Dark Moon Daughter

by J. Edward Neill

  “No. Not so clear.” He shook his head. “I want to know what it is. I want them to show us what we are searching for.”

  “Why?” asked Ghurk.

  “I think I know,” sighed Saul.

  He cracked his eyelids open. The grey men’s lantern lights slunk across the faces of every nearby man, making ghosts of all of us. “Almost time for work,” he said. “How deep shall we dig today? To the bottom? Deeper? You two think I have given up. I would never.”

  “You’re talking nonsense,” said Saul.

  “Maybe.” He shrugged. “But I want something before we die. I want to find what we are digging for. The warlock stole everything, but I’ve something for him. I want to be the first one to swipe the dust off his treasure. I want to knock the last wall down. And then, before any of his grey men can stop me, I want to smash his treasure to pieces. You call us cowards for helping them, Saul, but what if you and I carved our way out of here only to leave everyone else behind? What if Grimwain discovers what he seeks, and what if it is something more awful than we imagined? Another book, another monster, another weapon? What if?”

  Saul and Ghurk fell silent.

  “I expect neither of you to help me, especially you, Ghurk,” he continued. “This is not your fight. With me as distraction you might even escape. Hide in the caves until the grey men leave. Live to love another day.”

  “Madness,” said Saul. “Of course we’ll help.”

  “We will?” fretted Ghurk.

  “We will.” Saul nodded. “Rellen, how long have you been stewing over this? We thought you’d forsaken any notion of escape.”

  A grey man wandered past. The soldier’s face looked painted in ash, his footsteps too quiet on the cold, dead stone. Rellen waited until he was gone before speaking again. “I have given up…for myself. I lost hope for Ande and Garrett weeks ago, and I whittled away at all my plans until I came to this.”

  Saul sighed. “In all the books I have read, I never once encountered a passage about this Undergrave or any treasure within it. There might be nothing here.”

  “Maybe not.” Rellen shrugged. “But I will not believe it. Easier ways to kill us than work us to death. If the warlock wanted us gone, these caves were already plenty deep enough to bury us in. I think they have been digging for years, long before we arrived. They seek something. Look all around us. The signs are everywhere.”

  “So then…” Ghurk was sweating. “We keep digging?”

  “We dig until we cannot dig a moment more. Either we are near the bottom, or these whispers in my head are the first sign of me going mad.”

  He found no treasure that day. The grey men forced him to the lowest grotto of the Undergrave, whose far wall he and the others tore apart with picks, shovels, and sledges. He expected cave-ins to crush him or the bones in his hands to turn to dust, but none of it happened. He and his fellow prisoners knocked a gaping hole in a grotto and carved their way into the black tunnel beyond. When it was done, the grey men marched him back to his pit and dropped him into darkness again.

  During his next seven periods of sleep, he dreamed none. He woke to Grimwain’s drums again and again, his body hurting, his mind a wasteland. Down, down into the darkness he descended at the grey men’s command. They never said a word to him, merely pointing their spears at whatever section of stone they wanted riven. He began to see the pattern of it all, and he suspected Saul did the same. They know which walls must fall. They know where the next tunnel will lead. They have it all mapped out. These tools are made of shadow. They tear the stone to tatters too easily. The warlock knows what he is looking for. Something is down here, and we must be the ones to destroy it.

  Once more, the same as every time before, the drums awoke him in his pit. Boom, boom, boom! Boom, crack, boom! In the silence reigning afterward, the shadow men dropped the rope ladder into his pit, and he climbed out. After a meal of bricklike bread and lime-tainted broth, the march began anew.

  At the lead end of his two-hundred man chain, he descended into the lowest Undergrave entrails. The air felt warm and the silence in the void absolute. The tunnel walls wept, pale rivers from the forgotten overworld. He marched steadily at first, yet the deeper he went the uneasier he became. During the long way down, he saw scores of dead Thillrians, the staked and skewered remains of those who had dared to resist. The bodies were stacked high in the shadows, their faces hidden by black shrouds. The grey men look like ghosts, he thought, but they kill well enough.

  In the lowest tunnel, where the walls were pale and the floor split by a shallow stream, the grey men bid him halt. The chain’s ringing and the clatter of the prisoners’ footfalls died in his ears. As quiet as I have ever heard it. The dark stone hallway stretched out before him, a black finger pointing directly to the world’s bottom. He plucked his hammer from its resting place against the wall, glanced at all the broken men behind him, and went to work.

  How long he hammered at the tunnel’s end, he never could have said. He and a dozen others smashed their tools against the same section of stone, stretching the tunnel with each stroke, making powder and pebbles of the proudest rocks. The bones in his hands went numb. The crash of two hundred tools deafened him. Blood seeped from his fingers, raining red upon the floor. Work, work, work. He forced himself to think. Be the first to find it. Only eleven grey men are with us today. Find the warlock’s treasure, kill the greys, and make an end to this. Goodbye, Ande. I love you.

