The Shadow Eater (The Dominions of Irth Book 2)

by A. Attanasio

  Out of the advent of night, a throb of thunder shook the gnome and widened to words that reverberated like the very weather: "Come to the bridge-gate!"

  Old Ric's body obeyed before his brain could think. He leaped off the well and onto the tufty sward and began running through the amorphous dark. Only then did he regard the peril ahead. Quickly, he slowed his pace and stood a moment on the night-smothered lawn, pondering the wisdom of returning to the well and the long climb down whence he had come.

  But of course he could not disobey the summons of the Radiant One. The very fate of the universe depended upon him and this being of light. He ushered himself forward, jaw set, face turning darkness like a flame.

  Several paces on, something sloshed in a tarn. The frogs fell silent again. Funny lights ran upon the shelved horizon, and he remembered that his face was no flame but mortal flesh aquiver with fright. He ran harder and soon attained the zigzag road. Its dry gravel snored under his scampering feet.

  Ahead, the brimstone lantern flared brighter from upon the bridge-gate and cast warped shadows with its lonely light. By that small glow, he stared down to either side and glimpsed the wild lands. Above the terraced lawns, boulders hunched, forming a labyrinth of crevices. Leather-winged minions rose up from there on the vesperal wind and flashed past him with their agonized faces. He gasped and mounted the steep road faster.

  At last, the path turned a final bend and placed him before the bridge-gate, with its ponderous lantern of iron fins and spikes. Thick dockweed and dense hollyhocks sprouted before the giant, weighted gate.

  "Old Ric has come," he announced in a wheeze. He bent over and held his knees as he reached for breath.

  At his word, the gate clanged from within, and the immense wormholed planks groaned upon their clawed hinges. Blinding brilliance rayed forth from the narrow crack of the budged gate, and the gnome slapped his hands over his eyes. Through his fingers, he watched the old door swing wide upon star-core radiance.

  "Come forward!" the voice of thunder commanded.

  Through a fog of white blindness, shapes gathered. Gradually, the gnome discerned the narrow bridge beyond the gate. Its substance seemed a phantom of the glare, and he advanced upon it by inches.

  Through wincing eyes, he could make out only the skimpiest visual details, and he moved forward with both hands pressed to his face. Averting his gaze, he glanced downward into rocky chasms where fog floated in rings around craggy peaks.

  He gingerly returned his gaze to the fiery path ahead and crept ever forward. Eventually, he found himself stepping onto a stone ledge and, by swinging his gaze side to side, observed that he stood before a great wall of stone. Its height vanished in the abyssal darkness above.

  "Asofel?" the gnome called tentatively. The brilliance required him to press the heels of his palms into his eye sockets, yet he felt no heat. "I am come as you bid."

  The massive voice spoke. "I am sent into the darkness! I am sent to destroy the shadow thing that trespasses our lady's Bright Worlds!"

  "For the sake of our lady's child," Old Ric said with head bowed.

  "For the sake of the child!"

  The glare dimmed, and when the gnome dared remove his palms and squint through his fingers, he confronted a large human figure shaped of white fire striding away.

  The Radiant One approached the towering pylons of the vast wall. White flames splashed over the stone blocks and swirled up the pillars beside the titanic portal.

  Slowly, the giant gateway opened outward on darkness and the smoke of stars. A vista of stellar fumes and planetary orbs in gibbous and crescent phases loomed into view.

  "Behold the Bright Shore!" the cataclysmic voice announced.

  Old Ric backed away from the widening panorama of nebular vapors and orbs of far-flung worlds.

  "To the brink, gnome!" the stupendous voice commanded.

  "Not I!" Old Ric protested. "I am as you say—a gnome. I dare not place my frail self before the abyss."

  "Our lady requires you to go before me! Find this shadow thing!" Asofel boomed. "Come to the brink!"

  "Nay!" Old Ric backed several paces. "Let me return to the Bright Shore by the ladder of magic that I have always before used to come and go from World's End."

  "Obey! I have opened a more direct route to the worlds below!"

  The big voice shook the very meat on Old Ric's bones, and he scuttled forward with his hands against his ears.

