Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1)

by Christian A. Brown

  “Thule? Thule, please say something. You are pale. You, too, Caenith.” Morigan had finished her account a sand ago, and neither of the men had said anything. She pulled on their hands, which seemed to stir the two from a waking sleep.

  “My Fawn,” muttered Caenith, and bowed to her side.

  Caenith had not seen everything clearly; Thule had been thrown right into the memory. Worried that he might be sick, he wrenched his hands free and covered his mouth.

  “What is going on?” asked Morigan.

  “You…urp—” Thule paused as the bile fought to come out instead of words. “You did…urp…I can’t…I can’t…urp.”

  “You used your magik, my Fawn,” explained Caenith in a whisper for her ear alone. “I felt it, which is saying much, as my kind are slippery when it comes to the craft. Magik cannot affect what it cannot find, and being of two natures acts much like the spots on a toad. You are very strong; the greatest hags in Alabion couldn’t do what you have done to me.”

  “Magik? Oh, Thule, I am so sorry!”

  Morigan tried to reach for the old man, but he crawled back into his chair as if she had the plague. Caenith softly restrained his Fawn while Thule gasped and heaved himself back to normalcy. He could never carve what he had been shown from his mind; however, once he was settled as much as he could be, he sat up again and patted the distressed witch on her knee.

  “Your gift is a dark wonder, child. I would not have believed the horror myself if you had not shown me. Across Geadhain, there are farcasters, farseers, and other adepts of the mind, but not even the mistress of the House of Mysteries could pull me into her inner self like you did. You are…tapped into something, Morigan, something beyond me. At least now, I understand how you have suffered. I shall put aside my differences with your…gentleman for now, as we have far greater perils to attend to.” Thule drew a hand over his face; he was still quite ashy. “What you did there. That spell or trick or whatever it was. I shall need you to do it again for someone else.”

  Morigan nodded. “I can try. For whom, though? I’d prefer it if the secret of my strangeness didn’t get about.”

  Thule quashed the idea with a flip of his wrist. “I wouldn’t worry about that, my child. She can keep a secret as tightly as a whisper to an oak.”

  “Who can?” asked Caenith.

  Thule answered as if they had asked a trifling question.

  “Queen Lila.”

  III

  Mouse was good at pretending, and right now, she was feigning sleep. At her first glimmer of wakefulness, the survivor’s instinct shot into her like an ampul of adrenaline. She recalled the studio, the dead fleshcrafter, her abduction. As her head bounced about, she sneakily gathered glimpses of her surroundings. She saw the black-metal-and-buttoned upholstery of an expensive carriage, and through a grubby portal, she spied wisps of clouds so cottony that she did not need the humming of her seat to confirm that they were airborne. Persons came and went. Once the Raven came over to her, kissed her on the cheek, and called her Lenora. If she had her knives, she would have gutted him without pause. However, her hands were bound and her possessions had been stripped from her, even her clothing. Someone had dressed her in a lacy ladies’ gown. So she stomached his kiss and continued playing dead, until she heard the lisping chatter of the Broker, and she realized that she was in the company of more than one monster.

  The monsters left after a time, and one less frightening creature remained. She could smell his sweet-tobacco cologne nearby but could not say exactly where he was, for he didn’t breathe or cause the tiniest sound.

  “They are gone, for the moment, if you would care to open your eyes,” said the dead man quietly.

  Fuk, thought Mouse. Cautiously, as if it could be a trap, she did the slightest of squints; she still could not spot the dead man.

  “Let me help you,” he offered.

  Opposed to any of these fiends touching her, she shrugged off the cold hands that reached for her and twisted herself up; her face peeled off the leather with a painful slurp. She was in a cabin with long couches and small circular windows, the sort that a seafaring ship would have, crossed in iron. On the other side was a turn-handled portal to another area of the skycarriage. Now that she was upright, she could see her silent companion a few paces down the couch from herself. He sat with gentlemanly leisure, his arms and legs crossed as if he were watching a fire and sipping spirits. He appeared sad, though he had always seemed that way to her, or perhaps that was merely her despair projected onto the creature. He was one of her captors, after all.

  “The Watchers will have all your heads!” she swore, and pulled at her restraints, which she realized were metal, and she cursed her situation all the more.

