Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3) Read online

  The Dominions of Irth

  Book Three:

  Octoberland

  A. A. Attanasio

  Octoberland

  published by Firelords Press

  Ignite your imagination!

  Second Edition

  Copyright © 2013 A. A. Attanasio

  First edition published by Avon Books: 1999

  Dominions of Irth; bk. 3.

  Pen Name: Adam Lee

  Library of Congress classification: PS3562.E3 17028 1999

  http://aaattanasio.com/

  Cover Art:

  Alexey Yakovlev

  Ancient Rune Magic

  http://kypcaht.daportfolio.com/

  Map:

  John Bergin

  http://web.mac.com/grinderx/Site/home.html

  For Bel Atreides—

  and all like him:

  "The people who walked in darkness (and) have seen

  a great light."

  —Isaiah 9:2

  I form the light and create darkness —Isaiah 45:7

  Contents

  Foreworld

  Flesh Rags

  In a World of Her Creation

  Remembering Dogbrick

  Blight Fen

  Beyond the Swamp Angel

  Dogbrick on Earth

  The Magical Beast

  The Coven

  The Voices of the Flowers

  The Road to Moödrun

  Attack of the Trolls

  Wife of Darkness

  Beauty without Cruelty

  Who in a Nightmare Can Help Herself?

  Blackness Burning

  I Hide in the Sky

  In the Forest Evil

  Sinister Angels

  How the Witches Live

  The Return of Ripcat

  Overy Scarn

  Mental

  Octoberland

  Street Exiles

  Outcasts of the Light

  Octoberland

  Nailing Heaven and Earth

  The Palace of Skulls

  Faerie Chambers

  The Assassin's Art

  The Dead Awake

  Astral Violet

  Monstrous Immortal

  Eternity and Space

  Speak of Hell

  Secret Honor

  The Terrible Reality

  Building God

  A Biography of the Sky

  The Eternal Guardians

  In Judgment of Ghosts

  The World of Your Eyes

  Madness

  The City of Lost Light

  Out of This Darkness

  The Thoughts of the Rain

  The Dark Voice

  Think of a New God

  This Dreaming Thing

  The Waters of Fire

  Terrible Love

  Earth, Be a Road

  Cold Stars Watch Us

  White Cold Blood

  The Underlife

  As Does the Troll

  False Star

  That Joy in Death

  Beauty and the Balance

  The Strange Creatures Came

  Angel Fate

  Light in the Head

  And

  Shadow with a Shadow

  The Moon Has a Book

  Rider of the Dream

  The Burden of the Dream

  Demons

  Death's Nightmare

  Torn and Most Whole

  Journey to No End

  Invisible Light

  Emissaries of Unknowing

  Weapons from the Dark Shore

  Mothers of Magic

  And Stillness, Our Dancing

  Voices Calling from Empty Space

  Hunted by Thunder

  Eating the Wind

  Time before Time

  Conjuring in Hell

  Assail Infinity

  The Doom of New Arwar

  Evil Creations

  Return to Octoberland

  Dirty Reality

  Reconciled among the Stars

  Afterworld

  Foreworld

  At nightfall, the water in the garden’s marble pool appeared black. Its taut surface mirrored a young woman sitting cross-legged on the rim. From her bowed head, long hair spilled in red ringlets over her swollen breasts and pregnant belly and touched the quiet water with ripples. She gazed forlornly at wobbly reflections of tree-hung lanterns and swaying temple columns.

  In this pool, she had worked magic and had created chimerical worlds. She had composed a phantom cosmos replete with pinwheel galaxies and motes of planets and suns numberless as gusted pollen.

  The eons that carried all the dynasties of evolution in this conjured universe had amounted merely to a few months here in the garden. Even so, she appreciated the complexity of her creation, concocted for one purpose alone: to educate her unborn. Within this mirage of happy worlds, she hoped her infant would experience joy and playfulness and a bounty of love.

  But something had gone wrong. Ill-shapen, deranged, and malevolent forms had emerged out of the darkness of her dream and polluted her gentle and antic worlds with disgusting events: Violence, old age, sickness, and death stormed through her invention.

  Slowly, with grim astonishment, the possibility occurred to her that this evil originated with the child's father. He alone had motive for such a cruel intrusion. She had refused to step to the edge of this precipitous thought for a long time, because the implications unnerved her.

  The child’s father, a warlord of her people's ancestral enemies, had been captured alive and unharmed through a fortuitous accident. With jubilant expectations of peace, her people offered the warlord's return in exchange for a truce. The warlord's rapacious generals had answered with scorn, too consumed with bloodlust to extend any kind of ransom.

  So the warlord had languished, a political prisoner condemned to this very garden and its adjoining court.

  As a novice enchantress and minor personage in the house of the suzerain, she had first laid eyes on him here, while serving those responsible for the captive's interrogation.

  He had been helpless to keep any secrets before the onslaught of their persuasive magic, and soon they had adroitly manipulated him into revealing everything they wanted to know. With this timely intelligence, the suzerain’s decisive attacks quickly repelled the warlord's army, broke his war machine, and decisively crushed his ambitions of conquest.

