Ralli-Faj hung like a dead thing and yet spoke. "The Dark Lord is-s touring his-s world. He has-s left me here to torment his enemies-s most worthy of pain. And I have s-sent for you to help me. Oh, I did not know what form you would take, my minion. Yet, I have been calling urgently, Whipcrow—urgently. For there is-s much work to be done."
Dark the Seed
Jyoti and Poch hiked through pools of daylight in a grove where branches waved, buoyant with blossoms. She carried across her back the firelock the wizarduke had given her, and he dangled a gurgling flagon from each shoulder. Both wore the hoods of their frocks pulled up to protect them from the direct rays of noon.
Though the margravine had given her younger brother permission to depart from her and submit to the Dark Lord, he stayed at her side. He was afraid to stand alone. Except for his sister, everyone he knew had fallen into the source of night. He did not want to lose his sister, too. He did not have the heart to walk a solitary path.
Since leaving the Qaf, food and water had been easy to find, and their amulet frocks protected them from the elements. Of the highest quality, the power wands on the collars of their frocks drew Charm directly from the Abiding Star and would charge their amulets for many days before needing replacement. They possessed the means to continue Jyoti's quest for the sorcerer Caval—so long as they avoided detection by the malevolent cacodemons.
Their eyes traced paths through the sky, searching for the monsters and reaching ahead toward the plateaus of their destination—the Steppes of Keri. From there, they would cross into the Malpais Highlands, whose ranges of staccato mountains hung blue and vaporous on the farthest horizons.
"What if he's not there?" Poch asked and peered once more into the frock's epaulets of niello eye charms.
"The sages will know where he went."
In his eye charms, Poch found no threat, only harpy snakes wheeling under the Abiding Star, daylight glinting on wings and tail feathers. "But what if he was never there?"
"The Calendar of Eyes is where he went," Jyoti answered patiently. "It's the only place on Irth where a body can return to the light, to the Beginning. He went there."
He lifted his hooded face toward the hot zenith, shadowed his eyes with his hand, and tried to gauge the distance to the Steppes of Keri. Sometime in the night, they would begin that tedious climb. "Is it far to the Calendar of Eyes?"
"It's very far. It's at the edge of time. From the summit, you can see across the ages. But you have to hold a lot of Charm in your body just to get there. There's no air and it's terribly cold."
"Well, how will we get there?"
"We're not climbing to the summit." Jyoti squinted through bright pollen that swirled with the breeze in radiant shafts of daylight. "We're only going as far as the high slopes, to the sanctuary. Our amulets can carry us that far. And if he's not there, they might have something of his that we can use with our seeker."
"But what if he's already climbed the Calendar of Eyes? What if he's gone back to the Beginning?"
"Then we will have to find another worker of sorcery to help us."
"There is no other worker who knows the archives of Arwar Odawl."
They emerged from the blossoming grove into a grassy swale of flickering butterflies. "We know the archives."
"I don't," Poch responded. "And you've never been down there, either."
"It's a blood memory. A strong enough charmworker can summon that memory in us."
"And what if we do?" he pressed. "What if we go down there and then find there is no magic that can stop the cacodemons?"
"Little brother"—she smiled at him wearily—"you ask questions only time and deeds can answer."
"I'm frightened, Jyo." He peeked into his eye charms again. Ruby asps writhed in the tall grass, and he watched their swift currents rush off like streaks of red energy. "Even with all these amulets, I'm frightened. I can't stop thinking about Mother and Father dead. And all our brood. Dead. I feel we should be dead, too. I feel our brood is waiting for us to finish our dying."
"That’s fear talking," Jyoti admonished. "Now let courage speak."
"Courage says we should be brave enough to accept the defeat of our brood. We should be brave enough to go to the Dark Lord and submit before his might. If he slays us, then our dying is done."
Jyoti gazed into the shadow of his cowl. "I will never submit to evil."
"Why is he more evil than any other conqueror in history?" Poch returned his sister's stare with a worried mien. "Our ancestors submitted to other conquerors. That is how our brood survived since the most ancient of times. Grandfather Phax grew up in a household that had submitted to the One-Eyed Duke of Ux. Were his father and mother less for yielding?"
