Celaise had been healed from his withering gaze. Had she imagined she could stay that way? Whole and happy? Yes, she had thought she could live a comfortable life with Jerani, but that could never be. She could never escape. She could only run.
“Celaise! Celaise!” Jerani’s voice plucked at her, trying to snag her.
The lord’s command cut far deeper. Return. The lady will be disappointed if you leave the party so soon.
Celaise reached up to her jaw. Her onyx teeth were full of poison and death. The lady had done something to them, and they would kill Celaise if she didn’t obey.
But she couldn’t, not when it meant going back. The world was on fire, inside her. The air buzzed. Everything sizzled with the smell of cooking oil. It would only be worse if she faced the Winged Flame.
She sped downward. The stairs twisted around then flipped upward. The steps gnashed over her. Stone smashed into her shoulders and legs, punching, clobbering, battering. Oh no, oh no, oh no! She was falling.
The tower spun away and left her in the sky. She was back in the Cloudcrusher Mountains. Her family had forced her from the cliff because she was worthless bad disgrace. Now she had nothing to hold onto but the sky.
And the whirling clouds.
And the sun god.
He streamed by with all his macaw wings. Too many to count. They made the sky blue. Blue death. Blue flame. Blue despair. They were all around her, pushing her downward to the rocks.
The god had come back to punish her. He cursed her with pain and fire.
Celaise slammed down. She landed at the bottom of the stair. The darkness was wet with her blood.
Hiresha would die. Her intestines felt clogged with a slurry of diamond grit. Death reflected between her worlds, from one facet to the other. Tethiel had been broken in the sunset facet by her magic. In this one, she would be killed by the uninvited god.
The Winged Flame dominated the sky. He was a fissure of brightness weaving over the city. His light had roused the bees. They swarmed after his color, seething in furious bedlam.
Above this new fog of black bodies rose the tower topped with Hiresha, the guests, and her dragon. The drone of the bees pulsed whenever the god changed direction in his winding flight. He dove around the spire. His length sped by, and at the end of his tail, a second head turned and gazed at Hiresha.
She couldn’t be seeing correctly. Her mind filled with a crackling, humming, burning nonsense. But it was true. The god had two craniums, both snouted and fanged like a feathered reptile.
He had more than two eyes. That idea sounded familiar as if Hiresha had dreamed it. She might’ve glimpsed a glyph of the god before as a snake with a head on either end. Someone might’ve spoken of it within her hearing. She couldn’t remember how, yet she had always known how much the god’s anatomy would offend her. Speculating on how he excreted would only infuriate her further.
She would not be killed by such an illogical being. He had invaded her wedding. “I warned him. A god should know better.”
“My heart, wait!” Tethiel left her side. He bounded down from the crystal dragon.
Very well, if he insisted on wasting time at this critical juncture, she wouldn’t have to mind him while she taught the Winged Flame a lesson. “He is lacking in omniscience.”
Hiresha launched herself off the tower with her dragon. Amethyst claws lifted to pierce and rake. They would rip through that meager armor of feathers and maul the god until he learned some manners.
His hind head saw her. The innumerable wings swiveled, faced the other direction. His plumage ruffled and turned from blue to green. She couldn’t theorize how the god could reverse all his momentum, and yet he did. He coiled toward her. He lunged. He struck.
Hiresha realize she should’ve changed the angle of her attack. It would’ve meant delaying sinking her talons into the impertinent god, and now was too late. She floated through a wash of dream and reality at a reckless velocity.
The god swerved around her crystal claws. He batted his head against her construct’s side, and it was all she could do to hold her creation together. The impact boomed against her mind. The horizon flipped around. City lights blurred into stars. She couldn’t tell which way was up.
No, she couldn’t fall like this, disoriented and newly wed. She let gravity pull on her blue paragon and orient her. She only had to right her dragon. One of its wings ripped.
The god glared overhead. His feathers shimmered in flame patterns. He dove toward her, jaws open and vomiting an opalescent haze. He had accelerated to a lethal velocity, and she had lost.
