by A. Attanasio
The witches unstrapped the old man, and he laboriously stood upright. "Come along, Reece Morgan. It is time to go back home."
"I can’t leave Irth." Ripcat removed the red cord and climbed through the hatch after Duppy Hob and his witches. "Why are you sending me back?"
"Always the why." Duppy Hob's voice echoed from far away.
Ripcat stepped onto a ledge of charcoal and nitre. At the brink of a blue abyss, muscular, shaggy Dogbrick stood beside the shimmering transparency of Lara.
Startled, Ripcat blinked—and they were gone. In a bound, he rushed to the brink and caught sight of them dropping through empty air, flailing like eels.
He spun furiously about, glaring for Duppy Hob. And the old man stood directly behind him. With a soft push, he sent startled Ripcat over the edge.
Wind snatched him away in its great hand, and Duppy Hob vanished above him. The green knobby mountain peaks disappeared, too, and the blue sky widened, darkened, dissolved to night—and he fell across cold, shoreless vistas of fluorescent star smoke and comet veils.
Part Four:
Empire of Darkness
"There is no freedom from our freedom.
—Gibbet Scrolls, Screed 2:16
Devil’s Work
Empire of Darkness in red letters encircled a stylized goat’s head, stenciling a pavement slab in front of a converted warehouse in lower Manhattan. A homeless squatter slept on the metal stoop, wrapped in cardboard beneath black steel-sheeted double doors.
No signs marked this entrance save a tiny reverse pentagram painted in fine scarlet razor lines. A staring eyeball covered the peephole at the center of the inverted star, and if one could peer back through that lens, the exposed interior would stand empty: bare concrete floor and fluted iron columns gloomy with alley light let down from caged windows.
By night here, several hundred revelers milled to thundering music played by live bands on wire-mesh platforms suspended directly over the dancers. Floor and ceiling strobes ripped light and flung shadows through the crowd. The din shook rust from the ceiling's exposed girders.
To Ripcat, the place stank of sourness—an acid mix of rancid sweat, stale urine, and brick mold. He climbed stone steps up out of the darkness where Duppy Hob had pushed him.
A moment ago, he had tumbled helplessly through the starry Upper Air into the void of the Gulf. Lightless cold wrenched him. Then, he had tumbled onto a stone floor with a startled groan like a dreamer falling out of bed.
He had glimpsed Duppy Hob's green slippers winking up the stone steps: That was his last remembrance. Traffic noise churned from outside, and an acrid stench of motor smoke burned his sinuses. He did not stop to investigate. He rolled out of the darkness and scampered up the stairs after the green slippers.
Ripcat stopped at the head of the steps and blinked into an open space of morning light grilled with shadows. A loft of metallic screens hung from a molded ceiling. The man in green slippers who stood hashed in these shadows smiled with a strangely youthful exuberance. Tousled hair stiff as wild rye capped a round, clean, adolescent face.
"Remember me?" the young man said in a spry version of Duppy Hob's voice. He leaned casually against an iron column, arms crossed over his black tunic fretted in gold. His small, jet-black eyes said in a less-than-friendly way that he knew more than he would say. Those fixed, staring holes of darkness shimmered with an almost ultraviolet sheen. "This is my human guise. What do you think? Too young perhaps? I look inexperienced. But that's the advantage of youth. It's disarming."
The young man had no more odor than a mirage, and this perplexed the Cat. "You're—Duppy Hob?"
"Yes, I'm stronger on the Dark Shore, as I told you." He smiled warmly. "I don't enjoy returning to Gabagalus. I'm so old there. It was worth it, though, to get you."
"Why?"
"Again, the why." The youth, swinging by one arm, spun his compact body around the column of molded iron. "It feels divine to come back. Do you know where we are?"
Ripcat advanced into the capacious hall, staring up through a lattice of catwalks and scaffolds at the high windows. Morning sunlight stood like a golden angel against the pitted, time-stained brickwork of an adjacent building. "This is the Dark Shore," he said with grim realization.
Duppy Hob's puncture-hole eyes never left Ripcat as he walked across the wide room to a metal ladder. "Oh yes, this is the Dark Shore—the planet Earth, as unlike Irth's dominions as you can imagine." He pulled the ladder toward him, and a pulley let it down at the angle of a stairway. "But you don't have to imagine. You're from this cold rock, aren't you? And now you remember. Even though you still wear the skin of Ripcat, you remember."
