The moment of death never came.
It was Saul who stopped him, locking his battlestaff beneath his chin and tearing him off Garkhan. Dragged across the bonemeal, he thrashed, but mighty Saul tightened the staff like a vise around his throat, slowing the blood that pounded so black inside his skull.
“Garrett!” Saul hissed his name. “Stop…fighting. This isn’t the way!”
Had Saul let him go, he would have killed his friend. But the longer Saul held him, the more his wrath cooled. His sword slipped from his numb fingers and fell onto the beach. Clarity struck him like a sliver of cold, clear moonlight. Choking, he grasped the battlestaff with both hands, and yet Saul held him fast.
“Release…me,” he growled.
Saul dragged him farther away from Garkhan and the fire. “You’re not…in your right…mind.”
“Release…me.” He saw stars in his eyes.
“Not until you’re you again.”
Eyes clamped shut, teeth locked in front of his tongue, he waged a war against himself. He felt the drumming of his pulse and heard the bonfire’s searing snap. Saul has me, he knew. Could break my neck. A sword. Right there. Could take it. Could kill him. No. Do not.
Let it go.
Let it all go.
“No more,” he gasped. “Release…me. The wolf…can live.”
He felt the pressure lift from his throat. Saul staggered behind him, panting like a hound. He sat up on the beach, sucking in broken breaths. He wondered what had happened to him, where the awful darkness inside him had come from, and where it had gone.
“What now?” Saul slumped to the beach beside him.
He shut his eyes to think.
“Your skeleton boat,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Build it.”
Will of the Witch-Girl
The rain awoke Andelusia.
The first droplet chiseled at her cheek, stinging her bruised jaw. The second landed on her dry lower lip, awakening her forgotten thirst. Her bones feeling fragile as straw, she stirred to life. She had no concept of how long she had lain in half-consciousness, only a vague sense that everything was wrong, that I am not where I should be.
She crept back to awareness, a child having wandered to the end of a deep, dreamed-of labyrinth. A thousand pains pummeled her. After sitting upright and leaning back against the frigid, bone-mortared wall, she remembered.
Not dead.
At the bottom.
Still alive.
In the darkness, she opened her eyes, but saw nothing. Her right eye was swollen from Grimwain’s blow, and her Nightness vision foiled by the iron manacles. The manacles’ chain, thick as three fingers, remained fastened inextricably to the iron ring in the wall.
Father died right here. Grim wants the same for me.
The rain quickened. How it reached the pit’s bottom, she dared not guess. The droplets pattering against the bones broke the perfect silence and the rain wetted her ragged shirt. She suckled at her sleeve, taking in her first drops of sustenance. In days? Weeks? Eons?
From a sky too far above to see, the invisible rain fell ever harder. It was cold, bitterly so. In her manacled, nearly-naked state she suffered countless shivers, and when at last the downpour slowed, her skin felt slick and clammy as a corpse.
Sleep, she desired. Sleep again. So deep that nothing can find me.
The rain quickened again.
A million tiny knives, it pierced the darkness and tortured her as if for sport. She dripped like a wet leaf, her dress sticking to her body the same as a second skin. She hugged her knees and shivered uncontrollably. After a thousand breaths, she wished for more than sleep. It hurts, she agonized. Chained like an animal. Come and claim me, death. Let my next shiver be my last. Here I am, Ur. Ooze from the walls and turn me to dust.
For a long, long while, she dreamed of death. Of sweet release, she fantasized, of drifting into oceans serene. Would be so easy. Just close my eyes. Just go where no Ur can touch me.
At length, her morbid wish faded.
She was human, after all, and even in her darkest moment she entertained the fragile hope that she might escape. The rain eased, her torment lessened, and the images of death tumbled from her mind. Sucking the water from her shirt, she felt sharper than before. She pushed the black strands of hair from her cheeks, furiously rubbed her hands together for warmth, and allowed a thought to slip almost unnoticed into her mind.
This is not the end.
