And fall the Lordkings did, for the true nature of a Menosian could never be hidden and would ever be his undoing. After the Lordkings had entrenched themselves as the supreme benefactors and rulers of the City of Waves, they began to demand more and more of the people. Soon the city had swollen with ill-gotten gains and become an untouchable bastion on the tip of Central Geadhain. For a time, Carthac in its foul prosperity rivaled even Menos—until, that is, the sea-folk unseated the lords in a single bloody night. They burned the Lordkings’ temples and dragged the masters and their families out into the streets to be gutted like fish and hanged. The prideful masters of Menos had forgotten that the sea-folk had wills stronger than those of average men. Carthacians were elemental folk, with an almost magikal connection to the Blue Mother and born with her temperaments. One could not truly know wrath until one had seen a storm on the ocean. Aside from the historians, no one in Carthac chose to remember these doomed lords of antiquity. Instead, they made gardens of their grand, toppled manors, and parks and hospices of the ruined temples where iniquity had once reigned.
“We have a strange patient,” said Abagail. “A man from the East.”
From the East? wondered Lila. They walked on, trading shadows for the occasional halo of firelight granted by a sconce. Overhead, rain drummed and dribbled through millennia-old cracks, filling the hallway with tiny lakes and ripening the mustiness of the building. Lila considered how unhealthy the mildew must be for those trying to recuperate. However, the argument could be made that most men came here only to die.
She and Abagail entered the great hall of the temple, once stunningly ostentatious. Their feet scuffed on tarnished plates of ivory and gold; from beneath the ancient grime flickered teasing glimpses of the gilded friezes upon the walls. Dull golden columns surrounded a wide court, which lay under the deteriorated dome of the temple. The area was sealed off with rope and tarps—tan sheets ruffled in the air like a ship’s sails in a tempest. As they passed through it, making their way toward an arch and holding their garments against the wind and rain bleeding in from the night, Lila wondered how it was the whole place hadn’t fallen down. Perhaps the nameless spirit that these sisters worshipped had truly blessed this temple.
In her great life, Lila had met idolaters and zealots before. These women were different. Neither Abagail nor the other sisters ever gave their patron spirit a name other than the Great Will, the Blue Mother. For religious folk, they were quite lazy about proselytizing. They did not recruit, and they observed little in the way of rituals from what Lila had seen. The sisters kept their beliefs to themselves and, perhaps because of this, the people of Carthac had allowed them to settle in ruins for which the city had no use. There, they carried on with their hedge-healer ways. They calmed the demented with herbal elixirs. They fed those in extremis with the blood of the red poppy that soothed all pains. They acted as wardens for the insane. Sometimes, they released the chronically suffering from the mortal coil—when such was the patient’s wish. The Order of St. Celcita dealt with whatever runoff of sin and social refuse physicians, fleshbinders, and the Veiled Confessors of Carthac could not heal.
Lila felt at home with the sisters. She often wondered, though, what grief or suffering had driven St. Celcita to abstinence and asceticism. Furthermore, what wrongs had the current women of the order suffered or perpetrated in this age, that they embraced the same self-denying seclusion as Celcita? Perhaps all were secret sinners here.
In the hallway past the arch, the hunger of the wind died, and the women straightened their clothes. Before striding down the damp corridor, Abagail gave Lila a little smile. Get ready; here we go. As they continued, additional signs of faded grandeur met their eyes: brass door handles, white stone frames around doors for men as tall as Brutus, the shimmer of silver from spiderwebbed candelabras on the walls. Every door they passed was closed and barred heavily on the outside. Some of the portals thudded as deranged folk requiring sedation bashed themselves against the wood. Rarely was Lila assigned that duty. Lila’s skills, Abagail declared, lay in preparing a man’s soul for the long sleep.
“Black thistle?” asks Abagail.
