Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3)

by Christian A. Brown

  “How did you endure it?” she asked, once again standing on her feet. “When you and Caenith came for me, all the way across Central Geadhain in what—a week?”

  “Less,” Thackery boasted, grinning. “I did it for you. I would take that journey again, with all its perils and thrills.”

  Morigan laid her head upon his shoulder, and they watched sand whirl out from dunes and then spiral across the dark, bleak plain before them. Winds wound down into the blackest cracks and soared up over the buttes—puckered with holes like coral—atop which lanky beasts called. Thackery wouldn’t call those creatures wolves, because they trilled as birds did. He preferred not knowing their species. Likewise, the black, scuttling pools here and there inspired only horror in him, especially when he realized these stains on the sand were great clacking swarms of insects.

  “We should avoid those carrion creatures,” boomed Caenith from behind him; he must have returned to his man-skin during Thackery’s gawking. Without bothering to dress himself, the nude giant strode barefoot across the rough desert toward the base of the nearest butte. It was a ways off, and Caenith soon turned and picked up Morigan. In his arms, she struggled against sleep. Thackery, bemused, watched the Wolf’s head nod as well, although Caenith regularly shook it to ward off this sympathetic fatigue. That man was never fatigued. A run and swim around the circumference of Geadhain wouldn’t tire him. How close they have grown. They are almost one being now, thought the sage.

  Under a dusted plate held up by stones, they made their camp. The space wasn’t quite a cave, but it could accommodate all four of them. Familiar with the Wolf’s behavior in times of pursuit, Thackery knew they wouldn’t rest for long—he’d better make the most of it. The Wolf left them and shortly returned with a curious lizard as large as a doe and covered in brown feathers. They skinned and ate the creature raw. Gulps from their increasingly flat waterskins helped to wash down the bitter, gamey meat. Adam gnawed on what bloody bones were left, appearing content to remain as an animal. Without Mouse around, perhaps he sees no reason to be a man, Thackery thought.

  After dinner, the Wolf exercised some civility and put on what for him constituted clothes. Usually, there would be a fire, tales, and laughter, but tonight there was only the threnody of wind through the wastes. Morigan commented on the dreariness. “A cold night. A dark night. I miss our companions.” Adam dropped the bone on which he chewed to whimper, then laid his head down. “I wish we had a fire,” she added.

  “There is no wood in this dry land with which to make one, my Fawn.” The Wolf kissed her head, which lay against his chest; he lingered to smell her hair and sweat. He tightened himself around her like a greedy crab. “I shall keep you warm.”

  “A fire would be nice…” mumbled Thackery. Then the thoughts from earlier—magik, Will, age, Pandemonia’s etheric currents, and his having nearly blown himself up—coalesced into inspiration. “That’s it!”

  Morigan glanced over. “What’s what?”

  “I think I can do it,” said the sage. “I believe I may have figured out how to use my magik here.”

  Adam whined his concern.

  The Wolf wasn’t convinced, either. “I recall a lot of fire and smoke when last you attempted to use your sorcery.” Still, the spruce-hint of genius emanated from the sage, so perhaps Thackery was onto something; the Wolf’s nose never lied. “I can tell that you’re determined, all full of sprites and ideas. What did you have in mind?”

  “A demonstration,” said Thackery, clapping.

  “Are you sure this won’t be like the last one?” Morigan warily asked.

  Flashing a bit of pride, Thackery stood and crossed his arms. “I’m a sage and a Thule—no mystery is beyond me. I was reckless last time, though I’ve learned my lesson. Mine is a theory only proved through the act. You’ve carried us so far, Caenith, so many times. Please, allow me to bear my shoulder of the burden on this journey. I am one of the greatest sorcerers in this world, and it’s high time I acted like one.”

  The Wolf raised a hand as if he’d offended his friend. “Go ahead then, element breaker. Outside, preferably with a bit of space between us, though don’t wander so far that we cannot keep an eye on you.”

