The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  Wiry and spry in hemp sandals and oil-stained jerkin, he moved quickly among the passengers—short, quiet people with beastmarks of sleek otter fur and sloe eyes—dockworkers and fisherfolk commuting to their homes on the outer isles.

  When the mate came to Jyoti and Poch, he paused and nervously eyed the firelock. He jerked his thumb toward the pilothouse, where the captain watched from the tall window.

  The mate escorted them past the overtly curious stares of commuters and up a corkscrew ladder to the bridge. The captain, a stout, turbaned woman in newt's-eye bodice and rat-star gem earrings, raised one bold red eyebrow when they informed her they were bound for the Cloths of Heaven.

  She asked no questions. She knew from their firelock and frocks. Renegades.

  "No ships approach the Cloths of Heaven," she told them sternly. "Only the Dark Lord's vessels have safe passage in those waters."

  "Take us as close as you dare." Jyoti handed her a gold mesh brace set with theriacal opals. "It's a healer's mesh. But … it's charmless. And can't be recharged. A cacodemon mesmermur broke its hex pattern. Even so, it's of Peerage quality, and the materials, the elemental gold and silver, are valuable scrap. They will fetch several prisms of actual Charm."

  The captain stared at Jyoti's earnest expression and accepted the fare without comment. The Peers returned to the deck. They sat by themselves on the cargo hatch until the ferry put in at its first port and deck benches cleared. Three more stops and they continued as the last passengers on board. The mate brought them two flagons of seaweed soup and skewers of braised fish courtesy of the captain, and they ate voraciously.

  Dawn erased the last stars when the ferry turned and banked toward a brooding shore of spider-root trees and looping lianas. The incoming tide allowed the ferry to shoulder close to a shore of willow shoals. The mate let down a plank walk to a shelf of roots crawling with tattoo snails.

  After the two passengers disembarked, the ferry backed away, boiling muddy water. Jyoti raised a hand, and the pilot jangled her bell. Swells of leaf waste and kelp undulated in the slapping waves on the verdant bank as the ferry moved out. The mate leaning on the rail watched pink shore birds soar upward like pieces of dawn taking their places in the sky.

  Huddled in their frocks and scalded with insect bites, Jyoti and Poch slept fitfully till midday. In the afternoon, they trudged through the swamp, meandering along fern trees and root mats, yet bearing east toward the destination given them by the sibyl many days before.

  At night, they lashed their bodies to trees with vines and took turns sleeping among the cancerous cries of predators. Blue plantains and abundant sugar grass provided nourishment, and they collected dew for drinking water. On the third day of their swamp crossing, they both fevered.

  The world began to look warped, and their bones leaked so much damp heat they felt soft. For a day and night, they lay shivering on a flat bough and watched the oily tide slide among the canes.

  Jyoti understood that they would die if they stayed. She cut walking sticks sturdy enough to bear their weight, and they hobbled on. Fiery shadows accompanied them. When they stopped to rest, blown flames danced transparently closer and ate their strength. Jyoti forced Poch to continue with her—crouching, shuffling, dragging through the poisoned shadows, ever eastward.

  In a bracken cove of hanging moss, she collapsed. The demented cry of a carrion monkey dwindled away as she toppled toward lethal sleep.

  Poch heard the same monkey's feeding cry and thought it howled for him. He looked for Jyoti, and she beckoned him onward. Too weak to walk anymore, he lay on his belly and wept until fever glistened to darkness in him.

  "Wake up, Poch," Jyoti's voice called.

  The shivering boy opened his eyes. His sister knelt above him. Her parched head bent close to whisper encouragement. "Get up—look!"

  Jyoti helped him to his knees and gestured at the shelf on which they had sprawled. The rock stared back at them with the worn visage of a serpent woman, the carved features of a giant smashed idol.

  Excited by what this stone face implied, Poch forced himself upright, stood swaying, and glimpsed through the treetops skeletal towers and immense broken bodies of winged sphinxes. He hauled his sister upright with all his ashen strength, and she glimpsed the ruins and sagged back to her knees.

