by A. Attanasio
"That's a dangerous proposition, Asofel." Old Ric gnawed the corner of his lip dubiously. "The lady was impatient with me last we met. If we appear before her, and the child remains motionless in her womb, she will surely wake the father."
"The dark father—yes, the one who would regard this school of dreams for his child frivolous." The Radiant One seemed to ponder this. "Maybe then he is right."
Old Ric's eyes narrowed. "You—you just want to get out of the dream, don't you? You care not for these worlds."
"This is true, gnome." Asofel impatiently tapped his fingers on the yoke. "I belong with the other sentinels, not here in the dark and the cold chasing after chimeras. The shadow thing is gone. Our work is done. Let us away from this illusion meant for a child."
"You don't care if these worlds vanish or not." Old Ric glared angrily. "You're not of these worlds. But our lady has given me authority over you. And so long as you are in her dream, you shall do as I command."
The Radiant One's countenance of blue ash turned slowly. "And what do you command, gnome?"
"I don't know." Old Ric sank deeper in his seat. "I think we must go back for Broydo. We abandoned him to our enemies. I feel terrible about that."
Disgust masked Asofel, and he said sharply, "I was not sent here to rescue elves."
"Broydo is our ally," Old Ric asserted. "Without him we would have failed before we began."
"Ally or not, we are all at risk in this mad dream." His face looked like a visage seen from the other side of smoke. "We will not imperil ourelves for him or anyone else. I will use my power only for the mission we were sent to fulfill."
Old Ric accepted this with a sigh of resignation. "And so, Radiant One—what now?"
"Find the witch-ghost," Asofel decided. "She saw the shadow thing last. She may well know what has become of him."
They flew on in silence. The acid-stained landscape crawled below. Abruptly and excitedly, Old Ric spoke up, "She has moved swiftly. She is there!"
He pointed to a chain of mountains that gleamed like glass on the horizon.
"How can she move so quickly?" Asofel banked the airfoil and glided toward the icy rim of the world.
"These planets are riddled with charmways, passages that connect distant points." Old Ric held a crystal prism from the Necklace of Souls close to one eye. "Ah, yes—there she is on the slope of a mountain. Still alone."
"Where is she going?"
"I cannot say." Ric's jaw slackened. "Ah, I recognize that mountain now. It is among the tallest peaks on the planet—the famed Calendar of Eyes."
"What does that portend, gnome?" Asofel steepened their descent so sharply, their ears whistled. "What is this Calendar of Eyes?"
"It is a crag that reaches higher than time." Old Ric filtered the snowy light of the approaching mountain through a prism and watched the ghost moving across a snowfield and leaving no tracks. "She has crossed to here through a charmway. I think she intends to leave Irth."
"For where?"
"We'll know when we find her." Old Ric indicated the direction Asofel should fly, toward a prominent mountain with a shape like a shard of broken glass. "She is a ghost. All I can see is where she is now. And she is entering a cave, there on the south flank."
Asofel landed the airfoil with dainty precision on the brink of an icy slope above a glaring snow bowl. The cold did not touch either the gnome or the Radiant One, yet both stood as if frozen after they had deplaned from the flight pod. No paths wended among the drifts.
Old Ric waded through the powder white snuff. Asofel followed, his orange hair fluttering like flames and the cold steaming off him in silver fumes. On all sides, ice mountains stood giantly.
"There!" The gnome hurried gingerly past frosted boulders, anxious not to fall and stab himself again with the arrow already lodged in him. "She's gone in there." Sheaved ice glittered starkly from the lintel of a cave.
"Why do you hesitate, gnome?" Asofel threw a tuft of fire into the lightless cave and illuminated glossy rock walls unhewn by mortal hands.
"This is no ordinary charmway," he warned. "She has gone back into the Well of Spiders. If we follow, we will leave lrth for worlds beyond."
"We must capture her." Asofel stepped to the threshold of the cave, and his luminous presence revealed asp holes and viper crevices among the ill-joined rocks. "My power will protect us from what beasts we find. Lead the way, gnome. Do not let the ghost elude us."
