Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  “Reality conquers all,” she whispered, her hands falling back to her sides.

  “Yes.” He nodded. “This cannot change what is. We are at war.”

  “Maybe at the end. Maybe then we will be free to love,” she sighed.

  “At the end. Whether ours or the world’s.”

  “Yes. Either. It does not matter.”

  He touched her cheek, melting her, yet too soon his gaze went distant. Kiss him again, she screamed inside. No. Wait. This is not the time.

  Unfinished, the moment ended. She returned with him to the camp, gliding over the frosted grasses like silk over glass, yet feeling all too hollow within. By the time he said goodnight to her and retreated to his tent, she was already numb again, her eyes once more the color of spent coal.

  Black Sails over Selhaunt

  Even as the first gleam of early spring sunshine broke the far horizon, Andelusia sat beside a long-dead tree, lost in a fog of loneliness and regret.

  I should have done it, she scolded herself in silence. Why not? We both wanted to. What could it have hurt?

  Another kiss. And then more.

  For too long, she despaired. The sun climbed high, warming everything except me. Her heart sank when she thought of Garrett and broke completely when she concluded she would never again be so alone with him. A coward, I am, to have let him walk away.

  And there lived another feeling within her.

  A taste, little more, lingered on her lips from Garrett’s kiss. It was as the rarest of wines, familiar in a way that took her many hundred breaths to comprehend. Only when the sun glittered above the trees and her companions stirred to wakefulness in their tents did she realize what she should have known all along.

  Father was wrong. The calmness, the strength, the shadows in Garrett’s eyes. He is one of us. He is of Archithrope. It explains everything.

  I am not the last.

  She knew it then, though she said nothing. The fact that Garrett’s blood was thick with the same shadows as hers would mean nothing good for him, or so she believed. Keep it a secret, she decided. For it does not matter.

  When Garrett and Saul pushed their ways into the sunlight, she imparted a quiet good-morning before ambling alone to a far tree. The hulking, gnarl-barked sentinel stood at Sallow’s southernmost reach, overlooking the grasslands beyond. Leaning against it, she bathed in the early sunlight.

  Within the hour, she was back to traveling.

  With her diary, ink, and quill stuffed into the weathered satchel corded about her waist, she took barefooted to the Thillrian wilds. Striding with the springtime winds, she trailed Saul and Garrett into the dry scrubland beyond Sallow. Her plan, explained to Saul a dozen times over, felt fragile at best. She knew little of Lyrlech, capital of Shivershore. She was certain only that the men Garrett had captured had sworn under threat of death that Grimwain’s servants were bound for the harbor city. I wonder if the monster himself will be there. She often shivered. I hope so.

  What she did know was that ships lay in Lyrlech, sailors too. It was her hope to use Saul’s remaining coin to convince the most desperate men she could find to take her to Cornerstone Isle.

  With her hair streaming in the wind, she marched with these hopes in mind. She trusted Saul to lead the way, and he did it with all his usual diligence, striding into the scrub with an old Thillrian map unfurled below his chin. Garrett strode well ahead, and though she hoped it was due to his distraction with her, she knew the real reason. Hunting. Always hunting. For Grim, not for dinner.

  With both men’s horses lost days ago in a vicious snowstorm, walking was the only way. She did not much mind. The terrain south of Sallow allowed easy passage, being nothing more than one cheerless meadow after another. She daydreamed of flying to Lyrlech as a Nightness shadow, but to take Saul and Garrett felt risky. Not worth it, she surmised. If they die, so shall I.

  For many days, she walked.

  On the long road to Lyrlech, she was sometimes awake, more often dreaming. The days blended together, half-clouded, always chased by her storm’s hungry outskirts. At a nameless grey hour on the sixth afternoon, she entered the Thillrian realm of Shivershore, which she remembered all too well. No storms needed, she thought, to cover this place in a thousand shades of grey.

  In Shivershore, the last of the world’s beauty fell away. Dreary plains gave way to dense thickets, dark and serpentine rivers, and sparsely scattered villages. The sights resurrected unwanted memories in her mind. She recalled the Nightmare Forest, dwelling grounds of the cursed Uylen, and until my encroachment eight years ago, the resting place of the Pages Black. Unable to drive the hated memories out, she took her first steps into Shivershore with less enthusiasm than before. Saul and Garrett urged her not to despair. But what do they know? They never saw what I did.

