"Your life entire?" Hu'dre Vra asked with a skeptical tilt to his flared helmet.
"Uh, almost entire, my lord." Romut's mind raced, wild to determine what this powerful being sought from him. Dare I tell the truth? How can I not? He must know everything about me—or can find what he wants easily enough. Is he the wizarduke's minion? Then my luck is truly terrible. He has already killed me three times!
Horror bleached all further thought, and he answered mechanically, "I left these tidal flats for a spell—with the Bold Ones."
"I know of the Bold Ones," Hu'dre Vra said, and Romut heard no malice in his huge voice. "You served their leader, yes?"
Romut kept his head low. "I did, my lord. Yes. I will not deny it. I served him with all the others."
"Tell me of him."
"Wrat?" Romut peeked upward, met the hot eyes fixed upon him, and spoke freely, afraid to withhold anything from that burning gaze. "Wrat and I knew each other as runts, my lord. We scavenged together. Just us. The other runts, they detested me. For I am ugly. Half gnome, you see." He gestured at his squat, wart-knobbed shape. "But he—Wrat, that is—he detested me, too, but he saw the usefulness of my strength. I've twice the physical strength of the strongest man, you know. And so he abided me, Wrat did, even sometimes defended me against the others. And I helped him pull the hooks and nets faster and longer than any other. It was I and none other who dredged the coral grotto and budged the boulders that revealed the sword of Taran. It was I. But he seized it and used it to unite the Bold Ones."
"And did you begrudge him ownership of the sword?" the cavernous voice asked.
Romut shrugged off the futility of lying and said what he believed. "At first, I did. I uncovered it. It was I. But it was he knew best how to use it. Or so it seemed at the time."
"Explain yourself."
Romut splayed his stubby fingers over his thick chest. "I—well, I would have kept the sword for myself surely. I would have used its Charm to better myself alone. That is my nature. Why should I have shared it? I am an outcast by birth. A grotesque. I would have kept that sword and used it for what good I could have for my own self. But Wrat—" A harsh laugh sparked in him. "Wrat had a vision. He thought to use the sword Taran to unite all the scavengers in the Reef Isles of Nhat. 'Why?' asked I bitterly. I who had turned the boulder, for none other had the strength to do it. 'Why share it at all?' And clever Wrat made clear that if we kept the sword for ourselves, its Charm would buy us small pleasures. But if we used it to rouse the many—to storm the heights—we could have the greatest pleasures, the joys of the Peers. We could be Peers ourselves! Yes, Wrat was a man of vision. A greedy, arrogant man with a vision. He wanted to raise us all—all of the lowest, most mean denizens of Irth—raise us to the very heights of Irth. To the heights! He promised us glory. He promised us we would make our own place among the Peers. He used the sword Taran for us all. Yet it never left his hand. Not once. And we served him proudly. Until the end."
"I know of the end." The Dark Lord spoke mordantly. "The wizarduke, Lord Drev, defeated Wrat and cast him and the Bold Ones into the Gulf. How came you to be spared that terrible fate, Romut?"
"My lord—" Romut slumped with shame. He knew he could not deceive the Dark Lord, and yet he yearned to hide this truth even as he confessed openly, "I hid. I disguised myself as myself. The wizarduke sought a man, for that was the guise I'd worn as a Bold One. When the others fell, I saw my chance to escape. Craven. I admit this craven act. I was a coward, and I fled and shed my skin of light. I became again the despicable thing you see before you now. I became again a gnomish man. Lord Drev cast the others into the Gulf, and I fled here, to these miserable flats where I began, where I thought the wizarduke would think last to search."
"And Wrat?" Hu'dre Vra asked with the voice of a thunderhead. "What of him? Do you not despise him for leading you and the others to ignominious defeat?"
"Despise him?" Romut lifted his stone-jawed face defiantly. He had confessed his cowardice; he would not hide his pride. "My lord, what glory I have known in this life was his gift. In my skin of light, I took women, I slew men. I knew power. I regret only that my arrogant master had not been more subtle. We were too bold."
The Dark Lord's eyes sharpened like star flames. "But if you had kept the sword Taran for your own, Romut, you would have known a life of comfort."
