Dark Moon Daughter

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Dark Moon Daughter Page 34

by J. Edward Neill


  She set off into the night. Eastward the stars summoned her, to the Undergrave. She had no food, no water but the rain, and yet she feared nothing. The Nightness will not let me die.

  After many thousand steps into the swordlike grass, the last of the sunlight died behind her. She felt stronger in its absence. The darkness drove her hunger away. The rain cleansed her of her weariness. She heard the water crash against the earth like hammers, the grass bending and snapping like trees beneath her bare feet.

  Many hours she walked. She encountered no cities, no farmsteads, not a single lantern burning in the night. Many times she thought she heard noises behind her, but whenever she looked she saw nothing.

  And then she felt her blood go cold.

  A thicket lay ahead of her. She ran to it and clung to the side of a grey-barked oak. For breaths uncounted, she gazed into the grass, knowing more than the wind was chasing her. Something is out there. The Nightness knows.

  She glimpsed her pursuer at the edge of her sight. It lumbered through the grass, stalking on two legs, untouched by the wind. Its body was armored, its face masked, while in its hands she saw a spoke of midnight-shaded steel, a sword like no other. A Sarcophage. Father would see me dead.

  She hid behind her tree, watching the creature’s slow, mechanical march toward her. She felt her knees shake and her mouth go dry, her terror rising like a knife to tickle her naked throat. She knew who the Sarcophage was. In the absolute dark she saw his mask smoking, his breath a black fume poisoning the night.

  Mogru.

  She watched him come. His armored feet slew the grass wherever he walked. The rain turned to ash against his eyeless mask. His sword looked as though it had not been used in eons, and yet she sensed it was as nightmarishly sharp as the day it had been forged.

  Mogru marched for the trees. She whipped her wet hair over her shoulder and fled. Sprinting as though she were made of rain, she wended to the far side of the trees and ran into the open grassland beyond. The grass tore at her calves, the wind at her face, and the lightning at the sky. She heard Mogru crash into the trees behind her, and she ran all the faster, empowered by the Nightness for what felt like an eternity.

  Hours later, far from any realm she knew, she staggered to a stop. The bottoms of her feet felt tender and raw. Every muscle in her body throbbed. She peered across the prairie, where the rain tumbled in sheets, and she saw no sign of Mogru. Drenched from head to toe, she tottered through the grass until she arrived at the bank of a streamlet. She scooped a few handfuls of water into her mouth and dared a look into the black meadow behind her. Maybe I lost him, she hoped.

  She looked at her hands. Curtains of rain washed over her, and she gazed at her pale palms as if hoping for an answer. How long can I survive? She asked herself. The Undergrave is east, but how far? A day, a week, a month? I have no food. Is the night sustenance enough? Will the sun melt me if I linger beneath the day too long? Give me the answers, Nightness. Show me the way.

  The rain slowed. After redressing her wrists with strips of her dress’s sleeve, she stood and peered into the western fields. Flashes of white lightning illuminated the horizon, and too soon she saw Mogru’s shadow, his hulking deadness inkier than the night. He stalked through the grass, bearing directly for her. Tracking me. Hunting me.

  She watched him march within five-hundred paces, then four hundred, then nearer. She dreamed of what he would do if he caught her, of how many pieces he will cut me into. After a deep breath, she felt the calm wash over her. At so dark an hour, she knew her Nightness was at its strongest. The power of the Ur, unmeant for any mortal, flowed through her blood, aroused by midnight’s arrival. I am of the old line, the Archithrope, a child of the same cursed realm as my father. Mogru will not catch me. Father should have come for me himself.

  The closer Mogru marched, the harder her dark power pounded in her heart. At some hundred paces, she saw him rip his sword from its perch upon his shoulder. “No!” she shouted. “You will not!”

  She closed her eyes and spread her arms. She felt the wind writhe around her. In her next breaths she became shadow. If any living creature had seen her change, they would have fled, for the shape she took was nightmarish. Her fingers became like spiders’ legs, long and sharp as knives, while her hair stretched into a sinuous black mane. Her limbs became ghostly, the shadows smoking whenever she moved. No creatures save the Ur could have hoped to touch her. She was the night. She was darkness.

  Free of the earth, she soared above Mogru’s grasp. He cut the air where she had been, but his stroke found nothing. In a spear of shadow she ascended into the clouds, which parted willingly to accept her. She lost sight of Mogru. The wind played with her, the clouds and rain melting wherever she flew. Lost… Her last recognizable thought fluttered through her. I have no control.

  She carved her way through the clouds and escaped into the void above the storm. The stars wheeled around her, the earth a forgotten thing. Her consciousness faded, and her vision of the night gave way to hallucinations. She glimpsed faces in the storm clouds. Among the wind-tortured countenances she swore she saw the shadowy shapes of Rellen, Saul, and Garrett, but she had no lips with which to cry out to them.

