by A. Attanasio
"Killing basilisks stokes an appetite." Jyoti winked encouragingly. She liked this earnest elf. She had seen the fear in his face when he had peeked into the tidal pool at the sea viper exiled from its element as cruelly as they had been torn from their former lives—and yet, the next moment, his features had brightened at the prospect of a meal.
A voice squeaked from her aviso. She gave her name and title and described the surroundings. She scanned the wet land with her lens cube looking for something identifiable. On a nearby butte, she spotted a rocket pad and gave its location. "They'll meet us there."
"Who?" Broydo followed Jyoti along a slope of wild boulders to the trace he had spotted.
"Their foreign office is sending someone to meet us at that rocket pad." She passed the lens cube to the elf and showed him where to look. "We'll warn them about the dwarves. I didn't want to mention invaders on the aviso. If we're overheard, a panic could ensue."
Stromatolites stood like mossy stumps along the path of loose bricks and seashells. Tracks of small creatures—crabs, millipedes, waterspiders—wrinkled the scalloped drifts of sand that banked the brick path. "Life is so small..." Broydo mumbled.
"You sound like Dogbrick," Jyoti cajoled. "Are elves philosophers?"
"Elves are too practical for philosophy," Broydo replied quickly, "especially counselors, who must advise the leaders with pragmatic assesments, not ideals. But this quest has made me philosophical, margravine. To know that there is an author of worlds and that our lives are but dreams ... does that not trouble you? Do we not seem so much smaller now?"
"I lost almost everyone I loved to the Dark Lord." Jyoti kicked at glittery shards of periwinkles and fish bones in the tide wrack. "Mine is a philosophy of survival. We are small lives and only together do we matter."
"We are united by this terrible threat," Broydo agreed, "but tell me, margravine: Why have you given yourself to this quest? My grandmother, our clan leader, commanded me to see this through. But you—you've lost everyone, you said. Why do you care?"
"I lost nearly everyone, it's true, Broydo. I did not lose heart." She placed both hands on her amulet-vest. "Charm saved me. Without my amulets, I'd have gone mad with grief. The power in these hex-gems and conjure-wires has made my suffering bearable enough to feel the pain of others. And their joy. I don't want these worlds to end.”
"You have been reduced to your lone heart—all that remains of your clan." The elf's shoulders slumped sadly. "I am surprised that even the great power of Charm can heal such pain."
"Not all my people are lost." Jyoti's jaw tightened. "I have a brother yet alive and scores of survivors who managed, like myself, to elude the Dark Lord. Together, we will rebuild Arwar Odawl.”
“And for that, we move through this dream,” Broydo nodded. "If only we could find the others." He led the way into a vale of billowing scarves: wind-shivering tentacles of giant sea anemones. The elf swatted them with his sword, and they retracted. "We must locate Old Ric and tell him what we know."
If the dwarves have not already found him, Jyoti feared. "The Shadow Eater—"
"Asofel," Broydo corrected her.
"Can even Asofel stop these many dwarves?" She recalled the fiery shape she had briefly chased in Saxar and doubted any one being could stop so many maggot-warriors.
"The Radiant One is of another order," the elf reported. "Old Ric believes Asofel has the strength to make the dream right again for the nameless lady."
"That strange nameless lady—" She lifted her chin curiously. "Who is she, Broydo?"
"Little is known of the Nameless Ones," the elf replied. "They dwell beyond World's End, beyond the bright and burning Upper Air, inside the very aura of the Abiding Star."
"They are creatures of light."
"Less substantial than we, and more powerful." His mind shimmered when he thought of these entities for whom he was part of a dream. "In a way, I suppose, we are their shadows."
"Just as the dark worlds are the shadows of the bright."
Broydo accepted this silently. Soon after, he mumbled, "I am deeply sorry, margravine." Then added more loudly, "—sorry that I held the serpent sword and used it so poorly when Ripcat and Dogbrick needed it to fend the dwarves."
"I thought we had settled that, Broydo." She put a kind hand on his shoulder. "Don't blame yourself. Together, we will get them back from the dwarves." If they are yet alive, she told herself, and then adjusted the flow of Charm from her power wands to quiet her anxiety.
