Less inebriated, the ogres patrolled the camp and the strand with irascible vigor. Life became hard again for the prisoners. In despair, Tywi sought Drev but found him only in her dreams. She had no answer for the perennial question of the camp: When would salvation come?
Dogbrick spoke for her. "Fire burns, hope dwindles. Don't you see? We can't live on hope. Eventually it will exhaust itself and our strength will burn out. We have to live on each day and that alone. Who knows what love means? What is the sating of desire? These are questions we have to answer here. We don't need salvation for that. And if and when salvation does come, we will be stronger and ready for it."
The philosopher's words, spoken softly to one or two individuals at a time, helped. All that had been achieved had not unraveled. A large core of workers recognized the benefits they had created for themselves from the greed of their overlords, and they strove to convince the others that Dogbrick spoke the truths that could keep them alive.
Nights and more nights of remorseless tidal work passed, and once again the crews brought in large yields. Whipcrow took his reward in the warlock's gardens, the ogres imbibed their dew-wine on the dune tops, and slavery became more bearable for the scavengers.
Dogbrick marveled that his words—his philosophy, which he had learned from Wise Fish on the streets of Saxar—had weight with people who once would have loathed him. He had to turn his hard wisdom on himself to keep from bloating with pride.
"To survive, contain the counterflow," he quoted from the Gibbet Scrolls whenever he felt himself becoming important. The flow of encouragement and philosophy into the camp was important, while the backwash of admiration and neediness from the others posed dangers as real on the strand as they were on the street. If the ogres ever took special notice of him, if Whipcrow ever found cause to act on his enmity, or if the warlock ever glimpsed him behaving like a leader, he was dead.
Laborious nights and sleep-shackled days, the scavengers endured. Though Whipcrow and the ogres continually rearranged crews and sleeping quarters to discourage bonds of friendship and love, social groups gradually emerged in the camp and acquired stability: lovers created families, families joined in clans. With this renewed order, efficiency increased to a higher level because the clans devised ways to improve equipment and techniques. Fewer people died from injuries, and the new prisoners that the ogres delivered in their chattel carts adjusted more easily to enslavement and suffered fewer casualties. With no Charm and little hope, the camp endured.
And then the scavengers found the fallen star.
A fish-colored rock no larger than a woman's head, yet heavy as a boulder, the star broke the net that snagged it and required seven men, among them Dogbrick, pulling on cables to haul it ashore. Five blackened stobs marked where its points had burned off in its fall through the atmosphere. The tarnished skin bore iridescent swirls and streaks where flames had jetted.
Owl Oil barged through the scavengers gathered about the fallen star and the watery trench it had dug as the men dragged it onto the beach. "I'm a charmwright. I've worked with stars before. Get me a chisel. I can free its song. Hurry—before the ogres get here."
The drunken ogres lolling on the dunes had not yet noticed what the scavengers had pulled out of the tide. When Owl Oil used an awl as a makeshift chisel, the sharp, ringing tones alerted them. They came bawling and tumbling down the slip faces of the dunes, weaving across the beach, swatting with torches.
The surface of the star broke away in glassy shards and exposed a face like a fist. Everyone pulled back from the terrible visage except the charmwright. She watched closely as the drilled-out eyes flashed open, pink with pinhole silver pupils.
Through those tiny apertures, the star-core interior emitted needle-thin rays that scanned the heavens from whence it had fallen. It seemed surprised and pitiful. Then it noticed the charmwright and the others cringing behind her. The compressed features unclenched in the night air and became lovely with frightfulness.
Owl Oil met the radiant stare with her arms cocked at odd angles, her hands contorted in mudra knots. For an instant, the star-core energy glazed over her and formed the green vapor shape of a younger woman with mild features and distinctly regal mien.
The handful of scavengers close enough to view this clearly recognized the body of the crone as a skin of light that disguised a Peer. Then she collapsed, and the star closed its eyes. Its glandular cheeks trembled, and a bewitched breath exuded from its tiny ribbed mouth.
Music flared over the beach. A radiation of desire poisoned everyone. The scavengers leaped with shock and danced, rolled in the wet sand, ran splashing into the sea.
