The poison needle struck, the angel smoked into the luminosity around Nox, and as the outstretched body crumbled to cinders, flesh tones scabbed Nox's brow and stubble sprouted from his bald pate. With each of the coven members whose life force he pulled into himself through the magic needle, he grew younger and stronger.
The old, necrotic flesh peeled off, and a youthful body gradually emerged. By the time he sucked into himself Leo's strength and stood again before Virgo, he faced her sinister angel with a proud visage of nutmeg complexion and long jet hair swept back over broad shoulders.
"You will not die," he announced with a smile of perfect white teeth. "For with you, Mary Felix, I will begin Mayland, the coven of my new life's springtime." His almond eyes, brown and clear, gazed serenely into the spectral shadow's wicked countenance. "Go down and bring her up so that Mayland rises with her."
The sinister angel obeyed. Its phantasmal form seeped into Mary's prostrate body, and she shuddered awake. Like a sleepwalker, she rose straight up to her feet, and the angel stepped back from her. Its wings beat the air like thermal wrinkles.
Groggily, Mary blinked alert. The handsome man before her smiled. She knew him to be Nox, not only by the black needle that he held but also the brisk command with which he led her angel away.
The two stepped to the altar, and the wraith looked back at her with her own face, cruelly sharper. The shade took the candle flames in her hands and exploded like dust in brisk sun. Blown pollen glittered to a momentary sphere that enclosed the circle of ash.
Balmy meadowsweet breezes blew away the cinders, leaving eleven body-long robes stained with soot.
"Octoberland is finished," Nox announced in a melodious voice and threw the needle at Brick's bloody body.
At the needle's touch, Brick flapped into blue flames. A tantrum of twisting gases and spurting sparks consumed the space around him. His body lay unmoving on the ground. Untouched by the fire itself, he remained still while his residue of Charm burned away in an incendiary flare.
With his last flash of consciousness, he blazed into a vision. He witnessed his human body fully fleshed, long hair bound in a topknot. From the roof of Octoberland, he leaped! He plummeted feet-first into the abyss, into the glittery city night. Magic ensphered him in luminous force! And Nox, swollen to a giant immense as the beaux art building that upheld Octoberland, staggered backward. Brick’s magical Charm battered the demon-colossus! And for one instant before oblivion, the flayed man knew: Light will prevail!
Darkness clapped and snuffed all light in the windowless coven hall. Blue night stood suddenly in the doorway as Nox exited. And darkness slammed back into place when he shut the door.
Mary breathed in dewy redolence of coolness and freshness thrown off by a running brook. No spark of light shone. The only sound she heard: the whirr of the flue that squatted darkly at the crest of the cone roof.
She edged forward, feeling for the altar. Her hand touched sticky flesh and sparked a sharp cry from Brick.
Mary's touch broke the spell of Nox's trance, and Brick buckled around a howl of agony. He woke to complete pain, every severed inch of his skin shrieking. So vehement were his yells that Mary leaped backward and fell to the ground stunned.
Outside, the young Nox stretched his arms to their joint-popping limit. He embraced the screaming, the birth noise of his new life. The pain would not kill Brick immediately. This man had come from the Bright Worlds, and death did not easily fit him on the Dark Shore.
It would take time for Brick to die. With his eventual death after long suffering, Nox would come into sole possession of his Charm. Enough Charm would swell in him to drive his youthful strength for centuries.
The mad cries dimmed.
Nox relaxed his arms, shook them like a fighter limbering for the next round. He stood in moonlight and the halogen glaze of the city, shaking the meat on his bones, touching himself, flexing his limbs, and leaping. He bayed the curling howl of a wolf.
"The Moon has a book," he sang the poem his mother had chanted to him in Jarmo as a boy in a mud village. "The Moon has a book, and on each page is written the names of dogs."
He laughed across seven thousand years and heard his laugh’s echo coming back to him from the blue haze of the Zagros Mountains.
"Enter my name in that book, Mother!" he shouted in the dialect of his boyhood. "I am the nomad of centuries. I am eternity's dog!"
