Black, oily smoke churned from the pyre and tangled its darkness with the night. Immense faces leered from lightning-painted clouds, then lapsed again into nothingness. Reece and Jyoti looked back no more, for the night swamp threatened swift annihilation to the charmless.
They thrashed for a blind eternity about the perimeter of the burning salt house with only brief flares of thunderbolts and gusts of green flame for illumination. Boulders hunched like crocodilians, and lianas lashed like vipers. At last, Jyoti grabbed hold of the charmor vests she had left in the underbrush.
When they pulled the sodden garments free, laughter replaced their desperate cries, and they leaned panting with relief against each other.
Thus bolstered by the inherent Charm of the protective vests, they slogged through the Mere of Goblins. The only amulet that Jyoti had spared from her incendiary attack hummed: the seeker that N'drato had pressed into her hand. The directional chill that it emitted guided them under the tuneless whistle of the storm, through a maze of root buttresses and canebrakes.
Not a dozen words passed between them as they slogged on. The charmor vests gave them the strength to shove through waist-deep water and clamber over fallen trees and gravel banks, and the seeker provided guidance. For protection against giant centipedes and firesnakes, only their shared experiences of wandering the wild places of Irth gave hope.
As much as they could, they kept to high ground, creeping along broad boughs, leaping from one root ledge to the next, until the seeker delivered them to a shallow cave beneath a limestone outcropping. The opening yawed above a pool viscid as quicksilver in the storm-lit night and appeared to lead nowhere safe—yet it seemed welcome sanctuary under lightning clouds hunched like beasts and hunted by thunder.
Eating the Wind
Charmways glimmered with green shadows and a parched stench of scorched rock. "They're still burning." Reece stood at a fork in the passages, watching pulsing radiance at the end of both corridors, “I think the fire has spread." He looked back the way they had come, then glanced again at jumping shadows in the branched corridors ahead. "Which way do we go?"
Jyoti arbitrarily chose one of the two bright corridors. The heat beat against them as they advanced, and the sharp air burned their throats. Arms raised to shield their eyes, they turned a bend and found another fork. One blazed hot enough to brand their eyes with retinal blood flowers, and the other bored darkly to an unknown destination. They ducked into cool darkness and walked slowly hand in hand through the lightless passage.
"So long as we're together, I don't care where this leads," Jyoti said and pressed close to him.
Reece squeezed her hand. “The goblins are dead. We did it, Jyo! And we did it together."
"The blind god Chance alone spared us back there when the trolls came for us." Jyoti's voice floated in the darkness.
"I know it's odd but if we had died then, I would have given myself to those foul goblins almost happily," Reece confessed. “I saw them as—well, as beautiful. And we are the monsters."
"They call us demons," Jyoti remembered. “That was the trance they spun over us. What are they doing in New Arwar to Poch?"
An aqueous blue light shimmered ahead. They walked more quickly and soon emerged through a small portal into a spacious sea-view chamber that Reece remembered. "This is Duppy Hob's swimming pool on the underside of Gabagalus!"
They stepped cautiously onto a carpeted deck beside an oval swimming pool cobbled with light. A petite woman in black veils awaited them at the far side of the pool and greeted them heartily. "Margravine, welcome. Magus Reece—our circle is joined." She approached with small, quick steps. "I would have sent my sisters to lead you here when first I saw you in the charmways, but they are in other dominions, every one of them saving what lives they can. I am alone here—in Gabagalus, the nest of the nightmare."
"Lady Von!" Jyoti bowed before the witch queen.
“The charmfires led you to me." She lowered her veils before them, and her moon-round visage shone with sad benevolence. "Most of the passages have been consumed. Charmfire is burning the entire labyrinth of links on the other side of Irth, and soon it will reach here. When I observed that you had no choice but to come to me, I simply waited for you."
She embraced Jyoti, then turned to Reece. "Magus, you fulfilled our mission—you and the margravine found the goblin horde and destroyed it. I have seen it in trance. Your presence broke the blinding spell that had always before hid them from our strong eye. Your body from the Dark Shore has been the focus of our trances since you departed my presence at Mount Szo."
