Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1)

by Christian A. Brown

  V

  Menos was darker than usual: its clouds as black as the shadow of fear that haunted Mouse. The city felt more menacing to her. She saw shadows in every corner, noticed the glint of every ruffian’s blade or slave’s chain as though they were all intended for her. The warning of Alastair played inside her skull on a loop of nightmare theater.

  A hand over her mouth startles her awake, and she twists for the dagger in her pillowcase until she recognizes the shadowy apparition atop her, who hisses at her to calm.

  “Alastair?” she gasps.

  The hand unclenches and the willowy shadow retreats to more of its own; she can only see the scruff of his red beard in the dark.

  “Get up, Mouse. Get dressed.”

  Her mentor sounds annoyed or confused; she is each, but finds her garments quickly enough anyway.

  “I don’t like good-byes, so let’s not call this that,” Alastair says with a sigh. “But it will be a parting, nonetheless. You need to go low. Lower than you’ve ever been before. A new name won’t be enough. You’ll need a new face. I don’t know how or who, but the sacred contract of our order has been broken. Your safety has been bought.”

  Mouse knows the who and how, and as she glances up from her boot-lacing to explain to her mentor her predicament, she sees that he is gone. Just empty shadows, echoing words, and the sound of her heartbeat drowning out all the rest.

  She expected the dead man and his icy master to emerge from the dim nooks and doorways of the buildings she passed at any instant. With a hand on her knives and a fury to her step, she swept down the sidewalk; no carriages for her today, as they were essentially cages on wheels—too easy to trap oneself in. With its sooty storefronts and their wrought-iron windows, its black streetlamps that rose about her like the bars of a prison, Menos was constricting itself around her, and she had to get out.

  You’ve survived worse than the nekromancer, she coached herself, though she wasn’t certain that was true. She hurried through the grimness of Menos, dodging pale faces and quickening her step with every sand. By the time she arrived at the fleshcrafter’s studio, she was sweating and stuck to her cloak. She looked down the desolate sidewalk and up the long sad face of the tall tower with its many broken or boarded-over windows. When she was sure she wasn’t being pursued by the phantoms that her paranoia had conjured, she pulled back a rusted door that did not cry out as it should have, given its appearance, but slid along well-formed grooves through the dust. She raced through the door and hauled it closed.

  It was dark and flickering with half-dead lights in the garbage-strewn hallway in which she stood. Mouse picked through the trash with her feet, tensing as she passed every dark alcove in the abandoned complex. Hives, these places were called, and used to house enormous numbers of lowborn folk under a single roof. In Menos, even the shabbiest roof was a desirable commodity, so the building’s ghostly vacancy meant that it likely was condemned by disease at one point. Soon the stairwell she was seeking appeared, and she tiptoed down it, careful not to slip on the stairs, which were slick with organic grunge.

  Couldn’t have picked a nicer studio, she cursed. I’ll be lucky if this fleshcrafter leaves me with half a lip to drink with. Lamentably, speed and discretion were her two goals in choosing where to have her face remodeled. Such stipulations cut the more promising fleshcrafters off the list and left her with the dregs. She hadn’t put much thought into what she would have done, or even if she would end up hideously disfigured. Monstrous disfigurement could even work in her favor, as she bore an uncanny resemblance to that crow-eviscerated woman whom she suspected was the object of the nekromancer’s dark desire. I’ll take ugly over dead. Over whatever he has in mind for me. Consigning herself to whatever face fate had planned for her, she went on to think of other matters, such as where her flight from Menos would take her. As unpleasant as the notion of seeking refuge among a libertine state of do-gooders and royal lapdogs sounded, Eod might not be such a terrible idea. It could even prove a marvelous hideaway with its Nine Laws, virtues, justice, and all the other shite that Mouse only cared about as a hunted woman. Eod it is, she decided. Mouse reached the bottom of the stairwell. A path cleared from foot traffic led to a metal door that bled yellow light around its edges. She rushed to it, tested the handle, which gave, and went in.

