The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  Thylia waved the emerald eye charm before her until she felt the precise direction. She pointed the way, propelled through tilted and dazzling heights by a cold stream of black magic. And the cacodemons in their hundreds followed, rivering among cloud chasms.

  Flight above the rageful mists of the mountains took far longer than the witch queen had imagined. When the emerald in her grasp indicated that the wizarduke hurried through the forest directly below her, the Abiding Star shivered red in the treetops.

  Grassland tumbled in steep bluffs and tottering boulders toward a misty horizon: the sprawling Falls of Mirdath, a turbulent gulf of exploding water.

  The wizarduke and his five men leaped and cantered downhill. They spun around the monoliths in their way. Their long shadows bolted beside them. They had seen the sky full of cacodemons in their niello eye charms before the armada loomed like a storm front, and they barreled over this stony terrain with arm-flailing abandon.

  The falls hovered at an impossible distance, and Lord Drev had abandoned that goal while still among the trees. Instead, he sought a particular chute among the sinkholes on the slope. The sharp-eye amulet in his grasp felt the thin dry thread of Spiderland. This arrived as a scent from a charmway hidden somewhere among the falls. The distinct odor leaked out from one of the sinkholes ahead.

  Already he could see that the monstrous flock would descend upon them before they found the right sinkhole.

  "Fix knives!" Leboc bawled when the roars of the approaching legion fell upon them like chunks of thunder.

  "No!" the wizarduke countermanded. "Too many to fight." He stopped running, and the others staggered to a stop around him. "We have to use the boulders."

  "Avalanche?" Leboc queried, his raptor hood shaking with disfavor. "We'll crush ourselves."

  "Not avalanche." Drev unshouldered his firelock, aimed at a thrust of rock, and hit its edge with a white-hot stroke of charmlight. Arcs of lava sprayed upward with projectile force. "Breakaways."

  Leboc scanned the front of the advancing horde and the placement of boulders around them, and he swiftly deployed the three troopers and found a firing position for himself.

  Drev took Ripcat's hand and pressed into his palm the crystal rhomboid of the sharp-eye amulet. "Feel out the sinkhole where this amulet leads," he ordered. "When you find it, press the amulet to your brow and call for me. I will hear you. Go!"

  Ripcat bounded away, at first feeling nothing, simply eager to comply. Then, he sensed it—a faint tremolo of vibration within the amulet that varied as he pointed the crystal. It led him through the scarlet glow and stretched shadows of twilight among tall slabs of rock and grassy bluffs.

  In the distances below him, mists from the extensive torrents and cascades of the Falls of Mirdath rose with the wind, frayed, and caught the setting light in red sparks and hot fumes blown high into the atmosphere.

  The thief heard Leboc shout, "Hold fire! Hold!" And he glanced over his shoulder to see the five hooded men kneeling in the sparse grass, firecharms poised. Above them, a black wave of cacodemons descended. A veiled woman, a witch, dove forward with them. Her gray robes furled like smoke and her amulets shone sharply like broken facets of twilight.

  The deafening roar of the demon army smothered the sound of Leboc's commands. He raised his left arm high, withholding fire until the dread shadow of the multitude fell upon them. With claws and fangs thrust open to strike, the murderous throng swooped to the attack, and Leboc dropped his arm and opened fire.

  Blinding bursts of charmfire blazed in wide enfilade, struck the blunt edges of rubble stones and boulders, and scattered fiery trajectories of burning rock across the purple gloaming. The front ranks of cacodemons exploded under the searing impact. Limbs, skull shards, and looping coils of viscera flew into the night.

  Wrecked bodies collided with the onslaught behind them, and more cacodemons tumbled into the lethal fire of shattered rock.

  The witch queen rose higher, bullets of stone ricocheting off the invisible mantle of Charmed protection from her ruby tiara.

  Leboc sighted her and released several direct bursts in her direction. Most sliced brightly under the evening's hieroglyphic stars—until one struck her with a flash that erased the constellations. Her protective tiara fell apart, and she spiraled Irthward.

  Two cacodemons seized her, one by each arm, and lowered her to the corpse-strewn ground.

