She stared past the sword to Ripcat.
"I will go with you," the beastman said, "if you will allow."
The joy she felt looking at him—lithe, blue furred, empty of Charm, full of animal divinity—reflected her magnificent astonishment at finding herself alive. She would not refuse herself to this sword or to the graceful messenger who had brought it to her.
"Let's find my brother."
/ |
Ralli-Faj stood in hot daylight, feeling Charm leaking out his pores with icy radiance. SIowly, as the Abiding Star crossed the sky, his physical body deflated while his mind rode the updraft of Charm far above the day sky.
Atop the buffeting atmosphere, in the charmflow from the Abiding Star, the warlock knew rapture and emptiness. His message to the Dark Lord announcing the capture of Drev had yet to be answered, and he spent this interval of waiting disengaged from Irth.
When Hu'dre Vra's call came, little had changed down below: On the bright, triangular face of the Palace of Abominations, the Chain of Pain still clanked along its soundless track bearing Drev's ponderous freight of suffering. The camp’s prisoners still slept in their huts, resting for the labors of the coming night. And the cacodemons came and went from the flues of the pyramid, completing their construction chores.
Only Ralli-Faj's body had changed. Fully deflated, it lay draped like a flesh rag over a supporting stick. He gazed out from his empty sockets with his Charmed eyes and discerned an apparition of the Dark Lord before him.
Hu'dre Vra's imposing ebony armor floated translucently, imprinted over the garden's raked sand and the boulders of agate. His voice vibrated like a storm's tremor. "You have done very well, Ralli-Faj. Oh, you have done very well indeed. I shall be in Nhat at first light tomorrow to inspect your prisoner—and to reward you."
The image slanted into sunlight and vanished.
In his heightened, Charmed state, Ralli-Faj's awareness reached deeper than the Dark Lord's phantom voice. The warlock saw the Dark Lord in Mirdath. His armor fell away like dead petals, and the famished nakedness of Wrat emerged.
Webs of mist from the cascades blew through the air onto the balcony where Hu'dre Vra had stood projecting his message to the warlock in Nhat. With a shiver, Wrat turned his back on the chill vibrant air of the open portico with its panoramic vista of the Falls of Mirdath.
"The hunt is over," he announced to Thylia. She awaited his pleasure among silken bolsters and squabs. "That skin without bones found him last night sneaking around the ogres' camp."
"Now that he is in hand"—Thylia beckoned with her body from where she lay, her black diamond eyes gazing at him down the length of her valiant nakedness—"tarry with me. I have only begun to thank you for saving me from the Spiderlands—and for forgiving me after losing your prey."
"My prey is in a cage of pain this moment." Wrat leered. "He suffers even as I steep myself in your exquisite and Charming expertise, witch."
He stepped down into a round chamber hung with diaphanous veils of indigo. This was the pleasure altar in the palace of the sorceress Lyna, Countess of Mirdath. Every 222 days, her witches and sages copulated on this dais in a sacred ritual of Charmed trance, a tantric rite with origins lost in pretalismanic times. It delighted the irreverent Dark Lord to take his pleasure here, and with the witch Queen no less!
As for Lyna—her corpulence, her dominion's perverse icon of beauty—quivered in hiding somewhere among the mud villages on the paddies below. His cacodemons closed in. Since the savage and total destruction of the City in the Falls, the people had lost hope of salvation from the Peers, and informants abounded throughout Mirdath.
"Why do you think Drev was there?" Wrat asked as he climbed toward her over lustrous pillows and cushions.
"To spy on you," she whispered and drew him closer. "He sought you where you would most logically be—were it not for me."
The telepathic voyeurism of Ralli-Faj wrinkled away as the witch's arms enclosed Wrat. Physical exigencies disgusted him. That was why he had sacrificed his viscera, burned them all away in a rapture of Charm. He had hollowed himself to a husk with celestial pleasures.
Who needs the darkness of flesh, he moaned to himself, when one is a portion of light, a blazing star, a mind? Only the weak.
With his apparition, he summoned a cacodemon to set his flayed flesh upon his stilts. The tentacles worked far more deftly than any of his human slaves, and he quickly found himself standing upright.
