Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  Me.

  A shiver, colder than cold, wormed its way through her body. All the feeling in her fingers and toes abandoned her, and her heart slowed nearly to a stop.

  “I am afraid, too.” She flexed her fingers. “I worry he will hurt you and Saul. I worry I have dragged you into something that is mine to suffer. If not for me, he would not have the Pages. He and Father would still be dithering in some sopping Shivershore hall.”

  Garrett shook his head. “Unlikely. Grim has designs beyond our reckoning. Whether for conquest or for the doom we fear, his plans are long-laid. In either case, I do not care. His endgame is not what matters. It is what he did to Rellen…what he did to you.”

  Vengeful, she knew. Cooking for years in his heart. Does he even believe in the Ur?

  Garrett said nothing else, and she was happy to follow his lead. An amiable silence settled. For a time nothing existed but the roiling of the sea and the unmentionable magnetism between her and him, a whisper of a thought binding them without need of words.

  And then all pleasantries were interrupted.

  Catching herself gazing wistfully in Garrett’s direction, she turned away just in time to glimpse an approaching sailor. He was a young, dark-eyed Thillrian, possessing far more of his teeth than most of Daed’s crew. He sidled into the space of open deck behind her and Garrett. He had a crossbow slung over his shoulder. She disliked him immediately, hating him a little for cutting short her time with Garrett.

  “Allo,” he greeted her unctuously. “A right grey day at sea, aye?”

  She said nothing. He was one of the ones she regularly caught ogling her, and upon realizing it she pulled her borrowed blanket tighter to her neck.

  “Aye,” Garrett said flatly, failing to mimic the nameless sailor’s accent. “Right. Grey.”

  The sailor clutched the railing, rocking on his heels and gazing out over the ocean with incurious eyes. For a half-breath, she entertained the idea of pushing him overboard.

  “So then.” His accent faded. “You so sure of this?”

  “Are we sure of what?” she asked.

  “Of this.” The sailor gestured to the Selhaunt.

  Again it was Garrett who answered. “I have a guess.” He stared the sailor down. “He means to ask if we are sure we want to continue. He doubts our purpose and our odds of survival. He is afraid, rightly so. His nocked and bolted crossbow suggests he expects danger the moment we make land. He wants us to turn back.”

  Garrett is right. She saw it in the sailor’s eyes. This one is afraid.

  The sailor wrinkled his hawkish nose and tugged twice at the collar of his black, salt-stained shirt. “My meaning is as sharp as the gentleman’s sword.” He nodded curtly at Garrett’s blade. “To the White Island you would have us, to the exiles’ coffin. One day away, it would seem, til death puts his cold claws around all our necks. Well m’lady, I and some of the others have decided we’re of no mind to die so soon. To you we’d advise this: march your lovely bottom into Seaman Daed’s cabin and tell him the way of it. Tell him you’ve come to your senses, that you’ve decided the White Island’s no place you and yours want to die.”

  He threatens us. The fool. Garrett’s hand is on his sword. If I walk away, Daed will have one fewer sailor.

  “Why now?” She glared. “Why wait until today, one day from the island?”

  The sailor smirked again. “Mayhap I’m fond of you lot. Or mayhap I thought better of losing my skin to the frosts and the wolf-maned men you itch to track down. Now that Seaman Daed has chosen me for landing duty, my blood’s dried up a bit. I find myself unwilling to cast my bones to Cornerstone. You’d feel the same, were you standin’ in my boots.”

  Though not wanting to, she understand the sailor’s fear. But too late. Too little.

  “I never asked for Daed’s help beyond sailing us here,” she said. “If you are afraid, tell him we need no landing party, that once we set foot on Cornerstone he and the rest of you are free to wait for us on the ship. Once we reach land, my husbands and I will tend to Grimwain…alone.”

  Clucking his tongue and looking her up and down as though able to see straight through her blanket, he pulled his hands from the fore-railing and started back the way he had come. “Aye, you’re plenty brave, m’lady,” he said with narrowed eyes. “With your swords, your menservants, and your sway over Daed. But this young sailor reminds you; it’s Cornerstone you make for. This ain’t some green island paradise. Nary a fellow who sets foot upon these slabs of death ever returns, n’er in this life or the next.”

