The Shadow Eater (The Dominions of Irth Book 2)

by A. Attanasio

"What are we going to do now?" Broydo wanted to know, watching the army of dwarves swarming across the roadside ditches.

  "Light cannot be destroyed." Asofel spoke aloud but to himself, gathering strength for the mortal act that awaited him. "My power is still among us. We must work together and not despair. No matter how powerful Duppy Hob looks, we must not forget that he is the shadow—and we have the light to drive him out. The survival of the worlds depends on all of us. I cannot do this alone anymore."

  "But what are we going to do now?" Broydo swung his head, watching the dwarves leap with shrill cries onto the roadway. "What now?"

  "What I can." Asofel opened his door. "And I expect each of you to do the same—no matter how painful that may be."

  Ric grabbed the sentinel's arm as he moved to exit. "Asofel."

  The Radiant One smiled, and for an instant the car interior dazzled like water braiding sunlight. "Farewell, gnome."

  A hatchet skirred through the open windshield and gashed open the seat where Asofel had been sitting. Other thrown hatchets smashed the grille and headlights and thudded off the rooftop. The occupants of the car threw themselves on the floor and cringed under the shrieking attack.

  Asofel stood in the road with arms upraised, iridescent raiment shining hotter. He did not have the strength to attack Duppy Hob and win—but these weaker creatures, these dwarves augumented out of mere maggots, their energy in the dream floated upon the void differently than the life flux of natural creatures. He drew on that energy. He pulled it into himself from the very fringes of the dream.

  Cries edged with anguish cut through the war whistles and trills of the dwarves. Maggots collapsed onto the roadway with wet slaps and brattling of armor. Upon all the hillsides and in the depths of the pine woods, dwarves wrenched free of the magic that had transformed them. Far into all the riddling charmways, maggots writhed, and the evil that had shaped them flowed directly into Asofel.

  The Radiant One hunched over, hair of moon air darkening to nightsmoke, black lips curling back from snarling incisors. He turned on the stalled car, wicked eyes gleeful, radiating Duppy Hob's power.

  With one tug, he tore away the side door and stuck his scorched head in the car. The human fabric ripped from his cheekbones and brow, revealing a blackened skull underneath.

  "Use the sword!" Asofel gnashed. His dark face knotted, veins bulging. It took all his strength to restrain the ferocity of the dwarves compacted in him. "The serpent sword!"

  Broydo rose up on his knees to pass the blade to Old Ric, and he faced Asofel's blood-fire stare. In the black depths of the Radiant One's pupils gleamed two red eyespots.

  "I can't do it." Old Ric refused to take the sword and cowered against the glove compartment clutching the Necklace of Souls. From the facets of the crystals, thousands of red eyespots fixed him in their empty gaze.

  "I can't—hold on—much longer—" Asofel's grimacing face throbbed. "The dwarves—will kill—you—"

  Broydo shot a terrified look to Jyoti, wanting her to take the sword. The driver's seat and headrest blocked her from delivering a clean blow to Asofel.

  She glared at the elf. "Use the sword!"

  Broydo thrust, and the bone blade pierced Asofel's chest and caught on his ribs. A scalded cry shook the car, and Broydo flew away from the sword, punched nearly unconscious by the pain that jolted through the haft.

  Teeth meshed in agony, Asofel swung the hilt of the lodged sword toward the gnome. "Ric—help me!"

  Old Ric, who had pushed himself up on the dash and sat half out of the car, locked his frightened gaze on the disheveled and charred creature before him. Asofel's devilishly angelic lineaments had burned to a vague semblance of sooty hair on a ridged skull patched with singed rags of flesh.

  The eldern gnome took the sword's grip in both curled hands and drove the cutting blade deep into Asofel's body. Vibrant agony jarred Ric and threw him to the floor. Glimpsed briefly, Asofel's visage shone with feverish beauty again, then the devils' torment yanked him out of the car and cast him onto the road.

  Asofel lay writhing on the steaming asphalt, his heart visibly throbbing through the amber casing of his rib cage. The serpent sword stood upright in his chest, vibrating as it destroyed the dwarvish magic he had pulled into his body. Its bone blade and gold-coiled haft incandesced briefly, then went still and dark.

