Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  “Not done. Not quite yet,” the Master replied.

  Composing himself, he took ten steps forward. He saw then the source of the sickly-earthed stench. In the far corner, just beyond the shadow in which the Master lingered, there lurked a coffin propped upright at the joining of two walls. It was a massive thing, two heads higher than the Master and twice as wide. Its rotten lid had been punctured with dozens of holes, gaps through which he felt many eyes were watching him.

  “What is within?” He averted his eyes.

  The Master rolled his neck and loosened his limbs like a lion ready for his hunt. “I brought you here, Pale One, not only to deliver a book. There are things I haven’t told you, things I have said to no other in my service.”

  His bones rattled like rusted sabers beneath his cold cabled muscles, and a quiet sense of terror lathered him from head to toe. “What things?” he asked.

  If ever he glimpsed human emotion upon the Master’s countenance, the moment was now. The Master’s gaze dimmed as though by death. If I didn’t know better, he would have thought the Master had only now remembered some terrible tragedy, that his black heart had momentarily thawed.

  “Tis is a hard thing, Pale One.” The Master shuttered his eyes and put two fingers on each of his temples. “To house so many names, so much torment. Were there some other way, I might have welcomed it.”

  “I don’t understand.” He stared.

  “These names, they do not suit me.” The Master snapped his eyes open. “Master, Lykaios, Lord of the Wolfwolde. I’m none of these. I’m somewhat else entirely.”

  Where is this leading? he thought. “Do you wish something more of me? Your business would have me in Sallow.”

  “Stay,” the Master snapped, “and listen. Of all the wicked men in the world, you will understand best.”

  No man had ever compelled him to such captive stillness, and no occasion but his own death had so direly chilled him. He understood then that this was a moment long in the planning, and I have always been meant to be its only audience.

  “I was a little boy, Pale One.” The Master’s gaze trailed to some distant, unknowable place. “I cared nothing for war or violence. I lived in my father’s shadow, young and foolish and full of ideas. But then came the rarest of nights, and I was a boy no more. I left my house, and my life as a simple son of Romaldar ended. On that night, in the fields beyond my father’s manor, I watched the black streak tear across the sky and pierce the soil of a graveyard.”

  “Black streak? What do you mean?”

  “The Needle, Pale One. The largest. The sharpest. A shard from our heavenly prison, the key to all that was and all that shall be.”

  The grimness of the Master’s mood deepened. He paced, his palms squeezed into bloodless fists, his jaw locking and unlocking like some dread manner of machine. “I claimed it. And I became this new creature. Whether it chose me or I chose it, the decision to force the Sleeper into my little boy’s body could not have been better made. Do you understand my meaning, Pale One? Do you know.”

  “I do not.”

  “You should. You with the blackest of hearts. You who has never loved. The Needle came to me, and I am glad for it. I despised this curse for so long, but now at the end I come to cherish it. I will feel no sadness come the day the earth turns to ash and Father Sun is smoked from the sky. My childhood was a wretched, wasteful thing. My mother perished ere I opened my eyes, and my father, brother to the King, was a butcher whose name is still hated in every corner of Romaldar.”

  Standing numb as a spire of ice, he tried to absorb the meaning of it all. Just as he thought to crack his lips and utter a question, the Master’s mood changed again.

  “This is the truth.” Twilight reclaimed the Master’s eyes. “This body housed an ordinary lad. It lived twelve summers on the western border of Romaldar, where its father made war as he wished and valor had no value. It lived long, long ago. A hundred? A thousand? It cannot remember. It had brothers who now lie dead, and a country who hated it. But now there is no lad. I have no name but what the darkness gives me. I am the Sleeper, the sharpest knife in the night. My Ur brethren call me Grimwain. I am the first of many to come.”

  “Grimwain…” He shivered, his black forelocks falling across his eyes. “Why tell me this?”

  “Because there is something I wish you to see,” said Grimwain.

  He wanted to leave, to turn his back and avert his eyes from whatever was to come. He managed nothing. When Grimwain set his palm upon the coffin and shoved the lid aside, his only reaction was an imperceptible flinch, a swift shuttering of his eyes he was grateful no one would see.

