A dull vibration announced the activation of the prop engine, and rasping sibilance signaled that the witch had used the control panels to disengage the last of the mooring wires. Through the long windows, Reece watched the sky bund swing away and flickers of cloud rush past.
Esre returned to the passenger cabin, her veils back in place. "Sit down." She pointed to a bench whose squabs had not been untainted by blood. She spoke while she moved around the cabin picking up body parts and tossing them out the open cargo bay.
"The Sisterhood sent me for you. Not the blind god. I lied to you. You surmised this from the first. The Sisterhood in New Arwar inform us that you are returning to the Dark Shore—leaving us even as the goblins return." With a grunt, she rolled a headless corpse out the bay. "We can't have that. You are Irth's greatest magus."
"I am not. Not anymore." Reece remained standing, hands fisted with frustration at his sides. "I told you already. I have no magic. None."
Esre tossed another body through the open floor hatch, then knelt and spun the crank wheel in the hull that closed the bay. "You are a man of the Dark Shore. That means you are made from a different gradient of Charm, a colder, more dense Charm. That is why you held Duppy Hob's magic so very well. And that is why you will hold our magic just as well."
"Hold your magic?" Reece moved toward the witch. "You sacrificed all those people back there to use me? Do you think I'm going to comply after that?"
Esre straightened her disheveled veils. "Comply—" she shrugged "—or not. Either way, you will serve the Sisterhood—once more, hero of Irth."
Wife of Darkness
This is our curse: for every yes, a no.
—Gibbet Scrolls: 28
Beauty without Cruelty
The Margravine stood at the railing of an observation tier. She surveyed steep boulevards and switch-backing avenues of her nearly vertical city, New Arwar.
Grief spoiled her appreciation of the enormous work already completed. What had been ruins five hundred days ago appeared very nearly a whole city again: Flame trees lined streets, colorful birds roosted among floriate eaves, and blossom fragrances wafted on Charmed winds.
Yet, though the lovely, antique buildings of yore had been restored by magic, she knew that this metropolis would never fly again. The cost of the hover charms necessary to levitate the city exceeded the expected income from all Elvre's exports for the next fifty thousand days.
Gloom shrouded the city. News of troll and ogre attacks from every dominion frightened the populace. Many had already abandoned New Arwar and decreed it cursed.
A gentle knock turned the margravine to face Nette, a compact woman in a black utility uniform. Her cowl folded back from a bronzed face. Short-cropped silver hair, stiff as bristles, heightened the angled planes of her head. "I have news from Moödrun."
Jyoti signaled her to advance, and the short woman entered with the silent grace of a shadow. A weapons master from the Brood of Assassins, Nette had previously served the wizarduke, Lord Drev. He had assigned her to protect the margravine the day that he learned Reece had lost his magic.
"I have already heard the aviso reports from Earl Jee," the margravine said, trying to preempt a tedious report of loss and destruction. "I am aware of the damage to the sky bund and the great numbers of casualties."
"The attack had been timed to coincide with the arrival of Reece Morgan at the harbor city." Nette paused a moment for this to sink in, then added, “The trolls targeted the magus. But he is not among the dead. The trolls failed their goblin masters."
The margravine tilted her head inquisitively. "Why did the goblins wait until he reached Moödrun? They could have assaulted the convoy on the highway."
“The convoy was too obvious." Nette spoke matter-of-factly, her tone conveying her certainty in this assessment. "The goblins do not want us to know that he is a threat to them."
"How is he a threat?" Jyoti asked quietly, suppressing her anxiety. She wanted to touch a power wand in her amulet-vest and increase its soothing flow of Charm. She restrained herself, not wanting to show weakness before her hired guard. "Reece has no magic. How can he threaten the goblins?"
The assassin watched Jyoti through the shaded slits of her recessed eyes. She heard the harmonics of worry in the margravine's voice and read the hesitant movements in her hands. "I am interpreting the behavior of our enemy, margravine. I do not yet understand the full import of their actions. My brood's assessment of the troll nests in the jungle around Moödrun clearly indicates that the trolls were in position to attack the harbor days before they did. The goblins restrained them until the magus arrived."