  Faster and faster she flew, boring a hole in the night. The clouds arose in a vast colonnade before her. Instead of faces she saw only a great, sky-injuring mountain of obsidian. Malog, she knew. A dream of Furyon. Please…do not take me there. Stranger still, although the Nightness had claimed her and her heart was shadow, she could not help herself. She wished for Garrett.

  At last, after what felt like an eon of soaring amid the stars, she floated back to the earth. She did not know where she landed, nor if one night or many had passed. She touched down in a realm far from Midnon, and as the shadows sloughed off and her body retook its natural shape, she lay on the earth and dreamed no more.

  When she awoke, she felt as though she were rising from her life’s deepest, darkest sleep. She heard voices nearby, people talking to her and about her. She tried to open her eyes, but sunlight poured over her face like fire, and she managed only a groan.

  “Shhh! She’s waking,” she heard a boy say.

  “Looks like a ghost,” said a young woman.

  The boy laughed. “She’s almost naked.”

  “And hurt.” A second woman’s voice floated to her ear. “Mistress, are you wounded? Where’d you come from?”

  She cracked her eyelids open. Bleary and bewildered, she sat up and peered into the early day, saying nothing to the gasps greeting her first movement. “Garrett?” she murmured. “Rellen? Is that you?”

  “She’s got fog in her head,” she heard the boy say. “She thinks we’re someone else.”

  She rubbed the last remnant of Nightness from her eyes. Mere scraps remained of the clothing she had taken from the cabin. Look at me. Almost naked, just like the boy said. She found herself sitting on a hillside. The grass beneath her was scorched and blackened, and elsewhere looked little healthier. To her left stood a brittle, decaying fence, and to her right, at hill’s bottom, a field in which several dozen sheep nibbled at the earth and brayed. A farm. She sagged. Nowhere near the Undergrave.

  People stood all around her. She counted a dozen, none of them familiar, all of them gawking. She saw nine women, two children, and an old man whose parched skin hung like sackcloth from his bones.

  “Hello,” she greeted them meekly.

  “Hello,” several answered.

  “Where am I?”

  The tallest of the women took one step closer. Clad in a white apron and a simple grey dress, the woman kneeled in the grass. “This is Lune, dearie. I’m Lilia, and these are the Sallow Hills. Do you know how you got here?”

  “Lune? Sallow?” She rubbed the soreness in her forehead. “Is this east? How far to the Undergrave?”

  Lilia paled. “No. You mustn’t mention that horrid place. Someone must have throttled you and left you for dead for you to say such a thing.”

 
She rose. Her audience gaped, especially the eldest of the boys. Her white shirt lay in tatters over her skin, and her breeches were burned black and pocked with holes. No time for shame. She mused. Just a ghost, naked or not.

  “The Undergrave,” she said again. “I have to find it.”

  “But why?” asked Lilia. “You’re in no condition.”

  “Something terrible is about to happen. I mean to stop it.”

  The other villagers stared. Only Lilia, bravest of the lot, seemed able to speak. “But dearie, it has already happened. The warlock controls us all. Haven’t you seen his grey men, standing watch over each city, over every blade of grass? They’ve taken Denawir, Muthem, and Dray. And the rain, oh the blackest rain, falling every nightfall, but quenching no thirst. Haven’t you sipped it only to scrape the dust from your tongue? Thillria is conquered. Where’ve you been?”

  She let her eyelids fall shut. Boiling in her mind was the image of the entire world turned to ash by the Ur. Grey men. Black rain. This is only the beginning.

  “Has your enemy a name?” she asked.

  The villagers whispered in each other’s ears, searching for the right words until at last the old man stepped forward. He shuffled to her, balancing his meager weight upon an old, oft-whittled cane. “Young lady.” He crooked his finger at her. “Our enemy has no name. His soldiers are everywhere, but nowhere. They come at dusk to threaten us. They take our men away. They tell us we must wait to know why we suffer.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but stopped short. She meant to throw the warlock’s name at their feet, to give substance to their fear, but even as she tried she realized she did not know her father’s name.

  “He may not have a name,” she said, “But I know the warlock well. He fancies himself as king, not just of Thillria, but of the world. I know what he wants. If your men are missing, it is because he sent them to the Undergrave. He is using them to dig.”

  “Dig?” The old man shivered. “Dig for what?”

  “Death.”

  Lilia looked to the children behind her. “How do you know this? What can we do?”

  “You can help me. You say this is Lune, but where is the Undergrave?”

  The villagers collectively gazed eastward. In the field below the hill, she glimpsed their ugly stone huts, rotting outhouses, and empty paddocks. Beyond their tiny hamlet she saw a shallow lake, and beyond the water a nest of gloomy hills where the sun seemed reluctant to shine.

