The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  The Eye of Protection he had placed on her had worn away at some point in her travels to this dingy place. The wizarduke knew she would not now be alive without the Charm that the Eye must have imparted to her.

  He studied her with fascination, imprinting again on his memory the dimpled chin, the curved fullness of the upper lip barely covering a rabbity overbite, the diminutive nose with its wide nostril wings, the dark eyebrows, bold lashes, and a rounded forehead like a child's.

  No desire stirred in him for this waif, yet immediate warmth suffused his chest, an affection born of his soul's recognition. He wanted to reach out and touch her, stir her to wakefulness so that he could tell her of himself and find out what sentience occupied this soul almost too poor to be human.

  Lord Drev sensed the pressure of a watchful presence, and he looked up from his examination of his bride to see staring at him an older woman with gray-streaked hair pulled back from a worn face. Through a crooked smile, she whispered, "You do not have the strength to wake her."

  The wizarduke drifted across the hut to where the old woman sat with her back to the woven reeds. A slash of daylight made her brown eyes seem orange. "Who are you?" he asked, testing to determine if she could hear him as well.

  "Who I am is not important," she answered, and her smile deepened at his sustained expression of surprise.

  "You can see and hear me," he said, looking her over and noting her torn and scuffed charmwright's apron. "That makes you important to me."

  She passed a finger through his glossy shadow and felt an astral chill. "You are Lord Drev of Ux, the wizarduke of Hoverness. That is what matters. Two days now, I have seen you in this camp, lurking about young Tywi. Why?"

  "Tywi." Lord Drev looked back at the sleeping woman. "You know her?"

  "Yes."

  "Where are we?" He questioned the charmwright with an anxious tone. "Why is she made to sleep in filth and with no Charm?"

  "You don't know?"

  "I am a fugitive from Wrat the Scavenger and his cacodemons." His flittering silhouette darkened at the very thought of his enemy and nearly vanished. "I lack the Charm to see my way clearly in this form."

  "Yes, you are but a body of light." The crone squinted her eyes. "And a slim one at that. From where do you come?"

  "I am hidden far from here."

  "You need not fear me, my lord." She opened her arms and exposed her evident distress. "You can speak freely, for I am not your enemy nor allied with them. I am myself a prisoner in this place."

  "This is a prison?"

  "Of course." She cocked her head, taken aback by his ignorance. "You are in Wrat's labor camp in the Reef Isles of Nhat."

  "That far?"

  "You do not know how far you have journeyed?"

  "I am trance traveling, stranger." He turned an inquisitive stare on their dismal surroundings. "I had no notion where my Charm took me."

  "Ah, then you must have hitched a charmline to the Abiding Star and followed that here. But why?"

  The wizarduke turned his attention sharply back to the old woman. "I see you know something of charmworks. You are no common charmwright graced with sight." He examined her for signs of Charm and recognized none. Yet he knew. "You have advanced knowledge of wizardry."

  "You have not answered my question, my lord."

  Drev frowned, and his shadowy features blurred like smoke drift. "How can I trust you? Who are you?"

  "You may call me Owl Oil."

  "You are a sorceress?"

  "I am, as you see, a prisoner. What little Charm I have is held in my body." She wrung her hands. "It is not sufficient to free me from this grief."

  "Holding Charm in your body?" He edged closer as if to see deeper into her. "That is advanced wizardry indeed. You must be a Peer. Reveal yourself to me."

  "No." Her eyes jittered in their sockets. "Already you have put me in grave peril. I have revealed too much."

  "I am no danger to you. We are allied against Wrat."

  "Yes. But there are Peers allied with Wrat." Her voice softened almost to silence. "Among them is the warlock of the Spiderlands. He guards this camp."

  "Ralli-Faj!" A jolt of alarm spun him toward Tywi. If the warlock found out about her, she would experience such horrors of Charm that death would seem a gallant gesture.

  "By day, he drifts in rapture trance," Owl Oil said. "We are probably unseen by him. But occasionally he breaks his routine and tours the camp while we sleep. If he comes through, he will see you as I am seeing you now."