Up the iron steps Duppy stepped briskly, and Ripcat followed. "What is this place?"
"It's a club—a dance hall—a useful facade." The metal stairs clanged under the weight of the climbers. "At night, musicians and crowds make so much noise no one can hear the chanting of my acolytes."
"Acolytes—you mean, ritual helpers?" Ripcat stood on a scaffold before Duppy Hob and a barred window. Even this close, where the Cat could feel the man's body heat, the youth had no detectable odor. "You work magic at nights, here on the Dark Shore—"
"Here in Tribeca. Reade Street, in the shadow of the civilized world's most concentrated power." He jerked a thumb out the window. An alley framed two identical platinum towers shining with rose-pale light. "World Trade Center. Beacons of affluence. Symbol of my power."
Ripcat cocked an eye tuft. "Your power?"
"Why are you surprised that my interest in this world is proprietary? I've lived here long enough." Duppy Hob strolled watchfully along the platform beside the windows. "You saw that in our shared trance back in Gabagalus, didn't you? When my dwarves cast me into the Gulf, this is the planet where I landed. Over two million days ago—six thousand Earth years. When I arrived, this was but a world of animal-hide tents and mud cities. The science I brought here from Gabagalus changed everything. So, yes, this city, those towers of commerce, the very civilization on this cold rock, these are symbols of my power."
Leaning over the railing, Ripcat drew a line of sight through the open trapdoor and down the stone stairwell he had climbed. Absolute black squatted below. "You have a charmway in the cellar," he observed.
"I have built many charmways in this city alone." Duppy Hob gripped the rails of a wall ladder with hands and green slippers and slid down to the floor. "I can return to Gabagalus whenever I choose—though you saw the price I must pay to feel again the Charm of the Abiding Star. I don't go back often. It's much healthier for me to remain here on the Dark Shore, where the Charm of my own bones is enough to live as a god. Not quite the god you were at Arwar Odawl, mind you. My, my—you not only drew water from rocks but sprouted whole forests from those minerals! Nothing of that sort for us. Here on this Earth, I've had to live a far more meager existence. Yet an influential one, as you can see."
Ripcat tossed a glance over his shoulder, through the dusty, caged window at the chewed bricks of the alley and a keyhole glimpse of the flat, purely geometric towers. "Your magic rules a dim and cold world, Duppy Hob."
"The Dark Shore has none of the Charm of Irth. I agree with you." He kicked the trapdoor shut over the cellar hole. "That is why my acolytes work their chanting rituals down there every night, drawing what vague Charm they can from this massive array of amulets I've built—each city a talisman—Manhattan, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Dhaka, Sydney, London—a world of giant amulets gathering dilute Charm out of the planet itself." He waved for Ripcat to come down from the scaffold and opened a side door under a smashed exit sign. "Combined, those devices have garnered me enough power to live forever as lord of this world."
Ripcat slid down the ladder, drawn by the draft of outdoor scents. He stood in the exit, pushing his face into the columnar light that fell into the alley, tasting the gutter stench and engine exhaust. "Lord of this pitiful place?"
"Believe me, Reece, I've devoted my whole life to get
ting out of here." Duppy Hob stepped into the alley, ushered Ripcat ahead of him, and let the unmarked, knobless door wheeze shut. Their breaths smoked in the chill air. "This is a warm period on this planet, mind you. I got here some time after the last glacial epoch. There'll be another onslaught of ice soon enough, and I want out before then."
They stood in a tight alley littered with windblown newspapers. Passersby bundled against the wintry morning moved at the street end and, beyond them, glossy metallic vehicles identical to those he had seen in his dreams of Darwin—cars, buses, trucks.
He remembered that life in total now. And all of it, the whole transit of his life, seemed infinitesimal, consigned to fleet anonymity in the shadow of this greater being. He gazed forlornly at the busy street and wished he enjoyed the ignorance shared among those drifting lives.
"Want to run free—escape from me?" Duppy Hob swept an arm toward the mouth of the alley. "Go ahead. I won't stop you. I won't have to. The whole world is like this city. Roads everywhere. Radio waves everywhere. Nothing is hidden from me, because this whole planet has become my talisman."
