The Voices of the Flowers
Mary Felix, with a rucksack slung over her shoulder, followed Dogbrick through the trees and over the scattered stones of a rattling creek. "The others are coming back for me," she had warned him. "We must go where they won't find you." He led her deeper into the sunless woods, to a hollow hung with moss gray as hag's hair. "I should leave a note. They'll keep searching for me."
"Go back." Dogbrick kept walking. "I will find myself on my own, somehow. Go back to the others."
"Wait—you walk too fast for me." Mary panted. Her muscles ached, yet she hurried to his side. "I want to stay with you. I've got to understand. For my own sake, I want to know who you are."
"I am glad for your help, Mary Felix." Dogbrick moved relentlessly over the gravel banks, avoiding mud, leaving few prints. "But I have felt your people, and they frighten me."
"Slow down—please!" Mary clutched at her aching side, huffing for breath. "I'm not—not trying to capture you—or trick you. Look—I'm not even taking pictures—or recording your voice. I feel your fear. You can trust me. Just slow down. Let me come with you." She stopped walking and called after him. "I don't want to go back. I have nothing to go back to. I'm alone. Like you."
Dogbrick stopped and turned. Seeing how frail she looked and hearing the sharp note of despair, he experienced her sadness. He nodded, balled strength between his palms, and tossed it to her.
The warmth filled her muscles with vigor, and she bounded alongside him as he strode among immense ferns. "What have you done to me?" She laughed and skipped like a child. The heavy rucksack that had been hurting her shoulder now felt light as paper. "I could run for miles!"
"I gave you strength."
"How?"
Dogbrick shrugged and clambered over ramparts of roots and under twisted beeches splotched with lichen. "I don't know exactly."
Mary Felix took his blond-furred arm. "I think you should know."
He stopped and leaned against a tree. This small old woman, watching him through a haze of awe, spoke a plain truth that made him ache. The more he tried to remember, the emptier he felt, until he virtually throbbed with hollowness.
Frightening futility closed on him, as if he were shrinking. Abruptly, he shoved away from the tree. "I can't remember anything."
"Well, you remember meeting me."
“That just happened."
"And before that?"
He shoved through ferns to the grassy verge of a brook, a wider swerve of the creek they had crossed below. The brown muscle of a fish shifted among the reeds under his shadow. "I remember the others."
“Tell me about them."
They sat on the thick grass, watching the current splice among the rocks, and he told her about the others, the ones she called Sasquatch. She had endless questions. She craved the most minute details, and they sat a long time talking.
Slowly, he followed the clews of his memory back to his first awakening, under a cedar where sunlight lay like sawdust atop bracts and needles. "I remember gliding down shimmering layers of blue—but I don't understand what I remember. I think I was—I was flying through the air. I was flying."
"You're a magical creature." Mary Felix stared at his beastmarks with open wonder. "Why can't you fly now? Have you tried?"
"No."
Try."
Dogbrick stood and willed himself into the air. Blue light rayed through him, as though he had become translucent as smoke and perforated by moonbeams. For an instant, he glimpsed pale bluffs under him and geese on the flyway arrowing above shreds of cloud.
Far below, woods spilled among the hills—and he spotted the red wagon again, tiny with distance, followed by two green vehicles on a road like a pale thread.
All at once, he stood again beside the murmuring brook and Mary Felix on her knees, mouth agape.
"You disappeared!" She reached out and grabbed his big hand, wanting to reassure herself of his solidity. "Where did you go?"
"Into the sky," he said in a hush of surprise. He glanced around at the spilling brook and the walls,. And though he confirmed that he occupied the same place, he felt he had arrived somewhere new. "They are returning for you. I saw them. The red wagon that came yesterday—"
“The Land Rover." Mary hastily got to her feet and turned to look at the trees and bracken that screened the lower slopes. "I told my research assistant to bring help. We thought we had found Sasquatch. They'll come looking for me."
"Do you want to go back?" Dogbrick pressed his palms together, gathering strength. "I'll give you what you need to get down there quickly."