  On the seventh dawn, concluding that the best way to be rid of Shivershore was to make quick work of it, she pried herself from depression and picked up her pace. Three days longer it took, three that saw little sunlight or cheer. Skirting every major settlement and stopping only to barter for food and supplies, she, Saul, and Garrett cut through the glooms of outer Shivershore and wormed their way into the deep, deep south.

  At the very least, her travels saw her better dressed and equipped.

  After Garrett stopped at an unhappy village and traded his bow for a peasant’s dress, a pair of sandals, a white wool blanket, and a sack of food, she admitted she liked being out of her shoeless, sackcloth-clad state. The trade also did wonders for their food supply, earning enough smoked meat and brick-skinned bread to last a week. I only wish we had something other than his bow to trade, she regretted. He might need it before the end.

  On the forth eve into Shivershore, she sensed Lyrlech was close. The sky threatened rain, the sun sinking behind the clouds. Marching between her companions during the last hour before dusk, she tasted salt in the air and heard the distant crush of what she imagined was the Selhaunt Sea. It was then, even as she daydreamed of another dismal night to come, Garrett laid his hand upon her arm.

  “The last traders we met said Lyrlech was just ahead.” His eyes were dark with warning. “We do not know whether Grim stationed men on the lookout. I think it best we let Saul do our talking. The enemy knows less of him than you or I.”

  “Agreed.” Saul rapped his battlestaff against the stone-strewn road.

  “Agreed,” she sighed. I have nothing to say anyhow.

  The grim procession continued toward Lyrlech. At dusk, after a thousand more strides, the lights of a not-so-distant city glimmered in the growing dark. Here lay Lyrlech, eerie and unfamiliar. Her first impression was that the harbor town was an ugly place, a sprawl of shanties intermingled with the attempted glory of a northern Thillrian town. Lights from grey towers shined dully through the dusky haze, while the murmur of Lyrlech’s people was ever present, a constant thrum in the night. At the city’s edge, she saw no gates and encountered no greetings other than the glowers of Lyrlech’s outer guards. She set foot upon the first street while sulking in Saul and Garrett’s shadow. Her peasant’s dress looked simple enough, but her moonlike beauty was too obvious to hide. Soldiers and civilians leered at her, and whether they were ordinary folk or Grimwain’s spies, she could not tell. For no one smiles. And everyone whispers.

  “They dislike us here.” Saul found an alley away from prying ears.

  Garrett halted at the alleyway’s entrance, his shoulders broad enough to block the city out. “We are plainly not Thillrian. The locals may even think we are Grim’s servants. We will not be trusted.”

  “Aye.” Saul scratched his beard. “We’d better get indoors.”

  “Just one night of sleep,” she interjected. “We all need it. Find Grim tomorrow.”

  Nodding, Saul assumed the lead again. Always, he kept them moving closer to the sea. “That’s where the sailors will be,” he remarked. “By the docks. Or so we can hope.”

  The night deepened. Save for splashes of street
lamp light, the alleys and roads went dark. She slunk through the alleys, knowing the ocean lay near by the utter darkness of the horizon, the smells in the air, and the bruise-colored clouds haunting the night. The Selhaunt’s thunder crashed against a shore she could not yet see, loud as ever her Sallow storm had been. Surrounded by darkness and the sea’s treacherous rhythm, she shuddered. A haunted place, she felt. Bad men have lived here...and still do. To her it felt almost as if the Ur already had a foothold in Lyrlech, that their breaths were the ocean’s relentless booming, and that the skies were blotted with funereal fumes instead of clouds.

  “Maybe this is Grim’s doing. Maybe he knows we are here,” she whispered.

  “What do you mean?” Saul clutched his battlestaff close.

  “Feel that?” she asked. “Eyes are on us. Eyes in the clouds. Eyes everywhere.”

  “Unlikely,” said Saul. “No one would expect us here.”

  “But the sky is watching,” she breathed. “The shadows are thicker here than anywhere.”

  “All the more reason to hurry,” he grunted.

