Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3)

by A. A. Attanasio

  They recognized him, too, when he sashayed into their dance. His caftan jumped with his happy steps as he moved to the drum. Dancing, he shared his magic with the Eternal Ones and their latest guises. Frenzied, reckless with something crazed, something darker, waking in them, they hungered for the light and moved lighter on their feet. His presence lifted them with hollow bones, spry as spirits, into splendor and the holy madness of the dance.

  Grinning hideously, the drummer played faster, and the princess and her shirtless consorts danced quicker and more nimbly than in any of their lives. Wide, bright grins blurs in the neon shine, they danced.

  And the turbaned man pranced among them, light and spry, singing in a high eerie voice how love would never die, how love would dance forever and carry them all from life to life. And from high overhead, the trumpet rode the crest of their frantic rhythms with a scream like a soul spilling into the night.

  Nox left his battery-powered miniature fan with an old man on the steps and ambled with satisfaction toward Columbus Avenue. The dance had enlivened and emboldened him. He would speak with the dead. He would consult with those who had gone before.

  To master and control Dogbrick, he needed information. If he miscalculated with these beings of a hotter reality, all that he had carefully built for himself over the millennia would be lost. Yet if he successfully manipulated this creature, he could conquer not only his own life but the world entire.

  Alas! Nothingness bound the dead, and to speak with them required blood heat. Who will it be? He looked into each face that he passed on the street of intermittent trees, each tree in its iron cage. One of the apartment buildings on Central Park West belonged to a coven member, and he briefly thought of using her.

  That ritual end awaited each of the coveners eventually: When they had served their lives out and had begun to dodder, he took them into the park and splashed their blood heat to attract the dead. That way, he had a chance to converse with friends of elder times, and he did not remand his acolytes to an arbitrary death in a nursing home. But the member he had in mind was not doddering yet, and finding a suitable replacement in time for the next meeting in Octoberland would be far more difficult than choosing a victim.

  Nox took no relish in this necessary work. He had marked out no place in his heart for murder. He preferred swift and clean ritual acts. He wanted the dead, not the killing.

  On the steps of the Museum of Natural History, he spied an old woman feeding birds. Something in his chest agreed. The startled look of surprise on her worn face lasted only an instant when he stood before her. He bowed to bring his skull-shrunk face close to hers. Then he whispered her name, and she rose, almost weightless.

  Together, they walked through webs of light toward the park and its fields of darkness. Small birds flurried after as if following saints.

  I Hide in the Sky

  Blood heat drew the ghosts, and Nox waved them off with muttered curses. Drug addicts and suicides came first, as usual. After them wavered the bewildered dead, accident victims and stroke-struck taken swiftly in mid-stride of their busy lives. Grumbling unhappily, he dismissed them all. Those that lingered, he jolted with cold fire so that they flitted away wailing—a whistle of the wind.

  "Duppy!" he called among ectoplasmic shadows smeared on the darkness. "Duppy Hob!"

  "He is not among us." A calm voice spoke from out of the panting wind.

  "Who are you?" The sound of that voice, so distinct and reverberant among the thin mewlings of the dead, announced a presence of a stronger reality. "What is your name?"

  "I am Caval—a wizard from Irth."

  "What age of Earth?" Nox inquired, baffled that such a strong being could have arisen on this cold planet.

  "Not this world. I am from Irth among the Bright Worlds—Irth of the Seven Dominions."

  "Yes, yes!" Nox's bones shook like sticks, he trembled so violently with excitement. "I know of your world. Duppy Hob fell to Earth from your world—long ago."

  "Duppy Hob is dead, slain in Gabagalus. His forlorn ghost wanders the ocean bottom, held fast at night by the Charm of the sunken continent and held fast at daybreak by the radiance of the Abiding Star. You will never see Duppy Hob again."

  "How do you know this, Caval? And why are you here, so far from your world at the beginning of time?"

  "As you are, so am I. A sorcerer trained here on the Dark Shore. Duppy Hob summoned me to this cold world then, though I knew it not at the time. I know it now. As a ghost, I know a great deal now."

