Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3)

by Christian A. Brown

  “If there’s no handle, it’s an access point,” said Curtis. “Doors swing open by way of magik once the key’s inside.”

  A near-silent debate raged among the four, while they contemplated various possibilities. What if that wasn’t, in fact, a door? Where else would they find another? Not back the way they’d come, surely. Climbing out into the streets again where night would soon be upon them would be suicide. However, they’d crossed through the swamp of death; they were four survivors where no other life lived. If they needed to defeat a handful of dead soldiers to take that one next step to freedom, then that was just what they would do.

  Aadore gripped her sword, Sean his cane, Skar his axe, and Curtis the hammer that had hung on his belt, the same hammer he had used to dismantle Aadore’s apartment. Curtis was ready to start another project with his hammer’s claw now, to deconstruct bone and pulverize rotten flesh. The four nodded and struck a silent agreement by holding up their weapons. Skar passed out rattling jars—the newest batch they’d made in Aadore’s apartment. Each of the fellows armed a weaponless hand with a noise-making bomb. Without further discussion, they moved.

  They dashed round the heap, no longer caring about their splashing footfalls—

  CRRAAAAWK!

  A funhouse face lurched out of the dark, missing a nose, lips, the cap of its skull—it was all teeth. An eyeball swung out from a socket as it shrieked. It was one of the unliving, one of the smarter of its breed, and it had heard them and then crept up to them. The monster shrieked again, then flailed about and threw its naked, gangly body toward them.

  CRACK!

  Aadore astonished the men by hurling her noise-rattling bomb. She had unerring aim, and the glass jar shattered against the creature’s face, spraying it with shrapnel. Disoriented, the unliving stumbled and swiped like a fool at the silver and glass gnats that had attacked it. Aadore’s action awakened her fellows, and the four quickly descended as a phalanx upon the flailing horror. The men bashed, hacked, and sliced the monster as it crumpled into the water. Twitching bits of the dead floated here and there when the men’s frenzy had diminished.

  But bloodlust quickly filled them once more, for the noise of the battle had reached the other wailing atrocities ahead. They raced toward the unliving, as howling and mad as those damned souls themselves. The unliving met their charge and came forth into the brightness in a rage, splashing and hissing. As had the monster the fellowship had just returned to death, these horrors moved with evolved gaits, loping and sweeping their limbs. Perhaps it was here, in the wet wombs of the city, that they grew stronger, cocooning themselves in rot, wetness, and death. Somehow, the fellowship of Iron souls was not afraid. Anger shivered its power down their arms, which they swung with untold strength—a strength inspired both by fear and by the thrill of meting out bloody justice.

  Aadore and Curtis reached the horde first. He hurled his noise bomb, and it struck the soft shoulder of one of the horrors. Unfortunately, its flesh was too soft to allow for a proper impact, and a hunk of it dropped into the water with the intact projectile. Skar’s throw was more successful; his glass jar shattered against the chest of the horror Curtis’s had left unfazed, and a glittering explosion added to the tumult of this small war. The creatures faltered, some spinning in the water. The fellowship realized that not all of the unliving could see, and others were disoriented by the bombs. Sean hurled another jar of trash, sending the pack into fits of shrieking. By now, the noises had woken Ian: he giggled, though no one paid him any heed. The distance at last bridged, the seven horrors and five survivors clashed.

  Aadore and Curtis remained side by side, while Sean and Skar stood back to back—with the brute keeping his hand on little Ian the whole while. The two former soldiers knew how to fight in close quarters. Sean wielded his cane as if it were the righteous sword of a king. Nothing touched him; no assault could break through his spinning, black defense. The creatures that did not receive a cracking riposte from Sean met with gory ends through the swift, true strikes of Skar, who chopped as if he were a forester possessed. Together, the soldiers whirled in a tornado that brought decapitation, evisceration, and amputation. A man with an appetite for gladiatorial sport—Lord Moreth of El, for example—would have found their brotherhood and the blood they shed sublime.

