The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  "I did, Rett." Wrat flushed with insane mirth. "I killed you for your blood. And now here you are, back on Irth. As ghosts. And the Dog Dim says I lied!" He laughed so hard vision bleared.

  When he could see again, a man without a nose and with no upper lip but bare brown teeth and purple gums glared at him. "We are ghosts, and the demons come again to pull us out of the air! You tell us why, Wrat. You tell us why we had to die so that you could have demons at your side instead of men."

  "Men!" Wrat tried to sit up but succeeded only in thudding his head against the floor, so drained was he of strength. "You had your chance as men, Skull Face. I led you out of Nhat as men. And as men you climbed the stairs of heaven to the domain of the Peers. You had your big chance. But you failed."

  "We failed together," said a short, towheaded youth with sad eyes. "We should have stayed together on the Dark Shore. We were the Bold Ones, Wrat. We could have ruled that world."

  "Rule the Dark Shore? Rule the gutter of the universe? How long would we have ruled, Little Luc? How long before some illness wasted us? Or old age shriveled us on our bones? Bah! When we found those pathetic gremlin kings who thought us magicians returned from hell, you saw a chance to use their magic to rule a small world. I saw the way back to Irth. To freedom. From sickness and decrepit old age. I saw the way back!"

  The six wraiths that had spoken retreated into night shadows, depleted of their thin energy. Only one remained, a tall, pallid man with lustrous red hair and regal bearing.

  "Go ahead, Piper." Wrat spoke bitterly. "Spit your venom like the others."

  Piper said nothing, only stared from somnolent depths.

  "Come on," Wrat cajoled. "You were always one for sweet words. Let's hear your sweet tongue speak sour."

  Piper said not a word but stepped back silently into the enclosing shadows. From there, he stared with a solemn look of mute pity pressed upon his noble features.

  "You're as much a fool as the others," Wrat cried out and choked on his ire. He coughed fitfully, then spat blood. "Don't look at me like that. I'm not the pathetic one. You are. You're the ghost. I'm alive. I'm the Dark Lord! Hu'dre Vra! The whole of Irth kneels before me!"

  To his mouth the phantom lifted a reed pipe and blew a sad and flimsy tune. It was the music of their earliest days together as scavengers on the tidal flats of Nhat. That tune, sometimes jauntier, had accompanied them on their quest for glory and, sometimes with a noble lilt, had comforted them in their despair.

  "Blow your weepy little song, you fool!" Wrat shouted and found in his anger the strength to sit up. "You can't touch me with that! I laugh at all of you! You're all fools! You ate your defeat at the hands of Drev and his Peers. You ate it and would have lived out your puny lives on the Dark Shore, kings of the sewer! But I won't eat defeat! I'm going to make Drev eat it! And all of Irth will join him!"

  In the darkness of night, the music veered away.

  "You're all fools." Wrat chortled again and wobbled to his feet. His chest ached where the gremlin had pushed through, and he pressed a fist to his sternum. "Don't you ever do that again," he warned the thing inside him. "We have a world to destroy. If we have to swallow some pain to do it, so be it. And if we have to die, you little bloodsucker, it won't be because of pain or panic. You hear me? Death comes to us. We will not run into its claws."

  He stood at the window and looked upon snowfields radiant blue under star fumes. Cacodemons fell toward him through the void. He could feel them. Their approach hammered iron dents in his blood cells, banging strength back into his body.

  Soon he could see them, a black spiral against the sidereal incandescence. They funneled down toward him. Pieces of darkness settling out from the spaces between the star webs, they came at his silent summons.

  He climbed onto the sill and raised his arms. His skinny nakedness swelled, and he felt the evil puppet in the cave of his heart jerk taller, yanked upright on taut strings of blood. Shadow leaked from his pores. It shimmered darkly over his skin like fur, and his pallid flesh disappeared beneath a pelt of darkness.

  Cacodemons descended from the sky's luminous spirals and hung in the dark air before him. Big and silent as totems, they watched him with glass-bead eyes and monstrous thoracic faces. No will in heaven or Irth could match the hideous wrath compacted in their hulking and sinuous shapes.

  He drew on their power. The penumbra enclosing him widened, expanding into glossy curved plates of barbed armor. A cowl of black-glazed mirror covered his rat profile, and he enlarged to the size of a cacodemon. He stepped through the Charm pane and off the windowsill.

