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

  The proprietor of the grill was the eponymous Wise Fish, a crone who had lured him from the warrens when he was an orphan to shelter him here. A retired thief herself, she had taught him all she knew of thievery. And when he had reached adolescence and had learned what she had to teach, she had let him go cruelly. Muttwit, she had called him and had said he was a dog who had learned his tricks well.

  Until then, Wise Fish had always treated him as a person and had never referred to his beastmarks. Her last words had cut him deeply. Yet even with her harshness she had taught him, and her last lesson had been the limits of love.

  Obviously, that lesson had impressed him, because even though fear for the end of the world had returned him here, he could not bring himself actually to enter the grill and face her again.

  The rest of the afternoon, he sat on the pier and watched the arrival of the black dirigibles that brought the first direct news from the south. Soon after they reached the sky bund, the temple chimes began, and the factory flues stopped smoking.

  Fumes from the industrial ranges cleared away and revealed in broad daylight roasted buildings and oxide-seared streets. Dogbrick sat motionless, entranced by the eerie sight of Saxar naked.

  Cancerous colors blistered the cliff slopes of the manufacturing districts and exposed a charred labyrinth, a torched nest of sinister furnaces, vats livid as cankers, and distillers coiled among themselves like burnished black vipers.

  He watched the fleet come in early, an event unprecedented in Saxar's history. The colorful vessels in the ocean each day unfurled huge talismans designed to capture the radiance of the Abiding Star. The numerous amulets that continually changed hands and sustained the city originated here, minted from the Charm harvested by these ships. Many citizens would suffer in the days to come from the drought of these few hours.

  Dogbrick determined not to be among them. The world had ended—but he would go on. He would defy despair. His own teacher had named him a mutt with her last words to him. To honor her, he would go beyond all that she had taught, and he would prove himself a man.

  On the day that Wise Fish had called him a muttwit and he had departed to make his own way in Saxar, he had paused before the draped cage of a sibyl. Wise Fish kept the creature beside the grill to amuse her patrons with its mesmermurs and oracles.

  He had removed the magenta shade of dried kelp with a flourish and had set the gold sphere of the cage spinning wildly. Amidst a thrashing of crimson and green feathers, shrieks clawed, like rough, shrill sketches of dying.

  The sibyl had shown its tongue of fire that day so long ago, and Dogbrick had laughed then to watch its gaudy feathers quivering over its marbly nakedness as the color of its wings bronzed with anger.

  Dogbrick remembered how he had seized the cage and stopped its spinning. "Tell me true, sibyl," he had shouted, "am I man or am I dog?"

  The sibyl had spit blue sparks, then whistled, "How you die decides that!"

  Dogbrick's laughter had glittered, brighter than ever to hear his destiny spoken aloud. "Mark that, Fish! The sibyl cannot lie. I am a man, for I will not die like a dog. I am my own master!"

  That had been thousands of days ago, and only now had he returned, now that the cacodemons were coming and he feared how he might die.

  The ebb swirl churned below, violent as the emotions twisting inside him. He stood and felt foolish for having come back just to relive this painful memory. Even so, he had needed to touch again the place where he had learned to be a man, because soon the test of that manhood would be upon him.

  Sighing, he looked around. The seiners had run off at the sound of the first alarm from the temples, and he stepped over lank coils of rope and twists of net dropped in panic. Bleats of ship horns announced the last of the fleet entering the marina. The alert had passed, and a shrill chorus of gulls rose above the thudding surf.

  He took out his seeker, opened it, and called, "Ripcat!"

  A chill current guided him along the pier to the tide wall. The beach loomed empty, except for scavengers, who had to work or starve. The streets, also, stood vacant, and he had no trouble finding a city carriage. Three stood unoccupied at the turnpole.

  He rode up Fiddler Street, past the plaza where he had emerged from Devil's Wynd. The bazaar had gone, scaffolds and tapestries removed. The cool directional breeze led him out of the carriage and across the plaza among the afternoon's long shadows. In the distance, cliff walls usually hidden by factory smoke revealed brown, lacy erosion like giant diseased lungs.

