A knock tapped a soft rhythm at the door.
"Ah! Now, Scarn, you shall have the opportunity to witness once more the effectiveness of this spellbinder."
She released the girdle and stood back. "Wait, Overy. Before you put on your precious hexware, tell me—why must I always be the one to confront the margrave and his wife? You are so proud of your spellbinding, why don't you manipulate them?"
"Surprise, Scarn. Surprise. The most powerful weapon in war." She wrapped the girdle about her waist and struggled a moment with her pudgy fingers to hook the conjure-wire clasps. "And do not doubt we are going to win this war with the goblins, Scarn. We must—or everything we have worked so hard to attain is lost. The dominions must be broken, yes, but not obliterated. At the correct moment, we shall use our ample Charm to crush the goblins and claim Irth for ourselves. And we shall rule as queen over all."
She motioned for the door to open, and a burly sentinel in heraldic crimson and gold entered. He dropped to one knee on the parquet, and she bid him rise and enter her waiting embrace. Once enclosed in her arms, the Charm that enraptured him shuddered him to the bones with ecstasy. "Tell me, Roidan, tell me all that you have seen."
The thick-necked Roidan tugged at his blazer, frantic to remove his clothes. Charmflow from the spellbinder so flushed him that he could barely breathe, and he spoke, panting, "Beloved Overy—beloved!" He nuzzled his face in her creased neck, his voice muffled. "The goblins suspect nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all." He lifted his fervid face toward hers. "From the attic above their suite, conjure-fibers capture all sight and sound from below, so subtly that they suspect nothing. Nothing at all!"
She helped him squirm out of his trousers. "You installed the conjure-fibers most expertly, my dear Roidan. Not for nothing are you a charmwright's son. The knowledge was in your secret mind all along and needed only my coaxing to bring it forth. But now tell me, what have you seen since last we embraced?"
Roidan's tufty orange hair tickled her chin as he smothered himself in her breasts. "Jyoti Odawl has fled—freed by her weapons master, Nette—who hangs now in the goblins' web with another assassin—a man that came to rescue her and was captured by—"
"Hush!" Overy's mind reeled. "Why did you not tell me of all this sooner?"
"Sooner?" Roidan lifted a thick face drowsy with rapture. "You told me to forget until your summons. I forgot."
With an annoyed hiss, she shoved his stupefied face back into the comfort of her breasts.
And
And when she had taken the pleasure that she wanted from Roidan and had dismissed him with the command to once more forget their liaison, she removed the spellbinder girdle with trembling fingers.
Much as she craved the carnal joy that the spellbinder allowed her, she had not enjoyed herself this day. Two assassins hung in the goblins' chamber, and that meant that soon the Brood of Assassins would send others to investigate. This unfortunate turn of events obliged her to accelerate her plan.
From her wardrobe, she removed a small satchel of red fabric and exited her suite. She moved quickly along the corridors, her yellow slippers just grazing the polished floor. At the double doors of the margrave's chambers, she nodded once to the sentinel. A share in the timber trade had bought from the sentinels access to every corner of the manor, and she entered without knocking.
Wearing bright parachute silk pants and batik pullovers, Poch and Shai Malia sat on a chamois divan, their sneakers propped on soft leather ottomans. Carnelian bowls on tripods stood at either side, filled with pretzels and potato chips. On the low rattan table before them, a half-eaten pizza and tinsel chocolate wrappers lay scattered between two tourmaline ashtrays filled with cigarette butts.
The margrave wore mirror shades in the nest of his rusty-colored hair, and his wife hid her smoke-burned eyes with wraparound sunglasses. Only the tremulous glow of television light illuminated the heavily draped chamber until the chandelier spilled its crystalline radiance.
Shai Malia stood up, indignant at the abrupt arrival of Overy Scarn. Poch remained seated, his slack gaze fixed upon the nattering TV.
"Sit down, Lady Shai." Overy Scarn motioned for her to be seated and clicked off the TV. "I've not come to challenge you. Your titles are secure, your income from our various enterprises steady. I bring you no troubles whatsoever. Rather, I am here to share with you a new and most wonderful gift from the Dark Shore."