Jyoti shrugged. "That is why Grandfather used Charm to summon the blood memories from before Charm. It was impossible to fight his enemies with Charm. They were too powerful. He fell back on the old ways and learned how to fight without Charm, with his body alone."
"So let us yield as his father yielded!"
"No!" Jyoti spoke sharply. "It is different. Terribly different."
"How so?"
"The One-Eyed Duke of Ux fought to unite the seven dominions," she explained with a taint of impatience. "He destroyed only those who resisted. This so-called Dark Lord destroyed Arwar Odawl without provocation. He never gave us a chance to yield or resist. He used the death of our brood to terrorize the others into submission. That is evil."
"I do not have the heart to fight evil."
"Who does?" She helped herself to one of the flagons hanging from her brother's shoulders. "Only evil has the heart to fight evil. It is enough that good be strong enough not to submit. In time, evil consumes itself."
"I don't understand."
She sipped the chilled Charm-sweet water. "Why do you think Grandfather Phax taught himself the ancient fighting ways? He had no hope of fighting Charm with his bare hands. It was not a useful martial skill in modern times. What hope could such skills offer against firecharms? And yet he devoted his life to mastering open-hand fighting. Why?"
"Father said that Grandfather was an eccentric who hid away inside himself, apart from the world." He accepted the flagon Jyoti offered and drank.
"Father was Grandfather’s son. He was disappointed that his father was not like other men. Grandfather did not hide in himself. He resided there. In his heart. The place of angels and demons, he called it. He mastered open-hand fighting not to defeat others—but to conquer himself."
"Is that why you learned from him—to conquer yourself?"
"Not at first. I just thought Grandfather was strange. And I wanted to know why he spent so much time tumbling and rolling about like a court zany. Then he had me try it, and it was fun. That's all it was for a long time. Fun. A sport. I liked it, and I got good at it."
"You spent a lot of time at it, Jyo." His voice softened with rueful memories. "Mother and Father worried about you. Mother thought Grandfather had cast a spell on you. But Father said Grandfather was charmless. He worried you were wasting your time on a ridiculous sport and he feared that people would think you crazy as Grandfather. He wanted you to prepare to take his place, to be margravine. Not a court zany."
"I mastered my other studies." Jyoti sounded hurt.
"But you sure spent a lot of time letting Grandfather push you around."
"I miss him most of all."
"I miss Mother and Father."
The margravine set her gaze toward the iron-blue horizon. "We will avenge them all."
They continued across grassy plains that day and advanced into late afternoon's long shafts of hot light with heads down, faceless beneath their hoods. A pack of muscular wolves followed them into the night, yellow eyes shimmering like heat in the twilight. The thin aura of Charm around the two wanderers kept the big lobos at a distance, and by nightfall the pack loped away, long noses to the ground.
Dawn found the travelers on a highland heath cluttered with bald granite boulders. The lo
wlands they had crossed lay in darkness below even as ruddy morning light blazed from snow peaks and harpy snakes wheeled in the blue depths.
"Jyo!" Poch cried out. His head turned to peer first into one niello eye charm on his shoulder and then the other, confirming his fright. "They're coming!"
Jyoti, who had been breathing deeply of the cold air and admiring the snow ranges, checked her eye charms. She marked two cacodemons soaring up from the dark void along the path she and Poch had climbed. "It must be a stray patrol—and they've spotted us!"
Poch whimpered and began running for the forested hills beyond the heath.
"Not that way," Jyoti called. "They'll catch us in the open. Over here. Follow me."
She pointed to a tall cairn of mounded boulders where she hoped they could hide in the crevices. They dashed through purple gorse and reached the rock pile as the cacodemons glided up from the night's depths into morning.
The Peers crawled into the wedged spaces between boulders and squirmed about to see if they had been detected.
Cacodemons read their prey’s tracks on the heath, one stalking on the ground, the other hovering above, scanning the red dawn. They moved in close enough to reveal the iridescent gloss of their scales and scarlet gleam of gums gripping dagger fangs.
