Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3)

by A. A. Attanasio

  "What happens to any of us?" Aries rejoined. "We are all mortal beings. Only the Master will live forever."

  "He wants Dogbrick," Mary asserted. “That's why I'm here, to lure Dogbrick to Nox."

  "The beastman has magic." Scorpio nodded and folded the white robe in her dark hands. "Will he help us, the way he helped you? Will he make the Master young again?"

  "How do you know he helped me?" Mary cast a watchful look around the cab and out the windows at the coven members in the Mercedes on one side, a taxi on the other, and the motorcycle officer behind. "What do you know about me?"

  Taurus tossed a bemused grin over her shoulder. "In the circle, we know everything we want to know."

  “The Master is a sky magician," Scorpio said in a tone soft with awe. "He learned from the first sky magicians, the ones who built Stonehenge and the other ritual rock circles of the North. He knows how to collect cold fire from the sky."

  "That's why we bear zodiacal names," Aries added, as if by explanation. "We are like a magnifying lens that focuses very tightly the energies of the sky—the power we see in lightning and among the auroras. The potential difference between the ionosphere and the Earth is enormous."

  "Oh, don't badger her with your scientific prattle, Aries." Taurus glared at him in the rearview mirror. "Listen, sweetie, the beastman comes from a world higher than the sky. His magic is many times stronger than anything we have ever known. The Master wants to use it for the good of us all."

  "You're lucky you're the one who found Dogbrick." Scorpio gleefully nudged Mary with her elbow. "Look how young you are now!"

  "There's something you should know." Mary pitched her voice to carry apprehension. "There are goblins. I think they come from a world even higher than Dogbrick's. Do you understand what I'm saying? Their magic is stronger than anyone's—and they are evil."

  "Evil!" Aries launched a laugh that caromed through the interior of the cab. "Good, very good! The Master will love that. Evil!"

  Bewilderment squeezed Mary's young face. "How can you laugh? These goblins will devour you—and our whole world!"

  Taurus's eyes appeared merry in the mirror, and Scorpio held a hand to her mouth to keep from laughing outright. Aries patted Mary's knee consolingly. "Weren't you listening to what I said earlier? The very God of the Bible creates good and evil. Don't you see, young lady? Everything born must die. We are already devoured."

  "That is why we call our coven Octoberland." Scorpio nodded knowingly. "As Virgo you must understand this, for autumn is your season, the time of harvest."

  "We are as grass under the scythe," Taurus spoke.

  "Our strength—our power as a coven—is that we know this," Aries went on. "And we use it. We use our mortality to dare what others fear. We know we are doomed. We are all doomed. Every amoeba and every sequoia. All doomed. Cold stars watch us come into this world and leave it. But we know we are doomed, and so we dare to use good and evil to fulfill ourselves before God."

  "If you saw these goblins..."

  "Oh, Mary," Scorpio said in a hush of intimacy. "We have seen our own deaths. No goblins can frighten us."

  The cab pulled to a stop before a massive apartment tower, whose mustard-yellow bricks climbed higher into the sky than any of the nearby buildings on the avenue. Mary briefly entertained the hope of escaping this mad troupe of death worshippers for whom evil offered as much fortune as good. When she exited the cab, the coveners from the second cab and the Mercedes, as well as the motorcycle officer, formed a cordon and steered her into the building.

  On the ride up the elevator, the group crowded around her, and Scorpio began to undress Mary. "You must put on the ceremonial robe for your induction." Mary pushed her hands away, and the stern expressions of the others informed her there would be no reprieve from this command. She compromised by leaving on her clothes and slipping the ceremonial robe over them.

  No one said anything. In the reverential quiet, Mary heard her heart pacing, and she began to feel foolish again for having abandoned Brick in the Canadian woods. The certainty of convincing these people of the danger of their ambitions had evaporated during the cab ride and left her feeling small and vulnerable. Their magic thrived more powerfully than she had anticipated, leaving her with no hope of fighting them or protecting Dogbrick.