  “No, they won’t, and I think you know that. I don’t know that taking my head would do more than inconvenience me, either, so save your threats. I would urge you to keep your voice down,” cautioned the dead man. “Metal walls can carry sound like a shaken tin sheet.”

  Mouse could hear echoes coming from elsewhere in the ship, and she took his advice. She couldn’t understand why he pitied her. Still, it would be best to assess the extent of her danger before attempting to extricate herself from it. She reminded herself that a long-lived mouse knew when to listen for the padding of a predator’s paws. She would listen, then. I’ll be quiet for now, dead man, but not so much once I get a hold of something shiny and sharp. I’ll play whatever damned game this is, and I’ll win, too. We may just find out if taking your head does the trick after all.

  “Why? Why are you doing this?” she whispered, as ordered, with a genuine note of hopelessness.

  The stitched lips frowned further. “I am following the master’s orders. As much as all living—or reliving—things might wish to pursue their own lives, that is not my purpose. My purpose is to serve. I do not question the commands that I am given. If I were the master myself, and not the servant, perhaps your fate would be different.”

  Mouse swallowed a lump of fear. “My fate?”

  “We needn’t talk about that. Mayhap you will be different from the others. Yes, there is a spark, a newness to you. As if…” While swallowing her with his profoundly black gaze, the dead man trailed off.

  “The others?”

  “The other women,” replied the dead man, fading back to his guest. “They weren’t suitable. They weren’t right. Granted, Master hadn’t perfected his experiments. His work was still rough and unformed: quite messy.” The dead man shook his head with regret. “Success is much more in your favor than those that came before you.”

  Experiments. Other women. Mouse remembered the thing flopping on the master’s table like a fish in a lake of blood, and her stomach began to roll. I’m as good as dead. It’s merely a matter of when. She attempted to control her hyperventilating, and unexpectedly, it was the dead man’s large cold grip of support to her naked shoulder that calmed her. Looking to the hand, she finally saw what she was wearing. She had been dressed in the evening wear of a master’s wife: an onyx-beaded bustier, a crinoline-and-lace skirt, and a necklace of dark pearls. In any other situation, she might have gasped in delight. Presently, she made a whimper of shock.

  “That…,” said the dead man, and he slid his fingers over her shoulder and down the side of her bust—the gesture was not sexual, though certainly intimate, “that was her favorite dress, so I am told.”

  “Lenora’s?” guessed Mouse.

  When she said the name, the dead man’s hand faltered at her waist and he withdrew it. He folded his arms and turned to watch the clouds whisk by in the purpling sky.

  “Yes, I believe that was what Master called her.”

  I think you know more than that, dead man, thought Mouse. Or some part of you does. The part that reached out to me a moment ago. I might have considered it, too, if you weren’t dead and hadn’t kidnapped me. You’re not a reborn, not as I know them. And you look so much like that nekromancer that it’s uncanny. I don’t know how these
black threads all tie together, but if I intend to live, I need to find out.

  Mouse shuffled down the cushions toward the dead man. “Who was she?”

  “Someone very close to us. Very dear.”

  “Us? You mean your master?”

  The dead man’s face wrinkled with compunction, and he clutched at his head. Mouse knew that she had found a crumb, a crack, possibly with the sweet wind of freedom blowing through it. She asked again.

  “Close to us? What did you mean by that?”

  “Close to…to the master…to us. I don’t…I don’t know,” grunted the dead man, as if in pain.

  Right up to his ear Mouse leaned, as if to suck out the secret. “What is it? What don’t you know? What can’t you remember?”

  “Ssh!”

  Abruptly, the dead man slapped a hand over her mouth, and she thought that she was about to be grievously harmed. She heard the spinning of the hatch, though, and went from biting her captor to collapsing against him as a maiden fainted in the summer heat. When the Raven entered, Mouse was, for all appearances, asleep on his servant’s shoulder.

  “Get her off yourself. It’s unseemly for such beauty to rest on a corpse, you disgusting creature,” spat the Raven.

  “Yes, Master,” replied the dead man.

  Mouse was gently laid upon her side. The Raven came over to inspect her, blanketing her in men’s flowery perfume and the iron tang of death, which was on his hands, skin, and probably in his mouth at some point. No cologne could erase the rot that had infused his body.

