Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  It was Nephenia who answered, crying shrilly into the darkness. “Down here! Down here! Help us!”

  A pause, and the voice let loose again. “Garrett? Doesn’t sound like you. Whoever you are, take the rope. We already dropped it. Hurry! Our torch is dying!”

  “Rope?” Nephenia whispered. “What rope? Is it true? Are we saved? Or is Wrail tormenting us?”

  “Not Wrail,” he said. “But whether friend or foe, I cannot say.”

  He reached into the darkness. The voice had spoken true. A rope, strong and slack, hung from the void in the ceiling. Only partly trusting, he closed his fingers around it and pressed it into Nephenia’s palm.

  “They mean to pull us up,” he said. “The choice is yours. If we go, you go first. If you fall, I will catch you. But if they take only one of us from here, I want it to be you.”

  He heard her breath catch in the air. He felt her muscles tense beneath his touch, her calmness breaking. “Go,” he told her. “If you reach the top, lower the rope and I will follow. If this is a trick, fight them.”

  “Fight them?” She shivered.

  “Push them down here.”

  He felt her tension ease. She exhaled, cool and calm as ever, and he imagined her cracking a smile.

  “Pull me up!” she cried out to the voice. “I have the rope!”

  In the next moment, he was alone. He heard her whisper a goodbye, and then she was gone, rising up through the tunnel. The man behind the voice is powerful, he imagined. To lift her so. But then he feared for her, doubting his decision to let her go.

  Many moments of agony passed. He waited and waited, hearing only the slaps of her bare feet against the tunnel’s slick sides. All sounds grew fainter, and soon he stood in absolute silence, the shadows closing in.

  He breathed, and the Ur voices came crashing in.

  He saw them in his mind, shadows with starlit eyes floating across a ruined plain, black towers crowding him on all sides.

  Stay, they urged him. Stay until the end.

  Ours will pluck yours out and give yours life everlasting.

  Stay, and ours will save yours for last.

  Sleep in the Null, and listen to the world burn.

  Nephenia’s cries broke the voices’ hold of him. “Garrett!” she shouted. “Garrett, we’re saved! Grab the rope! We’re sending it back down!”

  He paused for one breath, then another. The Ur were nearest now. He felt them smoking from the walls, the floor, and from the black pillar beside him. Whether real or imagined, their hands pried at his insides, tugging him in all directions. He felt rooted to the floor as if by glue, utterly vulnerable in Nephenia’s absence.

  Stay… they uttered. Yours is finished. Hers has begun. Depart the world. Join ours forever in death.

  Descending from above, the rope hit the floor beside him. Without it he might never have awoken. As it coiled on the floor, he escaped the lulling of the Ur long enough to know that now is my only chance. He snared the rope and tugged it twice. Mercifully, someone on the other end tugged back.

  “I am ready,” he called.

  He climbed hand-over-hand, assisted by a powerful pull from above. Just as his feet cleared the edge of the ceiling, he sensed the shadows swell beneath him. Half-imagined, half-real, the Null Chamber turned blacker than black, filling to its abyssal brim with a broiling cloud of nightmarish darkness. Like a grave drowning in mud, the shadows gathered at his ankles and threatened to suck him down.

  Gritting his teeth, he scaled the rope one tortuous breath at a time. A light appeared above him. It was distant at first, a scarlet mote wavering in the void. He saw the top of the rope pulled by two powerful hands, and a firelight held high by another. His shoulders burned with the strain, but still he hurried, scaling to the top.

  A moment more of desperation, and he pulled himself over the pit’s edge. The darkness swelled one final time beneath him, and then the voices went silent.

  “Free...” He hunkered on his hands and knees, panting like a dog. “Get me to the sun.”

  He clenched and unclenched his fists, relieving the fire in his muscles. Rising slowly, he thrice shut his eyes and thrice reopened them, each time expecting to reawaken in the Null Chamber. But no. This is no dream.

  “Garrett?” Nephenia’s face looked ruddy in the torchlight. “Are you hurt?”

