"What about Brick?"
"He is dead."
"You can't leave him here."
"He has already departed. He is now no more than a few photons expanding through the vacuum of outer space at the speed of light. Forget him." Nox shoved Mary through the door, and she nearly collapsed down the varnished steps. "You are alive and will live so long as you obey me."
Her boots clomped heavily under her as she staggered onto the roof. When she spun about, her pale face glowed in the dark, bent with anger. “I will not obey you. You can kill me now, you monster!"
Nox flung a laugh at her. "You think death is an escape. It is not. It is a diminishment. It collapses the tower of our lives to its mineral blocks and scatters the precious light that dwells within. Is that what you want?"
Mary stared at him with rigid defiance.
"Be patient. I will not deny you." His almond eyes gleamed with passion. "But first I need you, my young one."
"I am not your young one." She reared back from him in disgust. "I'm an illusion."
"Not an illusion, my dear, but Charm. Charm has restored your youth and given you importance in the ritual circle." His white smile gleamed like a blade in the nocturnal light. "You are my Virgo, and with you I will summon another eleven—a new coven to begin a new era in the grotto of Mayland."
"What about Brick?" She pointed to the water tank and the ram's-head knocker shining with city light. "You can't leave him there."
"Why not?" Nox tossed his head back to cool his shoulders from under the weight of his lush hair. "He is the final fruit of Octoberland. Let him rot there, emblem of my past, symbol of all the kings and their empires that have rotted in my time. In this heat, he will putrefy quickly, and soon his bones will decorate that forsaken altar."
"He will be found." Mary stepped away from the youth whose swarthy skin shimmered with sweat. "The police will come. You can't kill a dozen people without someone finding out."
"I can do whatever I please." His smile strengthened. "But I take your point. Pride goes before the fall. Know then, I will take precautions. The brass knocker shall be removed. The door sealed permanently. I own this building, and I will never return here after tonight. A simple spell will keep intruders away. Who would want to break into a water tank anyway?"
As he spoke, he advanced on Mary, and she retreated before him.
"The eleven who died—and the Virgo sacrificed before you—they are already forgotten." He reached for her, and tiny sparks whorled upon the tips of his fingers. "No one knows they were here. Their bodies now are ash. Nothing remains of them in this world. They have simply disappeared from this planet, and all inquiries will lead nowhere. Octoberland is finished. Nothing of it remains."
Mary backed against an air-conditioning shed, and the sparkling fingers of the ritual killer hovered before her, swaying with mesmeric cadence. His luminous hand glowed like a flower at his wrist. Her frightened eyes tightening with the will to fight, she asked, "What do you think you're going to do with me?"
“Think?" He clapped his hands together, and the air between them exploded into ether flames—green and blue swathes of fire that emitted no heat. "You are mine, Mary Felix. And what I'm going to do with you, you do not want to know."
Mary lunged sideways to avoid the cold fire.
Nox kicked one leg forward and tripped her. As she fell, the refulgence blanketed her, and her thick hair fluffed, swept up in a static rush, each individual strand tipped with a pinprick of sharp light. Sleep wafted over her, and fear slimmed away.
"Good," Nox breathed next to her ear. "Now you are ready to hear what must be done."
He stood and motioned with his hands for her body of light to rise with him. A sinister angel stood upon her unconscious body. It resembled her in a wicked way, for it was in fact her life force transfigured by his will.
"You will be my witch wife." He offered his hand, and when the ethereal figure took it, the aqueous fire that composed the phantom brightened. "You will weave compliance into this physical form. You will weave desire. I am young again, and the sap of life rises in me."
The sinister angel licked a toad tongue in the air.
"Good, good!" Nox burst with laughter. "You will fill this female body with desire for me, her master. And I will guide her to the new ritual ground—the subterranean place where spring begins."
Gaseous strands of burning hair radiated from the angular face of the apparition, and she leered.
"That's right, Mary Felix. Your body of light obeys me, and you will obey me in turn. Together, we will go down from this high place to the depths where the sex of all things begins. Together, we will create Mayland."