A blare of horns and the growling of engines kept Ripcat from moving. He read river scents on the iced wind and beyond that the sea, pelagic, ancient just as on Irth. If he closed his eyes, he would think he stood in a factory lane on the sea cliffs of Saxar.
The cold spoiled that dream. The wind that brushed his fur whisked away blood warmth and left him shivering. His nostrils dilated before a fragrant hint of grilled meat.
"Hungry?" Duppy Hob read Ripcat's beastmarks accurately. "Out here there is not enough Charm for common amulets to sustain life. You have to eat to live. You were a vegetarian as Reece Morgan, when you last lived here on Earth. But with those beastmarks and the metabolism that goes with them, you're carrying one big appetite. And I don't think vegetables will satisfy."
"Now that you've given me back my memories of Reece, remove this skin of light." Ripcat huddled his shoulders against the cold. "This body doesn't belong in this world. I want to return to my own form again. Give me back my original body."
"Oh no, Ripcat. You are far more useful to me as you are." The youthful face smiled but not those cheerless, oil black eyes. "Follow me, and I'll show you why I went to such peril to take you from Gabagalus myself."
At the back of the alley, a metal plate in the ground yielded to Duppy Hob's grip and slid aside. They descended down bellied steps patched with gray ice into the lightless chamber of the charmway. A flame like a bright petal opened in Duppy Hob's hand, and he set it upon the darkness.
The vault lit up, revealing a stone altar carved from the bedrock itself. A bowl scooped from atop the center of the altar wobbled with liquid silver light.
Ripcat paid it little heed. His attention went directly to the alcove of the charmway, and he bolted into that shadowed niche, seizing a chance to escape back to Irth. He smacked hard into a rock wall and sat down in a drizzle of stars.
"Come out of there, Reece." Duppy Hob's laughter raked the chamber with giddy echoes. "It's just an empty vault. I keep the charmway closed until I need it."
Ripcat emerged, rubbing his bruised snout. He surveyed the ritual chamber, the stairwell to the dance hall, the iced steps to the alley. The throb of his nose convinced him to forget about escape, and he moved toward the anvil-shaped altar with its inset bowl of quicksilver.
Duppy Hob invited him closer and sat on the edge of the altar stone. "At night, while the eternal party rages above, my acolytes chant a cadence that carries my influence through the charmway to Gabagalus. Using Reece as an antenna—and, before him, the gremlin and his cacodemons—my will reached across Irth to direct my dwarves. Such a terrible bother. But my goal is a great one. It has taken all these two million days for me to get this far, this close to greatness."
In the silvery light, Ripcat's long eyes gleamed coldly. "What greatness can come of maggots?"
"Obedience," Duppy Hob answered at once. "They followed my commands without ever realizing they moved again under my control. I used them to set up a soul-catcher under the Abiding Star itself. They thought that the fall of the Necklace of Souls into the Labyrinth of the Undead on World's End a blunder, an accident of their eagerness to depose me. But that was no accident. Rather a last, desperate ploy to reclaim my power—and with a vengeance. It took hundreds of thousands of days, two million days actually, but my soul-catcher eventually absorbed sufficient Charm to catch a truly enormous soul."
"The child's soul—" Ripcat gasped, and all at once he felt understanding shaping itself like an ice form, hardening to something he could grasp. And the cold of it burned him. "You caught the soul of the nameless lady's child. You captured it with the Necklace of Souls!"
"Where it safely abides even as we speak." Flesh crinkled mirthfully around the holes of Duppy Hob's eyes.
"That's why the child does not move in her womb." Ripcat stepped within claw strike of the smug youth, who sat on the altar with ankles crossed, relishing Ripcat's reaction. "You've captured its life, haven't you?"
"Oh yes. And I control it, too," he announced triumphantly. "If the nameless lady who has authored our universe wants her child to live, she will give me power over all the worlds. She will make me God! Once she agrees to that, she may have the Necklace and her child's soul. Isn't it delicious? All this is possible because I possess the soul of our maker's child!" Then his face clenched as he added, "Or I did—until a gnome stole it from me."
