Fearing he would arrive late, the sorcerer used his Charm to bound up the steep slope. In moments, he traversed the treeless waste and churned through blue snowdrifts surrounding the powerful crag of the summit.
On a rampart above an icy cornice, he reached an open court of cracked flagstones surrounded by mighty rock formations. This was the platform where he would greet the Abiding Star and become pure light.
The lavender sky carried only a handful of sharp, silver stars. Low on the horizon of snow ridges, two worlds floated—Hellgate and Nemora, precarious smudges in the glare of the coming dawn. Ruddy light crept down the hanging rocks above him and would soon bring the Abiding Star into view.
Transfixed by the shine of glare ice at the peak, Caval stood motionless. These were the last moments of his mortal life. Soon he would abandon form entirely. He could not imagine what lay ahead, except that he knew he would be replete, whole in a way impossible in this world of physical limits and uncertainties.
"Here I am!" he exulted aloud. "Here I am—in the Calendar of Eyes!"
The Charm he had struggled his long life to gather to himself and to master served him well. The cold wind and rare atmosphere caused him no discomfort. Never before had he fit his body so well, painless and vibrant with health in these final moments before he would doff the flesh forever.
High cirrus cast metallic radiance across the blue sky, and the sorcerer opened his arms and turned a slow circle on the broken flagstones. He lifted his face to the void.
So strong was the moment that he decided to gaze upon the many moments of his own past that had gathered him here to his fulfillment.
With a beatific grin, he strode across the open court to a gap between two titanic boulders. From there, he could peer southeast toward the region where he had lived his days on Irth.
As before, when he had first glanced back at the sanctuary, time stratified. The mountainsides shifted under a blur of seasons—blizzards of past winters wavered in and out of sight between shining blue days of lost summers.
He had no interest in the redundant cycles of elements among these high peaks, and he willed his vision to cross the still universe of ice and shale to the distant lowlands where once he had lived.
Whirlpool radiance opened a peephole. He peered into that swirling brightness and beheld the shaggy cypresses and viscous swamp light of Elvre, the jungle dominion where he had served the Brood of Odawl as weapons master. Scrim of moss and lianas parted and revealed a smoldering mountain.
Caval gasped. What he beheld was not a mountain but—a city!
Slowly, unbelieving, he recognized twisted shapes as buildings collapsed into melted metal and rock. Broken avenues and upended pavements lay heaped under churning smoke. And everywhere strewn bodies and torn limbs smoldered in the mountainous pyre.
The sorcerer tried to pull his vision backward, thinking that he had inadvertently budged into a dire future. He thought he witnessed some apocalypse to come, as he had glimpsed the ruins of the sanctuary further ahead in time. But perception remained locked on that fiery debris.
"Arwar Odawl!" he cried out, identifying with certainty the toppled facades of buildings he knew too well.
Shock gripped him. Arwar Odawl had been the oldest and most picturesque of all the floating cities of Irth. He had lived most of his life there, and this silent mirage of horror scalded his soul.
A loud cry cut through him. The unfathomed depths of the collapsed city hid from view thousands interred in flame and crushed stone. He could behold no more, and he spun away, hands clapped to his eyes.
How can this be? he demanded of his memory. When he had left Arwar Odawl, 843 days ago, the city had been secure and his successors competent. What has happened?
Caval slumped to the flagstones, and he sat cross-legged, head hung, dazed. His Charm wavered and left him shivering against the icy paving stones. Gray eyes storm-lit, he stared blankly, remembering the whole of his life in that beautiful city.
The Margrave Keon had hired Caval directly from the Brood of Assassins when the sorcerer was untried, a callow student not yet ten thousand days old. A meticulous worker, Caval had proved capable, and for the next thirty-five thousand days, he had served the kindly and noble margrave as weapons master, creatively outwitting the enemies of Odawl so effectively that the old Peer knew nothing of strife during Caval's tenure.
Tears began to flow unhindered, and he pressed his palms to his eyes and reviewed in his mind the enemies who could have done this.