  "Show yourself to me, Caval, sorcerer of Irth." Nox squinted to discern the voice's source. "Let me see your countenance."

  "I am here, Nox of Jarmo, Nox from the foothills of the Zagros Mountains."

  Nox looked left and right, found nothing, then turned and confronted a tall, robust man, who wore his bright red hair cropped close to his chiseled head. His orange whiskers precisely outlined the sharp angle of his long jaw and the stern contours of his hard mouth. Garbed in bright tinsel and blue gauze windings, he appeared to Nox like a fierce mummer out of a carnival parade.

  A small shout escaped the coven master, for he had never beheld a phantom so fully realized, so humanly whole. He reached out a scaly hand. The apparition sifted under his touch like bright dust, not forming again where he had contacted its tingling, magnetic texture. "By the gods themselves! You are a being of the first light! How came you here and I did not see you climb down our sky?"

  "I have told you. Duppy Hob summoned me. And he kept me well hidden for a terrible purpose—a monstrous hope of mastering the author of the worlds herself."

  “The Queen of Heaven, Dumuzi-abzu, the Quickener of Life in the Deep—" Nox felt dizzy and backed away a step from this vivid wraith, frightened by the hard stare of the ghost’s cold eyes. "How can that be? Can the wizards of the first light master the gods themselves? Is that possible? Speak the truth, dead one!"

  Caval smiled thinly. "You have not summoned me to hear how Duppy Hob hoped to master the author of worlds and failed. Why am I here before you, Nox, who learned his magic in Eridu from steppe wanderers, wayfarers on the plains beneath the star houses?"

  "How do you know so much of me, of my origins?"

  "When first I came to the Dark Shore, I built a laboratory for myself in the sky. There, I gathered the very rare and most powerful Charm peculiar to this side of the Gulf. I desired greater strength in my own world. Before I left, I sprinkled enough of that Charm behind to find my way back should I ever lose my body among the Bright Worlds. Or if my enemies cast me into the Gulf. When that fate did finally befall me, I simply allowed my soul to follow the crumbs of Charm to my old haunt on the Dark Shore. Now, I hide in the sky. From there, I see everything—everything that is and all that was."

  "Then you know of Dogbrick?"

  The ghost nodded. A light of revelation brightening in his eyes. "So that is my use to you, Nox of Octoberland. You wish to harness the power that Dogbrick carries unwittingly from the Bright Worlds—to heal your time-ravaged body."

  "Will you help me?" Nox asked eagerly.

  "I am but a ghost. My power is too dim to change anything."

  "Not you, wizard. Dogbrick. Will you help me to win his magic?"

  Caval gestured to the dead woman lying face-up on the grass. Breastbone split, her viscera glistened purple in the dull light. "The Sisterhood of Witches reared me, and I am sworn to break evil and discipline madness. Look at what you have done, Nox. Look! Then tell me if you are worthy of my help."

  "She was an old, decrepit woman!" Nox protested shrilly. "Death had her in his jaws before I found her."

  "If she merits destruction, are you not even further jammed in death's jaws and thus all the more worthy of doom?" Caval pressed closer. His angry stare hardened to a scowl. "I am your enemy, Nox. I am the enemy of everyone like you. And if I have my chance, I will destroy you."

  Nox swiped his hands through the face of the ghost, clawing away the wrathful expression until only a headless
phantom remained. Then, he hurled cold fire at the specter and burned it to charred shadows and the stink of burned vomit.

  Panting, he backed out of the glade and left the hungry ghosts to feed on the dimming heat of the corpse. The old woman's ghost stood in the midst of them, jostled, startled to find herself among ravenous wraiths. Her familiar face stared sightlessly above her cleaved torso.

  Striding with angry vigor, Nox returned to the brilliant pools of light around the museum. Ghosts followed him like gnats.

  He shooed them off and paced along the walkway to the planetarium, muttering to himself.

  Caval is a ghost and can be mastered like any ghost. The coven would give Nox the power. He considered how soon he could begin to gather more cold fire and if the phase of the moon had ripened enough for massing the strength he would need.

