Another fearful flip and she arrived at the ninth Page, the Page of Ur-Fire. It sigils looked like ebon flames, streaks of grey ash, and smoldering slivers of charcoal. She peered over her shoulder many times, waiting for her father to rush out of the shadows and strike her down. But no. Nothing. If he watches, he approves.
Though she had spied on the ninth Page many times, its spells were yet a mystery to her. She staggered over its symbols, pronouncing each one under her breath before slogging to the next. She intended to linger only a few breaths, but the longer she looked, the deeper she fell. With great effort she translated one small segment, which seemed not a spell but a story. She shivered as she mouthed the words. Their meaning made her heart slow and her blood thicken inside her:
We must clean life. Like chaff from the stalk, we must thresh, thresh, thresh. Animal first, then man, then tree, all things left to burn on the skillet of night. Boil the sea, black and bubbling froth. Smoke the skies, clouds and ash. Vengeance will be ours.
The final days we write this, the last of us. Sleeper, take these words, our only gift. Use them to burn man away. Only char must remain, dust and soot of marrow, haze of smoke blocking hated dawn. Take this, our last mote. Remember when there was nothing, when we frolicked alone on the shadowed Thropian plain.
She read it four times. Four was enough. As the last syllable slipped off her tongue, she slapped the Pages shut, blasting its coldness across her lips and into her eyes. She knew the passage had been written by the Ur, the darklings mentioned by the warlock, the cursers of the Uylen, and the dwellers in the towering tomb beneath the earth. She understood what the Ur were. Death, she imagined them. The reason for evil. The voices in my mind. The cause of my torment. They left the Pages Black for us to stumble upon. They knew someone like father would find it.
And he will set them free.
She sat for time unknown, dwelling on the Ur passage. She was afraid to think of them, lest they tunnel through the millennia and find her. She dreamed too long. She heard the doors behind her open and felt a shadow enter the room. The warlock approached and grasped her shoulders from behind, lording over her like the moon over still water.
“It is late,” he said. “Time to sleep.”
“Not Mogru again. Please…”
“Do not be afraid. He will not molest you. Follow him, and you will arrive in your bed sooner than you know.”
That night, the journey to her room took what felt like an eon. Mogru led her through too many chambers to count, all of them lit by Ur lanterns, all seeming strangely the same. No tears remained in her dry, dark eyes. She dragged herself after Mogru’s hulking black shape, dreading he might turn and make a meal of her.
She came to her room. She slinked inside, casting her gaze downward so as not to accidentally glimpse her escort, but he followed, clasping her iron bands back in place before leaving. She felt like screaming when he touched her, like wailing into every corner of Midnon, but she was too terrified to make a sound. Frozen on the floor, she held her breath and waited for it to be over.
And then he was gone.
She sat on the edge of her bed, pawing at the floor with her feet, shivering away the last memory of Mogru. He is not the worst that has happened to me, she made herself believe. Far from it. Father never should have shown me the tower. He had me, body and soul. But now…how can I continue? Soon I might match him, shadow for shadow, spell for spell. Did he mean for me to learn so fast?
She felt hungry, but her apple bowl was empty. With her stomach gnawing, she tumbled onto her bed, closed her eyes, and allowed herself to slip to the very edge of consciousness. Between deep breaths of the frigid Midnon air, she dreamed the world’s fate should her father succeed. I know you, world that will be. I see your sky without a sun, without a moon. I see the starlit graves of countless dead. I see cities become grazing grounds for the Ur, shadows roaming the eternal twilight, and fell creatures prying out the souls of the living. All the earth’s animals are slain, stolen by the nightmare shades. Bird, bear, and bee alike are hunted to extinction. If father opens the coffin, this is what will come. I know. I see it now.
The horror of her thoughts drowned her. Gasping for air, she opened her eyes and sat upright. She looked to her window, beyond which the cold stars winked, and she felt a sensation like fire streaking through her mind’s shadows. I do not belong here, she knew. This is wrong, all wrong. How could I ever have believed?
Her stomach, knotted like a seafarer’s rope, roiled inside her. She dropped to the floor and vomited, afterward shaking like a sheaf of wind-torn paper. She tried to stand, but her arms failed her, weighted by her bracers, weakened by her sudden sickness.
This is wrong, she swore in her mind. What am I doing here? Why am I with this man, these monsters? What is the matter with me? Get up, Ande. Get…up!
The evil inside her stirred to life. She rose to her feet, but plummeted back to the floor. But how can I fight it? And why? The old blood lives inside me. My destiny lies in darkness. Why resist?
