She had been prepared to prove the existence of Sasquatch. What she had discovered instead had cancelled all her previous beliefs about existence itself.
She still wanted to understand what had made her young, what had filled her with knowledge of other worlds—yet, the knowing within assured her she could never know. She felt its depth extending far beyond the wan light of her mind, a history wider than her brain.
"Your friends are gone, returned to Irth," she continued. "While they were here, a devil worshipper, Duppy Hob, mastered them and prevented them from using their magic. But he's gone, too—taken back to Irth and slain on Gabagalus."
"How do you know this?" Dogbrick squeezed her hands, trying to draw knowledge from her. "Was I with them before they left?"
"No—these are not your memories." She tilted her head and regarded the flood of sunlight among the spruce before facing him again. "Your presence has attracted the attention of a magician here on the Dark Shore—Nox. He is very old, and he wants you to make him young, the way you made me young."
Dogbrick's squint tightened. "This magician—Nox—he came to you?"
"While you slept, he came to me, as a phantom." She sighed and released his hands. "He has put a spell on me. He cannot control you. You are too powerful. But even now as we speak, he fashions a hideous spell to draw me to him. I won't be able to resist. And if you try to use your magic to stop him, I will die."
"Then we will go to him together." Dogbrick shook off his confusion. "I will make him young. Where is he?"
"Dogbrick, this will not be so easy. There is more." She threw her arms up helplessly. "There are goblins."
The beastmarked man bent forward and peered into her bright eyes, seeing the film of tears. "Why are you crying?"
"Because if we go to Nox, he will use you." She kicked at the tufted grass, flustered. "And if he uses you, the goblins on Irth will have a way into this world."
"Goblins are bad, aren't they?"
"Very bad." She clutched at his arm. "They are the most gruesome creatures I've ever seen. They have powerful, evil minds, and if they come to the Dark Shore, they will enslave all the world." She held so firmly to him that she nearly pulled herself off her feet. "I've decided. I'm going to die."
"What?"
"I'm going to kill myself so that Nox can't bring you to him." Her wet eyes held his stare firmly. "Without you for anchor, the goblins are too weak, too small to cross the Gulf."
"Are you sure about all this?" Dogbrick put his palm against her bereaved face. "There's been a lot of magic tossed around. Maybe you're confused."
"No. I'm not confused." She released him and wiped the tears from her eyes with the backs of her wrists. "I saw the goblins. I saw Nox. And I remember Irth and your life there."
"Then, it's me that has to die—not you." He cast a dolorous look at the dark woods that appeared lamplit from within, where sunlight shone off a starry creek. He wished he had stayed among the others, the Sasquatch, and been happy with his anonymity.
Mary grabbed his arm. "You don't have to die. You have to leave here. You have to go back to Irth. Then the goblins and Nox can't use you."
"How?" He looked up hopelessly at the sky, as if he had to climb the clouds. "How do I go back across the Gulf?"
"There are charmways—corridors that connect the Dark Shore to the Bright World. The devil worshipper Duppy Hob created them while he was here." Her tear-dazzled eyes looked hopeful. "If we can find one before Nox finds us, you'll be free."
"And you?" Dogbrick tossed the wind-scattered mane from his eyes. "You can't stay here now that Nox has put a spell on you."
Her gaze dimmed, and she stepped back from him. “I would go with you, but I can't. His spell would kill me. But you must go—or this whole world is in peril."
Dogbrick declined and Mary insisted, so they argued as they strolled over the meadows. When the day waned, Mary opened her rucksack and took out bags of dried fruit and nuts. "Don't you have any meat?" the bestial man complained, frustrated by what he could not remember and all that his magic could not change.
With cold fire, he struck a hare senseless in the grass verges and gutted and skinned it with his talons. The ruby signet of the sun hung in the trees as he roasted the skewered animal over a small fire. "We've discussed this back and forth for hours," he groused. "I'm tired of words."
