"Tywi?" Ripcat's eyes enlarged in the dark, and he raised his open hand to his shoulder. "She's this tall, with brown hair like burnt brass and buckled front teeth, and a dimple in her chin—"
"You know her?"
"She is a factory waif from Saxar."
"Yes!"
"My partner, Dogbrick, the philosopher, worked with her in Saxar. We found her again in the Qaf—a lone survivor."
While Leboc and the troopers fanned out through the shadowy doors of the forest, searching for threats, Ripcat related how Tywi had miraculously survived the massacre of Lord Hazar's army by cacodemons and trolls and how the three had crossed the Qaf with the corrupt factory manager Whipcrow.
"That explains much," Drev acknowledged, realizing now how vital his Eye of Protection had been in preserving her life. "In trance, I have seen this Whipcrow with Tywi. He works for the ogres now, and she is a scavenger in a labor camp somewhere in Nhat."
"And Dogbrick?"
"I have not seen him. The camp is large. It is not far from where Wrat is building his Palace of Abominations. That is where we are going."
Ripcat tossed a wild look at the forest canopy riddled with powdery shafts of starlight. He felt derelict of his will, under consignment to some wider, more pervasive power. "Your Charm did not bring us together?"
The wizarduke shook his head. He, too, pondered how circumstance and design had so deftly intersected to serve them. "Luck." The word felt odd on his tongue, and he gazed into mid-space as if he could see this peculiar concept turning before him.
"It comes in two flavors," Ripcat said with a vexed expression. "We've tasted much of the bitter."
"I know," Drev said, staring into emptiness, still trying to comprehend this unforeseen serendipity. "I tasted that bitterness with the evil luck that returned Wrat from the Dark Shore. Perhaps, then, this is the counteragency to that misfortune."
"Then we should seize this chance while we have it," Ripcat said. "Is there any faster way for us to get to the Reef Isles?"
"If we take a light cruiser or a dirigible from any of the cities," Drev predicted, "the cacodemons will pull us out of the air."
"Only if they know we're aboard," the thief countered. "If we fly as stowaways..."
"We must trust too many others," the duke said. "That is too risky. There is a better way, a way known by very few. In a cavern among the Falls of Midrath is a charmway—a passage that connects remote areas of Irth. The charmway in Midrath links to the Spiderlands. There, I know of another charmway that will take us into the Reef Isles."
"The Spiderlands—" The thief blew a silent whistle of fright. "I have heard that the spiders there thrive on Charm."
Lord Drev sighed resignedly. "Until the cacodemons arrived, the spiders of that dominion were the only creatures invulnerable to charmfire. We will have to defend ourselves with common fire, our blades—and, of course, luck."
They wandered into the night, wending south through the forest. Foraging as they walked, they made good progress through the rolling country. At dawn, they saw through the narrow windows of the forest the ice peaks of the Malpais Highlands. The wind striding from there chilled them with keen scents of arctic scrub and tundra.
Leboc, hood thrown back, mask dangling against his combat vest, sidled up to the thief. He held out his hands, and Ripcat saw that they gleamed with the palest fire. He glanced down at his own body and beheld a caul of luminiferous air of no color yet distinctly bright.
"It's charmwind," Leboc said. "Thylia, the witch queen of the highlands, has sent it to find us. And it has."
"News of the dead cacodemons has surely reached Wrat," Lord Drev guessed and angrily threw off the cocoon of wind about him. It hung in the air briefly, limp and tendrilled as a jellyfish, then slipped away through the trees. "Now we know for certain that Thylia serves him."
"Who would have doubted it?" Leboc's lump of a nose wrinkled with disdain. "She was never a friend of your regency or our brood."
"What does this mean?" Ripcat asked and tried to shake off the sticky, flimmering wind. It wobbled about him like a gelatinous sheath and would not loosen.
"We are in the witch queen's dominion," the wizarduke said. He slashed his hands downward before Ripcat in an abrupt clawing strike that ripped away the viscous ether and left it dangling from his clenched fists, a crinkled sheet of transparency. "She has the power to send these charmwinds roaming across the Malpais Highlands, looking for intruders. They are invisible to our eye charms, and now that they have found us they have released into the winds our location."
