Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1)

by Christian A. Brown

  Without chronexes or transparency in the bleak sky, the war council broke around what they estimated to be noon. Each of the legion masters saluted and then hurried to his post; so much needed to be done and they had no idea when Brutus would reveal his hand. The king hailed the last of the legion masters as he left.

  “Leonitis, stay a moment.”

  The Ninth Legion master and leader of the king’s retinue turned on his step. He was the younger brother to Dorvain, master of the North Watch, and they shared the same apparent mother of a mountain and a cinder block. For he was as broad and stoutly muscled as his brother, with custom-crafted armor that still barely fit his girth. Mayhap his position was less stressful than Dorvain’s, for he had managed to keep a full head of brown hair, woven into braids against his scalp. Certainly, his job was less dangerous, for his wide refined face was not as scarred or beaten as his kin’s was, though he shared the same twinkle of metal to his stare as Dorvain. Brother blades they were, though one a chipped great sword and the other a polished broadsword. Leonitis’s advice had been exceptionally helpful during their strategizing, but the king had a final set of instructions that were for select ears only.

  “How may I serve, Your Majesty?” asked Leonitis, as gruff as the hunting cats for which his parents had named him.

  “Keep a hundred horses back behind the lines,” said the king. “The men of your legion will trade lance for sword. We need you on foot. Too much cavalry and we shall do little but clutter the pass.”

  “My King—”

  Magnus smote the big brute with a glance like lightning. “This is not the time to question. Do as I say.”

  “I shall!” said Leonitis.

  The king dismissed him with a nod and went back to pondering the shadows and ash of his brother’s kingdom. After he and Erik had been alone for some time, the hammer voiced some of the worries he had been harboring.

  “Your order…was it for their escape, my King? The horses?”

  “I cannot think only of your safety or of the importance of your duties. If there is a chance for others to avoid certain death, then it must be arranged. Even if those men are too brave to hear of exigencies beforehand. If I fail to stop my brother when he and I finally clash, that should be the push that any sensible soldier would need to see a horse and leap upon it. Leonitis is the most level-headed of my commanders; he thinks of others before himself, and not in a cowardly way. I am sure that he will remember my couched intent in a dark moment of decision.”

  “Should it come to that,” contended Erik.

  A beat.

  “Should it come to that,” replied the king.

  Erik knew the king well enough to worry over what the pause meant. What bothered him more than the outcome of this conflict was how ambiguous their enemy was. What do we fight? Brutus? A bodiless spirit? Both evils united, is what it seems, and if so, to what horrid end? As he stared over the impossible desolation, the questions that he had for his king were as endless as a deep-water spring, which, if he tapped it, might never run out. Unexpectedly, the king allayed many of these misgivings by simply placing a gauntlet upon Erik’s back.

  “Son of the Salt Forests,” he whispered, “no matter what remains after the storm of this battle, I am proud that you have come this far in life with me. I have few centuries that I remember, the memories blend like water on glass, but I see our years together with the brightness that parents speak of, or with the camaraderie that soldiers only feel. You are, and always will be, my son. Blood will not change that.”

  Erik’s black makeup was cut by a tear. “As you are my father.”

  And while the encampment behind them bustled with the clangor of war, and the land ahead of them began to tremble from a second drum, a new rumbling—the march of countless synchronized steps—and the hourglass of death dropped its final sands into the chronex, the hammer and his kingfather had their silence; their calm in the storm, their memory of the other before the knowing of how precious that memory would be.

  VII

  Brutus had acted according to the king’s prediction; the Sun King was a hunter, and not the patient kind that hid in the bushes, but a predator who bashed down the woods while chasing his prey. He wants this fight and he will come for it, the king had advised his legion masters, and not long after the council had disbanded, the smoky, unseen gates of Zioch opened. With their shaking spyglasses, scouts could see what approached, wave after wave of people—part metal and part meat—each as unique as a fleshcrafter’s mistake, with no real conformity to their make. There was no end to the freakishness that churned from Zioch’s factory of horrors: rows of cavalry; the knights like pincushions who rode on ebony-stared horses; firecallers who had been pulled from the flames they conjured, somehow still alive, with charred skin, red coals for eyes, and staves of crimson magik in their hands; persons made into golems covered in sheet metal and golden nails; swordsmen and pike-men whose weapons were fused to their fists so that they might never be dropped, their only purpose to kill. The scouts could not believe what they were seeing, how effectively living beings had been turned into weapons, but they were steady in their flow of reports, if not entirely in their nerves and trembling voices, as they told the legion masters what was coming. Blackeyes and Redeyes, one clever scout coined them, for a name had to be found for their enemies, and their unearthly stares were the one aspect they shared.

