Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  He understands. This is almost worse.

  “It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t welcome you into my family, only that I expect you prefer something else,” he continued. “I was there in the Undergrave when you fought the warlock. I saw most of it, and I heard the rest thereafter.”

  Oh, no. My father. Ghurk knows. He will have told the Duke. I am undone.

  She feared for what was next, but if Ghurk knew the truth, he carried on without mention. “A simple life would bore you, a simple man doubly so,” he said. “It’s not to say I’ve given up hope, but more that I’m content to have you stay here, love or no love. And then there’s Garrett, of course.”

  She stifled a gasp. She had never doubted Ghurk’s intelligence, but this is not what I expected.

  “I never speak of Garrett,” she said. “Who told you?”

  “Saul did.” Ghurk shrugged. “After we escaped the Undergrave. He told me enough, and I filled in the rest.”

  “Marid, I—”

  “Think nothing of it,” he shushed her. “You probably suppose I’m a dreamy-eyed fool, just waiting for the day when you forget him. But what I’m really trying to say…what the meaning of all this is…is that I know I make a clumsy suitor, and I know we’ll only ever be friends. You saved me, remember? You came down there and plucked me from my pit when no one else had the courage. I’ve always owed you for that. Father, too. So I’m not going to beg for your hand in marriage, and I’m not going to let Father drive you off. The way I see it, if we can do even a few small things to make your life more pleasant, we will’ve repaid some tiny part of our debt to you.”

  No proposal? she thought. Nothing more about the warlock? My neck not in a noose because of Marid?

  She could not remember feeling such relief in her life. For a single breath, she remembered what it was to feel warm, and she wrapped her arms around Ghurk and squeezed him as though he were the last tree standing in a hurricane.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  She beamed at him. “For being my friend. For trying to understand. You have no debt to me. If things were different, if I were smarter, I would be with you. I swear it.”

  “You mean that?”

  “I do.”

  He blushed. “I’m so sorry, Ande. All the flowers and notes. All my clumsiness. If ever I made you uncomfortable, I’m truly sorry for it. Father always warned me not to be a fool, but I never listened.”

  “Do not be sorry.” She kissed him on his cheek. “Without you and him, where would I be?”

  She and he sat on the bench, upon whose sagging planks they lingered in thoughtful silence for a while. The oak leaves rustled as though it were late autumn, the lights from Maewir winking out. For a time, she forgot the Nightness, and felt such peace as she had many seasons ago.

  “You’re so very different than other girls,” Ghurk said at length. “You know that, right?”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Everyone loves you, but no one knows you.”

  “Not everyone.” She smiled. “And there are one or two who know me well enough.”

  The quiet between them took hold. The darkness sheltered them, deep as midnight, the silence the same as a snow-blanketed forest. Wise to her fondness for such moments, Ghurk did nothing to disturb her.

  He is happier now, she knew. From this day forth, the burden is mine for not loving him.

  And for lying.

  The eve drew on, and the night remained pleasant in spite of the cold. She and Ghurk roamed lighter topics: wine and weather and the many events that had led them to where they were. They were briefly disturbed when the Duke’s guests exited through the courtyard, but the quiet reclaimed the world when the tipsy throng ambled through the gate and down into Muthem proper.

  “I suppose we should go back.” Ghurk exhaled a frosted breath. “If we stay out much longer, rumors’ll start to fly.”

  Rather than rise, she set her gaze upon him like two silver stars in a colorless, cloudless sky. She stared at him, hypnotizing him, holding him rapt.

  “Ghurk,” she said his name.

  “Is something the matter?” He shivered. “Say it.”

  “Thank you. You have been nothing but kind to me, and I have been distant. I am grateful for your patience, for your understanding. You are my last and truest friend. Thank you.”

  “Of course.” He looked worried. “But you’re sure everything’s well?”

  “Yes,” she lied. Everything is well…save the wrongs I have done you and your city. “All is fine. I promise.”

  He looked as though he wanted to say something more, but she stood and took the lead in walking back toward Maewir. Nimble as a moth, she fluttered over the paths and between the frosted hedges. He could but follow.

