The Shadow Eater (The Dominions of Irth Book 2)

by A. Attanasio

  Trailing a throng of farm couples and their children, Old Ric came into view. He descended the pilgrim road from the wooded hills. Behind him strode the Shadow Eater, glowing like stone shed from the moon.

  The eldern gnome strode toward her, eyes glazed. He stopped a single pace away, and his crinkled face snapped to alertness. With a slow and careful hand, he reached and took her crystal prism. At his touch, her wraith form shimmered into view, and the crowd flinched backward and cried out at the sight of her gory wounds.

  She lifted her smashed chin so that everyone could see the decisions pain had made for her.

  "Where is the shadow thing?" Old Ric asked flatly. "I saw you with him in the Necklace before he disappeared. Where has he gone?"

  Lara would not speak, and so the eldern gnome reached through her prism and took her memories.

  Gingerly, Old Ric's Charm touched her motionless soul, careful not to disturb the memories near her wounds. That pain would break his threads of Charm. He reached only for thoughts of the shadow thing—and he learned then of Reece Morgan, the magus from the Dark Shore, apprentice to the Wizard Caval, young master of this witch unburdened now of flesh.

  Ric retreated three paces. He said to Asofel in a voice barely audible above the excited chattering of the crowd, "We cannot find the shadow thing, because he has abandoned his original form and his magic for the aspect of a man with the beastmarks of a cat."

  "Why have you sent him away from us?" Asofel asked the ghost.

  "You eat shadows..." she mumbled in reply. "You intend to harm him."

  "You think we want to kill him?" Old Ric asked in surprise. "You are mistaken, witch. We mean only to remove him from the Bright Shore, for his magic troubles the author of these worlds." The eldern gnome touched the Necklace of Souls to Lara's prism and gave to her all that he knew of the nameless lady and his mission.

  Lara trembled like a fern. "That can't be! Caval told me that my young master is in dire trouble."

  "It is the worlds that are in trouble!" Old Ric corrected her with exasperation. He gave Asofel a hapless look and saw that the Radiant One scowled, unhappy with the witch's meddling.

  Lara's whole being throbbed with fright. "Caval told me..."

  "How could Caval speak at all to you in the Abiding Star?" the gnome asked sharply. "His soul has flown into the Gulf. No voice can cross that abyss."

  "Yet I heard him," she began. Before she could say more, screams blundered out of the crowd.

  "Dwarves!" a voice yelled and curdled to a shriek.

  Out of the hills, squat white bodies flurried in their hundreds across the summer veldt. They came hurtling toward the brookside village, whirling hatchets and firing volleys of arrows.

  The crowd of gnomes broke apart under the hail of whistling arrows. Anguished cries seared the air as many went down under the attack. Like a sweeping curtain of rain, another volley darkened the sky.

  "Asofel!" the gnome wailed. "Asofel! Stop them! They are killing my kith!"

  The Radiant One turned his back on the legion of dwarves. "I have no power to waste defending gnomes," he stated flatly. "Mount my back, gnome, and we'll outrun them."

  "My kith!" Old Ric cried as more arrows slashed among the scattering gnomes. "Save my kith!"

  "On my back, gnome!" Asofel commanded. "Quickly! They want the Necklace of Souls. We'll lead them away from the village and your kith."

  Old Ric leaped onto Asofel's back, and the arrow that impaled him jabbed the Radiant One.

  Asofel scowled. "If you panic, we are doomed."

  The eldern gnome clutched his legs about the Radiant One's shoulders. "Run! Carry us far from..."

  Asofel sprinted away, and the gnome nearly toppled from his back. His head snapped back, and the prism fell from his fingers. He glimpsed the wraith Lara still fixed where he had rooted her. Arrows slashed through her transparent body.

  In moments, the dwarves would be upon her, and with the crystal prism in their hands, her fate belonged to them.

  Asofel bolted along a rutted dirt road that ran aslant the advancing dwarves.

  The army of maggot-warriors shifted the line of their attack away from the village and toward the glowing being and the gnome who carried the Necklace of Souls.

  Broydo Blunders

  “Give me the serpent sword,” Ripcat ordered Broydo.

  They stood with Dogbrick and Jyoti under a tall rubble of clouds at the brim of a small sinkhole. The muffled drum of marching steps resounded from within the lightless shaft.

