Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  Ten steps beyond Unctulu’s camp, he decided on none of these roads.

  Follow me if you can, apprentice.

  He marched past ten watchful Wolde, who shrank at his passing. He took long, graceless strides into the dark, his footsteps striking the earth the same as hammers. He reached the border of the camp, where the guttering torchlights and flailing yellow campfires died at the night’s edge.

  Dark out here.

  Maybe I’ll lose him.

  Maybe not.

  A half-hundred steps into the dark, he heard the lightest footfalls at his back. He sensed Wrail slinking behind him. Grinning, he strode ever faster. He marched into a maze of fallen trees, between which outcroppings of razored shale jutted toward the sky like teeth. No tents had been assembled here, and no Wolde patrols were at large. The darkness was all-consuming.

  He slowed, and Wrail caught up. He looked back at the little man and felt a shiver run up his spine.

  “Archithropian.” He circled a boulder. “You see well in the night.”

  “Indeed.” Wrail followed him through a jumble of rocks. “You dislike it, don’t you. You dislike me.”

  “I dislike everyone.”

  “So I’m told. Especially Unctulu.”

  “Him more than the rest.”

  “No matter that he’s the one who raised you.”

  “Doubly so for that.”

  “Tell me,” Wrail said as they crossed a rock-strewn streamlet. “Is it true what the Master’s men tell me?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you’ve served the Master too perfectly. That you’ve conquered Thillria with uncommon ease. And that you’ve done all of it without once wetting your swords with Thillrian or Wolfwolde blood.”

  “My methods are my own.” He wended between a thicket of dead trees. “That I murder less and manipulate more is only my most current preference. Might change tomorrow. Might last forever.”

  “Interesting…” Wrail danced around a half-dozen slate daggers, slowing none. “We expected a certain…brutality from you. We assumed you’d rule the Wolde at the end of your blades. And yet, by some method not dreamed of, you’ve subdued everyone by cunning alone. I think we may’ve underestimated you, Lord Degiliac.”

  “You’d not be the first.” He hated the compliment.

  A quiet time ensued. He and Wrail drew closer to the Undergrave. He carried himself with great caution now, half-expecting an ambush, half-expecting Wrail to shed his skin and reveal himself as one of Them. Rather than take any of a dozen common paths cut into Undergrave Hill’s western slope, he decided on a different way, a secret way. He led Wrail through a maze of boulders and slate, where footholds were few and worn paths fewer. Tall, toothy rocks stuck out of the hillside like broken headstones, while no light lived beyond the palest whispers of Mother Moon and the red glow of the Wolfwolde’s campfires against the bottoms of the clouds.

  “Why are you here, little Wrail?” He cracked the silence some two hundred steps up the hillside. “What do you want from me that I’ve not already given the Master?”

  Wrail came to a sudden stop. The clouds parted and the moonlight shined through, and the Master’s little man halted on a patch of hillside where the pale light burned brightest. Five steps ahead, Archmyr glared.

  “Pale Knight.” Wrail opened his palms to the sky, inviting the moonlight to splash his skin. “I’m here to see that everything comes smoothly to its end.”

  “You?”

  “Indeed,” Wrail answered. “There’re none more fit than I. I’m the Master’s watcher, his eyes and ears. I’m wiser than the Wolde, less vulgar than Unctulu, and apt never to trust a task is finished until the moment I see it for myself. Why, had we stolen the Pages with more time to spare, the Master would be here instead of at Cornerstone, for he’d need the Anderae warlock none.”

  He scoffed. “So it’s as I thought. You don’t trust me. You’ve come to observe me, to indict me, and to lurk ever behind me. Same as ‘Tulu.”

  Wrail shook his head. In the moonlight, he seemed a ghost, paler than any of the dead trees.

  “Not exactly.”

  “What then?” Archmyr shot him an evil look. “Why this walk? Why the dance? Why now, when all’s perfect?”