  “Did she wake?”

  “No,” lied the dead man.

  “Shame, we have so much to catch up on, Lenora and I. She is the one, I can feel it.”

  Feel it he did, with his greedy, caressing hands and then his kisses along what skin she had exposed—neck, collarbone, and shoulder. Mouse kept her eyes closed and went to that place she visited when men used to put their slimy pricks inside her: an endless golden plain where the wind was warm and swept all worries away. She only noticed the Raven’s cloying shadow when it was off her.

  “We should be in Eod in a few hourglasses. I’ll be sending some of the Broker’s men in to keep you company. Can’t have them buzzing about my head like blowflies. Insufferable cretins, all of them, for men who don’t speak. Don’t touch her again unless she’s about to roll off and crack her pretty face,” ordered the Raven, slamming the hatch closed.

  “Yes, Master.”

  Mouse didn’t have long before more captors arrived, and certainly not enough time to chip away at the dead man. She did the next best thing and watered the seed a bit more, out of genuine gratitude and not entirely a desire to manipulate.

  “Thank you, Vortigern,” she whispered.

  As the dead man took his seat again, in defiance of his master’s command, he laid a cold touch on Mouse’s skin. A fleeting comfort gone as quickly as it had come.

  IV

  No sooner had Thule mentioned Queen Lila than he had pulled out the chronex that hung around his neck, twisted off one end and dropped into his palm a small stone similar to an opal. After discarding the sand, he cupped the stone and whispered between his thumbs as if he was making a birdcall. His observers heard no call. Not a single sound escaped his hands, not even to Caenith’s ears. Thule seemed just as odd when he held his hands up his ear, nodded several times, and then dropped what looked like a black pea to the floor.

  “Farspeaking stone. It is all used up now. I was given one in case of these sorts of emergencies. The Silver Watch should have a skycarriage along shortly. Go freshen up if you need to.” Thule cast a withering look to Caenith. “Put on a shirt, perhaps.”

  Morigan held up a finger to her lover’s lips as Caenith began to snarl a reply.

  “I know you’ve pulled a few strings here and there,” she said, “but are you going to explain how you know Queen Lila?”

  “Not at the moment.” Thule shrank from Morigan. “And keep those magik hands or bees away until I’ve said my piece. A man should have safety and some privacy, at least in his own head.”

  “I’ve shared enough for a lifetime with you, and you’ll need to do the same eventually,” warned Morigan, and she took her finger off Caenith’s lips and tapped it on her nose. “I’ve never met a queen before. I should give myself a once-over.”

  Morigan smiled at the men, asked them to behave, and went to use the lavatory. Morigan’s footsteps were barely down the first flight when Thule looked to the shirtless man in his study as if he were an animal that had defecated on the carpet and dragged its arse around the room. He asked, “What’s the sport, then? What are you after with her?”

  Caenith wasn’t a liar and did not hide the truth of his feelings. “I wish to make her my bloodmate.”

  “Pardon me?” said Thule.

  “You spit at me as if I have made some offense in proclaiming my intentions with the Fawn. Do not question me, my honor, or my virtue. Your ears did not deceive you, son of the house of Thule,” snarled Caenith.

  “It seems that we each know a bit of the other,” tossed Thule right back—deterred only for a speck by the dredging up of his ignoble heritage. “I cannot change into which family I was born, though I have done much to prove myself a man not cut of the same wicked cloth as my forefathers. What penance I have done, too, were you to know. How deeply I have paid, a thousand times over for the crimes of my ancestors. Can you say the same, Caenith? Shame on you to speak of honor and virtue. You, who plays the role of the pet of the house of El. At least I hope that you are pretending, for the implications otherwise are as damning as they are preposterous. In either case, you’ve drawn a mark on yourself, and likewise on Morigan. Revenge for the Blood King’s murders has not been forgotten by the masters of El.”

  Caenith held the old sorcerer’s stare, unwavering. “A Wolf does many things when he is without his pack. Loneliness is its own terrible beast. It can claim even the strongest man over time, as water rubs away the hardest rock. When we are lonely, we do not listen to the voice of reason or civility. We do not hear the Green Mother. We are the animal. We are instinct. The animal, now he can be as wild as a river of blood, and in Menos, there are many who would feed that sort of urge. Many who would set it loose and watch it destroy for profit or black amusement. I have my shame for what I have done. I pretend to be nothing, element-breaker. Let the masters of El come. I shall feed them to their ancestors.”