Jyoti considered this a moment, then said, "Earl Jee tells me that the airship Reece had booked to carry him into the Spiderlands was destroyed, but he was not on board."
"That is true." Nette motioned for Jyoti to move away from the observation tier railing. "You must not expose yourself to weapons—or to the strong sight of niello eye charms. Assassins and spies abound during these unsettled times. You have no heir, and your brood's position among the Peers is only as secure as your person."
Jyoti frowned. Out of respect for the wizarduke, she had accepted Nette as her weapons master, but she disliked being told what to do. Her grandfather, the renowned warrior Phaz, had trained her from childhood in the ancient fighting techniques. She had mastered the acrobatic exercises from far-gone times before amulets of Charm, when survival depended upon using the body as a weapon. She felt competent to protect herself. "My brood is not entirely dependent on my survival. I have a brother—"
"Poch," Nette finished for her. "I am well aware of your weakling brother."
Jyoti glared at the assassin. "Your effrontery is insulting. Are you trying to infuriate me?"
Nette shook her head slowly, with restrained exasperation. "You are a proud woman. And you have a right to your pride. You are heir to a noble lineage. The privilege of Charm has not been squandered on you, for you possess beauty without cruelty, power without arrogance, and hope with little delusion. I am honored to serve you. When the wizarduke secured my services, I was skeptical. You had lost everything—your brood, your capital, your wealth, and the magic that might have restored it. I believed your survival among the rapacious scavengers of these dire times unlikely. But in the hundred days I have been with you, I have seen that you are far stronger than most Peers. You have not been softened by a lifetime of Charm. Your illustrious grandfather trained you well. You are resilient enough to thrive on adversity. But—and I say this with no malice—your brother is not. He is a weakling. Charm alone keeps him alive—and so he is vulnerable to every manipulation of Charm."
"And the point of this analysis?" Jyoti asked coldly, her harsh stare not relenting.
"My point is simple." Nette turned her hands palm upward to show her sincerity. "You are the last of your brood. The hope you cherish of reviving Arwar Odawl depends entirely on one fact—your survival."
Who in a Nightmare Can Help Herself?
Poch arrived at New Arwar in a charm-prop glider piloted by Shai Malia. The chrome-winged vessel tilted a salute—the first airship admitted into the sky above the reconstructed city. A small crowd had gathered on the champaign beyond the city's circuit road to watch the glider loop out of the thermal clouds and land on the grassy plain under the dark wall of the jungle.
Henna hair tousled by the windy flight, Poch looked jarred and frail as he disembarked, yet the crowd cheered him. He had survived the Dark Lord's torment in the Palace of Abominations to care for the wounded at Blight Fen, a noble brother of the dominion's margravine. He offered a feeble wave in answer to the boisterous shouts from fur trappers, lumberjacks, and city workers who had gathered to greet him after hearing his flight reports on their avisos.
Shai Malia stepped down from the pilot's pod, and a baffled murmur rippled among onlookers as the veiled woman followed Poch into the waiting van that Jyoti had sent. Rumors had circulated that Poch had become demented while a prison
er of Hu'dre Vra and that he required the ministrations of a witch to hold on to his sanity. The sight of the petite woman in gray and black veils confirmed this suspicion. When the charmored van pulled away, bystanders watched in respectful silence. Their concerned faces reflected in the silver-tinted windows—and in Poch’s heart.
"They pity me." Poch squirmed in his seat to peer out the wraparound windows at the quiet group of well-wishers retreating in the distance. “They think I'm an addle-brained casualty of the Conquest."
“They are in awe of you." Shai Malia contradicted him. "You are a heroic survivor of the Dark Lord."
"They cheered until they saw you." A dark look troubled his pale face. “They think you are my healer. I told you we should not have flown in. We should have come by caravan and entered the city quietly."
"We could well be troll scat by now if we had," Shai Malia retorted, parting her veils to show Poch her frown of displeasure. "You realize the goblins are at war with the dominions, and they are looking for vulnerable Peers. Your sister herself told us to fly in."