  Again, Poch helped Jyoti to her feet, and they tottered through a slant hole in the root dike that enclosed the Cloths of Heaven. They staggered with locked arms under the shadow of the enormous sphinxes. To pass through tangles of creepers and enter the lightless interior, they had to let go of each other.

  Faint trickles of light led them deeper into a confusion of decayed collapse.

  Poch protested and moaned, wanting to say, We don't even know Caval is here. But he had no strength. And they had traveled too far.

  In the darkness, he reached again for her, and she was not there. Her voice whispered from an unexpected direction, and he groped that way and found her again. She clutched his arm more firmly, pulling him after her through the dense and black shambles.

  The ground trembled, cracking and sizzling under their weight. They whimpered in unison and inched forward.

  With a creaky groan, the floor tilted. Poch clutched at Jyoti, and they both slid sideways among clattering bricks before jolting to a stop. They glared at each other in the dark, the whites of their eyes shining.

  A deafening boom plummeted them into darkness. Their screams, shrill as bat cries, ended abruptly, kicked out of them by a thudding impact among rocks. Debris crashed atop them. In the hissing silence that ensued, Jyoti lay still. Poch shoved away a cinderous beam rotted with fungus. The decayed stone broke in his hands like brittle paper.

  He felt for his sister in the dark, urgent hands crushing more stone until he found her inert body close beside him. He pressed his face close to hers, feeling for her breath while listening with fingertips for a pulse at her throat.

  Terror astonished him in a Stygian cellar thriving with bog rats and his sister's corpse in his arms. Flawless fright electrified him. He shook with paralysis and could not let her go.

  A soft blue light fell over them, and Poch observed his sister's face suddenly very clearly, slack as a sleeper. He twisted around and winced up at a tall, long-jawed man with orange hair trimmed stiff as bristles, close to his blunt head with its severe features.

  Jyoti snored.

  Poch stared at her in the quiet blue light. Her nostrils flared, and he felt the knock of her pulse.

  "Let her rest." The man spoke reverberantly. Azure radiance leaked from his pores. "The healing has not yet set. Wait."

  "Are you—"

  "Yes, Poch." The square, strong face squinted an avuncular smile. "You remember me."

  "You are the sorcerer CavaI," the boy said vaguely. "I think. I saw you so rarely—and always from afar."

  Caval's orange eyebrows lifted compassionately. "That's how it is with Assassins. We are known only by those we serve. I served your father."

  The sorcerer lifted Jyoti into his powerful arms and carried her into the dark. Poch scrambled to follow, drawing strength from the blue, healing charmlight that wafted off Caval.

  He was not swift enough. In moments, the sorcerer had disappeared, swallowed whole by darkness. With him went his Charm, and the boy wobbled to stay on his feet.

  Poch forced himself to move blindly forward. Presently a dim glow appeared, more firmly outlining the mess of upended floor slabs and tilted columns. He wanted to cry out for help. His parched throat made only croaking noises through his chattering teeth.

  Dragging his body like a dead thing, he slowly moved toward the breathing light buried in the smashed architecture. Beyond bent girders corroded to rusty lace, he found Caval again.

  The sorcerer sat cross-legged in a perfect circle of ash. Air plants and fire-flowers drooped around him among shafts of daylight jittery with butterflies.

  Poch gasped. Caval appeared tremendously aged. In windings of tinsel and
azure gauze and with long wisps of gray beard and shriveled body, he looked wizened as an insect. A blue radiance shone around him. It blazed brighter than the daylight in the shining fern glade.

  Peering over blocks flocked with fungus, Poch wanted to ask, Where is Jyoti? But his throat would not work. Where is my sister?

  Staring long and hard, the boy accepted that the wizened squatter sitting still as an idol was indeed Caval, much aged.

  Poch choked back his fearful questions. He advanced gingerly over the crumbly detritus, chary of a misstep that would send him plunging into hopeless depths.

  Caval did not budge at his arrival. The aura around him brightened.

  Poch stepped from the gloomy shadows into the daystruck brightness of airy blossoms and floating butterflies and squinted. The long and perilous trek was over, and he stood shivering in the fragrant haze of prehistoric plants, wincing in the luminous presence of this withered and shining man.

