Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  Swifter than a finger’s snap, she summoned a sphere of molten Ur fire and hurled it at the Sarcophage’s back. The black blob smoked through the air, evaporating every raindrop it touched. Her aim was off. The sphere sped past the Sarcophage’s skull and burned a crater in the slate behind it. The dread creature, somehow annoyed, turned its attention away from Marid.

  “Yes,” she challenged it. “Come for me.”

  Dead gaze gleaming, the creature hoisted its thousand-notched sword and clattered toward her. It cared nothing for the cold curtains of rain.

  “Help Garrett,” she said to Marid. “Go!”

  With a roar, she hurled a second sphere of Ur magma at the Sarcophage, but the ebon flame only clipped the monster’s flank and melted a strip of its armor. The horror rushed her, and with a breath she became black smoke. It tried to skewer her, but like a sword thrust into the wind, it did nothing to harm her.

  Fury replaced her fear. No match for me, she convinced herself. Like liquid smoke she swirled through the air and reappeared behind the monster, where she carved off a half-dozen ribs with the flats of her burning hands. The Sarcophage clacked its fleshless jaws. It knew no pain, no fear. Its next sword-stroke whirled close to her throat, missing her by a hair’s breadth.

  She danced with death.

  Twenty times, the Sarcophage cut the air, its sword screaming past her ears, her neck, and her belly. Twenty times she survived. Whenever the monster’s sword sang near, she slipped into the shadows. Each time its blade cut harmlessly through her body, she retook mortal form and counterattacked. It was an inelegant fight, demanding perfection. Piece by piece, bone by bone, she hacked away at the Sarcophage with the smoldering flat of her hand. She never missed. The monster’s sword never struck her. She sheared off its ribs, its arms, and finally its smiling skull. When she breathed afterward, all that remained was a pile of bones sizzling in the rain.

  The Sarcophage’s bones cooled. The rain drowned all other sounds. Panting, her face streaked with ash, she staggered toward the Undergrave maw. The battle here was ended. She came first to Marid, who stood over the remains of a headless, armless Sarcophage, the pommel of his sword jutting from the beast’s broken breastplate. Though the darkness consumed everything, he seemed to know she was near.

  “Ande?” He kicked the Sarcophage’s skull away. “You…have to help…Garrett.”

  She shielded her eyes and swept through the rain in the direction Marid pointed. She stepped over bodies Yrul and Sarcophage alike. Dread wormed its way into her body. Garrett was nowhere to be seen.

  “Garrett? Love? Where are you?” she called out. “Garrett? Say something if you can hear me!”

  The Nightness felt weak inside her. She felt it regenerating, but not quick enough.

  “Garrett, damn you!” she shouted. “Where are you?”

  At last he emerged. Striding out from the storm-curtain, he brushed her shoulder with the tips of his fingers. “Ande…” He dropped his sword and knotted his fingers with hers. “You made it.”

  Shocked back to life, she hugged him as hard as she could. “You can see me?” she asked with her cheek planted against his chest. “Even in the rain?”

  “Of course I can. Always could.”

  “Are you hurt?” she fretted.

  “No,” he said. “Well…perhaps a little.”

  Something is wrong, she knew. His embrace is weak, his skin clammier than rain alone could cause. She stepped back, her hands squaring his shoulders.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  He went down to one knee. She followed him, kneeling with him as the rain threatened to strip her skin away. Her heart drummed away inside her. She felt Garrett quiver, but not from the cold.

  “It was just a nick.” His eyes were heavy-lidded. “Just like you said.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “One of the dead men.” He murmured. “The biggest. His sword smoked like mine and Marid’s. His eyes were hollower than the rest. He knew me, Ande. His masters must have told him. I destroyed him, but not before he cut me.”

  Her heart stopped dead in her chest. Only the Nightness kept her alive. She searched Garrett’s neck, face, and arms, touching him everywhere.

  “Here.” He made a fist with his left hand and tapped his middle knuckle. “He cut me here. So small a nick. But enough for the poison to get in.”

