The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  The outbound current nagged at them, and when the foam flew past and dragged back, Tywi clutched at Dogbrick's arm.

  "Stay behind me," he advised and cast the weighted net onto the seething water.

  Tywi anchored one end of the seine while Dogbrick sloshed deeper and pulled in the weights, bringing up seaweed and leathery eggs. They threw the eggs back, moved several paces along, and cast the net again. This time they snagged a large rib cage webbed with kelp: a chimera's skeleton.

  Dogbrick waved for a recovery crew. Scavengers shoved a floating barrow through the churning water to where Tywi and Dogbrick rocked among the waves, untangling the net from the slatted bones.

  The next several throws brought in the rest of the skeleton—the chimera's blunt skull with its fabled crimson teeth, thick thigh bones, and vertebral coils of the serpent tail and its barbed tip. The recovery crew laughed with delight at their luck and offered a ride to shore on the barrow. A large find like this guaranteed a food break and an easier assignment. But Whipcrow waved them back into the waves.

  "He wants to kill us." Tywi despaired. "He ain't going to be happy till we're drowned."

  "Don't cry," Dogbrick said and maneuvered himself before her to take the brunt of the waves' impact. "That's what he wants. Deny him that and he will weary soon enough of this harsh game. Come, Tywi. The night is beautiful. We will make play of this work."

  But the battering of waves and entangling undertow offered no joy. They netted mostly seaweed and driftwood and only a few kraken teeth. And though Dogbrick strove bravely to protect the small woman from the pummeling breakers, by midnight her legs gave out and the riptide swept her away. He dove after her and pulled her sputtering from violent water.

  On shore, she lay shivering in the sand. The ogre who stalked down from the dunes and stood over her spoke only one word, "Basilisk."

  Tywi cried and struggled to her feet. Dogbrick stood protectively before her. "No!" he said gruffly to the compact face of the ogre. "She can rake the tideline or work the shoals."

  Whipcrow arrived, a blue sneer on his lipless face. "My offer from the forest remains. Will you give yourself to me, Tywi? Or to the basilisk?"

  Dogbrick lifted Whipcrow off his feet by his throat. "Touch her and I will break all your bones!"

  A thick hand seized Dogbrick by his mane, jerked him into the air, and shook him until he released Whipcrow. The manager fell choking into the sand and rasped through his bruised larynx, "Punish him!"

  The ogre holding Dogbrick by his locks carried him away at arm's length. The thief swung his legs, trying to twist free, and that only tightened the pain in his scalp. He winced with hurt and forced himself to look back at Tywi valiantly. "Do not fear."

  Do not fear! He could think of nothing else to say, and he felt smaller for that. There should be much more to say of courage in so desperate a moment. The pain in his scalp left no room for bold thoughts, and without his rat-star gems, his mind felt like a bird without sufficient feathers.

  The ogre lugged him through the dunes to the swamp verges. There, it threw him down among creeping fungi and nightwort. Before he could push to his feet, the ogre snatched both ankles in one powerful hand and raised him upside down. It pounded his head against the mud-caked lip of a viper-wasp hive until the swarm seethed forth. Then it rammed his head into the hive and dashed away.

  Dogbrick tore his head free and thrashed among strangler vines under a vibrant cloud of viper-wasps. Howling, he bounced to his feet and ran toward the dunes slapping at himself. Among the mats of sea grape, he collapsed, his muscles cramping with toxins.

  Tywi shoved Whipcrow aside. Terrified of his threat, she had let him lead her from the water's edge toward the dunes. But when she saw Dobrick prostrate in the weeds under a venomous swarm, she ran to him, throwing handfuls of sand to drive off the stinging swarm.

  Whipcrow backed away from the enraged viper-wasps and watched with grim amusement as Tywi tugged at the thief and swatted at the stinging attacks. With her help, Dogbrick managed to wobble to his feet and hobble to the sea. They stumbled into a tide pool and wallowed there.

  When the swarm thinned away, the ogres picked up the stung scavengers and threw them both into a wagon laded with that night's treasures. Among gummy bones and buckled sheets of corroded metal, they lay in feverish pain. Their flesh puffed and throbbed. Nausea curdled their blood. At one point, Dogbrick stopped breathing. His diaphragm had become fiery metal and welded shut, and he had to labor strenuously to drag air into his lungs.