  He stopped abruptly. A slithery sound rustled hedges at the bottom slope of the footpath. A long shadow stretched across the reach of lamplight there, and the old woman shoved through the shrubbery, her blue bowels in her hands.

  A passerby screamed. Two others shouted. Nox stood and stared and stared. He discerned the astral shimmer around her as she staggered onto the path: The shine of the wizard Caval's power animated her corpse—and wore her face as a rubber mask, eyes clouded.

  One hand lifted, ropes of viscera dangling, and she pointed toward him. Her mouth sagged open as if to speak before she collapsed in a lifeless heap when Caval's strength dimmed.

  Nox turned and walked off without glancing back. At his heels, in the stifling heat of the summer night, a cold wind spun.

  In the Forest Evil

  By day’s end, Dogbrick and Mary Felix had crossed highland meadows of wildflowers, carpeted acres of purple gentian and blue morning glory. They stood in scarlet light before a primeval forest. No track entered the perpetual gloom of these ancient trees, yet a singing sifted from far within the dark interior. A droning song broke close to silence on the wind. It came and went like surf.

  "Do you hear that?" Dogbrick asked.

  Mary stood staring up at the cold voids hanging among the early stars. The absence of arthritis pain for the first time in years left her feeling airy as the sky. In the violet depths, she watched the galaxy venting its glowing immensity across the void. Her renewed youth drank deeply of this vitality. The vaporous shine from billions of suns folded like milk to the horizon.

  Dogbrick listened and heard only the droning of bees from some hive in the high branches. Stink of bear wafted dully from scat hours old. "Come." Turning his back on the agate evening, he shoved through undergrowth of soft-barbed thorns and entered the forest.

  Among draperies of hanging ivy and a fallen tree flanged with mushrooms, he wove cold fire to dreamy sunlight. An owl called. He straddled the log, and Mary sat cross-legged on the ground. Her young face shone with expectation, and her luxuriantly jumbled masses of chestnut hair glinted with sequins of caught light.

  "No one will find us here tonight," he said, glancing around at the high stories and their burdens of darkness. "We have a chance now to know what has happened to us."

  "You have magic, Dogbrick." She held out her young hands and turned them in the saffron light. "Look at how you've changed me. A seventy-nine-year-old woman, nineteen again!"

  "I don't know how I did it." The orange eyes in his bestial face gleamed with worried sapience. "I feel that this strength is using me."

  Giddy fright swarmed in Mary. She stared at the hulking figure astride the dead tree like some ensorcelled animal king of a fairy tale, and she asked with hushed temerity, “Then why are we here? It's night in the wilderness—I'm young again! And you—you look like a regal beast. This feels like a medieval story to me, as if we are in the forest evil."

  "You sense it, too?"

  "Sense what?" she asked nervously. Her fright thickened to cold syrup in her bones.

  "Evil." His tufted ears lifted and moved independently, sampling forest sounds. “That's what you said—evil."

  "Maybe we should go," she offered gently. "Come with me and meet my friends, my colleagues. I know you don't want to-—but you have so much to offer us! And what can we hope to find out here? I'm a scientist, and I can take you to our world's best minds. They will help you."

  Dogbrick shook his head adamantly. "The others—the Sasquatch—they knew to stay away from your kind. I trust them. I don't belong in your world. You go. Don't think about it. Just take the strength I've given you and go. Leave me here."

  "I want to know more first—about you." She rose to her knees and reached for the cold fire that he had shaped earlier and left nodding beside him like a large glass flower, a candescent polyp breathing the night air. "There must be a way to use this magic on you—to help you remember who you are, where you come from."

  Dogbrick heard it again—a surf of singing voices, droning in the distance. "What is that?"

  She listened and sensed the wind writhing in the sedge, scudding among the boughs. "I don't hear anything." The cold fire tickled her wrists. Wonder widened through her, and she discovered that she could shape the shining plasma. She fashioned gloves for her hands and held them up to her magical companion. "Look."

  He showed his fangs in a vague smile and gave her more strength, until the fire that sheathed her hands shone frosty green, almost white. When she stood and came to him, he did not object and did not move as she laid her radiant hands upon his brow. Her hands felt cool, and their chill rang through his brain.