As they closed, Poch moaned with fright. "Shoot me, Jyo! Kill me fast. Don't let them get me."
"Shut up!" Jyoti pushed Poch deeper. There was not room for both of them in this crevice. "Stay here and don't move."
"Jyo!" Poch wept. "Where are you going?"
Jyoti pulled herself out and swung around to where the cacodemons would spy her first. Quickly, she read the shadow side of the heaped stones, searching for a cleft large enough to accommodate her.
She did not dare spare even an instant to glance at the monsters, yet she knew they had spotted her. She heard the triumphant squawk of the soaring cacodemon beginning its dive, and the crackling of heather alerted her to the charge of the other.
Into a chute barely wide as her shoulders, she shoved herself. Claws clacked against the stone as she squeezed into the niche and fired upward with her weapon. The powerful bolt smashed harmlessly into the saurian visage pressed against the opening, and the tight space filled with the styptic stink of seared rock and ozone.
Dust and pebbles churned around her with the aggressive attack of the cacodemon, who pried at the jammed boulders. From the roaring and frenzied scuttling above, she knew that both cacodemons worked to get at her. They had not yet found Poch, and she was glad for that. Perhaps when they took her they would be satisfied and not realize he was hidden nearby.
Cloudy shafts of daylight blinked around her as the cacodemon's powerful limbs widened the chute. In moments they would scoop her out. She contorted and pulled her knife from its sheath in her boot, preparing herself to die fighting.
Grandfather! she called upon the spirit of her teacher, trying to smother fear in bravado. Death has found me with my knife in my hand! I will die as I know you died, my last breath a war cry!
A fierce roar shook the flesh on her bones, and had she not determined to die slashing her enemy, the raving jaws bellowing above would have blasted all vigor from her muscles. Instead, she screamed back at the malefic swamp-brown face, and she forced herself to see every detail of the thing: lobed brow, black-rimmed slits for nostrils, and lidless black glass eyes—tiny, rayed with malice, the left one surrounded by a maroon stain like an acid burn. She kept staring even as talons hooked her amulet frock and dragged her out of the cranny.
She whacked the cacodemon with her firelock, striking it hard on the cleft of its snout, and when it reflexively flung its head to the side, she drove her blade into the monster's left eye, and the maroon stain gushed with spilled vitreous fluid.
Shrieking in agony, the cacodemon released Jyoti and toppled over, tumbling among spinning rocks into the heather.
Jyoti landed among the rocks with a bruising thud, her hand and knife glutinous with the ichor of the beast's pierced eye. She leaped up at once to find the second cacodemon. It had run to its companion, and both hunkered below her.
Obeying lethal instinct, she climbed to the crest of the rock pile, lay on her stomach, and fired a burst at the boulders below. They avalanched with an explosive rumble, and the cacodemons disappeared in dust fumes.
Clambering down the rock pile, she called, "Poch! Come out! Hurry!"
Poch raised his head out of his covert and saw Jyoti skid past him. The sky seemed to shake with the crazed roars of the cacodemons. He jumped from the fissure and landed running on the heath, flailing his arms to catch up with his sister.
They sprinted for the wooded hills, throwing terrified looks over their shoulders. Behind, they gaped at the cacodemons struggling to free themselves from the rockslide. The stabbed one shoved loose first and staggered about clutching its gashed eye, screaming.
The heath climbed sharply toward the trees, and Jyoti and Poch clawed at bramble and weeds. Arms and legs churning to power themselves up the tussocky slope, they flung themselves into the forest and rushed, splashing, down a rill that carved a narrow, somber avenue through the dark woods.
Until the Charm of their amulets could sustain them no longer, they ran. Exhaustion dropped them in a glade of blue flowers. Gasping for breath, cheeks pressed to the ground, they stared at broken bottles, a twisted cart wheel orange with rust, splintered wood slats, a steel drum gashed and dented.
"Junk," Poch wheezed.
"Jettisoned from Andeze Crag," Jyoti reasoned. "They dump on the Keri Steppes. Read about it in a dominions report." She sat up, scrutinized her niello eye charms, and, seeing no cacodemons in the forest, drew a deeper breath and exhaled with relief. "We're just days away from the Malpais Highlands."
