The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  "Put down the firelock, Poch," Ys-o whispered.

  "We have come to take you to the Dark Lord," Ss-o added quietly.

  Poch shook his head. Words opened and closed like butterfly wings. "You—tried—to kill—us..."

  "No." Ys-o hushed him.

  "Blind, blind, blind nothing—no thing is what is—blind nothing..."

  "The Dark Lord sent us for the margrave's children," Ss-o explained with soothing softness. "But your sister attacked us. She hurt us."

  The cacodemons slowly edged closer, and daylight touched their wounds. Ss-o tilted its long head to reveal the gashed socket emptied of its eye, crusty with pain. Ys-o, too, looked deformed, its snout cleaved to an ugly scar and its frilled throat and muscular shoulders mottled with black scabs.

  "We forgive you the pain," Ys-o assured.

  "We are but servants of the Dark Lord." Ss-o spoke gently. "Come away with us."

  They rose to their full heights, and the sight of the warped faces pressed into their bellies startled Poch. He gasped, and his finger tightened on the trigger.

  "Blind nothing—no thing is what is—"

  He lowered the weapon and gazed up in awe at the flexing talons and widening fangs.

  Jyoti, roused by her brother's gasp, lay still, peeking through her lashes, measuring distances. The queer mouthings of the abdominal faces lulled her pounding heart and kept panic in check, leaving room in her mind for calculation. In this crucial moment, she was grateful that she made a habit of sleeping with her knife in her hand.

  One more step, and the cacodemons would be close enough to strike. Jyoti did not wait. She flung her knife at Ys-o, and the blade pierced its belly, cleaving the brow of a singing face. Following through her movement, she hurled herself over her brother, pulled the firelock from his hands, and rolled off firing.

  The first shots cut high, splashing harmlessly against the cacodemons' legs. Ys-o shouted with rageful pain, yanked the knife free, swung about, and lashed with its serrate tail. It sliced grass heads to chaff and scythed a whistling inch from Poch's head. The boy dove under the writhing tail and scrambled away.

  Ss-o leaped after him, and Jyoti's second burst struck the ground under the lunging cacodemon. The explosion of dirt and stones heaved the creature into the air and dropped it to its back.

  Firing rapidly, Jyoti gouged the ground, flinging incandescent rocks and fuming soil at the howling beasts. She advanced, intent on destroying the killers, and they fled before her, spouting black blood and maimed cries. She exhausted one cartridge, tossed it aside, grabbed another from her belt, and slammed it into the breech, pausing only briefly in her fusillade.

  The cacodemons bounded skyward and circled back. When they dove, Jyoti fired at their shadows on the ground. The blasts geysered deadly jets, and the cacodemons pulled back abruptly and gazed down from an impotent distance.

  Jyoti ducked into the grass and in moments vanished from sight. The cacodemons glided overhead for a while and then departed, weakened by their wounds. Their furious cries climbed down the sky for a long time.

  Poch sat sparking with cold sweat, his terror unmitigated by Charm. Jyoti tried to soothe him, and he shoved her away.

  "They came to escort us to the Dark Lord!" he shouted bitterly.

  "You believe that?" Jyoti knelt before him, scowling with incredulity.

  "They could have jumped me." He spat the words.

  "They were afraid of the firelock. If you had put it down, they'd have gutted you on the spot." She waved the weapon at him, its muzzle still warping the air around it with its heat. "This is all that saved us."

  The boy said nothing. He stared hard into the switching grass shadows. When Jyoti spun away angrily and stalked off to search for her knife, his face wrinkled, and he wept.

  A Maiden in the Fastness of Ogres

  Ralli-Faj hung from his stick among fragrant silks of perfume in a garden beneath the Palace of Abominations. Around him, walls of green and blue glass enclosed flowering trees, vine arbors, hedges shaved to animal shapes, and a cirque of boulders hewn of raw gemstones. This was his piece of heaven.

  The Dark Lord had blessed him with this serene paradise and made him master of the hell beyond. So long as he managed well the terrors of Hu'dre Vra's prison, all the pleasures of this soft world were his to exploit.

