Duppy Hob's magic gave me this strength, and necessity the will to use it. Brick is here with me.
"You have Dogbrick with you?" she asked skeptically. "I sense only you."
He is dead. And he is no longer Dogbrick. He has lost his beastmarks to a local magician—
“The disciple of Duppy Hob's. I feel him, but not here."
More an admirer than a disciple. He calls himself Nox, and he has taken Brick's beastmarks and uses that Charm for his own magic. All that I have salvaged from this corpse is the Charm of a man.
Lady Von exited the elevator and followed Caval's presence across a carpeted corridor to a metal door and concrete stairs that climbed to the roof. Like a piece of windy night, she flew among ducts and tar-papered sheds to the water tank with the ram's-head knocker on its door.
A weak spell sealed the door, and she snapped it with a tug that admitted her to a shrine of perdition. Death's incense stained the darkness, and on the altar spraddled a flayed corpse crusty with dried blood and flies.
The witch queen reached out with both hands and rubbed between her palms the thread of Charm from the Abiding Star that held the wizard Caval. The thread widened to a ray, and out of that transparent light seeped a strong autumnal scent of dried leaves.
Return to Octoberland
Voices of the vanished season swelled from the widening ray of charmlight—the sizzle of pouring leaves in a forest wind.
The light tasted of wood smoke. Chilly gusts, speckled with rain, scattered flies from the decaying body. And the hanging poppets of carved gourds and sun-dried fruits rattled among herb bines and grass sheaves.
Caval flushed stronger with the Charm that the witch queen poured into him. When the shaft of clear light had widened to a trunk that enclosed the entire stone altar, Caval appeared as he had looked in his prime—tall and robust, bright red hair cropped close and orange whiskers precisely trimmed to outline the sharp angle of his jaw. Garbed in bright tinsel and blue-gauze windings as if for funeral ascension, he gripped the edge of the altar and gazed at Lady Von with silence in his face.
Brightness of understanding passed between them. "This is a closing ritual," Lady Von stated softly. “I cannot bring you back to Irth. Your soul is too thin for any living thing, and no amulet smaller than this world itself can hold you."
"This is a closing ritual," Caval agreed. His voice rode a heather breeze of echoes. "I am honored that the witch queen herself is here to give me away to the blind god Death. I have endured too long as a ghost balked about by emptiness: watchful of all that transpires under this wide sky yet helpless to change it. Only for this moment have I endured."
Charmlight expanded to the circumference of the ritual circle, and the rustling leaf wind that buffeted through the chamber muttered with faraway chanting, voices calling from empty space. Twelve shadows stirred in this ice-white radiance. The coven's souls gathered form, swelling from mist, drawing upon the witch queen's Charm until the sinister angels who had possessed the last worshippers of Octoberland stood ceremonially robed in frosty light.
"You are the latest ghosts of this atrocity," the witch queen addressed them, staring into each of their tapered faces and cruel eyes. "You are the last souls that your master Nox shaped to his greedy will. Before you, in the seven thousand years of his life, he corrupted many others, and all have faded into the void, as you too will fade in time. But now you must make a fateful choice. Let time whittle you away, as it did the others— or sieze the only freedom you have and use this Charm I have given you to drop yourself down into the earth and return your power to the mineral floor of creation. Begin again."
"Death always begins," Caval assented, and the twelve echoed his words vigorously, sharing avid glances of agreement—silver-fleeced Aries clasping hands with long-shouldered Taurus and she with lanky Gemini all around the circle, through flaxen-haired Virgo to Pisces with her dark, kelpy tresses.
Haloed by the thermal blur of their wings, the circle of hand-clasped angels gazed down past their naked feet. Charmlight shafted through the building. Its brilliance erased the opacities of the interior and spotlighted Nox.
The broad beam of blinding light erased Nox to a white shadow. Smeared features woefully gazed upward into the glare. The charmlight had caught him in midstep of his ritual dance. All around him bloomed wild, flowering walls of shrubs and vines: plantains and acacias, myrtles and spiny palms, all washed of color. Floral outlines dripped from the alchemic arch and vaults of the fanged ceiling, powdery as a charcoal sketch.