  In a few hourglasses since the meeting on the escarpment, the thunder of the Blackeyes’ march shuddered the valley like a heartbeat, and the scouts were relieved to tend to other matters once all could see the dark wave rolling in. Brave, so brave were the king’s men and so set in their valor that the imminence of war and death set their feet and fingers working faster. Weapons were counted, honed, and checked. The field of battle was cleared and trenches were dug. Tents and bedrolls were shredded to make ladders for access to the bluffs of the Fangs of Dawn; from there the thunderstrike archers and sorcerers would rain ruin upon the Sun King’s horde. An advantage perhaps, for the scouts had spotted no artillery among the Blackeyes except for the deadly crimson conjurers; though a more pragmatic opinion shared by the king’s army was that Brutus had no intention or subtlety to the warfare he proposed, and that it was his intent to pulverize them in a swell of bodies. He certainly had enough men to do so, and as the river of Blackeyes swayed toward the king’s camp, it was apparent that they were outnumbered ten or even twenty to one. Still, none of that was important. Every man knew that a victory through force was unreasonable well before the endless stream of foes appeared. Their role, as explained to them by their legion masters, was to dam the tide long enough to give Magnus an opportunity to defeat his brother. Only then would this battle be ended—if the head was taken from the snake.

  The Blackeyes were nearly across the valley when the king summoned his men. He would not leave them without words to inspire them, or thanks for the lives that they would dearly pay today. On the field of battle, he met his army, all nine hundred of his fellows as quiet, stiff, and ready as a crop of swords and gathered in half-circle ranks about him. Beyond their king, the sky darkened with evening, and yet the black dawn of Brutus’s army rose and shimmered at his fore. The army’s thousands of footsteps rumbled the land, and they made a fearsome, unified chant of the mad king’s name: Broo-tus! Broo-tus! But none of this frightened Magnus’s army, for they had passed the threshold of terror, and they shared in a silence with their fellows that shut out any distraction. King Magnus rode along the line, shouting to his warriors.

  “Men! We stare into a nightmare! Look at this plague my brother has conjured to ravage Geadhain. Look and feed your anger and pride! For who else has seen this danger? Who else will protect our lands, our children? We are alone; I shall not lie to you. We are the single star in a sky of darkness. Therefore, we must shine ever brighter; we must blind the darkness with our deeds! No matter the cost, our line must not be broken! If a new age is to be born from the blood of our sacrifice, then we
shall boldly go into what comes beyond! I shall lead that charge! I do not fear an end to my long years as much as I dread my brother’s madness bleeding into the world. If I die, I die for you! For tomorrow! For Geadhain!”

  A roar went up through his army, and the king unleashed his blade, which fumed with green power as he threw it into the soil. Where it landed, there was a whoosh of flame that spread as if on oil along the length of the escarpment. In specks, the fiery strip had writhed into a wall, and the wind that flickered the tall emerald flames blew frosty, refreshing air onto the army—while cold, that fire would sear whatever passed through it. Quite literally the line had been drawn. With this signal, the footsoldiers went to their ditches, spearmen clanked their shields into phalanxes, knights raced to their mounts, and thunderstrike archers and sorcerers climbed to their perches. The king ascended with them; after his daring speech, he would not sit this battle out, but he needed a bird’s-eye view to find his brother in the horde if their plan was to work. Brigada was left in the care of Erik, and she behaved under him as if he was the king himself while he trotted to join the other mounted men who would lead the charge.

  Then came the waiting, along with the dying of whatever cursed sun was hidden. They chanted their own rallying cry of weapons on metal, and a chorus of For Geadhain! that while sung by voices many score less than their enemy, was somehow all the grander and louder from hope. We are the line between chaos and life, they all thought in one manner or another. Watchmen said their prayers to the fates, or the more learned ones to the Sisters Three, who wove them. And Erik glanced more than once to his kingfather while pressing the lump under his armor that was the king’s testament. He could not say how, yet he understood in that moment what the talisman was. Magik, yes, but a specific sort of Will: a condensation of love, the Will of a father wishing his son to safety. He was stung by the beauty of it, and he would have hurried to the king to say one more thing that had yet to be said; however, a horn boomed from above. The war had begun.

  VIII

  Brutus’s horde surged out of the valley and spilled onto the escarpment in a tide; the chanting did not slow or end as the smaller were trampled by hooves or boots and died praising their king’s name: Brutus! Brutus! Brutus! When the Blackeyes and Redeyes reached the barrier of flame, they paused to organize their numbers and herded the skinnier and smaller of their kind—women and children—through the inferno first. Magnus did not wait to watch them get consumed, but sang to the sky with his anger, the bitterness of an eternity of brotherhood ending in this atrocity. The heavy evening clouds grew blacker than the ash could make them and then dazzled with white. Forks of lightning roared from above and landed in the swirling mob outside the barrier; wherever they touched, the land exploded into potholes of ignition.

