Dogbrick, too, had grown impatient waiting for cacodemons to swoop down on them, and he played along with Tywi's visions of Drev. He crossed the gravel bank at the point where she had said the wraith stood, and he stopped cold and motioned his bedraggled partner closer.
"Behold the tower of perfidy!" he gnashed. "Lord Drev led us most accurately."
They peeked through a blind of waxed fronds at the titanic pyramid floating above a burning parkland.
"This place stinks!" Tywi inhaled sharply, eyes darting about, constantly searching for cacodemons.
"There has been a firefight," Dogbrick said, misreading the erratic pattern of scorched vegetation. "A great battle has raged here."
"Ripcat—Jyoti?"
"Wait here. I will scout ahead." He bolted out of the screen of wax ferns and dashed across the sward, clutching the firelock across his chest.
Tywi followed.
"I said wait!" Dogbrick whispered hotly. "There will be cacodemons."
"Look, Dog!" Tywi pointed through the smudged air of smoldering grass to where the wraith of Lord Drev stood, naked wounds visible to them both.
"It's the wizarduke!" Dogbrick leaped forward, and the wraith retreated.
The phantom flitted among torched shrubberies shaped like animals, and they ran after it. Above them hung the massive interior of the pyramid packed with chambers and bowelings of ducts.
"Gryn!" Tywi identified the dead ogre with the cleaved face.
Dogbrick put a moldered sandal on its chest and pulled the assault knife from the ogre. "That large roast over there must be Gnawl."
They looked for Drev's wraith and found him hovering beside the fallen star, wavery as a flame. Maroon with sores, he gazed at them, eyes vibrant.
"Circle around the star from the back," Dogbrick advised, leading Tywi through a yard of smashed agates. Sand fused to glass in long chromatic threads crunched under their sandals. "It's alive yet. Was it luck protected it from the crossfire that burned these gardens or its own Charm? We'd do best, I think, to stay well out of its line of sight. Nearly killed Rica."
Tywi walked toward the wounded shade of Drev, and it wisped away. With her imagination, she called him back. In her mind, she beheld her apparition, without wounds.
Thin filaments of charmsmoke gathered to a semblance of the maimed duke.
"I can feel him, Dog!" Tywi called out excitedly. "Drev is alive!"
Dogbrick lifted the fallen star from behind by hooking his elbows under two of its points. It was heavy, and he could only barely lift it. "It's almost dead," he reasoned. "It's heavy with the emptiness of Charm."
Tywi advanced toward the wraith, it vanished, and she summoned it back. She repeated this until it led her to the helical ramp. "Drev wants us to go this way."
Dogbrick staggered toward her, carrying the fallen star. "Can't—take this—with us." He groaned and dropped the stone star. Its top point punched a hole in the ground, and it stood upside down.
Its pink face tightened like a fist.
Dogbrick snatched Tywi by her shoulders and hauled her away before the star's eyes opened. Their radiance blended shadows across the damaged park, and the air before its gaze shivered like silk.
The star's charmlight shone on a baobab, illuminating protozoan transparencies in the branches—the gelatinous ectoplasm of departed souls.
Caval stood there, too. Neither Dogbrick nor Tywi recognized the bearded skeleton. To them, he appeared as a cadaverous ghost, which was what he was. A cacodemon had found his punctured corpse on the ramp way and had dragged it down to the garden to devour it in private.
The shriveled ghost waved them away, pointing and gesticulating at the baobab. Then the fallen star closed its eyes again, and Caval's revenant vanished.
"He wants us to go to that stout tree," Dogbrick said and strode toward it.
"No, Dog!" Tywi waved to call him back. "The ghost warned us away!"
From around the broad trunk, a cacodemon emerged dragging the scarlet rib cage and eyeless head of the carcass that was Caval.
Dogbrick jumped away and collided with Tywi. She tumbled over the stony ground, and he wrenched himself away to avoid crushing her.
A tentacle snared his leg, dragging him furiously through the rocky sand. He fired maniacally at the tusked jaws in the creature's underbelly grinning to eat him.
Charmlight washed futilely across the meshing red teeth and spider-bright eyes. Swiftly, his free hand drew the assault knife from his belt and hacked with ferocious vigor. He kicked and howled and swung knife and firelock until he broke free.