Tok. Tok. Tok.
He stepped over to the sand garden where the fallen star sat in its bed of colorful silica. It slept, and he chose not to wake it. He wanted to avoid calling attention to it. Perhaps the Dark Lord would ignore it entirely, and he could keep it for his own raptures and strategies.
Tok. Tok. Tok.
He walked up the spiral ramp, checking the amber cells of prisoners along the way. The neon pink of blood smoke swirling about embalmed bodies informed him that still they lived, still they suffered.
Satisfied, he hurried upward to the vast notch that pierced the pyramid near its summit. Tok. Tok. Tok. He stab-walked down the face of the pyramid, held in place by the same black magic that spun the locomotive and its cars on their impossible round.
Ralli-Faj knew well the reputation of the wizarduke as a Charm master in the Lazor tradition. This was a pragmatic school of wizardry, an efficient tradition the warlock did not underestimate, for he had been trained in it himself—over 150,000 days ago, as one of Lazor's own disciples. He had to be certain that Drev remained enthralled and had not devised an escape.
From the observation ramp, he watched the locomotive slash past on its demonic rush toward nowhere. Drev stood in the first car, plastered against the long window, his hair like rays, his swarthy face smeared upon the glass in slug-mouthed howls of mad, unbearable suffering.
The warlock smiled. His leather face did not move, but the blue flame flickered brighter in its mouth hole. The car’s design forced victims to display their anguish: Pain diminished slightly at the windows, and this cruel ministration pressed passengers hard against the pane.
Tok. Tok. Tok.
The warlock staggered away, reeling with giddiness. He returned to where the fallen star slept and considered waking it. He wanted to puff himself up with its Charm and celebrate—but a chill shadowed through him. Someone approached.
He sensed the unctuous anxiety of Whipcrow and pronounced the intonation that unmazed the glass walls surrounding his private garden. In the few moments that Whipcrow required to find his way among the pollarded fruit trees and sinuously espaliered vines, the warlock peered into his simple soul.
Ah—another prize! Ralli-Faj flared happily when he received the news that several informers among the scavengers had seen the healer Owl Oil drop her skin of light. The conjuror Rica, Duchess of Nhat, already suffered in his grasp!
Whipcrow skipped into the garden. "My lord warlock, I have news—"
"I have already dispatched a cacodemon to bring Rica to us," Ralli-Faj silenced his manager. "Your presence affirms your loyalty to our Dark Lord. So come, Whipcrow, come with me to behold how our enemies journey to zero, so slowly, so very slowly."
Whipcrow blinked and closed his mouth in a haze of awe.
Tok. Tok. Tok.
The warlock climbed again the wide, stone spiral. Whipcrow accompanied him proudly, disguising his horror at the sight of the embalmed Peers swimming blindly in their scarlet effluvia.
Halfway up, a scream came. Moments later, a cacodemon flew by, dragging Rica in its claws and tendrils. The demon faces in the beast's thorax chewed at her, and as she whipped past, her face bleated cries of hurt.
The warlock hurried his pace, and Whipcrow had to run to keep up, the sleeves of his black cowl flapping like wings. A mammoth portal swung into view, and the manager's run slowed to a procession of astonishment. Outside, thermal clouds soared over swampland, and the afternoon lay sprawled across alluvial plains of golden waterways.
Rica la
y in a puddle of her torn garments, her limbs drained of rigor. Her slack face pressed against the polished stone floor. Beside the enormous pylon, she appeared a mote and the cacodemon hovering above her a bigger speck.
Tok. Tok. Tok.
Ralli-Faj walked his stilts to the brink and over. Whipcrow stopped to see him disappear beyond the edge. The cacodemon collected Rica, and she thrashed alert but couId not extricate herself from its hooked clasp. With a wail, she disappeared as the demon dragged her through the giant doorway.
Whipcrow edged himself to the brink and gazed down at stilted Ralli-Faj and the viperous cacodemon dragging Rica into the face of gravity—toward the Chain of Pain that he had watched from afar writing its zeroes at the top of the pyramid.
The train slowed with a metallic yowl. The draft of the gliding engine lifted the empty arms of Ralli-Faj. As the first carriage drifted past, Whipcrow eyed a man with a face of reckless anguish pressed against the oblong window.