  Asofel stood aside, and as the gnome passed within the Radiant One's shaking blue aura, a now gentler voice, neither large nor vibrant but mortal and close to soothing, spoke, "Fear not, Old Ric. The way is long, and our destination is darkness. But I will never be far from you. Go now and obey our lady."

  The gnome peeked around the barrier of his arm and met a luminous face slant of bone as a lynx's. Its long and devilish eyes, both humorous and wicked at once, peered at him. Its lips, small as petals, smiled, and the complexion of its visage looked like bluish powder tinged pink, a face of ash still cooling from a fallen star. Blond, almost white, hair, long and massy with curls, seemed to float like sunlight swarming on water.

  Asofel pointed into the gulf of star vapors and moons. "Go forth now."

  Old Ric dared not hesitate before such a compelling vision of good conjoined to evil. Resignedly, he dropped his arms, gazed full upon the incandescent depths before him, and stepped forward.

  Instantly, he fell into the void and knew he fell only because, as he turned about in his plunge, he saw above him a great wall lifting rapidly away. Among the huge open pylons, a star burned. That was Asofel. His skin of pale oxides burned within the hearth of stars.

  Darkness hung in webs of light. Planets, in various conjugations of reflection and shadow, breathed smoke in the cold of space. Yet the gnome felt no chill. Looking at himself, he noticed that his body shimmered faintly blue. The Radiant One had sheathed him in magical fire!

  His plunge slowed and arced, and he realized then that he had not been plummeting but launched into space. And now he plummeted back to World's End, to a day-struck region of that realm far from the great wall already steeped in night.

  He had been launched from the heights of World's End, where the lady's magic had created the garden wherein she could meet him, her dream-creature. He was too frail a being to trespass her place of origin higher yet within the Abiding Star itself. Asofel had simply flung him onto the lowest level of World's End so that he might begin his quest of the Bright Worlds from the top down.

  A limb of land appeared. Weathers scrawled feathery whorls above blue waters and ocher and green swatches of soil. He discerned the pocks of volcanic craters and the jagged slash of a rift valley. Below ranged dangerous places: the feral lands of Faerie and Elf, the haunts of the Undead, the stalking grounds of the slitherous squid monkeys, and the dread Forest of Wraiths.

  Fearful to behold where among these terrors he would descend, the gnome lifted his gaze to the heavens.

  The horizon of World's End swelled against outer space, and Old Ric peered at fluorescent streamers of cometary exhaust. He cast a final glance at the far-flung worlds he knew: icy Nemora in her white shrouds—Hellsgate, sulfurous and veined red with living torrents of lava—and Irth, half ocean, half land, spinning at the very edge of the Bright Shore.

  Meet the Elves

  Old Ric struck the atmosphere of World’s End with a sizzling roar that burned the sheath of blue magic from his body in a trail of twisting flames. Mountain lakes flashed with day-struck gasps of light. He soared over a glacial range and swooped toward dense, primeval forest. A scarlet flock of firebirds scattered with horrified shrieks as he disappeared through the forest canopy in a leafy explosion.

  A sundering boom sheared boughs, split tree boles, shredded undergrowth to leaf meal and gouged an immediate crater in the loamy turf. At the bottom of the crater, Old Ric lay stunned, his mouth and nostrils packed with dirt and his startled eyeballs staring at the uplifted roots of a toppled oak. He coughed vi
olently, gasping for breath. In his numb ears, he heard the echo of his impact go from room to room of the forest and return again only slightly diminished.

  O gods and forebears show me clemency! he wailed in his mind, as his lungs choked up gouts of peat and duff.

  By the time he had cleared his air passages, the forest had begun again its timeless fracas, and he clambered out of the steaming crater to the chirrups of birds and the obstreperous howls of monkeys. He brushed futilely at the dirt stains on his browncord breeks and looked about for his cap.

  A boisterous animal laugh craned his aching neck. He spied among the serrate rays of daylight in the shorn canopy a blue-bottomed monkey tossing his velvet cap from paw to tail with delight.

  "Give that here, you beast!" the gnome cried to the frenzied joy of the monkey.

  He swiped a chunk of broken bark and heaved it at the creature. That evoked more frantic laughter. The monkey spurted away through the upper reaches of the forest, leaving Old Ric hatless and stamping with fury.