Old Ric entered the cave, and a smell of damp stone enclosed him. Warmth radiated from ahead. And scuttling noises, scratching, clicking sounds of chitinous creatures trembled around them. The spiders had not sensed the ghost, but they flinched excitedly at the approach of her pursuers.
Asofel's face blazed like a lamp and cast slewed shadows from the craggy walls.
The gnome's shadow stretched ahead of him like a narrow path. He crept forward, listening to the sharp sounds growing louder and nearer. From out of the dark tunnel, a spider big as the cave itself came scurrying. Its jointed legs scraped noisily against the rock walls, and a scissoring sound from its lively mandibles chewed its own echoes.
Old Ric cried in terror, yet even before his shriek unwound, a flash blinded him. Wincing, the gnome looked away. When he turned back, the giant spider had been blasted apart into thousands of flittering puzzle pieces. Tiny spiders unclasped from their gigantic form by Asofel's attack scattered into the dark, some burning like embers.
"Move forward," Asofel commanded. "Take us to the witch-ghost."
The gnome advanced less timidly, having experienced the force of Asofel's renewed power. The sound of the scattered spiders' cries flew ahead, and the way appeared clear enough for Ric to take his nervous eyes off the shadowy path and to gaze again into the Necklace of Souls.
"She is far, far ahead of us," the eldern gnome reported. "She is a wraith, after all. She has moved on to the shaft that lies ahead and has climbed up the Well of Spiders. We will have to move quickly to keep pace with her."
"Then hurry." Asofel nudged Old Ric forward, and the two moved almost at a run through the long cavern until they arrived at the Well itself.
The sound of water searching for a deep place to rest rippled from below. Even Asofel's lucid eyes could not penetrate the darkness that plumbed depths far below Irth.
The wraith had gone not down but up. And in that direction, bats spun, spider nests dangled, and faeries twinkled like motes of gusty fire.
"How will we climb the Well?" Old Ric asked. "I have not the sight or strength to mount these rock walls."
"Get on my back, gnome." Asofel knelt, and Ric reluctantly mounted his shoulders. "Had I taken more of my light from the dream, we could fly. As it is, you must cling to me. And do not lose sight of the ghost."
The touch of Asofel did not burn as the gnome had feared. Straddling the Radiant One's shoulders, Old Ric felt suddenly wild at heart. The licking flames of Asofel's hair brushed him with cool, musical sensations of holy fire. He sat up tall so that the barbed tip of the arrow through his chest would not poke the sentinel, and he held his attention on the prisms that hung from his neck.
Asofel clambered with astonishing swiftness up the nitre-crusted wall. The way ahead lit up with twin rays from his flame-cored eyes. Sparks drizzled where his hands clawed at the rocks, and his boots kicked footholds into the wall as though the stone were soft clay.
Old Ric watched through the crystal prisms as the image of the witch drew nearer. She had already departed the Well of Spiders and strolled beside a shallow brook in a field yellow with small vetch.
The eldern gnome immediately recognized the silhouette of the knobby mountains and the wind with its lapful of birds under a violet sky. They entered the land of his earlier life—the summer veldt of Nemora.
"She has gone to my home world!" the gnome announced excitedly.
Asofel made no reply.
Already, Old Ric felt that he could smell the rain of the veldt full of freshness. And he could feel the
cool shadows of the great blue thunder-heads trawling slowly over the land.
"Stop squirming," Asofel demanded.
The gnome clung tighter to the Radiant One, amazed that the blind god Chance had favored him this way. Here in the summer veldt he had lived as a boy, before departing for the frost plains and snowy tracts that dominated most of the planet.
Life on the veldt had been hard. The one fertile region of Nemora, it had to provide grains and fruits for all the broods of gnomes in the frozen regions. His parents and their forebears before them for many generations had served as dyers and weavers for the gnomes of the veldt farms and orchards.
He alone of his lineage had left the fecund fields and the hard labor of veldt life to study magic in the ice caves. And he had not returned to the green land of his ancestors—until now.
In the rainbow light of the prisms, the witch ambled slowly beside the slapping waters of a brook. She sensed her stalkers in her crystal prism. Sparks sizzled in the Well of Spiders from the Radiant One's fierce hands that clawed at the rock. His fiery hair snapped brightly in the dark, illuminating the gnome astride his shoulders. Ric’s aged, underlit face gleefully watched her.
