V
At the table behind Curtis, Aadore’s brother and the large man snored in their chairs; they’d fallen asleep at the table. From a stool by the bed, Curtis watched Aadore and the child as they slept. She was lovely, perhaps the loveliest creature he’d seen in his life. With an innocent vulgarity, he studied her, stirring with lust as she shifted her long, muscular legs suggestive of pieces of alabaster broken from an androgynous statue. Occasionally, he wondered how her frowning hard mouth—her beauteous scowl, as he’d once called it—would taste and feel against his lips. Now and then, he felt jealous of the babe that nuzzled so close to Aadore’s plump breasts. He thought of kissing the pale arc of her neck, which was exposed as she rolled her head and spilled her dark hair to and fro.
These were the inconveniences of being a man—a youngish one, at that—and of never being able to turn off one’s raging sexuality. But though his thoughts were tinged with passionate red, the focus of his study of Aadore was how much respect was owed to her. She had survived this disaster. She commanded worship from him even while she slept, even while patterned in oil and filth and dressed in rags resembling a ballerina’s burned and tattered tutu. Curtis hoped that Aadore hadn’t thought he’d done anything untoward with her negligee, which she’d modestly tucked under her pillow once at the bed. He’d kept it close to him only while he slept, much as the babe now slumbered near the warmth of her breast. In the darkest of days, a man needed an anchor; he needed a reason to survive. Curtis frowned, remembering the day before last, or however many days ago it’d been when Menos had fallen: the moment Aadore had become his reason.
Curtis stands on the shaky metal floor of a turbulent skycarriage. This crowe has been built for luxury and has the posh, gleaming interior of an expensive passenger train: brass bars, buttoned seats, and small windows leading to a cloudy outside. Curtis must stand, for the seats, while not all fully occupied, are reserved for masters. He would be a fool to ask for an empty spot on these comfortable-looking benches. He would be beaten simply for asking, and he wants to keep his face handsome for his and Aadore’s date. She’s inspired something in him: a bravery, a desire. He doesn’t care if she’s older than he, and spends no time worrying about the complications a pairing such as theirs would probably create.
You should be proud of yourself, he thinks. Cleaned yourself up. Living in a proper neighborhood, with a proper job, maybe even a proper lady. Curtis feels so proud of himself at that moment that the bloody flashes of a brawl and a man lying face-down in the mud—still, deadly still—don’t make him cringe today. Nothing you could have done, he tells himself. You were only defending yourself from that madman. He was drunk and ranting. He would have killed you. All true, surely, though now he is a murderer, forced to live in a realm of murderers and madmen. There’s some justice and penance in that, he decides.
Men of great importance fill the skycarriage. Although he rather hates men like this—they are willing villains, he thinks, not hapless ones like him—he enjoys taking their money. His masters, though, appear pale and afraid today. Perhaps they find themselves questioning their continued importance: no one, including these men, who are Horgot’s accomplices, has heard from Curtis’s employer, Iron Sage Horgot. Curtis wishes he were at home, and could see Aadore glancing at him from her window. He’d rather exist in that fantasy than be here with men congealing in sweat and expensive perfume. They smell like tropical fruit that has spoiled.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Three gongs and the world ends. Fire and dust scream outside the craft. Men scramble from their seats and rush over to the windows on each side of the cabin, babbling questions: what, how, why? Curtis pushes for a view as well, unable to comprehend the roiling smoke and glowing rents that appear beneath him in the city and sanctuary he has known for years.
BANG!
A humming blast hits the skycarriage. The crowe must have been struck, for a hurricane of wind now gusts around him. A sizzling hole has been punched in the side of the ship. Too stunned even to flail, Curtis finds himself spilled out of the frenzy and suddenly swirling through space. The last he sees of the crowe is alight with flames and veering through the sky. “I must have come from there,” he thinks, still stunned. Delirious, he falls. He descends toward a landscape of brimstone explosions and toppling metal towers; with each whistling inch of his plummet, he realizes he is about to die. The impact comes abruptly, shattering him with stars, but he has landed on something softer than concrete. Curtis rolls and rolls, falling unconscious after an instant.
Darkness. Muffled commotions.