Lila turns to see who is speaking to her in the marketplace. When she wraps herself up like a beggar, no one ever notices her, let alone pays her a word, although sometimes they throw coins in her direction. In the dusk, the woman and her loose dark clothing blur together with the shadows of passersby, the darkness cast by tents and their awnings, the smoke curling from outdoor tanneries and ovens. The woman’s face is obscured by a veil, and Lila cannot make out her features. The stranger stands very close and speaks once more, her voice that of an ancient. “Do you know what it is used for?” she asks.
“Possibly.” Lila hands the sachet she’d been generously filling back to the scowling merchant, canceling the sale, and starts to walk away.
“A dash in one’s tea,” continues the woman, trailing behind Lila as she swims in and around the throng, trying to avoid conversation, “and the aches of arthritis blow away like dandelion dust. More than a dash, however, induces calm and a sleep so deep that death is but a footstep away.”
Angrily, Lila stops and turns, and they stand almost nose to veiled nose. Lila detects a smile under the black veil—a flash of eyewear, too. “I had no intention of killing myself,” spits Lila. She’d already tried that with Erik. She wanted the herb only to deepen her slumber, to deaden her to dreams.
“I hadn’t considered it,” says Abagail.
“I merely sought a cure for my restlessness.”
“Oh. Well, come with me, then. At the Order’s sanctuary, we have herbs much better than this ditch-peddler’s tripe at warding off fitful nights. Unless you fancy scoots and a headache.”
Hooking her arm into Lila’s elbow as if they are old friends, the odd woman guides her through the crowd. Men are getting drunk around them; merchants are closing shop and joining in. A herd of children and seemingly wild dogs races across the street, giggling and barking. In specks, the hints of sunlight leave, and the world feels dark, loud and spinning on an axis of giddy chaos. What is going on? Where is this woman taking her? Lila tries to pull away, but the stranger’s grip is fierce.
“You have the look of the lost,” says the stranger, without stopping. “I tend to the lost; I know what they need. If you want your herbs and the peace of a sleep without terrors, then you must work for them.”
“Work? What?” Lila is aghast at the presumption that she has agreed to perform some kind of service. She hasn’t engaged in manual labor since milking lizard-cows ten centuries ago.
“Just a bit of blood on the hands and a little sweat. I think you have a knack for it,” replies her gleeful kidnapper.
The moment is so queer that Lila wonders if she’s somehow already taken a lethal dose of black thistle and is right now lying dead on the floor of her squalid home. Embracing the nightmare, Lila stops asking questions and allows herself to be marched off through dark streets and into the darker reaches of Carthac.
“Always wandering off in your mind,” said Abagail, tugging at Lila’s arm as she had in the memory. The two had entered a large space separated from the rest of the room by drawn sheets that years of sweat and sickly breath had spotted yellow. This area of the hospice smelled worse than any other ward. In here, the most fevered, pustulant, and leprous sufferers lay waiting to die. Women dressed like Abagail, but also wearing heavy masks, rubber gloves, and splattered aprons, swept to and fro. The sisters carried bedpans, draining needles, and bowls that steamed with aromatic effusions of petal and herb. A nearby sister glared at Abagail for speaking.
Among their many mysterious oaths, Lila knew that for the Sisters of St. Celcita, their vow of silence was paramount. We hear so much better when we ourselves do not speak, she’d explained to Lila. Abagail herself was exempt from this vow, as the order needed an advocate among men. Lila felt that Abagail stretched that freedom further than she should with her frequent palaver, but she made
no objection: such talk served her well, as it kept her abreast of happenings here and beyond. Around each other, the sisters communicated through a language of complicated hand gestures, stares, and the occasional written note.
“The Easterner,” Abagail said as they continued to walk. “He came in a night or two ago, definitely after the last time you visited us. We found a wallet and papers on him, announcing him to be a man of certain means…” Her voice dropped low. “A man from Menos.”
Lila stopped, and they huddled behind one of the curtains while a sleeping wretch wheezed nearby. “Menos?” she asked.
“Not just any man. A master.”
“Who?”