"Perhaps." What does this monster want of me? Why does he toy with me like this? "My lord, people despise me for being a gnome. Gnomes despise me for being a man. All would have coveted my sword. What comfort could I truly have hoarded for myself? No, my lord. Wrat, for all his arrogance, was right to use the sword to uplift the lowliest. We stormed the heights. We failed." Romut lifted his arms away from his sides, exposing all of himself. "If you are the wizarduke's ally and have seized me to wreak his vengeance, then I am doomed. With the power you have shown me, how could I have told you other than the truth?"
“The truth you speak has not doomed you, Romut." Hu'dre Vra spoke with reverberant intimacy. "I am no ally of the wizarduke. I am his most dire enemy returned to bring vengeance down upon him. You know me well. Will you speak my name?"
"Know you, lord?" Romut frowned with incomprehension and fright. "You are Hu'dre Vra—"
"Such is my mask, Romut. Surely you cannot have forgotten me, the arrogant one who first led you from this place."
Amazement clashed with disbelief in Romut, and dizziness spun through him at the outlandish possibility. "Wrat?"
"The same!" Hu'dre Vra bellowed. "Behold!"
The plates of black saurian armor whirled away like a startled flock of black birds, and in the place where the titanic Dark Lord had towered stood the small, lank-haired, weasel-faced familiarity of Wrat.
Romut fell to his knees in the sand. "Are—are you some devil's illusion of my old friend?"
"Old friend, am I?" Wrat snickered coldly, his lean face squinting with contempt. He motioned with pale thin hands at his skinny body garbed in the coarse hempen tunic of a scavenger. "I'm a greedy, arrogant man. You know it. So you named me."
A cold wind circled Romut, and his head became curiously clear. "Slay me now, then, Dark Lord. Torment me no more."
"I've killed you three times already," Wrat said, annoyed, and turned away to view the distant ocean with its combers smoldering on the far horizon. Nearby, tide pools reflected star froth bright as cauldrons among the salt grass. "This is where we began, old friend. This is the same damnable place. The stink of sea rot and that mad pounding. It was the pounding I hated the most. Used to think I'd go mad. Guess I did go mad. Remember how a good night's work meant finding a beat-up girder or some rusted sheets of dented plating? Ha! It was lugging the dead, rotted things I loathed. Eight newt's-eyes we got for every ten creels of dragon bones. Oof! Those slimy things stunk so bad we had to stuff seaweed in our noses. But that's what the alchemists and gallipots wanted, right? They wanted everything ugly and stinking in this stinking sea. Twelve newt's-eyes we got for every stinking basilisk's bladder—the only part of the beast the flukes won't eat, it's so deadly foul. Puncture that thing you go blind from the fumes. You remember Skull Face. That's how he got that way."
Tears stood in Romut's black eyes. "It is you! Wrat! How?"
"How?" Wrat turned about, and his pointy face grinned with malice. "Murder, old friend. Murder. I killed them all. Grapes, the Dog Dim, Rett, Skull Face, Little Luc, Chetto, and Piper. Oh, yes—I killed sweet Piper, too. Murdered them all. You alone remain of the Bold Ones, Romut. You alone."
Romut groped with his big hands where he knelt in the shining sand, trying to grasp the empty air. "I don't understand."
"That is why you are alive, old friend." Wrat sneered wickedly. "If you had fallen into the Gulf with the rest of us, then you, too, would have landed on that nameless planet in the void, that cold world where we found the cacodemons. Unless, of course, you broke your neck in the fall like Harrow, Pinch, and Silly. They never saw the demons. They never had a chance to
see that we were gods in that world. Gods! We could do anything there. We were hot beings in a cold world. We could do anything! The cacodemons obeyed us. They showed us the power place in their world, built by magicians long ago. Magicians long dead or gone. They thought we were the magicians come back. And they opened the power place to us and revealed the first rung of the energy ladder that climbs back up the Gulf to here. And we learned how to climb it. And we learned that with the cacodemons, with these monsters from the cold, we could be as gods here on Irth. Charm could not touch us. And the demons would do anything we wanted. Anything! They don't think. Not like us. They just obey. I saw then right away that Irth needed only one god. And so I killed the others. I murdered each one of them. And I came back alone."
Romut's glassy black eyes blinked, and he ran fretful hands over his bald and warty head.
Wrat recited slowly, "Rett, Pinch, Grapes, Skull Face, Silly, Little Luc, Chetto, the Dog Dim, Harrow, and Piper. All the Bold Ones—save you and me. All dead. Save you and me."
