The Judgment of the Sentinels (The Temple of the Blind #6) Read online

  The Temple of the Blind

  Book Six

  The Judgment of the Sentinels

  By Brian Harmon

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2013 by Brian Harmon

  Published by Brian Harmon

  Cover Image and Design by Brian Harmon

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, places and events are entirely coincidental

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Don’t miss the first five books in this series:

  The Box

  Gilbert House

  The Temple of the Blind

  Road Beneath the Wood

  Secret of the Labyrinth

  For more about this author, visit

  www.HarmonUniverse.com

  Chapter 1

  Thirteen months and a lifetime ago, Albert Cross unlocked his car door and found a small, wooden box. It was only a ten-inch cube, but the object had contained much more than its physical dimensions suggested. That box was where everything began. Everything that came after that singular moment in his life could either be traced directly back to the box or was changed forever the moment he laid eyes on it. Entire worlds had been inside, entire lifetimes. Looking back now, Albert realized that he had essentially found the woman he loved inside that box. And the best friends he’d ever known. Inside that box had been his future, his destiny, even the end of his virginity. Inside that box had been blue eyes and blonde hair and sweet kisses and a warm body pressed against him every night. Inside that box had been adventure and intrigue. But inside that box had also been fear and pain. Inside that box had been grief.

  Wayne was dead.

  He’d appeared from nowhere, a mystery like all the others that had spewed from the box since that early September evening, out of nothing, and he had hurled himself headlong into an adventure the likes of which none of them had ever imagined. He fought monsters and journeyed across entire worlds to save lives he barely knew. His body battered and bloody, he had soldiered forward with unrivaled courage, enduring without fear or regret, and in the end he had died protecting them all. He was a hero. And now he would forever lie entombed in the relentless darkness of this very passage.

  How long had they been walking since they said goodbye? Albert couldn’t recall what time that was. It felt like hours ago, though it was probably only half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes. For that matter, he couldn’t recall the last time he even glanced at his watch. And he didn’t bother now, either. He couldn’t seem to care enough to make it worth the effort. It wasn’t important.

  He reached out with his good arm and took Brandy’s hand in his. She turned and looked at him, her blue eyes wet and shimmering. He’d almost lost her back there too. In his mind’s eye he could still see her plunging into that darkness. He could still hear her screams as she fell. He thought that his world had ended. But somehow his prayers reached Heaven, even from that dark and endless labyrinth far beneath the earth, and she survived. She was still with him, as though God, Himself, had given her back to him so that he would have the will to keep going, so that he could continue to fight.

  Brandy pressed close to him, her cheeks wet with tears. She’d hardly known Wayne, but she knew what he had done for them. He saved Olivia from the nightmare of that horrible forest. He saved her precious Albert from those awful hounds. He’d taken on things she could not imagine, things she would not have been capable of enduring. He was their hero when they most desperately needed one.

  She remembered the way he scooped her up into his arms when the labyrinth began to quake. She remembered the way he held her, not unlike the way Albert held her when he carried her from the fear room all those months ago…when she first knew that she was in love with him, that she wanted to spend her life with him, that she wanted to be his one and only. This was not the way she had felt about Wayne, of course. She was in love with Albert, not Wayne, but by being held that way, she’d felt a little of Albert in Wayne. They shared inside them all the best and most important things. She’d felt his strength, his courage, his compassion. Even with her head pounding with such pain that she could barely focus her eyes, she had felt those things. She knew at that moment, without any doubt, that Wayne was a great man.

  But now he was dead and her heart was aching in a way that she would not have believed just a few short hours ago.

  Ahead of them, Nicole and Olivia walked side by side. Nicole had finally looked down at her hand. There was a painful hole in her palm and her flesh had been burned by the fire that belched from the stone altar at the top of the tower. Her middle and index fingers were blistered, as were her palm and wrist. Her entire hand was bright red. The pain was constant, both throbbing and stinging, and she had nothing with which to dull it.

  Olivia looked at her, her eyes falling on those injuries. She winced. “Are you going to be okay?”

  Nicole nodded. She had to be. She didn’t have much choice now. God only knew where they were or how far they had traveled from home. There wasn’t much chance that this tunnel was going to lead them to a hospital emergency room. She lowered her hand again and kept walking, trying to ignore the pain.

  Olivia did not press the matter. She turned and stared into the gloom ahead of them once more. She could feel the wet trails that her tears had left down her cheeks, could still taste the salt on her lips. She felt numb. Wayne had been her hero, her Superman, courageous and strong and, it had seemed, impenetrable. He risked his life to save her, gave his all to protect her, just as he’d promised he would…but now he was gone.