"All the more reason for us to have come overland." Poch pouted. "I won't have her managing me. I'm not a child anymore. If you would marry me, I could show her I am my own man. And those gawkers would not now be whispering about my sanity."
Shai Malia softened her look and took his chin in a soothing hand. "First, you must take your place as margrave."
Poch glanced nervously at the driver's compartment, where a burly guardsman handled the van's steering yoke. Though separated from his passengers by a smoked-glass partition, his presences unsettled the youth. "Hush, Shai. We are in Jyoti's court now."
"She cannot hear us." With a blue-enameled fingernail, she tapped the quartz pendant of hearken fetish at his clavicle. "Why do you wear all these amulets if you're not going to use them? See. The quartz is cloudy. No one is eavesdropping. And besides, what is there to hide? You deserve to be margrave. You endured torment in the Palace of Abominations while your sister hid in the wilderness. And after the fall of Hu'dre Vra you stayed on Irth to heal his victims, while your sister traipsed to the Dark Shore, abandoning her responsibilities to adventure beyond the Gulf. How dare she call herself margravine?"
Poch silenced her with both hands upraised. "Please, Shai. Don't breathe a word of these thoughts again. I agreed to come here with you to save ourselves from the trolls and the goblins, not to usurp my sister. I don't want anything of hers. I want my own."
"Then, you must take it."
"Not from her. She may be overbearing toward me at times, but I must remind you that she has had to be both mother and father to me since Arwar fell." He turned a disconsolate look out the window at steeply graded streets cloistered by stately trees of fiery blossoms.
The city looked oddly familiar. The lean, gingerstone buildings, chiseled with sylvan scrollwork, displayed features as ornate as the houses of his childhood, yet too new, too young to bear the ennobling patina of moss, lichen, and ivy. He regretted coming to this unhappy simulacrum of his ancestral home. "We're just here until the goblins are crushed. Then, I'm going back to Blight Fen. I'm happy there as docent. If you want to come back with me—as my wife—you're welcome. Otherwise, you'd best find your own way."
"You move me when you are strong, Poch." With an impish grin, she kissed his cheek and then pulled her veils over her glistening black curls and dusky face. The van had rolled to a stop before the colonnade of the margravine's manor, and the hatch door swung open.
Jyoti appeared to Poch virtually unchanged by her active status as margravine. With her streaked hair gathered into a topknot, she dressed as casually as when their parents had lived. She wore a simple amulet-vest of power wands and eye charms over a blue bodysuit, and apart from the hard-eyed woman in assassin's black at her side, no sign showed of her position as the dominion's ruler. The siblings embraced warmly, and she whispered to him, "You've been away too long."
After they parted, Jyoti nodded coolly to Shai Malia. "Your aunt was a dear friend of our parents. I am glad for this chance to get to know the niece of the conjurer Rica."
The margravine did not wait for a reply from the veiled woman but took her brother by the arm and escorted him into the main hall—like the rest of the city, a replica of what had stood before the Conquest, replete with buttressed walls, recessed windows, and great crossbeams in the vaulted ceiling four stories above their heads.
Poch listened absently to his sister's happy prattle about having him home and gazed up at the levels of balconies and viewing arcades. As a boy, those niches had been occupied by the members of their brood—uncles, aunts, cousins—bound by blood fealty to his parents. Now strangers gawked down at him—charmwrights, merchants, and trade brokers, the extensive commercial entourage that his sister had gathered about herself to finance the building of New Arwar.
"I hear we're broke," he said, interrupting the margravine's enthusiastic exposition on the reclamation of the capital from ruins. "Dig Dog Ltd. underwrote all this—" he waved his hands vaguely at the shadowed carvings, alcoves, and crannies illuminated by long, dusty shafts of light from distant clerestories—"all this historical construction, and now that Dogbrick has disappeared, the capital brokers intend to foreclose."
Jyoti stopped in her tracks and flicked an uneasy look at the veiled woman. "We'll discuss this later, Poch."