The ocean talked from far off across the shining flats where the tide retreated, and Romut blinked hard again. He saw Wrat before him, smiling his malignant smile with half his small mouth.
"Get up, Romut!" Wrat boomed in a voice larger than his spindly body could hold.
From out of the dune shadows, dreadful shapes slouched. They cut from the night the barbed outlines of lizard men—bigger than men. Raspy breaths hissed. On every dune crest and in all the sandy saddles between, cacodemons rose, awaiting the command of their master.
Romut stood slowly, afraid to startle the enormous lizard people.
"Let us behold what we have wrought!" Wrat bellowed, and his scraggly body swelled outlandishly. Hooked plates snapped together out of mere air, enclosing Wrat in spiked armor black, glossy, shivering with caught starlight. "Let us fly!"
Romut cried out when a magnetic wind swirled him upward into the depthless night. On all sides, the ghastly cacodemons soared. The Dark Lord hovered closest, obsidian apparition of death itself.
"Stay close," the black figure warned. "My magic alone keeps you aloft."
The gnomish man looked away, afraid to meet the stare of fire in Hu'dre Vra's cowled mask.
Below drifted the Reef Isles of Nhat ringed in surf. Cloud tatters obscured the view of river bog land. Where the vapors tattered, dark arteries branched among swampy wilderness.
This was the Mere of Goblins, and Romut was glad for the wind-feathered clouds that hid almost wholly from view the demonic flashes of star-cobbled lakes where dragons went to die. Here their huge carcasses floated upon the waters phosphorescent with the thrivings of giant centipedes and firesnakes.
Land fell away, and they sailed above the valleys of the sea toward a wrist of morning twilight.
Romut stretched out his arms and legs, a flying human star. Eyes wind-teased and bleary in the bright dawn, he looked with amazement at the Dark Lord and his company of cacodemons. They hung against the pink clouds like black pieces of nightmare flung into the face of a new day.
/ |
Elvre eventually lifted its ocean limestone shores and jungle tassels above the horizon. By then, morning shone brilliantly through cloud plateaus over a nether realm of enormous, green chasms. Silver threads of waterfalls outlined jade cliffs and fed sprawling, branching rivers.
In the midst of this wild verdure loomed a scorched mountain seeping vile subterranean fumes. The ground all around it rayed with burned streaks of impact.
This was Arwar Odawl.
Cratered deep in rank vegetation, the heaped ruins of the fallen city leaked brimstone vapors. A sulfur halo hung above the crash site.
Among the charred debris, carrion dogs prowled and crows flitted like black thoughts. They fed off the trapped dead, who were too heavily weighted by rubble to ascend with the nocturnal tide.
The Dark Lord and his entourage alighted on a skewed width of spalled pavement near the summit. Around them, motes drifted and spun in the yellow smoke.
Romut gagged from the putrid stench, and the Dark Lord laughed like thunder.
"It's the smell of revenge, Romut. The stink of dead enemies!"
Hu'dre Vra surveyed the devastation from his high vantage. His hook-plated arms spread out as if to embrace the whole steaming pyre in a pincered grip.
Romut swatted away a searing haze of flies and looked around nervously. The army of cacodemons had perched on the baked and blistered girders and slabs. Their tiny beadlike eyes offered no hint of sapience. Yet, their nimble movements and alert postures suggested predatory intelligence.
"I will smash all of Irth," Hu'dre Vra declared, "before I deign to build it again in my own image. Every one of the Peers shall suffer, for they all stood against us—did they not, Romut?"
"All," Romut agreed, fighting back nausea. "All, led by their regent, the wizarduke, Lord Drev."
"Oh, he shall suffer the most," the Dark Lord promised. "He will die many deaths before I relinquish him to oblivion. That I swear!"
Romut shuddered at the wrathful memories of his own deathly sufferings in the shadow of Hu'dre Vra.
The large figure ignored him and summoned two of his cacodemons. Maroon stains marked them—splash marks, about the right coal-chip eye of one demon, the left for the other—branded by acid stains from the abominable magic the Dark Lord had worked to instill them with human voices.
"Ys-o." The cacodemon with the marked right eye announced its name and stood below its lord on a jut of broken pipe. In its talons it held the glory belt, whose pouches fit together to form the falcon seal talisman, emblem of Irth's regency.
"Ss-o." The other spoke its name and uplifted in its clawed grip a severed head with blind blue eyes and a death snarl.