  The sentinel drifted on a sea of pain. Outside the dream, the pain would have been light, and he would have grown brighter for all this suffering. Trembling with cold, he felt himself shrinking darker. Yet he experienced no fear. He had known it would be like this, and he had wanted it. The dwarves were finished. Duppy Hob had become less. These thoughts gave meaning to his pain, just as the gnome had said.

  The I at the center of his suffering shone with the last of his radiance, blazing with all that remained of his consciousness. In moments, death would deliver him from pain. Until then, he burned with his hurt body on the melted tarmac, glad for the suffering, glad for the last of his life, all of him given away, for the love of a dream, all of his light given to darkness.

  

  Lightning jumped down from the storm clouds at the far end of the road and staggered closer. Out of the thunder, Duppy Hob strode. His approach frosted the remaining windows of the car, and the glass collapsed in opaque granules, shaken by the blast. He jammed the heel of his sandal against Asofel's throat and wrenched the serpent sword from his torso.

  "Stop!" Old Ric shouted, and struggled upright.

  Jyoti shoved him back in his seat and averted her eyes from where Duppy Hob had raised the sword overhead with both hands. He drove the blade down into the maroon, pulsating heart.

  A brilliant flash erased the gnome's face. When the glare faded and his features returned, pieces of the sun burned in his big eyes.

  Broydo wailed with despair.

  A ray of cold fire touched the elf between the eyes, and he curled up asleep on the backseat. Jyoti shook him by his shoulders until his eyeballs clicked into place. Stunned out of his mind, Broydo groaned as from a nightmare, "Asofel is dead!"

  Jyoti kept her face turned away from the smoldering glow outside the car. In the rearview mirror, she eyed the patch of road where Asofel had fallen.

  The asphalt had melted to his outline. Flames licked its edges, and only ash remained where the body had been—a white bed of crushed diamonds—and a blackened stick for the sword.

  In the mirror, a slippery imp pranced around the incinerated body. Flames brushed his motions in sticky streaks upon the air. Blue volts popped from the corners of his porpoise grin. And swift, nimble movements blurred the blaze of his sleek shape.

  When Jyoti dared a glimpse over her shoulder, she saw Duppy Hob as a jet-eyed youth dancing under Ripcat's hide.

  "You see it, too," Old Ric whispered. "Duppy Hob is…”

  The roof of the car peeled away with a screech of violated steel. Old Ric, who stood on the passenger seat, spun to a blur, caught in a tight whirlwind that whipped him into the sky.

  With the child's soul in his grasp, Duppy Hob had no further cause to hide his power. His human disguise shredded like snake molt, and an ether devil blazed hotly on the Dark Shore.

  The cold of the Gulf condensed the devil's ethereal form to a fiery gargoyle with wings of red lightning, and he soared with Old Ric in his talons. Below, thunderclouds sheared to long scarves of fog.

  Desolate with grief, the eldern gnome moved to pull off the Necklace of Souls and end the perfidy of his existence now that Duppy Hob had triumphed.

  A webbed claw stopped him. With a voice like glass grinding to sand, the demon announced, "You are coming with me to the garden of the nameless lady. You will negotiate with her for me, while I hold secure the child's soul in the Necklace. She may try to snatch the soul back. That will not avail so long as I hold even one of the crystal prisms! She is to give me her dream and make me the god of these worlds. When that power is mine, when all the Bright and Dark Worlds are my dream to command,
I will release the child's soul from the Necklace and the child will move again in her womb."

  Old Ric clutched at the Necklace of Souls. "The child's soul is in here?" Shock pierced his shock! Finding himself in an ether devil’s claws high above the hazy blue curve of a cold world, he cried, "All this time—all this time—I held the child's soul!"

  The demon grinned triumphantly. "Even as my dwarves rebelled, even as they cast me into the Gulf, I used what power I had to drop the Necklace of Souls into the Labyrinth of the Undead. I had designed the Labyrinth for this purpose. To focus that array of gems from afar. Slowly, tediously, over thousands of Earth years, I lensed the light of the Abiding Star and gradually absorbed the soul of the child. Now it is mine!"

  Duppy Hob hooked a radiant claw around the Necklace of Souls as they rose higher and starlight tapped into indigo. "Two million days of power come to bear on this one day, this one hour of victory!"

  Lightning exploded overhead with an oceanic roar, and the demon smashed into a wall of stars so violently he dropped the gnome.

