The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  Drev knew then he should turn about. In the transparency of time, he viewed the Palace of Abominations. The massive pyramid rose spectral white above the anarchy of the swamp. At its crest, a circular rail path hung like a vast medallion beneath an organic doorway that opened on darkness.

  His vision penetrated. Within he located Ralli-Faj, an empty skin strapped with cords and talismans to a pair of stilts.

  Tok. Tok. Tok.

  The stilts stepped closer, carrying the human hide near enough for Drev to clearly discern the crisped flesh around the warlock's vacant eye sockets and the ghost fire in his woeful mouth.

  Drev pulled away from this vision with a shudder that nearly broke his trance and returned him to his body. He rooted his attention on the terrain. Mangrove archipelagos seeped fog whose tendrils reached across the spans of glossy water between the islands like strands of a snaring web.

  Ill omens loomed everywhere in the star-steamed landscape, and he considered going back. But then the labor camp that held Tywi rose into sight. The pyramid of evil cacodemons seemed far away. It was a distant pale wedge in the acrid darkness and appeared less threatening than he had feared. He soared down into the ramshackle camp, intent on finding Tywi and Ripcat's philosopher, Dogbrick.

  The huts stood empty, the camp occupied only by the ill, two attending healers, and an ogre on patrol. The wizarduke flitted unseen among them, following the strand of Charm that bound him to his fateful double.

  Skimming over a rutted path through a tunnel of hanging moss and mist, he spotted starlit dunes, white horizons of surf, and the diminutive figures of laborers toiling over the tide wrack. He accelerated, and at that very instant, the space ahead of him wobbled like a sheet in the wind—and Ralli-Faj on his stilts stepped out of nothing.

  The warlock had sensed Drev when the wizarduke first came over the horizon. Chance alone had directed his searching gaze in that direction this night as he had paced the Dark Lord's adytum. The chamber atop the pyramid had only just been completed, and Ralli-Faj had carried himself there on his chained stilts to inspect its construction. As he had peered out the slot doorway, admiring the view of the Cloths of Heaven, he spied the thin ray of a ghostly intruder.

  Ralli-Faj had no notion what this intruder might be until he floated down from the pyramid and confronted him in the swamp. The flimsy charmlight tried to elude him, wisping off like so much swamp haze.

  The warlock raised the leg of one stilt. The black magic that Hu'dre Vra had installed in him made the sharp point of the stilt an irresistible destination, capturing from out of the air the tenuous ghost that had flitted into his camp.

  Lord Drev veered away from the warlock, and an invisible hand gripped him and held him fast. Slowly, despite his fiercest efforts to break the spell of his trance and wake again in his body, Drev slid closer to the skin hanging on its sharp stilts.

  Pulled very near to the cracked, reptilian flesh, he felt himself scrutinized by the eyeless face with its sunken nose hole and gaping mouth tongued in flame. Then recognition flared through the warlock, and the green fur of fungus that splotched his draped body glowed with astonishment.

  "Wiz-z-zard of Hovernes-s-s!" The warlock's voice spat like hot oil.

  "Ralli-Faj," Drev greeted with forced bravura. "I have sought you out to enlist your aid."

  A dark laugh gleamed from the warlock. "I am no s-simpleton, Drev. You have come to s-spy out the Dark Lord's-s palace. And I have caught you!"

  "I come to you as your fellow Peer," Drev pleaded. "Surely by now you have heard the cacodemons are not invulnerable. Swords cut them. Arrows can pierce their hide. We can fight them. Ralli-Faj, help us smash the claw of the invader."

  "Oh, the Dark Lord will be mos-st pleas-s-sed to hear your judgment of his-s flaws-s. Come, Drev. I mus-st get you in a container before you thin away to nothing."

  The warlock jerked forward and stab-walked down the marsh road, dragging Drev's wraith behind.

  Drev could do nothing to extricate himself from the powerful grip of the alien magic. He helplessly watched the pale boles of swamp trees float by.

  "With your help, we can rid Irth of these monsters," he called out again.

  "S-save your s-strength, wiz-z-zard," Ralli-Faj advised coldly. "After what your great-grandfather did to my dominion, I would s-sooner ally with hell than you."

  "You have, Ralli-Faj! Wrat is the living void. He will destroy everything."

