"So you have given your brother the city you rebuilt. And now he will work it hard and not for the good of the people. Your ancestral city will serve his masters." Nette sighed ruefully.
Jyoti hung her head, chin touching her chest. "I have no choice—for now." She looked back at the assassin. "Do you believe it is chance alone that has spared our city from the goblins?"
"Indeed, they have attacked every dominion, every major city, and most of the hamlets and thorpes." Nette stepped around the chair and stood before the deposed margravine. "Do you suggest that the goblins have spared New Arwar because they back your brother?"
"I don't know." She straightened and glanced at the tinted windows. She gritted her teeth, making herself feel the muscular reality of the moment and the truth of what had happened.
Again she faced the compact woman in front of her. The assassin's eyes watched her with cool intensity.
Jyoti relaxed her fists. "The goblins now are Poch's problem. We can retreat and see what develops."
"And how do you propose we retreat, my lady?" Nette queried the younger woman. "Where will we go? Shall we go to Dorzen and inform Lord Drev directly what has transpired?"
"We're not going anywhere. We're staying here." Jyoti removed her hand to point at the three-dimensional map of light. “The city will be our sanctuary. It's a big place with numerous districts. And I know every corner of this town, every one of the lanes and alleys. We will become street exiles and hide in the outlying warrens, where we can watch my brother."
Nette looked skeptical. "You will be recognized."
"You think so?" Jyoti asked, still regarding the map, playing her gaze over the maze of convoluted byways and wynds, tree-clustered parks and tiered precincts. "All these residents are new—immigrants from across Irth come to New Arwar to begin untried lives. They don't know me the way the original residents did." She put a hand to the gold cinch that held her hair at the crown of her head. "Without my topknot and with a change of garments, I'm just another anonymous woman come to the city looking for work. I'll call myself Jyo. And you—you're my sister, Nette."
"To stay here is dangerous." The weapons master stepped close behind the taller woman and spoke in a near whisper, full of dire portent. "If the goblins are in any way involved in your brother's promotion, they will use their telepathy to seek and destroy you. And even if it's not goblins, whoever backs Poch will want you dead. You pose too great a threat alive. The assassins will come."
Jyoti offered a kindly smile that showed her gratitude for the vigilant woman who wore soft body armor and stealth togs. "We will leave the manor at once. We will depart in a convoy for Moödrun and once out of sight we’ll circle back on foot. If we come in through the timber camps, the jungle troops won't even notice us among the ranks of workers."
Jyoti packed all her clothing trunks and amulet scabbards aboard a convoy's passenger trailer and departed New Arwar with Nette at her side. Poch and Shai Malia watched from an oriel window of the manor. And Overy Scarn observed directly from the platform of the freighter berth, wanting to ascertain that her investment had indeed purchased the exile of the former margravine.
As the convoy rolled along the city viaduct onto the jungle-cloistered highway, Jyoti cut her hair into feathery locks that fell just over her ears. Then she selected the amulets she would need and addressed the remainder to a witch hostel in Moödrun.
When the convoy glided to a stop within an atrocity memorial park, she affixed a do-not-disturb sign to the door of her private berth. She and Nette slipped away unseen through a noisy group of blue-haired elves fleeing the jungles of Elvre for the rocketpads at Moödrun and the safety of other worlds.
Outcasts of the Light
“She’s gone.” Poch stepped away from the oriel window. "I am margrave now."
Shai Malia removed her cowl of veils and tossed it on the round bed. "You are margrave of Odawl.”
Poch took her by both shoulders. Freckled face tense, serious eyes searching her open features. "We will rule Elvre together. You are my margravine—of equal status to the conjurer Rica, who once mocked you for a ne'er-do-well."
Her dusky face tilted toward him, glistening black curls spilling over her shoulders, almond eyes lidded heavily. "I will take no title. You alone rule—the one master of the dominion."
"Well, at least in title." He lifted his eyebrows resignedly. "Dig Dog is master. Without their money…"
"Money!" She laughed and climbed into his arms, twining her petite body about his and whispering huskily in his ear, "There are powers far greater than money."
"Charm," he agreed. "Charm and love."