  When he had calmed enough to assess his situation, the eldern gnome's anger chilled quickly to fright. This was the Forest of Wraiths.

  He had never before trespassed this dreadful region of the Bright Shore; yet, he recognized the place by the lurid descriptions of its crimson pearl mushrooms, a poison celebrated in song and chant. The songs decreed that all who found themselves in this grisly place should swiftly eat the lethal fungi and suffer willingly the subsequent wracking convulsions and vein-bursting death rather than confront the further terrors indigenous to these doomful woods.

  Old Ric reminded himself of Asofel's promise: I will never be far from you. And he trod over the crimson pearl mushrooms, seeking a suitable tree to climb from which to search for the Radiant One.

  A leaning behemoth sycamore offered easy access to the forest awning. Perched upon its sprawling crest, he scanned the verdant horizons for the bright presence of his guardian.

  In that whole wide vista only the sun of the Bright Shore shone—the Abiding Star. World's End, the planet closest to that source of light, enjoyed warmth and magic.

  From his vantage, he could actually see the lachrymal cliffs known as the Labyrinth of the Undead. The cinder cones that lorded over the niter cliffs seeped fumes that ignited under the close proximity of the Abiding Star and flared occasionally into tremendous ruffling auroras of infernal light.

  Within that convoluted cinderland, the dead offered unholy rebate to the living. It was said that magic so charged this high, barren range that shades could assume physical form and resume their mortal lives for so long as they had Charm to sustain them.

  Charm! Old Ric wished mightily that he possessed that most concentrated form of magic. Magic itself existed everywhere. It radiated forth from the Abiding Star. It flourished in blossoms and seeds. It sparked the life force in all living creatures. Yet it remained elusive.

  Only certain stones, known as hex-gems, and rare alloys, called conjure-metals, could retain magic in the compact and potent form known as Charm. Charmwrights fashioned these materials into amulets and talismans, and with them humans eluded sleep, lived for days without food, and witnessed things from afar.

  He had no amulets or talismans. He possessed no Charm but the natural magic of his gnomish flesh and bones. And he felt hungry and tired.

  A thrashing movement in the distance caught his eye, and he twisted about with alarm among the topmost branches. His impact in the forest had alerted a pack of squid monkeys!

  His keen and bulging gray eyes distinctly perceived their tentacles lashing through the forest canopy as they swarmed toward him. Dimly, he heard their boisterous shrieks.

  The gnome swiftly descended from his roost and dashed into a tunnel of the forest that led away from the advancing squid monkeys. Their whooping cries bounded closer, and he moaned to imagine how their powerful tentacles would tear his limbs from his body.

  Fire! he thought. But there was no time to ignite a fire. A hole! he thought again, and dismissed that desperate notion with a gasped moan. Squid monkeys could easily excavate any shallow burrow he might dig.

  He tripped over a root and skidded across the leaf litter with a howl. As he scrambled to his feet, he dared glance back and beheld with horror that the thicket where he had fled shook with the frenzied presence of the pack. Their yells struck him like physical blows.

  Arms whirling wildly, knees pumping, the gnome bolted through the forest corridor. "As-o-fel!" he called, and his heaving breath barely cleared the name from the sound of his huffing fright. "As-o-umph!"

  The bark of a slant tree swung wide and struck him full in the face, knocking the wind from him. He lay sprawled on his back, staring up at a young and warty blue-black face with green, nappy hair and wintertime eyes.

  Two strong hands seized his shirtfront and yanked him upright and into a door in the tree. The bark slammed shut behind, and the rescuing hands spun him about so that he could stare through the knothole in the secret portal.

  With one agog eye, he watched the orange-furred squid monkeys charge past the tree. Their slavering muzzles snarled back from black gums and massive fangs. Tentacles thudded against the tree, and a crimson-fringed sucker slapped briefly over the knothole. Then, they disappeared deeper into the forest.

  "If they'd found us in here," a gruff voice spoke from directly behind his ear, "I'd have fed you to them and escaped. I warn you, I can harm as hard as I heal, so don't even think of fighting me."