He dashed in a whipped scurry among vapor pipes and air-conditioning sheds, yipping vigorously. Then he knelt and bayed again at the celestial waters that reflected backward the letters of the law.
The meek inherit the earth—the strong take the heavens!
He stood and began to move in stately gait around the perimeter of the roof. With regal bearing, he regarded the city. To him, it looked like Babel lifting random patterns of light to write big under the heavens.
His walk accelerated to a striding prance, remembering the pages of sand that covered the mangled libraries and city ruins that once ran with the waters of paradise. And he laughed at the corruption of time, the prophets themselves so much dust in the desert.
From inside the water tank, Brick yelped like a nomad berating a camel; then, came whimpering and silence.
Death danced in the darkness of the coven room, leading Brick into the underlife, the caverns of hell, where the temple cities of empires stood as monuments of dung.
And Nox danced on the rooftop, danced, laughed, and danced to an internal music he heard all around him, the stars themselves his most triumphant chorus.
He stopped at the roof's parapet and gazed jubilantly at the smoldering lights of the city. Here shines the cold fire of Gehenna, the heatless radiance at the place of sacrifice. Like auroras that curtain the void over the planet's altar, like the north taiga and tundra where life lies down in obeisance to stone, so here the stone ascends in servitude to mind.
His life had joined the extremes. He had brought the very old to the very new, and now the world succumbed to his command.
Rider of the Dream
Wisdom is not always wise.
—Gibbet Scrolls: 18
The Burden of the Dream
Jyoti and Reece had climbed out of the chalk grotto of the goblins, anxious to confirm that the assassin N'drato had in fact departed.
"I don't see him anymore," Jyoti said, peering by revelations of lightning into a niello eye charm. From her high perch, she viewed the storm-lashed forest as if flying, and not even an assassin could hide from her gaze. "He's not lurking nearby. I think he spoke the truth. We are not his targets anymore."
Reece pressed his back against the crusty wall under the rifted cupola and watched rain run off Jyoti's face. The smudges on her cheeks and brow washed away in gray tracks. He felt his heart pushing at him, aching against his ribs. Only now did he realize that they had been apart too long.
With his attempt to rescue Dogbrick ended in complete failure, their separation seemed so unnecessary. His abduction in Moödrun, the arduous journey south pursued by trolls, ogres, and giant spiders, the escape from incendiary charmfire, and the death of Ripcat in the Cloths of Heaven—none of these had made him feel as vividly alive as looking at her profile painted by lightning.
"I can't find our airfoil." She squinted, better to read the dark landscape. "Drake's blood! I think that son of a troll stole it!" She glared into the tempest. "That's why he gave me the charmway seeker—so we can get out of here."
“Through burning charmways." Reece thought of Dogbrick and questioned what hope remained of retrieving him from the Dark Shore. "We have to hurry."
"The goblins—" Jyoti returned her attention to the squalid cavern. So many of those horrid imps dwelt below, she tried to quickly assess how best to destroy them all. She did not want even one of those abominations to escape.
Reece watched her staring intently into the grotto, and the sight of her served as an amulet to drive off anxiety. Dogbrick could well be stranded on Earth forever, the b
easts of the marsh might soon devour them, or charmfire burn them to ashes, yet none of that seemed as dire now that Jyoti .
"I don't think this can be done quickly." Jyoti noticed Reece staring at her and returned the niello eye charm to its place on her amulet harness. "What are you looking at?"
"You were right all along, Jyo. Let's not separate again—ever." Thunder spoke, and he fell silent.
She put a hand to his stubbled cheek. "I feel the same. If you'd been with me, I would have been stronger—I would have said no to Poch and made him challenge me for my title before the regent if necessary. I'm less without you, Reece."
'Then, we're decided?" he asked and wiped droplets of rain from her eyebrows. "We will stay together?"
"Always."
They embraced, and the air shook around them with the storm's din. Arms about each other's waists, they turned and gazed down into the lightning-wiped grotto. "Are they moving?" Jyoti asked, tilting forward.
