The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  Poch feared for the sanity of the one man who might be able to save them. In fright, he reached out and clutched the blue tinsel windings that wrapped the emaciated man and shook him. "Stop it, Caval!"

  “The mystery of our lives depends on the dance of the three blind gods,” the sorcerer mumbled, still staring with crazed attentiveness at the truth of an invisible world.

  "Stop it now!" Poch shook the old man hard, flinging tufts of Charm into the air like torn fleece. "Stop it! Stop it!"

  The old man's face blurred with the ferocity of Poch's assault, and he recognized then the terror in the boy and calmed down. He gripped Poch's wrists firmly and gently freed himself.

  “Thank you." He spoke earnestly and met the youth's apprehensive expression with a placid smile. "I'm sorry. I lost myself. I'm better now."

  The sorcerer's Charm had steadied to suffused radiance, an azure dusting aswirl about him, the pollen of an impossible flower. Poch understood that Caval's very bones had become a carrier of Charm. His body is a living amulet!

  Though their telepathy had vanished, Poch marked the imprint of profound sorrow in Caval's cracked clay face and knew the old man's pain could not be healed by Charm.

  "Can you stop Wrat?" Poch asked, voice edged with desperation. "Can you stop him now that you remember?"

  Caval shook his hoary head. "I cannot stop him. The magic of the cacodemons is the magic of the Dark Shore." He stood, and his aura of Charm dimmed, yet his large eyes grew brighter. "I cannot stop him, but Reece can."

  "Where is he?"

  "I don't know." The elder put a quavering hand to his brow, where veins clustered like kelp. "I must find out if he is still on Irth. If he still lives."

  Poch shivered. In the diminishing shine of Charm from the sorcerer, he felt the damp chill of the rainy swamp. His breath painted the air with frail smoke, and he noticed he was panting. He strove to steady himself against the doubts and imagined fears that haunted him again in the absence of amulets. Though the sorcerer had restored the lad's amulet frock, the hex-gems still held no Charm.

  "If Reece is alive," he asked, seeking hope, "what can he do against Hu'dre Vra?"

  "He could start by killing him," Caval replied and walked to the edge of the ashen circle.

  "Reece could do that?"

  The sorcerer rubbed the air with his open palms, feeling outward into the world. He was too feeble to sense much of anything beyond, and he gave up with a frustrated sigh. All his Charm had focused within. He would have to search from there.

  He shot an annoyed look at the boy and wished he had the strength to keep him in telepathic bondage so he would stop asking questions and let him think about all that he had just learned.

  "You shared my memories of the Dark Shore," Caval said. "You know I chose Reece to help me with very difficult work. I did not choose a weak man."

  "What about the cacodemons?"

  "They are phantoms to Reece ," the sorcerer explained and returned to stand at the center of the scorched circle. "He is a denizen of the Dark Shore where cacodemons are psychic entities, not physical creatures. They cannot touch him."

  Excited, Poch pushed to his feet from where he had been huddling in the cold rain light. "Then we must find out if he is alive."

  "Precisely, young master." Caval sat, face tucked in, veiled by his white hair and florid beard. “Now if you will keep your silence for a while, my lord, I will search for him with a strong eye. But, mind you, my Charm is weak. The trance used me up. I will need some time. Will you stand back, out of the circle, and watch over me?"

  "Of course," Poch agreed and quickly exited the cleared area. "Seek him at once."

  Unlike the erect and powerful old sorcerer who had guided him here with his Charm, Caval looked slumped over and simply unconscious when he entered trance. He could be dead. But Poch knew he was not, and he paced among the rubble anxiously, searching for vipers in the smashed plates of paving and chunks of masonry.

  From around a broken slat of the tilted floor, a cacodemon glided. It had entered the Cloths of Heaven searching for the fugitives from the labor camp and had heard from afar the disturbed gravel of Poch's nervous pacing.

  In the embroidered silence of dripping rain and muted bird calls, it floated, watching its prey. The gaunt old one looked dead. No body light shone about him and no scent of heat tinged the chill morning from his inert body.