She was not afraid. She had accomplished what she had set out to do. She had led the Shadow Eater away from the man she loved—even though that man no longer seemed a man. Transformed into a beastmarked amnesiac, Reece had fled into the charmways of the Spiderlands.
The witch had no idea where on Irth those charmways had taken him. She knew he journeyed somewhere on Irth, because those charmways led only among the dominions.
Through her prism, she noticed that the Shadow Eater and Old Ric could no longer locate Reece. Changed into Ripcat, he had become a form they could not detect. When they arrived, she would lead them across this lovely country to the next shaft of the Well of Spiders. She sensed it not too far distant.
How long she could continue to distract them from Reece she did not know. Now that he had lifted her free of pain, she could go on indefinitely.
She waded across the brook over green rocks, making not a splash as she moved atop the clear water.
Part Three:
Gabagalus
"Truth is the most necessary fiction.
—Gibbet Scrolls, Screed 3:24
Alliance in the Qaf
Gabagalus sank into the night ocean. Jets of spume and veils of spindrift shot from its submerging peaks and shone like phosphorescent vapors under evening's planetshine. In the west, citrine streaks marked day's end. The last waves exploded over the summits.
By nightfall, the swells of the sea undulated in broad amplitudes of shining darkness, lit from above by star smoke and from below by the glittering lights of the sunken continent.
One of those submerged lights shimmered from a bubble dome on a cliff ledge. Kelp ribbons silhouetted the bright dome and its spare interior: an oval swimming pool that cast cobbles of reflection across the suite. Globe lanterns hung over the pool and a timber deck.
Beneath one globe on the deck, an old, old man sat in a wire chair. His bald, mottled head gleamed. Wearing green slippers and a black tunic fretted in gold, he expressed wealth. Time seemed to drip from his eyes. And the flesh of his cheeks folded like melted wax.
His mouth hung open, and a voice like a slow shadow emerged, "Where is Reece Morgan?"
Ripcat sensed something wrong his first night under the stars. The scrolls of planet-smoke and webs of star-fire had changed too much in too short a time. At first, he thought perhaps he was enduring a strange dream. The cold rock floor and the black knife of the night wind convinced him otherwise.
Though he had been trying to reach the Cloths of Heaven in the Reef Isles of Nhat, where he last remembered himself, the charmway from the Spiderlands had conveyed him unexpectedly to the Qaf.
Instead of returning immediately to the charmway and getting more disoriented, he had lingered that afternoon. From the crest of a rock ridge, he had spotted spurs of rhubarb and tufts of oat grass in the saddles of the tottering hills to the south. He could find his way to water and food when dawn came.
And so, he had settled down in a rock crevice that both blunted the wind and anchored him to Irth. The nocturnal tide would not carry his Charmless body into the sky this night.
He had waited for sleep and dreams of the Dark Shore—until he discovered the ominous night sky so changed from what he remembered.
Fearful thoughts rushed through him: Had a warlock stolen his memories? Or had the Dark Lord himself entranced him so that many long days had passed obliviously?
He compared what he observed of the luminous sky vapors with what he remembered from only a night ago it seemed. In all four directions, the planetoids lay scattered far from where he had seen them last: a comet he had viewed in the north had carried its icy streamer to the west. Veils of star-exhaust had shifted in the wide winds of space to new abstractions. And even the planetary phases marked a changed order: Hellsgate and Nemora scooped different volumes of shadow in their vessels of light.
"This cannot be," he murmured to himself like a chant. "This cannot be."
And his chant carried him to fitful sleep under the ballast of the desert rocks.
The same dream came to him as it did every night he slept as Ripcat. A dream of a peculiar world without Charm. As on Irth, the sky there shone blue, and clouds moved in herds on the migratory paths of the wind. Unlike Irth, in these dreams he never glimpsed basilisks, griffins, or dragons anywhere.