  / |

  Across the span of night, Hu'dre Vra flew with his gang of monsters. A delirium of cruelties occupied his mind the entire flight—tortures he designed and perfected for the punishment of the witch queen who had betrayed him. But when, after midnight, they reached the ragged fringe of the mountain forest and alighted on the rocky slopes where demonic carcasses lay dismembered and reeking, weakness stymied his rage.

  The slain demons did not rise in the nocturnal tide but remained in the obscene postures of their dying, rapidly decomposing. A haze of decay pooled over each corpse, and viscous shapes turned and mutated in the air. Fetal gnomes and hellish marionettes hung cobwebbed in sticky fumes above the mangled bodies. These were the squalid souls of the newly dead, greenly luminescent, astonished to find themselves alive and disembodied in the Charmed night.

  The sickly presence of these ghosts depressed the imp caged in Wrat's heart and sapped his vitality. His knees wobbled, and the jointed seams of his armor buckled.

  With a defiant cry, Hu'dre Vra raised both arms to the sky. Lightning crawled across the treetops, and a brisk storm front scattered birds and leaves out of the forest. A wind drove by, dispersing the effluvial floss like smoke, and the figurines of chimerical souls flew off in wisps of mist.

  Unhappiness loomed in the Dark Lord. He fisted both hands above his helmeted head as if trying to drag the star-chains down from their celestial moorings. A gale howled over the forest. The trees bowed their heads in unison. Pebbles scampered downhill, and the husks of the dead cacodemons stirred, rolled, and fumbled nearly upright. Severed limbs winged away, dissolving to ash and smoke as they flew.

  Hu'dre Vra shouted furiously, and the tempest shrieked downward with a vertical force that smashed the corpses to powdery pieces. Reduced to debris of humus and pulpy decay, the slain cacodemons swirled away with the wind.

  Stillness settled over the cleared killing ground. The Dark Lord reviewed the boulders gnawed by charmflre, their edges melted, fused sharply, and stained with flame streaks. He put a hand to the glassy scorch marks and shook his head. This was a danger he had not foreseen.

  The hundreds of survivors from this horrendous battle waited farther up the grassy rise in the forest. He signaled, and they came forward bearing Thylia among them. She dangled unconscious, and he realized then that she had suffered to fight his enemies. What ire toward her remained in him evaporated at the sight of her blood-streaked face, and he felt pride in her ferocious effort.

  The cacodemons lay her on the weedy ground before him and stood back.

  "Rise, Thylia," he directed, placing a hand atop her head, over the gash in her brow. The Charm of her amulets obeyed the pressure of his touch, and the head wound sealed at once and smeared away. Her lids fluttered open.

  "I have failed you," she said with obvious trepidation and did not move.

  "On your feet." He beckoned. "Drev may have escaped for now, but you have won for me new understanding of my vulnerability."

  She rose slowly, surprised to find herself whole. The scalding effort of summoning lightning had knocked her unconscious beyond the healing reach of her Charm. She peered meekly at the Dark Lord. "You are not angry?"

  "I am enraged," Hu'dre Vra snarled. "But not at you. Irth will feel pain for what Drev has done here this night." He turned in a majestic circle to confront his minions. "Irth will feel pain!"

 
In a vortex, they rose into the night and flew south, away from Andeze Crag. Thylia hung close to her Dark Lord within the processional sky. Relieved to escape Wrat's fury and anxious about their destination, she dared not ask and disturb the madman's delicate peace with her.

  She stretched into her flight, in the warm and soothing current of the Dark Lord's magic. Under the blind stars in the indifferent dark, she and the hundreds of cacodemons aloft on the night wind locked into their trajectories as securely as the orbits of the spheres beyond. She glanced about at the others. Limbs and tentacles tucked back, flanged viper jaws thrust forward, they drifted sleekly against the splattered stars.

  / |

  Dawn spread a green mantle over the eastern rim of the world when the glassy spires of Dorzen rose before them. The floating city emerged from mountainous amber clouds high above the cliffs and exploding surf of Ux. Gulls wheeled among crystal-domed belvederes and swooped under buttresses and arcs of hanging sidewalks.

