Dark Moon Daughter

by J. Edward Neill

  Into the corridor beyond the room, she crept. No Ur lanterns lit the way, only the wavering tendril of her violet candle stretching into nothingness. Down, down she went. No Sarcophages, she hoped. No father. Nothing living at all. But who opened the door?

  She searched the darkness, groping the emptiness with her fingers. Unnerved, she felt mere breaths from fleeing back to her room when she glimpsed movement at the edge of her candle’s pool of radiance.

  The hairs on her arms stood on end. A shiver climbed from the small of her back up into her shoulders. She reached out, her eyes closed, and grasped at the darkness. Her candle dimmed. Her heart stopped inside her. She expected to touch a Sarcophage’s mask, a pile of bones, or some starving Midnon wraith eager to take a new bride.

  She opened her eyes.

  Hovering in the deep shadow cast by her candlelight, she glimpsed a young woman’s face. Her heart leapt back to life. No monsters. Her muscles unwound. Only a girl.

  “You,” she whispered into the darkness. “Where did you come from?”

  The woman, silent and serene, emerged from the gloom. Andelusia recognized her at once. The warlock’s urchin. What did he call her? Ona? Ah, but she is a beautiful thing. Down here all alone.

  Ona gazed at her, her big dark eyes backed by a cautious smile. She was no more than twenty summers old, and her gown and silken black hair were not unlike Ande’s own. We might be sisters, she thought. I wonder…

  “Hello.” Ona’s voice made sweet, sad music.

  “Hello.”

  Ona peered up and down the corridor, seeking someone or something that was not there. Floating at the edge of the candlelight, she looked like a ghost, only not terrifying at all. “I know you, Andelusia,” she said. “I watched you in Denawir. I saw your long walks at night. You remind me of myself.”

  Andelusia did not know what to make of the ghostly girl. She is not what she seems. Is she real, or another of fath…the warlock’s illusions?

  “Who are you?”

  “Ona.”

  “What are you doing all the way down here, Ona?”

  Ona’s little smile melted away. She looked profoundly sad, her serenity shattering on her otherwise perfect face. “He tells me this is where I live now. I miss the ocean. I miss the countryside. But this is not so terrible. I have this whole corner all to myself.”

  “But it is so dark down here.”

  “Not to me.”

  “You…” Andelusia narrowed her eyes. “I remember what you did. You were walking behind Garrett. Is that how you captured him? By seducing him? How? He brushed me away like dust, and yet you...”

  “It was an accident.” Ona’s eyes welled with shame. “I didn’t mean for him to get hurt.”

  A swell of anger surged inside her and then crashed against the shores of her hardened heart. “Perhaps he deserved it.” She gritted her teeth. “He let me go to Nightmare alone. The way his mind works, I believe he knew all along what would happen. And now I will never see him again.”

  Ona shook her head. “It was not his fault. It was mine, all mine…”

  Then and there, she changed her mind about Ona. She is not the warlock’s minion. She is just a girl, lost the same as I.

  She smiled inwardly, sensing an opportunity. The shadows moved inside her, compelling her. She walked to Ona and grazed the girl’s arm with her fingers. She is no ghost. If she lives and breathes as I do, she can answer my questions.

  “This place is so lonely, so sunless.” she said, feigning sympathy. “Do you like it here? Do you mind that there is no one to talk to?”

  “We are not alone.” Ona glanced over her shoulder. “Our master is here, Grim too. They bring apples and wine for dinner and cool water for me to bathe in. There are others too, but I am not supposed to talk about them.”

  Others. The Sarcophages, she means. “Are you like me, another of his daughters? Did he bring you here to learn the Pages?”

  Ona creased her brow. “No. He says I’m nothing and no one, not until he remakes me. I would resist, but I know he’s right. One day he will reward me.”

  She looked Ona up and down. We are sisters, she knew. Look at us. She saw Ona’s eyes, grey as dull steel, and her hair, the same color and oily texture as her own. We are blood, this girl and I.

  “The darkness is the same in us,” she offered.

  “No,” said Ona. “Yours is purer. Your mother was one of them, the ancient peoples. Mine was a farm girl. Our father murdered them both.”

  The thought should have terrified her, but instead provoked more questions. “Why did he bring you here?” she asked. “Are you his helper…or his captive? Have you known him your entire life? This is far from home, very far for one so pretty.”

  Ona’s innocence drifted out of her gaze. Her childlike expression hardened, and her gaze narrowed like a cat’s. With one coquettish blink, she slinked around Andelusia, smiling impishly.

  “You have so many questions, sister,” she purred, trailing her finger along Ande’s shoulder. “If you must know, he asked me here, and I came willingly. He offered me the world, a place at his side, a life of luxury. Who could say no to that? He’s everything. He’s more than our father. He’s our master, our king.”

