Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3)

by Christian A. Brown

  The circle followed the king’s narration. Except for Erik, they couldn’t see past the soldiers that clustered in the arch of the Southern Gate; somehow, though, they felt as if the dunes flowed with red and black ants. When they gazed up at the emerging outline of the moon, they imagined redder hues in the iridescence of the Witchwall. Here Rasputhane’s witch-tinged stare saw farther and more clearly than the gaze of the obsidian knight. He peered into the stream of Fate and saw ripples of danger—or rather, a spot. “What…is that?” he asked.

  It was so incredibly far away. For an instant, he almost believed a piece of dirt had blown into his eye, for the thing stuck in his vision like a spot caused by staring at the sun. The spot was black, and it did not fade. A convulsive shiver racked him and twisted his stomach in a knot. His bowels dropped, then clenched in fear. He couldn’t say why he was so terrified. Not until the dignitaries—monarchs, broken comrades, and even the Mind in its sightless way—described the mark in the heavens.

  “Black,” said the spymaster. “Something black.”

  All of the minuscule entities peering up at the cosmic event—however great their earthly power—sensed their insignificance in the face of the dark weight that was descending. In prophecies and on scrolls of flesh, by doomsayers, soothsayers, and witches, they’d been warned of this event. In their souls, they all knew what was occurring. A shift. A changing of the order. The end of this era. For there, pulsing, lowering, and soon to hang clear above Geadhain, was a star. It was a star unlike any known celestial body, for it was made of darkness and antimatter, of hunger. It was a reflection of the Black Queen, who had at last returned to devour her home. The leaders quivered, Magnus most of all. They were not entirely sure what evoked in them the horrific terror of being devoured in a chattering jungle, the most primal of fears, but they knew the threat was real.

  Then the presence from the depths of eternity spoke to her son. Finally, her cosmic body had drifted near enough to the veils that separated them to reach down through the millions of spans of space and air and slip a whisper into her son’s ear. Magnus heard it as if she stood beside him, dripping madness and evil. “You see me, my son. At last we are to be together. We shall begin the great work, the grand feast of which I have dreamed for ages beyond ages. Your Will remains strong, but it cannot resist me forever. I see that you are now unchained by love; you want to be filled. Good. We shall eat them first, the ones you loved. Passion makes for the sweetest meat. Surrender, my son. I shall fill you. I shall be your love. Surrender now, and save yourself the agony of being devoured.”

  “Never!” declared Magnus.

  He shrieked and threw up the strongest barrier he could conjure in his mind. Those around him were pushed back by a dazzling burst of green light and a hammer of freezing wind. When the pocket of whirling smoke separated, they saw Magnus curled in the dirt. He wouldn’t rise or answer them.

  XVIII

  DEEPEST TRUTHS

  I

  Beauregard was amazed at how much he’d come to detest a man about whom he knew so little: Gustavius. Throughout their entire lengthy flight, they’d discussed next to nothing. Astonishing, considering they’d each recently dived into a waking dream of a nightmare civilization: the Mortalitisi and their wicked city, Veritax. Incredible, as they’d learned that everything they believed about their world was unfounded, and that reality was in truth ruled by crystals, elements, and divine beings.

  Alas, the Iron lord wanted to discuss none of these things, and Beauregard spent most of his time in the skycarriage pondering these conundrums himself, while also wondering how to coax more secrets about these mysteries from Amara. He hated visiting her like this, as a spy more than a friend. As he arranged his thoughts, they passed over the scraped majesty of Mor’Khul with its charcoal twists, black valleys, and scorched earth. He remembered then why he had undertaken this duty: Amara must speak for the sake of the world. The Iron Lord sat and glowered on the opposite couch; his silence wasn’t so oppressive when Beauregard remembered the real problems they faced.

  When the flight landed in the heights of the Silent Peaks, and Beauregard and the Iron Lord walked along the zigzag of rocky road that led to the distant gray keep, he felt as grim and determined as his scowling companion. Monkish, gray-robed men bearing quarterstaffs met them at the gates of the bastion. They weren’t greeted—and these men wouldn’t have spoken anyway—but they were led immediately into the keep, as though they’d been expected. The Faithful escorted Beauregard and Gustavius through hallowed and quiet stone halls. Occasionally, a wind or rustle disturbed them, but all was as still as Beauregard recalled. Soon, Beauregard and Gustavius sat in Amara’s quiet sanctum, awaiting her arrival. The Keeper had been detained: she had been overseeing rebuilding efforts below and hadn’t been at the fortress when they arrived. She had had to be summoned, explained one of the Faithful in a note.