He surfaces and finds himself in darkness. How sensible it has been of him to do daily exercises including push-ups, leaping squats, and chin-ups off his doorframe. His athleticism has saved him from his fall onto a wooden roof softened by rot, and then down into an alleyway piled with crates, which have both been broken by and broken his fall. Curtis stares up at a swinging eaves trough and contemplates the mathematics of his incredible drop. He praises the Fates for his luck in being alive. However, he has praised the Fates too soon: the sky is black, and as the buzzing leaves his head, sounds of destruction—screaming, wailing, crashing, crumbling—come to him. Taking a deep, aching breath, Curtis lumbers to his feet. Every part of his body complains, especially his back and his ribs, of which a few are probably broken. He stumbles down the alleyway…
Into madness. Men on fire, running. Geysers of smoke and stone. Ground that will not stop shaking. Slumped things moving in the haze. What is real? What giant has smashed the home across the street into rubble? What has happened to Menos? Too many questions. Curtis calms himself, wills his pains way, and asks only one question: Where is Aadore? The question rises from the deepest part of him. Sometimes a man who has nothing needs something to hold on to, no matter how irrational the attachment. Aadore can be his guiding star. There is nothing else in his life that could drive him to live. His family has disowned him; he doesn’t have a favorite whore in town, nor even a pet that would miss him. Aadore might care. He marches into the fog of death to find her.
And I did, he thought now, and sighed.
“Curtis the Worthless,” his father had always called him. May, his mother as well as Riverton’s cheapest, nastiest whore, was never any kinder. His parents had each told him he would amount to nothing. They’d stressed he was as worthless to the world as they were. They’d laughed when he had confessed to the fight, the accident that had turned him into a murderer. Then the wretches had told him not to waste his tears and to set his feet to running before they went after him themselves for the bounty. They were horrible people, and had made him a horrible person through the curse of their blood. However, he had decided he could do better. He would do better.
Aadore caught a sudden shiver and Curtis flew to her, slid a blanket over her and the child, and then returned to his stool.
VII
TAKEN
I
Mouse dreams of a long white room with walls of fluttering, transparent sheets; they tickle her skin as she floats by them. Warm, diffuse light streams in from somewhere. Mouse feels partially blind, as if she’s walking beneath the sun of a gorgeous summer day. A dark and dapper man sitting in the room’s single white chair beckons Mouse forward. If she were not in a dream, she would be able to move faster. She would race to meet the gentleman in the chair. Alas, she moves as slowly as a lazy wind, and her insides clench with excitement and fear: she is to see her father again. She can tell who the dapper man must be, even though he sits with his back to her. A back ramrod straight, shoulders squared and proud, and a tumble of softly twisting hair: these can only belong to her elegant father. Mouse will indulge any illusion that allows her to see him. She’s aware that she’s dreaming, and that this billowing hallway does not exist where her body lies. Who cares? she thinks. She reaches the man in the chair and moves to grab him. He surprises her by turning around in a juddering ripple that suddenly flips chair and occupant to face her.
; Mouse recoils from the stitched-up countenance. Black thread sews up the face’s eyes, nose holes, and mouth; the needlework is messy and imprecise. Vortigern had already appeared doll-like; the stitches make him seem even more surreal. Not until he thrashes in his seat, somehow bound without rope, and starts moaning and screaming through his vile restraints, does Mouse leap with the awareness that he isn’t a simple nightmare. She had not experienced a vision this clear and biting since her time in Alabion, when she’d encountered Adelaide once more.
“Father? Father? What’s wrong?”
In a howl of force, Vortigern is pulled down the hallway and spun as if he were a kite in a hurricane through a passage now black and violent with wind; the summer day is gone, eaten by a terrible crackling storm. A fragment of her father’s plea pierces the blustery noise of the tunnel. Vortigern’s words jar his daughter, who at last understands his muffled plea: “Help me!”
