The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1)

by A. A. Attanasio

  "Yes." Her voice softened dolorously. "I will not be joining you on the Dark Shore."

  "Not just yet, Thylia." He smiled and tilted his head sagely. "All of brightness eventually falls to dark. The Gulf awaits all Irth."

  "All, sorcerer?" Her voice arched to express her awareness of his sagely ambition, punctured by Ralli-Faj's stilt. "There are the few among us who find their way back to the Beginning."

  "The holy do," Caval concurred with a humble sag of his shoulders. "Only the holy."

  "Yes, it was your shadow that pulled you back from heaven, wasn't it, old mage?" She regarded him ruefully. "That insubstantial thing, that shadow of a good man not good enough, has broken many lives. You have earned your place among the damned for what your ignorance inflicted on Irth, Caval. Yet you should depart knowing your sacrifice was not unnoticed—and not given in vain."

  Caval accepted this judgment with a skeptical frown. "How can you be sure of that, witch?"

  "You have set the mage of the Dark Shore upon Wrat," she answered with glib assurance. "The gremlin knows it is doomed. Only Wrat insists on keeping it here to play out the full blood rite."

  "Yet look, Thylia—" Caval pointed to where Ralli-Faj had walked his stilts to the inverted star. Under the pressure of the warlock's furious will, its eyes opened, and Charm flowed as a particulate silver mist into the slack skin.

  "Reece may need help," Thylia acceded with a worried squint. "I will pray on my way to the crystal abode of the Sisters. I will pray for the magus from the Dark Shore."

  "No!" Caval called to her insistently. "We must do more than pray."

  "More?" Her laugh floated from far away. "We are ghosts, Caval."

  "Stay with me," he requested with ragged, outstretched arms. "You can yet make a difference."

  "How?"

  Caval motioned to the fallen star. The warlock's stilts stood empty beside it. Ralli-Faj, swollen to manshape, dark flesh glossed with Charm, marched away trailing an aura of diamond chips.

  On the ramp, a cacodemon met him with a knife belt, and the warlock cinched it about his waist, not breaking his stride as he bounded after his prey.

  "Ralli-Faj is far older than most suspect," Caval confided. "His origins are not in sorcery, where he has found his longevity. No. He began life, as did I, in the Brood of Assassins. Like myself, he is trained in murder." He opened his webby hands and looked at her beseechingly. "Reece is no match for him, in magic or in killing."

  Thylia's gaze constricted. Why are you telling me this, assassin? What can we shades do against the living? Precious little."

  "Oh, precious little, indeed." Caval agreed wholeheartedly, feeling emptiness crawling through him with the waning day. "Yet here, at the very edge, very little things matter a great deal. You do understand?"

  Thylia backed away, believing him mad, his mind rancid from the experience of death.

  "Wait, Sister. I will need your help."

  "There is no help for where you are bound, lost soul. Fare light, Caval."

  "Thylia—behold!" He gesticulated to the beastman and mud woman creeping into the roasted garden. But the witch queen was gone.

  Flighty witches!

  Caval approached Dogbrick and Tywi as closely as he could, yet with so little Charm he could not make them see him. Even so, he jumped and waved and wagged his long beard.

  "You are mad, Caval," the witch queen called from above. She perched in the baobab tree among the shivering souls clustered like amoebae.

  "Come down from there," he summoned her urgently. "I need your help reaching them."

  "How did you know they were coming?" Thylia asked. "Who are they?"

  "Never mind!" Caval shouted impatiently. "Dance with me, Thylia!"

  The witch queen floated to his side and danced the cadaverous old man across the blackened lawn to the wary intruders.

  Tywi stopped Dogbrick with a startled hand. "It's the old man, again!" she cried. "The corpse the cacodemon was eating! The ghost from my trance..."

  "I see him, too!" Dogbrick yelped. "He's a frightful, horrid thing. Let's move away quickly."

  "No, no, Dog. See him waving. He's pointing to the fallen star. He wants us closer."

  "More reason to be farther. Let's away."

  "I think he wants us to pick it up." Tywi strode closer.

  Morosely, Dogbrick padded after her, looking up at the underside of the pyramid, searching the circuitry of ducts, silos, and receding shafts for cacodemons.

