The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  They departed without talking. They knew not if the sorcerer Caval had perished among the anonymous dead or if he had fled and ascended to the timeless pinnacle on the Calendar of Eyes. They could not remain in this inhospitable place. They only hoped that their power wands held sufficient charge to get down from these cold heights.

  Knowing that the Dark Lord held the Malpais Highlands, they traveled south, out of the snow mountains. Eventually, they descended onto the riverine plains in the Falls of Mirdath. They conserved Charm by using only one power wand at a time. On a bosky stream they found a kayak lodged against a tree that had fallen into the water.

  They righted and bailed the kayak and rode it downstream, avoiding the river and its settlements. They kept to small tributaries that wound in emerald-dark tunnels under boughs hung with air plants and orchids. After a few days on these chattering streams, portaging small foaming falls and brisk rapids, they shot out of the steep country into the shoals. Tributaries trickled over sandbars and vanished into pebble flats under gigantic prismatic trees—the Rainbow Forests of Bryse.

  Out of the sandy ground, thick boles grew with crystalline bark. The shiny trunks divided high overhead into boughs of varied colors, so that each tree displayed sprays of spectral leaves in many hues. The corridors of the forest filtered light in sparkling rays. The shattered light colored the dense woods and awed and disoriented them.

  Wandering these shimmering boulevards, they misread the bright, mottled shadows around them and in their niello eye charms, and they snagged themselves in the web of a dragon-spider. Big as a man, the red-and-black arachnid pranced toward them silently. Its eight mad legs blurred with its hurry to seize its prey in its scissoring mouthparts.

  Poch screamed as his struggles bound him tighter, and Jyoti screamed with him when her firelock tangled in the gummy web. She managed to twist her arm behind her back and reach the charge pin and the trigger. Her first shot cut the guy lines of the web and splattered sparks of wild spectra.

  The spider fell upon Poch, and his screams weirded to yodeling pain.

  Jyoti pulled the firelock free, and her second blast smashed the spider to brown pulp and twitching leg parts. She hurried to her brother and staunched with one hand the bubbling wound at the base of his neck while her other hand groped for theriacal opals in the inside pocket of her frock. At their touch, the bleeding stopped, and the wound began healing. It was deep and would take a few hours before he could move.

  Poch grimaced with frantic fear, amplifying the terror of the spider attack. “They must have seen it! They must have seen it!"

  Jyoti activated all the power wands to calm him. "We're deep in a forest, Poch. They won't have seen it."

  But she did not believe that. The two bolts of charmlight had flashed brilliantly through the millions of prisms that were the forest leaves. The vigilant cacodemons could not have missed it.

  As soon as Poch felt strong enough, she dragged him to a covert among the huge buttressed roots. They waited in silence. The theriacal opals completed their healing, and Poch suffered no scar but the ghastly memory.

  Footfalls thudded in the tight, shining alleys of the forest.

  Poch curled tighter under the root arch. "They're coming!"

  "No. It's just one. Listen." Jyoti distinctly heard the heavy gait of a large beast. In her niello eye charms, almost camouflaged by the stained-glass shadows of the forest, she found it. Lumbering beneath interlocked boughs, the scaly creature advanced slowly. Its tiny ink-drop eyes read their tracks in the silica leaf litter.

  By the maroon stain around its right socket, she identified the cacodemon that had attacked them on the Steppes of Keri, the one she had not stabbed. It roamed alone. Is the other dead? she wondered and hoped. Maybe I can slay this one, too.

  A bizarre singsong crying began. It sounded like the imperfect utterances of a malformed being—mutilated phrases and half sense: "Blind nothing—no thing is what is—blind, blind, blind nothing—no thing is what is—blind nothing..."

  Several voices spoke, yet she saw only one monster in the crooked shadows. Horror gripped her: The gorgon faces pressed into the creases of the cacodemon's torso had begun to move their bent mouths, chanting odd words.

  The image in the niello eye charm faded. She looked at her other epaulet, and that eye charm, too, had blurred.

  "I can't see anything!" Poch called in a desperate whisper. "My eye charms are empty!"

  Sudden fatigue weighted brother and sister, sorrowful lethargy out of sync with the wild fear in their scramming hearts. Jyoti reached to adjust the power wands in her collar, but they had gone dead. All the amulets in her frock had lost their Charm.

