Sean startled them. “Enough with your long faces. We think we’ve found a way through the Iron Wall.”
Curtis sat up. “Through?”
“Right through,” said Skar, and grinned. “There’s a tear in the untearable, a rip right down the wall. It’s a small one, but your brother here has eyes that a hawk would envy. He thinks it runs all the way through. I’m hopeful enough to believe that.”
I want to see fresh air and a blue sky before I must close my eyes forever, thought Aadore. “We’ve had enough of a rest. We don’t need to spend the remainder of the evening in shelter. I’d like to leave. Now.”
Aadore stood and passed Ian back to Skar who slipped the lad, still asleep, into his arm hammock. She gestured to her fellows to mobilize themselves, but Sean and Skar stayed where they were, frowning.
“Sister,” said Sean. “We must take a moment. The night is hungry and thick with terrors. The damned are everywhere. Skar and I were nearly spotted at every turn. You know that the dead have eyes now, ones they can use. And there is something—”
“All the more reason not to wait. We don’t need more eyes and more dead,” snapped Aadore.
She seemed unreasonably angry and volatile. Sean came forward, hoping she would respond to his caution, listen to certain bleak details of what he and Skar had found. Sean took hold of her shaking hands. Oh, how dreadfully cold her flesh felt. Darkly, and with a flash of the empathy that only the closest siblings possess, one never dulled by time and years, Sean sensed a whisper of Aadore’s terror. She hadn’t been afraid this whole journey: not of the shrieking and rotting unliving, not of the asphyxiating clouds of death through which they’d come. Yet, at this moment, she trembled with mortal fear. Something was terribly wrong in her, something that felt like the dark secrets of laboratories and experiments he kept in his own head. While he couldn’t guess what vexed her, he would honor her desire. “Very well, Sister,” he said, and kissed her clammy hands.
“Hold on!” barked Skar, balling up his fists and puffing himself up with importance. “Just a damn sand! We would never make it, not at night. You know what’s out there, in the marketplace. You need to tell them—”
“We shall live,” declared Sean. “And they will see soon enough what final trial we face.”
Sean’s fieriness quieted Skar to a grumbling obedience. The four walked down and through the decayed opera house, making their way around burned detritus, kicking up trails of ashes, until they came to an antechamber. Together, they worked to hoist open the bent and buckled doors of the theater. As soon as they went outside, Sean knew that they’d have to be quick. At least his stump wasn’t complaining today; he might be able to manage a hobbled-run. Stealth would be an ineffective tactic against an army of the dead. And where there was an army, there was also a commander.
He and Skar had been the only ones to see it: the mount of bones, cinders, and shadows. Atop the jutting throne had sat something resembling a man, though the companions couldn’t determine anything more specific than that. When it had moved, they had run back to their hole. Now, they would have to run again: past the shambles of the market, past the gnawing hordes, past that mount of ashy dark, and past whatever sat and reveled in the kingdom’s rot and doom. Sean prayed to the Kings, Sisters, Iron Queens, Saints—whatever or whoever might hear him—that what sat upon the new throne of Menos would not notice them.
IV
Although the metal creaked and screamed as they tore open the doors of the opera house, the clamor didn’t summon as many unliving as they’d feared; only a couple of curious, noseless horrors came sniffing about the entrance. Skar rushed ahead, bouncing baby and all, and prevented their imminent wailing with two messy head-severing blows. The remaining companions crept out onto the rubble-strewn stairs and into the cold kiss of the fog of death. Sean and Skar had spoken truth: the night echoed with terrors. They ran.
As they’d already exhausted their supply of noise-bombs, the four tried to stay quiet. Tonight, the moon’s bright light pierced through a layer of the gloom, and in the foul glow, the crumbled shells, fallen columns, and teetering piles looked like nightmare versions of the houses, lampposts, and carriages they’d once been. They not only had less cover, but also more cause to fear the moving shadows, the legions of moving shadows about which Sean had warned them.
