Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3)

by Christian A. Brown

  Now that her sister has been purged, her purification can begin. Earlier, Ankha found her sister in her bedchamber, sobbing loudly, and therefore breaking another commandment. Her soul was in need of so much redemption. Amunai refused to leave her bloody sheets or the clot of jelly she cupped and had decided was her child. They gagged and bound her. They dragged her away. Since then, Amunai has not been in need of sedatives. She is calm, because she has been destroyed. Ankha believes that the worst of the talisman’s enchantment ended when she snatched it from her sister’s neck. Ankha decided that her sister must have been bespelled, somehow, to have fallen so low. Now Amunai wobbles on her feet and stares catatonically while Ankha punishes the inciter of all this sin: the tempter himself.

  Although she considered taking his manhood for his crime of savaging a virgin Keeper, she has decided that his tongue has caused more damage. That is what she cuts out while his jaw is pried open with a steel joist. He weeps and screams the most animal noises she’s ever heard. However, darkness reigns in Ankha’s mind throughout the wicked surgery, and she feels no mercy. Not until she holds the still-squirming lump of spastic muscle in her hands, not until her sister suddenly wakes and begins screaming behind the rags stuffed in her mouth, does Ankha fully realize what she has done. She can find no explanation for the blood on her hands, or for her lurching nausea.

  She’d planned to rip off the tempter’s talisman, as well as her sister’s, but at the moment she cannot look at his glistening, bloody chest without bile filling her throat and nose. Has she not done only what was necessary? What would Isith’s or Teskatekmet’s choice have been? Surely, either tyrant would have decided on a crueler fate. But answers force themselves into her mind. My sister. I’ve killed my sister’s child. I am a child. Who am I? I’ve cut out her lover’s tongue. I am a Keeper. I am a monster. I am bound in duty. I am angry that she chose him over me. I am alone. I am nothing. What have I done?

  The thoughts are a storm that will not be quieted. To banish her horror at herself, she casts away the evidence of her evil: she orders the mangled prisoners removed from her sight. The disgraced warrior of Aesorath is to be thrown out into Pandemonia, to live or die among the Amakri. He will never again poison another with his tongue. Mercy, the twisted keeper tells herself: this is mercy. Amunai, still wailing, is brought to Aesorath’s bleakest depths. There she will contemplate her acts in darkness.

  It is there that darkness itself will find the fallen Keeper. For in that sensory-deprived torment, a hollow of absolute black, Amunai will reach out to the only being more despicable than what has happened to her. She will call out to the one that feasts upon depravity: the Black Queen. As the Dream crumbles, Morigan reels and is brought into a filthy, lightless pit—a horrid place crawling with flies and spiders. There, a rocking, haggard woman—Amunai—shrieks and bashes her head against the roach-skittering floor. The drumming of her cracking skull, the potency of her grief, and the spattering patterns of her blood have become an incantation, a summoning.

  “Blood has been the sacrament. Blood of your body, blood of your child…The wounds in your heart have called me, desolate one. Your sorrow is a feast on which I could fatten myself. What is it that you want? To forget? Accept me into your heart, and I shall eat away the pain but leave the glory of your hate. Your enemies will rue their existence. If they did not fear your voice before, they will now. Your softest whisper will taint hearts and poison dreams, as yours were poisoned by injustice. I shall eat away the weakness of your flesh, and you will be reborn as my child, my Herald, my Voice. The Green Mother and your people have forsaken you. I shall be your whispers. I shall be your mother. Invite me into your heart.”

  Amunai, so wretchedly destroyed, does not take even a speck to contemplate the offer. She smiles for the first time since being cast down into Hell. The rats squeal in a chorus of fear and excitement as she cries, “Yes! Take it. Take it all! Take me!”

  “You monster,” Morigan hissed, casting off the Keeper with a flash of wolfish strength. The waifish woman was thrown hard to the floor. She chose not to recover herself, instead remaining exactly where she’d landed on the stone. A shadow of fury, Morigan stood over her in a speck. “Why? What did you do? Feed her one of her own fruits? Those that she grew for love? For you? Speak for your crimes!” roared Morigan, and kicked the woman in the ribs.