  Reflexively, she checked the firelock. It remained fully charged, and by that she knew that the cacodemon's blinding song had only drained the Charm circuited to their bodies. The abdominal faces chanted a mesmermur song. That had opened them to the demon's influence. But that thing could not hypnotize her firelock. Her grip relaxed, and she set the charge at full and slung the weapon over her shoulder.

  "Jyo!" Poch rasped. "What's happening?"

  "Hush." She drew her knife. "The cacodemon is casting a spell."

  Lying flat and peering around the tree's pediment, she watched the cacodemon slouch into view. The crazed faces in its belly had stopped yammering, and their eyes glinted like seeds.

  Then the great lobed head spoke, its voice so much twisting smoke. "Jyoti, Poch—you are close. I smell you now. A red smell. Your blood spinning. Soon spilling."

  Jyoti pulled her head back. "Stay here," she told her brother. "I'm going to lead it away. When it comes after me, you run the other way. Try to keep to the root ledges. Leave no tracks."

  Before Poch could protest, Jyoti rolled away and ran bent low around the colossal tree.

  "I stole your Charm," the voice of smoke said. "I, Ys-o. Now you cannot run. You can only die."

  Jyoti burst into the open, and a roar brattled tree branches when Ys-o saw her and charged. She ducked under shrubs, and the cacodemon ripped them away with one slash of its claws. She had vanished, scuttling and rolling through the underbrush. The cacodemon pursued, bellowing angrily.

  Without Charm, Jyoti tired almost at once, and fear alone powered her over roots and under thorn arbors. Cutting hard among the trees, she forced the cacodemon to slow down and gained precious distance in her flight. Too soon, her breath burned and legs wobbled. When she knew she could flee no farther, she threw herself against an immense tree and fired rapid bursts into the forest awning.

  The cacodemon lunged to smash her against the tree wall, and a heavy bough struck it behind the head. As it went down, Jyoti shoved forward and drove her knife into the beast's face, ripping toward the nostril. A roar of maddening pain flung her backward. She curled and rolled into the underbrush.

  Again she turned and fired bursts, this time at the trunk of the mammoth tree where the cacodemon thrashed itself upright. The shearing blasts shattered the glassy bark and sprayed hot flechettes at the enraged beast. It covered its eyes and writhed with grotesque, misshapen cries, and the faces in its torso shrieked in agony.

  Bawling cacophonously, the cacodemon fled, crashing blindly through the underbrush. It collided with a tree and staggered about. Jyoti aimed at that trunk, and bursts of blue charmlight exploded its rosin bark to fiery projectiles that shredded nearby bushes and gashed the monster, tearing away gouts of its scales and spilling black blood.

  It sprang into the air and crashed to the ground under the weight of its wounds. Screaming, it wrenched upright and shambled away.

  Jyoti wanted to hunt it down now that she knew how to hurt it, but exhaustion claimed her. Having severely maimed Ys-o, she hoped Charm would return to her power wands, and she stood in a shaft of daylight, wanting the amulets to recharge and give her strength to pursue. They did not. Wearily, she shuffled in the opposite direction from the cacodemon and found her brother hiding inside a hollowed log.

  The cacodemon had
fled north, and so they continued south, much slower and far more carefully without the strength of their amulets. Adrenaline powered them through most of that day. At nightfall, exhaustion asserted itself. They lashed themselves with vines to sturdy roots and took turns sleeping, yet even when they slept, they clutched a knife.

  In the night, predators drifted. Howls and cries permeated the dark hours and drenched sleep with dreams filthy with danger and fright. Molten eyes watched from the shadows. The lumens of hunger in those avid stares dimmed when the travelers threw a stone or waved the firelock.

  By day, the wanderers moved gingerly, watchful for dragon-spiders and camouflaged adders. They collected water only from springs that gurgled out of rock, tart with lithic aftertaste but free from animal contaminants. Their sure but aimless destination led them through the Rainbow Forest and its colorful and lethal deceptions, bound for one of the large cities of Bryse—Lake Apocalypse, Mount Szo, or Soft Anvil—there to tell the Peers about the vulnerability of the cacodemons.

