Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3)

by A. A. Attanasio

  To test his theory, N'drato steered away from the direction of his seeker and found himself running toward a Reef Isle with a palisade of timbers—Blight Fen. The trolls changed direction with him. "You evil things! You are using me to find the magus. How? How do you know I am running him down—except..." Chill braced his ribs. "Except the telepathy of the goblins informs you?"

  The thought that somehow the goblins had penetrated his mind disturbed him, and he decided he would try to break their psychic hold. He beached his float at Blight Fen and ran through the open gate to prismatic tents of theriacal canvas. Brood reports had told him this isle had been abandoned when Poch and Shai Malia departed from it, and he also knew there was much charmware left behind.

  He gathered all he could find—healing opals, amulet-harnesses, hex-gem vests, and stacked them atop the crates of power wands that Poch had forsaken in his haste to flee for the sanctuary of New Arwar. The assassin set a timer-rigged blastcap among the trove and retreated the way he had come.

  At his float, he found trolls emerging from the swamp, shawled in water and kelp. A few short volleys from his firecharm shattered the nearest of them to floating bags of viscera and limbs writhing in the sand.

  He shoved off and sailed around Blight Fen, leading the horde of trolls into the vicinity of the Reef Isle. When the timer exploded the blastcap, all Blight Fen ignited in a storm of charmfire. The shock wave bleached everything to a sky-white scream and sent the float hurtling over the swamp water into a rain of bone and blood.

  False Star

  The fires of the destruction of Blight Fen burned along the ragged horizon of the swamp like a false star. Reece Morgan observed it from leagues away, far to the north, where he had drifted on his raft into the Mere of Goblins.

  He stood up on the gravel bar where his charmpowered vessel had grounded, and he marveled at the brilliant green light that burned beyond the trees. He wondered if the fire that Esre had inadvertently touched off underground had erupted here in the Reef Isles.

  "Is the whole Irth going to explode?" he asked his shadow. "Have I brought doom to the entire planet?"

  The star dimmed away, and he turned morosely toward a raucous vista of gloomy corries and hills. Rotted vegetation saddled dark fens, a concourse of fearsome heath, steaming in brown daylight. Dragon bones littered the landscape. Gulls flurried among the palings of great ribs. Firesnakes skimmed brightly over muddy shoals where mire and dragon's blood mixed.

  The amulet boots he had stepped into at Blight Fen kept away vipers and centipedes, and he marched with the strength of his power wands into this phantasmal scene. The stench of putrefaction did not faze him, for his amulet harness generated a nimbus of clear air around him.

  Protected by hex-gems, he made easy progress through the mere along trails of root ledges and dragon vertebrae like big stepping-stones in the muck. Draperies hung on all sides: gigantic sheets of moss, tangled vines, and dragon skin flayed from wings twisted free of their sockets among the treetops. In this umber darkness, he wandered, searching he knew not for what—yet searching.

  Bees droned in their canopy hives. Dragonflies darted, constantly swerving to adjust their errancy. And waterbirds stood one-legged like pink-and-white lanterns in the dismal forest enclaves.

  As he had risen from death in the mineral pool under the Cloths of Heaven, he had glimpsed a trove of goblins hidden among these necrotic pools. Bounding among root mats and dragon bones, he remembered the blue flower in the palace of skulls. The goblins had gone to some trouble to create that shrine—to what? To the hotter reality they had lost? To the beauty of this world that they wanted wholly for themselves?

  These thoughts pestered Reece through that day and the following night of his wandering. He thought of Dogbrick, amnesiac on the Dark Shore, and Jyoti, left alone to defend her city without his help. He had owed both of them so much and yet, slogging through the swamp, had nothing to offer but his perseverance.

  Through the bioluminescent tiers of the jungle, dawn light filtered like scattered rubies. By that red light, he came upon the salt dome he had seen in Ripcat's death vision—white as the chalk house of Earth's Moon. What he sought awaited there, he knew at once, and he moved quickly through the loops of a dragon's leathery bowels hung where they had snagged as the great beast collapsed into the forest.