Dogbrick dove into a tide pool, and the cold water broke the frenzy briefly. He climbed out and knelt on the gravel, staring amazed at the jubilantly frantic crowd thrashing in the sand. He found Tywi among them, not dancing but clawing at the people in her way as she struggled wildly to reach Owl Oil.
Then the ogres came howling down the beach swinging their torches. Their small faces scowled with rage. They jumped furiously onto the singing star and beat at it with their burning sticks.
Dogbrick sprang forward, bounding among the dancers until he reached Tywi. Opening a way for her with his imposing size, he guided her to Owl Oil, and together they carried her unconscious body out of the shadow of the enraged ogres. Not until they climbed into the salt grass did they dare look back.
The ogres continued pounding the star and had soon pummeled a crater into the sand. Yet the star still sang. Its music, undulant as water shadows, trembled in the air, brighter for the beating, feeding off the furor of the ogres.
Black lightning uncoiled from the star-flung sky and blasted a gravel bar, spraying hot pebbles into the huddle of ogres. The roaring explosion and the gashing hurt of the flying rocks scattered the big hominids. They fled up the beach and bent around to behold with fear the arrival of Ralli-Faj.
Out of the momentary blackness of the shadow stroke, a bodiless mask floated. Fashioned into faceted flesh of dark amber and red epoxy, it gazed with empty sockets. Slowly, deliberately, moving with human speed and at a man's height over the water, it approached the crater where the fallen star lay.
Green vapor solidified to hands in the physical space where they belonged on the invisible body, and the warlock bent and picked up the star. The green hands raised the singing stone face outward and turned it so that its glassy visage shone visible to all on the beach.
The music changed in the warlock's grip. The star sang lower and more vesperal as if from the narrow confines of sleep. Nobody danced. The energy of desire dimmed. With processional slowness, Ralli-Faj carried the raised star up the beach, past the cowering ogres and the dunes, and into the swamp tunnels that led toward the Palace of Abominations.
The power of the celestial stone filled the warlock with hungry excitement. This was the purest concentration of Charm he had ever experienced. But it was raw Charm unrefined by the mechanics of hex-gems or conjure-wire. It was his to shape, his to remake, and he carried it back to his gardens with joy.
On the way, he listened to its sidereal song. It sang like the wind, grabbing at everything, turning in midair like perfume. It sang of no ponderable thing but the distant lamps of the stars, the sparks of Charm running out of the Abiding Star and down into the darkness.
When the Palace of Abominations came into view with its skewed and tilted scaffolds crammed with cacodemons, the song of the fallen star changed again. The music grew sullen. It sang grimly of the door in the air that opened upon infinite spaces and silences—the portal through which the cacodemons had come to Irth.
Ralli-Faj tilted the star so that its music aimed at the roosting demons and laughed to watch them stir and fret. The star song excited them with intimations of the chartless distances they had climbed to ravish this world beneath the Abiding Star.
The warlock lowered the star stone when the glaring pack began to sing along, more informed than he of the evil pleasures of t
he Dark Shore that caulked their ravenous minds with nostalgia. The sound of their crying crawled through his blood like spiders searching for his heart.
He hurried into his maze garden, and the singing star changed its tune again. Among the blue and green glass walls and the topiary shrubs illuminated by crystal spheres, the music lilted serenely. The green hands lowered the fallen star to a bed of sand raked in annulate pastels. The hands disappeared, the floating mask turned to smoke and wisped away, chewed by the wind.
Ralli-Faj woke inside his own hung skin. Framed by boulders of chrysoprase, agate, and chalcedony the fallen star sat in its bed of colored sand directly in his line of sight. Its tranquil music poured into the fragrant air thick as hot cane, surrounding him with sugared heat that offered deeper raptures of trance.
The warlock wanted something more than trance. The blue tongue in his mouth hole sparked a command. "S-see me!"
The singing stopped. Silence penetrated the garden like a bell's clarity. Then the fiercely alien face opened its pink eyes. Silver rays of coherent Charm shot from its pupils directly into the vacant sockets of Ralli-Faj's limp skin.