  Today, fewer candles tempted a devastating fire in Amara’s grand study. Still, one wrong gust of the wind, and the flames would spread from the fluttering stacks of papers to the heaps of scrolls that lay in organized chaos around him. Beauregard saw wisdom now in the fact that all of the shelves of this library had been carved out of stone; he wondered how many fires this ancient room had survived. He considered posing the question to Gustavius, but knew he would meet with no response. Boldly, he stared at the ghoul instead. Who are you?

  Even hunched in the light from the sanctum’s great window, the man appeared as if rendered in gray. Even sunlight couldn’t relieve his pallor. In the light, he looked older, however, written in lines. A handsome fellow, perhaps, with a longish face and a full, groomed gray beard. Age be damned: the Menosian still possessed a muscular heftiness to his frame. Indeed, Gustavius was quite a large and menacing man. He barely fit upon one of the small stools that had been given to him and Beauregard for their wait. Beauregard couldn’t place the man’s ethnicity. The man’s coloring suggested that he must hail from some place without much sun, or perhaps from a land where one needed to conceal oneself from the elements and therefore had no color at all.

  “It is impolite to stare. Men are often killed for choosing the wrong object for their attention, for seeing the wrong thing,” said Gustavius.

  “I would like to believe that there’s no threat of that between us,” said Beauregard. The silence thereafter stung. However, the lad would not be daunted; his curiosity was too great. “Where are you from? I cannot place your features or accent.”

  Beauregard received a considered look from the man. Gustavius stood up, still glowering, then finally responded. “I am from the North. In the land where I was born, a man did not speak to one whose respect he hadn’t earned. If he did so, he would learn his lesson—usually only once—through a fist. We do not know one another, spellsong of the king. We are not friends. We are but temporary allies until this war of wars ends, and we can once again engage in less catastrophic conquests. Make no mistake, either: Menos has not truly fallen. The Iron Empire will rise from the ruin into which it has been cast. I do not know you. I do not respect you. You are still my enemy, though I must tolerate you until I am allowed to call you that openly once more. In my homeland, our discussion would have ended days past with your missing teeth and my sore fist. Perhaps also with your corpse lying in the snow. That is all you need to know of me.”

  “Point taken,” said Beauregard.

  Engrossed in this exchange, neither noticed Amara’s sudden appearance until a shadow drifted to Beauregard’s side, and Gustavius turned towards it. Beauregard turned, too, as the youthful, olive-skinned, dark-eyed Keeper fluttered a small note against his ear.

  “Hello again, friend,” it read. “I am sorry to have kept you waiting.”

  “Is this the Keeper we are to meet?” asked Gustavius, and looked the young woman over as if she were a naked slave at auction. “She seems young, and unwise.”

  Beauregard leaped to her defense and to her side. “She is neither of those things. And we mus
t respect the silence that these people cultivate; we must not use our voices.” Amara strutted over to the Menosian and thrust a pad and quill at him.

  The Iron lord took the items but then tossed them on the floor. “I shall not indulge in ridiculous ceremony. The fate of our world is at stake. You speak to her—or rather write. I expect to see each and every correspondence that the two of you share. I shall occupy myself with silence, then. Although I shan’t be meditating.”

  With her hooked hands and huge eyes, Amara looked like a vengeful owl. Beauregard took her elbow and walked with her to her dais. She was trembling and gritting her teeth. This was the angriest he’d ever seen her, aside from the moment she’d learned of the duplicitous diplomatic warning from the former queen of Eod. He wondered if her anger would be further enflamed when she found out about his service to Magnus and to the kingdom that had betrayed her—if the silver-and-white garments hadn’t already given him away. While she collected herself, Beauregard went to collect the discarded notepad and quill. A missive had been prepared in his absence. He read it. “I see you have not come in the spirit of friendship, that you are a ship caught in the tides of war. I see that crows now fly with the silver doves of Eod. I had heard of this aberration, but I did not believe that our world had become so imperiled that people would be driven beyond common sense. You cannot trust the crow. It is a trickster.”

