The air inside the grand chamber was thick, the gloom so heavy it drifted like smoke across her eyes. She labored to breathe, and when she sneaked behind one of the Ur statues, she felt watched even though no one was near. She saw no lanterns, no sources of light, nothing to distinguish the cathedral from a cavern carved into the bottom of the world.
This time, when the voices returned, she expected them. They rushed into her mind, black water flooding an empty well, and her body thrummed with pleasure as they invaded her. They told her a thousand things. They made innumerable promises. She could but stand and shiver and listen.
“Find me.” One whisper arose above the rest. “Take me.”
“Where?”
“Look to end of this room.” The voice bounded into her mind. “I am where I have lain for eons. Free me from this prison.”
“You are prisoner here? But why? Who put you here?”
“Find me and learn. Be swift or die.”
Terror and elation swelled inside her chest. After all she had seen, after all she had been through, her chance was finally here. She pushed herself away from the shadow statue and shaped her fingers into fists. Dark power moved within her, consuming her, swelling in her fingers, toes, and lips. She became invisible again. Her feet, filthy and naked, made no sound upon the barren floor as she moved. Who is the hunter now? She thought of the Uylen. I am.
Wraithlike, she floated across the great chamber, drifting past pillar and Ur effigy alike. In her mind the voyage consumed an immense amount of time, but in truth she took mere moments to reach the cathedral’s far side. When the long rows of pillars and stark, cold-eyed effigies came to an end, she looked up to see a staircase leading to a grey altar.
“Now,” said the voice. Take me.”
She let the shadows leave her. Whole again, she pushed her ebon hair from her midnight eyes and ascended the stairs to the altar. Her breaths frosted the air. Her heart pounded like ocean waves against her ribs. “Claim me,” the whisper demanded. “I have waited centuries for someone like you.”
Halfway up to the altar, she froze on the stairs. Something moved in the darkness ahead. She clutched Wkhzl’s dagger tight, ready to draw as much blood as needed. “Come out!” she challenged the darkness. “I am not afraid. I am not little Ande, not anymore. I am queen of the night, destroyer of the Uylen. Come out!”
No sooner did the words escape her lips than a horror moved into view. The ghoulish Uylen shuffled out of the void behind the altar and erected itself on the very top stair. Her boasts abandoned her, her heart gone still. The horror, far taller than any mortal man, possessed four arms instead of two. Its six sightless eyes were as white and dead as tiny, barren moons, its flesh pale to the point of translucence, and its bones crooked and sharp as swords. It wore only a white loincloth, pooling like milk on the obsidian stair. With each movement the cadaverous thing made, its bones popped louder than a dozen creeping dead.
She saw it, and it saw her. Where should have been the horror’s hands were surgeon’s tools made of bone: a forceps, a saw, a blade, and a hook, each stained with old blood. The lord of the Uylen, she sensed. “What are you?” She took one step back.
She expected no answer. She waited for the thing to attack, but when it cracked its mouth open and spoke, she nearly collapsed in surprise.
“Hers should know,” it said. “Ours is the Mortician.”
Her stomach turned. “The Mortician? You made those totems in the forest? You carved up all those bodies?”
“Ours did this, yes.” The thing creaked, its voice as dry as dust. “Hers is here for the Pages? Hers is filled with Nightness, we think.”
“The Pages?” she blurted, still clutching the Kiln dagger tightly. “Is it here?”
“The Pages Black, the ten of the Ur. They left it here with ours. It makes us hungry, oh yes.”
“If you cannot see me, how do know I am a woman?” She dared two steps up the stairs. “I could be a soldier. I could have an army right behind me.”
“Hers is Ur meat.” The Mortician clinked its tools like silverware. “Hers fathers were fallen men. Hers blood is Ur wine, precious as twilight. We can smell she, yes we can. We know hers is a woman. We know hers has no army.”
“And you want to devour me?” she spat. “If you come one step closer, I will burn your bones to ash. I am a sorceress. Do not test me.”
“Hers boasts, but hers does not need to.” The Mortician knelt upon the topmost stairs. “Ours will not eat the child of the Ur. Hers is meant for better things. Hers can end this. Hers can take the Pages away. Hers is the Nightness, and hers blood can carry the book and let ours rest.”
“You want me to take it away?” She doubted it. “You will stop the killing if I do?”
“Yes.” The Mortician clicked again. “Hers is very smart.”
“I do not believe you.”
The Mortician let its four arms fall to its sides. “Hers does not understand.”
“Then make me understand.”
“Ours is doomed here. Ours has no hope. Ours cannot see to learn the Pages, to use its magicks to escape the night. Soon ours will be gone, but ours would rather it come tonight. Oh, how sweet to sleep, to leave the gloom. How sweet to see stars again. If the Pages go, ours may rest forever.”