"There is nothing more to say," Mary agreed, gnawing nervously on a dried apricot. "The rational decision would be to go to Manhattan to find Duppy Hob's charmways. Nox is calling us there anyway with his magic. I'll feel the power of it by morning, I know."
"And does he know about the goblins?" Dogbrick asked. "Are they part of his evil plan—or is he entirely unaware of them? Perhaps we can reason with him."
"Perhaps." Mary shivered, and a green flare of twilight spilled upon the vastness, nailing heaven and earth. "I think if Nox knew about the goblins, he would want nothing to do with your magic."
The Palace of Skulls
Rain dragged through the prismatic trees of Bryse, flooding depressions between root buttresses of the forest floor. Rainbow leaves like colorful reflections floated in mats upon boggy puddles, and several times Esre stepped on what she thought solid ground and found herself waist deep in water.
Ripcat, who adroitly moved on the narrow root ledges, jumped from the base of one tree to the next. He lifted her out of the mire with one arm while clinging to a dangling branch.
"Where are we going?" he asked, wiping raindrops from his tufted brows and glaring irately at the witch. "How will we find the goblins?"
"South," Esre replied laconically, watching her footing in the forest.
"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Ripcat griped. "I don't want to wear beastmarks if I don't have to."
"South," Esre repeated, "to the Mere of Goblins. That is where the creatures have lived since the end of the Goblin Wars. No one has seen them since, and I think they are still there. Also, the attacks first began in the south, near the mere."
"Isn't that where dragons go to die?" Bedraggled Ripcat led the witch toward a tussock. "If the goblins were there, dragon-bone hunters would have reported them long ago."
"The mere is a labyrinth of pools, bogs, and lakes." Esre's conjure-silk cowl repelled the rain and even her sheathed feet appeared dry. "Most dragon-bone hunters never return from the mere—that's why their wares are so precious. Common knowledge says they are lost to quicksands—and the giant centipedes and firesnakes. And rumor has always warned of goblins."
"I still don't see why we couldn't ride a dirigible south," Ripcat ventured. The rain poured through the canopy like silver harp strings. "I'm drenched to my marrow."
"No one must see you." Esre clambered beside him to the crest of the tussock from where they could observe the tops of other hummocky mounds floating in the forest haze. "Goblins are telepathic. They can't sense you as long as you are Ripcat. If others see you— Well, I am carrying a lapse-gap agate that will wipe selective memories. But we can't use that on more than one mind at a time. You must stay hidden. No amulets or talismans, either. The goblins could well sense disembodied Charm moving through the dominions and know it was you. Then we will have the entire troll horde after us."
Ripcat accepted his wet misery silently after that. The rain abated during the night, and the following day they ascended through a rocky pass among flowering rainbow trees whose pollen flurried in the wind like fiery motes.
Dark gorges gleamed ruddy orange with boulders covered in luminescent moss. Wild grottoes of cloven rocks shone like lava streams. The forest glittered under the rays of the Abiding Star, and the rain-washed trees refracted light in an iridescent mesh of splintered spectra.
By noon, they came upon a brilliant glade where over ten thousand human, elf, and ogre skulls had been stacked in a monstrous array that resembled columns. "A palace of skulls," Esre breathed in horrified awe. She searched her niello eye charms and located no dangerous creatures nearby.
> “Troll spoor." Ripcat pointed to claw prints in the rain-softened ground. “Trolls did this."
"No." Esre nudged aside the gray veil across her eyes to better view the abomination. “Trolls are brute carnivores. They have not the imagination for this. What we see here is the terrible genius of the goblins. They directed the trolls to construct this—this shrine of terror."
Ripcat gaped at the gruesome ossuary. “They must have ravaged every hamlet south of Mount Szo to gather this many skulls."
“That confirms the reports I've been picking up on my aviso." Esre stepped back toward the shining forest. "Let's get away from this horrible place."
"Wait." He stepped closer, slowly, like a man in a trance. "I want to see what they put inside their shrine." Up the four steps of cranium cobbles he mounted and peered through the colonnade of stacked skulls. In the bent light, all was dim and hazy with bone dust.
