Nox blinked.
The summer heat drained from him in a cold wash of fright. An entity in the sky with one end hooked to the stars had connected its other end to his soul, to one of the deepest memories at the bottom of his mind. Who?
A vibrant hum made sunshine jiggle like sheets of sulfur dust, and a voice resonated within him: I am with you, Nox of Jarmo, Nox from the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, Nox from the time before the first cities.
"Caval!"
Yes, I am yet with you, Nox, who learned his magic in Eridu, Nox who took knowledge from the steppe wanderers, the wayfarers of the plains beneath the star wheels. I hide in the sky, Nox, and I see everything. No good will come of drawing Irth's Charm to you. The innocent Dogbrick cannot help you.
"Be gone, dead thing!" Nox crisscrossed his arms with scissoring swiftness, and the presence thinned almost to nothing.
Wait! You have the power to dismiss me easily enough. I am weaker now than ever. Yet I have come to you for a purpose.
“To destroy me! Away with you, wizard of Irth."
I am truly a wizard of Irth. Hold to me, Nox, and I will show you the Bright Worlds themselves. Hold to me—
Nox stopped moving his arms and instead crossed them over his rib-grooved chest. "You are a thin thread of being, Caval. I can snap you. I can break what little is left of your life and reduce you to the heat simmer of gravel and street dust. Do not think to deceive me. Though I am wary and weary of tricks, I will see what you have to show." He opened the burnt sticks of his arms and received the shine of day and within it the energy of the wizard.
In an instant, the harmonic force of Caval's wire-thin being matched the frequency of waveforms from the Bright Worlds, and the mind of Nox ranged across the Gulf, across fourteen billion light years, to the brightness of the Abiding Star. The fierce radiance blinded Nox. Immediately, he pulled back, seeing nothing but silver luminosity.
As he fell away, vision adjusted, and within the glare he perceived flame shapes, smoke turnings, vaporous neon shimmerings—the star fumes and comet vapors that enclosed the planets of the Bright Worlds.
From out of that foggy coastline, sparks sifted. Grains of light sublimed from the white aura of the Abiding Star and dissolved into the abyss of eternal night.
These are the dead of the Bright Worlds. Their bodies, unanchored by sleep and death, drift on the charmwind of the Abiding Star—drift into the void.
"Why are you showing me this, wizard?"
All souls come from the Abiding Star. Once, you too lived among the Bright Worlds, in another life, with other memories.
"Help me to harvest this Charm, wizard. Gather this Charm into my flesh and make me young again."
The Charm of these dead is too thin to change a dense being such as you.
Nox withdrew from the vista of sugary smoke wafting into the dark. These seeds of Charm would grow other lives among darker worlds. He retreated toward his earthbound body, and as he floated back to himself, he noticed the few sparkles of charmlight that followed the same cold vector.
Distinctly, he beheld their bodies rolling head over heels through the vacuum—and though they looked like people, they were not human.
Stymied by wonder, Nox hovered alertly in the emptiness, watching bodies with blue and green hair, tufted ears, and purple flesh tumbling toward him.
Elves—their corpses bound for the Dark Shore.
The colorful carcasses, dressed in garments of bark, moss, and vines, began to erode like mud shapes in a wash of rain. Diaphanous peelings of flesh and braids of hair spiraled like foam and faded to a bright haze that then dimmed to tinsel glints in space. Soon, nothing remained of the elves but flecks of light, a drizzle of Charm aloft above the blue orb and feathery clouds of Earth.
Down they sifted, fireflies, sparks guttered against the night. Caught on the planetary wind, they swept over oceans, where most fell. Some random chaff of these lives descended onto continents and seeped down through the atmosphere to forests and grasslands.
A little of the bright grit accompanied Nox on his return toward his body. Below, night waited. Manhattan flung luminous reflections in the twin rivers and stood recast in the water like submerged torches. The seemingly momentary journey had consumed the day.
His body received him from where it had slumped against a standing elbow pipe, and he sat staring at the fiery geometry of the city.