"Yes, Charm." She nibbled at his earlobe. "Charm spins the worlds on their axes. But love—ha!" She slid away from him. "What do the Gibbet Scrolls say of love? 'Love is a question.' We wonder, will love fly? Will it carry us above ourselves? Or will it abandon us?"
"You do love me, Shai Malia?" Worry stamped Poch's look, and he reached for her.
She let herself be caught and twirled against him. "The Screed of Love says that 'Love is the fullness of lack.' What would I be without love?"
Poch laughed. "The conjurer Rica's spoiled brat."
She frowned, then tweaked his snub nose. "And what would you be, my anxious fool? What would you be without love?"
"Docent of Blight Fen, exiled in the swamps." He hugged her closer and breathed the cinnamon fragrance of her sable hair. "Your love drove me to this. You made me margrave. But there is no love between us and Dig Dog. They put up the money, and Overy Scarn will arrive shortly to instruct us how she wants our first edicts drafted to serve her enterprises."
"Yes—Overy Scarn…" Her voice trailed off, and she began again, sidling closer, pressing her back snugly against him. "Dear, what do you think the screed means when it informs us that 'Lovers await the tread of the Huntsman from whose hand they will feed?' Do you have any notion?"
"I am the son of a margrave." He pulled her to the bed and sat down with her in his lap. "I may be your fool, but I am not uneducated." He bounced her playfully in his lap. "The Huntsman whose title is capitalized must be death. And lovers feed from his hand, for they are his trackers, who lead him to his prey. And death's prey—well, that is what comes of love—babies, children—for all that is born sooner or later must die."
She pushed him down on the bed and squatted over him. "A power greater than money."
"You—you're not proposing we murder Overy Scarn?" Poch propped himself up on his elbows.
She laughed and pushed him back down on the bed. "All I am saying is that there are greater powers than money. Charm, love, death."
A knock thudded at the door.
Poch rolled his eyes and eased Shai Malia off him. He took both her hands and gazed serenely at her until she nodded. "Enter!"
A brawny guardsman in the heraldic crimson-and-gold uniform of a manor sentinel stood before a wood cask with dark brass hoops and dented studs. "Mistress Malia asked that this be delivered as soon as it arrived."
"Bring it in," Shai Malia commanded from where she sprawled on the bed. "Set it in the middle of the room and leave."
The guard complied, and when the door closed behind him, she bounded off the bed. Poch held her back and pointed to the port of origin stenciled on the gray, moldered slats of wood: Nhat.
"It's probably from your aunt—the conjurer." He shook his head dubiously. "We should have the charmwrights open it. Perhaps she's sent an enscorcellment."
Shai Malia pushed him aside. "You see evil everywhere, Poch. Your time in the Palace of Abominations thoroughly demented you." She removed a hex-ruby from her amulet belt and smashed it across the top of the cask. The container’s protective spell sparkled away. "There, you see? There's nothing to be frightened of here. I personally packed this shipping barrel and had it sent to arrive in time for our wedding. These are our friends—the dear ones."
The brass hoops snapped apart, and the cask slats fell away exposing a cluster of filt
hy dolls—five in number—small and bald as babies. A rancid stink gushed out and gagged the scream in Poch's throat: "Goblins!"
"You must never speak that vulgar name again." Shai Malia scowled. "These are our dear ones."
The babies squirmed and rose on misshapen legs. Alien and unreal, they flurried like distorted figures from a dream. Their tiny, warped arms reached for him. Their dirty arms and swollen bodies, smudged with dirt, and stinking of clotted decay, reached for him. Their eyes looked wrong. Bruised lids drooped unevenly over irises like cracked glass. And their tiny mouths opened and closed soundlessly, a trace of smile upon them, sad and wicked.
Shai Malia knelt before them and took their soft bodies in her arms. And their small hands clutched at her. Their bulbous heads, too large to hold upright long, lolled against the woman's breasts, and they lay in a loose jumble in her lap. "Come, Poch. Come and hold these dear ones with me."
Poch staggered backward, horrified. The cheesy air curdled in his lungs. With a mournful cry, he sagged to his knees.
