the tracks chickens left in the mud.

Jorad traced a finger backward along a line of characters. “Incredible. And this is only one scroll of hundreds still legible.” He gestured around the room, and Corvan saw that the walls around them were covered in cubicles of various sizes, many of which contained one or more scrolls.

Jorad pointed above the cubicles, where a balcony ran around the room to meet at a set of curved stairs. “I have heard stories of the remains of a great library in the broken half of the city, but I never believed it could be this vast. It would take a lifetime to read all of these.” From the tone of his voice, Corvan knew Jorad wanted to start immediately and would not be easily distracted from the task.

The priest moved along the wall, tugging out scrolls, reading the identifying marks, and reluctantly pushing them back into place. “You can see where the water rose up.” He pointed to the wall where a line of black mold encircled the room about three feet from the floor. “All the documents below are hopelessly ruined, and the dampness in the room will eventually destroy even those the water did not touch. And look here.” His voice choked in anger as he kicked at the remains of a campfire made from the scrolls. “They used scrolls for a fire! Fires are not even permitted in the Cor. Our air is much too precious. And there!” His hand shook in wrath, pointing to where strips of scrolls had been used for toilet paper. “Animals. The Broken have become nothing but animals!”

“Who are you to judge our people?” a woman called out from behind them.