Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3)

by A. A. Attanasio

  Remembering Dogbrick

  Jyoti snatched the niello eye charm from Reece’s grasp.

  He shuddered in the darkness. "My God, they were inside my head!"

  "Goblins do that."

  Gasping, he wiped his face with both hands. "I smelled them! Ugly—deathly stink!"

  "And that's merely a Charmed image of them." The eye charm clattered onto her night table. "Pray you never actually confront them."

  "How can I leave you here with them?" he asked tensely.

  "I'm not alone, Reece." Her voice carried calm strength. "All the dominions of Irth are united against the goblins. We defeated them before—we will again. And when you return with Dogbrick, you will help us."

  Dogbrick. The large, beastmarked man had befriended Reece when the magus had first arrived on Irth, disoriented and ignorant, half dead under the fierce rays of the Abiding Star. Ripcat would have perished then and there without him.

  Fondly, he remembered his friend—his tawny mane brushed back from a visage cognate with the ferocity of a wolf. With such human emotion in those orange eyes, Reece had thought of him as human from the first. Even so, that big-toothed, heavy-jawed muzzle could roar fury as readily as speak philosophy.

  It is big inside a human heart, Dogbrick often said. Big enough for reality and dreams together.

  "I will return as quickly as I can," Reece promised.

  Jyoti, relieved to hear the certitude in her lover's voice, embraced him and for a long moment held wordlessly to his strong frame. After so much loss—the people of her capital and the entire Brood of Odawl, all of her name but her brother and herself dead—she clung to him strongly.

  And then she let him go. The fact that soon light-years would separate them, quite likely forever, gripped her with sorrow. She offered to the darkness a smile of somber warmth, remembering the happiness they had shared.

  The Charm of her amulet-vest blunted her feelings and his as well. When they embraced again, free of the unbearable weight of grief, his mind roamed ahead to Earth and the quest for Dogbrick. He determined to find a way back to Jyoti as fast as possible.

  Her thoughts settled on those who could not escape Irth, who had to face with her the goblins and their armies of ogres, trolls, and wild beasts. She wondered grimly how many would survive this latest goblin war. She wondered if she herself would survive. And finally she fixed upon the one person for whom she had to survive, the one person who most needed her, who had always needed her—Poch.

  Blight Fen

  A beardless, six thousand-day-old youth, Poch wore green and black dalmatic robes woven with protective sigils of the most finely spun conjure-wire. His white kid boots, trimmed in witch-fur and studded with hex-gems, warded vipers and poisonous centipedes. Upon his head of henna-colored hair, a turban of glory rags set with rat-star gems imbued his brain with Charm, amplifying his alertness and lending a calm aspect to his wide, squared features.

  Thus armored against both physical and psychic harm, the cautious Poch strolled the ramparts above Blight Fen.

  Below him, to one side, ranged colorful tents of theriacal fabric where the Peers tortured by the Dark Lord had been healed. All the Peers had departed some time ago, and their prismatic tents remained as part of the atrocity museum of Blight Fen.

  A small blackstone exhibit hall constructed with contributions from all the dominions displayed realistic epoxy statues of the cacodemons. These monsters with horrid faces embedded in their bellies had ravaged Irth for Hu'dre Vra, the so-called Dark Lord. Few visitors arrived to see again these slitherous abominations against whose talons and fangs Charm had been useless. People wanted to forget that horror.

  And so, Blight Fen remained almost entirely unoccupied. Poch continued here because his role as docent provided him livelihood and station in society greater than he could possess anywhere else.

  He would not live again under his sister's authority, obedient to her whims. At least here, on this large marsh hummock walled in with mangrove palings to keep out swamp beasts, he lived as his own lord.

  Atop the ramparts, he turned his back on the memorial grounds and gazed over the Reef Isles of Nhat: the expanse of black water and boggy holms that extended to this dominion’s misty horizons. Not long ago, he had suffered here under Hu'dre Vra—and then fortune had turned.

  What had been a frightful swamp became a verdant wonderland when the memorial committee assigned him an assistant to help manage Blight Fen: the apostate witch Shai Malia.