  Aadore and Curtis performed their own dance of crimson. Fetid fingers that reached for Aadore were given a flashing reprimand from her sword. Aadore swung without her brother’s finesse, her sword strikes more hackings than pointed attacks. But the difference was of little consequence, as they faced not trained swordsmen but rabid, slobbering beasts. Aadore’s fury and strength were more important. She wielded her sword like a club—sometimes its edge connected, and at other times, she stunned an unliving with the flat of its blade. Like a mad gardener, she brought her weapon down on every lumpen face and limb she saw, tenderizing them to pulp.

  Curtis proved a more adept killer. After all, he’d killed a living man before—not with intent, but with an innate ferocity that had turned a push into a lethal fall over a railing. He shoved the reeking carcasses with the same brutality into which he’d tapped before. Whatever Aadore didn’t haphazardly dice, he finished off with tackles and brutal swings of his hammer, careful always to get away before he could be scratched.

  Once, his hammer hooked into the jaw of a leering skull, and the creature’s head was torn out by its roots and flung into the murk. The horror abandoned its assault and tapped the sappy pit where its neck had been. It bumbled about, almost comically, until a spittle-foaming Aadore stepped in and thwacked it in the chest. The dead thing dropped, splashed, and did not get up. Already, another horror had filled its place, this one reaching out to grapple with Aadore. Curtis leaped and shoved Aadore to the side. He caught one of the horror’s soggy wrists and smashed back its other clawing hand with his hammer. Curtis snarled, kicked the horror in its stomach, and concentrated his full, terrible strength on the limb that he held. Off popped an arm, which the man then used, along with his hammer, to beat the creature back and down until it met a true death.

  He then heard Aadore struggling, and turned to see a horror wrestling with her sword—trying to pull it, by its blade, from her hands. Aadore saved herself by abruptly letting go her grasp: the creature, a victim of its own force, then impaled itself on her weapon. Such a wound would not kill what was already dead, however, and Curtis hurried to turn its skull into a meaty pulp, for he’d realized that removing the head neutralized the other monsters. While Curtis completed his handiwork, Aadore placed one foot on the writhing horror and pulled her sword from its guts. Silence. They noticed that the fighting had ended, at least for the moment.

  Aadore turned and saw Skar and Sean, panting, wet with sweat and rancid blood, standing in a hacked tumble of limbs and bent corpses. She felt no surprise, only a little rush of triumph—but then the underground plaza suddenly came alive with the inquisitive screeching of other hungry dead. A horde was nearing. The survivors hurried toward the door.

  Curtis fumbled for the key. After a click and a spark of magik, the iron portal opened in an oiled sweep, and they shoved themselves into cold, dank safety, pushing shut the door. Within a moment, they heard the scrape of claws on metal—but the door could not be opened without a key. They wandered through the pitch black, guided only by their huffing. The tunnel stank like wet metal. At last the noise of their pursuers faded, and they found themselves alone with the chattering of rats. Rats, thought Aadore, rejoicing at the sound of a living thing, even if that living thing was vermin. She needed to stop for a speck, not to indulge her sense of relief, but because her leg had developed a stitch. As she leaned against a freezing metal wall, her shoulder protested and screamed with pain. She blurted out a small cry.

  “Are you well? You’re not hurt, are you?” asked the ghost of Curtis in the dark.

  Perfect soldiers, Sean and Skar had already appraised themselves for injury while shuffling along the passage: blindly groping
themselves and checking for pain. Both men reported on their fitness. Aadore had yet to speak.

  For a wound throbbed in Aadore’s shoulder. Consumed by the glory of battle, she hadn’t noticed it until now. She tried to avoid confronting the unthinkable, to prevent herself from wondering whether the injury had come from teeth or claws. However, her head teased her with a heinous, hazy picture of that last horror pulling at her before she used her sword to push him away. Pulling and clawing.

  Sean whispered in the dark. “Aadore?”

  “Just a stitch,” she lied.

  III

  Once, a long time ago, Aadore had visited the Royal Opera House. Shortly after Sean had been sent away, kindly Beatrice had sensed her handmaiden’s sadness and decided to delight her with a satin frock and a ticket for one to Un Balle Sanguia: the Blood Ball. Aadore had never felt so fancy, so much like a lady, as on that evening. While ascending the palatial steps into the theater, and throughout the night, gentlemen tipped their hats to her and opened doors. They had no idea, these men, that she was the one who spent her life opening doors and ingratiating herself. Aadore remembered how her hands had trembled with joy as she’d held the yellowed programme, which in calligraphic script described the opera she was about to see. The opera had been unforgettable.

