“Oh, but there is.” Ona’s eyes glimmered with a moment’s light. “Midnon isn’t what you think it is. You might’ve noticed if you did not love him, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“I should not say.”
“Yes you should. You know this is wrong. Father can be all yours. Take him; I do not care. Just tell me the way out.”
Ona’s mouth hung half open, the truth dangling like a dewdrop from her tongue. “It’s as I said; I’m here for much more than father.”
“Fine. All the same, tell me how to get out of here.” She stepped forward, and Ona’s lantern dimmed. “I will not live like this. I will be free, your secrets be damned.” A moment more, and I will smoke the truth out of her. One life will matter none if father has his way.
“I should not say,” Ona shuddered a last time. “But for you, sister, I will. There’s no way out of Midnon, not in the ordinary way of thinking. Many rooms change every day, while others stay the same. It might seem like a maze, but there’s sense to it. I’ve lived here long enough to see that much.”
“Then how do we escape? Must we slay him?”
“No, never!” Ona admonished her. “If we hurt him here, we hurt ourselves. If he dies, so do we. Haven’t you seen it, sister? These walls are not made of stone and mortar. This place is father’s mind, full of his thoughts, his glory.”
“You mean none of this is real.”
“Only as real as he makes it. Only as real as we believe.”
“An illusion?”
“A small part of the world to be.” Ona showed a sad smile. “You should know as much. You’ve studied with him. You’ve consumed all his attention. You know the truth. He has shown it to you by now.”
“Yes.” She backed against the wall. “But how do we escape?”
A lone tear trickled down Ona’s cheek. “Trust your heart, sister. Make your own door out of here. It’s the only way.”
“Door? What door?”
“The way out is wherever you believe it to be. Nothing here is real, least of all for you.”
Make my own door, she thought. All this time, I could have gone?
“There’s nothing more for me, sister, but you…you are still alive,” said Ona. “Leave Midnon. Find your friends in the Undergrave. Go east to the Gluns of Sallow, the place no wise Thillrian goes. Get them out and flee from this country. Go as fast as you can. Trust in nothing you see.”
“The Undergrave?”
“Where father keeps your friends. The caves where his prisoners dig. Go east. You’ll know it when you see it.”
“Come with me.” She offered her hand.
“No. I can’t.” Ona shook her head. “I’m lost. I can’t leave without him. You’ll never understand.”
Time, Andelusia believed, was running out. She felt a sudden sense of tightness in her chest, as though Midnon had become aware of her, as though the walls would begin to close in and crush her should she linger a moment longer. Father knows. He will kill Ona. I will be next.
“Goodbye sister.” She backed toward the door. “Thank you. It should not have been this way.”
“Goodbye,” Ona whispered. “Now run.”
She fled into the corridor beyond Ona’s room. Make my own door out of here, she remembered what the girl had said. What does that mean? As she stood in the darkness, she shut her eyes and tried to make sense of it. Midnon is too huge to be real, she concluded. No fortress could be so vast. The endless rooms, the shifting portraits, the thousand paths to and from the warlock’s room…they are the claustrophobic corridors of his mind, the dark of his unhappy dreams. He made this place, but not with stones. I am inside him. Every room is a compartment of his mind. Every book is an old memory. I am here, but only my mind. My body is…where?
“Not real,” she said aloud. She walked the corridor for a while before halting at a blank section of wall. “I am alive. I live beneath the sun and the moon. Midnon is a lie.”
She touched the wall, pretending it did not exist. Nothing happened.
A door is here. She pushed harder against the wall. Sister tells the truth. Anywhere I believe it, a door should exist. I am not father’s captive. I am his undoing. I am not his little girl, his student, his apprentice. I will make this right. I will, I will, I will. Open, wall. Let me out!
Flailing against the wall with the flats of her blood-stained palms, she carved herself a way out of Midnon. The darkness split open. The shadows consumed her. She tumbled through the void, and though she feared her feet might never feel the earth again, her fall came to a sudden, painless end. She was briefly blinded, first by utter darkness and next by the sharp sunshine, which shined upon her cheeks as if for the first time in her life. She wandered the edge of consciousness until at last, after a flicker of her wet, midnight-hued lashes, she opened her eyes again.
She awoke. Midnon was no more. She lay in the center of a barn, hay-strewn and earth-floored, far from the black corridors of her former prison. A wide-open window in the barn’s second floor let the sunshine through. Where? She wondered. How?
She peered from corner to corner of the barn. The horses’ stalls were empty, the floors clean and dry. Piled in one corner she glimpsed baskets, some empty, others full of apples. Ona’s apples. My apples.
Staggering, she walked about the barn. She was dressed in a dingy grey gown, not nearly as fine as the black silks she had worn in Midnon. Her legs trembled, as if I have not used them in months. She stretched her arms in a pool of midday sunlight, the first warmth she remembered feeling in months. She heard no people, saw no animals, and felt nothing save the breeze against her skin, drifting into the barn from its wide open doors.