  August heat visibly crinkled the air above the roof’s tar paper. As if in procession, coven members escorted Mary to a large wooden water tank on an iron scaffolding. Varnished steps led to a door with a ram's-head knocker that Aries pounded three times. The curved door swung outward, releasing a chill breeze scented with autumn soaked in twilight.

  Mary entered trepidatiously, as slow as though lugging a sack of stones. Coming from the sun-bright summer day, her eyes perceived little but shadows, though she sensed she had entered another reality: She inhaled briar smoke.

  The murmurous chant of the others displaced the already receding traffic noise. And where sunlight from the open door wedged, she noticed a floor of polished planks painted with a crimson circle incised by a pentagram. Then, the door shut, and gloom hardened.

  The coven members took their zodiacal stations on the circle, and passengers from the Mercedes—the blond-maned Leo and honey-haired Libra—each took one of Mary's elbows and guided her to her place on the circle between them. Her eyes had adjusted sufficiently to discern all the details of the shagbark-walled room—hanging bines of herbs, totems of apple faces, and the big black block of an altar, fat black candles, and the four tools of the magician: galled stave, hammered plate of black silver, dented urn, and a knife, with its silvered edge and sharp smile.

  White Cold Blood

  Starlight broke Dogbrick’s heart. It reminded him of the great barrier between himself and Irth, the world of his origin. Mary Felix had called that barrier the Gulf. And she had said it loomed billions of light-years deep and held in its abyss all the galaxies of the universe. She had told him so much, he ached to think he had let her escape. Where would she run with all his knowledge in her head?

  As he hurtled through the night forest, he remembered what she had told him about the Abiding Star—the source of Creation, from which the entire cosmos had emerged at the beginning of time. All the stars scattered in the void had begun there. And this planet of the Dark Shore had been there, too, just as he had been. The fires of the Beginning had cooled to atoms. Now all matter displayed light in its last disguise.

  Dogbrick felt glad when the sun rose. In the dark, endless thoughts had absorbed him. With colors fitting themselves back into the world, he had other things to occupy his attention. He observed the delicious flow of things carried away by motion. The blur of trees flew past in undulating waves. Sunlight sparkled like ocean spray on leaves as he rushed headlong out of the woods onto the smooth, black arm of the dream that was a highway.

  Fatigue did not touch him, yet he feared being seen and hunted. When a trailer truck appeared ahead, traveling in the direction he ran, he sprinted to it and leaped upon the metal step at its back. Then he crawled beneath the undercarriage. The road streamed below, inches from his suspended body.

  When the truck rolled into a town, he slid away between the big wheels. Men in billed hats and flannel shirts gawked and pointed, and he threw sleep at them. They collapsed next to their rigs. And he bounded away unseen over the sun-baked tarmac. As an amber shadow, he streaked past the diesel tanks of a truck stop.

  He ran across wild country, bursting through bramble and leaving a trail of shredded leaves and burst branches. Dogs howled to hear him coming, then whimpered, wondering where he had gone. Cows felt their rose-pink nostrils tighten at the scent of his passage, then relaxed back to their grazing. He paced the sun, the yellow barge drifting on the ocean of the sky.

  Contoured fields of farmlands and static villages floated past in the distance. He leaped hedges, and his magic lifted him off the ground. The earth quilted below, patchwork fields embroidered with roads, rail tracks, and the brown seam of a river.
He did not fly. He walked into the sky as into a big blue kitchen. Clouds fogged around him, and he stepped above them. Along the hazy horizon, he watched jetliners crawling.

  The power he experienced striding above the planet tempted him to turn his magic upon himself and pull forth more memories of Irth and the city called Saxar where Mary said he once had dwelled. Yet he sensed in an irrational part of himself the danger of that, and he put aside his urgency to find himself so that he would not lose the strength to find Mary.

  The ease with which he strode over cirrus marblings assured him that once he found her again, he would have the strength to draw his own memories from her head and place them firmly back inside his own.

  He walked along the river of day, searching the terrain for New York City. Frustration tangled with anxiety as he struggled to identify the numerous splotches of concrete that flourished like mosaic viruses on the green earth. And he just knew that if he had been trained as a wizard he could more aptly direct his power.

