by A. Attanasio
"If you are Duppy Hob, I'm afraid to find out." Ripcat watched the old man with a surly curiosity and tapped a claw on the seat's wire grille. "I thought you would look—well, more imposing."
"I am old. Very old."
Movement caught Ripcat's eye in an open hatchway beyond more wire chairs on the far side of the pool. Veiled figures passed in and out of sight. "Then why not use Charm to make yourself young again?"
"I have." A vague puzzlement, a gray shadow troubled the old man's features. "This is as young as Charm can make me."
"I don't follow." Ripcat mistrusted the mummied body before him and did not disguise this in his voice. "You look like you're about to drop dead."
"I might well," the crackled voice agreed. "That is why I need continuous care. This body is over two million days old."
Ripcat regarded more closely the waxen flesh, the spider hairs on the bald pate, the oily eyes.
"What do you know of me?" Duppy Hob asked, his voice full of sibilance and clicks, sifting through crisp lungs.
"Only hearsay."
"What have you heard?"
"That dwarves you created from maggots on World’s End deposed you and threw you into the Gulf." Ripcat shrugged. "Everyone believed Duppy Hob a myth. But when dwarves arrived in Saxar, the margravine of Odawl detected you commanding them."
"Detected me?" Viscous eyelids drooped. "How?"
"With her eye charms—her amulets—" Ripcat answered frankly, seeing no reason to withhold or lie. "She saw that you had somehow regained command over the mutinous dwarves. How did you do that?" He perched himself on the edge of the wire chair. "And why?"
"Tell me."
“How would I know? I don’t remember what I knew on the Dark Shore as Reece Morgan.” Ripcat sat back. "Why don't you use your charmware to read my mind?"
"That's too messy." His curled hands fluttered in his lap, agitated at the thought. "If I do that, your skin of light may tear. That's not good."
"Why?" Ripcat stood. "Are you afraid I will use my magic on you?"
"Your magic?" Duppy Hob laughed eerily, his breaths sharp as bird screams. "Your magic? Oh, I see. I see." His rigid body seemed to shrink with relief.
"I know far less than you thought I did, don't I?" Ripcat realized, suddenly angry at his ignorance.
"You are clever, Ripcat—but, ah, not as clever as I had feared." The heel of one tremulous hand pressed against a wet eye. "Sit down. Go ahead, sit on the carpet if you like. But sit, sit. Tell me everything you do know. Be open with me, and I will return that kindness."
Ripcat did not sit. His ignorance before this laughing old man enraged him. He did not know what to do or what to make of this frail being, and he seethed with frustration. Yet he held himself in check and paced slowly around the seated figure. "Kindness? From a devil worshipper?"
"Sit down." Duppy Hob's voice spurted like a flame, all laughter gone. "Do not think to defy me, creature."
'Why not, old man?" Ripcat addressed the back of his host's bald head, the large ears waxily translucent. "Are you going to make me sit—like a trained animal?"
"If I must."
Ripcat bent over the doll-like figure and smelled more strongly the sour redolence of the aged flesh. "I don't want to be treated like a trained animal. I don't want to obey you at all."
"You are a bewildered creature, Ripcat." The old man's eroded profile did not flinch or his black eyes avert their vapid focus. He looked too tired to care about the fanged grin beside him. "You do not know enough to act. Sit down."
"No." Ripcat strolled around to the front of the small, seated man and crouched to meet those depthless black eyes. "I want you to tell me why I'm here."
"You serve me." Duppy Hob pointed a bent finger at him, his gaze black as the eyes of a squid. "And I need your service now."
"Serve you?" Ripcat straightened and continued walking around the seated man. "I won't serve you."
"You already have." The crepey skin of his jowls trembled with silent laughter. "You are how I communicate with my dwarves."
"Explain."
A weary breath asked, "Must I?"
"The dwarves cast you into the Gulf." Ripcat dared poke the sere and shrunken man's shoulder. It felt fragile under his claw, loose ligaments and wobbly bones. "How could you have survived? Look at you. You're about to fall apart."
"I survived the fall to the Dark Shore," Duppy Hob rasped. "Oh, I was so much younger then and full of fire. Even so, I barely survived. It took me hundreds of thousands of days to regain my strength."