  He circled along moss rocks that surrounded the salt dome. Frequently, he stopped and pressed against the crystal surface to peer through its webbing of cracks. He saw nothing. After completing a circuit, he climbed up the rough surface, his boots crunching on glassy nodules. A crevice large enough to squeeze through presented itself, and he entered feet first.

  The air smelled putrid, and even the amulets of his harness could not filter out all of that ghastly stench. Both cool and burning, the atmosphere of the interior enwrapped him in an otherworldly sensation. He emerged on a spiral shelf cut into the crusty rock and squatted above the capacious amphitheater of his vision. Below, basking in lilac morning light, hundreds of goblins lay sleeping. Their small, naked, doll bodies lay scattered haphazardly among knobs of salt and glossy mineral accretions.

  The weirdly chilled and singeing air seemed to bear the burden of their souls. He could feel their dreaming twisting inside him. A fine snow fell through his mind, icing his muscles. He leaned back, pressing his shoulders against the nuggety wall, hoping to keep himself from pitching forward and falling down among them.

  Pink crevices in the dome let down dawn fire and illuminated the greasy bodies of shiny, bulbous heads and warped limbs. They smoldered pink, streaked black with filth, embers softly glowing through soot. The heat of their dreaming lifted his psyche up through the dome roof of his cranium, up past the dome roof of the salt cave, up past the dome roof of the sky, into the glare of the Abiding Star.

  The goblins dreamed of their lost lives as pixies. Under blue mountains, the smell of something wonderful ran with them into jade shadows. They crouched under fronds and lacy ferns, gazing into a cobbled garden that spun with golden leaves. In the garden's marble pool, a young woman with long tresses of auburn hair bathed her swollen belly. Her bright ringlets spread like flames in the ice-green water under temple columns and a sky of mauve dusk.

  Reece tried to pull himself awake. He knew this young woman. The author of worlds... The pixies watched her weave her magic. Her purpose, they knew, generated a Charmful experience of light and dark, good and evil by which to teach her child. But the pixies had another use for her power: They would climb down into her magical dream and live there not as mere pixies but as gods.

  Forcing his eyes open, Reece looked down at the goblins sleeping in their grime. They had succeeded. They had infiltrated this colder world, and with their hotter minds they exterminated the only ones who could deny them their godhood. Not at all evil, they endured as dear ones looking for a world of their own, where they could run free in their naked happy bodies.

  That Joy in Death

  Smutchy with goblin ordure, Jyoti staggered across the manor grounds. Her face lifted to the strong rays of the Abiding Star. Residual telepathy from her time with the goblins filled her head with a mist of noises: the thoughts of everything around her.

  She heard the cypress trees, each with its ten or twelve hearts throbbing in the underground dark, thinking about the rising day, talking with chemical noise to one another on various subjects—the loom shafts of daylight, the acids seeping from the rocks and diffusing with last night's rain, the rumor of sapsucker insects from trees on the other side of the wind.

  She heard the agitation of gnats and flies sacking the land for food and sex, the utterances of the grass under the weight of her feet, the grief of a squirrel who had lost her young to an owl, and the joyful noises of the owl as it ate. For an instant, she experienced that joy in death that had been life's most primal justification from the first, and it appalled her.

  Holding her head in her hands, she wended her way among the trees toward the glider field tha
t Overy Scarn had cleared from the nut groves on the crest adjacent to the manor. When she heard people with her mind, she slipped into the shadows of the trees or ducked into coverts under the shrubs.

  Still panting from her strenuous descent down the ivy wall of the manor, she lay in green darkness. Her head filled with the smell of loam and lichen in the thicket—and a strange vision opened, an inward bond with the goblins themselves. She beheld them in their hundreds possessed by a wild patience thick as sleep. Waiting within an albino cavern of limestone and salt, their tiny bodies spasmed with dreams of the world beyond World's End.

  They remembered their former life as pixies, eternal babies of the forest, children smiled upon by cloud shadows and mineral faces in rock shelves. Their small, powerful bodies dreamed themselves clothed in milkweed and mallow. They recalled sneaking into the lady's garden and hiding under the arbor, beneath an aspiring helix of clematis and hanging roses white and yellow and afreight with golden bees intoxicated by attar.

