The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  Old Shard, the colossal granite port on the headlands of Mirdath, had wasted no time in erecting scaffolds above their famous helical towers that the cacodemons had toppled. Drev did not linger to inspect the busy reconstruction, for he was eager to see his capital again.

  Adrift above the convolute. jungle gorges and cloud forests of Ux, Dorzen spun daylight from domed minarets and suspended ribbons of pavement. But before he could fly closer, a soft yet insistent voice summoned him.

  "Drev—"

  He woke to Tywi's mild smile. Her hands, weathered as rocks, clasped his. All the hues of pain, all its oily stains on his soul, had been washed away by Charm.

  Yet he remembered.

  The sky and ground rising and falling on his harrowing ride to hell continued far back in his mind, where the light of talismans could never shine.

  He remembered. The way to hell was slow and with many detours into memory…

  "Drev—wake up," Tywi called with gentle entreaty.

  Clarity flickered in his weary face as he forced himself to his elbows and took in his surroundings. Dawn light breathed in pearly billows through the trembling tent canvas. The conjure cloths gathering the first Charm of day had roused him. His sleep was over. He had absorbed all the Charm his body could hold. From this point on, healing required his mindfulness.

  Tywi helped him sit, and he stared at her a moment without recognizing her, surprised how Charm had transformed her. She was no longer the street mouse of his trances but an intimate stranger with quiet beauty that had been hidden before by dirt and despair.

  He searched out the traits he found familiar—her dimpled chin, rabbit pout, and bold eyebrows—and the recognition he felt placed him again at the center, at the pivot of his life, in touch again with the fulcrum that the sages called destiny. With Tywi at his side, he sensed peace and its measures of happiness stretching ahead of them. He felt he would scry it for certain if he closed his eyes. But he could not stop watching her until she pulled him hard against her.

  "We must never part again," he whispered into the softness of her hair.

  "Never."

  He separated from her, stronger and all at once more clear-headed, and he put a palm against her cheek. "We have suffered many little deaths apart, Tywi," he said, searching her eyes, wanting to be sure he understood her beyond Charm. "Do you really think it's possible that we can enjoy a long life together?"

  Her embrace answered him beyond words.

  Within the hour, they departed Blight Fen with arms around each other in a wind cruiser with no captain but himself. The fleet craft carried them high above the melodious isles and hills of Irth. Helm secured, the ship hove through a clear sky, and they stood together at the rail.

  On that placid flight, they shared in person all they knew and feared. And only after their love-locked bodies unstuck and they had tacked into the dusk and turned to run hard before a scarlet night did they share what they feared to know.

  "What brought us together?" Tywi asked, sitting beside him on the pilot's bench, their joined arms at rest on the helm. She wore a throat band of rat-star gems that polished the transparency of her mind. Under its influence, thoughts and words moved differently in her.

  "Is it Charm?"

  "No, not Charm," Drev whispered dreamily, face upturned to the gold-thatched sky. "Not Charm. Fate."

  "What is that?"

  "I'm no Dogbrick,' he stated flatly and regarded her from the smiling corner of his eye. "I have no real answers to questions like that."

  "What do you think it is, then?" she prodded him, and turned her cheek to the balmy breeze.

  "A pattern in the light of the Abiding Star." He glanced back at the following sky of vagrant twilight. "Shadows of heaven—I don't know. What we were when we were light, I suppose, before we cooled to bodies and destinies."

  "Then we met in heaven." She liked that and let him know with a kiss.

  He squeezed her hand with savage tenderness. "What I fear to know is what set us apart on Irth. Peer and street orphan. What breaks the light into privilege and poverty? No sage has ever explained that to my satisfaction."

  Tywi hesitated to voice the obvious: "That flaw is in ourselves. 'Peers whisper to Peers.' Isn't that the old saying? We keep ourselves apart from each other."

  "That can change with us."

  "You are in love." She laughed briskly. "Excuse my giggling! I've had almost all my dreams in a trash bin, Drev, so they're less shiny than yours."

