The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  With an echoing uproar, the galleries emptied, and the cacodemons charged out of the crystal palace. Through the oblate panes of the skyroof, they hovered visible against the peach and apricot clouds of morning, a black thunderhead roiling toward the blue zenith.

  "Romut," the Dark Lord summoned, and the tall man stepped away from the altar and presented himself with his chiseled features raised. "The bodies you have hanged from the walk ramps and the sky arch. Who are they?"

  "Peers, my lord," Romut answered with a sharp gleam in his long-lashed eyes. "I have gathered several hundred in warehouses I have converted to prisons. I'm executing them at random, by games of chance whose rules continually change. I think you will find their despair amusing."

  "Show me what you have wrought, cruel Romut." Hu'dre Vra's voice glittered with restrained laughter. Without facing the witch queen, he dismissed her with a brusque wave and mocking tone, "Await me here, Thylia. I would not offend your kinder sensibilities with the horrors my vengeful appetite requires." He hurled a laugh across the court so hard that its echoes tripped over each other.

  / |

  The Dark Lord walked off jubilantly with Romut and his escort of cacodemons, and Thylia and Lady Von found themselves alone in the vast central hall staring bleakly at each other.

  "My queen—" Lady Von began.

  The witch queen silenced her with an uplifted hand. "Say nothing unkind. I am the Dark Lord's consort, and all that you speak to me is spoken to him. Remember, sister, we are privileged among the Peers and so must honor Hu'dre Vra in all that we say and do."

  Lady Von understood at once. "Then, my queen, we shall dance."

  "Yes." Thylia released the stays of her robes so that her witch veils unraveled about her. "Two witches in a hall this magnificent may complete a most wonderful dance."

  Lady Von lifted a power wand from the altar, gestured with it, and released dulcet strains of religious music. To this slow duple rhythm, she initiated the stately turning steps of the archaic Pavane for the Goddess. Such an old and traditional dance, so well known to every witch, allowed the dancers to insert freely signs and code movements, conveying messages. In this way, Lady Von related to her queen the barbarities that the gnomish Romut had inflicted on her and all Ux.

  She danced a ghost-borne account of massacres that left whole villages skewered on spikes—the villages through which the Bold Ones had once been escorted in shackles, defeated by Lord Drev and on their way to the night cliffs and the plunge into the Gulf. She danced the terrors of the Peers. She danced flames and screams and the razor claws of the cacodemons and the pitifully slow and anguished deaths of Peers stripped of their amulets. She danced their pain and the lewd laughter of Romut. And, finally, she danced before the salt gates of grief, recounting the atrocities committed on her body by that half-human creature.

  In reply, Thylia's dance steps wove a cloth of compassion out of the shadowy air and the streamers of her flowing veils. Then she danced the truculent lust of the Dark Lord that had ripped her body and ripped her again each time Charm healed her. And, at last, she revealed the battle on the stone hills above Mirdath and how the wizarduke and his few men stood off five hundred cacodemons and slew forty.

  "Can it be so?" Lady Von asked aloud, abruptly stopping her dance.

  The witch queen danced on, silently describing the vulnerability of the cacodemons to physical assault.

  "Charm!" Lady Von marveled. "For so many generations, Charm has been our strength. We were not prepared to accept it as our weakness."

  Thylia signed her again to silence, and the two danced to a more triumphant tempo, exploring hopeful implications of the witch queen's discovery. They danced war. They danced the forms of killing. Sword flourishes, lance thrusts, arrow volleys hurried their steps. Until, sullenly, they slowed before the terror to be visited upon Mirdath.

  Lady Von spun a question, wondering if Thylia could somehow persuade the Dark Lord to withdraw his lethal order to destroy the City in the Falls. The sisterhood needed time to circulate news of how to destroy the invaders.

  The witch queen's sad dance stopped. She shook her head.

  Lady Von gracefully reflected her understanding, unpacking quick, whipped steps that showed Hu'dre Vra's fear of his cacodemons' vulnerability. Then she too stopped. Mirdath was doomed.

  / |

  Out of the long colonnades, maniacal laughter scampered. Wrat and Romut returned from viewing the torment of Dorzen's Peers. Flanked by cacodemons, they entered the central hall and amused themselves with the gem-star. In its charmlight they viewed the flight of the assault demons toward Mirdath. At Wrat’s command, the visuals channeled to the courts of every major city so that all Irth could behold the wrath of Hu'dre Vra.

