III
Marks of the army’s passage were evident, and Sorren limped his way through the ruts and footprints the beasts had left behind. Smaller trees had been snapped and then crushed into a flattened road. A light dusting of snow concealed its dangers, and he slipped often. Although Sorren was mad—he knew that well enough—his intelligence hadn’t dulled, and he made a game of counting the foot, hoof, and paw prints left unfilled by the snow, and tried to estimate the size of the force. Thousands, he conjectured. What was their destination? Menos was obviously out of the question for it had been destroyed.
During his period of captivity within Death’s mind, he’d thrice had visions of events transpiring on Geadhain—real scenes that weren’t ash and emptiness. Once, he’d seen a roguish man with copper hair and strange eyes of differing colors standing in a graveyard. The man had given him a look of amused pity and said a word or two before Sorren was pulled back into the world of ash. On another occasion, Sorren had stirred from his prison and seen a broken tower dark in a massive smoldering ruin that he knew without doubt was Menos. There would be nothing there for the wolves to raid, for civilization as he’d known it was no more. His third moment of clarity had come at the end of his use as Death’s vessel: entirely aware—though through sight riddled and milky as if he’d aged ten thousand years—he’d watched his own decrepit hands unearth the remains of his brother.
Now, no more Death’s avatar or prisoner, he reflected on these previous escapes, and began to see that Death’s power over her host wasn’t absolute. There were times when Death’s Will over her vessel’s flesh became weak—not weak enough to allow the prisoner to break his chains, but weak enough that he could become aware of the outside world. Perhaps this awareness was all that he needed to reach his brother: to summon Vortigern’s soul forth for a new bargain, a better pact. For he knew why Death had made him dig Vort’s dismembered remains from the frozen ground: she needed another vessel as his own body had been all used up. And if she needed a new vessel, she needed a new pact, too, an agreement with a living soul. Vort was alive—his soul, anyway. Wresting him and his body out of Death’s grasp would take a miracle, but he had a pouch of three of those. I have a stone of wonder just for you, Brother, he thought. I hope it will be enough.
IV
By the time dawn had wriggled its fat fingers through the crystal mesh of Alabion, casting glaring orange and red rays, Sorren had made it quite far. Because he so often drifted in and out of nightmares—visions of ash, screaming faces, the now sickening sensation of viscera on his fingers—he wasn’t good at keeping track of sands and distance. So when light set the forest aglow, he realized that morning had come and that he’d managed to cover a great deal of ground.
Well behind him now were the darkest, oldest, and thickest parts of the woods. Less threatening hisses and barks stirred the climes in which he currently found himself. Indeed, none of the usual carrion-hunting cats or scaled hounds had chased him during the night. His continued safety struck him as unusual, as Alabion was never kind to unwanted travelers. He paused to double-check his anatomy to see if anything was missing. Hands, feet, and flesh all seemed intact. The wounds of yesterday, including his limp, all appeared to have mended. When he pulled up his sleeves and trouser bottoms, he spotted nothing save for hairless and smooth alabaster skin. Below his shin, his regrown foot looked flawless, even somewhat gracefully formed—although the nails had been turned blue-black by the cold he couldn’t feel. Curious, he thought.
You’re quite insane, dear chap. Who knows what you’re really seeing?
Moving in and out of a daze, Sorren continued. He was making fantastic time. Or perhaps it was simply that the wind now whipping his side gave him a sense of speed. As exhilarating as his sprint was, Sorren didn’t lose his breath. Sometime later, as the forest warmed and birds woke up and sang, he noticed a glistening flicker ahead: a river or stream. Sorren raced toward it, thinking he should refresh himself. But this urge was driven by instinct, not by a demand of his body. In fact, as he strode up to the crystal brook that babbled and broke the ice with its chatter, he felt no thirst at all. Many hourglasses of jogging—which had felt like walking—and his throat spoke only of numbness.
When had he last had a drink? He couldn’t recall. What about a meal, for that matter? He remembered sipping bitter, liquorice-scented tea back in the sisters’ abode, then…Well…Surely, he must have nourished himself afterward. Perhaps because he was paying attention to his stomach, it disagreed and then decided to gurgle as if it had something to expel. Within instants, the indigestion had grown violent, but it brought with it no pain. Contemplating these oddities, Sorren squatted in the snow and shat with no concern for dignity. He wondered if it was the cold that made his fingernails look as dark as his toenails. He stared at his very pale hands while a flurry of wet slop fell from his insides—with a fanfare of gas, though without cramping. Sorren’s excretion went on for far longer than normal, but his hands distracted him from the nasty business. Then the stench of rotten eggs and spoiled meat wafted up and around him, and Sorren, fascinated, still wiping his arse with a piece of cloth ripped from his tatters, turned to look at what he’d made.
