The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  He recognized then that only his presence offered the narrow chance of separating Jyoti and Poch from the cacodemons. But to what avail? he wondered and pressed his sight harder against the kaleidoscope of black shapes surrounding the young ones.

  Intently, he stared through scarlet cords of nightfall at the black outline of his own body in the dark and demanded of his Charm, Show me!

  The deep emerald door of day's end opened. Inside, he beheld Jyoti and Poch in pure light, the shine of the void. He was there, too, but only vaguely, his body erased to a dim blur in the emptiness.

  Was that him gone at last to the Beginning within the Abiding Star? Or was that his form blurred by death? He could not tell.

  Yet, it did not matter, because there before them hovered the floating cities—Dorzen, Bryse, Mirdath, Sharna, Keri—adrift once again in a new dawn's aquamarine sky and all the final horizons of Irth empty of cacodemons.

  The vision closed. A mist of stars touched the darkness where he had stared through time and chance to a tentative future.

  The hope is so small, he despaired.

  He gazed flatly at the last smoky remnants of twilight under gauzy constellations. Small hope for Irth—and for me.

  His hard face did not flinch, and the diamonds in his eyes did not waver. He could not abandon Irth even if that meant oblivion. This small, unborn hope would have to be enough. He dared not fail.

  Without hesitation, he crossed the open court to the side farthest from the sanctuary and began the long descent from the Calendar of Eyes. All his life he had wanted to be a sage, to commit all his Charm and his very life itself to reshaping the iron of what was real.

  He felt great gratitude for having at least glimpsed the immortal. Beating Wrat and his cacodemons out of the iron of reality would be hard work, the hardest task he had ever set for himself.

  A mournful yearning for the Beginning, for the rapture of freedom, haunted his exiled heart. Yet he did not glance back. He was Irth's one small hope and that was bigger than all his longing.

  Under violet dusk, he descended from the heights at the margin of time toward the treacherous world of life and death. His footsteps left blue holes in the snow. And as he went, his strong body narrowed smaller and withered.

  By the time he reached the gravel slopes, the years he had shed during his stay in the sanctuary at the limits of time found him again, and under their burden he picked his way slowly over rocky terrain.

  His beard shriveled scabrous and white upon his sunken cheeks, and his hair thinned to gossamer pierced by stars. With stooped, bent shoulders and knobby legs quavering upon the mountain's bricks, the aged sorcerer felt his way downward through darkness.

  / |

  Daylight's swords pierced the industrial smoke of Saxar to illuminate stained brick walls of gaunt factories and narrow lanes cluttered with trash. Tywi squatted in one of those sulfurous shafts of light among strewn garbage, examining a short peel of conjure-metal. Its iridescence coiled about one finger, and she wagged her hand, trying to estimate the weight of the metal curl.

  A weary and sad frown bent her bold eyebrows as she realized the scrap carried little worth: a newt's-eye to a charmwright. For two days, she had not eaten. This might buy her some bread but no freedom from sleep.

  "Hey, what you got there?" a voice called from down the lane.

  Tywi rose and held up the clipping of conjure-metal before the three young scavengers who came strolling down the alley. "What did you find?"

  Two of the scrawny youths opened their hands and showed chips of witch-glass and snippets of conjure-metal. The third—the youngest and still a child—had found nothing, and he stood hollow eyed with fatigue, sucking his thumb.

  "Come on," one of the older youths said, a boy with a bent nose and malicious eyes. "The day's done. We got to get to the shops before the charmwrights shut down. Let's go."

  "We'll pool," Tywi offered, wearing the conjure-metal like a ring on her finger. "Maybe we can get a quoin for all this together."

  "Forget it," the two older rummagers said simultaneously. The broken-nosed youth held up a chunk of obsidian witch-glass. "I'm getting two newt's-eyes for this alone, and I'm eating black bread and raisins till I'm stuffed tonight."

  "Me too," the other said and closed her hand, making a fist to protect her charmed remnants. "But we got to hurry. Day's end."

  "What about the kid?" Tywi asked, jerking her smudged chin at the youngest, who had slid down to squat with his back against the powdery bricks, too tired to stand. "We got to pool for him."

