The Shadow Eater (The Dominions of Irth Book 2)

by A. Attanasio

  The gnome watched Broydo heave about and fling his wire-wrapped club at the advancing dwarves. Beyond the elf, Ric watched the horde of archers taking position on the root terraces and dwarvish lancers running through the smoky shadows among the trees.

  "Asofel!" Old Ric shouted strongly.

  Shafts of star fire pierced the forest night as though a gargantuan moon veered overhead. Silence washed away the din of the battle and left sobs and groans palpitating from the alleys of the forest but little other sound.

  A keening cry crooned from Smiddy Thea, and the serpent sword rose skyward in her grasp. A tangle of small, hot voltage lashed from the tip of the white-bone blade, and strokes of this sizzling energy flashed among the branches and struck the archers.

  The Radiant One floated overhead. He grasped the wide scope of peril that threatened the gnome and their mission. He saw Old Ric and Broydo quailing among the root steps of a giant tree, and a squad of lancers and hatchet troopers assailing them. With mortal precision, he stabbed the dwarves with lightning.

  The bursts of charmfire that Asofel shot at the invaders arced from the serpent sword upheld in Smiddy Thea's rigid grip. She focused the power of the Radiant One. Her frail, aged self became distant, and she rose to her toetips strong with dreamstrength. She could see what Asofel perceived.

  Across the forest slopes and down the mountain ranges, the nation of dwarves milled destructively. All the vile maggot-manikins on World's End had gathered in the Forest of Wraiths to reclaim the Necklace of Souls.

  "They can have it!" Smiddy Thea could hear the gnome bawling. And she could feel the Radiant One not listening. His energies flowed rapidly, coursing from him through her and the sword in wider and longer whip strokes of lightning. He reached out through her across the forest, striking at the throngs of dwarves that staggered blindly through the dazzling forest.

  Scores fell and writhed into dying larvae—large, twitching curls of segmented flesh waxy white and spiked with tiny stiff hairs. The effluvial mists of broken magic pooled into fog shoals and ringed the trees.

  But Asofel could not slay the dwarves fast enough. Smiddy Thea felt his power waning. The force pouring through her faltered. She looked upward. Overhead, the lunar glare muted.

  Lightning still uncoiled from the sword but more fitfully. And soon even those jolting spurts stopped.

  Night closed in darkly, and Smiddy Thea's arm went slack. The heavy sword weighed her to the ground, and she stooped and then knelt in the trampled mud. Her last shared thought with the Radiant One revealed more swarming dwarves. They roamed far off on the mountainside, for all the near squads were dead.

  Broydo crossed to where his grandmother sagged and took her weight in his arms. She clasped the serpent sword to her body, and it burned against both of them, cold as ice.

  Old Ric stood and gawked at the dead maggots everywhere. On every root shelf, the thick, white, humid bodies lay inert. At dawn, the rays of the Abiding Star would shrivel their pale remains to crisp husks.

  "Asofel?" the gnome called tentatively to the still night.

  The moans of the wounded and dying answered him.

  "There—" Smiddy Thea flung a limp arm toward a thicket where the ectoplasmic fumes of the dead dwarves shimmered brighter.

  The gnome stepped toward the dense grove of thin trees, where a glaucous light sputtered. Like a piece of green morning, the saplings and spindle trees separated from the darkness, then dimmed again into night shadows. Several elf fighters staggered out of the gloom, eyes glowing with fright.

  "There's a burning man in there!" one of them shouted.

  "He fell out of the sky!" another cried. "He fell burning out of the sky!"

  Broydo's heart banged like a bat in his chest as he hugged Smiddy Thea to him and hurried to follow Old Ric into the thicket.

  "The Radiant One could not slay them all," Smiddy Thea muttered. "The others are coming. They will not stop—until they take back the Necklace of Souls."

  Old Ric shoved through the thin trees, mindless of the flinching pain from the arrow through his chest that the branches wrenched. He heaved himself toward the smoldering luminosity at the interior of the dense undergrowth.