  The Blood Ball was an opera in three parts, and both began and ended at grand dances. The opening act was set during Menos’s Age of Discovery, and its action took place on the sprawling estate of Master Gestault, an Iron lord and hero of that era. Gestault was playing host to his friend and wartime companion Ferdinand, an uncommonly kind feliron mogul, and his new bride, the Lady Ingray, whom Ferdinand had met while traveling through distant continents in one of Menos’s new crowes. The Lady Ingray was exotic and beautiful, and the diva who played her had been radiant. Gestault, like the audience, found himself seduced by her charms. From there, the plot promised to develop into a fairly standard examination of a love triangle—but a twist came when the Lady Ingray rejected the handsome Gestault’s advances.

  Well, this is new, Aadore had thought. A Menosian master rarely failed to capture his prize. After his spurning by the lady, prideful Gestault resorted to the services of a witch in the hopes of bespelling her. Before giving him her potion, the witch warned Gestault that love couldn’t be forced, only offered, and that her concoctions at times induced not passion, but madness. However, Gestault cared not, and he snatched the elixir from the witch. At the first opportunity, the Masked Ball of the third act, Gestault dosed Ingray’s wine with the love potion. Within moments, the elixir took effect, and the pair stole away to a suite within the mansion, where they removed their masks and clothes and engaged in lustful sex. Wild with passion, Ingray sang to Gestault that he would be hers and hers alone forever. Post-coitus, Ingray left the spent, drunk, and sleeping Iron lord to seal her promise.

  As the opera approached its finale, Ingray’s madness was revealed. Under the influence of the spell, she started a long, strident song about the trials of her love with Gestault, about how many sought to keep them apart. Mad Ingray then locked and barred the mansion’s doors, collected Gestault’s rifle and cutlass, and commenced “honoring” her beloved. Still gloriously wailing, she cornered her husband in a pantry, shot him into mincemeat, and then gouged the eyes out of his skull. But he was not the only one she felt stood in the way of her love: a similar fate awaited all the others in the manse. The guests fell to her sword blows and bullets, each dying a screaming and bombastic death. No one escaped Ingray; she proved herself unstoppable. For the Lady had been possessed by Gestault’s selfish, prideful desire. She loved Gestault as he loved himself: she became his perfect bride, a living mirror of his narcissism. Even when the surviving folk rallied in the great room, broke apart furniture, and assaulted her, she did not succumb to her wounds. Instead, they fell to her bullets and blows. Soon, nothing could be heard in the mansion but Ingray’s song and the loud snoring of Gestault. As Un Balle Sanguia ended, Ingray ascended the crimson staircase, which was draped with fallen bodies, wearing her wedding dress of blood.

  It was this moment that played over and over again in Aadore’s mind: Ingray walking up a staircase of death and ruin. Aadore felt as if she and her fellows had just done the same. She fixated on the image as she huddled in the darkness of their new hideaway: the Royal Opera House. She rocked Ian, listening to the creaking beams that somehow held up the ancient building in defiance of Menos’s apocalypse. When she looked over at the dim and empty stage, spotlighted by the moonbeams penetrating the chamber’s fractured roof, she could almost see and hear the ghostly Ingray singing her heart out. Un Balle Sanguia’s makeup, scenery, and effects had been remarkable, reflecting what Aadore now knew of true violence. Ingray’s victims had looked just like the unliving horror after Aadore had hacked it to pieces with the blade that rested in the empty seat beside her. Unconsciously, she adjusted the pack hiding the throbbing wound in her shoulder. How long before the poison sets in? she wondered. How long before my brother hacks me to bits?

  “Aadore?”

  Someone tugged at her, and the nightmare disintegrated. From the shadows beside Aadore glowed Curtis’s white countenance. Curtis rubbed her back with his hand. “You look as if you’re dreaming, but I can see that you’re awake.”

  “I wish I were dreaming. I wish that this nightmare would end already.”

