Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3)

by A. A. Attanasio

  Mary Felix sat up taller. Cool air had penetrated the muggy night. A fragrance of oat stubble and rain scum from the crotch of willow trees swirled among the refueling trucks. Her nostrils widened, her eyes gleamed with alertness.

  Her feelings had turned inside out. The magic that Nox had sent to call her south to Manhattan had disengaged from within and filled the space around her.

  She felt the grooves in her brain sparkling and knew that something strange was about to happen. She looked about her, and when her gaze brushed the ground, her blood swerved with fright.

  In an oil-spilled rainbow at her feet, a face began to form. It had skull-like features, adder eyes, and tiny teeth in a grin wider than illusion.

  A Biography of the Sky

  “Brick!” Mary Felix nudged the sleeping man beside her. Her scientific mind assured her she was hallucinating—but she needed to be sure. "What do you see in this oil smear?"

  Brick roused himself from his stupor and glanced at the spectral colors on the concrete. "I don't see anything."

  A horn honked a quick greeting, and a beige pickup truck swung onto the tarmac apron in front of them. On its door, a university seal announced this was the reply to Mary's telephone call.

  The driver in plaid shirt, faded jeans, and mud-caked boots stepped out and offered a puzzled smile. Brick recognized him as the researcher who had accompanied Mary Felix on her search for Sasquatch. He looked no worse for having had his soul knocked free from his body. His bald, sunburned head gleamed under the station lights.

  "Ryan!" Mary Felix leaped to her feet.

  The researcher gawked, his lantern jaw loose. "Mary Felix?"

  "Her granddaughter," Brick offered, standing up behind Mary.

  "Yes—yes, I'm the one who called you." Mary shifted uneasily under Ryan's intense stare. "I talked to your machine. I'm glad you got my message. Like I said on the phone, my grandmother—she gave me your number in case I needed help." Her freckled cheeks burned at her lie. "We were in a boating accident—"

  "My office assistant relayed your message..." Ryan shook his head with disbelief. "Your voice—your face—my God, it's too weird—you sound and look just like your grandmother! Your name is Mary, too?"

  "Yes. We were boating north of here—"

  “Then, you don't know." Ryan exhaled sharply. "Your grandmother is missing." His pale eyes widened with concern. "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I lost her on a fauna count—a university expedition in the reserve. It was horrible. I don't really know how to begin."

  Brick and Mary looked at each other.

  "We've had helicopter flybys and team sweeps of the area where I lost her," Ryan continued in a faltering voice, "but we haven't found much of anything. And the worst of it is, I know what happened to her—yet no one believes me." He crossed one arm over his chest and with the other reached around to scratch the back of his head. "I don't even know if I should be telling you this."

  "Grandmother said she believed she had seen Sasquatch in the outland woods. She told us that the fauna count was just an eco excuse to get funding from the university so that she could track Bigfoot. She found it, didn't she?"

  Ryan's eyes flickered with surprise, then cast a nervous glance at Brick before turning excitedly to Mary. "We found Sasquatch, all right. We really did! And it knocked me out with one blow. My team sent me back for medical observation. You can see the bruise." He turned his cheek and displayed his mottled jaw.

  "You're okay?" Mary asked, touching his arm with concern.

  "Yes, sure, I'm fine. But—I'm ashamed to say this, Mary—I left your grandmother out there. She convinced me to leave her where we made contact. And now, she's missing. I feel terrible. I never should have left her. That creature must have come back and taken her. And now she's gone."

  "You mustn't feel bad, Ryan." She tightened her grip on his arm. "It's not your fault. I know my grandmother would not want you to blame yourself."

  Brick leaned forward. "Look, I'm sorry to interrupt but I could use some clothes."

  "Oh, of course." Ryan reached around to the back of the pickup and removed a duffel bag. "I brought a double set of everything. The message said you were big, but I didn't realize you were this big. These will be a little tight, I'm afraid."

  Brick accepted the bag with a grateful nod, opened it, and began taking out the clothes.

  "I also found your grandmother's emergency cache just where you said it would be." He handed Mary a Velcro-sealed pouch. "There's cash in there, which will help you get back home. I know you probably want to stay here and look for your grandmother..."