  His face white as death in the moonlight, the Master’s apprentice became deadly serious. “Has it ever occurred to you, Lord Degiliac, that you’re not the only one who stands to suffer should we fail? Surely by now you know there’re many more of us than yourself. I was pricked first by the Needle, Unctulu second, but as for you, you’re but the two-hundred eighty-eighth, nearly the last. No matter our order, it’s the same for all of us. The nightmares of ordinary men are but specks of sand in the ocean of horror you and I have endured. Always, we’re haunted by our evil deeds, and never can we repay our debt. There’s but this one chance, Pale Knight. Succeed, and the Nether realm will be empty for us to roam. Fail, and our souls climb to the darkness between the stars, where the Ur will torture us eternally.”

  Until that moment, he had not known. His inklings that others like him might exist had always seemed unimportant. He snapped his eyes wide-open, his limbs slack as leaves in a winter rain.

  “You doubt me,” he said to Wrail, “because I’ve not stacked the bodies high enough. You think I’ve gone soft. But don’t you see the irony? The evils of our first lives are the very reason we’re here.”

  For once, the white glimmers in Wrail’s eyes faltered. “Yes. It’s as you say. We’ve only ourselves to blame. Doesn’t matter. Better men may die and soar to meadows touched by Father Sun. But not you and I, Pale Knight. If we do nothing, you know very well where we’re bound for.”

  After a hard breath of hesitation, he understood. For my less-than-bloodthirsty ways, for my mercy, and for my not putting all of Thillria to the sword, I’m to be supplanted.

  The realization swept like falling rain through the graveyard of his mind. In days long dead, he would have slain Wrail on the spot and brought his severed head before the Wolde as a display of dominance, but here and now he faltered. For I no longer care how the Master’s plan reaches its end.

  As long as it does.

  “What now?” he asked. “You’ll take control away. You’ll rule Sallow and command the Wolde. Will it be death for me? Though I’ve not killed many in this second life, I’ll butcher dozens if you force me. You’d be the first. ‘Tulu the second. I think I’d rather enjoy both.”

  Wrail shook his head. “No, not death.”

  “Then what?”

  “Relinquish your power. Retire to your cabin. Alive and unshackled,” said Wrail. “Tomorrow, when you wake, do as you wish so long as it doesn’t hinder us. It’s just as you say, Pale Knight. I’ll assume stewardship of the Undergrave’s excavation. I’ll take control of the Wolde’s defenses. You’ll come to no harm, I swear it. I left the last of my violence in Archaeus, and the Master is pleased enough with your performance that he orders you be given whatever makes you happy. I hear you refused Unctulu’s offers of women and sport. Find something else that pleases you, and I shall provide it.”

  A shock, it felt, for him to have his powers stripped away so swiftly. He might have reeled had it not come as such a sudden, sublime relief. Rather than fume, he breathed deeply, almost satisfyingly, the cold in his bones thawing for the first time since his resurrection.

  “That’s all?” He mistrusted his freedom. “You asked for this walk to release me from the Master’s service? I’m free?”

  With an eerie, moonlit smile, the Master’s apprentice folded his hands. “We knew you’d relish this. You’ve earned your sleep, Lord Degiliac. As a warrior, as a soldier, you’ve reached your deserved end. Freedom is yours.”

  Though it lay right before him, he mistrusted it all the same. And now Myklokain will come, he imagined. To carve me up. Or an arrow with some of ‘Tulu’s poison. Or a hundred Wolde.

  When nothing happened, he felt numb. The glorious expectations of his se
cond life no longer mattered, and the meaning of violence and war was lost.

  “I’ll stay in Sallow,” he told Wrail.

  “As you please.”

  “I trust you can find the way to the Undergrave without me?”

  “I can,” said Wrail. “The Nightness will aid me.”

  A half-hour later, he arrived at his hut under cover of darkness. No vengeful soldiers awaited him, and no Unctulu sat on his stoop to nauseate him a final time. Untrusting, he cracked his door open and stood before the dark aperture. No daggers. He felt surprised. No Wolde mob. Not yet, anyway.

  He might have become peaceful then. He might have walked into his hut, sat before his hearth, and slept deep as since his first death.

  But, as ever in his life, the moment of peace abandoned him.