She retched again. Sour ropes of her forgotten breakfast dangled from her lips. She sat in a puddle on the floor, aching, staring hard at her hands.
Get up, Ande. Get up.
The Andelusia of years ago would have wept. She would have crumpled to the floor like a baby’s blanket, damp with her own despair. She would have been weak, frail as a flower, flighty as a drop of rain. But not today. She clenched her jaw and balled her tiny fists. She felt angry, her heart hot as a furnace. She knew the warlock’s plans, and a moment’s strength was all it took for her to rail against it.
He should not have shown me the tower.
Her fury turned black. She glared at her iron bands. Watch me, father. These I will remove. She extended her left arm away from her body and set her heels against the back of the band. With all her might, she pushed. Her cheeks turned hellish red. Her wrist burned, her calves and shoulder knotting. Sweating, sobbing, and bleeding, she pushed and pushed and pushed with her heels. The band inched down her wrist and over her hand. Her blood, now a lubricant, pattered in droplets upon the floor, while her pallid flesh turned a dozen shades of black and blue. The room spun through her vision, the stars in the window like eyes burning holes through her. Her skin tore, and still she pushed. The band slid over her thumb, her knuckles, and finally over her fingertips before clattering to the floor.
One.
She doubled over, her left wrist a mangled mess of blood and bruises.
One more.
The second band slew her senses even more than the first. She pushed against it with her bloody heels, and waves of agony washed over her. She wanted to scream. She wanted to crawl into her bed and never wake. When the band slipped over her knuckles and clattered to the floor beside its twin, she gasped to catch her broken breaths. There will be scars, she wept. But I am free.
Like the moon spearing over the midnight horizon, she stood. Blood streamed from her wrists, raining to the floor. Her heart drumming a deathly beat inside her, she tore two strips from her gown and wound the silken black cloth around her wrists until her tattered flesh vanished beneath it.
Now… She glared at her bedchamber door. How to escape? In all her days in Midnon she had glimpsed a thousand rooms, a thousand hallways, but never a way out. Midnon’s doors were too many, its windows too narrow to slither through.
Ona. The girl’s name winked to life in her mind. She will know. If she is any kind of sister to me, she will help. If not, I will spoil her pretty face with a touch of Nightness.
Her fear became focus. She bolted to the door, wanting to make a wild dash for Ona’s haunting grounds in the bottom of Midnon. She flung the door open, but halted only one step beyond it. My bands. She peered back to the two hunks of iron sleeping on the floor. The Nightness. Why not? Do it, Ande. Use what you have learned.
She mouthed the spell’s words on lips black as midnight. Her flesh turned grey, the sharp features of Midnon melting in her gaze. In the small spac
e between breaths she touched upon the Nightness to become the shadow of a shadow, a ghost no more visible than drifting graveyard wind. She had used the power once to evade the Uylen, but now I have refined it. Another thing father never should have showed me.
In her shadow state, Midnon’s walls felt as insubstantial as gossamer window dressings. She flitted across the seven-doored chamber and breezed down the stairs in half the time her feet would have carried her. Beside the portal at the stairwell bottom stood two Sarcophages. The masked monsters sniffed the air as though recognizing she was near, but made no motion to stop her.
Silent, she moved through Midnon in her Nightness guise. She drifted across the great hall like a trail of candle smoke, striding through the pews rather than around them. Her body took any shape she desired: woman, silken cloud, or shadow sticking to the floor. She came to a locked door in an alcove, and like a wraith passed through it.
She remembered the way to Ona’s room. The route was not complex, just ninety rooms straight into Midnon’s bottom. Fearing the warlock might be watching, she skulked against the wall of each chamber, shapeless save for her eyes. She tracked every puff of dust and every gleam of gloomy Ur light. She floated through libraries, chapels, and vast laboratories. She saw picture frames hanging from many of the walls. Some of them, their canvasses once painted with nameless, frowning faces, were now blank, as though someone had stroked them over with black ink. Other portraits wore different expressions than she remembered, their faces changed from weary to anguished, from pensive to horror-struck. These are all people he knows, she sensed. But what of the ones blacked out?
She drifted on. Many of the rooms were the same as they had been before, but others were different. Rooms once filled with strange, nameless objects were now empty. Cryptlike halls, once stocked with hanging portraits, were bare-walled, as though nothing had ever been there. She floated through them all, marveling at Midnon’s weirdness, but careful never to linger in one place for more than a moment.
At last she came to a long, dark corridor with many doors. She remembered it well. No lanterns here. Only darkness. Ona’s hall.