  Flying closer, the source of the gulls' frenzy came clear: Corpses hung by their twisted necks from the city's renowned suspended sidewalks.

  Dead bodies also depended from the giant serpentine sky arch. No commerce moved upon the city streets.

  Hu'dre Vra signed for his cacodemons to assume posts upon the tower summits, and he and Thylia flew directly to the opulent crystal palace. They entered through the mammoth arcade of sardonyx columns. In anticipation of their arrival, the gold pylons stood open upon the vaulted, marmoreal court where once the wizarduke had reigned.

  Lady Von, in the gray and mauve veils of a witch dancer, waited there. Beside her stood a tall, blond man with a handsome eagle's frown. He wore a jumpsuit of spun gold. They awaited the Dark Lord before the hall's marble altar under the tiered court galleries packed with cacodemons. At the approach of Hu'dre Vra, they bowed abjectly and offered sonorous greetings.

  The Dark Lord ignored them. He had come to stand in Lord Drev's central court from which he could activate the gem-star that the ladyship of sorcery, Luci Ux, the wizarduke's grandmother, had installed above Irth. By its charmlight, he could speak to the palace cities in all the dominions.

  The blond man separated from the diminutive Lady Von and advanced toward Hu'dre Vra, head bowed. "My lord, I must address you."

  "What is it, Romut?" the Dark Lord asked, surveying the groined vaults above him and finding to his satisfaction that the gem-star projectors had not been vandalized.

  "Lord—" The hazel eyes under their ledged, blond brows stared suspiciously around the barbed plates of Hu'dre Vra's armor at Thylia. "You brought her here? The witch queen? Is that wise, my lord?"

  Hu'dre Vra finally paid full notice to the muscular figure at his side. "Romut, what are you doing in that absurd disguise?"

  Romut splayed his hands across his capacious chest. "It's a skin of light, lord."

  "I know what it is, fool." The Dark Lord stood disapprovingly. "Why are you wearing it?"

  "It is my wont, my lord." Romut smiled abashedly, his blond face imploringly lifted toward his master. "I am so ugly. I cannot bear to look at myself."

  "I prefer to see you as you are. I have no fond memories of your last disguise."

  Romut lifted both arms and nodded vigorously. "Of course. Of course. Yet that skin of light saved my life, so that I could be here now to serve you. Otherwise—well, my lord, you yourself told me that had I been with the others—well, you know..."

  The Dark Lord's angry voice in the enormous hall lifted toward echoes. "I would have murdered you, as well."

  "Yes, exactly." Romut smiled timorously and glanced at the two witches, who watched with cool remoteness through their diaphanous veils. "My lord, please." He slumped his shoulders humbly and peered up meekly at the black armorial mask. "May I speak with you in private? For a moment?"

  "I have much work to do."

  "This is important."

  "It had best be." They strode across the hall to an alcove of pillars entwined with marble ivy.

  Romut's noble brow creased with anxiety. "My lord, I have seen them again—just this last night."

  "Who have you seen?" the Dark Lord asked impatiently. "What are you talking about?"

  'The Bold Ones," Romut blurted and gnashed his teeth with fear. "I saw them. I mean to say, I saw their ghosts."

  "Did you?"

  "Oh, yes." He nodded with such vigor his curly blond locks fell over his eyes and he had to brush their fleece aside. "Seven of them—the ones you murdered. I saw them. They spoke with me!"

  "Did they?"

  Romut stepped back a pace. "My lord, you mock me."

  "I mock your fear. You should know better, Romut, than to fear ghosts."

  "They say terrible things, my lord."

  "Yes?" The Dark Lord's voice rumbled like muted stirrings in the tectonic depths of Irth. "Did they rail at you that I murdered them, one and all, in a slow and horrible way so that I could climb the ladder of energy up through the Gulf and return here?"

  Romut shook his head and tossed his golden hair back. "Worse, my lord."

  "What did they tell you?"

  "They say—they dare to say—well, they say that you are mad—that you are insane."

  "Do you doubt it?"

  “That you are … insane?" Romut's upper lip twitched, and he blinked several times. "I—I should think not. You are the Dark Lord!"

  "I am insane, Romut."

  Romut's hazel eyes grew large. "You—are?"