Two veiled figures breezed into the chamber through the open hatch. Healers from the Sisterhood of Witches, they wore traditional gray-and-black robes, like the witches Ripcat had seen tending the sick and homeless in the gutters of Saxar. They went directly to the old man and began to press feather amulets and theriacal opals onto his brow, calming him down.
Duppy Hob waved them off, and they lingered, flustering around him until he waved again. Then the veiled ladies retreated in a rustle of scarves and hems.
"My story is too long," said Duppy Hob quietly, soothed by the ministrations of his healers. "Know this. Exiled on the Dark Shore, I needed a way to reach across the Gulf and regain control of my dwarves. It took me hundreds of thousands of days and much hard work on the Dark Shore to develop magic that could reach across the Gulf."
Ripcat stood directly behind Duppy Hob, and the speckled pate tempted him to strike. He continued to restrain himself and asked, "Why would the dwarves who overthrew you take your commands?"
"They wouldn't. They wanted nothing more to do with me. I had to amplify my strength. So I found another. Your teacher—Caval. I used my hard-won magic to influence him from the Dark Shore. Oh, I did not know then it would be him—just someone, anyone intrepid enough to imagine they could reach the Dark Shore and return. There were others. They failed. Caval succeeded."
The name "Caval" startled Ripcat, because he had greatly admired that wizard. Caval had served Jyoti's father and had sacrificed his life and the possibility of rapture in the Abiding Star so that his death would buy time for others to attack the Dark Lord. The thought that Caval had been used by this shriveled man disturbed. "I don't believe you. I don't believe anyone can reach across the Gulf with their minds."
"You climbed from the Dark Shore yourself, pursuing Caval." Merry wrinkles cracked the flesh of his gray cheeks. "Don't you see? I called Caval to the Dark Shore intending that you or someone like you would ultimately follow him back to Irth." A laugh hissed through his caked lungs. "Your training as a magus under Caval—that was my strategy. And the death of Lara. Who do you think inspired the townsfolk to kill her?"
"You want me to believe an old wreck like you has shaped all our destinies?" Ripcat walked to Duppy Hob's side and placed his snout close to the old man's yellowed ear. "Ha!"
"I am old here on Gabagalus, but on the Dark Shore I am much stronger." Duppy Hob's head turned with a sound of crinkling cartilage, and his puncture-hole eyes stared impassively at the beastmarked face. "To control my dwarves, I needed to put in place on Irth someone from the Dark Shore where I was exiled—an antenna, if you will."
"So I'm an antenna now." Ripcat continued circling, snout wrinkled before the ghastly smell of curdled flesh. "You duped Caval and killed Lara to send me to Irth so that I would serve as your antenna. You exploited me to broadcast messages to your dwarves. Is that right?" His sharp teeth flashed. "Well, your antenna left the Door in the Air open out of ignorance. And through that Door came the Dark Lord. All this time I thought his arrival my fault. But now you'll tell me you sent him. You are ultimately responsible for the Dark Lord."
"No." Duppy Hob lidded his eyes like a turtle, reflecting back. "The Dark Lord himself was of Irth. His name was Wrat, though he preferred to call himself by his mythic name: Hu'dre Vra." More sharp, chirping laughter whistled from his chest. "No, no, no, I did not send that pompous idiot. I sent the gremlin inside Wrat and the cacodemons that obeyed the greml
in."
Ripcat cringed at the memory of the cacodemons. "Then you are responsible for all those deaths, all that destruction?"
"It was necessary," his rib-scrubbed voice whispered. "Every great achievement requires blood sacrifice."
Ripcat suppressed a shiver of revulsion and stood before the old man with his claws tightened to fists. "What great achievement?"
"I sent you first to be my antenna. Reece Morgan of the Dark Shore." Another breath of mirth tangled in his lungs, and the veiled witches hovered in the hatchway. "When you arrived, the shock of confronting the Abiding Star overcame you. Your magic—my magic—created a skin of light to protect you from those rays in the desert where you landed. I admit that as Ripcat, you were useless to me. So I was forced to send the gremlin. When you eventually destroyed it, you had shed your skin of light. You were Reece again, and I didn't need the gremlin anymore. I had you to serve as my antenna. You enabled me to communicate with my dwarves. That's all that mattered to me—reclaiming my dwarves." He gasped for breath, a gnarled hand to his throat. "And don't you dare ask me why. You will find out in time, in time, in time. We must use our time very wisely now."
