The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  At dusk, with sky the color of stone above a chill green pool in the west, he shuffled through low whorls of fog to the forest's edge. A salt wind tinged the air and burned branch tips and grass to curled ash. He found himself atop a bluff that fell away in heather slopes and gray weathered bramble to dunes below and beyond that, the slate horizon of the sea.

  A crude wooden barge sat aground on a sandbar, listing hard. The tide retreated behind it in a froth of pawing waves. Even at this distance and through the misty scud of twilight, he could clearly see the big, hide-covered bodies of ogres building a driftwood fire on the beach.

  Two chattel carts sat on a sandy saddle between dunes. A dozen people slogged single file through the tide pools to the barge, where an ogre directed them up a ramp and into the hold.

  Farther down the beach, two basilisks thrashed, feeding voraciously on something, their black tails snapping like whips. He could see the greasy stumps on their scaly red backs where the ogres had docked their wings. So intent was he on viewing these maimed creatures with their spiked elbows, serpent necks, and spiral-horned heads that he almost overlooked the small shape of a man in the dunes behind them, kneeling in the sand, burying something.

  Whipcrow squinted and caught sight of Dogbrick. The thief worked energetically, scooping sand with his hands and pushing it away from the hole with his feet.

  Confident that Dogbrick, preoccupied with his task, would not heed his eye charms, Whipcrow made no attempt to hide himself but moved boldly along the margin of the forest until he arrived directly above the dune where his foe was digging. There he crawled under the pulpy decay of tree husks, humus, and mushrooms and watched Dogbrick bury the walking staff and two bolts of trance wrap.

  When the thief finished, he covered the site with a tangle of seaweed and a twist of driftwood and ran off bent double to stay out of sight of the feeding basilisks. Whipcrow stayed himself from going down after his staff and the trance wrap. From his new vantage, he could see what the basilisks were devouring. They struggled noisily over the remaining orts of a human being—a skull crushed to brain pulp and bone shards.

  While they finished their meal, he observed the thief.

  Dogbrick strode across the belly of a dune directly into the ogres' line of sight. He had already decided not to attack them with his firelock and risk losing his battle and Tywi to their superior martial cunning. Instead, he chose to confront them and appeal to their avarice.

  Much as the ogres despised Charm, they well knew the value of amulets, which could be sold to traders for what the ogres coveted and could not make for themselves—exotic dew-wine, that most rare and fragrant vintage from the grassland arbors of Sharna-Bambara. That was what made their willingness to explode all the amulets in the thief's treasure trunk so frightfully devious: Ogres indeed proved themselves supreme tacticians by willingly suspending greed to destroy a potential enemy.

  Dogbrick's entrails shook with fear when the ogres bellowed at the sight of him. Why will they trade Tywi for what they intend to destroy in the first place? he fretted. They must! I am a philosopher, not a warrior. I cannot hope to slay them all.

  He held his firelock in both hands over his head, intending to show that he approached without aggression—yet ready to use the weapon if they attacked.

  Gnawl stepped away from the others hunkered about the bonfire in the evening gloom. The ogre immediately recognized the dogman who had pursued it through the forest several days earlier.

  "Dogbrick!" Tywi's voice called from the barge, and he spied her pressed against a window grating in the prow. "Dogbrick!"

  He took his hand from the firelock's muzzle and waved to her. From down the beach, the basilisks roared at the sound of a human voice and came bounding out of the dunes. Gnawl shouted a guttural command, and several ogres leaped up to quell the beasts.

  "Woman!" Gnawl pointed its giant arm toward Tywi and showed its black teeth in a lush grin. "Yours!" Its tiny face in its great-skulled head wrinkled with abrupt lines of merriment. Then it looked at the firelock and sneered. "Kill me—die!" Its little eyes motioned toward where its comrades had unsheathed bows long as young trees and had pointed quartz-tipped arrows at him.

  "I have not come to kill you," Dogbrick said. "I am here to barter. Ogres are honorable. You trade without treachery for what you want. Yes?"

  "Barter!" Gnawl roared. "What?"

  "That woman, Tywi, for trance wrap. Enough trance wrap to buy twenty barrels of dew-wine. Twenty barrels!"

  "Blown up!" The ogre made a vicious face, its small eyes vanishing in creases of malice. "You blown up!"