"Sure, why not put it off?" He nodded and lifted a dismayed face toward balconies of strangers in their spidersilk robes and opulent amulet tabards. "I don't blame you, Jyo. Not one bit. Everything we once had is gone. Only this mirage is left. And even that's fading. I don't expect you to have any answers. It's just something that's happening, and it can't be stopped."
He leveled a hard stare at her. "Who in a nightmare can help herself?"
Blackness Burning
Nox strolled down Broadway on a sultry summer night. With his time-scorched head tightly wrapped in a turban and a caftan draping his lanky body, he drew little attention among the diverse, ethnic crowds basking in neon auras of the storefronts. Sometimes, dressed more elegantly but just as muffled, he attended the theater, the ballet, the opera. But this night, he chose simply to walk and look at the people streaming through the shining darkness. The flow of life stimulated him, reminding him what he strove to attain: life, life eternal, and the purpose of life—desire and fulfillment.
He watched lovers clinging to each other—babies snug in pouches harnessed to their parents—toddlers in strollers or riding on obliging shoulders—children scampering—adolescents prowling—adults conversing on street corners and in sidewalk bistros—and the old people, the geriatric ones that time had worn away to dismal shapes of their former selves.
Such an old one, he remembered his first pangs of decay in the palaestra of Mycenae, where the heads of thieves nailed to poles had become hives of maggots, a warning to hill bandits troubling the farms. How long ago was that? Three millennia before this sweltering night of noisy buses and cars spewing noxious fumes.
That had been the season of myths. Standing in shadows at the gates of the market, listening to cries of babies, farmers hawking their produce, he had watched athletes, glossy with oil, emerging from the gymnasium. They had crossed the courtyard of the palaestra to the contest field, not even noticing the piked heads, so intent on their own prowess.
Until that day, he could have competed with any of them. He had felt it then, for the first time—the stiffness of his hips, the ache in his knees. He had been touched by time. His body had begun to die. He heard the warning of the severed heads.
So long ago... Since that far-gone time, all his magic had only delayed the inevitable. Even walking had become strenuous, especially in this humid summer heat. He paused in the air-conditioned sanctuary of an electronics shop, regarding the latest computerized trinkets.
A clerk approached, noticed his leprous face, and stood back while Nox fidgeted with a handheld electric fan. The whirling yellow fins of soft plastic stopped harmlessly a
t a touch, and he smiled, revealing tiny seed-corn teeth. With a whisper, he announced to the mesmerized clerk that he would take this toy. He departed, training the fan on the sweaty iguana creases of his neck, while behind him the vendor rang up the imaginary sale.
For a while he strolled with his face upturned, cooling his hollow cheeks and gazing through the halogen murk of the night at darkness burning with a few rare stars. He was determined to live to see those stars burn out. He would live long enough to walk off Earth to other worlds, other suns. He would live forever. And though he had entertained doubts of this ambition after time had begun to wither him, recently the possibility of eternal life seemed plausible again.
In a trance, he had seen the beastman trekking through the north woods. That creature from the Bright Shore possessed the power Nox needed to rejuvenate himself. He had to be summoned. Such delicate work. Nox knew that the beastman—Dogbrick, his companion had called him—had the magic of another order of creation. He could reshape reality as powerfully as Duppy Hob, the magician who had come to this planet before the beastmarked man. But this new arrival lacked the awareness of a magician and so was more readily accessible—and far more dangerous.
Laughter ferried him into a sidestreet, toward the Eternal Ones of the Dance. Ah! They wore different faces, yet he had met these dancers before on the mud banks of the Euphrates, in the festival plazas of Nineveh, around the ritual fires of Dionysus at Thebes, in the alleys of Rome, on a sidestreet in the Alhambra, in heat waves of seven thousand summers.
A young princess of the Gypsies and her consorts danced a rhumba to a bongo drum. The old jazz baron, king of song, sat on the stone steps, clapping his hands and stamping his feet. The blare of a trumpet in a third-storey window called down to earth the spirits of small paradise, haunt of dead lovers and lost children. And the hot air curled with honeysuckle and reefer smoke.
Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3) Page 5