  Ice clouds glinted in the stratosphere like cold gods, like the dead dreaming of the living. He swiped at them with his magic, hurling at them his memory of Mary Felix, and they flurried their tiny, glittering rainbows to semblances of her.

  "Go to her!" he commanded, and they rained away in sheets of hail. "Go to Mary Felix!"

  Holding firmly in his mind the memory of his friend, he stepped down the sky on steps of hail and rain. Lightning forked. Thunder spilled around him. The way down seemed longer than he had realized, and the sun bled into the horizon leaving behind sponges of pink and green light.

  He kept thinking of Mary Felix and all she had told him about himself and the Bright Worlds.

  All matter is light, he pondered as he stepped through the feverish clouds and descended toward a glittery city on a narrow island. He knew this must be Manhattan. His memory of Mary Felix twanged more tautly in him as he approached the massive twin towers at the southern end of the island.

  In waters shining with twilight, he eyed a giant green statue of a robed woman holding a torch high over her spike-crowned head. Boats floated around her like sparks in the gathering dark.

  "All matter is light," he said aloud, intrigued by what Mary had told him of the origins of the Dark Shore. "Light lost in matter." He descended boldly into the City of Lost Light, following the tight thread of energy that he sensed connected him to the woman who held his memories.

  He stepped over rooftops cluttered with ducts, pipes, and water tanks and came down before a large, cone-roofed edifice with a ram's-head knocker holding the last ray of the fallen day. Mary awaited inside. Through static of traffic noise, he heard her singing a dark song accompanied by the voices of the sinister angels.

  "Mary!" he called in his booming voice. "Mary Felix!"

  The curved door opened outward, and Nox emerged. Gauntly shrunken to the bone, he wore the cowl of his black ceremonial robe drawn back from a long, blackened skull. "Welcome to Octoberland, Dogbrickl" He waved a tall, knobby stave in greeting. "Come in and join the circle."

  Dogbrick threw sleep at him, and Nox caught it with his fungus-frilled stave and threw it back at him. Like a balmy wind, weariness doused the beastmarked man, and his legs sagged under him. Abruptly, he found himself lying on his back upon the tar paper roof, staring up at stars that glinted like tears.

  Nox loomed over him and thumped him once with the blunt end of his stave between the eyes, hard. The blow sprayed bright dust across Dogbrick's brain, and his limbs stiffened numbly. "Ah, you have journeyed a long distance to be here," the skull face said. "Rest now. Your journey is done."

  Dogbrick struggled to move, and a shudder passed through him and twisted his joints with aching pain.

  "Lie still, Dogbrick." The adder eyes narrowed, and Nox showed his tiny teeth in a grimace. "I want to do this cleanly." A black knife appeared in his spidery hand. "This will hurt, I'm afraid—but hurt less if you stay still."

  The point of the blade pierced Dogbrick in the pit of his throat where his collarbones joined and cut to the breastbone. Incising vigorously, Nox sliced from throat to groin, and a muffled cry leaked from Dogbrick's paralyzed throat. In moments, Nox had flayed the skin, and the fur peeled away from the torso with a wet sound.

  The dark singing from Octoberland continued, floating above the seething sounds of traffic. The black knife worked busily, and Nox's seed-corn teeth gleamed and gleamed.

  The Underlife

  Life shapes itself on the anvil of dreams—and the hammer is death.

  —Gibbet Scrolls: 21

  As Does the Troll

  N’drato tracked Reece through the Cloths of Heaven to the edge of the inky water. Under the twin columns, each crowned by a winged sphinx, he stared out at the mirroring swamp, set eyes on the braided vapors of star fumes reflected in the depths, and found no foothold in his brain from which to pull hope out of his heart. His quarry had escaped.

  The assassin turned and looked at the Cloths of Heaven, cruel in its ruin. Skeletons of creatures drained of their lives by the blood-mad wraiths hung among looping vines and niches of eroded stone, glowing softly in the dark. He contemplated returning to the temple depths and locating the charmway back to New Arwar. Could he find his way with the charmways on fire?