  The tenderly spiced air lofted the warlock to unprecedented heights of rapture. Most of each day, he spent deep in euphoric trance, a seraph of light singing in the sky's abyss among the seven-horned stars. Dumb with joy, all inner narrative silenced in him, he drifted free and triumphant, a mystery of flame and pleasure. This was fulfillment far grander than anything he had won for himself with Charm.

  As a warlock, he had learned to float in a small space of bliss, and he had enjoyed it so thoroughly that he had allowed his very flesh to wither away to a husk. That thrill had been a paltry and wan glimmer of the radiance that the Dark Lord gave to him. By Hu'dre Vra's magic, he lofted upon the very wings of stars, high above the blue wall of day.

  At nightfall, the happy dream ended, and he returned to Irth, which in his light-struck eyes seemed a thing of shadows. All form existed as a flimsy aggregation of atoms hung in a void of immeasurable blackness. All life endured as so much diamond ash molded in frail and ludicrous shapes. To bear it, he breathed deeply of the garden's soporific perfumes until the glare of his dazzling trance dimmed and he could see clearly once more in the dense and dim world of matter.

  Then he made his rounds.

  Thousands of days ago, Ralli-Faj had lost his physical powers of locomotion and learned how to project his consciousness out of the hanging skin of his body and into his surroundings. It was not possible for him to go far. Charm carried him like a mote in the wind, skittering about in a general direction. That had been sufficient for his purposes in the catacomb citadel from which he had ruled his dominion.

  Since arriving at the Palace of Abominations, he had received from the Dark Lord the magical power to walk among the shadows of the world, a shade himself. At his whim, he could remain invisible or reveal himself to those around him. And he could journey as far as a man could walk to midnight and then walk back by dawn. He had never actually done this, because among the Reef Isles of Nhat, there was nowhere to go. Thus, he constrained himself to a nightly tour of the Palace of Abominations, the work camp, and the tidal flats where, sometimes, he wandered out among the scavengers.

  This night, he began his rounds as usual within the palace. After the fragrant and supple scents of the garden had grounded him in his physical senses once again, he stepped out of the limp skin of his body. Invisible and chilled, he walked through the trim garden, casting not even a shadow under the glow of suspended crystal spheres.

  An alabaster portal in the glassy wall led to a helical ladder that ascended toward scaffolds, derricks, and trestles—an immense framework jutting at skewed angles into a sky bright with the day's frayed ribbons. Hordes of cacodemons roosted on those skeletal ramparts.

  The demons labored, constructing the white stone facade of the palace. It would be an enormous pyramid when completed. The warlock had gruesome plans for the maze of chambers, shafts, and pits that the four triangular walls would enclose.

  At the apex, the Dark Lord's adytum would overview a plunging maze of torture cells where the Peers of Irth, embalmed alive in black magic, would suffer eternally. Their anguish would power a winding engine that the warlock envisioned pulling a chain of torture boxes endlessly around a circle—a circle that Hu'dre Vra's magic would suspend vertically on the face of his pyramid, under the apex, at the portal to his adytum. And on that pain chain would ride the most infamous of Wrat's despised foes—Lord Drev, the arrogant wizarduke, and his haughty brood reduced to so much cargo on pain's relentless journey to nowhere.

  Ralli-Faj delighted. He strolled among torture tiers, ramp ways where soon permanent stone vaults would be installed to house the damned. For now, the living bodies of the Dark Lord's en
emies hung encased within oval cages of amber.

  Baronet Fakel occupied one cage and his two sons, the wizarduke's nephews, shared the cage beside him. They looked like fetal creatures embalmed in bloody yolks. Naked, curled upon themselves, and glistening with tattered frills of flesh, they floated in oily smoke, alive—and suffering.

  The warlock marveled at the Dark Lord's power. His enemies twitched with jolts of pain and their eyes swiveled with anguish in bruised sockets, and yet their bodies appeared already necrotic, days dead. How does he sustain them? he asked himself and shrugged. How does he do anything?

  Continuing on past other tortured bodies—all Peers and former allies of Lord Drev—Ralli-Faj considered the host of cacodemons perched above him. Large and ferocious and animated by savage intelligence, they nonetheless appeared to the warlock like apparitions, fiercely vivid ghosts. They did not require sustenance and ate only for pleasure. They drank only human blood. They had simply fallen out of the night with the Dark Lord and stood vigilantly in attendance upon him.