Reece pulled her back. "No. It's the storm shadows. The goblins are asleep. I saw that in my vision, in the Cloths of Heaven."
"Tell me about that vision," she asked, craving assurance. 'Talk to me as we go back down there. Tell me everything that happened to you."
Reece let her go so that they could feel their way carefully along the broken spiral ledge that curled toward the floor of the domed structure. But he held to her with his voice, recounting all that had befallen him since he had left her in New Arwar. By the time the salty floor crunched underfoot, he had described the strange sensation of waking alive in the mineral pool after Ripcat's death.
Jyoti listened intently, glad for the sound of his voice. "You've suffered enough. The sooner we're done here the better."
Reece upheld a wristband of lux-diamonds and scanned the large chamber of huddled, tiny figures. "How will we destroy them all?"
"I don't think we should shoot them." Jyoti unholstered two firelocks. "If they wake before we destroy all of them, their telepathy will overwhelm us."
"And that fractured dome up there might come down on us." He swept the light of the lux-diamonds along the knobby walls. "What do we do?"
Jyoti held out the extra harness of amulets she carried. "Here's how. We plant the firelocks at opposite sides of the chamber and place amulets from the harness on the floor in between. Then, we jam the charge pins on the firelocks and climb out of here fast. When the firelocks explode, they'll ignite the amulets, and this whole vault will burst into an inferno."
"Can we get out fast enough?" Reece asked, looking askance at the uneven stone ledges that roughly spiraled the chamber. "I think it's better if we drop a jammed firelock from up there."
"That's good. But we'll have to use more amulets to make sure the initial explosion ignites them." She began unbuckling her harness. 'Take off your vest. We'll use those amulets too."
"But how will we get through the swamp to the charmway without amulets to protect us?"
"Outside I have two charmor vests loaded with amulets. They were too heavy to drag down here, but they'll serve us well in the mere—" Her voice broke off, and she reached a startled hand for Reece. "They're moving—look!"
He saw a ripple of shared movement pass over the wide arena of small, twisted bodies. "It's a telepathic dream," he ventured. "They're dreaming the same thing and moving in unison."
"Maybe it's the storm that's troubling them." Jyoti began removing amulets from her harness and placing them among the small beings. "We better move fast."
Reece imitated her, stepping cautiously among the stirring doll shapes, dropping hex-gems onto the ground. Lightning flapped and briefly washed out the rays of his lux-diamonds, blearing the goblins to heaps of huddled babies.
In a niello eye charm that he tucked between curled bodies, he glimpsed an azure afternoon, a drift of summer-castle clouds risen above persimmon trees and evergreens splashed with bright spangles of mimosa—a parkland of the world above worlds. And there, in the wind-tossed grass, the sleeping goblins, pixies now, childlike creatures in flower necklaces and moss skirts, danced with the splotched cloud light, leaving him standing there, holding the burden of the dream...
"Reece!" Jyoti hissed.
He snapped free of the reverie from the niello eye charm, yet for a lingering moment the resinous scent of evergreen and the perfume of mimosa superseded the rancid stink of the cavern. "Don't look into the amulets," he warned. "You'll see their dreams."
"I've seen their dreams," she answered. "And in them, we are the demons."
Demons
Jyoti bent to place a hex-gem in a narrow gap among a cluster of goblins, and one of the vile creatures sat up. Its half-lidded eyes stared with tightening pupils. Its pudgy, dirt-streaked face sneered angrily.
With the butt of a firelock, she struck the thing's bulging brow and knocked it senseless. A white milk oozed from the bruise on its smashed forehead.
She shook with violent fear, remembering the cheesy stench of the goblins invading her sinuses, souring her brain till she could not think, could not move. "They're waking up!"
Reece straightened, and stabs of light from the lux-diamonds revealed heads smooth as gourds stirring, rising.
Demons!
The word buzzed in the air, and Jyoti and Reece crouched under its impact.
Jyoti snapped the charge pin of a firelock to stun and fired a red bolt at a swollen head rising among the sleepers. The bright Charm slapped the goblin prone again—and a vast tremor passed among the entire horde.
