Sorren’s innocence died along with his brother. Yet the fates demanded more blood, and Lenora disappeared the night that the pale walking ghost that was her lover returned with her mad husband. Sorren did not search for her until suspicions grew grim, for he wanted her to grovel for his pity. He was raging when they found Lenora picked and chewed by ravens several mornings hence, and he bitterly said, It’s too late to bring her back. I shall have to work on another vessel.
Madness had taken him, and Gloriatrix left Blackbriar for the safer walls of the Crucible after that—walls warded in iron and magik, though she wondered if her son could breach them if he truly wished. The events of that murderous night had warped more than his psyche; they had changed his power. He’d gone from sorcerer to nekromancer in an instant. She did not ponder this, as she did not want to know what species of horror her son had become. No one could truly raise the dead. No nekromancer in Menos, Eod, or any in the history of magik. Once the fire of life was out, it could never be fanned again. What her son had done to Vortigern was an abomination, but she would not dare to tell him that, for who knew what form he might find more fitting for his mother. Particularly if he was to learn of how she, who had reprimanded him for his failures his entire life, had failed him in the act of blood that he had demanded of her: to kill the bastard child.
The tantrum finished after a spell of kicking the numberman’s corpse so violently that Gloriatrix’s skirt was splashed with blood. Spent, Sorren flung himself back in the chair. She waited a few more specks before attempting reason.
“I am sorry, my son. You try so hard to please me. Elissandra will be here soon. I am sure that there are footprints all over this manor. Ones that our eyes are blind to. A hair, a drop of sweat. That is all she needs. We shall find Vortigern and the witch soon.”
“And the girl,” added the Broker. He had remained in his position during Sorren’s rant and was spattered in red whorls, which he did not seem to mind.
Gloriatrix found the freak as appalling as he was interesting. She shook her head to break the spell and asked, “What girl?”
“The one who looks like the lady in the pictures,” said the Broker.
Finally, he noticed the gore and began the queerest ritual of licking a curled hand and then rubbing his face with it. It was animalistic, though Gloriatrix could not say from which bizarre species. She had to shake her head again to focus.
“Lady in the pictures? Who? Len—”
“None of your concern,” interrupted Sorren, his voice tight. “A pet project of mine.”
A pet project? Lady in the pictures? thought the Iron Queen. Threads were being woven outside her web. Dangerous threads. With secrets that threatened to disturb the deeply packed graves of the past. While she waited for Elissandra to arrive, the blood-soaked chamber became ever more stifling. And she had only a preening, metal-faced man and a son that was hollowed out and filled with wickedness for support. Should her fortunes turn, she realized, her own grave had been dug.
XIV
WHISPERS FROM THE EAST
I
The Red Mary left Thackery and Caenith upon the rocking wharf like two sailors come home from war. Only in what was a reversal of the tradition, men flamboyantly waved and cried from the bow of the ship instead of from the shore as it retreated into the waves. In the day it took to cross the Feordhan, Jebidiah’s men had proven fine company, even if they were interested in Caenith in ways that he would never consider. Affectionately, he remembered the raucous feast and minstrel show they had provided while the Red Mary cruised along last eve. He gave an enthusiastic wave back to the seamen. His spirits knew no bounds now that Morigan had secured some measure of safety.
“They certainly liked you,” smirked Thackery.
“I am likeable,” said Caenith with a smile.
“Yes, you are.”
