The Shadow Eater (The Dominions of Irth Book 2)

by A. Attanasio

  A heavy door opened onto the roof, and they stepped out. Iced tar paper crunched underfoot. Winter morning offered a gray smoky panorama of chimney pipes and ventilator sheds. Blackened steel trusses upholding rooftop water towers etched Tribeca in visionary despondency.

  Duppy Hob climbed onto the ledge and waved Ripcat to the brink of the building. The Cat hopped nimbly to his side and shared with him the teetering prospect of parapet-squatters. Dauntlessly, he peered down five storeys past air-shaft windows to the littered alley where they had stood earlier.

  "I need for you to stand here—on the edge." He took Ripcat's shoulders in a strong grip and turned him to face a wedge of sooty sky. "You're agile. You're a Cat, right? You can do this in your sleep. Now don't move."

  Ripcat scowled. "Why should I help you?"

  "I need you." Duppy Hob jumped down from the ledge and held his arms out to signal Ripcat to stay. "Just stand there. As Ripcat, you carry Charm from Irth, and your internal core of Reece Morgan grounds it perfectly on the Dark Shore." He backed away and left the beastmarked man with his fur shimmering in the wind. "I need you beside me as my antenna, so that I can direct my dwarves to the Necklace of Souls. Help me, and I will be generous with you."

  The youth grinned warmly, yet his stare retained the bolt blackness of a shark's eyeholes. "Look, Reece—" He pointed up, into the hoar gray sky. "Look there with me—across the sky, to the far shore, to the Bright Worlds—"

  Dea dwalker

  Asofel gazed back at Duppy Hob and Ripcat staring into the sky, across the dream, directly at him. They did not actually see him, only the radiance of the Bright Shore, the light of the Abiding Star, chilled across time and enormous spans of darkness. That they could see this energy at all demonstrated the astonishing power that the devil worshipper had accumulated while marooned on the Dark Shore.

  The Radiant One marveled at Duppy Hob's evil ingenuity. The devil worshipper had found a way to communicate with Irth. A little piece of the dream could now manipulate the larger pieces. Yet still, it presented no more than a dream.

  Dwarves continued to march out of World's End, streaming through subterranean charmways and the central Well of Spiders. Asofel watched them with cool fascination, like a child studying an ant farm.

  Duppy Hob had generated millions of dwarves over the ages, and he had set them all marching, descending through the worlds with one intent—to seize the Necklace of Souls.

  Asofel did not question why. He did not care. The Necklace of Souls served Old Ric, and the dwarves would not have it. They would be left to wander aimlessly through the dark soon enough now that the shadow thing had crossed the Gulf and departed the Bright Shore.

  

  From afar, Ripcat sensed the Radiant One watching them, and he wanted to wave, shout, jump up and down for help. He did not move. The sentinel was too distant, his presence vague and disinterested as some cosmic observer.

  Once, Ripcat had feared the very thought of the Radiant One, but now he stood rigid with hopelessness on the rooftop, fearing only the luminous being's silence, his detachment. With frustration, the beastmarked man felt powerless as the smoke he watched twisting along the cold streets below, seeping through manhole covers from the city's infernal depths.

  

  Ripcat's despair did reach Asofel. The Radiant One ignored the man on the Dark Shore. The shadow thing would naturally be disgruntled, having lost a godlike mastery among the Bright Worlds. The Radiant One did not dwell on this. His mind already calculated how much longer he would have to endure the indignity of serving a gnome inside a dream.

  The expectation of his last foray into the cold moved him with exuberance. He sought out Old Ric and found the eldern gnome on Nemora. Ric had left Hellsgate after the slaughter of the giants to return to the ice caves and snowfields where he had lived most of his life.

  Through chill fog, Old Ric mounted the stiles that led from the frozen river to Knolls Brae, the cave community where he had reared his children. The sinuous curves of the rooftops stirred emotional depths in him, and he nearly sat down in the blue snow sobbing.

  Threads of peat smoke rising from flue holes in the ice domes carried sumptuous scents of meals shared with loved ones who were now all ghosts—two wives, three children, including his beloved Amara—

  So befuddled by awakened grief was the gnome that he did not see the fisherfolk climbing down the stiles toward him, saws and axes strapped to their backs.