  Old Ric tumbled into free fall above the azure crescent of the atmosphere. From one corner of the sky, among a sprinkling of tiny stars, the moon hung like a pulpy, rotted thing. Was he truly plummeting high above the weather? Or had the ether devil trapped him in a trance?

  Duppy Hob snatched the eldern gnome from his plunge and stood him upright in the violet shine above the sliding jet stream.

  "You are trapped on the Dark Shore!" Old Ric laughed, mad with horror, not knowing if he were awake or dreaming—yet accurately reading the rage in the devil’s viper face. “You cannot cross the Gulf!”

  The demon spoke with black intensity. His sharp fingers upheld the lone prism that had housed Lara's soul. "I must rejoin the crystal prism to the others before we can leave the Dark Shore."

  Old Ric folded his twisted hands over the Necklace. "You have not the power to rejoin the prisms," he challenged.

  "Power!" The demon snarled. "I have more power than I can use. Buti t will take far more than power to rejoin the Necklace. Wait here."

  Duppy Hob dove through the wind, disappearing among frosty strata of clouds, and Old Ric floated in a bubble’s iridescent transparency. He took the Necklace of Souls in both bent hands and trembled to think of the child's soul he wore. That he had nearly removed from his shoulders the very prize he sought hollowed him with anguish. He looked about for a place to hide under the rumpled darkness of outer space.

  With Jyoti dangling from one taloned fist and Broydo from the other, Duppy Hob returned. His slitherous tail lashed onto Old Ric's leg and pulled him down from his slow climb toward the moon.

  "There is a great deal of work to be done," the demon said, taking Broydo by the arm and leading him across the fluorescent glass roof of the sky toward the sun. "Elf, you will work the bellows."

  Auroral curtains of ionized gas hung in cathedral tiers, shrouding invisible lines of force from the planet's magnetic field. Wide as the horizon, the shining draperies buffeted in the solar wind. Duppy Hob shackled Broydo to the drapes with cuffs of pain.

  At the demon's command, the elf ran along the world's rim, propelled at hundreds of leagues a step. He flew across the planet, dragging immense sheets of plasma, then doubling back. His hurtling body, composed of matter from the Bright Shore, fanned the sky fires to gusts of blue-and-violet flame.

  "Now, margravine, your task is to gather lightning bolts from the flames of the bellows and stack them for me." Duppy Hob set Jyoti in the electric wind blustering from the whipped curtains of plasma, and her brindled hair lifted from her head, bouffant with static.

  "And you—" Duppy Hob jabbed a fiery finger at Old Ric bobbing against the void. "Stay still. Do not move or you will be burned to a cinder, and I will have to use the elf for my negotiator."

  The eldern gnome remained motionless against the black wall of space and watched the others surreally toiling. I am dreaming. Truly. This is the Lady’s nightmare!

  Broydo already gleamed with sweat. His stocky frame ran hard to pull the planetary sails of light after him, back and forth across the slippery roof of the sky. When he fell, sparks flew along his skid path, and he jumped to his feet, grimacing with pain.

  Jyoti, too, moved with alacrity, knowing that any delay meant violent suffering. She reached into the clouds of blue fire that Broydo pulled from the auroras and came out with fists of eelish bolts.

  Sweat flew like sparks from her florid face as she stacked the blue-hot tangles of lightning, turning them so that their oppositely charged ends locked onto each other. By the time she had linked all the bolts into an incandescent chain, Broydo came huffing across the world, dragging another full sail of captured energy.

  Duppy Hob wrapped the chain of electric bolts that Jyoti gathered around Old Ric's shoulder, connecting the sizzling edges to the facets of the crystal prisms. The labor required all his attention, and his horrid face grew eyestalks that pressed close to the sparking crystals. They broke concentration and swiveled aside only to search for more bolts.

  "Hurry, elf! Run! Run! I need more power to open the Necklace. And more yet later to close it. Hurry, margravine! Stack the bolts quickly. If the Necklace is open too long, the child's soul is forfeit—and so are all the worlds of the dream!"

  Broydo and Jyoti moved as swiftly as they could. “Am I dreaming?” the elf wondered, as unbelieving as the gnome that they labored high above this blue world on the Dark Shore. He threw himself skidding across the sky, spewing sparks and screams of pain yet scooping even more energy from the solar wind.