How many of the dead have been reborn? wondered Aadore. It was impossible to count the lumpy, shuffling things they skirted in the fog of death. Moments later, Aadore saw what she thought was a heap of trash that filled the scraped-out ruin of a building. Then the mound moved, splitting into caterpillars and milling shapes, and she realized it was a gigantic orgy of the dead—which had been sleeping or insensate until they sensed the life of her and her fellows. The sleepy dead started spilling out from the fissures in the walls and through the building’s shattered windows. The company raced away before the hissing things could catch them.
They made a number of narrow escapes, most made possible by Sean’s acute reflexes and senses. Despite his leg, Aadore had seen him fall only a few times, when they’d pushed themselves to the limits of exhaustion. Indeed, Sean’s soldier’s grit gave him the strength of a man far haler—that and the darkness that rode within his soul, for fear and hatred were the most potent of fuels. It was incredible to Aadore how quickly her brother could move: a spring and a pivot off his cane with naught even a grimace to show any exertion. Still, even her rage-powered brother couldn’t protect them from an army.
The night reeked with the earthy putrescence of a split, fly-buzzing carcass, the kind of smell that conjured vomit in the back of Aadore’s throat. And the stench was intensifying. The fact that she was able to deafen herself to the droning of so many flies and the squelching and flatulent shifting of tons of rotten, maggoty flesh was a testament to her willpower. At any rate, the appalling music served to muffle the sounds of her company’s footsteps, huffing, and heartbeats. A blessing? A curse? Who knew in this madness? Glancing at Ian—the eternally quiet child—Aadore noticed that Skar had swaddled him almost to the point of suffocation. Aadore assumed that Skar knew what he was doing, and there was no time to check, for they needed to run, run, run.
The company raced past shelled-out houses, waterlogged paths, and sloppy shapes. They took any shelter they could find—behind ruined walls and shields of sheet metal, and in dips and crannies in the road—but hid only for specks. Then they were on their feet again, outrunning the packs of wild dead things like a herd of fleet deer darting through a wolves’ den. They never spoke, for doing so would have brought death upon them. They began to breathe in the shallowest rasps and ran until their oxygen-deprived muscles screamed and burned. But the four soon reached the marketplace of which Sean and Skar had spoken.
Tipped stalls, shattered glass and cookware, scattered weapons, and barricades of trash and wood fluttering with soiled silk flags emerged from the fog of death like a grand battlefield. Indeed, a battle had been fought here: signs of struggle remained in the form of long smears of both dried and freshly glistening gore, and severed hands clutching daggers. At least the people of Menos had taken a stand, however doomed, against the darkness. The devastation went on for some distance, illuminated by the ghastly moon. Aadore suddenly remembered a bold-lined image of a wolf atop a cairn, possibly from one of the books in the Lady El’s library, but she couldn’t say for certain. Even as Curtis pulled her ahead, she gazed up at the moon, captivated.
At first, the Black Markets seemed deserted. However, the hunched backs of Skar and Sean and the lightness and slowness of their tread told Aadore that her companions were aware of a potential threat. They crept through the misty battlefield, which was curiously empty of walking corpses. Every hair on and nerve in their bodies thrummed with danger. They brandished their weapons, prepared to attack the first rotten face that appeared. Soon the faint squares of houses faded away, and they skulked around the edges of black cracks in the flagstones and wove around mounds of filth. Wh
en a civilization fell, all of its baubles and riches were reduced to a slag of putrefied, buzzing matter. How meaningless is man’s desire to rule and conquer, she realized. Like a fortress in the sand, which the tide will claim in time. Aadore couldn’t distinguish rags from riches, or bones from meat. An alarming baby doll stared at her from atop one of the many piles of ruin on this beach of despair, pointing at her with its only remaining hand. She could almost hear it whisper, “Look what the wrongs of men and Kings have wrought.”
Sean stopped in what felt like nowhere, and urgently motioned everyone to hunker down. They were forced to stow away their armaments and from that point on, walked low to the ground like crabs. Sean, who could not easily hold such a pose, handed his cane to Curtis, then crawled on the earth. Agony racked him when he touched the swampy hard stones; what he’d experienced these past few days could easily have killed someone with his disability. Aadore wanted to tell her brother that she loved him, but he shrugged off the pain and scrabbled away too quickly. She vowed to tell him how she felt before the ache in her shoulder developed into a worse affliction. Curtis, Skar, and Ian, too, should know her heart as well. A woman shouldn’t go to her end without a slate free of unspoken truths.