"Don't fire!" Reece called. "The Charm is feeding them."
"Then let them eat this!" Jyoti pulled the charge pin to maximum and fired rapid bursts of blue-white heat into the throng.
Gouts of goblin flesh spurted into the air, spinning flames. A shrill scream as from one mighty being pierced the moment, then stopped abruptly. The harsh echoes faded to the crackle of burnt orange embers rustling in the ash where the bolts had struck among the goblins.
Reece jumped to Jyoti's side and seized her shoulders. "Stop it!"
She lifted the pink-glowing muzzle of the firelock and pushed backward against him, needing to feel his physical nearness to counter her fright. "They're still," she whispered through clenched teeth.
The entire chamber of goblins in their hundreds lay inert. Their sleep piled like hay in the dark—a mounded stillness.
"We have to get out of here," Reece said, wanting Jyoti to move.
She stood still. "Listen!"
Rain sizzled through the cracked dome. Thunder walked about in the distance. And from nearby came scratching and sugary crunching.
"It's from outside," Reece observed. "Something is climbing the wall."
"Not something—many things." She cocked her head and heard them from all sides: gouging, scraping noises encircling the entire chalk house of the goblins. "What is it? What's happening?"
Reece shook his head and followed the flurry of scratching noise up to the dark cope of the mineral ceiling.
In the clefts of the dome, lightning illuminated a swarm of bolt-eyed figures whose metallic skin reflected the flaring storm.
"Trolls!" Reece spun on his heels. “They've surrounded us!"
Jyoti pointed her firelock at their fanged snouts and then lowered her weapon, fearful of shattering the dome and dropping massive chunks of rock upon herself and Reece.
"Our amulets," said Reece, flustered, reaching for the niello eye charm at his shoulder. "Search for a charmway. These goblins got in here somehow."
In the eye charms, enormous plateaus of summer clouds floated upon evergreen crests and mimosa meadows in pixieland.
"The goblins are blocking our eye charms with their dream." Jyoti watched the first of the trolls stepping onto the salt ledges, and she fired several yellow bolts of charmfire.
The trolls shattered against the white rock, leaving stains of black blood. Clawed limbs rained down and flopped among the still goblins. The talons dug into the crusty ground and began crawling toward the couple.<
br />
With a sweep of charmfire, Jyoti incinerated the severed claws.
Demons!
The telepathic shout of the goblins staggered Jyoti and Reece and nearly dropped them to their knees.
As one, the goblins sat up.
Jyoti handed a firelock to Reece. "We have to burn them—as many as we can!"
"Wait." Reece pushed aside her weapon. In the hundreds of glinting eyes, he felt as though he stared again into the amulet of their sleeping and he had become a rider of their dream, gliding out of this haunted chamber to another world, a high heavenly forest of evergreen shrubs and persimmon trees. "There are too many to burn."
Jyoti threw a frightened look at him. "Don't stare into their eyes. They'll trance you."
“Try to communicate with them." Reece knelt down, so that he faced the goblin throng at eye level. Looking into their fat, dirty faces, seeing in their weary-lidded eyes their vision of a dawn forest where mist sleeved the trees, he felt lonely before such beauty.
"It's your amulet harness that is protecting you from their spell," Jyoti warned him. "When they exhaust our Charm, they'll possess us. They'll feed us to the trolls."
Reece would not budge. He had seen past the bloated bodies streaked with filth to paradise and the fabled folk of the earliest creation.
Jyoti aimed at the trolls creeping down the spiral shelves and blasted several more to blood smears on the salt walls. She burned the lopped limbs as they thrashed toward her.
The whining sound of the firelock's discharges shook Reece, yet he kept his mind fixed on the blue-eyed grass and leaf light where the pixies squatted, garbed in chokecherry blossoms. "Do not fear us," he said. "Call off your trolls. Let us talk. Let us reason."
A creeping troll hand reached for Reece's ankle, and Jyoti kicked it away and seared it with a green bolt of charmfire.
"You have come from a world of beauty," Reece went on. "Why do you bring destruction to us?"
Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3) Page 23