  Herself a Peer, the niece of this dominion's regent, conjurer Rica, Shai possessed the Charm to rule a dominion. The atrocity exhibit hardly required a manager of her status, let alone two docents, and both understood from the first that Rica hoped to match her n'er-do-well niece with the margravine Jyoti's ineffectual brother and hope for the best.

  Surprisingly, the two found each other more than just compatible. Poch and Shai, from the first, collided passionately, and after two hundred days together remained stupefied with desire.

  Watching the petite woman mounting the rampart stairs, a nymph of night caught by daylight, gray and black witch veils tantalizing him with the provocative shades of her dusky limbs, he flushed with amorous heat. She had abandoned the Sisterhood more than two thousand days ago. She wore witch veils to entice him—and to mock the Sisterhood, who had made her childhood difficult.

  "Have you heard yet from Jyoti?" she asked as he reached to take her into his arms. She extracted the clamshell aviso from the inside pocket of his dalmatic robe and read the message log. "Poch! You haven't even signaled her yet!"

  "I don't want to," he whispered against the soft gauze of her veils, drowsy from the cinnamon scent of her hair. "We don't need her. We can make our own way in the world."

  "With goblins and trolls at war with the Peers?" She pushed away and pitched her voice to carry alarm. In the last three days, their aviso had been cluttered with reports of savage troll attacks in all the dominions. "We are unprotected here. We must seek sanctuary in Elvre, in the city of your ancestors."

  Poch stiffened. "I'm not going back to New Arwar."

  She returned the aviso and both her hands reached from under her robes to massage his shoulders. "You're an Odawl. You've as much right there as your sister. And more, I say.”

  "More?" He succumbed to her expert fingers, and his shoulders relaxed. "She's the margravine."

  "Who abandoned her dominion to adventure upon the Dark Shore. Some margravine!"

  "She had to rescue the magus." He nuzzled again against her veiled hair and breathed the spice of her. "She loves Reece Morgan, as I love you."

  "Reece!" Her fingers dug deeper into his muscles, and he straightened with a brightening of pain. "Why is she consorting with this common creature of another order?"

  He grasped her strong hands and lifted them from his shoulders. "He's not a creature. He's a man—the man who killed Hu'dre Vra. We all owe him a great debt."

  "He is not of the Bright Worlds," she protested and twisted her hands free. "He is a creature of the Dark Shore. How else could he have slain the Dark Lord? But is he worthy of your sister?"

  " Jyoti is her own woman." His eyes widened with mock alarm. "And I won't return to Arwar Odawl, because if I do she will treat me like a child!"

  "Not with me at your side." She slipped her arms around his waist. "If she wishes to risk her life on the Dark Shore and consort with those strange beings, then I say she does not serve well the people of her dominion. She should abdicate to follow her heart to alien worlds, and you—Poch Odawl—you should serve as margrave of Elvre. That is your duty now."

  Poch said nothing.

  Shai edged back, miffed. "Haven't you heard a word I've said?"

  "I hear you, Shai," he replied with a smile and pulled her close to him again. "I think I would listen better if you were my wife."

  Her scowl darkened, obvious even through her veils. "We will marry when you are margrave."

  Gently, he lifted the veils from he
r face and stared softly into her ink-dark eyes. “Then I shall ask your aunt Rica to appoint me margrave of Blight Fen."

  "Do not jest with me, Poch."

  "Never," he promised, pulling her down with him onto the wood planks of the rampart.

  Beyond the Swamp Angel

  When Shai Malia got to her feet, Poch lay deep in sleep. Her enchantment would keep him unconscious for several hours. So long as he wore his robes of conjure-wires and his turban of glory rags and rat-star gems, her witch spells did not avail. Passion removed his garments—and opened him to her craft.

  While rearranging her veils, she gazed over the gloomy swamp waters. Beyond a wall of fallen trees and uplifted black roots, she sighted the Cloths of Heaven. These ancient ruins, the oldest on Irth, offered only speculation about who had constructed the original edifices and for what forgotten purpose.

