The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  His orbit carried him too high to see any trace of highways, wort farms, or the rocket pads that he knew were down there. Since the beginning of talismanic time, envoys from the dominions of Irth had been sent to this amphibious domain. Most did not return.

  Those few who did reported a sophisticated civilization, a boisterous colony belonging to an interplanetary Utopia that spanned bright worlds. The salamandrine denizens of Gabagalus invariably treated their guests with respect; yet, toward the Drylands—as they called the dominions—they held complete and relentless indifference.

  Drev watched the slippery continent drift away as his orbit carried him onward, continuing his stratospheric trajectory into night. He swung along the brink of the Gulf and then curved in his flight to glide back toward the twilit edge of darkness and the blue marblings of dayside Irth.

  Saffron drifts of afternoon in the Reef Isles widened around him, and he dropped toward the smoldering pyramid, into the smell of fire and a circle of haggard, triumphant faces grinning at him from all sides.

  / |

  Dogbrick carried the shriveled wizarduke away from the mephitic stink of the engine of pain. Tywi kept close, using their destinal bond to hold his ghost in place. When she touched him, she felt the heavy stone of his body and how his soul had already disconnected.

  Then Poch ran alongside ad placed the sword Taran in Drev's limp hands, and its Charm began to heal him at once. Reece and Jyoti sprinted ahead to see if they could find theriacal opals among the cacodemons' vaults.

  In the adytum, Drev raised his head and encountered Wrat's torn carcass where it lay staring up blindly through crooked lids. Only then did he relax enough that, when he lowered his head, he slipped past trance into sleep.

  / |

  Even Caval's ghost at the base of the baobab tree felt the arc of destiny that illuminated the Charmed moment that ended the reign of the Dark Lord. He gazed up at the emptiness of heaven between the clouds and thanked the Nameless.

  Death has become easy.

  He turned to the Abiding Star, the white light that had yet to cool to matter, and relaxed in its warmth. Slowly, the rays lengthened and ruddied toward night, and slowly the old sorcerer-assassin faded away.

  When Reece came at dusk to find him, to tell him what he had learned of himself from the Dark Lord, what he remembered that he had forgotten deeper than his magic, Caval's soul was gone. It had drifted out on the night tide.

  Reece the magus departed that night as well. He slipped away without farewell while the others worked fervently to release the Peers from the pain vaults. He had completed his role for the blind gods on the Bright Shore and believed that he had earned the right to continue his search for the first woman he loved. His feelings for Jyoti would have to wait until he had completed the task that had carried him here from the Dark Shore.

  Lara's soul scented the distances of Irth with her music. That inward song led him far away from the Reef Isles. He followed it by boat to Drymarch. A dew-wine cartel had erected a sky bund there, at the site where cacodemons had burned the old docks.

  A dirigible carried him north to Dorzen in anonymity, and from that festive city he sailed a wind cruiser across the sea to jubilant Keri. By glider, he traveled deep into the northern mountains away from the celebratory frenzy of the dominions. Finally, on foot, he climbed the frost-laced gravel heights of the Calendar of Eyes.

  The air burned cold, but his magic warmed him. On all sides glowed the ash of dusk. Lara's song glittered brighter than he had heard since he had drowned it in the cold waters of the Dark Shore.

  Atop a windy spire rock, he sat in the night listening to the soulful singing until dawn. He stood up under a striated emerald sky to greet the Abiding Star.

  It rose on all sides of him. White radiance shone from the Beginning and enclosed him with dazzling serenity, brute joy that opened the gates to the secret kingdom of himself.

  And there he heard Lara's song in its proper setting, and at last he understood.

  He climbed down the Calendar of Eyes. Along the way, he stopped to close the Door in the Air. Stars infested the sky dense as sand, yet the door was easy enough to find once he knew that it was there. He clambered to its slender threshold and stood at the sightless edge of forever, gazing down across the Gulf to the Dark Shore.

  "Caval!" he shouted.

  After a while came the reply, "I am here, Reece. And I see you ... far away ... on the limb of a star ..."

  "I found Lara!" Reece called. "She has returned to the Abiding Star! To the Beginning!"