"Don't look so troubled, Poch." Shai Malia emitted a glittering laugh. "It's the dear ones. They'll help us. They are a power stronger than money."
Poch shook as if shivering, trying to extricate himself from what held him in the feculent room.
The puckered mouths of the dolls hooked to sharp little smiles. Thin filaments of spittle drooled. Speckled orange eyelids twitched.
He felt himself inside their bulbous heads in darkness disdainful of time and space, darkness of such amplitude it enclosed worlds and all the outcasts of light.
Octoberland
Summer thunderheads towered above Manhattan. In the purpling light, skyscrapers stood like gods of a monolithic time. An older order of ritual realized itself more perfectly in these modern monuments.
Steamy heat rose from the pavements. Thermal shivers accrued to watery reflections at the bleared ends of avenues. And from rooftops, haze sifted into every cranny of the hot and smoking city.
A different world waited within the water tower with the shagbark exterior. Once the ram's-head knocker sounded thrice and the curved door opened, autumn poured forth. Yellow and mauve leaves swirled in a gust of wood smoke. And the portal exhaled a breeze freighted with mountain coolness and redolence of trees gone barren.
Octoberland enclosed its members in an eternal season of leaf falling. Languorous chill mingled with heathery scents opened a secret room outside the day. Hung from rafters, large boughs bunched with dead leaves rustled. A frosty downdraft wagged hanging totems of carven apples shriveled to wrinkled visages.
The coven squatted in ceremonial tunics on the crimson perimeter of a circle that enclosed a large pentagram. In Octoberland, they carried the names of the zodiac, each member selected for attributes of the sign they represented. Over the millennia, Nox had played with and against the archetypes in his coven. Presently, he enjoyed selecting wonders of exaggeration for each sign:
Aries of the glowering brow and fleecy silver hair sat at the eastern point. Prominent minister, leader of his flock. To his left hunkered Pisces, pale woman with sable hair. And to Aries's right, Taurus, a banker with brown, bovine eyes and strong shoulders. She glared unhappily at Nox, who stood in his black robes at the altar of obsidian.
"I sensed you the other night, master," Taurus grumbled, her African features compressed to a frown. "I sensed you coming for me—as though my time were done and all that remained of me was my blood heat. Is that so?"
Loomed fabric of midnight and lunar phases lay under Nox's spidery hands as he leaned far forward across the altar to return the big-shouldered woman's stare with his adder's eyes. "This is so. I needed blood heat to summon the dead, to learn more of the magical one from the Bright Worlds—Dogbrick."
Taurus thumped a fist against her chest. "I'm still strong. You frightened me when I felt your mind turn toward sacrifice."
The others in the circle murmured agreement, and Nox took in hand the stave of cracked and resinous wood, knobby with galls, and knocked it so hard against the planked floor that its fins of scalloped fungus trembled. "Hush, all of you! Remember we are in meeting. Only one may speak at a time." He nodded toward the woman who still held her clenched fist to her chest. "You are correct, Taurus. Your blood heat was not needed. I found another. But you are wrong to assume I cannot cull you as I please."
Another disquieted muttering passed around the circle, until Nox thumped the stave again.
"I have not done so before, because there was no need. This is a unique time. And the magic I will show you now, you have not seen before." Nox released the stave to lean against the altar and reached into the sordid urn that sat atop a dish of hammered brown metal.
His hand came out gripping a finger-long needle, black with tarry drool. "I need blood heat." He pivoted on his heels and pointed the dripping needle around the circle. "I need enough power to draw Dogbrick to me. Who will give me their blood heat?"
"Do not break the circle, master," Scorpio pleaded. "Let us dance up a devil and use that heat for your spell."
"No." Nox laid the black needle on the altar between two fat black candles. "No dance can muster a devil potent enough to draw Dogbrick. He is a being from a hotter reality. I need blood heat itself if there is any hope of manipulating this beast-man. Who will give to me for all that I have given to you? Who?"
No one budged. Taurus whimpered, for the master gazed directly at her.
"I am too young," she protested. "I have served you but twenty years. I can serve you another twenty! This I know."
Nox smiled, showing tiny, multicolored teeth. “Twenty years of perfect health. Of every whim fulfilled. What have you been denied? And why do you now deny me?"
