“It’s an old access tunnel, built by my father to use in cases of emergency. Father told me about it, as I was the eldest male of our family. I doubt Gloria knows of it; if she had, it would have been sealed or heavily guarded for her own personal use. The architects that my father hired for its make were all… silenced. The passage leads to the Drowned River, near the old reservoir, and I am pleased to say that it appears my gamble was not in vain and that it has not been discovered. I suppose we shall confirm that in a speck. The lights are no longer hunting us for the moment. Let’s move.”
They darted out into the night and splashed their way toward the wall. Once through the whipping reeds, the two men ripped at the vines—Caenith’s one arm moving faster and doing more than both of Thackery’s—and soon revealed a heavy black gate, like that of a prison cell. Just as the watchtower lights swooped past, they hauled themselves up onto the rim of the pipe and pressed their bodies against the bars. As soon as they were in shadow again, Thackery turned and clutched the lock that sealed the gate. Caenith would have simply kicked the metal in, but Thackery muttered something—a woman’s name, Bethany, heard the Wolf—which opened the lock with a crisp click. The gate screeched as it swung into the dripping tunnel beyond.
“We should cover up the entrance in case it is spotted by the patrols.”
Thackery had to ask again, for the Wolf was distant and staring into the pipe. While he still could not feel his bloodmate, her scent of wind and flowers and the soils and sweetness of the West was somehow wafting toward him. She was close. His heart stirred from the rush of the chase.
“Morigan, I can smell her,” he said.
Thackery didn’t ask what miracle this was, or how it had come to be, for he had learned never to question good fortune. In a flurry, he pulled the greenery over the pipe and then waved the Wolf on. With that, two men and their tiny fading charge sped into the bowels of Menos to find the one woman who could right almost everything that was wrong.
They fled before the storm began, though Caenith absently heard the drumming and thunder echoing after them. He did not see the magnificence of the weather: the sky as it ran black as ink, the droplets as large as stones, or the winds that clawed hunks of earth and hacked the green from the sanctuary of the trees they had recently left. The land was angry; the land was in sorrow. A sadness greater than either of those two could have guessed had occurred, and Geadhain was about to mourn.
The storm had started.
III
He’s coming, the bees whispered.
Morigan rattled her chains when the message was delivered. She hadn’t meant to; it was the surprise that made her do it, and she had been pretending to be quiet until this point with relative effectiveness. Or so she believed.
“It’s about time we ended the charade, no?” said the Broker. “I don’t get many guests, and my sons don’t tend to converse much. I wouldn’t say I’m lonely, but I’m certainly lacking for an ear. Well, maybe not an ear, per se—I have a collection of those. C’mon now, let’s have a little chitter-chat. I imagine this will be the last civil discourse you have before the Iron sages take you. They’re not the convivial sort. You won’t much care for their conversation, I’d say. Go on. Open your eyes. Don’t be scared.”
“I’m not scared of you,” declared Morigan, and she meant it.
Inside her, the spirit of the Wolf growled, and she sat up as dignified as she could while being chained by the wrists and ankles—more of that feliron, she could tell, from the way it aggravated her skin with itching and chill. A bit of the Wolf’s senses were with her, and she could construe the particulars of her dingy imprisonment: the strange stucco walls made of metal and trash; the high roof and its dying yellow lights; the tables and their piles of coin, weapons, and instruments heaped with a mad child’s incompetence for organization; and the sugary decay of the withered things—bodies—hanging from sets of chains like her own along the wall. More children like young Kanatuk. Only they were spared the disgrace of a life in his service, she thought with solemnity.
“Sons. Weak sons. Failed sons. They didn’t survive The Binding,” the Broker said, sighing, when he noticed her staring.
Morigan was having difficulty finding the man’s voice in the shadowy chamber. Whenever she thought she spotted him, it was only out of the corner of her eye. He moved with a serpentine slipperiness, and the bees warned her with a sting that there was something unusual about him.