Claws clicked in Ripcat's palms as his body flexed with understanding. "Old Ric—he stole it from your dwarves to heal an elven clan."
A shouted laugh lifted Duppy Hob off his haunches. "The fool carries the very purpose of his quest about his neck and has no notion!" Weary with amusement, he slapped a square, practical hand over his chest. "The irony has been a blister on my heart since I found out. But what can I do? That idiot gnome is running around the Bright Shore with a Radiant One who devours everyone who gets near."
"You're scared of the Shadow Eater."
"Even the Nameless Ones who dream these worlds fear the sentinels. That is why they are sentinels. They are powerful." Duppy Hob fixed Ripcat with a narrow stare. "You should be scared, too. If he absorbs your light, you—whichever form you are, man or beast—you are finished. Forever. Radiant Ones are too hot for us. Our souls melt like snowflakes in their light." He sagged, elbows on knees, shrinking at the very thought. "To keep as much distance between that monster and me, I've been directing my dwarves from here, trying to reclaim the Necklace that is mine, what I worked two million days to make mine."
Ripcat shook his head defiantly. "Looks to me like it belongs to Old Ric right now."
"Not for long." Duppy Hob slipped down from the altar with the anvil stone between them. "That's why you're here on the Dark Shore with me. You're going to help me." He reached across and took Ripcat by his shoulder. "Look with me into this eyepool. It holds just enough power from last night's chanting to transmit one command. You must see this."
The youth's strength felt immense and could have lifted Ripcat bodily if he resisted.
Ripcat did not resist, for he wanted to see into the eyepool, to learn as much as he could of this demon's plan. He slowly advanced until he met himself in the mirroring liquid. Blue spectra floated across his reflected face.
Elusive as an optical illusion, the spectra rearranged to the image of Dogbrick and Lara together. Shackles bound Dogbrick to the salt-stained wall of a sea cave.
"This is an illusion. You used Dogbrick and Lara to trick me on Gabagalus, to get me to the cliff edge—" Ripcat spoke hotly to himself, trying to talk himself away from the altar. As much as he feared to look, he knew he had to see more of these two lost friends.
"This is different," Duppy Hob assured him, their brows nearly touching. "You are seeing this through an eye charm. It is most real. Watch—"
A burly dwarf approached Lara and snatched the crystal prism from her throat. Instantly, her image wavered, assumed sp
asmodic postures, then blinked away entirely. The dwarf fit the prism to the latex pouch of a sling and snapped it quickly out the mouth of the sea cave.
The crystal prism winked like a star, then fell into darkness.
"What have you done?" Ripcat cried. "Her soul is bound to that prism!"
"So it is." Duppy Hob stepped back with a satisfied sigh. "At last I have a piece of the Necklace in hand again. I didn't dare bring it across until you were here. It is useless to me without you."
Ripcat hissed with fright. "She can't survive a fall through the abyss!"
"She falls through a Door in the Air, just as you did." The fingers of one hand tapped his chin with mock surprise: "Oh, and look where she is landing—"
The quicksilver fluttered, and the blue spectra formed the gray, key-toothed skyline of Manhattan and an iron bridge across the wintry Hudson. A streak of light fled down the sky from above the city. It burned across the gray river and its ice cakes, slanted over the New Jersey Turnpike, and slammed into a catkin meadow among a few brown trees.
The frozen ground erupted in a mucky explosion that tossed clods of peat high into the frosted sky. Moments later, out of the canebrakes, a mud woman lurched, covered scalp to sole in algal slime and industrial ooze.
"Not very dignified," Duppy Hob chuckled, "but I would have been foolish to use the charmway here twice in one day. I don't want any pesky wizards or clever charmwrights discovering my secret corridors between our shores. Not just yet." He slapped the bowl of quicksilver, and it splashed to nothing. "Follow me—our work has moved upstairs."
Excitedly, Duppy Hob ran around the altar, up the curved stairwell and through the trapdoor to the empty dance hall. From there, he opened a fire door and bounded up steel flights, pulling himself along by the knurled iron banisters, chatting without losing breath. "Now that one piece of the Necklace of Souls has arrived on the Dark Shore, I may use it to find that larcenous gnome and my Necklace. But to do so, I need you."