  After many hours, he rested. Sweating, bleeding, and clad in a layer of white cavern powder, he slumped against the wall and sipped at the broth the Thillrian boys brought him. The grey men wandered away, taking their lights with him, leaving him and many others in near total darkness. A moment of peace, he thought. Scores of other men groaned from their pains, wept into their hands, and slurped noisily at their broth, but he closed them all out. They should not despair. Today is easier than all the rest. The stones are softer here. I know why. Someone has already worked this stone. Ten years ago or ten thousand, this tunnel has been visited before.

  “The end is near,” he murmured to Saul, who gazed blankly into nothingness beside him.

  “Aye,” said Saul.

  “The last wall will fall, and we will be the ones to do it.”

  “Aye. Perhaps.”

  “Ever wonder where Ande is?” His head swam with a vision of her, her crimson hair streaming with the wind in the fields beyond Gryphon. “Think she is here, maybe? Beyond the next tunnel, maybe?”

  “No,” said Saul. “She’s not. For her sake, I hope they keep her far, far away from this place.”

  He opened his mouth to reply, but felt a stone clatter to a stop against his heel. “You there,” a scruffy prisoner ten men down on the chain barked at him. “Why you work so hard? What’s it earn you? They favor you no more than the rest of us.”

  The grey light made a gloomy, pitiful sight of the man. The Thillrian’s face was haggard, his hair falling in ragged shanks to his shoulders. “This is our last job in life,” Rellen told him. “Best do it well.”

  “He’s no Thillrian,” growled another prisoner farther down the chain. “He’s Grae. Could be one of the enemy, for all we know.”

  “No. Sorry to disappoint,” he replied.

  More of the prisoners stared at him. A grey man stalked closer with his lantern, illuminating the prisoners’ faces.

  “Work slower,” hissed a squat, white-haired man.

  A noble, he remembered hearing someone say of the man. The Lord of Dray, or somesuch. “Why?” he crowed back. “Seen the piles of bodies in the caves above us? Seen them bundled all in black?”

  “We’ll all be bundled soon.” The lord scowled.

  “True enough,” he answered. “But not for being slow. I have a better idea.”

  The rest period ended. The grey men made their motions, and Rellen arose with everyone else. He hoisted his hammer over his shoulder and went to the wall again. The pale stone bled water, leaking like silver tears
at his feet. Ande’s tears, he imagined. Or not. She has forgotten me, most likely. Her heart has turned black, same as her hair.

  He struck the wall once, then twice, then many hundred times more. It broke apart easily at his strokes. He felt stronger than ever in his life, else this tool is bewitched. He worked so hard he never sensed the man striding down the chain-line. Long after the others had stopped swinging their tools, he continued to tear the wall down.

  “Stop,” he heard Grimwain’s voice and his blood went cold.

  He felt his hammer loosen in his hands. The prisoners’ silence overtook him like an ocean wave, chilling him the same as winter’s wind. Grimwain is no grey man, he knew.

  The lord of the Undergrave’s face was not the color of ash, nor were his eyes like cold iron. Men knew better than to speak when Grimwain was near, for though he was never angry, he was in every man’s mind the slayer of Thillria, the maker of Thillria’s woe.

  “Your work will set you free.” Grimwain’s voice reverberated in the shadows as he strode down the chain-line. “The other workers envy this line, for you are yet alive. Continue toiling this hard, and you might find your heads still stuck atop your necks.”

  Rellen saw Grimwain and glared. The lord of the Undergrave stalked slowly past each poor prisoner, gazing like twilight upon them. No pity lived in his eyes, no emotion whatsoever. Whatever moves in this man’s mind is as unknowable as sunlight here in the deep.

  Grimwain walked to the end of the tunnel. His face looked cut of marble in the grey men’s lanterns, his black shock of braided hair swaying none as he move. Clad in fluid ebon silks, he halted before Rellen, his pale palms resting atop the twin swords at his waist, each of which lay in rotting scabbards.

  “Nice day for a stroll.” Rellen smirked. “Might I borrow one of those swords?”

  “Shhh!” Ghurk hissed in his ear. “Are you mad?”

  “No. I think he likes it. Is it true, Ser Grim? You must be bored down here, so far from your master. You seem hardly the sort of man to follow the warlock. Or perhaps you are him? Just another of his manifestations. If so, I rather liked Hadryn better. At least he smiled now and then.”

  Unaffected, Grimwain walked to the weeping wall at the tunnel’s end and ran his fingers down the stone. When he drew his fingers back, he licked them, seeming to like what he tasted.