She must do something. If only she could think fast enough. Her head thudded with nearing doom.
A figure sprang into view. It wasn’t Tethiel but Fos. He had leapt off the tower with his enchanted greaves. Fos had put all his power and her magic into his jump. He flew with scimitar raised at the Winged Flame.
The god snapped at him.
Fos slashed the jaws away. A fang tumbled free as Fos somersaulted onto the god’s snout. The man stomped a beady red eye and kicked clear. “‘He’ll better countless fools …’”
Fos was reciting his prophecy. Even near the god’s brain-melting heat, Fos had maintained his grace. Displaying deft spellsword training, he pivoted around his blade midair for another attack on the god’s bleeding head. She remembered why she had proposed to him in her other life.
“‘And lions will run from his—’”
The god’s other head bit Fos in half.
The Winged Flame had curled around to strike from the side. Hiresha should have seen it. She should’ve reacted fast enough to warn Fos. Nothing could surprise her like this, and in a manner of speaking it hadn’t. She had known someone would die.
Fos’s head and torso slurped into the god’s gullet. The legs that had been snipped off now tumbled toward the city streets. Bee clouds parted around them then resealed their throng of blackness.
Death quaked her worlds. A shrilling of denial reached a pitch of resonance. All could shatter. All was breaking beyond repair.
Hiresha wouldn’t permit it be so. She focused on the one existence, where she floundered on her crystal dragon. Nearby, Fos’s sister screamed. The other Bright Palm had deserted her on the tower. Alyla lay paralyzed, weeping glowing tears that defied explanation. Bright Palms shouldn’t feel grief.
Insanity rebounded everywhere. Hiresha had to fight off this winged madness.
She could yet save Fos. He could perhaps be reassembled before brain death. Her magic reached out toward his enchanted greaves, toward the metal coat that had been dragged with him into the god. Hiresha grasped only molten rage. Flames licked at the corners of her vision.
She would rip Fos free. Her amethyst construct slammed into the god’s side. She tore at his flank.
Stop! Tethiel’s command was distant and of no use. His words didn’t even make sense to her. The god’s blood is a poison of passion.
The divine flesh resisted her claws. Hiresha screamed and thrashed. She would overpower this god with her anger. Bite, yes, and tear. No telling if it was her battering or her dragon, yet she was hurting him. His wounds did more than bleed. They fumed.
His blood was evaporating, not that it mattered. Maybe she was thinking nonsense. Flames had covered her sight and cast the world in hues of melting yellows and boiling reds. She could scarcely see past her inferno.
Hiresha didn’t need to. Wrath would guide her. She would mangle and ruin. She grappled with a god, and between the two, she was greater. She would commit deicide. Then she would slaughter all the god’s priests. He had offended her, and it was her right.
All the pitiful pantheons and all their stooges would have to die. People were idiots, and she wouldn’t allow them to worship falsehoods. They needed new inspiration.
Through revenge and fire Hiresha would transcend. Soon all would have to bow before the Goddess of Gems.
One terrible hope remained. Tethiel had to Feast.
His castings melted away from the Winged Flame. The immortal would immolate Hiresha’s mind then kill her, unless Tethiel surpassed him in power.
The Winged Flame had enraptured the city. Far below they fought and loved each other. Tethiel could imagine their life force leaking from their mouths with each labored breath, rising in a fountain of specters. The people’s frenzy and passion strengthened the Winged Flame. Tethiel had to free them with fear.
With all the people screaming before him, Tethiel could rival the immortal. Tethiel would devour him. Once Tethiel began a true indulgence, he wouldn’t stop. He would tuck in his napkin and Feast on everyone. A new era of fear would begin. His dreams of wonderful frivolity with Hiresha would go to rot.
So be it, if it would save her life.
He bit open the night. The fabric of the lands tore. Someday the damage might result in a catastrophe, but for now Tethiel knew it was a necessity. He reached into the portal. His grasp spanned hundreds of miles, across continents, from night into shadow, high into the Monastery of the Sacred Cups, deep into their locked and hallowed wine cellars.