  The fleshcrafter’s studio was immaculate compared to what preceded it. The room was small, tidy, and had clean metal walls. After so much murk, her eyes stung from the lights overhead, but she squinted out a row of steel chairs over by a set of swinging doors and made her way to a seat. Her only other company was a bald man dressed in leather, who gave her a mercenary smile with a jaw that had been fleshcrafted with iron teeth and bones. There was nothing friendly about his greeting. Mouse let her cloak drop open, and the hand on her weapon hung out in a greeting of her own.

  In Eod they have fleshbinders, not fleshcrafters. So I’ll never see another thing like him again, she thought, as if she was a child being told a nursery tale. Waiting, waiting, waiting. She tapped her foot to make a bit of music while the sands dripped by as if coated in honey. She sensed that the man in the room was in some sort of distress, for he paced and nattered to himself; sometimes twitching or slapping his head. Or just crazy, she concluded, and felt this to be the truer supposition. Eventually, she gave up her foot-music and slouched in her chair.

  No sooner had she reached a certain calm than the man came barreling toward her. The double doors flapped open before she threw her knives, and she quickly thrust her hands back into her garments as she realized that she wasn’t the target. Instead, he ran past her to lift a buxom blond woman straight off her feet and spin her around as if she were his bride on their wedding day. The chesty blonde laughed huskily, and asked if he fancied them: her breasts, surely, which pressed over the man’s shoulders. Several not-so-subtle glances were needed for Mouse to absorb that she was seeing two pairs of breasts, bundled like grapes beside the other, and after another instant of comprehension, it dawned on her that the throatiness of the bald ruffian’s partner was actually the hoarseness of a man.

  A four-titted whore with a prick. Maybe two pricks, for all I know. Well then, I don’t think Menos could have given me a finer send-off, Mouse decided, watching the happy couple kiss and fondle their way out of the studio. The fleshcrafter who stood holding one of the swinging doors was so silent that she didn’t notice him until the couple had left.

  “I am paid by the hourglass, as well as by cost of parts,” he said.

  Mouse turned to the man, whose dark-circled, hooded eyes and pinched, generally unimpressive face was common among fleshcrafters. Mouse’s theory was they couldn’t be bothered to fix themselves up, doing what they did on a daily basis. The fleshcrafter wore the cotton gown and rubber apron of the more medically minded members of his art, though Mouse was not here for healing today, but a rebirth. Casting off any second thoughts, she followed the man into his workshop.

  Inside the studio, Mouse was pleased to see that the fleshcrafter kept his workshop as sparse and clean as the waiting room. Immediately, Mouse spotted the steel physician’s slab where she was to lie, with its large waterspout above and pink-stained grates below. She wondered how much of her would be washed through that drain that day. By that were a small wheeled stool and a tray of surgical and magikal implements: crystals, scalpels, drills, vials of foul-colored alchemy. Floor to ceiling, the walls were fitted with lockers, and Mouse felt a chill coming off them and whitening her breath. While she removed and folded her cloak and tunic, she played guessing games as to what sort of meaty contents were preserved within the lockers. When she was done, she placed her clothes on the floor and walked to the still-wet slab to sit. The fleshcrafter rolled up to her on his stool; he had put on a pair of gloves and clapped his hands together.

  “What are we to craft today?”

  “My face,” replied Mouse.

  The fleshcrafter reached out and turned her head from side to side. “Your
face is decent, pretty enough. I’d recommend what I gave the gentleman that was just in here. You seem to be lacking in what men like.”

  “I don’t need a bundle of tits. I need a new face,” spat Mouse, crossing her arms over her chemise. “As different as you can sculpt. Pretty is fine, though plain will suffice, too. Whatever you choose, I don’t want to look a thing like this when I leave. I hear that you are among the best and most discreet of your trade, and I have coin to pay for such discretion.”

  Even though Mouse could have intimidated the man to service with her Watcher’s sigil—it lay securely in her boot cuff—she wanted to live as a shadow, which meant leaving no distinguishing marks of her passage. Revealing herself as a Voice would not be a fact easily forgotten. He appeared content enough when she handed him a purse thick with crowns—the black stamped chips of Menos’s anticurrency to the fates of Eod. The fleshcrafter tucked the purse under his apron and set to work at once. He took a metal basin from the tray of many instruments and wheeled over to the lockers. Mouse lay down and looked away after watching him pick out a disembodied nose from the frosty storage.