“There are others who have served you longer!" Taurus's eyes stared wide. "Take one of them! Take Gemini! Take Leo! They have enjoyed your gifts for thirty and forty years!"
"They have not questioned my right to their blood heat." In his right hand, he lifted from the altar the poison needle. "I have been generous with all of you. Money. Status. Health. Freedom from loss for yourselves and those closest to you. How else could you possess all this except by me?"
"Master—I apologize." Taurus pressed her brow to the wood floor, and when she rose, beads of sweat and tears glinted on her cheeks. "You have been generous. But I am too young. Take one of the elders. Not me!"
"I may take any of you whom I choose, whenever I choose!" The smile curdled on Nox's decayed face. "None of you has been forced to the circle. All serve with the understanding that your blood heat is mine. Does anyone disagree?"
The circle sat silent.
"Good." Nox pointed the sharp death at Taurus, and her mouth opened woefully around a noiseless cry. Then, his wrist snapped, and the needle flew over his shoulder and pierced the unsuspecting eye of Virgo. The youngest member of the coven, a flaxen-haired woman of twenty years, fell backward. Her limbs jerked twice, then stiffened.
He swung an urgent look around the circle. "Now we must be swift, before the blood heat escapes. We need it to summon the companion of Dogbrick—who will take her place in our circle."
Leo and Libra stared aghast at the dead woman between them.
"Feel no anguish for her," Nox advised, striding to the dead woman and kneeling beside her with the brown metal dish. "In the four years she has served me, she has possessed the power to heal all whom she touched—and she touched many hundreds and brought them back from suffering and certain death. I am certain she does not begrudge me her blood heat."
Nox withdrew the needle from the punctured eye, and with it came an effluvial thread of incandescent blood heat. He wound the thread about the needle. Then he deposited the shimmery ectoplasm in the metal dish before dipping the needle again into the stabbed eye and drawing more luminous life force, smiling a mummy's grin as he worked busily.
Nailing Heaven and Earth
Dogbrick woke, and his own face felt strange. He sat up among tall grass that moved so fluently in
the wind it seemed for a moment like another language, a different kind of speech.
Mary Felix stood against the cotton of the sky. She possessed youthful beauty, and he watched her with passionless intensity, noting her masses of chestnut hair, pale skin ruddier on her arms where the sleeves of her plaid shirt had been rolled up. The sun had tinged her brow and cheeks so that her freckled face appeared bright as the weight of a flame.
"I fell asleep." Dogbrick groaned and pulled himself upright. "What happened to us? I don't remember."
Mary faced him squarely. Her dark eyes glittered with tears. "I know who you are."
Dogbrick slouched toward her. "Who—who am I?"
"You are a beastmarked man from Irth." She bit her lower lip and shook her head softly. "You don't remember anything, do you?"
He shook his head in rhythm with her.
"Irth—it's where you're from. It's a planet at the edge of the Gulf. Don't these names mean anything to you?" She watched him closely for some sign of remembrance. His orange eyes gazed from bone pits shadowed with befuddlement. "The Gulf is the abyss that separates the Bright Worlds from this Dark Shore, where we are now." She frowned to see that he did not remember. "I know it all now. Your magic put all your memories into me."
"My magic." Dogbrick looked at his heavy hands with their black palms and tawny-furred backs. "What is my magic?"
"You come from—" She took his big hands in hers. "You come from a long, long time ago. From the beginning of everything. Your world is not made of this cold stuff but of light. When you fell here, with the others—with Ripcat and Jyoti… ." She kept searching for flickers of recall and saw none. "You fell into the shadow of the worlds of light. You have the power to reshape our shadows—our world."
Dogbrick squinted, trying to comprehend. "Why can't I make myself remember?"
"It's easier for you to shape shadows than your own light." Holding his hands, knowing who he was, Mary felt a wind in her veins, as if she were about to blow away before all that had already happened—and all that was yet to happen. In her former life, she had become so accustomed to making rational inquiries, to thinking scientifically, that what had befallen her seemed more than just unreal. It violated her identity.
Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3) Page 9