Emissaries of Unknowing
A large crowd had gathered at the main hall, occupying the four stories of balconies and viewing arcades among giant buttresses and tall, recessed windows. In the higher galleries, beneath the great crossbeams of the vaulted ceiling, a motley gathering of mill workers, lumber agents, building contractors, and laborers of every city guild attended on wooden bleachers with their families.
The upholstered settles of the pilaster boxes held merchants, traders, and investors, who observed the amulet-festooned dais with oculars in one hand and stock reports in the other.
The city's elite sat in cushioned chairs within the colonnaded, open studios that encircled the dais: charmwrights with their glittering vests, master wizards greaved and mailed with conjure-metals, and Dig Dog executives elegant in silk tunics and flrepoints of gems—yet absent from among them, their chief officer, Overy Scarn.
She stood in the plush anteroom outside the main hall, resplendent in pale-blue raiment and spellbinder girdle. Tiny whitethroat blossoms graced her brown curls. With her round cheeks aquiver and eyes slanted with ire, she faced the margrave and his wife. "You will go out there, both of you, and greet the city. The emissaries have completed their report, and you must officially accept it so that we can send them happily on their way."
In a heavy, dark chair, Shai Malia perched glowering. Eyebrows arched above wraparound shades, black-denimed legs crossed, arms folded over an orange halter top, she shook her head. Her blue-painted nails dug into her upper arms. "I'm not going out there—not until I get more smoke."
"And I'm telling you no more smoke until you go out there and satisfy the emissaries and the crowd." Overy Scarn could not believe that her spellbinder girdle proved useless in the face of coca smoke. The drug exerted more power than she had estimated. More powerful than rapture-garnets and ecstasy-topazes! She turned to Poch, who glided about the anteroom on Rollerblades, running his hands along the red velvet walls. "Come here, you."
Her angry face swam closer, reflected in Poch's mirror sunglasses. He offered a lopsided grin around a smoking cigarette and zipped past her. His yellow parachute-silk pants rippled as he careened along the wall, weaving past armorial chairs. "We came down here for a private meeting with the emissaries," he said. "Send them in here and we'll accept their report. I'm not going to perform for the galleries."
"The galleries are your subjects," Overy Scarn reminded him in a sardonic tone. “This is your city, margrave."
Poch brushed cigarette ash from his red pajama top. "This isn't my city, Scarn. It's yours." He spun a lazy circle around his sulking wife. "And those aren't my subjects—they're parasites. Every one of them is here to suck off the city as it eats into the jungle. This isn't a community. It's a cancer."
"You know why those emissaries are here, don't you?" Overy Scarn leaned over the back of an armorial crested chair. “The trolls have stopped attacking the dominions. There's been a lull in the Goblin Wars. And the Peers have had time to look up from their desperate battles and their ravaged cities, and what have they seen?" She slapped at the armorial crest in the upholstery. "New Arwar without a single troll sighting, let alone murderous raids and a gutted populace. Not a single sighting. Why?" She swung an arm toward the bluewood door with its oval one-way window that looked out upon the dais.
"That's why the emissaries are here. That's why they're reading their damage reports from their provinces to the galleries, informing everyone of the terrors they've endured. And when they're done, they're going to ask, why has New Arwar been spared?"
Poch removed a band of theriacal opals and dropped it into his wife's lap. "Here, Shai. Press this to your brow. It will clear the ugly hunger for more coca smoke."
Shai Malia clutched the opals to her forehead and shivered as her addiction drained. "The jungle protects us."
"The jungle offers no protection at all." Overy Scarn stepped heavily toward the seated woman. "It's the goblins in your bedroom that have spared this city."
"What do you know of our bedchamber?" Shai Malia asked irately.
And simultaneously, Poch declared, "There are no goblins in New Arwar."
"Oh, that's right." Overy snatched the cigarette from Poch's lips as he floated past, and she threw it fiercely to the floor. "You don't call them goblins. To you, they're dear ones." She fixed Shai Malia with a wrothful stare. "I believe that the assassin N'drato called them pixies. Is that what you think they are?"