  "That there is Old Ric for sure, I told you!" an excited voice announced from above.

  The eldern gnome started, lifted from his dismal trance by the sound of his name. He recognized gnomes in eel-skin slickers and squid-leather boots on their way to the river, and he identified the oldest, a net-weaver and fishmonger who had once employed Ric to build a hearth in the far-gone days when he did such firework. The eldern gnome lifted both arms in greeting.

  The fisherfolk returned the greeting, then paused in their descent. They had drawn close enough to notice that the eldern gnome wore rags of grass and vine and a necklace of rainbows. He wore no hat, his bald pate scalded by exposure. And—was that some kind of gory prankster's prop?—a barbed arrow pierced his torso.

  "Ric?" a nervous voice called out. "Are you Old Ric of Knolls Brae?"

  "The same!" Old Ric clambered toward them half-naked and aswirl in pale vapors. "I have been to World's End, brothers and sisters!"

  Two of the fisherfolk began to climb hurriedly back up the stiles. The third crouched in amazement. "Goddess forfend, this really is you! Old Ric! What is that arrow—by the gods themselves, you're wounded!"

  Old Ric dismissed his injury with a curt laugh even as he had to twist his body to keep the arrowhead from catching on the embankment as he climbed. "A dwarf arrow found me when I found the Necklace of Souls—" He chuckled as he ascended. "I was lucky I was holding the Necklace. It's a soul-catcher, you see."

  "You're a deadwalker!" the fishmonger yelled, seeing more sharply the ripped flesh and the crimson arrow shaft with its varnish of blood. He skidded in his abrupt eagerness to flee and shouted with livid fright as he slid down the embankment to within grasp of the eldern gnome.

  "Calm down—I'll not hurt you." Old Ric bent forward to help the fishmonger to his feet.

  The fallen gnome kicked and lurched about. "Get away!" he cried, and charged up the embankment. His ice-cutting tools fell clattering.

  Old Ric proceeded climbing the stiles, hurt by the foolish reaction of the fisherfolk. "I'm no monster!" he called. "I'm Old Ric, I tell you!"

  Before Ric reached the top of the embankment, several squat figures in the white and gold raiment of elders blocked his way. "Go back, Old Ric."

  He remembered some of these elders from their childhoods, and he called out their names, beseeching mercy accorded the venerable.

  "Get away, deadwalker!" They waved staves threateningly. "In life you kept to yourself. Now that you are dead, you dare return among us? Get away quickly before we bring the fire knives from the forges."

  Old Ric moaned with disbelief. "I've died to save you—to save all the worlds!"

  "You're mad! Begone!" The elders flapped their ivory robes and beat their staves violently. "Bring the fire knives! Bring the knives!"

  Old Ric stuck out his tongue and waved away the distraught elders. Angrily, he showed them his back and walked down the stiles kicking chunks of ice with each step and muttering, "Ignorant gnomes!"

  Before him, the gray river swerved to where the Abiding Star floated in a cold haze above broken plates of ice. Frost gardens tufted the banks. Morosely, he thought to go there and lose himself among the brittle, ice-webbed drifts that wind and hail had sculpted.

  Amara used to play there—as his other children had. The frost gardens consisted of thick, strong ice, ideal frolic sites. The children enjoyed smashing shapes out of the frosted lattices, building mazes, playhouses, icicle palaces.

  Old Ric moved like a shade down the stiles, toward the frail,
glass stems and branches. Surrounded by ice flowers, enclosed by fragility, at the very center of vulnerability, he thought he could remove the Necklace of Souls.

  What good does care do when by our very natures we are doomed? If he removed the soul-catcher, death would lift away the heavy burden the nameless lady had pressed upon him. Like Amara, he would find freedom.

  He lifted the Necklace and glimpsed Lara within the crystal facets. Her body looked bruised, like a battered vegetable.

  "The witch—" He shuddered to see her face so damaged, walleyed with concussion. "Lara—" The wise witch who had outwitted Blue Tipoo, who had come down from the Abiding Star for love—what had reduced her to this atrocity? A wail of indignation and pity started from deep inside him.

  Noonlight shrunk shadows, and Asofel strode to Ric's side from behind, shining exuberantly. "It is finished, Old Ric."