Nox staggered to his feet in time to watch, sprinkling toward the street, the flecks of Charm that had accompanied him on his journey across time and the Gulf. "What is happening to these lives? How will they be reborn down there in the gutters?"
The lives lost among the Bright Worlds are cast widely across the Dark Shore, Nox. Most drift endlessly through space. A few land among dead worlds. The rare souls who reach Earth on the winds of chance wind up on the floor of this world and are gradually taken into the mineral matrix of the planet, perhaps to find lives again among algae, plants, and eventually animals. When you die, that is the fate of your soul.
The Thoughts of the Rain
“I am not going to die!” Nox shouted defiantly. He danced defiantly, too. He danced across the rooftop under the haze of city lights and a few hard stars. "I haven't lived this long to collapse to insensate minerals."
You will die, Nox—
With an abrupt slash of his arms, Nox broke the bond with Caval. The wizard's voice vanished among distant sirens, diesel noise, and horn blasts from the streets. "No, Caval. You are dead. I am yet alive. And I will live forever."
He retrieved his ceremonial robe from atop the air-conditioning shed where he had flung it. After donning it, he climbed wooden steps to the shagbark door of the converted water tank and entered.
As ever, Octoberland bore a heady scent of leaf drift and mist-rubbed rocks. In the chill and lightless interior, he moved hurriedly to the altar of obsidian and drew the black needle from the stained pot that housed it.
Dancing and chanting, Nox pranced with the poison tip hugged to his chest, then bending his blackened lips to it, then stooping low and making it skim the floor, releasing it, watching it slide through the oily light to the spot where Virgo had died.
Nox knelt in the dark before the living needle and whispered to it, "Come to your place in the circle."
*
Six miles high and hundreds of miles away, Mary Felix heard Nox. She sat in the window seat of an airliner that would bring her to Manhattan with dawn. Silver blushes of lightning pulsed in dark clouds, and at first she thought she heard the thoughts of the rain: Come to your place in the circle—
The rain, risen from the baked earth into the thermal swell of the sky, brushed against the frigid edge of space and turned back to the night world below.
Mary had been flitting in and out of trance since abandoning Brick. She had visited Irth and been instructed by the dead there to find the wizard Caval on the Dark Shore. None of her attempts to contact the mysterious wizard had been successful.
Instead, she had sat in the airport lounge watching summer twilight stretch patiently through orange and red to indigo. She had nodded to sleep. In the rest room, washing weariness from her eyes, she had gawked at her young face and tried to make sense of her new identity.
Her youthful features gazed back at her from the airplane window backed by night. The engine noise droned with a fearsome din of barely audible voices, psychic mutterings from her troubled soul and memories that Dogbrick had poured into her.
She felt unhappy leaving Brick behind with Ryan. She had fled the magical being who had given her youth and knowledge of the Bright Worlds. At the same time, she knew she had no choice. The knowledge she possessed was their only weapon against Nox.
Come to your place in the circle.
She closed the shade of the window at the sound of Nox's voice inside her. That he could reach her even up here, at the limits of the sky, frightened her.
She turned to the passenger in the seat beside, wanting to ignore the t
elepathic summons. The woman sitting there, flaxen haired and young, dressed oddly—in a white robe. Mary realized she had not noticed her before.
"Don't be frightened," the stranger said in a quiet voice. "I was frightened at first myself. Once you feel the power, there is nothing to fear."
Mary Felix stared at her with narrowed eyes. "Excuse me?"
"You don't have to pretend with me." The young woman placed an icy hand over hers. "I know what's happening to you."
"You do?"
"My name is Virgo—like the sign of the zodiac." She smiled serenely. "Octoberland sent me."
Mary withdrew her hand as from a flame.
Virgo shook her head with disapproval. "I'm not going to hurt you. I came to reassure you. There's nothing to fear. I can answer all your questions."
"Pardon me, please." Mary unbuckled her seat belt and stood up. She edged into the aisle and toward the back of the plane. When she glanced back, Virgo had gone.
Inside the lavatory, she washed her face—and Virgo stared back.
"You're going to take my place in the circle," the specter told her with a jubilant smile.