  Thackery ran from their shelter and into the desert, stopping when the Wolf called for him to do so. Thackery pondered how to begin, his palms sweating, his heart pounding. Youth involved strange chemistry: it made one all excitable, gave one hands that shook and erections that spontaneously formed in the night. Thackery could only imagine what it would have been like had Eean given him still more years. He might once again have become the man who’d broken the ruling class of Menos and run away with a pleasure maiden to live on the outskirts of Alabion. That man had been a rebel, a lover, and a passionate father. There was a certain irony in the fact that he might have fared better in Pandemonia if he were still a doddering sorcerer, a man whose feelings were dull and bitter, rather than the gallant fellow he had once again become.

  Instead of allowing his passions—his fire, his light, his Will—to burst forth, he dwelled on tranquil scenes. He envisioned babbling brooks. He thought of a sleepy-eyed read through a long, slightly boring novel. He even recalled how he had labored to cut back the growth that had snarled the site where he and Bethany had built their home. But he resisted further thoughts of Bethany, as they might conjure a magik too pure and strong, causing Pandemonia’s wild currents to ignite like a river of oil. Thackery needed to blend creativity with dutiful devotion. He needed the calm and concentration of a master smith hammering at his anvil. As Thackery contemplated all these productive, slow, utilitarian exercises, he let his magik hiss out of him in measured, small steps that would eventually allow him to make the climb.

  After watching the sorcerer stand still for many sands while making tranquil faces, the Wolf finally smelled the sulfur of his magik. He heard a hiss, and then from the man shone a weak, pale light like that of a lamp under lace. Thackery moved his hands. The Wolf clenched and held his Fawn, for this was the moment when something might explode. Yet the light dimmed away, bringing with it no disaster. During the invocation, Thackery’s hands had come together, and they now held an object of trapped brightness. Beaming as he returned to the rock shelter, Thackery revealed what he clasped. In his palms lay a twisting complexity of points and whorls and radiance—a subdued light, like that of a tired star. He bowed and offered it to Morigan. “A light for you, as you requested, my daughter.”

  Morigan took the tingling star and kissed the hands that offered it. She and her Wolf curled up together and slept. They dreamed of racing through meteor showers. They dreamed of howling together at halos of green suns that dawned over the hemispheres of strange planets. They dreamed of freedom and love and all that they would hunt, once their quest was over.

  III

  Morigan and the Wolf awoke before dawn was even an orange thought in the sky. Morning seemed as heavy and slow in rising as were they. Even the Wolf found himself more tired than usual, and he suspected his union with the Fawn was the cause. By dreaming together, they were crossing the borders—the last border—that separated them. They were never apart now. For a man so accustomed to his ways, his wants, and his needs, the Wolf was quite complacent about this usurping of what he defined as self.

  We are changing into something new each day, my Fawn, he mind-whispered. Then he kissed, pawed at, and rolled with her while they were still drugged by sleep. Adam wagged his tale at the randiness. Finally, Thackery made a few ah-hems before anything too untoward occurred, and Caenith roared his way into his bestial shape. Once packed, and while braiding grips in the Wolf’s fur, Thackery made a playful jibe about having Caenith fitted for a proper mount and bridle, to which the lord of Fang and Claw responded only with a ferocious growl.

  They left while the sky was still painted black, and raced until the gold strokes of noon came. By then, they had cleared the sands and reached greener pastures. Here, the travelers dismounted and hiked up kno
lls that were dressed in gowns of moss and bonneted with flowers. Morigan, already sore from another day of clinging, reminisced about the ease with which she’d ridden her mate in Dream; they might have to seriously consider Thackery’s harness suggestion if this sort of travel continued. The steep hillsides were more treacherous than they appeared, and the land’s delicate green skin often ripped off, causing Morigan and Thackery to stumble. They were never harmed, though, for the Wolf and Adam stayed in their four-legged forms and nudged their less able companions along like a pair of sheepdogs.