A pulse of thunder lifted their attention to the skyport at the far end of the road. A silver-finned rocket reclined on its launch-pad, surrounded by wheeling gulls scattering across the morning.
Thunderheads cored with orange flames rose from the end of the road, and a star lifted into the blue day. The rocket swiftly arced out of sight, and its contrail etched the indigo zenith, pointing to where the ship had flown beyond the sky and into the Upper Air.
"Where is it going?" the elf wondered.
"Far worlds." Jyoti continued down the long road. Apricot clouds lingered over the launchpad.
Farmworkers riding a giant sloth crossed their path, carrying harvest rakes to the cress paddies. They shouted and waved, and Broydo saluted them with his sword.
A white cumulus of rocket exhaust still floated above the skyport when Jyoti and Broydo arrived. Salamandrine stevedores laded another ship for an afternoon launch. Forklifts conveyed bales of wort and cress to the hold of the horizontal rocket.
The gatekeeper raised the spiked fence at their approach and bowed, greeting Jyoti by her title. "Margravine!" A green salamandrine with yellow blotches, he spoke dominion dialect without an accent. "Welcome to Gabagalus!"
"We have urgent news!" Jyoti noted that the guard wore an open aviso at the hip of his spun-gold raiment. "Dwarves have arrived not far from here, in the highlands!"
Below his turban, the gatekeeper's shiny brow creased with worry lines. "Dwarves? Please, pause for a moment."
Jyoti turned to Broydo for confirmation and spotted him wandering off. A blazing outdoor grill drew him to where salamandrines in kilts mingled, eating with their long, big-pad fingers.
Overhead, a flock of gliders in camouflage white and blue slid across the sky on their way into the mountains from where Jyoti and Broydo had descended.
"You are a head of state from a dominion of Irth," the guard stated humorlessly. "We received your distress call from the mountains. You must have crashed at dawn, and the tide has swept away your balloon or your boat."
Jyoti bent forward to speak directly into the gatekeeper's open aviso. "We came to Gabagalus through a charmway from the wilds of Zul."
"Charmways?" The yellow-marked salamandrine took her arm and led her toward a solar wagon mounded with crates. He motioned to the manifest, marked with ports of call she did not recognize. "Margravine, Gabagalus is an interworld trade colony. The prosperity of this entire continent depends upon the security of these heavily underwritten agrarian enterprises. There are no charmways breaching our security."
Validating that statement, heaven's drumroll rattled the tiles of the arcade roof. A jet of green flame blazed skyward from the crag where Jyoti and Broydo had entered Gabagalus.
"That's charmfire!" Jyoti gawked at the blackened stob that had been a summit moments before. "By the Goddess!"
"Please quiet down. This is a sophisticated audience—rocket mechanics, pilots—and they understand about charmways. But there are workers here who don't. If we give them cause, they'll spread panicky rumors of holes into other worlds. It's hard enough to get good farmers..."
The margravine stared beyond the gatekeeper and the sheet-stone walls of the rocket pad.
Rising out of the algal muck of the adjoining paddies, pointed heads whistled shrill war cries. Dwarves slogged ashore, unwearied by their descent from the mountains in stream currents and irrigation canals. Quickly, they hacked foot niches into the stone wall with their nimble hatchets and stormed
onto the launch field.
Flares of green charmfire from skyport guards cut into the first wave of muddy invaders. The flames exploded the miniature warriors to shredded metal and papery embers of flesh.
Another throng of dwarves soon spilled over the sheet-stone walls. And more smashed through the spiked gate, shrieking their piercing berserker cries.
Jyoti tripped the gatekeeper and rolled his slim body under the wagon before he fully realized what had happened. "Do you have a weapon?" she shouted above the din of screaming dwarves and searing firecharms.
The gatekeeper shook his head and clawed at the ground, eyes spinning with fright.
"Then pray to your gods." Jyoti ducked around the side of the wagon, peering under the carriage, searching for Broydo. She sighted his bark boots scurrying toward her.
Standing, she watched him running, knees kicking high, serpent sword stabbing the air in his jerking arm. A dozen dwarves pursued.
