Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3)

by A. A. Attanasio

  The door opened, and through the gauze that masked her face, Jyoti watched a silhouette approach. Fingers ripped away the strings that held her standing, and she collapsed into the soft mat of the goblin's furry white excrement. Lying there, she felt the telepathy of the evil creatures struggling with the interloper.

  The goblins' minds strained, baffled by Charm, the condensed energy of the Abiding Star. The struggle would not last much longer: Their hot minds burned brighter even than Charm, and Jyoti sensed them incinerating the hex-gems that guarded the silhouette stooped over her.

  The cool flat of a knife kissed her cheek and cut away the stinky fabric that covered her face. Nette's pugilistic features bent close, cobwebs stuck in her bristly, silver hair. "Can't save us both—" She groaned as she lifted Jyoti in her arms. "Get away from here."

  Nette carried the margravine through drifts of sticky webs, the larval eggs hobbling her ankles.

  The goblins cowered under the windowsill. Their lobed brows glistened with mica flecks of sweat as they exerted their telepathic power against Nette's vest of amulets. One by one, the power wands cracked lengthwise. Their amber translucency clouded instantly black.

  The assassin wanted to slash at the goblins with her knife and cut open their small bodies. The air around them shone too dense with the vibrancy of their strength. If she had dared to approach them directly, all her power wands would have cracked and she would have fallen helplessly before them with the margravine in her arms.

  Instead, Nette kicked at the window above with her boot heel, and the latched frame burst open. She lurched forward as the last of her power wands split open spilling their Charm, and she lowered Jyoti out the window.

  The margravine clutched at the wall ivy and brick grout, and the assassin gasped from above, "Beware N'drato—I'm lost to you—"

  A sudden inrush of air slammed the latched frame shut when Nette's Charm exhausted itself and the telepathy of the goblins seized her and pulled her toward them. Weavings of silver filaments clouded the cracked window panes, and Nette opened her mouth to cry out. And no sound emerged.

  The larval sacs at her feet had burst, and their fumes swirled up through her nostrils into her brain. The spinal fluid and cranial liquids of her brain quivered, the waters of fire that held the small lightnings of her thoughts, of her very being, shivered with the dendritic changes that altered her.

  The door to the room swung open, and Poch and Shai Malia advanced gingerly among the torn webs. "Dear ones—why are you so frightened?" Shai Malia called out. "Why are you cringing?"

  "Jyoti!" Poch cried. He rushed to the kneeling figure by the window and pulled her head back by her short silver hair. "What have you done with my sister, assassin?"

  "Out the window!" Nette cried. "By the gods themselves, I lost her to us! I lost her!"

  Poch flung open the window and spotted the path of ripped ivy where Jyoti had climbed down the manor wall. Among black flame cypress trees, no sign of her appeared.

  "What have I done?" Nette wailed. She gazed with tear-blurred eyes at the goblins—the pixies—her hands opened before her beseechingly. "Forgive me, dear ones. Forgive me."

  Shai Malia knelt beside her and cradled the assassin's sobbing head. "Hush now. The dear ones love you—and there is time yet for you to show your love for them."

  Terrible Love

  Shortly after the jetliner landed at Newark International Airport and before it completed its taxi to the gate, Mary Felix got to her feet and headed for the exit. A steward stopped her, which comforted her. The ghost of the flaxen-haired young woman that she had been seeing throughout the flight did not approach other people. During the descent, the pale woman had disappeared entirely, as did the chill autumnal energy that had surrounded Mary for most of her journey. Even so, Mary feared the phantom would reappear at any moment, and she deplaned quickly.

  "Mary!" A short minister with fleecy silver hair waved at her, and a sunburst halo shone briefly around him. "Mary Felix!"

  She watched him timidly, afraid that he, too, might be a ghost.

  "You've come to find Octoberland," the minister said earnestly as he stepped up to her. "I've been sent to escort you."

  Mary backed up against a row of plastic seats. A vacuum widened in her chest. "How did you find me?"

  "Find you?" The minister offered a merry smile. "We've been with you all along!" He offered his hand. "I am Aries—the first in the circle and so the first to meet you here and introduce you to the others. You've already met Virgo, the woman whose place you are taking."

