The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  Tywi shook her head ruefully. "You're lucky you got this far without getting jumped." She thought a moment, then added, "You need protection if you're going to move through this city without weapons. And I see you don't have nothing but your fancy clothes." She glanced down at the amulet in her fist, then faced them again with a determined look in her eye. "Let me take you to a thief I know who will get you anywhere in the city—if you're willing to pay him."

  "A thief?" Poch asked anxiously. "Can a thief protect us?"

  "This one can." Tywi nodded with grim assurance. "He's beastfolk from the warrens. They don't come tougher. And he knows this city better than anyone. He'll get you through. Then all you have to worry about is the Qaf."

  Jyoti tugged her brother along as the waif turned and led them across the warren to a dark alley. They climbed notch stairs to another level, an oil-stained esplanade overlooking derricks and trestles of a lading yard.

  A large man with bold beastmarks paced the cobbles, hands clasped behind his back. He wore a harness that strapped power wands to his ribs, and he looked dangerous.

  "Dogbrick, look here," the waif called. "I brought you some work."

  "Don't need work," the creature rumbled. "I am replete."

  “You’re what?” Tywi motioned for the Peers to wait on the slick steps, and she approached the muscular thief. "What’re you talking about? I've got me two Peers! You believe that? Look! They're fugitives from Arwar Odawl."

  "We are all fugitives from that fallen city," Dogbrick groused. "I can’t help you. I'm running a job that can make me enough Charm to buy a lifetime far away from this grimy city."

  "You don't look like you're running nothing."

  Dogbrick regarded the waif with defensive pride. "It's just gone down, curious mouse. So I'm thinking through where to go from here. Foresight is more precious than Charm. And if the rumors are right, Charm isn't going to be worth dung when the Dark Lord gets here."

  "The rumors are right, bold Dog." Tywi nodded to where Jyoti and Poch watched from the alley steps. "Those are Lord Keon's kids, so they claim. The only survivors of Arwar Odawl."

  Dogbrick glared at them. All he could think about was the trance wrap that his partner Ripcat would be delivering in a few hours at Mirage Climb. "What do they want from me?"

  "Safe passage to the Qaf."

  Dogbrick barked a laugh. "Safe passage to hell."

  "They have the amulets to pay," Tywi whispered. "That's why I think they got to be telling the truth about who they are."

  "I don't need any more amulets. Especially if cacodemons are coming."

  Tywi shrugged. "You said you're going to Mirage Climb anyway, right? Come on, Dog. Where's that noble heart of yours? Take them with you. From the Climb, it ain't far to the city limits and the Qaf. Do it for me and give me the amulets."

  "I am indebted to you, Tywi," Dogbrick admitted and nodded his large head resignedly. "Of all the urchins who've spotted for me, you've been the best. I have never been spied on your watch. Not once. So I will do this favor for you, girl. Tell those fancy-pants kids to hurry along. I'm leaving now."

  Tywi waved the siblings closer.

  Dogbrick looked them up and down carefully, assessing the worth of their amulet-frocks. Then, he reached out and plucked several hex-gems from their frocks. "Payment up front," he announced and handed the gems to Tywi. "Spend them now, while they're still worth something."

  "They're already spent, Dog," Tywi said. "I'm going with Hazar's army today. These sparkles are buying a slot for me in the caravan with the troops. I'm gone."

  Tywi nodded her gratitude to the Peers, hastily thanked Dogbrick with a smile, and loped down a narrow lane.

  "And don't try stealing anything from those soldiers," Dogbrick yelled after her.

  "I know how to make my own way, Dog," she shouted back.

  Dogbrick watched after her with a worried scowl, then turned toward his new wards with a hard stare. "So—you are Peers," he said coldly and studied the play of emotions on their faces.

  The boy stood before him paralyzed with fright. The young woman observed him intently, shifting her weight subtly yet decisively as if she were actually about to spring at him.

  Timidity and temerity, the thief observed and relaxed his hostile stance. He motioned for them to follow. "These are cruel times for you." He spoke as he guided them up a steep ramp littered with broken crates.

  "For us all," Jyoti agreed and tugged at her reluctant brother's sleeve, as he stared with alarm at the large beastmarked man.