  Dazed, he fixated upon his rescuers. Standing beside him was a woman he did not know. She was a dark-haired Romaldarian, young and diminutive, her nut-brown cheeks doubtlessly owing their color to a summer spent toiling in the sun. He gazed into her eyes and knew at once: she is no agent of Wrail’s.

  He looked next to the man, who pulled me from doom. The bear of a man wore a shaggy brown beard, with short curls of earthen-hued hair and a glint of goodness in his eye.

  I know him.

  Saul.

  Do not ask how.

  “You old dog,” he grunted. “You found me.”

  Saul of Elrain, sturdy as the stone beneath his feet, set aside his quarterstaff and clasped Garrett’s hand. It was a familiar feeling, the crushing grasp of his truest friend, and he returned it as best he could.

  “Wasn’t easy.” Saul steadied him. “But I had help. The hills rang with your name. ‘Go to Archaeus,’ the people told me. ‘Free the Hunter.’ But neither they nor I can claim the glory of finding you. It was little Mykla here who helped me when my search died. Her former masters’ tongues were loose. She knew where they put you, and she brought me down here.”

  Saul gestured to the dark-haired girl. Mykla nervously held both men’s gazes, her dark, bobbing curls failing to disguise her fear.

  “Mykla. Thank you.” He nodded to her.

  “Yes, m’lord. Glad to help.” Her voice was but a whisper.

  Saul allowed the moment to pass, and then cleared his throat. “Garrett,” His smile was thin and worrisome. “Only the tiniest hope brought me here. I can scarcely believe you’re alive.”

  “Aye.”

  “There’s much I wish to ask, so many questions that need answering,” said Saul. “It’d take a week for us to say all that needs to be said, but it must wait. We have to leave, the sooner the better.”

  “Lead the way.”

  Saul nodded and turned on his heels.

  The procession away from the Null Chamber began.

  Trailing Saul and Mykla, Garrett walked through the tunnel and entered the grand corridor beyond. The Ur presence dwindled at his back, but he felt no freer. The open darkness remained tangibly thick, the shadows threatening to snuff Mykla’s torch and douse any living thing who dared wander out of the light. He felt weak, wary, and hungry. He saw Nephenia stagger, and he knew she felt the same.

  “Is this happening?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” he answered. “It must be. Saul will explain.”

  “Who is he? Why did he come?”

  “An old friend. As for why…only time will tell.”

  “I’m tired, Garrett.” She took his arm. “Everything hurts. My eyes especially. It’s too much, too fast. And this tunnel…this place…it’s like we’re days beneath the earth, not hours.”

  “I know. I feel it. We are watched. By what, I cannot say.”

  Guided by Mykla’s meek torchlight, the procession continued. The deeper into the dark he walked, the more he felt as though something was pursuing him. He clutched Nephenia’s hand and marched unsteadily forward, many times glancing into the darkness behind him.

  The voices. Real, but not. Ghosts of ghosts. The memories of the Ur, but not the Ur themselves.

  Or maybe I am wrong.

  Maybe they are real.

  At length, his faith in Saul was rewarded. A door appeared in the distance, a shadowed slab of wood burnished by Mykla’s torchlight. Its hinges were broken, its planks splintered. He knew at a glance it was his prison door, the same the Wolfwolde had locked him behind so long ago.

  “Not far now.” Saul halted at the door. “The worst is behind us.”
<
br />   “How’s that?” said Nephenia.

  “Aye.” Garrett rolled his shoulders. “Wrail and the Wolde, soldiers and swords. The worst lies ahead.”

  Saul made a grim face. “You’ve both been under too long. The Wolde is gone. They left you and milady behind.”

  “Everyone’s gone?” asked Nephenia.

  “Everyone,” said Saul.

  She doubted it. “But where’d they go?”

  Saul’s eyes lost all color. “I wanted to wait before telling you.” He shook his head. “But then, I suppose I doubted I’d ever find you.”

  “Tell us,” said Garrett. “Tell us now.”

  “Please,” Nephenia begged.

  Saul squeezed his quarterstaff until his knuckles went white. “This won’t mean much to Mykla or the Princess.”

  “Tell us,” Garrett repeated.

  The shadows in Saul’s pupils went wide and black, his face suddenly gaunt. Garrett had never seen him so grave, nor so fearful.