  From his black leather harness, he removed an aviso and sent a coded warning to the Brood of Assassins, alerting them to the charmfire spreading through Irth. Their response came immediately: Complete your mission.

  With a sigh, N'drato sat on the cracked stone stairs and drew the knife he had used to hack apart Ripcat. He removed wiry blue hairs that, gummed with blood, had caught on the edge, and he inserted them in a seeker amulet. The thin cold sensation within the crystal lens of the amulet pointed across the inverted sky of black water.

  Before he began gathering the logs and vines to fashion a raft, he opened his aviso again and sent a coded signal to his sister: Must talk.

  No reply came. This alarmed him. All their professional lives they had kept this channel open, even when working on rival assignments. N'drato considered Nette a disciple, and she had always been attentive to his instructions. His guidance had been key to her swift advancement in their brood. That she did not reply meant only one thing.

  No knowledge avails against the final end, he quoted The Talismanic Odes to soothe the pang of heartache.

  The remorseless training that had shaped him asserted itself, and he compacted the mourning anguish that swirled in him and put aside that packet of pain, to be picked up at a more appropriate time. For the moment, he had to complete his mission, and to that end he began foraging in the maze of the night jungle for rafting material.

  Dawn smoke lit the sky, and the planets glittered in ether levels of the evaporating night when his aviso touched him with the silent hum of an incoming call. "Nette! Why didn't you reply sooner?"

  Her voice came to him with greater stillness than he had ever heard in her before, a soft voice as if wise from sleep. "Priority silence. Even now, I cannot talk long."

  "You didn't return the priority silence code," he accused, using an edge to his voice to cut through her thick tranquillity. "What happened?"

  "I cannot tell you now."

  "Have you informed the brood?" he asked and stepped onto the mosswood float he had created. "Do they know what you're doing?"

  "I am completing my mission—protecting the margravine."

  "You sound—different." He sat on the float and examined the directional cipher lights that formed pinprick patterns along the inner shell casing of the aviso. "You're calling from New Arwar—from the manor. What are you doing in there? Has Poch taken his sister back?"

  "I can't talk now. I see you are in the Cloths of Heaven. Have you tracked down Ripcat?"

  "Yes. I made my report. The brood will fill you in. When you call, ask about the charmways. You'll see what I mean. And be careful in that fallen city. My patron has resources."

  "'No death in honor.'"

  With that
grim quote, she broke their aviso link. For a long moment, N'drato sat still, pondering why she had chosen to end their conversation with the maxim of their brood—an adage usually reserved for those who lost their lives on assignment. The serene, almost rapturous, tone of her voice belied the possibility that she intended to sacrifice herself. Yet, she occupied the manor of her enemy. No code phrases had been used to indicate jeopardy or subterfuge; so, he concluded that she knew her purpose.

  Only later, as he skimmed over the slick water, catching the wind in a frond sail he had stretched over the antlers of a branched bough, did he suspect otherwise. He called in to the brood, ostensibly to report massive troll movements among the Reef Isles, but he wanted information about Nette. He learned then, she had not reported to them since declaring her intent to enter the manor and retrieve the margravine.

  Shaded by a leaf canopy, with the sail's guy ropes in his hands, N'drato wished he had not asked the brood for direction but had simply gone back through the charmway to New Arwar. Now he would have to complete his mission before he could find out what had really happened to his sister.

  Movements on the island shores distracted him from his concern for Nette, and he again trained ocular lenses into the green tumult ashore. Among stilts of swamp groves and on the broad boughs of mammoth trees that stood up to their knees in algal water, he spotted more trolls.

  They moved in the same direction as he, and at first he thought they stalked him. Only as he leaned over to bank his float around the percolating black waters where the swamp angel stood guard did he notice that the trolls not only swarmed across the Reef Isles, they also glided in the water. The metallic sheen of their bodies glinted sharply in the murky depths. If they had been after him, they would have boarded his float long before.

  "You run in my shadow," he said aloud to the fanged faces and bolt eyes skimming beside him. "You are tracking the magus, too, aren't you? I am running him down with a seeker amulet. How are you sensing him? Or are you? If I no longer move as does the troll, will you know how to find him?"