  "Listen!" Tywi cupped a hand to her ear. "He's talking to us!"

  The thief listened, yet even with his acute ears heard nothing.

  Tywi bent close to the desiccated ghost, and Dogbrick held her arm, ready to snatch her away. The phantom simply whispered and smiled. Then he bowed to them, stepped back, and slurred to daylight.

  The excited woman repeated quietly to the thief what she had heard from the assassin, and the beastman's hackles rippled. He immediately stooped to pull the star from the ground. With a grunting effort, he lifted it and staggered after his partner. She waved him on and scampered to the spiral causeway.

  "You are a clever killer, Caval," the witch queen gloated as Dogbrick lurched away. "I am glad you served on Irth rather than ruled. It is too sad that we must lose you now."

  "Not now, Thylia. There is time yet. Let us use your Charm to follow them. Let us be certain our work is done."

  "Our work is long done, old fool." She smiled benignly at the doddering sorcerer. "You were most cunning to find this way to reach the living again—and to such lethal effect, too. I trust in the events you have set in motion, Caval. You are redeemed in the eyes of the Sisterhood. The Goddess watches over you even as she takes you into her uterine darkness, into a new life among the cold worlds."

  "I want to see your victory!" Caval called after her. "What if they fail? What if Reece fails? I must know! Or I cannot die!"

  "You are already dead, old fool," she called from among the crooked shadows of the baobab. "Already dead..."

  "I want to see Wrat dead!” Caval bawled.

  He heard himself and flinched coldly. He sounded as maniacal as the monster he loathed.

  Searching for Thylia, he watched shadows creep longer. She had vanished into the orange and purple lightfall of late afternoon.

  Head hung with weariness and worry, the dead sorcerer drifted toward the wide, spreading tree of souls.

  / |

  From the strong eye of the Dark Lord, Ralli-Faj drew sight. He searched for Reece and found him loping down a corridor of smoked glass pipes and checker-work mosaics. The warlock recognized the orange and yellow banded hallway as a conduit for effluent steam pipes from charmworks below. With the strong eye, he opened the valves.

  Reece vanished in sulfurous billows and reappeared almost immediately, turning fast and gathering the steam in a spun spell of dark magic. He shouted and stamped his feet wide apart, arms stretched out, head high, a human star radiating black light. Hissing a serpent's song, the steam threaded back into the valves, pulling after it the ultraviolet hues of Reece's aura.

  Deep in the pyramid's interior, thunder rolled. The ramp under Ralli-Faj shook violently, tumbling him off his feet, and rock dust flurried in sizzling streams from the grating plates of the pyramid's surface.

  The warlock sat up startled. The magus he confronted could destroy the palace!

  Ralli-Faj called again on the strong eye—and he felt Hu'dre Vra go slack with weakness as he gave freely the force to counter Reece's magic. Propped on his onyx throne in catatonic trance, unable to move without disturbing his spell, the Dark Lord locked his magical will to his opponent's. The powers of the two magicians negated each other. Wrat slumped on his throne, and Reece became a man devoid of magic.

  The warlock ran to the chute that led to Reece. Black magic had been canceled in the pyramid, and the strong eye faltered and went out. He did not need it anymore.

  The Charmed chute carried him higher into the palace and dropped him thro
ugh an open duct into a checker-worked corridor where steam hissed.

  Reece waited for him, crouched in the vaporous shadows, and pounced even before the warlock hit the floor.

  Ralli-Faj took the full force of Reece's blow in a falling feint, pulling the magus after him. They tumbled, and the warlock rolled atop his prey, one taut hand squeezing off Reece's windpipe, the other unsheathing from his belt a green steel knife with barbed tip.

  A double-handed blow broke Ralli-Faj's chokehold, and Reece squirmed free—only to find himself with his back to the curved checker-work wall.

  Passing the knife fluidly between his hands, Ralli-Faj grinned to see fear in his opponent. Reece, no more than another simian without his black magic, watched the knife with wild eyes. His frantic features jumped with each twitch of the blade destined to slit his belly, sternum to groin. The warlock's chest flushed hotly as he moved in to place the blade.

  A sturdy thump swiped his attention. Dogbrick had fallen out of the chute and landed on his rump with Tywi in his lap.

