Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  Can it be true? Might he still be alive? Father told me this same story the day before they led him away in chains. I did not believe it then, but now my thinking is altered. Garrett tells me Grimwain’s second army is bound for the Shivershore port of Lyrlech. Lyrlech is the sole harbor on the Selhaunt Sea, the nearest place to where Cornerstone is said to lie.

  The pieces of the puzzle assemble in my mind. I believe Grim will commission a ship in Lyrlech. He will go to Cornerstone. He will find my father and bring him back to the Undergrave, whereupon he will turn the final gear in his machine.

  This is what I believe now. After all my grief, Father might be alive. I fear I might go mad with such possibility. What will I do if I face him again? Weep like a child? Kill him on the spot? Fall to my knees and beg him to help me destroy Grimwain? I am overcome with many emotions. Saul. Garrett. Father. Marid. I should stop writing your names. I should leave this place and never return.

  My quill quivers between my fingers, a spinning top about to tumble. I start to strike through entire passages as though to erase them from my mind, but somehow I resist. Maybe I am mad. Maybe this is all for nothing. Maybe Grimwain will drag every soul in Thillria to the Undergrave’s bottom, and maybe he will fail. If the Ur were already free, we would know it. All would have turned to ash. Black towers would have erupted from the earth in a million places. Everything would be dead.

  We still have time.

  It is after midnight, and my thoughts are more muddled than when I first sat down to write. Thank goodness Saul and Garrett remain asleep. I do not want them to see me until my mind is right, until I bury my hurts and set my mind to doing what I must. I am a mess. My quill is chewed. Gobs of half-frozen ink are stuck to my fingers and skirt. My bath tonight consisted of slathering myself with snow whenever Garrett and Saul were not looking. Pardon my words if they are difficult to read. I am hungry, wet, tired, and completely unable to focus. I would ask the world, ‘Why me? Why of all people should I be thus afflicted?’ But no. I am what I am. There is no sense in fighting it. There never was.

  With a little luck, I might see the sun rise tomorrow morn. The thought of it puts a shiver into me. I have not seen a cloudless dawn in so very long. I do not know whether I am excited or afraid.

  But it is not the possibility of Father Sun that has me aquiver. My heart leaps against my ribs for something much more worldly. I feel weak. I feel ashamed. I spent the whole of yesterday with Garrett, walking, talking, listening, and yet I never once told him how often I dream of him. I am a fool. This is no time for pounding hearts and sweating skin. There are monumental matters at stake: war, Grimwain, and the resurrection of earth’s destroyers. If Rellen was right, our world is the last.

  But Garrett. I have not seen him in so long. My feelings should have long ago disintegrated, crumbling like leaves with the passage of the years. Perhaps it is that I am vulnerable, that I lack someone to love. But no. It is truly Garrett. He held my hand yesterday for all of two quick breaths, and I swear in those moments I remembered what it was like to be warm again. He does not know the effect he has upon me. I dwell on whether to tell him or not. Would it be selfish? Pointless? There was a day many years ago when he loved me, but that Garrett is likely long gone, long extinguished. Surely his years of hunting Grimwain have darkened his heart to me. Surely. No?

  And so I must go on. I will tell Garrett nothing. I will shut my feelings in the blackness where they belong.

  I will lead the chase to Cornerstone.

  The Sleeper Speaks

  After so many years of dealing death and misery to nations far from home, Archmyr Degiliac returned to the cradle of his birth.

  Shivershore, blighted by near-eternal grey skies, looked little different than he remembered. An early spring rain, clammy and coarse, raided his every movement. On either side of the mucky, rock-strewn road, rows of shabby hovels jutted like broken boxes from the dirt. Despite trotting high atop his sable steed, his boots and scabbards dripped with mud, the wet earth clinging to his clothes. Such a dismal morn was enough to make him long for the snowy sloughs of Sallow, which now seemed regrettably far away.

  And then of course there’s ‘Tulu.

  Archmyr’s bulbous escort rode just beside him, slouching low in the saddle and bending the back of his undeserving stallion. Unctulu’s sausage-like fingers gripped the reins like loose noodles while his knobby heels stabbed cruelly into his stallion’s flanks. Glancing one too many times at his disgusting companion, Archmyr hoped that his stay in Shivershore would be short, and that the Master’s next order would be to send him back to Sallow to aid in opening the Undergrave.