With a nudge to his companion, Thackery turned toward Blackforge. From the corroded wharf that wrapped around a wall of grim rock, to the listless folk who shuffled, facedown, in drab gray habits, Blackforge was a stark contrast to the liveliness of Taroch’s Arm. It stank less than Taroch’s Arm did, too, yet what smells it bore were of iron and sweaty fear. A thick morning fog had coated the docks, and the sails on boats hung like heavy-shouldered mourners. As the companions started down the planks, the city on the hill forbiddingly revealed itself through tentacles of mist. Blackforge was a city of longhouses and cabins painted dark by coal-burning hearths, which grew up a casual stone slope like an unusual forest: one not unlike the steep vales of the Black Grove, a woodland outside the city from where the lumber for these buildings had been hewn. Overseeing the city was the grandest longhouse, which crackled with torches and fluttered with grim banners bearing the image of a hammer striking an anvil. Stone roads and steps snaked through Blackforge, and the companions soon found themselves off the wharf and climbing through sparsely populated neighborhoods. People were about, though the streets were light of steed or feet. Occasionally, Thackery and Caenith spotted pale faces peering from windows. At alehouses, bards plucked limp, out-of-tune melodies, and patrons kept to themselves and stared into their drinks with empty eyes. Thackery had always known Blackforge to be a despondent port, as the masters of house Blackmore were miserly rulers who taxed their fief to near poverty; however, its misery superseded its reputation. To divert his attention, Thackery struck up a conversation with his companion.
“Have you…spoken with Morigan again?” he whispered.
“Not as I am accustomed to,” muttered Caenith. He strode beside Thackery for a while before stepping into an unused alley to explain himself. “Not with the same clarity that I should. I know that she is out of immediate danger, and I catch hints of where she is and of what she is doing. However, conversations between us are broken, at best.”
“Conversations? You mean in your head?”
“Yes.”
Thackery pondered over what might interfere with the sort of farspeaking Caenith was describing. He snapped his fingers as it came to him.
“The feliron! Of course! It’s a mineral than dampens magikal aptitude, and the mines of Menos run deep with it. The bulwark of the Iron City is fortified with it, too: it acts as a repellent against spycraft or sorcery. Nullifies all magik within a certain range, come to think. While I doubt she is standing near the wall—or at least, I hope not—the feliron must be affecting the link between Morigan and yourself. Once we get within the iron wall, it should resolve itself.”
Contemplating the trials ahead, Caenith’s brow wrinkled with despair.
Encouragingly, Thackery cuffed his fellow’s arm, and then shook his hand from the numbness, having forgotten how hard the man was. “We will reunite with her soon, I promise. First, let’s keep our chins to the ground and get out of Blackforge. I expect that the sword of the queen and that other man—familiar, he was—a master of the watch, I think, though I can’t recall his name. In any event, they’re surely on our tails now.” Thackery scratched his chin. “They were looking for one or both of us, though I cannot say why.”
“They are seeking answers. Or someone to blame,” said Caenith.
Surly and preoccupied, the companions slipped out into the streets again. As a man of odd customs and habits who did not age, Caenith had been run from many a settlement of man. When he became too reclusive, outlived one too many elders, or refused the wrong hand in marriage, the people’s tolerance for his queerness predictably came to an end. He could well imagine what infamies were brewing in Eod regarding his name. With Morigan’s consent, his next home might have to be beyond the great mountains. Perhaps in a land of snow, ice, and solitude, where loneliness was a part of life, he would be less questioned and more widely welcomed.
Striding fast, they were soon high upon Blackforge’s hill among the grimy market tents and smoking outdoor kilns, ovens, and hearths that gave the city its reputation. At one time, metals surely simmered over these coals, yet today the travelers saw only bland foods, claywar
e, and the occasional jewelcrafter; no jolly bellows or aproned strongmen singing to the day with their hammers and anvils. As a city founded upon smithies, they were surely in short supply. Thackery recalled the rumors that in the last decade, Menos had bled the mineral veins under the city dry, and the absence of metal outside of scrap hauled by weary oxen in carts—for what purpose? wondered Thackery—confirmed this suspicion. More folk wandered around the market, though there were as many merchants as there were customers, which was not symptomatic of a healthy economy.
How far the iron hand reaches, thought Thackery. Do you have any idea how much cruelty you spread, Gloria? All for an ambition that feeds itself like a monster. Do you blame our mother’s weakness, or do you blame our father’s sin? Do you still hold your husband’s death against me? He was wicked well before you decided to outshine his evil. Either way, the poison stems from you. Into your children, too. Did Sorren act on his own? It seems unlikely, attached to your teat as he is. No, you share the blame as much as he does. I would pray to our Menosian ancestors that we do not meet, Gloria. For all my grievances flow back to you, and I shall see you pay for every one of your treacheries, wretched sister of mine.
