Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3)

by Christian A. Brown

  A haunting species of ebon moth with golden patterns on its wings proved the changeling’s next distraction from the hunt. He chased a living cloud of them for a time, all the way to one of the strangled, solitary, jarringly ugly trees that grew on this plain. The damned moths moved as fast as hummingbirds, and he couldn’t catch even one. Vexed, he called out, “Please, I only want to see your wings of sunshine and night. They are so beautiful. If only you would stop and let me look.”

  The cloud of fluttering, sparkling things paused, hovering. Adam walked into the shade of the tree, feeling a little cautious, but still mostly giddy from the thrill of having hands instead of paws. He used his hands to reach up into the moth-cloud, and then used his voice of man to praise the beautiful creatures as they tickled his fingers and palms like faeries of cotton and static.

  “Thank you, my friends. You are beautiful.” Adam smiled and spun like a silly child in a rainstorm, letting the insects fly around him. “Go on then,” he said finally. “You’ve entertained me enough, and your lives are short.”

  Absorbed in his frivolity, it did not strike him as strange that the cloud obeyed, although it probably should have. I must hunt, he suddenly remembered, and raced off to tend to that demand. Thackery would surely be hungry by now.

  However, he soon found another diversion when a herd of loping mammals appeared on the plain. Adam darted to a rocky throne of the land, climbed it, and watched the herd. Although the creatures were merely shadows with long legs and huge strides, he felt they would be as soft and gentle as the night moths he’d recently met. Adam considered hunting them, but then thought better of it. There were dozens of them, and they moved as a pack—they were a family, and families should never be broken apart. It wasn’t like the aborted cray-squids, which he also now regretted eating; even if he wasn’t sure whence that regret came—the repercussions of his act, or the act itself. He heard a lone chortling creature, perhaps blood relative to a hog or quill-beast, snuffling on the grassy knoll below him. It sounded old and tired. Ready to die.

  Adam’s sentimentality surrendered to his instincts, and the wolf reigned for a spell. A red haze fell over his sight; when it had dispersed, he found himself in a shady dip in the land, on his knees, pinning a bleeding porcine beast down with his still half-clawed hands. It squealed in terror, not quite dead despite the brutal tears on its belly and throat. Its watering, rolling black eyes found him.

  “Preeease…” the creature wheezed. “No die. No kill.”

  Adam shook his head. He was hearing things.

  “No die. No kill.”

  Or perhaps he’d gone mad. The wolf in his spirit seized control once more, making the decision the man would not. Adam’s claws ended the creature with quick, deep slashes.

  As his bestial self subsided, the smell of blood and sweet perfume of his kill sickened him. Adam turned into the grass and heaved. Afterward, he staggered up, unable to look at the steaming corpse. Preeease…Preeease—the words seemed to echo. Adam slapped his face and chest to dispel the insanity. It worked for the moment, and he cautiously prowled around the carcass.

  Adam assumed his sentimentality had tricked him. There were downsides to being a two-legs and to pretending he wasn’t an animal. It was known that repressing the beast within could have consequences, though he’d never heard of anything as bizarre as hearing one’s kill plead. Quite puzzled, Adam arrived back at the campsite with a vacant expression on his face. Thackery noticed the young man’s detachment. Concerned, he stopped poking the flames with his glowing staff, stood up, and went over to his friend. The changeling was greased in clammy sweat. “You look a bit haunted,” said Thackery. He peered into the night. “Something out there?”

  I think I spoke with butterflies, and then a boar begged me not to slay it, Adam replied in his head. To Thackery, he gave a less-complicated response. “Pandemonia,” he replied. “Strange.”

  “I’ll say,” replied Thackery.

  Thackery watched the young man drag his kill to the fire and was surprised when he left it there, making no move to eat. Instead, he walked over to the pool and washed the blood from his hands. Scoured the blood, rather. Thackery was familiar with the sneers and pinched eyes brought on by self-disgust: Adam appeared to have mastered the expression.

  IX

  RETURN OF THE QUEEN

  I

  Following a single path forward down the great gullet of the lordvessel seemed the only way to go—Lila and Erik needed to find an engine room, or whatever passed for one, on the ancient Menosian warship Abagail had given them. It was hard for them not to fall to distraction and wonder at the simplicity of the design: the dark, hollow cavern, arced and strutted in feliron ribs. Along the ribs gleamed dead metal gaslights, which Lila lit with her magik every so often so that she could see in the dark.