It was a dangerous thought. Here at the world’s bottom her magic was muted, her body weakened by lack of food, and her wrists bound to the ring in the bone-basalt wall by a chain too thick to dream of breaking.
Grim’s prison is perfect. But what if? What if I could?
She closed her eyes and climbed into a daydream. She followed the corridors of her mind, journeying all the way back to the beginning of her adventures, reaching a time and place some ten years ago. She felt sad to remember the days long passed. She wished she had never left Cairn, her tiny home in the Graehelm hills. She wished she were still there, still roaming the green hills and deep thickets behind the Rockbottom. If she could not return home, she wished at least she had never traveled the long road to Thillria. Without the Pages, Father and Grim might never have harmed a soul. Rellen would still be alive.
She dreamed of being married in the halls of Gryphon, free to walk the suntouched stones of her husband’s home without any care in the world more serious than what song to sing or which raindrop to taste. Her hair might still be shining scarlet, her eyes green as any meadow, and the Nightness but an afterthought no drearier than a passing summer storm.
But these things are not so.
It was pointless to wish for them, she knew. Reopening her eyes to the blackness, she accepted her situation with a fresh sense of serenity.
Grim should have finished me.
She considered her obstacles.
Wrists…welted and swollen. Burning. Cold, not hot. Hands will never come out. Arms will snap and fingers crumble to dust. Need a key. There is none.
And food. Sucking water from sleeves is one thing. Without Nightness, need real food. Already weak. Running out of time.
Water will have to do.
Scrabbling as far from the wall as her chain allowed, she searched for a puddle from which to drink. She found none. The rain had seeped below the bones, draining down into a place she did not want to imagine. She jerked at the chain and hissed in frustration. Same as the Selhaunt, she fumed. Surrounded by water with nothing to drink.
I have an idea.
On hands and knees, she scrabbled. A million dead lay beneath her, their ribs, fingers, hips, and femurs a macabre carpet. She searched through the nearest piles, her chain pulling at her. Here, she thought. And here. Grimacing, she collected two hollow skulls and erected them bottoms up. Go ahead, rain. Fill these like goblets. Drinking from dead men’s heads…fine with me.
She spent the next hour waging war against her manacles.
No idea was too small, she imagined. No matter the darkness, she used fragments of bones like lock-picks, working them into the manacles’ tiny keyholes. She pried, picked, and twisted, snapping scores of bone slivers. When bones failed, she gnawed at the manacles’ pins with her teeth, chewing like a wild wolf pup until her jaw went numb and scarlet streams wept from her lips onto her forearms.
By the time she quit prying and collapsed against the wall, her hopes of escape felt crushed. Weakling, she cursed herself. Were I Garrett or Saul, I would rip these chains in half.
Exhausted, she closed her eyes and curled on the floor. Bones pricked her and fluttering raindrops tickled her skin, but it matters none. Sleep chased her from the world. A part of her hoped it would be her last.
Hours later, she awoke again.
As she had slept, so had the rain returned. It bored into the pit, enjoying the taste of her. Her love of it, once worshipful, crumbled with its stings. She sat up, dizzy and blind, starving a
nd listless. She felt thin as paper, her body but a shell.
Not yet. Think of something. Break the chain. Fly out of here.
Her pulse quickened and her tiny fists seized open and shut. Furious, she gnashed at her manacles’ pins and ripped at the chain as though she were strong enough to break it. Her lips bled. Her fingers deadened. She lashed out all the harder, hammering at her chain with every nearby chunk of bone until they all splintered in her grasp.
The rain fell ever harder. Like cold stones, it welted her. She turned her wrath against her truest enemy, the iron ring through which her manacles’ chain looped. She knew it was there even though she could not see it. Rooted in the wall. A rusted eyelet. I hear you, yes I do. Every time I move, you sing at me. My chain makes you laugh. My bones you hunger for.
She groped at the darkness and found the ring. It was as thick as the handle of Garrett’s sword, its surface smooth and wet with rain. Gripping it with both hands, she pulled with all her might, wanting to rip it out of the wall. When it moved none, she flung her sandals aside, set her bare feet against the wall, and pulled with all her weight until every sinew in her body creaked and popped.