  "Wise up, Tywi," the bent-nosed trash picker said. "'For every yes, a no.'"

  "That's a curse from the Gibbet Scrolls," Tywi protested. "We ain't supposed to live that way."

  "Yeah, well, it's the only way we can live," he answered defiantly. "There ain't enough for all of us."

  Tywi held on to his icy stare. "Let's pool and get out of here, out of Saxar."

  "What are you babbling about, girl?" the scoop-cheeked woman asked.

  "Arwar Odawl has fallen," Tywi replied urgently. "That's all the noise in the warrens."

  "So what?"

  "So monsters are coming—cacodemons. They'll rip this city."

  "More stuff to rummage!" the boy with the broken nose answered gleefully.

  "You don't understand. Word is they destroy everything."

  "Word is we don't eat, we starve to death." The young woman with the sunken cheeks tugged at her partners arm. "I want food."

  Tywi stepped closer. "Look, I hear Lord Hazar is organizing a march across the Qaf—"

  "Death march," the woman said grimly.

  "I don't think so," Tywi answered confidently. "Hazar's heading for the Malpais Highlands to set up some kind of exiled goverment. He'll have everything he needs to get across the wasteland, be sure of that. This is our best chance to get out of here."

  "Hazar ain't looking for street urchins for his army," the woman replied coldly.

  Tywi's voice lifted hopefully, "We can buy our way into the marching column with a few quoins. We can get out before the monsters rip through here. Let's pool and keep rummaging."

  The bent-nosed youth scowled. "If getting out was so important, Tywi, why didn't you take that seeker from the addled coot the other day? We wouldn't be hungry now—and we'd still have enough to buy a place in Hazar's shadow."

  Tywi shrugged. "It ain't right to steal from old people and children."

  "It ain't right to starve, either," the skeletal young woman said and walked away. "Come on. Let's go before the shops close. I want to eat tonight."

  "And the kid?" Tywi asked again.

  "Let the witches feed the stoodle," the youth with the angry squint said over his shoulder.

  "Hey!" Tywi shouted after them. "I want to keep rummaging. You take him to the witches."

  The boy pushed to his feet and slogged off through the drifts of refuse.

  "Where you going?"

  "I ain't going to the witches," he answered. "They said I have to stay if I go back for more food."

  "They'll take care of you, kid."

  "I ain't working for them no more," he said. "I don't like it there. It stinks, and they make you sing and read books all the time. I want to stay in the warrens."

  "Well, let's see what we can find then." Tywi kicked at a heap of soggy cartons filled with the charmless detritus of the factories. Bone shavings, gray clots of nameless waste, and gobbets of alchemic slag spilled over her ankles, and she probed the mess with her tattered rope sandals.

  While she hunted, the tired boy sat on the cobbles, sucked his thumb, and stared at a slip of light as if reading a scrap of paper plastered to the bricks. In a day or two, the night tide would take him away.

  Tywi had seen other children starve to death, their withered bodies curled tight around their hunger. She never wanted to launch a child's corpse into the night wind again, and she carefully searched the alley for more scraps of hex materials. By day's end, she had f
ound nothing more.

  With the boy's hand in hers, she walked cobbled alleys that looked mottled as snakeskin in the falling light. They climbed damp, bellied stone steps to a remote ledge. There, an oblique shack smoldered among pokeweed and shattered cinder blocks. The old charmwright working late in his hut ignored her pleas for charity and paid her a single newt's-eye for her curl of conjure-metal.

  Dusk like a black and gold mask hung at one end of the city. And stars like sugar sprinkled the coming night. Tywi took the boy to a narrow bakeshop in Pass-by Lane and bought a loaf of nut bread. She broke off a heel for herself and gave the rest to him. They sat on the curb and ate while Nemora and Hellsgate hung above the cliff city.

  The boy devoured the bread silently. Tywi tried to talk to him about his life in the warrens, but he had nothing to say. His was another life of drift. When he was done, he thanked her with a quick kiss to her dirty cheek and ran off to find his friends.

  Hungry and tired, Tywi stood and began to ponder where she would sleep that night. Heat lightning wiped the sky. Soon the cacodemons would arrive. Soon the hunger and weariness would no longer matter.