If he were a little less involved in himself, Thackery would have noticed the contingent of charcoal-cloaked warriors gathered before a table of poultices and tinctures before bumbling into the largest of them, who turned. The appalled sufferance with which the tall stranger beheld Thackery suggested that he was a man of mortal power, and his brocaded garments supported this thought. He was thick, but not fat, with a beard and hair that were sleekly groomed and a weaselly cunning to his eyes. One of the man’s hands went to a hilt at his garish silver baldric and the other pushed against Thackery’s chest.
“I would remove that, if I were you,” cautioned Caenith.
The man sneered. “I am Augustus Blackmore, the master of Blackforge, and I shall do as I please in my realm. No wanderer or his oversized manservant will say otherwise.”
A quartet of gruff whiskery warriors, all aged beyond their youth by scowls and frowns, attended the master of Blackforge, and they unsheathed their weapons in a flourish of steel that sent folks running and hiding behind barrels or under their tables, like the merchant tending this particular venue. As quickly as the blades flashed, Caenith’s arm passed about him in a circle, the limb as vibrating and indistinct as a struck tuning fork: perhaps to key the chorus of yelps that followed. The men and the master all dropped their swords from his slaps. Caenith had moved too quickly for Thackery to interfere, and as the severity of the slight dawned on the old man and the astonished but rapidly reddening master of Blackforge, he stepped in to mitigate the worst of the offense.
“Do excuse my guard’s swift hands,” begged Thackery. “He is a martial disciple of the southern lands. A man of instinct, who only acts in the interest of my protection and is unfamiliar with the decorum of central Geadhain.”
“He’s rather large for a Southerner,” said Augustus, pouting and nursing his wrist. “Rather dark of skin and heavy of frame for those reedlike yellow bastards. I could have him beaten for his disrespect.”
Caenith’s eyes darkly shimmered. Try, he thought.
“I would ask that you don’t,” said Thackery, who knew that such threats would end poorly for the master. “And that we put this unpleasant misunderstanding behind us. We have pressing business elsewhere and must be on our way. A thousand pardons to you, Augustus.”
“Business?” asked Augustus. “What manner of enterprise are you involved in, old man?”
“Spices and exotic materials.”
“Exotic materials? Sounds suspicious.”
Having just retrieved and stowed their swords, Augustus’s men were clearly debating whether to pull them again. Augustus nodded for them to still their hands.
“You are an apothecary, then?” asked Augustus, flicking a bundle of dried herbs off the table and into the muck. “With better goods than this hedge-healer’s tripe?”
“I am a trader, mostly,” Thackery replied, smiling shakily. “I do not practice the art of healing, myself. I merely provide the tools.”
“I am at my wit’s end, trader.” The master sighed. “I have seen every physician and sorcerer passing or summoned to this realm, and I am still without a cure for the condition of someone I value. If I can borrow you for an hourglass or two, I would have you look at a patient and tell me if any tools you know of can assist in her condition. Perhaps that is where I have gone wrong, in seeking specialists instead of the medicines and their peddlers themselves. Perhaps the simplest midwife’s draft will cure this problem.”
“Oh, I don’t know—”
“Your courtesy would make it easier to forgive the insult to my house,” said the master, smiling without kindness. “I shall see you speedily set on the road afterward. You are not invited to feast with us, so you needn’t stay.”
After sparing a silent curse to Caenith, Thackery bowed his agreement. He was grateful when Caenith didn’t simply sprint off to Menos and allowed the men to circle and herd them like livestock down the road. In fact, much of Caenith’s manner was sullen and subdued, though what stirred under that cool mask was what worried Thackery the most. For the Wolf would not be indefinitely delayed in his quest. Soon the beast would tire of these games of men and would bite at whatever hands tried to thwart him.
“I never did catch your name,” said the master from up ahead.