Shai Malia did not sit. "We have enough of your gifts, Scarn. Now we demand your respect."
"Ah, Lady Shai, please, sit down." Overy Scarn shoved an upholstered chair embroidered with griffins to the side of the TV table and sat. "I am a businesswoman. Whatever you get from me, you must earn, not demand."
"You think you own us." Shai Malia blew a stream of smoke from the corner of her mouth and jabbed the butt of her cigarette into an ashtray. "You think you're so powerful. I want you to come with us, upstairs. There is something I want to show you there that will earn your respect."
"I'm not going upstairs," Overy stated with finality and placed the small satchel of red fabric on the rattan table beside the cold pizza.
"Last time you berated my husband, you implied that you knew something of the goblins and why New Arwar has remained unscathed by their attacks." Shai Malia's black, eyeless gaze watched her ominously. "What do you know?"
"All I know is that the goblins have spared this city," she replied, seeing her twin reflections small and meek in the dark curved plastic. “There is something about the jungles of Elvre that intimidate them. And if I inform the Peers of this, they will come to seek the cause, and what autonomy you enjoy will be lost."
Shai Malia exchanged a slow look with her husband.
"Right now, the Peers are too busy defending their own dominions," Overy continued. "But as Dig Dog's chief executive, I will be heard by them if I speak up. So, it is wise that you do not act too imperiously with me. We are lucky to have escaped the notice of the goblins thus far. If the Peers pay our city heed, perhaps then their enemies, the goblins, will, as well."
Shai Malia sat down, signaling a sullen satisfaction with Scarn's answer. "I still think you should come with us upstairs and see what we have there."
"And what would that be?" Overy Scarn asked, innocently fingering her brown curls.
"My wife refers to the assassin we have captured," Poch intervened before Shai Malia could respond. “The weapons master, Nette, has returned and allowed my sister to escape. Jyoti has commandeered an airfoil and fled the city."
"And you scolded me for attempting to kill her when she trespassed the manor!" Overy Scarn wagged a finger at Poch. “I was trying to protect you. She knows that Dig Dog has underwritten your claim to the title. What we did is illegal, and if she brings her claim before the regency you will lose all you now possess."
"And so will you," Shai Malia reminded her. From the side of the divan's cushion, she drew a chrome-plated handgun and pointed it at the trade executive. "I think it's time we take you upstairs."
"And shut me in with Nette?" Overy Scarn hid her fright behind a sneering laugh. "You need me alive and free more so now than ever. The Brood of Assassins will surely want to know what has become of their Nette—and I have the resources to buy off their meddlesome inquiries. Besides, if you shoot me or hide me away, Dig Dog will necessarily review my accounts and the fact of my sponsorship of Poch's title will be revealed. So long as I am accounts executive and bond agent, we can use our wealth to counter even Jyoti's claim to the title."
Poch reached out and took the gun from his wife. "She's right, Shai. Her interests and ours are the same."
Shai Malia reluctantly released the weapon to Poch. "We want your respect, Scarn. We have earned it by hearing you out and letting you live. Do you understand?"
Poch shoved the gun under the cushion of the divan and smiled apologetically at Overy Scarn. "We must respect one another, don't you think?"
"Most certainly." Overy lowered her head deferentially, then
looked up with a mischievous smile on her small lips. "And do not forget that I am your trade representative to the Dark Shore. The Goblin Wars will not last forever. When they are over, we will have all these goods to import to the dominions. We will usher in a new era on Irth. Meanwhile, you can enjoy these benefits for yourselves." She unzipped the red satchel. "Now, look what I have brought for you today from the Dark Shore."
She cleared a space among the crushed cans of cola and laid upon the rattan table a glass pipe, a butane lighter, and several yellow molars, rough-cut pebbles of ivory, or perhaps crumbs of an aged cheese. “This is more rare than tobacco. It is the extract of a mountain plant called coca, specially prepared so that it may be smoked thus."
Into the glass pipe she placed a morsel of the coca extract and heated the bulb of the pipe with the lighter's tongue of flame. The morsel melted to bubbling tar, and she sucked its milky vapors into the pipe stem, sipping enough to demonstrate to the suspicious Shai Malia that this was not a poison. She exhaled it with a satisfied sigh and handed the glass implement to Poch.