  Understanding flexed in her mind like an alignment of forces, like something magnetic and physical. “The ghost—she is one of yours?"

  "Was one of ours." Aries swept his arm toward the sliding glass exit doors. "Come along, Mary, and I'll tell you everything you want to know."

  Mary hesitated. She had journeyed this far to confront Nox, to see what she could do to save her savior, Dogbrick. Now that she had arrived, her fear seemed heavier. “This is all so new to me—magic, ghosts, even my own body! I'm not really this young, you know."

  "We know." Aries smiled gently, and when he took her arm electric warmth pulsed through her with a charge of well-being. "We helped revive you in the forest not long ago. Don't you remember?"

  She allowed herself to be led out of the airport to an off-duty taxicab waiting for them in the lot. Though morning had not yet delivered the sun into the sky, the air outside the terminal felt close and sticky. In the east, above the controller's tower, Venus blazed against the last blue shadows of night. "Where are you taking me?"

  "Why, to Octoberland, of course." Aries ushered Mary into the backseat of the cab and sat next to her. "Our driver is another coven member. Her name is Taurus."

  The driver, a big-shouldered black woman with large, bovine eyes and a ready smile pulled the cab away from the curb before the minister slammed the door. "You look frightened, sweetie." She swung a smile over her shoulder. "You mustn't be. Octoberland is about life and joy."

  "Virgo didn't look very happy—or alive," Mary dared to say and leaned back with surprise at the laughter of the minister and the driver.

  "Everyone has to die." Taurus winked at her in the rearview mirror. "Except the Master. He is going to live forever and ever."

  "Nox," Mary said.

  "Oh, we never call him by that name, dear." Aries reached over and squeezed her hand firmly. "He is the Master, because he is never going to die."

  "Even Jesus died," Mary ventured and looked to Aries. "You're a minister. How can you call anyone but Christ your master?"

  More glittering laughter filled the cab. "I'm a banker," Taurus offered, "but I don't worship money. Aries is a minister. He tends to the sick and the desolate, but it's not Jesus that gives him the power to heal illness and change lives. It's the Master's magic."

  "Surely, you understand," Aries picked up. "Look at yourself. You're a teenager. Was it a miracle that transformed you from the crone you were? Not at all. It is a science we only dimly perceive, yet a science nonetheless. By that science, the Master will never die."

  "And you?" Mary inquired coldly. "And Virgo? Why is there only enough science to keep the Master alive forever?"

  "She's a feisty one!" Taurus laughed. "You are going to have a high old time with the Master. A high old time!"

  On the busy viaduct above the tule grass and green pools of chemical waste from surrounding factories, the minister asked, "And what is your faith, Mary Felix? How do you reconcile what has happened to you with what you know of God?"

  "I'm a scientist," Mary answered, though she felt increasingly unsure about any part of her past identity. "I believe God wants us to think for ourselves."

  "And in your thinking, Mary, have you left any room for faith?"

  Mary suppressed a shiver, a tremor of fear at finding herself alone in a car with these strangers, on her way to a place of evil. She fixed her mind on a neon eagle spreading its wings over a brewery. “I have fa
ith that when there's no room left for thinking, God will take care of the rest."

  "Good answer," Taurus interjected. "Leave mystery where it belongs. Our responsibility in this life is to deal with what we already know. If we would just do that, the world would be a much finer place."

  "Surely you must have some idea of the Supreme Being," the minister pressed.

  "My husband did," Mary said, watching a police motorcycle pull alongside. "He used to say that God was Nature itself, that we're already in heaven and in hell—and living is about learning to tell the two apart."

  Aries leaned over Mary and waved to the motorcycle officer. “That is Gemini. He has agreed to escort us. And there is Cancer in the cab ahead of him, with Sagittarius driving."

  Mary peered out the window and spotted an elderly Asian woman in the back of a cab driven by a smiling Amerindian in a cowboy hat. A Mercedes glided past in the lane to their right, and an elegantly dressed couple nodded and waved, the driver's full blond hair coiffed like a lion's mane, the long-throated woman sitting tall, honey hair poised atop her head.