"Ah, Lord Keon," Hu'dre Vra recognized. "Margrave of Arwar Odawl. How dead you look!" He laughed with proud and mordant humor. "Now my vengeance is begun with the complete destruction of Irth's oldest brood."
"Not complete," Ys-o said in its smoky voice.
"The margrave's children yet live," Ss-o added.
"No!"
"Yes," Ss-o affirmed.
Hu'dre Vra hissed ragefully and struck from Ss-o's grip the lopped head. It bounced down the tiers of the mangled city into plutonic mists. "Who are these fugitives from my justice? And where? Where are they?"
Ys-o gathered the sour fumes, and between the tines of its claws the mist thickened to a serous fluid. It dripped into the shape of an orange-haired, freckled woman of lean stature and blunt features. "Jyoti." The cacodemon spoke her name.
At her side appeared her younger brother, a diminutive lad with the henna hair and squared features of the Odawls. "Poch," said the demon, pronouncing the name in the dialect of Elvre: Poe-sh.
"Where are they?" the Dark Lord asked with inflamed annoyance.
"Not here." The cacodemons spoke in unison.
"Not here!" Hu'dre Vra's eyes pulsed hot as gouts of lava. "Find them! Now! Bring their heads to me. Go!"
The two cacodemons erupted into the sky.
"Bestial idiots," Hu'dre Vra said through gnashing teeth. "No one must escape the wrath of the Dark Lord.”
A magnetic vortex flung Romut upward, and Hu'dre Vra soared after him. After another slow circuit of Arwar Odawl’s ruins, the Dark Lord moved away with his flock of cacodemons. Romut in tow, arrowed through the blue sky, faster than the Abiding Star.
Dazed by the wind, Romut curled upon himself and crossed arms over his head. He watched Irth pass under his elbows, the tumultuous jungles of Elvre, riotous and enormous.
Beyond noon's blue meridian, he watched the rain forest give way first to chaparral and then the gauzy cotton woods of the Spiderlands. Full of confused updrafts and thermal towers of silver clouds, the land’s beauty belied the horrors that lurked below—among gossamer-spun shrubs.
The span of the afternoon carried them across seemingly endless prismatic tracts of Rainbow Forests in Bryse. Jeweled sprays of boughs reached from spectral treetops,
and glittering horizons stained the sky with colorful coronas.
Late in the day, the chromatic undergrowth fell away before a topaz sea. Waves dazzled in the Abiding Star's long shafts. Ahead lay the river-gorge dominion of Ux. Its capital city, Dorzen, floated in panoply of cumulus above finger valleys of lush cloud forests.
The cacodemons glided into rock canyons layered in pastels of time. On the highest plateau, the city's bastions, with crystal-domed belvederes and curves of hanging sidewalks, etched its famous skyline against pink twilight.
When the Dark Lord arrived with his army of cacodemons, no one resisted. Not a single shot resounded from the tiered balconies or rooftop magnolia gardens.
Two representatives of the Council of Seven and One waited under hovering globe lanterns on the terraced lawn. Behind them reared the city's towering sky gate.
The manicured park beneath the titanic arch of serpentine marble stood empty of all other presences save a flock of white peacocks. The birds fled with the arrival of the cacodemons, who landed in prowling gangs among the surrounding willow groves and grass shelves.
The two representatives, Baronet Fakel and Lady Von, bowed humbly as Hu'dre Vra alighted on the sward before them.
The towering presence in spiked ebony-shell armor and cobra-cowl helmet motioned to one of his cacodemons, and the slitherous creature flew toward the city.
Then the Dark Lord's luminous adder eyes touched upon the two who stood before him, acknowledging their presence.
“In the name of the Council of Seven and One,” Baronet Fakel spoke, his dark, handsome features composed, voice strong, bolstered by the power wands under his crimson robes. “We welcome you to Dorzen.”
Lady Von, his wisp of a wife, parted the gray veils of her witch dancer’s headdress, revealing a pretty visage of sullen furtiveness. She added: “All of Ux bows to you.”
"Then Ux shall be spared the fate of Arwar Odawl!" The Dark Lord's voice caromed among the city's glittering spires, and the attractive features of the two before him visibly relaxed. "But what of the Council? The Seven and One? And what of Irth? Does Irth bow to me?"
The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1) Page 8
