Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  Unctulu looked longingly at the tine, his throat welling like a toad’s. “It’s time, Thresh. Remember what we’re here to do. Now and only now, you’re to let me have it. If I don’t give it back, you’re to butcher me, but otherwise I’m to use it.

  “Just. This. Once.”

  Thresher released the tine. Unctulu grasped it from its thicker, duller end and waved it from side to side as if to carve a lesion in the night. When Thresher reached for his sword, Unctulu grimaced. “Oh, all right. Well and well. Good and good. I’ll play nice.”

  Thresher left his sword in its scabbard. Sniffing the air and swiping the saliva from his chin, Unctulu hunched over the exhumed cadaver. “If you’d eyes, Thresh, I’d tell you to close them. This’ll not be pretty.”

  Unceremoniously, he stabbed the tine into the soil, wounding the dirt next to the corpse’s ribs. The tine punctured earth and loose stone as though they were water, sinking down to half its length. Gurgling, Unctulu left it in place, sharp end pointed to the heart of the world, the other aimed straight at the star-pricked sky.

  “A long way we marched,” he drooled. “And all for one man. How many nights have we blackened the road, Thresh? How many times did the Grae almost catch us? I’d sooner raise up the whole city than this one cruel carcass. But it’s as the Master wishes, and so we’ll do as we’re told.

  “We’ll bring him back.”

  The tine lay half-buried in the loam. Mist arose from the punctured earth, the grey vapors swallowing the open grave and slinking across the bones like a tongue. Unctulu’s lantern light played across the mist. It gleamed white at first, then blue, then lavender. Unctulu held his breath as the vapors thickened, the mist winding in ever tighter circles around each bone, adhering to the marrow like mortar.

  “Look, Thresh. It’s working.”

  A tremor rattled the courtyard. The grasses near the grave withered and turned to ash. Where once the cadaver’s brittle bones had lain bare to the night, fresh tendons reknit themselves, and muscles, raw and red, took shape. Layer upon layer, pale flesh stitched itself atop a template of veins and sinew. Organs pumped to life, and a new heart spasmed, thumping a black rhythm in a body eight years dead.

  Faster than Unctulu could swallow ten breaths, the body became whole. The deep shadows lessened, and the night’s natural sounds resumed. Unbroken, the tine expelled itself from the dirt and rolled to a stop at Unctulu’s feet.

  “Disgusting, wasn’t it? It’s different watching it happen to someone else.” Unctulu snatched up the tine. “Ah…well…I suppose you’ll want this back.”

  Thresher snared the black tine and slid it back into his greaves.

  The body stirred.

  The man in the grave seized a sharp breath and exhaled.

  “Look at him.” Unctulu gave a three-toothed grin. “Not jealous, are you Thresh? Seems eight years in the dirt leaves a man in better shape than eight hundred. Worry not. You’re still prettier.”

  Thresher tilted his head. Behind his iron mask, thoughts unknowable roiled.

  “You want to know?” Unctulu asked.

  Thresher remained still.

  “Of course you do,” said Unctulu. “This’ll be the last of the ones Master raises, leastways for now. No one wanted him during his first life, and no one but Master wants him now. Look at him, whiter than his bones, waking up from his nightmare. Well…if his dreams were rotten, he deserved it. More than any other, I’d say. More even than me.”

  Thresher tilted his head again.

  “That’s right, Thresh. Don’t you know who this is? This be Archmyr Degiliac, mass murderer, ruin of the Furies, butcher and raper and slaver. The Pale Knight, they called him.

  “And they’ll call him worse yet.”

  Resurrected

  Amid the coarse grass and upturned earth, the second life of Archmyr Degiliac, most hated son of Thillria, began.

  My pain…gone.

  The voices…silent.

  What’s that stink?

  He awakened as if from a nightmare, stunned to his mortal senses like a babe squeezed freshly from the womb. Not knowing where he was, he clambered to his feet and glared at the fat man and the iron hulk standing before him. He did not understand why his body worked. He clenched and unclenched his fists, worked his predatory jaw, and swept the dust from his moldered sleeves. He felt young, his black hair hanging in lashes down his hard white cheeks, dangling like strips of midnight over the face of a pallid moon.