  Theirs was like no magic Ralli-Faj had ever witnessed in deed or history. It defied all laws of Charm. He would not have believed such abominations could be possible if he himself had not witnessed their tangible reality. Many times, to sate his curiosity, he had gone up to them and touched their scaly hides, outlined with his ghostly fingertips the grisly faces embedded in their torsos, and felt the ivory razors of their upturned tusks.

  He paid them little heed on this tour. They obeyed an evil power he did not fathom, and, at last assured of their dangerous reality, he felt content to leave them to their avid watchfulness. His assignment from Hu'dre Vra entailed the torment of his enemies, not to wonder at the Dark Lord's power.

  Before each cage, he paused and reached out with his sensitivity to ascertain that the prisoner lived and suffered. He had strict orders to make certain that none of the captives died. Indeed, most of the Dark Lord's victims had the power to end their lives. Masters of sorcery, Peers all, they possessed sufficient Charm to snuff the sparks of their lives. All that prevented them from ending their torture was the warlock's surveillance.

  When a caged Peer dwindled too close to death, the warlock had to bring over one of the crystal spheres. They relayed the Dark Lord's magic. Usually, Ralli-Faj kept those spheres in the garden, the better to enhance his daily rapture trances. And when he dispersed more than three at a time to break the Charm of the Peers, his bliss diminished. That had only happened a few times, in the first days when the will of the Peers was yet strong.

  Recently, not enough Charm remained in the captives for them to defy the cruelty that bound them to their torture. Yet Ralli-Faj insisted on watching them closely. He did not want to invite upon himself the wrath of Hu'dre Vra and find himself in one of these eggs of torment hatching a new species of suffering.

  And so he welcomed the help of Whipcrow, the ally that the warlock had summoned by his own Charm. With him to watch over the labor camp, Ralli-Faj could pay greater heed to the captured Peers—and the enjoyment of his raptures.

  Hu'dre Vra had appointed the ogres to run the labor camp and to take their share of treasure. But he wanted Ralli-Faj to oversee them and ensure that the workers served the Dark Lord and not the overseers. Also, only city dwellers and those of the fortunate classes were to labor. Those who had been scavengers or who had lived at the lowest levels of Irth society as aborigines and nomads would receive the treasures gleaned from the tidal flats.

  The warlock left these tasks to Whipcrow, though Ralli-Faj made a point of including the labor camp and the flats on his rounds. He wanted there to be no chance of his finding disfavor with the Dark Lord.

  Sometimes he made himself patrol the camp in his physical form so that all could see him and recognize his authority. To accomplish this feat with his boneless husk of a body, he had the cacodemons strap him tightly with crude, heavy thongs to a crossbar fixed between two stilts. The hard ironwood of the stilts carried amulets—power wands inside the hollowed tops. By their Charm, the stilts walked like scissors, the very sharp points marking his gait along the stone pavement of the palace: tok, tok, tok.

  On the dirt paths of the labor camp and on the sandy beach, his Charm wafted him a worm's width off the ground so that he could advance across any surface, even water. This frightened everyone—the prisoners and the ogres—and interfered with productivity.

  And so this night, confident that the Peers in their cages languished in mortal agony, he did not require his skin to be secured to the stilts. In his disembodied form, he proceeded down ramp ways flanked by cacodemons to the swamp path. That path curled among fallen behemoths of trees with dislodged root crowns tall as hills and broken trunks luminous with fungal gills and nodules. Marsh mist pooled among the forest's mangrove arches and drifted in whorls across the trail.

  The labor camp had emptied at nightfall. Two ogres remained behind to watch after the handful of laborers assigned to clean latrines. Smeared with excrement, the ditch workers gleamed like salamanders.

  The ogres paced before the sturdy log warehouse where they stored their treasure. Their muscle-packed bodies moved with surprising litheness while the small faces in their large heads attentively watched the prisoners.

  Ralli-Faj entered by the front gate of lashed bamboo, open to allow the laborers to cart out the ordure and dump it in the marsh. Satisfied, he exited through the back gate, where the rutted path led to the wagons that the workers pulled along the shore retrieving the tide's treasures.

