She pressed her cheek to his. "I said I'd marry you when you were margrave."
"Don't you want a grand ceremony?" He pulled away from her so that he could see the emotion in her eyes. "We can do better than an astrosopher. We'll have a wizard marry us. We'll get the archwizard from the Calendar of Eyes to marry us!"
"No, Poch." She brushed long, rufous hair from his face. "Think of the dear ones. They need our care now. A grand ceremony will only distract us. An astrosopher is fine."
Poch nodded, and perplexity replaced the dreaminess in his expression. "The dear ones—where are they from? How did you find them? What—what exactly can we do for them?"
"Protect them, Poch!" She took his face tenderly in both hands. "They are so small, so delicate. They come from beyond World's End, you know."
"From beyond World's End, from inside the corona of the Abiding Star." Poch mouthed aloud his realization, quiet with awe. "No wonder they touch us with such beauty. How did you find them?"
"Simple chance, my love!" She shone with enthusiasm to share her discovery. "They had crawled into the Cloths of Heaven—"
Poch shuddered. "Ugh. That ugly place. The wraiths there could have devoured them."
"And might have, but I heard them! In a dream, at Blight Fen."
"Why didn't you tell me then?"
She smirked at the silliness of his question. "And what could you have done for them? A docent? Now—now you are margrave. We have this manor, this city, and all Elvre to protect them!"
"Yes." He clasped her tighter, with admiration and shared determination. “These pixies have come to Irth to build their faerie chambers at a dangerous time. They will need our protection and our sustenance. Shai, do you see? They are our children!"
The Assassin’s Art
After the marriage rites, Poch sat in audience with Overy Scarn. The portly woman squatted beside the margrave's ornate chair on the hearing bench, a narrow wood settle made purposefully uncomfortable to keep petitioners from lingering too long.
While they chatted, the capacious hall twirled with ribbon dancers and fire jugglers. The dazzling acrobats amused galleries of trade brokers, lumber mill agents, merchants, and their families, that day’s petitioners and surprise witnesses to the margrave's marriage.
Shai Malia had exited immediately after the rites, informing her husband that she intended to look in on the dear ones. He longed to accompany her. But Overy Scarn needed to make immediate arrangements for Dig Dog to begin swath harvesting timber.
While they discussed details, Shai Malia retreated to a dark alcove lit by a solitary incense-filament. A gaunt figure awaited—a cowled man with hawkish profile and small, black eyes.
"N'drato, I assume." Shai Malia, staring through the gauze of her veils, met the soft nod and the hard stare. "Confirm."
His raspy voice spoke the code promised by her contact in the Brood of Assassins: “To wipe away memory—I kiss your brow."
For payment, she had offered the Brood of Assassins a large interest in all of Elvre’s timer concessions—a steep price even for the assassin's art. Yet, the necessity of this mission justified the expense. "I will authorize transfer of bonds once I have proof of your success."
"Do you have what I require?" N'drato extended a hand gloved in black silk so tight it appeared painted on his flesh.
Shai Malia handed him a round ceramic box no larger than a thumbnail. "I gathered them myself from her pillow."
N'drato backed into the liquid shadows cast by the smoky lantern and vanished silently. Moments later, when Shai Malia stepped forward to see where the assassin had gone, she found the round ceramic box sitting in a wall niche before a jade statue of the Goddess. The lid removed, the box held only shadow.
*
N'drato slipped out of the margrave's manor by a narrow utility portal that returned him to the nettle ditch where he had entered. One by one, he removed the foil dishes, the Charm reflectors, he had hung in the hedge to baffle the manor's sentry amulets. He slung the tinsel panes over his shoulders.
With the foil dishes hung around him like a mantle, he strode down the manor hillcrest and merged with the enclosing dusk that flared full of planet shards and star clusters.
He followed icy directional cues from the seeker amulet Shai Malia had given him. As he ambled across the sloping parkland behind the manor, he folded the foil swatches so that his silhouette dimmed to a shimmer of gray. Soon, he appeared to common eyes as a wind blur on the lawns.
