THE HAUNTED KINGDOM 3 by CHARLES E.J. MOULTON (ereader that reads to you .txt) 📕

only vodka distillery in her country.
The angels had given him the vodka, not Adnicul.
Was this a problem?
Only because Adnicul had passed it on, not for any other reason, was it a problem. But it was for emergencies and the ideas of the angels, apparently.
Someone had penetrated his mind and given him that dream.
Someone was out to get him.
What scared him more was that this dream had only been a small taste of what was about to come.
Alexander took the blanket he had used and wiped off his forehead, determined to find Adnicul where ever he was at the moment. Was he a new friend? Maybe he was a friend. At least, Alex felt that seeing him after having a nightmare was a comfort. How strange to visit a nightmarish man after a nightmare, Alex thought to himself and laughed.
Alex walked along the bushes and on to a halfway decent path, trying to erase the images of the horrid faces from his mind. He walked down a hill and up a small rising onto a place that overlooked some sort of valley. He had to stop several times and calm down, realizing that the images in his head were radically turning his soul into an inferno of terror.
The blue sky had a glitter about it this morning and the few cloud upon it made March worth experiencing. A bird or two had left its nest to find food for the babies and they were soaring up what seemed to be grass and fields for as far as the eye could see.
He sighed, shook his head and walked on.
Alex looked to his left and saw Adnicul standing there next to a small cave, looking at the landscape.
As Alex walked up to him, he saw that his former enemy was almost in a trance, dreaming himself away to some place where pain was not a necessity.
Alex walked up to Adnicul and stood beside him for a while, realizing that this was a man in deep agony. Was it agony? Or was it just simple, true pain?
There was a long pause before the memories of the dream came flashing back. Adnicul broke the flashing silence of dream recovery by uttering:
“There is so much I wish I had not done now that I know I was used.”
Alexander looked out upon the grass, blowing in the wind and really didn’t know what to say. What could one say to someone that had done so much ill and regretted it? Don’t worry? After dreaming about being trampled to death by a demonic army he had to confess that he was worried. Very much so.
He obviously heard through Alexander’s lack of will to respond that he without question was left speechless as to what to say.
There was softness in the former tyrant’s gaze that Alexander detected in his glance.
Alex smiled to himself.
“What troubles me, my friend, is that you were the tyrant of our continent one day and then here in this twilight zone you decided that you regretted what you had done.”
Adnicul shook his head and looked out into the open.
“You still don’t understand.”
“I understand that you were betrayed, locked up, recalled what you had been and what you had become. But why now?” Alex sneered again, a tear rolling reluctantly down his cheek. “Why first now after having killed my daughter? Why do I have to retrieve my daughter from hell because you involved yourself in a scam you never wanted?”
Adnicul took a long look at his former foe and looked down, wind blowing in his hair.
“Whatever happens I will loose my life. All I want is to save my soul.”
Alexander looked at him and for the first time saw a misunderstood man, a man he had not before seen. Alex lifted his hand and laid it upon Adnicul’s shoulder. There was a silence there that penetrated the walls of death and reached Belinda hanging in a cage over the pit. She cried as well.
The two men stood silent there for an hour and watched the morning before turning their backs at the past and rode together for the first time toward a dangerous first challenge.