  Above the span of onyx water brooded broken coral columns and walls of the immemorial ruins. And to them whispered the witch Shai Malia, "I am coming. I hear your summons, and I am coming. Be patient, my dear ones. I must purge myself first. You do not want me with this fool's child, do you? That is not our promise or our hope. So, be patient, dear ones. Be patient. I am coming to you shortly."

  Shai Malia left Poch slumbering on the planks of the rampart protected from the glare of the Abiding Star by the shade of the parapet. She descended to her tent of iridescent theriacal foil. There, she cleansed herself with wort rinses, then donned sturdy garments: knee-high boots, brown canvas trousers, and an amulet vest embroidered with protective glyphs. Over her sable tresses, she wrapped a long gray witch-scarf to keep spiders out of her hair. Then she departed Blight Fen in a scull.

  The scull carried her over the black water past banks of giant medusa trees that stood in ranks dimly retreating into foggy depths of the impenetrable marsh. Soon, she glided alongside the tarn of inky, percolating water where the Dark Lord's Palace of Abominations had been sunk by vengeful charmwrights of Irth.

  A swamp angel had been set over the site to ward off speculators who might seek to plunder the sunken pyramid. She paid it no heed. Merely an apparition, the holographic illusion frightened the uninitiated. Soon, it dwindled out of sight.

  Ahead loomed sphinx columns mired in miasmal bog. Winding serpent-coil stairways curled to nowhere. And a tangle of vines and creepers strangled these ruins of domed porticos and tiled atria.

  The Cloths of Heaven received her with squawking monkeys and tollings of garish birds. She lowered the charm-sail, and the scull skidded to a stop against a broken slab of masonry.

  The Cloths of Heaven provided a creaturely haunt for wraiths. Ravenous for blood heat, bodies of light infested the ruins, and their hollow voices called faintly from domed vestibules and archways tangled with vines and creepers. She would never have dared enter this doomful place except that the dear ones had summoned her.

  Briefly, she lifted her gaze to the winged sphinxes atop the corroded pillars and thanked the beneficent gods for guiding her to the dear ones.

  When she had first arrived at Blight Fen, she had been so unhappy with this remote posting she had resolved to squat in her tent and gnaw trance roots. To her utter surprise, the fool who shared her work proved far more charming and playful than she could have ever dared guess. Her body responded to his with irresistible yearning, and they enjoyed together the most unconventional gambols and amorous feats.

  Her only disappointment: his weak will—a will as untrained and diffuse as smoke. He had no psychic strength, no drive to make more of himself than the simpleton docent that fate had elected him.

  All her attempts to inspire defiance of his sister had proved futile. He wanted nothing more than to enjoy erotic mischief with her, and she had resigned herself to play with him for a while before moving on.

  And then, the dear ones had summoned her. Ever after, she celebrated Poch's weak will. Such child's play to put him to sleep at her whim and obey the beckonings of the dear ones. Always, the same. They called her here to the old ruins, and she obeyed. She glided over foggy waterways to this somber place. They led her, as they did now, under the shadow of the sphinxes, through murky colonnades, and along toppled walls so thick with lichen they appeared melted.

  The wraiths did not touch her. They flitted away at her approach, for the dear ones protected her. She moved nimbly over fungal beds of arched passageways and among broken spandrels and collapsed tiles to a dark cavern.

  The power wands of her amulet-vest illuminated a felled forest of pillars and a cracked ceiling of sagging vaults upheld by dense ganglia of roots.

  Among crazed shapes of crumbled stone, the dear ones waited. The goblins themselves, waited: five of them, doll bodies and warped legs barely strong enough to uphold their bulbous heads. Their sad and evil smiles widened at the sight of her, and the cracked agates of their hooded eyes shone brighter.

  Shai Malia knelt in the rubble before them. The cheesy stink of their cankerous bodies did not offend her, for they held her mind in their little hands and passed it around among them.

  They fingered her thoughts—such delicate thoughts. They touched them carefully. They needed her for their war. Just as they needed the trolls. Too small and fragile to fight on their own, they recruited help from the cold world around them.