  Tywi listened to him struggling to live and wanted to die. There was not enough venom in her body to kill her. From each of the many welts where she had been stung, a flame cooked her flesh, and the necrotic smoke curled through her veins and sickened her.

  Dawn trembled overhead, and the wagon rolled back into the swamp tunnel on its way to the camp. The ogres sang their ponderous songs, and the scavengers shuffled listlessly, already half asleep on their bones.

  The reed huts caught the morning's rays through woven seams and shone from within like ovens. While the others collapsed in the stained darkness and plunged into sleep, Tywi and Dogbrick lay awake on the hay-matted floor, gnawed by pain.

  Dogbrick moaned, barely audible. "'It is big inside a human heart.' I am no dog but a man. And it is big inside me. Yes, it is big."

  Tywi sat up on one elbow to hear more closely what her protector mumbled.

  "He quotes the Gibbet Scrolls," a haggard voice said in the mottled darkness. A woman in a charmwright's leather vest drifted out of the spongy dark and knelt beside her. This was the same person who had helped her after Gryn had tossed her into the chattel cart with the other prisoners. Her gray-brindled hair and large brown eyes lent her an aspect of wisdom. "Beastfolk often recite that quote. They yearn to be human and so believe that if their hearts are strong enough to endure all suffering they will become human. It is sad."

  The charmwright bent closer and examined the thief's swollen features. "This is Dogbrick, the one whose amulets caused the charm blowout in the forest—the one you hoped would save you." The older woman shook her head sadly. "'Hope is sour desire.' That, too, is from the Gibbet Scrolls." She put a hand over his heart. "He is strong and will survive."

  "Who are you?" Tywi inquired, appraising the woman more closely, noting the gaunt cheeks that looked long and hollow like tracks rain had deepened.

  "Who I am does not matter," the old woman confided. "Not anymore. The Dark Lord has changed everything."

  "What do I call you?"

  "Owl Oil," she replied with a faint smile. "Now lie back and rest."

  "I can't rest," Tywi protested, yet relented to the elder's gentle hands that pushed her down onto the straw ticking.

  'You are in pain, I know." Owl Oil's hand curled in the air as if plucking an invisible fruit. When she opened her palm, she held a theriacal opal, shining inside with lilac milk. "This will restore you and Dogbrick."

  Tywi gazed with surprise at the charmwright. "You kept this hidden from the ogres?"

  "From everyone." The old woman touched the opal to each of Tywi's welts, and the inflamed flesh cooled at once to smooth, unblemished skin.

  "You got others?" Tywi asked, thinking of Dogbrick.

  "No." Owl Oil placed the opal between the thief's swollen eyes. "There is sufficient Charm in this gem to begin healing your protector."

  "Why?" Tywi asked, staring with wonder at Dogbrick as his puffy features and limbs began to deflate to healthier contours. "Why use your gem for us?"

  "Dogbrick is the strongest of us," Owl Oil said with a sage nod, "and you are his ward. If there is any hope at all of freeing us from this prison, it lies with him. And I have a taste for that most sour of desires."

  The theriacal opal dulled to common stone, spent of its Charm, and Owl Oil slipped it into a pocket of her leather apron with such deft speed it appeared to vanish from her fingertips.

  "He is not wholly healed," she said, regarding the wheals that
still inflicted his tawny pelt. She stroked his brow, and he relaxed into sleep. "But it is for the best that he not appear recovered too quickly. We do not want to rouse suspicions."

  "The ogres are clever," Tywi agreed. "And Whipcrow is Dogbrick's enemy, for sure."

  "Far more dangerous than Whipcrow or the ogres is the warlock who oversees the Reef Isles," Owl Oil warned. "Ralli-Faj patrols the camp regularly."

  "I seen him on his stilts," Tywi acknowledged with a shudder.

  "More often he comes as a shade. He thinks he is invisible. But those with the right Charm can see him well enough."

  "Do you have—the 'right Charm'?" Tywi asked, looking into the weatherworn face for some indication of power and finding none.

  "Charm is not only held in hex-gems, witch-glass, and conjure-wire," the elder whispered. "A body can hold it, too—if the mind within that body knows how."

  "You're a sorceress!"