“I never gave it,” replied Thackery.
“You should,” said Augustus, again laughing without mirth. “Only a fool invites strangers into his home.”
Only a fool trusts a lapdog of Menos, thought Thackery. “Jebidiah Rotbottom,” he replied.
Only the barest pause was taken, though Caenith noticed it, and the odor of sweet strawberry mulch—the stench of corruption—around the man grew greater. Any ideas he had about knocking these wicked men around were stalled by the shadows gliding through the deepest clouds that Thackery, or most slow-walkers, could not sense: skycarriages of Menos. Crowes, patrolling the border of the Feordhan. They were not in familiar or hospitable lands anymore, and he must be wary—even if that meant bending to the whims of this insignificant slow-walker. Or at least he should wait until they were in a more private location to release any violence.
Folks shied away from the passage of their company, women pulled their children from the road, and the few who were caught in their path stopped their wagons and bowed their heads at Augustus. Beaten souls, all of them, noted Caenith. He pondered what cruelties they had suffered under the master’s hand and felt a rare moment of compassion for slow-walkers, as these were so terribly broken. What, then, could break a man to a cowering dog? he wondered. Caenith received an answer as they came to the palisade that protected the master’s longhouse. From beyond the wall rolled a sour wave, and Caenith’s ears were teased by the faint bleating of mortal woe. With this forewarning, once they were marched past the churlish gatemen and into a mucky enclosure, what the Wolf saw did not surprise him. Thackery, however, gasped at the wooden platforms and their cluttered stockades: each prison filled with an emaciated figure, some dead for so long that the birds and flies had picked them to half-white corpses. The ones that were alive moaned, more of delirious agony than true pleas.
Augustus was mad, the companions realized.
So ghastly was the scene that Thackery’s feet froze and he had to cover his mouth to catch the bile. The Wolf maintained nothing more telling than his usual glower. Gently, Caenith pushed his companion forward; he kept his hand to the man’s shivering back for a time. The gesture and its warmth were comforting. The master’s words were not.
“Criminals, all of them. Spare them no pity,” said Augustus. “Do not think me cruel, for I cast the sentence that put them here, and I know the name and crime of every offender.” He pointed to a skinny wretch on one of the platforms as they moved by. “That man there, Twyn Barlay: a bread thief, whose food allowance was not enou
gh for his greed. Tough times are these, and the stores must be protected. War is on the horizon, and the people must be strong, lean, and ready to obey their masters. A hungry man is a willing man, and Barlay crossed the line between willingness and desperation. I make these decisions for the endurance of the house of Blackmore, and I bear the burden of these souls’ penance as much as they.”
Thackery was hard-pressed to believe that the master found any of this to be a burden, for such misery could only be gleefully inflicted.
“War?” asked Thackery.
“Have you not heard?” said Augustus, puffing himself up. “It seems you have been far away not to know. The Iron Queen has at last struck against Eod. An incendiary in King’s Crown. Dozens dead. The first arrow fired, so to speak. The time of hidden alliances is at an end. All men must choose where to cast their lot. Who would you choose, merchant? The West or the East?”
“As a trader to all nations, it serves me best to claim neutrality,” said Thackery. A heavy quiet fell over the group, until he added, “Yet as a man who must choose, I would side with those most likely to win. I would choose the Iron City.”
Augustus clapped. “Wisely said. And even the simplest man can see the victor. A nation of peace-loving philanthropists and poets? Or a people who are born and bred to conquer without compassion? I know who is more likely to slay the other, sorcerer kings aside. Menos has its own technomagiks that can peel the soul from a man at a thousand paces or melt flesh like lard in a fireplace. I would like to see how a sorcerer king, mighty as the legends say, can withstand that. Legends are stories for children and campfires. History, however, is fact. Fact written by man. Immortal Kings have no place in our history. They should fade as stories, with the faeries, wyrms, and other relics of the past. House Blackmore will side with the Iron City. We shall make history. Already the Iron Queen extends the hand of their protection to our skies, and soon we shall—”
Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) Page 40