"What are you talking about?" Shai Malia rose, and Overy Scarn shoved her back into her seat.
"You and the margrave are under their spell—as was N'drato, the assassin you hired. As is Nette, Jyoti's weapons master—hanging now in sticky white webs from the rafters of your bedroom."
"You've been in the bedchamber?" Poch asked, his voice hushed.
Overy turned on him, grabbed his arm, yanked him to a chair, and sat him down. "Listen to me, you two fools. The dear ones are goblins. They've poisoned your brains into believing they're adorable little creatures. They're not. They're monsters—and you are in their sway."
"No!" Shai Malia stamped her boots defiantly. "You're trying to deceive us. That's why you drugged us—to keep us away from them."
"What have you done to the dear ones?" Poch leaped up, alarmed. "Have you hurt them?"
Overy gathered him into her arms and pressed him against her ample flesh and its girdle of spellbinder amulets. "No, no! I would not dream of harming your 'dear ones.'"
"Let me go!" Poch squirmed, but in his Rollerblades he could not gain purchase to pull away from the large woman.
"Shush!" She hugged him firmly and breathed hot, moist words into his ears. “The coca smoke was meant for your pleasure, as were all my gifts. I had no notion it would interfere with the goblin's telepathic hold on you. But I have since learned that it does—and I have learned a great deal more about our pixies. A great deal more."
Shai Malia stood and pounded her fists against the broad back of the woman who held her husband. Overy Scarn locked Poch in one arm and with the other swept his wife into her embrace.
"The dear ones and I have come to an understanding." She clasped the couple tightly, her face jammed between theirs. "I will protect them and provide for them, just as you have done in the past. They are safe with me. Your beloved dear ones have nothing to fear in my care. But you must help me."
She released them, and they staggered backward and sagged into their chairs, suddenly graced with warm feelings for the bond agent from Dig Dog Ltd. "Do you really think our dear ones are goblins?" Shai Malia asked, bewildered.
“The emissaries would think so," Overy warned. "They would try to harm the pixies. But with your help, we can save the dear ones from this danger and turn their enemies into emissaries of unknowing."
Weapons from the Dark Shore
The margrave skated fluidly across the dais, into the midst of the emissaries. He raised both arms in greeting to the stunned galleries. Then, he gestured to the ramp that led from the anteroom, motioning for his wife to join him. Shai Malia skipped to her husband's side and waved to the murmuring crowd.
The seven emissaries, in diplomatic scarlet robes and amulet waistbands, rose from their high-backed chairs, and the margrave motioned for them to sit. Each had already delivered a detailed report of devastation and horror.
The chief of the delegation remained standing. Spare as a dragonfly, mostly eyes and gaunt frame, the speaker for the dominions glared at them from under hoary eaves. "What is the significance of this strange garb?" His hollow voice, amplified by the amulets that festooned the dais, echoed through the hall, and the crowd grew silent to hear the reply.
"Our garments illuminate our reply to your impassioned reports." Poch drifted across the dais and back, arms outspread to display his colorful apparel. "This is what is worn by the denizens of the Dark Shore."
Excited mutterings swept through the galleries.
“That's right—New Arwar has opened a route of passage to the Dark Shore!" He spun around to face the emissaries. "Until now, we have kept this route a Peer-class secret, for fear that general knowledge of it would expose our discovery to the goblin threat."
Shai Malia took the lanky chief emissary by his arm and guided him back to his chair. "We made our discovery while serving as docents at Blight Fen. In the Reef Isles of Nhat. It is the reason we returned to New Arwar and asked Jyoti to relinquish her leadership of the city."
"With the financial assistance of Dig Dog Limited," Poch went on, "we exploited our discovery to open a trade channel through the Gulf to the Dark Shore."
"And what has this to do with the Goblin Wars?" the chief emissary asked. "Have you discovered their sanctuary on the Dark Shore?"
"No one knows their sanctuary," Shai Malia declared hurriedly.
