The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1) Read online

  And so the newt's-eye of an impoverished, unemployed factory laborer found its way far to the south and into the opulently manicured dominion of Ux and the floating capital city of Dorzen.

  Lord Drev initially ignored the shoulder guard and the other gifts that routinely appeared on the altar of the central court. Each day, the adepts swept the offerings away and extracted their Charm for the wizarduke's own talismans, and he at the very least thought it courteous to glance at them first.

  Charm, as every schoolchild knew, radiated from the Abiding Star.

  Plants absorbed it directly, and animals held it within their living bodies. Only people needed amulets to endow themselves with Charm.

  Staring at the tribute of Charmed offerings on the altar, he thought of the many reasons given for this by sages and witches—all their dogma about evolution and the migration of consciousness from the Beginning of the Abiding Star and into the void to populate the cold worlds of the Gulf—the Dark Shore.

  Despite his station as the most powerful man on Irth, he wore a simple brown work uniform with black piping. His exalted position showed only in the gold armorial star crests at his collar. A white leather amulet belt girded his tight waist. The full pouches, crushed with wrinkles, revealed much use.

  He stepped closer to the altar, glanced at the daily offerings that stood on display, swept his gaze around the empty court galleries and back to the gifts. Among the usual glitter of hex-gems and ingots charged with Charm sat a quaint shoulder guard fashioned from crude, handmade prisms.

  He picked it up and, quite unexpectedly, heard a chime of longing, a mute echo of fate. Quickly he returned the amulet to the altar and stood back, warily watching it perched on its reflection in the champagne marble.

  As a child, when he had first learned to scry, he recognized true love as only thinly possible for himself, and then solely with one woman, a commoner he would have to search to find. Many times in his life he had sensed her from afar, though never as clearly as he had with this primitive amulet. He knew then, some part of it had belonged to her.

  He turned his back on the altar and cursed his sudden hopes. Why now? Why now when love is well-nigh impossible!

  The rueful yearning he experienced when he held the shoulder guard struck him with the same vivid memory of destiny he had felt whenever he had contemplated love in his green years, not long ago.

  In that happy time, when Mevea, his sister, lived and wore so affably their brood's mantle as duchess, to scry love with a common woman and contemplate a life of labor and family in a distant dominion seemed possible, if outrageous.

  Since Mevea’s death, the mantle had belonged to him, and intimate love of any kind became impossible. The Duke of Ux, like the duchess before him, would rule for the benefit of the people, not for his own fulfillment. The love that possessed him had to be impersonal, spacious and magnificent as all Ux.

  Still—if there was any chance of finding her, his dearest stranger...

  Mevea had died one thousand days ago, and every one of those days, Drev had worked hard to fulfill her legacy. He had pushed himself to his limits to serve Ux as duke and all the dominions as regent.

  Perennial trade disputes had been successfully arbitrated and commerce flourished for the time being. Small wars had been fought and won to preserve the union of dominions, and he had personally taken the field at each battle, adamant to prove his mettle and his worthiness as Mevea's successor.

  Irth, once again, enjoyed stability as it had under his sister's care.

  All at once, Drev knew that if he did not now pursue this hint of destiny that he felt within this humble newt's-eye—if he did not track down his true love at this rare time of peace—he never would.

  / |

  Using his considerable Charm to disguise himself, the wizarduke wove a skin of charmlight that put upon him the appearance of an indigent old man, aged as a storm-twisted tree. Then he used the newt's-eye in the shoulder guard to fashion a seeker, an amulet that would lead him directly to the woman who wore his shadow of destiny.

  The palm-sized seeker guided him north, and he flew by light cruiser across the blighted expanse of the Qaf to the kingdom of Zul and the cliff city of Saxar. Along steep and narrow streets the newt's-eye guided him into the factory district, past smoking refineries and clangorous foundries.