"No, I've already told you—and I mean it—I want to go on with you." Her face almost seemed to glow. "This is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me."
"I am going to move quickly, back into the deep woods. You can come with me if you want."
"Let's go!"
He gave her strength, and they traveled swiftly past the hedged banks of the brook, over tumble stones, and into green woods smoking with pollen. By mid-afternoon, they reached a glade of feathery grass patched with blue flowers: a clearing bright and unearthly under the dark wall of evergreens. Here, they paused.
"Are you hungry?" Mary reached into her rucksack for the bag of granola and tins of herring she carried.
She froze.
Her hands—how different they looked! The wrinkled flesh had smoothed. Age spots had faded entirely away. "My God!"
Dogbrick paid her no heed. He listened to the flowers. They were hard to hear, because bees hummed among them. Clouds sizzled softly overhead. The wind ransacked the trees. And Mary Felix kept jabbering.
"I know I'm awake—but I feel I'm dreaming." She rummaged in her rucksack and came out with a small mirror with a hole in its middle for flashing sun signals. In its radiant surface she beheld a woman she had not seen in thirty years—her loose gray hair chestnut brown again, her face smooth as a teen's and freckled. “My God!”
"Listen!" Dogbrick hushed her with an uplifted hand. "The voices of the flowers..."
She heard nothing more than the wind in the pines and fell to her knees in astonishment. "I cannot believe any of this!"
Dogbrick began to step forward, then paused. The flowers were not singing, he realized with a chill. He heard the voices of invisible people, chanting words he did not understand.
A figure appeared in the clearing—a translucent figure of a bald, scorched-looking man. Adder eyes watched intently.
The deathly look in that charred face with its tiny, discolored teeth frightened Dogbrick. He had seen this phantom before, in the misty hours of the forest coves with the others, who had stared and not seen. He hurriedly wove fire in the air and whipped the flames at the apparition.
The ghost vanished in a blue glare and thunder trembled underfoot.
"Did you see that?" Dogbrick asked and turned to Mary.
She had seen nothing. She gawked at herself in a small mirror and fingered her face.
"You made me young!"
"Not me." Dogbrick spoke distractedly, searching the clearing for further signs of the evil wraith. "The strength I've given you did that. Don't worry. It won't change you anymore now that you're as strong as you can be."
The Road to Moödrun
Reece Morgan departed New Arwar as a passenger on a convoy of lumber freighters bound for Moödrun. He wore an amulet-vest festooned with every kind of device the margravine could convince her charmwrights to bond with conjure-wire: amber power wands hugged his ribs, collarbones, and spine; hex-rubies patterned a spiral over his liver, protecting him from poisons; sanctum-panes of platinum patched his solar plexus providing energy to overcome fatigue; tiny scarabaeus mirrors glinted like sequins in spiral designs meant to alert him to peril and ward off enchantments; buttons of witch-glass served also as revelation prisms that would expose invisible entities; theriacal opals covered his kidneys, ready to energize his body if he faced threats; rat-star gems lined the inside of the vest, amplifying his m
ental functions; and niello eye charms covered his shoulders, acting as powerful ocular lenses for seeing at a distance.
With the aviso tucked into the inside pocket of this sturdy vest, he could contact Jyoti at any time. And the barb gun holstered at his back offered an added measure of personal protection.
Yet even with all this charmware, he lacked protection against the harsh rays of the Abiding Star. As a man of the Dark Shore, he lived in jeopardy of charmstroke. Overexposure to the radiance of creation's light had instinctively fashioned for him a protective body of light when he had first arrived on Irth: an animal form adapted to thrive in the radiance of Charm.
Ripcat's bestial strength and feral agility had protected him not only from the Abiding Star but also from most predators. The loss of magic had deprived Reece of that protection, and now he had to wear a cowl of tinsel to reflect the glare that could kill him outside the sanctuary of cities and Charm-powered vehicles.
On the convoy, Reece rode in a passenger trailer connected between the lading beds of a freighter. The other travelers barely paid him any heed. A clean-shaven man of average stature, with sandy hair and visage blunt as a boxer's, he wore the unassuming appearance of a city maintenance worker. His mantle of tinsel, brown trousers and sandals seemed utilitarian.
