The Shadow Eater (The Dominions of Irth Book 2)

by A. Attanasio

  Old Ric quailed and clutched at the muddy front of his shirt. "But how can my small life be of use to you against a demon?"

  "The cure we need to break this curse and survive exists only in the Labyrinth of the Undead," the elf crone rasped. "You must go there and retrieve it."

  "To the Labyrinth of the—no!" Old Ric's knees buckled, and he dropped forward to kneel and beg for release, but Broydo held him upright. "Send me not to the Undead! I am already on a mission of utmost importance for the author of these worlds. I cannot be distracted from my task."

  Broydo shook the gnome so that Ric's teeth clattered. "If not for me, you'd be in pieces now all snug in the gullets of the squid monkeys. How would that have furthered your important mission?"

  "But the Undead!" Old Ric looked desperately from one elf to the next. "The squid monkeys will have me for supper, and the Undead will own me for a long and horrid time ever after."

  "Then it's the squid monkeys, you lying gnome!" Broydo hauled Ric toward the stairwell they had descended. "Your life is a lie!"

  The gnome thrashed free of the elf-counselor's grasp and stood defiant before the congregation. "I swear, I am no liar! I am a gnome!" He lifted his whiskery chin and turned toward the crone with the flared nostrils of his pug nose quivering. "All right, then! I will go to the Labyrinth of the Undead, even as you command." His sunken, whiskery cheeks puffed out with the irate vigor of his speech. "I will find the cure you seek and return it here to you, however inconvenient that may be for me. Then my life-debt to Broydo shall be paid and you—" He swung a knobby finger around the grotto. "All of you, save Broydo, will owe me a life-debt. Is that understood?"

  Smiddy Thea's slow smile returned to her haggard visage. "Understood, gnome. When you bring us the cure we need to live, our entire clan will surely owe you a life-debt, and we shall be yours to command."

  "Indeed you will!" Old Ric righteously asserted, wattles shaking. "I am a gnome and good to his word." He emphasized this with a firm nod. "Now tell me, Smiddy Thea, what is this cure I am to retrieve from the Labyrinth of the Undead?"

  The crone's smile slipped from her chewed face. "The Necklace of Souls."

  Old Ric sat down where he had stood and rested the misery of his head in his hands.

  The Necklace of Souls had been crafted by the dwarves, night-creatures, created in ancient times by the devil worshipper Duppy Hob from maggots in the flesh of a world serpent. The dwarves, monstrous, carnivorous creatures with supernatural stamina, possessed the mania of devils fused to the single-mindedness of maggots.

  Duppy Hob had employed them to make his fiendish demon harnesses and devil cages, so that he could trap fiends and shaitans out of the ethers of the Upper Air to do his bidding on World's End. The Necklace of Souls was one such wraith-fetcher. It snatched ghosts with crystal prisms and bound them to the will of the wearer.

  When the dwarves revolted and cast Duppy Hob into the Gulf and all his hellish instruments after him, the Necklace of Souls alone survived. The overeager dwarves had dropped it accidentally into the volcanic labyrinth. Its presence there enabled departed souls drawn into the radiance of the Abiding Star to return and briefly assume mortal form again.

  The Undead hovered about the Necklace, feeding off the lives of all foolish enough to enter the maze of lava tunnels and cinder cones. And the dwarves themselves, with all their wicked fervor, guarded the Necklace in the labyrinth and often enslaved the wraiths attracted to it for their own dwarvish magic.

  "The Necklace of Souls is all that can trap the demon who possesses Tivel," Smiddy Thea said in her thin voice. "Unless we get it, we shall rot away. Go, old Ric, and fetch our cure from the Labyrinth of the Undead."

  Broydo

  The gnome exhaled a long, hopeless sigh and rose to his feet. Without saying another word, he shuffled out of the grotto and up the winding stairwell to the door of the hollow tree. Outside, numerous staves of daylight crowded the forest, and no squid monkeys were to be seen.

  From numerous eyeholes in the boles of hollowed trees, the clan of elves watched him trudge through the leaf drifts. He traveled in the direction of the baleful cliffs that he had seen on his plunge to World's End, muttering to himself the whole way.