After both the margrave and his wife had inhaled the fumes and sat back, swaying and feeling light in the head, Overy Scarn turned on the TV.
"On the Dark Shore, they say that everything goes better with coke. I will leave you two alone to enjoy my gift." She stepped lightly to the door, paused, and turned to say, "Remember, if you find this smoke enjoyable, I will make arrangements for you to have more. I will do that for you."
Shadow with a Shadow
An apple-fall fragrance and ritual incantations seeped on a chill breeze from the open door of the water tank. Inside, amber haloes of two fat, black candles lit the circular room with the peachy glow of a hearth. The roots of a tree hung from the rafters, a forest in itself, dangling minty sprigs, dried flower chains, wreaths of waxy leaves, shriveled fruit with crone faces, garbled vines and creepers withered like tangled wires.
Octoberland.
The name of this autumnal niche in the hot August night on a rooftop in the blaze of Manhattan came to Brick. He understood this—and so much more.
His flesh flayed from him, he glistened raw crimson. The packed meat of his muscles naked, he shone with blood. White ligaments striated the wet and oozy contours of his skinned body. Pain clothed him. Otherwise, he stood naked.
Lifted by the magic of Nox, Brick leaned back on his heels, his thick body torn free of his beastmarks. The gory sheaths of his sinews twitched with hurt, and his lipless mouth twisted around a silent scream even as his staring eyeballs in their gummy sockets gazed wide with terror.
Now, Octoberland would perform the ceremony that would make Nox young. Brick knew this with telepathic certainty endowed him by the evil magician. The twelve had gathered—and among them, Mary Felix! They, too, would contribute their magic, the power of their lives, to transform their Master from a geriatric husk to a youth.
Nox danced around him. Shawled in the furry hide of Dog-brick, he pranced about with lively steps. The tawny mane jumped on his back, the snarled fangs bright against the charred black of his face. Like an African shaman, he crouched under the pelt and paced with the feral rhythms of a beast.
"Come!" he shouted, and pain brightened in Brick's exposed muscles. Leaving bright-red footsteps, the flayed man agonizingly stepped over the tar-paper roof and mounted the varnished wooden steps to Octoberland.
Mary Felix nearly collapsed when she saw him. She waited in the circle with the other eleven of the coven. And when Nox entered wearing Dogbrick's pelt, walking hunched over like some huge canine, and Brick followed, dazzling crimson, shucked of his flesh, bald as a skull, face skinned to the cartilage and integuments that strapped his jaw, she shrieked.
Her cry dwindled above her as if she were falling. But she did not fall. Her shadow held her up. Each of the twelve stood before a shadow with a shadow beneath it. These standing shadows enfolded the dream bodies of the coveners, the sinister angels she had first seen in the north woods. Now she had a sinister angel of her own, and it supported her by the shoulders when Nox and Brick entered.
Nox's magic enwrapped these angels in the life force of each coven member. Mary peeked over her shoulder and confronted her own face demonically elongated, yet faded to shadow, like an old photo or an ancient religious image. She whimpered and looked away, at shaggy Nox and glossy Brick, ichor red and slick as a seal.
Brick spotted Mary and turned away from the horror in her face. He recognized that same mix of disgust and fright in the faces of the others. They had never performed a ceremony like this before. Only the shadows behind them grinned.
He knew those shadows as the same sinister angels he had met in the forest. Then they had been white as packed snow. Here, they appeared sooty, tinted gray, shadowy as clouds freighting rain. Their sleek eyes still shone green as flecks of twilight, and their long faces sneered with the malevolence of bats.
At Mary's cry, the coveners, who had been chanting, fell silent. Their white ceremonial robes fluttered softly in a slim breeze of cold air that flowed from the obsidian altar. The slight wind spilled out of the squalid urn with its tar-gobbed brim.
"Octoberland is the harvest," Nox droned, striding outside the circle.
The coven moaned, "Falling leaves, rising spirits."
"Octoberland is the harvest."
"What is full shall be emptied."
"Octoberland—Octoberland!"