Reece shared the trailer and its several sleeping berths and small galley with three violet-haired elves. Master charmwrights all, the elves had earned small fortunes helping rebuild the fallen city. They departed New Arwar for the rocketpad at Moödrun and an ether ship that would return them to their homeworld of Nemora.
Along the way the convoy picked up a fur trader, a witch, and a noisy group of lyceum students—aspiring jungle botanists and herb merchants—completing a tour of the dominion. The fur trader and the students filled the only other trailer in the convoy, and the freight manager asked permission of the elves and Reece for the witch to ride with them.
No one objected, and a sturdy woman shrouded in traditional black and gray veils entered. She sat at the oval window where Reece gazed forlornly past tapered trees at epoxy statues of cacodemons. His lost magic had created these.
"Magus of Elvre," the witch observed at once in a tone of mute surprise.
Reece nodded glumly. Preoccupied with memories of all that had fallen away—Jyoti, Irth, magic—and apprehensions of what lay ahead—the search for the charm-ways, the passages that would quickly return him to the Dark Shore and the uncertain search for Dogbrick...
"Forgive me this intrusion." With her free hand, the witch parted the veils from her face and revealed a patchwork of scars, one eye lost, disfigured flesh sunken into the socket. "I have dwelled in the House of Rue. I offer these scars as warrant for your confidence.”
She turned to the three elves, who stood on the deck of the observation bubble regarding the gruesome collection of cacodemonic statuary. In a whisper, she announced, "You are the man from the Dark Shore.”
“I am.”
“Slayer of the Dark Lord!" She turned her gruesome visage full upon him. “Touch me with your Charm.”
Reece moved to rise and go to his own berth, and she took his sleeve.
"Forgive me, magus."
“Witch, I have far to go.”
“The goblins believe that the dominions are weak—and you leave us?”
Fear brightened in him at the recollection of the drowsy-lidded dolls with their bulbous heads and filthy, warped bodies. “Who sent you?”
“The blind god.”
“Sister…” Reece's hands flopped helplessly. "I have no magic. I can protect no one."
“Your magic is exhausted. Forever?"
Reece frowned. "Don't trouble yourself about me, sister. There are too many others who need your good help. Save your strength."
"I understand." The witch nodded and adjusted the veils across her face. "I, too, want your destiny inviolate. Forgive my intrusion. I cannot help my inquiries. I am a witch, obliged to serve the welfare of all beings—even the magus of Elvre!" She sidled closer and spoke in a confidential whisper. "I apologize, Reece Morgan. I leave you in the light, now that I have seen for myself. You express the very ideals of my Sisterhood: pessimism of intelligence, optimism of will."
Attack of the Trolls
The witch introduced herself as “Esre, Irth-healer”—and, seeing that she could not leave him alone, Reece amplified the Charm from his amulet-vest until a smile lifted his heavy features. He sat deeper in the upholstered seat, and they chatted amicably about the Dark Shore and the Sisterhood until nightfall.
Then Esre proved herself an exquisite cook. Even the elves, who usually preferred their own cuisine, partook heartily that night of her spiced salad and braised tubers. And they flocked to her side in the morning, helping prepare honey-berry flummery.
Along the highway, the convoy occasionally stopped to stack timber onto the lading beds from the jungle dominion's lumber camps. The journey went slowly. Reece found ample time to reflect on his fate.
He knew he would never catch up with his past, never achieve again the marvels that his magical powers had wrought. His life had slowed down. Gradually, he came to see that his quest for Dogbrick also search for the common man he had become, to begin again.
A passionate quiet enclosed him, and he examined his imperfect heart. He understood then that he expected to find himself on Earth, because he belonged there. Now that he had forsook his role as magus, his ambitions fit the boundaries of the Dark Shore better than they did the magical possibilities of Irth.