  A troupe of religious singers rode the crosstown city carriage with him. They kept to themselves, droning softly, though he stared right at them with his baleful, bone-hooded eyes and smiled. He wanted them to acknowledge his humanity, and so he tried to keep his black lips closed over his orange teeth.

  Before he could introduce himself, the ether trail that would lead him to Ripcat left the carriage.

  He stepped into Cold Niobe Plaza at the crest of Everyland Street. He stood under the imposing dragon coils of the plaza’s marmoreal arch. And he peered straight down Everyland into the pit of an extinguished hell.

  Silver-black temples jammed the crater: storage domes and chimney steeples of refineries. The factories cast spidery shadows over the tarnished alleys where Dogbrick had grown up.

  For a moment, he stood entranced by the craggy buildings baked to iridescent enamel. He had never before seen his neighborhood in direct light. And he traced with his ardent gaze the familiar places of his youth in all their colors of ash.

  "I have not risen this high to fall again so low," he spoke aloud to the depths, and his words sounded dreadfully frail before the charred city cliffs.

  Eagerly he followed the seeker to a public carriage and traveled up Everyland. He wondered how his partner would respond to the coming of the Dark Lord.

  Ripcat eluded predictability in all things but one—virtue. The only honest thief on Irth, he gave away everything he stole and kept only enough Charm to protect himself while he slept.

  The carriage sailed through cloistered spark trees, and the perfumed air glittered. Dogbrick gazed longingly at opulent onyx estates set in the deepening shade of hedge ranks and mammoth trees and spied no human figure. Everyone had withdrawn to watch their crystals this evening. Dogbrick snorted at the image of turtle-jowled Lord Hazar and her portly Ladyship Altha reassuring Saxar from their arctic citadel.

  Blinding rays of horizontal daylight illuminated the park at the crest of Everyland, where the carriage reached its turnpole. Dogbrick dismounted and stared east, into the purple sea and approaching night. Below, upon the wide estates, flashes of color reflected from pools and water gardens.

  Dogbrick wanted to walk down the park slopes to the viewing platform and survey the naked city, but the chill breeze in his hand blew the other way. Squinting into the glaring afternoon, he climbed a cinder path within a grove of jigsaw trees. Stone steps curved upward to a bluff of faceted boulders and wild twists of cypress.

  The seeker stopped at a high ledge of baked guano, white and slick as enamel. Beyond, desolate gravel flats sloped gradually downward into the ancient volcanic plains of the Qaf.

  On the bright, laminar horizons of sunset, mesas and plateaus stood like distant vermilion kingdoms.

  Dogbrick turned a slow circle, looking for his partner.

  Twilight shone less spectacularly than when the factories ran till nightfall. Apricot haze filled the clear sky, and it was easy to see that the cypress grove below stood empty. Wind wafted out of there, medallioned with scents of birds and sap resins, but not a whiff of people among the sepia trees.

  This certainly seemed a typical haunt for his strange partner, remote and yet exposed. Is he invisible? Dogbrick's hackles quivered under his cloak and lifted his shoulders in an involuntary shrug. "Ripcat—"

  The nine gates of twilight opened, and scalloped colors crowned the point in the desert where the Abiding Star set. There the horizon glowed like a hot edge of nicked razor. Th
e thief could see for miles to distant sand fins and gypsum reefs burning bright as fallen stars. No one stirred out there.

  Festal lights glimmered in Saxar, far fewer than usual, yet sufficient to outline the city's chief arteries. Many sharp points of blue light followed the fractal coastline: flares illuminating the scavengers' advance as they followed the tide out.

  Dogbrick watched in fascination the luminous workers toiling to keep up with the retreating tide. The Dark Lord had come to destroy Irth, and still the work gangs searched avidly through the ocean's droppings, rummaging among debris of wrecked coral and mussel beds for rare, invaluable jetsam and flotsam from far-off kingdoms—spilled cargo, lost spoils of war, uncovered treasures of far-gone ages, some even from other worlds, cast adrift in the terrible clashes of mages and sorcerers.

  The tide pickings would become spectacular in the coming nights as jungle rivers washed through Elvre and the wide scattered ruins of the fallen city, Arwar Odawl. But on this first night of the horror, there was only just enough activity on the tidal flats to make out the sea cove where Wise Fish sat in her stupefied gloom.