  They emerged behind warehouses where a charmless gang milled about a blazing steel drum and a skinned cat roasted on a spit. The malefic stares of the gang took in the amulet-frocks and cut like a cold wind through the Peers. Poch slid closer to Dogbrick.

  "Ah, don't fear them, lad," the robust thief whispered. "They are Irth's charmless. With the amulets you have on your back you should feel nothing but pity for them."

  Poch and Jyoti followed silently, warily peering into the gloomy alcoves among factories and assembly shops and finding threat everywhere: wild dogs, squatters guarding with clubs and sticks their shanties in the sewer mist, and roving bands of the charmless kicking over trash drums and glaring predaciously, too intimidated by Dogbrick to approach or even call out.

  Along the way, the thief regaled his wards. “Talk is glory. It is what asserts our humanity, don’t you agree? Words. Words. And more words. The corpuscles that compose the storied blood of our souls! That is why I insist on talking with myself at all times. At all times. It is an excellent way to know one's mind and express one's heart. How else to make those important and often snap distinctions in life between what is true and what merely useful? Is that not also the way among Peers?"

  They crossed a rusted span above churning cascades of clanking mill wheels. The loquacious thief turned to help Poch across. He saw then the distraction in their faces. They were attentive to a world they had never visited before, this curious architecture of winches, spans, and trestles conjoining the towering cliff faces.

  "Drake's blood!" he cursed himself and smiled, showing fangs. "I talk too much! Especially when I'm with strangers and can speak freely without fearing I'm repeating myself. You see, words are both poison and cure in my life."

  The philosopher climbed a switchback stairway toward modern stone buildings awash in daylight. The sunstruck skyline reared above the fuming precincts like parapets of a higher world.

  "They are dangerous powers, words," Dogbrick rambled on. "Words, symbolic and unreal as they are, demand genuine friendship with the actual, you see. They want to become real. They want to be included in the circles of necessity that define our lives. They strive, even against our will, to share and shape the other dreams and visions that flower from the Irthen bed our flesh in fact is. To live with words—as must we all—requires us to negotiate constantly between these energies of the body and the arts of action. Do you understand?"

  Jyoti and Poch nodded smartly, though neither of them had been listening. The cityscape opened around them as they climbed out of the refinery district. They paused on a terrace of townhouses and merchants' shops.

  Below, industrial smoke seethed, and among rips in the vapors they beheld the sooty depths from which they had risen. Forge fires flashed in fuming grottoes, crimson and sudden, an infernal semblance of celestial lightning.

  Dogbrick urged them away from the railed landing into the daystruck boulevard. At a street corner station, they caught an uptown trolley and rode the rest of the way to Mirage Climb and its tiers of jigsaw trees.

  "Follow that gravel path through the park." The thief directed them with a burly arm. He pointed at a flinty trace among mauve and yellow trees. "It starts here as a path, wanders awhile through that grove, then widens immediately afterward into the wasteland. Glad fortune to you both in that blighted expanse. You have water, of course."

  Jyoti indicated their flagons. "We have water and a water seeker. And our amulets are fu
lly charged." She said this in an encouraging tone, for Poch's sake. "We even have some food left from our flight in. We'll be fine. Glad fortune to you, Dogbrick. Thank you for getting us this far."

  "You paid Tywi well enough," he said with a smile. "Glad fortune. Glad fortune, all!"

  They felt relief when Dogbrick finally took his leave, sauntering away into a grove of broken daylight.

  "What a blowhard," Poch muttered after the beastman had departed.

  "But a useful blowhard," Jyoti said. "We surely would have been jumped down there without him. If we hadn't gone in during those early hours when everyone was still waking, we probably would have been assaulted then, before we found that girl Tywi. All I have on me is a utility knife."

  "What I can't figure out is who could have put the Eye on Tywi if not Caval?"

  Jyoti thrust her thumb back at Saxar. The carved cliffs glowed blackly in the daylight like a cauterized sore. "This is a city of charmwrights, Poch. Masters of sorcery come and go from here all the time. It could be any of them."

  "Jyoti, look!"

  Over the horizon, a dark thin line undulated. It could have been gulls, though at that great distance they were far too large and black.

