Beyond the shelled facade of an anonymous structure whose pale stone piers upheld a hieroglyphic frieze, they found a broad stairway. The smashed stone steps ascended into a domed vault of rubble. Among these broken slabs of masonry, they located the abandoned hive, its stone walls thick with scurf.
Ripcat plucked at a woolly clump of web and found, snagged in its midst, an egg sac. "What is this stuff?" The fragile glazed sac broke in his grip and oozed milky liquid. "They made this?"
"Secreted from their bodies." Esre scanned the dome for cracks and found a fissure hung with ganglia of jungle creepers and vines. “They absorb the Charm in the light of the Abiding Star. What you're holding are the toxins they eliminate—their feces."
Ripcat dropped the clotted web and stepped away. "Cripes, it looked like something alive."
"It was." She kicked at the sacs, and they collapsed in a hiss of dust. “The goblins are from a hotter reality. Even their waste partakes of their higher energy, and it lives. Not in any sentient way. Like amoebae, I suppose. But the goblins use their web works to focus their telepathy. The intricate geometries serve as antennae for broadcasting their will widely. And those who hear must obey, for we are like phantoms to them and they are powerful wizards in judgment of ghosts."
"Where did they go from here?"
Esre's twisted face constricted. "I don't know. It seems they left here sometime ago. We had better get out ourselves—before more wraiths descend on us."
They clambered over jumbled plates of stone. As they mounted upward to where daylight revealed emerald glints of jungle, the long shadow of a man fell upon them.
Ripcat lifted his head in time to see a flash of blade whirling at him, too close to evade. A violent collision knocked him sideways, and the flung knife pierced Esre's throat. The hilt lay flush against one side of her neck and the blue metal tip emerged from the other. Her eyes stared lifelessly at him from within her mask of scars.
When Ripcat looked up, the killer had gone. Stunned by the efficiency of the assassin's strike, he lowered Esre among the fallen slabs. His heart punched hard. He reached for the knife strapped to her thigh, and a metal whip sang from below and snagged painfully about his leg.
The killer had dropped noiselessly to a ledge below, so quickly that Ripcat feared for an irrational instant that he was a ghost. Then, the whip coil tightened and jerked him off balance.
N'drato emerged from a crawl space between the rocks, leaning his full weight onto the metal lariat. The beastmarked man glared at him and actually roared.
That made the assassin smile, which further infuriated the beastman. He grabbed for the metal coil snaring his leg, and when he pulled on it, N'drato let go.
Ripcat flew backward, skipping over the tilted and uneven stones, and fell just as the assassin had planned. He spun about in midair and sighted the pool among the sharp rubble before he struck it. Helplessly, he splashed into it, claws open, thrashing about the mineral-dense water. Before he could pull himself from the slurry pool, the blade that had killed Esre glinted for one instant in his sight. The sharp edge thwacked him hard between the eyes and cleaved his skull.
N'drato used the metal whip to dredge the corpse from the thick water. Briefly, he studied the dead beast. The knife had penetrated deep enough to pierce the brain, and the green eyes in the bestial face had crossed to see the blade that had skewered his skull.
He yanked his weapon free and wiped it clean on the blue nap of fur across the dead man's chest. Then, he looped the metal coil about Ripcat's ankles and dragged him behind.
The World of Your Eyes
Mary moved quickly south. The grip of Octoberland tightened, and she knew she could not elude it. Determined to protect Brick, the magical being who had lost his magic by restoring her youth, she did not resist. Mid-morning, she had slipped through the woods back to the road and caught a ride to the highway in a logger's truck.
Noon found her in her cool aura of autumn at a small train station where heat bleared the tracks and crinkled the air in the distance. A rural family huddled in the meager shade of the platform awning and stared askance at the young woman under the smiting sun. A lilting breeze stirred her masses of chestnut hair, and yellow leaves danced around her hiking boots.
In the air-conditioned passenger car, the chill nimbus surrounding Mary became less noticeable, yet her perfume of heather and gray mist drew a smile from the conductor and the easy comfort of the riders seated near her.
