The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  In an instant, the horrified man-gnome comprehended what had happened. Hu'dre Vra had allowed his servant to partake of glory, to taste power, so that the taking away of that grace would inflict the most scathing injury of all on his psyche.

  With a scissoring bite, the gremlin severed Romut's umbilical of Charm. The ectoplasmic tube spurt vaporous milk and serum, the very effluvia that bound Romut to his body. As the phosphorescent smoke leaked away, its fumes dissolving to nothingness in the air, Romut's consciousness separated from his body.

  Looking down, he observed himself, his big head hanging back, crossed eyes sightless. The doll with its membranous rags and lace of blood vessels swayed as it sucked upon the cut end of his lifeline. The withdrawn effluvia entered Wrat, and his wasted body began to inflate.

  While the enclave tilted and rotated slowly below him, Romut drifted further away. Distinctly, he witnessed the gremlin withdraw into Wrat's chest cavity and the flesh close over it, sealing him whole. Restored to his full vigor, he stood.

  From greater distances and less clearly, Romut discerned his own form moving, hands on his chest feeling for a wound and finding none. He squinted to see how his own form reacted without him there to guide it. But already he had drifted too far to distinguish more than the motion of small figures at the bottom of a shaft of moteless light.

  Horrified, he gaped about and met only darkness. Below him, far, far beyond him, the world of light dwindled. Soon it was no more than a remote star. On all sides, utter darkness ranged.

  Romut shouted with outraged terror. "Lord! Lord! You have killed me again! Bring me back! Bring me back!"

  But the Dark Lord could not hear him, for he had released Romut from Irth and sent the flimsy waveform of his mind adrift in the Gulf. All that remained of him in the marmoreal enclave of the crystal palace's central hall was his body and its animal needs.

  / |

  Wrat walked to the portal, and Romut followed slowly, wearing a mindless stare in the permanent scowl of his heavy face. The Dark Lord offered a hand to the witch queen where she slumped on her knees looking dazed.

  At his gesture, she aimed a cold stare at him. "You're not human. You're not a man."

  He smiled. "I am the Dark Lord."

  "You're the puppet for a gremlin."

  His smile stiffened. "Don't irritate me, Thylia. If you irritate me, we shall see who is the puppet."

  His close-set eyes narrowed menacingly, and she shifted her stare to Romut who waited passively behind Wrat. "What have you done to him?"

  "He hated his body. So, I cut him free from it." Wrat patted Romut's enlarged gnomish head affectionately. "I set his mind free. It plunges now through the Gulf—on its way to the Dark Shore." He offered his hand again. "Come. I have a thing you must see."

  She stood without touching him. "I have seen enough, gremlin."

  His whole face flexed as if setting tighter to his skull. "Call me that again, witch, and you will join Romut."

  Thylia followed him out of the enclave and up a spiral stairwell to a gallery. In the window bay, they gazed upon the luxurious city of Dorzen. A Charm display arrayed like a tabernacle niche, framed in onyx ferns and winged newts beside the window, allowed Wrat to adjust the view. He passed his hands over the controls, and the city vista clouded away.

  When the sheet glass cleared, they peered at the interior of a warehouse where scores of Peers lay about on straw ticks or sat with their backs against corrugated walls, staring listlessly at oil-stained wood boards and splintered rafters. Many clutched amulets. Thylia noticed that a pearly aura of Charm pervaded the gathering and realized that they relied entirely on their amulets to keep them alive. Though each of them appeared impeccably dressed in elegant conjure-satins and tailored trance silks, haggard features betrayed their suffering.

  "They need food and water," Thylia said in a tone dulled with hopelessness.

  The flesh between his eyes pulsed. "They shall have smoke and fire!"

  Flames leaped like bright toads from under the planks, and the prisoners bounded upright, waving their amulets. Charm could not stay this conflagration. In moments, the frenzied throng stood engulfed in the blaze. Clothes and hair ignited, silent screams broke from blistered faces, and the burning, thrashing bodies vanished in twisting smoke.