  “Who are you?” he growled at the fat man. “Why have you awakened me? Is this some new torment?”

  With bloated cheeks and baggy eyes, the fat man gloated over him. “So quick to ask questions. Such murder on the mind. Do you remember who you are?”

  Archmyr stood in the center of his upturned grave, contemplating himself. My swords are gone. My armor taken. My clothes are rags. “This is the place,” he said.

  “Where you were slain,” snorted Unctulu.

  “Yes and no. This is where I let the princeling kill me, where I let my part in the war come to an end. History may deem my killer a hero, but I went willingly.”

  “Oh?” the fat man laughed, his vials clinking.

  “You smile?” Archmyr climbed out of his grave. “This amuses you? Do you know how they’ll punish me when I die again, what suffering my absence will cause me? They’ll make me start it all over. They’ll leave my soul in tatters for thinking to escape.”

  The fat man ceased laughing, though his repulsive grin remained. “Little Archmyr, I understand more than you know. Your eight years of suffering pale next to my five hundred, and are less than nothing to Thresh’s many thousand.”

  He did not believe the bloated man, nor did he know what to make of the hulking, masked, ironbound knight. His body was intact, but his sense of truth and time were incomplete. A chasm breached his mortal memory, a void unfilled by naught but the darkness of the grave.

  He blinked, half expecting to recall many years of lying dead beneath the dirt, yet his only memory was a flash of the world beyond the living, the lightless, boundless Nether, stretching from death into places so horrifying no living soul would ever wish to imagine. He remembered some small fragment of the agony he had endured, but his wits failed him, and again he felt only emptiness, only the inexplicable now.

  “So confused,” the fat man mocked. “You want to know how, who, and why? Well and well. Good and good. My name’s Unctulu, and this is Thresher, who can’t say his name for lack of a tongue. You’ll want to help us, Pale One. You’ll want to do exactly as we say. I know you feel like fighting, but there’s no other way to happiness, not for you.”

  He did not know how he came to be alive again, but he was certain of one thing; this Unctulu…I hate him. The very thought of doing the stumpy, maggot-breathed man’s bidding rattled him with rage.

  “Why?” He clucked his tongue, stalking slowly around his grave. “Why should I help you? I was exactly where I deserved. What manner of fool would wake me?”

  Unctulu lingered in Thresher’s protective shadow. “You ask good questions. I’ve good answers.” The fat man teetered on his toes. “You and I and Thresh, we’re the same. We’re alive against our wishes. We’re stuck in a world that’s no longer ours, that doesn’t remember why it’s best to fear us. But there’s a way out, Pale One. It’s simple. We do as the Sleeper commands. If he has his way, we’ll bring the darkness down here and go back to sleep. When the earth goes black, when Father Sun flees, our tormenters will leave the realm of death for the comfort of the physical world. Simple, you see? We do our duty and die again, and our reward’ll be to sleep the true sleep, in which They cannot harm us.”

  Few besides Archmyr would have known what Unctulu meant. Half-stunned but fully understanding, he staggered one step backward. He wanted to believe the dirt, the graverobbers, and the star-riddled sky were false.

  But they’re not. This is real.

  “Why me?” he rumbled. “Why now?”

  Unct
ulu smiled, his jagged teeth grey in the lamplight. “Our master thinks you’re the best, or perhaps the worst, so I say. He sent us all the way from Romaldar to find you. He says no man has murdered more. He says yours is the conscience of death itself, and that you’ve commanded armies to do things no other would have the stomach for. He needs you. We need you. There’s a war to be won, and you’re to win it. Do it, and you’ll die the true death.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  Shrugging, Unctulu stuck his knobby tongue into the gaps between his teeth. “Thresher here’ll carve you up, stuff you in a sack, and lug you in pieces to Romaldar. You’ll be resurrected again and again until you comply. We thought this way might be easier. The march to Romaldar will take a month. Better for you to use your legs than for Thresh to carry you. Easier for you to remember who you are, what you’re meant for.”