Avoiding the pale orange cones of lamplight, he moved into the thin dark trees on the sward above the manor footpaths. He passed the stele and obelisk of monument stones that bore the names of the margrave's lost brood, the dead in whose memory these streets and buildings had risen from ruin. Fully aware that he had been hired to destroy one half of what remained of this once venerable family, he moved with fateful purpose.
Along pavements shadowed by flame trees, he descended from the manor heights. He crossed streets only when the black shroud of running clouds obscured the big moons in their webs of star smoke. Scores of people milled on the boulevards and chatted on street corners, yet no one noted his transit.
The seeker amulet led him between buildings lifted against the night like ramparts. He had departed the elegant heights and begun the descent into the bleak perimeters of the city below the treeline.
Cobbled paths ended, and narrow sandy lanes meandered past corrugated warehouses, sawmills, and storage barns. Lumberjacks and sawyers on their way to their shanty sheds or to the noisy mead hall slouched out of the jungle into the wan glow of pole-hung lanterns.
Alongside their parked timber haulers with giant muddy wheels, drivers sat with their boots propped on crate wood. They guarded the day's cutting from poachers, while their partners fetched food and drink from the hall. None of these guards noticed the slinking shadow of N'drato. He passed behind and between them, a liquid black ripple at the edge of sight, come and gone.
The assassin found his target, Jyoti Odawl, behind the mead hall, under a window with tin panes and rusted frame. Dressed in buckskin trousers, boots, and torn frock dangling straps and leather cords empty of amulets, she looked like a common laborer. Intent on gnawing her rusk of bread, her bowed head never marking him in the alley of old dark brick.
N'drato timed his movements with the boisterous noises from the mead hall, gliding between rusted trash bins. The tight passage led him to her side. And he drew a black blade as he slipped closer. For one instant, he paused to identify where her guard patroled.
He identified no guardian and felt a flash of doubt, a moment of spoken doom, because he knew the Brood of Assassins had assigned Nette to protect the last of the female Odawls. Before his doubt could stymie him, his hand flicked, aiming a blade-disk for Jyoti's exposed throat.
From the trash bin, a gloved hand struck, spoiling his throw. The throwing-razor clanged off the tin pane beside Jyoti's head, and she jumped up in time to see Nette lunge from one trash bin and shove a shadowy figure against the other. The two grappled momentarily. And then the shadow wrenched away and vanished in the dark beyond the timber haulers.
Nette brushed off sticky tuber rinds from her black vest and stepped to Jyoti's side. "You did well," she said to her startled companion. "You drew him close enough for me to disarm him. I'm sorry that I could not kill him. He is very adroit—a master."
"You know him?" Jyoti slid her attention across the grots of darkness among the tall trees and shrubbery reflecting the yard lights. Futilely, she searched for shadowy signs of him. "You predicted his attack perfectly."
"N'drato. He is a master, with murderous skills beyond mine." Her eyebrows flicked with resignation. "He is my brother."
Jyoti straightened with a jolt of surprise. "And you would have killed him?"
Nette deflected the question. " My job is to protect you. I have failed."
"You saved my life."
"No. I put it in jeopardy." The assassin opened her gloved hand, showi
ng a gold coin lensed with witch glass. "A seeker. I took it from him. It has your hair in it."
"My hair—how?"
"Only one realistic answer." Nette lowered her chin. "I did not purge the manor well enough before we departed. Your brother—"
"Poch would never hire an assassin!"
Nette held her sharp stare for a moment, then slipped the seeker into an inner pocket of her vest. "Master assassins are not cheap."
"He's still out there." Jyoti continued to scan the ill-shapen dark of the jungle. "What are we going to do?"
"What else can we do?" Nette picked up the assassin's knife and handed it to the Peer. "We must hunt him."
The Dead Awake
The world felt slow with desire whenever Mary Felix looked south. Nox summoned her to Octoberland, to take her place in the circle of his coven. All other directions seemed gray, numb, hopeless. So she journeyed south with Dogbrick. They moved quickly along logging roads, stepping into the woods whenever a vehicle growled past.