  Thylia slashed at Wrat with her nails, scoring his cheek and neck and cutting for his carotid. Instantly, she regretted her violent impulse. The wounds healed at once, like water, and he turned upon her a frigid grin. "Look!" he ordered.

  The smoke thinned, and she stared upon the charred and melted carcasses stirring. The dead rose. Ashes peeled and flaked off as the newly immolated stood and gawked about with unnerved expressions. The sloughed cinders wisped away, and soon the Peers touched themselves and one another, shocked to find no damage.

  Flesh throbbed between Wrat's tight eyes, and again flames jumped like luminous frogs. Again, the captives panicked, faces contorted with pain and fear, and fire ate hungrily among them.

  "How many times shall I kill them?" Wrat asked as the churning smoke obscured their view.

  Thylia said nothing. She no longer looked at the window but had sunk her vision into the inhuman entity beside her. She employed her Charm as she had many times before with this ugly man, wanting to see into him, into the nature that thrived there. Always before, he had remained opaque to her Charm. But now, the gremlin let her see.

  Mute and infinite distance opened in him, through him to the Gulf beyond, where all boundaries broke. He embodied darkness itself. He embodied the emptiness that swallowed whole all the light, warmth, and Charm of the Abiding Star. His void held an ocean vaster than planets, wide as the very drift of time.

  The witch queen turned away, feeling cold and abandoned, the vacuum of space blowing through her. In the window, the smoke had cleared. The Peers rose in their shrouds of ash. Their blistered faces healed, and they gaped in terror when the toadish flames leaped again among them.

  She saw yet did not see the world around her anymore. Helplessness gathered its shadows in the placeless place of whatever dreamed in her, and she did not object when Wrat took her elbow and guided her out of the gallery and down the spiral stairway to where Romut waited.

  Together, they strolled back into the central hall. Lady Von sat alone at the banquet table and rose at Wrat's return. The gloom in the witch queen's face and the vapid expression and animal slouch of Romut alarmed her, yet she restrained her emotions before Wrat's leering and searching stare.

  "The charmwrights have prepared the seekers you requested, my lord," she informed Wrat with lowered eyes.

  "Outstanding." He chortled. "Then my queen and I shall be away at once to hunt down the renegade Drev. And you, my dear"—he took her chin in an icy hand and lifted her face to meet his languid gaze—"you shall rule Ux in my absence. I trust you to maintain the stringent standards I require. Do you understand?"

  She nodded almost imperceptibly and stole a nervous glance at the passive, slack-faced Romut.

  "Do not look to your consort for much guidance," Wrat counseled. "He is a changed man, you see. Animal appetites are all that concern him now. You will fulfill those, of course. I expect no less than your complete diligence, Lady Von. Otherwise—well, you shall have to be replaced."

  Wrat turned away abruptly, took the witch queen's arm, and strode off with her toward where charmworkers waited in the dark alcoves.

  Lady Von stepped around the table and stood before Romut. She gazed into his eyes for the thing lost. Out of those obsidian mirrors, her own hapless expression reflected.

  With her Charm, she reached deeper, feeling fearfully for the robust lust of the gnomish man. Instead, she felt darkness, so black that she sensed the animal tread of his heartbeat and the simple hungers of his body parting around her like a school of blind fish.

  Deep in Romut's core, she found the hole where his soul had been. A falling dream began there, and she dared not move too close. No wounds of wanting, no
moods, no soul, only void remained.

  She stepped back and felt her own soul come away stained with darkness.

  Ladder of the Wind

  The Cloths of Heaven was haunted. Wizards and ogres alike avoided these ruins, the most archaic on Irth and infested with wraiths elusive of Charm and greedy for blood heat. When the sorcerer Caval entered the ghost city in the swamp, he expected to find none among the living, and he was not disappointed.

  Old and bent from many thousand days of arduous service as weapons master to the Brood of Odawl and tired from his long journey out of the north, Caval moved slowly. His garb of bright tinsel and blue-gauze windings fluttered around him in a charmwind that filtered the miasmal air for his aged lungs.

  Briefly he stood on a broken old slab of masonry and gazed up at sphinx columns that guarded the entry to the ruins.