Reece took the witch's news with weighty sadness, for now all hope of rescuing his friend Dogbrick vanished with the charmways. He swallowed, composed himself, and began, "Then, you know of Esre—"
"She died protecting you."
"She shouldn't have had to die at all. You should never have ordered her to abduct me."
The witch regarded him silently, then said, "The strong eye has shown us otherwise, magus." She put her hands on his wrists, and the Charm she shared lifted him like an old dog out of a cold stream. "Deprived of the magic that carried you here from the Dark Shore, have you also lost your percipience of magic?"
"You should have used that magic more effectively," he whispered gruffly, though he surged momentarily with the sunshine that flared inside him at her touch. "You should have given everything."
"Trust that we did." She let his wrists go, and he felt his soul swerve to the dark-facing side of himself. "Without you in the Reef Isles, N'drato would not have followed. Blight Fen would not have culled so many trolls from the marsh to burn when the assassin destroyed it. No one would have been able to get within a league of the goblin horde's sanctuary. It has been there for ages, you know. The opportunity to pierce it required the correct propitiation of the three blind gods—"
"Chance and Death were both satisfied," Reece responded darkly. "And Justice?"
Jyoti pressed against him. "What future we the living build, that will justify or condemn what we have done. Our mission is not yet complete. There are other goblins in New Arwar."
Reece relented with a heavy nod. Fugitive as the last blue hue of day, he accepted his smallness. What kind of savior did he think he was, protesting the witch queen's actions? He had no magic anymore, only an arrogant memory of its fabled strength. Whom had he ever been able to save? Not Lara, the soul who had first led him to the Bright Worlds—nor his mentor, Caval—nor his friend Dogbrick—nor even Ripcat, the last mask of his magic. He nodded heavily. "We must go to New Arwar at once."
"You need Charm." Lady Von motioned for them to follow her around the pool to where its gelid shadows fluttered upon a hatchway. "I have prepared talismanic garments and weapons for both of you. Come."
"Lady Von—" Jyoti strode to her side. "You said that the green fire is destroying all the charmways of Irth. What will happen to our planet?"
"Fear not, margravine." The witch queen took Jyoti's arm solicitously. “This is a controlled burn."
"But why?" Reece asked. "The charmways were the most powerful way to unite the dominions of Irth."
"Far too powerful." Lady Von stopped before the hatchway, and her gaze touched each of them with cold severity. "You have spoken of Justice. These charmways were the work of the devil worshipper Duppy Hob. His evil magic created passages that connect the Dark Shore with the land of his origin, Gabagalus. This is the scaffolding by which he intended to raid heaven. It must not stand."
She led them through the hatchway to a metal platform above a colossal pylon of scaffolds and ramp ways that spanned two knobs of coral-like mountains. An air pier, replete with mooring trestles and berthing stanchions, each end penetrated the pocked crags. Gummy green mucilage stained the perforated rocks and crevices of the tunnels, and a dim echo of their virid glow shone within those dark depths.
“The fire of Justice burns ever closer to these charmways," Lady Von announced somberly. "One last charmway will take y
ou to the Dark Shore, to bring back Dogbrick. The other leads to New Arwar, where the last of the goblins must be destroyed. The glare of the fire blinds the strong eye. From here, the future is uncertain. You must choose which way you will follow."
Time before Time
Caval had lived a long life, more than 45,000 days on Irth, the equivalent of over 120 years on the Dark Shore. He had been preparing for death since his early days in the Brood of Assassins. Later, as a wizard, he had learned all its mysteries, and he knew exactly what would happen to him when the taut string of Charm that remained snapped. Consciousness of himself as Caval the wizard would end, and his Charm would scatter across the mineral floor of this planet.
But death had not yet broken his charmstring, and he spent his time exploring all the possibilities of what remained of his life. Trained as a wizard, he knew well how to focus Charm.
He knew it so well that he had succeeded at focusing the Charm of his own life force even after his physical body had been destroyed on Irth.