The witches hovered closer, chiding their master for getting overworked. Through their gauzy masks, they cast disapproving frowns at Ripcat.
"Enough!" Ripcat snarled, and the veiled women stood back, hands casting warding signs at him. "Who is this old man? Answer me!"
The witches backed off silently.
"They answer only to me," Duppy Hob whispered.
"I don't like you, old man." With a tiger's slouch, Ripcat placed himself in front of the frail figure. "You say you killed my Lara. I want to know about that. I want to know just who you are." Stars of malice glinted in his long eyes, and he reached out and took the front of the old man's tunic in his claws. "And you're going to tell me everything."
As Ripcat lifted the birdweight man out of his chair, the floor disappeared underfoot, and he hung helpless in the talons of a furry, thick-shouldered man with adder green eyes. He stared agape at his own beastmarks from inside Duppy Hob's body! And behind those tapered animal eyes, he sensed Duppy Hob staring back with malefic glee.
"Now you are mine, Reece Morgan." Ripcat's voice spoke Duppy Hob's words, and the old body flailed bonelessly in the clawed grasp of the Cat. "Wake—and remember!"
The shout deafened to a roar. Ripcat felt his consciousness shredding away from the withered body that had clasped him. Flung into the Great Silence, Ripcat remembered Reece. All his memories returned to him from where dreams were woven, and he recalled trying to heal Lara of her pain—of the wounds he had felt responsible for.
Memories congealed like a wave sludging to shore. The joined awareness of Ripcat and Reece trembled in the Great Silence before the black darkness of Duppy Hob. With telepathic ardor, the devil worshipper's life revealed itself.
He remembered now that he had grown up here in Gabagalus, well over two million days ago, the son of a wort farmer. As a young man he had trained to become a rocket pilot, and he had sought his fortune offworld, exploring the perilous planets closest to the Abiding Star, where few dared journey.
Treacherous stellar currents marooned him on World's End among squid monkeys and poison-spore mushrooms. He would have perished then as so many other luckless wanderers had before him, except for a demon from the Upper Air.
The ether-devil took up residence in the smashed wreckage of the rocket. By accident—by the deft hand of the blind god Chance—the mess of shattered lenses in the navigation pod proved an excellent receptor of charmlight from the Abiding Star and of ether forms from the Upper Air—the corona—of the Star.
This demon had taught Duppy Hob how to make soul-catchers from the lens shards of the crashed rocket. Listening to the voice that opened in his head when he stared into the prismatic splinters, the salamandrine explorer from Gabagalus stranded at World's End became possessed by a demon from the Upper Air.
Ether-devils partook of both the Abiding Star's Charm and the darkness that received its light. They swirled among and through each other with bodiless intelligence. Once they found their way to physical shapes, their hungers overwhelmed them.
In one instant, Reece experienced all the rapacious hunger of the demon, the insatiable appetite of darkness for light, of emptiness for substance. The ether-devil had taken Duppy Hob for its own, and together they had become one.
Reece recognized this demon. Floating in the Great Silence, he sensed its vivid, evil presence as the wicked intelligence of the Dark Shore. There it had thrived under many names: Ahriman, Belial, Shaitan. Duppy Hob had brought it with him when the dwarves heaved him into the Gulf. They had not overthrown their master but the demon who controlled their master.
Reece writhed with Duppy Hob's demonic voracity, wanting to devour all four mystic worlds—the Dark Shore, the Bright Worlds, the Upper Air, and the Abiding Star. He wanted to eat it all, to chew everything down to its inmost name.
The demon felt destined to eat all the worlds, but so far he had not been able to get past the one dark world where the dwarves had thrown him. For two million days, he had squatted in Duppy Hob's body on the Dark Shore, devouring human lives, using mass graves for his cesspools. He ate pain and created cities to help him—huge talismanic lenses framed in concrete and steel to better house his bloated greed, immense as the world-stone itself.