She had never imagined she would pity the Uylen. Everything about them was putrid, ruined beyond any hope of restoration. Yet the Mortician’s voice sounded as sad as any human’s. “I will take it. If you will swear not to hunt me once it is gone.”
The Mortician retreated to the altar at the top of the stairs. She crept after him, her dagger curled to strike should the horror prove false.
“Take it.” The Mortician genuflected toward the altar. “Be gone with it. Ours is done. Reap it for herself.”
The horror backed away from the altar, and she advanced. When she reached the top, she saw it skulking down the stairs on the altar’s opposite side. “Where are you going?” she called.
“Sleep, long and needed.” The Mortician’s knees popped as it descended into the shadows. “When the Pages goes, ours will die. Ours are the forerunners, the first of hers’ ancestors. Ours deserves our sleep. Ours needs it.”
“Wait. I have questions.”
“No questions,” it said. “None more for ours. Take it and leave. Ours will never hunt hers again.”
Without uttering another sound, the Mortician vanished into a corridor at the stairs’ bottom. The place he entered was void, she sensed, a gate to the deep, dark underhalls of the cathedral. He will not emerge again.
For a long while afterward, she stood upon the top stair. The altar, a block of cold, black slate, sat in silence beside her. The dust upon it was thick, the layers deep enough to obscure everything atop it. She crept toward it, and the voices overtook her again.
“Yes,” they said. “Come near. Clean the dust from my cover. Press your lips to my cheek. Take me away from here.”
She came to a standstill before the altar. She glimpsed something lying atop it, an object large and dark and alive. It lay hidden beneath strands of dust and wisps of ancient webs, waiting for her touch. When she brushed away the first few fingertips of dust, it quivered, and when she blew a gust of cool breath across it, it shivered like dry earth beneath a heavy rain, thirsting for more.
Her fear became exhilaration. She swiped layer after layer of dust away, clearing the altar top until all that remained were her and it, the object she searched for. The Pages was a book, a great tome bound by a black sheaf of mummified flesh. Its spine was as tall as the oldest tomes in the cellars of Gryphon, yet only as thick as two fingers’ width. She reached for it. Her eyes, dark as midnight, glimmered like stars as her hand settled upon it.
When she touched the Pages Black, the world paused. Over the ruins and over every city of man from the Uylen chapel to the farthest reach of Graehelm, the clouds froze in the sky, the wind ceased to blow, and men’s voices hung in the air, stilled for a long, slow momen
t. When she cracked its cover open, a sound like ribs breaking cut through the stale cathedral air, while elsewhere, lying in graves dug impossibly deep, the oldest of the world’s dead stirred, roused to a moment’s life by the book’s awakening.
A book, she marveled. But so few pages?
She took the book into her arms, clutching it close to her breast as though it were her child. What will Rellen say? She wondered. When he sees I undid Thillria’s evil, he will feel foolish. All of them will. As well they should.
With a smile, she stole the Pages Black from its altar. She ran the length of the Uylen church, pattering through the vast emptiness, pelting down the hall like a common thief. The voices were gone, but she needed them no longer. She sprinted out of the cathedral and into the open night, where the stars painted the sky with an endless sea of watchful white eyes. She found no Uylen, no traps laid by the Mortician or his minions. She felt only the crisp midnight air, teasing her hair like spider’s silk as she fled down the streets.
After many strides, she came to the city’s edge, where milk-white grass and broken street joined beneath the stars. Breathless, she knelt amid the pale blades, made certain that no Uylen were near, and set the book before her.
She cracked the Pages open a second time. Its pages felt thick and fleshy between her fingers, made of some substance not quite paper, not quite skin. Whereas the darkness of the cathedral had thwarted her, the starlight gave her sight. She saw black glyphs and arcane sigils upon the first page, many thousand in number, and though she hoped to read them, all were illegible. She flipped to the second, the third, and the fourth page, and it seemed to her each set of sigils depicted a different theme. Some of the glyphs were like fire, scrawled violently about their page. Others were like storm clouds, whose graceless letters reminded her of Furyon. The never-ending rain, the thunder, and the lightning. If Saul were here, I would if he could read it.
She flipped all the way to the end. To her utter surprise she found only nine pages in total, nine sheaves writ front and back with too many sigils to count. Just nine? ‘The Pages Black, the ten of the Ur,’ the Mortician had said, and so she had expected.
She flipped to the final page and saw something out of place. One page, the tenth, was missing. She had no way of knowing how or when, but it seemed clear someone had ripped the final page out, for only a frayed edge of fleshy paper remained. One page gone, but not all? She grimaced. Did someone try to steal it before me? Only Jix will know.
Journal, Part V
The heartland
I am close, so very close. I must remain patient.
I sit in the grass outside my tent. The sun sets as I begin to write. I marvel at the colors in the sky. The clouds are lavender like a king’s robe, the stars are silver candles, and Mother Moon is a pale pearl awaiting her chance to shine. The twilight is a welcome thing on an otherwise restless eve. I have longed for it all day.