  Never before in his seventeen thousand days had Lord Drev visited this industrial metropolis, and the poverty among the steaming assembly plants appalled him. Here, where guilds manufactured Irth's amulets to carry Charm into the world, scores of charmless people cluttered the alleys, scavenging among waste bins for scraps of hex-metal and witch-glass to sell for food.

  At one such bin, in a lading yard strewn with fuming mounds of smelters slag, the seeker pulsed three times in his palm and stopped. He had found the owner of the newt's-eye—the woman whom fate had chosen for him.

  He lifted the lid of the trash bin and inside found among ribbons of scrap metal and shattered packing crates Tywi curled asleep. She appeared half his age, which explained why, when as a child he first became aware of her, she had appeared too dim to scry, for she had not yet been born.

  With dirty brown hair cropped close against lice and her gamine face smudged and streaked with soot, she offered no immediate physical appeal to Drev. Yet—she is the one, he realized and looked upon her rag-garbed body, skinny bruised arms, and the scabs on her knees with gentle regard.

  "Hey, old coot!" a belligerent voice shouted from behind.

  Drev faced several young scavengers with malicious scowls. They strode toward him wielding planks of wood.

  "You're in the wrong alley, coot." The scavengers closed in, waving their clubs threateningly. "What's that you got in your hand, old man?"

  Drev pocketed the seeker and showed aged, gnarled hands.

  The scavengers surrounded him, plucked at his gray, torn traveler's mantle, and poked him with their wood sticks. One reached into his pocket and came out with the gold disc set with hex-gems and Tywi's newt's-eye. "Look at this! You found a real treasure, coot!"

  Before he could reply, a voice piped up from over his shoulder. "Give it back, boys."

  The lid of the trash bin banged open, and Tywi rolled out and stood at the old man's side.

  "Forget it, Tywi." The scavenger holding the seeker raised it high. "Look at this thing! It's a whole amulet. It must be worth dozens of prisms."

  "Give it back," Tywi insisted. "He's an old man. He needs it more than we do."

  "Squat on that, sister," the scavenger said with a surly frown and backed away. "The coot's already spent his life. We got to think of ourselves."

  Tywi advanced and held out her hand. "Give it back, stoodle—or I'll sic Dogbrick on you. I swear it."

  A look of fright crossed the scavengers' faces. "Hey, come on, Tywi. We're just looking out for ourselves here. Why you want to make that kind of trouble for us?"

  "Give it back!"

  The scavengers looked at one another anxiously and then passed the seeker to Tywi.

  "Here, old man," she said and pressed the seeker into his bony hand. "Take your amulet and get where you belong."

  Drev stared into her face, gazing past grime and fever sores to memorize the waif's rabbity features. She was not unattractive, only toughened by street life. Her hard expression startled him with what it revealed of a life without possession, where all was drift.

  He wanted to speak to her, but she slapped his shoulder in friendly farewell and strode away with the charmless young men who had woken her.

  "Come on." She beckoned the others. "Let's find our own Charm."

  The wizarduke started to follow across the lading yard as she skipped ahead to lead the others away. Before he could move, a chime sounded in his skull. He had not heard this piercing alarm since his last battle, several hundred days ago.

  He gave an exasperated groan. The next insurrection could not wait for the fulfillment of his personal whims.

 
Quickly, he reached under his skin of light and used his glory belt to set upon the retreating Tywi an Eye of Protection. The Charm he focused upon her would last only a season and she herself would never know she carried it, yet for its duration the invisible Eye would give her minimal protection. At least, for the time being, she would not float away on the nocturnal tides that snatched the charmless when they slept.

  He watched Tywi disappear with her cohorts into an alley, then reluctantly shed his skin of light and used his glory belt to summon a light cruiser. Almost immediately, the insectile shadow of the cruiser fell over him, and he clambered up the drop-ladder.

  The captain of the cruiser had far-see crystals that showed him a hamlet torn to pieces as if by a windstorm. But no windstorm would have disemboweled every citizen—man, woman, and child alike.