  "How can we help?" Mary asked the question she knew Ryan expected.

  "You can't." Ryan shook his balding head grievously. "Your grandmother disappeared up-country. There's nothing you can do. It's best that you just go home. Where is that?"

  "Manhattan." Mary fit the snaps of the pouch to her belt. "I feel bad leaving grandmother lost—"

  "We'll call you soon as there's word," Ryan promised and opened the door to his truck. "Come on. You're a long way from nowhere out here. I'll drive you back to civilization. If we leave now, we can make it to a station by morning, and you can catch a train."

  On the ride through the night, while Ryan energetically voiced his guilt and Mary reassured him, the scent of autumn thickened in the truck. A chill of spruce resins filled the cab. Surprised by this, Ryan dangled his arm from the window to feel the warm night.

  He reminisced about Mary Felix, and Mary stopped listening. Dreams pressed close to her—a vision from an evil Marc Chagall: angels with bestial faces in a flurry of autumn leaves.

  Brick worried when she fell asleep, and he tried to wake her. But she would not be roused.

  "Better let her rest," Ryan advised, breathing deeply the redolence of a leaf-clogged creek. "You've been through a lot."

  Dawn stretched a green wire under a gray sky when Mary woke, her body soaked in ether of north wind and dead-wood. She asked them to pull over.

  The dreams of animal angels flying in the night terrified her, and she felt certain that something wretched would happen to Ryan and Brick if she stayed with them. On the pretense of relieving herself in the shrubs, she slipped away.

  When the air went hot and still, Brick realized that she had left them. Without alerting Ryan, he pursued, calling her name, and wandering into the woods of the brightening day. A sour smell of leaf drift and the rot of unburdened apple trees guided him.

  *

  Far away, Nox sat in trance beside the obsidian altar. The needle of black poison hung loose in his hands. From this distance, he could see into Mary as into a lucid pool that magnified the slime-muted shapes at its bottom. And there, he faced the goblins.

  His skin puckered at the sight of their filthy flesh, hairless heads swollen and dented, and their bone-hooded eyes.

  He realized that these frightful little dolls were thinking about him and how to explain themselves. With an unsheltered sorrow, they decided to share with him a biography of the sky.

  They began with the clouds, the dragon breath that rose from the moist earth and chilled to rain. They climbed above the clouds to the ionosphere, the fringe of the atmosphere buffeted by the solar wind, where electrical powers circulated—the source of the cold fire in the planet's magnetic field, the origin of Nox’s terrestrial magic.

  Entranced, Nox rode the thoughts of the goblins higher yet, into the Gulf. The abyss, fourteen-billion-years deep, enclosed all the galaxies and their shrouds of cosmic dust and gas. Mounting higher yet, he glimpsed the Bright Worlds, the chaff of matter aswirl in glowing eddies of Charm, billows of comet veils and star smoke—Irth, Nemora, Hellsgate, and hundreds of planets beyond, afloat like motes in the fiery fumes of the Abiding Star.

  There, within the blinding brilliance at the beginning of time hovered the original home of the goblins. In that luminosity began the real worlds of which all the Bright Worlds in the aura of the Abiding Star and all the galaxies of the Dark Sho
re and the tiny Earth itself existed as shadows cast upon the void.

  Nox cried out to see this! And his vision curdled to his own shrunken body. His heart knocked in its dark cave, and his breath labored with the heat of an August day in Manhattan.

  The Eternal Guardians

  Two manor sentinels in heraldic crimnson-and-gold uniforms burst into Overy Scarn's suite followed by Shai Malia, veiled in gray and black. She had searched for her husband with her eye charms and had summoned the guards when she heard the explosion from the bond agent's suite.

  "What has happened here?" Shai asked sharply, looking irately at the woman and then at Poch in his strange garb before noticing Jyoti on the floor.

  "She shot my sister!" Poch cried and knelt over her. "Opals—quickly!"

  "She broke into my suite," Overy Scarn asserted defensively. "Margrave, tell them. I merely defended myself."

  "You shot my sister!" Poch spat back, yanking theriacal opals from his vest and pressing them to Jyoti's body.

  "Get that weapon away from her," Shai Malia commanded and went to Poch. "What is Jyoti doing here?"