  / |

  One slick night, with rain drooling through the canopy and nearby streams rocking loudly in their beds, a sibyl sought shelter in the root cove where the young wanderers had lashed themselves. Poch slept, his unconscious body buoyant in its moorings, and Jyoti's gasp did not waken him.

  The sibyl, no larger than a small child, stood dripping under the eave of a root buttress. Her crimson and green wings bedraggled, her marble nakedness jeweled with raindrops, she looked miserable. Clawed, three-fingered hands brushed inky streaks of hair from a vivid, inhuman face. Her curved eyes, glazed as quartz, studied the sister and brother.

  "I am cold," she said. Her silken voice sounded from far away.

  Jyoti set the charge pin on her firelock to its lowest setting and pointed the muzzle at the visitor. Its thermal breath huffed over the sibyl, and she gratefully raised her winged arms.

  Once dry, she folded her wings about her and curled against the root wall. The blue spark in the bore hole of her mouth flickered. "Ask me what you would know."

  "Where is the nearest settlement, sibyl?" Jyoti inquired at once, eager to find her way out of the perilous woods.

  "Soft Anvil is east," she answered in her remote voice. "Twelve or more days as you would walk. But danger awaits you there."

  "Why? Are there cacodemons in Soft Anvil?"

  "Not yet." The sibyl fluttered her crossed wings and leaned closer, confiding, "Your destiny is not there."

  "What is my destiny?"

  The sibyl closed her eyes, lifted her crescent face, and sang, wispy voice drifting into vastness: "You are hunted and you hunt. What hunts you will find you three times. And each time you will stand on the shadow of death. If you die, your story dies with you. And there is no more. No more. Dark the seed that dies in the ground. Remember, on your journey, Irth is flat—and you stand on its edge. Dig deep your roots, for if you fall, you will fall forever."

  Three times! Jyoti thrilled with understanding. "The cacodemons have found us twice already."

  "And twice you have survived by strength and speed." She lowered her head under the weight of a pause and opened luminous eyes. "What hunts you will find you again."

  "When?"

  "When you sleep."

  "Soon?"

  "Your soon is not mine."

  "Where will it find us?"

  "In the south," the sibyl promised in her distant voice. "In the grasslands of Sharna-Bambara. If you avoid it, you will never find what you hunt."

  "Caval!" Jyoti remembered their original quest as if from a former lifetime. "Where will we find the sorcerer Caval?"

  "At the Cloths of Heaven. He has gone there to gain strength for the tasks ahead."

  Jyoti recognized the truth in what the sibyl said. She knew it in her heart.

  "Rest now," the sibyl advised and closed her mineral eyes. From the socket of her mouth, starlight seeped, and with it came music of vacancy, so empty it held everything.

  These mesmermurs lulled Jyoti to sleep. When she woke and sank back to the ground in her vine-tangle, morning stood outside the root cove, and the sibyl had departed.

  Poch glowered, unhappy to hear of the sibyl. "What if she lied?" he asked as they hiked south through the heraldic forest. "The Cloths of Heaven—those are ruins. Why would Caval be there?"

  "To hide from the Dark Lord?"

  "But it's in Nhat—the Dark Lord's dominion." Poch's upper lip shivered. "We can't go there. What about our plan to find a nearby city and tell them how to kill cacodemons?"

  "The sibyl said we would never find Caval if we do that."

  "What if she lied?"

  "Sibyls can't lie."

  "Maybe you misunderstood her."

  "No." Jyoti spoke as she scanned the variegated depths of tree lanes and tiered shrubs. "She was very clear. We have to go south. To Sharna-Bambara. We have to stand down the cacodemons one more time. It will come on your watch."

  Poch moaned. "The prophecy said if we failed, we'd fall off the Irth forever. Are they going to throw us into the Gulf?"

  Jyoti slapped an open hand against her brother's chest and stopped him in mid-step. At his scuffed boot tip, a scarlet scorpion-asp coiled, nearly invisible in the red shadows, only its fangs and stinger glinting like diamond points.

  "If you don't pay heed," Jyoti warned, "you'll throw yourself into the Gulf."