  Neither the captain nor any of the crew had even the slightest notion what evil could have caused such massive destruction. They flew the wizarduke directly to the grasslands of Sharna-Bambara and the site of the atrocity. And there he viewed for himself the distinctive mud prints of sizable claws.

  / |

  On Lord Drev’s return to Dorzen, more news arrived of slaughtered villages and massacred travelers in Sharna-Bambara. Whatever curiosity about Tywi he may have had vanished among terrifying reports depicting monsters falling out of the night sky above the grasslands and attacking every living thing. The few rare survivors spoke of demonic creatures of abominable ferocity greater than Irth had ever witnessed before.

  The wizarduke dispatched squads of the Council's Falcon Guard to patrol Sharna-Bambara and report back to him. When three of those squads turned up butchered, he gave in to his advisers and hired a master from the Brood of Assassins, an expert on murder, to solve this gruesome mystery.

  By then, the first far-see crystals obtained from a massacred Falcon Guard disclosed the unbelievable—horrendous serpentine creatures with tentacles and talons, unreal things of hideous proportions.

  Cacodemons, the wizarduke realized, though loath to believe it. These grotesque demons existed only in children’s fright stories. Yet, he saw for himself, they had come vividly alive.

  / |

  Days lapsed, and Drev felt helpless as reports of bloody destruction persisted. He strove to keep this black news secret, to avoid all-out panic and the collapse of the union. Only the remoteness of the destroyed villages permitted this. Concealing everything, he attended court functions and fulfilled his responsibilities as regent with his usual aplomb.

  Alone in his vaulted court, he despaired. The Brood of Dorzen—all the hundreds of kith who ruled Ux and looked to him for leadership—faced greater jeopardy now than at any time since his great-grandfather. Then, the famous One-Eyed Duke, their common ancestor, had waged war with the Fierce Realms to unite the Seven Dominions.

  He marveled that, just days before, he had entertained amorous thoughts—and now scores of cacodemons descended out of the night.

  Such monsters had never before trespassed Irth, and everyone but the most Charmed and knowledgeable wizards still believed them imaginary beasts. Night after night, they landed in the grasslands of Sharna-Bambara and ravaged the lush farms and ancient villages with rabid abandon.

  The most dread secret of the invasion: all intelligence suggested that Charm had no affect on the monsters.

  In the central court, Lord Drev conjured up a life-size simulacrum of a cacodemon. No two demons looked alike. Many deployed tentacles instead of limbs. He had selected an image of a more humanoid type. Because it did look eerily like a man, he thought he could take its measure with close visual inspection.

  It stood a full head taller than he, a crocodilian hulk, green-black and viperously human, with robust limbs, hook-taloned hands and feet, and a slitherous spine serrated to a lash of tail. A skull-fixed grin of fangs hung beneath an eel's embryonic brow, where tiny, black hypnotic eyes tightened their diamonds to a wrathful glint.

  Lord Drev looked away from that horrific countenance. Folds and creases in the thick torso disclosed other faces, tortured and enraged visages embedded in an underbelly of scaly seams.

  Disgust churned in him, and he waved away the abomination. It vanished at once, and where it had loomed, a shaft of clear radiance shimmered wetter than water.

  For a long time, he stood gazing into the pellucid light, afraid to think, knowing that thoughts could lead only to further terror and panic.

  An urgent voice roused him. "Sire—I have news."

  The wizarduke motioned to the dark alcoves, admitting the vigorous figure of Nette, the weapons master he had recently retained from the Brood of Assassins. The dominion of Ux had never before employed these dread mercenaries and, indeed, over the generations had fought them many times among the ranks of every rival. But, then, never before had cacodemons dropped from the night sky.

  Nette advanced energetically—a short, mobile woman folding back the cowl of her black utility uniform, revealing a square face with bronzed, burnished complexion. She advanced into the shaft of clear light at the center of the court and bleached to a shadow.

  Standing perfectly still while the gemlight searched her for arms and poisons a seventh time since she had entered Dorzen, the weapons master squirmed inside to share her devastating news with the mighty wizarduke.