As their slow worm inched onward, Sean repeatedly stared at something off to one side. What are you seeing, Brother? wondered Aadore. What do you see that has the power to frighten even a man who’s endured the dark torments you have? They crawled between two trash dunes, and Aadore froze as the moon shone so brightly that the tattered veil over the land was burned away.
Deep in the gray plumes of this valley of evil lay a heart: a mountain. A hundred strides away, maybe? Aadore felt as if a force pulled her forward, as if she were being compelled to kneel before this monument. It looked as if it had been constructed out of the slag and ruin around them, perhaps even out of countless bodies of Menos’s dead. Whatever its building blocks, it was magnificent in size—as tall as the Iron Wall. Radiant and ethereal, the moon cast its glory upon the gruesome tit. There was almost a feminine harmony to this symbolism: moons, the breast-like shape of the mound, the nipple at its apex…What was that? A structure? A figure? Surrounding the mountain of death were the children of this apocalypse—tens of thousands of dead. Aadore no longer wondered why the dead seemed to have vanished: they were all here. They had all come home and were…worshiping. Indeed, the rows of rotting, standing things swayed and tilted like the gentlest waves on the ocean. They were united in their movements and focus. They were not restless now, but still and reverent. Aadore couldn’t believe what she was witnessing and smelling, the gagging rot as the dead rejoiced in their odious faith. In another speck, Aadore would either have vomited or passed out, so she was grateful when Curtis nudged her along to the next mound, behind which Skar and her brother were crouching. Pallid and sweating from any number of aches and fears, the four dared to rest a moment.
“Now you have seen,” whispered Sean.
None of the four could grasp the absurd logic behind a dark mountain, an army of faithful dead, and a series of calamities that had unmade the known world. The crack in the Iron Wall, their planned escape from Menos, and their fellowship were the sole reasons for their hearts to beat, for their hands and feet to start moving though the muck. Aadore resisted the temptation to look back at the tit of darkness a second time. Instead, she exhausted her mind by fantasizing about what they would soon see: a crack, and beyond that greenness and starlight. She knew the fantasy would never come to fruition, at least not for her, but she held onto it desperately nonetheless. Knees slapping mud, hands squishing putrid garbage that puffed wet spores into her face as it crumbled, Aadore thought only of her dream as she crawled. They were all moving the same way as Sean now, and all likely daydreaming about realities less horrid than their current one. Little Ian didn’t make a peep.
Finally, Aadore felt a fresh untainted wind and looked up from her scuttling. Through the fog, she noticed a black scribble that didn’t waver or dissolve like a mirage as they drew nearer. The blackness widened, becoming a lightning bolt carved through iron, through a barrier that even now dominated the landscape and commanded awe: the Iron Wall. They’d made it. The dead must have been worshipping still, for the fellowship saw none. Perhaps no one else had made it this far. They would be the first to escape, they decided, and they stood and ran.
The Iron Wall and its great tear loomed in front of the gasping survivors. At the base of the titanic split, they noticed a quarry of waste and cindered iron, which they’d have to climb. However, no obstacle seemed impassable now. Their little star, Ian, was finally awake and gurgled as he bounced against Skar. Escape was within their grasp. They stopped at the base of the opening to assess its safety, and then stared up at its misty heights and deep into the canyon through which they would head.
“We’ve made it,” exclaimed Aadore.
“Almost,” said Sean.
Though they felt the urge to cry or scream, they climbed instead. People of Iron, to the end.
SCREECH!
What felt like the coldest wind in Geadhain suddenly blew up their spines. It circled around them, stinging their eyes with the ashes it bore, pushing them back. Terrified and battered, they held onto each other as the hurricane of black grit solidified into a blob of shadow on the rocks before them. The shadow stretched, and darkness fluttered from it like ravens. It faded into the shape of a man, one striding down the broken ruin of the Iron Wall toward them. Sean saw him most clearly: black eyes, strong, tall, and regally handsome, like a master. He was clothed in a rippling, tattered garment that wafted and dissipated like the shadow-born gusts that had transported him here. Is he some kind of sorcerer? they all wondered. Then the being’s icy presence withered their genitals and skins like naked children thrown into the winter. His gaze arrested them with its pulsing dark power. They reeled with impressions of whistling emptiness and crumbling dynasties; tickling breaths of bone dust blew across their faces. This was no sorcerer, they knew now: this was a force beyond their ken.