  "No, I am not blown up." Dogbrack slapped his harness. "My amulets protect me. And the trance wrap. I got out before the charges went off. I have the wrap hidden. Two bolts of it. Enough for twenty barrels of dew-wine. And you can have it all for Tywi. Give her to me, let us go, and you can have the trance wrap."

  Gryn came up behind Gnawl and muttered something ominously, glaring at the firelock the thief held before him.

  "Look, you two," Dogbrick ventured, "I hear that ogres are tactical masters. The best on Irth. Surely, then, you see how it makes sense to trade one prisoner from a score of others for a bounty of dew-wine. This deal is so good, I will stake my life on it. Here. Hold my weapon till the deal is done. The honor of ogres is well known. So I don't need this weapon to threaten you now that you understand what I have to offer."

  The thief held out the firelock, and Gnawl snatched it away in a flash. "Get woman," he growled. "Get wrap."

  Gryn lumbered toward the barge and yelled to the ogre at the bow, who disappeared below deck.

  "Get wrap!" Gnawl commanded.

  “Tywi—" Dogbrick objected.

  "She comes!" The ogre bowed its vein-gnarled head. "Get wrap!"

  Dogbrick led the way into the dark dunes, keeping a tide-stacked mound of drift bramble, bleached logs, and sea wrack between him and the snorting basilisks. From behind, Gryn came running with Tywi slung over its naked shoulder.

  Spume and cloud shreds muted the star glow, and Dogbrick wandered disoriented in the darkness among tussocky dunes, twice passing the site where he had buried the trance wrap. He did not at first recognize the location, because a gaping hole stood in its place. When at last he stopped before it and Gryn lowered Tywi to stand beside him, he stared wordlessly, uncomprehending.

  "I didn't really think you was coming for me." Tywi breathed excitedly beside him, clutching his arm.

  Her voice came to him from far away, across a vastness of despondency he had never before conceived.

  "Get wrap!" Gnawl shouted.

  Dogbrick faced Tywi, thick brows sadly arched. "I'm sorry, Tywi. I had the trance wrap here. But now—it's gone."

  A powerful hand seized Dogbrick by his mane, pulling him away from Tywi. He flailed helplessly as Gryn tore the amulet harness from his body. Gnawl snapped the stock off the firelock, then the muzzle, and heaved the breech angrily toward the sea. With Dogbrick gripped firmly by his mane and Tywi held by both her hands, Gryn dragged them through the sand, mumbling grouchily.

  Into the muted glow of the stars stepped a slender human shadow holding a tall walking staff. With a brisk flourish, the staff lit up amber bright and revealed Whipcrow, cowl unfolded, black hackled hair fanned wide around his hatchet face.

  "I have the trance wrap you want," he announced to the ogres. "It was mine originally, before this thief stole it from my factory. You may have it and all the dew-wine it will purchase in exchange for my safe passage to the next human settlement. Are we agreed?"

  "Whipcrow, you liar!" Dogbrick shouted, and Gryn shook him to a blur that left him dizzy in a dazzle of neural stars.

  "Agreed!" Gnawl pronounced, and Gryn nodded with satisfaction and a tight, smug smile on its minuscule face as it lugged its captives onward.

  That night, Dogbrick and Tywi sat in the dark and stink of the barge's hold among other desolate prisoners. Many bobbed against the low ceiling, weightless in sleep
. Others pressed against the hull, peering through tiny chinks and seams at the inaccessible stars, grateful for the salt breeze that leaked through.

  "It is safe to sleep here," Dogbrick said in a desultory whisper and closed his eyes.

  "I'm glad you came for me," Tywi said, nestling against his fur.

  "I failed you. I failed us both."

  "Whipcrow betrayed you—again. You should have killed him when he tried to kill you."

  "I am not a killer or a warrior—"

  "Yeah, right. You're a philosopher, I know."

  "And so I must endure the fate of philosophers," he groused softly. "I only regret that you must suffer with me. Fate put you in my care, and I have failed you."

  "Not failed me," she muttered. "Joined me."

  A faint smile peeked through his beard. "You are a philosopher, too, I see. Good. Together we will share the truth. Together we will discover what it means to have largeness of heart. For if I have learned anything it is that the smaller the circle of imprisonment, the larger the dreams of escape."