  She shuddered at that morbid thought. She wanted to live. She wanted everyone to live. Though her life had been no easier than any other orphan of the warrens, she felt no bitterness. Early on, the witches had taught her that love extended its own justice and that if she loved she would find many helpers. And she still believed them. Though many whom she had cared for and helped in her small ways had departed on the nocturnal tide, she took comfort that their suffering had ended.

  The skeleton head worlds of Nemora and Hellsgate floated above the mongrel skyline. They covered the slick streets with watery lawns of planet light. Slowly, Tywi made her way in the opposite direction, into the narrow lanes that ran on to darkness.

  / |

  Jyoti and Poch strode through the jungles of Elvre on a road of mottled brick known as a spice trail, a trade route that connected interior plantations to the dominion's cities.

  Jyoti had cobbled together a crude seeker from components of their amulet-frocks. They had no item from Caval to focus their seeker; so, Poch offered a tiny hex-ruby from a guardian ring that their father, the margrave, had given him.

  Jyoti did not care whether it actually worked or not. She just wanted to get away from Elvre, far away from the smoldering ruins of Arwar Odawl and the deaths of their brood. They followed faint impulses from their makeshift seeker to the jungle trading capital of Moödrun.

  The treetop city, built in the canopy of the jungle, frenzied. The citizenry believed that the cacodemons would strike their busy sky bund next, and everyone bustled to escape—though no one knew to where.

  In their panic, the citizenry paid little attention to the two lone survivors of Arwar Odawl. Jyoti and Poch blended into the swirling crowds on the bough streets and scaffold roads that rayed across the top storeys of the forest.

  The governor's palace carved into the central bole of a massive pilaster tree stood starkly abandoned. Its hanging garden balconies and fern terraces stood empty of the brokers and trade agents who usually managed Elvre's commerce from this hub of webbed avenues.

  The governor himself, Earl Jee, a faithful friend to Lord Keon, had gone into hiding, and could offer no help to the margravine’s orphans.

  With the three quoins and two prisms that they had between them, Jyoti and Poch booked passage on a market dirigible heading north, the direction that their crude seeker pointed.

  The slow journey up the coast revealed no signs of destruction. Fishing villages and farming thorpes over which they flew appeared idyllically serene. On board, however, gossip circulated about the horrors inflicted on the Peers of Dorzen.

  Whispers carried news of the Palace of Abominations under construction somewhere in the south. Dark rumors spoke of Hu'dre Vra interring prisoners in pain cages charged with black magic that never allowed victims to die.

  For most of the journey, the brother and sister avoided prying questions from the crew by keeping to their tiny cabin, an empty tuber bin between loamy stalls of mud beets. At each stop, they hoped their seeker would point the way to Caval. But not until the final stop in Zul, at the most extreme limit of Irth's dominions, in the industrial cliff city of Saxar, did the seeker beckon them to disembark.

  Saxar seemed only dimly aware of the Dark Lord that early morning when they arrived. The factory chimneys billowed smoke, and the vertical city bustled with everyday activities.

  The unique character of the cliff city intrigued them with its numerous bridges, pulleys, and quaint ornate lifts. Imperial villas and frugal chalets, cottages, and huts all had tile roofs and overhanging eaves that curved upward to protect occupants and passersby from falling objects.

  Jyoti and Poch followed the strengthening impulses of their seeker down smoky Everyland Street deep into Saxar's refinery district, where the city's character changed darkly. They hurried through narrowing lanes and alleys among torn shadows of steam escaping from gutter gratings.

  Behind a massive factory of black brick, in a warren of weeds and discarded steel drums, the seeker signaled their arrival.

  A mousy young woman in rags, with stringy hair and soot-streaked face, looked up startled from the heap of refuse where she knelt digging. She stared at them in open wonder.

  "You two kids better get back to where you belong," the waif warned. "You can’t slum here. You'll get those amulets and fine clothes torn off your backs in an eyeblink."

  Jyoti and Poch exchanged bewildered looks, and the boy backed away and pulled at his sister's sleeve.

  "Hey, wait, before you two go—can you put a newt's-eye or two on me?" The trash digger stood up and approached them. "I ain't seen food in days."