  "And you will be there to s-see," the warlock promised. "I have created for you a s-special punishment to pleas-se my lord, Hu'dre Vra. The Chain of Pain!"

  Ralli-Faj surged with joy. On the pivot of this moment turned the promise of the fallen star. The Dark Lord would reward him richly for this prize. His future was assured and felt enormous. By that deep, shining lake of time, he strolled toward the gigantic pyramid with the doorway at its peak, long, indrawn, and folded as a flower of evil.

  Once within the watery glass walls of the lower enclosure, the warlock went directly to the rock garden where the fallen star sat in its bed of bright, ringed sand. The sad smoke of its song curled in the air.

  "Behold, wiz-z-zardl" Ralli-Faj crowed and inhaled the Charm of the fallen star. His flaccid skin puffed up with charmwind so mightily that the straps fixing him to the crossbar burst and the stilts fell away.

  The warlock dropped to his feet, whole and naked, a gleaming figure ghast black as a tar blister. His sockets blazed with heat and filled with smoky jet swirls resembling eyes.

  Drev stood immobilized by the warlock's magic, mind racing for routes of escape. Charm from the fallen star beat like the wind's vibration, and the entity's pink, fiery eyes peered directly at him, fully aware of his presence.

  "Help me," he appealed to the fallen being.

  Ralli-Faj boomed laughter. He wrapped his muscled body in a scarlet robe, then spoke in a voice no longer frayed. "This star cannot help itself. How then can it help you, wizard?" Laughter boomed again, and the warlock seized the misty shawl of Drev's ectoplasmic body in his Charmed hand and dragged him out of the garden.

  Up a wide curving ramp of stone, Ralli-Faj marched, waving Drev behind him like a victory banner.

  As they climbed, Drev viewed cells set into stone walls and sealed in amber. Smeared human shadows floated within a swirl of lymph and blood smoke. Torn faces pressed against the brown glass, faces ripped almost to skulls.

  The ramp way spiraled upward to an enormous notch, where the night hung its chains of stars. They strode through that portal outside onto the brink of a walkway whose undressed stone plunged straight down the face of the pyramid toward a rusted winding engine and its train of corroded iron carriages.

  Ralli-Faj stepped over the brink and, defiant of gravity, moved down that vertical path. "I do wish we had more time to converse, cousin Drev, but as it is, your body of light grows dim. In here, the Dark Lord's magic will sustain you until your body arrives—and Hu'dre Vra himself comes to retrieve you."

  A blistered metal door squealed open in the metal car behind the locomotive, and the warlock hurled Drev's astral body into the black interior. The pain began even before the warped door slammed back into place and the locomotive shrieked into laborious motion.

  Seamless as a flame the hurt covered every sentient point of his being. It ate like silence, voraciously and deep.

  Lord Drev lost his mind at once but not consciousness. He remained fully alert and exquisitely sensitive to the pure agony that owned him. Yet all power of reflection fled. Pain had become his being and awareness his overshadow.

  Outside the grime-streaked portholes, the fixed stars and tumult of the swamp flew by in turns as the chain hurled around its clanking circuit, first up the face of the pyramid and then down. At the top of its climb, under the gate to Hu'dre Vra's adytum, the pain stopped. This proffered several moments of painless awareness in which to anticipate the plunging rush back into irreconcilable pain. Randomly, the polarity of suffering and surcease alternated. The cycle, designe
d to baffle the wizard, confused all thought but the experience of hurt itself.

  Drev screamed in various voices. His ghost throat cried, painting the air in twenty colors of misery.

  The warlock heard him and danced gleefully in the adytum, danced without stopping through the night and all the following day into the next night. He stopped only briefly to dispatch a flock of cacodemons. Soon they returned with what the warlock had said they would find—the physical body of Lord Drev.

  It had come floating up on the nocturnal tide above Nhat, bound for the Gulf, and the demons identified it and delivered it to the dancing warlock. He clasped the corpse like a lost brother and with a shout drove the rigor mortis from it.

  Ralli-Faj escorted the wizarduke's soulless body through the colossal notch in the wall of the pyramid and down the vertical face of raw stone. At his gesture, the hurtling train slowed and eventually clattered to a stop so that the first car of the chain waited before him.