  Romut ordered a feast, and banquet tables replete with silver trays of the most sumptuous delicacies and flagons of dew-wine floated from the alcoves. The cacodemons retreated into the dark archways. Charmworkers, with hot-colored ruffles and satin costumes, entered in flurries of trance vapors. At their appearance, mesmermur music lilted among chords of subtle perfumes.

  Hu'dre Vra dropped his armor in a vortex of thistledown and appeared out of the swirling feathers as Wrat, garbed in chrome mail and purple tunic. "Take off that ridiculous skin," he commanded Romut.

  The gnomish man complied at once, peeling away the illusion with one swipe of a power wand. Revealed in his squat, long-skulled form, his scowling face swung about expecting insults. Receiving none, Romut grinned with one side of his mouth, thick lips curling away from tarry teeth.

  Wrat invited him to the table, and the two sat together chortling and guffawing. The morose witches sat opposite them, eating little and muting themselves with soporific drafts of charmsmoke. Neither man paid them any heed.

  All that day, the Dark Lord and his comrade feted, watching in the gemlight the horde of cacodemons flying to Mirdath. When the monsters attained their destination early in the afternoon, Wrat cheered their swooping attack upon the farming thorpes, and Romut whistled gleefully.

  Villages burned, and shadow shapes of cacodemons flitted in the smoky depths. The shifting wind rent vapors, revealing a mayhem of murder—crowds toppling over themselves in panic as demons ripped off limbs and heads and gutted those who fled, paying out guts as they bolted toward oblivion—and then the wind turned and stitched together the vapors, reducing the mêlée to a silhouette of clasped shadows.

  Late in the afternoon, the rabid army arrived at the Falls of Mirdath. The horizons of smoking waterfalls and rushing torrents caught the light of the Abiding Star in churning clouds of spray.

  Wrat adjusted the gem-star's perspective to reveal the City in the Falls. Daylight smoked through sheets of falling water in citrine draperies and illuminated a delicate coraline city of chalk towers, shell domes, and rime-melted shapes. Delicate mists wisped among fluted columns. Mica-glinting cornices and plinths and winding friezes stood out, hewn from the pale bones of Irth.

  Cacodemons splashed through the toppling walls of water and attacked the support pillars of the cavernous metropolis. The stalactite walls buckled and leaked briny smoke. Piers snapped, buttress posts burst, and spongoid clusters of dwellings slid away in avalanches of dust and rubble.

  Whole cliff faces groaned and collapsed. Boulders toppled into skylines of spires and towers and razed all to heaps of slag beneath boiling thunderheads of stone dust and mortar.

  Wrat leaped onto the tabletop, hysterical with evil joy. He and Romut peered with proud glory at the ancient gothic city reduced to unrecognizable rubble.

  "No one now will dare attack my demons again!" Wrat exulted and leaped from the table.

  "Nor will any dare offer succor to the fugitive Drev," Romut offered.

  "Yes, his doom is most sweet of all—because he knows now that I dominate all Irth. Everything that once was his is mine—and more." Wrat paced a mad, happy circle through the great hall. "I have the whole world in my grasp. The whole world!"

  "And D
rev himself hides from you like a little animal." Romut wagged his big warty head with delight.

  "Yet he hides." Wrat groaned. "He eludes me. I cannot abide that. He has slain my cacodemons. For that, he must suffer!"

  “Then let us make a game of him," Romut suggested. "We play death with all the other Peers. Why not play with him?"

  Wrat stared sideways at the gnomish man and tugged his lower lip. "What are you saying?"

  "Let us hunt him for sport!" Romut crowed. "Look around you, my lord! We are surrounded by all that once belonged to Drev's own person."

  A happy light flushed the Dark Lord's rat face. "Of course! A seeker!"

  "It can be done," Romut asserted. "We can make seekers for the cacodemons."

  "And for ourselves," Wrat agreed enthusiastically. "We shall use them to find him wherever he burrows. We shall find him—and then we shall have some real sport." He grimaced with mirth. "See that it is done, Romut."

  "At once, my lord." Romut clapped and beckoned the charmworkers.