"In a short while, Thylia will know precisely where we are in her dominion." Leboc tore off the gummy ectoplasm in shreds, and it curled to the ground and fluttered away. "When cacodemons come this time, they will come in droves. We must hurry." He snatched away the last patches of charmwind and helped the troopers tearing at the elusive substance.
They fled among stupendous trees, away from the mountain peaks. They ran fast and limber over the tangled root weave. Their tiny figures dwindled smaller among the giant timber vaults and vanished into the gloomy owl distances of the forest.
/ |
Far to the north in the mountain fastness of Andeze Crag, the witch queen Thylia, standing naked before a crystal obelisk, watched Drev with eyes of black diamond. "My charmwind has found them, lord."
Wrat sat up among the colorful silk cushions where he had been pleasuring himself with the witch queen for the past several days. "Drev?" he asked sullenly. "You have left my bed to tell me of Drev?"
"Yes, the wizarduke," Thylia confirmed. She turned away from the arboreal imagery in the obelisk and faced the small man lying among heaped silks. Knobby-shouldered and pale, he physically repulsed her. His pointy face with sharp nose, long nostrils, and obscure chin required all her Charm to bear, especially when his bony hands groped her.
His reptilian lust required constant and slow coupling while his slim murky eyes stared intently, finding sweetness in her woe. Days on end he possessed her, laboring with bestial shamelessness that sickened her soul and would have broken her health if not for Charm. Joy flared in her that morning when her obelisk ignited with news of the wizarduke.
"He will not tarry in my dominion, my lord." Thylia seized the gray veils of her witch habit from the onyx chair where Wrat had thrown them and draped herself. "You must now hurry forth to exact your revenge upon him while he is yet in our grasp!"
Wrat propped himself among the cushions to watch with prurient vigilance as the object of his desire sheathed her nakedness with the multiple and intricate folds of the witch's vestment. He had taken pleasure in tethering his carnal heat to a woman dedicated by convention to the sages—and a queen, at that. He wondered if he would ever tire of this passionate bliss.
"Let the cacodemons savage him," he replied wearily. "His death is a small thing now that I have taken everything from him. I am happy enough that he has been reduced to scurrying like a mouse through the woods, never knowing when the owl will strike."
"You can make him suffer." Her black eyes glittered. "You can make him feel true suffering, suffering that yearns for oblivion."
Wrat dismissed that notion with a distracted sigh. Now that she had tied up her platinum tresses in a hair net and stepped into her fawn shoes, he wanted her naked again. He lay back and lifted his engorgement with one hand. "The greater revenge is not Drev's suffering but my pleasure. Come, straddle me."
Thylia crossed her arms and did not move. "How can you be so indifferent to the man who cast you into the Gulf?"
"Had he not, would I be here now with you for my plaything?" He leered and wagged his phallus at her. "I should thank him for what he did. But he is too dangerous."
"Indeed, my lord." The queen scowled with concern. "You grossly underestimate Lord Drev. He is a formidable wizard, probably Irth's greatest living master in the Lazor lineage of pragmatic wizardry. I do not doubt he could craft an amulet from a pebble and straw."
"Enoug
h!" Wrat sat upright, dark, narrow eyes tightening. "His amulets do not frighten me. I am the Dark Lord! Charm is merely the light of the Abiding Star—and every light casts a shadow. I gather that darkness—and I smother Charm!"
Thylia dropped her arms to her sides and bowed her head contritely. "I do not mean to impugn your greatness, my lord. My love for you insists that I warn you not to ignore the wizarduke. He should be slain at once."
"My cacodemons will destroy him," he said and lay back again, exposing his renewed desire. "Now come—sit on me."
Reluctantly, Thylia edged closer. "He has already killed three of your cacodemons."
"I will send twenty—a hundred."
"Now he knows how to kill them." She knelt among the heaped cushions. "Yesterday he gave you your first defeat. And today, will he escape? Tomorrow, how many more demons will you lose? And what will you do when he finally comes for you, if you do not first go for him?"