  He yanked the door open and found Drev's soul like a broken wing on the tarnished floor. Deftly, the warlock plucked it up and jammed it into place in its body.

  Drev awoke, startled. Colors throbbed. Sounds came in waves. "The Dark Lord..." Rail:Faj spoke in fragments, his rubbery face with its inky eyes pressed close smelling of burned cloves. "Comes this day to face you and... Peers become one with the dust of those whose days built the Cloths of... Meanwhile, ride the Chain of Pain ... and so be gone!"

  The rusted door clanged shut, and the metal hull shook with a desultory bong, then lurched forward, throwing Drev to the back of the car. A whistle pierced the loud metallic screams from the wheels and the rattling of the tracks, and the pain began again. Only this time, the hurt cut deeper, for it sliced into his living flesh.

  Sprawled belly down on the buckled metal floor of the shaking car, impaled by black magic, he poured his suffering into a cry that spilled forth from him all at once and always.

  / |

  Ripcat worried for Drev. The wizarduke's body lay inert in the canes. No breath disturbed the fur at the back of the hand that the beastman held beneath the duke's nostrils. No pulse knocked in the duke's neck under his jaw.

  Lord Drev of Ux, Duke of Dorzen, wizard of Hoverness, had died.

  Ripcat sat with the corpse all day, sorrow a mist in his ears, uncertainty a film on his heart. He felt sad for the dead man who had lost his life for love. He had shown the thief bravery, sorrow, deep caring—and none of the arrogance the people of the warrens expected from Peers. Also, he took with him his passion to destroy Wrat. And that left Cat pondering what he could hope to do without the wizard's expertise and direful rage.

  Flies like black jewels mizzled the duke's face, and the thief brushed them away. He would at least have to continue on to Nhat to free Dogbrick from the labor camp—and Tywi as well.

  But how?

  He unsheathed the sword Taran that the wizarduke had bequeathed him. Its lightness in his hand felt hopeless against the future's heavy odds.

  Carrion eaters stood in the trees, wrapped in their black wings, watching for him to abandon the corpse. A pack of hairless cadaver dogs with long heads and scorched faces prowled the riverbank, attracted by the carrion eaters. They fanned out through the cane, circling the dead thing.

  Ripcat drove them off with flourishes of the gold sword. He moved lithely around the dead man in a slow protective dance until dusk and the tide of rising.

  Drev's body floated off among the night's bright tinsels. Ripcat saluted it with the sword Taran. Silence was his prayer as the corpse lifted away, deep in the hand of space.

  Ripcat sheathed the sword, strapped it to his back, slung the firelock over his shoulder, and went again his solitary way.

  The power wand Leboc had given him repelled weariness and granted him the strength to avoid sleep. He journeyed south among the reef isles. Nourished by Charm and the wetland's bounty, he moved swiftly. By day, he crossed the islands, avoiding roads and villages, alert to presences. At night, when the tide withdrew and the coral bridges rose, he waded between the islands without benefit of lantern or torch, relying solely on night vision.

  Unseen by any, he saw all. In the swamp, he slinked through the attic of the jungle, far above the boggy floor, attentive to the full compass of sky and terrain. When he doubted direction, he unsheathed the sword Taran.

  "Show me the way to Tywi," he intoned, evoking his memory of her from the Qaf.

  The sword shimmered with blunt radiance and by the intensity of its vibrancy in his hand, he fathomed direction. It guided him among the numerous isles to a feverish jungle of gigantic trees hunched under heavy manes of moss and bearded like teachers of sadness.

  A charmless woman sprawled unconscious in one of these obscure alcoves. He would never have seen her in that slum of shadows and mossy veils if the sword had not taken him directly to her.

  She wore an amulet frock tattered almost to lace. This frayed web of conjure-wire and hex-circuits attracted the sword. That and the firelock she hugged identified her as a Peer. Her features, bruised, streaked with swamp mud, and swollen from insect bites, offered only a mask of despair.

  Ripcat tapped her vine-lashed shoes with the sword, but she did not rouse. He stabbed the sword into the peaty ground and bent close enough to discern that she lived, then removed the power wand from his waistband and placed it in her hand.

  It did nothing. She was too weak—dying.

  The thief examined the tarnished mesh of her frock and found contacts for the power wand in the collar. He attached the amber rod and again nothing changed.