  Her eyes fumed with Nightness smoke. Grabbing Garrett’s fist, she locked her lips fearfully tight. The nick from the Sarcophage’s blade was tiny, almost superficial. Cauterized by the heat of the monster’s blade, it seemed the furthest thing from a mortal wound.

  And yet…

  “Are you sure?” She pleaded. “Could you have cut it another way? On one of the monster’s bones maybe? Or maybe it was already there? From the crash. On the rocks.”

  Garrett shook his head. Streaming with rain, his face looked paler than a ghost’s. “No. It knew me. It was here to guard against me. I smelled its sword. It reeked like the smoke whenever you take to the shadows.”

  She felt furious, powerless, disconsolate. Marid plodded up behind her, and her first instinct was anger. “Marid, how could you?” she snapped. “You fought just one while he fought all the others? Why? What’s the matter with you?”

  Marid’s sword, steaming in the rain, fell from his grasp and clattered against the ground. “I…I tried to help.”

  Her anger turned to panic. Her tears streamed down her cheeks faster than the rain. “Maybe the poison is weaker than mine,” she reasoned. “Wrail was slower, less powerful. Maybe he was the one who made it. Maybe not lethal. Maybe just enough to make you a little sick.”

  As if to silence her, a crushing hymn of thunder rattled the top of Undergrave Hill. Slate shook and earth trembled. She knew the reason. The Black Moon is nearer than ever. The Ur…too close.

  “This is how we knew it would be.” Garrett squeezed her hand.

  “No…” she wept, “not true.”

  “Survival was never likely.” He rested his forehead against hers. “But still…not finished. Wrail is dead. His spell should be…gone.”

  “I will not leave you.” She kissed him.

  He released her hand. She hated the feeling. “Test it, Ande,” he told her. “The ‘Grave is right behind you. Test it for Wrail’s ward. Tell me if you can pass.”

  She did not want to do it. She wanted to stay with him until the world’s end. She hoped, in the bottom of her heart, that the ward would remain. Purposefully plodding, slunk to the Undergrave maw. Marid stood in her way, but she brushed past him. Near the maw, she expected Wrail’s spell to melt her on the spot.

  But no.

  She stepped out of the crashing rain and into the pitch of the Undergrave’s first grotto.

  “Gone,” she murmured. “Safe.”

  “What does that mean?” Marid fretted.

  Pale and haggard, Garrett lifted his head. “It means she has to go on without us,” he said. “Our usefulness is finished here.”

  “I will not go,” she declared.

  “You must,” said Garrett. “You know it. If not for everyone else, go for Marid, for Saul, and for me.”

  Marid crouched by Garrett’s side. “Where exactly is she going?”

  “To the bottom,” he said. “Grimwain will go there. Her father too, and a host of others. It is not yet tomorrow. Midnight is not here. The Ur…the enemy…still imprisoned.”

  She hated him then, and loved him all the more. He is right, she knew. To stay means giving the earth to Grimwain.

  “Why should I go? What can I really do?” She feigned rebellion.

  “You will think of something.” Garrett managed a smile.

  After a moment’s hesitation, she went back to him. Weeping, shivering like all the dead trees in Sallow, she wrapped her arms around him and squeezed.

  “Marid,” she said while clinging to her love, “take him away from here. Go before more wolf-men come. If the Moon falls and
the sun fails to rise, do not give up. Take him away as far and as fast as you can. Promise me. Say it.”

  “I will. I promise.” Marid shivered.

  “As for you.” She touched Garrett’s cheek. “I order you to live. No pitiful poison will take my Garrett’s life. You are undying. Do you hear me? You will see the sun rise again. You, me, and our children.”

  He smiled at her. She clutched him a final time. He felt clammy and weak, and yet she felt herself thawing.

  “Go,” he told her. “Hurry.”

  Body and soul, she wanted to wrap her arms around him and never let go. But the rain served as a reminder. I have to do this. Peeling herself away, she rose. The wind washed over her and her dress flagged against her saturated limbs, but she stood tall.

  “Marid,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Go now. Get him out of here.”

  Marid knelt beside Garrett. With a grunt and a heave, he poured all his Thillrian might into helping her love to his feet.

