The soldiers ignored her. They know what they face, and who. Filing in two lines, they strode straight for the gap between two behemoth towers.
And then they were gone.
With the soldiers away, she found herself alone with Bretaen, his two fellows from Shiver’s Pride, and a Wolfwolde warrior, a black-bearded beast huger than any of the three Thillrians. She wondered how long it would be until they slew her, beat her, or did much, much worse. Darkest in her mind was that she no longer cared.
A short while passed. Bretaen came for her. She felt nothing when he grasped her upper arm. She let him tug her to her feet, where she stood still as death.
“Come, grey girl,” he ordered. “An old friend of yours awaits. With a bit of life in our boots, we may even catch him ‘afore he does the deed.”
She had her guesses as to what he meant, but she was well beyond the point of caring. Her usual curiosity felt dry as desert sand. Even the sunshine failed to spark her eyes to life, for here in Cornerstone, the distant orb hung between the behemoth towers like a hateful eye, far from the welcoming sight she saw last at Sallow’s edge.
And so, sulking behind Bretaen, she marched. She was careful never to look at the Thillrians or the grimly silent Wolfwolde thug. For if they see me, they might decide they have waited long enough. She leveled her gaze at the centermost tower climbing heavenward before her. Like a white dagger skewering the sky, it ascended to heights impossible. She wondered what lay inside it, but then decided she did not want to know.
On her way through the valley, she felt nothing beneath her sandaled feet. She walked behind Bretaen for hours, gliding across the dead earth, a ghost in a girl’s skin. The dread towers loomed, vast headstones casting shadows the size of cities. In their darkness, she said nothing, no matter what Bretaen asked her. The Ur danced on her heart, laughing. She felt nothing else.
Much later, long after all sense of time had faded, Bretaen halted in front of her. She staggered past him, but the Wolfwolde brute stopped her. With his meaty, oily palm, he grasped her shoulder and awoke her from hours of miserable daydreaming. She looked up to him, her eyes empty. His were lustful, devouring her, but she did not care.
“Where have you brought me?” she asked.
Had she looked, she might not have asked. The sun was hidden now, caught in a web of clouds she did not realize had gathered. Shadows fell on the flat expanse of earth lying between her and the final, tallest behemoth tower. It was there, pocked in the brittle earth just ten paces beyond Bretaen, a vast, unknowable pit lay open. It was a hole in the world like no other. Even at midday, no light illumined what lay within. Its edges fumed with liquid darkness, while the gloom of the clouded sky descended near it, but not into it. The dread chasm looked at least fifty paces wide, she reckoned, enough to swallow a thousand men with a single gulp, no doubt deep enough to engulf many million more.
In a daze, she slid past the Wolfwolde warrior and started toward the pit. Bretaen snared her by her wrist when she ventured too close.
“Careful, lass.” He held her. “Plenty I’ve heard about yon hole. You’ll not want to jump.”
“And why should you care?” She snapped awake, icing him where he stood. “If I should fall, would you not laugh? Or is it that you and your friends prefer to have me before I die, a last pleasure before you all catch fire and blow away with the Nether wind?”
Bretaen looked confused. “If not for me, I can promise m’lady it would’ve been worse. The whole camp would’ve taken turns with you. I’ve protected you.”
“Protected?” she spat. “Take off these manacles. I will show you what your protection is worth.”
That much he seemed to understand. Shaking his head, he looked to her wrists. “No, grey lady, I think not. I don’t know what you mean by catching fires and Nether winds, but my patron warned us well enough. Said to keep you locked up neat and nice. I regret it’s me bringing you to him. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Regret...” She grimaced. “We will all regret this.”
“Quiet,” said Bretaen. “No more.”
She obeyed, and Bretaen walked away to converse with his Thillrian brethren. Arguing, she understood. About who will go first. About whether they really want to do this. About how scared they all are. Except the Wolfwolde man.
At last, the Wolfwolde warrior stepped in and ended the argument. Bretaen returned and took her by the arm to the pit’s edge. Were ever there an abyss so dark, so deep a wound in the earth, she could not imagine it. Gouged into Cornerstone’s heart, the pit fell into forever, a void so profound she imagined no bottom but the very core of the world.