  Erik had no such difficulty with the shadows, but it pleased him to see how golden her magik was once more. Many cross-handled portals led from the interior. Erik opened a few, and they peeked into dustless metal quarters with bunks built into the walls—slots for bodies similar to those found in a mausoleum. The lordvessel seemed to defy every rule of shipbuilding he knew. It had been constructed to impose itself, not to conform. It was a wonder, as well, that ancient Menos had birthed such technomagik. Erik wondered, though, whether ancient shipwrights and technomancers had been wholly responsible for the lordvessel’s advances. With his new senses, he could smell something under the tons and tons of feliron and salt—a reek older than feliron, a hint of something bloody and sour. Erik couldn’t place the faded scent; his instincts told him only that it might be otherworldly. Erik mentioned this to his queen.

  “A smell, you say?” she replied. “Older than Menos? That is indeed very strange.”

  “Aye. It could be that this ingenuity was not entirely the result of Iron minds. I cannot explain it, my queen; I am filled with sights, sounds, and smells that I have yet to understand. Some of these are more like impressions: it is as if I can see, hear, and taste secrets. I know many things about nature that a man should never know.”

  “The Fuilimean changes us, Erik, in ways we can’t even imagine.” Lila felt stronger, more secure, with his obsidian bedrock of support inside of her, but she retained her sense of self. I don’t need a man who will change me drastically—only one who makes me a better version of myself.

  “I believe that I do,” whispered Erik, having heard her thoughts. Erik slipped his hand around her waist and spun her around for a kiss—not taking, but waiting until she pressed her lips to his.

  You do. Lila smiled and kissed him.

  The lordvessel was long, and they took their time exploring it. More than once, they stopped to entertain their lust. Although they shivered with arousal, Erik did not once slip his dark sword inside her. They’d discovered they didn’t always need to engage in the physical act of sex in order to experience euphoria. As they exchanged spit and touches once more, Lila found herself swimming in the cold, gray ocean of her lover’s spirit. She’d never been this intimate with Magnus; with him, there’d always been a wall in his heart beyond which she could not penetrate, beyond which Brutus lurked. Erik, for his part, found himself floating in fantasies—of running through swards aglow with sunlight, of chasing a wind spiced with Lila’s apple and brandy scent. Intoxicated by each other’s passion, they faded from the world and stumbled about the ship. Eventually, they came up against an unyielding table, sprawled on top of it, and laughed.

  “My knight, we need to remember our duty,” she said, caressing his pouting face. “Our great duty. We have a secret of all secrets to deliver to Elissandra. The lives in Eod depend on our level heads.”

  “I am sorry, my queen. I have wanted to taste this all of my life. I have now been given more of a feast than any man could eat.” Erik kissed her, and the shadow of him surged within her, driving as hard as the meat against her leg. I shall try to have my fill. I shall eat and eat your beauty…When there is time.

&nb
sp; Erik assisted his queen from the table. They had blundered into a dining area; the hall had veered abruptly, and they were now in the heights of the hull. Across the room stood many tables and benches that seemed made of some stretched mucous-like metal that resembled black putty or wax. The furniture’s eerie style extinguished some of Lila’s passion. Again, she thought of Erik’s suspicion that a culture older than Menos had inspired these designs. Hand in hand, they walked across the deserted hall, imagining the place once again filled with fierce, black-armored men gobbling gruel.

  In Erik, the vision created a sense of confinement and suffering. Strange as it seemed, he felt as if he could smell misery—stale, foul sweat, and the salt of tears. On the other side of the feasting hall was another throat of metal, ready to swallow them. Through that passage, toward the tip of the hull, was where Lila felt compelled to go. They passed more portals, Erik sniffing as the ozone-and-matchstick scent of magik intensified. Lila lit fewer lights now. It seemed as if they had been walking through the engulfing darkness for an hourglass, though surely it hadn’t been that long; likely the feeling was the result of claustrophobia induced by the steadily lowering roof.

  Finally, they came to an archway, an end to the road. They hurried inside, and Lila lifted her arms and threw her Will at the clotted shadows. A shimmering dust of golden stars flew like powder from her hands, dusting the walls, ceiling, and floor of the chamber. The pulsating yellow light unveiled the ancient deck of command that had been built into the bow of the ship.