  “Sallow,” said the old man. “Up those hills and through the dead valleys, there you’ll find your Undergrave. The Gluns, we call it, the hills like teeth. The shadow men took our sons that way. You would know this were you a Thillrian.”

  “I am no Thillrian.” She looked upon Sallow, most dismal of lands. She saw slate-capped hills and shadow-stuffed valleys where only the most gnarled trees and withered grass seemed to grow. She had no doubts about finding the Undergrave therein, only worries for what she would do when she arrived.

  “I must apologize.” She faced the villagers again. “We have only just met, but I must leave now. If you can spare it, I need new clothes, a sack of food, and a skin of water.”

  The Lune folk gaped again. They think I am mad. They will not help me.

  “Just who are you?” asked one of the women.

  “Andelusia.” She lifted her chin. “You will not have heard of me. I come from a Grae village little larger than your own. I escaped the warlock’s prison. I would stay to explain, but there is no time.”

  “Mistress, you are not well,” Lilia worried. “You have a fever upon you; we can see it. You should stay here with us. You’ll be safe. The dark men never take women.”

  “No. I am hunted. No matter how far I fly, the monster will come for me. He will never stop until I am dead.”

  Lilia drew back. The other villagers clutched their children close. “Mistress, you frighten us.” said Lilia. “You say strange things. How did you come to sleep in our field? Are you unwell? Are you one of the warlock’s agents? We’ve done nothing wrong, if so. We swear it.”

  She sighed, her small hope of earning their help fading. “I see. I should be going now. You will not see me again.”

  In hurried silence, she slid through the villagers’ huddled ranks and descended the hill toward the lake lying in Sallow’s shadow. She glanced back only once to the twelve folk, who remained right where she had left them. An unhappy lot. I wonder how many lived here before father came. She felt ready to make her way blindly to the Undergrave, ready to be alone again, but the moment she faced Sallow she heard a cry ring like a death knell across the autumn morn.

  “There!” a boy screamed. “Near the lambs!”

  The wind ceased to blow. The world ground to a halt. She faced the villagers, above whom the sunlight suddenly paled, black clouds blossoming out of nothing. Father, she knew. Why do you hunt me?

  “Look!” one of the village women despaired. “See what the girl has brought! The grey men are back, and long before twilight!”

  She gazed to the western grass, where the prairie ran into forever. Near the lambs, which scattered in fear, the grey men approached. She saw twenty marching in a black line. They wore no expressions. Their raiment and spears were the same drab hue as their skin, as if they and their garb had been cut from the same miserable stones. I know these men, she thought. The same who took Garrett away.

  The villagers huddled on the hillside. The children wept, clinging to their mothers’ legs, while the adults cast their gazes to the earth. As ominous as the grey men were the clouds, roiling in the sky, spreading like a plague. In the growing dark the grey men surrounded the villagers. Their spears caught none of the morn’s dying light. Andelusia reckoned their minds were full of murder.

  Help them, she told herself. This is your fault. Remember?

  Up the hill she walked, striding back to the blackened patch of earth she had slept the night on. The shadow men rounded the hillside and halted on the other side of the Lune folk, their gazes grey and haunted. In the gloom beneath the clouds, she felt the Nightness rise again inside her.

  “Do not be afraid,” she told the villagers. “They came for me, not you.”

  “No,” wept one of the women. “They’re here for our boys!”

  The grey men stood like stone columns, unmoved by the villagers’ tears. Andelusia planted herself before them, not twenty paces away. “Leave them be.” She crossed her arms. “I am the one you want, not them.”

  One among the men stepped forward. His skin was a ghoulish shade of grey, but his eyes were blue, as though he had been an ordinary man before being cursed by the warlock. The villagers huddled all the tighter as he shouldered his spear and came for her, their teeth chattering as though he was made of ice.

  As the grey man approached, she twiddled the fingers of her left hand. Have the Nightness ready, she told herself. “What do you want?” she snarled. “Leave them alone.”

  The grey man, cold and dry as hoarfrost, stopped within three paces of her. His steel-hafted spear stood twice her height, his gaze penetrating her. “I am the king’s voice.” His voice dripped like sludge from his jaws. “I am the fist, the prod to move the unwilling. I come today to bring a warning to Lune. This village has not been forthright. Men are hiding in these hills. The master and Grimwain are aware.”

  Not here for me after all. She did not move. “Were you wise,” she dared, “you would skulk your way right back where you came from. Lune is free. Tell your master his plans will fail and Thillria will soon rise against him.”

  The grey man snorted, and the shades behind him moved one step closer. “Who are you, ragged girl? Speak, or be bound in chains.”

  “I am Andelusia, daughter of your master,” she said, and the villagers’ faces paled again. “Your chains would better hold the wind than me. A twitch of my fingers and your blood will turn to dust, your teeth to ash. Better to run than stay in Lune.”

 

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