  After a second deep breath, he turned in his doorway and he looked to the skies. There, perched like a dead star in heaven’s heart, the Black Moon awaited his gaze.

  “Pale One, Pale One.” the deathly voices swarmed into his skull and drove him down to his knees. “We thank you. We adore you. We welcome you to the fold. So selfish, the mortal heart, willing to murder the world for a long, slow sleep. Your father is proud of you, Pale One. Close your eyes now.

  “Close your eyes. Listen to him scream.”

  Diary, Alive but Dead

  Somewhere on the Selhaunt

  I breathe. My eyes flutter open. My fingers, black and blue and a thousand shades in-between, work just well enough to lift my quill.

  I crack your cover, dearest journal, and Cornerstone’s grit rains from between your pages and into my lap. I remember who I am. I am Andelusia. I am here. I am not yet in my grave. Pain, ever my companion, courses like a river through me. I am alive, but dead. I am lost, and I fear I have no purpose anymore.

  Nothing shines down here in the dark. I lie now in the belly of Shiver’s Pride, chilly and damp and hungry. My cabin is small and stuffy, lit only by an oil lantern who likes to gutter and die just as my eyes get used to the light. My bed is stiff and uncomfortable. My body, wracked by fever, feels broken. And yet somehow I continue to live.

  Over the last days, I have begun to piece together just how I came to be here. Or at least I have tried. My memories are few and far between, small slivers of light peeking through the midnight of my mind. What happened on the White Island mostly escapes me. I have only the words of those who witnessed it, and I suspect even they know only fragments of the truth.

  I do know this much: Seaman Daedelar is the reason I live. The captain of Shiver’s Pride turned out to be an honest, honorable man. I remember thinking in Lyrlech that he was a thug, a dirty, skulking Thillrian willing to take me aboard for all the wrong reasons. I assumed he would drop me on the Cornerstone shore and leave me for dead. I could not have been more wrong. Daed was true to his promise not to abandon me. He and his men pried my dying body from the White Island. He saved me, though he did not have to. I feel terrible for having brought him into this, but it is too late. Both of us survived Cornerstone, and both of us must live with it.

  So there you have it. I am alive and stuck on Shiver’s Pride. Daedelar, my unlucky savior, is my only friend. He is the only person I see each eve, as the rest of his crew is always above decks, straining to cut our rickety craft into Selhaunt’s fickle springtime winds. Grizzled, his face writ with permanent exhaustion, Seaman Daed still finds time for me. He clambers down into my cabin each evening and helps me remember all that has happened. He talks to me for an hour, sometimes longer. Poor soul. He likely thinks me asleep most of the time, for it is dark down here and my condition is such that I often tumble swiftly into unconsciousness. But no, I am awake during his visits.

  Here is what I have learned from his visits:

  Grimwain escaped the island with my father. His destination is unknown to Daed. I suspect he is bound for Sallow.

  More than half the crew of Shiver’s Pride is dead or badly wounded, the lot of them having skirmished against Grim’s warriors.

  My kidnappers were planted among Daed’s crew a month before I arrived, long before Grim and his servants arrived and set sail for Cornerstone. Grim knew I was coming.

  I was ashore for nine days. On the tenth day they found me soaking on the beach, half-drowned and wrapped in a chain.

  We are seven days north of Cornerstone, tacking slowly across the Selhaunt in search of Lyrlech.

  My chains are gone.

  My magicks are weak.

  Garrett and Saul are dead.

  Let me write that once more, lest my heart stop and my quill never move again. Garrett and Saul are fallen. When Daed told me three nights ago, I thought I would die. My tongue went still and my eyes leaked until my body contained no more moisture. I gasped for air, retched my supper, and drove Daed out of my room with my screams. Because I cannot walk yet due to my injuries, my only choice was to weep and weep until a dismal slumber took me. I closed my stinging eyes and shivered my way into the abyss. I hoped I would die. I wanted eternal darkness to claim me.