  “Are you really leaving?” He sagged under Garrett’s weight. “This is it?”

  “Garrett is right. I have to go.”

  Willing herself to the coldness of the void, she faced the Undergrave maw. She sensed Marid’s heart pounding, Garrett’s thudding weakly. With a last glance at the Black Moon, whose presence threatened to consume the world, she flicked the rain from her fingers and became shadowstuff. She no longer heard the rain or Marid’s cry for her to return. She heard only the whispers of the Ur, who tried to invade every crevice of her consciousness, but whom she silenced with the force of her will.

  I am coming, she promised them. Best be ready.

  Grave New World

  The Undergrave walls wept water. Black as oil, it streamed in rivers down and through ancient stone. It trickled from cracks too tiny to see, collecting like capillary blood before vanishing into darkness. As it crawled to the world’s bottom, it made no more sound than a whisper.

  After three days of enduring it, the Pale Knight reckoned he never wanted to hear water again.

  His feet hurt. From water and slate and cavern stone, his boots rotted beneath his soles. He felt blood squelching with each step, squishing between his toes as he marched.

  He adored the sensation.

  Might as well. It’ll be my last.

  Three of Wrail’s men marched in front of him, and seven at his back. They were the foulest of those Grimwain had resurrected. The worst of the worst. Chosen to be at peace before all the rest. They wore cloaks black and grey, and though their salvation awaited, they marched with only darkness in their eyes.

  Most of them lived hundreds of years ago, he mused. Thousands, maybe. They want it to end. And here I am, slogging along with them.

  Worst of the worst, indeed.

  Following their torchlights, he shuffled through the Undergrave’s thousandth corridor, walked a bridge spanning a chasm ten days deep, and crossed a cavern whole cities might have been forgotten in. His swords clattered on his hips, his last two possessions in the world.

  “Why even bring us here?” he heard one of them mutter behind him.

  Because, you idiot, he wanted to say. We’re so repulsive we deserve to die first.

  After crossing another span of stone, beneath which the blackness fell away into forever, the haunted men stopped. They lay down their torches, hunkered in the shadows, and passed a skin of wine from man to man. With a snort, he sat among them. Weaklings, he thought. Probably haven’t marched this hard in a thousand years. The world’ll end above and below, and we fools will be late for it.

  The pale, gaunt, black-toothed man beside him passed the wineskin along. He took it, smelled it, and turned up his nose before handing it down the line.

  “Smells like death,” he murmured.

  “And so it is,” said the man.

  Whenever one of them spoke to him, he felt ill. He may have butchered more than all ten of them put together, but somehow he sensed they were more evil yet.

  “I suppose I should be honored to be down here.” He licked his teeth. “Truth be told, I’d have rather waited up above.”

  The gaunt man lowered his hood and gazed into nothing. “Foolish words, Pale One.”

  “How’s that?” he dared.

  “If you waited up there…in the rain…with the cold wind and the moon falling, you might die sooner than you like. The Ur would have you for a while in the Moon. And every hour with the darklings…an eon in which to pull your insides out and make powder of your bones. Needless, your suffering would’ve been. Better to meet the end with us.”

  “Doubtful,” he cracked, though not without a shudder. “Nothing left up there to kill me. Not enough Wolde in all of Thillria.”

  “Not the Wolde,” said the gaunt man. “The girl. The witch-girl.”

  “She’s dead,” he snorted again. “Old ‘Tulu told me. Besides, not even the living can kill me. A skinny dead girl wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  The gaunt man looked at him. He hated the pale light in the man’s eyes. “Your boasting brings you no glory, Pale One. Your swords and disdain are your strengths, and yet you know so little. Forget what you think you know. This girl cannot die.”

  “Everyone can die.” He remembered his own expiration. “I should know.”

  The gaunt man stared him down all the harder, and like a skeleton clacked his teeth. “The Anderae girl,” he said, “cannot die. Never. Do you understand? Her grandfather…the worst of the Thropians. Her mother…a creature bound by nothing. Stab her, flay her, roast her, or scatter her to the wind. She won’t die unless the black fire touches her.”

  “What do you mean…won’t die?”