She pawed at the dark with her shadow hands, tearing it apart. Without her bands, the gloom impeded her none. She glimpsed a light in the distance, not an Ur lamp, but a warm, natural glow. The slender beam shined through an open door, gleaming like gold in the otherwise perfect darkness.
She emerged from the Nightness, becoming flesh again. A single step from reaching the light, she stopped. Ona, she listened. The girl is singing. The sweet sound of Ona’s voice took hold of her heart. The song was sad, hardly reminiscent of the girl Andelusia remembered:
My father, he loves me so,
In his palm, pure and strong, he minds me.
Safe, I am, but so very alone,
Alone where no one will find me.
She pushed at Ona’s door. The slab of wood groaned open beneath her fingertips. She peered inside, spying a barren bedchamber with only a bed and a rocking chair as furnishings. The walls were dry, grey stone, and the floor littered with apple cores and jars half-filled with cider. An orphan’s hovel, she reckoned. The poor thing. She has it worse than I ever did.
In the middle of the squalor Ona sat on her bed, still beautiful, still flawless as a flower. The slinking, sharp-tongued woman Ande had met was gone, replaced by a girl.
“Sister,” Ona greeted her. “Hello again.”
“Hello.” She dared one step into the room.
“You’re back. I thought you might return. Don’t be afraid. Come closer.”
She slid three steps deeper. “Are you father in disguise?” she wondered. “Are you real or a ghost?”
“I’m no ghost. I’m just me, just Ona.” Ona rose from her bed. She was nearly naked, garbed only in a delicate, colorless tatter of a gown. Her skin was pale as snow, her eyes the color of twilight clouds.
“What are you doing down here?”
“Waiting,” said Ona.
“For what?”
“For him to love me.”
“Love?” She recoiled. She means father. Has she gone mad? How long has she been down here to hope such loathsome things?
“In time, we will be together.” Ona beamed. “Father promised.”
“Sister,” she said with a shiver, “You are the only one who can help me. May I tell you something? It is a secret. You must not repeat it.”
Ona fidgeted, twirling her hair as a much younger girl might do. “A secret sounds dangerous. Maybe it’s better not to say. Father doesn’t like secrets.”
“Oh, but this one is important. Too important even for him.”
Ona glanced here and there into the shadows of the room. “Maybe so, but I’m a miserable keeper of secrets. I always let them loose. When father asks, my knees go weak. I can’t hold anything inside.”
“Why should you fear him so? Why has he stowed you down here, so far from him? Seems more than passing strange.”
“He’s busy. His books…his plans…I would only be a nuisance.”
“Do you love him?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
Hopeless. She nearly spun and walked away. But if I leave, I am lost. This poor creature is my only hope.
“Do you know who father really is?” She approached Ona’s bed. “Have you sat beneath the stars with him? Has he told you about his life, his dreams, his fears?”
“Well…” Ona stammered. “Not often, but…”
“And what about Midnon? Did he say why he brought you here? Does it not seem strange you sleep so far from him, and that you live in his lowest, darkest room while he is away doing as he likes?”
“I try not to think about it. I do as I’m told.”
“This place is no place to live, Ona. No father should treat his daughter so. If he really loved you, he would let you stay in his room. Do you ever question why he keeps you down here? Have you ever wondered what is beyond these walls?”
Ona moved her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. She looked bewildered, as lost as a sparrow without her wings.
“Midnon is our prison,” said Andelusia. “We must escape it, else we will die here.”
Ona’s gaze fell to the floor. She seemed to fall into a faraway place, neither breathing nor blinking her eyes. “I know. I’ve always known.”
“You know what?”
“Midnon. Our prison. No escape.”
“None?” Her heart sank into her gut. “Are you sure?”
“No walls, no doors, no way in or out. Not in the common sense, anyhow.”
“I will not believe that.”
Ona’s tranquility fell to pieces. The girl shivered violently, sank to her skinny knees, and wept a silent stream of tears onto the floor. “Sister, do not tempt me,” she whimpered.
I knew it. There is a way. “I must leave this place,” she said sternly. “You should want to leave, too. Help me out of here. I will take you with me.”
Ona looked up to her. “Leave if you must. No one’s keeping you. I must stay. I love him too much to go.”
“Love him? How can you say that? He is your…our…father.”
“It’s not just father.” Ona shut her eyes. “It’s…you wouldn’t understand.”
The poor, wretched, indoctrinated thing, she thought. “As you like.” She shook her head. “Stay if you must, but show me the way out. Midnon seems to be as you say. I see no doors to the outside. It is always night beyond the windows, no matter the hour. There is no escape.”
Dark Moon Daughter Page 32