  Little could be seen in the chamber except for a sudden pyramid of steps that led to a dais upon which stood a single, thorny chair. On one side, the platform curled up into a skinned arm of black metal—all sinewy cables—the hand of which clutched an eye of crystal. With a glittering wink, the orb refracted the light Lila had summoned. Whatever sorcery the orb had originally been imbued with had not faded through the years, and it called to her.

  Touch me. Command me, it said in an intimate whisper almost like that of a bloodmate. As he was bound to his queen, Erik sensed this gravity, this force that drew her. A hand always upon her, Erik followed his queen up the steps. Once they’d reached the small circular summit, Lila stood between the throne and the sphere and gazed deeply into the latter. Erik cared for neither relic. Sickly sweet sin wafted from the cruel and twisted iron throne, while the orb crackled with invisible power. As Erik stared at the orb, he was reminded of a glass skull as mist eddied within, forming nose and eye sockets, and little shadows for teeth.

  Lila resisted touching the surface of the crystal, though it pulled at her hand like a magnet would metal. She wandered over to the throne and drew a finger over its barbed-wire twists, wondering how a person could sit on such a contraption; he would have to be wrapped in similarly evil skin, she supposed. She would stand to pilot the vessel, and Erik would be her moorings. She turned to face the orb. Feeling her intention, Erik moved into position behind his queen. Erik braced his legs and held her waist.

  “Someone sitting there,” she said, nodding at the throne, “would command the orb with his or her mind. It desires to be used, that orb, as if it were a living man. It wants me to touch it. I wonder how such a thing was ever made.”

  From somewhere in the room, perhaps the orb, Erik thought he heard a noise other than the gentle groaning of the lordvessel. A heartbeat, perhaps—one that was not theirs. “Living, yes,” he said. “Although it must have a cursed kind of life, the life of a reborn.”

  Lila sighed. “Are you ready, my knight?”

  He was, and she felt his eagerness. She leaned against the hard rock of her bloodmate, forgetting the body he so tightly held, and extended her Will to the unliving, cursed presence in the orb. Throughout the chamber, the radiance she had cast flickered, and Lila slumped. When she touched the presence within the sphere, it pulled her spirit from her flesh and threw her up through the ceiling to the jagged deck of the lordvessel. There, she hovered as a white-fringed cloud of vision. In this form, she could see anything she wanted, things that would not have been visible to her eyes, or even to Erik’s. She could somehow see in many places at once, as if she were a gemstone and her beveled edges were windows showing everything above, beneath, and behind. Although she was having difficulty reconciling these various panes of sight, the Mind, the presence of the sphere, welcomed her.

  Greetings, Navigator, said the Mind.

  She was too stunned to reply; too many wonders were emerging at once. The voice echoed in her head like that of a second bloodmate and immediately filled it with technical information. The Mind whispered, There are seven female organisms of bipedal standing gathered at the prow of the ship; it must mean women. It then mentioned that a portal was ajar, and offered to close it if she had no objection. She made no response, because she continued to reel. In one of her many panes of perception, she had a vision of the black outer hull of the ship: its feliron was running wet, softening, and sealing itself over like melting wax. Wind power density, wave speed, temperature, and forecasting data whirled in her mind in a confusing burble, but the Mind soon quieted the storm and began dispensing the information to the slower neurons of its host one drip at a time.

  Erik hadn’t been terribly concerned thus far, because he could feel his bloodmate’s calm and awe, but suddenly her body rose up in his arms. Her consciousness, though, was still elsewhere, chatting with the strange, busy thing: perhaps there was no cause for alarm. The ship then lurched without warning, giving him no time to further contemplate this uninvited stranger. What power the ancient lordvessel had—a strength the Straits of Wrath would rue. Like a black sword, the lordvessel tore ahead. Erik trembled from the might of the technomagikal engine that rumbled through the metal. He trembled, too, with excitement and rage as he thought of where they were headed: to Eod. Magnus would pay for what he’d done to Lila, and now Erik had the power to punish him.

  II

  After the ship had lurched away from the dock, actually shaking the stone and nearly tipping Sister Abagail into the water, it sped out of the underground port. Time and rising sea level had shrunk the once-great cave leading out of the harborage, but the lordvessel would brook no opposition: it simply burrowed a new tunnel through the rock. The citizens of the city above, still recovering from the bloodmate’s rampage, were set to screaming again by this second terror. The Mind told Lila, though, that none of the Sisters of Celcita had been harmed, and that the resulting tremors would neither seriously damage property nor bring about any loss of life.