Angrily, he rose. What did it matter who among the rival Peers had slain his former master and the people they had been sworn to protect?
Arwar Odawl is fallen.
The light went out in his body. All strength fled. Even his Charm wobbled against the buffeting cold.
He knew if he let grief lead him, he would lose more of his Charm and then it would be nigh impossible to enter the caudal trance and become one again with the Abiding Star.
Arwar Odawl is fallen... He shook his whole body, trying to free it from the numbing shock of this truth. Another form returned to the formless.
But the lives—the people he knew... The inescapable horror defeated every attempt to free himself from grief and outrage.
Caval dared to open again the whirlpool tunnel of sight to Elvre. He had to make certain that he had not deceived himself. No word had reached the sanctuary of such a cataclysm. That meant nothing. The sages would be the last to know, there in their most remote mountain fastness, cultivating indifference to history and all its multifarious incidents.
His heart beat in him again as he faced once more the mangled heap of the destroyed city. From over his shoulder, beams of daylight pared away the last of the night shadows, and he cried aloud once more. He did not want to see this.
He dispelled the visionary vortex and turned away heavily. The white luminosity of the Abiding Star summoned him to the Beginning. Yet, after what he had seen, how could he go? Arwar Odawl needed him...
Arwar Odawl is no more!
Voices unfurled in the blinding new day. Young voices.
"Caval!"
Clouds loomed over the glittering snow peaks. Only his tracks marred the snowy ascent to the open court of ancient flagstones and ponderous rocks where he paced his grief. Ice motes glimmered among the gravel beds far down the mountain. But no figures appeared.
"Caval! We need you! Where are you?"
The sky enclosed a majestic prospect of mountains. The tumbling clouds seemed to carry the voices to him from every direction in this cavernous space.
"Caval!"
Distant snowfields echoed his name.
"Who intrudes?" he asked, already knowing the answer. He knew these voices. He had heard them so often before in his former life, when Arwar Odawl drifted free above the mist-torn jungles of Elvre.
Once he identified them, the voices stopped. In the dark silences within, they continued their calling—pleas from the heirs of his former master, the two beloved children of Margrave Keon.
"Jyoti! Poch!" the sorcerer called aloud, though he knew they could not hear him. He had sensed them only because he had used his Charm to open an astral window to Elvre. He called to them. To hear their voices through the reach of his Charm meant that they yet lived.
Is it possible? Hope flared in him that the unspoken voice of his master would call out next. Is it possible the Peers have been spared?
Concentrating, he stared down at the flagstones where prints of snow left by his boots dissolved in the day's brilliance.
"Margrave!" he called out and squeezed his eyes shut, wanting to receive a reply.
When he finally dared to summon his Charm again, he heard once more the children calling.
"Caval! We need you! Arwar Odawl is fallen! We alone have survived..."
His eyes opened, and the hot fire of day branded his retinas and hurt his face.
Keon is dead, he realized. Somehow the children have escaped this doom.
He rem
embered their eyes of green rimmed in blue, freckled faces and orange hair.
Daybreak heat lifted soft energy from the stones with a subtle scent of warmed soil. That was to be the cue that initiated his caudal trance. If he wanted, he could still use these signals to trigger the trance.
Instead, he stood taller and slowly raised his face toward the cold breath from the mountaintops. Though he had no desire to return to the difficult and dangerous life below, he had been summoned by ones he could not refuse. The children of his former master needed him.
Wait—
The heat of the day restored his Charm to its full potency and gave him a new prospect to wish for. He would exploit his vantage from the Calendar of Eyes to see their future. Perhaps they would not need him after all. Perhaps the future would disclose something better than what he feared.
He watched prodigal clouds overflowing with daylight and freedom. Using his Charm, he projected his awareness into them with omen force.
Like a dream, mildness swelled, erasing all signs of the sorrow and fury that had possessed him. Charm opened the veils of time and obeyed his suggestions.