And then she saw the stairs.
They were narrow, coiled like a skeletal snake against the pit’s outer wall. Made of stone planks, each stair was no more than two men wide, spiraling down into unfathomable darkness. No man would build this, she knew. Not willingly.
Nervous, both of Bretaen’s fellows struck torches to life, and both stared fretfully over the edge.
“Down there?” said one. “Why?”
“Orders,” said Bretaen. “He told us if the lass came bobbing in before he was done, we should deliver her to the bottom.”
“The bottom? I didn’t think it’d be that deep.”
“Aye. All the way down. Didn’t say why.”
“Why not just throw her?”
“Alive,” said Bretaen. “He wants her alive.”
Full of fear and doubt, the three Thillrians looked to each other. It was the Wolfwolde brute who ripped one of the torches away and sent his steely gaze straight down into the pit. “We go.” He smiled a black-toothed smile at Bretaen. “Or you jump.”
It was enough for Bretaen. Lashing his fingers around her wrist, he descended one step, then another, then another. She did not resist. She understood there was no escape, no meaningful fight she could give, and so she trailed her captor willingly. Twenty steps down, she gave a last glance to the sky, whose sunless expanse already felt impossibly far away. If only it would rain, she thought. Would be nice to feel it one last time.
Down, down Bretaen delivered her. The Thillrians’ torches became her only sources of light, for the aperture to the sky soon dwindled and vanished. At the moment the last trace of sunlight died, she lifted her gaze from the stair and took in the pit’s horror. Silence absolute pervaded, broken only by torch-fires crackling and footfalls striking stone. The walls were mortared with human bones, the skulls and ribcages blended with shapeless, seamless basalt. Between the bones she swore she saw faces, not human but alien, maws wide and laughing at her hopelessness.
She was glad for her detachment, for had her mind been in a better place she would have screamed until her lungs burst. She felt surrounded by an evil too ancient to comprehend. Naked and falling, she thought. A hundred years from now, I will come to the bottom. And the Ur will devour me.
Without the Nightness, her body betrayed her.
She walked the stairs, placid at first, then hurting with every footfall. Her calves cramped, her eyes ached for sunlight, and her manacles froze her bones. One hour deep, she feared she might crumble to dust and drift to her death. After two hours more, she hurt so hard she went delirious, dreaming of nothing beyond the endless stair and the bone-mortared walls, and the faces watching me.
In those most despairing of moments, she teetered close to death. Her heel struck a gouge in the stone, and without the desire to save herself she felt her body falling. Bretaen reached for her. She felt him grasp her sleeve, and she heard his hoarse cry echo in her ears. Quick as lightning, he hauled her to safety. Why? She gaped uncomprehendingly at him. Why save me?
“Thank you?” she said in a stupor.
“Aye,” he panted.
It happened then.
In the instant after he saved her, Bretaen lost his balance. His foot struck the same gouge she had, and he reeled as though invisible hands had stretched from the walls and shoved him off the stair. Poor Bretaen keeled over th
e side and pitched headlong into blackness. Five stairs above, his fellows could but watch him fall and listen to his screams.
After Bretaen was gone, all fell silent. The Thillrians gaped over the stair’s edge, waiting for a thud that never came. They might have turned and fled, but behind them stood the Wolfwolde warrior
“A pity.” The big man smiled, his mouth splitting his cheeks hideously. “Doesn’t matter. Deeper we go.”
“But…” one of the Thillrians stammered. “This pit…it’s got no bottom. Bretty’s dead! We n’er should’ve come here!”
Again the Wolfwolde scoundrel smiled. “You’ll be better for his fall. His pay’s yours now, gold enough for three split between only two. Now grab the girl. And keep your feet under you.”
“And if we don’t?” dared the other Thillrian.
“Over the edge.” The Wolfwolde man nodded toward the darkness. “Both of you.”
The Thillrians clawed back their courage. Their gazes glittered in the torchlight, red and slitted like lamplights.
“Aye,” reasoned one. “Maybe you’re right. How much deeper?”