“They are not your sons,” she challenged. “I’ve seen what you do to these poor boys, how you nurse them on cruelty. How you beat their flesh until their souls scream. You are the weakest kind of creature. A parasite that feeds on pain and fear. When that is all you have, it is all you are, and that is an empty life, indeed. I do not fear you because you are pitiful. I do not fear you because you will shortly meet your end.”
In a black sweep of motion, the Broker was before her, clacking his teeth in her face. Still, Morigan did not cringe.
“You are right,” he hissed, and licked his scarred lips with curiosity. “You do not fear me as you should. Which means that you have either foolishness or power in abundance. I’m betting on the latter, as I know that you did something to Twenty-Two. He was a favorite son of mine. So strong and diligent, and you ruined him. You took him from his father.”
“I did not ruin him. I freed him. If there is a soul to be salvaged in you, perhaps I shall free you, too.”
Morigan smiled, wolfish and dangerous. The Broker had placed himself perilously near—close enough to touch. Ferociously she sprang at him, and while her chains limited her, she was still able to reach and grasp one arm as he pulled away. As soon as contact was made, she called her Will and sent her swarm to attack the man. Show me your secrets! Show me your sins! she commanded, and the air rippled with invisible force. But the bees could not penetrate their target, and silver sparks scattered in the air as their stingers bounced off the hard soul of the Broker, his spirit somehow resistant to her magik. While laughing like a tickled man, the Broker viciously slapped off Morigan’s hands and then cracked the witch across the face. He stepped back, creating a distance that she could not cross with her chains, and took a sand to finish his spell of humor. When he was done, he had to wipe the tears from his eyes. Morigan did the same, though from pain. Despite this development, she was no more afraid than before and twice as angry that her magik had failed. She didn’t have to wonder why, for the Broker’s ensuing rambling explained plenty.
“I told you that your tricks don’t work on me,” the Broker said, snickering. “I see now exactly what you’ve done to Twenty-Two. Went into his head like a technomancer with a wrench and jiggered all the bolts you shouldn’t have. No fixing him now. Should he pop his head out of a hole again, I suppose I’ll just have to lop it off and add it to my ears.” Pensively, the Broker stroked his beard, and his beady eyes worked furiously upon thoughts. “Yes. What power you have. A touch of the East. The lost Arts of Alabion. A Daughter of the Moon? Perhaps, perhaps, though I wager Elissandra doesn’t have the tricks you do. It’s a shame that I must surrender you, for we could have such interesting play together.”
The Broker sauntered over to Morigan and slithered his thin fingers over her neck and bust; she thrashed away from some of it, but by the king’s, his hands were fast.
“What are you?” she spat.
“It has been a while since anyone has asked me that.” The Broker grinned. “These slow-walkers here, they don’t remember the truth to the old legends, only the stories. Of the things that crawled under the bed, gutted their wives and cows, and ate their children. You should know what I am, for you have encountered my kindred before.” The Broker darted his head toward Morigan and sniffed. “A lord of fang and claw…his scent is all about you. Rank as an otter’s piss. How special you must feel, being a mate to such majesty.”
Mockingly and with foppish flair, the Broker bowed to Morigan. She understood then what she had been missing thus far: his speed,
his animal senses. Of course. Morigan blurted her realization aloud.
“A skin-walker.”
When the Broker looked up, his metal smile was shining. “Cleverness. Wise as the winter owl, you are. A skin-walker, yes, but not like your noble lordling. No, not all of us are born to royalty. Some of us are not meant to be born at all! We are abominations. The sins and surprises of two who should not mate. A ratling and a catling. A badger and a bear. We have no clan that will house us, no place in the East. Though Alabion is a wicked mother to her children now—not fit for any but the strongest claws and teeth. I have those, but I would not stay where I was not welcome.”
“You left Alabion?” asked Morigan.