Rather dramatically for a holy woman, Abagail waved her hands and said, “Sangloris Donanach, father of the House of Mysteries.”
Someone shushed them. Abagail shushed back.
“Show me,” said Lila.
Abagail nodded, and they moved through curtains and past the resting and nearly dead. They came to the bedside of a direly pale man, who was wrapped up to his neck in wool blankets and sopping wet with greasy sweat. His smell induced a small heave in Lila. He stank like the fish markets of Carthac in the morning, when yesterday’s offal and blood were being washed into the sewers—tangy with death. The man’s lips were chapped and flaked in white. His eyelids flickered like the candle by his bedside.
As a former companion to Death, Lila now possessed an acute sense of when a man’s life would simply let go. This man was close to that release. Examining him, first with her eyes, then unknowingly with her fingers, she noted that Sangloris shared some of Magnus’s attributes: the ivory skin, the uncommon hue and clarity of the eyes—silver in this case—the fineness of the nose and cheekbones. Abagail cleared her throat as Lila’s fingertips drifted to the man’s dry lips.
“How did he end up here?” asked Lila, and set her wandering hand to combing the man’s white hair.
“We don’t know. The Twelveswatch brought him in. None of the twelve aldermen will claim knowledge of a Menosian master hiding in plain sight. Even today, the City’s hatred of the Iron masters burns as hot as a young man’s passion. If you were here then, you will certainly remember that folks lit bonfires and danced in the streets when they heard of Menos’s sad fall.” The sister clucked. “So you can see why none of the aldermen will utter the faintest peep that could indict them. They’ll likely remain silent until a moment comes when they can take credit for his glorious murder, whether they’re entitled to it or not. I imagine the master of Menos was here doing business—as those iron folk always are. I would assume that events went sour, as he was gutted like a pig and then thrown to his doom in the Straits. A strong man, he must be. I admire that. To have held onto a slippery island—bleeding and wounded—while the world tried to drown him…”
“How terrible,” said Lila, saddened.
“Not for much longer.” Abagail touched the fallen queen’s shoulder. “The rot has set in from his wound. No magik but that of the Everfair King and all the wonders of Eod could cure him in this state.”
Lila shivered.
“You’re trembling like a winter lamb, dear child,” said Abagail. “I’ll get you a blanket and fetch him some more poppy’s blood. I doubt he’ll wake up again. It’s awful when he does—so much thrashing and agony. I shan’t be more than a speck. You just talk to him, and let him know it’s all right, and he can leave whenever he must.”
Sister Abagail’s departure conjured a gust that killed the weak flame by Lila’s side. She could have sat in the darkness listening to Sangloris’s sputtering gasps, but the sound of his ghastly rattle managed to unnerve her. Quickly, before Abagail returned, Lila flung a hand toward the gray smudge she assumed was the candle and readied herself to Will it to life. Trembling once again like Abagail’s winter lamb, Lila found she couldn’t bring herself to summon her magik. Would she summon flame or deepen the shadows?
Since the events at the Iron Mines, her magik had been polluted by its sinfulness; she now eschewed phantasms, preferring to disguise herself with cowls and scarves. On the road once, she had, though, tried healing a gash on Erik’s shin, one he’d received while stumbling around partly drunk. The task involved only the most basic mending, demanding none of the complex anatomical knowledge of a fleshbinder. She’d frozen then, too. When she’d finally squeezed a bit of Will from herself, the light she shone—her magik and soul—had been so black and burning that Erik screamed. To this day, Erik wore the brand of her brief touch: a five-pronged marking on his leg. In time, she hoped the scar would blend in with his natural pigment.
It’s only a flame, you child, she chastised herself.
Anger summoned her Will, and with a puff of black smoke and a scattering of sparks, the wick was lit. The act had not been marred by the appearance of dark forces, and that felt like cause for celebration. But then she looked over at the ghoulish man and any exhilaration that might have blossomed was stillborn. He was now sitting up in his cot, the sheets pulled down his torso to reveal a wound like a giant green bee sting on his stomach. His silver stare was locked on Lila, and he reached out and seized the hand she’d been using to conjure the flame. As soon as they touched, a buzzing cacophony and a dazzle of lights assaulted Lila’s senses. She fell.