  "You don't think we can end the Peerage?" He sat up and stiffened with mock surprise. "My great-grandfather united the strong and weak realms into the seven dominions. My grandmother set the gem-star above Irth and brought together near and far. But you and I, Tywi, we will do even better. We will join high and low and make heaven touch Irth."

  "Now you do sound like Dogbrick," she said, with an amused grin.

  "I hope we can bring Charm to all the warrens on Irth. I can play that dream by heart."

  "Well," he admitted upon a moment's reflection, "even if you are right and we don't succeed, Irth can never again be the same. We are closer now to the Dark Shore. All of us, even street orphans, are Peers above that abyss."

  Mention of the Gulf made tlim shudder, and they hugged wordlessly under the night's red branch. A long time, they held to each other, their hearts full of departures healed by Charm.

  "Let's rise above the darkness," Drev suggested.

  They parted smiling with a shared understanding and walked down separate sides of the cruiser, angling the hex-vanes on the rails to catch the last red rays. When they met at the bow and held to each other again, the sails of conjure-silk filled taut with dusk. For the moment, time stood still as their vessel lifted toward brighter layers of sky above the shadow of the world.

  / |

  Poch accompanied Jyoti when she presented herself to Lord Drev with the sword Taran. The wizarduke, just recovered from his Charmed sleep, looked thin as smoke and eager to be away from Nhat with his new bride. Yet he dismissed his cortege of well-wishers and excused himself from his beloved Tywi to meet privately with Lord Keon's children in the silver shadows of his healing tent.

  He consoled them again for their terrible losses and heard all that had befallen them after their paths had crossed in the Qaf. At the time, he had never expected to see them again. And yet here they were—the wan brother and athletic margravine, lone orphans of Arwar Odawl, survivors of perilous paths.

  In a solemn gesture that had as much to do with tenderness as justice, he bequeathed them the sword Taran to serve as an emblem that would mark their generation and the beginning of a new Brood of Odawl.

  Poch thought it a dubious honor to receive the blade that had created the evil that was Wrat. What grace in a sword that had led scavengers against Peers? To him, the brother of a margravine, this seemed a sinister legacy, this cutting edge that had severed the life of the wizarduke's own sister, the Duchess Mevea. The youth might have thought the sword a bane and not a trophy at all if not for his sister's triumphant pride in receiving it.

  "You carry nothing with you but what you have lost," the wizarduke said to them upon bestowing the weapon. "Carry that lightly and this sword may help you carve a future out of your emptiness."

  Soon afterward, the wizarduke and his consort left by wind cruiser, and Jyoti and Poch sat on a knoll outside the camp with the sword standing in the ground between them like a blade of daylight.

  "I'm not going back with you, Jyo."

  Jyoti watched her brother with animal calm. "We have a city to rebuild."

  "Leave Arwar in ruins." He frowned, his anger Charmed to annoyance by the profusion of amulets he wore. "Don't ever rebuild it."

  "Why?"

  "No Charm can ever heal it," he said, bitterly. "It can never be the same."

  Her calm tightened to relaxed vigilance. She looked for insight into her brother from the shadows of expression that crossed his face and from the colors in his voice. Since the ca
codemons had turned to smoke, she had been trying to understand what had happened to him in the Palace of Abominations. He would not speak of it and hid behind his amulets.

  "I'm leaving on the first flight to Moödrun," she told him in exasperation. "Just like we talked about. I'm margravine—"

  "Of ruins." He mocked her with a cold smile and added gently, "Leave it that way, Jyo."

  "The Earl of Moödrun has already been in touch, you know that. He's sending an escort." She searched for her brother in his taut stare, trying to see through the depths of his days to the loud and happy child he once was. "Elvre looks to us for leadership, Poch. We are Arwar Odawl now."

  "You are."

  "I want you to serve with me." She reached over and took his hand. "It's too much for me alone."

  "You won't be alone." He squeezed her hand affectionately and a glint of mischief sharpened his stare. "There's the earl and scores of other Peers throughout the dominion who will be eager to replace our fallen brood."

  "No one can ever replace them—"

  Poch rolled his eyes and let her hand go.