  "Look at them! It's the demons!" Poch shrilled, clasping his sister's arm. "They've arrived!"

  Jyoti took his hand and rushed with him up the gravel trail. The jigsaw trees parted, as the thief had foreseen, and they mounted to a ridge at the scalloped edge of the Qaf. Tracts of cinder and slurry swept to the horizon.

  The Peers balked at the massive sight of the badlands and regarded each other with trepidation.

  "We have Charm," Jyoti reassured him yet again. "Our flagons are full, and we'll find more water as we go. If we stay here—"

  They both looked back at the cankerous city with anguish. The thin, undulant line of demons, not yet visible to the hapless denizens in the cliffside metropolis, advanced remorselessly—and the sole survivors of Arwar Odawl knew what horror descended. Hand in hand, they stepped into the dead land.

  Lord of the Nethermost

  Lord Drev paused in his wanderings at a clear pool. He had climbed high among the northern mountains of the Malpais Highlands, and all around him snow peaks soared against the fathomless blue.

  Like convolutions of a giant brain, dark gorges and valleys mazed below, where no light from the Abiding Star reached. A griffin circled through vast silence, white feathers bright as tufted starlight.

  On the mountainsides around the wizarduke, giant trees crowded slopes and ridges and softened all edges under carpets of yellow and bronze leaves. With each turn in the wind came rich humus smells laced with bracing scents of iced rocks and snow.

  Drev breathed deeply and, for an ironic moment, marveled that he would never have known such beauty had not the return of Wrat forced him out of the fortressed comfort of Dorzen.

  Yet, with this loveliness came terrible solitude and anguish for his brood. His dominion vulnerable to the Dark Lord's cacodemons, he dreaded what was to become of Irth. Assailed by a rampaging madman invulnerable to Charm...

  The conviction gnawed at him that this was his fault, that this nightmare would not now be upon them if only he had been more ruthless. If I had executed Wrat outright...

  He determined to lead the so-called Dark Lord on a chase for as long as he could. He had no doubt that the petty scavenger would want his revenge and would scour Irth for him.

  Drev planned to journey north to the desert kingdom of Zul on the far side of the terrible wastleland of the Qaf. He would search for Tywi, the woman whom Charm informed him offered true love. If these were to be his last days, he would spend them questing for her and keeping one step ahead of Wrat and his minions. Along the way, he would remain attentive to finding ways to defeat this maniacal enemy of Irth.

  Questing Tywi offered him the hope of becoming stronger, not in Charm but in his ability to take this darkness in.

  Yet, even if I find her again, will she be pleased? Or will she find me unworthy—a renegade without dominion and only the Charm I carry to share with her? What will she think of me?

  He knelt at the pool of tannic water and gazed at himself. He pondered if she would find him acceptable, or even attractive without the mirage of Charm to enhance his features. In blue cloak, brown uniform, and low boots of hide, he looked like a common trooper. Worse, he felt like a fool—an undignified fool hiding like this.

  Kneeling among cinnamon fern, he parted crow-black hair falling to his long shoulders and peered into the pool at dark copper skin and oblique eyes blue as ice.

  He appeared striking, though not necessarily handsome, and he took comfort in the truth that fate had united him with Tywi. As a child, when he first learned how to scry, she had been the first one he sensed, a woman of low station and far from him, at that time not yet born, yet already bound closer to him than any other.

  Why? he had often questioned. Why her?

  He might as well have asked why magic, why joy, why innocence, sweetness, violence, and death? Fate unifies impulse and instinct. So he had been trained to believe as a child by Irth's finest sorcerers. In learning to scry, he gazed into dangerous abysses of chance, fate, and the implacable future. He had learned that to scry was not to know but to imply.

  No hint of Wrat's return had ever been scryed by anyone, as far as he knew. The power to glimpse future time existed sketchily among the bright worlds under the Abiding Star—and not at all beyond the Gulf on the Dark Shore.

  And now that the Conquest had begun and Wrat had thrown chaos upon Irth, he might not ever find Tywi again. The future was changed. And yet she was there, at the causal end of the string of events that had first brought her last newt's-eye to him. She was there.