  A Wolf ? Is he mad? Does he believe what shite he is spinning? wondered Thule, yet could not assemble a retort for this convincing con man, who was so fervently assured with what he had said. Which left Thule to consider the second, less palatable truth, wherein this great hairy thing with his cold-metal eyes and confessions as a killer of hundreds was somehow older than all the sorcerers Thule had known, notwithstanding the Immortal Kings or Queen Lila. Indeed, as Thule engaged in his contest of wills with Caenith, the unblinking stare, the musk, and the shadow of the man seemed less worldly and more otherworldly, and he broke the stare and retreated to his seat, as if hiding from a yellow-eyed predator in the woods.

  “You can’t be,” rambled Thule, unable to hold his thoughts and skeptical of what he was saying. “Are you…are you the Blood King?”

  “I have given you my answer,” declared Caenith.

  Having said his piece, Caenith dropped his hands off his haunches and spread them over the floor, posed as a waiting, tail-thumping hound would be. The cold gray eyes lost interest in the old man and made lightning glances elsewhere in the room: to motes of dust dancing in ribbons of sunlight, a spider spinning its web in a corner, a bird flying past Thule’s window, or a dozen other instances of life in one precious speck. Caenith’s nose was just as active in honing in on Morigan’s wet, sweet scent above the usual alchemical farts and industry of Eod. All the while, Thule watched Caenith and his strange behavior and faltered ever more in his theory that this man was a fraud.

  An ageless warrior? References to animal behaviorisms. What
strange idioms he uses. A bloodmate? Does he mean an ancient ritual of union? Dear Morigan, what have you invited into your life? What am I looking at? Thule sweated. He leaped a little in his seat when the cold gray eyes suddenly found him again.

  “Morigan is coming,” warned Caenith. “I shall not have you speaking of my sins before I have had a chance to confess them to my Fawn. I shall afford you the same courtesy to speak of your cursed bloodline at a time when you see fit. A pact of silence between sinners, then. Do you agree?”

  “Fine, yes,” said Thule, though he would have agreed with whatever the man had proposed to get that stare off himself. Caenith put on a slightly fanged smile, which chilled Thule with its hungry gleam, and rose to meet his lover. Into the room, Morigan flowed like a breath of fire and excitement. She warmed each man with a grin.

  “You two appear to have sorted out your differences,” she noted.

  “For now,” replied Caenith.

  Thule gave a contrite smile and stayed in the security of his chair while the lovers huddled together, whispering sweetnesses to the other. Watching them made Thule’s stomach crawl with nerves, for he felt as if Morigan—the daughter he had known better than his own, dear Theadora—was a stranger to him, or had matured into something else, and in so short a time. As for the man, no longer a smith or a deceiver did he see, but a creature more concerning than either. A Wolf. Yes, Thule thought, now that Caenith had planted the word in their conversation. Thule was so swept up in the storm of his thoughts that it took Caenith barking at him twice to tell him that a skycarriage was here.

  As guests of the palace, they would want for nothing, so Thule abstained from grabbing any personal effects and hurried down the stairs with his companions. He did not lock his door, as magik would see to that, but shut it and turned to see Morigan running wonderstruck toward a silver vessel that dazzled in welcome, with Caenith loping after her. There was a definite animal heaviness and grace to the man, observed Thule. He caught up with the others as they were introducing themselves to the half-dozen Watchmen assembled aside the skycarriage’s elegant silver-and-tempered-glass stairs, which had been folded from the vessel. The skycarriage was a remarkable achievement in artistry and technomagik. A vessel nearest in shape to a mastless ivory skiff, with a sharp prow, a thin bow, delicate metal struts that bore the weight of the craft, and wavelike curves and platinum embossing about its windows and portals. Compared to the sky terrors of Menos, this was a dove to their Crowes, and Caenith was impressed at the craftsmanship even if he was apathetic at man’s overall desire to conquer nature. As far as Caenith was concerned, the sky belonged to birds, which had the right and the tools as given by Geadhain.