  “My Fawn! Hold!” Caenith restrained her.

  Caring no more for the decorum of silence, Morigan spat her words. “She poisoned her own sister. She destroyed Amunai’s unborn child. She mauled and exiled Amunai’s lover. I can see why Amunai surrendered to the Black Queen. If I were so forlorn, I, too, might find that darkness tempting.”

  While she spoke, the bees delivered some of the pollen of her journey into the mind of her bloodmate. The atrocities that the Wolf saw repulsed him. If Morigan decided to kick the Keeper again, he would not stop her. He might even offer a kick of his own. Still, as a frequent observer of the failings of mortals, he understood what had driven the Keepers, each of them, to madness. The one before him was nothing but a horribly beaten child, in both mind and body. For the leader of a nation of vast power and wisdom, she had little of either. She was a figurehead, confined to a tower, and left to ponder the emptiness of her being for hundreds upon hundreds of years. Ankha surely thought of her sister, had spent an eternity nursing the painful secret scars she had borne since Intomitath. Ankha’s innocence had been flogged from her flesh long before she ever visited Aesorath. What should have been a homecoming, what could have been a rekindling of a flame of sisterly love and hope, had instead become yet another rejection.

  Once Morigan had recovered herself, the Wolf, with a shade more civility—although no more kindness—than his bloodmate, picked the Keeper up and helped her to hobble over to her torn settee.

  Thank you, mind-whispered the Keeper. On the edge of the ripped-up furniture, she sat down upon her hands, refusing to look at the great shadow.

  “Do not think me merciful or forgiving,” warned the Wolf. “An animal that harms its own pack is deplorable. You are deplorable. A person should be hardened by their trials. A champion rises when he is knocked to the ground. You only fell further. You must summon our companions, real champions, to your sanctum, as quickly as possible. We shall need all of our strength to defend you and the arkstone.”

  Defend me? I am in no danger.

  “Foolish creature,” he replied, all white, snarling teeth. “Do you think your justice will not come? For what do you think your sister bargained with the darkest force in creation? Your doom. Her vengeance. Brutus comes for the stone. Amunai, however, comes for you.”

  XVI

  THE DESCENT

  I

  “Should you be playing with that?” asked Talwyn, looking at the knife that Mouse held, which glinted dully in the misted sun. He’d been watching her like a hawk, curious to understand the mechanism by which an unassuming piece of metal could be made to spontaneously swallow several tents in a maelstrom of white fire. What a blessing that no one had been hurt and that the tents had been abandoned at the time. Mouse and Moreth had emerged from the ashen cloud with a bit of charcoal makeup, but had not been singed or burned. The cards she often played with had also been salvaged from the ruin.

  For most of the morning, Mouse had hung behind the small line of Amakri as she and the warband wove through stone claws and up icy foothills. Now and then, she’d fondled the dagger in its sheath. Finally, she had brought it out and stroked the blade with a thumb while silently mouthing a word of ancient Ghaedic that the scholar construed as Imperatrix. She had explained the destruction back at the encampment: how she’d beseeched Feyhazir for power and this dagger was the result. Pythius readily ignored any of Talwyn’s concerns, thinking of Mouse’s gift as simply another miracle of the divine. Indeed, Pythius and the small band of Doomchasers chosen to delve into the realm of the blood eaters marched on ahead and cast few thoughts toward Mouse, her weapon, or any perils beyond
those of the looming crags of ice on the horizon.

  Talwyn asked again: “Should you be playing with that? Imperatrix, or whatever it’s called.”

  “Shh!” Mouse ripped herself from her stupor and pointed the dagger at him. “I wouldn’t say that word if I were you. Well, maybe you can. I certainly shouldn’t.” She placed the dagger back into its casing. “I don’t suppose you happen to know what it means. Queen, I think, though I’m rather clueless when it comes to Old Ghaedic. There was an image of a queenly woman on the card I’d drawn from my deck before, well, everything exploded. Regardless, it sounds like an unusual name for a weapon.”

  Talwyn chuckled and corrected her. “A magik weapon. And the word translates to Empress, not Queen. My dear, you sound uncertain of what you’ve inherited and of whether or not you even wanted this divine gift.”