The woozy light of the clouds folded into shapes he recognized and forms he did not. He spotted the margrave's children.
Jyoti— She had been six thousand days old when he had retired, a young woman. Even then, though, she had displayed formidable martial skills. Her grandfather, the venerable warrior Phaz, had trained her from childhood in the ancient fighting techniques, the acrobatic exercises from the far-gone times before Charm, when survival depended upon using the body as a weapon.
Not far in the future, her lissome body laid broken beside her brother's—Poch. He had been a frail child in Caval's time. Large eyes, diminutive and clumsy body—the very reason Phaz had favored the boy's older sister. On a nearby bend in the timestream, he sprawled, dead, rib cage flayed open under the claws of a—what?
Caval squinted into the time glare, not believing what he saw.
A cacodemon?
He incredulously identified the creature crouched over the dead bodies of the margrave's children by its eel-lobed brow, tiny, tar-drop eyes, and hulking saurian frame horrid with abdominal snouts of gnashing fangs. It was the monster of legend feared by all Irth children.
How can this be?
The dazzling grasp of the future loosened before his astonishment, and he had to concentrate sternly to restore clarity.
As a sorcerer, he knew what few believed was true—that it was possible to journey to the Dark Shore and return. He knew that these creatures of myth existed among the cold worlds.
But he also knew that the Gulf was not easily traversed. With growing fright, he wondered, How could so many of these terrible beasts have found their way to Irth?
The ripped-open bodies of Jyoti and Poch lay lifeless beneath the razorous claws of a cacodemon. Staring into its spider-bead eyes, the sorcerer perceived the others—the flocks of cacodemons that stampeded the future. He watched them falling out of the night sky, blotting the stars with their gruesome silhouettes. Hundreds of them dropping out of the darkness, swarming vehemently.
How?
The future appeared scorched with all the destined acts of the cacodemons. Like storm clouds, they assailed the floating cities, and flames burst from the tabernacles housing the hover charms that kept the cities in the air. Streaking smoke, the cities plummeted. Dorzen, Bryse, Mirdath, Sharna, Keri—all fell to Irth with explosive impact.
No!
The sorcerer's gaunt cheeks glistened with tears. What he witnessed loomed inevitable.
Unless...
He pulled his vision of the future back to the slain bodies of Jyoti and Poch under the bloody claws of the cacodemon. The sapience of the monster struck him. By that he knew the source of this taloned beast, with its heavy jaw ajar and its evil faces squashed among the creases of its belly. This creature obeyed a human.
It was not a creature of Irth. It had fallen out of the Gulf from some distant cold world.
The sorcerer knew that bodies never fell to Irth—they fell from Irth. The Abiding Star pushed all forms into the Gulf and drew nothing at all to itself. And so he understood that this beast smeared with grease from the carcasses of the margrave's children had been summoned.
Who? he demanded of his Charm. Show me who has visited such atrocity on Irth!
The cloud of future-knowing shifted and took the form of a weasel-faced man with shrill eyes and gummy pale hair.
Wrat! Caval fit a name to that scrawny man, recalled from a small but virulent uprising of scavengers that the wizarduke Lord Drev had suppressed.
Away down the sky, where clouds boiled above ice ranges, the future came clear. Wrat, usurper of the sword Taran, had by some mysterious magic returned from the Gulf that had swallowed all the dead and whole armies of the living—and he had come back with a swarm of rabid cacodemons under his ruthless command.
Cloud banks revealed the future as a monument of abomination. Wrat would destroy every one of the floating cities and slaughter all the Peers, sating his lust for revenge inspired by the wizarduke who had defeated and humiliated him. Civilization would be smashed. All who survived would be forced to live as animals again in the primitive conditions that had existed on Irth before people learned to make amulets and harness Charm.
"Jyoti and Poch are not yet dead," he reminded himself forcefully and turned his back on the cloud shapes of the future. "The future is a dream. It can yet be shaped. Nothing is certain. All is possible."
All? reason questioned.