  "Of course..." Caval's voice stretched to red shadows. "She is a witch... She belongs with the Mother..."

  "But how?" Reece yelled into the blind depths. "She died on the Dark Shore!"

  "I took her dead soul," Caval answered in time, his words smeared with echoes. "I took her soul out of the river as it came downstream ... I carried her back to Irth with me ... gave her to the Sisterhood ... Her soul was sturdy ... from a cold world ... hardy enough for the sisters to save ... They wove her a body on Irth ... She lived thirty-five thousand days ... a witch in Keri ... before she climbed the Ladder of the Wind ... to the Beginning!"

  Reece stood dazed above the mist of stars and the yawing darkness beyond. In the few years it had taken him to gather the Charm to climb to Irth, Lara had lived decades and fulfilled Caval's broken ambition. "Why? You never told me you were taking her soul back to Irth!"

  Silence swallowed his cry. Eventually, from a tiny place in the darkness, he heard the smallest whisper. "I was selfish ... never thought to see you again ... never have to answer your questions ..."

  "Caval!" Reece shouted with all his might, his body swaying from the jamb and nearly toppling him into the Gulf. "Without you in the dark, I could not be here in the light! Master!"

  No reply came.

  Reece closed the Door in the Air and climbed down the Calendar of Eyes.

  / |

  When the cacodemons prowling the streets of Dorzen withered to charcoal scrawls of smoke, Lady Von knew at once that the Dark Lord had met his doom. She witnessed this while plying her witchcraft among Peers huddling in sewers and imprisoned in warehouses.

  Since her installation by Hu'dre Vra as ruler of Ux, she had avoided the palace. She preferred to move unannounced through the city with only a few handmaids, witches themselves, helping those in need. In that way, she did not have to oversee the torture programs and could do what was in her power to help Wrat's victims.

  Tar streaks of melted cacodemons hazed the air as Lady Von sped back to the palace in her coach. She rushed immediately to the central garden, where songs of water and pebbles rose to an open and vividly blue sky.

  A handsome man in a silk tunic sat on a stone bench throwing petals into a trickling rill and watching mutely as they whisked away between his bare feet.

  "Romut?" she called, and her voice startled small bright birds from the walls of black ivy. They spilled through fern-hung bays and flew over a boulevard crammed with people dancing as news spread of Wrat's death.

  The handsome man with the fleecy yellow hair continued plucking petals and dropping them in the crinkled water.

  Lady Von stared into him with eyes darker than shadows and found his mind blank. Once she ascertained that the demise of the Dark Lord did not allow Romut's soul to return, she withdrew and left him to his mindless pleasures.

  She found a group of old witches gathered around the champagne marble altar at the center of the crystal court. They parted their veils at her arrival, and she recognized none of them.

  "Thylia is dead," a witch mother with flesh of varnished wood announced. "The Sisterhood has chosen you to replace her as our queen."

  Lady Von stood speechless before these bent messengers and groped for a reply. "I am but a veil dancer in the Sisterhood..."

  "The witch queen is not an earned rank, Von." The witch mother inspected her with an aspect of concern. "The role the Sisterhood offers you is an appointed service.
Are you prepared to accept?"

  The petite young woman glared numbly. "I am not worthy of such responsibility."

  "You are full worthy, my dear." One of the group broke away and swept toward her in muttersome veils. "You suffered Romut's sacrileges against your body and when he came into your power, you did not return his cruelty. Instead, you cared for him."

  "And you did not truckle to Wrat." The varnished face spoke again. "Nor did you act foolishly and defy him outright."

  "You adapted to all the necessities for survival," the witch at her side stated proudly, "without betraying your vows to the Sisterhood. Will you serve as our queen, young Von?"

  "And my husband, Baronet Fakel, and his children—" The well in her heart filled with all the love that the Dark Lord had tried to drain from her, and no words could carry those sudden feelings.

  "Your family will join us at Andeze Crag," the witch mother assured her. "There is room there for everyone's happiness!"