Tywi seized his arm as he sped past, and he lifted her off her feet. Clinging to his shoulder, she gazed back at the gashed cacodemon writhing black whip strokes in the air, its blood smoking in watery billows.
Dogbrick ran until the ground gave way, and they splashed into a bog pool. On the far bank, they pulled themselves out, and the thief ground his molars for soaking the firelock.
"It ain't chasing us," Tywi announced hopefully, peering back at the pyramid on her hands and knees, ready to spring away. "Don't panic."
"I'm not in a panic," Dogbrick huffed. He shook clots of pond scum from the firelock. "I slipped on the muddy bank."
"Sure." Tywi stood taller to be sure nothing followed them out of the pyramid's shadow. "We're all right now. The place looks empty."
"You see Drev?"
"No." Tywi sat back on her haunches and scanned the chambers of the swamp. Pink cranes stood on a green sandbar eating crayfish.
"Now at least you know he still lives." Dogbrick set the firelock at its lowest thermal setting, and sparks sizzled from the clip contacts. "I think we better find someplace dry to clean this firelock, and you can seek Lord Drev with your trances—before it gets dark."
They followed a stream that ran over a red floor deeper into the marsh. Saw grass closed around them, and they prodded their way among the brittle stalks to higher ground.
Atop a rampart of junipers on a bough of blue lichen, Dogbrick took apart the firelock and Tywi lay down in a rectangle of emerald daylight.
She stepped out of her body and flowed across the lawn, back into the shadowy parkland. At the baobab, the jellied geometries of souls clung trembling to the branches.
Drev was nowhere to be seen.
The ghost of the old, withered man sat on a root ledge near where his scalped skull had rolled. He pointed along a singed hedge to a field of rolling black fog—the smoke of dead cacodemons.
Warped cries leaped from that seething smoke.
Tywi heard the Dark Lord dying. Inside the black fog, the wind of his screams carried absolute darkness and the raging roars of wild beasts.
She woke with a start on the blue bough in the fen.
"Ghosts?" Dogbrick asked, preoccupied with the parts of his weapon.
"Almost."
"Dung of the drakes!" the thief swore in frustration. "This weapon is ruined!"
Tywi stood on the flat bough and reached for a view of the pyramid. "We got to go back," she said in a hush of awe and caution.
"Did you hear me, woman?" He showed her the breech slathered in virid scum. "The firelock is useless. I gummed it up in the pond."
"Forget the firelock," she whispered to him. "We got to go back right away."
"Why?"
"Have you looked at the pyramid?" She grabbed his furry shoulder and urged him to his feet. "See up there! See the smoke?"
Inky tendrils of smog scrawled through the atmosphere around the pyramid. Staring closely, he noticed the black fumes leaked from the palace ducts.
"It's the blood of cacodemons!" she said excitedly. "It's the same blood as the one you knifed."
"That is blood smoke of demons?" He went to his toe-tips in amazement.
When he glanced down at Tywi, her face glowed through its mask of mud. "They're dying by the hundreds!"
/ |
Rett, the Dog Dim, Grapes, Little Luc, Skull Face, Chetto, and Piper. All the Bold Ones
who had fallen into the Gulf with Wrat and survived, all his former comrades on the Dark Shore, who had been ritually slain and fed to the gremlin and its hive, walked Irth as ghosts.
They stood in the slewed shadows of Wrat's adytum inside the pyramid's apex. Wrat saw them from where he slumped on his onyx throne, and he stared at them from under his brow, through quivery baubles of sweat.
The sacrificial blood of these seven enabled black magic in Wrat. Their deaths empowered him to bind the demons of the Dark Shore to his own Irthly frame. His hand clutched the purple fabric of his tunic, knuckles pressing against the pain in his chest.
Poch hung in the writhing tendrils of a cacodemon, watching Wrat with the sparkling intensity of a caught creature. He did not see the ghosts.
"Don't look so concerned for me," Wrat called to him. "With your help—" He winced and sucked a sharp breath. "With your help, I will soothe this discomfort."
The seven ghosts milled closer to their perfidious comrade, eager to watch him die.
