The Shadow Eater (The Dominions of Irth Book 2)

by A. Attanasio

  The hairless humanoids had overwhelmed most of the factory guards and imploded their firecharms. Green flames licked avidly at the warehouses.

  "Great Goddess, what are those things?" Jyoti asked in a voice fractured with fright. Then she remembered what Lara had said about stealing the Necklace of Souls. "Drake's blood! Those are dwarves!"

  "Pull away!" Dogbrick ordered frantically, and grabbed the yoke.

  The air van dipped, then rose sharply as the beastmarked man grappled for control.

  A green flash inked dark shadows in the pod. An instant later, the shock wave struck, and the air van bucketed violently.

  Jyoti pulled the van away from a billowing green fire cloud laced with black soot. Gravel flung upward by the explosion twanged loudly against the airframe.

  When they crested and Jyoti caught the lift to ease them into a wide circular path, they observed that the warehouses had vanished. The entire flank of the cliff where the hangars nestled had collapsed onto the terrace below.

  Factory sirens wailed, and firefighters and security forces scrambled among nearby winch lifts, hurrying to bring aid from other levels. A large water-bearing balloon from the seaside swung through the boiling clouds.

  "Yes, those are dwarves," Dogbrick finally answered her. Face pressed to the pod window, he looked for the diminutive warriors and found none in the rubble. "I saw a pickled one once when I was a boy. They're denizens of World's End, you know, where they are..."

  A rattle from somewhere within the air van's ducts clattered louder and faster and quickly shrilled to a whining shriek.

  "Our thrusters have taken in some debris," Jyoti grasped at once as the yoke vibrated in her grasp.

  Two rapid explosions from the interior shook the pod to a blur, and Dogbrick groaned.

  Jyoti cut the engine, and the vibrations quelled. She eased back on the yoke, bringing the van's nose up. "We're going down, Dog. Curl up and relax. The pod's Charm will cushion the worst of it."

  Dogbrick tucked his head between his knees. "Don't drop us in the sea!" he yelped. "I can't swim!"

  The van plummeted into an abrupt sideslip. The smog tore away, divulging a brief tableau of factory yards with pitched roofs and chimney stacks tucked compactly into niches of the sea cliffs. Then, the buckled landscape of broken rock and brickwork swung toward them, and they glided through acrid fumes of the smothering charmfires.

  Talking fast, Jyoti relayed an emergency broadcast to the sky bund. Static from the charmfires disrupted her message and sizzled louder as the shattered rocks below swung toward them.

  Impact ripped the air van apart. Panels winged away, and the airframe splintered into toppling rails and a spewing of engine parts. The pod bounced free, and carried its whirling passengers over fields of shattered rock. It rolled to rest against a cutaway factory of freestanding stairwells, twisted pipes, and an open interior where forges still steamed and spat flames.

  The pod hatched, and Jyoti helped a dizzy Dogbrick climb out onto a slope of toppled boulders. Above, through shreds of vapors, Saxar's factory tiers loomed. Below, curved rooftops stagger-stepped down the cliff face to thriving dockyards. On either side, destruction ranged.

  Peripheral movement seemed just a blur of dizziness to Dogbrick until Jyoti seized his arm and tugged. "Quick, get down!"

  Dogbrick ducked with Jyoti behind an upturned slab of masonry. They watched as several dwarves strode through the seething fumes. The abominations wielded brutish hatchets and short lances, and their thickly jointed bodies moved with surprising nimbleness though encumbered with heavy straps and plates of amulets. Metal helmets like insect mandibles framed featureless, glossy faces of rippling slit mouths and lidless, crimson eyespots.

  From her amulet-vest, Jyoti took out her aviso and tried to call for help. Static flared from the communicator, loud interference from charmfires that still seethed under the buried buildings, and she slapped it shut. "We're on our own, Dog."

  To elude the approaching squad, Jyoti and Dogbrick crept backward, past a stone abutment fallen to its side and into the hole its collapse. At that moment, the damaged engine core of the shattered air van exploded. The roar, muted by the weight of heaped boulders, swelled like thunder over the cliffs, distracting the dwarves. The abhorrent creatures turned aside and moved off to see what the blast portended.

  Dogbrick took advantage of their absence to scan for a way out of the fuming pit.

  Jyoti called to him softly. "Dog!" Her whisper carried urgency.