  Whatever retort she meant to give was lost upon her lips. The sailor left too swiftly, striding back into the mess of ropes and crates littering the deck of Shiver’s Pride. She fumed for several breaths before looking to Garrett, but upon seeing his calmness her heartbeat steadied.

  “What if he is right?” she asked.

  “He may be.” Garrett draped his arm around her shoulder. “It matters none. We have come too far.”

  “You mean it?”

  “Always.”

  That night, far removed from the morning’s encounter, she slept alone in her cabin. If this was to be her last eve before Cornerstone, she promised herself no insomnia would claim her, that no visions of the Ur would trouble her mind. In the bowels of Shiver’s Pride she dozed in her hammock, whose rock and sway eased her into the deepest of sleeps.

  She dreamed profoundly.

  In the beginning, she saw only snow, within which she stood peacefully, clad in diaphanous robes of silver and grey. The snow drifted down like ash from a ruined sky, and yet it failed to smother her. For time unknown she wandered her dreaming realm, which seemed like the forests of Sallow, its trees sharp and stark against an endless backdrop of sullen clouds.

  I am not alone here.

  She walked an endless path, and at length she passed her father, who could not return her gaze for lack of eyes. His face was white, his footfalls silent as a ghost’s. Unperturbed, she wandered until she came to Saul and Marid, who stood between two trees and bickered about how best to rescue her, but who were unable to see her even when she walked right between them. I should be frustrated, she thought. But no.

  Continuing through the ashen forest, she climbed a hill whose sides seemed less like solid earth and more like a trailing, wraithlike cloak. Garrett stood guard atop the hill. He acknowledged her with a smile that meant he loved her, but then looked away. He gazed westward with unknowable darkness in his eyes, and his demeanor was not unlike that of every day aboard Shiver’s Pride, when often she had seen him standing alone at the aft of the ship instead of the fore.

  Weeks might have passed in her dream, maybe longer, and yet Garrett never looked at her with the adoration she hoped for. Her dreaming heart might have shattered, but when she placed her hand upon her chest and his, she felt no rhythm. Both hearts were as stone, both bodies cold as coal beneath the miserable winter’s sky. Her dream was of death, not life.

  A clatter at her cabin door, and the ashen snowstorm of her dream rolled back. Daedelar. She heard him calling her name. Pounding my door off its hinges. Upset about something.

  “Enough! I am awake!” She lurched upright.

  “Good thing, sweet one,” Daedelar answered through the door. “The Corner’s Stone is here.”

  A shock of excitement coursed through her body. Forgetting her dream, she bolted upright from her hammock without her protective blanket. Daedelar smiled when she flung the door open, but she barely acknowledged him. Pushing past and bounding through the lower corridors of Shiver’s Pride, she climbed a narrow stair and emerged into the grey light of another miserable dawn.

  Wholly oblivious to the sky, she rushed barefooted across the deck with a smile she did not know she wore. At the fore, Saul, Garrett, and the entire crew had gathered. She cut through their ranks to behold Cornerstone. The men parted before her like dust before the wind.

  She was unprepared for the sight awaiting her.

  Halting
in the midst of many gaping men, her lips parted, her eyes widened, and her body went utterly still. Cornerstone was no tiny isle, no heap of lonely rock claimed to its neck by the Selhaunt waves. It was far grander, far more terrible in its vastness than anything she had expected. Upon the beach, meadows of brittle white sand spread forth, stretching to the ends of each horizon. Beyond the beach, a grim, boulder-pocked plain scarred the island, a scrubland of bleached earth and colorless, snow-sprinkled crust. There were no trees, no living things, nothing but a dry and deathly tundra across which not even the wind dared traverse.