  She kept thinking that she would wake up, that any minute now the dream would end and she would be back in her bed, back in the Cube, her alarm clock buzzing, alerting her that it was time for her early class. Misty Redler would roll over with a grumble, her class not for another hour, and she would realize that there was no Wayne Oakley and never had been. There was no Albert Cross. There was no Brandy Rudman or Nicole Smart or Andrea Prophett. Nick and Trish were not lying dead somewhere inside a dark and empty dormitory. They were alive and well and she still had to break off her dead-end relationship with Andy. The world was still turning mundanely and her life was as it always had been because there was no way that things like this could exist. The only worlds besides the one in which she lived were Heaven and Hell and God would not have made a place like the Wood or a creature like the Caggo.

  But there would be no waking from this nightmare. Her aching feet were real. Her broken heart was real. These people around her were real. It was so much for her to take. She had actually fallen in love with Wayne Oakley, fallen for him like any girl would fall in love with the man who saved her life, who rode into a dark nightmare as if on a great white steed and carried her away to where everything was okay, to where nothing could harm her.

  She could not help but wonder if she had killed Wayne. If she had not insisted on coming with him, on helping him, on seeing with her own eyes what all this terror had been about, Wayne might still be alive. He would not have had to wait for her. Nicole would have gone through that opening after Albert. And Wayne would have had time to get away. He would not still have been standing there when…

  Fresh tears spilled down her cheeks. She couldn’t help it. Poor Wayne. Why couldn’t it have been her back there? Why couldn’t she have taken his place? He had already saved her life. It would have been worth it to save his in return.

  It just wasn’t fair.

  Andrea walked ahead of them all. She did not want to face them, did not want to look at them. Tears streamed down her face. She couldn’t make herself stop crying.

  One of them had actually died down here. The reality of that terrified her, but more powerful than the fear was the hurt. Her heart had broken at the sight of Wayne lying there, telling them to go on, to leave him. He actually told them not to tell anyone what happened to him. He wanted them to let him pass into mystery, to vanish without a word.

  He’d been right, of course. Nobody would believe them when they returned home. People would probably accuse them. It wasn’t fair, but that’s the way the ignorant world worked. People refused to believe in anything, much less anything as fantastic as…all this.

  Wayne’s family would never know what became of him. They would never know if he was really dead. They would never be at peace. And they certainly would never know that he died a hero, that he gave his life protecting others. Didn’t they at least deserve that much?

  Would it have been easier if they hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye, she wondered. Would it have seemed less cruel if she had not watched him hand his flashlight to Albert? If she had not had the chance to say goodbye to him, if the thing that speared him through had pierced his heart and dropped him instantly dead, if he had not told her that he was glad to have met her, would it have hurt any less? Would her heart still have been so br
oken?

  A part of her just wanted to stop, to sit down on this cold, hard floor and not take another step, to cry until the pain was washed away. But what was the point? Wayne was already dead. Soon, the rest of them might be too. They knew nothing about what awaited them in the darkness ahead.

  Albert put his good arm around Brandy and squeezed her. It was hard, but they had to keep moving. They had to push on. Wayne would not have wanted them to give up on account of him. That would have made his death pointless. He might as well have sat down and let the Caggo kill them all.

  He would not let it be that way. He would not let it be for nothing. Wayne knew what he was doing when he made them go first through the opening in the tunnel wall. He knew the risk he was taking, and Albert knew that he would have done it no differently if given the chance again.

  He promised Wayne he would take care of these four young women, that he would protect them and lead them safely to their mysterious destination. And he swore to himself now that nothing as meaningless as a broken arm would stop him from keeping that promise.

  Chapter 2

  The Temple of the Blind was more than any of them had ever dreamed. But all of it, from the first sentinel statues with their grotesque proportions and empty, featureless faces, to the tower with its vast belly full of fire, was only gray stone and shadow. What awaited them at the end of this final passage was far more.

  A soft glow greeted them as they approached, like the first light of a new day. But it was no sunrise. They emerged from the labyrinth and stood beneath a sky that was as black and as empty as the tunnels they had left behind them. Rising into this pitch-black sky was a great, gray mountain. The light was coming not from the horizon, lending hope to some distant sun, but from the mountain itself. Columns of fire blazed from hundreds of unseen vents in the stone, illuminating its rocky face in an angry undulation of light and shadow, and from its highest peak spewed a towering inferno of orange and yellow flames.

  More fires rose up from cracks in the ground on either side of them, scattering the shadows at their feet and lending a dreadful hue to the path on which they walked. It was as if they had finally descended all the way down into the blazing pits of hell.

  “Where are we?” asked Nicole. “What is this place?”

  “The Temple of the Blind,” Albert replied, still staring up at the burning mountain. It was the most frightful place he had ever seen, far more terrifying than any scene from any movie. “It’s inside there. All of it. This is what it looks like from outside.”