"Your fearfulness bores me, Thylia." He rolled to his side and fixed her with a hard gleam in his stare. "If you had not already given me such exquisite pleasure and so freely, I would want to hurt you."
She placed a querying hand softly on his knee. "Are you not afraid of losing all that you have won?"
"Afraid?" He brushed aside her hand and rose to his knees. "Why?" His sharp face flinched. "Witch, I have been flung into the Gulf. I have stood upon the Dark Shore. Do you have any notion what that is like? You have lived a long life of Charm. Well, there is no Charm among the cold worlds." He glared at her ignorance. "The Dark Shore is the cloaca of the universe. Everything the Abiding Star eliminates seeps through the void to that ruder place—every illness, every deformity. And I lived there. I thrived! Steeped in sickness and weariness, surrounded by the ill-shapen and the deranged, I thrived! In those alien reaches, where people are so blunted by suffering they spend a third of their lives unconscious, asleep, unborn, I thrived! To a darker world I went, and I returned stronger. I am not afraid of anything on Irth!"
Thylia did not retreat before his rant but kept her noble features composed, without a hint of the loathing she felt for this graceless churl that accident and ferocity had granted power. "Very good, my lord. I spoke out of love. And now I will keep my silence."
"Love!" His stringy brown hair swung over his eyes as his head snapped back. "Twice you used that word freely with me, witch. Do you truly believe this is love I inflict on you? I have seen the disgust in your eyes. You do not love me. You endure me like a sickness, because if you did not, you would suffer far worse."
Thylia's placid visage offered no sign of distress or the maledictions rising in her. "My lord, I respect you for what you are—a survivor, the only one ever to return from the Dark Shore. When I say I love you, what do I intend but respect, awe, and submission? 'Love is a question.' You are my answer."
"Do not quote the Gibbet Scrolls to me!" He shoved her away so violently she toppled to her back on the stone floor. "I may once have been a lowly scavenger with only the Scrolls for comfort, but now I am the master of Irth."
She rose to her feet and confronted him without rancor or fear, though both competed in her. "I never doubted that, my lord."
"Of course not." He sat among the bright cushions, arms locked across his chest, and his upper lip curled back from wet brown teeth. "Show me your love, then, witch queen. Go and bring to me the head of Lord Drev. I will post it above our conjugal bed so that when I mount you next I can gaze into his lifeless eyes and savor that boldest of unions—passion conjoined with death."
"My lord!" Thylia's jaw rocked loose, and she stepped back a pace. "My Charm is no match for the wizarduke."
"Take as many cacodemons as you want. But go!" An angry tic in his sunken cheek writhed like a lizard under his flesh. "Bring me his head. And hurry. I will have to amuse myself with your court ladies until you return, and they cannot compare to a true queen."
Thylia fled the bedchamber, relieved to be away from the lecher and yet wrung with anxiety about the deadly task he had set her.
Can I slay the wizarduke? she questioned herself, wondering if she had the lethal cunning to match her foe's Charm.
The ancient corridors of hewn stone carved with somber statues of her ancestors offered little solace. Her forebears had been enemies of the Brood of Dorzen since Lord Drev's great-grandfather, the One-Eyed Duke, slew their leaders and forced the Malpais Highlands to submit to the regency.
She passed numerous niches and alcoves outfitted with censers, incense trays, veils, and trance-slings. Witch ceremonies had been the central function of Andeze Crag since the citadel was chiseled out of this mountainside almost a million days ago. Many of the chambers served worshippers who communed with the primal Goddess of life all witches served.
As queen, her bedchamber occupied the highest tier of the spiral tower that corkscrewed down into the grottoes of the metropolis. There, the Dark Lord's cacodemons awaited her. Several hundred had accompanied him when he descended upon her city, and he had posted them among the many vaulted plazas and market squares that conjoined the maze of subterranean streets.
Hu'dre Vra had authorized her to conscript as many of the squamous monsters as she wanted, and she decided she would take them all with her, every one. She was certain that he could summon more if he needed, and for the time being her people, dwellers of perpetual night who naturally feared the beasts skulking about in the dark, would enjoy a respite.
