Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1)

by Christian A. Brown

  As the insects cheeped their songs, the men chewed on bitter silences. At length, Caenith turned to Thackery.

  “I respect you, element-breaker,” he said with fierce passion. “I do not know what torments you, though I see how you fight against it. As we all must do: challenge the darkness of our natures. I commend you for your strength. Know that I do not idly fan the ego of another, and I have never called a slow-walker a friend, yet you are close to that in my mind. As for Macha, she is one half of her nature and without a single guardian in this world. We can be this for her, her guardians, until we can find a place of safety better than the arms of two dangerous men. I shall not ask if you have committed to this, for I knew your answer when you called your wrath upon that vile master.”

  That said, Caenith was moving again. Inspired by their candid conversation, their professing of honor and sentimental responsibilities, Thackery chased the Wolf down.

  “Wait,” he requested.

  Penitence was heavy on Thackery’s face when Caenith turned round. The stink of a confession was all over the man.

  “If we are to call each other comrades,” said Thackery, “I must tell you of my ties to Menos. Sorren, my sister…all of my shame.”

  Caenith did not ask what this shame was; his presence was as dark and spiritual as those of the veiled priests of Carthac who counted and forgave sins. Thackery continued. The truth was easy to tell: it wanted to get out.

  “A woman…I fell in love, and I disregarded everything a Menosian master cherished in order to be with her. We helped others like ourselves. People who wanted to break the chains fate bound them in. I still had money to my name, a gross amount of coin, though not the infinite resources of my family, and I used every crown toward this venture. We saved so many. We lived as free as a man and woman could…near the Untamed, where we believed ourselves safe in the shadow of Alabion. We had a child. A beautiful girl named Theadora, as lovely as the one you’re holding yourself and magikal in her own way. Perhaps even in my way, for I felt she was special…”

  He had faded off, and Caenith had to focus his companion’s attention.

  “They died?” he asked sharply.

  “They did.”

  After a silence, and much shuffling on the pine needles, Thackery went on.

  “My family, you see. We are cursed. No matter what we do, it seems that blood and madness is what we were made for, what we excel at without effort. We used the Watchers to communicate with those who wanted our aid. An unreliable ally, I know, as they are agents to the highest bidder. I can’t accuse them of betrayal, for that would be to project upon them virtues they do not have. They acted as one would expect rogues to do. While I am sure that they never openly gave our exact names or locations, they gave enough clues for us to be found. I think, however, that it was my willingness to help another Thule, another soul trapped in our family web, that truly called the hounds. You see, my nephew reached out to me.”

  “Sorren?”

  “No, his brother, Vortigern. He and Sorren’s wife had fallen in love, and they wanted to escape the Iron City. I was suspicious of helping them until their pleas grew desperate. Moreover, until…” Thackery was rent by twisted emotions; his frown looked painful. “I learned that they had a child. I had the Watchers confirm this, and knew then that I had to aid them. Therein was a critical error, for the information returned to my sister. How much, I do not know, but she made use of whatever scraps wisely and wickedly. Sorren intercepted his brother and killed him, though I am told he keeps the corpse around as some sort of grisly trophy. The boy’s mind is all filth and death. I have never been so close to such madness.”

  “Sorren’s wife? And the child?” asked Caenith. Unconsciously, he brought a hand to the chest of the small life he cared for in his arms.

  “Lenora was her name. Heiress to the Blackbriar fortune and from a family of great prestige: technomagikal-engineering magnates. The sort of valuables my sister desired and connived her way into attaining through the marriage of her son, Sorren. She had plans for Vortigern, too; I can only imagine what. Strange that my sister never chose to remarry herself.” Thackery caught himself wandering. “Lenora, right. I have seen cameos and portraits of Sorren’s wife, and she was as fair as they come. Noble, too, for she was willing to leave it all for love and family. Vortigern’s passing and the loss of her child threw her over the edge of sanity. Quite literally, I suppose. She tossed herself from the highest roof in Blackbriar, only her body slid into an easement and never made it to the ground. It was almost a week before the corpse was found and only because so many ravens were feasting on it. In Menos, you may remember, those birds are ravenous vermin that shame the gulls of the Feordhan or the vultures of Kor’Khul. As I think back on it, her desecration was likely for the best, or Sorren would have brought her shambling back into some state of unholy life. There wasn’t enough of her to do that, bless whatever powers control these things. Sorren tracked me down after that. Blamed me for his inability to have a heart or give a woman love. And the cost…” Thackery bore into Caenith with the rawest hatred—this was the Will that had summoned the fire in Blackforge. “What he took from me can never be replaced.”