  "Leo and Libra," Taurus introduced. "We are surrounded by friends. They have all come out to see that you are safely escorted to Octoberland."

  "Are you afraid I might try to escape?" Anxiety tormented her with the certainty that she had made a terrible mistake in leaving Dogbrick.

  "Escape?" Taurus threw her head back with a bright laugh. "Where could you go? This whole world belongs to the Master."

  For the remainder of the ride into the city, Taurus and Aries described the happiness of their circle, devoted to magic and longevity. Her attention drifted to cardboard hovels on the wrought-iron stoops of old brick buildings, and she heard the minister commenting about them.

  "Jesus knew, God loves them more—the homeless, the infirm, the diseased. Do you know why, Mary?" His hazel eyes watched her with cold intensity. "Remember, Jesus said to love your enemies, because God loved them! God made the rain and the sunshine to fall upon the wicked no less than upon the righteous. Remember that? And in Isaiah, Jesus's favorite prophet, the voice of God declares, 'I make good and evil, I the Lord do this!' Do you understand?" He smiled without mirth. "God loves us. With a terrible love."

  Earth, Be a Road

  Brick pounded on the heavy door of the storage shed. "Hey, Ryan! Let me out of here!"

  No reply came, and Brick sat down in the middle of the empty space, certain that Ryan had fled to report him to the other staff members of the university research station. This infuriated him. He had been sincere with Mary's colleague. He had thought that a man who had actually seen him as Dogbrick might believe him. He groaned and kicked at the door.

  A long time passed while he sat fuming, and eventually he grew tired of picking at straws. He lay down and drifted to sleep. He dreamt of wading through shallows, where sea horses shed bright peels of color through crystal-lit water. He arrived at a pier and climbed a ladder notched into one of the tar-painted pilings and mounted to a lantern-hung den at the end of a pier.

  There, sail menders and talisman braiders ate together at an open grill. He sat on a wobbly bench at a cracked table of lashed driftwood under a sharkskin lantern. Through the open sides of the den, a sea wind brisked, and he stared across a sparkling bay at industrial fumes shredding from the sides of a cliff to reveal in broad daylight oxide-seared streets and roasted buildings carved into the rock face of the palisades. Cancerous colors blistered the cliff slopes, which had been riddled to a charred labyrinth.

  Then, feathery thrashings from a draped cage beside the grill caught his attention. He removed the magenta shade of dried kelp with a flourish and confronted a small figure of marbly nakedness shielding itself with crimson and green wings. Greasy hair covered its face until he asked, "Tell me true, sibyl, am I man or am I dog?"

  An alabaster visage lifted toward him. Its faunish features watched him with oblique jade eyes. From a perfectly round mouth, a tongue of blue flame spit, "How you die decides that."

  Brick woke with a start. He knew he had dreamt of Irth, of his life there as Dogbrick, yet he did not know if this was memory or fantasy. The lucidity of the dream assured him that what he had experienced had been seen before.

  He strained his mind, trying to remember more of his former life on Irth. Nothing more emerged, and soon he began to dwell on what the sibyl had said. He wondered if the dream augured his death, now that he had become a man.

  Brick pounded at the door again, then angrily paced the small room. He jumped at the walls, smacking them with his soles and palms and pushing off, infuriated. Then, he seized the door handle and tugged with all his might and whirled away when the latch did not budge. Furious, he grabbed at the light switch and yanked mightily, ripping the wire from the switch box.

  A jolt of current ripped through his hand and up his arm. The lightbulb overhead dimmed to a gray shape of itself. The red filament throbbed. Brick's knees buckled, and he jerked to release the naked wire. The electricity sluiced hotter, holding him with fiery tenacity.

  In the pulsing shadows, he gaped at his electrocuted hand and arm swelling. Tawny fur stood fluffed with static energy, and sparks jumped from brown talons and spun like blue spirochetes in the air. His body expanded with a sound of rent fabric. His flesh shuddered violently on the sturdy scaffold of his bones.

