Salt Storm: The Salted Series: Episodes #31-35 by Galvin, Aaron (top 5 books to read TXT) 📗

thereafter. “Choose what?” Kellen demanded of Hypnos. “What am I choosing from?”

The voice of another ghost answered him from afar. “Life or death now, iddn’t it, special boy?”

Kellen shuddered in recognition of the dead, Selkie taskmaster that appeared some thirty-odd yards deeper into the chamber. Kellen swung his torch away from Hypnos, pointing its fiery end at the darkness where the voice had come from. “Tieran . . .” said Kellen, naming the ghost from his past, as if needing further confirmation of the one he had killed in the depths of Orphan Knoll.

The dead Selkie taskmaster grinned back at him easily enough. “Aye, special boy,” said Tieran, his eyes as milky and lidless as the dead who had chased Kellen out of the dungeons and up the spiral stairs. “Bet you didn’t think to see me again, eh? Nor any of them others we done in together down in the Knoll.”

Others? Kellen thought, a cold breeze whispering across the back of his neck like a lover might do. Kellen trembled at its phantom kiss, then summoned his courage to make a quick glance over his shoulder. He nearly dropped his torch at what stood behind him.

A wall of the Selkie dead stood between him and what remained of the broken, oaken door. Its bracing was splintered and cast aside, the darkness having overtaken all existing beyond the open door’s threshold. For all their hunting of Kellen, the dead no longer gave him chase. Their milky eyes stared at him in soulless emptiness, the lot of them like an army of freestanding mannequins and robots awaiting commands.

“I’m dreaming,” Kellen said, his voice broken and quiet. “This is all a dream. Just another nightmare that I’ll wake up from soon.”

“Aye, a nightmare true enough, special boy,” Tieran called out to Kellen, reminding him of the added threat before him also. “But not one for you to wake from this time, eh?” He chuckled hoarsely as he had done in life.

When the corpse of Tieran coughed and choked on the seeming phlegm, however, Kellen noticed the purple-bruised rash of scarring around the dead taskmaster’s neck. The deep marks stood out among the elsewise pale flesh, the circular rashes a reminder of where Kellen had strangled Tieran with the same whip that the Selkie taskmaster had attempted to murder Kellen with also.

Tieran smirked at Kellen’s stare homing on his throat. “Ready to make your choice, then, special boy?”

“What choice?” Kellen asked, glancing over his shoulder again at the army of Selkie dead when he heard the scuffs of shuffling feet scraping over the cobbled stones.

The dead were marching as one, an oncoming wall of slow-moving flesh to push Kellen deeper into the chamber.

Kellen retreated from them. “Stay back . . .” He swung his torch around, waving it as if to try and fear them.

The dead gave him no more response than they had done before, continuing their slow march to push him further in.

“Wouldn’t go that way, if I was you,” Tieran crowed behind him. “Nah, special boy, never that way.”

Kellen wheeled around, whipping his torch with him to illuminate Tieran also. He screamed when finding the dead man had silently crossed the distance between them; Tieran’s milky gaze and eager grin an inch from Kellen’s face.

With one hand, Tieran clapped his icy hand upon Kellen’s dislocated shoulder, squeezing another scream from him. When Kellen tried to swing the torch against Tieran, the dead Selkie taskmaster caught that too.

“No need for the torch, special boy,” Tieran laughed, wrenching the torch away and then casting it ahead of them. “Won’t need no light where you’re headed, though you’ll be wanting it all the same.”

Kellen’s heart thundered against his chest as the torch clattered and rolled ahead of him, the light from it revealing the same pair of freestanding doors he had seen in the Cavern of Somnus.

With a swift kick against the back of his legs, Tieran dropped Kellen to his knees and then kept him off balance by dragging him quickly toward the doors.

The doors stood in opposite contrast as he remembered seeing them in the Cavern of Somnus and one of them with additions Kellen did not remember from his lone memory of them. The door to his right was liken to a truss of what once may once have been greenish reef and sea-grass, but all were long wilted and dead now. On his left, the other that Kellen recalled having once seen glistening like bone-white coral ivory was different too; now holding streaks of crimson stain from that which adorned it also.

Kellen’s throat parched at the sight of severed appendages posted to the four corners of the door frame. He screamed all the louder when staring into the milky eyes of the Nomad slaver who had assaulted him in life too. Roland . . . Like a decapitated head upon a pike, what remained of the slaver had been positioned like a door knocker upon the blood-stained, ivory door.

Choose, boy, Roland’s voice echoed in Kellen’s mind, his words heard even over the continued screams. This door, or the other . . .

Tieran hauled Kellen to his feet, then shoved him forward to stand between the pair of doors. “Aye, make your choice, special boy,” he shouted. “Else the master makes it for you.”

The master? Kellen wondered briefly. He averted his gaze from the ivory door and the constant, accusing stare of Roland. He remembered the fear in the Nomad’s begging cries for Kellen to stop the torture of him in Orphan Knoll, all before Kellen had gleefully used his newfound Sancul power, strength, and hate to rend the weakling slaver apart.

Choose . . . Roland’s voice boomed in Kellen’s mind. Or allow us to do so for thee.

The army of Selkie dead hissed at Kellen with a singular voice then, hastening him along.

Without daring to look upon Roland again, Kellen took off for the opposite door. He reached for the coral-encrusted knob of the door littered and crafted with