  “I’m not certain of much these days, to be honest. I feel as if we’re marching off a cliff with bags over our heads. This plan of Pythius’s: that when the time is right I shall somehow, mystically, guide us deep into the lair of these creatures, like iron to a lodestone…It sounds carelessly grim. I feel as uneasy as when I’d learned that my body had been taken for three days.” She shivered. “Do you think he’ll do that again? Possess me? How else would I lead us? I can’t—I won’t lose myself.”

  Talwyn wasn’t at ease with the plan himself, which had been discussed prior to their separating from the Doomchaser encampment. For last night Pythius—and not Feyhazir’s vessel or that vessel’s guardians—had been visited by a snake of smoke in his dreams. Feyhazir had told the shaman to gather a band of his best warriors and to press on to the Forever Stones, then, when the time was right, his vessel would guide them to the Covenant. Faith. It seemed they were operating on blind faith, which no one from Mouse’s side of Geadhain possessed; especially as they’d seen how the Dreamers treated their flocks—very much like sheep or cattle. Realizing something should be said to dispel Mouse’s dark disposition as she walked along, kicking snow, Talwyn said: “It’ll be different this time. I know it. Call it a hunch. Our aims and the Dreamer’s aims are aligned. There’s no need for him to assume control over your body. When the time comes—however you sense these things—let him know you’ll serve him, we’ll serve him.”

  “I suppose I could try that,” she replied.

  Moreth, who walked beside Mouse and had spent all morning in gray silence, now broke his glumness with a small laugh. “I’m glad all this business with magik daggers and possession is settled. We are entering into the realm of the blood eaters.” He pointed somewhere just below the flinty crags looming over the foothills. The companions would have to climb a little more to see the land as it opened, then dropped and hollowed into a grand frozen basin. They paused as the Doomchasers tried to make sense of the prickled and snow-muffled land, akin to a valley of spears with weathered banners and battlements all crumbling and rendered in white. Farther still, a waterfall of shadow poured from the lipped crags at the base of the titanic Forever Stones—a foothill within a foothill, one that looked as if it could be climbed only by giants. Muted by the mountains’ grandeur in that lower valley of darkness lay a field of taller points and half-tumbled cylinders that seemed too smooth, too white to be natural obelisks. Even from an extraordinary distance away, that nest of shattered ivory called to them. It radiated in the dark, seeming to promise both mystery and danger. Snowflakes lingered in amorphous clouds on the scenery and tricked the eye into seeing vestigial shapes that were not there. Ghosts. The queer hints of symmetry and construction suggested it had been a city, and a grand one. If so, how long ago? Mouse wondered.

  After a quick exchange with Pythius, Talwyn clarified the lay of the land for his fellows, telling a tale Moreth had once heard from the Slave. “Pythius calls this Fantasmoch, the City of Ghosts. Once, after surviving a great disaster, the Lakpoli and Amakri—at that time, one tribe and not two—lived here. The bones of their civilization have stood as long as all the other stones in this region. Winter, spring, summer, and fall may come and go, but these ruins remain.”

  Mouse huddled in her cloak as a rough gust of wind blasted the desolate escarpment like a shrieking voice. “I thought that the Lakpoli and Amakri hated one another.”

  “They do,” replied Talwyn. “However, there was a time, before the great cities were founded, when they had not yet decided to live apart. As Pandemonia is, well, Pandemonia, there were few places with the necessary terra firma upon which any lasting civilization could be erected. The Forever Stones were one such place, and here Pandemonia’s various tribes flourished and developed the rudiments of magik, law, and life. The era of this culture is spoken of by Pythius with reverence. He claims it was an age of miracles, brought on by the wisdom gifted to the people by Feyhazir when last he walked these lands. Many incredible and ancient magiks were conceived in this realm. I wonder if any remain…”

  “What happened?” asked Mouse, knowing the answer would be grim.