  After that, she had felt pity for this lord of war, whom blind chance had broken. Despite his humiliating losses, he continued to bear himself with dignity and self-effacing humor, and in time she came to befriend him.

  A strangely beautiful man—tall, with slender build and light gait—he expressed serene melancholy shadowed occasionally with disdain. Two thin lines of determination under the blond mustachios at the corners of his mouth hardened his otherwise soft features.

  Others of the suzerainty disliked and even feared him. For her, he seemed the most truly sincere person she had ever met.

  Having witnessed his interrogation, she knew that no magic disguised him. No secret remained undisclosed inside him. A defeated conqueror, he had been reduced to his essence, a man of power who had failed. She felt more at ease in his presence than among the posturing courtiers in the house of the suzerain. Before long, she took the warlord for her secret lover.

  Together they knew a guarded happiness built on stolen moments—until the suzerainty discovered that she carried his child.

  The elders sat in silence.

  She had shamed her people by conjoining with the enemy. The elders decided her punishment. Exile. And they sentenced her to take her lover’s place as prisoner in this garden.

 
The suzerainty gave the warlord to the magicians, who plunged him into profound sleep and carried his entranced body across the sky. Somewhere far in the night, they hid him.

  The night—the starless void beyond the titanic ramparts at World's End—had always frightened her. This was her people's ultimate punishment, the black depths where criminals could be safely forgotten. Timelessly suspended in this void, captives required no care.

  Those whom the magicians sometimes brought back from the night reported frightful deliriums in those lightless deeps. Many claimed that the darkness thrived as a living thing and had owned them. Rarely was it necessary to return anyone to the night ranges.

  The young woman had wanted to use her magic to find and free the father of her child from this terror. And though she knew that the elders would sit again in silence if she did, she bravely would have defied them for the sake of her unborn.

  In her heart, however, she understood that her child would suffer from such drama, and so she had restrained herself from obeying her desperate impulse. She lived quietly in her garden prison.

  Only now, toward the end of her term, did she begin to suspect that the warlord entranced in the night did not smolder in delirium. The darkness did not own him as it had owned the others.

  Bizarre as it seemed, perhaps he possessed within the darkness powers unknown to her magicians. Perhaps the magic of his fierce people drew as much strength from darkness as her people called forth from light.

  How else to explain the cruel intrusion of evil into her spell of spun light? Somehow, the warlord's internal arts had defeated the magicians' trance, and he had reached through the night to enter the dream worlds she had created for their baby's benefit.

  The lady of the garden looked up from the reflecting pool and observed the night-held garden. Did he in fact continue here with her now—that strangely beautiful man, a phantom among the flame shadows of the lanterns?

  For a moment, she believed she caught the scent of him, faint civet on the floral breeze. It vanished. She stretched her legs and gingerly pulled herself to her feet, peering about at the vaults of darkness beyond the columns.

  Will-o'-the-wisps flitted across black ranks of yews outside the garden. These few blown sparks under the mighty trees disappeared into the embers of twilight. Otherwise, nothing stirred.

  The lady of the garden sensed something missing in this voluptuous stillness. Gawking about at the leaf drifts footing urns and shrub pots, she stepped away from the pool and retrieved her feather robe off the stone bench where she had dropped it. She drew its warmth about her beneath the cage of a tripod lantern. Attentively, she scanned the garden wall that abutted the trellis gate with its litter of fallen blooms.

  "Pixies," she muttered to herself. "There are no pixies here."

  Usually, two or three of the impish creatures lurked about, eager to steal the garden's flowers for their elaborate dances in the sedgy fields. This night, no furtive pixies scurried across the terraced banks of flowers, no eye glints in the velvet dark under the cedar pruning tables, no baby shapes squatting behind the fern sprays that screened the compost bin.

  The lady of the garden drew her feather robe tighter across her enlarged belly. The temple columns of the garden cirque stood around her, graven still and final against the starless dark. Perplexed, she asked as if to her companion in the shadows, "Where are the pixies?"

  Flesh Rags

  Hope is sour desire.

  —Gibbet Scrolls: 27

  In a World of Her Creation

  Irth basked in the silver aura of the Abiding Star. As the marbled planet turned her hemispheric ocean toward daylight, a sunken continent rose steaming out of the blue depths: Gabagalus.

  Rockets flared from launch pads tucked between green paddies. Their holds, laded with telepathy-inducing wort, conveyed this cherished plant throughout all the worlds. Yet, nowhere in any of the trance dens or shrines among the glittering planets did the dreamers sense the Nameless One who was herself dreaming them.

  Of those few who knew about the pregnant author of the worlds, two lovers lay enfolded in their bed on the dark side of Irth: the magus and margravine of Elvre—Reece Morgan and Jyoti Odawl. A man of Earth and a woman of the Bright Worlds, they knew about the levels of creation.