Along the way, she began to share with him all that she had learned from his magic about Irth and the Bright Worlds, describing with the scientific avidity of her training the mesh of cultures under the Abiding Star. "Gnomes, elves, and people, these comprise the three most anthropic cultures where you come from. Among the people, I'm including the salamandrines of Gabagalus, who are clearly human. But to me it's highly debatable whether ogres qualify as anthropic. They are undeniably sapient, but their intelligence is the least humane of…"
She broke off, seeing in his face a terrible aspect, a change that choked her words. "Your features—" She stopped, her heels digging deeper into the gravel as she leaned away, shocked. "You look—different."
Dogbrick reached for his face, and his fingers trembled in the vacancy where his snout had been.
"Your hands!"
The fur had thinned from his hands and his black palms had faded to ochre. He bent his fingers, searching for his claws—and they were gone. Among bunched weeds at the roadside, he sat, stunned.
"You're losing your beastmarks!" Mary knelt beside him and touched his sturdy profile.
He sat perfectly still while she traced his human lineaments with her fingers. From within himself, he drew strength but had to reach deeper than before. And the power he found moved more thinly through his fingers. "And my magic—it's less."
Mary examined her own hands to see if she had begun to revert to her aged self. They appeared young.
"You haven't changed," Dogbrick reassured her. He touched his arms, noting that the shaggy fur had thinned to burly hair. "I think I've used up my magic."
She touched him and felt warm skin under his body hair. "Most remarkable. But I don't understand what's happening."
He brushed his hands through his mane, and it felt less substantial. "How do I look?"
"Like a brute—but a man. A brute of a man." She stood up and experienced the spell that Nox tightened upon her. "I have to keep moving or I'm going to be sick."
"I have some magic left." He pushed himself to his feet—bare feet, smaller and aching with weariness. "Maybe I can break the power that is holding you."
They left the road and entered among dusty trees into a corner of burdock and nettles hidden from the gravel road. Between his hands, he gathered all the strength he could hold.
What to do with it?
He tossed it to her, and her heart paced faster, her inner knowledge brightened—yet the taut summons from Octoberland persisted. And when she stood back from him, he appeared smaller than before and less hirsute.
"It's not working." She helped him stagger through the underbrush back onto the road. "Are you okay?"
Dizziness swarmed through him briefly, and he bent over and caught his breath. When he stood, he had to tighten the gray breechcloth about his waist. "I think my magic is gone." He regarded the brown flesh of his limbs and blond glints of hair. "At least it gave me a language you understand—and a body that seems to belong in this world."
"Your coloring is a little off." She paced around him, taking in the massive musculature, the ponderous shoulders. "People with brown skin don't usually have blond hair—or orange eyes."
He opened his mouth and ran his tongue over his teeth. "My incisors—they're gone, too!"
"No more fangs." She put a fist over her stomach. "Come on. I've got to keep moving. Maybe we can catch a ride and get you some clothes in the next town. You'll open some eyes, but no one's going to think you're from another world."
They trudged along the unpaved road two more hours before a truck going their direction slowed to pick them up. Then, the driver got a good look at the loinclothed giant and sped past. Mary hopped angrily and shouted obscenities, and Dogbrick sat down at the edge of the road.
"We best keep walking," Mary said, clutching her stomach. The spell twisted insistently.
"How far to anywhere are we?"
"I don't know. Twenty miles. Maybe thirty." Mary looked at the sky, to gauge the time of day, and noticed a man standing in the trees across the road from them. Tall, with a long face and wearing odd garments, he seemed to shimmer in the tree dark. "Who is that?"
Dogbrick got up and crossed the road. The figure appeared familiar. He wore wrappings of silver and gold foil that dangled streamers of tinsel. In a dream, it seemed, they had met before. He recognized something about the ruddy complexion and the red beard trimmed to the strong outline of his jaw.
"Who are you?" he asked. When he noticed that he could see the tree trunks behind the stranger, he jumped backward.
"Don't be afraid." The ghost waved them closer. "I am dead, it is true. Your power has awakened me. I am from Irth, the same as you. My name is Caval."