  “Vortigern and Lenora’s child?” asked Caenith a second time.

  The old man’s anger crumbled into glimmering sadness. “I have dodged the question…it seems my heart does not want to share that. Yet you should know what sort of monsters hunt us and the ones we love. So I shall tell you the bitter end. My sister, well, she is the teat from which Sorren has sucked his evil. She disposed of the child, I was told. What particular end is unknown, but it is best not to think of how children can pass.”

  Caenith’s instincts would not let Thackery slide into sorrow. He smelled a rotten truth, as old and settled as an aged stain of wine upon wood.

  “Who is this woman? Your sister?” he asked.

  Thackery muttered a reply as if it were of no consequence.

  “Gloriatrix Thule, now Blackbriar. The Iron Queen of Menos.”

  Silence.

  In what was a fortunate interruption, Macha whined and then squirmed against Caenith, and the men attended her at once. The familiar moment where she was terrified of her guardian came and went, and Caenith set her down to stretch her limbs. While Macha tiptoed around them, burbling old Ghaedic to the night birds she spotted camouflaged in trees, Caenith and Thackery soaked in the other’s grim stare, considering what had been said.

  “Now you know everything,” declared Thackery.

  “Yes.”

  Unpredictably, Thackery tossed away his walking stick and hunched to make grinning overtures to Macha. She wasn’t clear on what the wrinkly gentleman wanted, but he reminded her of an old stone that she and her kin once lay on: all lined and gray with the blue of his eyes like a splash of the sea. So she went to him, to the memories he represented, and he picked her up and carried her into the woods. Thackery wouldn’t be able to navigate them anywhere but in circles, so Caenith quickly took the lead. The sun was beginning to thread through the pines, but neither man was weary. Invigorated from the release of secrets, Thackery felt as though he could walk for spans. While the well of secrets was dry for Thackery, Caenith had one of his own: a part of Macha’s tale that he was still trying to untangle. The matter of why she and her kin had come so far west into the deadly lands of man. Alone, for that matter, without even their clan.

  Why did you leave the safety of the Untamed? he had asked in one of their exchanges. Macha had appeared confused by the question, so he asked it once more.

  Safety? she had said, finally understanding. It is not safe. The lords of fang and claw have united under a terrible warmother and the clans that do not bow to her are hunted. Alabion is at war.

  III

  Augustus sighed with pleasure as the compress was placed upon his throbbing face.

  That fuking merchant and his oaf. They should have stayed to stick a sword in me, for I shall hunt them to the ends of Geadhai
n.

  “How bad is it?” he asked the muddled shape that was tending to him. The burns had eaten the flesh around his cheeks, forehead, and right eye. The eye was unsalvageable by even the fleshcrafters and had been removed. He assumed that he looked hideous, and the delay in a proper response by his maid only deepened the speculation. Furiously, he clawed for his tender and seized a wrist.

  “Answer me, you cunt!”

  “I…am a man, Master Blackmore,” confessed the tender. “The wounds are…I am no physician. Should I fetch the fleshcrafters?”

  Augustus wrenched the servant close to him, so close that they panted like lovers across each other’s cheeks. At an old maid’s distance, he could see a bit more of the dopey, unremarkable lad; mostly, he could read his horror.

  “How does it look?” he hissed.

  “T-terrible!” stuttered the tender.