  Tywi grew lighter against him, rising into sleep, and he put an arm about her and held her close to him.

  / |

  Morning flood tide rocked the barge, and both Dogbrick and Tywi woke to find themselves pressed against the low ceiling. They dropped to the deck with hard thumps that jolted them fully awake. The hold resounded with the loud thuds of numerous bodies falling back into consciousness as thin rosy rays of dawn threaded through the cracks in the upper hull.

  Seasickness overwhelmed many of the captives crammed into the tight and sweltering hold, and a rancid stench rose from the retching bodies. Both Dogbrick and Tywi succumbed. Day and night, they curled around their soft bones, weak with nausea, sleeping in fits. The greasy slop lowered into the hold in rusty pails only sickened them more.

  Whipcrow paced the open deck above, limber as a mariner. His black cape flapped like wings in the stiff sea wind. A grin, a blue slash, opened the wedge of his dark face every time he thought of Dogbrick suffering below. And this was just a prelude to the torments yet to come.

  The ogres, true to their word, had granted the factory manager safe passage on their barge. They would have released him the following dusk when they came to shore farther south on the pebble beach within sight of Old Shard, the colossal granite port on the headlands of Mirdath. But he refused to go. Above the port's famous helical towers, in the orange shades of day's end, floated cacodemons.

  Gryn and Gnawl, well pleased with the ample bolts of trance wrap delivered to them by Whipcrow, confided in him the purpose of their mission. They sailed for a desolate swamp in the Reef Isles of Nhat. There, the refugees they had collected would populate work camps established to serve the Dark Lord.

  Obeisant to nostalgia, Hu'dre Vra had spared Nhat from the devastation he visited upon all other dominions. The realm where he had once slaved as a scavenger, scouring tidal flats for valuable flotsam, would now serve as a vast labor camp for the Dark Lord's many enemies. And the ogres had been commanded by him to run this vengeful site with all the brutality for which they had won infamy.

  Whipcrow pondered this and decided to take his chances with the ogres who favored him rather than wander aimlessly among cacodemons. And so he remained on board the entire voyage, amusing the ogres with the games of cruelty he devised for culling the weakest prisoners to feed daily to the basilisks. Captives danced on trapdoors above the hold of the basilisks and the first to drop exhausted fell through to be devoured. In a variant game, a pulley line rigged above each trapdoor kept the trap shut with the body's weight so that the first prisoner whose grip gave out fell to the ravening jaws.

  The factory manager came up with new ideas every day. He most firmly secured his position among the ogres with a remarkable feat he accomplished in the coastal city of Drymarch on the littoral plains of Sharna-Bambara. Flanked by Gryn and Gnawl, Whipcrow entered the low-lying metropolis of pastel dykes, grass verges, sand roads, bright yellow cottages, white pickets, and flower-strewn yards bordered with pink conchs and periwinkles and met with the mayor.

  The portly, ruddy-faced woman feared the arrival of the cacodemons. She listened avidly to Whipcrow's news of the ogres' alliance with the Dark Lord. Eager for reprieve from destruction for her beautiful municipality, she arranged to deliver to the barge a hundred kegs of dew-wine. The ogres carried Whipcrow back to the ship like a hero, raised high above their heads.

  As the barge sailed south the following morning, they spotted a chevron of cacodemons arrowing toward Drymarch. Shortly afterward, columns of black clouds rose from the city, and the ogres put ashore to gather the evacuees fleeing through the salt marshes. The new captives marched on board that evening included the florid mayor, her eyes vapid, pudgy flesh pale with shock.

  For the rest of the voyage, Whipcrow no longer had to pace the boards or brace himself with the deck cleats in rough weather. Instead, he enjoyed the comforts of a quarterdeck cabin with a hammock and a wide desk set before a bay of mullioned windows and shelved with tomes from sacked libraries. The ogres gifted him with the amulet harness that they had taken from Dogbrick. And they went out of their way at subsequent ports to secure for him fine foods and drink—fried squash flowers, abalone soup, octopus salad, and blue beer. They also gladly returned to him the two bolts of trance wrap, since they no longer needed them to trade for dew-wine.