  Wrat placed his knuckles on the tabletop and leaned his weight on his straight arms, staring at the two witches. "You have said nothing all day, either of you."

  "We share your joy, my lord"—Thylia spoke with effusive sincerity—"without wanting to intrude on a pleasure rightly your own."

  "I'm sure." The flesh between Wrat's murky brown eyes wrinkled devilishly. "Prepare yourself, my queen. We are going hunting!"

  He whirled away from the banquet table, and his ebony armor snapped loudly back into place, leaving only his pointy face exposed.

  Lady Von flinched and placed a tremulous hand on Thylia's arm.

  "You must do what we danced," Thylia told her and squeezed her hand.

  "If I must die myself," Lady Von promised, her lemur eyes wide with fright, "I will see that all Irth knows of what we danced."

  "And what would that be?" Hu'dre Vra boomed from across the great hall.

  "The Pavane of the Goddess, my lord," Thylia answered quickly.

  "The Goddess?" The Dark Lord spoke from under the black shawl of an archway. "What nonsense are you speaking? Or is this treachery?"

  "Neither, my lord." Thylia rose and walked around the table to join him. "I have convinced Lady Von to see that all witches on Irth recall the ancient worship of the Mother of Life, She who bears all. For surely, as we have witnessed this day, there is much suffering to be borne before the Dark Lord."

  "And what has the Goddess to do with that?"

  "She teaches us acceptance, my lord." Thylia strode to his side, speaking with amicable assurance. "Just as you would have the people of Irth accept you, She requires that we accept all that Irth offers, good and bad. That is the significance of the famous quote from the Gibbet Scrolls: ‘The Goddess provides. Life sucks.'"

  "Pithy." He turned his back on her. "Romut."

  The warty man had pulled the skin of light about himself again and stood tall and striking among the harlequin-garbed charmworkers. He left the festive group immediately and came to Wrat with chin to chest. "My lord, the seekers are being prepared at this very moment."

  "Come along," Wrat said, stepping out of his armor. "I want to have a heart-to-heart with you."

  Thylia stepped away, and Wrat waved her to his side.

  "Come, Thylia." He smiled coldly. "You are most dear to me. I should like you to witness this."

  They walked across the expansive hall to a marmoreal enclave crocketed and inset with alternating gargoyle dwarfs and cherubim. Thylia stood beside a winged pilaster carven to an angel's lithe body and watched as Wrat led Romut toward a tall tapered window that admitted frosty light through tinted panes.

  "The death of so many of my cacodemons has weakened me somewhat," Wrat admitted and turned Romut so that they faced each other.

  "Take your rest here in Dorzen, my lord," Romut offered with a generous smile.

  "Oh, I will take whatever I want," Wrat assured him.

  Romut's lips fluttered nervously. "Are you displeased with me, lord?"

  "Pleasure—displeasure." Wrat's long nostrils widened. To a madman, what is the difference?"

  Romut shuddered and made no attempt to hide his fright. "My lord, I—I never once said I believed that—I never said that. It was the ghosts."

  "Yes, the ghosts." Wrat jutted his lower lip, and his close-set eyes jittered, playing over Romut's handsome features. "They are right, of course. I've told you that. And you know it is true."

  "You suffered on the Dark Shore," Romut acknowledged.

  "Oh, indeed." Wrat's sketchy eyebrows lifted. "And you were not there."

  "I am here for you now, my lord," Romut spoke in a voice splintered with fear.

  "And I need you now." Wrat's avid stare hardened, and pearls of sweat glittered at his temples.

  "You are in pain," Romut observed.

  Wrat said nothing. His eyes stared up from under his frowning brows and tightened with dread import. In each of the tiny baubles of sweat sparkling at the bridge of his nose, a minuscule and polished skull grinned.

  "You're going to kill me again!" Romut wailed.

  "No, Romut." Wrat spoke softly, though the pulses in his neck and at the sides of his head throbbed with threat. "I'm not going to take your life." With quavery fingers, he unclasped his chrome-mail vest and pulled aside the purple tunic to expose his pale, bony torso.

  Romut whimpered to behold the flesh palpitating vigorously between the rib slats of Wrat's chest.

  Wrat groaned through gnashed teeth. "I'm going to take your soul!" His breastbone buckled. And the skin unstitched, spitting blood.

  Romut screamed and turned to run.