Viscera, a kidney, and strings of fat floating in a gravy of oil stared back at the appalled man. The scrap of arse-wiping cloth that he threw in shock was drenched in black. Sorren fumbled backward, his trousers down and tripping him, his heart racing…No. It wasn’t racing—it wasn’t even beating, said the Thulian aspect of his mind. The panic drum played only in his head. The trickle of cold sweat on his neck was another phantom memory, a sensation his body was reproducing based on past terrors. That same autonomous reflex was responsible for his gasps, which arose from no genuine hyperventilation. These breaths had a pleasant fragrance: a potpourri of cloves, herbs, and spices used to preserve apples and sweet things.
A man’s heart raced. A man sweated from fear. A man felt cold. A man ate, drank, and shat. These rules applied to Sorren no longer. As he finally pulled up his trousers and stumbled to the creek, the shattering realization came to him. There, in a pane of ice like a mirror at the water’s edge rippled a ghoulish white face, a grimace of yellow teeth, and a gaze as black as all the evil that had once dwelled in his heart.
The words of the golden sister echoed in his mind: “She stopped the great decay, though she could not remove the piece of Death’s great shadow that is within you. Doing so is beyond my sister’s power. You let Death in, and now She can never be removed—even if the worst of her power and presence has gone. You are tainted. Or rather, more tainted, I suppose. Is that why you’re weeping? Because of what you will become?”
“I have become Death,” he whispered, and sobbed, though no tears would come.
V
One boon of his curse was the speed of his new body. By evening, after following the changeling’s trampled road, Sorren had covered a great deal of ground—the army was far ahead by now and had shown no indication that it knew of his presence. He felt he was too fast for them to catch, anyhow. Still, he wondered if he could catch them, and how little time and energy of his that would take. An hourglass? A day? On the matter of days, chronexes and time, however, he could not determine the color of the sky or the hourglass, seeing only the land’s muffled lightness.
Shortly after his body had evacuated itself of mortal organs, his sight had waned to a cataract-like blindness, a bleary gray through which he now saw the world. Almost everything that had a spark of life possessed an outline in the haze, like a white-coated man walking through a rainy night. Thus he could see the soft, pulsing rods of light that were trees, and the four-legged and fluttering gobs of radiance that were animals and birds. His sense of depth, detail, and shape, though, had been lost. He could no longer see the details and beauty of these creatures. For a man once imprisoned in a realm of ash, a man who longed only to see the world again—all the glories he’d rejected and profaned in life—this was another cruel penalty added to an
eternal sentence. A sentence, though, that he knew he deserved. No matter. He was fast now, and strong, which would make his mission to save his family from the depths of monstrosity easier to accomplish.
Sorren came to the balding outskirts of Alabion. Although he still felt drawn by the woman of the red aura and her army of vicious wolf-men, he knew he must go north if he were to find human habitation and information about his family. Whatever war to which the wolves were marching was not his battle—not now or yet, at least. Sorren tore across the wavy field of gray rises and fog, heading for civilization.
VI
Heathsholme was quaint—Central Geadhain’s darling, as the locals proclaimed. Looking down upon it, passengers on skycarriages were often struck by the fact that the realm possessed the look of a joyfully made quilt. Red-leafed orchards, yellow fields of flax and corn, patches of blue brocade that were swimming pools and watering holes…all threaded with brown branching roads. Sweet winds blew down from the North year-round, bearing only cool and refreshing properties until winter rose to claim the throne of seasons. When the North wind came, it froze Heathsholme’s pools into skating circles and decorated the large trees with grand chandeliers of ice. In the depths of that season, the staunch apple trees finally died. Their fruits fell to the ground and were collected. Their blossoms broke from their branches and filled the air like flocks of migrating winter birds. During this season, families came from the West, South, and East to visit Heathsholme and enjoy great outdoor festivals of food, music, mulled cider, and wine—for which the region was also famed.
Partly on account of the season’s coolness, these celebrations happened around great bonfires. At night, when the happily drunk howled at the moon, a primal spirit took hold, and effigies of nameless spirits were burned in the pyres. No one could remember why or how the Vallistheim tradition had been born, only that it was a remnant of the customs once imposed by Taroch. The ancient warlord had been fascinated by the Northmen’s rites, and had introduced many of them to Central Geadhain. Vallistheim—the winter festival—was believed to bring bounty and luck in the New Year. Over time, polite society had done away with many of the less pleasant sacrificial details to make the ritual friendlier to outsiders. Now only one cow from each of the barns and byres that rose on rings in the hilled highlands around the heart of the township was cooked in a great feast, without having been ritually slaughtered first.
In the uncultivated grasses past the city proper and its farmlands, a dedicated explorer could find the remains of crumbled churches that had been built to honor the now vanished religion of Taroch’s fancies. Runes that the sages had translated into such names as Freyallah, Odric, and Helhayr were found chiseled in the mossy arches of these grounds. These sites of an ancient religion were thought by modern minds to be haunted or perhaps protected by the ancient spirits or warriors mentioned in the stones. It was the sort of refuge where a monster, fearful of being seen, could find sanctuary.