  The guards opened the gate. Strolling beside Ghurk into the Duke’s darkened hall, she stopped and touched his collar only to let her fingers fall away.

  “Goodnight, Ghurk. A fine Duke, you will make. A better husband to a woman wiser than me.”

  “Goodnight.” He backed toward the stair opposite hers. “He looked so small as he retreated, the same as he had looked as a much younger man. “Maybe we’ll see you at supper again, maybe tomorrow.”

  “Yes. Maybe.”

  She watched him walk away. He moved between a pair of braziers whose fires had long gone out, and then took like lightning to the curling stairs.

  He and I will never walk alone again.

  After he vanished into the labyrinth of corridors above the Duke’s hall, she felt the comforts of his presence dwindle. The last burning brazier, its fire red and amber, threw off a light that played with the shadows on her face. All the good done by the night’s conversations fled from her heart. The same as Marid. Without the hope of love, my friendships will wither and die.

  She should have gone to bed. She looked to the stair, whose curling steps invited her to ascend to her bedchamber, but she did not climb. With Ghurk gone and Maewir asleep, she felt a familiar calling.

  The Nightness.

  The voices.

  Why do I fight it?

  The Nightness, her dread and her desire, came roaring to the surface of her mind. She blinked, and the darkness stirred within her, the shadowy broth pumping through her veins. Her heartbeat slowed and her fingers went numb. The wind seemed to answer, howling outside Maewir’s walls like a pack of starving wolves.

  No. Leave me be. Give me one more night of peace.

  ‘No,’ the voices said.

  Left too much alone, she crept into the alcove beneath the stair, taking refuge where Maewir’s sentries would never find her. She backed onto the cold stone wall, sliding slowly down, a rivulet of falling rain. The back of her dress caught upon a protrusion in the stone, tearing a long gash in the silken fabric, but she hardly noticed. She sank all the way to her bottom, and the deeper she slumped the more the darkness overwhelmed her.

  What is it you want?

  ‘Everything.’

  Why now?

  ‘Now is the hour.’

  She willed herself to stand, to breathe, and to reclaim possession of her mind. It was no easy thing, for the Nightness had whims of its own. Beaded with cold sweat, she lifted her chin, breathed a dozen deep breaths, and drove the thousand whispers from her mind.

  When she emerged from the alcove beneath the stair, she did not know her own appearance. Her hair lay in dark lashes across her cheeks, while her torn dress dangled from her left shoulder. She strode into the hall as though nothing were wrong, but the sentry who chanced across her stopped some twenty paces away and stared.

  “Mistress?” he called. “Didn’t see you there. It’s late. Are you unwell?”

  She struck a statuesque pose, gazing at the sentry in such a way that he dared come no closer. “I am well,” she said, cool as the moon at midnight. “Forgive me. I was only now returning to my room. Goodnight.”

  The sentry said nothing, and she ascended to her bedchamber. At he
r door, with none near to see, she risked a moment’s pleasure. She did not open her door, but rather passed right through it, in one breath a grey-eyed ghost and in the next a woman on the door’s other side. For many years, she had never allowed herself such luxury. She had resisted using her power.

  I should not have done that, she scolded herself. I should never do it again.

  But I will.

  Safe inside her room, she stripped to her sleeping gown and stood before her wide-open window. The happenings of the last two nights lay heavy on her heart, and the conversations with Marid and Ghurk echoed in her mind. I did the right thing, she tried to convince herself. When this gets worse…and it will…they will be grateful to be disentangled from me.

  Her guilt dulled and subsided. The clouds streamed past her window, entrancing her. This was a rare eve, an eve of reckoning, she supposed. It was on nights like this she missed her father, however cursed and short-lived her relationship with him had been. Foolish as it seemed, she wished he were alive and standing beside her, that he might tender some small morsel of advice to her.

  “What would you do, Father?” she asked of the night. “How would you fight it?”

