“A march? You are speaking of starting a war.”
“A battle so swiftly and silently decided will be no such thing, my Queen. For all appearances, I am marching south to help my brother with the unruly savages in the Mor’Keth. My brother has superior arms and numbers, and legendary sorcery of Will over the physical self, but I have the strongest sorcerers in Geadhain and Will over the immaterial. Though he moves like a bitter wind, I am the wind itself. If it comes to a trial of might against the unseen, my magik will prevail—unless Brutus has some other feint to play, which we must not rule out. While I am gone, there are two grave tasks that fall on you to execute.”
Before her blood-union with King Magnus, Lila was a rebellious spirit, a renegade daughter to the Arhad, and after the ritual that bound her and her Immortal King, her flame of independence grew brighter still. For a sliver of his cold pride and magik had entered her heart along with his devotion. Thus, she was a sorceress, too. A woman of courage, power, and composure enough to serve when her nation demanded it. A noble bride and complement to her king. A true queen. She did not shrink from whatever was required of her, but walked to her king and formally bowed upon a knee.
“What would you have me do?”
“Your first task is to keep the ruse behind my absence afloat,” instructed the king. Lovingly, he played his fingers over her face and touched her golden tresses. She did not rebuke him. “I have never been able to give you, or any of my past and forgotten lovers, the gift of children. That shames me as a man and has always been a regret of mine. A shared sorrow of yours, for I see how you look at the smiling faces of the children that run these stone halls. But together we have come to love Eod as if every life here were a child of our own. Now more than ever, these lives need stewardship. They need to know that they are safe despite what darkness or wars might rise. Functions of the nation must continue as if nothing is amiss.”
She was not a silent monarch; she ruled more of the kingdom than Magnus did, for he was too often preoccupied with metaphysical matters or meditations in the Court of Ideas. The responsibility was easy and as good as done. No harm would befall any man, woman, child, or animal behind Eod’s white wall.
“What of my next duty?” she asked.
Magnus frowned. “My mind’s creativity works against me, as it arranges probabilities and outcomes. We must consider the possibility. We must think of what our next course of action will be should I fail.”
Lila caught the hand that was tracing the light bruises on her neck, kissed it—wincing at the memory of her blood on that very skin—and held it tightly.
“You will not fail.”
“Not if my love for you alone determines it, no,” promised Magnus. Her soothing Spring was glowing inside him, and he took the liberty to kiss his bloodmate for as long and as hotly as he could. When he had raped her, he had not kissed her, and his cool tongue was not instantly offensive to Lila. Magnus would not assume the freedom to pursue more than a kiss, however, and he was the one to end their small passion.
“I shall never harm you again. I swear I shall end myself before I do.”
“Stop it,” said Lila, as smartly as a slap to the face. “You will not leave me alone and everliving in this world, like a tormented ghost. If I am to haunt Geadhain, it shall be with you. We shall endure whatever this storm is. The only promise you need to make is that you will return to me. No matter how broken, how bloodied, or how lost. You will return to me.”
“I swear.”
Never had he treasured the day he had learned of his bloodmate more than this moment. The journey that he had taken to find her, the arduous climb through the wildest deeps of the world, reminded him of what he had yet to say.
“What I would ask is that if my return is hindered, if there are walls to surmount before I reach you again, you must find the bravest souls in this age and set them upon a quest. A most dangerous journey. Find men of courage, strength, and cunning, for all such traits are needed where they will tread.”
Most dangerous journey, she thought, knowing where but unable to accept it. Her king had undertaken a similar quest once, and it had come close to claiming his immortal life. He whispered what she feared.
“Those charged by your hand must seek counsel with the only three known creatures in this world older than me. From the women who know the names of trees that I do not, for they watched those first saplings grow. They surely understand the dangers we face. The oldest and wisest on Geadhain…you know of whom I speak.”
“I do.”