  His wrist was twisted by Augustus, and he was thrown somewhere into the cloudiness of the room. Augustus heard him scramble away. In misery he lay, the room fading in and out like a daydream. Deceptively delectable, the air reeked of roast hog, and the smell began to nauseate him because he knew it was his own cooked flesh. Over time, the tincture that the fleshcrafters had given him had fluttered into his fingers and toes like tiny butterflies, taking most of the pain away. He was only semi-aware that he was in a cordoned-off, salvaged section of his longhouse, or that he had been so viciously humiliated by Rotbottom and his oaf. Dark urges and wincing memories haunted him. He thought of slapped hands. Of the denouncement of his rights as a master. What had the oaf called his master? That shout… when the walls were falling in fiery waves and he was crawling on the burning soil. Tack? Tackry? Tadackry?

  “What are you mumbling, man? I see that the palliatives have taken effect,” said a cultured voice.

  Now Augustus noticed the subtle woodsy cologne. A master this was—somewhat familiar, too—and Augustus slouched over in his cot to see him. Master Moreth of the house of El sat by his bedside, preening his handsome beard with his gloved fingers. He had a countenance as frozen as a mask: eerily skeletal and wide-eyed, with hardly a line of expression to be seen of either smiles or pouts, and in Augustus’s altered state, he seemed glossy and fishlike. Even his lacquered hair could have belonged on a wax statue. While the master’s bowler hat and cane rested across his lap, this was an indication of class, not patience, which was a quality Moreth did not have.

  Impassive, Moreth managed to sneer using only his words. “Please, I would rather you do not look at me. I’ve seen a man’s face scraped off in the pits, but yours truly is a dog’s breakfast.”

  Augustus snorted in disdain and lay back down upon his cot. “What do you want?”

  “I was in the neighborhood, as it were, delivering some fresh workers to our operation in the fort when I heard the news. Well, I saw the fire, too, though I wasn’t particularly inclined to investigate it until the Iron Marshals handed me their report. Jebidiah Rotbottom was responsible for this? He’s causing quite a bit of mischief lately. How much witchpowder did he use? And how did he manage to slip away from a fully armed…well, this shitebin isn’t quite a keep, is it? So a fully armed encampment, shall we say, being generous.”

  “Magik,” grumbled Augustus. “His guardsman is a touch unnatural as well; moves like a spitting snake.”

  “Pardon me? Magik?” exclaimed Moreth. “There isn’t a dash of sorcery to be found in the Rotbottom lineage. That’s not possible.”

  “I know what magik is and what it looks like, and that is what he used.”

  Following a quick debate over Augustus’s lucidity, Moreth put on his hat and got to his feet. “Thank you, Augustus. The Council of the Wise has acknowledged your work. Please recuperate with haste. I shall leave you to your Thack/Tak anagrams, then.”

  Moreth’s suggestion inserted the puzzle into Augustus’s mind anew. As Moreth was prodding aside the hides with his cane—not wanting to touch them with a hand, even gloved—Augustus recalled the name screamed during the inferno.

  “Thackery,” he muttered.

  “What did you say?” asked Moreth, whose ears were sharp.

  “Thackery. That is what the servant called him. I remember that. I feel as if I have heard that name before,” said Augustus.

  “You very well could have,” whispered Moreth with a genuine and rare frown. “He is the cursed blood of Thule. The cast-out brother of our Iron Queen and the one who sought to unmake the order of Menos.”

  Slinking back to his seat, Moreth asked to hear the master’s entire account, and listened to every word from Augustus’s misshapen mouth with the greatest severity.

  XV

  WELL OF SECRETS

  I

  Menos was the coldest place Morigan had known at night. Although the winter realms that Kanatuk had come from were certainly colder, the spiritual chill could not have been greater. Staring out the window pane into the man-made nightmare valley of black peaks and feeble yellow lights—less than a mole would need, surely—it was a wonder to her that people chose to live in this place. Or that they would stay and not choose to flee, though perhaps Thackery’s misadventures had put an end to that. To leave, one had to get past the Iron Wall, which dared the brave with its ever-present horizon of blackness, no matter where she looked across the city. It was as permanent as the Crucible, but all the more daunting because she knew that she would have to challenge it.