  "How could I not be?" The fathomless mask pressed closer. "I have fallen into the Gulf. I have walked upon the Dark Shore. I carry inside my heart the very evil of that place. And by that evil I will bring death to all of Irth."

  "All of Irth?" Romut backed away another pace, wringing his hands. "My lord, surely once the Peers are dispatched—"

  “The Peers!" Hu'dre Vra straightened, fists upturned before him. "They are my personal revenge. The rest belongs to the evil inside me. But first the Peers." He turned toward the great hall. "Come. Drev has dared strike at my cacodemons. I must punish Irth for that."

  "Wait, my lord." Romut jumped forward. "The witch queen. Is it wise to have her here?"

  "She gives me pleasure, Romut." A soft laugh silked through the needle-toothed baleen of the ebony mask. "You know they are trained in special ways to please the sages. Ah, but you must by now have experienced those special ways from Lady Von. Does she not please you?"

  "Oh, very much." He affirmed this by clasping a fist over his heart. "Her witch ways have given me delights I never expected. That's just it, my lord. She is a witch. Witches work some kind of magic older than Charm. Some kind of power from their Goddess. It is dangerous to bring her together with the witch queen. They say of their Goddess, 'When two witches travel together, She walks as the third.'"

  "The sisterhood does not concern me." He stepped out of the alcove. "They are interested only in helping the charmless, bringing comfort to the poor, and worshipping with the sages the old gods."

  "The Three Blind Gods." Romut spoke in a fearful hush and hurried to his side. "Her three consorts—Death, Chance, and Justice. She guides them on their blind way. And Her witches attend. My lord, please, do not underestimate their power."

  "Their power presented no obstacle to us when we rose up as the Bold Ones." The Dark Lord spoke while walking.

  "Surely, you remember, lord?" Romut turned so that he walked backward and could look up at the blood glow in the adder sockets. "I made peace with them for you. I promised them that the Bold Ones would never violate their coven houses or the sanctuaries of the sages. And, as you say, they strive to help the helpless and indigent—and as the Bold Ones, we championed the lowest, as do the witches."

  The Dark Lord stopped in mid-stride and stood in wide stance. "But now, Romut, old friend, I champion only myself, is that it?"

  Romut waved both hands in firm denial. "You are the Dark Lord, lord. You are a new and greater order."

  "Ah, yes. My new order has been threatened
. I have some work yet to do to maintain my law and my order. Come, Romut."

  "But the witches..." Romut pleaded, scurrying beside the giant.

  "They are no threat to me," Hu'dre Vra intoned confidently. "I am the Dark Lord—master of all Irth."

  He is indeed mad! Romut thought and followed worriedly.

  From the center of the court's spiral mosaic, Hu'dre Vra gestured at the coped ceiling, and a wet shaft of gemlight illuminated him.

  Romut walked swiftly to the altar and placed himself between Lady Von and the witch queen.

  Together, they watched as tableaux of courts from across Irth wavered into view like mirages encircling the wide hall. Apart from the hung skin of the warlock Ralli-Faj in his chamber of delicate trees and aqueous glass walls, no other Peers showed themselves.

  Passersby stood gawking, arrested by the sudden holographic appearance of Hu'dre Vra. He turned regally so that all might view his grim countenance. "Hear me, denizens of Irth," he intoned gravely. "Continue to obey me and no further harm shall come to your cities. Defy me and death will descend upon you as swiftly and surely as doom befell Arwar Odawl."

  He gazed into the startled faces, searching for fear, and found it abundantly. Most of the once-noble courts had been converted to markets. And where Peers had formerly trod exclusively, commoners milled about among their stalls and makeshift theater platforms.

  "Those who dare strike at the cacodemons I have set over you will know painful death," the Dark Lord continued. "I will tolerate no acts of violence against your masters. In the dominion of Mirdath, the renegade Drev has dared attack my legions. For that affront, I will savage Mirdath and the communities of the Falls. Behold this terrible retribution and know the horror that awaits all and any who stand against me."

  At the sweep of his hand, the gemlight disappeared. To the stacked galleries he raised his voice, "Go and destroy Mirdath. Tear to pieces every village, hamlet, and thorpe. Not a stick left leaning on a rock. And pull down the pillars of Mirdath's capital, the City in the Falls. Slay every Peer and all others who oppose you. Go—and bring death to Mirdath!"