  They proceeded in watchful silence. A breeze, charismatic with fruit scent, led them to a grove of blue banana. They feasted and moved on. Late in the day, they crossed through a wide depression warted with limestone, remnants of an ancient lake. Sinkholes matted over with ivy plunged remorselessly at random intervals and offered fatal opportunities. When they climbed out the far end at twilight, they slewed stagger-footed with fatigue, eyes dizzied and aching from reading pathways in the shattered rainbows.

  That night, they moored themselves to the red stilts of a fig tree and fell asleep together. Poch woke at midnight to find tiny, barbed land crabs crusting his hands and face, eating salty wafers of skin. He screamed and flung them off and screamed again to see his sister equally matted with the thorny parasites. The crabs vanished across the forest floor, and Poch readily agreed to take the first watch.

  / |

  The Rainbow Forests of Bryse held them in a labyrinth of prisms for a dozen more frightful days and restless nights, reducing their frocks to tatters. Even their boots wore thin and had to be patched with bark and twine. On the brilliant afternoon that they stepped through the trees onto a bluff of mushroom rings above the soughing grasslands of Sharna-Bambara, they looked like wraiths.

  Vision dazed, they squinted, and the plains below appeared pale, faded, and apparitional as a mirage. The horizon's thick mane of grass tossed in the wind and carried minty scents of sedge and rain. Wearily and with fateful apprehension, they descended toward the wide land and its slippery cloud shadows. Their approach released arrowheads of birds. Small animals spurted through the reeds.

  "How far is Nhat?" Poch wanted to know.

  "Days and days, brother," Jyoti answered, standing on tiptoe to peer above the tall hay. Veils of rain smudged the distant sky and threads of lightning tangled and vanished without thunder. "Sharna-Bambara is larger than Bryse."

  "What if Caval is not at the Cloths of Heaven when we get there?"

  "He's a sorcerer." She regarded Poch, and the sight of his long, unkempt hair and tanned flesh drawn taut about startled eyes hurt her heart. "Perhaps he will find us."

  The boy asked nothing more. Before the Cloths of Heaven, before the hope of Caval, lay the third encounter with the cacodemons, the one that the sibyl prophesied would come to him. He tried to forget about that and put his mind on the trek before them. Waves and ripples on the grass ocean scattered across the world, tossing glints of pollen and butterflies.

  Lacking vines to moor themselves at night, the nomads took to cutting burrows in the soft loam with their knives. They weighted their torsos with soil and what rocks they c
ould find and left their faces and arms free. That was not as satisfactory as the ties they had utilized in the forest, and more than once the sleeper budged free of the soil and had to be woken by the other before the nocturnal tides lofted the sleeper into the Gulf.

  They tried sleeping by day and hiking the flat terrain at night under the star glow. But they could not see as far. And twice in one night they trespassed the lairs of dangerous animals they could easily have avoided by day. Poch collided with a hive-cluster of viper-wasps, dirt towers tall as a man and fragile with knobby protuberances of egg cases. Viper-wasps bloomed in inky clouds against the stars.

  The cool night slowed the swarms, and the trespassers fled without being stung. In their haste to get away, however, they barged into a camp of sleeping hippogriffs. Crazed wings exploded into flight, claws ripped the air with searing screams, and stout thigh bones kicked hooves and pounded the ground like cannon.

  To keep from getting crushed in the stampede, Jyoti fired bursts of red flares that drove the screeching beasts away. The thunder of the herd evoked panther roars and yowls of startled dog packs. All that night, sister and brother sat back to back, scanning the star fields for silhouettes of cacodemons.

  Under that morning’s ground mist, Poch slept. At noon, Jyoti curled to sleep and Poch began his watch. That was when Ys-o and Ss-o arrived, crawling snakewise through the tall grass.

  Poch heard a hiss, turned and spied eel grins and spider eyes peering at him from the cane shadows. He wanted to shout his sister awake, but the cacodemons had begun to sing a dreamy noise that scraped the will from his nerves and left him jaw-slung and voiceless, staring with wild eyes at the lizard masks. "Blind nothing—no thing is what is—blind, blind, blind nothing—no thing is what is—blind nothing..."

  The black depths in the cacodemons' tiny eyes looked back into him, and he did not move. The monsters did not move either. The boy held the firelock, and it pointed at the ground before them. Each blast would spray rock and quartz nodules at them with mangling force.