Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  In the ensuing quiet, darkness fell complete upon Cornerstone. Night’s black broom swept away the dusk, and clouds gathered to ink out the stars. His anger diffusing, he considered Saul’s words.

  “You want me to give up on her,” he sighed.

  “I want to find her more than anything,” said Saul. “But if she’s dead, I want to finish what she started. Grim needs to fail in everything he does. It’s impossible if we let him sail away.”

  Another silence took hold. He sat atop his rock and stewed. The Hunter’s flame boiled inside him, propelling him to a thousand disastrous courses of action, but with all his strength he resisted. Saul is right. Ande would not want this.

  “Tomorrow,” he murmured at length. “We try it your way.”

  The next morn he awoke upon his boulder, his body aching. The sky smoked with heavy greys and bottomless blues. Black masses of clouds blotted the sun, their corpulence consuming the upper half of every behemoth tower. So dark. And only an hour after dawn.

  Seemingly recovered from the worst of his poisoning, Saul stood in wait for him. His old friend faced northward, battlestaff in hand, gazing at Cornerstone’s horizon as though to challenge it to war. “I wonder if Ande made these clouds.” He ground his staff’s bottom into the bonemeal.

  “No.” Garrett slid off his boulder. “This is the work of her monsters.”

  “How? They’re not here. She said we’d know it if they came. She said everything would die.”

  “Maybe. But these clouds have the look of tombstones, of the Ur.”

  After a quick meal of dried wheat cakes and a few sips of warm, tasteless water, he and Saul were off to the northern shore. In his mind, He felt his feelings burn away. Entombed in one of the towers, he feared of Ande. Or buried in one of a hundred, dead-floored valleys.

  We will never find her.

  The morning died to the sound of bones crunching beneath his boots. He and Saul marched until midday, and then roamed miserably into afternoon. Always, he walked in near total silence, leaving Saul’s questions to hang.

  By mid-afternoon, he and Saul approached the barren northern shore. The weather was no fairer, the bone-addled beaches blighted by no fewer shadows than the dry inland plain. Ten steps from the ocean’s edge, he halted. The sea sloshed upon the shore, lapping at the bottoms of his boots. “No Shiver’s Pride,” he remarked. The dark waters beyond Cornerstone’s cemetery-like coast were empty.

  “Seaman Daed must be after Grimwain’s ship,” said Saul.

  “Or fleeing to Lyrlech.”

  Saul sagged upon his battlestaff. “What now?”

  He narrowed his eyes against the heavens, pupils gone as grey as the clouds. He imagined he saw the faces of the Ur, mouths of shadow filled with teeth like knives. “We go east. Follow the shore. If any ships are here, we will find them.”

  “Why east? Why not west?”

  “A feeling.”

  His mind massing with as many shadows as the sky, he walked eastward. His steps fell ever harder against the shore, crushing fragments of ancient bone into powder. The clouds threatened to unleash torrents of rain, but no storm ever broke, and no thunder cracked the sky. An hour he marched, then two, until all became still and the sun’s grey ghost plummeted. The sea was calm and noiseless, the clouds black and frozen in the sky. With one final bootfall atop the countless dead, he halted at last.

  “Nothing and no one,” He withdrew his sword and stabbed it into the shore.

  “We are all who remain here.”

  The Archithropian Son

  On Cornerstone’s soundless shore, the hour was unknowable. Nothing stirred in the dark, neither wind nor Wolde nor utterance from the shadows. Ribbons of black clouds draped themselves across midnight’s kingdom, concealing moon and stars.

  Beneath it all, Garrett slumbered.

  He roamed the edges of the dreaming world, aware of some vast and terrible presence lurking just beyond his mortal senses. He was a nomad, a spirit floating on the surface of a black, bottomless, ocean. He was about to plunge deeper into his dream, to face the shadows beneath him, but it was during this latest hour he felt a hard squeeze on his arm. The dark spat him out, and the Hunter’s sharp senses returned.

  “Garrett!” Saul hissed in his ear. “Wake!”

  He exhaled upon waking. All memory of his dream fell away. Slow as a rising sun, he grasped his blade and clambered to his feet.

  “Look,” Saul whispered. “A fire on the shore. We’re not alone.”