A single shaft of daylight illuminated a mound of skeletons caulked with grave dirt, and at its center sprouted a single flower. Its velvet blue petals burned like a flame in the dark. Lit by one thread of radiance, it shone with an alien, unreal intensity, a blossom foraged from a dream.
Staring up at the surrounding pillars of eyeless dead, he realized that the heaped skulls had been arranged precisely to block out all illumination save this one filament of bright Charm. Through the circuit of the day, the string of light entered from different angles yet always touched the blue flower.
"Why?"
"The goblins are of another order," Esre answered from behind him. "They are not of Irth. Who of our worlds is to guess their reasoning?"
"What order spawned them?" Ripcat edged away from the blossom until he stood again atop the bone steps in the comforting brightness of day. "From where have these goblins come?"
Esre took his arm and guided him after her down the steps, back toward the spectral forest. "Beyond World's End, higher than our sky, is another level of reality."
"The Nameless Ones dwell there," Ripcat added. 'The author of these worlds is one of them."
"Few know about the author of the worlds—that all of our reality is a dream of a hotter being." A mosaic of rainbows illuminated the translucence of her witch veils as they entered among the bright trees. "Reality exists in levels. Each level higher than ours is closer to the Abiding Star, to the Beginning of All—and hotter, with more Charm, more light. Some say there is no end to the levels. And each level has its worlds, who are gods to the colder levels below."
"And the goblins—they've come to Irth from the hotter realm of the Nameless Ones?"
"The lore says that they are pixies among the Nameless Ones." Esre parted a trumpet vine, reading her eye charms to find the safest route through the forest. "When the author of the worlds first dreamed our reality, some pixies, who were unhappy with their lot as merelings in their domain, climbed down into these colder worlds, thinking they would be as gods. But the dream was vaster and stronger than they, and they could not control it as fully as they had desired—nor could they depart it. Ever since, they have wickedly struggled to suppress all other creatures who strive for dominance. Only their small number has kept them from overwhelming the endeavors of humans, elves, and gnomes. Or so say the legends."
Cloud shadows darkened the grove. "Why don't they climb back, then?"
"Legend says they cannot." The rumor of more rain turned on the wind. "Charmways do not climb to higher realities. Not usually. On the Dark Shore, it took the devil worshipper Duppy Hob two hundred thousand days to open charmways back to Irth. The goblins are pixies, not wizards."
"Pixies." Ripcat grunted a dark laugh. “That sounds so harmless. Little mischievous sprites, imps of the forest."
"If they are pixies, then the legends make sense of this sacred flower in the palace of skulls." Esre had to speak louder to be heard above birds frenzying in the canopy as cloud shadows passed. “The goblins revere life. It is sentience that they hate. The minds of others are a mockery to them. After all, it was curiosity, their questing awareness, that led them here—and exiled them far from home."
Faerie Chambers
Poch felt a forest inside himself, where he had gotten lost among wild avenues. He kept circling back to the same clearing. There the little dear ones sat in a shaft of daylight contemplating a single blue flower.
Where once he found them repulsive, now fully entranced by their magic, he ached with inconsolable yearning when he looked upon them. So full of mortal beauty, so fragrant of minty grasses, their presence made him cry with happiness.
They possessed a loveliness that the world could not bear. That was why they hid here in the forest inside himself. Now no one would find them except he and Shai Malia. The world misunderstood them and called them goblins. The world wanted to destroy them. Here, they were safe. They knew he would bring them the hex-gems they needed to continue their war of survival and righteousness.
Looking at their small bodies, their gentle faces translucent with withheld light, he understood this was a dream that would never end, that would never leave him—a dream he could die of.
He wanted to stay in the light-struck clearing with the little dear ones, embraced by their precious smiles, their eyes clear as pieces of day sky. They needed him to find his way out of the forest, to return to the world of shadows and assassins and fear. He had to find his way out now, to gather more hex-gems so that they could continue safe in the dream of loveliness and peace, in the faerie chambers of serenity that they nurtured like a flower.