  Though she had been hired by Leboc, the duke-regent's marshal, and never before had met Drev, she already disliked this man who had come to power by default.

  As with all Assassins, she had little respect for this wizard’s brood, who had spurned the services of the Assassins all these generations. Until now, when the nightmare has found you and Charm no longer provides! Proud Drev, you are moments from your fall.

  She gloated and knelt on one knee before the wizarduke. Then, head lowered, she blanked her thoughts, expecting him to read directly from her brain the information he needed.

  "Rise, Nette, and speak," the duke said quietly, with comradely intimacy she had been trained to disregard. Without her amulets, she found it difficult to repress her surprise and admiration for any ruler willing to hear the truth to his face.

  She stood and scrutinized him, noting tiny tics of fear at the corners of his handsome eyes and mouth. She realized then that he had restrained from using Charm to sedate himself. The soft warmth of his voice demonstrated an act of self-mastery.

  He is not the arrogant lord I expected, she thought, and her stomach winced now to have to tell him her sinister news.

  "What I have to say is meant for your reply alone," she warned him, increasing the pressure of her stare until certain he understood.

  "I will no longer keep this matter secret from my brood." The duke half turned to his left, toward the red shadows of a gallery where family members attended, and he exposed sadness in his long profile. "We must all know the truth. That is why I had Leboc hire you. Now speak, Nette, and let all in Dorzen and Ux hear."

  The weapons master canted her head warily and warned him again. "The Dark Lord has said that this message is for you alone."

  Lord Drev stepped down from the altar stage and beckoned for her to exit the gemlight and join him on the marble stairs. "You have finally located this Dark Lord? You have met with him, then?" he asked with barely restrained eagerness. "The lord of the cacodemons?"

  "Oh, yes," she said, amazed to be released so casually from the cage of light. "I have met with the Dark Lord, master of the cacodemons."

  "And?" The duke took her arm, escorted her to the stairs and made her sit on the steps beside him like an old chum. No false pride hid his deep consternation. "Tell me everything."

  She met the duke's earnest stare with cold appraisal, yet behind the mask of her conditioning, she began to like this hapless man and searched for some way to soften the blow of what she had to say.

  "I bear this message for you alone." She warned a third time, as she had been taught. "Read it first and then decide if you would have this spoken to all Irth."

  Drev puffed out hi
s cheeks and held his hands before him, showing that he had no choice. "I am Duke Dorzen Drev, wizard of Hoverness, sovereign of Ux and regent of the Council of Seven and One. How dare I conduct secret negotiations with monsters? No, Nette. The ghosts at this altar would never let me betray my people's trust. Say aloud what the lord of the cacodemons would have me know."

  "Very well, sire." The assassin watched him through shaded slits of recessed eyes, attentive as a boxer. "The Dark Lord would have you know that he is not a monster, not a cacodemon or an invader from another world, as are his troops. He claims to be different. He says he is a man of Irth, one of many cast into the Gulf by your hand. He has returned to exact vengeance."

  "Nonsense." Lord Drev huffed a laugh. "No one returns from the Gulf."

  Nette's eyeslits widened. "This one has returned, sire."

  "How do you know?"

  "I am Nette, weapons master from the Brood of Assassins, adept of illusion and minister of lies. How dare I not know the truth when I see it?"

  He smiled sadly at her gentle mockery, and she liked him all the more.

  She had to employ internal arts to continue without emotion, her voice dry and serious. "No, sire. The ghosts of the Brood of Assassins would never allow me to betray your trust. You have hired me to mediate with the Dark Lord. I have, and I can assure you that he is authentic. He is all that he claims to be."

  The duke gripped her elbow as she spoke, and he felt the veracity of her words. He pressed closer, clutching her arm like a doddering grandmother reaching for understanding. "How can he have returned from the Gulf? The abyss falls away forever."

  "Not forever, sire," she whispered the obvious. "There is the Dark Shore."