  The boy it recognized from hive memory—Poch, the stripling whose sister Jyoti maimed Ss-o and Ys-o. That memory kept the cacodemon wary, alert for the presence of the margravine. Only after it had circled through the fallen girders and become convinced that no others lurked nearby did it swoop in to seize him.

  A scream split from Poch at the sucking evil sound of the cacodemon's attack. He did not see the monster until the hooked tentacles snared him and yanked him violently away. Pulled up against the tusked faces in the demon's thorax, he shrieked.

  The mouths tore at his body, and the hideous jaws, gnashing inches from his eyes, widened in amazement at the rapid intensity of his cries. Its laugh laved him with its carnivorous breath, and then it chewed on his face.

  Poch's frantic cries jarred Caval from his renewed trance and spilled Charm like holy dust, driving shadows away. He jumped to his feet in a whirlwind of light.

  The boy had disappeared.

  Caval spied him high in the bright attic of the ruined temple, thrashing in the cacodemon's coiling grasp. The eelish monster slithered through a hole in the tower wall that opened on the rainy sky and climbed rapidly away.

  Under a wild cry, the sorcerer collapsed. Madness swooped in. It arrived as emptiness. Cabochons of raindrops on the ground so close to his eye appeared like polished scry crystals—and the future he beheld in them was empty. As magnifying mirrors, they reflected his staring eye and the ramshackle interior of the Cloths of Heaven. And the ruins were empty of all but him.

  He felt powerless before the curse of himself. He did not want to move. It was time to lie there and die. The evil he had loosed upon Irth had at last broken him.

  A deep drumbeat sounded within the throb of his heart. It reverberated like the evocation drum the witches used to summon divine presences. His gray eyes flexed and changed focus from the very close raindrops to the surrounding debris of silt-stained rocks.

  Out of the rain mist rose three monolithic shadows. The blind gods.

  Caval blinked.

  The gods remained. Woolly as smoke, they leaned forward to include him in their confidence.

  / |

  Jyoti soothed her comrade with a mesmermur song she had learned as a child from her father. The song quieted the glade. Even the lizards did not stir, and when Jyoti was done, Tywi slept in Dogbrick's arms.

  The margravine reached over and gently removed the sword Taran from Tywi's crossed arms. The sleeping woman stirred and muttered incoherently.

  "Sometimes she walks out of her body," Dogbrick revealed. "I think she learned how from Owl Oil—the Lady Rica." His animal features tightened. "The cacodemom took her—snatched her right off the beach."

  Jyoti sheathed the sword and secured the scabbard to her back. "My brother is out here somewhere. I must find him before the cacodemons do. So I'm going to the Cloths of Heaven. A sibyl told me the sorcerer Caval is there. Perhaps he can help me track down Poch."

  "We dare not linger here long." Dogbrick worried. "We must get out of the Reef Isles before the cacodemons organize a wider search."

  "The demons could be here any minute or not for days," Jyoti said. "But Tywi is not ready to travel. You both need to rest."

  Dogbrick nodded and leaned back against the mossy hummock. "Morning is a good time to sleep. Go with her, Ripcat. Find the sorcerer the sibyl spoke of and bring him here if you can."

  Ripcat agreed and left his firelock with his friend. He moved lighter without it and scouted for Caval far ahead of Jyoti into the marshland. He skimmed as a fleet shadow through the swales, stopping at intervals to be sure J
yoti followed. From tree crests he searched out hazards and more easily identified coral bridges among the isles. Before noon, they reached the Cloths of Heaven.

  Jyoti used the sword Taran to feel for Caval's presence in the rambling ruins, and the gold blade directed her to a fallen tower. Ripcat crawled nimbly over the toppled stone blocks and descended into a deep well where daylight burned at the bottom in rags of mist. An old man lay there facedown in his beard, one eye cocked to stare at the ground.

  Ripcat rolled the elder onto his back and felt life stir in him. His pulse feathered softly, and his breathing came thin and irregular. He gazed upward with blind eyes until Jyoti arrived and lay the sword Taran upon his withered frame.

  "He is my brood's weapons master." Jyoti recognized him. "But so much more aged!"