“Not far.” The brute looked at her. “Less than an hour.”
“An hour. So you’ve been down here before,” asked the braver Thillrian.
“No,” the wolf-skinned beast grumbled. “Not I. Others in the Master’s service, yes.”
The bolder, fouler Thillrian came for her. He slipped his hand into her dress’s bodice, smiling with quick pleasure at the touch of her. After a feel, he knotted his fingers into her dress-cloth and pulled her down several stairs.
“No more trouble from you.” He eyed her. “You’ll not be pushing me o’er the edge like Bretty. One peep, and we’ll tell the Master just what you did.”
True to the Wolfwolde man’s word, the bottom was not so very far. At some point over the next thousand steps, she glimpsed a trio of torchlights burning in the void. Far below, they wavered in the darkness like waiting eyes. She could not tell who held them aloft, but she had her guesses.
Grimwain. Her lips soundlessly shaped his name. You are here.
Their pace quickened Her Thillrian warden’s gropes ceased in favor of hurriedness. So deep within the earth, her pain began to pale. Her senses dulled such that she no longer knew whether her heart was still beating or whether she was already dead.
The moment she stepped off the final stair and set foot onto the abyssal bottom, her eyes glimmered back to life. She saw everything, and she knew she was still alive. Her first sight was Bretaen, or what remains of him. The Thillrians shined their torchlights shone on his salted shirt, and the shape therein was hardly recognizable as human. Poor Bretaen had been pulped like fallen fruit, his bones broken and his innards turned to red jelly.
Half-dreaming, half-awake, she tore her eyes away from Bretaen’s body and surveyed the realm before her. The pit’s bottom was dark, illumined only by the Thillrians’ torchlights and three winking fires some fifty paces away. Worse yet, the floor was not a floor at all, but an ocean of bones. Splintered skulls and empty ribcages spread out before her. How deep the skeletons went, she feared to know. Not shallow, she gulped. Thousands upon thousands.
A voice, raspy and harsh, crossed the cold silence to reach her ears. It belonged to the Wolfwolde warrior, whom she realized she was alone with. The Thillrians are too afraid.
“Girl,” he grunted. “It’s time.”
The brute clutched her. He tugged her forward, but she stripped her arm out of his grasp. “Leave me,” she told him. “I will go alone. I know what is next.”
Free of him, she strode into the darkness. Glittering at the chamber’s far end were three red torchlights, three eyes blazing. She walked toward the lights and barely breathed. Old bones and ancient gristle popped and crackled beneath her sandals. She crossed the dead as gracefully as she could, containing all her horror behind her hardest grimace.
At the great chamber’s far end, she slowed.
“Grim,” she said his name.
Dressed entirely in black, the world’s enemy stood amid three tall, copper-haired warriors of a nation she did not know. Grim’s gaze was unmistakably tranquil, his eyes like moons in the abyss. His chin and cheeks were dusted by the barest outline of his beard, while his black braid hung over his shoulder. Almost looks human, she thought. Almost.
“Daughter of darkness,” he uttered. “You have come far from Muthemnal.”
Her numbness fled. Her anger roiled to life within her. “You knew I was coming.” She glared. “How? Where is Father?”
Grimwain went to the wall, to a place where the bone mortar and basalt were smoother than anywhere else. Placing his hand on the cold, black stone, he looked back to her after a long quiet. “The Eye,” he exhaled. “Did you doubt it? While you stared at the sky, didn’t you know we gazed upon you as well? You knew. Of course you did. You watched us. And we watched you.”
“The moon. The Black Moon.”
“Indeed.”
She peered to the copper-haired warriors, wondering if they understood. No. She saw the vacancy in their eyes. They do not.
“No one knows, do they?” She skewered Grimwain with a stare. “Not your wolves, not your Thillrians. If they knew why you invaded, none of them would have joined you.”
Grimwain inclined his chin. “Some know nothing. Others know everything. It won’t matter, not here at the end.”
She longed for freedom from her iron bonds, that I might end it here and now. Had she possessed a weapon, a sword, a dagger, or a hairpin, she would have lunged at Grimwain with intent to end him. But with empty hands, she sagged, her manacles’ chain going slack.