  Mercifully, Saul was swift and discreet in finding lodging for the night. He seemed to know which alleys were safest, which people to trust with a few hushed questions. On one of the last streets before the harbor docks, he ushered her and Garrett through a rickety door and into a Lyrlech inn.

  Grafter’s was a close-quartered, dingy place, though much more hospitable than the open night. More importantly it possessed clean beds, a luxury she struggled to remember ever having. After a meal of honeyed porridge in Grafter’s commons and a cold, candlelit bath, she said her goodnights. “At the crack of dawn,” she reminded her companions. “No one will want to sail to Cornerstone. We will have to be convincing.”

  “Aye. Very convincing,” agreed Saul.

  At last, after ducking out of the commons and climbing a creaking stair, she found herself alone. She slunk into her tiny second-story bedchamber, closed the clattering shutters, and snuffed all the candles out. She did not care that her door had no lock, that her bed smelled of fish, or that her feet hurt like never in her life. I am indoors, she felt relieved. The night cannot see me.

  Her exhaustion weighed like storm clouds upon her eyelids, and within moments she slipped into her bed and curled into the blankets. She heard nothing save the Selhaunt’s muted rhythm, which lulled her into precious sleep.

  The tides moved in the night. The moon, a crescent sliver, peeked into her shutter cracks, sliding down her body as though adoring her. She dreamed deeply, remembering places she had never been, striding on the white-sanded shore of a paradise she knew she would never visit. These were the rare nights, the good nights.

  So seldom did she sleep so deeply that she dozed much longer than she knew. The hours slipped by and the darkness became dawn. She dreamed well past sunrise, drifting ever onward, oblivious to everything.

  A knock on her door awoke her.

  Groggy, her head aching from the unwanted sensations of life, she staggered to her feet beside the bed. “Who is it?” She rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands.

  Garrett’s voice echoed in the hall outside her room. “You overslept. When you are ready, come downstairs. We have breakfast and good news.”

  She wanted to throw the door open and ask him for the news right then and there, but she remembered her appearance. Her hair was uncombed, her eyes still dim with sleep, and her dress hanging revealingly off her right shoulder. For a reason she thought foolish, she could not allow Garrett to see her.

  “Wait! Garrett?” she called back through the door, but he was already gone.

  After dressing and tying back her hair, she slipped like moonlight into Grafter’s common room. The innkeep, a smiling fellow with no more than a trio of teeth, seemed to know what she was about. “Over there.” He intercepted her. “Been talking all morning, those three.” Jabbing his bony finger toward the common’s most shadowed corner, the innkeep showed her where Saul, Garrett, and a lanky, grim-faced Thillrian man were seated at a tiny round table.

  She walked to the table, steady and serious. “Hello.” She sized up the Thillrian stranger, whom Garrett and Saul seemed to trust well enough to sit beside without their weapons.

  “Hello.” The stranger smiled.

  The Thillrian man was not like any other she remembered meeting. He was thin and tall, with black stubble so dense upon his hard cheeks she wondered what manner of knife he used to keep it at bay. His eyes, dark but not quite treacherous, lurked deep beneath his brow, following with great interest her every move. She thought him at first a soldier, but concluded that the smell of salt from his high-collared shirt meant he was surely a man of the sea.

  “The name…” He held out his calloused palm to her. “…is Daedelar.”

  Having not been introduced to anyone new in many months, she forgot her usual manners. She eyed Daedelar with unabashed suspicion, not bothering to conceal her narrow, grey-shadowed gaze.

  “Ande,” said Saul, breaking the uncomfortable quiet, “we were busy while you slept. You needed your rest, so Garrett and I spent the morning roaming the docks. We think Daedelar here is a man we can trust. Already he’s told us much we did not know.”

  Blowing an errant stripe of black hair from its perch across her eye, she returned her stare to Daedelar. “Forgive me,” she said evenly. “I am not quite myself. Who are you?”

  “M’lady, I—” Daedelar began.

  “Saul says you know things,” she interrupted. “Is it so? Did dark men arrive here recently? Soldiers not of Thillria? Was a man with them, a man with cold eyes, with a black braid and a manner like the quiet before the storm? Did they charter a ship? Did they sail to Cornerstone?”