  Brandy gazed up at the mountain, confused. “But the Temple of the Blind is underground…”

  “In our world, maybe. Not here.”

  Andrea turned in a circle, her wide eyes taking everything in. “We’re in a different world?”

  “We’re in the Wood,” said Olivia, her voice edged with unmistakable anxiety.

  “How can you tell?” asked Nicole.

  “It has the same sky.”

  All of them lifted their faces toward the darkness above them. It could have been nothing more than an overcast night sky, but it wasn’t. Peering up, they could somehow tell that it was utterly empty. An eternal abyss filled the heavens here, and looking into it was deeply unsettling.

  “I don’t like it here,” Brandy decided.

  “You don’t get used to it,” Olivia assured her. She recalled cowering beneath the fallen night trees, staring out into this perpetually empty darkness, trying to decide if a place this black could really exist or if she had been struck blind.

  Last time she looked into this sky, Wayne came to rescue her. It broke her heart to know that he wouldn’t be coming again.

  Albert scanned the landscape. A pool of rippling water stood between them and the rocky terrain at the base of the mountain. The smooth, right-angle edges of the temple’s interior were not apparent here. This stone was raw, rough, indistinguishable from any other natural formation except for the fire belching from it.

  These flames also illuminated the road ahead. It surged from narrow fissures in the stone, hot columns of fire reaching for the sky, lighting the way so that, for the first time since he descended into the steam tunnels the previous evening, he did not need a flashlight to see.

  But Albert found little comfort in the light. Inside that mountain was coiled every passage they had traveled during the night, and countless more they never glimpsed. He thought of all that they’d already been through, all that they’d accomplished. And still there was no end in sight. How much farther would they be forced to go? How much more would they have to endure?

  Andrea moved closer to the nearest flaming vent, her hands in front of her, cautiously testing the heat. “At least we can warm up out here.”

  “I think I warmed up enough back there on that tower,” Nicole decided. She could still feel the baking heat that had beat down on them as they fled the burning structure. It felt like sunburn on her back and shoulders.

  Andrea felt that, too, but it was still nice to know that they now had the option of warming up. They didn’t have that inside the temple.

  “So what now?” Brandy asked.

  Albert looked at her, his eyes washing over her pretty features. He couldn’t stop thinking about how he’d almost lost her back there. “We could use some rest, I think. Help me get the first aid kit out of my backpack. We need to look at Nicole’s hand.”

  “Right,” said Nicole, annoyed. “The guy with the broken arm is worried about the girl with the scratch on her hand.” She’d been trying to hide her injury, determined not to let anyone worry about her. But very little ever got by Albert.

  “You kind of stabbed your hand,” Andrea recalled. “All the way through.”

  Nicole rolled her eyes. “Not helping.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Let’s just all take a break for a little bit,” Albert said, wincing as Brandy eased the backpack off his shoulders. “We’ll get everyone patched up.”

  Olivia stepped toward them. “I can help. I’m not hurt.”

  “Can’t tell it by looking,” observed Andrea, staring at her back. “You’re covered in bruises.”

  Olivia looked down at herself. She was still dirty from crossing that awful mud chamber, making it difficult to see exactly how badly she’d been battered, but even so, it was obvious that her arms and legs were spotted with black and purple bruises from her ordeal in the forest. Her belly, too. There was even a blemish the size of her hand on her left breast. She had little doubt that her back looked equally bad. Probably worse.

  There were large, blue-black splotches spreading from around the two bite marks. The one on her thigh had grown to the size of a grapefruit. On her arms and legs were a number of long, skinny bruises. These, she realized with something that was almost horror, were finger marks. That was where those zombie things had grabbed her and held her down, their hard, bony fingers pressing into her soft flesh with bizarre, desperate strength. She remembered lying there on the cold ground as they swarmed over her, ready to tear her limb from limb and eat her alive.

  The memory gave her a hard shudder and sent gooseflesh racing across her entire body. She couldn’t help but glance around, half-sure that the shambling dead had surrounded her again and were even now closing in, determined to feast upon her flesh.

  “We can switch out those dirty bandages,” Nicole suggested.

  Olivia nodded, shaking away the awful thoughts. That was probably a good idea. The mud from that room had turned the gauze on her arm and shoulder black. If she survived this day and didn’t contract a serious infection, she’d count herself twice lucky.

  “Let me see your hand,” Albert said as he eased himself down onto the ground.

  “It’s nothing,” Nicole assured him. “Take care of yourself first.”

  But Albert was determined. “Let me see it.”

  “Seriously, stop worrying about me. I’ll be fine.”

  “I reserve the right to worry about the people I care about. Now show me your hand.”