  Jyoti nodded to Poch, and he handed his sister the seeker. She offered it to the scavenger.

  The waif took the alms eagerly. With nimble fingers, she examined the makeshift amulet. She hissed surprise at the high quality black mirror panes and hex-ruby that comprised it. "Dragon piss! A hex-ruby! But why's it patched together like this? What's it supposed to be?"

  "It's a seeker," Poch answered from behind his sister. "It led us to you."

  "To me?" The vagabond laughed like a cough. "Who you looking for? And who are you, walking around here dressed richer than factory bosses?"

  Jyoti, who had been scrutinizing her niello eye charms, looked to her brother. "She's wearing an Eye."

  Poch squinted at the smudged woman in her patched garments, then gazed into the epaulets of his amulet-frock. There he glimpsed an aqua shadow: A vague aura fluttered about the tattered woman.

  "The seeker’s hex-ruby is from Father's guardian ring," Jyoti figured, "so apparently the seeker led us to the strongest guardian Charm it could find—this Eye of Protection."

  "What're you talking about?" the waif asked, fidgeting impatiently. "Who are you?"

  "My name is Jyoti. This is my brother, Poch. We are refugees from Arwar Odawl."

  “The city that crashed?"

  "Our father was Lord Keon, Margrave of Odawl."

  "Dragon piss again! You two are Peers!" The woman gawked at them blatantly, understanding now their fine apparel. "What are the likes of you doing down here?"

  "We're looking for our father's weapons master, the sorcerer Caval," Jyoti explained. "Our seeker led us to you instead, because you're wearing an Eye of Protection."

  "Look"—she opened her arms, displaying patchwork trousers and tattered jerkin—"my name is Tywi. I haven't eaten in days. I sleep in closed trash bins so the night tide don't take me out. I don't have no Eye of Protection on me. Whatever that is."

  "It's a spell," Jyoti told her, "a protective spell. Only an advanced sorcerer with a great deal of Charm could cast such a spell and make it stick without charmware."

  "I don't have no charmware—except what you given me." Tywi examined again the hex-ruby in its delicate setting of tiny black mirror panes. "Thanks for this. It's going to save my sk
inny shanks. I hope you don't want it back now."

  Jyoti shook her head. "No. It's yours. That seeker is no use to us anymore."

  "Do you think Caval put the Eye on her?" Poch queried.

  "Maybe."

  "Why?" Tywi asked. "I never even heard of him till now."

  "Then obviously we've made a mistake,” Jyoti admitted. "If Caval were in Saxar, the seeker would have found him, I think."

  "What are we going to do?" Poch asked, looking around at brick walls black as dank cliffs.

  "We have to leave the city," Jyoti decided. "We have to find Caval before the cacodemons find us."

  "Where you looking?" Tywi asked. For all her rough appearance, the waif did not have an unpleasant manner, and intelligence and curiosity shone in her face.

  "The Calendar of Eyes, maybe," Jyoti answered thoughtfully. "It's a sanctuary for sages in the Malpais Highlands. Caval always fancied himself a sage and spoke now and then of that sacred place. I think he may have retired there."

  "The Malpais Highlands." Tywi frowned. "That's way across the Qaf. No overflights go there from Saxar. Our Lady Altha hates the Highland's witch queen. And you won't find no trade routes between our dominions either. Fly south to Mirdath and take a connection."

  "Too risky," Jyoti said. "The cacodemons are advancing north. We'll get swept up with the others if we go back. We have to cross the Qaf."

  "Yeah, you and half of Saxar," Tywi said. "Word in the warrens is, Hazar's gathering his army north of the city right now to cross the Qaf. He's going to hide in the wilderness and strike back at the Dark Lord. Glad luck to him, say I. Glad luck, because he's our only way out."

  "We can't travel with Hazar." Poch said.

  "You're right," his sister agreed. "The cacodemons will be looking for Peers. We'll have to rely on our amulets to help us cross on our own."

  Tywi winced, then shrugged. "Unless you've got weapons, children, you'll be so much meat for the trolls."

  "We'll take that chance," Jyoti asserted. "What’s the best way out of Saxar and into the Qaf?"