The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  "I will send cacodemons."

  "Us-seless-s."

  "They can stone him to death."

  "He is from the Dark Shore, my lord. They become phantoms in his charmless presence as they were on the cold world of their origin. The cacodemons are wraiths of the Dark Shore and do not affect one another as he does—for he is a physical man from beyond the Gulf. Near him, they can't even pick up twigs."

  "The ogres can!" Wrat cried. "Send the ogres! And you! You can kill him, Ralli-Faj. Stop him and we will share together all the spoils of Irth!"

  "I will win that pledge with his-s corps-se, my lord," the warlock promised and hovered backward out the giant portal into the golden afternoon.

  Wrat looked with dismay at Thylia sprawled before the onyx throne, lifeless. He waved for her to go away, and a cacodemon dragged her corpse into the air and out the towering door.

  In an effort to stare down danger, Wrat gazed at Poch in the coils of a cacodemon and did not blink until the details of the boy's horrified features took on lucidity and significance.

  "You think I am defeated, don't you?" Wrat asked dully, stepping closer. "I can see it in your face. That's what you think. I know. You are a messenger of my destruction, because you come from Arwar Odawl, the first city I destroyed."

  "I'm no messenger," Poch asserted sincerely, afraid of the crazed look in Wrat's pinched eyes.

  "What you really are sinks deeper than what your memory can follow" the madman instructed. "Yet I will show you, vengeful messenger. I will keep you alive to show you. I am not defeated. I cannot be defeated. For I am greater than the ashes of which we are made!”

  / |

  The cacodemons could not see Reece from afar. They spotted Jyoti in the marsh's sprawling fog. She ran through the torn mists with the sword Taran drawn. Its gold blade flashed, barbed with hot spikes of reflected sky.

  At the fringe of the marsh, they swooped over her, and she danced a cutting path into their midst. Only close up did the demons confront the magus beside her. His presence was enough to destroy them, yet he waved his assault knife in a warding pattern anyway, responding with fear before the horrid creatures, and a score of cacodemons drizzled away into cold fumes.

  Jyoti and Reece sprinted across the grass verges into the pyramid's shadow. They entered a maze of thorn hedges bright with impaled butterflies, many still twitching where the wind had flung them.

  Using the sword Taran as a seeker, Jyoti brought the presence of her brother to mind and let the vibrancy in the haft guide her. The thorn shrubs gave way to blossoming bushes and espaliered vines.

  They entered a cul de sac—a wall of blue glass—and Reece knocked against the glass with his knife, repeating the warding rhythms he had learned as a magus under Caval's tutelage. Here on Irth, his magic from the Dark Shore was powerful enough to break Charm. The wall fogged away, and they rushed on.

  Dwarf fruit trees and unhewn boulders of chalcedony and agate filled a wide amphitheater. Terraces of miniature trees and flowering arbors enclosed a central plaza of colored sands raked in broad hex-circles. At its center, the fallen star lay on the ground, asleep.

  Reece's warding magic had broken the spell of walls and light. The ceiling of crystal spheres had vanished. Above them loomed the colossal interior of the Palace of Abominations with its enormous, skewed girders and shafts echoing with the shrieks of cacodemons.

  The sword Taran pointed to a spiral ramp that ascended into dense upper storeys nested with crypts, vaults, and trusses. Jyoti did not hurry to it. She paused before the fallen star.

  "Free it from its suffering, Reece," she called to her partner. “The Dark Lord has found where Ralli-Faj has hidden it and is using his black magic to keep this poor creature alive."

  Before Reece could reply, a harsh cry shouted from the terraces. Two ogres, Gryn and Gnawl, charged across the sward swinging clubs. Jyoti unslung her firelock, and a tentacle from above snatched it out of her hands. She ducked. With a cold whistle, a whipstroke tail sliced through the air above her.

  Reece ran to her side, cutting a sigil in the air with his knife. He sliced the attacking cacodemons to mist above the topiary garden, then spun to face the attacking ogres.

  Jyoti held them off with a flourish of the sword Taran.

  Gryn and Gnawl circled in opposite directions through the dwarf shrubs and blossom trees.

  A flung club struck Reece in the chest and dropped him breathless. Jyoti jumped over him and drove off the ogre who had swept in to grab him.