  The witches closed around their new queen, laughing and talking excitedly. And even as they celebrated in Dorzen, far to the south, in the Palace of Abominations, Dogbrick and the liberated prisoners from the camp removed the queen's husband and step-children from the pain crypts with the other Peers. Bundled in theriacal wraps, they shed their wounds even as balloons carried them out of the miasmal swamp to a makeshift aid station established on the upland pastures.

  The balloons, the opals, and all the materials for the station came from the lading docks and construction yards that the cacodemons had built in a nearby sea cove. Under the leadership of Dogbrick, whom everyone in the camp recognized, the rescue of the torture victims in the pyramid proceeded swiftly.

  The presence of numerous charmwrights among the prisoners provided the necessary expertise to devise amulets for this careful work. And using treasures of Charm found on the docks, the rescuers labored through the night and freed all prisoners by dawn.

  Ogres watched enviously from within the marsh. With the cacodemons gone, the ogres' perpetual war with people could continue vigorously once again, and they mumbled among themselves strategies for taking the Palace of Abominations for their capital.

  The charmwrights thwarted this ambition when they fit the giant structure with numerous anchor and ballast amulets and sunk the pyramid in the marsh. Bog water churned brown waves leprous with vegetation, and the spying ogres fled deeper into the marsh. When they climbed into the canopy to look back, the Palace of Abominations had disappeared. Where it had stood, black water boiled.

  The charmwrights named the bubbling morass Blight Fen and set over it a swamp angel, a muddy wraith of seaweed hair and mossy wings, to ward off the curious. That frightened the ogres. Ever afterward they set themselves apart from this remote corner of Nhat where the ruined Cloths of Heaven reflected in the black waters of the drowned pyramid.

  In the absence of ogres, the aid station on the grassy pastures above Blight Fen flourished. Cities from every dominion sent amulets and charmwrights to aid in the recovery of their Peers, and within days, most of Wrat's victims looked whole and could laugh again.

  At night, when the wounded Peers slept in their theriacal hammocks, after the galleys had been cleaned and the night crews set to work preparing for the next's days meals, Dogbrick took time from his chores to sit on the grassy bluffs with the scavengers who remained.

  Mostly they talked about their hopes for Blight Fen and for Irth in the new days. Individuals recounted their camp experiences and what it took to salve their damaged souls. Visitors, who had come to see for themselves the preserved camp and the simmering black fen, occasionally asked Dogbrick what he had learned in his captivity.

  "The Empty Screed is right," he gladly pontificated whenever called upon. "There is no freedom from our own freedom. You have to make it up as you go along. Each remorseless day." He strode to the edge of the bluff, his maned shadow cut from the starry sky. Pointing down the far side to the ebbing sea and the tidal flats, he added, "In the camp we were forced to look into mystery's mirror. We were forced to see that most difficult truth. That we are all just little more than ghosts."

  "'Such littleness is life!'" someone would almost invariably sigh or chant at this point, quoting the Talismanic Odes.

  "We are little more than ghosts," Dogbrick would agree. "Ghosts measuring distances by stories, right to the edge of the world. What does it matter then if our story is Caval's or Wrat's? The edge cuts away such petty distinctions. Good against evil? What matters light or dark in the void? The Gulf swallowed the holy sorcerer as readily as it took back the monster Wrat."

  "Churl's bane!" Sometimes the audience would curse him for what sounded to them too like the Dark Lord's nihilism.

  Dogbrick smiled a glint of fang. "Are we not little more than illusions, all of us?" he accused the scavengers Charmed free of their scars and the visitors protected by their talismans. "One moment we are whirlwinds of charmfire standing on Irth. And the next, we are fugitives to our own bodies. Pilgrims of the abyss. Nomads in the cold worlds."

  / |

  For a day Drev lay in Charmed sleep, swaddled in trance wrap and strapped with theriacal opals to a hammock under a chrome tent that filtered rays from the Abiding Star. While he rested, Tywi helped Dogbrick and the other volunteers at the aid station. She removed drained hex-gems on the amulet casts of the wounded and fetched replacements for the charmwrights.