  "I did not say that." The elder turned her hands palms up. "What I am is as unimportant as who I am. This is the time of the Dark Lord, and the values and identities of the past no longer pertain."

  "Yeah, but you ain't like us." Tywi gestured with her eyes at the other prisoners in the hut, sprawled on the ground, some curled upon themselves, others sitting with their backs against the walls, hollowed out with exhaustion. "What do you see?"

  "Someone watching you," Owl Oil said. "There." She pointed toward a corner littered with shadows and straws of sunlight.

  At first, Tywi saw nothing. Then, the elder placed a soft hand on her shoulder, and she discerned a glinting energy in the shadows, fleeting and recurrent as needles of rain.

  "What's that?" The young woman gusted with surprise.

  "Not what, Tywi." Owl Oil removed her hand, and the grainy apparition dimmed but did not vanish. "Who."

  "Who then?"

  "We have talked enough for one day," the charmwright answered and crept away. She lay down among the other sleepers, turned her back toward Tywi's following gaze, and did not stir.

  When Tywi looked again for the energy, it had dimmed, and it wavered like wheat caressed by the wind. She sat up taller and squinted and noticed that, as the power waned, it narrowed to the shape of a man. The harder she stared, the more it faded until it wholly vanished.

  She lay back in wonder. The oppression that had made living seem unbearable had become lighter, and she drifted toward sleep with hopefulness she had not experienced since Saxar.

  / |

  The clangor of the ogres' wake-up bell roused Tywi from dreamless sleep, and she sat up into scarlet twilight seeping in through the woven reeds. Many of the others in the hut had already woken, and when she searched for Owl Oil she could not find her.

  Dogbrick sat on the tamped ground, rubbing his eyes with his palms. The residue of eerie dreams left him feeling desolate and forlorn, and he was glad for the ache of his stung flesh, because the pain sharpened his wakefulness. He was happy, also, to see Tywi appearing clear-eyed and revived.

  On their way to the camp field where the ogres distributed the day’s rations and divided the labor force into crews, she told him about Owl Oil and asked him, "What did she make me see?"

  "The warlock she warned about?" Dogbrick guessed.

  They spotted her among the hundreds of workers gathered about the forage carts, on her way out of the camp to gather food from the swamp for the next night's rations. She did not return Tywi's wave and marched into the crimson dusk without acknowledging her.

  "That old thing has Charm?" Dogbrick asked, unable to believe that anyone with power would appear so aged. "The ogres will be feeding her to the basilisks before too long."

  "Hush!" Tywi scolded. "She spent her last hex-gem yesterday to heal us."

  "Better she'd have used it to get us out of here." He moaned, seeing Whipcrow watching them from atop a wagon.

  With a curt gesture, the manager assigned them once again to the scavenger detail, and they glumly fell into line and accepted from an ogre their meager rations of tubers and berries. They said nothing more until they shuffled with the others toward the beach. Then Tywi questioned, "How'd you get your beastmarks?"

  "No wizard put them on me, if that's what you mean." He straightened proudly. "My parents were beastfolk, what little I remember of them. Like most of my kind, we had little Charm, and after the house fire that killed them, I had none but what I could steal for myself. But I tell you, if I had all the Charm of a wizard, I would not imitate the wealthy. Those with Charm remove their beastmarks and pretend to be wholly human. I will always be just what I am."

  "So, Owl Oil was wrong to say you wanted to be human?"

  "Am I man or am I beast?" Dogbrick lifted his bearded head ruminatively. "With those such as I, that is ever the question. But a sibyl has already answered that for me. How I die decides that! And I tell you I will die a man, because in me the beast serves the man."

  "That's why you was quoting the Gibbet Scrolls in your pain?" Tywi asked.

  "Of course." He thumped his chest and winced from the pain of his hurt flesh. "It is big inside a human heart. There is room there for every nobility and every iniquity. To be a beast, instincts are enough. But to be human, one must be a philosopher."

  At the beach, under fuming constellations, Whipcrow separated them. He sent Dogbrick out to net the waves with another burly man, and he assigned Tywi to rake the sand.

  "I have been kinder to you this night," the manager whispered from behind her, making her jump. "I can be kinder yet if you favor me. Dogbrick, too, can be spared the difficulties that await him."

  Tywi glared at him and said nothing.

