MudMan (The Golem Chronicles Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

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