  The electric power draining into him carried with it the Charm that Earth's planetary amulets had accrued: power line grid works, mammoth hydroelectric dams, and cities with their geometries of talismans. All the millennial handiwork of Duppy Hob that had made of the planet a giant Charm collector poured its force into Dogbrick.

  With the return of Charm, he abruptly understood this. In that split second, his life became clear to him again.

  The overhead light blacked out, and the electricity in the ripped wire cut off. Dogbrick's night vision detected minute threads of light slipping through the jamb, and he put one hand on the metal door and tore it from its frame with a rasping cry of dislodged bricks. The door clanged to the ground, and he emerged into a night of faultless beauty.

  No artificial lights marred the celestial radiance of the Milky Way pouring its star flow across the sky. He reached within himself for strength and loped into the night, gravel crunching loudly under his heels.

  Later, a flashlight's beam would wag along the pebbly drive as Ryan emerged from the darkened research building. He would find the wrenched metal door, shreds of clothing, split-open boots, and inhumanly large footprints marking the long stride of a giant runner. And he would know with a cold shudder and a dizzy brain that every mad detail of what Brick had told him was true.

  For the moment, though, Dogbrick fled into the dark forest with no one aware that he ran free upon the face of Earth. He sprinted with indefatigable vigor. The charge of electricity pouring into his body had underscored what Mary Felix had told him about Duppy Hob's labors over six thousand years to create the civilization of this planet as an array of amulets. And now he knew that all the highways, all the power lines and cables, all the jewel-like cities existed to gather Charm for him.

  He moved south through the woods, and as he ran, effortlessly, in a blur of liquid speed akin to the wind itself, he contemplated his dream. Failure is heroic, he understood from the sibyl's message. It mattered not whether he existed as man or beast, only that he was mortal. That thought made him speed faster through the starlit corridors of the forest. Branches rattled and leaves spun in his wake.

  He remembered almost nothing of his past. Yet he knew the great truths that would guide him to his fate. Darkness hid meaning. Light revealed. Fire burned. Hope dwindled.

  These truths stirred deeper feelings not yet memories—and he had the sensation that thinking hard was what he had done often in his former life, thinking hard for everyone, trying to grasp the meaning of meaning.

  And it became clear, as he hurtled toward Octoberland and the sinister angels who had stolen Mary Felix from him, that at the end of this jour
ney there would be a new meaning to his life—but for good or evil, he could not tell.

  Cold Stars Watch Us

  Octoberland began to appear less foreboding to Mary Felix during her taxicab ride through Manhattan, so completely did she now feel under its sway. Even though the coven members had plucked her out of the airport and whisked her into the city with the alacrity of an abduction, they themselves bore no aspect of evil.

  Even their zodiacal names, which she supposed should have troubled her with their anonymity, lent them a playful air and made her want to guess at their true names and identities. Silver-haired Aries in his clerical attire had the genial features and watery eyes of a pastor with allergies, and she felt comfortable enough with him to ask if his name was Walter, the same as a softhearted uncle of hers.

  "No, my dear. Theodore." He squeezed her hand warmly.

  "But you must call me Aries. And you are Virgo. We have roles to play, you see. We have our places in the timeless circle."

  The cab pulled over to the curb, and a stocky woman with a Peruvian face got in on Mary's side, wedging her against the minister. "And this is Scorpio," Taurus introduced and slid the cab back into the flow of traffic.

  "Hello, Virgo." Scorpio handed her a garment box. Inside, Mary found a white ceremonial gown identical to what the flaxen-haired ghost had worn.

  "Now, you are Virgo," Aries told her. "And when we arrive at Octoberland, you will meet Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, all the others. They are preparing the ritual that will admit you to our circle."

  Mary knew she should be afraid, yet the smell of leaf drift from the flowers assured her that she had found her way to where she was going.

  Scorpio lifted the white robe out of its box and held it up to display ecru embroidery of harvest sheafs and vintage grapes. Her Incan face peered around it with a smile. "When you wear this, you will not be Mary Felix any longer. You will be one of us."

  "What happened to the last Virgo?" asked Mary, curious more than fearful.