  Here, standing before her window, her question was most meaningful. For though her father could not answer, there lived another voice in the darkness. She heard it at the edge of sensation. It was as subtle as autumn’s last leaf falling to the earth, as low a sound as thunder from a storm many hours away.

  The wind cut through the window, colder than before. The gale tore at her gown and washed like water over her skin. The rain followed, erupting from the sky, a river freed from a broken dam. She stood still in the tempest. The rain lashed her face and pooled at her feet.

  Not a natural storm. My storm. Coming for me.

  She stared from the window. Out in the night, beyond the clouds, beyond the bounds of Thillria, she found what she sought. The Black Moon moved behind the rain, her direst enemy, her most treacherous friend. It watched her. It whispered to her. If ever she had doubted her sanity, if ever she had looked in the mirror and questioned whether the despair in her heart was real or imagined, now I know otherwise.

  The Eye of the Ur, the roaming Black Moon, fell from her sights as quickly as it had appeared. It did not matter. One glimpse was all it took for her to remember.

  The Eye.

  The Ur.

  They desire freedom.

  And they want my help.

  Exile

  Try though she did, Andelusia failed to slow the Nightness. The very morning after glimpsing the Black Moon, she understood what was happening.

  My contentment…at an end.

  The dark season…here to stay.

  At dawn, she stood by her window. Gauzy grey clouds buried the sky to the end of sights. The wind felt desolate, the sea tormented. Ruthless, frigid rain descended upon Muthemnal, extinguishing summer utterly, drowning the realm beyond her window such that she could no longer tell where the ocean ended and the city began.

  For three days, she watched.

  On the first day, the cold slew the Duke’s gardens. The frost withered every flower, blackened every blade of grass, and chiseled the ivy from Maewir’s walls. At dawn the rains fell hard and saturating, while at night the clouds spit icy daggers against the earth, showers of glass rending leaf and root alike.

  By the second day, the city’s marbled domes and chiseled granite towers wept without end, pouring rivers from their roofs and sluicing sorrow into the streets below. Midday resembled twilight, for the sun never shined and the rain never slowed. Many of Muthemnal’s narrowest streets flooded, while others were spared from inundation only to be impassably crowded with tents and shanty huts erected by folk whose homes the rain had destroyed.

  On the third day, black masses of clouds swelled like bruises in the sky. The winds howled in a vast ring around the city, in one moment blasting from sea to shore, in the next tearing every ship in the harbor from their moorings. The storm spun over Muthemnal, the tempest’s dark heart beating faster with every hour. A maelstrom, it seemed.

  The Nightness, Andelusia knew.

  At noon of the fourth day, she heard a knock against her bedroom door. No surprise, she thought. I wonder if they know. She sat cross-legged on the floor, nestled resignedly beside her lamp. Her shutters were closed, but without a fire in the hearth her room remained the coldest in Maewir.

  “Mistress?” A man’s muffled voice boomed on the door’s other side. “Mistress, are you inside?”

  She rose. Her gown, the same hue as her cloud-colored eyes, fluttered wraithlike from her hips as she crossed the carpeted floor. She cracked the door ever so slightly open, allowing just enough space to see the guardsman outside. He was a tall, broad-shouldered Thillrian, an oafish fellow scarcely fitting inside the seams of his leather jerkin.

  One of Marid’s friends.

  “Yes?” Her voice was barely a whisper.

  The guardsman, his hair sopping wet and his jerkin dotted with dark spots of rain, tugged at his collar. “Mistress, there’s a meeting in his Lordship’s tower. They mean to discuss a plan of action against… against the weather. Your presence is requested.”

  “Me?” She feigned surprise.

  “Yes, Mistress. A messenger arrived from Denawir this morning. Nothing’s decided, but there’s talk of an evacuation. They want everyone accounted for, especially you.”

  “How bad is it?” She already knew the answer.

  “Not good,” he said. “Not good at all.”

  “A moment, please. I will be out.”

  The instant she clicked the door shut, she felt herself drowning. What have I done? What does the Duke want with me? I do not want to know. She sank to the carpet, where her gown puddled around her like a shapeless pool of rain. She felt no tears welling in her eyes. Rather than weep, she gasped, her breaths knifing between her ribs.