  The warlock's angry scowl showed glassy shards of teeth, and his inhuman cry assured them they would die next. His knife wove an intricate killing pattern between his hands, mesmerizing the frightened magus.

  Tywi shouted, "I kill you, Ralli-Faj! I kill you with the light!" She dropped out of Dogbrick's lap and exposed the fallen star in the beastman’s arms.

  "No!" Ralli-Faj shrilled like a jungle monkey.

  When the star's eyes opened, all color washed away. The warlock's figure stood locked in a posture of defiance as Charm poured into him. His body swelled to balloon limbs and a goggling visage of terror.

  His eyes popped first, emitting twin rays of fiery Charm. Then all the holes in his body gave out, and he stood lanced with light, expanding beyond the limits of human recognition.

  With a dull boom, his taut glossy skin exploded, splattering rags of leathery flesh down the corridor in a gasping rush of sour air.

  Hu'dre Vra felt the warlock s death in his chest. The gremlin writhed. To calm it, he stared out at the tall day and spotted Nemora cocked in the sky, cold and blue.

  The gremlin's claws vised his ribs, and the pain forced him to drop his armor. It fell away as ill shapen peelings and rustled on the floor like trash restless in the wind.

  Wrat regarded the hordes of cacodemons gathered in the cavernous adytum. Legions of screaming mute creatures packed the space around him, their sour stink calling to the gremlin scratching behind his breastbone. Embedded faces with diabolic grins mouthed mesmermur music through their tusks. These vesperal tones filled the jammed arena with a crawling calm.

  Jyoti and Poch hung on either side of Wrat's throne, prominently displayed among the eelish writhings and serrated spikes of the enclosing hosts. Fist to chest, Wrat sat sullenly, the sword Taran hanging idly in his left hand.

  Out of the hole in the stone bulwark where Jyoti had blasted her way in, ghosts entered. The Dog Dim scurried through, followed by Little Luc, Skull Face, Chetto, Grapes, and Rett. Piper stood on the threshold of the rubble-strewn gap smiling wanly.

  The ghost held a pipe to his mouth and blew a single, frosty note.

  Reece stepped through the ghost and staggered to a halt among the broken stones. The throngs of cacodemons in sleazy tiers watching him with their tiny heatless eyes chilled his blood. Their interlocked bodies formed a cathedral of pestilential blackness reaching to the very cope of the adytum.

  At the writhing center of its base, Wrat sat casually, mockingly. He nodded to his victims on either side, then motioned Reece closer.

  Before the magus could move, Dogbrick and Twyi stumbled through the torn bulwark, eager to catch up with him. Tentacles plucked them into the air and lofted them toward the ebony heights of the stacked cacodemons.

  Reece briskly flashed an elaborate warding mudra, but the Dark Lord's power matched his own, and the two powers canceled. In this state, Reece would have to physically lay hands on each demon to slay it.

  "I can have one or more of your people pulled apart in an instant," Wrat threatened dully, sounding almost bored. "But I won't kill them just yet. Because I want them to watch me hack you into small pieces."

  Wrat waved the sword Taran and sent slashes of reflected light sweeping across the polished floor.

  Reece flicked a look around him, searching for a weapon.

  "We are very much like alike, you and I," Wrat said. "We are consumed with selfish desire. We are greedy for what we want. You for Lara—and me for power. What you want is dead. And what I have is most alive—and something we can share."

  "I had power in my world," Reece replied. "It had a bitter aftertaste, and I want no more of it."

  Wrat chewed his lower lip and wagged the sword. "You don't want power. And your Lara is dead. So why are you here? What are you going to do? Kill me? Is that why you rushed here, to slay the Dark Lord?" A laugh shouted from him. "And how will you kill me? With your bare hands?" He flicked his thumb across the sword's fine edge and shook his head. "You are a fool. I offer you power. And you grope for death."

  Reece straightened, his mind reaching for words, for time to decide what to do. "You say we are alike, and in our greediness, this is so. That is why I am here. I have lusted, like you, for what is not mine." He allowed himself a brittle smile at the desire that had brought him to this fatal moment. "I at least loved a woman. You love yourself."