  But I am a tenacious thing. After two days of sleeping, two nights of lying motionless in my bed and waiting to die, I awoke again to this existence. I wished not to live or breathe or eat, but Daed found me. He propped me up and forced spoonful after spoonful of soup into my mouth, refusing to leave me until my bowl was empty. He made me live, and oh, how I tried to stop him. I played at petulance and fought him. I threatened to incinerate him with my magicks, at which he laughed. I pretended to be asleep and deaf to his plying, but he knew it was an act. I could almost damn him for his persistence. He made me eat, and for every invective I hurled his way, he smiled and ladled another spoon of broth down my gullet. I hated him for it, hated him for forcing me to live. But now I think I will hate him no more. The concern in his weary eyes breaks me down. I will live for a while, if only out of respect.

  Oh, but it hurts. It hurts bad. My quill feels so heavy in my hand. Each letter is harder than the one before. Garrett. Saul. Marid. Rellen. I swear it this moment, this breath; I will never write your names again after today. It will kill me if I do.

  Look at me. I weep even now. The spots on this page are the tears dribbling from my chin. Deserts might be turned to forests by my sorrow, and famished soil soak up my weeping, growing carpets of grass by the very next morn. To divert the endless streams, there seems only one way. To cope, to live, I must become cold. Truly cold.

  I will do it. The remainder of my days will be like the droning of a worker ant. I will never complain again. I will not burden anyone with the sight of my tears. I will speak nothing of sadness or misery, not even when the curtain comes down and the world goes black. I will speak my soul only to you, dear diary. No one else gets anything.

  Forgive me, dearest journal. I left you for a while just now.

  I was writing, and my eyes fell shut. I slept. I dreamed. I woke. Another day has passed me. Or was it two? During my convalescence, the meaning of time escapes me. I wonder if my mind has cracked. It would not surprise me. My fevers come and go, but ‘tis the weakness and forgetfulness that are the worst. I tremble most times like a woman thrice my age. The weals on my wrists do not heal, but fester beneath their bandages. My elbows pop with pain every time I bend my arms, and my fingers have a habit of going numb. I feel disgusting. I know that I stink, that my hair looks like a mad cuckoo’s nest, and that my dress is so ragged I resemble something dredged from Selhaunt’s floor. Oh, what a pathetic sight I am. I laugh when I imagine how I look. What else can I do?

  Daedelar came to me again this morn. Rather than spend my time resisting his help, I swallowed my soup and tossed the empty bowl right back at him. It was a small victory. I almost cracked a smile, but not quite. After an amiable quiet, he talked to me again. He told me many things, most of them good, a few bad. Sometimes I think he lies to me because he thinks it will give me hope and make me desire to live again. I do not mind it, I suppose. He has a way of making even the worst situation sound survivabl
e.

  What he told me:

  We are ten days north of Cornerstone.

  There is no wind, no current, no waves. Shiver’s Pride moves only by its oars.

  Since leaving the White Island, the sky has been painted a solid shade of grey.

  We are running out of food. I feel to blame, since Daedelar ordered his crew to linger offshore many days while waiting for my return.

  The world has not yet ended.

  And that is what he left me with. The world has not yet ended. I tried to explain that with Grim’s victory at Cornerstone, all is lost. He was unconcerned. I told him that the dead sky and silent Selhaunt were my fault, my accidental doing, but he only scratched his bristly chin and shrugged. Shivering, I tried to tell him how the end will arrive, that shadows will overlay the sky and all life be extinguished. I even told him that the warlock who once conquered Thillria was my father, and that with his aid the veil between this world and the Nether will be breached. Nothing. Daedelar fears nothing. He does not believe in magic. He listened to my stories, my wild-sounding claims, and all he gave me was a smile and his usual piece of advice. “Rest goodly, sweet lass,” he said. “Tomorrow will be better.”

  Were I my usual self, I might have been infuriated. But he is right. No sense in being upset. Not now. Not ever again.

  A last thing before I shut my eyes and nap again. It is important for me to say that I feel the Nightness returning. I know this because my lantern is out, but I can still see. Heavy planks lie between the ocean and me, and yet it feels as though I am swimming freely, with all the sounds of the sea thrumming in my ear. Strange, I think, that the Nightness should bother with me. Nothing I do now can aid or thwart its makers, the Ur.