  In a single bound, he stood beside her. Immediately, he spotted why she had summoned him, and he grabbed her shoulders and pulled her back and down behind old plates of upended pavement.

  Through a honeycomb lattice of foundation girders and ganglia of jarred-loose cables, they watched ranks of dwarves emerging from inside the cliffs. Their bodies glowed green in the dark, and they stumbled forward, clearly blinded by the light of the outer world.

  "They can't see us," Jyoti pointed out, and moved deeper into the shaft, to where it widened and she could stand.

  Dogbrick gnashed his teeth at her temerity and followed, hunched over.

  A stone's throw away, a steady advance of dwarves gleamed greenly among the cavern's shadows. Jyoti used her eye charms to find her way through the dark. Moving parallel to the advancing dwarves, she advanced farther into the cave.

  Ahead, a grotto sank among a dense scrollwork of stalagmites. The dwarves advanced from there, stepping out of a crevasse.

  "It's a charmway, I think." Jyoti spoke over her shoulder to where Dogbrick crouched at her heels. He read his amulets with eyeballs that seemed to hum in their sockets.

  "My—my eye charms show the dwarves stepping out of nowhere!" Dogbrick stammered.

  "It just looks that way." Jyoti drew a strand of conjure-wire from a utility pouch in her vest and began dexterously binding two amulets. "They're crossing from another domain of Charm. If you want to see where they're coming from, patch the niello to a rat-star. Then look."

  Through the amplified eye charm she had cobbled, the grotto changed appearance. The cave branched into a hive of tunnels. The dwarves shambled along these many shafts, arriving from farther than the eye charms could probe.

  Dogbrick affixed several tiny trapezoidal squares of hex-gems to the modified eye charm and he listened, past the thudding fright of his own heart and Jyoti's running pulse, to the life strength of the dwarves. He heard their slow blood. Their turtle plasma spun its loops through thick bodies.

  He listened closer and distinguished the brood talk of the dwarvish nation. Unlike the brood talk of his own clan—harmonics of perception and thought—their talk never varied. Their thoughts seemed frozen, a wall of ice that enclosed an image of gold-clasped gems each as big as a thumb and tufted with rainbows.

  "The Necklace of Souls!" Jyoti gasped.

  "Hush! Listen!" Dogbrick put a taloned finger to his ear, listening further to something enormous—a deep entity breathing sustenance into the dwarves from beyond.

  "I hear it!" Jyoti whispered hotly. She gazed into the altered eye charm in Dogbrick's hand. And she heard an ashen voice, the chanted commands of their creator. "Duppy Hob!"

  Somehow broadcast from the Dark Shore, the gray voice of the devil worshipper who had shaped the dwarves from maggots directed their advance. They moved with the unison of one mind, the will of their exiled master. His magic burned in each of them with a heart pinch of pain that forced them to obey.

  "The lord they deposed has got power over them again," Jyoti mumbled almost in trance cadence. "He's sending them down from World's End. Why?"

  Dogbrick snapped apart the conjure-wire, and the charmful perception broke. "The devil worshipper must not sense us."

  Jyoti clutched at her vest's power wands. She released more Charm to calm herself in the face of what they had witnessed. "I thought Dubby Hob was a child's fright story."

  "They thought the same about cacodemons until not long ago." Dogbrick tapped at the rat-s
tars on the hatband that glinted under his mane. "Think about it. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that this most evil of sorcerers appears now after the wave of cacodemons."

  "We have to get this eye charm out of here and show it to the others." With frantic fingers, Jyoti secured in a hip pocket the niello that had peered across worlds. "The Dark Lord was just a scout!"

  Dogbrick drew a blunt-nosed firelock from beneath his shawl and aimed it at the grotto. "Let's close up this rathole."

  "Don't!" Jyoti seized his hand. "We could collapse more of the city and..."

  Her grasp jolted a round from the firelock. The blue bolt smashed into the fanged ceiling, and chunks of limestone fell like spears and anvils. The dwarves yowled and stampeded each other under the slamming collapse. Their flung bodies hurtled across the cavern.

  Dogbrick swept Jyoti in his arms and charged with her away from the plummeting rocks and panicked dwarves. He briskly searched with his eye charm the way back along the path they had entered. The blindness of the dwarves had kept them from noticing the wider corridor through which they trickled, but now they fanned out, impelled by the crowd surging from the din in the grotto.