Lila’s soul was turbulent. It circled his ribs like an angry bird. He tried to calm it. “A last resort, is all, if I do not return as soon as we might hope. I do not believe there is a mystery in Geadhain toward which the Sisters Three have not tended a hand, eye, or ear. They will know the true nature of our clouded enemy.”
Magnus lifted Lila’s chin and his emerald gaze bore into her. He said, “I was once lost and seeking…restless with all that I had done…weary of the achievements of mortalkind. Of the empire I raised, or the lovers I took to my bed. None of it satisfied me. I believe Brutus felt that restlessness, too, and it can become like an unfed monster. Time and distance did not heal it, for we can never be apart. Not until now, at least. How can either of us be a man with nothing that is truly our own? I wanted that, Lila, my Spring, my golden, glorious Spring. I took the journey; I found the myth that was not myself. I asked the question, and you were the answer. Without the Sisters’ hand, without your face reflected in the witch water of that one with the mournful stare, I would not be here. I would not have found what made me a man.”
He is there again, in the crystal-studded cavern that bleeds unearthly light. Three figures are about him: one large, one medium, and one child-sized. They have not told him their names. They do not feel he needs to know them, yet he knows who they are. The eldest one found him in the woods, slung him up like a bag of turnips, and through blinking and inky memories—brambles, bobbing up rocks—he ended up in this cavern. And he sleeps, lightly, while they dress his wounds and sing old songs, like the ones he and his brother made up while pretending to be animals.
It is a wonder that he is alive. Although he does not recall much of the sleepless, deadly trials that brought him here. He has flashes of hunting animals with spear and wit; as magik, even his great magik, works as it wants in Alabion, which is often not at all. He remembers the whispering trees that would lead him astray, off cliffs or into thornbushes, or try to lure his feet into serpents’ holes. He remembers running, panting, and shivering in trees as grotesque, shaggy terrors sniffed for him below. He remembers hiding from his brother, too, lying about his whereabouts and concealing his intents. For this is his journey, his alone. It is more difficult than the Untamed’s lethal wilds. It is the fight against the fire-beast within that cannot live without him.
I want to live without him. I want to be myself.
Onward the chant drives him, bloody-kneed and ragged, until he falls.
Now he is here, with the three women who hum with magik, even though he does not. When he is good enough to stand and not much better, he is hauled up and brought to look into a pool. All or one of them speak; he cannot say. But voices echo in the chamber.
“Outside these woods, you are a king. Within, all truths are bare, and we see the boy in the skin of a man. You seek what will fill your emptiness. What you will rule as yours and yours alone. All life is a circle, and you have come so far only to return to where you left. A flower, a golden flower in the desert. Show him, sister. Show him what he seeks.”
In the water, a vision ripples forth, conjured by the sad-faced sister’s hand. He sees her, this golden flower, wrapped in the sheets of an Arhad bride. Only her eyes are revealed, which are all that is needed. For the iron in them, the determination to be more than her fate, is as striking as his pale countenance that shimmers alongside her reflection.
“A queen. A love to last one thousand years before it is tested. Go, b
oy. Go and play at being a man, until that happiness must end,” command the Sisters.
Lila allowed Magnus to float back to her, knowing that he was off in a memory. She saw wisps of it in her head—glimpses of grand, haggard woods, yellow-eyed beasts, and three eerie women in a glowing hollow.
“I shall arrange for this quest, should you”—she hung on the words until spitting them out—“be delayed in your return.”
“Good,” he said.
A thick silence hung between them, but they did not disengage from each other. They relished their contact. She, in his smooth strength, as if she hugged pliant marble; and he, in her lemony perfume and the tickling of her hair against his cheek.
“I must soon prepare our soldiers. Would you lie with me awhile? Nothing more than our bodies entwined on the bed. Nothing more than my arms around you, if you trust them.”
“I do,” she replied.