Still nothing.
At the end of her endurance, she released the ring. A shock of pain coursed through her bones. She collapsed in a heap, breathless and defeated.
Garrett? she wanted to cry. Help me? Father? Rellen? Saul? Please. Someone help.
She wept. Her sickened sobs wracked and rattled her. At the end of it, her eyes dried and her soul went dark. She collapsed into sleep yet again, and countless cold hours slogged past.
She awoke again.
Heedless of how long she had laid senseless, she slunk back to awareness. Her head felt thick with fog, and for several breaths after sitting up she wondered if she was truly alive. No rain, she thought. Body heavy as lead. Hands crusty with blood. Her hurts were ethereal, her pain and hunger penetrating her so deeply they felt dreamed rather than real. She tried to stand, but her chain caught on the ring and hauled her back to her knees. She shouted into the blackness, but the only sound she managed was a hoarse, ragged bleat.
“Marid?” she creaked, not knowing why it was him who came to mind. “Where are you? Saul? Garrett? Who’s there? Anyone?”
She wished she had not thought of her friends. She knew they were dead already, all murdered. She felt tears glide like dewdrops down her cheek, and she allowed herself a prayer for each of their souls before forcing herself to forget them.
Her mind empty, her heart cold, she crawled until she found her pair of skulls, and she drained them of their shallow contents. Setting the skulls down, she wondered who they had belonged to, how many thousands of years they had lain within the pit, and how greatly their owners had suffered before they died.
Grimwain. How many did your brethren kill? How many before you stopped? How deep does this place go? A day?
Forever?
Her memory of Grim was nearly enough to end her. With his face rooted like a black mountain in her mind, she might have sat deathly still until she died, dreaming forever of a ruined world in which the Ur frolicked forever. She understood now what it was to hate. She embraced the feeling, relished it. She imagined an alternate arrival upon Cornerstone, a pleasant fiction in which she set foot upon the shore and used the spells of the Pages Black to turn Grimwain and every last one of his men to ashes.
Her thoughts were so gratifying that her moral self burned away. Her hatred became new motivation for escape. Still hurting from her last battle against her manacles, she rolled her narrow shoulders and prepared herself again. She knotted the chain in her fingers and pulled it against the ring, straining and grunting, a rebellious child waging war against a powerful parent’s grasp. Ten times she tried, each more furious than the last. When the chain held fast, she gave her fury to the ring. She entwined her fingers around it and tore backward against it until her shoulders burned and her arms went numb.
Again the ring moved none. Inseparable from the wall, she thought. Mortared in place from here to the very bottom of the world.
No matter.
Full of hatred, her muscles singing with pain, she refused to give in. She regained her ragged breath, pulled herself upright, and gazed into the dark place where she knew the ring to be. It, she tried to imagine, is not a part of the wall. The Ur would do no such thing. World-killing shadows have no need of iron trinkets and weakling chains. Humans put it here. I am not the first prisoner to be chained to it.
Grimacing, she gripped the ring much the same as she had seen Daedelar steer the helm of Shiver’s Pride. Rather than rip it out of the wall, she tried to twist it as though it were a key and the wall its massive lock. She accomplished nothing at first. Her hands were too wet with blood, her arms quivering like loose bowstrings.
Try again. Until I die.
Teeth gritted, she took ten hard breaths and dried her hands on her dress. She took her fiercest hold of the ring, straining herself to breaking. She saw stars in the corners of her eyes and a hellish haze blur the empty blackness before her. A single breath from utter failure, she poured all her soul’s strength into unscrewing the ring from the world’s bottom. If I break, she swore, I will lie down and let myself die.
But until then...
She expected to fail. She assumed her wrists would snap or her heart seize and give out. But when the ring groaned and moved, she gasped.
Impossible.
Did that just happen?
Did I dream it?
It had only been the slightest turn, its sound the barest creak in the wall, but her spirits soared. Wide-eyed and euphoric, she plunked down to her bottom and gaped into the darkness.