  Dogbrick huffed again at the thought of her. She had betrayed him to fear and called him a mutt. That hurt, because she was the one who had shown him how to believe in himself as something more than a beast—as a man, able enough in body and wit to climb the heights.

  "Heights are also depths," he quoted from Talismanic Odes and lifted his stare out of the cliff city to wide tracts of wasteland. Wise Fish had never learned that truth. She only knew how to climb. But then, she had never been to the Qaf. Out there in the imponderable wilderness, Dogbrick had walked the floor of creation, searching for the mettle to become a man. He came back with singed fur, a blistered snout—and his partner Ripcat.

  Dogbrick had found him wandering out of the Qaf, staggering blind with heatstroke. That had been nearly five hundred days ago. Since then, the partnership that had found them charmless had won them more amulets than they could use.

  If the Charm in amulets could have been preserved, he and Ripcat would have stopped thieving after their first ten days. Sadly, amulets wore down, and the fate of the charmless narrowed as bleakly as the Qaf.

  "Ripcat—are you out there?" Dogbrick called into the maroon shadows of night. A treasure of trance wrap awaited their attention. "Ripcat—"

  Overhead, stars, planets, and cometary globules clustered. Cold trampled across the hot gravel beds with a crackling of sparks, and the thief pulled his cloak tighter. He restrained himself from calling again. The seeker had led him here, and he would wait. Ripcat had to be close, even if he could not be seen.

  He closed his eyes and tasted the sage breezes.

  Nothing.

  Then he stopped breathing and listened through his beating pulse to the glittering night. And he heard again nothing, nothing at all of man. He did remember another line from The Gibbet Scrolls. It swam up out of memory and fixed him more securely to the moment: Silence listens.

  / |

  When Dogbrick opened his eyes, Ripcat stood before him, fur glossed blue by starlight. The wind tufted his shoulders, yet he wore, as usual, only trousers and ankle boots, proudly displaying his taut human torso.

  "Cat!" Dogbrick jumped to his feet. "At last! I had hoped to find you earlier—to tell you as soon as I had learned—but Cold Niobe was impossible—clogged with a weavers' bazaar."

  Ripcat climbed the bluff, slow and adroit, using the ascent to stretch his muscles. He had been curled asleep under the ledge where Dogbrick was standing, until the cold woke him.

  A gust of dark laughter shook Dogbrick. "You have no idea what's happened, do you?"

  Ripcat's curved eyes watched him curiously, and Dogbrick laughed again.

  "Come! You must see to believe." He led his partner through the cypress grove and down the cinder path among the jigsaw trees to the park's viewing platform.

  Even before the city came into sight, Ripcat sensed an astounding change. The smell of the ocean met him stronger than usual, untainted by the grimy fumes from Saxar.

  With a bound, Ripcat alighted on the timber railing and leaned far out, peering down at the shadowy cliffs for the city immersed in night. Apart from the scavengers' torchlights across the tidal flats, Saxar looked dark. A sparse scattering of festal lamps flickered on the main avenues, too dim to ward off the night.

  Ripcat whirled about, green eyes sharp with surprise, and perched on the rail facing Dogbrick. He waited to hear what had become of the fire festivals and lantern ceremonies that flowed every night through the streets, incandescent as magma.

  Dogbrick suppressed another black laugh. His partner's chiseled head, with its short, dense fur gnarled with scars and lumps, looked funny gauping.

  "The world has collapsed," Dogbrick declared and clutched at his bounding beard in fright. "While you slept, dreamy Cat, everything has changed!"

  The large thief stepped closer and spoke with hushed intensity and a crazed glint in his merry eyes. "You could think of yourself as the Dreamer, who took a nap in one world and woke in another. Maybe you should return to sleep."

  Ripcat sat back and watched him like cool green grass.

  "Forgive me," Dogbrick conceded. He gripped his brow between thumb and forefinger, and his voice broke into another brittle laugh. "I'm giddy. The world has become very dangerous, my friend. And I must laugh or go mad with fright."