  Shrieks of alarm went up as the dwarves spotted the intruders. Hatchets slashed past, and Dogbrick tucked himself around Jyoti and ran close to the shadows. Sparks flew where the hatchet steel cut stone, and an enraged clamor boomed along the corridor, whipping him faster.

  Ahead, several dwarves scuttled for the exit. The rumbling cataclysm masked Dogbrick's footfalls, and the fleeing dwarves did not sense him until he slammed over them.

  In a bound, he lunged out of the hole beside the toppled stone abutment. Three dwarves stood with their backs to him as he released Jyoti and leveled his firelock. One shot leveled all three.

  Dogbrick waved Jyoti to run toward the factory ruins beside them. He jammed the firelock so that it would explode and dropped it into the hole before sprinting away.

  The force of the rupturing Charm mechanism set boulders scampering again. Dogbrick snatched Jyoti from behind and swept her out of the way of a tumbling, vat-shaped furnace.

  Dwarves shrieked from above. Their pale spongoid arms waved their hatchets wrathfully.

  Dogbrick immediately wished he had kept his firelock. Then he reminded himself that a stray shot among these charmworks could ignite another firestorm. He looked for an escape route downward.

  The strewn rock spill crawled with dwarves. "We have to go up," he decided, and drew a thick, short blade from the sheath strapped to his back under his amulet-shawl. "Stay close behind me."

  "Just get us out of here, Dog." Jyoti drew her utility knife and slapped his back, signaling him to go. "We have to warn Irth."

  Dogbrick clambered up a slope of broken slate to the shelled facade of a factory shop. Jyoti followed, throwing fitful glances over her shoulder. The furious dwarves scrambled after them across heaped rocks. Their shrill cries sliced loudly as the sirens.

  Up a ramp way to a lading yard, Dogbrick and Jyoti ran hard, relying on their amulets to give them strength. The dwarves, too, seemed to partake of Charmed stamina. They nimbly ascended the incline of jagged slate and whirled their hatchets above their heads as they closed in.

  Dogbrick faced Jyoti with a harsh stare. "Hold on to me, margravine, and don't let go."

  She threw her arms around his thick shoulders, and he grabbed a nearby pulley rope with one hand and with the other used his knife to cut it from its anchor. The cargo crate fastened to it hurtled downward, and Dogbrick and Jyoti flew up. Concrete walls blurred past, and the rush of their ascent shoved their viscera against their ribs.

  At the top, they swung onto a scaffold landing as the crate smashed below, crushing dwarves. Dogbrick searched in vain among the loading bays for workers or security officers. The wailing sirens had driven everyone from the area. Below, dwarves churned up the rungs of a cliff-ladder. Any hope of escape lay above.

  Dogbrick climbed narrow steps behind the wooden piers of the lading docks, and Jyoti hurried after him to the stile-lanes that mounted the stone fences between factory levels. She climbed the stairs bent over, using both hands and feet. She fixed her eyes on the oil-stained stone, not daring to look behind.

  Along a stone ribbon-walk above the turbid black water of a canal, they fled. The piercing cries of the dwarves dimmed, and escape beneath the pocked brickwork of imposing walls seemed suddenly plausible. Overhead, through shreds in the dense factory smoke, large, colorful balloons sailed, carrying to the smoldering rubble gondolas filled with water.

  From the canal's towpath just below them, a hatchet blade swung into view, splitting the pavement before them. A shrieking dwarf pulled itself onto the ribbon-walk.

  Dogbrick did not break his stride. His knife spun from his hand and cleaved the dwarf's head between the metallic mandibles of its helmet. Deftly, he retrieved his weapon and, with a thwack of his powerful arm, severed the blunt head of the dwarf. Howling triumphantly, he hoisted the helmeted trophy to the cloudy sky.

  Jyoti grabbed his arm. "Dog, stop it!" She put her hands on his amulet-shawl and activated another power wand.

  The surge of Charm calmed Dogbrick's frenzy, and his howl curved to silence. "My apologies, margravine."

  "Don't apologize." She glanced up anxiously at mazy heights of trestles, winches, buttresses, duct pipes, and cables, looking for dwarves. "Just get us out of here—quickly!"