  Broydo shook his head.

  "The sword—" Ripcat extended a black-palmed hand, whose thick fingers each bore a retracted claw. "I need the sword if I'm to go in there and face those dwarves."

  "I can't give it to you," Broydo stated flatly. He stood with the sword in both hands, pressed against his tunic of woven grass. "Smiddy Thea entrusted it to me. I will have to answer to her if I relinquish it to any other."

  Ripcat appealed to the others with an exasperated look. "I need a weapon in there."

  "The serpent sword is the only effective weapon we have against the dwarves," Jyoti gently reminded the elf. "It's the only hope we have of capturing a dwarf and making it work for us. We are not your enemy. Let Ripcat have the sword."

  "He has the fastest reflexes of us all," Dogbrick pointed out.

  "If anyone should carry the serpent sword against the dwarves, it should be the Cat."

  Broydo shifted his weight apprehensively and looked each of his captors squarely in the eyes. "Forgive me, I cannot relinquish this sword placed in my care. The lives of my clan may yet depend on it."

  During the hike through the dark charmways that had led them out of the Qaf, Broydo had said little and had dutifully followed the others. When, after groping their way through dank rock corridors lit only by the wan glow of hex-gems, they had asked to make a dwarf-seeker of the sword, he had not objected. He had even helped Dogbrick braid conjure-wire and affix lozenges of black crystal called niello eye charms to the haft.

  A net of linked rat-star gems had formed a makeshift glove. When completed, Broydo had grasped the hilt, bringing together the rat-stars and eye charms, and, as Dogbrick had predicted, the elf had felt the presence of dwarves in the grip of his blade. By waving the sword around, he had sensed a direction toward the dwarves through the maze of charmways.

  "We trusted you to lead us here," Ripcat persisted, his fur-backed hand still extended. "Now you have to trust me to use the sword correctly. I will give it back. You have my word."

  "Old Ric and I suffered to get this sword." Broydo's hands tightened on it. "I cannot let you have it."

  Ripcat's arm dropped to his side. "I'm not going down there without a weapon."

  "Is this reluctance your attempt to serve your gnomish friend—Old Ric?" Dogbrick approached, stepping through a mushroom circle on the forest floor. "Are your loyalties so skewed, elf, that you do not yet realize that we are trustworthy. We want what you want."

  "You want to save the worlds?" Broydo asked with a taint of acid. "You do not even believe that the worlds are in peril."

  "Why should I believe your hearsay?" Dogbrick snarled briefly with indignation. "A nameless lady has dreamed our worlds into being? A likely story."

  The elf squared his stance with doughty defiance of the beastmarked man. "Old Ric told me so."

  "And who told him?" Dogbrick chided. His hand flashed out and snatched the serpent sword from Broydo's grip. "Ha! Enough of rumor. Let us catch a dwarf and see what it has to say about all this."

  Broydo jumped to retrieve the blade, but Dogbrick pushed him away with one hand and glared menacingly at him until the elf backed off, stamping and huffing.

  Ripcat quickly seized the sword from Dogbrick and, leveling at his friend a sidelong stare tight with disapproval, handed it back to its rightful owner. "We're not thieves anymore," he admonished the beastmarked man. "So take back your blade, Broydo. If you're brave enough to stand against this bully, then you'r
e worthy of holding your own weapon against the dwarves. Will you lead us?"

  Considerably buoyed by this act, Broydo affirmed this with a shake of the sword. "The bone of the world serpent will protect us!" He strode to the sinkhole, to the side-shaft from the Well of Spiders that opened upon the dwarves' route from World's End.

  Jyoti put a cautionary hand on Ripcat's shoulder and bent to his ear. "Is this wise? Our only effective weapon in the hands of an elf with no battle experience?"

  "I just hope his sword does what he says it will." Dogbrick tossed his head ruefully as Broydo descended feet-first into the hole.

  "Let him carry his own weapon," Ripcat reiterated. "If we thwart him, we will have to watch our backs. This way, he serves us."

  "No matter how poorly," Dogbrick added sourly, and lowered himself into the hole where Broydo had just vanished. "I'll watch his back now to be sure we do not lose our one defense."

