Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  Several hours into the trees, Unctulu brought them to a sudden halt. It was not for weariness’ sake, he knew, for somehow the foul, ungainly man seemed inexhaustible. It was for another reason.

  “Dawn.” Unctulu crooked one finger at the forest canopy. “It’ll be here soon. We camp now. We march again after noon.”

  “What season is it?” he asked.

  “Summer. Late summer. Can’t you tell? Everything has a stink about it.”

  That’s the not the season, he wanted to say. That’s you.

  He trudged to an impossibly large tree, an oak whose trunk was twenty arms wide, and he lay against it. “Why only the pack horse?” he groused. “Why not mounts for each of us?”

  Unctulu stripped the bags from the horse and patted the weary beast in its rump. “One died,” he grunted. “The other, well…we ran out of food. A fine meal, it made.”

  He regretted having asked. Heavy-lidded, he watched Unctulu erect two tents and strike up a meager fire. The loathsome man worked harder than Archmyr thought possible, all the while gnawing on nameless foodstuffs from his bag.

  “Poor warlord, you must be starving,” the fiend said after finishing the camp.

  “Famished.”

  “Being dead is tiresome work.” Unctulu smirked.

  “If I haven’t begged for supper, it’s because I don’t want to guess what manner of maggot-broth and rot-meat you two consider food.”

  “Ah, this grub, so tasty,” Unctulu burbled. “Thresh, bless his empty chest, won’t partake. These treats are just for you and me.”

  The fat man tossed him a brace of unidentifiable meat, the lump landing beside his boot. Grimacing, he lifted the brace to his nose and sniffed. “Horsemeat.” He scowled. “Back from death, and the best I earn is horsemeat.”

  “Unless you’re as good a hunter as you were a murderer, I suggest you savor it,” said Unctulu.

  Too hungry to deny himself, he sank his teeth into the meat. It felt so very beneath him, so below the standards of his former station. He had been a warrior, but he remembered that he had also been fastidious, given to the freshest meats, the warmest breads, and the finest liquors of whatever nation he was busy laying to waste. With each bite of the meat his heart beat harder with hate, and with every glance at Unctulu, he dreamed a new death for the squat, sardonic man.

  Him, he thought with a smile. Yes, him. Him I’ll gut first. When my place in the world is secure again, I’ll find a tree heavy enough hold him. And I’ll hang him, feet first, until his blood runs out his neck and his color is the same as mine.

  That’s right.

  That’s better.

  Now I remember who I am.

  Midnight’s Mistress

  Peppered with perspiration, Andelusia laid in her bed and cooled. Her cause of coldness was not the frigid, rain-scented breeze slinking through her tower window. Nor was it the lack of heat in her bedchamber, for she was long accustomed to living with her hearth unlit.

  No, tonight the cause is deeper.

  Her lover rolled away and slid his hand off her thigh. She felt his warmth leaving, her heart slowing to a steady thud. With her arms laid flat at her sides and her knees bent toward the ceiling, she closed her eyes, resigned to a truth yet unspoken.

  The Nightness has returned.

  Her ravisher, young and oblivious, looked content enough. He rested on his pillow and sighed, and she became ever more withdrawn. “You’re everything,” he murmured. “Tonight…I don’t know…I think I love you.”

  She said nothing. In the aftermath of lovemaking, her body hummed, but her soul remained unmoved. She trembled as she felt the shadows swarming in, and tried not to let her lover notice. She knew her body was what Marid wanted, not my mind.

  If he desired her so, Marid could hardly be blamed. The years had been far from kind to Andelusia’s heart, but in the flesh she remained as rare and exquisite a woman as any the world knew. She lay naked and melancholic upon her bed, and yet her beauty was nothing less than transcendent. Her eyes, a sharp, almost luminous shade of grey, looked the color of moonlit clouds racing across the sea. Her raven locks, black and lustrous as shining obsidian, framed her cheeks like luxurious dark curtains. More than a decade removed from Furyon, she was as lithe and fair as a girl many years her junior, a virtue nothing, not even the arrival of the Nightness, could diminish.