Beneath the failing light, the open country sits before me, broad and green and without end. I think if Thillria’s neighbors knew the beauty of this place, they might covet it. They might march their armies across the quiet dells with spears and shields clanking, itching for easy spoils. If Triaxe or Yrul or Romaldar ever invaded, they would walk over us like oxen over an anthill. But no, they shall not come. Where we ride, no one will find us. Only when it is too late will the rest of the world know Thillria’s name.
I am a nanny tonight, and I shall be for a while to come. I have three to watch, three to tend to. They are men grown, these three: the Lad, the Erudite, and the Blood. Watching them whisper and plot and brood is no sort of chore I relish. I suppose I could try to be rid of them. I have soldiers with me. I could drown the fools in swords or tie them to the trees as bait for the crows, but such direct deeds of murder are distasteful. I have enough blood on my hands already. I much prefer Grimwain to do this deed for me.
Tonight is our second night away from Aeth, and this old diary is serving a new use. Most eves, these pages make for a good place to waste my ink, but tonight the journal is my distraction, my only retreat from the nauseating conversations taking place all around me. I can hardly decide who is more annoying: the Thillrian louts I hired to make this trip or the Lad, the Erudite, and the Blood, all of them hunkered like hens around their fire. They think they are some sort of heroes, these three. They go on and on about rescuing their beloved girl, blathering about her as though she was some sort of stable wench, some apple-cheeked lass meant to marry and spend her life with one of them. They do not understand, not even the Blood. How could they? I want to scream and them and slap the life right out of their faces. I want Grimwain to mince their bones and serve them as supper to the worms. Patience. Remember. Patience.
I complain too much. I am too hungry for it, for the moment that is due me. I can hardly stand to wait a moment longer. I must move my mind elsewhere. I must forget.
My angel is here. She sits alone among us, an outcast from her fellow Thillrians. Her shirt is loose and dark. Her pants are as droopy as an empty potato sack. Her hood is drawn so tight I can hardly see her face. Only one part of her is visible, the tip of her nose, a diamond drinking the warm evening air. I know what her shabby shawl hides. Save for the Blood, the rest of them think she is a boy, a mute porter dragged from Denawir’s streets. She is no such thing, my angel. She is much, much more.
I lean against my pack, pull these pages closer, and dream of my angel. She is youngest of the two. I remember her mother as though it were yesterday. I had only just arrived in Thillria when I met her. Whereas my first wife had been all fire and fury, my Yonia was a soft creature, the pillow upon which I lay my head at night, the only woman I ever truly loved. Yonia is dead now, of course. I strangled her the night she stumbled upon this very journal. That was seventeen winters ago. Our daughter lives on.
The sun falls beneath the horizon. I stare at my angel as the light leaves her. Ona is the fairest girl in Thillria, the shadow of her sister. In truth, she seems a girl no longer. She is a woman now, a living dream to the desires of men, and her father’s finest servant. She would gladly swallow a goblet of poison or run a dagger along her throat just to see me smile. I should be ashamed of what I have done to her, of the things I have shown her. I love my Ona, but I need her sister more.
I write slowly tonight. My ink is shallow and my lantern too dim. The Thillrians grow quiet. The wind picks up. A storm is coming. A hard line of clouds moves against the stars, consuming them one after another. I know this storm. It moves for us. It knows we are close. It knows that within the coming days, all shall change. My dreams, vast beyond my own comprehension, shall become real. The skies, the storms, they shall bend to me.
If I dwell upon how it came to this, how a puny Romaldarian schoolboy ended up with this rarest of opportunities, I am left with only one honest answer. It was all an accident. I do not recall writing of it before, but now with the wind shearing across the grass just as it did those many decades ago, I come to remember the night it happened. I was a rummager, a pilferer, a digger of old graves and a picker of women’s pockets. When Grim came to my hiding spot and laid the package in my hands, I hoped it might hide a bauble or a few coins to spend in the market. I did not understand what he had given me until later that night, long after he was gone. I sat in my secret graveyard and gaped upon it. The moon looked the same as it does tonight, pale and perilous. A Page, Grim had brought me. Mine and only mine. He never said a word after he gave it to me, and I did not see him again for many, many years.
And now, with a momentary failing of the wind, I can hear them conniving again. The Lad is in a dread state of mind. He glares at the Thillrians and whispers threats in my direction. The Erudite tries to temper him, but fails. He murmurs wise words aplenty, but lacks the wit to know how useless he is here. The Blood, meanwhile, gazes through the rest of them as though they were ghosts. He listens, but says nothing.
They think they know my little girl. They do not. When we find her, they will see
a side of her they never knew existed. They will shiver in her presence. Their bones will go cold and their fingers numb. They will not like the new Andelusia. But then, of course, it will be too late…
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