The manager pulled away startled to behold such a paroxysm of torment gazing at him beseechingly. His chest burned hot. His heart ignited with desire in the presence of such power and powerlessness together.
He swung his gaze far across the immense span of the vault and dizzied. A metal door clanged shut with a doomful echo.
When he looked back, two carriages of the Chain of Pain had faces smashed against their windows. Their shining distress electrocuted him with unanswerable desire.
Then the locomotive squealed and jerked into motion. He rose quickly to his feet and stepped over the threshold, eager to stand in the embrace of the Dark Lord's magic and watch the chain drag its souls up out of hell and back again.
/ |
Predawn clouds piled up in a maritime wind that carried rain onto the beach and battered the ogres' bonfires atop the dunes. Several left their posts early to return to the camp, and only two ogres and Whipcrow remained behind to escort the scavengers back to their huts.
Whipcrow used the power wand of his staff to lash small wind spouts off the incoming tide and drive the weary net crews faster to shore. Since witnessing the torture of Rica and the wizarduke on the warlock's Chain of Pain, he felt driven to work the scavengers harder and increase the treasures dragged from the sea.
Everywhere lurked informers. Rica's capture emphasized that truth, and Whipcrow determined to display before them his abject servitude to his masters. He prodded laggard workers with his staff, sparking them with sufficient jolts of Charmed pain to make them scurry faster out of the water and up the tidal scarp.
As ever, Dogbrick slogged to the beach last, hauling the nets for two other workers. A wind spout Whipcrow had set in motion swept over the beastman and submerged him. He surfaced spitting seawater and missing one of the nets.
"Find it, you muttwit!" Whipcrow shouted against the booming breakers.
Dogbrick dipped under but came up without the lost net. He pushed to shore, too tired to search any further.
Whipcrow's staff met him as he clambered to the beach and jolted him so severely Dogbrick's fur rose in wet hackles and he howled with wrung hurt.
"Stop it!" Tywi yelled, running from where she had been securing rakes and hooks to the last utility wagon.
Whipcrow ascertained that the ogres had moved up the beach, herding the laborers. Sure they were not observing him, he touched Tywi with his staff and sent a shock of Charm through her that sat her down stupefied in the wet sand.
Dogbrick snarled, and Whipcrow waved the luminous amber staff before him. "Come on, muttwit," the cowled manager challenged. "Attack me. Go ahead. The ogres will strap you to a hornet hive after you wake up from my blow!"
The thief kept his wrathful yellow eyes on Whipcrow and bent over Tywi. Dogbrick helped her stand, and she leaned heavily on him until she caught her breath and sensation tingled back into her limbs.
Up the beach, they shuffled to the utility cart. Dogbrick helped Tywi into the back among coils of net and sifting equipment, and he fit himself to the harness.
"She walks," Whipcrow commanded, "like all the others. No. Better. She pulls!" He yanked her out of the cart and shoved her to the front. Ralli-Faj, too busy with his Chain of Pain, would not care what befell any of the prisoners, Whipcrow believed, and he felt less compunction to restrain himself with this scrawny woman who time and again had refused to satisfy him.
The rain came down in sheets as Dogbrick and Tywi pulled the utility cart among the dunes. Whipcrow followed, waving his luminescent staff like a lantern in the starless dark, signaling to the ogres ahead that all went well at the rear.
In the tunnel of swamp trees that led to the camp, the rain had washed out the dirt path, and two pelf wagons loaded with heavy kraken bones had sunk to their axles.
"Leave wagons!" the ogres commanded and waved the scavengers on through the driving rain.
A flash of lightning illuminated the arboreal tunnel so brightly that colors leaped from the foliage. Jade leaves, saffron moss, and scarlet air blossoms appeared out of the gloom, and an ogre fell to its back in the mud. Its wee face in its big woolly head grimaced, and a startled moment passed before the second ogre realized its partner had been shot.
Another blue-white dazzle of lightning, and the standing ogre bounded into the air and crashed into the underbrush where it did not move.
"Charmfire!" Whipcrow cried in alarm.