The wind of Octoberland descended with the gaze of the sinister angels—and Nox's magic ran to shadows like a mirage.
Where a sinuous smooth-barked tree had stood before a small tiered waterfall, Mary Felix cringed at the foot of stone stairs. In the intense glare, she looked for Nox and spied him reduced to a skeletal shape, like a thing of wire. Only his head seemed substantial, his long skull bobbing with fright.
"Who are you?" Nox screamed.
"Do not be afraid." Caval appeared alongside the frightened magician and took the withered shape within the embrace of his tinsel and blue-gauze windings. "You are not alone. What you have feared all these thousands of years, we will face together."
Nox staggered away from the apparition of Caval and tried to hurry toward the raddled shadows outside the fierce illumination from above. "I am going to live forever!" his tight throat croaked as he hobbled across the stone floor. His ligaments rasped. "I will never die!"
Caval rose before Nox, tinseled arms outspread. "We cannot flee, not either of us. Death is a god—and we are but men."
Nox met twin stars of certainty in the wizard's staring eyes, and he knew then that the eternity he had possessed only moments before had vanished. He had reached the end of an endless life. A great sob broke from his spindle-shanked body, and Caval's shining arms closed on him.
From above, the ring of sinister angels plunged with a banshee scream. The chamber flashed to stunned whiteness.
Mary Felix's whole body winced, starting to twist away, too late. When sight throbbed back into her eyes, she gazed at embers of a human skeleton pulsing red and brown in the darkness where Nox had squatted in terror. By the sepia light of those smoldering bones, she felt her way up the stone steps and out of the grotto.
In the ritual room atop the roof, Lady Von waited for her. Charmlight had sunken into the earth with Caval, Nox, and the coven of Octoberland. Chill lingered in the air with hues of frost and cedar resins. Already that fragrance had begun to thin in the summer heat. Baked odors of the city widened through the room from the open door and its slant of morning light.
While she waited, the witch queen stroked the body on the altar with a power wand sheathed in a helix of theriacal opals. At the touch of these amulets, ruined flesh healed. Brown and black decay sloughed off the skinned body like scales of rust, and new flesh appeared through orange haziness of Charm—brown flesh, sleek and human.
Brick woke in the house of his eyes. He looked up at shriveled apple faces dangling in amber wedges of sunlight.
A round, pallid face bent over him. Eyes large and luminous with reflections smiled. At the black center, he saw himself, a square, brown face under a nest of blond hair.
He sat up and touched his naked skin, looking for the pain.
"Charm has made you whole—and human," the round-faced woman in black raiment told him. "You have lost your beastmarks and found a new life."
Her words mesmerized him, and he sat still in the absence of suffering. Feeling only the warm weight of sunlight across his thighs, he closed his eyes. Behind his lids, dreams slipped by like a river of milk. And when he dared open his eyes again, Mary Felix stood in summer’s doorway.
Dirty Reality
Heat pounded the charmways. Even in their amulet shawls, Jyoti and Reece could not stay in the smoky corridors long, and they ran a few paces and jumped out the nearest portal.
They emerged on a high knoll in Elvre among snake temple r
uins. A tourist destination for blue-haired elves from Nemora, several visitors mingled in a shrine of serpent-coil pillars open to the sky. The surrounding alcoves, carved like fanged mouths, had been taken over by jungle creepers and monkeys.
Scarlet birds flapped away heavily as the elves rushed past those alcoves into the jungle, fleeing the soot-eyed couple. Beyond the scaly rooftops of the temple village, Jyoti sighted what had frightened the aelves, and she had to lean on Reece as her knees jellied.
New Arwar filled the jungle horizon. A tiered mountain of ferny estates and tree-colonnaded streets lifted above the forest in a majesty of haze. At its crest, flames stretched black banners of smoke into the sky—green flames. It took Reece a moment to recognize what Jyoti had known at once: Charmfire greedily consumed the entire city from within.
Emerald sparks flashed from small fires among lanes and terraces. The interior blaze had ignited charmwrights' shops and warehouses, and whole tiers of buildings exploded. In moments, New Arwar had become a radiant torch heaving black clouds into the new day.