Mary crashed into the door in her frenzy to get out. Once in the aisle, she feared returning to her seat. She searched among the other passengers for the ghost and did not see her. Out the window, a splinter of dawn gleamed. They would land soon.
At the far end of the aisle, Virgo stepped out of a lavatory. Mary turned away and bumped into a stewardess.
"May I help you?"
"That woman is following me." Mary pointed down the empty aisle. "I'm sorry. She was there a moment ago." She scanned the faces of the passengers and did not find her.
Mary refused to return to her original seat and instead found a vacant one next to a sleeping businessman. The stewardess brought her an orange juice, and she sipped it while glancing around apprehensively.
*
Nox felt her fear six miles below in the approaching city. He laughed. "Very good, Virgo. Very good. Keep an eye on her, and you will soon be free of the black needle. This one will take your place, and you shall be free."
His laughter sounded hollow to him. Contact with the wizard Caval had polluted him with fear even thicker than what his prey felt on the incoming flight.
Death meant collapse to the mineral level of reality. He could not abide even the thought of that, and he got up and went to the altar. With a hissed cry, he ignited the fat black candles, and their flames jumped brightly, wagging shadows over the curved walls and lifting into the visible hanging chains of shriveled apple faces.
Transparent to the shuddering shadows, the young, flaxen-haired woman stood. "Release me now, master."
"Not yet, Virgo. Not yet."
"My replacement is found. Release me. I am cold, and I want to die."
Nox lifted his fungus-gilled staff from the altar and swung at the apparition, shattering her like glass. The luminous shards skittered across the floor and spun to dull, brown embers that unfolded bristly legs and scuttled away as cockroaches. "Are you satisfied now, Virgo?"
He shuddered and threw the staff to the ground. Death appalled him. Caval had whetted its fear. The wizard had forced him to see the insensate limits of extinction—and the eternal endlessness of being. He did not want to become dust. He wanted to live forever as himself, only younger, stronger.
Among the leaping shadows, he began to dance. His feet pounded the planks, wanting to feel the actuality of his bones, the liveliness of his muscles and ligaments. And as he danced, he sang, "I will never die. I will dance and dance—and I will never die!"
The Dark Voice
N’drato dragged the corpse of Ripcat through the murk of the Cloths of Heaven by the metal coil that bound the dead thing's legs. Glancing up at the dark keeps within the yawing well of collapsed stories, he gauged his location within the dripping shadows of the ancient ruins—and he searched for blood-hungry wraiths. Gray clots of anonymous shapes moved at the higher levels, but nothing nearby approached.
He intended to bring Ripcat's carcass whole to Shai Malia, to be stuffed and displayed in the hedgerow gardens of Primrose Stilts. However, that ambition required his finding a charmway close by. The path through which she had dispatched him on this mission awaited several stories higher, and if he could not locate the adjacent passage down here that would lead him back to New Arwar, he would have to sever the beastmarked head for a trophy.
Eyes moving, constantly on the watch for blood feeders, N'drato grimaced and lugged the dead body over chunks of fallen masonry. He veered past pools that stirred with small bubbles of gas erupting in iridescent wisps.
How Shai Malia knew so well these hideous ruins, the assassin feared to guess. Not even his own brood had dared map this doomful place with the precision that she had offered him. If she were a true witch, he would have accepted that the Sisterhood had imparted their comprehensive understanding—though, even then, he would have had difficulty believing her, for witches devoted their powers to serving the indigent, not the vampirical.
Shai Malia's description of the rifted byways in the forest of graven pillars proved entirely accurate. N'drato hauled the corpse through nameless dross of fungal gray dust mixed with decayed stone, bat dung, and dead beetles. Pausing when the body foundered on a masonry pedestal smothered in the dread waste, he laid his hands on the carcass and lifted it over the obstruction.
The lifeless stare, still locked cross-eyed on the wound that pierced its brain, had dilated to reveal a hollow interior. Meager light from the cavernous surroundings entered the vertical gash and incandesced in the empty skull.