  "Maybe the Nameless One will help us against the goblins," Reece said into the disarray of Jyoti's hair.

  She lay curled against him in darkness, and her body tensed in his embrace. On this last night together before Reece returned across the Gulf to the Dark Shore and Earth, they shared the burden of their unhappiness.

  Just hours ago, the margravine had received reports that the Goblin Wars had begun again. After a lull of more than four hundred thousand days, the telepathic imps had emerged from their exile in the Mere of Goblins. They had begun using their strong minds to control ogres, hippogriffs, basilisks, and trolls, inducing them to attack cities and farmlands.

  Learning this, Reece Morgan wanted to stay on the Bright Shore with the margravine and help her defend New Arwar. This towering city climbed above the tasseled horizon of the jungle in scaffolded spires and tiered neighborhoods. Stately palms lined broad boulevards still under construction, and trellises of flowering vines dripped outlandish blossoms over a maze of unfinished lanes and winding byways.

  Most of New Arwar consisted of buildings cobbled together from the mountain of rubble that had been Jyoti's ancestral home, the flying city of Arwar Odawl. In the war with the cacodemons, the city that had once toured the skies of Irth had crashed into the jungles of Elvre—killing much of the population and all of the margravine's family save her younger brother, Poch.

  Before he lost his magic, Reece had used his power to soften the edge of Jyoti's terrible loss by creating anew the ancient metropolis. His magic from the Dark Shore had been powerful enough to rearrange the heaped debris into a verdant city vaguely shaped into a flat-topped pyramid. If he could have, he would have restored the dead themselves.

  But his magic had been limited to manipulating the physical stuff of the Bright Worlds.

  Then, he lost both his magic and his friend Dogbrick to the Dark Shore during their adventure with an old gnome. This gnome, who served the nameless lady of the garden, had revealed to the lovers that all creation existed as a mother’s dream. In that cosmic illusion, Reece felt compelled to retrieve Dogbrick from the Dark Shore, while Jyoti remained on Irth to complete the construction of New Arwar without magic. Neither of them wished to separate.

  And now that the Goblin Wars had resumed, Jyoti wanted Reece away from New Arwar—away from Irth entirely. She did not try to dissuade him by pointing out the likelihood that his friend was already dead. Reece would be safer on the Dark Shore, she reasoned, well distant from the terrible events unfolding on Irth.

  So when his voice in the dark asked about seeking the nameless lady's help against the goblins, she replied quickly, "That’s not an option." She rolled free of his embrace. "Trying to find the Nameless Ones beyond World's End would be even more dangerous than facing goblins."

  Reece sighed. It pained him to possess no longer the powers he had worked a lifetime to master. As a child, he had scoured libraries and secondhand bookstores for texts on every related subject from astrology to zoanthropy. Astrology had proved useless, as soon as he had learned enough magic to journey beyond Earth and the constellations of the zodiac.

  But zoanthropy—the arcane lore of human transformation into animal forms—that knowledge had served him exquisitely well. At the height of his powers, he had possessed the skills to cover himself in beastmarks.

  As Ripcat he had worn the talons and fangs and physical strength of a man-sized beast.

  He restrained another sigh. Of that remarkable power, only memory remained.

  "What do these goblins look like?" Reece wondered aloud.

  "I can show you." Jyoti's reply came from across the bed in the dark, where he heard her clattering among her amulets on the night table. “The Sisterhood
of Witches captured a moment with them in a niello eye charm. I pity the woman who sacrificed herself for these images."

  Jyoti pressed a cool, glassy lozenge into his hand. "Don't look too intently," she warned, "or you will be spelled."

  Reece felt the magnetic tingle of Charm in the lozenge. Charm, the energy of the Abiding Star, concentrated like a battery charge inside naturally forming crystals—crystals that, properly cut and shaped by charmwrights, became hex-gems.

  In turn, hex-gems could be combined, their powers amplified and focused into amulets and talismans designed for specific purposes: amber wands of power, wound-healing theriacal opals, or image-capturing niello eye prisms—as many different kinds of talismanic tools as there were needs for the clever charmwrights to fulfill.

  He cupped the niello eye charm in his palm and held it close. Caught like a holographic image within the dark interior, small creatures the size of dolls gazed lazily back at him, their smiles both sad and evil.

  Reece sensed dark, anarchic thoughts polluting the curdled brains inside those bulbous heads. And a putrid stench, a rancid reek of cheesy flesh and carnal sulfur, packed the dim grotto where they squatted. Their rickets-sprung limbs twitched as if at the sight of him.

  All at once, the grotesque dolls seemed to lean closer. Their bald dented heads bobbed, hollow eyes lidded blackly gold as toads' eyelids.

  They appeared dazed, concussed, dream hooded, attentive to other voices or beholden only to their own minds' shapeless shape-shifting. In the gray-green smoke of their staring thoughts, he felt his life become their toy.

  The inner lives of all people—the psychic reality of every sentient being—passed before these squalid, grinning things as if provoked out of nothing by their own thoughts, as if reality itself were their imagining...