  During a break in her chores, she met Dogbrick on a hill of salt-bleached grass. To one side, the sea fumed among high-water boulders and on the other, the tents and pavilions of the aid station caught the radiance of the Abiding Star with their conjure-cloths of chrome and dazzling gold.

  "You kept me alive in the camp,” she said, sitting with him on a driftwood bough dragged to this crest no doubt by ogres. “And Drev says it was me kept him from Rica’s sorry fate. So you saved him as well, you see—through me."

  Dogbrick turned away abashed and swept his gaze over the shiny fabrics of the makeshift settlement. “Look at us here on Irth, perched at the crumbling edge of the Gulf with its vacuum and dim lit cold below, waiting to swallow us whole. Sooner or later, we all fall…”

  "Yeah, Dog. All but the holy.” Tywi put a hand on his furred arm. "I got a question. It ain't about the holy or the damned. It’s just about living."

  "Good! I am neither holy nor damned myself,” Dogbrick said and put both large hands on the crude harness of power wands and rat-star gems he had rigged for himself from wharf supplies. “Like most people, I'll walk the Bright Shore until I drop my body and my light carries me into the darkness of the Gulf. That is what the talismanic doctors predict, and I doubt them not at all.”

  Tywi nodded and fingered her amulet necklaces, glad for the soothing strength they offered. "You think this is a life we can love?” she asked. "I mean, Dog—we've seen so many die. And so horribly. ‘Amulets heal the body, Charm heals the soul.’ That’s what witches say. And yet, the dead—they are gone. Their absence mocks me.”

  "Mocks you?" A startled laugh jumped from him. “Now you’re sounding like a witch."

  "Mocks what I'm feeling. You know what I’m saying.” An urgent expression brightened her stare. “Dog, I love Drev.”

  "Love!" The philosopher inhaled to begin a discourse on the bewitching truths of The Screed of Love but restrained himself when he saw the concern in his ward's tawny face.

  "All I really know of him is just a dream. Yet I love him anyway. We can love dreams, can't we, Dog?"

  "Some philosophers would say all that we can love is dreams."

  The shadow vanished between her eyes, and her body relaxed. "So it's all right? Me and Drev?"

  "'Love is a question,'" Dogbrick recited from Screed and peered at her with a warm glint in his amber eyes. "The answer lies not with me, but with Drev."

  They both turned their attention to the flashing tent tops of the station, thinking about the healing that remained and the work yet to be done. Dogbrick bid farewell and stro
de back to work with a lofty gait, proud that he had counseled his ward like a sage, without wordy oration.

  Love, he thought. The philosopher turned his face into the wind to taste the spindrift and continued speaking to himself from the quiet of his heart, his words creating for him a warmth like the radiance of a star in its solitude.

  "Alone in the wind with her dance, humanity seems to me very much like an old healer on the sliding scree of a mountainside under the vacant swirl of the shoreless heavens. All of her soul hovers in her incantation." He sighed. "To what shall we dedicate the palsy of this dance, Dogbrick? To what? I tell you, man, by this pain of unknowing, by trying to know and understand this grief of living, we learn the extremity of love."

  Tywi watched after him fondly, seeing him talking to himself and glad that he had kept his counsel to her so direct. She felt gratitude again for his friendship and touched the talisman beads around her neck that he had given her and that allowed tenderness to wake in her after so much hardship.

  Presently, her thoughts returned to Drev, and she wondered what their life together would be like.

  In a day, the wizarduke would wake whole, purged of the damage inflicted by the Chain of Pain. But for the time being, he ranged far from his unconscious body. In fever flight, he circled the globe and looked again for Gabagalus. Night held the far side, and all he sighted below was the shining sea, glossy with planet light and star smoke.

  On the day side, he cruised through wind-hair clouds over the sacred crag of Floating Stone. The scorched quilt of farmlands in the shadow of the suspended mountain already lay speckled green, enlivened once more by charmwater.

  Grasslands swept by, and occasionally he spied a prairie village floating in the quiet flaxen sea of grain. The far distance glinted with razor lines of shoals, tide pools, ad the sea's horizon. Drymarch paraded past with its dew-wine vineyards, pastel bungalows, and a sky bund stacked into the clouds with trade dirigibles.