  Ona’s new tone unsettled Andelusia. “Our king?” She shivered. “This is not the first time I have heard as much. Of all the realms to be king of, Thillria seems the weakest. What does he mean to do with this power of his?”

  “He hasn’t told you?” Ona smiled. “I shouldn’t ruin his surprise. He would punish me.”

  “Surprise? What surprise?”

  “The grandest of all surprises.”

  I like this girl less, she decided. Wandering these empty halls, looking too much like me, knowing father’s mind in and out. He meant for me to come here. These are all lines in his damnable script.

  “How do you know all this?” She frowned. “What is this place? Where are we?”

  Ona smiled coyly. “I shouldn’t say more. He would be angry. He might hurt us both.”

  She recoiled from Ona’s touches. She half-expected the warlock to swoop into the corridor and deliver some swift and terrible punishment. Ona has been peeking over my shoulder. Someone is near. Someone is watching.

  “Perhaps I should leave.”

  “Perhaps.” Ona stared, the grey in her eyes colder than before. “Perhaps you should keep to your room until after your first lesson. You can come back another eve, while father and Grim are away. We can meet again. We can explore together.”

  No. I think not. She decided she did not like Ona, neither her false innocence nor her honey-dappled tongue. She felt jealous, and she believed Ona was her rival, perhaps even the warlock’s favored apprentice. If my bands were not so tight, I would smite the girl with a taste of Ur fire and cure her of her cuteness.

  “I have to go.” She backed slowly away. “No need for us to be friends. You stay here in your coffin and I will keep to my studies.”

  “Are you sure?” Ona slyly smiled.

  “Yes. Very.”

  She retreated. The shadows in the hallway thickened, and her Ur candle’s flame seemed near to death. She lost sight of Ona, but the girl called out once more.

  “Always keep one eye open, sister. Father and his dead are always watching, always waiting for us to slip up. Remember that. You might live longer.”

  She fled. Her bare feet freezing, she pattered up the corridor and through some hundred rooms: libraries, laboratories, crypts, and empty, hollow chambers in which the dust swirled like stars. The chambers felt disordered, their instruments, paintings, and shelves arranged in a different manner than only an hour ago. It does not matter, she told herself as she ran. Just fly, Ande. Get back to your room.

  Breathless, she slid through a final door and arrived back in Midnon’s main hall. The Sarcophages were as she remembered, still and silent, and hopefully sleeping. She hunkered in the pew nearest the stair to her room, her bones quaking, a thousand imagined p
lots roiling in her head.

  The girl looked like me. She was dressed like me. Is she meant to be me? Was she another of father’s disguises? Like Jix, Orumna, Hadryn…Wkhzl? Be calm, Ande. Be steady. If he wanted you dead, he would have slain you long ago. All you know is already lost. Nothing remains except the Pages Black. You will find it. You will learn it. And then the power will be yours.

  She sat in the pew for longer than she meant to, her knees tucked under her chin, her hair hanging like ink strokes across her eyes. She felt cold, deathly so, and her iron bands burned into her wrists, punishing her more than ever. She wanted rid of them. She wanted the shadows back. She wanted the warlock to find her and teach her everything…tonight.

  Undergrave

  The drums jarred Rellen from sleep. Boom, boom, boom! The sound shattered the silence in the abyss. Boom, crack, boom! Even when they stopped, he heard them thrumming in his skull, shaking all his darkest thoughts loose. Some hundred breaths later, he looked up from the bottom of his prison pit and saw three pale lanterns glaring down at him. Time for work, he knew. Time to dig. Time to find what the warlock has waiting for us.

  The shadow men lowered a rope ladder. Rellen, Saul, and the skinny Thillrian lad named Ghurk climbed out. The pit, a hollow cylinder graven five men wide and ten deep, was but one of thousands near the Undergrave’s bottom, and all of them were filled with prisoners. Sixty-one days in this damnable hole, he counted as he ascended. Not that it matters. We will never see the sun again.

  In the Undergrave, the sun did not exist. The lightless hollows and worming tunnels slithered many days deep into the earth, snaking ever nearer to the bottom of the world. During his previous sixty days, Rellen and his fellow prisoners had marched through thousands of grottos, some small and treacherous, others huger than any city. The black caverns flowed together like the hollows of a many-chambered monster’s heart, all of them connected. Whoever had thought to delve into such a place, and why, were mysteries to him. None of his captors had ever said much other than, “There,” and, “dig.”

  For the sixty-first time, he climbed over the rim of his prison pit and marched down into the darkness. The warlock’s grey men corralled him, Saul, and some two-hundred Thillrian prisoners into a ragged, chained-together line. His was but one group of twenty, he reckoned. They have half of Thillria down here. And likely the other half is dead. He would have tried to escape, had he any hope. But there is none. Ande is gone. Garrett is dead. It’s just Saul and me and everyone else, digging our way to death.