Thunder from explosions reached Jyoti and Reece, and they clutched each other tighter. A white star expanded to a silver sphere of moony brilliance when the conjure-metal girders of the infrastructure erupted. The conflagration imploded, and New Arwar collapsed into the jungle under a tempest of dazzling cinders.
The healing Charm of her amulet-shawl held Jyoti still and calm, even as she gazed into the black thunderheads where her capital had fallen.
"Let's get out of here, Reece," she murmured. "Let's go to the Dark Shore—and let's not come back."
Holding to each other, Jyoti and Reece turned back toward the steaming charmway under the ulcerous stones of the snake temple. "The goblins are dead," Reece spoke gently to her. "Irth will rebuild. We will find our place among the dominions."
She shook her head and turned to face him. "Before the charmways to the Dark Shore burn, let's go. And let's not come back. I mean it, Reece. I've lost everything of this world that mattered to me. Only you are left—and the future we can build together. But not here. Not in a world that killed my brother, my parents—my entire brood. I don't ever want to come back here."
Reece recognized the certainty in her face, like the cruelty in a knife. "We are meant to be together, Jyo. I feel as you do. I've seen enough of Irth. Other than the love we found together, I brought nothing but trouble to this planet. I want to go home."
Jyoti held his strong stare. "If we don't go now, we may never be able to cross the Gulf."
Together, they shouldered into the smoke-filled charmway. The lux-diamonds of their shawls penetrated the miasma, and they ran hard against the brutal heat.
Green flames leaped from side passages and crevices in rock walls. Reece feared that their amulet-shawls would explode if licked by those searing sparks, and he charged just ahead of Jyoti so that they could both run in the middle, away from the sudden jets of fire.
Ahead, the refulgent heat dimmed, and soon only the light from their amulets lit the way. No side passages opened. This single tunnel led away from the holocaust. A cool waft of sea breeze pulled them around the next bend into daylight and an arched view of the green mucilaginous crags of Gabagalus.
Jyoti and Reece ran onto the air pier where they had left Lady Von and crossed the trestle platform to the tunnel at the opposite end—the charmway that descended through the Gulf to the Dark Shore.
Not five paces in, they nearly collided with the witch queen. Two people accompanied her—a freckle-faced young woman with thick chestnut hair and a burly man in a breechcloth, his blond hair scattered and a lopsided smile on his strong face.
"Reece! You've lost your beastmarks too!" The large man slapped his naked chest with both hands. "It's me. Brick! Dogbrick!"
Reece squinted at him, and Jyoti searched her niello eye charm to see if he wore an illusion.
"Dark Shore magic changed me!" Brick exulted with a thick smile. He took Reece in his arms and then swung him to one side to take Jyoti into the embrace of his other arm. “The sibyl's prophecy is fulfilled! I died a man. And Caval and the witch queen have used their magic to bring me back as a man!"
Lady Von lowered the veils from her pale countenance and nodded, smiling. “The blind gods have been fulfilled on the Dark Shore. And now you two are here to complete our devotion in the Bright Worlds."
"You didn't think we'd survive New Arwar, did you?" Jyoti stepped away from Brick and looked hard into the witch queen's large, limpid eyes. "If Reece were consumed, the Sisterhood could rightly declare it had purged all remnants of the Dark Shore from the Bright Worlds."
She caught the glint of truth in those tranquil eyes, and she went on to say, "Your Sisterhood can still make that declaration, because Reece and I are leaving the Bright Worlds. No one will remain on Irth from the Dark Shore."
"I'm from the Dark Shore," the young woman piped up from behind Brick. "And I've come to Irth to make my way with Brick."
"This is Mary Felix," the large man said, releasing Reece and taking her under his arm. "She was my champion on the Dark Shore—and she's decided to come back with me."
"There's nothing left for me on Earth," Mary admitted. "After a lifetime there, I'd outlived all that mattered to me. Now, Brick is giving me a chance for a new life—on Irth."