  Nut-husk eyelids opened on rheumy irises, and the sorcerer stared in real time at the brother of the margravine for whom his duty had stolen him from heaven. The boy stood before him ulcerous with sores, his face shrunk to his skull, burning eyes sunken deep in their round holes. Even so, he recognized the father, Lord Keon, in the lad's tall brow.

  He nodded and beckoned Poch closer.

  They looked at each other briefly, joy and expectancy immixed in their harrowed faces, and then the boy came forward gratefully. As he stepped into the ashen circle, the blue aura of the sorcerer's Charm enclosed him—and his wounds sloughed away like snakeskin, falling behind as an emaciated shadow. At the dark perimeter, the shadow of wounds waited for his return.

  Pain dimmed to ache, and Poch's mind sharpened instantly as if he had startled awake from a long and tedious nightmare.

  The old man nodded and smiled.

  "Master Caval!" Poch cried in relief. "Master Caval—you are so old!"

  "I am old," the sorcerer admitted in a flimsy voice. "The climb up the Calendar of Eyes used most of my strength."

  Poch felt strength returning to his starved muscles. "My clothes!" He gawked at his pristine frock and pants and his buffed shining boots, shocked to see that Charm had mended lifeless matter.

  He touched his amulets. Fully charged, they hummed with Charm under his fingertips.

  Caval sighed and unlocked his crossed legs. The blue aura disappeared. Its power drew back into his core, and he did not rely on it to pull himself heavily upright.

  "Yes, I am old," Caval drearily acknowledged again. "Over forty-five thousand days old—and most of those days spent defending your father, Lord Keon."

  The old sorcerer bowed, and Poch feared he might tumble over and moved forward to catch him. The old man straightened, and the boy found himself close enough to see the circuitry of burst capillaries in the sorcerer's long nose and in the gray sclera of his eyes.

  "My sister," Poch asked. "Where have you taken her?"

  The sorcerer lifted the wisps of two arms. "I do not have her."

  "I saw you carry her off."

  A smile webbed across his sunken face. "That was my body of light. I sent it to guide you here. Your sister was an illusion."

  "Then, where is she now?" Poch peered about in the fulgent sunlight at flame-blossoms and spiral ferns. "Is she dead?"

  "Perhaps."

  "Don't you know?" Poch asked, alarmed.

  "I don't know everything, young master." The tired old man hung his head dolefully. "It was enough to get at least one of you here safely. That it is you who stands here now and not your sister was decided long ago by the blind gods. Will you question their decision?"

  "Then you know why I am here?" the boy asked, his thrilled eyes searching the rugged terrain of the sorcerer's decrepit features for emotional cues and finding none, only fatigue and the ravages of time.

  "We are here for the same purpose," Caval asserted. "Irth is in jeopardy."

  "Can you help us?" Poch blurted. "Can you find my sister? She is your margravine now. You must find her. She cannot survive long out there in that fetid swamp. Don't you see? She has lost all her Charm!"

  The torpid elder sighed. "We will need far more than Charm to defeat our enemies." He placed a pallid hand on the boy's brow.

  His touch absorbed all exhaustion, and a mute vibration of peace and health passed into Poch, consolidating the Charm he had already absorbed from the sorcerer's aura.

  Caval motioned for the traveler to step forward, and Poch timorously slid closer and flinched timidly when the sorcerer reached to touch him again.

  "Fear not, mousekin." Caval smiled and showed perfect teeth behind his wispy beard. "My touch gives but does not take. Come and rest in my Charm."

  Caval laid both hands on the boy's head, and Poch felt his feet grow light. He realized that for the first time in many days, he was not tired. His body did not ache. Fear did not hunker in his chest.

  He returned the sorcerer's smile and pressed his face into the old man's concave chest. His beard smelled of alpine resins, and spikes of stars glinted behind Poch's closed eyes.

  "You have traveled the length of the world to find me, child of my dead lord." He spoke soothingly. "And now I am your servant."

  Poch separated from the sorcerer and gazed hopefully up into his venerable face. "Can you slay the Dark Lord?"

  Caval shook his head. "You have been too long without Charm. The touch of it makes you think I have powers greater than a sorcerer."

  Poch scowled and stepped aside. Immediately he felt the light of his body dim. The shadow of wounds edged closer.