  Jyoti rubbed her face with dead leaves until the sour resins broke the goblin's spell. At first on hands and knees and then crouched over, she shambled through the bushes, scratching her face and hands and glad for the pain that fit her back into her body.

  As the goblin vision faded, she knew she had to get away from New Arwar before the vile creatures used their enthralling power on her again. Hungry for hex-gems, famished for Charm to extend the reach of their telepathy, they called for help. Her mind raced for escape, yet thinking had grown difficult.

  The mob in her heart sounded louder than she had ever heard before. Her own thoughts, this telepathy of her personal unconscious, spilled voices. A crushing rhapsody of fears, doubts, and rage polluted her, distracting her with their insistence. She needed Charm to silence them. Her breath turned to groans as she limped out of the underbrush and approached a hangar still under construction.

  You are a weakling and a sniveling coward. Look how quickly you submitted to Poch's false claim, how eagerly you surrendered your rightful station and with such craven alacrity.

  No workers occupied the hangar when she arrived. She could hear them and several sentinels in the distance, eating lunch among the stacked lumber and the behemoth, orange grading machines. Their thoughts pattered like rainy drizzle, not nearly as loud as her own psychic voices.

  Because of your lack of leadership, everyone suffers. Nette has given herself to the goblins so that you can crawl away through the bushes. Your weakness in the face of challenge has brought doom to your entire city!

  Jyoti tried to ignore the swarming recriminations and forced herself to act despite her fear. She strode across the concrete flight apron with its wooden braces still holding the wet stone in place and entered the hangar. Past an airfoil, a flying machine with blue canvas wings, brace wires, struts, fins, a bubble canopy, and a Charm-injected engine, she walked. Her telepathy guided her behind crates of unassembled airfoils to where she heard two sentinels conversing.

  There are two of them! You can't take both. They're armed with firelocks, cudgels, and charmor. You don't even have a single power wand and no weapon at all. Stop now—sneak back into the bushes while you can.

  Jyoti did not want to attack her own guards, but she knew she had no choice. They served Poch, who served the goblins—the dear ones to him as they had almost been to her as well, before Nette freed her from their influence. For Nette's sake, for whatever hope of stopping the goblins, she moved to attack.

  Stepping out from behind the crates, she heard alarm in the skullbound brains of the guards, heard their hearts leap, and noted the surprise in their broad faces harden almost instantly to aggressive grimaces.

  The flicker of a moment—where they took in the scurfy woman befouled in goblin grease and then shockingly recognized her as the margravine—permitted her to advance within striking distance. She caught the arm of the nearest guard as he reached for his firelock, twisted his wrist, and sharply slapped his larynx.

  The other guard drew his weapon, and Jyoti used the falling momentum of the first guard to drop toward the ground and scissor-kick upward with her legs. One boot knocked the firelock from the shooter's grip, the second caught him under his sternum.

  The guard who had braced her kick hit his brow on the concrete and lay dazed under her as she unholstered his gun. She rolled to her feet, setting the charge pin to fire stun bolts, but that was not necessary. Both sentinels lay curled around their pain, and she stripped them of their charmor vests and amulet harnesses with no resistance.

  You were lucky. They were caught by surprise—but others must have heard the scuffle...

  The telepathic voices ended abruptly when she slipped into an amulet harness and slung the other over her shoulder with the two heavy charmor vests. As she had feared, the other sentinels had heard the noise of her attack, and they came running across the flight apron with the workers. Not breaking her stride, she fired stun bolts, striking two of the three guards in their legs.

  The third dropped to a firing stance, and she twisted to one side as if to leap away then abruptly spun back and fired, hitting him in the side of his head as he turned to fire where she should have been. The workers turned and fled.

  Jyoti climbed into the flight pod of the waiting airfoil and locked the bubble canopy in place. Engine thunder shook the airframe, and the props whirled to shadowy blears. She rolled the machine onto the apron, careful to avoid the stunned sentinels. As soon as she reached the flight field, she pulled back on the yoke and lifted the airfoil into a vertical ascent, rocketing into the sky.