"The sword!" she shouted, and a hatchet blurred over her head and struck her topknot, spilling her yellow hair over her face. When she brushed the tresses aside, she saw Broydo spin about and slash with the serpent sword.
Maggots flopped to the ground among crashing hatchets and armor. She ran to his side where he stood in a wide stance howling.
"Calm yourself!" She pulled him back toward the wagon, away from slashing bolts of charmfire and whirling hatchets. "We have to find where they're coming from."
"Down the flues from the mountain charmway," the elf guessed.
"There are too many. Look!" Jyoti's shrill stare pointed to soldiers falling back from the perimeter under a glare of blue flames. The dwarves had seized a firecharm!
"Too many for the flues." The serpent sword trembled in his grasp. "What do we do?"
"There's a well out there—it's a charmway." Jyoti pushed him ahead of her. "Let's go find it."
Broydo dug in his heels. "Why do I have to go first?"
"You have the sword."
He curled around and held the shivering bone blade between them. "Take it."
She pushed the flat of the blade away with her open palm. "Smiddy Thea gave it to you."
"And I'm giving it to you!" He closed her hand around the hilt. "There are too many. I will follow you."
"Stay close then!" The sword pulled her after it, its life in its balance, and she gave her body to it, let it lead her out from behind the wagon.
Star white streamers of energy arced overhead as some dwarf struggled to fit a firecharm to its three-fingered hand. Jyoti let the serpent sword cut a path for her directly toward that star-welder's fire.
Maggots toppled on all sides, and Broydo hopped among the spasming gouts of white flesh. It took all his alertness to keep up with the suddenly slinky and agile Jyoti. So when a firecharm skidded under him and briefly tangled between his ankles, he jumped away from the green metal muzzle and wood stock. By the time he recognized it for what it was and twisted around to seize it, a dwarf had snatched it.
The scalded barrel pointed at the elf's face. He did not blink.
A pale blur of bone blade thwacked the dwarf's helmet, and the faceless warrior convulsed to a maggot.
Broydo caught the firecharm before it hit the ground.
"The charmway is here!" Jyoti dashed among shards of the trampled gate. Dwarves vanished under her hacking sword. The swarming dwarves led her directly to the sewage duct, a concrete drainage pipe half-submerged in the algal pools behind the rocket pad.
"It stinks!" Broydo complained as they approached the feculent duct. Yet, he did not slacken his pace, for the drainage pipe glowed green within, packed with dwarves. More of the manic minions spilled down the culvert in shrill pursuit. Armor barely slowed them in the sludge.
The elf hurried to stay within range of the serpent sword, for he had no notion how to use the firecharm in his hands.
Gray water sloshed at his knees, and he hugged the weapon to his chest. Jyoti bowed first, bending to enter the cloacal tunnel, sword first. Maggots splashed in the fecal water, drowning.
Broydo gritted his teeth. He followed her into the tunnel, head lowered in humble obeisance within this shrine of final things and darkness.
Beastmarked in Manhattan
Dogbrick heard the pain of the dwarves. Something had begun killing them in the charmways, and their death wails trilled at a pitch his keen ears could read. Though far away, their dying sounded swift, almost instantaneous. Their cries sliced to silence. No wounded shrieks followed. And many died at once.
Soon he would be dead, as well. He had been shackled too long without food in this cave, licking water from the dew-chilled walls. Charmless without his amulets, he starved. He felt too weak to stand. Lying among his chains, he stared through the open mouth of the cave with dull eyes.
"Rest, Dog." Lara hovered like mist, more felt than seen. "Rest and share with me. Share."
A taste of moonlight colored the air, but Dogbrick lacked the strength to raise his head. From under his salt-crusted mane, honey brown eyes watched tenuous vapors weave Lara's phantom. She squatted before him naked, sensuous as smoke fumes writhing, then dissolving in a gust of sea wind.
"I'm trying to hold on to you, Dogbrick," the phantom whispered almost silently, tickling the hairs of his long ears. "I need you. You must not fall into the Gulf."
He closed his eyes.
"Stay awake." The phantom suffused the space around Dogbrick, fraught with the odor of blue dusk. "Stay awake, or I will slip away. The crystal prism has fallen to the Dark Shore. It is pulling me after it. Stay awake now."