  Dogbrick tossed the severed head into the canal and kicked the rotund corpse after it. The black murk received the body and left no trace on its oily surface.

  Dogbrick guided Jyoti on a weaving route among old brick lanes between warehouses. Presently, they climbed cobble-stairs to a trolley station on a day-bright terrace above the smoky industrial congestion of the city.

  This was Hiphigh Street, a small avenue of fishmonger stalls and vegetable stands. Crowds had gathered to gawk down at the jammed factory yards below and the steaming rubble that had buried several warehouses.

  Jyoti snapped open her aviso and contacted the sky bund atop the cliff city. A channel clicked open, and silence seeped through. Then, a frightened voice chattered, "Margravine! the Star of Fortune has docked. We've been trying to reach you."

  She recognized the voice of the squad leader she assigned to oversee the arrival of the ether ship bearing the party from World's End. "Have you boarded her?"

  "Yes—yes, we boarded," the frantic voice replied. "But no one is aboard! No one!"

  "No one?" Jyoti turned a worried glower on Dogbrick. "Who piloted the vessel? Who brought her in?"

  "Something terrible is happening, my lady!" A sob choked the voice. "The whole squad—all of us! We—we don't seem to have shadows!"

  Ghost Ship

  Asofel strode down the gangway of the ether ship clothed in feathers of light. His gauzy hair the color of fire snapped sparks into the stiff wind blowing through the girders of the sky bund. He stood on the staging where Charmed bollards had secured the large, gray, toadlike body of the ether ship. From here, he could see all of Saxar plummeting below in a wide curve of black and riven sea cliffs.

  Old Ric and Broydo timidly emerged from the ship, afraid for what they would behold. And, indeed, no one appeared anywhere on the multiple platforms of cable-suspended docking bays. A black dirigible floated motionless in its berth, with no sign of crew or passengers. Even the stevedores who usually bustled among the tiered stagings had abandoned mounds of crates and barrels.

  "He ate them all!" Broydo whispered sharply to the gnome.

  "Not all, elf." Asofel pointed a shining arm past crisscross struts of scaffolding to the cliff city. Among the scorched buildings and oxide-seared streets of the factory town, motes of people milled visibly. "I am not the monster you pretend me to be."

  "Then you have fully restored your power?" Old Ric asked. "You'll need no more lives?"

  Asofel ignored the question. Instead, his ignited eyes scanned the industrial ranges and fixed upon a district where a fleece o
f chimney exhaust obscured many of the slopes. "The dwarves are here."

  "What?" Broydo croaked and nearly dropped the serpent sword he carried in both hands. "That cannot be. We climbed down the Wall of the World far ahead of them. And it's daytime now. How can they be about?"

  "We are far from the Abiding Star, elf," Asofel explained without budging his stare from the cliff city. "At this level, the dwarves can move actively by day and night."

  "Oh by the gods!" the elf wailed. "All is lost! They will be everywhere!"

  Asofel still wore a pilot's brown leather tunic and gray boots, though with his new strength he bulged the seams. Rays of silver light leaked through gaps in the garment. "The dwarves have found their own way through the dream."

  "This may be a dream to you," Old Ric said, "but I beg you to remember, this is our reality. We must strive to proceed from here without taking any more lives!"

  The Radiant One turned from his scrutiny of Saxar, his angular face blue as ash. "Where is this shadow thing?"

  "He is with the witch." Old Ric lifted the Necklace of Souls. "I can see her in here, because she carries a crystal prism from this soul-catcher. She has found her way to the magus we are seeking."

  "And where in this world is that, gnome?" Asofel trawled a wide review of the horizon, from the steel blue horizon of the sea, across the charred vertical labyrinth of the city, to the ghostly salt hills and hardpan waste of Sky Edge, the margin of a dread wasteland called the Qaf. "How much farther must we travel to fulfill our mission?"

  "You sense dwarves but not the magus of our quest?" Old Ric asked coolly. "But, of course. The dwarves are creatures from World's End, shaped from the same energy of the Abiding Star that has made you. But the magus—the shadow thing—he is a creature of darkness, risen from the abyss. He is a being of the Dark Shore. You have no sense of him at all, have you?"

  "None," Asofel readily conceded. "Now where is he? Let us swiftly conclude our work."

  Old Ric walked down the gangway and stood in the hot aura of the Radiant One. "I won't tell you."