  She blinked hard and caught sight of what loomed high above the lifeless Cornerstone plain. If her jaw could have fallen to her feet, it surely would have, for nothing she remembered seeing in her life was so awe and dread-inspiring. There stood against the far horizon a line of gargantuan, cyclopean towers, colossi of ice and ivory claiming dominion of the isle. The towers were unimaginably immense, brooding over the island like faceless, featureless monsters. From her vantage the towers were but great grey shades, yet so terrible that nothing with eyes could ever have failed to fear them. She counted twenty towers in number, and in their presence she was unable to speak, unable to move, able only to despair.

  Slowly, painfully, she came to understand what she was seeing. Too huge to be naturally made, she knew. Too vast for mankind to dream of building. Only the Ur could have made challenged the sky with such terrible things.

  Only the Ur.

  “They existed here,” she uttered, her mouth still open.

  Entranced by the towers as much as she, Saul whispered. “I read nothing of these things. I didn’t expect…I don’t know what I expected.”

  “Beautiful,” she breathed.

  “Horrible,” said Saul.

  She stared, as did Saul, as did everyone. The crew of Shiver’s Pride was held rapt by the sight, all save the skulking young sailor who had issued yesterday’s threat. Him she caught pushing his way to the back of the group, where he stood with such a smirk she might have slapped him were she closer.

  “So…there we ‘ave it.” It was Daedelar who cracked the oppressive silence. “It’s no sight for a sober man, it’s agreed. But no more time for gawking. Landing party, make ready to disembark, and all others to your posts. We’ve us a Grimfellow to catch and a ship to steal away!”

  Prying her gaze away from Cornerstone’s towers, she forced herself to remember her plan. Find Grim’s ship. Kill everyone on board. Find Father. Bury him once and for all.

  And live a long, quiet life untouched by the Ur.

  She scanned the waters right and left of Shiver’s Pride, but saw nothing near the dead-sanded shore, no sails jutting from the water for as far as she could see. Daedelar noticed her watching and jostled her elbow.

  “You hope for the Grimfellow’s ship.” He smiled cunningly. “But ‘tis not to be seen. We’ve made anchor on the western shore. Grim’s likely made berth in the east, where lies Cornerstone’s harbor. Exile’s Cove, so the old sailors used to call it, where many ships who were to drop their human cargo foundered. It’s safer here, safer where our enemy can’t see us.”

  She turned her gravest gaze on him. “And you swear not to strand us?” Her eyes narrowed, beautiful and full of shadows. “On your honor?”

  It was a question many times asked, many times answered, but this time Daedelar’s answer was as grave as she. “I do swear it, my grey-eyed lass. Were I fool enough to leave you and your husbands, I wouldn’t trust the ‘Haunt not to sink me. I know there’re things I haven’t said, but my vengeance against the Grimfellow has been long in the coming. I won’t leave you. I promise it.”

  “Good,” she said. “As for your kiss, you will have it. Deliver us safely back to Lyrlech when this is done, and I’m as likely to give you ten kisses as one.”

  “A fair offer.” Daed’s eyes sparkled, his face not entirely unhandsome. “Now to more serious matters. Your dinghy to the shore will be ready as you like it. They say the isle is not cold even though it be covered in ice and snow. But if I were you, I’d bundle in your blankets. Better a blanket than to face the Grimfellow in nothing but your dress.”

  “And food for my husbands?” She looked over her shoulder to catch Saul and Garrett still marveling at Cornerstone’s behemoth towers.

  Daedelar nodded. “To be loaded in haste.”

  She left him then, bowing ever so slightly before hurrying back to her cabin. It was an odd feeling that followed her below decks. She felt she could trust Daedelar, and yet she did not know why.

  Down in the depths of Shiver’s Pride, she sensed the moment of truth was at last upon her. She felt it in the heaviness of her feet, in the muted sounds of all her surroundings. Numb nearly to her heart, she halted at the entrance of her tiny cabin.

  I am a soldier, she told herself. Me on one side. Grim on the other.

  How did it come to this?

  She shook her ebon hair from her shoulders and entered her cabin. Snatching up the satchel Garrett had bartered for her, she stuffed her beloved journal within and tethered the bag to her waist. Her sandals lay on the floor, and she clapped her feet within them even knowing they offered no comfort. Before leaving, she remembered Daed’s concern, and she plucked her blanket from her hammock before closing her cabin door for the final time.