"I've seen you before—"
"I tried to warn you about Nox—but his magic was stronger. I am, sadly, but a wraith. I hide in the sky." Caval's image bleared among sun shafts. "Now your power is spent. And I am come to warn you—"
Mary sank to her knees in the roadway, nearly doubled over. "I can't go that way. Nox fills me with too much pain if I even think of it."
Caval moved back, and his body grew more substantial, augmenting itself out of the darker shadows. "Come, Dogbrick. Leave her be. Nox will not allow her to enter my presence."
Dogbrick followed Caval into the forest. "Are you a wizard?"
"Yes." Caval's figure shimmered as if about to dissolve. "I lived a long life on Irth and collected enough Charm from the Abiding Star to survive my transit through the Gulf to this cold world. The less I tell you of that, the better for you."
"I've lost my magic," Dogbrick admitted. "I don't understand."
"You lost your magic because you do understand." Caval wobbled closer, gleaming like water. "All your Charm is in your memories. When they were forgotten, you had ample Charm to throw around. But now—now you have given those memories to that woman. Your Charm is squandered. And worse yet—the more she tells you of Irth and your life there, the less you will become, until you are a ghost like me. Only, I have resources of wizardry that you do not. When you are a ghost, you will slip into the frenzy of rebirth. Your Charm, your life force, will be taken up entire into the animal shapes of this cold world."
Dogbrick gaped at the phantom. "What can I do?"
Caval glared somberly. "You have become a mortal being of the Dark Shore. Whatever you do, you will have to do as a man."
Astral Violet
The more the wizard talked, the thinner he became. Already Caval looked narrow as a pencil, as if peering out at Dogbrick from the crevice of another world. If he said another word, he would compress to a string stretched from the stars to the center of the earth.
He kept his silence. Dogbrick flung questions at him, whose answers the wizard ached to tell. In Caval's eyes, the physical world shone transparently. Dogbrick, the trees, and the sunny tableaux of the roadway where the woman sat curled on herself faded against a dark sky of astral violet.
The wizard knew that the warning he had
given Dogbrick served him as well. He had little Charm left, and unless he gathered more of that rare power his identity would stretch to a tight filament and snap. Caval would die. His Charm would disperse like mist, reborn in loamy mushroom beds and in the hearts of trees.
He wanted that. He had lived too long confined by cerebral tissue. Even as a ghost, he projected repetitive neural patterns, behavioral arcs that had radiated from cerebral lobes, hippocampus, brainstem, all the neurofibrillary contours of his lost body, the old prison. The time had come to free himself from the past.
Before he let go, he chose to fulfill his religious obligations and end his life in the manner of Wizards and Witches—by parsing himself among the Three Blind Gods. Throughout his training and the long life that followed, the gods Death, Chance and Justice had guided him.
Death had already taken his body and stood poised to take the rest. Chance, too, lingered close by, visible in the faded scrim of the physical world, swaying in the treetops with each gust of the wind, as demented and unpredictable as ever. He could not give himself to them until he had completed his devotion to the third god—Justice.
That god demanded that the circle be closed. Duppy Hob had brought him to the Dark Shore to help return the devil worshipper to Irth. The blind god Chance had intervened, and the blind god Death had taken Duppy Hob to dance on the ocean bed at Gabagalus. That left Caval on the Dark Shore, to satisfy the blind god Justice and close the circle.
Close the circle—
Caval drifted away from Dogbrick. The wizard did not expect to undo all the talismanic work that Duppy Hob had accomplished—the cities, the electrical gridworks—a massive, planet-sized amulet that had opened charmways across the Gulf to the Bright Worlds. Caval had not the strength even to begin to dismantle that horror. He decided he would satisfy the blind god if he could at least return Dogbrick to where he belonged on Irth.
Up the transparent road he glided. Astral violet wobbled around him. The road vibrated and shook, blurring into a dozen roads. On some, ambitious sunlight traveled the road alone with its shadows. On others, vehicles traveled, some up the road, others down, all trailing dust like the smoke of a lit fuse. The fuse ended where a Jeep or a pickup or a trailer braked to a stop before a naked brute of a man and a young woman in his arms—and there, the future exploded.
Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3) Page 11