  Up in the nooks of the Fangs of Dawn, the thunderstrike archers wiped their sopping brows and added their bolts to the fray. Then followed the sorcerers, who unleashed arcs of fire onto the earth. A symphony of destruction had commenced, its music crisscrossing the sky in crimson and white power. The whole of the land shook, scattering rock upon the gutsy soldiers who held their ground under the rain of magik; men who watched with awe the starry detonations that made whirling torrents of bodies beyond the green flames. Wonder fled to nerves as, despite the destruction, the chanting horde was successful in snuffing the wall of sorcery with sandbags of their cindery dead, and in many places, the horde was trickling in. An initial wave of piecemeal Blackeyes that made it through were skewered by countless glowing arrows, but crawling over their remains came more and more of the cursed things, and handfuls of viciously barbed riders who wasted not a speck kicking their mounts into a charge. Behind the dread riders, the accursed firecallers followed, glowing in their auras, and they threw back at the rain of magik and arrows with pyrotechnic explosions and lashes of flame that toppled handfuls of archers and sorcerers from the cliffs surrounding the king. The line had scarcely held for sands, and behind stretched the tail of the horde deep into the valley. The king found him then, his brother, felt him more with his heart than located him with his eyes. At the tip of the tail was a glittering warband that had not lost the luster of the Sun King’s regalia: he was convinced that his brother was there.

  Good luck, Erithitek. Hold them as long as you can, and I shall end this, swore the king.

  Mortal sorcerers could rarely translocate without assistance and mechanical computation. However, Magnus was not mortal, and he when he closed his eyes, he saw the strings of brilliant patterns that composed all things—and arranged them into an invisible passage through which he forced himself. Agonizing, but when the pain left him, and his body resumed its shape, he knew that he was successful by the granite voice that called his name.

  “Magnus.”

  Magnus looked up from the heaps of hot ash into which he had fallen. An enormous float was passing by, one carried on the backs of man-golems and naked slaves, and atop which a parade of feathered male and female concubines swayed in a trance around a huge golden throne. Magnus dismissed other details, like the paint of blood that blemished the abundance of gold, or the repulsive mortal trophies—faces, limbs, and garlands of genitals—that hung off the banners. He was interested only in the massive shape that was rising off the throne and tossing whatever bodies were in its way off the platform. The shape leaped to the burned earth, landing with a tremor, and in the flickering light of war, Magnus gazed upon this heaving giant dressed only in a warrior’s skirt and slathered with spirals of gore, as if they were strangers. Savagery had overtaken him, as violent as the thick musk of death, sweat, and sex that wafted off him. Brutus’s regal beauty, the charisma and pride of a lion, had been warped into hideousness; with his luxurious hair and beard all matted and entwined with bones, his rock-carved, handsome face now twisted into a wolf’s wrinkled growl, and his bulbous, veined musculature made more threatening from a primal hunch, as if he was an ape. The line between beast and man had been erased, that battle had been won, and Magnus could recognize nothing of Brutus, his brother of forever. For the first time in eternity, their hearts and minds did not reach out to each other, and he saw nothing in his brother’s stormy blue eyes but hunger.

  “Hold, Brutus!” shouted the king, and stood. “You are a wild and wounded thing. I would hear your confession before I end your madness.”

  Brutus laughed at that, booming bellows that added to the concussions going off in the darkness. While he amused himself, his army slithered on, heedless of this conflict.

  “This is your chance to ask for forgiveness,” spat Magnus.

  Brutus whipped from his laughter. “Forgiveness! You would dare to speak to me of that! My brother of the long seasons! The cold half of my soul! My partner in eternity! You, who left me for the sniff of a woman’s legs!”

  “Is that it?” Magnus threw back derisively. “Jealousy? You would wage war on Geadhain because you could never find a woman, or man, who could bear your bestial lust? Pathetic. How far you have fallen from the man I knew. Look at what you have done to your accomplishments, to the people that trusted you, to the land that you swore to nurture! Do you remember when this was green? When we picked and named the saplings that would grow in the garden of your kingdom? Look around at what you have wrought and you should feel only shame. If you can admit that, then your punishment may be less cruel, but still more painful than you have ever known. This is my mercy for you. As for the dark spirit that haunts you, the one that you have cursed yourself to for this despicable power, I extend no kindness. I shall cast it back into bottomless filth where it belongs.”

  “Your mercy?” Brutus bit his lip with a fang and spit the red mucus on the earth. “How little you understand. I do not need your love, your forgiveness, or your mercy. For I have hers, and it is vast and warm as the rush of blood and milk in the throat. Hers is a river of darkness without end, an appetite that can never and needs never be sated. She feeds me as you never could. As only a true companion can.”

&n
bsp; “Of whom do you speak?” demanded Magnus. “To whom have you pledged this horror?”

  “Our Mother, Zionae,” growled Brutus.

  While Magnus anticipated some or all of that answer, he was no less confused by these associations that he could not recall, and there was no time to contemplate them. If Magnus had not been his brother since it all began, he might not have recognized the twitch of violence in the other’s face, even hidden under all that beard and mane, which told him that he was about to be attacked. Like a smear of grease across the eye, the giant was upon him. Perilously late, Magnus hurled up his arms and threw forth his Will, and a jet of crackling ice tore up the ash around him. Brutus crashed into the wall, snarled, and then vaulted over it. Brutus called his Will—the magik of the jungle, dominion over flesh and fang—and his arms twisted with brilliance into ragged blades that took the place of his forearms and hands and could rend a stone in twain: his claws. He descended upon his brother, who looked up, stunned, so slow compared to the agility that coursed inside him. Easy prey.