Help me. Mouse cannot battle the winds with her body of air and dreamy matter. She cannot Will herself toward the whirling epicenter of gray light in the storming chamber. But to the heart of this terrible tempest is exactly where she must go, for that is where her father is. Lightning shatters the hallway into fragments of glass and smoke, and Mouse wakes—
Inside another storm. Has she traded nightmare for nightmare? Her flesh remains leaden and beyond her control. Groggily blinking, Mouse catches glimpses of herself walking through whirling snow. Her head tilts down, and she notices the shuffling of her feet and the occasional flash of a hand. People are calling to her. They sound quite far away. Who is that? Must be Moreth, whose acerbity competes with the blizzard’s stridency. What’s happening? Is she awake? Dreaming? At some state in between?
“Sleep, my vessel. It is not your time. I have called upon our covenant of flesh,” says her master, Feyhazir.
I don’t want to bloody well sleep! Now Mouse realizes she has returned to the waking world, at least partially. But she seems to have left the safety of her pack, and she is wandering the realm of ice and frost, the unsafe tundra where the Red Riders and the ghost men who hunt them roam. “Sleep.” Feyhazir’s command comes again, and Mouse feels her eyelids sliding shut like stone sarcophagi, feels her mind spinning into a river. Her last sliver of consciousness, her final dreadful blink, captures a host of pale shapes, men of white shadow and snow, who rise out of the winter hills around her.
Feyhazir shouts through her stolen mouth, using a language unfamiliar to her, but one she somehow understands. The power of the Dreamer’s command shoves Mouse into the hungriest torrents of Dream, and she sleeps.
II
Vigilant Moreth stared out into the blizzard. A hand on his pistol, he stood ready to shoot anything that wasn’t a brown tail-wagging shape coming out of the whiteness. A sand ago, Adam had run off, barking as if he’d heard a noise. The rest of the pack still slept, even the Wolf, who growled and flexed his claws as if he chased something in a dream. Moreth wouldn’t wake the Wolf, wouldn’t embarrass himself just yet by asking the great hunter for assistance. Moreth assumed that if a truly terrible danger neared, the Wolf would be roused from any depth of slumber. This was his night, his watch, and nothing would escape the net of his senses—
Mouse breezed past him, striding out into the blizzard. Fuk!
She moved quickly and faded into a white shadow. In another step, she’d vanish. Hissing, Moreth raced after her. Mouse’s sleeping partner, Talwyn, had stirred when she rose, and the scholar joined the chase. Neither bloodmates nor sage woke and followed them, each being lost in the deepest of dreams, and Moreth and Talwyn were too harried to care. Talwyn threw a shout back to their shelter to alert those they were leaving behind, though he was now a few paces out into the storm, and he wasn’t sure they’d heard it. Regardless, the scholar caught hold of Moreth and joined the man in the futile calling of Mouse’s name into the white abyss.
By then, Moreth knew he should rush back to the stone hovel and wake everyone. However, a soft gray light sparked ahead, accompanied by a tingle of music. The queerest music: a song of sorcery. It prickled their skins: he forgot summoning the others, as queer visions of starscapes, spins through weightless space, and a glowing moon washed over his and Talwyn’s sight. They stumbled a bit, blinded by snow and swatting at the hallucinations.
When they saw once more, they were standing in a pale, roaring sea of nowhere, with no encampment in sight. They would never find their way back in this blizzard. The silver light—a figure—shone farther on, and a tingling enchantment remained in their bodies. They pursued the glimmer, stumbling, laughing. For a time they wandered, never catching up to the silver woman, to the mirage they felt compelled to follow. What of Mouse? wondered Moreth, abstractedly. The silver woman did not remind either man of anyone they knew; they wanted only to catch her and hear more of her skin-tickling song.
The pair entered a pocket of peace where the storm stilled: white dunes and gentle whorls surrounded them. The softly silver woman stood and spoke in a voice that sounded a little like Mouse’s, but even more like a choir heard through the delirium of wine. Again they stumbled and laughed their way toward her, wanting to touch her, to drink more of her sweet music. The wariest part of Moreth, the canniness that couldn’t be quashed, saw white and blue shapes rise from the dunes. Then netting entwined him and his drunken partner, and they tumbled down in a puff of white.
Using a language neither man had heard before, but which both somehow understood, the voice told them to sleep. As if each man had suddenly passed the point of happy intoxication, the music blared, their heads swooned, their stomachs twisted, and they took a nauseating trip somewhere dark, deep, and cold as space.