  Abruptly the branches and thin boles of the bunched trees became brittle, then ashen. Under the gnome's swatting arms, a whole wall of vegetation collapsed into a dusty cloud. Within its rolling darkness, a dull red light pulsed like a heart.

  Broydo pressed Smiddy Thea's face to his chest to protect her from the flying cinders and ash. He squinted at the still-glowing center of the thicket and discerned a human form standing upright at the base of a crater aswirl with mists.

  Asofel's countenance of curved eyes, long straight nose, and petal-small mouth shone with brown light. The angelically demonic features appeared pressed into metal still cooling from the forge.

  "Asofel?" Old Ric stepped closer, awed by the mortal dimensions of the celestial entity. "Asofel? Can you hear me?"

  The figure stood naked, throbbing with dark energy, setting rigidly to a statue.

  "He lives—he lives..." Smiddy Thea mumbled and writhed in Broydo's arms until he set her upon her feet. She stepped into the crater and pointed the serpent sword at the lithic figure of Asofel. "He gave everything he had. He killed all he could. He gave everything..."

  At the touch of the sword tip, the statue broke into caked ash. Clots fell away in crumbly spills of smoking dust. Beneath the outer shell of his former aspect, his new body crawled with sparks.

  A shriveled being breathed light within the broken casing of cinders. Then the light went out, and exposed a bald manikin skinny as a salamander. He looked blotchy and still steaming.

  Old Ric caught the shrunken entity as it fell forward from the brace of its cracked shell. In his arms, Asofel had the weight of smoke. Shivering, the Radiant One appeared no larger than a withered old man and barely as substantial.

  "He lives—he lives," the crone chanted, and handed the serpent sword to Broydo. A crisp look returned to her gaze. "Take the gnome and the Radiant One to their destiny, grandson. Serve them as they have served us. Go now and take the Necklace of Souls far from our clan so that the dwarves will kill no more of our folk."

  Broydo accepted the serpent sword, and the instant he took it, Smiddy Thea turned away. Many had died—but all would have died had not the gnome and the Radiant One broken the curse of the demon Tivel. The price was dear, yet it had bought salvation for the clan.

  She did not look back at her saviors, for she did not want to steal one moment from their vital mission. Instead, she waited until she had clambered out of the crater before she offered her blessing under her breath: "Go forth, grandson, and soar above all obstacles, your enemies far below, green with bruises, and you on the great wing."

  Part Two:

  Down the Well of Spiders

  "Love is its own justice."

  —Gibbet Scrolls, Screed 4:3I

  Lara

  Down the Well of Spiders, the cowled witch moved. As a wraith, she did not climb along the root tendrils that matted the walls of the Well, nor did she grasp at the rock walls that gleamed with seepings and mineral glazes. She simply floated down the wide shaft, her cowl blown back by her descent. Her black hair streamed from her ripped face. In the misty blue light that shone from above, her torn flesh gleamed with blood and bone-white swatches of skull.

  As she descended, she glimpsed herself reflected in thick nodules of quartz that the passage of spiders had buffed to mirror clarity. She was not appalled by her gory visage. Yet she remembered with bitterness how once she had looked whole.

  Long ago and far away from the original light of the Abiding Star, deep in the Gulf on a planet in a void of shadowy worlds known as the Dark Shore, she had been a living woman. Her name was Lara.

  From her first days, her life had been strangely cursed. At her birth, her mother, an aboriginal woman outcast from the tribe for bearing the child of a drifter, abandoned her at a station where the
forest ended and the desert began.

  Before the station manager could find her, a wild dog carried her off. She would have been devoured had not a muttersome crone seen the abduction and intervened.

  Another exile of the tribe, festooned in the bones of animals and renowned for her long, rambling chants to the stars, the hag tended the baby. They lived together in her small hut carved from a lightning-struck tree. She fed the girl root milk and mashed tubers until the child grew strong enough to walk. Then old age pulled the crone to the ground, and she would not get up when the child tugged at her.