  Drev knew if he were to find his fateful lover he would have to do so soon. In his niello eye charms, he watched flights of cacodemons scouring the labyrinth of valleys, searching for him. Immune to Charm, the cacodemons also were blind to Charm and could not sense him observing them. By that means, he had been able to avoid them—thus far.

  Arwar Odawl had fallen, just as Wrat had threatened. Looking down from the high ranges, eye charms revealed the ghastly crash site in Elvre’s jungle, and gazing at the seething crater mounded with char and rubble, Drev wept.

  Upon the smoldering black anathema, he identified nothing of the lyric turret towers famous across Irth or the fabled walled gardens from the Primrose Stilts where his parents had wed. Nothing remained of the living city. No shapes appeared among the vapors and rueful debris. And his heart grew darker with wayward thoughts of vengeance.

  Somehow I will elude the stalking cacodemons and learn to destroy them, he swore to himself. Somehow I will face Wrat again, and he will answer to me for Arwar Odawl. I will avenge this terrible thing. Somehow...

  With a hand upon the sword Taran in its black scabbard, Drev stood and again scanned his surroundings. Cold torrents plunged from snow mists in the upper world of ice peaks and depthless blue. Nearby, beneath great boughs of massive trees, rock gardens tumbled from one ledge to the next, cluttered with fern and saplings. Squirrels darted and bright finches alighted upon lichened boulders.

  He detected no enemy with his niello charms or with his own eyes, and thus he dared to draw his weapon and allow it to catch light from the Abiding Star and gain more power.

  It adjusted to his grip, enclosing his hand and flashing hotly as he danced with it. With each swerve of his arm, it changed shape, beveling itself to cut most swiftly through the air.

  Pointing the sword north at the far distant crest of the highest mountain, the Calendar of Eyes, Drev contemplated journeying there. Its craggy summit hid a sanctuary, and the sword Taran could surely lead him to it. Perhaps the sages in that sacred place would have knowledge of how to fight the cacodemons.

  He listened to what the sword had to say about this strategem.

  The reply came swiftly, and, in the wordless manner of the greatest magic, it shaped itself with h
is thoughts. And he knew at once that sanctuary was not a hopeful recourse for him, the prey of cacodemons.

  No, I must continue my quest—through the mountains and into the Qaf. That way led toward wholeness, toward a woman, maybe love and whatever hope might discover.

  Drev turned. He aimed his sword through wistful vistas of arboreal uplands and waterfalls, toward a faint silica aura: the desert shining from under the horizon.

  The sword hummed agreeably in his hand.

  He continued hiking down the narrow path of the mountainside. Charm gave him agility and disallowed missteps that would have sent the charmless plummeting into chasms below.

  Both day and night, he marched. Charm gave him strength. The collar and hem of his cloak had been fitted with a dozen power wands. To avoid griffins and dragons, he relied upon niello eye charms. Hex-gems granted him vision in the dark, and he made his way boldly out of the mountains and into the sere grasslands that fringed the dread Qaf.

  There would be little food and less water in the wasteland, and Drev took the time to resupply his provision sack. From a rivulet of ice melt, he filled flagons and, among hills of tall grass spangled with orchids, gathered as many breadberries and nuts as he could carry. By the time he stood before the cinderland of the Qaf, he shouldered as much hope as was possible against the brutality of the desert.

  / |

  The parched grasslands fell behind, and ahead opened cracked plains luminous as shattered glass. To keep out of sight of cacodemons that might overfly the broken land, Drev meandered among eskers, long wandering ridges of gravel deposited by ancient, vanished glaciers.

  The danger afoot in these ashen wastes hunted with deadly cunning: trolls. Bolt eyed as sharks, with quilled green hair, and clawed feet and hands, the carnivorous, snouted creatures could not easily be slain. Lopped limbs continued to live and stalk and kill. Only charmfire could burn them entirely away. And Drev carried no firecharms.

  His first night on the Qaf, the trolls found him. They came from their caves in the gypsum archipelagos under volcanic rims seeping scarlet into the night. Drev heard their claws scuttling over the gravel flats before he caught sight of their lucent eyes or smelled their sulfurous stench or heard their enormous groans of hunger.