  Drev retreated at once. His shadow shape folded into itself and vanished in a flutter of hot motes, star twinklings that left behind emptiness so pure that Owl Oil felt compelled to put her hand in it. She felt nothing, for nothing was there.

  / |

  Lord Drev awoke at the bottom of the lava chute where he had hidden. In the blue desert sky above, winged snakes floated like notes of an escaped song. Leboc and his Falcon Guard waited for him, hidden among boulders around the pit, watching their eye charms for the approach of trolls or cacodemons.

  For many minutes, the wizarduke did not move, held still by the success of his quest: He had once again found his mate, found the one chosen for him by the nameless powers beyond time and Charm. He lifted her image before his mind's eye and studied her again, his orphaned woman.

  He wanted to speak with her. Her image was not enough. He had to look into her eyes and see her seeing him. Until she spoke to him and he met her soul, he felt that he would not really know himself.

  He decided that he must make the more dangerous journey to her by night and risk the treacherous eddies of the nocturnal tide that would pull tenaciously at his astral form. If his charmlines tangled and he lost his focus, the tide would sweep him into the Gulf, and he would fade to nothing among the stars. His body would stop breathing and no amount of Charm could keep him from shriveling to dried leather.

  And more dangerous than the tide, the threat of Ralli-Faj impended. Empowered by the black magic of cacodemons, the warlock had mastered bodiless transit. If they met, the wizarduke would suffer to escape with his life if at all. And Tywi—she would know living death.

  Even so— He felt compelled to go to her. Fate had bound them, and he possessed no other direction in his life. He had been stripped of his dominion, his family, and all hope save her.

  "Leboc!" The wizarduke stood upright. The dust that had settled on him during his trance scattered in a mauve puff, shed by the amulets that also dispelled all weariness from his body. Spry as a spider, he clambered up the chute and emerged into the quaking heat of the Qaf.

  Leboc and the Falcon Guard awaited him, their raptor hoods in place, protecting them from the brutal heat.

  "I am going south"—Lord Drev spoke—"to the Reef Isles of Nhat."

  "My lord!" The black filter mask could not mute the surprise in the marshal's voice. "That is at the other end of Irth."

  "Leave me to make this journey alone," the wizarduke said. "You have traveled far enough with me."

  Leboc's hood shook adamantly. "Too many of our own have died for us to abandon you now." He turned to the others to see if any disagreed. They stood unmoving, silent with determination. The marshal turned back to his lord and said confidently, "We will go where you lead us. Just tell us why we are going to the Reef Isles. Wrat has made his residence there. Are we striking at him?"

  "If we can." Drev pulled his hood into place but left his face mask dangling so that the troopers could read his features. "I have not yet discovered how to fight our enemy. Yet my fate leads me to Nhat. My hope has ever been that by following my fate I would learn to overcome Wrat and his cacodemons. I can offer no assurances other than that I will remain true to the powers that have always guided me."

  "Among your many titles, lord, you are the Duke of Dorzen and the last living regent of the Council of Seven and One." Leboc spoke firmly for the others. "We are your Falcon Guard, sworn to serve and protect you with our lives. Lead us where you will.
"

  / |

  They marched south through nacre waste, wending among ashen dunes and corrugated expanses of gray slag. At nightfall, the wizarduke called a halt on a gravel slide under twisted towers of naked rock and announced he would spend the dark hours in trance. He situated himself on a slate shelf under a rocky promontory, and his guard took up positions around him, hidden among the enfolded stone. They watched the burning migrations of stars for shadows of evil.

  Drev closed his eyes and began the patterned breathing that would induce trance. Alone inside himself, he gathered the airy powers of his Charm, the meditative feathers that would lift him above the sinking depths of sleep, and he flapped free of his body.

  Electrical clouds billowed in the darkness, magnetic auras of the tall rocks, fields of force unfurling like green banners against the fixity of the stars. The Falcon Guard in the dark appeared to his entranced eyes like pieces of dusk broken off from the end of day and dropped randomly among stony crevices. They pulsed with thermal hues of red and orange, vibrant man-shapes crouched in the black crannies of the night.