  When, at last, the misty Reef Isles of Nhat hove into view, Whipcrow felt well rested and nourished. Staff in hand and wearing the amulet harness tailored to fit his gaunt body, he stood at the prow with Gryn and Gnawl as the barge sailed past the Cloths of Heaven, the most archaic ruins on Irth.

  Sphinx columns stood mired in miasmal bog. Winding serpent-coil stairways curled to nowhere. And exuberant vines and incessant creepers strangled domed porticos and tiled atria. Visible above seething mists and under speeding clouds, porphyry towers and gilded spires flared to storm-bent trees at their broken crowns.

  The barge docked alongside a crude wharf of lashed logs. The makeshift harbor squatted among giant medusa trees in the foggy depths of an impenetrable marsh. To one side, across a span of onyx water fetid with oily black rainbows, broken coral columns and cancerous walls of ancient ruins brooded. In the other direction, beyond sordid tanglings of swamp vines, beyond sepulchral depths of fallen trees, among crawling vapors, an evil place loomed.

  A lunatic teetering of scaffolds reared above the dark galleries of the somber swamp. Trestles, ramps, and catwalks skewed at weirdly obtuse angles. Swarming upon this immense skeletal construct, a thousand cacodemons crawled and hovered. They smudged the sky with their numbers as they constructed something. Fitting sheets of alabaster together, they fashioned a huge pyramid.

  In the foreground, along the cobbled road that led to the wharves where barges delivered construction materials and stone sheets, corpses hung from leafless trees. Carrion birds had plucked their faces to skulls, yet all could still recognize upon their dead bodies the amulet frocks and silken raiment of Peers.

  The ogres herded prisoners away from this horror toward a gloomy nave in the marsh that enclosed the labor camp. A rude prison shut in by tall palings of ghostly white wortwood stood topped with thorny coils of nettle-braid.

  Whipcrow did not linger on the wharf to gloat at Dogbrick. He went immediately along the wharf road of mushy planks toward the bizarre construction site of the cacodemons.

  His heart beat madly inside him. He had to draw Charm heavily from his amber walking staff and amulet harness to find the strength to go forward. Yet he knew that his destiny awaited him in this place that the ogres called the Palace of Abominations.

  As he rounded the bend in the plank road that took him through wild walls of vegetation, he came into full view of the terrible place. Cacodemons crowded crazy heights on the tilted structure so tightly that light came through in dusty, luminous shafts at crisscross angles. On lower tiers, scores of people hung in thorn cages, the blood from their wounds f
loating around them in red wisps. Their moans and cries echoed remotely from the cathedral heights of the eerily silent cacodemons.

  At ground level, separated from the construction by tall thorn hedges, opulence sprawled. Crystal globes suspended at intervals radiated a kind of Charm, stirring fronds of breeze and soft perfume. None blocked his way, and he entered with trepidation.

  Walls of green and blue glass opened through alabaster portals upon an august garden of topiary hedges, pollarded blossom trees, and espaliered arbors. At the center of this serene chamber, surrounded by marvelous thrusts of chalcedony, stood a gray stick. Upon the stick dangled a wrinkled empty skin of brown leather flayed from a human body. Flounces of limbs and pleats of fingers could easily be seen, as could the grisly face furred with green fungus. Its eyeholes gazed vacantly, its nostrils mere slits, gaping mouth void of teeth or palate yet tongued with blue flame.

  That fire-flicker hissed, "S-step clos-ser, Whipcrow."

  Despite the sedation of his Charm, the factory manager jumped. "Who are you?"

  "I am the warlock Ralli-Faj."

  "I have come to petition the Dark Lord," Whipcrow blurted before this frightful being. "I have in my possession two bolts of trance wrap as a gift of tribute to the great Hu'dre Vra."

  A mocking laugh sizzled from the mummy rag. "S-s-silly man! The Dark Lord possess-es-s all Irth!"

  "Of course! Of course!" Whipcrow hung his head. "I have come to honor him and offer my services."

  "I know why you have come." The blue flame wagged in its peel of skin. "I know who you are. I have been waiting for you, Whipcrow. You are here to s-s-serve me."

  Whipcrow lifted his flinty face, frowning with perplexity. "But the Dark Lord—"

  "S-silence!" The blue flame torched from the gaping mouth with acetylene intensity.

  Whipcrow staggered backward, his black hackles flaring outward in a crest of fright.