The warlock screamed, a vascular cry that sliced so sharply through the air it scattered the cacodemons from their high perches. The cutting shriek slashed distances, penetrating the marsh and crossing the dunes in a rush of anguish that vanished over the sea without a single echo as if the dark had taken back what belonged.
Ogres cringed, and scavengers gaped about with fright.
"What was that?" Dogbrick asked, hands over his ears.
"It is the warlock's cry," Owl Oil answered. She sat in the salt grass, back propped against a sandy hummock of sea grape. Her tired face looked scalded glossy red where the fallen star's eyebeams had struck her. Even in the star glow, the burns showed crimson. "He is hurting himself with Charm. Hurting himself stronger."
After the frightful appearance of Ralli-Faj, many scavengers had panicked and fled, and the ogres and Whipcrow ranged up and down the strand collecting them and driving them back to work. No one had disturbed Tywi and Dogbrick yet, and they crouched protectively beside Owl Oil. She had just woken from her stupor and looked wrung.
"You all right?" Tywi asked, frowning yet relieved to see her alert. "What happened to you?"
The crone's head lolled backward, and Dogbrick offered her water from his flagon. She waved it away. "I'm well," she said, and her voice sounded vibrant. "I took Charm from the fallen star. My body has not yet adjusted. But it will soon, and I'll be stronger than ever."
"You took Charm?" Tywi asked, bewildered.
"This body is a skin of light, isn't it?" Dogbrick asked. "We saw the shadow of your true self. You're a Peer."
"Yes." She rubbed her temples and blinked focus into her eyes. "I am Rica the conjurer."
"Rica—" Dogbrick passed a look of awe to Tywi who frowned back with perplexity. "She is the lady of the Reef Isles!"
Tywi bowed her head. "My lady—"
Rica stopped her with a firm hand to her shoulder. "I must remain Owl Oil or my struggle against Wrat is forfeit."
"Others saw you," Dogbrick warned.
Rica sighed. "It was a chance I had to take. I needed the Charm. There are so many who will suffer and die without it."
"You have amulets to hold this Charm?" Dogbrick queried.
"I used my last hex-gem to heal you many days ago,” she replied. "No. I don't require amulets to hold Charm. I am trained in the internal arts. I hold Charm in my body."
"You got to run," Tywi urged.
"Where would I go, child? Rica shook her head firmly. "This is my dominion. The only worthy escape open to me is death, and I am determined to stay alive Iong enough to see Wrat and his monsters destroyed."
"But Charm don't work against them," Tywi said with palpable fright. "You got to run, my lady."
"Charm is not our only weapon." Rica nodded sagely to her two companions. "Wrat's devils bleed at the bite of a sword."
"Is this true?" Dogbrick asked, astonished.
"I have seen it in trance," Rica assured him. "Lord Drev and others across Irth are discovering this truth. The fight has just begun."
"I'm scared for you," Tywi confessed. "If Ralli-Faj finds you here with us..."
"Be afraid for us all," Rica answered with sober alertness. "The warlock has the fallen star."
"What do you mean?" Tywi asked. "What is that thing?"
"It is not like the stars of the Gulf." Dogbrick relayed what he knew. "Those are giant spheres of burning gas. This entity is much smaller. It grew in the aura of the Abiding Star out of Charm and the void."
"Dogbrick is right," Rica said. "It is a creature that lives in the ethers between Irth and the Abiding Star. It is a concentration of raw Charm. In the hands of a warlock such as Ralli-Faj, it can be the source of astonishing power. Listen! Listen to the strength it gives him."
A bull roar throbbed in the distance, a mournful lowing. Ralli-Faj absorbing the Charm of the fallen star exulted. The twin beams of energy had filled the holes of his slack face with golden light, and he bellowed with the creative pain expanding inside his shriveled form.
The human leather hanging on its stick stirred as if in a stiff breeze. Like an inflating balloon, empty fingers plumped, limbs swelled. Slowly the warlock's empty body filled with Charm. His face of green fungus distended and jutted into skull contours of cruel aspect. Swollen strength flared through his torso, sculpting a wedge of taut muscle and grooved ribs solid as any living man's.
