Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1)

by Christian A. Brown

  Buildings fall like sandcastles, pulled from their bottom and funneling to oblivion upon themselves. Screams, there are so many screams amid the rumbling, and so much dust that he cannot see from where. He is too hysterical to be as terrified as he should be, perhaps from whatever injury has made his head hum and blood trickle over his eyes. Gloria and Mother are about, somewhere in the storm of filth, and he adds his cry to the racket.

  “Mother! Gloria!”

  Nothing answers but destruction.

  While the cobbles turn under him, he stumbles through more of the dusty obliteration. His determination is rewarded, and he sees a pale hand that he recognizes. A moment later, the smoke parts to his sister’s wan face. She is coughing and partially buried in the remains of the carriage, and the rush he has when seeing her enables his small boy’s body to heave debris—great panels of wood and smoldering wheels—off his sister. When she is up and they have hugged each other, he asks where Mother is. To this, Gloria shakes her head and points to the rubble from which he has extracted her. From the smoky pile, a broken axle of the carriage rises: it is red and gleaming as a freshly painted pole. Red with blood.

  “We’ll be all right, Gloria. We have each other,” he says.

  As the world continues its disintegration around them, they weep, hold each other, and promise to survive together.

  Thackery came back to his friend. “The smallest touch, the tiniest spark—which with truefire can come from two motes of dust—and the whole range tumbled. Buried everything for spans and bore its vengeance all the way east to Menos. Twenty thousand were estimated to have died in the mines, another half of that claimed in Menos. My mother, Isabelle, was among those taken. She died pushing my sister and me to safety. My mother was mourned, along with the other masters lost in the disaster, and for a whole week, the city wore shrouds of black. Then we moved on, without memorials or testaments, as grief is the crutch of the weak, and we are people of iron.”

  “We?” questioned Caenith quietly. Repeatedly and in many conversations, Thackery had identified himself as a Menosian. All this regardless of the how much that affiliation had cost him.

  Dourly, Thackery smiled. “What unites a man with his country—and his guilt—if not shame or tragedy? I cannot separate myself from the sins in my blood any more than you can separate yourself from your bloodthirstiness. Nor should I, and nor should you, for it is these struggles that define us. We are what we are, Wolf, though we can always try to be something better. I know that you understand this.”

  “Aye.”

  The men held a moment of silence with each other. Once it passed, Thackery waved his stick toward the heights.

  “Let’s keep climbing,” said Thackery. “I’m almost finished the story, and it is important that we get to the end.”

  As they ascended, the stone heaps grew taller and more tottering, the footholds shakier, and the paths thin as thread. Thackery’s lead was impeccable, however, and he saw routes that the Wolf himself might have missed. Thackery took them into whistling, constrictive chasms that could have been fissures in an arctic glacier if not for the absence of snow. He showed them where to step as they entered a wide field of rock so broken and sharp that it was like navigating a basin of shattered crystal. When they were safe on the other side of that particular hazard, and walking like mountain goats along a slim path on a steady incline with an echoing drop to their sides, Thackery—fearless, apparently—chose to speak again.

  “After the destruction, Menosians’ plans for expansion stalled until they rebuilt their resources and empire. Now, tens of thousands of deaths was hardly a deterrent to the Iron war machine, and at first, they thought to start again, as the truefire vein was now spent, the fault-line was now known, and enough of the tunnels and infrastructure remained intact. Yet that plan was more difficult in execution than in concept on account of the…occurrences.”

  “Occurrences?”

  “Disappearances. Unwholesome noises. Accidents whenever reparative efforts were made to the tunnels. It was not uncommon for entire dig sites and crew to simply vanish: gone like flatulence in the wind. Technomagikal equipment functions erratically in and around these ranges, and if you had a chronex to check, you’d note that the time would be off, or frozen entirely. As steadfast as Menosian tenacity is, they ultimately gave up and sealed the Iron Valley, opting for safer deposits of feliron elsewhere. A decision made from fear, yet also so that their enemies could not sneak into the hollows and set off another city-damning earthquake. Here we are, then, treading over the largest grave in Geadhain. I told you before that I don’t believe in ghosts, and that still holds true. However, even you, at first instinct, sensed the wrongness of this place. A shadow of death that no amount of time seems enough to wash clean.”