Lady Von lifted her black veils like wings. "The strong eye showed me none of this. Margravine—magus, believe me. You may well have died in New Arwar, and you both knew that when you went in to destroy the goblins. That the blind god Chance has saved you—that is an unforeseen blessing. Will you use it to serve the blind god Justice?"
"I've had it with your gods," Reece said. "I'm going back to Darwin with Jyoti."
Lady Von draped the black veils of one arm over Mary's shoulders and the veils of the other over the shoulders of Jyoti. "Before you take each other's place in your distant worlds, exchange Charm. In that way, Mary Felix will become a natural denizen of the Bright Worlds and Jyoti Odawl will herself belong on the Dark Shore."
"I will have no magic on the Dark Shore?" Jyoti asked.
The witch queen shook her head. "None."
"And I will not suffer from the brightness of the Abiding Star?" Mary inquired.
"Correct." Lady Von removed her arms from their shoulders and withdrew from under her robes an amber power wand wrapped at the middle in conjure-wire and bearing nodules of hex-rubies. "Each of you grasp one end of this amulet. This will only take a moment, and when I am done, I decree that neither of you will be foreign in your new homes. Each of you will belong to the dirty reality of your own world."
Reconciled among the Stars
On Earth, at dockside of their Tropical Boat Rental and Tour office in the Darwin marina on the northwest coast of Arnhem Land in Australia, Jyoti sometimes thought about Irth. Sun sparkles among the many hues of the bay reminded her of hex-gems.
Shimmering from the horizon in water shades of sapphire through emerald to the most lucid diamonds of sunshine in the clear water that fronted her office, the jeweled light had the beauty of Charm. Inevitably this reverie transported her to sad memories of her lost brood and Arwar Odawl, and she shunted them aside to make room for her new work and her new life.
Wind and cloud received most of her attention now that she had boats and tourists to protect from storms. Periwinkles and pink conchs bordered the sand yard in front of her office. Beyond that, bougainvillea blossomed in red and orange sprays over white pickets and a low stone wall of jasmine that fronted the quai and its berths of bobbing boats.
Reece came from there along the sand road, back from mooring the tour boat.
She went out to meet him, and they strolled together through feathery ironwood trees to the strand that flanked the marina. Hard sun and a high wind sheared cumulus to swift tufts that flung shadows over the glittering bay. And they read the weather together and knew it would rain before twilight.
They waded back to the waterfront office, happy with the prospect of
an early night and eager to balance the accounts for that day's business and close the shop.
At midnight, after the rain had returned to sea, they sat on the beach under ironwoods and the shining band of the galaxy. "Would you ever want to go back?" Jyoti asked, probing to see if he felt as happy as she on the Dark Shore.
"And miss marlin fishing season?" He leaned back against the giant and gentle tree and fixed her with a reassuring smile. "Forget it."
And she did, happily. For both of them, Irth had a dimness of recollection that paled within the vivid immediacy of their lives. The witch queen's magic had touched them with Charm to help them blunt the jagged edges of the most painful memories—and then she had taken away their amulets.
Without Charm, memories faded. As the years went by, they would do less recollecting, for their lives had become full and would fill even more when children arrived and their business expanded.
Across the Gulf, on Irth, in the sea-cliff city of Saxar. Mary Felix and Brick spent most days working in their executive suites at Dig Dog Ltd. They enjoyed the challenge of helping connect the city's factories and charmwrights with buyers in cities of every dominion. And their company flourished in the prosperous eras of reconstruction and expansion that followed.
At night, sitting together under puzzle trees in the park off Cold Niobe at the crest of Everyland Street, they watched planets sliding majestically among star vapors and talked about their work together and their future.
Once in a while, their thoughts turned to the Dark Shore and the adventures that had brought them together. Brick glowed with satisfaction that his trials had won him the unalloyed humanity he had always believed was his. And Mary Felix felt grateful to have found a life of Charm far from the cold world of her exhausted years on Earth.
"You know I can't even remember what he looked like," Brick said, squinting with the effort to recall. "Reece Morgan—he was stocky, blunt nosed, I think. I can't really see him in my mind anymore."
Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3) Page 29