  Behind him, the bog quaked and bubbled as the log sank that had carried him over the foggy waterways of the Reef Isles to this gloomy place. No trace would remain of his transit from the Calendar of Eyes to the Cloths of Heaven.

  With haggard visage that seemed hacked from sallow wax, he regarded the porphyry towers draped in moss and the serpent-coil stairways spiraling into cerulean emptiness.

  Hollow voices called remotely from the ruins.

  Caval nodded his approval and advanced wearily among chunks of upturned and silted pavement and into the shadow of the sphinxes. Eventually he made his way toward domed porticos shabby with vines and creepers. The eroded voices came from within.

  The sorcerer hobbled along toppled walls so thick with lichen they appeared melted. With bony hands, he parted curtains of overhanging tendrils. Charmsight enabled him to see in the dark, and there, among fallen entablatures and fractured pillars, he beheld the green ether of the ancient dead.

  Swirling in feculent stench, weightless as smoke, smoldering shapes rose. Arms like tentacles reached for him. Grievous voices swollen with emptiness droned hypnotic chants. Caval felt it tightening in his already stiff muscles, paralyzing him so that the leprous shapes could gather around his blood heat and feed.

  In the afterlife, which was death's slander of life, all spirits became one ravenous hunger. No sentience existed here among these earlier lives, no wisdom to evoke and to converse upon anything but need. For hundreds of thousands of days, these specters of nameless magicians had staved off oblivion and the night ride into the Gulf by cleaving to the warm aura of life. Their magic preserved them—so long as they nourished it.

  Without humans to feed upon, the phantoms had resorted to clawing at slime and pursuing slithers of bog creatures. Burning bitter green and corrosive stains in the air, these shadows of the emaciated damned had nothing human to offer the sorcerer, and he shouted once, firmly and without wrath.

  The force of his Charmed cry cleared not only the portico but the husk of spires beyond. Wraiths seeped out of gaping holes in the stone towers and bled glaucous as rain into the swamp forest.

  Like a wraith himself, Caval shuffled through the dirt and fungal beds of colonnaded passageways to a portal slewed with broken spandrels and collapsed tiles. He waved his hands above his head in small circles, and two globes of cool yellow fire bobbed into the air.

  He sent them spinning ahead through the portal, and they illuminated the giant empty shell of a broken tower—a cavern of cluttered putrefaction: beams jutted from under piled black cobblestones, and a felled forest of broken pillars crouched beneath sagging vaults upheld by dense ganglia of roots.

  Entering the wrecked chamber, he gradually worked through the crazed shapes of crumbled stone, making slow progress to a deeper recess lit from within. In this remote corner of the temple complex, random shafts of daylight stabbed. They illuminated small, florid gardens of air plants and baked a sweet fragrance.

  He joined the two globes of lux-fire and dropped them to the ground under bright vermilion flowers. They cauterized a circle among the sooty debris and vanished with a sparkling flash of ruby dust.

  The sorcerer sat himself at the circle’s cool center and lifted his haggard face into a blue shaft of daylight. Scented breezes stirred his long beard, and a thin smile touched his harsh and cracked lips.

  This was the first rung on the ladder of the wind. From here, his soul could climb into the sky, to the Abiding Star and beyond, to the Beginning. He could not take his body with him, as he might have on the Calendar of Eyes. His flesh would have to stay behind and rot among the swamp dead. But his soul—that could fly higher than time, back to the source of all time.

  Such was his wish. Yet it was only a wish. The sorcerer knew that in a few days the margravine of Odawl would find his hiding place. He had been watching her with his long sight since he had climbed down from the Calendar of Eyes, during his long trek to these ruins.

  That was why he had endured the strenuous travails of secret journeying across Irth to come to this decayed temple. Time and destiny would deliver her to this site—as duty had delivered him.

  Trained as a weapons master in the Brood of Assassins, Caval could not turn his back on the doom of Arwar Odawl, the tiny kingdom he had served his entire adult life. If there had been no survivors among the ruling Peers, he would have been free to ascend to the Abiding Star. But there were survivors and to them he owed the fealty of his training and lineage.