"Nearly all—" he conceded and wondered if it was already too late to save those who had cried out for him.
The sorcerer stood with his back to a rock outcrop and faced the rising brilliance of the Abiding Star. What he wanted was formless. The Beginning. The source of all forms. Yet fate had seized him fast. The formlessness that was to be his reward had dropped entirely away into a meaningless void.
The Abiding Star, fiercely radiant, would not be his return to the formless after all. Instead, he chose to use its mounting force to shape for himself a new form into which he could copy himself sufficiently.
He wanted to seek out the ones who needed him. He dared not go in his present form. Not yet. Not until he could ascertain that the children of the margrave offered some hope of staving off the terrible future he had foreseen in the clouds.
Out of whim and Charm, the sorcerer shaped himself a most explicit body of light—small, keen, and agile—a bird. He made it green feathered and just strong enough to carry his mind's eye.
And then he sat down on the cold flagstones that ledge the Calendar of Eyes, and, with a flurrying snap of wings and a shining cry, he set the bird free of his grasp—and he flew.
/ |
Jyoti paced a stone creek with the languid restlessness of a panther. Wistful bird calls glittered in thorn shrubs on the shaded bank where Poch lay curled upon himself, covered with leaves, watching her. He wore a scowl of worry on his young freckled face. Several times he had called to her to hide, and she had ignored him. At last, he had fallen silent and tucked himself small, glowering with fear, clutching his amulet-frock tighter about him.
They had been camping on the Kazu sand rivers when the horror began. It had been a casual trip, an impulsive decision of Jyoti's to do something with her younger brother that he would enjoy. Originally, two of his playmates were to accompany them. At the last minute, an opportunity opened for them to usher a clan wedding at Primrose Stilts.
Who could begrudge young adolescents a chance to experience the majestic opulence of Primrose Stilts? The most elegant temple grounds in Arwar Odawl, there the peerage traditionally held its coronations.
So Jyoti and Poch had gone alone to Kazu. They had not even bothered to request an escort. Why would they require guards on the open ranges of the sand rivers? With Arwar Odawl visible on the horizon as it drifted south for the winter, they harbored no fears.
Jyoti and Poch played game
s on the sand rivers of Kazu. The cold morning air walked through their bones as they traipsed among the dunes, sledding down slip faces, scampering around hulks of cacti, laughing and frolicking spry as lizards scurrying among the rocks.
In the distance, Arwar Odawl floated. The oldest of the floating cities, it originated in an antique time when hover charms, still new, required the city to use steering rudders to guide the massive structure through the air. The rudders dangled below the city in long metallic tentacles. And though no longer necessary now that the technology of Charm had advanced to the point of controlling weather, the city retained the pendulous vanes and cables that lent it the appearance of a metallic medusa.
In the afternoon, brother and sister had sat on a black granite ledge above the tall dry grass. They were enjoying a picnic of currant cakes and wind apples the kitchen had sent by flyer-box when the attack on the floating city began.
At first, Poch had thought the black swarm appearing above the horizon a storm cloud. Jyoti had known at once it could not be, for it moved against the wind. Through their niello eye charms, they magnified Arwar Odawl and gaped to behold ravenous flocks of cacodemons.
Within minutes, before the margrave's children could alert their father on their aviso crystal, jets of green fire erupted from the city.
Green fire! The margrave's children had known at once that such lethal flames appeared only when Charm ruptured. The cacodemons had smashed the city’s hover charms!
Terror stricken, they had watched Arwar Odawl tilt sickeningly. Green plumes flared from the tabernacle pyramids.
Screaming in unison, they followed with wide stares as the city spiraled beyond the horizon and an enormous fire cloud billowed above the jungle. The thunderous roar deafened them, and they fell to their backs before the hot pressure of the blast wave.
All day they had remained on that granite bluff, stunned before the black, churning tower of smoke that rose from the crash site. Their niello eye charms could not reach beyond the horizon, but the numb feel of their seekers informed them no one had survived.
The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1) Page 10