CHAPTER FOUR

FIRST CHALLENGE


Alexander was reshaping his mental landscape.
He, the king of Medatlantia’s biggest and now sleeping land, had hated the man next to him up until recently. Now he was his companion on the way to save his dearest and most valued family members.
The wandering soul that now bore the name Adnicul was a confused spirit in his current transformation. He had been a seed on the forbidden tree in Eden.
He had been the first unlawful angel.
He had been his master’s first crime.
He had been unwilling to serve someone he knew nothing about and therefore a crying fallen branch from God’s tree.
But feeling compelled to follow his master down to his abode, down to where roses do not grow and time does not pass, he had traveled that road as unwilling as he was unhappy. Way down the path he found out that the master had actually just been waiting for a moment to use him.
Therefore, he should be used for a truly criminal purpose: creating the ultimate weapon.
But Adnicul had never suspected being a tool.
After all, the idea of having a name that spelled Lucinda backwards was too remote and farfetched to prove a conspiracy at all. Adnicul’s father, a bohemian smuggler, had only spoken Arabic and not known that a name such as Lucinda existed, let alone give his son a name that spelled Lucinda backwards. And if so, then why give a boy such a name at all? The father had only named the boy so because the name had been sung to him during his sleep by someone to him unknown.
The smuggling trained youngster soon left home and ended up a bureaucrat in a dark land next to Wandiffia’s successor.
Adnicul had reasons to fear his past.
What had his father said?
“Let me tell you, young man” Father Undal Ibn-Dal had exclaimed in his characteristic cynical voice. “You will go far if you hear what I say. Don’t forget your task in life is to use your mind as well as your heart. The heart must have love and passion. One of these passions is wealth: it must have gold. There your mind as a smuggler and your heart rest. Never forget that your passion rests in the eternity of your promising development, young man.”
Whatever that meant, the young boy was eager to find out if he could find his eternal bliss in the riches of this world. What troubled him was that his father never believed he would go far. It troubled the young boy that his father sought dishonesty and made it into a spiritual lifestyle.
He searched and searched, for somewhere out there an answer had to be found.
His father had told him that a man’s happiness stems from his striving to find gold.
This coming from a smuggler, he knew consequentially that the young man would take to crime as his father had at the same age like a fish would take to water. But there was more there. The young buck knew in his heart that it was wrong. Before he could turn away from this, he met the wrong person at the wrong time.
One day the boy would meet his new master and one day that master would give him Nocturania. When that happened, his meeting with Lucinda made everything change and it never occurred to him that the meeting was a set-up. His father had been influenced to catapult the innocent boy into crime, but other forces were not eager to enslave the boy to crime but to evil. He had been sent by an unknown messenger that day to retrieve a smuggled artifact that he in the end never found. He had found himself in too remote a place for even his comfort, when he found her eating roots in the forest of Callenia, living on bugs and telling him a story of being exiled by a royal brother a while back. Coincidentally, he had fallen in love with this strange person, not knowing why. Coincidentally, she kept coming and going without warning and was so remote to even the most faithful servant that she remained a name to everyone but Eric.
When Lucinda and Adnicul, the newly appointed chief cardinal of the Nocturanian Temple Guards, met he found it fascinating to find someone that seemed to be his mirror image, not only in namely terms. The two were always seen together and rumors had it they held black masses in the temple after dark. Sometime in the end of the 14th century the Nocturanian Temple Guards were dissolved and formed a Rebellion Guard under Adnicul. These fierce pirates stormed Rigor Mortis and killed the last of the Johnathans, Henry John IV. Soon enough, Henry John was hanging legless from a tree outside the castle, the throne occupied by a new king and a new mistress by his side. The widow was sent to a remote castle at the border, guarded to the end of her life by invisible demons that controlled her every move. Zeekha never recovered fully and was used as a diplomat until her mysterious disappearance sometime in the 1420’s.
The initiator of these ill deeds was now Alexander Winsletenna’s best friend.
Oh, yes. He was special, this new leader.
Coincidentally, Lucinda soon began controlling his every move behind the scenes, although it was officially he that was training her in the arts of fighting and black magic.
The servant named Eric saw her one day and Eric knew at once that Adnicul was being used. There was no question that the forty scars that Eric had received after telling him so had been well deserved in Adnicul’s eyes. He had told him off four more times after that to stop calling Lucinda names, only because he knew that Eric was right.
And Eric had been right.
Adnicul was living a lie.
He was not remotely who he thought he was.
He was an unlawful angel forced to become a leader of demons.
The past came back to haunt him in a dungeon somewhere in the outer territories near the Prosperanian border.
Adnicul Ibn-Dal had been the son of an Arabian smuggler, continually on the road as a child. Once independent, he had taken over his father’s gang and let his father relax.
But freedom had been important to him. It did not take long before Adnicul was restless again and handed over the leadership to his brother and left the country to eventually settle in Hispania, becoming a scribe at the court of the Duke of Malaga.
But the moon caught up with him soon enough and he became a cardinal priest in the Temple of Zion near Yambollah once the princes of the lunar conspiracy caught hold of him.
Soon enough, the former traveling bandit was in such a complex labyrinth of lies he knew not how to find back. Until that day when he was thrown in a dungeon and had to rethink his situation.
Alexander for his part was confused. His entire life he had fought everything that Adnicul stood for. But now he was being told that this man was actually himself a victim.
The Clurafar-born leader of Prosperania had traveled for a year now and knew nothing of what was waiting for him.
He had been ripped away from his existence, his entire country extinguished, only to find