  He shivered away his sleep. In such unearthly darkness, he found the flame with ease. “Wolves.” He centered his sights on the distant scarlet pinprick. “I was wrong.”

  “What do we do?” Saul asked.

  “Attack.”

  “Attack?”

  “Kill them all.”

  “Why?”

  He breathed.

  He shut and reopened his eyes.

  In the next instant, he was off and sprinting across the shoreline.

  For him, it felt as though the far and leaping fire was none other than Andelusia’s beating heart. Go to her, the voice inside him cried out. Avenge her. Whatever Saul shouted in pursuing him, he never heard. He ran like Cornerstone’s only gust of wind, its sole predator. All other sounds died.

  Within a hundred breaths he descended upon the flame. The searing skyward blaze gobbled the night, fueled by timber planks and broken barrel-sides long abandoned on the shore. He halted at the edge of the light and counted twelve Wolde warriors. They hunkered around the flame, their grey-bearded faces and wolf-skinned shoulders as identifiable to him as the skin of his own palms.

  His blood boiled. His eyes became like daggers. Almost, he waited long enough for Saul to catch up, but when his hand grazed his sword hilt and the Hunter’s thirst parched his throat, he waded in.

  The first few Wolde never saw him. Sweeping into their midst, he invaded their camp as swift and deadly as a windborne plague. Two of them he slew before they realized he was upon them, clipping their vitals with an assassin’s precision. A third he hamstrung, cutting the huge Wolde warrior down just as the beast hoisted himself to his feet.

  With the wounded brute underfoot and howling, he erected himself in the center of the camp. The bonfire made a terrible silhouette of him and his bloodstained sword. The survivors heard their comrade’s screams and rose to face him, swords and spears pointed at his heart.

  “You!” roared one of the Wolde.

  “Lyko was right!” lamented another. “The Hunter’s here!”

  “How’s it possible? They killed him!”

  Like a lion, he licked his teeth. The fire blazed at his back, protecting him, lending him the guise of a murderous, wild-maned monster. He was outnumbered nine-to-one, and yet his enemies stayed away. Exhausted, he knew. Tired old men. Not as young as the others I killed.

  Their faces were haggard, their eyes hollow, and their skins stretched too tightly over their bones. As though reluctant to fight, they kept their crossbows slung on their shoulders, their swords wavering in their grasps. A half decade of slaughtering them. They know me. They are afraid.

  “What do you want?” hissed one.

  “Ande,” he told them.

  “Who?”

  Andelusia Anderae. The woman you helped murder.

  The Hunter’s heart beat blacker. Too easily, he slew the warrior beneath his boot, planting his sword in the man’s throat for the Wolde to watch. As the man died, he glared from face to face, injuring their collective courage with his savagery.

  “Your name.” He gazed upon the oldest, tallest of them, a black and grey-haired warrior with twice as many wolf teeth strung about his neck as any of the others.

  “Garkhan,” managed the Wolde man.

  “Tell me where she is. Tell me what you did with the girl you stole.”

  Garkhan unsheathed his broadsword. “You’re too late. The girl-witch is dead. Wasn’t by my hand, nor by any of my men. Lykaios saw it done. The Master.”
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br />   He flinched. Garkhan’s words felt virulent, a knife between his ribs.

  “The Master,” he growled through his teeth. “Tell me where he is. Give him to me. I will spare the rest of you.”

  Garkhan’s eyes looked hollow, his face pale with fear. “Would that he were here.” The Wolde man’s gaze sank to the shore. “We’d give him to you. But he and the others are gone, and our ship with him.”

  “Aye,” cursed another of the Wolde. “Left us for dead men, the devil did.”

  The faintest firelit smile curled at the corner of his mouth. They will suffer and starve. The same as me and Saul.

  Good.

  “There can be only one end to this night.” He lifted his sword. Droplets of Wolfwolde blood slithered to its point. “We will perish as we are meant to. Our pain will please the shadows in the sky. Death is what the Ur delight in.”

  The Wolde looked at one another and crooked their brows in confusion. They know nothing, he understood. Grim told none of them the truth.

  Garkhan and his men refocused and turned their deadly gazes back upon him. “Hunter!” A spindly snake of a Wolde warrior spat at him. “We’ll carve you up and have you on a spit!”