  "Never should I have heeded the voice of thunder," he groused. "What is a gnome to know of World's End? Why me? Had I not completed my labors for the gnomish kith of Nemora? Am I not eldern? Have I not outlived two wives and too sadly three of my own children? All I crave is a warm burrow and my pipe. But I broke my beautiful pipe! Ai-grief! I smashed it to pieces when I first heard that voice of thunder and thought it the blue smoke finally addling my brains. Ai-grief, what a blunder! Why me? Why should the blind god Chance pluck me from my happy seclusion to serve as a thirsty ear to the author of worlds? No one believes me in Nemora or even here at World's End. Why me?"

  He kicked at a cluster of crimson pearl mushrooms, and a puff of pink spore billowed. Quickly he danced away, afraid to breathe the toxic smoke, and collided with a barb-thorn shrub. A sharp yell escaped him as the sharp hedge pierced his breeks and stabbed his haunches.

  Fearfully, he crouched, listening for an answering cry from the prowling swarm of squid monkeys. Blessedly, he detected no surcease in the rattling songs of the forest birds. After a moment, the eldern gnome dared right himself and rub his aching flanks. Morosely, he scanned the enclosing trees, seeking landmarks by which to find his way back to this clan who held his life-debt.

  Nothing distinctive offered itself, and he briefly considered pounding upon one of the hollow trees and requesting further instruction. Then the hopelessness of his quest reasserted itself, and the unlikelihood of his return urged him onward with his muttersome trek, "Why me? Two impossible tasks! Is it not enough that I serve the greater powers? Must I now also accomplish heroic deeds for the sorry likes of elves?"

  The honor of the gnomish kith depended upon him, and he would not be remembered throughout time as the one gnome who broke his word.

  Time! The word rang hollow. If he failed the Lady of the Garden, there would be no more time. She would dissolve her dream-magic, and World's End, Nemora, Irth—all the Bright Worlds—would disappear.

  Sullenly, he continued his hike. The journey, tedious for its many enclosing dangers, required all his stamina. The forest, so dense that frequently he had to climb trees to scout the terrain, exhausted him. At nightfall, he curled about himself in a root cove.

  With only his upturned nose and weary eyes uncovered by leaves, he strove to calculate how long a time remained for him—and for all the worlds—before a full day elapsed in the garden at the heights of World's End. There time meant something other than it did outside the great walls.

  Dreamless sleep found him before he completed his calculations, and he woke to an emerald dawn and the first twitterings from the forest awning.

  "Elves!" he hissed with the vehemence of a curse and brushed dead leaves from his mud-caked clothes. "For the likes of elves I, an eldern gnome, am sleeping on the forest floor and foraging berries!"

  While he poked his bald, freckled head among the underbrush, searching for anything edible, he pondered the nature of elves. Like gnomes and dwarves, they lived underground. Like gnomes but unlike dwarves, they existed as natural creatures and enjoyed the light of the Abiding Star. But unlike gnomes and very like dwarves, they devised clever ways to trap the magic of daylight in hex-gems and conjure-metals, and they employed this Charm to manipulate their realms.

  Gnomes took pride in their charmless lives. They were not averse to utilizing amulets and talismans when they chanced upon them, though they preferred to live without such appurtenances. Gnomes did not need Charm. Their bodies, like animals and plants of the natural world, possessed sufficient magic to sustain them without Charm.

  That could not be said for elves, dwarves, or people. Lacking devices of Charm for ballast, all these creatures would drift away into the Gulf on the nocturnal tide if they dared to sleep. And by this distinct
ion, gnomes considered themselves the most superior of the sapient inhabitants of the Bright Shore.

  "If I'm so superior," the gnome chided himself, "then why am I risking certain doom for an elf? Asofel," he called aloud but not too loudly, for the squid monkeys roamed nearby. "Asofel, why have you abandoned me? You said you would never be far. Yet where are you?"

  No reply came.

  He advanced through the day to another night in a leaf-strewn root cove. And two more days and two more nights passed as he struggled through the forest.

  In the green dawn of the fifth day, the eldern gnome lay exhausted in his latest root bay, entirely bewildered by hunger and the terrors of the night. Sleek flame vipers stalking monkeys had crawled past him in the dark. And their shining paths, like molten trickles of lava, and the terrified screams of their prey had deprived him of all rest.