  All around her, the throngs continued their assault, shielding themselves with carcasses and dashing left and right, trying to outflank the shooters. Leboc had positioned the gunmen to chip away at the rocks from every side, and dozens more cacodemons fell before the blazing projectiles.

  Thylia's trembling fingers came away from her forehead sticky with blood. Another direct hit would kill her.

  With screaming carnage everywhere, she knew she was already dead in the Dark Lord's narrow eyes. She clambered among the mounded bodies, climbing into the line of fire, and cacodemons closed ranks to shield her.

  While they shrieked and died before the withering blasts of stone, she raised her arms toward the sky and a night swept with stars. Intoning her most direful spell, the blood of her brow burning her eyes, she activated the silver fylfot bracelets.

  A great surge of energy gusted upward from the ground through her and toward the breathing stars.

  Her gray robes billowed in the frosty updraft and brightened to silver, and something magnetic flexed in her chest and twisted her heart painfully. She doubled over as if struck, and in the same instant lightnings flared from out of the clear heavens.

  A tree of electric fire reared above her, its branches tangling at the meridian in darkness bleached by radiance and its writhing roots sizzling just overhead.

  With agonizing effort, she straightened. Blood-streaked face warped with pain, she stared through the loud glare, searching for her enemies. The brilliant tracers of their charmlight chewing away at the surrounding boulders located them for her, and she pointed vehemently toward one of them.

  A whipstroke of lightning lashed from the radiant tree and electrocuted a trooper, shriveling him slowly to a burnt husk riddled with crawling worms of blue fire.

  The witch queen clenched against her pain yet remained upright, seeking another target. The bodies of cacodemons hurtled past, struck dead by flying rocks, and she pointed her aching arm in that direction.

  Another branch of the burning tree swung downward and clouted a second trooper. His firelock burst, and green flames consumed him so quickly and thoroughly that only sparkling ashes remained, skirling upward on the thermal current of his pyre.

  Ripcat, running downhill in fits and starts beneath the flaring lightning, stopped to look back at every loud retort. The rhomboid crystal hummed in his grasp, and he stopped short. He teetered before a sinkhole that plunged into utter darkness.

  Pressing the amulet between his eyes, he called against the cacophony of exploding rocks, bellowing cacodemons, and hissing lightning, "I found it!"

  The wizarduke heard him. Drev felt out his direction and signed to Leboc and the remaining trooper to fall back. They sprinted into fulgurant darkness, and the cacodemons pursued.

  "Stop!" the witch queen cried.

  But the cacodemons rushed on, inflamed with blood rage.

  She wrenched herself upright and peered down the stony incline for the wizarduke. She could not distinguish him among the three hooded figures running over the littered terrain. Quickly, before agony crumbled her again, she pointed. A lightning blast jumped down from the sky and struck among the charging cacodemons.

  Several heads detonated, splattering brain matter and skull fragments across the field.

  Angrily and half blind with suffering, the witch pointed again and again and again, stabbing wildly. Three rapid bolts slammed into the slope. Rocks tumbled, and the cacodemons fell back. The wizarduke and his escorts ran unobstructed, and Thylia fought dizziness and molten pain long enough to steady her arm and point directly at them.

>   The next bolt incinerated the last of the Falcon Guard, and he crashed to the ground in a charred mass. The reverberation of the strike jarred the wizarduke and his marshal. Their eyeballs spun in their sockets and their knees buckled. They hit the ground and rolled, bruising themselves among the flinty stones.

  As they lunged to their feet, Leboc cursed. He would not die running scared. He stopped and turned, and, with a furious cry, he tore off his mask, the better to aim. Shooting as fast as he could pull the trigger, he released a luminous volley toward the base of the tree of massive lightning.

  The charmfire splashed harmlessly among the phalanx of cacodemons fronting the witch queen and climbed dangerously higher. A scalding near miss helped Thylia to find the strength to overcome her pain and raise her arm yet again. She gnashed her teeth and pointed down the line of incoming fire.

  Ripcat had disappeared, hidden from the destructive thunderbolts, yet the wizarduke sensed him nearby and ran toward him. So intent was he on following his psychic impressions that he did not realize Leboc did not follow until he heard the distinctive coughing of a firelock.