Onto a slick rock? She scrabbles to her knees, battling wind and salty shrieks, fighting the slippery ground for footing. A strong white hand hauls her up; for a speck, she believes it to be Magnus’s. Then the illusion flakes away, her spinning vision settles to take in a dark night, and she recognizes the extraordinary pallor of her patient, Sangloris. However, he’s not dying on a cot—instead, he’s handsomely dressed in a sharply tailored silk shirt and pants. A fury of wind and spume roars upon the tiny mount of rock where she and Sangloris stand. Black crashing waves circle the island. Nonetheless, Sangloris’s glossy boots have not a scuff of salt upon them, and the wind barely ruffles his free-flowing hair. He might almost be elsewhere. He is elsewhere, realizes Lila. He is with her in the basilica, as well as here in this Dream upon the Straits of Wrath. He stands with one foot in each world.
“What have you done to me, ghost?” she demands, and shakes off his hand, which feels convincingly real.
“I am not a ghost,” he says, in a cultivated, gentlemanly voice. “Not yet. But this is where my journey into the Great Mystery began, where I found more clarity than a living mind can touch. The secret moon, the moon of spirits, shone over me one night as I lay here, bleeding and dying. While I have not my wife Elissandra’s gifts for reading fate—none of the men of our line do—the moon, the magik of my blood, tapped into power from the deepest well: the well of time and eternity.”
“I don’t—” Lila nearly falls again, but the master instantly catches her in a whirl of white. They stare, face to face. “Whatever this is, send me back.”
“I shall.”
She waits and shivers in his arms, on this speck in the sea, while the half-ghost continues gazing upon her. A determining look, he gives, as if he judges her. She wonders how deeply the spirit can see into her heart, and suddenly she wants—needs—to be released.
“I know what you have done,” he says.
Lila struggles against Sangloris.
“I am no wrathful spirit,” he says, calmly. “I am not here to punish you. If you could see the horizons to which I shall soon sail, or hear the quietest voice that calls me to sunset, you would understand the futility of harming yourself with guilt over having ended a society of wicked men. I am one; I was one. I know what I have been. Death would have made her army, one way or another. Dreamers are toying with all these men and women as if they were playthings of glass; they are breaking everything they touch, cutting the flesh of our world with the bodies of the shattered. I am not here to punish you, Lilehum, most used of all Geadhain’s glass creatures. However, there is something I need you to do for me—an act I cannot complete before taking my journey. Cease your resistance.”
Lila has no choice
; she feels paralyzed, as if a poison has been seeping into her through Sangloris’s increasingly cold touch. In specks, her throat has numbed too much to shout anymore, and her fingers feel so deadened, they seem likelier to break off than to move.
He continues. “Open yourself: surrender to and embrace the fact that you are weak and imperfect. Let the tides of Fate wash and drown us both.”
Only in her frozen skull can Lila scream when Sangloris, holding her tightly, leaps into the black water. Liquid ice fills her lungs, bringing hopeless terror with it. Every nerve is on fire. Her body spasms for breath. The ghostly master tightens his arms around her. “Surrender,” he whispers, although it sounds more like a buzz to her water-clogged ears—ears that should not be able to hear. Bees? she wonders. Then the mystery loses importance, her body goes slack, and she and the master drift gracefully, their garments billowing, through sheer, cold blackness.
Death.
“Now you are ready to see,” echoes Sangloris’s voice.
She’d thought they were dead, so this, naturally, surprises her. The rude brilliance of light and a tremendous movement create a second dissonance. Suddenly, she is no longer underwater: she is hurled through panes of shattering whiteness, then stopped, then hurled and stopped, again and again. Each pause gives her a gasping moment in which to glimpse a scene.
Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) Page 11