“Worthless maggots,” it said. “I have offered you the chance to reign in my kingdom. You have seen what awaits you, what you will become, and you flee from my gift? Did you think you could pass without my knowing? There is not a star in the sky whose fall I have not ordained.”
Its words were thunder and knives that stabbed the skulls of the lesser creatures it approached. Curtis fell. Skar curled up and wrapped himself around Ian, trying to protect the suddenly wailing child. Inexplicably, though, the creature’s words registered with Aadore and Sean only as a tinny, distracting hum. It was merely an annoyance, not an aural assault. Iron born and Iron proud, hearts in their mouths and hands shaking, brother and sister drew cane and sword and faced the uncanny horror.
“Fall!” commanded Death from within her vessel. “Fall before me!”
The storm of ashes and slicing talons of wind kicked up once more, and the land was consumed by a frenzy of twirling trash and smaller, dashing stones. Those of the fellowship who had fallen screamed as the Dreamer’s Will drove further into their heads; blood trickled from their eyes, ears, and mouths. Sean refused to obey the command, and when the monster slunk toward him like a snail, he charged the horror and stunned it by cracking his cane across its head.
The fury stopped; debris scattered. Death was flabbergasted, her host’s skull ringing. The insolent maggot swung again, and this time Death caught its tiny stick and crumbled it to ash with her touch. Death snarled and snatched this grub, this pest that had somehow managed to strike a giant of the cosmos, and she filled it with her black Will. Aadore screamed and raced into the crackling bosom of ebon fire that had suddenly consumed both Sean and the entity. She was already tainted and dead; she had nothing to lose. If she couldn’t save Sean, then she would willingly burn in this pyre with him. A shrieking Aadore entered the warm, but not searing, haze of twisting ether. Immediately, she saw two fuzzy shapes, one throttling the other, and she stabbed the aggressor.
“GRAAAAAH!”
An unforgettable cry sounded: the ear-shattering frustration of Death denied. The flames fizzled away, and the world slowed to a pace that allowed Aadore to become aware of her trembling naked body—her clothing had burned to molecular ash—and of the nude, thin figure of her brother. He clung to her, the wood below his knee having also been incinerated. However, they were alive and their flesh had somehow been left untouched by this unholiest of powers.
Brave and united, they stood, scowling at the destroyer of their city. Death moved back from the maggots that had rebuked her. Her vessel had been run through with a blade; she pulled it out of her abdomen and reduced it to flakes of rust with a touch. Death spat at the maggots and at their disregard for her order.
“Cursed blood! You should not exist on this side of Geadhain! You should not exist at all! I shall eradicate your line forever! I shall—”
Curtis and Skar continued to scream with each word; they could not endure much more of this ranting. Even Ian’s wail had grown wet and choking. Aadore, somehow knowing she could not be harmed, challenged the unearthly horror. She left Sean to balance himself for a speck, dipped and picked up a rock, the only weapon available. Then, she and her brother took a step and a hop forward.
Death fled in a spiral of ash and a blast of foul wind.
Aadore and her brother limped over to their fallen comrades. She lowered Sean down onto a trash heap, and, a steadfast survivor, he set to work rummaging through the refuse upon which he sat. Eventually, he found an Iron City banner that could be worked into coverings for himself and his sister. Meanwhile, Aadore helped the cringing, weeping, bloodied men to their feet. As if she were a sainted mother, Ian stopped crying as soon as Aadore retrieved him from Skar’s weary arms. Curtis and the larger fellow took a moment to breathe and wipe the blood from their faces. Soon, Sean hopped over and handed Aadore some soiled shreds that she could tie about her chest and waist. He had fashioned a wrap for himself, too, but both would have to make do with bare feet. They did not discuss the unearthly encounter, wanting only to make good their escape. Helping one another—mostly Sean, who was without a leg—they climbed up the feliron rubble and out of the city of death.
Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) Page 40