  Were only I wiser, he thought. I’d never have died in the first place.

  He was not alone with Unctulu. Ten Wolfwolde riders trotted at his back, glowering at him as though it were his orders, not the Master’s, that brought them here. He saw their cold stares and returned them in kind, glaring back at them as though to taunt them.

  If there was any benefit to Shivershore’s wretched climate, it was that the weather did the small luxury of making the Wolfwolde miserable. The thought of their discomfort brought a slender smile to his lips, which he concealed by tugging his dripping cowl lower upon his brow.

  “Fine day for a ride.” He shot a grudging glance at Unctulu. “Might not I have stayed in Sallow where I’m needed?”

  “Foul, foul, this weather, yes.” Unctulu bobbed up and down on his stallion. “But not much longer now. We’ll go to Lyrlech just as Master commands. His warehouse waits near the sea.”

  “Lyrlech.” He nodded dourly. “Never thought I’d see it again.”

  “It won’t be as you remembered,” Unctulu grunted. “Your father’s fortress is torn down. They made powder of his bones on the shore rocks, so I hear. You’re not the worst Degiliac, they say, only the most available.”

  Indeed.

  He saw it soon enough. A last rutted road, a final drenching rush of rain, and within the hour his steed set its hooves into the only city in Shivershore that could truly be called civilized. Lyrlech, though far removed from the rest of Thillria, was Thillrian nonetheless. Its low, grey-mortared dwellings were marked with familiar coats-of-arms, while its towers were tall and narrow, their tops sluicing rain into the narrow streets below. Grimmer still were Lyrlech’s residents, who were as pale-faced and dark-haired as folk a week’s ride to the north, but who never smiled, even now that my father is dead.

  Unheralded, he trotted beside Unctulu onto Lyrlech’s largest street, the Wolfwolde close behind. Sour and discontented, rain-sodden folk stopped whatever they were doing to cast their ire upward. They tilted their grey gazes up to him, and they begin to remember.

  He knew at once the people disliked his presence here. They allowed him into their sights only because they were well aware of the fates of every county to the north. Grimacing, he followed Unctulu onto Lyrlech’s thoroughfare. He chose not to challenge any of a hundred suspicious gazes, knowing that to make a scene would only lengthen his time in Shivershore. Through markets and alleys and streets bejeweled by rain he went. He had no faith in his safety, no illusion that anyone welcomed him here.

  “See them?” Unctulu steered the company down an vacant alley. “The Master gives his promise that we mean no harm, and still they hate us.”

  Archmyr glared. “Perhaps it’s only you they hate. We Thillrians of Shivershore aren’t known to tolerate visitors, especially ones so ugly.”

  “Oh?” Unctulu wetted his lips with a slimy lick. “They’ll hate you plenty yet. When the skies go black and the Ur set the world ablaze, they’ll know who did it. I’ll seem a pretty thing then. The people’ll wonder whether they should’ve been kinder to old ‘Tulu, for maybe then their children would not be ashes.”

  Having nothing to say to that, her rolled his eyes and spurred his horse ahead of the company. Unctulu protested, but he ignored it. “Find me as you may.” He shot the Wolde his direst glare. “I’ll be ahead.”


  Riding through some twenty gloomy streets and narrow alleys, he arrived alone at Lyrlech’s eastern edge, where the grey dwellings gave way to an open expanse of rock-strewn shoreline, and where old memories stirred inside him. Lyrlech possessed no walls, and so he guided his mount onto the sodden, boulder-pocked plain lying just before the sea. It felt a world apart from the city behind him. The sounds of the waves crashing drowned out much of Lyrlech’s clamor. The rain felt less bitter, the clouds parting to allow a few narrow shafts of sunlight down upon the sand.

  Alone but for sky and ocean, he relished the moment. He dismounted and walked closer to the beach, where the grey waters of the Selhaunt slapped endlessly against the pallid sand. His horse stood at quiet attention while he leaned against an outcropping of jagged rock and stared out across the water. He remembered this place with a child’s mind. He saw the white waves and the mist riding like clouds atop the water, and for at least a few breaths he forgot Unctulu, the Wolde, and the Master.