  When the sun reached its zenith, the land stewed in a haze and nattered with life. Choruses of crickets made the loudest song, though they were often silenced by the springing, hissing lizards that leaped from rock to rock and ate the noisy carolers. Sometime into the afternoon, Morigan kicked over a rock and surprised a bed of wild cockroaches, little monsters with purple antennae. The insects were pretty until they shrieked like terrified persons and scattered. Morigan shrieked as well. Because of the density and humidity of the air, it felt as if the four climbed a mountain. They gradually headed upward; this land of many hills sloped only one way. Farther off, the land appeared to crest, then drop, into a shady emerald pit. Quite a lot of noise and scent welled up out of that valley: howls, musk, mushroom-fragrant earth. Most of it troubled the Wolf. Moreth had warned them against traversing any forests, especially the dense and primal ones, but Eatoth lay on the other side of this valley. They had no choice.

  They reached the lip of the valley and stared down into a milky green sea of unclassifiable conifers and flat-leafed giants. Little could be seen of what lay below the forest’s roof, even by the Wolf. It all felt too dense, thick, and entangling to the hunter. On the other side of the towering morass, the trees suddenly disappeared, defeated by a scrubland, whose yellow nothingness ruled until it reached a dot on the horizon. A shining dot; a bead of glass. They could all see it, wolf-blooded or not.

  “Eatoth,” said Thackery.

  A breeze that only Morigan could feel whipped in from the east and slapped her in the face. Smarting, she closed her eyes—

  And opens them to beauty, to a glimmering city of crystal, mist, and water. So much majesty cannot be taken in quickly. Beholding Eatoth is like staring into a glass ornament on a sunny day. She is dazzled and blinded. Then clouds descend, bringing a hungry darkness that rumbles. The slender glass buildings weave and wax from yellow, to gold, then to a furious red. She knows that the towers will fall, that a cacophonous shattering will soon begin.

  “We have to hurry,” said Morigan, and began hiking down into the trees. “Brutus is nearly there. They’re all going to die.”

  The four descended into the chattering emerald dark.

  IV

  Feeling both dread and wonder, they slowly explored the new land. Here, trees grew as wide apart as a giant’s legs, the rainforest dew collected in deep black pools that swam with spiny-backed shapes, and nets of corded moss fell from the overgrown canopy. They could not see the treetops. Sunlight trickled through as a jaundiced glow. The yellow dusk conjured long shadows, and while there was space to walk in the great paths between the trees, the dimness created haunting illusions. The four could see deep into the woods, but never far enough. Every path looked the same. Creatures haunted the heights of the trees. Even the changelings received only vague impressions of the beasts that swung from vine to vine above: lean, glistening, covered in protrusions. Once, these tree-dwellers threw down the steaming fresh carcass of a wild beast and screeched.

  Morigan and Thackery held hands and walked together, the great Wolf at their fore and the smaller wolf at their back. Their pride and fearlessness must have shone brighter than the lights Thackery conjured for himself and his adoptive daughter, for the tree-dwellers’ shadows eventually ceased passing overhead. Or perhaps we’ve simply moved into the lair of a more frightful beast, thought Thackery with a gulp. He noticed something white tangled in the hanging lattice of the forest—surely it was a bone. For Thackery, it evoked nauseating memories of a spider-filled tomb in Alabion.

  Further inspection revealed it was poking out of a dried corpse—one of the tree-dwellers, the Wolf determined. The body appeared humanoid, though it had spines on its shoulders, and its limbs were as long as an ape’s. Otherwise, the corpse resembled a man left to become jerky in the sizzling sun of Kor’Keth. What features it might once have possessed had shriveled upon its skull, but its teeth remained, their sharpness accented by the corpse’s grin. Looking carefully up and around, they found several more tree-dweller corpses. The Wolf sensed there was an order, a biological meaning and precision to this pattern; it reminded him of a spider’s web. He didn’t believe that spiders were the cause of it, though, as the bodies appeared to have been dried through a natural process of decay, not drained of juices.

  TCH-TCH-TCH-TCH-TCH-TCH.

  Soft and sinister came the tapping, clacking sounds. Brows knotted with worry, the four looked at each other. Some horrible beast or danger lay ahead, a presence dark enough to scare off the pests in the treetops. Thackery snuffed out the small star he held, then wandered over to a hedge and snapped off a long gnarled piece of wood that would serve as a staff—the kind an ancient sorcerer in a tale would wield. More chittering swirled through the dark, and the tension grew suffocating.