  From the other side, another thrown club hit Jyoti's arm, and the sword spun from her grip.

  Gryn and Gnawl pounced. With slashing knives, their prey held them off. Only for the moment. Gryn retrieved the sword Taran and hacked at the air with it.

  Jyoti knew that the charmless ogre had no notion how to command the weapon in its grip except as a cutting implement. The charmed bond between the margravine and the sword Taran offered her only hope before the ogre's furious attack, and she prayed that the blade would respond to the sound of her voice.

  She shouted a command to the sword, and its Charm flashed and burned the ogre's hands. When he dropped it, she darted forward. Before she could grab the weapon, Gnawl caught her leg.

  Reece jumped onto Gnawl and stabbed into the woolly mane.

  With a cracked roar, the ogre threw him off, and Reece splashed into the sand garden. He watched helpless from there as the two ogres closed on Jyoti. They moved with frightful swiftness, snagging her knife arm, seizing her shoulders, and bending her head to snap her neck.

  With a desperate cry, Reece chanted again the spell that had first transformed him, a magus of the Dark Shore, into Ripcat, beastmarked denizen of Irth—the same magic that had saved him when he lay dying in the cinders under the Abiding Star. Blue flames whirled up out of Irth and flung him to his feet as Ripcat.

  His roar froze the ogres, and he lunged toward them, fangs and knife bared.

  They dropped Jyoti. Still, they could not move fast enough to avert slicing wounds from Ripcat's blurred knife. Bawling their hurt, they backed swiftly away, searching for the firelock.

  Jyoti took the sword Taran in her grip and ran toward the ramp. "Let's go, Cat!"

  "No!" Ripcat pointed to where Gryn had found the firelock. "Take cover!"

  Rays of blue charmfire exploded boulders and ignited shrubbery. Ripcat rolled, leaped, bounced, and slithered among gusts of flame. Flying shrapnel cut sparkling; tracks in the air and kept both ogres crouched low and blind to their targets.

  Out of the tumbling smoke, Ripcat burst upon the inexpert marksman and threw his blade into the ogre's small face. The green steel cleaved the creature's skull.

  Ripcat plucked the firelock from Gryn's dead arms and turned it on Gnawl's howling attack. A burst of blue charmfire charred the ogre to a burning skeleton.

  Seeing Ripcat unscathed, Jyoti turned and bolted up the ramp, following the insistent hum of the sword Taran. She passed stone crypts with windows where tattered bodies bobbed.

  Down the wide ramp seethed a crowd of cacodemons. Jyoti ducked into a tight corridor between the crypts, and the monstrous throng swirled past her. Soon as they passed, she put aside the quest for her brother and followed after. Ripcat's body, transformed by the magic of the Dark Shore to an Irthly, beastmarked shape, had become vulnerable to their claws—and if they murdered him, the sorcerer would also die.

  Drastic screams echoed from ahead, and she pulled Charm into herself from the sword Taran and ran faster.

  Rounding the last bend, she glimpsed charmfire exploding rock gardens and boulders, slaying the demons that had rushed into the amphitheater. She fell flat.

  "Ripcat!" she called, and when he ceased fire she charged down the ramp toward the remaining two demons. At sword's length, she whirled and cut through tentacles and flared claws.

  The wounded cacodemons hauled their screams upward into a ventilation chute and disappeared among bonging echoes.

  Ripcat ran
to her across the scorched gardens. "You didn't have to come back."

  "You're Ripcat again." She sheathed her sword and clutched the blue fur at the side of his face. "You're vulnerable to the cacodemons—and the Dark Lord."

  "I couldn't fight the ogres as Reece." He handed her the smoking firelock, his head bowed resignedly. "I wasn't fast enough."

  "You can't face Wrat like this!" She despaired and pressed her hands to the cat facets of his cheeks. "Quickly, take off this skin of light."

  "I can't." His whiskers twitched. "I don't remember any of the magic now that I'm Ripcat again! I know that I am Reece, disciple of Caval, a magus of the Dark Shore. I remember that—but I don't remember how to work sorcery as Ripcat!"

  "Then we have to get out of here right now and find Caval." She took his arm, but he would not move.

  "Not without your brother." His jade eyes lifted toward the ghastly interior of the palace. "Lord Drev and Lady Rica are in here. If we can free them, their sorcery can free me, and together we can end Wrat's days on Irth."