In this sanctuary of stone, monks chanted to sweeten their vintages. Acolytes checked the casks twice a day and once past midnight for cracks. To gain the full red robes of their order, they had to hold a vigil before a bottle filled with the most potent of fermented elixirs. The young men knelt in front of the Bottomless Bocksbeutel of Ulthor.
Some succumbed, as the bold must. They flailed at the stopper. Their elders dragged the brave boys up to the roof and left them to die of thirst. The younger acolytes gazed up and swore they would resist temptation. They wouldn’t drink the forbidden.
Only when sweating before the Bottomless Bocksbeutel did some gain enlightenment. The revelation came that true courage meant yielding to their desires. To let Ulthor’s wine go untasted, languishing forever in its glass prison, that was the ultimate folly. No matter if the vintage was cursed. A pittance if opening the engorged bottle would unleash a flood of wine that would wipe away cities and then drown the world. Life was nothing without pleasure. The myth of the afterlife could only be lived in the eternity of a moment’s delight.
The boys’ appetites were in the right place. Tethiel praised them. They only hadn’t set the table. The bottle they had groped had been a false one, a decoy. The true Bottomless Bocksbeutel was hidden beneath a loose tile under the abbot’s bedpost. There Tethiel reached.
The neck of the bottle thrilled his fingers. He rescued from obscurity Ulthor’s greatest triumph and folly. Tethiel pulled it across the lands and through the shadow portal to the tower top. From darkness he brought it into the light of the immortal’s passion. The glass might’ve been the green of ages, but tonight it was tinted. It had the dark sheen of a black scorpion. The poison within would be far more exquisite and deadly.
The Bottomless Bocksbeutel rocked in his hand with the tidal sway of oceans. An abyss filled the glass jug, and the drink swirled with sediments of tabooed bliss.
“This isn’t black wine,” Tethiel said to his dandies, “but it’s the next best thing for all the joyless below.”
Wane unsheathed his sword. “Want it opened?”
Tethiel bit off the top of the bottle himself. His teeth sheered through the glass, and he swallowed shards and cork into the chasm within him.
He held the spurting bottle over the tower’s precipice. Time for his luscious entrance. He would need a chalice, and there one was, waiting in his other hand. “A toast. citizens, a toast to my marriage.”
The wine gushed down into the haze of bees. Some sifted away in time. Others were lost in the sticky sweetness. The wine broke their wings and stung their segmented eyes.
The first drops landed on the people below. It rained unease and drizzled seduction. Women stopped stabbing each other with knives to look up. Two men in the filthways paused their coupling to stare. They saw the Lord of the Feast.
“A toast to the fleeting. To lives over only too soon. To decay. To rot and ruin, for onrushing oblivion brings revelation. We exist only through pleasure.”
More and more of the little morsels below him heard. He knew they witnessed the wine pouring from his bottle. The flow could only increase. It would only stream faster. A red waterfall crashed down. Cries rose, of dread and joy. From his height they sounded the same.
The matriarch Elbe gripped his shoulder. “Tethiel, you will stop this. Wine poisons wombs and is illegal.”
“Wonderful! Let them enjoy it for the first and last time.”
Pall shoved the matriarch back. The dandy’s filigree carapace reflected firestorm light, but his bronze mandibles clattered together in anticipation of a Feast. Tethiel would give it to him and all his children. His wine roared out.
“Raise your glass high and drink deep. Lest you drown too soon.”
The streets filled with the richest and spiciest of wines. The flood broke through doors and into homes. People were climbing onto rooftops. Their eyes no longer were full of the Winged Flame but their own mortality. And to Tethiel they smelled like the meaning to life.
They could not swim. They could not escape. They could only give themselves to him. The Bright Rats were wallowing with the rest. The soulless had swarmed into the city to oppose him and his Feasters. They hadn’t expected the Winged Flame, and the immortal had burned off their emotional shields. Now they could fear.
The Bright Palm girl was sobbing on the tower for her dead brother. She should be rejoicing, to taste exquisite grief one last time.