Poch rolled to his back, attention fixed on his eye charms. "How?" he asked and sucked harder at the mulchy air. "How did you get us out?"
Jyoti raised her knife, which she still clutched. "I cut one of them. In the eye."
"You did that?" Poch sat up on his elbows and inspected the gluey blade. "Did you kill it?"
"I don't know." She wiped the blade in the loam. "I don't think so. But I hurt it. And that means—we can fight them."
"Not with Charm," Poch marveled, "but with blades!"
"Maybe." Jyoti sheathed her knife and supported herself with her firelock as she stood. "We don't know how they heal. How quickly. Maybe we can't kill them. But we can inflict pain."
"Will they come after us?" Poch asked, again studying his eye charms.
"I'm sure of it." The power wands had already erased her fatigue, and she looked about for food. "We must keep moving."
The forest ascended gradually among hills that opened to high meadows in cold blue twilight. Rain flurried throughout the night, and they marched over mushy ground with hoods up. Gray dawn led them higher into the steppe, to vast plains of wind-broomed grasses taller than they stood. Green bears, griffins, and herds of white antelope occupied this hissing land, and they had to pay close heed to their eye charms to avoid dangerous encounters.
They bore west, toward snow mountains, and two days and two nights later emerged from the plain onto sloping champaign. Red thorn and stands of bristle pine covered the campestral downs, and they stocked up on berries and pinyon as they proceeded toward the tundra heights.
Several times on the upland trails they spotted cacodemons circling the purple zenith, and they crawled into the shrubs and lay still until the sky cleared.
Cacodemons flocked on the aerie cliffs surrounding the capital of the Malpais Highlands, Andeze Crag. From the ram heights of a rocky pass, Jyoti and Poch observed that obsidian city. Its numerous needle spires and cliff towers clustered in black coral shapes. Dirigibles floated serenely to and from the sky bunds, and traffic appeared brisk on ramp roads and switchbacks. By this, the wanderers knew that the mountain capital and its Peer, the witch queen Thylia, had capitulated to the Dark Lord.
Aware of that, Jyoti and Poch a
voided the pasture hamlets and kept to wild traces above the gorges. They traversed flower fields of fire colors and crossed into cloud forests of shaggy trees and mountain mists.
Night there offered only foggy darkness. They made their way by the blue shine of their amulets. That attracted moths in every shade of ghostliness. And when they exited the dripping forest into orange dawn light, fumes of tiny, pale winged insects came with them.
The moths dispersed with the heat of day, and the Abiding Star rose upon silver breezes of cirrus and a rocky terrain: barren granite shoulders above abyssal ravines. A colossal wall of glassy mountains soared before them, and behind and below ranged swatches of cloud forest.
A day of stony walking led into cold, clear night and views of Hellsgate and Nemora hung in frost halos. They attained the snow line by morning, and followed glacial streams upward over ice-glazed boulders. Swift, soft clouds flew overhead through a sky of darkest blue. Far, far below, green meadows shone in daylight like spilled jewels.
A long scarlet twilight guided them across snowy tumulus, slippery footing that twisted at their ankles and knees and led them into another crystal night. They navigated by star fire. Crossing ice bridges and crusty surfaces of glaciers, they meandered among canyon rims high above roaring torrents.
The Calendar of Eyes, the tallest mountain in the range, marked their journey's progress. Looming larger as they negotiated the maze of steep mountainsides, the mountain gradually revealed its icy cliff faces. After midnight, they came within sight of the sanctuary, a rock-walled settlement of stupas and minarets beside a ribbon waterfall.
They reached the sanctuary early in the morning and found devastation. The cacodemons had attacked days earlier. Only gnawed bones and rags strewn across rock fields remained of the sages.
The outer vallation of the sanctuary had been toppled to rubble in several places. Snowdrifts migrated across cobblestone courtyards. More torn carcasses lay scattered there, bones webbed, flesh leathered by wind and dry cold. Tall, stately windows smashed, the great hall howled and sighed like a cave of winds.
The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1) Page 21