They wandered over to the bed and came to rest. Forehead to forehead, they lay, with Magnus’s arms and legs slid between hers, and he murmured his love to her in words or with bursts of his winter. Through that embrace, as they passed passion into the other, lovemaking without the crudeness of their bodies, she pardoned her king for a crime that was not ultimately his. As he left the bed, kissing her upon the shoulder, she was so calm and sleepy that she didn’t reach out to him when she should have. For without any magik, but merely in her heart, she knew that this was the last she was to see of her bloodmate, her immortal and beautiful king, for a long, long time.
V
THE MOUSE
I
If Eod was known as the jeweled crown of the desert, then Menos was a black crown of iron forged from the chains of a slave. Where one was built of white stone, clean magik, and honest work, the other was a grim metropolis of dark metal towers that stabbed at a polluted sky as if in hatred of its existence. A city whose foundations were smudged in filth and steeped in the blood of forced labor. Look closer and the handprints of slaves could be seen on the poured stone of Menos’s gray roads, all slippery with oil or alchemical effluences that ran in rainbow trails into rusty grates. Mirthless folk glanced up to the overcast clouds, hoping that it would not rain today. For in Menos, the sky was filled with technomagikal contamination, and when it wept, it burned enough to give one a case of stinkeye, as the locals called it—an unfortunate malady that made the eyes weep with cheesy encrustations. Those not walking rode the streets in carriages, with metal-and-meat horses that carried the faint herb-and-formaldehyde waft of preserved flesh. Beasts animated and repurposed from dead parts were these; enhanced with plating, pistoned legs, and nictitating eyes so that they could navigate farther and faster than a natural of their species. Jealously, the masters in these coaches sneered out at the rows of steepled, iron-gated manses, and with disdain upon the dilapidated, filthy quarters of the city—some of these homes no better than shanties piled alongside and atop one another. Scarce was the smile that was seen on the cheeks of a Menosian, for it was a society that valued mind and power over empathy and weakness. It was a hierarchy of predators, where the weak were food for the strong.
Spare the rod, sell the child, was the quintessential Menosian proverb. How true that adage rang in the markets of Menos, where anything could be bought and sold, from death to life to sin. Under a girded metal wall that encircled the city—the Iron Wall—commerce flourished in a raucous marketplace. Here abounded a sea of black tents, clanging metal smithies, and magikal workshops that looked like chapels with tin chimneys—ateliers, the locals called them. But at these chapels, a man would not pray to the lost spirits of the land; rather, he would procure elixirs to poison, confuse, or incapacitate. Were the tools of treachery not of one’s interest, Menos’s greatest trade was on display upon bloody stages, where chained folk shivered before barking crowds; or in even less savory arcades deep under the streets, where the nameless tribesmen stolen from their homes were sold in beaten, naked herds.
II
Mouse didn’t care for the Undercomb, the second city under Menos. It wasn’t the sweat-thick, pissy air that repelled her, however, or the cringing sobs of mongrels trapped in barred pens, or the masters shouting bids over one another, or the constant cracking of whips, or even the porridge of blood and fecal matter that ran down troughs along the cell-lined hallways. Mouse simply pinched her nose as she passed. In truth, these atrocities were nothing to her. She had known the kiss of a lash and the thrust of a knife to places meant to bear children. She had crawled from the indentureship of a Pleasure Maiden (what a wholesome name for such a despicable torment, she thought). These wretches could break free of their fates, too—if they were lucky, vicious, and determined enough.
She was as hard as a dagger, just as warm in bed, and twice as deadly. But that was the means to survival in Menos. You were strong or you were used and shortly dead. She would never be used again. She wasn’t opposed to taking paid instruction, however. Her shadowy overseers were kind and absent, and she was essentially the freest that any lower creature of Menos could dream of being. And she had her measure of power, for she assisted in the dispensing of information—a currency of its own in Menos, and as valuable as flesh. She was a runner in the shadows, an ear to heed, a mouth to whisper: a Voice, as her kind were known. She was an agent of the Watchers—the curators of all secrets, lies, and half-truths in the civilized lands. For the most part, being a string to the puppet masters of Geadhain was a satisfying vocation. The only regrettable part was that she did not choose her clients, or the messages she conveyed. Which brought her to the Flesh Markets this afternoon, for a visit to a man more terrible than any of the surrounding atrocities. She had an appointment with the Broker.