  If I’d chosen differently, he remembered himself as a youngling, causing mischief on this very shore, what manner of man might I have been?

  His reverie was short-lived. Too soon, Unctulu and the Wolde riders arrived, and his familiar mood, dark and dour, returned.

  “This way, this way,” Unctulu gurgled. “You go too far, Pale One. The Master’s lodging is behind us.”

  “Yes. So it is,” he grumbled.

  Tugging his mount behind him, he strode back into the Wolfwolde riders’ midst, scabbards clattering at his waist. He did not bother to disguise his disgust. The longer he thought upon it, the more the Master’s servants felt like rivals, invaders of his sacred Thillrian soil. But when his fingertips grazed the satchel in which the Master’s prize was hidden, he remembered. His briefly-forgotten purpose caught fire in his mind, and his scowl fell away.

  Do this. And be done with it.

  The Master’s lodging lay in Lyrlech’s southeastern quarter, in which every building sat uncomfortably close to its neighbor, and where the harbor docks stretched from the shore like knobby fingers into the sea. Trudging beside his mount, Archmyr followed Unctulu’s lead as the fiend prodded his poor horse into a maze of narrow streets and warehouses. The dwellings here all looked the same: stone-bottomed and wooden-walled, all of them sturdy enough to keep out the rain, and the thieves.

  It was to the largest of the dwellings Unctulu brought him, an ugly windowless warehouse of some three stories, exactly the sort of dreary lodging he expected the Master would choose. At the warehouse gate, the Wolde riders dismounted and fanned out into the surrounding streets. They did so without Archmyr’s orders, glaring with slitted gazes down each alleyway to warn any onlookers away.

  “The locals already know we’re here.” He glanced at Unctulu. “No sense in trying to be sneaky.”

  Smiling hideously, Unctulu lurched out of his saddle and banged thrice upon the warehouse door, then thrice again. A long silence ensued, during which he began to wonder if Unctulu in all his dubious wisdom had wandered to the wrong warehouse. But it was not so. At length the door groaned open, pushed from the inside by an armored Wolfwolde warrior, a copper-bearded Yrul barbarian who clacked his yellow teeth together and leered at him.

  “You. Come now.” The brute invited him into the dark space beyond the door. “Bring the prize. The rest of you wait here.”

  Just me? No ‘Tulu? He secreted a smile. One luxury, at least.

  Leaving his horse and shouldering the satchel bearing the Master’s prize, he entered the massive warehouse.

  Once inside, he sneered at the Yrul warrior, discomfiting the much larger man. “The Master awaits me?” He clucked his tongue. “Where?”

  “Upstairs,” said the brute. “You go alone.”

  It was instruction enough. His eyes already adjusted to the dark, he left the Yrul warrior and wove his way between the countless crates filling the first floor. He felt uneasy to walk here. Scattered lanternlights illumined the heavy darkness like floating eyes, and try though he did he could not ignore the eerie sensation that he was being watched. He wondered what was inside the crates, for with each inhalation he swore he tasted moldering earth, the smell of dirt not so recently upturned.

  Suppressing a shudder, he plucked a lantern from its hook upon the wall and continued up a narrow stairwell. The whole place was quiet as a graveyard, the chirrups of crickets and the creaks of wooden planks the only sounds in the darkness. He reached the top of the stair and followed a short passage dead-ending in a door, and he half expected to turn around and see ghosts skulking behind him.

  “Enter, Pale one,” said the voice behind the door.

  He obeyed, and stepped warily into the next room. The Master’s chambers, he knew. No guards. No one else. The man is fearless.

  The room beyond the door was huge and high-ceilinged, and mostly empty. Its walls were lit by an amber glow, the light emanating from a fist-sized sphere lying atop the room’s only table. Magic, he knew glowing orb to be. Everywhere I go, all this miserable sorcery.

  “Welcome,” the Master stepped out of the shadows in the room’s far corner.

  “Aye.” He nodded stiffly.