  "What are you going to do then?" she asked, proud at least that Charm had restored him to the wide possibilities of his life.

  "I'm staying here."

  "Here?" she asked derisively and swatted at a tuft of grass seed. "This is just swamp and ruins. What are you going to do here, curate an atrocity museum?"

  "I'm going to work in Blight Fen," he informed her with a self-assured smile. "Dogbrick says that these tents one day will be temples of healing. People will come from all the dominions to study the curative powers of Charm."

  "Dogbrick—" The last of her calm evaporated, and she scowled at him. "He's a beastmarked thief! This clutter of bright tents is just a chance for him to create a tiny fiefdom of his own. Why do you want to serve him in this remote place when you have a legitimate role to play in the larger world?"

  He laughed at her with familiar zeal and a brother's chiding humor. "Do you hear yourself, Jyo? You sound like Father. 'A legitimate role to play in the larger world!'" He gibed at her solemnity with a stiff face that shattered to a jeering grin. "What happened to the Jyoti who used to let Grandfather Phaz throw her around like a silly tumble monkey? Where's my sister who used to sand-sled with me?"

  "She became margravine."

  He nodded with glum acceptance and patted her hand fondly. When he stood up, he took notice of the gold blade. "The sword belongs with you. I don't want anything to do with it. It reminds me of Wrat."

  "Don't judge this too quickly." Jyoti rose and put her hand to the helve, so that it opened for her grip. "This sword is far nobler than any loveless lie Wrat could put on it." She turned the blade gently between them, side-lighting their faces with its gleam.

  "It's venerable!" she continued, excitedly. "It belonged once to the Liberator, the tailor Taran. And before him, it served kings." She gazed into it deeper, and its light made music in her eyes. "It was forged on Hellgate in the first talismanic days by Tars Kulkan, the blind smith who founded the dreaming school of sorcery..."

  Poch tossed her a friendly wave and walked off. "As I say, it's your sword." He strode across a grass field shiny with wind, walking away from the station of prismatic tents.

  "Where are you going?"

  "I'm meeting Dogbrick," he replied. "He's organizing perimeter sentinels with eye charms, in case the ogres decide they can't resist the supplies in our stores."

  Jyoti recognized he was determined to go his own way, and she sighed, as much releasing him as accepting him. "Fine. I'll know where to find you when I need you," she taunted in her most older-sister tone. "We'll stay in touch by aviso."

  "Sure, Jyo," he called over his shoulder. "Someday we'll sit across a table and negotiate trade routes between Arwar and Blight Fen."

  "Someday."

  He waved genially without looking back and walked on, not needing her anymore. A smile gleamed in her, then blurred to sweet sadness.

  / |

  Jyoti did not wait for the earl's escort to arrive from Elvre. The following dawn, still under the heel of darkness, she rode a sky barge out of Blight Fen. The tandem-lashed balloons—forty in all and with a spry crew of eighteen—sailed for Moödrun laded with the tide scavengers' latest harvest of kraken bones and sea dragon molts.

  From the stern rail, she watched the swamp angel burning in the twilight wilderness, illuminating the simmering black pool that had drowned the Palace of Abominations. As the barge pulled farther away, the angel flickered dimmer among the jungle isles and in the solvent hues of daybreak.

  Morning rose blue in tall ranges of luminous clouds. The calm and powerful sea swept below, strewn with spindrift and the blow smoke of Leviathan rising to their shadow.

  Elvre's green plateaus and jungle massifs lifted above the horizon. Soon, the sky barge slid off the maritime wind onto the Road of Clouds, the main trade passage through the realm. Silver trestles of sky bunds glinted above the forest awning and collected black dirigibles in clusters where cities thrived below.

  The barge navigator informed Jyoti when they reached the closest approach to fallen Arwar. On a launch stage above the cargo holds, she strapped herself into a personal glider, and the navigator set the hex-canvas to catch the rays ol the Abiding Star at the necessary angle to carry her to the ruin. When he released the tethers, she rose through a fog of cloud.