  Whipcrow wanted to seize her on the spot, but he dared not act on his impulses, not with the warlock's invisible presence skulking about. Instead, he came to her again throughout the night, taunting and threatening. Yet not once did she speak to him, and he began to plan more deceitful ways to get what he wanted.

  At dawn, he assigned her to a hut apart from Dogbrick and contemplated how to get her alone with him in his garden chamber at the Palace of Abominations. There, among the blossom trees within the green and blue glass walls, he plotted. By day, he knew, the warlock drifted entranced. He could bring Tywi to this place without any fear of discovery. And though there were many women among the captives that he could take, he wanted Tywi, for she had significance to Dogbrick and he sought vengeance on the thief who had defied him.

  By noon, he had resolved simply to carry her off. Who can stop me? he reasoned and marched with bold strides to the labor camp. Outside the hut where Tywi slept, he stopped abruptly, seized with icy fright. In stark daylight moved a slim, pearly shadow of human proportions, disembodied and wobbly as water shine.

  Ralli-Faj! Whipcrow feared and quickly retreated from the camp, running headlong down the mossy path, cloak flapping birdlike as he disappeared in the shadows of the forest's fallen behemoths. He did not look back, not even when an ogre awoke in its sleep basket at the crest of a tree and called after him.

  In the palace, returned to his residence among flower trees and blossom hedges, he clutched the large power wand that was his walking staff and soothed his tripping heart with Charm. No woman, no vengeful act, is worth the risk of inflaming the warlock's wrath, he decided, glad that the shimmering shadow had not pursued him. From then on, he determined, he would confine his brazen harassment of Tywi to the night. And with that resolve, he passed through an arbor of black roses to a garden alcove where a crystal sphere hovered. He stood there, laving himself in its fragrant breeze, readying himself for soothing trance.

  Had he dared to confront the shining shadow he confronted in the camp, he would have known at once it was not Ralli-Faj. Several paces closer and he could have discerned a face within the vague man shape—the fierce and decisive features of the wizarduke, Lord Drev.

  / |

  The wind glossed like silk around the wizarduke's body of light and bore the contours of his form bleared yet recognizable. The somb
er shade of his face did not waver when Whipcrow approached nor gloat when he fled. Tempered by the loss of his dominion and endless days wandering the badlands of the Qaf, Lord Drev carried the silence of the stones that drank the blood of his lost troopers. He felt no fear or delight at his own fate, only proud and tense expectancy at finding his way to the one woman on Irth bound to him by blind destiny.

  Blind no more, he exulted, entering the hut where she slept. At grave jeopardy to his life, he had left his physical form in a deep trance at the other end of the world, in a volcanic cave among the lava fields of the Qaf. Trolls could descend upon his body at any time, and Leboc and his remaining troopers would have to use their firecharms. And then the cacodemons would come again.

  It was a terrible risk and maybe without purpose: The wizarduke did not know what he hoped to achieve by following the charmlines that connected the newt's-eye in his shoulder guard to this hut. During his many nomadic days in the wasteland, he had slowly developed the connection, gradually intensifying the dim fatefulness he sensed in the newt's-eye until it thickened to a tangible filament he could follow with his Charm.

  The thread of fate led him through a slanted doorway of dried moss into darkness riddled with splinters of daylight. Twenty slumbering bodies crowded the interior. Yesterday, he had come this close but had been unable to focus his attention sufficiently to see anything clearly. A night of charmwork, adjusting the focus of his power, returned him to this sordid camp with keener sight, and now he stared about at the primitive hovel with thick unhappiness.

  He had hoped to find the woman fate had selected for him in better circumstances, and now he only wished that she had her health. In this starkly crude hut, he sensed no Charm or any of its virtues. The sleepers looked haggard and shrunk to their bones, their clothing shredded remnants. The men, nearly faceless in their wild beards and tangled hair, and the women, dirt smudged and mottled with scabs and scratches, seemed weary denizens of a prehuman epoch.

  The filament of Charm guided him among bedraggled bodies to a young woman, no less filthy than the others, with lanky hair the color of withered brown reeds. Her slight body and the bleak hollows of her eyes and cheeks evidenced her humble origins, and the wizarduke pondered how it must have been for her to have come from Irth's sadder regions, charmless all her life.