N'drato thought little of this at first. Droning had begun in the disordered interior of the forsaken temple, and he moved quickly to reach the exit of the charmway.
As an assassin, he had been trained to slay every form of living sentience, and even these wraiths voracious for blood were creatures that fell within the purview of his murderous skills. Vague entities, they were not beings easy to destroy. Yet, they lived, and so they could be slain.
The difficulty consisted in the fact that he confronted the wraiths not of common mortals such as people, elves, gnomes, or even ogres. These were wizards—enormously old wizards. Grown dim over the ages, they nonetheless had survived by magic and their willingness to take for themselves the blood heat of whatever lived and trespassed the Cloths of Heaven—toads, bats, even the saprophytic growths that furred the fecal droppings of toads and bats. Killing them would prove challenging, and he preferred to avoid such a contest.
The subterranean metropolis contained many collapsed shrines and the pseudomorphic shapes of gods alien and improbable. Beneath the mandibles of a deity shaped of ebony and buried to its compound eyes in cinder and brick, he found the charmway where Shai Malia had promised it would be.
A burnt scent of scorched stone lilted from the skewed crevice, a sooty smell that penetrated the fusty atmosphere of the ruins. Curious stobs of marble in the grim dirt prevented him from dragging Ripcat through the low opening, and he had to take the corpse by the shoulders and lift it over stone shapes of purposes long forgot.
Seizing the body, he noticed again the excavation of the cleft between the crossed eyes and this time, something more. The eyes themselves had crinkled and sunk like chitinous shells drained empty.
The murmurous chantings of the ravenous wraiths urged him to hug the dead man close and retreat bent over and backward into the charmway. The rock-scorched odor thickened around him, and he dared brighten several more lux-diamonds on his headband better to view the passage.
Thin fumes curled in the light. Does New Arwar burn? he wondered as he advanced, once more pulling the dead man after him. He knew the wraiths would not follow, for fear of losing their way among these lifeless corridors. Without Shai Malia's impeccable directions, the assassin himself would have become befuddled by the bronchial tubings that opened on all sides, none offering clues of destination.
Sizzling sounds rasped from
all the many corridors, growing louder as he advanced. Dimly, he began to suspect the nature of what tainted the air with stench and static. His heart paced faster at the thought. And when a green glimmer glossed the rock walls ahead, he knew he had read the signs correctly, and he departed the path that led to New Arwar and moved quickly toward the shining rocks, teeth gnashing, blood whipping loudly in his ears.
Around the next bend, a hot wind choked him with rock smoke. Amplifying the protective Charm from his power wands, he yanked the corpse after him toward where he perceived pulsing green fire. At the brink of a wide pit, he lay on his belly and gazed at a churning inferno. Gouts of flame filled all the passageways around the cavern, many of them flaring vengeful fiery talons into the open space.
N'drato pulled back and lay facing the corpse's snarled mask, panting. "Charmfire," he breathed hotly. "All the north and west corridors are filled with charmfire. It's burning its way across the planet!"
He sat up. The passageway to New Arwar had not yet ignited. He had to hurry, cross to New Arwar, deliver the body, and return to the Brood of Assassins to warn the others, if they did not already know.
He grabbed the body to shove it ahead of him and detected the green light of the fire passing into one ear and out the next, an emerald filament threading an empty head. With a startled grunt, he heaved the corpse upright and pierced its abdomen with his knife. He pulled back the furry skin and found the interior empty.
Shouting, he tossed the ponderous body to the ground and hacked at it with his blade. In moments, it lay cleaved in large pieces beneath him, a thick, heavy hide that had split open along the spine and released its human content back at the Cloths of Heaven. All that remained was the dead husk of the man, the beastmarks emptied of the life he had been hired to destroy.
N'drato stalked angrily through the charmway back the way he had come. He struck at the walls with his blade, scattering sparks, infuriated that he had deceived himself in his eagerness to escape the ghastly Cloths of Heaven. He had known that this had been no ordinary beastmarked man. This was a magus, who wore beastmarks as a guise, a protective shell. He should have beheaded him on the spot and confirmed his death.
Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3) Page 16