  It was too much, too soon. I’m not afraid. Archmyr crouched beside his grave. And yet I’m quaking. If I had my swords, I’d make ribbons of these two and sleep the night in yon tower. I remember that tower. I’ve been in it before.

  He thought about who he was and who he had been, and he felt sick.

  This can’t be real.

  I’m a ghost.

  This is another part of my punishment.

  No.

  This is happening.

  His memories rushed into his head. He remembered the truth of his former life. I’m as the fat man says. I was a warlord. Not a champion. A murderer, a destroyer. I’m Thillrian. A Degiliac, like my father. I fought for the Furyons, but also against them. Archmyr is my given name, but my soldiers called me the Pale Knight. Why? For my skin? No. For the ghosts I made. I laid waste to Davin Kal. I widowed ten thousand wives of Graehelm. We’re standing in Mooreye, the city I betrayed. The princeling slew me, but only because I let him. He was angry. I’d just killed a dozen of his countrymen.

  Before his death he would have boasted of all the horrors he had worked, but not now. He did not know if he could return to the life his awakeners desired. He did not know if he could bear to live at all.

  “Something the matter?” Unctulu interrupted his angst. “Feeling sick? It’s normal, Pale One. Imagine how Thresh must’ve felt. All those thousands of years rotting…and then ripped right out of his hard-earned hole in the ground.”

  If one thing remained of Archmyr’s self, one final feeling he would not be parted from, it was his pride. He sprang to his feet and leered at Unctulu. In the lamp’s light, the fat man had all the color of a corpse.

  “You test me, piglet.” he seethed. “What say I kill you and your iron friend? All the steel in the world can’t protect you, not from me.”

  Grinning, Unctulu rapped his fat fist against Thresher’s iron-plated forearm. “Impressive, Pale One,” he said. “You’ve still got some hate in you. But Thresh here doesn’t much care. Swords and spears and prickly Thillrian ghosts can’t make him die again. He’ll split you into more pieces than you can count. If you run, he’ll stalk across deserts, knock mountains into pebbles, and hew forests into kindling just to find you. No sense in hating me and him. Your only chance of peace is with us. You’re still in Graehelm, you know. You might not remember them, but they’ll remember you.”

  He knew it was true. Helpless, he reckoned himself. It’s the same as when my ship crashed on the Furyon shore. The harder I fight, the sooner I’ll die again. The sooner I die, the sooner my suffering will resume.

  And death, he recalled, was no place to hurry back to.

  I’ll abide these two.

  At least for now.

  Eight years it had been, eight that felt like ten thousand. The instant he had fallen, skewered in the rain by a Graehelm princeling’s sword, everything had changed. He had tumbled into a desolate underworld, a place without a sun, without sustenance, and without sleep. If other souls had fallen with him, he could not remember them, for all his moments from death until his second awakening had been spent in the company of Them. They had no names he could recall, no faces, and no apparent reason to exist save to torment him. Their bodies had been liquid shadow, Their eyes empty yet omniscient. In the twilit catacombs of the Nether void, They had stripped his mind of all he thought he knew, and when They spoke to him, he had seen visions of fire, darkness, and a world burned to a barren husk.

  He knelt beside his grave again. His pride failed him, his hate for Unctulu and Thresher forgotten. Even now, the memory of Their voices echoed like thunder in his head:

  The world is ours. It always was. It will be again. We are the makers. We are the finders. Before such things as dawn and day, we claimed lordship of the earth. We were its only children, the claimers of all. There was no other realm, only ours, only darkness, only silence.

  No other has the right to be here. No other will contest us. Come the hour, we will crack wide the veil and return. We will make our vengeance. We will end mankind. When we roam, yours will char, and ours will laugh forever.

  The memory fled. His thoughts cleared. Realizing he was squatting in the dirt, sweating and shaking, he lurched back to his feet.

  “You remember now, eh?” Unctulu said without smiling. “I see it in your eyes. They got to you, yes, just like They got to us.”

  “Yes.” He hated Unctulu all over again. “How will you do this thing? How will you secure our sleep?”

  Unctulu, beaming grotesquely, clapped a scabby hand against his shoulder. “Come with us. The Sleeper will show you.”