  She could still hear his muttering and the crack of each locker as it was opened, or feel the chill gasps come over her, and she bided her sands as patiently as she could. A few more hourglasses and you’ll be away from this. The weight of that notion struck her rudely. The concept of freedom, real freedom, with hunters, yes, but no masters to serve. Kings be fuked, this could be the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

  Mouse was grinning when the fleshcrafter rolled back into her field of vision.

  “Stop smiling,” he ordered.

  She obeyed, but found it difficult to hold down the corners of her mouth, particularly as the fleshcrafter drew lines upon her face with a ticklish quill. He tilted her head around, checking his markings, and then reached to his tray of curiosities and brought a vial of ether-smelling liquid to his patient. He helped her up so that she could drink it. The elixir tasted as harsh as it smelled, and she gagged it down.

  “That should put you out until I am done,” said the fleshcrafter.

  He assisted her back to a lying position. Already the slug of a substance had crawled its way to her stomach, where it wriggled sleepy nausea into her flesh. It was the sort of dizziness that Mouse had experienced when she had drunk too much to pass out, yet not quite enough to vomit. Her eyes were flickering up and down like shades, and the elixir was having a profound effect. In mere specks, the psychotropic properties of the drug had transformed the hovering fleshcrafter into a putty-faced caricature with great silver hands, which the soberest part of her knew was a scalpel. The freakish man was counting backward from one hundred, and in the midseventies when he suddenly stopped.

  “I am with a patient,” he shouted—a muddled sound to Mouse, as if her ears were stuffed with fat.

  “She is not to be touched,” replied another.

  She recognized this voice. Its sinister articulation, the way it addressed a person’s insignificance with every barbed inflection, could not be mistaken.

  No! she screamed, yet what came from her mouth was a garbled sound and a dribble of spit. Pathetic as her resistance was, she managed to slump her lead-limbed self on her side and tried rocking her useless flesh off the slab. How she would save herself, or squirm to freedom past the blurry figures standing in the doorway, was the most desperate of dreams. Three or more abductors were present, though she knew only two—even if she could not clearly identify them. Two lean shadows, one paler than the other: the nekromancer and his dead twin.

  “I say, you can’t be here! I don’t care—”

  Then came a quick flash of white power and a breath of frost, as if all the lockers had opened. She couldn’t make out what was happening until the fleshcrafter dropped to his knees before the table, thrust clearly into her view, and she watched him shrieking and fighting against the hand that held the scalpel for a speck before plunging the tip swiftly into his eye. The instrument struck his brain, and he did a quick jig and then fell on his heels.

  Upon his death, Mouse struggled harder, despite the reality that she would not escape. Not with this poison slowing her body; not against a man who could command flesh and bone. The Raven wanted her, and she had been marked to be his since their meeting. Nonetheless, her spirit was admirable even in defeat. He will not have me! she raged, tragically hopeful that the narcotic paralyzing her flesh made her impervious to the nekromancer’s magik; this might have been true, yet she was ultimately at his mercy. She was nearly at the edge of the table.

  “Vortigern! She will fall, you worthless corpse!”

  One of the shadows near the door moved so fast that her faltering eyes saw only the smear of black. Suddenly she was in the cold spicy embrace of the dead man, looking into his sad face, which was drooped with an expression that she sensed was regret.

  That was the last Mouse knew before the darkness.

  VII

  THE BREAKING OF LIES

  I

  Dusk ran in purple streams across the sky, and the Wolf heard the rumbles of hunger in his Fawn’s belly. Morigan did not ask where he was going. She just watched him with wonder as he leaped over the precipice and carelessly skidded down the mountainside. Straightaway, she missed the heat and throb of his body and noticed how cold it was so high up in Kor’Keth. The magik of Eod kept even the hint of winter away, trapped as if behind the wall of these mountains, though she could sense its insistence to be free in the hollow howls from above.