  “Aye!” crowed another. “Strip your guts out for the sea to salt! No less than you deserve!”

  Good, he thought again.

  That he and they should spill each other’s blood on the Cornerstone beach felt like a foregone conclusion. He watched as Garkhan ordered them into a half-moon formation, several Wolde on each side hemming him between their blades and the crackling bonfire. Within twelve paces they closed in, then eight.

  His sword angled before him, he waited.

  A heartbeat before they came, Saul staggered into the light. Sweating as though he had run many leagues, his tardy friend broke the Wolde line and staggered to a stop beside the roaring fire. “Stay back!” He whirled his battlestaff.

  Garrett looked at poor Saul. “Ande’s dead. Stranded men, these dogs. Grim left them here to die.”

  Saul swallowed hard. “She’s dead? How?”

  “Murdered by Grimwain.”

  “No…”

  “Yes.”

  So began a standoff, two against nine. Seeming to doubt the wisdom of fighting him with so few men, the Wolde completed their half-circle, imprisoning him and Saul between steel and fire. He swapped his sword between his hands, waiting, always waiting.

  “Madness!” Saul snapped at the Wolde. “If your Master abandoned you, he’s our common enemy! Why war against us?”

  “For him.” The skinniest warrior jabbed his spear in Garrett’s direction. “Him we were promised.”

  “The only promise Master kept,” cursed another. “He killed our brothers. Hundreds of ‘em!”

  Not nearly enough, thought Garrett.

  Saul picked out Garkhan out as the leader of the pack. “You.” He pointed with his battlestaff. “Why did your Master discard you?”

  “It’s simple,” said the Wolde leader. “We’re the descendants of those who served Myklokain. Myklokain the usurper. Myklokain the butcher of Roma.”

  “Who’s he?” said Saul.

  “You mean who was he.” Garkhan looked sick. “Lyko’s father’s father…twenty generations back. The Master’s killed everyone who had anything to do with his family. We’re the last of them. That he took so long to betray us is what should surprise us.”

  Garrett’s heart roared. No more words. Let them speak in blood and screams.

  Saul stood his ground. “He left you here? No ship? No hope of return?”

  “As punishment.” The skinny, spear-bearing Wolde advanced. “He couldn’t bloody well go back in time to kill our great great-grandfathers. Now move, old man. The Hunter’s ours.”

  Garrett tasted every man’s tension. He saw it in the Wolde when two of them unslung their crossbows and nocked razor-tipped bolts. He saw it in Saul’s white knuckles and knotted shoulders. Be calm, his darkest voice haunted him. Let them talk. Then finish it.

  “No.” Saul stiffened. “This won’t happen. There’s another way.”

  The Wolde, muscles tauter than bowstrings, aimed their bolts, spears, and swords. Saul stood as a mountain and held the pack at bay. “We can return to Thillria together,” he said between clamped teeth. “There need be no slaughter. We can all survive.”

  “Survive?” scoffed one of the Wolde. “Impossible. Our ship’s gone, yours the same. We’re corpses already.”

  “No…” said Saul. “There’s a way.”

  The Wolfwolde men hesitated. Though lasting but a breath, hope glimmered in their gazes.

  “Way? What way?” asked one.

  “Tell us,” snarled the skinniest.

  “A boat…” Saul peered beyond the fire and into the Selhaunt’s black water. “We stand now in Exile’s Cove. If I’m right, there’re a hundred dead ships in the shallows. There should be enough timber here to reconstruct a dozen galleys. And we need only one.”

  “What are you saying?” Garkhan glowered.

  “We set aside our differences.” Saul lowered his staff. “If we slaughter ourselves, our fate’s fixed. But if we salvage the carrion of all the ships that’ve crashed, we might live. It’s no sure thing, but we should try. I for one don’t want to starve or be skewered for a grudge unsettled.”

  The Wolde looked to each other, then to Garkhan. Their lust to live blazed clear as starlight in their eyes, but just as powerful was their pride. They want me dead, Garrett knew. They will never stop.

  Nor will I.

  The skinniest Wolde broke rank.