  Curtis could think of nothing to say. Out in the night, in the clouded ruins of Menos, shambling creatures called to the moon and to each other. The hordes had become an army. Although he and the other survivors had been able to make it as far as an access point leading to the Royal Opera House—a hatch that opened up right behind the stage—they were not yet free of the city. And the sublevels were now closed to them: water had found its way even into those feliron-reinforced tunnels. If they were to pass the Iron Wall, they would have to navigate the fog of death. Curtis pulled Aadore and the child into a one-armed embrace as he, too, succumbed to melancholy.

  After a speck, Aadore poked him. “Where did you go? I watched you fall asleep with your eyes open.”

  “Did I?”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “How much farther we must go. What were you thinking about before?”

  “An opera.” She laughed.

  Whenever Aadore smiled, which wasn’t often, her happiness spread like a fever. The little lad in her lap burbled and gave a gummy grin, and Curtis smiled, too. Curtis’s prolonged staring made Aadore feel shy. Pretending to pay him no heed, Aadore tended to the baby: checked his nappy, spoon-fed him a few scoops of the powdered milk-and-water concoction. But Ian’s food was nearly gone, as were most of their supplies. Aadore’s caregiving painted a motherly, fierce image that only intensified Curtis’s attention. Lovely, he thought. He wished that her thin pianist’s fingers would touch him with the same kindness as they did the infant. He wondered what her hard-set mouth would taste like, how it might part and gasp in pleasure. As a gentleman, Curtis knew he should stop eyeing her. However, his baser impulses demanded he appreciate every moon-hued, voluptuous curve of this Iron maiden: her long and shapely legs, her strong shoulders, the full breasts hidden behind her tattered gown. Curtis refused to believe it was a lack of sex—he was rather choosy—or the absence of other women that made Aadore so appealing. These conditions simply allowed Aadore’s inner light to shine. A gray light, surely, as she was a woman of the Iron City.

  Aadore scraped the last of the baby’s meal from the battered saucer, then placed the feeding paraphernalia back in her beggar’s pouch. Strange, thought Curtis, that she refused to put down the pack—doing so would make the task far easier, would save her from the awkward game of arm-bending and wincing that she played. Afterward, Aadore burped little Ian, and he settled into a nap. Once the infant appeared to be fully asleep, Curtis and Aadore leaned upon each other, their heads and shoulder touching. They watched the ghosts of Menos perform on the grand stage in twirls of dust and ash.

>   “We smell like absolute rubbish,” said Aadore.

  Curtis couldn’t disagree. “We’re lucky to be alive. We’re lucky to have found one another.”

  “Lucky…yes.”

  Aadore’s mind drifted, lulled by Curtis’s warm body at her side. Sleepily, she considered luck—and the fact that hers was about to run out. Relaxed and comfortable, Aadore nearly confessed her cursed future. Not now. I’m still myself and not a monster. Now, her brother and Skar were out in the city, which was thriving with so many dead—and more being born by the speck—that the men had risked scouting in the night for a way through the Iron Wall. To distract herself, she glanced at the blemished beauty of the grand opera house. She used her vivid memory to recall the polished balustrades, the gold-leaf balconies, and the red-velvet seats—features all now smothered in darkness and soot. What an effort it would take to make Menos majestic once more. Gloriatrix hadn’t been present in the Iron City for the calamity, and Aadore believed that her queen still lived; she must still live. Had Gloriatrix been successful in her quest to conquer Eod? Did the world know what had happened? She worried that the lack of any rescue and restoration efforts was a sign that the whole world lay in ruins. Aadore banished the thought and prayed that had not come to pass: she had to believe there was something green and living beyond the fog of death, and that she and the others would see it again. Aadore whirled in this maelstrom of thoughts, hopes, and fears, all the while rubbing her shoulder. The claw marks burned.

  Curtis sensed her restless shuffling and knew that her actions were odd. When they’d gathered at Aadore’s apartment, he had learned of Skar’s most recent employer and the complications surrounding the death of the master’s daughter. Aadore is fine, he repeated, but he believed himself a little less each time. Consumed by their brooding, neither noticed the gray shadows of Sean and Skar moving through the orchestra and up the stairs to the balcony where their companions rested.