  That had been the purpose he had chanted continually to himself since departing the Calendar of Eyes. Now that he had found a proper place to sit and reach deeper into himself he sensed wider powers that had conspired to lead him here. Blind powers. Chance. Death. And, of course, the third of the blind gods: the child, in fact, of the first two—Justice.

  Chance had led him to the threshold of heaven at the instant the Conquest began. It had seemed as if his departure from Irth invited disaster. Death compelled him to return—death in the guise of the people in their thousands who had perished with the arrival of the cacodemons.

  But how did this terror require him? What was the Justice that compelled him to come down from the mountain and sit in these moldered ruins, this place of sinking, where all succumbed to the darkness within Irth?

  He told himself that he had come back for Jyoti and Poch, for their father's ghost—indeed for all the ghosts of the murdered Brood of Odawl. Yet that rang hollow. He was just one man. He knew better than to invest any faith in the conviction that he could save anyone, let alone a world.

  He searched deeper into the blindness of his past, looking for what Justice had evoked in him. And so, for the next several days, the aged sorcerer sat in his coke bed circle among air plants and fallen walls, gathering Charm from the Abiding Star and focusing deeper into himself.

  Around him floated blossoms from the dangling tendrils of flora thriving on higher, sunnier storeys. Butterflies darted. Animal cries splashed in the droning forest beyond the decayed parapets, and Caval rooted himself in himself. From legendary depths, as deep as Irth itself, he summoned down the power of heaven, the Charm of the Abiding Star.

  / |

  On Nynyx, one of the large western Reef Isles of Nhat, Jyoti and Poch hiked along the edge of a forest following the black and brown footsteps of autumn. Both wore the hoods of their tattered frocks pulled up against the crisp breeze, and Jyoti carried her firelock slung from her hip.

  Evening descended over the hills. The forest corridors filled with red shadows and scarlet depths, and indigo premonitions of night climbed the pastures up from the dark sea. On the coast, a ferry village twinkled. Lantern lights spilled slick reflections across the cove. The wanderers headed there.

  Bells flurried, and a farmer led red ponies along a dirt path down a nearby hill and across a stone bridge. In a copse of jigsaw trees, a hunter in green motley gutted an antelope. Blood smoke stained his hands, and the gray shade of the animal flitted past the hikers, rushing in a sigh back to the forest.

  Before its panicked flight, crows scattered into day's end, and Poch jumped at their sudden cawing. Their first return to the c
ivilized worId in many days inspired anxiety. To reach the Cloths of Heaven, they needed passage over water. All other routes without Charm led to death.

  "Maybe we should see if we can barter the firelock," Poch suggested.

  "That's against dominion Iaw," Jyoti reminded him dully. "And besides, how will we protect ourselves in the swamps around the Cloths of Heaven without it?"

  Near the mill, boys played with fire, jumping among flames that leaped from leaf drifts like pale friends. The children stopped to watch the cowled travelers pass.

  Berries and most of the season's nuts had disappeared, and Poch wanted to stop at the mill to rest and barter work for food. Jyoti decided against that. She was determined to get to Caval as swiftly as possible.

  Night mended starlight above the hillsides, and brother and sister came down the steep trails and passed the tide pools. Fishermen dragged an enormous sable fish from a starlit pond, its cruel face full of whiskers and fangs. Above the voices of the reeds, men quarreled about something they had dredged from the ebb tide. Their red skiffs rocked in the shallows with the weight of it.

  Jyoti and Poch avoided the hamlet, following a littoral path through wild onion and dockweeds. On their way, they passed scavengers in fishskin tunics, who dragged nets and hooks across the sandy trod on their way to the glossy flats. The workers glared at the bedraggled strangers but said nothing in transit to their nightly labors.

  At the docks, the fleet was in, and the sailors had already retreated to taverns, fish houses, and cottages on stilts above the dunes.

  The night ferry had loosed its moorings as Jyoti and Poch came pounding over the boards of the pier. They skipped across a plank walk that a wharf hand extended for them and jumped aboard, huffing for breath.

  The ebb current carried them swiftly past the night-bound cliffs and toward the scattered silhouettes of other reef islands before the mate came down from the pilothouse to collect fares.