  The coffin lid clattered to the floor, splintering into rotten pieces. Archmyr gazed into the empty space that remained. He saw no cadaver, neither yellowed bones ravaged by the years nor a monster of the Sleeper’s creation. He saw nothing at all save a small, plump-bottomed pouch resting at the coffin’s bottom.

  “That’s all? A bag of dirt?”

  Grinning, Grimwain pivoted on his heels and erected himself straighter than the sharpest spire of Archaeus. When Grimwain reached to the back of his neck, the whites of his eyes rolling, Archmyr understood. The Needle. It’s inside him.

  “Behold,” Grimwain’s bottomless tenor rattled the room. “See now the rebirth of Romaldar’s most hated man: my father, the warlord Myklokain.”

  Prying at the pale flap of skin on the nape of his neck, Grimwain reached beneath his flesh and withdrew the Needle from his spine. He grunted with pain and pleasure, and the black tine slid out as smoothly as an oiled sword from its scabbard. Archmyr shuddered to see it again.

  Not a man. Not anymore. He’s one of Them.

  The Needle in his hands, Grimwain played the pads of his fingers along its ebon length. Its surface was grotesquely slick with blood and nameless grey fluid. Somehow, Grimwain looked unhurt. With a haunted smirk, he extended the Needle’s pointed end toward the coffin-pouch, puncturing a hole in the little bag.

  A handful of moldered ash spilled into the coffin bottom.

  His father’s remains.

  Satisfied, Grimwain stepped away. His gaze glimmered like two dying stars, and the shadows swirled adoringly about his ankles. “Watch.” His voice hurt Archmyr’s ears. “Witness.”

  Archmyr could not quite recall the moment of his resurrection. He remembered opening his eyes to the sight of Thresher and Unctulu, but nothing before that. He saw now what it must have looked like. Speared by the Needle, the ashes in the coffin moved. Like stew in a kettle they boiled from the pouch, fuming the same as the witch-girl’s storm.

  Myklokain’s life was not long in the remaking.

  His bones began to reform, grey and sickly. Layer upon layer of ligature and muscle roiled up along his marrow, and in a few breaths more, sheaths of rotten flesh coiled around fingers, forearms, ribs and arms. Bloodless and ghastly, unlife pumped into Myklokain’s body.

  When the creature’s black heart restarted, Archmyr felt it more than saw it. I was restored fully, he thought. But this horrid thing is so old it’ll never be whole again.

  Myklokain’s skin, mottled and reeking, stretched over his considerable bulk too tightly, tearing at every joint. Uglier still, his tattered hair regrew in burnt strands from his skull-like head, a head which had no eyes, only hollow, haunted sockets. Like Thresher. But worse.

  His senses revolted. His stomach twisted and his nose turned at the charnel smell. “What is it?” he said, more a curse than a question.

  “Sarco Paterus.” Grimwain sneered. “My father reborn. I will remake his legion. They will serve us until the end.”

  Myklokain stood. Grimwain sheathed the Needle back into his body. If that sight was not horror enough, when next Archmyr looked to Myklokain he felt the creature’s soulless, eyeless gaze staring through him.

  “Father.” Grimwain wooed his dread creation. “Father, look at me.”

  Dimly aware of his son’s voice, the Sarcophage rotated its holl
ow eyes. It seemed to recognize something in Grimwain, tasting some hint of the boy who had once lived within the creature now standing beside him. For lack of a tongue, Myklokain could not speak, but it opened its mouth still, its maw creaking as though in surprise.

  “Let this serve as your last lesson, Pale One,” Grimwain boomed, his tongue thick with the tenor of the Ur. “This is what I will make of you should you fail me. Give the Thillrians an ounce more mercy, and you shall never know peace nor the sleep eternal I have promised. You shall walk the burning earth like this, my unlucky father. You shall be dead but not dead, alive only enough to suffer from now until forever.”

  To endure such a threat set Archmyr’s blood to boiling. Any other time, he might have loosed his swords and carved Grimwain into scarlet ribbons. But his fear compelled him to do nothing. I need him, he knew. Fool that I am.