  What would happen if King Magnus and his great magik were no more? she pondered, and the dream of the brother kings and the black voice was scratching at her insides with fear again. In the bliss of these past hourglasses, she had neglected to tell Caenith of her dreams. She certainly should and would make a point of it when he was back. She decided to make the most of her time alone and shuffled off to find a bush to pee in, offering pardoning smiles to the finches as she soiled their home. Once that was taken care of, she found the bark flute that Caenith had used earlier and went to the pool to wet her throat.

  By the kings, you look like a bush witch, she thought as she caught her unkempt reflection in the water. She undressed herself and slid into the pool, which was covered in smooth stones and deep enough to rise to her breasts. She washed the leaves and grass from her hair and floated on her back, watching the stars pop out in the sky. Although her hearing was muffled in the water, she sensed the Wolf’s return: a wave of heat, a wash of bestial odor. She walked from the pool, beading with sensuous trails of water; a glistening ivory treat for the huge monster that panted on the shore. She felt no more embarrassed about her nudity than the Wolf did as he snapped and stretched and moaned his way back into a naked man. The transformation was no less interesting to see a second time. When he was back in his skin, heaving on all fours, she noticed the blood on his chin, neck, and chest and the large dead lizard in his shadow. The corpse had long fore and hind legs, a crest of sharp ridges to its face, and looked quite like a scaled, horned colt.

  “Spinrex meat,” barked Caenith, his voice still throaty and not yet completely a man’s. “I shall make a fire to cook it for you. I have had a few young already.” He hiccupped, coughed for a speck, and regurgitated what looked to be a bone onto the grass. Even at this, Morigan was not disgusted, only intrigued. Caenith wiped the drool off his bloody beard. “Do pardon me.”

  His eyes began eating the Fawn, who was as lovely in the evening light as a spirit of moonlight and fire. He resisted the call of the beast to nip her dewy breasts or kiss the shadow between her legs, though it pained him.

  “You should dress yourself. I shall wash up. Make myself presentable, as they say.”

  He lumbered into the pool. While he splashed and shook water from his hide, Morigan slipped back into her garments. Morigan had stoked many a fire and she picked some of the larger stones from the pool to make a pit for the flames, and then gathered leaves and dry twigs. By the time Caenith joined he
r, civil in his pants and boots, she had sparked the fire to life. He settled behind Morigan, fencing her between the mountains of his legs, warm and clean smelling if with a hint of damp hound. Quickly he set to cooking the stick-speared spinrex he had brought, abstaining from a spit and turning the beast himself. He held Morigan to him with his other arm and she ran her hands over the veined limb that entrapped her; she felt so at ease with him, despite there being so much unsaid.

  “You built a strong fire,” said Caenith.

  “Thank you.”

  She indulged in their intimacy, in the night songs of insects up in there small slice of nowhere, before speaking of her dreams.

  “I need to tell you what I saw. In my dreams.”

  Caenith nudged the nape of her neck with his nose. “I had not forgotten your mention of these visions. Please, my Fawn, go on.”

  Arranging the details was not difficult, and the bees seemed eager to help, filling her memory with flawless recall of blood, rape, and ritual sin. The words fell from her.

  “When you found me, I drifted in nothingness for a time. In this strange place that I think is called the Dreaming.” Caenith inhaled as if from surprise, though shared not from what. “These things in my head—bees, I call them, for they buzz and hunt for information as those insects do pollen. In the Dreaming they are silvery, a swarm of lights, and they led me to terrible memories. Ones that were not my own. I think—no, I know—whose heads I was in. First Magnus, and then Brutus.”

  Caenith did not conceal his shock. “The immortals?”

  “Yes, yes. I am sure of it. I felt them, this bond that they share like a mother’s cord that had not been cut. Brutus’s rage was bleeding into his brother, making him do the wickedest things. I don’t…I won’t repeat the worst of it, not that you couldn’t stomach it, but I doubt that I could again.” Queen Lila is pleading, her beauty distorted with swelling and bruises, her golden hair matted in blood. Morigan pinched her eyes and willed the bees to stop their harvesting. They could have gone deeper into recall if she chose, but she was afraid of how vividly she would remember. “The Everfair King raped her, his own queen. Against his will, I feel, for there was such a twisted sorrow between them. That’s all I’ll say.”