  Caval sat up, shaken yet alert. Down in his soul, the gods continued their conference, but he could no longer hear them. The well-being of Charm drowned them out with the renewed vigor of his heartbeat. Even so, he well remembered their purpose with him, and he fixed his gaze upon the freckled woman with Lord Keon's broad jaw. "Margravine—" The skeletal man struggled to sit up.

  "Take the sword, Caval." Jyoti urged it upon him.

  Caval received the Charmed weapon and pressed his brow against its blade. Pulling Charm directly into his brain, he purged the madness that had seized him only minutes earlier. The black hues of his despondency brightened to gray transparencies very like witch veils. He peered through them to the shimmering depths of his soul. There stood three monolithic shadows, three pieces of elemental darkness that would not go away.

  "I must tell you at once—" he croaked, then pressed the sword to his throat to find the strength to speak, "Poch has been seized. By a cacodemon. Just this hour. He was not killed outright. We must assume he is taken to the Palace of Abominations—to Wrat."

  Jyoti, without Charm to soften this news, felt her knees weaken. She knelt and faced her weapons master with a glare of urgency. "What can we do?"

  "Not we." He motioned for Ripcat to help him rise and seized the beastman's arm. "Him. He will slay Wrat."

  Ripcat looked with surprise into the wizened sorcerer's demented scowl.

  "Do you remember me, Reece?" Caval touched the sword to Ripcat's skull. "Do you remember Lara?"

  At the sound of her name, Ripcat plunged into trance. The sorcerer caught his body as he fell. He held the limp man in one arm and with the sword ripped from him the skin of light that had been his form in this world for over five hundred days.

  The skin of light shredded to mist, and a young man with pale hair and rose-white nakedness rolled unconscious to the ground. He lay on his back, his softly bearded face troubled, dream wrought.

  "He's so young," Jyoti marveled. "He can't be more than ten thousand days."

  "I worked with him many years," Caval remembered wistfully. "We worked in a laboratory where years are as days upon the Dark Shore."

  "What has happened to him?"

  "He is remembering. Look. Caval swept the sword across the supine body and charmsmoke lifted to images.

  Together they watched Reece climb the Ladder of the Wind out of an abyss of darkness. He emerged in the bright air among the glassy spheres of Hellsgate and Nemora. The stars around him sharpened their spikes, and Lara called to him.

  The dark music of her soul's shadow whispered from the eternity packed whole in the radiance of the Abiding Star. And the fool from the Dark Shore climbed toward it.

  Between the Gulf and the Abiding Star lies Irth. Reece collided with that world so forcefully, he lost consciousness. His Charm and his body of cold matter protected him from outright extinction, and he survived to wake stunned on the wild planetary shore of his longing.

  Lara's shadow sang from out of the sun. Only this was no sun that baked the anvil rocks and salt pans. It was the compact face of God. It was silence listening. It was all that Caval had foretold him: the floodgate of eternity, the hot fire of time spilling upon vastness, and all the worlds of creation going down into its smoldering sunset billions of years deep.

  Lara's shadow sang.

  Quietly as pain, her dark song chilled him. At first, he could not find her, though her soul's shadow lay all about him. Not until he looked up did he see that her music sang down to him from the first sun. She had soared into the Abiding Star shining fiercely above him and lay forever and infinitely beyond his reach.

  Reece raged with delirious grief. He dashed across the blasted terrain, wanting to lift away and rise toward her. He ran until he had spent almost all his strength. Then he collapsed and lay upon this strange planet, dying.

  In his madness, he spun a skin of light to protect himself so that he could go on and somehow find a way to the Beginning and to Lara. He shielded his blistered head and shoulders with cool blue fur. In the totemic style of the forest aborigines where Caval had trained him, he used the last of his magic to condense his strength into feline contours, amplifying his humanity with bestial powers.

  And because he did this—mad, desperate to survive—he used all his magic to create his new self. He invested everything he had of his old being, including his memories.

  Caval's charmsmoke lifted away from the comatose man, and Jyoti and Caval exchanged somber looks.

  "Even without his beastmarks, he looks dangerous," Jyoti said, glancing down nervously at the lithe, athletic youth marked discreetly yet clearly at his power points with small ritual scars and arcane tattoos. "Will he help us when he wakes?"