  Beauty and the Balance

  The Abiding Star shone like white acetylene in the abundant blue of the sky. Jyoti basked in its radiance, her stunned body healing under the influence of the hex-gems within the harness she had strapped on. Soon, the scratches on her hands and face had healed and the vertiginous fear that the telepathy had inspired vanished. She bestowed herself to silence briefly, glad that the accusatory voices in her head had departed.

  Once she regained confidence in her wholeness, she allowed herself to dwell on Nette and the others in jeopardy: Poch, Reece, New Arwar, and all of Irth. She could not go back for Nette. The goblins were too powerful. Nevertheless, she determined that Nette's sacrifice would not be empty.

  She remembered the vision she had suffered under the manor's shrubs. Somewhere among the dominions, hundreds of goblins lay dreaming of their former lives as pixies before the dark father enticed them to invade Irth. They constituted a greater threat by dint of their numbers, and she decided to find and destroy them. With a smear of the gummy web strands that clung to her buckskin trousers and boots, she loaded the lens of a seeker amulet that she found in her harness.

  The directional coolness of the amulet pointed her back toward New Arwar and the goblins that had entrapped her. She pulled the airfoil higher into the sky and swung out farther over the verdant horizons of Elvre. As she banked south, the chill thread of sensation within the amulet pointed away from the city—toward the Mere of Goblins.

  Flying high into lashes of cirrus cloud, Jyoti followed the seeker amulet across rumpled green ranges of jungle and then above the sea's sparkling facets. She arrived over the blotched marshland and pock-hole pools of the Mere of Goblins late in the afternoon.

  Amber slants of light cut banks of storm clouds to ethereal stairways, and treetops glowed like flame-soaked wicks in the waxy dark of the bog forest. Hung among the branches, she spied dragon carcasses fat as burst weed pods. A salt dome shone in the morass, white as a giant's skull.

  She circled it once, then set the airfoil down on a nearby gravel bank. With firelocks she had taken from the sentinels at New Arwar, she would blow up the temple of evil, and she holstered them with the harness straps at her back and shouldered the extra harness to help fuel the charmfire she intended to set ablaze. Then, she deplaned and stood in the purpling light, steeling herself to enter the monstrous enclave.

  On her flyby, she had spotted a sizable
crevice in the dome, and she climbed up the salt face to that rift and squeezed through. She stepped onto a crusty shelf and teetered precariously above a large gorge of glutinous baby shapes.

  The fetid air stung her nostrils until she activated all her power wands. Even then, the ugly stink nauseated her, and she scanned the depth of the chamber with a sneer of disgust.

  By light raying through cracks and holes in the dome, she viewed goblins in their hundreds just as they had appeared in her vision. And among their plumply small and oily bodies a purple glow of human light stood, a man in amulet vest and gem-studded boots—Reece!

  Her heart banged hard at the sight of him. Excited to find him alive, amazed to find him here, she feared to call his name, afraid to wake the dreaming goblins. She caught his attention by waving a headband of lux-diamonds.

  "Jyoti!" Reece shouted, and his voice boomed resonantly in the vaulted chamber. "Come down! Come walk among the dear ones!"

  Jyoti edged along the shelf, working her way slowly along the spiral curve that descended to the cluttered floor of the dome. As she proceeded, the heat of the goblins saturated her with their stink and their dreaming.

  Again, she found herself remembering her vision of these invaders as pixies in their own arboreal world. She witnessed them prancing in goldenrod, dressed in rough-headed blooms, armed with thistle knives, sneaking their way into the garden of the nameless lady...

  No! Jyoti insisted. She had seen this vision. She knew where it led, and she would not go there again.

  Focusing on the prisms of storm haze let down from the cracked dome and littering the slimy bodies, she broke the spell. When she reached the dirt-streaked dolls with their enlarged heads, thunder banged sharply overhead and rain sifted like powder through the cracked dome.