  And yet, for all her beauty, for all that she had survived, she felt no happiness now. Lying amid the white sheets and crumpled pillows, she could not have cared if she were as wrinkled as dry parchment, or as ugly as a clump of mud from Muthemnal’s gardens.

  Starry-eyed from his conquest, Marid swung his legs off the edge of her bed and played his toes absently across the carpet below. “May I close the window?” He glanced over his shoulder. “It’s getting cold in here.”

  “Yes.”

  Bounding to the great window, beyond which the midnight sky was seamlessly black, young Marid swung the shutters shut. He looked proud with himself for having locked the wind outside, and with a smile he slid back into his breeches and dawdled at the side of her bed. Swaying in the room’s fragile light, beaming down at her as though the world and everything in it belonged to him, he looked every bit a Thillrian lord.

  I should love him, she thought. Not his fault I cannot.

  Marid; young, lean, and darkly-coiffed with unabashed mischief in his eyes, grinned as he dressed. Handsome. Clever. And foolish. He was the sort of lad many young ladies of Muthemnal desired, and yet his attentions existed only for her. Love, he calls it. I wish I remembered what it feels like.

  She opened the shutter to her bedside lamp. In the soft yellow light, she looked up to Marid, stilling him. “Marid.” She said his name with none of her previous passion. “We cannot do this anymore.”

  “You mean not in secret anymore, right?” He was slow to grasp her meaning. “You mean we’ll tell the Duke, and the skulking will end?”

  She tugged the bed sheet over her breasts, her wavy locks raining like ebon silk across her face. “I mean I cannot be with you. These nights…they might be enough for some. But not for me. Not anymore.”

  “Then we’ll announce ourselves,” he declared with a fool’s grin. “We’ll be together in a proper way. I’m not as poor as I look, you know. I could join King Tycus’ guard. We could marry and move to the countryside. You always said it was a dream of yours, no? To live in the meadows, where the rivers run slow and the sky goes forever? Those were your words, not mine. I can give us that, and sooner than you think.”

  She felt no cruelty in her heart, no malice meant for Marid. His offer touched her enough that she considered it, if only for a breath. Drawing her knees up to her chin and wrapping her arms around her sheet-covered calves, she lost her gaze in the shadows at the far side of the room.

  “You do not know me.”

  “But I do,” he protested. “I know plenty. I know you love nights like tonight, when the clouds come in and the sea smacks your tower walls. I know you love Jix’s gardens, tilled fresh in the spring, full of every flower in the world by summer. And I know you love to read. You practically live in the Duke’s library, nosing though books nobody else cares about. Don’t tell me I don’t know you, Ande. I know you plenty, more than most.”

  “Marid,” she cut him off, “You cannot understand. Something is different now.”

  “Well then make me understand.” He plunked down beside her with his damningly disarming smile. “I’ll listen all night if I have to. I’ll hide under the bed when the maidservants come. I’ll sit right here for one day or twenty, whatever it takes. I’ll not leave this room. You’ll have to kill me to get me to go.”

  She almost could have given in, almost, but not quite. She heard the wind buffeting against the shutters, and it called to her. She felt the cold slip through, soothing her far faster than Marid could ever hope to. She wished her lamp were shuttered and the Pages Black spread flat upon her lap, that she might fall asleep and dream o
f nothing but forever soaring through the night. These were feelings Marid could never understand. These were her secrets, not to be known by anyone.

  “What if I were to tell you something?”

  “Tell me,” he said. “Anything.”

  “What if I were to say that the warlock Thillria despised, the man who held this entire nation captive, was my father?”

  “You jest.”

  “Mine, Marid. The marauder of Sallow, my own flesh and blood. Orumna’s slayer, my father through and through. And what if I told you I love nothing but the night, not you, not Ghurk, not even my lost friends, no other but Mother Moon and the shadows beneath her watch?”

  “Fibber.” He made a face. “You’re no such thing, not my Ande. The warlock’s daughter, you say. Ha! You’re making things up to get me to leave. You’re tired, nothing more. And who wouldn’t be…after what we just did?”

  She closed her eyes to concentrate. “If you will not believe that, will you believe me when I tell you I cannot love you, and that I am too old for you, you who have only seen twenty summers?”