  And so began Archmyr’s second life.

  While the night was still young, he trailed the fat man and the iron hulk like a straggling, grey-toothed wolf. He and they crept from the Mooreye ruins and stalked westward toward the meadows. The moon blazed in the night, haunting him. The crows went silent, and the night birds sang dirges for him to march by. When Mooreye’s burned-out towers and hollow houses vanished behind him, he walked the open darkness. He felt freer than in the city, farther from his grave, farther from Them.

  Some thousand steps into the grass, Unctulu led him to a lonely tree, to which a stout, sack-laden horse was tied. The bulbous fiend clipped the horse’s bonds with a wickedly sharp knife, and afterward showed Archmyr the blade as though its edge were a smile.

  “Here.” The fiend reached into a pack, producing a shirt, breeches, and a pair of hard-soled boots, all of which he tossed at Archmyr’s feet. “Put these on.”

  Though disgusted to dress under Unctulu’s watch, he stripped off his rotted rags and slid into the fresh garb. A pleasing enough selection, he thought as he slid into the silks. As if they knew me before I died. The shirt and breeches were swordsman’s attire, while the boots were light and snug-fitting. Better still was that the garments were dyed black, the very shade of his mood, always his color of choice.

  “Hungry?” Unctulu licked his lips.

  “I’ll eat when I don’t have to look at you.”

  “Well and well.” Unctulu shrugged. “Good and good.”

  Afterward, Unctulu took the horse’s reins and led the way south of Mooreye. Thresher marched along, his greatsword clattering. Happy to be out of his grave-clothes, Archmyr followed.

  “You said we were going to Romaldar.” He remarked after a long silence. “Surely they’ve dead villains of their own. Why not raise them instead of me?”

  Unctulu clucked his tongue. “We did. They failed to last. The Hunter got them.”

  “The Hunter?”

  “Yes. The Hunter.” Unctulu slowed. “He kills them, takes their bodies where we can’t retrieve them. A nuisance, that one. But Master reckoned you’d be harder to kill, and so here we are.”

  The journey continued in silence. With Thresher and Unctulu in the lead, he marched some twenty paces back. He relished his time alone. A prisoner, he reckoned himself. But the freest I’ve been since falling in with the Furyons. He roamed through the tall grass, touching each blade as though it were the first thing he had ever felt. He stared at the stars, invaded by thoughts he had not felt since childh
ood. A feeling of newness captivated him, and for a time his mind was not at war, his thoughts not yet turned to disgust for the world.

  In the gloom, he crossed the meadows and entered a shadowed woodland. Unctulu’s lamp lit the way between the trees like a second moon. Archmyr thought it odd that the little man was so competent. In truth he thought many things were odd, too many to raise questions of. He wondered how Unctulu, surely not a citizen of Graehelm, conversed so fluidly in the common tongue of the north. He wondered what substances sloshed within Unctulu’s clinking vials, poisons, curatives, or some mixture of the two. Moreover, he wondered about Thresher, whose mask covered his eyes, who moved in his armor as though it weighed nothing, and who never said a word, content to do anything Unctulu told him.

  Deep in the woods, he caught up to his awakeners.

  “What manner of creature can see without eyes?” he asked of Thresher. “Is he blind? A sorcerer? A feat of Romaldarian engineering?”

  “You ask of Thresher, but not how we made you live again?” Unctulu quipped.

  “How you managed that, I don’t want to know.”

  “Good,” said Unctulu. “Wasn’t going to tell you.”

  A while longer of trailing Unctulu’s moon-lamp, and he remembered where he was. Grandwood, he thought. Hugest forest in the world. Grandwood’s trees, twice as tall as any tower made by men, swayed in the midnight breeze like a thicket of drowsing colossi. Their leaves blotted the moon and their branches swatted aside the starlight, yet passage beneath them was as easy as in the meadows outside Mooreye, for there was no brush, no vines, and few deadfalls. During his assault upon Graehelm eight years ago, he remembered he had very nearly conquered Grandwood. The fires of his ruthless war had reached the forest’s eastern border, but were extinguished after his death at Mooreye.