  As Jyoti and Ripcat waited by the sinkhole, the margravine paused to regard her companion for a moment. She had not dared to look at him fully since he had reverted to his beastmarks. It bothered her to see him like this, for she had come to love him as Reece, and she was grateful yet again for her amulets, which eased her disquiet.

  She stopped Reece before he descended into the sinkhole. "We were there for a while weren't we? In Arwar, I mean. We had each other, and the world was beginning to look new."

  "We still have it." Ripcat held up his tufted hands. "This will change back. I believe the elf. The Necklace of Souls is powerful. Lara showed me her prism, and from what I saw, I know it can make me Reece again. The world will be new for us once more—after this."

  "And if this elf is right?" Jyoti asked, a hook of uncertainty in her voice. "If the Shadow Eater has been sent after you by nameless gods and the worlds are in jeopardy because of you—what then?"

  "We don't know that." He brushed the velvet fur at the back of his hand against her cheek. "Don't worry. We found our way together against the Dark Lord. You and I, remember? We will prevail again."

  Jyoti nodded valiantly, though her heart felt hollow with fear. The sound of the dwarvish marchers in the caverns below throbbed ominously. "We better hurry now, to stay close to Broydo. We don't dare let him lose that sword."

  Ripcat entered the sinkhole headfirst, and Jyoti climbed down after him. The shaft descended narrowly, and they kept from falling by pressing against the damp enclosing rock with arms and legs. The hole dropped them eventually into a grotto pulsing with the green glow of their dwarvish hosts.

  They huddled together behind a glossy wall of stalagmites only paces from where the eerily shining dwarves filed. Emerging from a crevasse that connected them to a labyrinth of other charmways leading back to World's End, the dwarves then departed through a similar rift in the wall of the stadiumwide cavern. Where they disappeared to Ripcat could not tell—perhaps to another dominion, summoned by the mysterious Duppy Hob.

  Jyoti and Dogbrick recalled the evil presence they had sensed in the grotto under Saxar, and in her fright she pressed closer against him. Together they watched Ripcat pad noiselessly among the mineral stumps and ringed cones deposited by seepings. He crept to a notch in the stone wall, where he stood behind the flow of dwarves.

  With a slow roll of his wrist, Ripcat summoned Broydo forth. The elf hurried to his side, kicking gravel and scraping grit loudly under his heels. He cringed. None of the dwarves seemed to notice. Their red eyespots, brown in the green shine, gazed forward entranced by some inward voice or music. Their husky, plate-armored bodies clattered and thumped and smothered the sounds Broydo made hurrying to Ripcat's side.

  "I'll grab a dwarf," the beastman whispered, "and you hold it at sword point."

  Ripcat bent to the ground, spying the squat legs of the army, reading the rhythms of their advance. He noticed some marchers moved momentarily out of view of the others when they turned the bend around the sheet of dripped rock. With predatory swiftness, he pounced, seized a dwarf by the leather strop that secured its breastplate and yanked it behind the stone partition.

  The dwarf eked the first whine of an alarmed cry, then spied the sword of shining bone pointed at its visored face. Its promise of death swiftly silenced the abhorrent creature.

  Dogbrick slouched over the dwarf, swiped the hatchet from its grip, and deftly looped its wrists together with braids of conjure-wire. He tugged off the sharp-jawed helmet, exposing the pointed, faceless head of the dwarf, with its lidless retinal patches for eyes and fibrillose slit of a mouth.

  Jyoti dragged it by its cleated boots, and Dogbrick held it by its breastplate as they hoisted it toward the pillar of blue light from the exit hole.

  Ripcat grinned at the elf. "Well done, elvish sword!"

  Broydo dismissed this praise with a wary glimpse over his shoulder. The drumming march of dwarves throbbed like pain in his ears. How many hordes of dwarves are there? During their search through the charmways, he had felt others in the hilt of the serpent sword—many corridors of maggot-soldiers through the caverns that connected one part of the Well of Spiders with the next. Where are they all going?

  After the Necklace of Souls? he answered himself with livid doubt. This vast army all to fetch a necklace from a gnome?

  "Something terrible and big is happening," Broydo whispered to Ripcat. "We must find Old Ric quickly."

  Ripcat froze. Broydo bumped into him and bit back a cry. Dogbrick, in his eagerness to shove the captured dwarf up the shaft, had exposed himself: His shaggy head stood taller than the screen of stalagmites. Before Ripcat could hiss a warning, a searing cry went up among the dwarves.