  Trying his best to ignore the noise, Thackery focused on his magik. After he had carefully dusted the moss and dirt off his stave, he coaxed his sorcery into the wood. He thought of an oceanfront, calm and bleached by the sun. He could almost feel a soft breeze upon his cheeks. The songs of the phantom gulls made him smile; he much preferred them to the escalating chatter in the real world. Instead of releasing his magik all at once, he Willed a fragment of the radiance and purity of that scene into the wood with each pass of his hand. After several sands, a golden-white light fluttered to life inside the staff. Thackery then stirred from his trance and found the Wolf, once again a man, staring at him.

  “A sound idea,” said the Wolf. He recalled what Thackery had been able to do with a stick of magik and thunder back in the Iron Mines. “We may well be needing your power soon. I could race us through these woods, but I would rather not leave any of us exposed and unprotected.” He sniffed and then sneezed as he inhaled the staggering spice of loam mixed with an astringent musk. He could hear the shifting and clatter of chitin. However, he still saw nothing in the trees or in the green webbing between them that might cause such disturbances. My eyes cannot find what I know to be out there. What is it, my Fawn? What do you see?

  For Morigan held onto her star with a carelessness that would soon cause it to drop. She stared up and out into the woods. She peered and peered, feeling something but not able to see it clearly. She had a sense that horrific things surrounded them: scuttling, clinging shapes, with parts bent and wriggling—tentacles or unnaturally flexible limbs. The shapes hung somewhere in the arboreal ceiling; they tricked her eyes and could only be spotted in the corners of her vision. Each time she whipped her head around to follow a movement, the creatures seemed to vanish. “Things,” she whispered, and the company drew close. “Large and prowling above. Not spiders, for they’re too limber. Not men, either, for they’re too odd. I cannot see them, my Wolf. They deny both your senses and mine.”

  “Invisible?” hissed Thackery.

  “Intangible,” replied Morigan. “I would say they exist somewhere between this world and Dream.”

  “These bodies are certainly real enough,” said Thackery, aiming his bright staff toward the tree webs and revealing wall upon wall of webs dangling with dried corpses. They would have to either turn back or pass through them. The Wolf was done with stalling and made the necessary decision. Onward, he strode. The others followed.

  They pressed forward until they could no longer skirt around trees or find creative paths under the webbing. The Wolf confronted the barrier they could not avoid and then tested it, finding it stronger and more elastic than he’d anticipated.
Mustering his strength, he ripped through it, and desiccated body parts rained down upon him. For a moment, he wrestled in corpses and tacky threads. Nonetheless, a hole had been made, and the four moved through it. Although the invisible lurkers clicked their displeasure, the things latched onto trees did not assault them. Perhaps Thackery’s golden staff, which pulsed brighter from his fear, kept them at bay; or perhaps it was the huffing, sweating, grumbling Wolf, whom no beast had yet tangled with and lived, or the woman whose eyes gleamed silver and whose figure blurred as though it, too, could remove itself from sight. Adam remained close to his pack, growling.

  They journeyed for a time, making holes, becoming slick with sweat, moving deeper and deeper into a giant cradle of mossy strings. The tangle showed no signs of lessening, and the stir and nattering of the lurkers above didn’t abate. Indeed, the land seemed to be doing its best to confine the travelers, to suffocate them with the dewy soupiness of the air, to make their bodies fail from all the squirming and exertion needed to move but a few paces. However, they would not be beaten. They’d braved the Pitch Dark, and this trek through strange woodland was a summer stroll by comparison.

  In time, their efforts were rewarded. Lesser creatures faced extinction farther into the city of webs. They neither heard nor saw any of Pandemonia’s unique avian life, and the scattering of tree-dweller remains above them dwindled until it vanished entirely. A chilling calm befell the woods. Flowers, verdure, and moss became scarce upon trees and shrubs. Every now and then, a dashing, furry thing popped out and then disappeared in a brown streak. The four wandered through colonnades of trees without many leaves or needles—plants, spotty and stripped, like animals with mange. Moonlight dripped into the woods, though it was hindered by the ornate tapestries of emerald vomit strung about. The webbing now hung higher up, meaning they could at least cease their hunching and begin to walk upright.