  The eldern gnome held a hand to his brow to shield his aching eyes from the glare. "What's finished? What are you talking about? I haven't called you."

  "There is no need to call me anymore." Asofel dimmed his luminosity and took a silver shape that reflected the glacial slopes. "It is over. The shadow thing is no longer among the Bright Worlds."

  Old Ric lurched about excitedly and nearly slipped. "What happened?"

  "Duppy Hob seized Reece Morgan in his beastmarks and threw him into the Gulf."

  "The devil worshipper?" The eldern gnome gaped. "You've seen Duppy Hob?"

  "I have. He is very old."

  Old Ric crashed hastily through a wall of ice-ferns toward the radiant being, reasoning aloud, "If he threw the shadow thing into the Gulf, Duppy Hob has to be here—on the Bright Shore."

  "On Irth—in Gabagalus."

  The gnome tapped his forehead, trying to nudge his memory. "I don't know that dominion."

  Asofel paced with him beside turquoise fins of ice at the riverside. "Duppy Hob is from Gabagalus originally, a continent on the far side of Irth. He has crossed the Gulf with the intruder. They are both on the Dark Shore. Our work is done."

  Old Ric stopped in his tracks. "I think not."

  "The shadows are where they belong." The Radiant One almost growled with frustration. Is this dreamwork interminable? "We should at least return to World's End and report to our lady."

  "And what of Broydo?"

  Asofel's silver surface dulled a moment as he trance-blinked, then brightened again when he reported what he found, "I have seen him. He is in Gabagalus with the margravine."

  The gnome stamped his foot with determination. "Then we are going to Gabagalus. And if we have to, we are going beyond. We will cross the Gulf if we must."

  "What are you ranting about, gnome?" Asofel flushed gold-red. "I will not squander my power in this dream again."

  "We must go to Lara." Ric lifted the Necklace of Souls with both hands, "Look at her!"

  Prismatic shadows shook and became wind tossing cattails and a mud woman staggering across spongy ground, crashing through the canes.

  "She is on the Dark Shore." Asofel stepped back. "We cannot go there."

  "Why not?"

  Out of a white aura, Asofel's face cooled, his mischievous donkey eyes widening with fear. "That is far too deep into the dream, too close to the dark strata of cold matter. To accomplish anything down there will require a lot of power. And if my light is spent in that darkness, it will be extinguished forever. You realize, I will never get out of the dream—ever."

  The gnome accepted this with a pensive look as he considered what to do. "Then at least let us go to Broydo and assure his safety." He held the Necklace of Souls to the anxious visage of the Radiant One. "Before we go, look again at Lara. See her here in the Necklace, Asofel—the woman the magus loved—the love that brought him here to trouble our lives—see her in the crystals..."

  

  Stenciled in mud, Lara dragged herself through swales of frozen grass and past green chemical pools. She shuffled along rutted, gravel roads. Above her, staring faces swept past in the flow of viaduct traffic. These impassive faces disappeared as she passed among concrete piers supporting the highway.

  Crows broke away from the clattering reeds like rumpled pieces of sorrow. She paid them no heed. The witch inside her slept and read no omens.

  Up a gravel revetment, she leaned and tilted across railroad tracks. A commuter train slashed by. More faces turned, watching the mud woman wander stiff-kneed through the switching yard like the zombie she was.

  Eventually, transit police picked her up in a restricted zone under high-tension cables. Trampling circles in the marsh grass, she danced power up out of the earth. Light spangled inside her head—flashes of who she was, sky witch, ghost, messenger of apocalypse…

  The arresting officers left the engine of their brown car running where they stopped on the access road near the madcap dancer. Pepper spray and hand shackles ready, the officers gingerly approached the twirling woman. They called to her and received no response. She appeared entranced, drugged. Most bizarrely, for all her frenzied exertion, no breath clouded the cold air.

  The crazed woman came away without resistance, the report would later show. No part of the report would note how the air appeared brighter around her. Static electricity from the high-tension lines, the officers figured. At their touch, no spark, only immediate passivity. They cuffed her wrists behind her back quickly and patted her torn and mud-plastered robes for weapons.