  “Do you submit?” Grimwain’s eyes glimmered black.

  “Even without this, I wouldn’t have failed.” The hate in his eyes became only a glimmer. “Haven’t I proven it? Haven’t I conquered this country and laid Sallow open to your spades? Did I not tramp through four days of snowy death to bring you a damnable book?”

  Unsmiling, Grimwain rapped a fist on Myklokain’s rotten shoulder. The Sarcophage was the one without eyes, yet it was Grim’s gaze containing the greater darkness. “There is no room for doubt, Pale One. Come the terminus of spring, your work in Sallow must be finished. The Undergrave must be open, and the path to the deep lake available for me to walk. If you are but an hour late, the Eye will pass and another eon of imprisonment will grip us. Think upon this as you ride back to the Wolde. Your death…nigh an eternity for you to suffer as the Ur desire. Avoid these fates. Do as I command.”

  He bowed.

  And left for Sallow.

  Part II

  A Glimpse

  You’re sure?” The campfire flames licked at the bottom of Saul’s beard. “This is what you want to do?”

  So tired she thought she might topple, Andelusia closed her eyes. It was not the first time Saul had asked, nor will it be the last. Since fleeing Sallow five days ago, nearly all of her conversations with Garrett and Saul had been the same. There is a task needing doing, and none but me to do it, she had told them again and again. Grimwain’s men will sail to Cornerstone and recommit Father into servitude. From there they will return to the Undergrave, and at the black tower in the lake’s middle, they will utter the Ur hymnal.

  If that happens, everything dies.

  “Yes.” She reopened her eyes. “This is the only way. If you two will join me, I will not refuse you. If not, I understand.”

  The looks in their eyes told her they had already made up their minds. They believe me. At last. With a sigh she dropped her chin into her palm and turned her attention to dinner.

  “Do either of you remember how to sail?” She absently turned the smoking strip of rabbit on its stick.

  “Poorly,” admitted Saul.

  “There was the Furyon galley,” Garrett recalled with a quarter-smile. “But we know how that ended.”

  “Splinters on the shore,” Saul ruefully remembered. “Oars and barrels and planks scattered like toothpicks in the water. A fine testament to our skill at sea.”

  “But we survived,” she reminded them.

  Saul smirked. “So we did.”

  Tugging her dinner away from the fire, she took a tentative nibble. Eating hardly seemed important now, and this particular dish reminded her too much of Marid. “No choice then,” she said while chewing. “Grim’s men are already on their way. We will charter a ship in Lyrlech and race him to reach Father first. The world forgive us if we fail.”

  Saul shook his head. “If we survive, my wife and child will never forgive me.”

  She caught Saul’s gaze and held it. For an instant, the firelight shone pale as death in her eyes, and the wind whipped wildly at the flames. “Sorry to say it,” she said, “but if we die, you will have no wife and child.

  “None of us will have anything.”

  Saul fell silent. Wishing she had not said so harsh a thing, she lowered her head. I need sleep. I am not myself tonight. Her calves throbbed from another daylong hike through southern Sallow, and her thoughts were stretched paper-thin from hammering out her plan a thousand times in her head.

  Bone-weary, she looked to the sky for comfort. The stars winked at her through the leafless trees. A crescent moon glowed in the north, white and smiling. Crunching on a last bit of rabbit haunch and sipping from Saul’s waterskin, she felt her eyelids plummet. The shadows…like pillows.

  “Sorry.” She murmured. “Sleep needs me. Tomorrow we will talk more.”

  Lying down before the fire, she plunged into a dreamless void. She forgot the world of the living, and for a time was at peace.

  * * *

  Hours later, she awoke. How long has it been? she wondered. One night? Or a hundred? By the look of the moon and the feel of the wind, she gathered that she had slept only briefly. The night still reigned, and the stars lay hidden behind gauzy clouds. Near total silence pervaded, suffering no sound but the breeze to breach the stillness.

  Rising from the earth and peeling back the blanket Saul had laid over her, she blinked at the empty heavens as though expecting to see the Ur Moon. But no horrors lurked skyward tonight, no Ur, and no shadows dancing at her accidental whim. Saul lay asleep beneath his coverlet and Garrett was nowhere to be seen.