  No sooner did Beauregard finish reading this than Gustavius loomed over him and snatched the note. “Perhaps she is wise after all,” he said. Amara shook a fist at him, and he laughed, booming and rowdy as a drunk. Finally, he at last showed some respect and made the gesture of locking his lips with a key.

  Amara wrote something else for Beauregard. The other note had been snatched back from the Iron lord and had vanished somewhere—into a candle, thought Beauregard. “It’s good to see you, friend, hero of my people. I’ve forgotten neither you nor your father’s sacrifice. We have a garden in his honor that I would like to show you one day.”

  Tears threatened Beauregard as he read her words. “One day,” he wrote, and they shared a smile and squeezed each other’s hand.

  Amara burned that message and was again writing. She handed Beauregard her message, no longer smiling. “I am sorry that we cannot meet to honor your father. I am sorrier, still, that you need something from me that I cannot give.”

  What followed was a rapid exchange: notes written and then passed from Keeper to spellsong to Menosian to Keeper to flame, in a vicious circle.

  “You know why we are here?” asked Beauregard.

  “You wish to ask me something about my order,” Amara replied. “I can hear the need, the pounding of your desire. Not for pleasure; I believe valor is your aphrodisiac. You want to know a secret.”

  “I do. I must know of the Ioncrach. Ones larger than the one I used to free the king.”

  Amara hesitated, and took great care penning her short reply. “I cannot speak of those.”

  But she’d confessed much about wonderstones, elementals, and Brutus’s possible involvement with these forces during their tense preparations before Gorgonath’s siege. Beauregard reminded her of this slip: “You already have. I know of the wonderstones, and something of the elementals—more now that I’ve seen the horror of Veritax.”

  Amara went snow white after reading his reply. “You should not seek this knowledge. Ever.”

  “I must.”

  “No.” Amara slipped her arms into the sleeves of her monastic garment and gazed off to the side. Dust glittered in the light like faery folk. The happiness of the Keeper’s reunion with the hero of Gorgonath should have eased her anger. However, the Iron shadow lurked in this very room, and Beauregard demanded that she say what must never be said to those who could not truly listen. Her friend was not familiar with the sinister nature of secrets. A single whisper, a forbidden ritual revealed, and whole empires could topple, entire lands verdant with the Green Mother’s kiss could be razed. Beauregard didn’t realize the dangers involved in the knowledge he sought. Certain evils should be buried in time. Certain wonders, the most powerful ones, must be forgotten, for they stirred dark intentions.

  That was why Keepers were the caretakers and archivists of all the world’s dangerous magik. They were never to use these miracles themselves. They were holy, above the temptation to abuse the Green Mother’s secrets. She’d heard of a mad Keeper in the East, where stood the greatest cities of those who listened, whose people had fallen from their path, abused the Green Mother’s trust, and succumbed to temptation. The mad Keeper had destroyed her city, erased thousands of years of wisdom and irreplaceable secrets. She’d done so by calling upon the very power that Beauregard wanted to understand. His curiosity alone could unleash a catastrophe. However, he wouldn’t leave, and she didn’t look at him or ask him to.

  The Menosian deduced that the tight-lipped priestess would certainly be more forthcoming if he allowed her and her friend a little space; whatever she shared with Beauregard, he could twist—literally—out of him later. Gustavius wandered off to snoop through the aisles of must and mystery. When Amara finally gazed at her friend, he saw there were tears in her eyes. By the time she had finished wiping them away with her sleeve, Beauregard had scribbled a note.

  “We have only moments until the crow returns. You must tell me, Amara. I know that your order protects what it fears man will use only to destroy himself. However, whatever the secret, whatever that power, Brutus has it, and we cannot fight a war against a black miracle without having one of our own.”

  She held onto the message, unwilling to burn it just yet, her hands shaking. Beauregard wrote another. “Please. Or we are doomed. Everything you wish to protect and preserve is doomed.”

  Amara’s training, although kinder than the indoctrinations of the East, had armored her heart against coercion or temptation. She burned his papers while softly crying. Beauregard caught her hand as it hovered in the smoke. He didn’t grip her hard, or passionately, but she felt a tremble of love: soft love, meaningful love, the kind that romance and broken hearts would not dilute. “As the king’s man, I shall be on the frontlines of the final war,” whispered Beauregard, tempting her anger, showing his heart, as well as manipulating her with guilt. “I shall probably be one of the first to die.”