  In the next instant, the rush of outraged dwarves shattered the mineral wall like crockery, and a dozen warriors swept over Dogbrick.

  "Broydo!" Ripcat pulled the elf forward. Between them and the exit, a crowd of dwarves surged.

  Broydo swung the serpent sword, startled at the lightness with which it cut through the pressing throng. On contact, the warriors shriveled away to twisting coils of maggots and a clatter of hatchets and armor. These deaths did not deter the attack, and another wave of shrieking, helmeted bodies advanced, battle-axes raised.

  Ripcat ducked behind Broydo, shouting directives to him. "Strike lower! You'll hit more. Watch your left! Your left!"

  Serpent sword flailing before him, Broydo cut a path toward the day shaft. Briefly, despair shot through him at the sight of Dogbrick hauled away howling, his large vigorous body swallowed whole by the seething mass of dwarves. Then the rabid warriors hacked toward him again with their brute weapons, and he had to watch his sword to keep it from shattering.

  "Give me the sword!" Ripcat swung about with a violent hiss, driving back the grasping hands of the dwarves. "Watch our back! They're going to cut us!"

  The crush of the crowd prevented hatchets from flying, but the blades still slashed dangerously close. Broydo tried to slash and turn in a wide arc and nearly tripped over Ripcat.

  Hands clasped the Cat's shirt and tore the last shreds of it from him. "The sword!" he called out as his ankles jerked away and he slid boots first into the throng.

  Broydo tried chopping a path after him, but it was hopeless. The oncoming dwarves had no end. His courage collapsed to find himself alone underground in the green pulsing mass of dwarves. Screaming maniacally, he beat his way toward the luminous column of daylight.

  Jyoti's hands grabbed him as he clambered backward up the wall ledges and pulled him into the shaft. Legs pumping, the elf squirmed up and out of the sinkhole, knocking Jyoti to her back with the ferocity of his exit. Immediately, he swung about and jabbed the serpent sword into the hole.

  The dwarves' screaming attack dulled. They had taken coup, and their ululating cries sounded jubilant.

  "Where's Reece?" Jyoti asked, leaving the captured and bound dwarf on its back. She rushed to the moss-clotted brink. "What's happened to Ripcat? And Dogbrick? Where's Dogbrick?"

  On his knees, Broydo dropped the sword and buried his shi
vering face in his hands. His wracking sobs gave Jyoti the painful answer.

  She grabbed the sword and dropped into the hole. Landing in a crouch, she swung the blade before her, and its flat breadth dazzled with dayshine. The edge cut nothing. The cavern stood empty.

  Bootsteps clopping hollowly on the rock floor, Jyoti advanced toward the rift in the cave wall where the dwarves had just been marching. The sound of their retreat muttered like surf. She started in, then stopped herself.

  The charmways were extensive and intricate, and she had witnessed hosts here and in the charmway near Saxar. She would lose herself underground if she entered without a guide. And are they yet alive?

  She made herself believe they were, or their bodies would have been destroyed in this cavern. Her belief wavered briefly at the weirding yowls from the dark, and she shut her ears to them and turned quickly away.

  Broydo still sat on his knees sobbing into his palms when she pulled herself out of the shaft.

  "Get up," she ordered. "Stop bawling."

  The elf obeyed, chewing at his lower lip, pressing the heel of one hand into an eye socket. "I tried to hold them back. There were too many."

  "I don't want to hear it." Jyoti held him with her angry stare and restrained herself from speaking for a moment while she concentrated on breathing away her panic. Momentarily, she said, "We just lost the most important person in these worlds to me." She edged a step closer, the serpent sword vibrant in her grip. "And, if we are to believe you, he's the most important person to all the worlds." She stepped close enough to stare past the blear of his tears. "We are going to get him back, you and I."

  "Kill me." Broydo spread his arms wide. "I deserve to die. I failed us all."

  "No!" Jyoti snapped. "I told you, I don't want to hear this. No crying. No pity. Not now. We have to move swiftly. We are going to get him back. That's all I want to hear." She handed him the sword. "Now you hold on to this. I need both hands."

  She removed her two niello eye charms from her vest and pressed their flat sides together, doubling their range. In their inky depths, she searched for Ripcat and Dogbrick and found neither.