  “Many times, she has been slain.” The gaunt man never blinked. “In the Furyon halls, she rose in darkness. In her father’s prison, she crawled up from her imagined grave. In Cornerstone, she starved, shattered like glass, and drowned. And yet, the Sleepers sends his whispers. The girl lives, never mind her many deaths. You, she might’ve killed just for sport, and for good reason. And then, how would your black heart beat, Pale One? Not at all, I say. Not in this world, anyhow.”

  His cold courage abandoned him. He swallowed the sick taste in his mouth and spoke no more to the gaunt man.

  Like shadows, the men rose at length and darkened the Undergrave walls. They raised their tired torches and walked down, down, down, and he followed. He thought no more of the witch girl, the gaunt man, or the thousands of others he had endured during his second life. He thought only of peace.

  What’ll it be like? he wondered. If one afterlife is pain, is the other pleasure? Will we have sensation? If our minds haunt us even after our deaths, will we truly know peace?

  Or will we bring ruin to yet another world?

  He arrived.

  On an outcropping of pale rocks, where violet candles burned atop poles and inky water lapped soundlessly again the shore, he and the haunted men came to a stop. Five boats awaited. The slender, daggerlike craft bobbed in the shallows, empty save for their oars.

  Haven’t been on the water since the Furies invaded Graehelm. And before that, raiding the north.

  Always hated water.

  “How far?” he asked no one in particular.

  “Not very,” answered a haunted man.

  “We’ll be there just in time to die,” said another.

  “Charming. I’ll row my own,” he told them. “You lot can share the other four.”

  As he climbed aboard his chosen craft, he watched the haunted men with disgust. Slow, he observed. Skinny and weak. Almost like the dead things Wrail brought along.

  I’d rather have been sent down here with ‘Tulu.

  I can’t believe I just thought that.

  “Do you know the way, Pale One?” a haunted man rumbled.

  “No. Do you?”

  “Yesssss,” another hissed. “We feel the Tower. We’re drawn to it. Follow us.”

  “I don’t feel anything.”

  “Yo
u’re too young,” murmured a haunted man on the boat beside his. “Died only nine years ago.”

  The haunted men dipped their oars beneath the water and rowed. If he had doubted their strength during the long march down, he felt disdain no longer. In a black line, with the violet candles on their prows, they rowed steady and true into the lake. Their four boats slid out beyond the shore, and he swore he heard more than one of them humming dirges from the old world.

  And what a miserable place that must’ve been.

  For time unknowable, he rowed behind them. He let their dirges fall out of his mind and allowed himself to savor the exertion of steering his craft alone. He had not done any real work since his resurrection. The Wolde had always whimpered beneath him, happy to do as he commanded.

  Father would’ve been enraged at that. What good is a man who lets others do his building, his raping, and his killing?

  ‘None,’ the old bastard would’ve said.

  Somewhere out on the lake, he felt his heart leap against his ribs. The sensation the haunted men had told him of washed over him, and his mind darkened with the knowledge of where he needed to go. An island. A tower. The door will open. We’ll all die. Rowing harder, he overtook the haunted men’s boats and gained a lead. The faster he went, the blacker his blood felt. Smoking inside me, he sensed. What’s the matter with me? Is this how it ends?

  When his boat hit a hard, crystalline shore, the sensations abandoned him. In a cold sweat, he leapt over the side and planted his rotting boots on a black, mirrorlike surface. The island, he knew. Violet fires burned in some hundred copper braziers, lighting a path before him. He looked down the path and felt sick to his stomach. Something’s out there. Air tastes dead. If ‘Tulu had come, he could’ve explained.

  He took one step down the dark path.

  He heard the air above him crack and felt a fearsome wind arise. Something had flown over his head, something cold, dead, and powerful. The deathly feeling stripped all the warmth from his skin.

  What…was that?

  Are They here?

  He waited to die. He drew ten breaths, but nothing. He opened his eyes, and for an instant he glimpsed the vast tower in the blackness beyond the path. The obsidian spear vaulted skyward from the island’s heart, climbing into forever. Straight at the Black Moon it pointed, he guessed, a dagger for the world’s death.