  “Grimwain has gone back to Thillria.”

  I might have guessed, he thought. “He did not go alone,” he surmised.

  “No indeed,” said Saul. “This time it’s no warlock following him, but the Wolfwolde. They’ve more than ten thousand Romaldarians, and many thousand Yrul. An army, armed to the teeth, with a Thillrian warlord leading them. A man with a heart blacker even than Grimwain, they say.”

  “This was inevitable.”

  “Yes.” Saul sagged. “And I know why.”

  “Why?” Nephenia interrupted. “I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to invade Thillria? It’s all rocks and pale, skinny fishermen, or so we Yrul believe.”

  “He wants to finish what he started,” Garrett exhaled.

  Saul nodded. “Andelusia was right all along. Grim wants to wake the Ur. We need your help to stop him, Garrett. No one else understands.”

  He listened hard to Saul’s words, though only one of them rang brightly in his mind.

  Andelusia.

  He remembered her. A chill coursed through his bones, a flutter in his chest, an echo of many things unfinished. “Ande.” He squeezed his eyes shut. The one I dreamed of.

  “She lives,” said Saul. “She wants to see you. When I decided to look for you, it was for her sake, though I admit now the reason is…different.”

  “Well and good.” He felt his heart pump harder than before. “It is settled.”

  “You don’t need rest?” worried Saul.

  “No. We escape Archaeus now. We leave tonight.”

  “But Garrett—” Nephenia tried.

  “No more questions,” he commanded.

  His blood battering his ribs, he plucked Mykla’s torch away and pushed through the door. The hallway beyond was black and empty. He expected to see the hundreds of coffins he had seen before, but they are gone.

  “The dead.” He waved Mykla’s torch. “The grave-boxes are missing.”

  Saul stopped beside him. “The what?”

  “The dead,” he said again. “This hall brimmed with them. Hundreds upon hundreds. Even the Wolde hated it.”

  Saul cracked his lips to ask a question, but Garrett was already marching. He stalked from wall to dusty wall, seeing only planks of wood and tiny hummocks of gravedust where once the coffins had been stacked. No good purpose, he knew. Grimwain and the dead.

  Alone with his thoughts, he stalked in guarded silence until he reached the stair at the hall’s beginning. “You say there are no Wolde.” He lifted the torch. “You say all of them are gone.”

  Saul regarded his quarterstaff, many-notched and stained with scarlet. “There were only four left,” Saul explained. “They never saw me coming.”

  “And the rest?” Nephenia narrowed her eyes.

  Saul gestured with his staff to the stairs. “As I said, they marched for Thillria. Every last one. Grim’s occupation is ended. He never wanted to be king. He only wanted what Roma and Yrul had to offer. Blood and soldiers.”

  And I failed to stop him, thought Garrett.

  He took to the stairs. Just as Saul promised, he encountered no Wolde, only the emptiness they had left behind. From hall to ash-covered hall, from each dreary corridor to the next, he walked briskly through the fortress. He swept up dusty stairwells, pushed through black curtains, and walked rooms whose floors were bare and whose walls had been stripped to their stones. And still he found nothing, no sign of the Master, of Wrail and his minions.

  Ahead of everyone, he crossed a last shadowed room and reached the fortress entrance. I remember this place. As if I had walked it only yesterday. Never minding the weakness in his legs, the pain in his ribs, and the emptiness in his belly, he cut across the room ahead of the others. At last he entered a hallway, shoved through a door, and ducked beneath a half-raised iron cullis. Free of the fortress, he stood like a statue at the edge of a vast and blighted courtyard. The Wolde pits were dry and dead, and the earth scorched black, but none of Grimwain’s men are here.

  Here at last he felt free, for here the darkness came to an end.

  The hour was dawn, and he walked into the winter air, which ruffled his shirt and set a chill into his bones. Like home, he imagined. Like Mormist.

  “Garrett?” Saul halted beside him. “About the dead. What did you mean?”

  “Look,” he interrupted. “The sun is rising.”