  "Da?" a small voice piped from the morning mist. "Da—where are you?"

  Old Ric sat up rigidly. He recognized that child's voice by its wet lisp. Amara! His youngest daughter. She had died many, many years ago, when he was young and married to his first wife.

  "Amara?" he called tentatively.

  "Da!" Out of the dawn vapors, a frail form appeared. The sight of her pallid face and slim shoulders draped in braided loops of russet hair yanked him upright.

  The eldern gnome staggered three full paces, arms outstretched, before reason seized him. "Amara!" he cried, as her body dissolved to fumes in his grasp.

  He fell weeping to his knees, and the next instant lifted an angry, blotched face streaked with tears. "May flame consume this damnable Forest of Wraiths!"

  Heavy-hearted, Old Ric twisted upright and continued his ponderous march. Not far on, he found more sugar stalks gnawed only a little by the monkey troops, and he foraged them but had no willingness to eat.

  He had loved Amara as he had loved all his eight children and all the more the three whom he had outlived. They appeared here in this forest, he knew, because his memories created them—memories he had stored away with locks of forgetfulness broken now by days of hunger.

  Avidly, he searched the corridors of trees for food, predators, and wraiths. He found none until midday, when he came upon giant droppings steaming on the river shales—tarry excrement packed with anonymous bones. A bull lizard prowled the purlieus of the forest. Its claw-prints scaled the riverbank and disappeared in the orange leaf drifts.

  Searching for spoor of the large beast so that he could avoid a confrontation, Old Ric noticed a glint like mica in the river bracken. He approached to inspect what glimmered, and a silver spark flurried out of the ferns and spun upon the tail of the wind.

  When it spiraled past him, he observed a faerie, a wee burnished figure with bleared visage and neither raiment nor genitals. And he yelped with glee! The faeries knew the way between the worlds.

  The gnome followed the flitting flight of the faerie up the riverbank. It would likely lead him to a shaft that dropped off World's End and slid through the middle air to another of the Bright Worlds.

  If he could find that, he would have a way to proceed with his quest of the dark thing after he had retrieved the Necklace of Souls for the elves. Otherwise, he would be obliged to seek passage with wayfaring humans on an ether ship. Gnomes, not much welcomed among humans, needed charmful objects to buy passage.

  The faerie led him scrambling up a rill, between boulders splotched with lichen. Pool to pool he mounted the watercourse, sloshing among trickling rivulets, slipping across mossy ledges. Dark scraggly trees fell away to bounding slopes of heather. Ravens soared across the wide high country, and the forest below hung tattered in mists.

  More faeries appeared. They swirled in the chill air like snow motes. Among rocks ferned with ice, he found a sinkhole, where hordes of the tiny beings blustered. He knelt on the rock plates and peered down into the pit.

  Filaments of hot light twisted like slow lightning. Teeming millions of faerie packed the chute, gyring up and down the corridor of worlds.

  As the gossamer beings twirled past his head, their chill music laved his brain. And he heard them singing in minuscule cadences that blurred to one speech: "Go down—-go down to what loves you."

  Da! his youngest daughter's voice called from the luminous depths. Da—where are you?

  "Amara!" he shouted into the hole, and then remembered he called to a wraith of his mournful memory.

  "Not a memory," the cold voices sang. "Time folds backward through this chasm. Go down—go down to what loves you."

  I'm here, Da! Amara called plaintively. Where are you?

  Amara's slim figure drifted into view far below. She stood upon a meadow among shredded fog, her arms upraised. Rags of fiery daylight blew past and illuminated her auburn hair.

  "Are you really there?" the gnome asked, amazed. "You are not a wraith?"

  "Time folds backward through this chasm," the whispering voices promised. "Go down—go down to what loves you."

  Old Ric climbed into the hole and began to descend, and the faeries sang with melodious glee. "You have found your way down to an old time made new. Down—down to what loves you."

  A strong hand grabbed the collar of the gnome's shirt and hauled him up out of the hole. He spun about and brushed noses with Broydo's smudged and warty countenance. "Where do you think you're crawling, foolish gnome?" the elf shouted into his startled face.

  "Release me, elf!" Ric shouted back. "Release me! The faerie have shown me a way back through time. I can save my youngest. I can keep her from death's grasp. Let me go! I'll return, I swear, as soon as I save her."