  The toddler wandered off to find food for the motionless crone. While foraging berries on a lush riverbank, a flash flood swept her small body away. She swirled deeper into the forest—to where a sorcerer from the luminous worlds had taken up residence. He called himself Caval.

  Caval's assistant found her bruised and nearly drowned in a bog. Under the care of the sorcerer and his apprentice, she recovered quickly. They named her Lara, an ancient name for one who is protected—and she was, first by luck and then by the sorcerer’s magic. Eventually she grew to become a beautiful woman with dark aboriginal hair, dusky skin, and night-deep eyes.

  The sorcerer lived in the sky. Caval's magic had built him a blue mansion whose many rooms filled the milky chambers of clouds. There he gathered the rare stuff he had come to the Dark Shore to collect.

  Lara did not understand his work. She barely understood him, the way his words always slipped away downwind. And light seemed to bend oddly around him, tiny prisms ever glinting from the orange whiskers that precisely trimmed his long jaw. Whenever he spoke to her, her attention drifted inevitably to the wee sparks in his bristly red hair.

  Caval's assistant, Reece Morgan, was easier to understand. Like herself, he belonged to the Dark Shore. He came from a city beyond the forest, where he had learned the ways of their world as well as the magic the sorcerer worked. Reece had named her Lara and had reared her and trained her as a witch.

  Kindly, playfully, he had taught her how to work for Caval, how to draw energy out of the solemn trees with her dances. She learned from him to gather the moon's white ink and write upon the night's darkness the talismanic sigils that directed forest energy to the purposes of the sorcerer.

  Lara did not understand those purposes. The energy she drew forth from the trees and spun from moonfire rose into the sky, into Caval's celestial estate. What little remained she played with. She made poppets dance, animals talk, and flowers sing.

  Her mentors delighted in her games, and sometimes they gave her magic simply so they could watch her call down the boiling twilights and transform forest shadows into a radiant garden tumbling with fiery acrobats.

  Caval laughed like wind torn by rocks, and the still center of his eyes burned like stars. She feared him. Though he never hurt her or even so much as scowled at her, she feared the way he came on black wing out of the cloud shadows and so casually walked down the sky.

  Several times, he took her with him to his blue mansion and showed her the glassware he used to purify the energy she sent him from the trees. Every time he carried her there and tried to explain his work, she lost her attention to the fluent clouds below masking emerald horizons of forest and the desert's long, blistered body.

  Lara felt happiest with Reece Morgan. Though a handsome man, he could look fearsome when he wore magic skin of shaggy fur to frighten away nomadic aboriginals that sometimes wandered into their corner of the woods. He had hair the color of fresh cut wood, a soft, pale beard, and hooded eyes, gray as mist.

  With care, he had provided her with everything she needed. He had built her tree-houses throughout the forest and a cabin in the desert with its own well. Out of the city, he brought her fabrics and jewelry, and sometimes he even took her back with him to see the giant towers of glass and endless storefronts displaying fabulous wares.

  As alluring as the city was, the wilderness remained her home. She enjoyed the city only because Reece accompanied her. She loved him and knew contentment wherever he escorted her. He had a blue scent, a smell like the windy sky that had rubbed its fragrance from mountaintops and glacial lakes. The placid odor of him comforted her, and she yearned deeper for him. She wanted to embrace him not just with her dances but with her body.

  Sadly for her, Reece cared for her as a father would. He watched after her as closely as his magic would allow and protected her from beasts and nomads alike.

  Lara resented that. With her own energy collected from the trees, she could easily control all the creatures she encountered. As for the nomads, she did not fear them. She shared blood with them. Hidden by leaf screens at the riverbank, she watched them gather water, splashing each other and laughing. Only when they were injured or ill did she reveal herself, and then only long enough to use her energy and her knowledge of the forest to help them.

  Reece warned her to stay away from the aboriginals. Vexed at him for treating her like a child, she ignored him. She met with the people who had settled along the river in small shanty villages. Because the wind talked to the sky and the trees talked to the wind, she heard from the trees all that transpired up and down the river, and she shared these secrets with whoever asked.