She bought a ticket for Toronto, where she would catch a flight for New York. Her mind continued to offer plausible hypotheses, scientific considerations of Dogbrick and the new reality that had abducted her.
All creation is energy, she thought to herself. Einstein has shown that. The worlds of the Abiding Star are the energy of the universe in the first instants. They are hot and very small compared to us. Yet they are a lot like us. Or I guess it's us who are like them. We're the shadow worlds of their light. Obviously, it's not hot enough out here on the Dark Shore for dragons, gnomes, hippogriffs, and goblins—all those creatures of Charm. But our lives still shadow the basic contours of their reality.
Speculative thoughts like these occupied her for the first hours of the long ride. Eventually, the shuttling sound of the wheels, the rocking of the car, and the green sameness of the landscape lulled her and her worries about what she would do when she finally confronted Nox, and she drifted to sleep.
Stars shine most clearly in the darkest night—and the darkest night of all opened within her dream: the Gulf. Pinpoint lights retreated in every direction among aisles of emptiness, the unconnected lines of madness, not going anywhere.
Not anywhere—until in her dream she lifted free of the galactic plane and witnessed how the seemingly unfocused scattering of stars fit together into an immense pinwheel, darkness enclosing a cosmic whirlpool of light.
She lifted farther away, into wider darkness. Now the galaxy and all the nearby pinwheels and globular clusters looked like icy flakes, a random dusting of snow. She soared through her dreaming, through thickening clusters of galaxies. Then darkness, utterly empty, stupefied her, and she thought her dream had ended—until another wave of galactic fog swept around her.
Flung by her dream to the very height of the Gulf, she gazed back at streamers of galaxies twisting like incense smoke, braiding long stretches of darkness between them. The whole universe lay beneath her—a pit fourteen billion light-years deep.
And when she turned, she faced into the incomparable radiance of the Abiding Star. Its silver light blinded her, and a cathedral of time built itself out of the glare before she could turn away. Archways of star smoke vaulted alcoves of darkness glittering with planets.
Her dream zoomed toward one feathery blue world. Night's crescent covered the planet's oceanic hemisphere, where she knew from Dogbrick's memories the continent of Gabagalus had sunk once more into the sea.
Facing the full brightness of the Abiding Star, the dominions of Irth gleamed in a colorful mosaic of geographies: from the Qaf's cankerous cinderlands umber and black to the wild, demonic gleams of dragon pools, lakes, and linns among the numerous Reef Isles of Nhat.
She fell to Irth. For a moment, she stood where Dogbrick had once stood, on a street corner in the industrial cliff-city of Saxar. Broken gods stared from the broad-leafed ivy of a building, faces faded by erosion, eternal world dancers carved into the stone edifice of an office tower that bore the gold plaque: Dig Dog Ltd.
Curbstones verdant with moss brinked a blue brick street where gilded trolleys powered by Charm clanged past. They carried veiled witches, leather-harnessed charmwrights, and lyceum students in purple frocks and saffron box hats.
On the pitched streets below squatted factory tenements effaced with soot and vat-shaped refineries unrolling sulfurous clouds. The sea gleamed at the bottom of the terraced cliffs, obscured by a cumulus of pollution.
Her dreaming mind lofted away on the sea wind. Dogbrick's place on Irth retreated. She st
ood upon the arc of the world and watched bodies of the dead drifting up on the nocturnal tide of the planet's twilight. They sailed away into the Gulf, unanchored by Charm.
She sailed with them, on her way back through her trance to her own body at the far end of the universe. Astonished, she watched as one of the many corpses launched at day's end into the night sky, tumbled toward her.
The carcass rolled close enough for her to see that this had been a woman—a ghastly one, her face a quilt of livid scars. Puncture wounds gaped at the sides of her throat, and from these gouges her soul leaked. Pearly foam oozed and evaporated quickly in the cold.