It makes no sense, she thought. It was almost winter when he took me away, and now it feels like autumn again. She trod in slow circles about the barn, scuffing her bare feet against the earth to make sure it was real. She chomped into an apple and found a jug of cider from which she took a shallow swig. Though she felt certain they were the same treats she had dined upon every day while in Midnon, she saw no door, no window, and no black-bordered portal for them to travel through.
She walked outside, where the sunshine reigned. The air felt thick and warm. Tiny log cabins and lush apple orchards surrounded her, a garden village seeming entirely out of place in Thillria, if Thillria this is. She basked beneath the sun for a while, and for the first time in many months she felt almost content, almost willing to sit down beneath the trees and drift to sleep.
And then she remembered.
Rellen. Garrett. Saul. The Undergrave. The Ur. All of this…everything. It will be ashes.
Tentative, she walked to the cabins. The little houses were empty, their windows open, their doors unlocked. She moved from cabin to cabin, seeking any sign of life, but found nothing. Suppers sat untouched on tables neatly set. Beds were made, vases stuffed with flowers, and bowls piled high with red apples. No violence was apparent. The people are simply gone. But where to?
She approached the last of the cabins. As she touched her fingers to the door, a bank of clouds drifted across the sun’s face, casting a deep shadow over her. She looked to the sky and glimpsed greyness instead of blue, sickness where autumn’s golden light had been.
A storm is coming. Father knows I am gone.
She flung the cabin’s door open and skittered inside. The clouds’ shadow fell like twilight, draining the house dry of warmth. Hurry, Ande. Clothes and food. Hurry, hurry, hurry!
She stormed through the house, overturning baskets and stripping drawers empty. She found clothes easily enough, plucking a loose white shirt and homely russet breeches from a hook upon the wall. As she dressed, she wished the garments were grey or black. But no, she thought as she kicked her Midnon gown into a corner. I am not that woman any longer.
Like the wind, she cut through the house, looking for anything to aid her escape. She found shoes, but the wooden clogs were much too small. A child’s, she knew. Not for me. Barefooted, she
tore a strip of white tablecloth and bundled six apples within. Food. Though not nearly enough. Anxious, she sprinted back to the door, beyond which the sunlight perished and shadows held sway. In the span of twenty breaths, the sky had gone black.
Her bundle of apples fell to the floor beside her. Thunder cracked, and she tumbled to her knees. She felt the darkness stir within her, clawing at her heart, drowning her in thoughts of evil and despair. She blinked, and upon opening her eyes she expected to see an army of Sarcophages surrounding her.
No. The dead are not here, not yet. After three sharp inhalations, she stood up again. I can do this.
She burst outside. The clouds crumbled over her head, the sunlight carving through them like sword strokes. She plucked up her apples and ran to the center of the village, where the light pooled in a lawn whose grass felt like water between her toes. She glanced in all directions, imagining a different fate with each turn of her head. East, she remembered. Ona said east. The Undergrave. The Ur tomb. Rellen, Saul, and…Garrett?
She knew which way was east. She had traveled the lengths of Graehelm, Furyon, and Thillria with Garrett, who had taught her to read the sun. The orchard trees rustled around her, trembling in the wind. The sun waged war against the clouds, the same as the battle in her heart. Go, she told herself. Go now and never look back.
She ran. The little houses vanished behind her. Some hundred breaths later she made it to the edge of the orchard trees, beyond which the sky was clear and blue for as far as she could see. The wind caught her hair, her black strands streaming under the sun. Goodbye father, she thought. You never should have shown me the tower.
Journal, Part VII
Midnon
My nights are longer than ever. My room is cold and empty. The slow slog of time, until now so strangely bearable, weighs upon me, a black shroud bundled about my shoulders. If a Page for advancing time existed, I would nudge it. I would urge the moon to crawl faster across the sky and beg the day to last but an hour before giving in to the night. I would do these things that I might wake and find the end is finally here.
Today is a wretched day. I did not want it to end like this. Many of Midnon’s walls reflect the faces of those I have seen to the grave, but I never wanted to see hers. I know how her portrait will look. Her eyes, so grey and penetrating, will cut right through the heart of me. I will not be able to see any other face, not my enemies’, not even Ona’s, only Andelusia’s. It makes me sick. It makes my stomach turn. It makes me want to forget all my plans and hurl the Pages into the world’s deepest pit.
But it’s too late. I have no other purpose now. I cannot allow her to roam freely, and so Mogru must finish what I could not. I will know the moment his work is done. Her portrait will appear in every room from here to the bottom, and nothing I do will ever make it go away. I could almost weep for her, had I a soul. What I’ve done is unforgivable.