  The sturdy hands that had pulled him from the forest floor heaved him about, and the gnome found himself facing that blue-black face of pale, wintry eyes and flesh lumpy with growths. The youthful visage seemed not unkindly but ferine, smudged with moss stains and scored with thorn scratches. Burrs and grass blades hung in the kinked green hair, and livid creases from the nostril wings to the mouth corners looked carved by much laughter. The midnight complexion and pointed ears tipped pink informed Ric that he had been rescued by an elf.

  "I'm Old Ric," the eldern gnome said, employing the common dialect of the Bright Shore that the elf had used. "And were it not for you, I'd be in gory pieces now."

  "You owe me a life then, Old Ric," the elf replied. He retreated a pace, revealing in the hollow tree's slim light his leaf-knit tunic and boots of vine-lashed tree bark.

  A warm odor from leaf-smoke hung in the air cut through with a redolence of loam. "One life promised to me—Broydo, elf-counselor in the Forest of Wraiths. And as you're a gnome, I know I will be paid back. That's why I took the risk, though the others feared me a fool. No counselor is a fool—yet as the Empty Screed recognizes, 'Wisdom is not always wise.'"

  "You know of gnomes?" Ric inquired with evident surprise. "I thought I was the only gnome on World's End."

  "Well you may be," Broydo said. "I've never seen another. Yet as I say, I am a counselor, and my position requires me to collect wisdom. And in collecting wisdom one gathers a great deal of knowledge. I've heard of your kind. You have faces like bats, wear frippery, and dwell upon Nemora, the winter world. It is said that sibyls never lie, and gnomes never break their word. Is this true?"

  "Aye, it is true." The gnome gazed past Broydo's large frame to the crude winding stairway carved into the living hollow of the tree. Latten braces of conjure-metal infused the pith of the tree with Charm, keeping it alive though most of its interior had been carved out. Crowding the stairwell, silhouettes backlit by an orange glow pressed closer.

  "Come with me then, Old Ric," Broydo invited, and led him down the uneven steps.

  The packed silhouettes gave way, and the warm odor of leaf-smoke thickened to a dense aroma of hearth ash.

  The gnome entered a large grotto hung with root tendrils. Numerous gourd lamps perched among crannies in the marly walls lit squat carven figures of telluric entities. A score and twelve elves ranged about the cavern, some sitting on the stairwells, others cross-legged on the tamped ground or fern carpets, many simply standing arrayed about an old ashen woman athwart a
settle carved to the likeness of a winged sphinx.

  The crone’s sea-green locks spilled like kelp over bony shoulders and withered dugs, and her blue-black face seemed gnawed and pocked as worm-riddled wood. Yet she gestured with soft grace, beckoning the gnome near to her.

  "Smiddy Thea," Broydo called to the aged elf, "I bring you the eldern gnome, Old Ric, who owes us a life."

  "Do you come well into our presence, Old Ric?" the crone inquired in a whispery voice.

  "Yes, elf lady," Ric attested, "I am whole and well."

  "Good," she said with a slow smile, and watched him for a moment from under droop-lidded eyes. "You alone then are well among us."

  Ric took the meaning of her words with grave concern and peered about more carefully at the surrounding throng. To his dismay, he discerned that all displayed the same warty nodules as Broydo, and many also had flesh grotesquely pocked with small holes. "What ails you elves?"

  "A demon has cursed our clan," Smiddy Thea confessed wearily. "We did hope to locate the conjure-metals we seek for our livelihood by invoking a demon."

  "Against my better counsel," Broydo interjected sternly.

  "For sure against my grandson Broydo's counsel," the crone acknowledged. "The one who summoned the demon, Tivel, is now worn like a garment by the evil thing. When we strove to drive the demon out, it laid upon us this cankerous curse."

  “Elves are famous through the Bright Shore for their healing talents," the gnome said to the afflicted gathering. "Can you not heal yourselves?"

  "We heal the illnesses of the world, not curses of the ultramundane!" Smiddy Thea whispered hotly. "No. There is only one cure for our clan. One cure alone. And already eighteen of our own have perished to attain that cure."

  Ric glanced about nervously at the bright eager stares in the dark faces surrounding him. "Surely now, you elves are not looking to me for help? I—I am but a gnome. What do I know of demons and curses?"

  "There is nothing to know," Broydo spoke up, clasping a sturdy hand to the gnome's back. "You owe us a life. You said so yourself. And gnomes never break their word."