III
Wind and harsh light woke Moreth. Shapes moved. With spots still clouding his sight, he sat up, reached around on the floor for the comforting hardness of his cane-and-sword, realized it had been hopelessly lost, then for the iron of his pistols, which hadn’t been removed—although his overcoat had been. He leaped to his feet, snarled, and aimed his weapons at the shape holding open the folds of a tent and ushering in winter’s breath. The big bluish shape threw a parcel down at Moreth’s feet, and snarled back. “Kratísoch ta óplac sae!” (Hold your weapons!)
Moreth’s trained finger didn’t twitch, even as he surveyed the horns, size, and stunning aspects of the blue giant. He glanced at the bundle of clothing—heavy, furred, stitched with lining—that had been tossed on the floor. By the time he looked up again, the giant was gone. If he was a prisoner, he was certainly a well-treated one. As was Talwyn, who, having been woken by the fuss, now yawned and sat up in his comfortable fleecy bedroll.
“What? Ooh, my head. Were we drinking? Wait…”
Fate had played a cruel joke on Moreth by trapping him with this bumbling fool. However, any ally was better than none. Moreth walked around their tent cautiously, examining the makings of the structure: bone frames, a patchwork of skins. Objects of ritualistic design lay around the shelter: brass and bone dishes, wooden figurines, even a swinging hexagonal object crossed in a cat’s cradle of twine and hung with feathers. Moreth looked these over carefully, then listened to the voices that could be heard through the leathery walls; he could hear chattering in what sounded like the strange language they’d heard before their minds went dark. He couldn’t translate full sentences, understanding only snatches here and there, but it seemed as if they were in an encampment of Pandemonian natives. Talwyn, now more awake and slightly scared, had blathered on while Moreth perused their confines. Moreth finally chose to answer him. “As you can see, we’ve been taken somewhere. I don’t know whether the others are with us, but I don’t think so. Adam ran off, in case you don’t remember.”
What did he remember? wondered Talwyn, scratching his head, where memories floated in a haze of phantom shapes that escaped his shrewd recall. “Well, we’re alive,” said Talwyn, “and cared for, even. That must be a good sign.”
“Not always. Some predators enjoy playing wit
h and fattening their prey before eating.”
Talwyn shivered and pulled tight the warm cloak he’d picked from the scattered bundle on the floor. Within the furs, he’d also discovered a bit of jerky and a hard round gray thing that might be bread, but looked like a stone. After Moreth’s glum caution, he put the food he’d been about to eat aside, and instead dedicated himself to wandering their tent and seeing what he could learn. While picking up engraved bone bowls, sniffing piney incense fizzling in copper burners, handling the totems of mutated creatures too terrible to be real, but probably representative of Pandemonia’s wildlife, Talwyn mumbled to himself about indigenous cultures and Ghaedic-style Cyrillic.
Suddenly, both men sensed the approach of the silver being who’d lured them into this cage. Each turned his head toward the split in the tent through which the day peeked. The light became more luminous now as the being entered; they became drunk once more on phantasmagorical visions of moons and stars, and were beguiled by the music of heavenly choirs. In that moment, they would have obeyed any demand from this creature, believed anything it said. The figure before them was Mouse, yet more than Mouse: wrapped in silver radiance, it poured black mist and gazed upon the men with star-laden pools into which they fell.
“I am the one to whom Fionna has pledged her body and soul,” said Feyhazir. “Be assured my daughter and your companion, Morigan, knows of our quest. You will, too, in time. I have given her a quest of her own: she must save the souls of Eatoth. She will fulfill this duty, for she is a miracle. She will save your tiny souls as well, if we can stop our enemy. For now, I ask that you go forth and meet with your new tribe. I have called you here to serve as Fionna’s guardians—you have been chosen for your talents to protect my vessel. She will be returned to you as soon as I have accomplished what I must.”
With that, the divine being wearing Mouse’s body left, likely to discuss matters with mortals more important than the ones who now lay gasping, groveling, and moaning on the floor. Moreth regained his sense and sanity first, and was appalled by his response. He wrenched a sniveling Talwyn to his feet. “Get up, fool. I believe we’ve just been given free rein to investigate our captors.”
Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) Page 28