  Tok. Tok. Tok.

  "Big plans-s," Ralli-Faj hissed from the burned hedges. "S-small means-s."

  Jyoti pulled the firelock from her shoulder and, even though she knew better, fired one tight burst at maximum.

  The Dark Lord's magic protected Ralli-Faj, and the charmburst erupted into a blow back of cold green phlegm. The warlock laughed like sizzling acid, blue flames dancing in every hole of his head.

  Jyoti and Ripcat pulled the thick ectoplasm from their faces and hands.

  "Save your brother," Ripcat whispered and pushed away from her. He darted in a smudge of fluid motion across the blasted garden directly toward the warlock.

  Ralli-Faj seized him easily, yet the effort required a moment's tight focus—and in that instant, Jyoti vanished up the curled ramp into the Palace of Abominations.

  Tok. Tok. Tok.

  "S-small matter." Ralli-Faj sighed and crossed the burned ground to where Ripcat hung shivering among razor-twisted strands of Charm. The boneless face with its flame-haunted hollows drew very close to the anguished beastman. "S-small matter indeed—now that you have been delivered into the hands of the Dark Lord."

  / |

  Caval trudged through the swamp, chewing curses at each misstep among the hummocks that plunged him waist deep in mire. Charm kept away leeches and biting insects and also made him invisible to the spidery-eyed cacodemons. But that took all his magical strength, and he had none left to help him through the marsh.

  The bog rose in green banks to the sward surrounding the Palace of Abominations. Caval sat there in the tasseled shade of ribbon ferns, catching his breath. Again, he cursed himself. You're an old fool coming here!

  Death for him in this sepulcher was certain and Chance alone would determine his fate thereafter. As for Justice, he had served that god by sacrificing his personal hope of heaven to undo what he had wrought of hell on Irth.

  And so the gods are fulfilled, he asserted and shuffled toward the palace. But not in blindness. In light, Caval. In light.

  He entered the open base of the floating pyramid with its wide expanse of hedge mazes and walked through charred openings in the shrubbery burned by charmfire. Two ogres lay lifeless among shattered boulders and scorched sand, i one with its face knifed open, the other a tarry skeleton.

  In the middle of the devastation, a fallen star slept. Caval knelt before it. This denizen of the bright air reminded him of his abandoned quest, and he regarded it sadly, a sibling of Charm, fallen to Irth, not too unlike himself.

  If he had more Charm, he would have killed it. Such a creature did not belong on Irth. The corrosive air seared it like acid. There was no returning it to the bright air either. It had completed its life cycle just as he had. Its fall to Irth was as tragic as his. It belonged in the Gulf, where the void would burst it to charmdust and scatter its beauty among the cold worlds.

  With his big-knuckled hands placed each upon a point, he drew Charm into himself from the star. Gently, at first. Then, when the energy flowed freely, more hungrily.

  Its eyes cracked slits of dazzling star rays, and the sorcerer quickly removed his hands. The lids closed at once, though colors around the star still looked faded.

  Caval had not been able to draw enough power to end the fallen star's misery, but now he was strong enough to glimpse the shadows of time, stressed and still wavering in this scene of recent violence. He saw the ogres' assault and Reece's despairing resort to the beast body of Ripcat.

  And he saw Ralli-Faj—and in that stretched veil of human fabric, the final veil, the shadow of death.

  A single tone sounded from his soul. It was the harmonic chime of his dying, echoing back to him from the near future. It would lead him to Ralli-Faj.

  Caval rose from the sand bed and bowed to the fallen star. "Thank you, cousin. You have given me the strength to have for myself what I cannot give you."

  The sorcerer, more nimble for the star's Charm, loped in the direction where he had heard his death. That crystal timbre guided him up a spiral ramp set among carbon skeletons of dwarf trees. Cacodemons flitted across the ramp, patrolling the lanes between the stone crypts. The demons did not see him any more than did the tortured souls afloat behind the long windows of the pus vaults.

  "You can hide from the cacodemons-s, Caval," Ralli-Faj called from around a blind bend, "yet I s-see you. Old fool, turn back and I'll not s-set the demons-s on you. Begone!"