  He whirled about in time to shout, "Leboc! Stop—" Then the air burned white and the booming blow of destruction kicked him off his feet.

  When vision winced back, he saw the tarry remains of Leboc steaming in a circle of charred soil. He cried aloud with rage, unslung his firelock, and aimed. He got off two rounds before hands grabbed him from behind and hurled him down into darkness.

  He struggled free. By the strength of his amulets, he saw that he knelt on a ledge surrounded by dirt walls. The thief crouched beside him, and he realized that he had been dragged into the sinkhole that they had sought.

  Above, a coil of lightning struck where he had been standing. A shaft of voltaic glare penetrated the sinkhole's depths, briefly revealing a honeycomb of tunnels and shafts.

  "We are the last," Drev said in a weary voice. "They are all dead."

  "They died to save you," Ripcat replied, his eyes iridescent in the dark. He placed the rhomboid crystal in the wizarduke's limp hand. "Let them not have died in vain. Get us away from here before the demons come."

  Drev nodded and lowered himself through the chute to the floor of the sinkhole. "We killed many," he muttered, waving the amulet to feel direction through the maze. "Five against five hundred!"

  "That many?"

  "Maybe more." Drev selected a tunnel tall enough to enter standing. "It grew dark before I could finish counting."

  Ripcat examined the walls with his fingertips and felt smooth contours where water had once coursed. "Where are we going?"

  "Same as before."

  "The charmway? To the Reef Isles?"

  "To the Spiderlands and then Nhat, yes."

  "But there are only two of us," Ripcat protested in the merciless dark that not even his eyes could penetrate. "Wrat has an army of cacodemons."

  The wizarduke answered with determination, "We will recruit others along the way."

  "Perhaps you should go among the dominions and tell the Peers how to fight the cacodemons," Ripcat suggested, thinking it more prudent to journey alone through the land of the enemy. "I will travel ahead to Nhat, to find Dogbrick, my friend."

  "You forget," the wizarduke answered. "I have someone more than a friend awaiting me in Nhat's labor camps."

  “Tywi."

  "Yes. She is my fate."

  "Does she know you are her fate?"

  "Of course," Lord Drev replied at once, and then added quietly, "in her heart—if I can find my way there."

  Three Blind Gods

  Hu’dre Vra knew pain. Among the cushions of silk in the crown suite of the helical tower of Andeze Crag, he twisted with sudden hurt.

  The three naked witches cavorting around him with chromatic ribbons of trance gauze rolled away in a fright. They leaped to their feet at the inhuman sounds that kindled in him. Clutching at one another, they watched with jarred expressions as the small man's skeleton began to glow with blue-white intensity from within the lamp skin of his flesh.

  Pulses of radiance and shadow strobed along the knobs of his spine. And his shining skull throbbed behind a transparent face wrinkled with anguish. Spewing weird howls, he twisted upright. Like a blossom opening, the luminous claws of his ribs parted, tearing his flesh into ragged mummy cloths. And the ruby black heart within him pushed outward, blood webbed and palpitating.

  A snarling face pressed through the sticky maroon wall of the shuddering heart. Thrusting its malevolent gullet and harsh staring eyes into the room, it released a ghoulish cry. Pain shook its ruffles of cankerous flesh, and the witches cried in horror and fled the chamber.

  The evil puppet in its drapes of frayed heart muscle and torn arteries stood hatched within the living body of Wrat, chewing screams. The dying cacodemons tormented it. The hive was dying by the dozen. This suffering ripped the fiend from its hiding, and it writhed in the open air, varnished in blood. Its epicanthic eyes swiveled madly, and its toothy, diabolic grin gnashed incomprehensible maledictions at this crazy world to which it had been carried.

  The killing stopped. The pain ceased and left behind murky ache. The demon parasite spoke softer cruelties, its pike jaw rocking sideways while its split tongue flicked between green-slimed incisors.

  Wrat gaped down at himself and the hellish imp swaying sullenly between the jagged spindles of his split ribs. He moaned the chant he had learned on the Dark Shore from the black magicians of the cold world where fate had delivered him. The tatters of veins and crimson tissues began knitting together, stitching themselves out of the slither of blood.