  She burst clear into a flyway of undulant and colorful waterbirds. For most of that afternoon, she sailed above a rambling wilderness interior. Wherever she looked, she surveyed the cinnamon sprawl of rivers and rain forest bunched in emerald horizons.

  Fallen Arwar came into view under the slant rays of late afternoon. Dense jungle encircled the intact crater, a chancre of melted rock crusted at its center with the debris of the fallen city.

  Steam still rose in tendrils from the rubble mountain of twisted pipes, broken slabs, and goliath chunks of masonry. Backlit by the swollen Abiding Star, the mound resembled a bald death's-head foul with decay, already splotched by the jungle's spongoid growths and anguished ganglia of creepers and vines.

  Other gliders wheeled on thermals above the ruins: gawkers, mourners, relations of the lost, and a vigilant patrol of well-armed air rangers that the earl of Moödrun had dispatched to stalk scavengers. When she crossed the horizon, the raptor-cowled rangers identified her with their eye charms as their margravine, and they escorted her, using green glow wands to light the way toward a cleared escarpment above a riotous gorge of fronds and mist.

  From where she came down in the clearing, she could view the crash site in vermilion last light. An air ranger helped her unstrap; another introduced herself and the squad.

  New faces, new names—a new city—everything new.

  She nodded cursorily to each of the rangers, then gave her attention to the shattered metropolis she intended to rebuild. In the umber light and with intoxicating currents of forest haze rising on the night tide, she visualized New Arwar. It would be as modern as Old Arwar had been classical. She would set it to drift in a wide elliptical trajectory through the dominion with this death's heap as one focus and lively Moödrun the other.

  She had plans. And the new faces and new names would help her to fulfill them. She turned to address them and saw a scuffle among the rangers farthest from her. Several guards struggled with someone among the bloodshot shadows at the fringe of the clearing and threw him to the ground.

  "A charmless miscreant," an air ranger whispered. "Probably crazed. Says he knows the margravine and demands to see her."

  "Send him forward," Jyoti commanded, curious to see who was so quickly aware of her return to Arwar Odawl.

  A pale, half-naked man rose and strode through the gantlet of hooded rangers. He wore no obvious amulets, only his soft-soled thieves' boots and black cord trousers. Thin as a cat, he lacked the physical symmetry and developed musculature of a mature Peer, and by this farouche appearance the rangers reasonably marked him for a char
mless rogue.

  "Reece!" She greeted with genuine and open surprise.

  "I knew you'd come back here," he said quietly.

  She dismissed the others and stared hard at the soft-bearded man. In the silver planet shine, he looked more familiar than she remembered. "Have you lost your magic?" she queried. "Why did you let my rangers restrain you?"

  "I was sure you'd see me eventually," he answered candidly. "There was no need for magic."

  She stepped closer, studying him avidly. "After you killed Wrat, you left so quickly. Poch and I—Lord Drev—we all want to thank you for what you did."

  "Thank me?" An anguished shadow darkened his features. "No. I'm the one who left open the Door in the Air. And because I left it open, Wrat could come through with his demons. It was my fault that Arwar fell." He stared at the fuming crater and muttered softer yet, "My fault that thousands died—and with them, your family." Touching chin to chest, he spoke his secret hope. "I don't deserve your thanks—but I need your forgiveness."

  Jyoti reached out and lifted his face to meet her ardent gaze. "Love led you here, Reece. You came to find Lara."

  "A ghost. And in seeking the dead, I brought death."

  She nodded, and her eyes narrowed, understanding him. "You came back to rebuild. Just as I did That's how you knew I'd be here. And that's why you didn't use you dark magic. You want what no magic can find."

  "Yes," Reece said with a hopeful catch in his voice. "You have a city to make new. I have a soul needs similar work. I thought maybe..." He looked into her face for acceptance, and when she smiled quietly, the fog in him lifted.

  A laugh deepened in her to see his extravagant and relieved happiness, a laugh of recognition, and she took him gladly in her arms and rocked with him beneath the teeming star vapors and planetary phases of the Bright Shore.

  * * *

  Appendix

  The Gibbet Scrolls