  Topside, Garrett and Saul awaited her. Should I be happy to see them? she wondered. Or should I wish they were safe at home? Garrett was dressed little different than a brigand, his garments the black of blighted coal, his sword the only possession that mattered. She expected him to wear something heavier, furs at least to shield him from Cornerstone’s cold, but his garb was so thin she could make out the shape of his steel-thewed limbs.

  Saul was dressed little wiser. Holding his battlestaff loosely in his grasp, he stood before her donned in lighter attire than the very day he had tracked her down in frozen Sallow.

  “Will you not both perish?” She approached them, forcing a wistful smile. “I know what Daed says, but the ice alone looks enough to kill.”

  Saul furrowed his brow, concerned as ever. “You can’t feel the difference, can you? For all the ice, it’s not cold at all. It feels like…like any day in autumn. A mild breeze, a light chill, nothing worse.”

  “So Daed was right,” she said.

  “More than passing strange.” Saul grimaced. “Those towers, this climate…maybe you were right after all.”

  “You mean maybe the Ur do exist, and maybe I am not so sick in my mind as you hope?”

  Saul looked visibly stung. “That’s not what I meant…”

  Slinking close enough to him to see the hints of grey in his beard, she took one of his weathered hands into both of hers. His sadness shined in her eyes, but his courage as well. He should be back in Graehelm, not here with me.

  “Sorry.” She squeezed his fingers. “I have dragged you furthest of anyone, and yet you stay. I mean it when I say I hope you are right. I hope there are no Ur. I hope Grim and Father are fools chasing their madness of their minds, just as I hope for myself.”

  “Ande, I—”

  “I mean it,” she interrupted. “I want to be wrong. I hope Grim’s ship sank five days behind us, and that the only thing we will find here are Father’s frozen bones.”

  Saul opened his mouth to answer, but when she raised her palm he thought better of it.

  “Now are you sure you want to come?” she pressed. “Garrett and I have our reasons, but you can still turn back. You could help Daed secure Grim’s ship and put some oak to his skull if he betrays us. You would be safer here, and I would feel better for it.”

  Saul tightened his grip around his steel-shod battlestaff. “No. We go united.”

  She understood then, and promised herself not to mention it again.

  The landing dinghy was almost ready. She heard the thuds and creaks of its planks as Daed’s sailors dropped the last of the foodstuffs and supplies into its shallow hold.

  “It is ti
me.” Garrett glanced to Cornerstone, whose towers loomed over his shoulder.

  “The worst part was the waiting,” quipped Saul. “The rest should be easy.”

  Doubtful, she wanted to say. The worst is yet to come.

  “Me first.” She slid between them both.

  Irons

  The dinghy looked like a sturdy enough craft, at least by Shiver’s Pride standards. Andelusia set her sandaled feet on its bottom and sat upon a crate packed with potatoes, leeks, and fresh water. Only a few rows to Cornerstone, she reckoned.

  I will live at least that far.

  While the others took their places, she stared hard at the White Island. Its arid beach and lifeless plains suggested nothing if not death. She thought it impossible that none of the others suffered from bitter cold, but it was just as Saul said: There is no cold. No one is wearing anything heavier than when we left Lyrlech.

  No cold. No wind. No anything.

  Maybe we are dead already.

  Garrett and Saul took their places beside her. Five mates of Daed’s crew soon followed. Under the weight of so many men, the dinghy’s sides dipped near to sinking, but she paid it little mind. In silence, the men rowed the little boat away from Shiver’s Pride. The boat moved swiftly, gliding through the still grey water like a curled autumn leaf.

  Of the five seaman accompanying her to the shore, the very first face she glimpsed belonged to the young sailor who had come with threats to her and Garrett. Him, she thought. Why him? He wore a sour smirk, his wiry half-beard bristling on his pallid chin. Worse yet, she saw two of his mates manning the oars, both of them among my oglers. Her sole consolation was that the remaining two seamen, older men who had never once troubled her, hunkered between her and the ogling three.