  “A madman,” Ghurk whispered. “He and his grey man took Muthemnal in a day, but he never said a word. He only stood at the city gate, grinning like one of the gargoyles on my father’s battlements.”

  Grimwain faced Rellen. Ghurk shrank into the shadows. Even Saul backed away.

  “Here lies the last wall,” Grim rumbled. The way he said it frosted Rellen’s blood. “Ten million strokes to carve so deep, and for the most worthy cause this world has ever known.”

  Here is my chance, thought Rellen. He thinks I will knock the wall down and stand aside. He does not know I am not a Thillrian. He does not know I am not so easily cowed.

  “The last wall, eh? Just a few more rocks between you and your master’s treasure.”

  Grimwain flicked his fingers, three droplets of water raining to the floor. “You’ve worked hard, Lord Gryphon. You’ve earned your gruel. A few hundred strokes more, and your deeds in the Undergrave will be done. Be finished with it. Take up your hammer. Every man here wants to see what lies beyond this wall.”

  The last of Rellen’s humor drained out of his heart. He gave Grimwain his back, hoisted his hammer over his head, and struck the wall again. This…he thought between each stroke, should…be…the…warlock…I…strike. With every prisoner watching, he worked the wall like a man possessed. His hammer fell like thunder, scoring rock as easily as flesh, breaking huge fistfuls of stones from their resting places. His arms burned and his hands bled, but still he chipped away, striking like a steel-toothed serpent against the wall, destroying the only enemy willing to fight me anymore.

  The wall crumbled.

  After his final stroke, the end of the tunnel collapsed and an avalanche of stone and gravel and powdered lime fell into the void beyond. The other prisoners froze, even Saul, who gaped as the tunnel caved into darkness. Water swept through the new aperture, streaming like a black-watered river between Rellen’s legs. The other prisoners tried to flee, but their chains seized, and down they fell, one after the other. The grey men seemed most terrified of all. They dropped their lanterns and drew back into the darkness of the grotto, huddling out of sight. Only Rellen and Grimwain remained standing.

  A raging river at first, the water soon slowed. It swirled up to Rellen’s ankles before receding into the darkness. The panic died, the prisoners’ terror turning to gasps of wonder and awe. Rellen faced what he had done. All others fell silent behind him. Crows take my eyes, what have I done?

  A haunted wind blew through the broken wall. Shadows washed over him. He gazed into the void beyond the tunnel, which he sensed was huger than all the other caverns he had walked. With what little light gleamed from the grey men’s fallen lanterns, he glimpsed the surface of a vast, indeterminably deep lake. The water was still as glass, the cavern housing it so vast as to make him shudder. Whole cities might be swallowed, whole populations drowned. What is this place?

  A murmur spread down the chain-line. The tremor of the prisoners’ fear drifted through the tunnel like a draft through an open window, echoing against the rock before dying.

  “He’s gone and killed us all,” he heard one Thillrian say.

  “That’s the end of our work,” another quavered. “Now Grim will have us all dead.”

  Rellen felt his heart leap against his ribs. Something is out there, he knew. Across the water. Something awful. The others feel it, same as I. Like the Fury storm, only worse. We have to cross the lake. We have to destroy whatever it is.

  He remembered Grimwain standing beside him. The lord of the Undergrave’s gaze chilled his bones, and his hammer slipped from his fingers.

  “You will want to see this, Lord Gryphon,” said Grimwain.

  “Yes,” he answered numbly.

  Grimwain loosed one of his swords and struck the chain attached to Rellen’s ankle. The cold, black steel sent a shower of pale sparks into the air, raining to the tunnel floor like falling stars. Impossible. He winced. He cut clean through it.

  “Moon steel.” Grimwain sheathed his sword. “No sharper blades have ever been forged.”

  “You would free us?” Rellen knew the answer before he asked.

  “No.”

  Stepping through the hole in the fallen wall, Grimwain made for the lake’s edge. Rellen followed. Like trailing a ghost, he thought with a shiver. Which is blacker? Grim or the water? He heard the prisoners’ voices fade to nothing at his back. He glanced once to Saul, still chained to the rest, and saw his friend’s face go paler than snow. And who can blame him?

  Twenty strides across a shore of wet, dark rock, he arrived at the lake’s edge. The water, black and still, stretched into forever. He peered left, right, and up, and saw only emptiness. A cave, he knew. Huger than any other. A world unto itself. Water, rock, and death.

  “What is this place?” he asked after a long silence.

  “As close to home as I’ve been in a long, long time,” said Grimwain.

  “Is this what he sent you for? Water?”

  “The water is not alone.”

  “What now?” He shuddered. “We go home? Thillria will be free again?”

  “Many will go home. You will not.”

  “Why?”

  “A question so foolish deserves no answer.”

  “What then? What happens to me?”

  “You will remain.”