"All that lives must die."
Nox entered the circle beside Mary Felix and tossed off the mantle of beastmarks. The large hide with its floppy arms and legs spun into the air above the altar and burst into flame—green fire—exploded Charm.
The heatless conflagration widened to a radiant ring above the coven and faded, giving its power to the shadows that stood behind the twelve people.
The shadows brightened, glowing white as packed snow. And the people in front of the apparitions fell forward onto their faces, struck down by the force of magic that poured into their ghostly counterparts.
Bathed in this flash of white light, Mary felt herself shoved forward. Colors bleached away. Her young body trembled. The planks beneath her feet looked like mist: the haze of atoms that made up the floor. The glare of the sinister angels had pushed her beyond the limits of her human world. She had fallen into the atomic surf that crashes upon the void and shapes the physical world from its foam.
The other eleven joined her, slowly emptying their energy, as she did, into the sinister angels that stood upon their backs. The angels drained the vitality of their surprised hosts.
She and the others thinned away, becoming emptiness, fading into nothing, eroding like mist. The living shadows that Nox had set upon them harvested their lifeforce. She wanted to cry out and knew the others wanted to cry also. No strength remained. They had already outlived their lives.
Brick stood over Mary Felix, powerless to help her. Pain owned him. And Nox owned the pain.
When the magician waved him into the circle, Brick stepped past Mary and with aching steps approached the pentagonal altar. Within the dented metal urn, a black needle stood. Nox removed the sharp object and began chanting in a language so ancient it fit only his voice among the living.
From between the spiked haloes of the fat, black candles, the poison needle stared at Brick from Nox's hand. On all sides, the sinister angels drew closer, walking upon the fallen bodies of their hosts. And with them came his memories.
Already half a ghost, his life flashed before him, a kaleidoscopic inrush. He remembered Irth. He saw again the steep avenues, stairway lanes, curved rooftops, and smoky factories of the sea-cliff city, Saxar. Recollections of his days as a thief stretched back to his childhood in the sumac warrens of the industrial district. He regarded again how he had lived wild behind the factories, catching his food in the weed lots and slag yards. Sometimes he stole a meal from windowsills or bird feeders of homes on the bluffs where the factory workers lived.
All his life, he had been running the ang
ular alleys and hobbled stairs of dripping stone that plumbed this vertical city. And further back than his life, he remembered his prelife...
The Moon Has a Book
On Nemora, among the Bright Worlds, gnomish magic fused the gametes of animals and mortals; thus, came beastmarks. Somewhere in the past, long before Dogbrick's orphaned childhood, the gnomes of Nemora had joined dog and mortal and made his forebears. His blood remembered that. And from that remembrance in the cryptarch of Brick's flesh, Nox withdrew all of the flayed man's Charm.
Brick convulsed, reduced to a mortal. Such separation of mortal and beast would have been impossible among the hotter reality of the Bright Worlds. But Nox's magic belonged to the Dark Shore, and its cold suasion, accrued over seven millennia, possessed the dexterity to take from this body the animal Charm of beastmarks and leave behind mortal chaff.
Nox wanted the animal Charm, for that he could control. If he had taken Brick's mortal Charm as well, he would have tainted himself with his victim's humanity—and he wanted none of that.
The black needle began to glow with the animal Charm it withdrew from Brick. Around the altar Nox marched majestically, the shining needle upheld. When he came to Virgo, he grinned and showed his discolored seed-corn teeth to the sinister angel atop her.
Then, he turned to Libra, and the glowing needle lashed out with a hot hiss and drew into its brightness the lucent smoke of the sinister angel. Libra's body flopped like a beached carp, and her ceremonial robe sagged flat as her body caked to ash.
Nox stood taller, stronger with the assimilated life force. Next, he approached Scorpio. The needle struck, and the angel vanished, inhaled into the brightening aura about Nox. Scorpio's prone body banged against the planks, then flattened to a cinereous shape of itself.
This time, black dust drizzled from Nox's face and hands, and he left a graphite trail as he walked to where Sagittarius lay. Her angel shape reached for Nox, eager to be absorbed by him and made a part of his magical glory.
Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3) Page 22