  They will know me.

  They will name me a witch, a sorceress, the second coming of my father.

  They will throw me out into the rain.

  She stood, black ribbons of hair falling across her eyes. She wanted to fling her window open and hurl a thousand execrations into the clouds. She wanted to soar into the sky and never return.

  No. Face them. If I run now, I will never know peace again.

  She trod to her wardrobe and shrugged off her grey gown. In the gloom, she dressed in a gossamer-sleeved bodice and skirt, something far more suitable for summer. The raiment had been a gift from Ghurk, and though she was disgusted with herself for wearing it, nothing matters less than appearances now.

  As she dressed, she glimpsed the Pages Black.

  An accident, but not.

  The Ur book lay at the bottom of her wardrobe, its fleshbound exterior entirely out of place amid a pile of stockings and sandals. She glared at it, scorning it, hating it, and desiring it. Within the dread grimoire, the ten disciplines of black magic were writ, the powers of the Ur, not least of which was the power to generate unnaturally malevolent storms.

  The guardsman banged upon her door again, startling her.

  “Coming!” She dropped a shirt over the Pages and slammed the wardrobe shut.

  She left her room behind. The guardsman led her away in silence. If he knew what awaited her in the Duke’s tower, he hid it well, ducking down the hall with his torch held low and his eyes averted. She worried it was a sign, that he might soon lead her from Maewir in chains. More likely he is nervous, or tired, or both.

  “Who else will be there?” she asked at the top of the stair.

  “Everyone,” he grunted. “Everyone important, anyway.”

  “The Duke’s son?”

  “Yes, Mistress. Everyone.”

  In silence, she trailed him down the stairs, reaching the floor just above the grand hall and following as he guided her through the corridors leading to the Duke’s tower. The passages were eerily empty today, at least until she came to the Duke’s door. Outside the great portal,
a dozen men milled. They murmured about the storm, the new king, and Muthemnal’s ill luck. Among the men, she counted several nobles from lower Muthem, a handful of city guardsmen, and worse still, the Duke’s brother-in-law, Surgereth of Dray.

  She had almost forgotten about Surgereth. Among the Duke’s closest confidants, the Lord of Dray had made no secret of his disdain for her. ‘That girl Andelusia shouldn’t be in Muthem,’ she remembered Ghurk telling her what Surgereth had said. ‘You heard the things she did in the Undergrave. Don’t be blinded by her saving us. She’s unnatural, she is. Just look into her eyes.’

  As she approached the Duke’s door, she thought to hide behind her barrel-shouldered escort, but the corridor was too well lit. The encounter was inevitable.

  “Mistress Andelusia,” Surgereth greeted her with an unseemly smile, “we’ve not seen you these past days. We were beginning to think you might never come out.”

  She slowed her pace and looked him twice over, disliking him more than ever. Even at nearly fifty years, the Duke of Dray looked like a wolf amongst men. He was Thillrian through and through, with dark hair, calm eyes, and a look of constant skepticism behind his hawkish brows.

  “Surgereth.” She forced a half-curtsy. “Were today a brighter day, we might have time to talk.”

  “Quite a pleasure that’d be. But it seems Ghurlain doesn’t want to wait. He’ll see us all presently. After you, my dear.”

  Lifting her chin like a swan and striding past him, she gave him a look that told volumes. Her eyes, at first glimmering silver and scarlet in her guardsman’s torchlight, went dark and dull when they met his gaze. Proud and powerful. She saw his fear. But humbled by the Nightness.

  Just like everyone else.

  Her escort opened the Duke’s door. Inside the tower, some forty lanterns and innumerable candles blazed, driving back any hint of darkness. She winced against the light and wandered into the room. Lavish carpets greeted her sandaled toes, plush and clean as springtime grass. Tall, stained-glass windows put a cheery face on the gloom-light from outside, dousing the room in ambers and muted reds. As she entered, a half-hundred men looked her over, disliking me, undressing me, judging me.