In the hold of Octoberland, Caval told his story to Brick, hoping to keep the dead man's soul calm and still. Memories of Dogbrick's flaying and the agony of his demise had traumatized this soul, and Caval feared that the pain would echo too loud for Brick to bear, even with Caval's help.
"Why are you holding me here, wizard?" Brick asked. Here was a vacuous space, empty and colorless as air. "Let me die."
"Be silent!" Caval admonished. "Does not my history intrigue you? It is the story of how you came to be here on the Dark Shore."
"History is done with me. I am dead."
"Nonsense. Your physical body is dead. Your soul yet lives and will endure so long as you remain calm and do not disrupt what little is left of my Charm."
"Why?" Brick cried out in an anguished voice. "Just tell me why you hold me here in this void."
"We are not in a void," Caval declared in a quiet voice. "We are in the sky. We are in the atmosphere of Earth. I had my refinery here once. It is safe from wizards and devil worshippers, and that's why I'm holding you with me. From here, one can see everything. Look, I will show you something you had never imagined. My Charm is stretched thin as a thread. One end is tied to Earth—and the other—" He laughed gently. "The other, dear Brick, connects to the Abiding Star. Behold!"
Brick had no desire to see anything more. He craved only oblivion, surcease to the suffering that resonated in him from his torturous death. He had no training in the internal arts that would have granted him the power to focus his Charm the way the wizard did, and so his awareness moved at Caval's command.
Brick's soul rose up the thin, drawn filament of Caval's Charm and in an instant crossed the Gulf, the Bright Worlds, and the upper air. Within the Abiding Star, he felt as though charmlight wove dream cloths around him, dressing him like an angel. In that bright raiment full of ruffles, windings, and streamers, his enormous grief got lost. He could not find what had pained him.
He looked around. Time's hallucinations danced on all sides, and when he glanced left and right, he glimpsed past and future: A fractured vista of the past revealed him in Saxar as Dogbrick, a beastmarked boy prowling for food among market stalls, sleeping in alley barrels, squatting under a sizzling grill on a pier listening to instructions from his first and only real teacher, Wise Fish.
In the other direction, he found Brick, a brawny, blond-haired man with dark skin once again on the step-notched avenues of Saxar and, at his side, under the curved eaves, in the shadows of the cliff city's winches and pulleys, a young, freckle-faced woman with masses of chestnut hair—Mary Felix.
This vision baffled him, and he turned his attention downward, through levels of light and mystifying sheets of stellar winds. Down to Earth, his attention plummeted. In a moment, he returned to Manhattan. Dawn gleamed thin and watery at the vacant ends of the streets. Above the East River, the gray sky glistened, tainted vaguely red as fish blood.
Conjuring in Hell
“Only a hand lighter than power can raise Mayland,” Nox informed Mary Felix as they exited the building whose summit carried Octoberland. "That is why I need you."
Barefoot and wearing only a breechcloth, the lithe, muscular magician led the frightened woman across a street that shone orange and blue at early dawn. A jogger at one side of the street and two dog walkers at the other stared openly at the nearly naked man with the unhappy woman at his side. Then, the couple disappeared down the steps of a subway entrance.
"Into the earth we go, Mary," Nox sang with joy, a bold grin on his handsome face. "Down in these depths, the generative energies coil. We shall harness them and grow a new coven."
Reluctantly, Mary descended the stone steps, looking about for someone to help her. The platform stood empty. She flung a desperate gesture at the woman in the token booth, but with one glance, Nox turned her attention away.
"Don't resist me, Mary." Nox pressed her against an I-beam column. His Persian eyes kindled a mesmeric sparkle. "There are others who will eagerly take your place." He looked to where twin white beams of an incoming train shone, reflecting slickly off the painted metal pillars of the dirty brick tunnel. "Would you rather be a corpse?"
"You're going to kill me eventually anyway." She pushed herself away from him. "Go ahead. Throw me in front of the train."
"Very good." Nox seized her arm and shoved her off the platform. He leaped after her, agile as a panther, and lifted her by her belt before she landed facedown across the tracks. The din of the arriving train quaked the air, and she only vaguely heard his shout, "We are going deeper!"