  Caedentriae, thought Caenith. In Alabion, when great acts of sorcery mixed with blood and tragedy, dark and persistent enchantments could result. Spells where time and reality themselves were scarred and twisted. A sacrifice on this scale could power the blackest of nightmares.

  “What you describe, I would call the Long Nightmare,” said Caenith. “A sacrilege against the Green Mother, where there is so much blood, death, and magik that it troubles her innocent mind, filling it with terrors. Only what she dreams, we live, and thus we live in her nightmares, too.”

  “An interesting theory,” mused Thackery. “A sound one, too, considering the balderdash that I’ve heard from supposedly learned men. Not a haunting, then, but a memory. A terrible memory conjured within the mind of the great green creature that we crawl upon.”

  “Yes.”

  “Be that as it may, I’ve been up and down the Iron Valley more times than I can count and have yet to see anything more terrible than this depressing atmosphere. A test on the nerves, but not much else. We should hurry and outpace the darkness, though. Accidents can happen in the dark.”

  Soon the two men were off the ledge and on a harsh incline. The heights of the range were ahead of them, crashing upward in twists of black rock like a gravity-defying wave. Here they traversed slowly, for the black stones were brushed with fine and slippery dust that would send them tumbling down the rise to the left or right and into the shadowy crevasses there. Only one path was open to them, and that was ahead. Caenith’s incredible fatigue chose now to harangue him: his feet were throbbing, his thighs were searing, and his spine had knotted above his hips, sending starbursts of pain into his groin. You shan’t stop. Not until she is with you. Not while you hold this child, willed Caenith. A punishing wind came over him, gagging his senses with the ash of the Iron Valley. Thackery heard his companion grunting, looked back to see the sweat and unsightly paleness on his overly tanned face, and understood that he was fighting a battle with his spirit.

  “I never told you how I know this place, if you haven’t already guessed,” shouted Thackery. “Bethany and I, this is the secret road that took many to freedom in the West. We traveled the paths that no one else would dare. Yet before any of that, we had to learn these roads ourselves. We had to force our feeble flesh to sweat, bruise, and scrape its way from one end to the other. There were times, many times, where we thought it could not be done and that we were to die together: more bones for the Valley. You, Caenith, are the strongest man I have ever known, and as much as you ache, as much as you burden yourself with responsibility, this trial will be a footnote to your ordeals. You will not break, not now or ever.”

  “I shall not break,” declared Caenith.

  Thus spoken, the fire of determination flared in the Wolf anew, drowning the meager flicker of doubt that had poisoned him, and he assuredly stomped after the old man. The wind was nothing against his hide now but a petty distraction; the agony of his legs, a trifling concern. Not long after, they were up and striding the peaks of the Iron Valley. The air was thinner up here, and their tread still quite unsteady, so they spared the expense of speaking and lugged themselves across the bluster while the sky began its surrender to night. Hurry, hurr
y, they each thought, but could not force this race without recklessness. Time deteriorated into task without measure: foot after foot, handhold to handhold, and cranny to cranny. All this, Caenith did with a single hand, for to allow Macha to test herself against these elements would have been murder. If he needed any more fire to drive him, the little seal—hanging tight—would whisper into his neck, Mo riderae (My knight).

  He would not disappoint her with his service.

  Another heave, another pull, a thousand burning breaths, and abruptly the Wolf became aware that they were descending. Although a grand gorge pitted with shadows and cruel holes still remained to be challenged, they had beaten half the range. Night was racing to hinder their travel with darkness, and the wind was a bitter slap to their faces. Thackery quickened their pace. Accidents can happen in the dark, he reminded himself, and on nearly every trip across the Iron Valley, this dire prophecy had fulfilled itself.