Dogbrick roared to drown out the manager's warning and threw off the cart's harness. Seizing a fallen branch, he confronted Whipcrow, knocked the power staff from his hand, and punched him between the eyes. The blow kicked back the manager's cowl and splashed his spiked hair in a wide fan before he collapsed unconscious.
Tywi untied herself from the harness and squinted into the driving rain. She had been hoping for liberation from the first, yet she had not expected it at this time. Drev's wraith had not returned, and she had begun doubting he ever would. She had peeked through the hut's withes at the radiant white pyramid that rose beside the swamp. Near its top, she could see a circular device like the face of a huge clock without hands. Whipcrow had told the camp that this was the Chain of Pain that Ralli Faj had built to torment Peers and that it carried Rica and the wizarduke himself.
Who then is this, throwing lightning at ogres? Tywi peered into the slashing rain.
From out of the dark, twin green eyes sparked and a slender beastface emerged streaked with rainwater. Dogbrick's partner approached, the mysterious thief who had saved her from the trolls in the Qaf. Behind him came the Peer she had helped to escape Saxar, pale, freckled Jyoti. They both carried firelocks, and Jyoti had a long sword strapped to her back.
Most of the scavengers had fled toward the camp after the first ogre fell. Those who remained scattered at the sight of the armed couple. Tywi called after them, "These are friends!" But the taking of Rica by a cacodemon had stoked fear in all their hearts, and no one returned.
Dogbrick let loose a curving howl of glee at the sight of his partner.
"Silence, Dog!" Jyoti berated. "We're not away yet."
Ripcat embraced his friend, and Jyoti hissed for them to hurry away. Approaching the camp had been very difficult, for the ogres had rigged numerous booby traps and alarms throughout the surrounding marsh. Only slow, diligent use of Charm and Ripcat's uncanny senses had enabled them to penetrate the area undetected.
With Ripcat leading, they returned to the swamp and moved swiftly over the path they had laid down coming in through the teeming ferns and mangrove. And Jyoti was right to hurry them. Moments later, a dozen ogres swarmed across the flooded path and into the fen.
Darkness and rain impeded pursuit, and the escapees crossed log bridges and then toppled the soft wood into the morass behind them. By the time the cacodemons arrived to continue the search, Ripcat had led them by footfalls light as breaths into a maze of glades where not even an army of demons could find them.
Dawn filtered through the storm clouds with hyacinth hues, and they paused in a fern holt under a broad awning
so dense only a few cold notes of rain came through. From a hummock perch, they scanned the terrain, searching for cacodemons in the violet sky and along the water paths and lily lanes that crossed in giddy zigzags the swamp.
No one followed, though in the far distance they could discern tossing tree crowns where ogres beat the brush.
Jyoti unsheathed the sword Taran. In the soft haze of rain, its gold blade lit the dark cove. She handed the sword to Tywi, who was quavering with exhaustion.
The touch of Charm immediately revived the bedraggled woman.
Ripcat passed his power wand to Dogbrick. Not much charge remained in the wand, yet Dogbrick glowed with gratitude to feel again the warm, effervescent touch of Charm.
Without the sword, Jyoti veered toward despondency. After much difficult labor, she and Ripcat had succeeded in freeing his friend and Lord Drev's Charmed double, but Poch was still missing. All that remained of her family, he had to be found—alive or dead.
Tywi hugged the sword Taran to her breast and gazed up at floating ferns and air plants that dangled like marionettes. The flush of Charm also carried with it Jyoti's contact, and Tywi felt her worry for her brother. At the core of incandescent health and well-being that was Charm resided a telepathic echo of Jyoti's calling. It came clearer to Tywi because she was not looking for it.
"Your brother—" Her mind reached toward where she sensed the boy calling back in reply to his sister. And she glimpsed again the plangent, worried face she remembered from their meeting on the sooty streets of Saxar. She stood up and pointed the gold sword at a tangled wall of lianas. "Poch is alive.”
With the blade, she parted a curtain of hanging vines and revealed again mazy waterways—and beyond them, a scrap of order in the tumult of misty swampland: Several pillars mounted by stone sphinxes with broken wings showed the way to the Cloths of Heaven.
The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1) Page 38