He ate pain, two million days of pain, to build the magical strength in himself so that he could reach across the Gulf and begin to devour the Bright Worlds
The spell broke, and Ripcat staggered back into his body. He released the old man in his claws and looked at his sable palms and clawed fingers. Ripcat again, he felt narrowed to his bestial form—yet he remembered everything about his life as Reece Morgan. All those memories seemed infinitesimal in the cloud of horror that billowed from his vision of Duppy Hob. "You—you're Satan!"
The small, geriatric salamandrine, head to his shoulder, body slumped, watched him from the seat where Ripcat had dropped him.
Ripcat shivered with an underlying thunder of terror. To hold his mind together, he spoke a comforting thought aloud, "The magic that pollutes these worlds—the magic is not mine but yours."
"Your magic is mine, Reece Morgan." The old man lifted a blood-webbed hand and pointed to himself. "I sent you to Irth." He gasped and struggled to sit upright. "Your presence is part of my grand magic. And you have served me well—albeit unwittingly." He motioned for the witches, and they bent and helped him to rise to his slippered feet. "Knowing that you are not at all responsible for the gremlin and its cacodemons ravaging Irth offers reward enough for the pain I've caused you, yes?"
Ripcat's mind felt like a shape of fire, burning with lucidity. The pawn of a monstrous demiurge, a demon who haunted worlds and devoured lives, he gazed numbly. He forced his mind to work, to form a thought that might help him comprehend the enormity of what he confronted. "What of the author of the worlds?" he asked almost soundless. "What of her child unmoving in her womb?" He peered at perdition in its disguise of shriveled flesh. "Is this true?"
"More true than we."
"Then this is her dream?" Ripcat felt warmed by the thought of a being greater than the demon and its hunger. "The universe as we know it is the dream of a pregnant woman?"
"Dreams within dreams, Reece Morgan." Bent and stiff, the old one hobbled toward the hatchway escorted by the witches. "Come along now. We have chatted enough of me. Now I have something of your own to show you."
The hatch admitted them to a capacious anteroom appointed with wall-fixed benches and chairs of chamois. Oblong portholes shone blue with crazed reflections from the mermaids' realm.
Not until the veiled women strapped Duppy Hob into one of the chairs did Ripcat realize that they occupied a vehicle. A moment later, the ratcheting hum of engine noise penetrated the cork floor.
Ripcat secured a red amulet cord across his lap as he obse
rved the witches do, and Charm held them in place when the ship disengaged from the undersea suite. Waving mermaids blurred past, and moments later sea-foam washed the portholes and day sky burst into view.
The fabled countryside of Gabagalus sprawled under the Abiding Star, and puffs of cloud filled the sky like white roses.
The heat of day had burned off the last of the brown algal caul from night under the sea. High fields of red lichen tilted above slick yellow farmlands of wort and green paddies of cress. Peaceful windmill villages stood like islands on the wet plains. Their garden purlieus adjoined compact orchards and country lanes that rayed across the glistening land for leagues before touching other hamlets.
"These worts induce telepathic trances and are cherished in all the worlds," the old man said softly, eyes hooded, small frame shivering with the flight's vibrations as he remembered back a lifetime. "This wort only sprouts here in Gabagalus. That is the reason why empire has come to this remote edge of creation."
"Where are we going?" Ripcat pressed his face against the porthole and sighted a rocket pad with a silver liner erect on its pillowblocks, ready to launch.
"To the Dark Shore."
Ripcat moved to get out of his seat, and the red cord snaked tightly against his waist and held him fast. "I can’t leave Irth."
The old man said nothing. He gazed out the porthole at a distant city of crystal filigree. "You know Irth is a wild planet. Civilization has never really touched it, not even here in Gabagalus. There is too much reliance on Charm for any genuine achievement to occur." A mild glittering in his eyeholes signaled humor. "But the Dark Shore—ah, there without Charm, where darkness is as plausible as light, great achievements are indeed possible."
Knobby, coral-like mountains reared outside the portholes. Gummy green mucilage stained perforated rocks and crevices. Atop a roughly faceted limestone cliff rose an air pier replete with mooring trestles and berthing stanchions. They docked there with loud metallic gonging and a shudder that droned to silence with the dying engine noise.