  Caval smiled grimly and did not slow his stride. Since childhood in the Brood of Assassins, he knew that in hand combat silence held power. The first to speak is always the weakest, he remembered the old teachers saying. Of course, they quoted the pre-talismanic warriors who had no notion of packing Charm in words. Ralli-Faj fought as a warlock facing a sorcerer. His words could kill. But was Ralli-Faj the warlock prepared to meet Caval the assassin?

  Why should he not be? the sorcerer spoke to himself to counter the drowsy effect of Ralli-Faj's Charmed words. Why indeed should he not be? No assassin had ever survived combat with a warlock., He did not intend to survive.

  The warlock came into view backed by a glistening black wall of cacodemons. In their snaky gasp hung torn and bleeding Ripcat.

  Caval lurched into a full-out run, his beard split and long white hair streaked back with the Chamed speed of his attack. He pumped power into his churning legs and ran with his arms whirling.

  Ralli-Faj spat a spark that flew to the feet of the charging wild man and smeared like grease.

  With a shout, Caval's legs shot from under and he fell in a tangle of limbs and tinsel windings.

  Ralli-Faj laughed—and his haw of delight came out soundless against the shout from Caval—a sharp cry that expanded to a roar. Its cutting force emptied the assassin of all Charm and struck Ripcat so forcefully it tore his skin of light.

  A blond human face screamed from behind the shredded mask of Ripcat, and Reece plunged into the greasy smoke that had been cacodemons.

  Ralli-Faj stepped into the flaring fumes, reaching with his black magic for the running man. The necrotic haze of the extinguished demons obscured his power, and he used the amulets tied to his stilts to stir a charmwind.

  From behind, Caval staggered upright and laughed. "Your time is done, Ralli-Faj! All hope for your precious future is gone up in smoke!"

  The assassin pitched his laughter to distract Ralli-Faj, and sparks of nervous light spat from the holes in the warlock's leather as he strove in vain to focus his charmwind before Reece disappeared among the crypts.

  "Too late!" Caval guffawed "His body is dark. It's invisible to the strong eye." The assassin laughed with lavish joy.

  Tok.

  The laughter stopped abruptly. The steel tip of a stilt lanced Caval through his beard and stood crimson out the back of his neck.

  Ralli-Faj shook loose the impaled weapons master and frantically ran up the curving ramp, searching with eyes of fire for the escaped magus.

  Tok—tok—to
k—tok—tok—tok—tok—

  Caval laughed. His wraith glimmered in the relict body heat of his cooling corpse, and he stared down at his dead body with merriment.

  Small price to save Reece, he thought, even though the icy draft of the Gulf already tugged at him. Whether now he lives or dies matters not. I did not abandon him in darkness—as I did on the Dark Shore. I have brought light to the three blind gods!

  That thought filled him with such profound completion that he calmed enough to hear the torn souls of the other dead sucking toward the abyss. His laughter dimmed, and he looked at his spent body with a firmer sense of forever.

  Listening for the future, he heard nothing. Should there not be echoes if Reece is successful and the Dark Lord falls? Why are there no echoes?

  He wanted to follow Ralli-Faj and see that Reece escaped, but he lacked the Charm. Only the Abiding Star offered him the strength to kindle consciousness in the effluvia he had become and to cling, however tenuously, to Irth. At nightfall, the nocturnal tide would carry him away and a new life would open before him—a life begun in darkness.

  / |

  In a trance, Tywi felt the Dark Lord dying. Behind her closed eyes, in absolute darkness, wild beasts raged and roared.

  "Wake up, small thing!" Dogbrick growled and tapped her gently with the muzzle of his firelock. They stood among feathery canes clicking in the wind. "Where has he gone? Where do you see him now?"

  Tywi opened her eyes. An apparition of Drev floated in the marsh mists beyond the next gravel bank.

  She had created this mirage of Drev with the Charm expanding in her. She knew intuitively that this new influx of Charm was the wizarduke’s last, desperate gift to her. Even as his life faded, he bequeathed her what remained of his enfeebled power, and she found herself endowed with telepathic strength she had never possessed before. She had used it at first for comfort in the fern holt where Jyoti and Ripcat had left her and Dogbrick. Then, when she could wait no more, she had used it to convince Dogbrick to go with her to the Palace of Abominations—to rescue Lord Drev and Rica.