  Daedelar seemed to want to speak, but either her beauty or her insistence silenced him.

  “Ahem…” Saul propped his elbows on the table. “Ande, we’ve asked him these questions already. He knows about Grim. Half the city does.”

  Daedelar, as typically bold as any Shivershore man, reached out and snared her hand. When she did not resist, he cupped her palm within both of his.

  “You have my hand,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “M’lady.” His smile disarmed her. “Forgive me. Hard times are these when a lady so easily mistrusts. But ‘afore you go to fearing me, let me tell you what I know.”

  Daedelar leaned in closer, close enough that she could see the flecks of bronze color floating in his eyes. “I’ve seen these soldiers and this man of yours.” His jaw tightened. “We all have. From the lads on Market Street to yon surf-splashed quay, their presence we feel still.”

  “Grimwain?” she blurted. “Here?”

  “Oh, he’s here a’right. He came seeking passage, just like you said. Who could forget it? We pay attention when the name of the Corner’s Stone catches the wind. No one’s asked about it since my father’s father was but a pup. Yes indeed, this Grimfellow of yours was all business, all danger. He wants on the White Isle like a buzzard wants its talons in a dead man’s sockets.”

  “Is he still here?” She pulled her hand out of his grasp. “Right now? Today?”

  Daedelar leaned back in his chair. Calm as ice, his smile reforming, he shook his head. “No. Gone three days ago. Brought his own crew. Paid ten gold ingots for our thickest cutter and set off into the ‘Haunt.”

  Her heart sank in her chest. So close, she despaired. Three days faster, and I could have killed him before he ever set sail.

  “We could always wait for him here, Ande,” Saul reasoned. “He’s gone, sure enough, but he has to come back.”

  She shook her head. “No. What if he lands somewhere else? What if the invasion of Sallow is a diversion and the deed is to be done on Cornerstone? No, we cannot wait.”

  “Deed?” asked Daedelar. “Begging pardon; what deed?”

  “Never mind it.” She flashed a dark look at him.

  A hush settled over the table. The candles, their flames once steady and warm, dimmed as
though aware of her dismay. She surveyed each of the men, who gazed at her with questions in their eyes. I do not want them to die for me, she decided. I could command the Nightness to take me to Cornerstone. I could fly across the Selhaunt alone.

  “I could do it,” she uttered. “I could go by myself.”

  No sooner did she say it than Saul opened his mouth to argue. But it was Daedelar whose voice rose above all.

  “Nay, m’lady. You didn’t let me finish. You see, just like I told your husbands here, I’ve a bit of a grudge against this Grimmy and his crew.”

  “Grudge?” she asked.

  “Aye. You’ll not hear it on many tongues, but you’ll see it in our eyes. We hate the Wolde and the Grim-wayne. He’s no Thillrian; none of them are. They’ve conquered our country and strolled through our city as though nothing is wrong. They’re king-killers, they are. I’d see them all floating dead atop the ‘Haunt if I could.”

  Her darkest thoughts roiled in her mind. Grimwain, dead in the sea, she daydreamed. And a vengeful Thillrian to help me do it. She looked to Saul, who gave her a half-grin, and then back to Daedelar.

  “Do you have a ship?” She dared to hope.

  “I do. Or rather, we do.” He drained his mug.

  “And a crew?”

  “Most of a crew. Needs a few more hands. Your husbands here would make a fine addition.”

  “And you are willing to go to this place, this White Island which men fear to speak of? You will take us and wait for us while we do our business?”

  Daedelar smiled. “For gold alone, nay. A fool’s errand, that’d be. No one goes to the White Isle just for coins. But we in County Shiver have every reason to hate this man, me especially.”

  “Why especially?” She narrowed her eyes.

  “My reasons are my own.” Daedelar leaned against the table, suddenly serious. “The deal is this: if we catch the Grimfellow, then his ship, the sturdiest in the ‘Haunt, will be mine. As part of your payment, you’ll lay no claim on it, nor on any of its bounty. It’s a mighty ship, it is. When the last Degiliacs died, they left their whole fleet behind, and this ship’s the jewel of them all. My crew and I will sell every plank and leave County Shiver forever.”