Through the skeletal silence of tree shadows, he walked. To keep from circling back again, he avoided the light and steered himself toward darker lanes of the woods where the flowers remained closed and tree boles appeared moon colored.
He walked a long time with only the wind's utterance to complete his loneliness before he came across her in her witch veils. He ran toward her through gray light. The towering trees bore grim shadows, dull as bones. She stood among them, wrapped in her veils. At her feet, a flower burned blue in a thread of splendor.
He reached out for her, and even as his hands touched her veils, he sensed that this was not his beloved Shai Malia. She looked too large, too big in the shoulders. The veils gusted open, and a face sewn together with scars glared at him.
An electric scream jolted through him and broke to a gasp when he confronted what stood beside her. Before a tower of skulls reared a ferocious man with beastmarks of blue fur, lynx eyes, and a snouted mouth heavy with fangs.
Fearing they would crush the blue flower and with it the prosperous dream that belonged to the dear ones, Poch flung himself toward the monsters—and trembled awake.
Shai Malia took him in her arms. In this plush anteroom outside the main audience hall, he had waited many times as a young boy, impatient for his father, Lord Keon, to complete some ceremonial function or other. Poch's eyes wheeled in their sockets, taking in the red velvet walls framed in bluewood molding. He gaped at the heavy, dark chairs, their plump cushions embroidered with the family's armorial crest. "Why are we here?"
"The dear ones are in your sister's old suite—our bedroom," Shai reminded him with a gentle whisper. She nodded to the brawny sentinel in the manor's heraldic uniform, and the guard backed away through a side portal that led to the scribes' intricate alcoves. There he used to play hide-and-seek as a child. "They touched you with rapture. I would not disturb your reverie. And so, I had the sentinel carry you down here so that we could meet the agent from Dig Dog in the audience hall. We don't want her disturbing the dear ones, do we?"
He rubbed his face with both hands, returning feeling to his numb flesh. "They are so—lovely."
"Yes, aren't they?" Her almond eyes glittered with happy intensity. "I knew you would adore them."
"We must protect them." He clutched at her veils, and they sagged from her swart and smiling face. "They are so fragile. And I saw—I'm not sure what I saw. Something evil."
Concern narrowed her stare. "Tell me. What did y
ou see?"
“The dear ones—so lovely, so very lovely, in a forest glade." His voice sounded washed out with dreaminess. "They need us, you and me, Shai! And not just for these five. I sense others— hundreds, sleeping, lulled by the coldness of this world. They are used to the warmth inside the Abiding Star! That's why only five are awake now. And we have to bring them hex-gems so they can amplify their telepathy. They have to protect themselves! Enemies come for them! A witch—a horrid witch with one eye and a face of scars. And there's a beastmarked man, an evil thing—with blue fur..."
Shai Malia stroked the worry from his brow with both her thumbs. "There. The dear ones are safe with us. That is why I brought them here. I knew you would care for them as deeply as I."
"Let's go back to them now," Poch said eagerly. "I want to bring them Charm and play with them in the faerie chambers."
"Hush!" She touched the hearken pendent on his amulet-vest. Its quartz had gone clear. "Someone is listening. Hush now."
Poch snapped the hearken pendent free and touched it to the niello eye charm at his shoulder. In the ebony interior of the eye charm he spied a court official with long face and a tall hat beaded with hex-gems. Once he identified the listener, Poch fit the pendent to an amber power wand with a conjure-wire clasp and spun it once over their heads, dropping a shroud of silence about them. The quartz of the hearken pendent clouded. "He can't hear us now." His voice sounded muffled in the cottony enclosure of Charm. "It's an astrosopher."
"Of course." Shai Malia smiled at him impishly. "I summoned him to the hall to marry us. He's probably wondering where we are. I hope you don't mind."
"Mind?" Poch blinked with surprise and pulled her closer. "I've wanted this for so long. I can't believe you arranged this yourself."
Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3) Page 10