  Wrat seized his shoulders in an iron grip, and the captive's handsome face twisted ugly with terror.

  A wet, tearing sound split Wrat's chest open, rending cobwebs of veins. Ribs parted like the skeletal fingers of an unclasping claw, and from out of the bloody, viscid interior a hellish doll thrust its shellacked head. Pugnacious jaws flashed fangs in an outraged scowl.

  Romut bawled hysterically. Tiny hooked hands ripped away the gold-spun fibers of his jumpsuit, and the furious puppet's face stabbed its sharp mandibles into his naked flesh.

  Thylia staggered. A gremlin! Such monsters existed on other worlds far into the Gulf, and she had heard of them and their mindless voracity—but never had she seen one. The sight appalled her. Under Romut's wild cries of pain and horror, she could hear the bone-crunching sound of its jaws.

  She willed herself to flee and found her legs numb, wobbly, slipping from under. She sagged to the ground, hand to mouth as if to yank forth the scream that had lodged soundlessly there.

  Locked in Wrat's steely grasp, Romut writhed, howls drowning in blood, gargling strangled sounds. His head lolled, yet his eyes remained alert and staring.

  The imp's dented skull vanished in Romut's thorax, shaking the man's body, rummaging for the pith of him. The skin of light flickered, and the gnomish body appeared and disappeared several times before the illusion sloughed away and left Romut's dwarfed figure shivering convulsively in Wrat's grasp.

  The pain stopped. Though the chewing sounds continued smacking and crunching, Romut's terrified eyes relaxed. Their black mirrors reflected Wrat's face, which carried suddenly a woeful stricken look.

  Something remarkable was happening. Romut found himself not dying but living stronger. The imp that had burrowed its cephalic abhorrence into his body was not killing him. It had fused somehow with the life force in him. Greater strength annealed with his being, and he dazzled with energy.

  Wrat, however, appeared weaker, jaw slack, eyes rolling white. The might of the Dark One entered Romut. All the bereaved dimensions of pain and fright collapsed, and he filled with visceral power.

  Colors brightened, and the enclave appeared incandescent. Sounds deepened, and he heard Thylia's panting fright and the crinkly collapse of the tissues in Wrat's body as the energy drained from the Dark Lord and his flesh shriveled.

  Wrat's ski
nny body shrunk to its bones, desiccated as a mummy. Romut swelled larger, and the hole torn into his body glowed. An erotic charge of well-being suffused from there. The squirming gremlin impaled inside him buzzed with magnetic fervor, electrifying his spine and sending cool tremors through his brain.

  These windy pulses of energy amplified reality for Romut. He gazed about with regnant clarity. The marble enclave disclosed all its secrets: He felt subtle drafts from the hidden door in the wall beside the pilaster, saw every flaw in the floor's stone seams down to the iridescent rays from the crystal fractures in the atomic matrix.

  This socket of marble inconspicuously hewn into a shadow-littered corner of the immense central hall became the exact center of the cosmos. From here, Romut felt as though invisible lines of force connected him to every atom in the chamber and, by extension, to each and every atom in the wide expanses beyond, to the farthest measurable extreme of the universe.

  He glanced at the witch queen on her knees, who looked back at him stunned to silence. And he felt her insides rotten with fright.

  In the shadows, he could see the dead beyond their dying. Ghosts stood within the arched portal watching dolorously—the seven wraiths of the Bold Ones fed to the cacomaggots on the Dark Shore. Their grave expressions offered no hope of pity or forgiveness.

  He dizzied with exultation. The authority of the Dark Lord dwelled within him. Wrat lay dead, his body shriveled to a dried husk. And now Romut reigned, the new master of the cacodemons! He would terrorize Irth in ways Wrat had never imagined. That was why the gremlin had selected him. He was the greater soul, worthy of the cacodemons’ obeisance by dint of his more wicked imagination.

  Derisively, he sneered at Wrat's withered corpse and wondered that such a pathetic creature had ever inspired fear. He shoved the dead thing away—and something broke inside Romut.

  The disgusting imp had not released its hold on Wrat's carcass and instead its warped head, jellied with blood and lymph, pulled free of Romut. It came out with a ghostly cord in its toothy jaws—the transparent umbilical that circulated Charm from the Abiding Star—Romut's soul.