  Fuming, his fingers bloodless from gripping his spear too tight, the wolfling charged Garrett. He came like a vanguard of lightning long before his parent storm, the first ocean wave of thousands. Even his brethren were caught unawares, mouths gaping as his spear flashed in the firelight.

  When the little man thrust his spear, Garrett spun his sword in a vicious arc, turning the weapon aside. His movement was effortless, his body so serenely adapted to violence that he and his sword might as well have been made of water.

  Tearing a hole in the night, he flicked his blade across the Wolde man’s throat and stepped back.

  Quicker than he deserves.

  Throat opened wide, the skinny man gurgled and dropped his spear. He collapsed onto the beach, his body like broken kindling. Within five breaths, he was dead.

  Eight, Garrett thought. Too few.

  “Kill him!” hissed the man beside Garkhan.

  “No!” screamed Saul.

  Two of the Wolde raised their crossbows and aimed for his heart. But their fingers failed them. Their courage drained from their faces, their cheeks white as bone in the bonfire’s glare. Blade steaming, Garrett rose to his fullest height and stepped before Saul. The darkness smoldered in his blood, the Hunter’s hate fully returned. The Wolde shrank at the sight of him.

  “Garrett, no.” Saul grasped for his sleeve, but it was too late.

  Black fire, bitterly cold, smoked behind his eyes. His ancestors’ darkness ruptured from its hiding place beneath his heart. He leapt in such swift strides that the Wolde seemed frozen in time, still as statues ready to be toppled. Two triggers clicked and two bolts hummed for his chest, but in his fury he moved serpentine, and both projectiles tore harmlessly into the darkness beyond the bonfire.

  He began on the left.

  Hurling himself in a horror of flesh and flashing steel, he cut down the first Wolde, splitting the man’s skull faster than any scream could escape. Next he came to a crossbow bearer, who tried in vain to reload. He clipped the man’s head off, sending it rolling onto the beach.

  He moved in grim fashion, silent as a coming storm. He faced two swordsmen at once, the wolves’ teeth around their necks rattling. These two he toyed with, sharing seven strokes with them until finally he split the skull of one and buried his sword halfway to its hilt in the abdomen of the other.

  He heard Saul screaming his name. The Elrain man pleaded
, shouted, and cursed, but the cries were but pebbles hurled into a raging river of blood. Deaf to all but violence, Garrett made short work of the second crossbowman, whom desperation made clumsy and slow. He advanced like a thunderstorm and carved open the ribcage of a second spearman, whose spear he hacked in half and hurled into the neck of a too-slow swordsman.

  With men dead and dying all around him, he faced the bonfire.

  One remains.

  As steady as any man could hope to be, Garkhan extended his broadsword and glanced sidelong at Saul. The Wolde man looked twenty years aged from moments ago, for I have just killed his family.

  “Tell him to stop.” Garkhan shook.

  “No more, Garrett! Please!” Saul begged.

  His cheeks dark with Wolfwolde blood, Garrett stalked like twilight falling. The bonfire’s light played his shadow upon the shore, making him look like one of the Ur. “We were supposed to kill each other.” He walked Garkhan down. “You disappoint me.”

  He shoved his way savagely past Saul and advanced. Garkhan slashed out at him, missing twice before grazing his upper arm with a third stroke. The sight of his own blood made his hate burn hotter. With three hacks he tore his way inside Garkhan’s guard and sent the Wolde man’s sword spiraling into the bonfire. When he kicked Garkhan’s legs out and pinned the aging warrior against the pale, gristly shore, his teeth shone in a cruel, unrecognizable smile.

  “You,” he cursed, planting his knee against Garkhan’s chest. “You are as responsible as your Master. For Rellen, for Ande…this death is not nearly as awful as you deserve.”

  “Do it then,” Garkhan gasped. “It’s owed me. I’ve served the earth’s cruelest lord…and basked…in the glory he brought me. To die here…it’ll be right.”

  “Garrett…don’t…” Saul grabbed his shoulder. “This isn’t what Ande would want!”

  No. He shoved Saul away.

  All this death.

  Saul’s right. She would not want this.

  But then, she is not here.

  He tried to resist, but the blood of Archithrope pounded cold in his veins. He raised his sword’s scarlet point, ready to claim his last prey.