"I am not dying, you charmless fools!" Wrat's voice leaked through his locked teeth. "I'm not dying! It's the idiot gremlin. It can't take the pain!"
The cacodemons that died hurt the gremlin vitally. It writhed with the suffering of its hive.
"The thing wants to break free!" He laughed like a shout. "It can't live without me." He grunted as the gremlin torqued inside him. "Your deaths made sure of that. So go away! I'm not dying." His jaw clacked convulsively, and he grimaced a smile. "I'm teaching these ignorant demons how to thrive!"
Take it back, Chetto called from across a cold space. His ulcerous ghost still rippled with the crawlings of cacomaggots under his skin.
Take the gremlin back to the Dark Shore, Grapes ordered, shaking his droops of polyps.
Back! the Dog Dim barked at him.
Use your magic to climb the ladder of the Wind, Rett told him, pointing with his scar-cleaved beard toward the massive aperture of the adytum, where the afternoon boiled golden clouds.
Jump into the Gulf, Little Luc insisted, his short, towheaded body vibrant with anger. It's your only hope of escaping certain death. Jump!
"I won't do it!" Wrat shouted. "I am the Dark Lord! I have come to loose chaos on Irth!"
Then don't jump back into the Gulf, Skull Face said and stepped forward into daylight. His noseless and lipless face stenciled the brightness. I want to see you die here on the Bright Shore!
Piper—tall and pallid, lustrous red hair spilling over regal shoulders—remained silent.
"You think I'm done?" Wrat spoke through clamped jaws. "No. To jump into the Gulf is to live again my defeat at the hands of Drev. No! We are staying here on Irth to rule all above the Gulf, with the stars under our feet!"
The gremlin twisted, and Wrat screamed to his feet and sat down again heavily.
The ghosts stepped closer to view his suffering and entered the cauterizing daylight. Their shadows disturbed the light briefly and vanished.
"I'm still alive!" he yelled and turned a bleary face toward Poch.
The boy watched in horror as the tunic over Wrat's chest throbbed.
"The gremlin wants to flee its pain," Wrat explained to the wide-eyed boy. "But if it breaks free, it will not live long without me."
Poch closed his eyes and pressed his chin to his chest, shutting out the nightmare.
Be still or die! Wrat commanded the bestial intelligence he hosted in his breast. "Calm down," he said aloud to himself. "You are in a panic. Calm down and let's face our enemy. You must trust me."
Wrat took his hand away from his palpitating chest and gripped the armrests of the onyx throne. He anchored himself against his pain, and he focused the gremlin's magic on the source of their anguish.
The strong eye showed them Reece: He ran wildly through the winding corridors among the torture crypts. When he surprised cacodemons, he motioned at them—and they immediately curdled to smoke.
The gremlin gnawed at Wrat's ribs, and he yelled, "Where is Ralli-Faj?"
The strong eye searched deeper down the pyramid and located the warlock in the charred ruins of his palatial gardens. He hung on his stilts before a fallen star that stood on its top point, upside down.
The star's eyes opened in its furious face, and twin beams of white Charm flooded the burned parkland. Ralli-Faj absorbed the Charm directly through his leathered skin and began to inflate.
Wrat watched with naked awe, impressed by the warlock's dexterity, handling such raw power. The charmlight was so strong, it wizened purple at the crispy fringes of his dried hide and pooled in the empty sockets, gelling to an inhuman semblance of eyes.
The awe of its host calmed the gremlin, and the knot relaxed in Wrat's chest.
"Yes, that's it," Wrat encouraged. "Calm down. Ralli-Faj shares our strong eye now. And he possesses the Charm to chase down Reece."
The gremlin settled to an ache behind Wrat's sternum.
"Now that you are quiet," Wrat continued soothingly, "I can show you why you can always trust me. This is my world. I know how to use it—for us."
The Dark Lord moved the strong eye from Ralli-Faj back up into the pyramid. He directed it at a smaller source of hurt and found Jyoti running amok through the palace, blasting walls, ducts, and portals with her firelock at the first glimpse of cacodemons, slaying some and wounding many.
Wrat smiled, unconcerned.
Within him, the gremlin sensed his smugness yet continued to writhe fearfully.
"Stop fighting the margravine," Wrat said to his attendant cacodemons. "Open a way for her at once. Lead her here, directly to us."