And so I move on. Even as I fret for my awful misdeed, I try to take pleasure in my progress. I am learning the Pages much faster than I thought possible. Its most dreadful secrets remain hidden, but not for long. In these last months, I have become as powerful as is possible for one man. The shadows obey me. The Ur fire smolders inside me. I pray one glimpse of me is all the world will need to surrender. A murderer of millions, I’ll be, the tender of the world’s grave. I only hope it will be swift.
I sit in my chair this gloomy eve. I swallow a sip of wine and relish the fact that one nation already belongs to me. Thillria is conquered. There are none within its borders who see me for who I am, and yet they all know my power by now. They slave for me. They bend to Grim’s every word, knowing a moment’s rebellion will mean the end of them all. The poor things. They would believe night were day if I wished it. They would think their fathers were mothers, their fingers were toes, and their nightmares as real as the air they breathe. I must seem a god to them.
Oh, to be so powerful. I gaze into my goblet and I remember my king, the lord of Romaldar. It feels so very long ago. I was a book-nosing imp, a motherless runt skulking the capital streets. The king cast a shadow over all of us. I saw men scurry to do him service and women flock to his door. I saw flowers at his feet, virgins in his lap, and pots of gold on his table. The king never noticed little me. His soldiers reviled me. His court ignored me. Who could blame them? My mother was dead, and my father, the king’s councilor, sent to Graehelm in exile. The King never looked at me, let alone loved me. He sat so far above the world he likely would never have noticed if every soul outside his castle walls had died. I remember. His was a cold power, his heart hard and black as the Selhaunt. He lives still, a shadow in his throne, though not for long.
My cup is empty. The Ur lamp my daughter learned by burns black. I’ve an admission to make, my little journal. I’ve kept a secret from you. I’ve another prisoner in Midnon.
I am not a vengeful man, but this prisoner, I detest. His pain brings me pleasure. I smirk at his misfortune. On the surface he is the sort of man I might like to be, but he sits now in my dungeon, moldering away like an old scrap of bread. He is not as smart as my daughters. He will never perceive the truth of Midnon. The sun shall ever elude him, and his memories of Ona, my Ona, will rot inside his mind. I should not waste any thought upon him, but I cannot help myself. Who is he to touch Ona? Who is he to think he could have protected my daughter from me? If his friends knew who he was, how he came to be so refined a soldier, they might call him a killer instead of a hero, a murderer rather than a man. I arranged his downfall, and even though I chose Ona as the object of his ruin, I remain jealous of him, and so he shall rot in the lowest cavern of my disdain. When I leave Midnon behind and walk beneath the night, I shall see to it that his portion of this prison remains intact.
The eve of breaking draws near, the hour the world becomes primordial again. I set my goblet down, grasp my quill, and feel my heart slow inside me. The Pages Black demands my attention. ‘Thresh,’ the voices whisper. ‘Only char must remain.’ Grimwain is gone, and so I will write the truth. I am terrified. My head aches and my blood runs cold. I have known for too long that I should have never opened the casket. I should never have taken the tenth Page for my own. But now the shadow has me. Body and mind, I belong to the Ur. I tell you now, little journal, I am not this man who subjugates the world. I am not a murderer of millions.
But I cannot stop.
It’s too late.
On an eve not long from now, I will open the tomb.
Hunted
The wind rattled the trees, rousing Andelusia from sleep. She felt the rain on her cheek, the water trickling from the ends of her ebon hair. She sat up in the weeds and rubbed her aching wrists. She thought she had slept much longer, but with the day only just dying it seemed little more than an hour had passed.
Not even tired. Almost night. I will move faster in this.
In a grove many hours east of her escape from Midnon, she rose beneath the twilight. The Thillrian prairie surrounded her on all sides, the grass like an ocean whose waves crashed against her tiny thicket of old oaks. As the rain misted her, she stood very still, lost in thought.
What will they think of me? She imagined Rellen, Garrett, and Saul. I betrayed them. I led them into father’s trap. If I should find them, will they hate me? And if father killed them? What will my vengeance be?
The mist peppered her body. She strode out into the grass. The night’s chill felt warm to her, and as the blackness became complete, her vision sharpened as though the hour were only midday. Only mildly hungry, she chomped on the last of her apples. Apples. She thought of the warlock and the many tricks he had played on her. All he fed me were apples. The liar. He was Jix all along. He was King Orumna, Wkhzl perhaps, Hadryn for certain. What did he do with those whose faces he wore? Death? Midnon? The Undergrave?
She let the apple core fall from her fingers. She felt the rain quicken, the wind wanting to rip her clothes away. She imagined the death of all her friends, of all those she had loved and cher
ished, and she came to one conclusion. My fault. She shut her eyes. If not for me, they would be safe.
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