  Jyoti emerged with armfuls of spitting bolts, blisters disfiguring the sides of her neck and face where the asps of energy had bit her.

  By their extreme effort, the demon garnered enough energy to open the binding cord and attach the lone crystal prism. The Necklace of Souls pressed more heavily on Old Ric's shoulders, and the greater charge of Charm quieted the loud horror resounding in him since he learned that he had possessed the child's soul.

  Distantly, the eldern gnome heard music—the dark song of Lara's soul. It eked out of the crystal she had worn, amplified now by the other prisms.

  Duppy Hob heard it, too.

  And more.

  Lara's ghost had joined with the dispossessed souls that had been caught by these crystals over the ages. Powerless on the Dark Shore, Lara had sunk into the crystal. She had joined the drifting shades in the spherical corridors of the Necklace.

  Hovering mindless among them, she endured as just another lost soul—until she realized how her origin separated her from the other souls. A witch of the Dark Shore, she possessed greater density than these souls of light. And she knew how to dance power.

  Since Ripcat was taken from her by dwarves in the winter park, she had been dancing. She had paused only when the demon turned the pressure of his awareness upon her.

  Her dancing had pooled the tenuous energies of the lost souls. The power of the witch rekindled in them rageful memories of capture and servitude. When Duppy Hob rejoined Lara's gem to the others in the Necklace, the wrath of all the souls in each of the gems converged to a ferocious chorus.

  The demon staggered back a pace before the blare of focused ire. His eyestalks shrunk with hurt.

  The startling sight of the demon's wide jaws agape gripped the gnome. A homicidal urge expanded faster than thought. With one hand he fiercely tore the barbed arrow from his chest, threading agony that not even Charm could mute!

  With his other arm, he grasped the underbelly of the ether devil and pulled himself hard against the shimmering torso. The arrow forged by Blue Tipoo punctured the devil’s skin of light.

  Instantly, Duppy Hob bled fire. Flames spurted from under the webbed fingers that seized the impaled shaft. His eyestalks shot straight outward, fixing Old Ric with savage amazement.

  Then, the demon curled around himself, desperate to contain the flow of fiery ichor dripping like clots of lava. The arrowhead had driven deep. If he pulled it f
ree, his life force would gush to nothing in an instant. Yet, if he left the barbed shaft in place, toxins doomed him.

  The Necklace of Souls! his pain screamed, wild for a way to heal himself.

  Old Ric's feet skipped on the glassy surface of the stratosphere. As he turned to flee, the demon unclasped from its agony and snagged the Necklace with its claws.

  Those claws had no strength. Even the gnome's withered hands easily restrained the desperate creature.

  Duppy Hob's blinding pain stymied all his efforts to grasp the Necklace of Souls. His sparkling arms entwined Old Ric, and the two collapsed in a tangle of thrashing limbs.

  The demon and the eldern gnome rolled down the sky, spinning astral blood like a meteor. Lightning crackled along their shining trajectory.

  Jyoti grabbed Broydo's arm and pulled him after her. Down the sky they plummeted, along the glittering curve of the ether devil’s fall that pierced the clouds. In the thunderheads, they flew blind. The fog darkened abruptly, and they crashed into a dewy cave wall.

  The roar of surf reverberated.

  At the mouth of the cave, crimson twilight streaked the sky above Gabagalus. Titanic waves swelled out of the dark sea and smashed against the headlands, sending frothy walls of ocean crashing onto sprawling plains of cress and wort.

  Duppy Hob and Old Ric wrestled nearby, on the rock ledge above this seething night sea. Their frantic bodies silhouetted phosphorescent explosions of spray. Cliff boulders boomed, and foam reared up behind them like a giant's face white with fury.

  Jyoti and Broydo each seized one of Old Ric's arms and yanked him free of the grasping ether devil. With a kick, the gnome sent Duppy Hob toppling backward over the precipice and into the churning waves. Not even the demon's piteous cry survived, swallowed whole by the howling tempest of the sinking continent.

  Return to the Garden

  Old Ric, Broydo and Jyoti moved deeper into the charmway as waves sloshed through the cavern of a mountain in Gabagalus. By the slim glow from the Necklace of Souls, they made their way within dense darkness to a rock ledge where the susurrant noise of the ocean did not reach. There, they examined the eldern gnome's wound and found it open yet not bleeding.