The soulless further below in the city smelled raw. Their worries were undercooked, but Tethiel would savor them most of all. He would save his bride, and the wedding would be a success.
Tethiel could only relish one regret. He shouldn’t have had the Bleeding Maiden killed. She had been right.
To eat was to exist, but to indulge was to live. Black wine wasn’t a problem. It was a solution. Tethiel would enrich a new age with terror.
The only true gods were pleasure and fear. The Lord of the Feast devoted himself to both.
Jerani caught up with her outside the tower. Celaise’s feather cape fluttered. She floated with her waist as high as his head. Her walk had all the dignity of a herd leader, unhurried and confident. No, Celaise was slower than that. A tarantula passed her to scuttle across the street and pounce on a roach.
She looked strong as a goddess, but Jerani knew she was hurt. She was limping, crawling, somewhere Jerani couldn’t see. That’s why she didn’t go faster. He had to help her. Reaching closer was like sticking his hand into a burrow full of darkness and fangs, but she needed him.
No, no she didn’t. Jerani stepped back. She wouldn’t want his help, and she had sworn to kill him if he touched her.
He walked past. She didn’t even glance his way. A rain drilled down around them. It burned his nose, and it looked red like hippo sweat.
Jerani guessed his place wasn’t beside her anymore. She had survived without him before they had met, and now she was even stronger. No use staying when this was his chance to get away. The wedding had finished. Jerani could go.
Every part of him pulled back toward Celaise. Another step away from her could make him collapse, but he had to leave. Before the Talon or someone else thought to sacrifice the tribesman to their dragon god.
In the sky it looked like a long bolt of lightning, the kind that lit wildfires. The heat of blazing grasses already pressed on Jerani’s brow. The red-sweat rain didn’t help. It blistered his eyes. He blinked and shielded them with a hand. He took another step from Celaise, then another.
No, he couldn’t do this. He had promised not to leave her, and a second time he had sworn to take her away from all the lord’s plans. The Lord of the Feast was a giant crouching atop the tower. His weight might crush the world. He upended a tub, and out crashed a river of redness.
The smell of the waters grated at Jerani’s throat and battered his stomach. The flow splashed up to his ankles.
“It�
��s flooding,” a woman screamed. She clutched a baby that had been painted like a butterfly. With her other hand she tugged at a child who refused to move. “Please, please come. Not now. Not now.”
The boy rolled onto his back, wailing and kicking.
The woman’s face turned ugly. She raised her foot over the boy’s head. Jerani wondered what she was thinking. The dragon’s light filled her eyes with fire. She moved to break the child’s skull. “You are a curse!”
Jerani caught her in time. He dragged her from the boy. She tried to punch Jerani, and the waters were rising, and the child changed into a gilled monster, and what could Jerani do except run? He pulled himself onto a roof and hopped from home to home.
He passed a Bright Palm fighting a Feaster. A terror bird had been chasing some people with its axe-sized beak. A Bright Palm had leapt on the monster, and it had shriveled down to a Feaster man. He was nailed through the leg against a building. Jerani could’ve hopped down to stop it, but the Feaster might just attack him too. Then a sunset tide swept the Bright Palm away.
The city wasn’t safe. Jerani could see he had to leave, even if another Bright Palm might try to stake Celaise. Jerani didn’t need to be there for her. She had escaped them on her own. The lord’s flood might not harm her.
One rooftop canopy had been set on fire. A man and a woman sat beneath it in the flower garden. They didn’t seem to care about drifting hot ash. They didn’t mind the red rain. The dragon god’s light fell full on them. The man spoke something in her ear. She ran hands through his hair. Their happiness stabbed Jerani to the marrow.
Jerani stopped at the edge of a rooftop. It was too much. He needed to go back to Celaise. He could find Bright Palm Gio. He had healed Celaise before. He might again, that or kill her.
Turning around, Jerani faced the tower, the Lord of the Feast, and the firestorm sky. Jerani knocked his head against the side of his spear. The other way was right, toward the emptiness beyond the city. That road would lead him to the grasslands. He belonged there. He could be happy. He could live.
Dark Lord's Wedding Page 45