  Over a thousand scavengers shuffled toward the sea under hanging vines and ragged draperies of moss. The ogres shepherded them with long gnarly staves and gruff shouts. Bioluminescent moths flitted about, drawn by torches set in sconces on the wagons.

  Whipcrow, dark as a piece of the night with his black flamboyant hair spikes and swarthy wedge of a face, stood in one of the wagons enticing the yoked workers to pull faster with promises of favored positions on the flats. Since his arrival, the labor camp had become more productive. Unlike the ogres, he did not bully the scavengers but employed techniques he had learned as a factory manager to motivate the crews. He offered incentives of food and rest for those who worked effectively, and he carefully organized and rotated the crews to avoid rivalries and disputes.

  Ralli-Faj appreciated Whipcrow's expertise. Even so, the warlock on his rounds invariably revealed himself to the manager, wanting him to know that he was being watched. The apparition climbed onto the trundling wagon and presented a masklike face with empty eyeholes and round mouth bright with blue fire.

  "Who are the new prisoners?" he asked in a voice more resonant and less sibilant than the sounds that hissed from his physical husk. He turned his vacant eyes toward the large man with the furry blond beastmarks yoked beside a small, mousy woman. "It is not like you to mismatch such a pair."

  Whipcrow bowed in a fluster of fright and reverence. The abrupt appearance of the warlock always shocked him. The man moved about as a ghost, a living dead thing. "Master, I have my reasons," he said in a hushed voice, meant to be heard only by the wraith before him. "These are two I know from my time in Saxar and my journey out of the Qaf."

  "Two that you loathe, clearly."

  Whipcrow peered from under his pencil blue brows at the warlock. There was no hiding anything from this being, and so he spoke freely. "They betrayed me. Of the thousand and seventy-four laborers who serve you, I ask for the authority to torment only these two."

  "The laborers do not serve me, Whipcrow." The floating mask spoke angrily. "They belong wholly to our lord, Hu'dre Vra. Your request to torment them is denied."

  Whipcrow bowed deeper to hide his frustrated scowl.

  "Torment is out of the question," the warlock insisted. "Harassment is not. So long as these two remain as productive as the others, you may trouble them for your vengeance as much as you please."

  "Thank you, Master Faj!" Whipcrow responded with gratitude—but when he looked up, the warlock had vanished. The
manager did not doubt that Ralli-Faj lurked nearby, and he continued to nod with grinning satisfaction. "Thank you. I shall inflict pain upon these two with the utmost finesse."

  Dogbrick's keen ears had heard this exchange over the noise of the wagon wheels, and he looked at Tywi with concern. She had heard nothing. Not that it mattered. Since arriving at the labor camp, she had behaved as though death alone could offer her freedom. He bent harder under the yoke, trying to lift from her small shoulders as much of the burden as he could.

  Whipcrow clapped, pointed, and several other laborers gathered at the sides of the wagon and helped to push. The parade of work crews marched through cypress archways where night birds clicked and fretted. In the dark tunnel, the salty tang of the sea thickened and the sound of the surf crashed. Then the swamp's murky avenue opened among dunes bristly with salt cane.

  The ogres herded the work crews toward their various jobs: raking the tide litter, scouring the sand, dredging the shallows, and, most dangerous of all, trawling the deeper water where the combers collapsed and foamed. Whipcrow pointed toward the distant phosphorescent glow of collapsing waves and ordered, "Get your nets."

  "Send me," Dogbrick said, staring up at where the manager stood in the empty wagon grinning at them. "Leave Tywi to rake the sand. She does not merit your ire."

  Whipcrow slanted his sharp face toward where the ogres stamped through the sand shouting in their thick voices at the work crews.

  Tywi picked up her coiled net from the equipment cart, and Dogbrick glowered at the manager. "Recall what your master said, Whipcrow. If harm comes to her, he will not be pleased."

  "Go!" Against the star-flung sky, Whipcrow's silhouette shook like black flames.

  Dogbrick held his harsh gaze a moment, then turned and took the heavy net from Tywi. They waded past the crews raking the shoals and stood briefly in the chill water watching big waves loom up, contemplate the shore, and collapse into smoking heaps of froth and spume.