Along the helical ramp that she descended, a wide vista of the highlands opened. She moved swiftly through colonnades of winged sphinxes. Charm kept the icy winds outside, but in pre-talismanic times frosty blasts had scoured these stones, and the sphinxes bore spalls and eroded features from those archaic days.
Handmaidens, witches in traditional gray veils, awaited her at the expansive balcony of tessellated tiles and gorgon pillars where she usually conducted her upper court. At her approach, they scurried to remove the chamois canopies from the Charm lenses where she cleansed and refreshed herself after her ceremonial duties or, of late, her lewd sessions with the Dark Lord. But this day, she waved them aside.
"Send in the Dark Lord's sirdar," she commanded, "and leave us alone."
The handmaidens departed in a whispering of veils, and Thylia paced quickly to her red-veined ebony throne. A tap of her beryl thumb ring opened the Charm drawer in the pedestal, and sparkling trays of amulets fanned before her.
She selected a tiara of hex-rubies potent enough to ward off all unwilled physical contact, and she fit it above the snood that secured her long hair. Fylfot-shaped bracelets of conjure-silver clasped her wrists, designed to call down and direct thunderbolts. About her throat, she placed an obeah cord from which dangled an emerald eye charm. Then, from under the Charm drawer, she extracted a cincture of power wands and tightened that about her waist with dragon-claw clasps of hex-metal.
Outfitted for battle, she closed the drawer with the toe of her shoe. She faced the serpent-coiled portal where a red-splotched black cacodemon awaited her.
"Summon all the others," she ordered. "We are to fly at once to the southern ranges to find and destroy the wizarduke, Lord Drev."
"All?" the sirdar asked in its eroded voice.
"Every one of them—by command of Hu'dre Vra."
“We number over five hundred," it rasped.
"Then over five hundred shall escort me," she replied firmly. "They shall exit at once by the nearest flues and shall flock across the eastern terraces to rise here." She pointed over the balcony at the prospect of snow crags adrift in the mist like crystal sails against the blue zenith. "Obey me now."
The sirdar backed off and silently disappeared down the curved ramp way, its limbless and tentacled hulk floating just above its shadow.
Thylia sat on her throne and contemplated her situation. She did not require Charmed insight or her training as a witch to identify Wrat as psychopathic. Madness festered in him from the cruel days of his sufferings as a scavenger.
In the
chambers of his quiet, when he lay calm with postcoital stillness, she had seen the abominations sloshing like brown sewage down the skewed corridors of his brain. Fevered with rage, he wanted them all dead, all the people of Irth who had lived better than he. From the Peers to the factory workers, they were all to be killed, all dead, dead by the millions, floating pulpy and rotted, bloated purple with death. In his mind, hosts of bobbing corpses lolled slowly in the seaward seethe that flushed their fecal murk into the tide's grimy drift.
All dead, she realized with horror. He means to kill us all.
She shuddered that his rancid brain possessed power none on Irth could defy. She had to obey him. And though her ancestors surely delighted that her hand would kill Lord Drev, the descendant of their mortal foe, she shrank from the task. She had to destroy the wizarduke or be flushed away, herself a carcass. Death did not frighten her. But she did not want to die until she had ruptured the secret of Wrat's magic and discovered how to slay him. From the instant his oily touch first defiled her, she had resolved to deliver his putrid body to the curing mud.
A sibilant summons steamed from outside, and sooty darkness fell across the balcony. Beyond the carven marble balustrade with its gargoyled supports, genuine demons rose. The swarm darkened the radiant sky, and she stepped to the balcony rail beneath a thunderhead of amassed monstrosities.
She raised her arms in summons, and an invisible demonic force gripped her with chill force and lifted her into the air. Complexions of night shifted on all sides as she rose among the packed swarm.
Charm muted her disquiet and thinned the garish stink of demon fetor. Emerald eye charm in hand, she chanted Lord Drev's name, and his image appeared fugitive and small in the caverns of the forest.
And with him ran four Falcon Guards in raptor hoods and combat vests. And a beastman with a pelt of blue nap and a panther's slouched stride. They splashed along a surly stream, charging fast through arboreal shadows where daylight swarmed in hot pieces.
The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1) Page 27