  Alone.

  What had awoken her, she could not say. She knew only that she felt refreshed and no longer in need of sleep. Still dressed in her tattered sackcloth skirt and tunic, she rose and wandered into the scarecrow-like trees surrounding the camp. This was the very southern edge of Sallow, and she meandered through the wide spaces between the trees, above which the clouds streamed in slow grey rivers.

  My storm, she imagined. Too slow to catch me tonight.

  The sky at night looked beautiful to her. She might have stood beneath the heavens until the brink of dawn.

  But her aloneness was interrupted.

  Garrett, returning from an unsuccessful hunt, entered the clearing on his way back to camp. His bow slung over his shoulder, his sword swaying rhythmically at his side, she picked him out of the darkness with her Nightness gaze. When the clouds parted and a sliver of moonlight glimmered across her cheeks, he saw her and approached.

  “Ande.”

  “Garrett.”

  He hung his bow from a low branch and meandered to her side. His slow, powerful breaths frosted the air, his effortless strides delivering him to her as though he were made of wind.

  “You were sound asleep when I left.” His expression was as unreadable as the sky.

  Whatever answer she wanted to give felt momentarily lost. Thoughts of Grim and her father, of the storm and even Marid fell away from her heart. All she thought of now was Garrett, whose presence drove away all her fears.

  “You look as though you have seen a ghost.” He stood peacefully beside her.

  “Maybe I have,” she said. “It is just…it is only that…”

  “Say it.”

  She drank a deep breath of midnight. “It is just that I never thought I would see you again. I spent my days trying to forget you. I tried…I did. But I failed.”

  She sensed it then, the slightest change in him. She saw emotion smolder in his gaze. He is not as indifferent as he seems, she wanted to believe. Or am I seeing things?

  “I never forgot you.” He looked down, up, every which way but at her. “I pushed you deep down. But I remembered.”

  The way he said it lit a candle of hope in her heart. She felt dizzy with warmth, thawing the same as winter’s last snow. He is so damnably handsome, she thought. His eyes were the color of the sea, his cheeks chiseled as if from Graehelm stone, but appearances were not what warmed her. It was something else, the nameless magnetism between her soul and his. In his presence, she felt the wind, the chill in the air, and the heat radiating inside her
.

  Near him, I am alive.

  Embarrassed by her feelings, she folded her arms protectively close. “There are things I might tell you, Garrett Croft, were the days not so dark. Not about Rellen or Marid or any of the terrible things I have seen, but about you and me.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “You do?”

  She feared he would became stoic again, but this time his reaction was different. He touched her arm, his fingertips like sweet sunshine against her skin.

  “There are things I might tell you as well,” he said. “Do not think for one moment your memory escaped me. I saw your face in every sunset, in every pool of water after the rain. In the eyes of others, I dreamed I saw your smile. When I hunted Grimwain, it was for you I nocked my arrows, and it was you who made me continue when all was lost. It seems so very long ago we met. But here we are again.”

  The right thing to do is walk away, she thought at first. These days are for death and darkness, not fluttering hearts.

  But she dared not leave. Allowing herself to stay, she opened her palms and entwined her fingers with his. When his hands accepted and closed around hers, her heart might have burst and her body gone limp, had she not willed herself to steadiness.

  “I dreamed of this some nights,” she said. “I always hoped for just one moment more with you.”

  “And I you.”

  She kissed him.

  Standing on her toes and folding her arms like flower petals over his shoulders, she allowed herself to feel as she had not felt in many years. Her lips contained all the feeling in her body, for the rest of her was forgotten. She kissed him softly at first, then harder. He did not resist, but guided her to the earth where he and she knelt on the soft soil. Had she opened her eyes, the deep greys in her pupils would have been lush greens again, vibrant as the day she was born.

  It lasted not nearly long enough. Wanting more but too timid to ask, she parted her mouth from his. Her body sang with heat, and the sensation of the Sallow breeze riding across her made her spirit soar. She wished the feeling would last forever, and yet felt it departing the moment she and he rose back to their feet.