  Dream-bright vision opened in Mary, and she witnessed herself standing at a brown curb on a narrow, high street of old cobblestones and paving bricks. Lean, high houses of black rock with round windows ranged up and down the steep lane, strange barnacle houses affixed to a cliff-side lane. Between the houses, she glimpsed factory flues and luminous fumes crawling through alleys, bright as moon smoke. And overhead, in the narrow track of sky, planetary orbs glowed through comet veils of fiery translucence.

  "Saxar—" she breathed softly.

  Dogbrick jolted. "Saxar—the sea-cliff city of my dreams!" He stared sharply at the young, dreamy face. "What else do you see?"

  Mary removed her shining hands from Dogbrick's brow and placed them against her own forehead. Vision sharpened. She staggered backward, shoved by an inrush of memories, names, images—all the world of Irth now a single stream of thought abruptly crammed into her consciousness.

  As if God thought about Dogbrick and Saxar, this divine attention had joined with her own small mind, a speck of dust flung into a huge world: Worlds! Nemora and its icy caves, volcanic Hellsgate, World's End so close to the charmful brilliance of the Abiding Star...

  She collapsed, her mind overflowing with alien knowledge, stuffed with a lifetime of remembrance, a drawer that would not close.

  Dogbrick crouched over her, trembling with worry. He gave her strength, and she shuddered but did not rise. The power drove her deeper into her vision of worlds beyond the Gulf.

  A strange, yet familiar destiny had seized her and escorted her to a central place within her being where all reality touched. The more power that Dogbrick fed to her, the more strongly she bonded with this unitary center, this oneness that underlay both the Bright Worlds and the Dark Shore.

  And there, she felt her own small life like a flimsy web, mostly emptiness, glistening with impressions gathered from her lifetime on Earth. And at the very center, at the core absence of herself, she found them—the goblins.

  Small as dolls with large, round, hairless heads and droopy eyes of cracked crystal, the dear ones watched her. She could feel their telepathic allure. They wanted hex-gems. They had depleted the Charm in the cache they held, and they needed more to continue their mastery of trolls and ogres. Their little eyes gleamed like jewels, mesmerizing her with their need...

  Dogbrick shook Mary, but she remained inert. He felt her throat for the knock of her pulse, though he already knew she lived. He could feel her life, feel the seething warmth of her body's cellular kine
sis. Yet the more strength he gave her the deeper she seemed to sink into dreaming.

  He reached into her with his mind and stood before solid emptiness.

  He pulled out with a howl that made the forest quiet.

  Through the silence, he heard the far off singing he had sensed before. Quickly, he lifted Mary in his arms and carried her body among looming trees toward the voices. They grew more distinct, and he heard the dolefulness of their chanting, warbling something about the night's remorse for the day's vanity.

  Their cries melted toward silence, then crisped louder. He felt with the hairs of his soul that they came and went from this world, yet he did not turn to flee. The woman who had tried to help him had fallen into jeopardy because of him, and he had to see if these ghostly presences could save her. He did not fear them.

  With horrified clarity, he understood that the evil he had sensed in the forest came from him.

  Sinister Angels

  In a moon-bright clearing, he found them—a circle of twelve sinister angels. Ectoplasmic shapes, men and women awaited, white as packed snow with blurred wings of wrinkled air. Their eyes shone green, star-bright flecks of twilight, and their alabaster faces sneered with the malevolence of bats. At their center a gristly skeleton danced. This ghost shape of a naked man withered to his bones leaked light through flesh waxy as a lampshade.

  "Come, Dogbrick! Come!" The ghost skeleton beckoned. He laughed, his face like a whiskery fish—scoop-cheeked, silvered brow dented at the sides where the ears had shriveled to holes. The cod between his legs dangled like dripped tar. "Come into Octoberland!"

  "Who are you?" Dogbrick called from the ledge of an uplifted root. "What manner of beings are you? Ghosts? How do you know my name?"

  The circle of malefic angels stopped singing and opened to a line of alternating men and women. Their nakedness looked as beautiful as their faces wicked. Even the eldest among them had firm torsos and elegant limbs, all shining with moon fire.