  He felt for the charmlines that radiated from the newt's-eye in his shoulder guard. What had once been no more than a subtle sense of destiny and then, after much attention and Charm, a thin filament, had become a thick cable in his ethereal grip. It had fed on the power he had generated during his two previous journeys and become sturdy enough to lead him with unerring swiftness to Tywi.

  But without the Abiding Star in the sky to renew its Charm, the connection began to thin immediately, its force bleeding away into the stellar abyss, drawn off by the nocturnal tide that carried charmless bodies and the heat of day into the Gulf. He would not have much time with Tywi before he would have to return to his physical form, for if the charmline wore out entirely, his body of light would be swept away from Irth.

  Drev put both of his spectral hands on the charmline and pulled himself toward it. A cold wind gusted through him, vision smeared to a fiery blur, and he abruptly found himself among dangling vines. The charmline in his grip tautened down a tunnel of overarching swamp trees toward the ghostly glow of ocean waves and star whorls.

  Slowly, he followed the clew, watchful for breathing red shadows of other entities. Owl Oil, though she wore no amulets, had seen him yesterday without his imparting any Charm to her at all, and perhaps there were others in Nhat who had this power, sentinels posted by Wrat. Perhaps Owl Oil was one of them. If so, then he had already betrayed Tywi, and that was his strongest motive in returning to her this night. He had to know that she had not come to harm because of him.

  At the end of the arcade of swamp trees, he found dunes concave and luminescent in the star shine. From there, he watched scavengers working the strand and spotted Tywi at once. She raked the high-water margin, gathering shells into one basket and oddments into another. Separate heaps consisted of kelp and drift bramble.

  Several ogres lurked on the dune tops nearby, though the wizarduke had no concern for them. Wholly charmless, they could not detect him. But Tywi did have the shadowy escort of a slender man in an ankle-length mantle, and he clutched a sizable power wand tall as he. Drev recognized him from his spiked hair as the man who had fled from him outside Tywi's hut two days before.

  That Tywi seemed unharmed fulfilled the wizarduke’s bodiless journey, and he considered returning at once to the Qaf. The charmline that bound him to his physical form had already thinned from a cable to a rope, and he could feel the tidal tug and the chill distances of night. A daring possibility stayed him.

  He stepped boldly out from behind the dunes and strode in plain view toward the sea. The man with the hefty power wand started with obvious alarm and moved immediately away from Tywi and down the |beach, busying himself with shouting orders to others.

  Quickly, Drev approached Tywi. She did not see him and continued her desultory raking. Finding her awake, she seemed to him less childlike, almost old, with thin but sturdy arms used to labor and a sober face that had known little of joy and rarely smiled. Her blunt-cut hair waved with the motions of her exertion, and the sinuous length of her body, bending under the night, carried the whole weight of human darkness.

  Looking at her, Drev experienced a feeling that at first he did not recognize. It felt like a giant surprise, as though he had suddenly perceived the secret hidden at the world's heart.

  Love!

  He stood still and defied this abrupt and immense feeling. How can I love this woman? I don't know her.

  Yet a part of him did know her. Watching her move, he felt he had known her always. This was the woman of his childhood scrying. His soul recognized her. And he knew then that he had loved her before, in a place outside time, in the Beginning before fate had separated them.

  Once he admitted this to himself, a visceral passion moved him. He wanted to hold her, to breathe her scent and feel her against him.

  He reached out and touched her with his luminous hand, and she straightened at the soothing contact of Charm and dropped the rake. The energy he gave to her through his touch thinned his charmline to a cord even as it infused her with strength as cheerful as clean snow.

  She gasped and turned to look at the man with the giant power wand. When she noticed that he was not directing magic at her, she turned full around. The ogres on the dune tops sat eating tubers roasted in their driftwood fires and chatting. None paid any heed to her.