  "She's not dead!" Poch grabbed at his wife's robes, reaching for the opals beneath her veils as she crouched next to him. “The projectile struck her amulet-vest. We can heal her internal injuries with theriacal opals. Give me yours!"

  Shai Malia obliged and whispered, "I will take her to the dear ones. They will see that she is healed."

  Poch faced her with a dismayed expression. "She says you hired an assassin to kill her. Is that true?"

  "She speaks from her rage." With a nod, Shai Malia signaled a guard to take the body. "You shocked her when you usurped her power. She will say anything to cause you pain."

  "She knows how we financed her overthrow." Poch threw an angry stare to where Overy Scarn stood in the custody of a sentinel. "Scarn told her."

  Shai Malia stood and addressed the guard she had summoned. “Take the former margravine to the corridor outside the suite she once occupied. Lay her there, and do not open the door. Do you understand?"

  "I am going with her," Poch declared and followed the guard who carried his sister.

  Shai Malia took his arm. "Wait." With a wave, she dismissed the sentinel who stood behind Overy Scarn. When he had departed, she pointed to the open crates and the heaps of clothing. "What is the meaning of this, Scarn? Why is the margrave dressed in such ridiculous garb?"

  Overy Scarn explained to the margrave's wife what she had earlier told Poch. "With Dig Dog's connections among Duppy Hob's remaining contacts in Gabagalus, we can bring many new and wonderful products to the dominions. The Brood of Odawl will achieve prominence once again."

  "Hm, yes—and you will manage this monopoly for us, I’m sure." Shai Malia sneered. "And the dragon's share of the profits as well."

  Overy Scarn cocked one of her small eyebrows. "Would there be a margrave—or his wife—if not for Dig Dog's investment?"

  "Why did you tell my sister the source of our funding?" Poch jabbed a finger at her. "It was you who hired the assassin—to protect your so-called investment. Admit it."

  "I did no such thing. But—" she straightened her large shoulders and acknowledged with a cold look—"the margravine's death would assure your position as margrave. I took advantage of her illegal trespass of my quarters to shoot her. I did that for you."

  "Do me no further favors, Scarn." Poch turned abruptly and left the room.

  "We shall discuss this further at a later time." Shai Malia gestured to the open crates. "Box all these goods and make certain no one else learns of our access to the Dark Shore."

  *

  On the polished resin floor of the corridor outside the chamber that contained the goblins, Jyoti lay with Poch squatting beside her. He plucked from her torn frock the dull opals whose Charm had drained into her wounded body and then said to the guard nearby, "We must summon a healer."

  "That won't be necessary," Shai Malia spoke from under the round pomegranate-stained glass at the head of the stairway. She sent the guard away and examined the amulet-sash under Jyoti's torn frock. Every one of the hex-gems had been shattered, and the amber power wands had ruptured lengthwise. "Scarn's projectile weapons are powerful. But the talismanic strength of the sash protected her. Not even her flesh is pierced."

  "She may have internal injuries." Poch's voice nearly broke to a wail. "She drained all the opals."

  "Trust that the dear ones will heal her. Now open the door."

  Numb-edged with fright for his sister, he touched his amulet-key to the latch. The door swung open on a filthy cloud mass of clotted webs. Nauseous miasma oozed from creamy mounds of larval eggs that dangled from rafters, wall beams, and furniture. The ichorous gossamer wove the chamber into a giant cocoon.

  In the midst of this sickly hot convolution of webbed tissue, the goblins clustered. Their fetal bodies twitched in the light filtering through the gauze that matted the windows. They ate the light. And from their orifices they exuded the gummy webbings and their white, throbbing roe. Dried, blackened spicules of these excretions grimed their stubby hands and streaked their bloated bellies.

  To Poch and Shai Malia, the fetid air smelled sweetly floral and inviting. They dragged Jyoti into the sweltering hive. "Oh, dear ones—dear ones—eternal guardians of Irth! Can you save my sister? Can you heal her?"

  The goblins blinked their toadish, gold-speckled lids.

  Poch drifted into a dream of sledding on the Kazu sand rivers with his sister, breathless with laughter, intoxicated with the redolence of sweat and heat-baked dunes as though this were the incense of always. He sagged among the reeking webs, smiling.