  Tunnel after tunnel, he descended. The grey men held grey lanterns and jabbed at his back with grey-bladed spears. He felt tired. His skin hung from his bones like frayed sackcloth, his cheeks drooping like bark from the hide of a sickly tree. His beard felt as full as ever, a bristly, filthy mass. On his way to the bottom of the world, he shambled like a tired old tortoise, roused to march faster only when the grey men murmured and pointed their spears in his direction.

  Two and a half days deep. He crossed a narrow stone bridge over one of the Undergrave’s ten-thousand chasms. The bottom was another half-day down, so far down in the void he shuddered to think of it. The warlock’s soldiers lit the way with a trio of grey lanterns, whose ghoulish light stretched like fingers into the darkness. The chain on his ankle was linked to Saul, and then to Ghurk, the narrow, dark-eyed lad from Thillrian city of Muthemnal, and then two hundred men more. Here I am at the front of the line. No accident, that.

  As the grey men led prodded him across another stone bridge and into the tunnels beyond, he jested to those who could hear him. “We need a bath, friends. How long has it been? We reek. Even if we did escape, no woman would have us.”

  Limping along behind him, Ghurk grumbled. “Aye. A short while in one of those cave pools would do us right.”

  “Why bother?” cracked Saul. “We’d stink again the very next day.”

  Rellen shot a sly smile at his companions, making sure the grey men saw him. “Maybe the reek protects us. If our masters would ever let us bathe, they might come close enough to whip us. The worse we smell, the farther they stay. I, for one, plan to never bathe again.”

  A dozen prisoners laughed. It was a rare sound, a thing seldom heard, though it soon died against the underworld walls. Two grottos and three tunnels later, the grey men made them sit on the hard, wet stone in a passage only two men wide. A dozen Thillrian boys scurried up and down the line, distributing bowls quarter-filled with cold, tasteless gruel.

  “Lunch.” Rellen took his bowl and slumped against the wall. “Or is it supper? Our bellies would be fuller if we licked the walls. Look at the rock, weeping for us like wives.”

  It was true. Slick with water that never ceased to run, the Undergrave walls glistened. Almost three days down. He sucked a drop of mineral-rich water off his fingertip. And still it rains.

  “We’ll die here, you know,” young Ghurk concluded the same as he did every day. “We’ll finish digging for whatever it is they’re trying to find and then they’ll kill us.”

  “I think not.” Saul shook his head.

  “Oh?” Ghurk countered. “You think they’ll feed us forever? You think they’ll let us go?”

  “No,” Saul answered. “I think Rellen will dream up a plan for escape. I expect it any moment now.”

  “A shame for you two.” Rellen opened his eyes. “My dreams are dead and gone. Ande is lost. She’s either murdered or turned against us. You saw her, Saul. You know. There is nothing worth escaping for.”

  “So you’ll sulk?” Saul frowned.

  Yes. Until the end, he wanted to say. “No,” he replied. “But only a foolish man has any hope of leaving this place alive. I can hardly feel my fingers, Saul. My ears ring with the sound of our hammers against the rocks. If I had a sword, I would hack these chains off and wade into our watchers, but no…how many are there? A thousand? And a thousand more waiting in the overworld? They are ghosts, and we will soon join them. Crows take my soul, I wish they would kill us today. I need the sleep.”

  Saul pushed his bowl of gruel away. He looked disgusted, his fury roiling in his eyes. “This is far from the Rellen I knew.” He glared. “If the shades kill us, so be it. Better to fight and die than watch ourselves rot. What kind of cowards are we, we who dig to help them?”

  The worst kind. Rellen sank against the wall. Only not. He felt the water slide down his back and pool beneath his legs. He wished it would fill the tunnel and drown him, though not just yet. “We dig and dig and dig.” He stared at his blistered palms. “Our hands run red for them, but there is no gold in these walls, no stones worth a lick to any sane Thillrian. Look closer, you two. The one they call Grimwain; who is he? The warlock’s servant…or his master? What treasure is so grand that lies so far inside the earth? The grey men want no plunder, I think. The warlock already has his book. Ande is turned to darkness. What else is there?”

  “Why should it matter?” snorted Ghurk. “We dig or we disappear. That’s the way of things.”

  Rellen closed his eyes again. The world felt blacker, the Undergrave gloom flooding his mind. “We dig, but not without reason. The deeper we go, the sicker we feel. Our jailers have no pockets they care to fill. Our coming here was no accident. Jix, Orumna, the Uylen, the warlock’s book…what does the fiend want so far down in the dark? Ande would know if she were here. She would tell us, and Garrett would hack our way out.”

  “But they are not here,” said Saul, calm as the cavern air. “It is just us. We can guess at why we are here or we can try to get out. Seems clear enough to me.”