  Caval held her gaze gently. "No, Jyoti. It is we who will have to help him."

  The Stars under Our Feet

  Reece woke charmless and fraught with memories of the Dark Shore. Rain dripped in sparks through the well of daylight. The Cloths of Heaven loomed above him with confused shadows, flitting dragon-flies, and heights of ruin.

  Irth, he realized with awe. He had climbed to the first world of Creation, to the place where magic began.

  He sat up and squinted at the old man and the freckled woman of Charmed beauty kneeling beside him—Jyoti to whom, as Ripcat, he had already lost his heart.

  She gazed ardently back at him, willing him to remember the destinal bond that had united them over the sword Taran, united them to find her brother or die trying. The question in her gaze could only be answered with love.

  A frown creased his blond brow, remembering his life as Ripcat.

  Now he was Reece. And there was Lara.

  Lara. Where is she?

  He could not hear the dark music of her soul's shadow anymore.

  "You would have to climb the Calendar of Eyes to hear that again," Caval explained, his harrowed face a bearded skull in the smoky light.

  Reece flinched, realizing that the old man and Jyoti could hear his thoughts. His mind floated in the charmsmoke peeling off him. As the blue vapors dissipated, so did the telepathy. With it went the certainty that this decrepit mummy in tinseled windings was his former master, the visitant from magical Irth who had come to the Dark Shore to purify his alchemic gold. He peered at the old man, trying to see the Caval he remembered.

  The sorcerer helped him by waving the charmsmoke over himself into a skin of light that masked him with the image of a beardless, red-haired youth of imperious mien.

  "You!"

  "Yes, Reece." Caval regarded him with a supercilious smirk, a disdainful hauteur that loosened Reece's jaw it so perfectly reminded him of his teacher. "We are together again—after so very long."

  Reece's frown deepened. "Where is Lara?"

  "Dead," he said, with a contemptuous flare of his nostrils. "You know that. You drowned her soul yourself."

  "It had become deformed." Reece felt he spoke from out of his bones, from so deep in himself and the past. "She would have suffered."

  "Of course." Caval's strong, young voice spoke coolly. "You did the correct thing."

  "No." Reece's frown became a scowl. "I didn't. That's why I'm here. You, too, I think. We did the wrong thing, Ca
val. We should never have made her a witch."

  "The sword of Justice cuts both ways, old friend," Caval reminded him with a cavalier smile in his handsomely self-possessed face. "Would Lara have been better left in the flood to drown as a helpless infant? Or should we have abandoned her only later when she was old enough to suffer a death summed of her own choices?"

  "Enough!" Reece pressed his fists to his eyes.

  "It is never enough!" Caval shouted, and his skin of light shredded to mist. Reduced again to a withered husk of his former self, the sorcerer continued in a fragile voice, "It is never enough with the dead. Remember, I taught you that. You knew better than to look. You knew about the shadow of death. You knew that if you listened too closely you would lose your own soul. You even tried to remind me. You do remember that. I know you do."

  Reece lowered his hands and looked up sadly at Caval.

  "Lara was an echo of a higher love." The sorcerer gestured with a spidery hand to Jyoti. "What do you feel in your heart for this woman, for Jyoti, whose life you restored, whose soul touched yours? Surely you see? There is a charmbond between you. For she, too, is an echo of a higher love yet, beyond the portal of the Abiding Star."

  "Where Lara has gone," Reece whispered, peering inward with open eyes.

  Caval put a caring hand upon his student's shoulder. "If you will let her go."

  "Lara is dead." Jyoti spoke up impatiently. "My brother is still alive. And he is suffering in the Palace of Abominations while you sit here talking."

  Reece stood up and lifted Jyoti with him. Bare-chested in his black cord trousers and worn boots he filled the same stature as Ripcat but wholly human and of a far more vulnerable appearance. "Let's go get your brother."

  "Wait." Caval struggled upright and clutched at Reece for support. "You have no Charm."

  "And neither can Charm harm me." Reece steadied the doddering sorcerer and addressed him gently. "I remember all that you taught me, Caval. And I know where I am. On Irth, I am a different breed of man."