“Why?” she asked. “Why do this?”
Grimwain cleared his throat. The shadows deepened beneath his eyes, the light of the copper-haired men’s torches no longer lighting his face. “I pity your pain.” He brushed the bone dust from his black sleeves. “That you know so much, that you’ve come so far only to fail. If it brings you peace, I will tell you that there’s nothing you could have done. This event is longer in the planning than many thousands of your little lives. Those who imprisoned us never reckoned our patience. A shame it seems, that none of them will be here to see it.”
He is one of them, she understood then. One of the Ur. She caught the tenor of his voice and recognized it. The whispers. In my dreams. While awake. Human, but hollow. His face…a mask. It was never a man we faced. Never.
He walked to her. The motion of his limbs looked ethereal, the shadows in the room pooling at his feet like puddles after a heavy rain. One of the copper-haired warriors took two long strides and wrapped his fingers around her upper arm. She did not resist.
The black tine, oily and sharp, came smoothly out of Grim’s back.
He withdrew it from the top of his neck, shuddering from the pain. To her eyes the Needle looked horrifyingly familiar, as though she had dreamed it. After a breathless moment, she knew the answer. The tine was a piece of the Black Moon, a sliver of the Eye of the Ur. She remembered dreaming its fall to earth, a streak darker than the night, its tip piercing the earth like the first dagger of a million to come.
Needle in hand, Grimwain gave her his back and looked to the floor near the wall. There, crumpled amid the broken basalt and a hundred cobwebbed bones, she saw what he gazed upon. The newest cadaver of ten thousand dead lay curled like a sleeping child upon the floor. Around eight of its finger bones were iron rings, and around one of its skeletal arms was an iron band, not dissimilar to the manacles clapped around her own flesh.
Father, she knew.
His bones were bound in the same iron tokens she had locked him in during his exile from Thillria. Her mouth fell agape. She tried to cry out in horror, but found herself unable. All she could do was watch.
Heedless of her horror, Grimwain tapped her father’s bones with the Needle’s tip. Dust and shadows swirled around its daggerlike end. Her eyes went wide as it happened, as her father’s dry, barren bones became wr
apped with grey sinew, and as mortal ligature regrew. How many breaths the ghastly process took, she neither knew nor cared. Her father regenerated, and he drew a terrible gasp of unwanted air.
Even resurrected, he looked older than she remembered.
His white hair trailed in threaded wisps from his colorless scalp, while the shapes of his bones jutted against his pallid flesh. This was her father as he truly was, not the handsome, youthful lie his magicks had allowed. He was flesh and sticks, knit together with Ur magic.
Given second life, her father rose. He was nearly naked, cloaked only in the vestigial, rotting robes his death had seen him wear. The copper-haired warriors shied at the sight of him, but said nothing.
“Old friend.” The Ur tenor was thick upon Grim’s tongue. “Your work isn’t finished.”
Awakened as if from the worst of nightmares, her father shivered and clutched his sides. His teeth chattered in his fragile jaw, while his body seemed only moments from collapsing back into death.
“You will need time.” Grim sheathed the tine back into himself. “And you will have it. The Nether pain is finished. Do as I command, and come the next season of this world, you will die and suffer no longer.”
If her father understood, he made no gesture to convey it. Tears streaking down her face, she tried to make him look at her. He gazed right through her.
Switching to a language she could not understand, Grim said something to one of the copper-haired men. A head taller than her father, the warrior took the decrepit old man and walked him past her. She gazed into her father’s eyes as he ambled by. He does not know me, she understood. Like he’s been dead a thousand years.
“Why do you need him?” she asked Grimwain as her father vanished in the dark. “Why not do it yourself?”
Grimwain rolled his neck as though to work out the Needle’s kink. “You’ve questions, so many questions.” He snared the chain between her manacles. “You want to know why we’ll destroy you, why yours and ours cannot coexist. You want to know why you have our powers, but I do not. A thousand years we might discuss these things, but you would never understand. These truths were made before the first sparks set fire to your sun. These answers were made in the void before all creation, when only we and the darkness were known to be.”
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