  Moreth interjected. He swept his eyes over the scene as he orated. “A schism occurred. When I heard the tale, I was told of the wisdom brought by the Wanderer—the Dreamer who travels with us now, I assume. The Wanderer’s wisdom showed the people of Pandemonia how to create fire, how to craft stone, sculpt water, and sing to the earth with their Wills—miracles similar to those generated by the runoff energy of four artifacts of incredible power. Wonderstones, a mother lode of the elements. Arkstones. However, the miracles of these arkstones came and went as capriciously as the Green Mother’s moods; man’s magik is always more reliable. Sometimes the stones would pulse and summon terrible storms, or they might flicker and cause every crop in the realm to mature to succulence. They weren’t reliable, and were contained, therefore, in sorcerous casings to inhibit their power. That’s where the problems began, with bickering over their containment and use.”

  “Massive wonderstones…” mumbled Talwyn, mostly to himself. Pythius had said nothing of a schism or a fight over relics. “The power—I can see how such volatile magik would best be trapped. I mean, I’ve only read of these objects and the magik that even the small ones—ones that fit in your hand—are said to contain. If I remember correctly, you told us that a lesser wonderstone was used to free the king back in Gorgonath. How large do you mean?”

  Moreth gazed off, deep in thought, and recalled his leathery friend having written down legends by a campfire. He whispered, “They shone like small suns and were trapped in vessels as great as towers, which could hardly hold them. They lit this corner of Pandemonia like four stars of different colors: red, blue, white, and yellow. Any man could look north on any night and see them. That was why wanderers were drawn to this area: it teased them with wonder. Legend tells that the Second City—I don’t know if there was a First, though I assume there must have been—stood through many of the great elemental seasons of the world: the Long Winter, the Age of Floods…It was the harmonic power of the arkstones—their influence, even when repressed—that kept the city safe. Come the Dry Season, however, the land became entirely barren. Green refused to grow even as the shamans whispered to it, and the whole of Pandemonia was stricken with famine and drought. The ages became so dry that even the veins of magik thinned, and spells to summon water or to call to animals no longer worked as they should. A great and terrible plague struck, as well—and was incurable by magik. It was as if Geadhain wanted the ancient tribes to vanish, to blow them away as dust.

  “With sorcerers being quite useless, the obvious solution would have been to use the magik of a relic—an arkstone—to summon endless water. As I said, however, disagreements arose over how the relics should be handled. There were those who believed the relics were sacred and should be used only as objects of reverence; then there were the iconoclasts, who saw the arkstones’ power as a means through which to end the decades of drought. A sorceress led the latter faction. I can’t remember her name: Teksa…Teresa…Tormet…No matter. Terrible things happened in that era. A civil war.
A religious war. When people couldn’t hunt off the land, they began to hunt each other…”

  “Cannibalism?” exclaimed Talwyn.

  “And worse. Amid the strife that erupted, there were also those who simply wanted to live in peace.”

  “So three factions: iconoclasts, preservers, and peacekeepers,” pondered Talwyn. “Of the two most at odds, which won?”

  “The iconoclasts, of course,” said Mouse.

  “Indeed,” replied Moreth. “The heaviest hand always wins. Teskatekmet! That was the sorceress’s name. She seized the arkstones and her army left the Second City with the relics—all of them. Charged with magik and wisdom that no others seemed to possess, Teskatekmet drew—safely—upon the extraordinary reserves of the arkstones’ power, and from that power she and her followers cured the plague, banished the drought, and built the four great cities of Fire, Water, Earth, and Air. I’ve seen only Eatoth, City of Water, and it’s an unparalleled marvel. A strange theocracy is in place there, with caste systems not dissimilar from Menos’s, though they are more insidious. My friend and I didn’t tarry for long—less than a day’s layover to refresh our supplies. He was afraid of…something. And I’d never seen him fear any beast or battle…Anyway, as for the losers in Pandemonia’s civil war…” He nodded toward the Amakri, hunched and surveying the ruins. “We’ve met them, and they haven’t had it easy. From what I gather of your conversations with the shaman, and from what I remember of the Slave’s intimations about the Great Cities and their ways, each side believes it’s been guided by the Wanderer’s Will.”

  Mouse touched her chest, as if feeling the Dreamer there. “Feyhazir. He certainly sticks his finger in a lot of pies.”

  “What of the third faction? Ones who cared not for the arkstones or for politics and just wanted to live in peace?” asked Talwyn.