  That light was the power of this world, the radiance of the Abiding Star that the people of Irth called Charm. To the parasitical gremlin within him, it was pure magic. On the Dark Shore, such magic had to be distilled laboriously out of the void into which it had dissipated in its light-years' journey from the Abiding Star, and the smallest quantities took enormous effort and time to garner. But here on Irth, just as he had promised this demon from the cold world, magic filled the air.

  The Dark Shore chants worked instantly. The ripped-free heart pulled inward, drawing the gruesome and sulky demon back into its glistening cocoon. Silver shining ribs closed over, and with the lost luster of his bones the pale flesh of his hairless chest went opaque and sealed like cooling wax.

  He sat down on the bed and blinked with amazement that he yet lived. From within, he heard the underwater droning of the evil thing that dwelled inside him. It felt betrayed. There was to be no pain. None of its hive was to die. They had come to revel and pillage in the shining fields of heaven.

  The slaughter of the denizens of Irth gave the hive paroxysmal pleasure, joy beyond anything they had known on the Dark Shore. But none of the cacodemons was to suffer. Now forty or more lay dead. The pain had been so unbearable that the diabolic imp had nearly broken free from its host and run raving into the ocean of light.

  Madness! Wrat thought.

  Without him, the gremlin and its entire hive of cacodemons would dissolve in the seething radiation of the Abiding Star. The black magic that united them drew power from the spilled blood of Irthlings that the demons had imbibed: Rett, the Dog Dim, Grapes, Little Luc, Skull Face, Chetto, and Piper. All the Bold Ones who survived the fall into the Gulf with him, all his former comrades, had been ritually slain and fed to the gremlin and its hive. Their blood enabled the power to bind the demons of the Dark Shore to his own Irthly frame and thus protect the demons from the destructive effects of this hot realm on their cold bodies. He was their talisman. They could not live on Irth without him.

  Swaying upright, he stumbled to the window, where he leaned heavily on the sill. He gazed down into a giant snow bowl half scooped in purple shadows from the soft shrouds of surrounding mountains.

  Thylia will pay! he promised the droning gremlin in his flesh. She betrayed me. And she will pay.

  The realization of his vulnerability inspired fear. A few more cacodemons s
lain and he would be lying among the cushions split like a shucked fish. In his giddy rush of power, he had underestimated his enemies.

  Not again, he swore and wobbled away from the window. He lay on the petrified wood floor, feverish and grateful for the cool surface. As soon as Irth turned away from the Abiding Star, his need would summon more cacodemons from out of the Gulf. They would rise to him from the Dark Shore like the cold effluvia they were. And they would fall toward him out of the night sky, drawn to the evil in his heart and the magic strength of his own flesh.

  The hive had drunk of Irth blood. They were bound to him by blood, and they would come in the night with crazy faces leering in their bellies.

  Lying helpless and naked in a scarlet pane of dusk light, he twitched to think of himself dead and his enemies thriving. A voice spoke through the wall of his chest, unintelligible rage. The gremlin's tantrum would become his own as soon as he had strength to bear it.

  Seven shadows advanced from where night pooled in the chamber's distant corners. Seven ragged, unshaven men clad in jute.

  The Bold Ones.

  "The Dead Ones," a turtle-faced man among the group croaked angrily.

  Chetto. Wrat had fed him alive, like the others, to the hive—but the cacomaggots had been sated by the six before him and devoured him most slowly. He had bobbed in the caldera of grubs for days, a screaming skeleton of ulcerous sinews.

  "The Sacrificed Ones," a bald specter accused, clusters of purple polyps on his face shaking with indignation.

  Grapes. Wrat laughed darkly. "Did you really think you would share all this with me?"

  "You lied to us," groused a squat man with the beastmarks of a canine.

  He laughed even louder at this ghost, the Dog Dim. "I lied! Did I lie when I promised that you would be free of scavenging? Did I lie when I swore we would assault heaven?"

  A black man with his beard cleaved by a scar from his ear across his mouth to his chin shook his head. "Wrat, you are a homicidal maniac. We could have lived well on the Dark Shore. You killed us for our blood."