  Father Sun broke the far horizon, glorious despite the season. Archaeus’ towers and white marble domes paled, still and silent and beautiful. Though the sunlight was fragile and moonlike beyond the grey winter clouds, it was as inspiring to him as though it were midsummer. He stood and stared heavenward. Only then did he truly believe he was alive.

  “I didn’t know how much I missed it.” Nephenia joined him.

  “Nor I.”

  “It feels like a dream.”

  “Or the end of a nightmare.”

  * * *

  That night, beneath a black winter sky in the wilderness beyond Archaeus, he sat beside a crackling fire. The wind howled across the lake, battering the barren trees. The cold gnawed through the blankets Saul had given him. And yet he felt more alive than in months. Or years, he thought. Or ever.

  In a nearby thicket, Saul tended to a pair of Yrul stallions. The shaggy white beasts, their manes thick as ropes, looked unbothered by the cold. He wondered how many weeks Saul had traveled to find him, and what dangers he endured. As Saul worked, Mykla hunkered close to the fire. The poor girl shivered beneath mounds of fur, her frosted breaths burning away in the campfire flames. Our silent hero.

  “Garrett?” Nephenia shivered beside him, unknowingly ending his contentment.

  “Yes.” He gazed at her. Shrouded in wolfskins, touched only mildly by the fire’s light, she looks no less beautiful.

  “Where have you gone?” she asked.

  He knew what she meant, but offered no answer.

  “You’re rescued,” she said with a sigh. “Your friend had a purpose in finding you.”

  “Yes,” he acknowledged.

  “So now I’ll ask; are you leaving me? It’s not that I’m afraid. With the Wolde gone, I’ll survive just fine. But I want to know. Are you and I at an end? Will you wake tomorrow and ride away?”

  A part of me rebels against it, he thought.

  “I must,” he said. “My oath remains.”

  “What if I told you I didn’t want you to go?” she asked without looking at him. “Would you consider it? Would you stay?”

  Her question struck a sharp blow to his reverence of the night. His gaze fell from the sky and onto her again. Her golden amber eyes were frosted with tears, her beauty composed even during her sadness.

  In that moment, he understood why he desired her.

  She is so like Andelusia. Young and willful. Strong yet vulnerable. I am cruel to have loved her, for my love is empty.

  “I must go,” he said after a long silence. “My prey is loose. What you and I had in the darkness...it saved me. But now all things are different.
”

  “You’re still the Hunter.” Her voice was hollow. “Your name may be different, but your purpose is the same.”

  He closed his eyes. “Yes. True.”

  Another silence prevailed, the second much colder than the first. Mykla, recognizing the moment for what it was, stood and wandered to Saul. The winter wind picked up, the trees shuddered, and Nephenia’s tears frosted on her cheeks.

  “It had to end this way.” She peered skyward. “I knew it when Saul said her name. I’m a fool. Your heart is with another.”

  “Nephi—” He reached to touch her.

  “No.” She pushed his hand away. “Let me be. I’m not angry with you, but I don’t want your pity. What happens now is what’s meant to be. This I cannot change.”

  Hours later, while Saul and Mykla slept, he lay awake before the fire. He heard the waters of Archaeus’ lake lapping upon a shore somewhere behind him. He heard the wind haunting the night, its whispers not so unlike the Ur. Nearby lay Nephenia, who dwelled on the opposite side of the fire, and the opposite side of the world.

  Even so late, she was awake. Reflections of the campfire danced in her eyes and colored her copper hair scarlet. He watched her for longer than her knew, hating his coldness, wishing he had the right words to say.

  When the night was quietest and it seemed he and she were the only souls in the world, she looked up to him.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “I did nothing.”

  “Yes you did. You saved me. You kept me sane. You bid the Wolde not to slay me, and they listened.”

  “You would have done the same for me.”

  “And so what?” she said. “When you leave me, I want you to be careful. In Thillria or wherever you go. I don’t care what else you do. I want you to survive. I want to sleep at night and believe you’re still alive. Promise me.”

  “Would be easier if I had the Greyblade.”

  “They destroyed it,” she sighed. “I didn’t see it, but I heard it happen. Wrail did something to it. It shattered. Sounded like glass. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before.”

  Killing Grim without it will not be easy, he knew.

  “There are no promises I can keep,” he said.