The Broker nodded; he continued quite sulkily. “I tried to make friends, but you know how slow-walkers can be. They buy you a drink, you tell them your sorrows, and the next thing you know they’ve got you in felirons and performing for scraps of meat. Many names, many cages. Gorgo the Swallower. The Jaws of Doom. Kashar the Gnashar. The slow-walkers all thought that I was an experiment gone sour. Always sour, always wrong! Ghaaa!”
Morigan decided not prod the man’s lunacy further, afraid of what she had already stirred. Also disturbing was that he had unfastened his cloak and was now unlacing his shirt. She assumed that he was undressing himself.
“I had many names and many masters, dear daughter. Until I’d taken my last whip. They should have thought better of Gorgo’s jaws. Even in our slowest skins, we have many times the power of a fleshling. It took me all night and shattered every tooth I had, but perseverance wins the race, and I chewed those chains to pulp. The masters and handlers then made for a better meal. These new teeth are just fine, just fine. Now I rule. I command. I mete out life and death. That’s what you were after, isn’t it? My story? A little pathos that you could use to heal me? Therein lies your mistake, in thinking that I need your compassion, when I am beyond those sentiments.”
With his clothing in a pile, he approached Morigan again. His sinuous body glistened with a sweat of excitement, and the heat of his repulsive desire was thrust upon her not only from his throbbing member. This lust wasn’t for her, not entirely, but directed more toward the things he spoke of: domination, pain, rulership. She knew that the Broker would never find salvation, by her or anyone else. He was a monster, and he reveled in that as a pig among the mud and filth.
Very near to her face and reeking of an animal’s heavy musk, he said quietly, “Do you fear me yet? I feel you fluttering. I am a nightmare. I am the sickness of the seed. I am…Jabberwok.”
One of Mifanwae’s grimmer Eastern tales rose in her mind and would not be silenced. She could almost hear her mother reading the poem to her while tapping the horrible depiction on the page: the sketched charcoal image of a pit scattered with bones and twined with the body of a great wriggling lizard, its mouth ragged and distorted as a clown’s messy smile, its talons long as swords.
Beware the Jabberwok, dear one.
In darkling coves and slithering groves,
it hunts with coruscating eyes and trilling cries.
Running is fair, though death has its flair,
and is the enviable endebum to the affair.
For you cannot bescramble, and are better to amble—gleefociously
into the curlivanting claws and the goobering maw.
A mouth to eat yer toes and feet,
to swallgag you down like a soup of meat.
In the bellybosom it’s warm,
and there you shall warn
with every belch of your bones,
those of bravery prone,
who dare the bloodscotched dark of the Jabberwok’s home.
“This has been nice, our chitter-chat,” said the Broker, and turned his heated passion away from her. “Mice—yes, one Mouse in particular—appear to have gotten into my lair. I can hear them scampering about. My sons are out looking for them; seems that they were looking in the wrong holes. You and your friends cost me so many of my boys. Spread too thin, too thin. I shall have to take care of this matter personally. I haven’t stretched from my skin in a slow-walker’s age. This will be enjoyable. Once I deal with the mice, maybe we will have an occasion to speak again before the Ironguards take you. Or after, I suppose. There won’t be much of you left when the Ironguards are done, but I’ll ask for the scraps, lovely as they are.”
Mouse? Mice? Did he mean Fionna? wondered Morigan. No sooner had the hope alighted than her skin crawled in horror. Jabberwok, she reeled, not quite understanding the monster, if in full appreciation of its menace. Jabberwok, Jabberwok, Jabberwok was all that she or the bees could natter—as the Broker suddenly hunched and groaned before her in the throes of a grotesque transformation. Whereas the shedding of Caenith’s skin was a shocking yet natural molting akin to a butterfly’s emergence, the Broker’s metamorphosis was like watching maggots festering in a wound. From within, he was viciously squeezed and twisted. It must have been excruciating from the cries he made, and he arced and spun and gurgled sprays of crimson and clear plasma. In specks, he swelled and bloated, he pimpled with scales, and bristles tore from his flesh. And when she believed that the shuddering mass could grow no more revolting, what rubbery trappings of skin remaining upon him flew off in splatters, and one such salty treat landed in Morigan’s gaping mouth. She spit the disgusting thing out, but could not abide the unwashed stench or the gagging heat of the grand shadow pacing the chamber, and the vomit burbled its way out of her. With watery sight and a heaving consciousness, her perception of the monster was fantastical and farcical. Surely, it could not be true, she prayed.