  Is this how it happens? wondered the Keeper. Did the first step into damnation begin with mercy? If so, then she was about to become the greatest sinner of her age and order. For she sat up, threw off her objections and tears, and quickly wrote down everything she knew of the wonderstones: the arkstones and the legends that told of ones even older than those—the wicked talismans of the Mortalitisi. She hoped that this secret would save her friend. It would be worth it, even if she had damned herself. Furious scribbling began.

  My friend, any time a divine—or infernal—entity comes to our world, it must be made manifest through the real: as a blood moon, an asteroid, a tidal wave of fire. It cannot come and go invisibly like the wind. Legend says that when Zionae last came to Geadhain, a fragment of her cosmic mass, the Black Star, descended to our world in an ark of heavenly stone and fire—what the ancients referred to as a meteorite.

  While much of her great ark deteriorated in the fall, four pieces survived the crashing inferno. These pieces were taken by the ancient people of the land where they had fallen: Pandemonia. The ancient tribes enshrined and honored the relics; such was the way of the Keepers even then. Our earliest legends speak of Zionae’s kindness, her generosity: she gave us these relics to use for our protection, and the relics did protect the ancient people from the worst of the seasons of the world. However, when the Season of Dust began, and Zionae’s benevolence and vessel were long departed, the shadow of the arkstones no longer offered enough protection; the ancient people starved, rotted from a black, incurable fever, and died. It’s said that they began to eat each other once the worst of the hunger and madness set in.

  Eventually, they fought over the power of Zionae’s gift
s—whether it should be enshrined, or instead tapped and used. We do not know exactly who inspired those who argued for the latter course…A whisperer. A wandering sorcerer without a face. We do know that he taught a wicked woman of my order, Teskatekmet, how to harness the incredible powers trapped in the arkstones. We know this whisperer was real, and that he must have been a demon, for no man or sorcerer of Geadhain could have had such knowledge. Many of my ancestors sailed from our homeland to other lands. They wanted nothing to do with their mad countrymen, with relics of the ark, and the seduction of their power as promised by Teskatekmet. Much of my ancient tribe remained in Pandemonia, though, embroiled in civil war. In the end, the warmongers amongst us took the arkstones for themselves. The bounty was split between them: one arkstone was taken north, one south, one east, and one west. There, they were used to build empires of obscene power. The people did not worship the stones, though; instead, they revered the kingdoms and achievements built through sacrilege.

  Later, one of the great cities fell to madness, and one of the arkstones was split. A mad Keeper split it, or so the story goes—though I am not sure how an eternal object could be sundered. Perhaps a combination of grief, magik, and insanity created the perfect tool for her task. We who listen believe that the Black Queen, transformed into a vengeful mother by the abuse of her gifts, came to the mad Keeper and offered her the power needed to break the stone, to end its magik: without it, Aesorath was unmade in specks. Or perhaps there was something in Aesorath that Zionae feared, or wanted no other to claim. Zionae giveth, and she taketh away. We cannot say why. We do not know why she has returned to Geadhain, not as a bearer of life, but as a bringer of death. I have as many questions as you when I consider our fate and past.

  Know, too, that when I say that an arkstone is eternal, I mean that it can never be lost, only fragmented. Destroying an arkstone would unmake any enchantments cast while it was whole, but it wouldn’t destroy the power of whatever shards remained. I have heard, from voices in the East, that these shards were sought for by the leaders of the Great Cities, but never found. Now Aesorath is merely avoided as a cursed reminder of how pride condemns us to fall. However, the danger remains. A power so great endures. One tiny shard would have the might to chain the Elemental of Fire, at least for a time. Imagine what evils a mad Keeper and a mad king might do with the shards they hold; we’ve seen some of this dark future already, here in Gorgonath. How many shards were salvaged from Aesorath? At least one. Nothing else could chain the Father of Fire. With a whole arkstone, one unblemished and unbroken, Brutus could command the elemental to cover the world in fire—nothing, save for the sleeping wyrm of frost, would be capable of cooling his rage.