  "Enough!" Broydo shook the distraught gnome to silence "That's a ghost hole you're crawling into. There's no escape from that. Behold!"

  The elf unslung a string of four dead hares from his back and dropped Old Ric to the ground. Deftly, Broydo unknotted the twine from a hare and dropped the animal into the hole. It fell a short way among a gust of faerie-lights billowing like windblown sparks, and then a pugnacious face of fangs jumped from a root-niche and devoured the hare in two bites.

  "A troll!" Old Ric gasped.

  "Without a doubt,” Broydo said fiercely, “it would have chewed you to a ghost and you'd have met your dead kin in the afterlife."

  "But the faerie—" The gnome stared aghast as the slitherous troll retracted into its hiding place. "The faerie deceived me! Why?"

  "You must remember, faeries thrive on the light of the Abiding Star," Broydo said, taking the gnome's arm and pulling him away from the ghost hole. "That is sufficient to sustain them. But bloodlight—aye, that is sweet wine to them. The trolls offer them bloodlight from every prey they lure to the ghost hole. You would have fed troll and faerie alike had you crawled in there seeking the wraith that lured you."

  "Then, my poor Amara is—" The gnome chewed his lower lip.

  "... but a ghost of your memory." Broydo led Old Ric to the leeside of a scarp overlooking the misty Forest of Wraiths. "All can see now how prudent it was that I followed you or there'd be no hope at all for my clan." He shook his head accusingly.

  The gnome stared up from under his knitted eyebrows. "You did not trust me."

  "I am an elf-counselor," Broydo proclaimed. "I trust no one. Not elf or ogre, not human or even a gnome. All have their foibles. And yours would have made you a tasty tidbit for a troll."

  "Then I, too, am grateful you followed me, Broydo," Old Ric admitted, and turned a hungry eye on the three remaining hares. "Would that you had revealed yourself earlier. I might have eaten better."

  "I had to be certain that gnomes do keep their word," the elf explained. "I've heard of gnomes and their veracity. But hearing and knowing from experience—well, you know." He slapped a callused hand upon the gnome's bony shoulder. "You could have fled. And for a while I thought you might, especially after your windy speech about the superiority of gnomes and the futility of accomplishing heroic deeds for the sorry likes of elves."

  "Forgive my wicked tongue, Broydo," the
gnome spoke contritely. "I grouse to quell my fear and soothe my anguish. I have much respect for elves, for they know the craft of Charm. And would that we had some Charm for this quest."

  "We?" Broydo queried, cocking a skeptical eyebrow. "I have shadowed you to test your merit. And you have not been found wanting, Old Ric. But this is not my quest. Oh no. I would not be foolish enough to enter the Labyrinth of the Undead."

  "Foolish?" the gnome asked with a huff. "Is it less foolish to await your doom passively in the forest hollows?"

  "That is a doom I regret but can bear better than the claws of the demon." Broydo unsheathed a curved flensing knife. "Gather kindling, Old Ric. You deserve a worthy meal before you enter the Labyrinth—a destination that awaits you beyond this scarp."

  The gnome obligingly marched up the long slope of gorse among pulpy clusters of mushrooms. He stood upon the mighty shoulder of the highlands gazing out at black volcanic hills and lava tunnels, ridged, crevassed, and jammed together as the lobes of a brain. No life stirred among those burned-out ranges. Yet beyond them, immense reptilian birds soared on sulfurous thermals exhaled by a pocked row of cinder cones.

  Old Ric came down the slope weary with despair, absently gathering dried twigs of mountain shrubs. He dropped the kindling into the small pit Broydo had carved in the heath and sat down with his back against a stunted spruce.

  "Don't look so grim," Broydo counseled, snapping a spark with flint-and-steel in one hand and catching it in leaf duff held in the other. "If you go into the Labyrinth with that black mood, you're sure to join the wraiths."

  Old Ric hung his bald head between his knees. "Unless you have an amulet to protect me, what chance have I among the Undead?"

  "Very little, it is true," Broydo agreed, fanning the flame in the pit with a thread-worn cap of crushed blue velvet. "Little chance, indeed, for I have no amulets. All the Charm that my clan possesses it uses now to stay alive under the demon's curse."