While the Iron sages were the masters of Menos, the Broker was the master of the realms beneath them. He was the keeper of the trades in which they were too haughty to dirty their hands. The choicest slaves—those who spoke, performed the best coitus, and looked the most desirable—were handpicked by the Broker and sent to the pleasure houses above. Trafficking, assassination, witchroot peddling, whoremongering, blood sports, and every other criminal pursuit was at one point acknowledged or approved by the Broker. The Iron sages knew that it was better to have these unpleasant elements united, contained, and controlled than to leave such crimes unregulated—and possibly used against them. Besides, as an Iron sage, it was easier to know who among the Council of the Wise was plotting to kill you if you all visited the same man, the same Broker, to arrange for your assassinations.
That day, Mouse carried a message for the Broker from one who did not want a direct meeting—possibly a member of the Council of the Wise. Although she was a woman who feared next to nothing, the Broker was the exception. She had encountered him once, when she was still an owned woman in a house of pleasure, and the impression that the Broker left did not fade.
The master of the house has summoned all the pretty ladies and gents in the foyer before a great staircase. They are all powdered, their bruises concealed, and slick smiles hide the terror that so often consumes them. A special client has asked for his pick from their fold, and he passes each pleasure slave like a shadow of death; he is grand enough to dim the air around himself; it is as if he eats light. She could believe such a fiction from the silver-capped teeth—filed to points—that he bears as he curls his mouth while making his selection.
She remembers these teeth most of all, for they belong on a predator, and dares not look deeper in case he chooses her. Never in all her days has she been so relieved as the shadow moves by her without a silver snarl. Her meek stature has saved her, it seems. For the client has chosen the thickest ladies and the most strapping men. They are herded off, and their strained smiles shatter as they see the heapings of coin being given to the master of the house. For a price that steep, the client has paid for delights blacker than sex.
“Poor sods,” whispers a tired old whore, almost drained of use. “If they’ve been picked by the Broker, we shan’t be seeing them a
gain.”
Mouse glances up to note that the man she so feared isn’t large at all; he is a short limber being who moves like a swaying willow, though the shadow he casts is grand indeed, and that she does not forget.
Perhaps I’ll see your face this time, and see if you still command such terror. I kept the name, but this Mouse has teeth of her own now, she thought, and was a bit bolder in her step.
The Undercomb was a second city in its own right, with trapeze-like bridges and ratty apartments strung up in the towering halls and over wide arcades. In these larger spaces, the slavemongers staged their trade, with rowdy ale gardens clouded in the sweetness of witchroot to ease whatever conscience might peek out in this sinful realm. Mouse bypassed these busier intersections and stuck to filth-slimed corridors lit by sorcerous orbs of sickly yellow light. Or she slipped through the pen-halls, dodging the desperate hands that reached through the cages. Along her path, ruffians lurked in dark places. They eyed her and once or twice followed her, until a flash of her daggers and the stylized iron eye dangling by a chain against her tunic stopped them. The Watcher’s eye was familiar to anyone who beheld it, and to harm a Voice, however surreptitiously, would be seen, heard, and direly punished.
Without incident, then, she soon came to the Broker’s domain, which was darker than elsewhere in the Undercomb. As black as sin, she thought, walking up a metal ramp to enter a cavernous chamber that dripped and hummed like the inside of a giant’s sink. The few yellow lights that sputtered here against the distant walls showed a curving architecture with bolted struts, so perhaps this had been a reservoir at one point. She was not even a foot off the ramp when several armed men, their faces swaddled like assassins of the Arhad, bled from the darkness at once.
Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) Page 10