  The Master glided to the table and sat on its edge. Everything about him was unreadable, enigmatic. In his black silks, with his braid lying over his shoulder, and with his rotten scabbards at his waist, the Lord of the Wolde looked utterly serene.

  Tapping his fingers lightly upon the glowing orb, he regarded Archmyr passively, and his gaze was as dark as a clouded sky at midnight.

  “This is a clever thing.” The Master admired the orb. “Exceptionally rare, this one. Glows gold rather than violet. Filled with old souls, I imagine.”

  Feigning a moment’s interest, he regarded the orb. “Old souls? Should I ask?”

  The Master let the matter go. He moved from his sitting place on the table to a creaking chair on the opposite side. In the chair, he lifted his legs and kicked nonchalantly back. “Come into the light,” he ordered.

  He hesitantly approached. He remembered the Master from Archaeus, but here and now the man felt different, like I’m meeting him for the first time.

  “Now that you’ve remembered me, Pale One.” The Master’s voice dimmed the amber orb. “Do you have what I require?”

  He rolled the satchel off his shoulder and withdrew the Pages Black. He laid the fleshy tome on the table and pushed it toward the Master, who set his fingers upon it with delicate reverence. He understood then then why the orb light had dimmed. It’s the book, not the man.

  “It was as you said.” He backed away from the Master’s table. “The storm, the cold. The girl was there, her consort as well.”

  “And you dispatched them?” The Master read deep into his eyes.

  He inclined his chin, his jaw gone rigid. “I did not.”

  “You did well nonetheless.” The Master nodded grimly. “Everything I have asked, you have succeeded in. It’s true I might have commanded another to lead our little invasion, but to capture this book, these Pages…no other would have been so driven, so careless with his life. Unctulu finally understands. You know best the torment of the afterlife, you and few others.”

  Nearest to a compliment he’ll ever give me.

  Accepting the praise with a grin, he exhaled hard, blowing a lank strip of black hair out of his eyes. “This is what I am now. What man could fail knowing what awaits us in the dark?”

  “In the dark, indeed.”

  A cold quiet prevailed, a silence during which the Master regarded him as though he were an object, not a man. Only when he felt the first inkling that it might be time to leave did the Master speak again.

  “A rumor reaches me, Pale One, a tale I would not believe had it come from any other than my most trusted servants. I’m told that during the invasion, you have never once drawn your swords. Not to slay an enemy soldier, not to cull the life of a willful prisoner, not even to put to the neck of an unenthusiastic girl. This seems unlike you, corps
e of the Moor’s Eye.”

  His left hand descended absently to his sword hilt, where it loitered for but a breath before he lifted it again. What he says is true enough. His urge to murder felt strangely absent, his normal bloodthirst fallen from his thoughts as though it had never been. Since rising from the grave, he could not remember drawing his swords for any other reason than to gaze at his reflection in the mirror-like steel.

  “If I’ve yet to kill,” His hands hovered above his scabbards, “it’s only because our new subjects haven’t dared rise against me. Moreover, you’ve been so gracious as to lend me many thousands who do my murdering for me. Seems I have little reason to fight, no enemy worth my effort.”

  Leaning deeper in his chair, the Master rubbed his chin. “Is it also true you allowed many thousands of women and children to flee to the countryside, and that you detained only noblefolk and men of soldiering age?”

  “It is.” He felt perplexed at his own behavior. “I wouldn’t do such a thing were this a war of extinction. But there’s no need to slaughter them, no cause to hold them captive only for our men to go soft from spending themselves in maidens’ beds. I did what was instinctive. Do you disapprove?”

  “No,” answered the Master, betraying nothing. “I do not.”

  The line of questioning seemed at an end. Neither contented nor displeased, the Master rose from his chair and ambled to the far side of the room, where the amber orb’s light barely penetrated the darkness.

  Thinking to follow, he took a single step before staggering to a halt. The hairs rose on the nape of his neck. He sniffed the air, and he smelled musty, moldering earth again. The gruesome vapor reminded him of the grave Unctulu and Thresher had extracted him from in the courtyard of the Moor’s Eye.

  “You are ill?” questioned the Master from the darkness.

  “Is there something more you wish of me?” He looked to the door. “My work seems done here.”