Poch nodded to Roidan, who stood in his heraldic crimson-and-gold uniform at the base of the dais. He in turn passed a hand signal to the sentinels posted under the colonnades, and they disappeared into the niches that led to the stairways.
"Though we don't know where the goblins are hidden," the margrave continued, "we know how to fight them. That's why our city has remained unmolested during these cruel days. We have brought back from the Dark Shore surveillance devices, very like our sentry amulets, only cheaper to produce and so capable of being distributed in greater numbers throughout our dominion. With them, we have scanned the surrounding jungles. When trolls approached, we dispatched them."
"But your security forces have remained within the city," the chief emissary noted. "All your firecharm squads are posted to protect the mills. We saw that for ourselves when we arrived."
"Ah, but we don't fight trolls with firecharms," Poch told the galleries in a coy voice. "The trolls absorb Charm, and that is what enables their severed limbs to continue attacking. We have a more efficient way to stop them—and it imparts no Charm at all."
"Only master sword fighters can approach a troll close enough to kill with a blade," one of the emissaries voiced.
From under his red pajama shirt, Poch withdrew a .38 auto pistol. "Not a sword—yet charmless metal, nonetheless. This weapon projects pieces of lead at high velocity. Behold!"
He aimed the pistol at one of the tall, recessed windows and fired. Glass exploded outward with a glittering noise.
The emissaries leaped to their feet with the crowd, and Shai Malia urged them back into their seats.
"A bullet in the head kills the trolls and provides no Charm to animate their vile corpses," Poch said, soothing the throng. He paused until everyone had settled, then added, "With these weapons we have protected our city. But we could not offer them to the other dominions until we were certain of their effectiveness."
Shai Malia stepped forward. "As further demonstration, know that among you are seated five uninvited guests from the Brood of Assassins. They were sent here to infiltrate our manor and eventually work their way close enough to my husband and myself to interrogate us, to learn what has befallen others of their brood who spied on us and would have taken these weapons for their own use."
"This is the fate of those who defy the good of all the dominions." Poch raised his auto pistol in signal, and shots rang out from the galleries.
Screams and shouts burst from the arcades where five bodies seated among the upper balcony onlookers collaps
ed, shot by sentinels armed with 9mm pistols. Under the frocks of the corpses, the guards found and upheld the black strangling cords of assassins.
Overy Scarn, who watched the proceedings through the oval one-way window of the anteroom nodded with approval. "You see, dear ones, New Arwar is under my protection—impenetrable even to the Brood of Assassins."
Nette, her black robe laced with the goblins' white web works, her silver, buzz-cut hair glistening with ichor, appeared at a side door to the anteroom. The pixies had released her to retrieve more hex-gems from Overy Scarn, and she had stood silently in the alcove, watching with cold fascination as the members of her brood collapsed, cut down by gunfire. "How did you identify the assassins in the crowd?"
"Cameras, dear ones, video cameras." Overy turned around, a tight smile on her small lips. "I have been very busy installing surveillance lenses throughout the manor. The Brood of Assassins knows nothing of this equipment, and so they are vulnerable to it. I assure you, the pixies are entirely safe from their murderous minions."
"Do you have the hex-gems that you promised the dear ones?" Nette asked.
"Most certainly." From beneath her spellbinder girdle, Overy Scarn removed a chamois pouch and tossed it with a clinking sound to the assassin. "These are sufficient hex-gems to resume the troll attacks. Do you hear me, pixies?" She reached with her stare into the cold, inset eyes watching her impassively. "We have given the Peers a reasonable answer to their inquiries into why our city is unscathed. That will keep them away for the time being, and thus you shall remain undiscovered in my care. But now you must act quickly. The Peerage must be brought down, or soon enough they will see through our ruse and return with murderous intent. They must be destroyed at once. Not all of Irth, mind you! Don't be monsters. Just kill the Peers and accept someone with sympathy for you to rule the dominions in their place. Someone like myself, who will see to it that you pixies have your own land, free from all of us wicked demons."
Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3) Page 25