  He turned and smiled gratefully at Caval, glad to no longer carry the burden of exhaustion. "I was afraid we might never find you."

  "Destiny was undecided," Caval agreed. "Death stalked you on your trek."

  "And still does, Caval. Cacodemons pursue us. They promise us the protection of the Dark Lord."

  "You are right to fear being seen," the sorcerer concurred. "Yet I sense no foes nearby."

  Poch's gaze hardened. "Jyoti learned that the cacodemons are vulnerable to physical force. But there are too many of them, you see. We need a spell that can reach into the Gulf and draw down the power to defeat Wrat himself."

  "That is why the blind gods have brought us together, young master." Caval motioned him to sit. "It is time to use their blindness to see. Sit. I need your young strength. I am too old for so deep a trance."

  “See?” Poch squatted before the sorcerer, his hopeful face shimmering in a ray of daylight. "See what, Caval?"

  "Echoes of lost time, young master." Caval composed himself, sitting still and tall as a heron, blue eyelids fluttering closed. "Trance. The spill of dying, young master. The sp ill of dying, without the catch of death."

  / |

  In the deep blue shadows of the Falls of Mirdath, Lord Drev and Ripcat faced each other. The roar of the cascades shook the air and muted shouts to whispers.

  "The way to the Spiderlands is through that cave!" Drev yelled and pointed to a vertical crevice in the rock wall behind them.

  "What about the spiders?" Ripcat called.

  "No Charm will protect us!”

  The thief shook his head and turned his attention to the walls of falling water at the end of the rock corridor. He and the wizarduke had come this far underground from the Malpais Highlands, following wisps of Charm to this gateway. No cacodemons had pursued. No witch queen had blocked their passage.

  Why risk the Spiderlands? he asked himself, recalling with a needling chill the horror stories of those badlands.

  Before he could express his reservations to Drev, the sheets of tumbling water ripped and a dozen cacodemons slashed into the long cavern. Behind them came the black-armored figure of Hu'dre Vra, huge voice booming from the baleen of his spiked mask.

  "I have found you, Drev!" The Dark Lord came forward with a gold seeker held high in one hand and a cutting tool in the other. "And now you will find death—many times!"

  Drev push
ed Ripcat behind him and discharged an orange burst from his firelock. It dislodged slabs of stone from the cavern ceiling, and the cacodemons pulled back in a panic.

  Hu'dre Vra smashed through the fallen rock like so much dead wood. His black magic, amplified by his armor, offered no vulnerability to physical assault. The sharp edges of that armor scratched sparks from the collapsed wall as he shoved closer.

  Ripcat leaped first into the charmway, and Drev hurled himself after. The thunder of the falls vanished. Sizzling silence enclosed them, and in an instant they tumbled onto hands and knees in a cinereous wasteland.

  Clouds of ash obscured sight, and they coughed and choked and scrambled to their feet, expecting pursuit. The cinder dust settled, and the two men pressed their backs together, defensively confronting the strange terrain that surrounded them. Everywhere jagged thorn trees crouched among high brooming thistle grass. Silver feathers littered this arid terrain, acres of molted feathers.

  As their eyes adjusted to the brash, unfiltered daylight, they recognized not feathers but tattered cobwebs. Animals small and large had left their husks dangling in the austere vegetation: shrunken birds, withered mice, and a shriveled troll hung from thorn trees, wrapped in shreds of silk. The luminous day revealed an endless landscape of scalloped sands and sharp trees.

  Fearing pursuit, Drev and Ripcat wanted to flee from the cleaved rock, but they feared dashing blindly into a trapdoor web. Slowly they edged among the cottony trees and their ornaments of perished animals, seeking a path.

  None offered itself, and the next moment a noise of surf echoed from the charmway.

  "They're coming through!" Drev realized. "We have to hide at once."

  The wizarduke had no time even to scan his eye charms before bolting into the bramble.

  Ripcat hurried behind, and together they crashed through a brake of thistle grass into a hive of spider mites. Immediately, their flesh burned, sprayed with venom. Tiny red mites dusted them like pollen. As Drev had warned, Charm did not faze them, and the two men hunkered low in the tossing grass and rubbed sand and ash over themselves.