  He winced. She hated herself for wounding him. But I have to do it.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “Just tonight, we…and what about…what’s the matter, Ande?”

  “I long for a life that is not this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I desire things no man of Thillria can ever give me. These nights together, as much as I have let myself be lost in them, cannot continue. We will not be lovers anymore. I will not be lovers with anyone. You and I may walk as friends, but this…this involvement we have will never lead to anything good. I am lucky you have not left me with child. I want no children. I fear they would turn out like me.”

  Marid, young as he was, guessed at last that it was no game. He shivered, his eyes clouded with wordless grief. She glimpsed tears welling in his eyes, and her heart felt near to breaking.

  “You’re right.” He swallowed his tears back. “I don’t understand. I’ve seen you like this before, and I said nothing because I was afraid. I only hope it’s nothing to do with me.”

  “So you accept my request? You will not knock on my door again? You will not try to kiss me when no one is looking, and you will not slip notes under my door?”

  She sensed the struggle within him. She gulped, sick with the things she had said. When he sucked in a deep breath and smiled, she felt sicker still.

  “Oh, I promise plenty.” He snared her hand and squeezed her fingers. “I promise not to do these things...” He released her hand. “…for one week only. And then, if you still say you won’t have me, I’ll leave you be for two weeks, then three, then four. But I’ll not give up on you, not ever. You say I’m young, but you’re hardly older. You make up stories, lies to let me down gently, but I know what I feel, and I know on some nights you feel it too.”

  With that, he threw on his shirt and guardsman’s vest, slipped back into his boots, and slung his sword through the steel ring on his belt. He straightened his hair with two licks and a run of his fingers, and he gave her the same beguiling smile he had when he first caught her eye many months ago.

  “So then, my sweet, I leave you to your thoughts.” He planted a kiss on her hand. “Remember, one week from tonight, I’ll be back. Unless the Duke reassigns me or you spill poison in my wine, you’ll find me at your door again.”

  “Marid…”

  “No. You need your time. I understand. I’ll give it to you. But if you think I’m devoted only to what we do here in the dark, you’re wrong. I’m devoted to you, Ande. I love you. Goodnight.”

  He left her no time to counter. Striding to the door, he unlocked it and peeked outside. A last wink and a quick bow, and he vanished, clicking her door shut behind him.

  Marid, Marid, Marid.

  What am I supposed to do now?

  Long after his leaving, she sat up in bed. She blew out her lamplight, delivering her room into utter darkness. The wind, gliding between the shutters like a soft-toed thief, drew out the last of her body’s warmth. Shrugging off her sheets and gliding naked across the floor, she reopened the shutters. Hers was the highest room in the tallest tower in Maewir Castle, the closest to the sea. On nights like these her chamber became the weathervane for the entire city, suffering the worst winds, the most invasive mists, and the bitterest chills. She had known as much when she chose the room years ago. She rarely regretted her decision.

  She set her palms upon the stone sill and leaned outward. The night felt buoyant, uplifting her, cleansing her of the angst of sending Marid away. She kissed the wind and relished the dampness as it settled on her skin. Any other person would have been blind in such absolute darkness, but with the Nightness drowning her she saw as though it were only now twilight.

  And what a beautiful twilight it is.

  Watching the waves foam against the crags below Maewir, she smiled. She wished she had the courage to leap into the sea and frolic in the deeps. I could do it. Right now. No one would ever know. She could have plunged to the bottom of the ocean, a slip of a shadow, needing no earthly breath to sustain her. She could have stretched her arms and sped into the sky like a dagger-winged bird, her darkness blotting out the stars. These were but a few of the powers at her command, gleaned from her secret study of the Pages Black.

  And yet something held her back.

  Beyond Marid, beyond the comforts of her privileged life, she had reasons not to give in to the Nightness.

  Rellen.

  He was gone now, slain by the enemy. But he was hardly forgotten. Her last promise to him had been that she would never submit to the shadow, and for as hard a vow as it was to keep she hoped to keep it nonetheless. For I will always love him.

  Saul.