Only Jyoti had kept him here—and would bring him back. And perhaps in a future day when the happy sorrow of her building New Arwar had finished, she would consider living for a while in his world…
By the time the parabolic arches of Moödron's sky bund climbed into view above the torn canopy of the jungle, Reece had overcome the melancholy plaguing him since leaving Jyoti. The wall of the jungle looked impossibly huge, and the treetop city of Moodron ascended higher yet.
Reece had booked passage on an airship that would drop him by glider into the Spiderlands. Charmways there, he hoped, would return him to the Dark Shore.
He departed the convoy station and strode across lumber-yards and through market crowds toward the sky bund—where chaos erupted. The bough paths atop the giant trees and the scaffold bridges that rayed across the upper stories of the jungle swirled with frenzied throngs.
“Trolls!" people screamed. Amulets clattered on tunics as the crowd jostled, desperate for escape.
Reece spotted the invaders climbing from the jungle floor along the boles of massive pilaster trees. The metallic-skinned creatures clawed rapidly through the ivy of the tree trunks. The charmfire from the city soldiers hindered them only slightly.
Viper-cowled rangers took up positions in the city’s fern terraces and loosed hot crimson bolts from their firecharms. They dared not fire stronger charges for fear of damaging the tree buttresses and igniting a conflagration.
Red flares of energy smashed the bolt-eyed trolls, exploding them to gory shards. Their severed limbs continued to climb. Unscathed trolls threw their comrades’ severed heads onto the balconies, and the bodiless fangs snapped at and maimed soldiers and panicked citizens.
Trolls on lianas swung from the jungle into the city and with swipes of their razor claws disemboweled their victims.
Swept along by the terrified mob, Reece found himself squeezed into the metal cage of a sky bund lift. Pulleys hoisted the cage out of the jungle treetops and into blue day, among trestles of the sky harbor. At the top, the cage gate swung wide, and the people rushed madly for the nearest dirigible gondolas. Wild to flee the assailed city, the frenzied mob stampeded—only to find that the trolls had already scaled the bund’s girders.
Clawed arms swinging like scythes, the predators lunged onto the ramp ways, cutting down everyone in their path. Horrified by monsters leaping over one another to bury snarling snouts in ripped bodies, people threw themselves over the guardrails and p
lummeted into the jungle below.
Reece unholstered his barb gun. The metal projectiles only inflamed the already vehement beasts, and they rushed him with raging howls.
A claw strike ripped away his mantle and amulet-vest in one stroke. Bare-chested and with a breathless scream in his throat, he confronted a furious troll. Its claws entangled in his torn garments, and he fired a barb directly into one of its glaring eyes.
When it wrenched away shrieking, Reece charged across a ramp that led onto the nearest gondola. The dozens already inside heaved against him, panicking to get out. Trolls had shimmied up guy wires and entered through the cargo bay.
Reece turned to flee, and hands grabbed and pulled him away from the hatch. He twisted about and faced the scar-slashed face of Esre. Her witch veils pulled asunder in the flailing crowd, and people pulled away.
"Stay!" she commanded, then quickly began to herd passengers off the gondola.
Heart writhing, Reece watched three trolls hack at the last of the passengers, severing heads, splitting breastbones to expose purple bundles of trembling viscera. "Esre—get out!"
From under her veils, the witch drew a compact firecharm. With lethal precision, she felled each of the three blood-frenzied trolls. She moved with surprising agility for a woman of her sturdy frame and easily rolled the twitching corpses out the cargo bay.
As Reece turned to signal for the others to return to the gondola, she jerked him aside and pulled shut the hatchway.
"There are more trolls out there!" Reece shouted. "Let the people in!"
With deft strength, Esre spun him away from the hatch and onto one of the cushioned benches where a lopped limb lay. "Don't move," she ordered hotly.
Aghast, Reece watched the witch crouch in the open bay and use her firecharm to blast the guy-line bollards. The gondola lurched, and the dirigible rocked free of its berth.
When Esre disappeared into the pilot's turret, he ran to the hatchway, hoping to fling the portal open so that others could jump onboard. Already the gondola had separated from the ramp way, and ejected passengers stood at the brink, screaming and sobbing while trolls descended upon them.
Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3) Page 4