Caval—the soul whispered to her as it seeped from the corpse. This world in your eyes was once his own. Find him on the Dark Shore. Use my life to find Caval—the wizard on the Dark Shore—
The corpse collided with her, and the sticky mess of her soul splattered over Mary and gummed up her dream. A flash of a spinning blade whirled at her, and pain slammed her neck, spiking fire into her brain and jolting her awake.
With a small cry, she sat up straight in her seat on the passenger train to Toronto.
Madness
Brick knew he had lost Mary Felix when he could no longer smell autumn among the jeweled green light of the summer forest. He cursed the loss of his beastmarks and grasped his nose, trying to widen his nostrils, hoping to catch again the leaf-smoke taint of her.
"You call this a nose?" he groused angrily. "It's a pathetic and useless lump of cartilage!"
Ryan, who had been bent over, trying to read Mary's movements from impressions among the leaf litter and bent branches in the underbrush, stood up with a bewildered look. "What?"
"She's gone. We're not going to find her here." Brick twisted uncomfortably in his tight jeans and Bigfoot T-shirt stretched almost to ripping across his massive chest. "We have to get to New York. That's where she's headed."
"But I must return to the university." Ryan scratched his head and peered hopefully through the sun-shot foliage. "I've got summer school classes to teach."
"Show me how to drive the truck." Dogbrick shoved through the shrubs, striding back toward the pickup. "And point me toward New York. Is it far?"
"You can't take the truck. It belongs to the university." Ryan rubbed the back of his neck, thinking out loud: "Something's definitely fishy. First, her grandmother disappears and now she’s gone?"
"It's too complicated to explain, believe me, Ryan. But we know she's going to New York. I can't let her go without me." Brick opened the driver's door and gave a hopeless shake of his head at the sight of the three pedals and the dashboard dials. "Just show me how to use this thing. I'll get it back to you."
"Why did she run away from you?" Ryan asked from the far side of the truck, eyes hooded suspiciously. "Did you hurt her?"
Brick straightened. "I didn't hurt her. She's trying to protect me. But she's putting herself in danger."
"What are you talking about?"
"Look, you wouldn't understand. Just get me to New York."
Ryan shook his ruddy head. "No way. For one thing, I don't have enough gas to get you out of the province."
Brick huffed an exasperated sigh. "Maybe you could put me on a train. Mary talked about taking a train to New York."
“That's expensive, and you don't have any money. You know, I'm beginning to think you two aren't on the level."
Brick reached inside himself for power, wanting to widen his sense of smell to a fraction of its former acuity so that he could scent out which direction Mary had fled. He felt nothing inside except his tight stomach. He was frustrated—and hungry.
"Listen, Ryan—" Brick ran both large hands through his straw hair. "You feel responsible for losing Mary Felix in the woods after the Sasquatch?"
Ryan nodded slowly. "Yeah, though I hardly believe myself anymore. I know it happened. The damn thing knocked me unconscious."
"Okay then, believe this: I knocked you unconscious." He tapped a husky finger against the stretched fabric of his T-shirt. "You had two pointy-eared, red dogs with you, remember? I threw sleep at them when they came at me. They collapsed, and you took a rifle and shot a dart at me. You hit me here." He slapped his thigh. "You stood over me with the rifle, and I struck you across the jaw."
"You?" Ryan angled his head with incredulity. "No, uh-uh. I saw something bigger than you—hairier, with a face you wouldn't believe."
“That's because I'm changed now—just like Mary is changed." Brick pushed his face urgently toward the researcher. "How else could I tell you what happened unless I was there?"
"Mary Felix told you somehow—when you found her in the woods."
“That was Mary Felix who ran away from us!" He thrust his big arm at the woods. "You heard her voice. You saw her face—her eyes, her nose, her mouth. Who else could that be?"
"No." Ryan shook his head insistently. "Mary is nearly eighty years old. Her granddaughter looks eighteen at most."
"Mary doesn't have a granddaughter." Brick glared at Ryan. "She doesn't have children. She and her husband were childless. You must know that."
"I thought so, too, but then I figured—maybe a child from another marriage?"
"Look at me, Ryan. Have you ever seen a human being that looks like me? My coloring—my size?"