  The sun has been eaten, and there are no stars to light their path—not that there has ever been starlight in the Iron Valley. The group’s progress was slow today, as one of the refugees is with child and has a boy and a girl already brought into this world that travel with her. Ten of them started this journey, and now only he, Bethany, and six others remain. On top of the range, one man was taken into the abyss by a violent breeze; later on, another unfortunate wandered off the path and slid amid a rockslide to his doom. Yet the worst of the journey has ended, and they are in the foothills that will guide them to freedom. They dare not make a light without it calling attention to the Crowes, so Bethany soothes their trembling souls with the humming of her voice.

  A girl’s scream interrupts Bethany’s music.

  Oblivious of his own security, he spins and pulls Bethany to himself. Commotion has broken out along the line, and he is counting heads and faces in the gleaming dark. Two are missing, and he can tell from the girl sobbing near a coughing hole, who has met their ends. “My mother! My brother!” she cries, and her words quickly devolve into sobs. While Bethany pulls the girl from the pit, he helps the other folk around the obstacle, which is still crumbling and looks as if it is ready to give way some more. Once they are back on the path, huddled like scared cattle, he leans over the yawning grave and wishes for the mother, her unborn child, and her son to find peace in the mystery that comes after this.

  As he turns, he sees it: a glimmer of something blacker than the night up the hillside. He can’t be sure of what it is, now or when he will look back on it in future years, although it could be a figure. If it is a person, it might be one of those he thought they’d lost. However, he does not call out to it. The words freeze in his throat, and his heart plays a frantic drum. He knows in that place of intimate knowing that this is not something he should reach out to, but a presence to be left alone.

  Bethany is shouting his name, telling him to hurry. He blinks and the wrinkle in the darkness is gone. A figment, he tells himself. A figment and nothing more.

  He had buried that story within himself, and how odd that it should resurface at this moment. His mind had done him the charity of clouding over a lot of what transpired in the Iron Valley. No escape from Menos was free of casualties, and no trip across the Iron Valley came without the cost of more bones for the hungry darkness down below. Forgetting was the easy part, he realized. Remembering was what brought the uncertainty and fear.

  There are no ghosts, he scolded himself. Only darkness, which is just as dangerous, and a lack of caution. No ghosts.

  From behind stirred a grumbling that Thackery strained to hear over the wind. Perhaps Caenith had spoken. “Pardon me?” he called back.

  When no answer came, Thackery whipped around. Neither the Wolf nor his tiny charge was there, and a dusty rip in the mountain, a wound into darkness, was where the two had certainly been.

  III

  A person. Or what approximated one. That is what had drawn Caenith’s keen eye on the dusky peaks. From a great distance, the figure rose from between two rocks: it shuddered to uprightness in a jerky way, and its appearance was so immediately shocking that Caenith stopped. What are you? he wondered, and could not pry himself from solving this riddle. What is dark as the immanent night and man-shaped? What has misty flesh and blurs like a shadow brushed between two rocks on an oil painting? What are those glistening accents where a face should be? Did he really want to know?

  Pinning an eye on the aberration, he stepped forward quickly, trying to signal Thackery without raising an alarm. Had he not been so engrossed, he would have noticed it sooner, the step into nothingness, and next, the sudden pitching of his weight forward. He was falling, and without a moment to scream. He tossed out his free arm, yet anything to hook his fingers into was well out of reach, and his body somersaulted over itself. While he could have spread his limbs and flailed for handholds, that would have come at the forfeiture of Macha’s life—something he never once considered. Instead, he held the whimpering child closer, shielded her with his enormous arms, and then did his best to straighten his body as he plunged through the shrieking void. For a man plummeting to his apparent death, Caenith was rather composed. Concentration was essential to the mastery of his flesh, and to achieve perfection, one had to fade out the world: the rattling darkness, the slash of air to his ear, the boom of his heart, and the panting of poor Macha. As a youth, when he had first discovered his uncanny resilience and power, he had jumped from the foamy heights of the Weeping Falls and landed without even a red mark from the water upon his skin. He could be harmed, yes, but he had still to find anything in Geadhain that could kill him. Macha’s survival was another matter entirely.