  "I am here," Drev whispered. When she jumped, he added, "Don't be afraid, Tywi. I am—your friend."

  He touched her with enough Charm to see him, and her pale eyes grew wide. The influx of Charm defeated her fear, and she gazed up in amazement at the tall man with broad, dark face and startling blue eyes. "Who are you?" She took in his full height, the naked length of him shifting with feathery illumination, lit from within and fluttering like a paper lantern on a gusty night.

  "I am Drev. A wizard from Ux, where once I was a duke. Wrat—the Dark Lord—he is my enemy, and I am hiding from him and his cacodemons. I have come to you in my body of light because—" He hesitated, not sure what to say. "Because my magic tells me that—you and I—we belong together."

  Tywi stepped back and looked around again, searching for the source of this illusion. It's Whipcrow's trick, she decided. But he seemed oblivious to her and had moved far down the beach to monitor the dredging of the shoals. The ogres remained preoccupied with their roasted tubers.

  "How do you know my name?" she asked and backed away another step.

  "I visited you yesterday while you slept," Drev told her. He withdrew the energy he had initially used to calm her, fearing to overcharge her with Charm and risk a depressing letdown when he departed. "The charmwright Owl Oil told me your name. Do you know her?"

  Tywi did not reply. She stared at him suspiciously and, furtive as an animal, swept her gaze along the shore. The nearest other rakers had noticed she had stopped working and cast nervous glances at the ogres.

  "Pick up your rake," Drev said. "I don't want to get you in trouble."

  She retrieved her rake without removing her stare from him.

  "I am a wizard, just as I've told you," he explained. "As a child, when I first learned to scry, I felt you. I didn't know it was you. I didn't see you. You weren't even born yet. I simply felt your presence in my future. I knew then you were my polar double—a woman as I am a man, with little Charm as I am a Peer, orphaned as I am head of my lineage, alone even as I was embraced by the Brood of Dorzen."

  Her gaze lowered from the sable locks that spilled across his large shoulders, along the sleek swerve of his torso to his phallus and cod in their dark radiance of nether hair. "If you're a duke, why're you naked?"

  "I am in exile," he answered forthrightly. "I have no charmclothes, only my work uniform, which does not carry Charm and so cannot garb my body of light." He hung his head slightly. "I am sorry. I am naked, because I have lost everything but a handful of amulets. My dominion, my brood, my treasures—all are taken from me by Wrat."r />
  "What do you want from me, Lord Drev?"

  "Do not call me lord," he begged with bent brow. "I am not your lord but your fateful double—your mate, if you would have me."

  "Your mate!" Her raised voice lifted the heads of rakers farther down the strand. She spoke softer but with no less intensity. "We’re strangers!"

  "Oh, I know you." He smiled at her mettle. "Not your history. Not really. But your being. And in your depths, you know me. We are both human, and a river of instinct carries us together through this life."

  "I'm a prisoner." She slapped the sand with her rake. "And you're a ghost. This is crazy."

  "No. I am real." The charmline in his hand had diminished to a thread, and he could not linger any longer to explain himself. "I will return." He opened his right palm and showed a wire red as gold whose one end trailed into the sky like the line of a kite lost among cluttered stars. The other end pointed at her and dwindled to the finest thread at the point where it touched her heart. "Tell no one you've seen me. Our enemies are cruel."

  He stepped back, and the fine filament touching her snapped and vanished. The apparition of Drev disappeared, and his departure left her feeling as exhausted as the seaweed strewn under her rake.

  From a dune crest, a gruff cry hurtled toward her, and she looked up sharply at an ogre motioning for her to work.

  She resumed raking, her head windy with thoughts. Dare she believe what the handsome wraith had told her? How could it be that fate would choose her, a factory waif, an orphan, for a duke? No. She could not trust giddy hopefulness. It's a trick. Whipcrow's trick. Or worse.

  She remembered Owl Oil's warning: Far more dangerous than Whipcrow or the ogres is the warlock who oversees the Reef Isles. Ralli-Faj patrols the camp regularly. Perhaps this was his trick.