  Wrat leaned forward, sword standing point down before him, both hands crossed on the hilt. "For all your love, look where your woman is now! Look at you, cowering, unprepared for our fateful encounter. And look at me! I am the Dark Lord!"

  His dirt-colored eyes squinted with the effort of his will. Without magic. Without violence. By will alone, he had forced this so-called magus to submit. "Bow before me!" Wrat yelled. "Bow! Or I will kill the margravine and her brother."

  Reece stared with alarm at Jyoti, and she gazed back helplessly from her tentacled bondage.

  The magus exhaled with heavy resignation and bowed. His long pale hair brushed the debris of the fallen wall, and a murderous thought snapped into place. When he rose, he came up with rocks in both fists.

  Whipsawing his right arm, he flung the first rock through the phantom blurs of cacodemons that swooped to block it and struck Wrat squarely between his startled eyes. The impact of the second rock against his exposed larynx cut short his yelp of shock. Wrat's head snapped forward, and he slumped dead even as the sword Taran clanged to the floor.

  Instantly, the towering ranges of cacodemons vanished to tar smoke tilting in the afternoon breeze, and daylight gushed into the empty chamber.

  Released from tentacles that had turned to vapors, the prisoners clattered to the floor. They fell around the throne and lay stunned, staring eye level at Wrat's corpse. Its bruised and cockeyed face jerked spasmodically, and Poch shouted and Dogbrick howled to see the dead man's purple tunic bulge and shred.

  The gremlin, like a maudlin puppet varnished in blood, shoved free of Wrat's ripped carcass and ran squealing into the fiery daylight trailing tarry fumes, already beginning to combust. It charged with rabid, endless fury across the floor, striking aimlessly with scorpion-jointed arms, seeking another host among the terrified humans sprawled around it.

  Tywi screamed and scuttled wildly, and the half-blind and blistered gremlin burst toward her.

  The sword Taran lay on the floor near Poch. With an astonished shout, he seized it and swiped at the gremlin. The razor edge sliced through the imp's bulbous head even as it mounted Tywi, and, with a piercing wail, the tiny monster dissolved to a curl of black smoke.

  / |

  The Chain of Pain lumbered to a metallic halt, groaning bestially from its weary rivets. The stink of death disembarked first.

  Dogbrick ran out onto the face of the pyramid. Though the black magic that powered the locomotive had perished, Charm from amulet panels within the pyramid held the chain in place and allowed the thief to dash along the ramp way.

  He
wrenched open the sliding door of the second car, and a noisome fetor gushed out with Rica's ghost.

  The enchantress' body lay melted upon its bones, a waxen skeleton in a charmwright's leather vest. Her mad wraith pulsed in the warm, amber rays of the Abiding Star, then flapped out of sight, like torn fabric in a gust.

  Tywi dashed to the lead car of the chain and with her own strength jarred loose the rusty handle. Through her hands, and through the tangled light in the steamy air around her, she felt Drev alive. Even so, she prepared herself to be shattered at the sight of his corpse.

  She shoved the door aside, and the wizarduke tottered into the light. Dogbrick caught him as he reeled forward, and he fell a long way through the smell of fire.

  / |

  Entranced by this sudden release from the interminable tenure of his agony, Drev's mind ranged time free across space. He soared beyond the turning light of the horizon. He flew toward the distant hemisphere.

  Night approached continental Irth, and he flew beyond, to the oceanic farside of the planet. There, day blazed. The sea polished its sapphires under the Abiding Star—and dark blue facets greened to emeralds in the shallows of atolls and seamounts.

  Streaming ocean froth and cascades of kelp, the sunken continent of Gabagalus rose for another day under charmfire and tumbling clouds.

  Gabagalus!

  Everyone on Irth knew of the Charmed continent of the antipodes that rose out of the sea by day and submerged again at night—but few had seen this planetary wonder.

  The wizarduke circled high enough above the hemisphere and perceived weather spirals knotting clouds to storm fronts across eroded peaks and coraline crags of ancient iron mountains. Seawater ran in enormous river works across the slick continental shelves.

  He peered intently into the blotched hues of mucilaginous flora that coated Gabagalus in motley of glistering brown slimes. Among the mountainous ranges, benthic cities hid, often behind immense, smoking cataracts of foaming brine.