  With the blind city to vouch for him, Dogbrick told Ripcat what had transpired that day.

  His partner listened zealously. And after the story was told the rapt listener sat ruminating a long moment, pug head bowed.

  Then he slinked over the railing and down the cliff. Nimble as a shadow, he vanished into the night on venturesome paths among the wild rocks of the precipice.

  "Hey!" Dogbrick called after, clutching the railing to lean farther out.

  Ripcat looked up, tinfoil eyes agleam in the dark.

  "Where are you going?" the big thief asked, gruff with surprise.

  The eye glints jerked away, and an indigo whisper came back and colored the darkness, barely audible, yet pitched perfectly for his ears and understanding, "To the dance."

  I Gather the Darkness

  Romut squatted on a knoll overlooking the sea, looking much like a big toadstool in the dirty light of dusk. Half man, half gnome, he glared at the world through a permanent scowl of bone-hooded eyes. Lidded and squinty as a man's but with orbs wholly black, his stare held the dark plains before him in a gnome's night-piercing vision.

  He searched for ogres, the masters of this misty land.

  Among the fumes blowing off the waves in the stiff maritime breeze, Romut spied the first crew of scavengers. They slogged among the dunes, laboriously dragging their hooks and nets.

  They would be expecting him to join them soon, but he was in no hurry. A thousand nights he had toiled among them and he knew well how long he could linger before the ogres would arrive to oversee their work.

  He drew a leaf of langor-weed from a pocket of his tattered vest and rolled it with one stubby-fingered hand while he fumbled in another pocket for his flint pebbles. With the tightly curled leaf clenched in his thick, blistered lips, he clacked the blue pebbles expertly between his fingers and caught the first spark with a sharp intake of breath. The langor-weed flared briefly and cast livid shadows across his ponderous features.

  After the first keen burn in his throat, the acrid smoke filled him with mercies of ease and a thin joy, and he regarded the bog land below with softer mien.

  Twilight rain hung in harps over the distant gloomy islets. Beyond them, the last scarlet cords of the day darkened toward purple and kindled the sea to sepia.

  Romut let the weed's soft euphoria carry his memory back to a grander time in his life, a thousand twilights earlier when he had, for a glorious moment of his tedious life, known true power.

  Then, he had worn a skin of light shaped to make him look tall and manly. And though the others of the Bold On
es had laughed at him for his vanity, he alone of them had survived.

  All the other alleged Bold Ones who had gathered under the sword of Taran to serve Wrat fell squealing like runtlings into the abyss, cast out by the mighty wizarduke, Lord Drev. Romut alone survived by shedding his skin of light and fleeing to this foreboding place of mist magic and bog giants—the Reef Isles of Nhat.

  A dark laugh smoked from his chest at the thought that he had escaped the abyss for this. Every night since the terrible fall of the Bold Ones, he had pondered ruefully if it would have been better for him to have dropped away from Irth entirely rather than cower here under the glaring scrutiny of the ogres, who worked their scavengers like beasts.

  Again Romut peered into the misty night for the arrival of the overlord ogre-lords. He wanted to dwell further on his splendid past. Those famous memories gave him strength to hoist the dredging hooks and trawl the nets that raked the star-bossed shallows for treasure the tide had forsaken.

  Yet he dared not arrive late on the tidal flats. Ogres detested gnomes, and they sought every excuse to torment him for his gnomish blood. He did not ever again want to hang from his heels above a viper-wasps' hive, stung so full of toxin that his eyes sealed shut and breath squeaked in his hot, swollen throat.

  He stood up at that grisly memory and stretched till his bones popped. With his hands atop his bald, warty head and the rolled weed dangling from his protuberant lower lip, he watched the last bruise of day heal to a horizon of pinwheel stars.

  Unlike all the other pitiable scavengers, whom he saw milling below on the tidal flats, waiting for the bosses to come and direct them, he had wielded power once himself. He had known what it was to be feared. And so since, he had been careful not to forget, careful to remember that he had once been far more than what any of these others dared dream they could be.

  "Romut—" a sourceless voice called.

  The gnomish man sucked harder on his burning leaf and peered about with black, scowling eyes. "Who calls?" he growled.