  "Yes, dear ones, yes!" Shai Malia squatted over Jyoti's sprawled body. "Let him sleep. His emotions for his sister cloud his judgment. Let him sleep while you and I search deeply in her."

  A flush of fever shivered Shai Malia as she felt her way into the unconscious woman.

  The dear ones gave her the strength of their deep seeing so that she could possess this flesh that had served as a lover to the one they hated, the one they feared—the magus of the Dark Shore, Reece Morgan. His skin had pressed against hers—and the psychic imprint remained of their commingling. By this intimate link, her awareness reached out across Irth, grasping one lover and searching for the other half of their splendor.

  A bestial man with a nap of blue fur marked by shoulder rosettes and maroon face stripes appeared in the mental space she shared with the dear ones.

  "No wonder we could not find him!" Shai Malia jubilantly thumped the body under her with both fists. "He is hidden by beastmarks!"

  She peered again into the psychic expanse of the trance and identified twin porphyry towers topped by winged sphinxes and beyond them ruins pierced by fronds. "Ah! We have found him! We have found our enemy. He has tracked you five dear ones to where you had hidden yourselves before we brought you here! With wicked cunning, he stalks you. But now, we have found him! He is at this moment among the Cloths of Heaven."

  In Judgment of Ghosts

  The charmfire explosion seared the fur of Ripcat’s back and tattered Esre's witch veils. In terrified embrace, they flew through the charmway, propelled by the shock wave, and tumbled among dusty, rocky detritus.

  The witch collapsed on her back, and the illumination from her lux-diamond headband vanished among heights of ruin. Stories of skewed girders and sagging floors spiraled upward to the crown of a crushed dome, where daylight penetrated in numerous laser-thin rays.

  Ripcat had crashed against a cracked and jarred pillar, and he shook off the stupor of his pain to look around. A forest of staggered columns ranged ahead, disappearing into darkness. The charmway through which they had passed, a jagged crevice in a wall of faded glyphs and engraved dragon coils, smoked with dust. The passage had collapsed under the force of the blast.

  Esre read the wild look in his feral face. "We're in the Cloths of Heaven—and there's no way back."

  "Are you okay?" Ripcat stared une
asily at her distorted face where she lay among rock shards, but he saw no open wounds.

  "My amulets protected me." She pushed to her feet, ignoring the aches of her bruises. "Only my veils are shredded."

  Beneath her torn robes, she wore a sable undergarment that fit her like a bodysuit and the empty holster of the firecharm that she had exploded. Conjure-filaments outlined her muscular legs and thick torso in gold circuitry that connected clusters of hex-gems at vital points on the suit. Against her thigh, a curved blade fit snugly in its strap.

  "Are your eye charms working?" Ripcat craned his neck, searching for some way to access the higher stories. "Can we find the goblins?"

  “They are not here." She showed him the niello lozenge she had been carrying in her palm. "At least, they are not here anymore. See in this corner—the webs?"

  He sunk his sight deeper into the black crystal in her palm and discerned a vault of tilted slabs draped with cobwebs. "Is it a spider's nest?"

  "No, it's goblin spoor."

  "Let's go there."

  They followed the eye charm among rust-varnished rocks that had fallen from ceilings far above. Hollow voices called remotely from on high.

  "Wraiths," Esre said with brittle fright. “They are the phantoms of ancient wizards who survive in these ruins by thriving off the blood heat of the living—plants, toads ... and humans if they can find them."

  Among fallen entablatures and fractured pillars, they beheld the green ether of the ancient dead. Swirling in a feculent stench, weightless as smoke, smoldering shapes rose. Arms like tentacles reached for them, and grievous voices swollen with emptiness droned hypnotic chants.

  Ripcat felt the chanting tighten his frightened muscles, paralyzing him so that the leprous shapes could gather around his blood heat and feed.

  Esre smashed a theriacal opal among the rock shards, and the wraiths flew to it, ravenous to absorb its Charm. While they fed, she and Ripcat fled through the forest of tilted and fallen pillars. The witch smashed two more opals during their run to keep the wraiths occupied.