Dogbrick heaved himself into a sitting position. Planetshine glossed the night sea. A moment ago, the ocean had been dull with daylight. The languid surf had lulled him asleep. He sniffed for the ghost.
The salt tang of spume carried a sour taint of guano from cliff rookeries. He swung his long head, reaching for odors and not finding the dry, cheesy stink of the dwarves. Yet he heard their dying. Louder and closer, their screams leaped like flames.
"You're awake!" Lara stood cat-eyed and transparent against the somber night sky. "I fell to the Dark Shore while you slept. Can you hear me?"
Through her naked outline, Dogbrick faced star fire shining out of seams among the clouds.
"I can only hold to Irth if you stay awake." She slid closer on the breeze. "I'm barely more than memory to you. But out there, on the cold world where the dwarves have cast me, I'm stupid. I can barely see straight. The fall has made me less. It took all my strength to warn the man who took the prism away from me. And he didn't listen. I know it. He has no idea what is going to happen."
The clouds healed themselves, and Dogbrick sat in darkness. Surf laved dimly over distant reefs in the ebb tide. His heart pumped weakly, and a ponderous wave of weariness rose over him.
"Oh don't fall asleep again—" She clung to him for purchase against the nightward tug of death, the pull into the abyss.
A freshened wind spat cold rain, reviving him a little. He lifted his face to the wet night and found the strength to mumble, "Lara—stay close."
"I'm here." Her dusky body shone with feverlight in the black socket of the cave. "I'm close enough now to help you. I can dance for you and draw strength for you out of the ground. You won't have to starve for Charm. I'm a witch. Reece trained me to do this."
She bent forward and kissed his cheek. At her touch, rainwater dripped down the weathered crevices of his face, and the apertures of his eyes flexed, seeing deeper into the dark, to the blind shapes of another world. He saw trees. Jungle birds fluted their cries from high galleries of looped vines. Lara danced naked among pale boles, the leaf floor quaking under her whirling steps.
The witch drummed power out of the ground and up the sturdy trunks of the trees. Caval and Reece had taught her the steps and the chants, and the rhythms entranced her and gave her strength to dance cold halos onto the forest floor.
The light that Lara danced shifted dreamlike to the faceted colors of the crysta
l prism itself.
Dogbrick's stare crisped. Lara's trance dancing had connected them to the soul-catcher. The crystal had held her ghost long enough that she could still see herself in it. Even from across the Gulf, the prism's lusters splurged around her.
Dogbrick's mind, loosened from his body by starvation and an absence of Charm, moved with the witch.
"Show us Reece Morgan," the witch commanded of the vessel that held her soul. And among its spectral shadows, they viewed Ripcat in rags standing stiffly on the rooftop of a gray brick building.
Reece sensed Lara. Her abrupt presence jarred the hypnotic rigor that had held him in place on the parapet. His stance relaxed, which Duppy Hob did not appear to notice, so absorbed was he in using Ripcat's body as an antenna to broadcast instructions to Irth.
Duppy Hob stood between a ventilator hood and a water tower. He gripped an amber power wand in both hands and held it up to the sky. The wind sloughing off the Hudson brushed back his wild rye hair and pressed the black tunic against his strong frame.
Static broke apart what Duppy Hob witnessed of Lara and the beastmarked man in Zul, and he snapped alert in time to see Ripcat dive off the rooftop.
He ran to the edge and watched impassively as the blue-furred creature landed in a springing run atop a neighboring roof.
Ripcat darted among vapor pipes and air-conditioning sheds and, with another prodigious leap, crossed to an adjoining building.
He ran along a roof ledge until he found a fire escape below and dropped to it. In moments, he had clambered into an alley and sped through back lanes and warrens, not breaking his stride even at tall fences but scrambling straight up them. He ran until his heart punched into his throat.
The farther he fled from Duppy Hob, the thinner his memory of himself as Reece Morgan became. Crouched between trash bins behind a Chinese restaurant on Canal Street, he remembered nothing of his former life as a human being. He panted for breath and scanned the skyline for Duppy Hob. Gray sky rivered overhead, and no one moved upon the rooftops.