It moved. It really moved.
She rested. She disbelieved. It will not turn again, she cautioned herself. Even if it does, it will never come out of the wall. Still, after a moment’s melancholy, she felt hope swell inside her.
“You will come out.” She said to the ring. “You have no choice.”
If turning the ring a mere quarter revolution had been an all-consuming battle, her next hours promised to be a battle like no other. Malnourished, sodden and shivering, she felt little more alive than a ghost, but fought like a caged animal. She snapped her teeth shut and twisted the ring again and again. It grinded within the wall, turning only barely each time she hissed and poured all her will against it. Hours passed her by, and her body often failed as she fought. Many dozen times, she collapsed, afterward drawing as many breaths as it took to recover what little strength she had left. Each time she felt ring turn, she fell, and each time she fell the bones on the floor made mincemeat of her dress and the tender flesh of her shins. It became agony to continue. Her skin wept ropes of blood, while her salted sweat set fire to her wounds. She should have quit, should have laid down and died, but when most would have given up, she willed her body to serve her beyond the realm of failure.
She warred the entire day, maybe longer. She neither slept, nor drank, nor rested longer than a few hundred breaths between each assault. Her muscles were knotted like tangled seamen’s ropes, her arms blackened by a thousand bruises, and the flesh of her palms ragged and torn. By will alone, she unscrewed the ring, click by click, hour by hour, scream by scream. In her delirium, freedom seemed somehow possible, and death not as inevitable as before.
After her thousandth respite, she sucked in her life’s deepest breath and assailed the ring a final time. A twist, a wrench, and an agonized cry, and she felt it detach from the wall. It made an awful groan as it tumbled into the bones. And then all went quiet, eerily so. The tension of her chains relaxed. She sat in place, gasping for breath, too weary to express any joy.
Impossible.
She closed her tired eyes and touched the ring. The screw protruding from its back was as long as her arm, as thick as Saul’s battlestaff. Flecks of rust, bone, and powdered basalt caked it, while its metallic stink reminded her of the taste of her own blood. Had she any strength left, she would h
ave shouted her victory to the very surface of Cornerstone, but she had nothing left. She hunkered in silence, and for a time the only sound was her heart’s ragged pounding.
She rested. She breathed. She let her limbs go as slack as noodles and her shoulders sag like wilted petals. Though paralyzed by a thousand pains, she dared not fall asleep for fear of never waking.
No sleep. Death first.
During the long, slow moments, her mind hummed with too many thoughts. She envisioned Grimwain laughing, gloating that her small victory meant nothing. She saw the faces of her friends, each of them as pale as Mother Moon.
One thought, however, stung her harder than the rest:
The irons remain.
I have no magic.
Nor food.
Nor water.
She felt the chain beneath her wrists. Still threaded to the ring. Anywhere she went, she lamented she would have to drag it, hauling it like a corpse upon its litter. Horror reclaimed her. Her hands shook like dry, frosted leaves, and her heartbeat slowed to a crawl. The ring, surely a quarter my weight, was too heavy.
Climbing the stair…impossible.
She had nothing to cling to. No friends are waiting. No food at the top. No ship waiting for me. She considered that Grimwain might very well have left guards at the top of the pit, men who would throw her back to her death the moment she crawled out. She hung her head, drained of emotion. Pointless to try. Pointless not to. Well done, Ande.
All this way for nothing.
Eyes falling shut, hands hanging limply before her, she imagined Grimwain again, this time in his truest shape, that of one of the Ur. She envisioned his face drawing into the shadows, his inner self crawling out of his skin and inking the sky. She saw his hands stretch into wraithlike claws, his fingers burning blacker than coal, his breath a smoking fume that dried up oceans and caught clouds aflame like tattered wisps of paper.
This is what will be. What will happen at the end.
Horrified, she imagined a winter of Grim’s making. Ebon snow fell endlessly and the foundation of all surfaces was human gristle and bone. Towers, black and sharp, carved the sky to tatters, their windows burning with the fell light of dying stars.
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