The gremlin trembled, and Wrat patted his chest with gentle assurance.
"She is already defeated," he said and cocked his head toward Poch.
The fright scrawled on the boy's face pleased the gremlin, and it finally calmed down completely.
In the strong eye, Wrat smiled to watch the cacodemons slither away into the lanes among the crypts.
Jyoti continued firing, singling out the obscene vaults carved as human orifices where the demons often lurked. Explosions marched ahead of her down the empty corridors, shattering lewd facades and carved niches that could hide clusters of demons.
She avoided hitting any of the crypts. Behind their yellow viewports, Peers floated in liquid agony. She reserved her berserk rage for demonic vaults and the chutes and scaffolds that connected the levels. The acrid smoke of seared metal burned her throat, and she hurtled on, following the direction of the sword in her left hand.
A pummeling stream of blue charmbursts smashed a utility wall ahead of her. Pipes twisted apart, spewing steam, and stone blocks crashed atop themselves and erupted into rock dust and whirling shards.
She stepped through the smoke into the expansive top chamber of the pyramid—the Dark Lord's adytum.
Far across an expanse of polished black stone, Hu'dre Vra sat on an onyx throne before a sinuous doorway tall as the sky and filled with shining clouds. His massive, gleaming armor shone like night. In the air beside him, tangled in the barbed loops of a cacodemon, Poch hung, tremulous with fear.
"Put down your firelock and my sword," the Dark Lord commanded. "Then you may join your brother."
Jyoti stared at Poch, who gaped back mutely, too afraid to speak.
In the sky-high portal, among the towering clouds, a black thunderhead of cacodemons swelled larger, swarming closer at their master's beckoning.
Jyoti dropped the firelock and with both hands placed the sword Taran upon the rubble of the wall she had punched through. She looked again to her brother, and he did not object.
Then, head high, she walked away from her weapons and into the power of the Dark Lord.
A Flesh of Dreaming
Under the baobab in the charred gardens of the Palace of Abominations, souls huddled. Lacking both training in the internal arts and Charm, these souls had amorphous shapes and nebulous perceptions of the world around them.
So many!
Caval c
ounted over a hundred before he stopped. They were mostly human souls from the camp, slain as panicky cacodemons frenzied among them. They cast a glum mood over the tree under which the assassin's carcass lay torn in bits.
He strolled the length of the tree's long shadow. At its end, Thylia stood, lean and radiant as a tapered flame.
"Why are you here, brother?" the witch queen's ghost asked in a distant voice.
The old man gestured toward the chewed and blackened grots of his body. "Waiting for the night tide, Sister."
"You are bound then for the Dark Shore?" She stepped three paces nearer and parted her veils to reveal a sad countenance. "You are not among the Brotherhood?"
"Loose affiliations." He tossed it off lightly, resigned already to his new venture beyond the Gulf. “And you? The Dark Lord grew weary of your amorous witchery?"
She replaced her veil demurely, yet her jet eyes still smirked. "You know the heart's hungers better than that, Caval."
"Then if you didn't bore him," he said, plucking his frazzled beard, "you must have crossed him."
"Does it matter now?"
He cocked a wispy eyebrow. "Why are you here, queen of the witches?"
"I saw you with these other lost souls." She motioned at the boughs of jellied blobs. "I don't understand. Why are you in this filthy place and not among the Brotherhood?"
"I was learning their mysteries..." Caval began, feebly.
"But you took your life into your own hands, didn't you?" She shook her head knowingly. "The Sisterhood has its apostates, as well. Like you, they follow the lone road to the Beginning. Few arrive. Most turn out just as you have, poor Caval, a ghost on the killing floor, waiting for the wind to blow it away."
"As you say." Caval's stare showed no hint of shame and none smudged him. With concern he asked, "And you? What becomes of your ghost, Thylia?"
"The Mysteries, Caval."
"I've heard tell." He pursed his lips, impressed at the genuine salvation that the covens and sanctuaries offered their most zealous devotees. "You've enough internal Charm to reach one of the Sisterhood's crystal collectors. There your soul will be stored and nourished, rested, until you are ready again for another life on Irth. Is that it?"
The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1) Page 43