  From there, the lordvessel struck open sea and turned on a skate’s edge toward the black rock towers and storming skies of the Straits; how swiftly it could maneuver its bulk! From her metaphysical all-seeing crow’s nest, Lila watched the black towers draw nearer and form jutting fingers, spears, and islands of the darkest rock. Any wooden or normal metal boat would have shattered like a toy there. In a speck, the lordvessel was upon the dangerous rubble and testing its hull against it. Erik noticed a few bumps, but nothing else: the ancient rocks that had claimed so many lives were ground to pebbles and swallowed by ravenous whirlpools of water. Nothing could stop the lordvessel, it seemed.

  Neither the glowering thunderheads nor the screaming sheets of rain obscured Lila’s vision in the nest. Indeed, the eyes of the lordvessel—now her eyes—pierced the maelstrom and revealed every sunken island razor-backed in stalactites, every black mast and ship’s skeleton floating in the path of the lordvessel. The Mind steered the lordvessel away from the worst of these obstructions, and the ship’s feliron bulkhead simply ploughed through the others.

  As they sailed, the Mind continued to play second captain to Lila. It would relay a new piece of information to the queen every so many specks. The delivery of the statistics was timed to perfection: the Mind never overloaded her with thoughts, as if it had somehow measured the pace at which her cortex could accept information. It must also have read in her their destination, for they were headed south and east. Even as Lila contemplat
ed the possibility of an error in charting, the Mind whispered that they would be arriving on Baldringer’s Point, at the southwest shore of Meadowvale, in approximately six hourglasses.

  The more sands Lila spent in the crow’s nest with the diligent, diagnostic presence, the more convinced she became of its benevolence. Not all products of Menos were bred from evil; perhaps this creation was merely another slave to the Iron Will. It certainly aimed to please her, in much the same way that a hunting dog would—with unwavering obedience. She regretted that the Mind, having just had its first contact with a master and a mission in centuries, would once again be lonely when they parted. Sitting there, waiting to be touched for another thousand years…She was being absurd, and she stopped herself. She resumed studying the glowing veins in the terrible thunderclouds, and scanning the shearing horizon for a land that was green instead of black and blue. What could make a land so tortured?

  The cataclysm, said the Mind, which listened.

  Pardon? Lila didn’t feel intruded upon, only surprised.

  North, south, east, and west were all connected, Navigator. In a time before your body’s cessation of age.

  She wondered how it knew so much about her makeup, including her immortality, but she was more intrigued by the cataclysm of which it spoke. Please explain. What cataclysm? I don’t remember hearing anything of this history.

  The Mind went quiet as it unearthed old data, and Lila was left with the howling rain. A few specks later, it returned to her. P.E. Zero. Landmass fractured by impact of meteorological phenomenon. Many primitive cultures and species on the geostratic surface eradicated. Twenty thousand years after impact, the four great ages end.

  P.E. Zero? Four great ages? A meteorological catastrophe that split the lands of Geadhain? Neither Magnus nor her studies of history had taught her anything of the sort. The Mind detected her confusion and, quick to serve her, fished for additional data. Efficiently and in a matter of specks, it processed and collated its information into a single explanation. Primogenal Era, abbreviated to consonant “P” and vowel “E.” Counted backward from an unspecified date—the origin of the world—to arrive at point zero, when the impact and the birth of the second era occurred. Chronological classifications thereafter may be confusing for you, Navigator, as I see that you adhere to the calendar of the West and count your sands by the A.E—After Eod—system. P.E. Year Zero occurred long before such measurements had been implemented by your preferred culture. Iron Sages theorize that an enflamed mass at least as large as a mountaintop struck the southeastern hemisphere of the world. The impact resulted in massive tectonic shifts, an underwater bleed of magma that formed rivers, seas, and oceans, as well as a swelling of clouds of ash that blocked out the sun. Iron Sages refer to this as the Age of Fire. Very little sentient life survived the P.E. Year Zero impact, and at first, evolutionary and cultural progress was impossible in such a hostile environment. It has, though, been suggested that the Immortals lived through this period, albeit as tribal wanderers, and I see from the images stored in your memory banks about your former mate’s trials through these Great Ages that this is true. Thank you for this information of your time in the Hall of Memories; I have added it to my repository. After P.E. Year Zero, uncountable geological, agricultural, and zoological transformations occurred as Geadhain found its balance—periods of excessive cold, saturation, and dryness. I have measured these periods from the millennia after the Age of Fire: each took several thousands of years.