With voluptuous strength, he stood her on her feet, took her weight under one arm, and led her down the tracks ahead of the hurtling train, his legs consuming distance in wide, gliding steps. The train's horn blared behind them, and their shadows leaped ahead. At the last instant, Nox pulled her aside, and they stood watching the aluminum sides of the express gleam past inches away.
The stained white tiles of the nook that held them curved smoothly about a narrow opening through which Nox pushed Mary. She entered an alcove of electric cable frames. Rats scurried between her feet. Nox lifted a ponderous stone plug using finger holes and his tremendous strength. "Down you go."
A dry, choking odor of dust and ash rose from the black well, yet Mary did not disobey. She descended into the dark on uneven steps hewn from bedrock. Chimes echoed from far away, the incessant drip of water. When her boots found no more steps, her arms reached out and touched emptiness.
Stiles of blue light rayed down the stairwell. Nox followed, sheathed in acetylene brightness, and she gaped at him. "Don't spread your awe before me." His shining arms motioned at the cavern around them. "Mayland is more worthy of your wonder."
Mary turned and faced a large cave with groined ceiling supported by a proscenium arch of pocked stone. Alchemic figures bleared the eroded span with worn images of metallurgic sigils, winged beasts, and an eyeball circled by a tail-biting serpent.
Nox danced past her, and as he whirled, blue flames spun from his body and ignited tiny flames among the faults and ledges. Soon, the cavern walls glimmered with a thousand votive candles fluttering to the clocked rhythms of treacly water leaks.
"Our temple," he announced. "Once it served Duppy Hob, more than a century ago. Now he is dead and our dream lives! From here, our magic will build a new world."
Beyond the tocking of leakage, subway trains rumbled like a storm wind. Mary hugged herself and trepidatiously gazed about at sparks of cold fire fluttering in their niches.
Nox's shadows standing upon the fiery walls blended as he danced. Waves of flickering phosphoresence ran through the cavern.
With a shout, Nox stopped his dance, and fragrance as from a rain-soaked forest suffused the chamber, supplanting taints of ozone and fust. Laughing, the magician turned to Mary and said, "Think what we will accomplish when our coven is gathered in full!"
Mary entered the cave. Her step crunched gravel. Nasturtiums peeked from crevices in the arch
of carved alchemic symbols. Trellised flowers gleamed in the dark.
"Water!" Nox cried. "What hope of spring without water?"
Again, he danced—and a soft stone echo announced the arrival of water. A rush of honeysuckle air breathed over them. Scrabbling blindly among stones in the dark, a rivulet felt its way to the boot tips of Mary Felix.
"I am conjuring paradise!" Nox exulted and splashed through the rill.
"You're conjuring in hell!" Mary shouted. The smear of spring in the electric air emboldened her, and with all her strength she shrugged off the fear that had stifled her since Brick had died. She lugged a rock from the ground and heaved it at him.
Nox brushed it aside and called after the running woman, "This is your new home! I've decorated it for you!"
Mary reached the hewn stairs before a shadow fell upon her and she froze. Though she instructed her legs to keep running, her body would not move.
Her hair tossed across her startled face like creepers, her tresses tangled to vines of waxy leaves. Staring at her hands, she beheld fingertips like exploded firecrackers, burst into blown flowers. Her wrists stiffened like her legs, taking on the rigidity of bark.
"You can't leave here, Mary." Nox crossed the shimmering creek. "You belong here with all the other emblems of springtime."
In her mind, she knew what was happening to her should be impossible. Nightmare jolts twisted her muscles yet could not budge her rooted feet. Immobilized, she saw only leaves fluttering where her hair had fallen forward over her eyes. And the more she thought, the more syrupy her thoughts became, thickening, slowing to a sap of mute awareness.
Nox approached the small, spellbound tree. Her boughs dangled helix creepers. Her tan bark gleamed smooth as flesh. He smiled and put an ear to her wooden heart.
Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3) Page 27