The city of his dreams did not float in the sky as did the greatest cities of Irth. This metropolis rose directly out of the ground in steel-and-glass towers, and houses sprawled for many leagues in grids of streets and avenues among tropic vegetation. He glimpsed road signs, and the name Darwin chimed in his dream-held memory—a meaningless name to him. Darwin of the Northern Territory in the Southern Realm that his dream named Australia.
On a tree-lined street of that town, in a pink house with white trim and sloping lawn of hedges and shrubs, he stood before a discreet sign that read: Boarders Welcome in large calligraphic lettering.
Infuriatingly, this repetitious dream seemed more than a dream and throbbed in him with the insistence of memory—though a memory that kept eluding him.
The people in the boardinghouse seemed to know him. Yet he could call forth no names. He encountered them only briefly as he entered the house and climbed the left-hand stairway, his footfalls silent on the burgundy carpet. As he approached the landing where a dark doorway of solid mahogany stood at the end of a corridor, the dream became ponderous. He moved slowly, with near paralysis. He sensed that this heavy, glass-knobbed door opened upon his room.
His hand reached for the knob with excruciating slowness. At its touch, the cold glass startled him with a jolt like an electric sting. Almost too real for the dream. Almost shuddering him awake. He clung to the knob and, with great effort, turned it.
Inside, heavy crimson drapes covered the windows. On the walls, precise circles of red paint contained intricate geometric patterns—magic sigils. The sight of each smote him like a drum. His insides quavered resonantly, echoing through him with bold recollections of himself naked, sky-clad, dancing with precision and vigor about the room. His limbs felt sheathed in cold fire. His voice chanted words that came not from his throat but his bones.
He looked away from the magical sigils and found no furniture save a long, shrouded table. Peering closer, he recognized an altar that carried a magician's implements—a rod of amber glass, a dagger with a green blade etched in serpent scales, a chalice of blackened silver, and several metal plates burnished to mirror brightness.
Slowly, he pushed himself through the dream's viscosity and stood before the altar. When he gazed down, he confronted his reflection in the buffed plate. A stranger's face regarded him, with storm gray eyes set deep in a boxer's brow, nose blunt and bent, hard-set mouth, flat ears, and bristly sun-bleached hair that at first he thoug
ht gray but for the youthful and clean-shaven cheeks.
The dream changed at the sight of this stranger, and he stood in a forest with a naked, sable-tressed woman—a dancer with footsteps so light no sound rose from the strewn leaves. Something else rose out of the ground under the rhythm of her dancing feet, a soundless tension like a gathering storm. And watching her, he felt as though he stood at the end of time.
"Lara—" he called to her. "Dance for us, Lara."
Us? he wondered in the dream and looked among the trees for others.
Night held the forest. The light by which he watched the dancer filtered through branches in threads of starlight. And the wind rose up with a ghost in it. A figure of moonlight flew through the woods—a man-shape with long limbs and a countenance like a fish hawk, hooked and predatory. Its fierce eyes fixed upon him with an intensity that set the fact of his existence into the fable of a dream.
"Caval," he addressed the fearsome figure. "The power rises! The witch has danced us the power, and it rises like the tide."
Caval—the name filled him with an urgency of something that wanted to be said.
Like a story with no beginning or end, the dream rushed on, turned to confusion, and things unseen and unspoken occupied him, magical things he did not comprehend.
He danced with Lara. The storm energy ran deep in his veins. The ghost called Caval became more solid, heavy as a rain-soaked garment. He stood at the center of their dancing, motionless, wholly real and rooted in his six senses.
"I've come back to the dream to warn you," Caval spoke with immediacy. "You will remember this when you wake. I have used the last of my strength to reach you here, and you will remember this when you wake. Remember—"
The shadow appeared both young and old. In starlight and night shadows, his red hair seemed caked to his long skull like dried blood, his bone-sharp face intent. "I thought I came here alone—on my own—by the power I had won from the Brotherhood of Wizards, the Sisterhood of Witches. I was wrong. Listen to me now. I was wrong. Terribly wrong. I was summoned here. Do you understand me? I was summoned to the Dark Shore by a far greater magic, an evil magic. I was called here to participate in a strategy beyond my ken. Do you hear me? Listen! I was called here by Duppy Hob."