For no creature could be so terrible. The slobbering crocodile jaw was jumbled with tusks and puny silver teeth. The swinging tail as mighty as a giant’s club battered furniture around as its massive body turned itself on stumpy legs—two clawed, two finer-toed and black. Was she imagining the webbed wings, these atrophied things useless for flight that were misplaced all over the creature? Or the black pearls of its eyes under a spiny crest of a brow? Or the long fluffed ears? These qualities belonged on a bat. No, this was actually happening, she grasped, and the upturned, mucus-huffing nostrils that snuffled at her spew affirmed this freakish reality. She jumped away from the head, which could swallow her to the waist as the legend said, and pressed herself to the wall as much as her chains would allow. The Broker had read her well: she was terrified past all reason, quailing and bloodless, not only for herself but also for the others that were rushing to her rescue. Go away! Please just go away! she Willed, as if magik or wishes could save her.
Mercifully, fate or another hand intervened, and the Jabberwok trilled a roaring screech, stomped its monster feet, flapped its many vestigial wings, and then vanished as quickly as a foul wind. She could breathe when it was gone, although the air was still polluted with its stench. She used her first breath to scream.
IV
After his episode, Sorren had calmed, as he usually did. Gloriatrix had returned him to his room and ordered the Ironguards to fetch him night willow tea—a nanny’s task, which they frowned at, yet knew not to question. The curtains were drawn, candles lit to flicker on the ominous and overwrought woodwork of the room, and he slept as overexcited children do, which is to say all night and into the following late afternoon. During that time, Elissandra and then the Broker had come and gone, and Gloriatrix had been taken with the affliction of nostalgia and found herself staying at the Blackbriar estate while her son rested: a situation and place that she tried as often as possible to avoid. When she came in the following afternoon, Sorren was finally awake; up against his headboard, dark-eyed, pouting, and clutching his sheets as though he was naked underneath, although he had slept in his clothing.
“He’s betrayed us,” complained Sorren.
He was referring to Vortigern, of course. Gloriatrix sighed and pulled up a chair to the side of her son’s sprawling bed; the seat was embellished with studs of onyx that uncomfortably poked at her. In a strange b
urst of sentimentality, she wondered if this wealth had ever done her family any good: driving a rift between Thackery and her, teaching her to love power over people, isolating every member of her family from one another, and ultimately ending in the death of her husband and one of her children.
“Mother, are you listening? He has betrayed us. Twice now!”
“Yes, I am thinking of your brother, too,” she said, and threw her emotions back in the cell that kept them. The iron for which she was famed stiffened her features. “While you were resting, Elissandra confirmed his disloyalty through whatever airy conjurings she uses to determine these things. The Broker, too, has suffered treachery in his ranks and lost a man to this witch you caught.”
“Who slipped away! With my prize!” shouted Sorren.
Wary of any accusations that might prompt another fit, Gloriatrix was less reprimanding and quite cosseting as she asked, “Your prize? A Voice, I am told. There is easier flesh to buy in Menos, particularly for the price you paid to the Watchers, from whom I did not know bodies could be had. You could have bought a hundred girls for that. Why such an interest in her, my son?”
He was sheepish with his reply. “She reminds me of someone.”
“Lenora?”
“Yes.”
Likely because that is her daughter, who should have died years ago in a pleasure house. If she is alive, let that be a miracle, and a second miracle that you should never see her again. She is my mistake. Do not pursue this path, Sorren. Truths, these bones of the past, can never be placed back once they are dug from their graves, worried Gloriatrix as she wrung her hands.
Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) Page 58