Ryan studied him dubiously. "You've got a point, I guess." He backed off a step. "Maybe you should get in the truck and tell me the whole story. We're not going to find Mary out here. And I've got to get back to the research station."
Brick agreed. While they drove, he tried to tell Ryan everything that he could remember from the time he woke in the woods among the Sasquatch pack until he encountered Caval's ghost on the logging road. "I think we might see him again. He's trying to help us."
“This wizard—from these, uh, Bright Worlds—you knew him?" Ryan asked as they drove through a small town of weatherboard buildings.
"Well, I don't think we actually met before, Caval and I. He helped my partner, Ripcat—a magus from the Dark Shore, where we are now. But, as I've said, I don't recall anything of the Bright Worlds. Mary told me. All my memories are with her."
"Right, of course." He slowly pulled onto a long rutted driveway beside a university extension sign and drove toward a cluster of cinder-block buildings. "So let me get this straight—all your Charm was used up when you made Mary young again. Then, when she tried to get you to use your power to revive your own memories, they flowed into her. But I'm not clear why she had to run off. Tell me that part again."
"The sinister angels," Brick reminded him. “The coven in New York called Octoberland—"
"Right, right. Their warlock has a magical hold on Mary and is drawing her south—to get you there so that he can use your magic for himself." Ryan braked to a stop under the corrugated zinc canopy of a crude carport. "But this warlock—"
"Nox."
"Yeah, Nox—" Ryan got out of the pickup. "He doesn't know that you've already used up all your power."
"I don't think he knows that—or about the goblins." Brick stepped out among gravel and weeds. "That's what Mary hopes to show him—the evil of the goblins. If he sees that, he won't want anything to do with me."
"Of course not." Ryan crossed the carport, past a van and a Jeep, both beige and bearing the university seal on their doors. "And the charmways in Manhattan—-the wormholes to the Bright Worlds that the devil worshipper Duppy Hob took six thousand years to create—that's an even better reason for Mary to get you to New York, so you can escape from the Dark Shore and not draw the goblins into our unsuspecting world."
"That's right." Brick followed Ryan among pigweeds as big, bent, and rusted looking as old machinery. "I think she wants to confront Nox alone—to try to protect me now that I've lost my power."
"Yeah, that must be it." Ryan approached a brick storage shed next to the tool shop and struggled with the rusted padlock. "Help me with this, will you?"
Brick wrenched open the lock, and Ryan slid aside the heavy metal
door. The tired iron runners shrieked. He stepped in and flicked on the overhead light. The small space stood empty, waiting to be stocked with winter supplies.
"Would you give me a hand with this?" he asked, and as soon as Brick entered, he curled around him and slammed the metal door shut, slapping the padlock into place with an expression of immense relief.
"Hey!" Brick shouted with surprise—and heard no reply.
The City of Lost Light
For the holy and the damned, time weighs a little less.
—Gibbet Scrolls: 11
Out of This Darkness
Nox exited Octoberland onto the rooftop and the hot tar paper of an August afternoon. Weary from his long trance work, he reeled almost drunkenly among black vapor pipes and silver air-ducts.
He wanted relief from the dim shadows of the coven and the smudged odors of lost leaves, and he moved out of this darkness into the radiance of day. He doffed his ceremonial robe, left it like a puddled black shadow atop the zinc housing of an air-conditioning shed. And he stood in red briefs under the styptic gaze of the summer sun.
The ancient sorcerer looked as though he had stepped from a furnace: His crinkled flesh charred, stretched like crepe over his angular bones, he sat atop a curve of elbow pipe and lifted sunken eyes toward the sun, glad for its savage fire.
He had grown tired of ghosts and their effluvia. He stretched withered arms up to the creator light and beseeched the powers to fulfill his ambition and restore his youth.
Mary Felix on her way to him and the coven ready to receive her, he knew that Dogbrick would follow. And the beastmarked creature's Charm would heal seven thousand years of time.
Out of the sun's glare, an image from the first temple formed: a standing goat with angel wings—a deity from long ago, a god of Sumer.
Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3) Page 15