  Though long absent, Saul remained her truest friend. Not a day had gone by on which she had not stolen a glance at Muthemnal’s courtyard gate, hopeful to see him trot into view, his stallion burdened by a thousand books. Even now she remembered him with a smile. He will be back. I know it. He has not forgotten me.

  And...

  Yet another reason existed, a light in the dark to fuel her hope. Her dalliances with Marid had somewhat subdued her memory of Garrett Croft, but not truly. Garrett, her savior many times over, felt all but lost to her. For all she knew, he is dead, captured, or returned to Mormist. It does not matter. Not knowing his fate, she had dreamed and daydreamed no less often of him. Thoughts of him were particularly strong on nights like these, when Marid was gone and the nighttime clouds conquered the stars. If it was foolish to hope he might come back, she did nothing to quell it. He had been her guardian, her soldier, the one mystery she had never unlocked.

  Silly girl. She patted her palms on the sill. Better to hope for Saul. Better to find someone else to love.

  With the memories of her friends fresh on her mind, her longing to escape into the night subsided. Lucid, momentarily liberated from the Nightness, she latched the shutters and went back to bed. She heard a storm quickening outside, but she ignored it. The Pages Black, her secret grimoire, whispered her name from its hiding place in her wardrobe, but she clucked her tongue and tugged the bed sheet up to her chin.

  Not tonight. She rolled on her side and cradled a pillow in her arms. Tonight I win.

  Into sweet oblivion, she tumbled. At first, no trouble of the world dared follow. She fell like a feather into realms deep and dreamless, and slept content as a bear in winter.

  But like most nights, her serenity did not last.

  Her first dream began well after midnight. In it she saw a moon, not a pale, silver sphere, but a dark, lusterless orb roving through the heavens. It was the second moon, whose existence she had learned of while memorizing the Pages Black. In her dream it clung low to the twilight sky, devouring the stars as it moved. As she gaped, she saw a sudden flash of Ur fire, a fume of hot shadow, and she witnessed a sliver of the Black Moon break off and fall to earth.

  Ages ago, she knew. I am seeing his
tory.

  She feared the moon might fully break, that its inhabitants might escape and set fire to the earth, but the expected implosion did not occur. Alone, the black sliver speared through the dimming sky, skewering the earth in a place unknowable.

  When the sliver struck, she awoke. Sweat beaded her skin, her hair sticking to her face in damp tangles. The storm outside sounded its angriest, and sleep for the rest of the night was hard to come by.

  * * *

  She awoke the next morn. Though only the first week of summer, it hardly felt so any longer. Something is the matter, she sensed. The season has changed.

  She dressed in a white blouse and cracked the shutters open. Father Sun was eerily absent, sheathed behind row after endless row of ragged, shiftless clouds. The wan light reaching her room felt fragmented and cheerless, carrying no more warmth than a corpse’s gaze. She stared from her window as though she was a prisoner in her tower, and she understood.

  Summer is gone.

  The cold…the wind…the clouds.

  What have I done?

  She stood for a time, the wind catching in her hair. She might have lingered longer, but a knock sounded at her door, and she knew by its tenor it was not Marid.

  “Come in.” She closed the shutters.

  So entered Aera, a maidservant of some forty years. Aera’s cheeks were scarlet, her white kerchief wound tightly in her greying hair. Aera was Duke Ghurlain’s most amicable servant and among Andelusia’s favorite friends in Muthemnal, but today the poor woman wore a dismal frown. A shattered saucer of milk lay in pieces at her feet, having tumbled from the breakfast tray in her hands.

  “Oh, sorry, dearie.” Aera set the tray on the floor and gathered the pieces of saucer. “It’s this cold. I’ve gone and dropped your morning milk.”

  She moved to help, but Aera had none of it. With shooing hands, the maidservant held her at bay while whisking the broken pieces of saucer into her blue apron’s front pouch.

  “My job. Not yours, m’lady.” Aera rose after toweling the floor dry. “Clumsy me, clumsy me. This cold’s to blame, you know. My bones were hardly used to summer, and here come these new shivers, biting me through the windows. My frosted fingers slipped, and you see the mess I made.”