The eyes of the fallen star closed, exhausted of Charm and song, and Ralli-Faj stood tall. Ebony skin almost blue, stretched tightly to its human limits, his naked form stepped forward, and the stick that once propped him clattered to the ground. The vitreous bulbs of his eyes recessed under browbone and epicanthic folds, and from their centers ink drops swirled and dilated and hardened abruptly to dark irises keen with malefic intelligence.
Whole again in every detail, the warlock released an exultant howl. The cacodemons on the soaring derricks replied with wild shrieks.
Ralli-Faj wiped the green fungus from his bald head and gazed down at the inert star and its glassy, off-human features. "Rest," he said in a dense voice. "Later you will sing for me again. After I have exhausted the Charm you have given me and I am once more an empty skin."
Giddy with his new freedom, the warlock marched through his garden with arms outstretched, touching shrubs, fingering blossoms, running hands over the cool glass walls. He broke into a run, laughing with resonant glee as his bare feet gripped the grass and his legs powered him along the winding lanes.
Packed with Charm, his stamina unlimited, he came to the helical ladder that ascended to the torture tiers. He bounded up them. The ever-dying hung mutely in their amber cages. He pressed his giddy face up against each one, kissing their suffering with his joy. The juxtaposition of mortal opposites, of his vibrant well-being and their dismal suffering, electrocuted him with desire.
I live! Over two hundred thousand days of life rejoiced in him. To his Charmed eyes, each day he knew on Irth watched him like a face in the crowd, and he remembered every one. They basked in his lurid health. Later, they would chant the choral memories that had sustained him all his many days. And great among them would be this day, when a piece of heaven came into his hands.
In the fallen star, he possessed sufficient Charm to live another two hundred thousand days. Or, should he choose to gamble, he might invest as much as half that power to depose Wrat—if he could find the man's vulnerability.
"'Everything made can be unmade,'" he sang as he hugged the pain cage of Baron Fakel. The man watched him woefully from his contorted fetal embrace, his noble features a blear in the blood smoke. "And some things unmade—made again!"
With lavish laughter, Ralli-Faj shoved away and climbed spryly among the trestle rungs. He swung ape like along the scaffold struts to the tilted skyway ramps where the cacodemons watched with reptile attentiveness.
He m
oved agilely into their midst. He breathed deeply of their dry sour musk and danced ecstatically among them. His hands touched their jaw-heavy grins and their talons like scythes. And he giggled like a child to think how well they would serve him if there were a way to usurp Wrat.
Starlight shone from the warlock's tight pupils and touched the eel-lobed brows of the cacodemons. He searched for knowledge of the Dark Lord. His own hot eyes stared back. They were, one and all, black mirrors.
If he angled his vision queerly, he could peer past the dark barrier, and he met a shadow face, the same face in each demon skull staring out from behind the mask of fangs. By waving his charmlight, the warlock underlit that face and recognized the weasel features of Wrat.
Ralli-Faj dimmed his penetrating stare and looked away from Wrat's mocking sneer. Quickly he made his way back through the raspy herd of cacodemons, not laughing, not touching them. On the open ramp, he hurried on without looking back.
The cacodemons grinned and watched after him with cold fidelity.
Strange Planet, Dying
Emboldened by his previous success with Tywi, Drev again left his body among the river canes, watched over by Ripcat. Like a cloud blowing across empty sky, he sailed. Reef isles crawled below. Clots of stars reflected in the slick water between the dark land masses, and the islands appeared like strewn puzzle pieces.
He gazed upward into the unspeakable darkness among the stars, from whence the cacodemons came. They were born out of the forgotten. All that had fallen away from the light of Irth into the void had congealed in the eternal cold to these monsters. They embodied the living void.
The wizarduke's anxiety thickened further when the Cloths of Heaven appeared out of the foggy country. The broken sphinxes and smashed crockery of temples evoked stormy sorrow in him, and foreboding began like remote music.
The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1) Page 36