  They did not find the crystal prism until later, at the state clinic where the patrol car delivered her for medical evaluation and care. The admitting team stood baffled around her gurney in the examining bay. She had no pulse or respiration, yet her pupils responded to light—and she spoke, "I am the Dog—I am the Dog."

  The crystal prism threaded by a coiled gold filament had no clasp. A nurse carefully lifted it over the patient’s bruised head while the physician’s aid removed the bedraggled robes and washed off the mud.

  The doctor held the chunky gem to the light, and winter gusted into her soul. She shivered and passed the crystal to the aide, who sealed it in a plastic bag.

  When the security officer removed the bagged prism from the room, Lara began to fade. She lost iris reflexivity and stiffened with morbid rigor. The doctor pronounced her dead.

  The nurse wheeled the draped corpse into the corridor. While awaiting an escort to the morgue, the wraith faded to nothing but the imprint of where she had lain.

  Later that night, a detective examined the missing corpse’s one personal effect: a prism attached to a fine gold neck chain. The fluent intricacy of the cord’s metalwork looked organic, pliant as hair.

  The jewel, rough-cut with random facets highly polished and shaped, carried light among internal curves like globular liquid. He knew he held something singular. Thick as his thumb, heavy as iron and opal smooth, the lucent object chilled him.

  He closed his fist over the stone and went to the examining bay where the Jane Doe had died.

  The swinging doors opened on an empty bay. Medical monitors stood inert. The exam table lay dark, already shrouded for the next trauma.

  "G'day, sir."

  The detective's long coat flapped like wings as he whirled about. "Where'd you come from?"

  A swarthy woman with long, sinuous black hair and wearing a priest's cassock stood beside the oxygen unit. No one had been there a moment before. "That's my crystal you have there."

  "Stay where you are!" The detective reflexively reached for his badge. “What’s your name?”

  "Sir, I have only a moment's clarity," the woman spoke in a swift and pleadful tone. "You must listen carefully to me. You are in grave danger if you keep the crystal. Give it to me. Please."

  The detective showed his badge. "I'm a police detective.” He slipped the crystal into the pocket of his coat. “I need you to come with me.”

  Something peculiar riffled in the woman’s dark eyes.

  “Please, turn around.” The detective removed his handcuffs. “Put your hands
behind your back.”

  She offered no resistance. He cuffed her and turned to call for a nurse to pat her down. The clatter of handcuffs falling to the floor pulled him around.

  He stood alone in the empty exam bay, and at his feet the handcuffs gleamed, closed and locked.

  Interlude w ith an Elf

  Broydo led the way out of the sea cave where he had just slain a basilisk. The hilt of the serpent sword had annealed to his grasp, so tense had been his fright. Not until he stepped outside and daylight painted him in warmth did his cramped hand loosen. He rested the blooded sword tip in the sand and peeled his fingers from the hilt.

  Before him, jigsaw horizons interlocked withered mountains and hill villages.

  Through a lens cube that she unfolded from her amulet-vest, Jyoti studied the villages. Hazings of distance peeled away, revealing field workers: salamandrines—glossy, hairless people with newtlike features.

  They had finished erecting the windmills and water flues packed away the afternoon before, and now they busily tended cress paddies and wort fields. Children frolicked in school gardens in the midst of the village's blue-stone bungalows. And on the long highways that traversed these quilted fields, wagons cruised, powered by colorful solar vanes.

  "How will we ever find Ripcat?" Broydo asked. They had emerged onto a limestone escarpment among spiny, eroded mountains. Some maroon viperish thing thrashed in the oozing tidal pool below, beached until nightfall if it survived that long.

  Broydo regarded it with fascination. He felt pity, convinced that the trapped sea viper expressed his own predicament, caught out of his element and surrounded by peril.

  "We'll get help from the local authorities," Jyoti said matter-of-factly. She opened her aviso and transmitted a general distress signal. "We have to warn everyone about the dwarves."

  "Those maggots can’t be far." Broydo tore his attention away from the stranded sea viper. In the distance, he spied a trace that spiraled down the mountain through a parkland of bulbous stromatolites and ruffled marine polyps. He had slain a basilisk! He could surely elude dwarves. "Let's follow that road. We may meet farmers. And maybe find something to eat. To keep up our strength."