  This frightened some of the townsfolk. The unhappy among them gathered into a small gang, and on a moonless night they took her from her tree house and hacked at her with their blades. Her magic could not protect her against their fear.

  Horror jolted through Lara at the memory of that murderous night. She aroused from her reminiscence and came alert to the Well into which she descended. As she floated down the shaft of hazy sapphire light, she met in its illuminated stone walls the burnished reflections of her mangled face and the painful memory of her death.

  Her last thoughts in her physical body had been screams. Then blood from her stabbed lungs choked her cries and drowned her. The wrathful faces of her murderers stenciled her vision as darkness seized her.

  She woke inside the brilliance of the Abiding Star. Caval had carried her marred soul there after he had found her dead body and buried her remains among the trees she had loved. From within the luminosity of the Abiding Star, whose rays shone across time, she had actually watched the sorcerer carry her soul up into the sky and away from the Dark Shore.

  Her soul had seemed such a small thing, a diminutive glassy sphere. Caval had stood at the highest rung of the Upper Air, among star fumes and planet smoke, and used his magic to propel her soul away from him and into the glare of the Abiding Star. His actions reflected in the clear round surface of her soul. The whole cosmos reflected there so long as she remained within the Abiding Star.

  Enwombed within that light, she listened to silence. And silence listened to everything. She heard flowing and eddying and splashing against the worlds of the Bright Shore and, farther away and more dimly, the thunder of surf against the cold planets of the Dark Shore. And in that sound hid the music of those spheres—the orbital chimes of creation tolling rhythms that canceled to silence.

  The silence would have carried her deeper into the Abiding Star, away from darkness, away from memory, to an eternity of brilliance with no time left to kill. Only a thin, distant voice stopped her.

  "Lara—"

  The sound of her name pulled her away from the promise of heaven. Memories thickened. She recognized that distinct voice.

  "Lara—come to me!"

  The sonorous, commanding voice of Caval summoned her away from the dazzling realm of light. And as she retreated from serenity and returned once more to the color and riot of memory, she realized that the sorcerer had not carried her soul up from the Dark Shore to the Abiding Star to deliver her to heaven.

  "Lara—come to me! I need you!"

  Caval had steeped Lara's soul in the Charm of the Abiding Star, the source of all Charm, to heal her. And the source of all worlds had indeed done that.

  Drifting down the Well of Spiders, Lara remembered the horror of her murder and yet was not haunted
by it. The Abiding Star had cured the trauma of her brutal death. The shock of knives piercing her body floated like a dream inside her. Saturated with Charm, she experienced no anguish at returning to creation as a ghost. Direct exposure to the interior of the Abiding Star had purged her of all shock and mourning.

  Now little more than a wraith, she had fluttered insubstantially through the Upper Air to World's End. The presence of the Necklace of Souls had enabled her to assume a form that others could see, and in that form she had deftly manipulated Old Ric and Broydo to provide her with a crystal prism from the Necklace itself. Without that, she would have been unable to leave the Labyrinth of the Undead and the Forest of Wraiths.

  Briefly, she pined for the listening silence within the Abiding Star, beyond time, far past remembrance. But the call had come from her master, the one who had made her a witch. In the round reflecting surface of her soul, his cry appeared as the merest mote, yet she responded. The sorcerer had created her for this. She remained his servant, even in death.

  Within the high vantage of the Abiding Star, Lara had seen all of Caval's life. The infinite country of time wrapped its reflections around Lara's spherical soul, and when she had been inside the Abiding Star she could have seen anywhere and anytime.

  Caval's call had drawn her awareness to him, and so she had witnessed all of his life, from his youth in the Brood of Assassins, to his training by the Sisterhood of Witches, and his service to the Brood of Odawl. Even his death did not elude her gaze. And she witnessed him stabbed by a rival warlock and his corpse torn to pieces among cacodemons.

  Caval's soul had not ascended to the Abiding Star and the listening silence of eternity. Instead, he had drifted off on the nocturnal tide and floated away across the Gulf and into the anonymous depths of the Dark Shore. And yet—his cry could reach her!