  They stroked lovely fragrances of summer rain and meadow flowers. They stroked images of babies, wise children of a forgotten realm come to Irth to end the hypocrisy of the Peers, who lived in luxury while so many suffered to survive. The dear ones would deliver justice to all.

  And Shai Malia would be their queen—if she would but bring them what they need now: hex-gems, jewels of concentrated Charm with which they may focus their telepathy and reach far beyond themselves to control trolls and ogres.

  Shai Malia delivered a handful of hex-rubies from her personal cache, and the dear ones filled her with meadow-sweet bliss. They had new instructions for her. The war had begun. The dear ones had sent the fierce trolls into the dominions to topple the Peers. Already weakened by the Conquest of the Dark Lord, the high-handed ones would surely fall.

  The magus who had slain Hu'dre Vra had lost his magic. Merely a man, an insolent man, he had made himself the lover of a Peer. With him away on the Dark Shore, the time had come for Shai Malia to go to New Arwar. She would position herself for the coming of the other dear ones, the hundreds who slept through the cold of this world in remote sanctuary.

  This would be their last meeting for a while. She would use her own cunning and witch skills to prepare a way for them. Though on her own, she would not forget them—nor they her. With loving care, they washed her hair in cold fire.

  Dogbrick on Earth

  He felt very strong. Sitting among heathery sweet fern in the woods, he gave his strength to the others. They looked familiar and yet different. Though larger than he and more densely furred, they lacked strength, nor could they give strength to one another. Quiet creatures, they did not make the noises he made. They listened. They could hear clouds moving overhead. If he tried, he could, too. But he had to try very hard.

  Far easier to give strength to the others than have them listen for him, he provided them with intensity, and they found food—sweet berries, silver thrashing fish, crunchy grasshoppers. When they moved over the long rolling country, he followed. He gave them strength, and they let him come along.

  The ground, brown and soft underfoot, led among tall straight trees with branches interlocking high above. The air smelled of resin and mint. Musk of animals flapped like flags and banners on the wind. The others tasted the wind and decided which way to go. Away from the acrid tang of bear, toward the fresh scent of rabbit.

  He traveled with six others, each tall and brown furred with a ruddy sheen to their pelage. His pelt had a tawny color and shorter nap, except for his shaggy, blond mane. Also, his face looked different. In the stone pools of the creek beds, he peered at his wide, massive jaw and red whiskers. His leathery black snout glistened with persp
iration, and a bewildered look set in his deep orange eyes.

  He had a savage face. His black lips pulled back from thick fangs and serrate front teeth. The others wore flat visages and small, calm, round eyes under sloped brows. And they donned nothing over their shag, while he sported a gray breechcloth.

  At night, the cold descended from the stars. The others huddled in leaf drifts or sat solitary, shivering mildly in their fur. The cold did not seem to touch him. He felt sadness for the others. And on one particularly chill night, he wove fire in the air and set it turning gently over the ground. The others did not like this and ran from him. They vanished like shadows, silently, suddenly. He did not see them again for three days.

  In that time, he moved alone through crowded corridors of the forest. In his heart's small immensity, memories stirred just out of reach. By these felt yet forgotten fragments, he knew he did not belong here.

  Dogbrick.

  The name called quietly to him in his half sleep during an ashen twilight. He sensed his name. The others had no names. They knew each other by scent and sight. Drops of rain sang through the needles of branches as he paced and spoke aloud his name, "Dogbrick—Dog-brick—Dog— Dog—Dogbrick..."

  That night, while rain sizzled through the trees and he lay curled under the lee of a pine ledge, he dreamt of a city carved into the rock face of a cliff. The city gleamed like black mica, tiers of smoldering factories and tilted streets hewn into the raw rock of titanic sea cliffs.

  Far below this fuming hive, the ocean surged. Its silver tusks flashed. Black dirigibles hovered on the city's heights. Three of the ornately festooned vessels floated near a sky bund of massive trestles, far upwind of the sulfurous smoke.

  Farther yet, suspended deep within the cobalt fathoms of the sky, other worlds held light like chunks of transparent crystal. Beauty and grace possessed him as he gazed at them. Then, orange mist from the numerous spires and minarets of factory flues covered him in sour fog.