  With a whisper, Mouse left them, saying something about a contact and that she wouldn’t be long. While she was out, Morigan explored the musty chambers of the manse, slinking through ghostly dormitories, hollow classrooms, and chambers that stirred her head with flashes of children. In a dilapidated studio, she saw dancing phantoms, as plumed and marvelous as exotic birds. Later, she saw a line of children practicing their makeup before mirrors in an empty lavatory. Chased by these ghosts, she hurried to find attire less red and more subtle to wear than her promise gown. Between a bedroom here and a closet there, she discovered some bloomers, a blouse, a cape, and even a pair of boots. Moth-eaten and a pinch small was most of it, but she beat it free of age and mites and made do. When she returned to the classroom where her companions were waiting, Vortigern and Kanatuk were studying the cobwebs and inextricable spirals of dust on the blackboard as if it were a profound equation. She could tell that they had hardly, if at all, spoken to each other. She returned to her watch at the window.

  “What is this place?” asked Kanatuk, who was more comfortable speaking with Morigan around. Living under the whip of the Broker allowed one to see many places in Menos, though he was not quite certain how this building was used.

  “Menos’s attempt at mercy,” said Mouse.

  Unseen, unheard to even the acute senses of an assassin, reborn, and seer, Mouse had manifested in the doorway. Her fancy dress had been discarded for sleek black garments and a sweeping cape. Mouse glided over to the abandoned desk at the front of the room. Textbooks were concealed under a gray blanket of years, and she brushed off their covers and examined them.

  “The children that lived here were taught mathematics, sciences, and the languages of Geadhain,” she continued, her head down. “Along with performing arts and lessons in society and grace, skills to make them sophisticated and intelligent companions.”

  “Companions?” asked Kanatuk.

  “The finest courtesans in Menos,” said Mouse. “In a city of only slaves and masters, an indentured life is the nearest one will find to freedom. Work long and hard enough and you can—theoretically—buy the chain off your neck. More often than not, this is a dream to distract from one’s prison, not a reality that can be attained. Most indentured never make it. If disease doesn’t kill you, one’s master or clients are the next surest bet.”

  A flash of insight stung Morigan. An old man with a gold-capped smile is leering in the vision; the glint of the knife he holds complements the malicious sentiment of his smile. He is going to cut Mouse with it, somewhere lower, for he traces th
e cold steel tip down her abdomen. And scream or struggle as she might, she is bound and gagged as a slaughterhouse pig and there is nothing she can do about it. “Bear it out, Mouse. Swallow the pain. One day it shall be you holding the knife,” the host tells herself.

  The first warm thrust is so excruciating that her head floods with stars and she blacks out.

  “I’m sorry,” said Morigan.

  As if sleepwalking, the seer had drifted from the window without any recall and was standing by Mouse. Morigan put her hand on Mouse’s shoulder and could taste the sour nectar of her despair. That despair suddenly festered into anger, and Mouse grabbed the hand that was upon her and pulled Morigan close. Mouse’s stare was hollow as she whispered, “I see you’ve been poking about, and I don’t need your sympathy. I am one of those who won. I earned my freedom in this shiteheap of a world. I saved every crown; I abstained from every indulgence that pleasure folk drown themselves in. I thought only of who I would be, not who I was. I paid my debt to my master. The first in my lifetime to have done so, I am told. I am a survivor, and if you pity me again, you will see how strong that has made me.”

  The rage fell away and Mouse released Morigan.

  “Back to your question, Broker’s man,” she said. “These orphanages never worked as well as they were intended to. A few generations after the Cost for Freedom Charter was penned by the philanthropic Gloriatrix herself, it was dismantled. Masters quickly realized that it was cheaper and more efficient to purchase hopeless slaves than to deal with the blight of optimism in their houses. Furthermore, the taxes paid by indentured servants were better thought to be in the greasy hands of their masters, who could obscure these costs more efficiently when the money was not monitored by the city. Thus, no more indentureship contracts were drafted, charterhouses like these were left to fade into history, and I would think that if one has not earned his freedom by now, he never will.”