  He poured rainwater from his flagon and began washing her face, looking for wounds his cursory examination had missed. The swollen features twitched alert when the dripping water activated contact with the power wand. Charm coursed into her febrile body.

  She jolted alert and aimed her firelock at the beastman crouching over her.

  Ripcat retreated behind the sword Taran, hands raised defenselessly. "I am a friend," he said in an indigo voice that helped the wand's Charm soothe the frightened woman "I used my power wand to bring you around."

  The woman put a hand to her collar and lowered the firelock, her puffed face already beginning to deflate. "You saved my life." She spoke softly, distractedly, as if listening to a riff of dreaming. "But my brother—Poch. Have you seen him? I lost him in the jungle."

  He shook his head. "Only you."

  She peered in the niello eye charm dangling from her left shoulder, found it dead, tried the other. It, too, remained opaque and no fiddling with the net of conjure-wire helped.

  "I must find him," she mumbled blearily, then caught herself as Charm came on stronger, having finished its work with her vital organs. Her gaze sharpened. "Who are you?”

  "Ripcat," he answered, rising from his crouch. "But I didn't save you. It was the duke's sword found you. I'm only its unhappy heir."

  She sat up taller and rose to her knees, looking both at the beastman and the sword standing in the ground before him. "That is the sword Taran."

  "Yes."

  "Heir?" She rose to her feet, consciousness firming to clarity. "If you are heir to his sword, then you must be an ally of Lord Drev."

  "I was his ally," he replied. “Lord Drev is dead."

  The woman sagged, but the mounting Charm in her frock caught her. Despair at this grim news sharpened to an edge of determination: This nightmare must end!

  She offered her hand to Ripcat. "I am Jyoti, margravine of Odawl. I owe you a life debt, Ripcat. So now you must tell me: Are we both allies against the same enemy?"

  He marveled at the effectiveness of her amulet frock as it vitally distributed Charm throughout her body, healing and cleansing her even as he watched. He took her hand and gazed into a pale, freckled countenance of rage without cruelty. She conveyed fury, a virtue of violence, controlled by a wider purpose. He liked her at once.

  She returned his respect, clasping his hand strongly when he acknowledged, "Lord Dre
v's enemies are mine."

  Under the beards of the forest giants, they sat and told their stories.

  While he spoke, she felt glad for the Charm he had given her, for it helped hide the surprised fascination she felt at his physical appearance. All her life in Arwar Odawl she had commingled with beastfolk, from childhood playmates to her palace guards. But none had ever intrigued her as engrossingly as did this feline man. As she learned about his amnesia, his plangent features seemed to emerge from a human depth deeper than his bestial traits, and she wanted to help him remember himself.

  He mentioned Dogbrick, and she recalled the voluble philosopher, the thoughtful Dog who had escorted them out of Saxar so very long ago it seemed. Charm stitched their fates. And in this she found hope, some famished expectation that survival and even a just end to this nightmare were possible.

  I'm drunk on Charm, she allowed and grew more sober with the realization, I should he dead.

  The strong feelings this stranger had begun to stir in her, she decided, were no more than the rush of Charm into her starved body. When her turn came to recount her history of stupendous loss, she related it matter-of-factly.

  Ripcat began to wonder as he listened if perhaps the sword Taran had led him to this woman. Perhaps while searching for the dead duke's Tywi, the magical blade had instead located his own soul double in Jyoti. He wanted to believe that. Her creaturely presence and her ardor attracted him. She looked not at all like the sable-tressed woman of his dreams, yet she inspired the same unanimous desire in him.

  How can that be? he asked himself and searched for common traits. He found precious few and decided that she displayed the same spirit as his dream lover. When he then learned that she had been trained as a warrior, he understood that the sword had found her to fill Drev's absence.

  He unstrapped the scabbard from his back and placed it beside the sword Taran. "Lord Drev's sword belongs to you."

  Jyoti stood and went to the sword. At this moment, her brother was somewhere in Nhat, alive or, just as likely, dead. Cacodemons haunted Irth. All her past was ashes. These facts defeated the enthusiasm of Charm coursing again through her body, and, unenthralled by any hope that she could ever solve these problems yet grateful for the chance to try, she put her hand on the hilt and promised her life, her death, everything to the blade's cause.