  The chasm did its best to end him, bouncing him against ledges and outcroppings in ways that would shatter a slow-walker like an egg, while he somehow held straight and true as a rod of steel. He hardly winced from the pain as his body was carved into. Abruptly, the ripping at his meat ended, and he was soaring through cavernous space. To his nose came the reek of stagnant water, and he tensed his every muscle, and cast out his every nerve and sense. In one broad net of sentience, he absorbed every drip and creak of the space he was in, tasting currents and calculating impossible mathematics—though he would never perceive them this way—information that was fed to his consciousness as mere instinct: a single miraculous effort of muscle and movement. In the air, he leaned and twisted acrobatically, realigning himself for a softer landing than rude stone.

  I shall not break, he thought. The Wolf took a hearty breath.

  Macha screamed at last, and suddenly her mouth and lungs were filled with filthy water. It was not her destiny to drown, however, and as quickly as she was submerged, she was up again, retching fluid out and dragging air in. Her tireless knight was then paddling like a man in a sling, and before she could make sense of the madness, they were out of the soiled lake and onto dry land. Her knight staggered a bit—he was surely wounded—and finally rolled onto his back. His arm slowly loosened about her, yet she continued to lie against him, and whispered for him to stay awake, for she could feel him slipping away. He was the only grace she had known since the slow-walkers had ripped her parents from her, and she was not about to lose him. Fiercely for a child, she slapped his face and pleaded with him.

  “Cos ni fiag, Mactyre!” (Do not leave me, Wolf!)

  When that had little effect, she did what seals do in their most abject moments. She bit him, right on the neck.

  “Mae creach na fiag tu (I shall not leave you),” groaned the Wolf.

  He was far from dead. Aching like a hundred-year-old man thrown off a tower, lacerated across his shoulders, back, and buttocks, with bones that felt wrapped in barbed wire and a gong in his head that resounded with pain, but he was most certainly alive. He healed many times faster than a slow-walker did, and by dawn, these wounds would be but small pink memories on his skin. Fatigue was his greatest adversary at the moment, and he cursed his body for its ponderous size as he tried to move. First, he lifted the delicate child off himself, a
nd then he hauled the rest of his sluggish mass up to sit. He waited a speck for the fireworks to fade, and with his gleaming sight—tuned for darkness—he began to discern the silvery details and outlines of their surroundings.

  From what he could tell, they had fallen through a crack in the roof of a domed excavation. He could see dust still raining from the black spot, and he was confident that they would not be returning that way. The space was huge and hollow, with a ringing silence disturbed by his breath and the faint pattering of debris down into the body of water that had cushioned their landing. It was not quite a lake, Caenith realized, but a flooding of water from an unthinkable depth and age that was as black and befouled as oil; the stink of it clung like pond rot to their clothing and hair. The pool filled a good portion of the room, and the shore to which he had dragged them was a twisted beach, where broken carts were buried in dunes of filth, rusty pickaxes and shovels were discarded with abandon, and hints of metal tracks lay muffled in gray sand. If he followed these tracks, he saw them lead to wood-framed tunnels. These, he was interested in, for one would hopefully bear them to the surface.

  He remembered how they had fallen, the creature that had distracted him into this trap, yet could not sense its presence in the cavern. Still, it was doubtful that was the end of their encounter, and he wasn’t in the best state for a fight, if it came to that. They needed to move. He knew his share of field medicine from the blood pits, from the years of maiming and watching the maimed, and he hastily checked Macha for bumps, breaks, and bruises. She was intact, if completely terrified. Standing up was a bigger chore for Caenith than it should have been, and it took him a sand and much staggering and panting. Once he was on his feet, he reached for Macha. She wouldn’t have his gallantry; she crossed her arms and politely refused him.