VII
However did you do it for so long, Vort? wondered Sorren.
Amid the ruins, he sat and sulked upon a pile that might once have been an altar and watched the static that he thought must be snow, unable to feel it on his gray skin. He’d spent only two days, maybe three—he was terrible with time now—in the same state of waking death that his brother had lived in for decades, and he didn’t know how Vortigern had succeeded in avoiding madness. For to live between life and death was to exist as a ghost in each realm. The living had no color aside from their auras, and the physical world, the soulless elements, were figments the elements of which one could only guess.
Sorren’s first encounter with another being had gone terribly awry.
After his race through gray clouds flickering with soul lightning of many colors he’d met his first man, or perhaps woman. He hadn’t yet figured out how to discern the intricacies of sex in these fluctuating blobs of colors. The person appeared suddenly during his marathon: a dazzle of color that he nearly missed in the blur. Somehow, he understood that the brightness, and complexity, indicated a person, for the being hovered like a snowflake of white-and-gold starlight. Stopping, he found himself by tall green squiggles of light: trees, as their color was always green unless they were sick. A few gaseous humps that Sorren suspected were hills lay beyond them. Another indistinguishable mound hovered behind the moving rainbow aura.
“Sir? Ma’am?” asked Sorren.
As he hadn’t spoken in a while, his words sounded strange and rather loud, even to himself. At once, the figure flared with a flickering muddy-brown light. The aura crinkled and cowered, becoming a doll of crumpled paper. In his new gray existence, Sorren could hear certain sounds quite well. The living produced coursings and thuds: blood flow and heartbeats; this person’s had accelerated. What he or she was experiencing was fear. A woman’s warbling underwater shriek shook Sorren, and the flickering soul ran off into the gray miasma. He knew he could follow her and catch her in a stride, but he didn’t. He’d never chase another woman again; the thought had made his withered prune of a stomach try to force up the vomit it could no longer produce.
Once his phantom sickness had passed, he had rummaged through what he believed to be a cart left behind by the woman. The search was a blind foraging: he couldn’t identify even half of the items he touched, but he took what felt like a hat, boots, and a large throw-over smock. In his enthusiasm to make contact with the woman who had so suddenly appeared, he’d neglected to recall that he was now well and truly a horror to behold. Monsters had to hide themselves to survive. Furthermore, he realized his words had actually come out in a screech of gibberish. If everything about his physical body now moved faster, that could well include his tongue. He remembered Vortigern—the dead version of his brother—practicing the careful enunciation of sounds, rolling his gray lips and doing strange vocal exercises in the mornings as he stood in front of a mirror.
“Aaaa…Eeee…Iiiii….Hhhhooooowwww…aaaarrrreh…yyyyoooouuu?”
Too self-involved, Sorren had never taken the time to discover the purpose behind this training. He found himself grateful for the memory, though, and for so many other strengths and virtues of his brother that he could now emulate.
“Please forgive me,” said the dead man.
Sorren practiced the phrase, slowing it down on the hitch of every syllable until he sounded like a village idiot. However, he knew that was the speed, the correct tempo, in which he should speak, because the muffled echo sounded not like a shriek but like distantly whispered words. Sorren spent the remainder of the day—he was beginning to be able to tell the passage of time by studying the softer and darker grays—walking the ruins and talking to the little auras that frolicked around him in stone and snow. Their attention, however shy, was a kindness for which he felt a humble gratitude. It was a mercy that they would even tolerate him in their home.
Finally, the monster awkwardly fit himself into the boots and clothing he had stolen from the woman on the road. The hat felt too tight, and the shift hugged him in queer places, but the boots must have belonged to someone with enormous feet, because they fit quite well. He figured his shoddy cloak would conceal at least some of his oddness. He would have preferred to use magik: a phantasm would have solved all of his insecurities. As Sorren had learned, though, when a man died, he apparently lost the passion necessary to spark magik. Sorren was a sorcerer no more: he was merely a dead man. Nonetheless, it was night, the hourglass of his kind, and he needed information on the war and his family. Sorren left the ruins.
After striding a ways through fluffed banks of cloud on the earth that were certainly snow, Sorren paused and looked down into the valley of lights and colors, the beating rainbow heart of spirits, music, and laughter that was Heathsholme. Sorren didn’t feel as if he should be allowed happiness, and yet the beauty of the sight clenched his tearless eyes.
VIII
Rhiannon swept her gaze across the rustic tavern a final time. A man lay facedown on a table. A woman an
d two fellows shared a shady corner; each man had a hand on her leg, which she seemed not to mind. The bard’s stool was empty; he’d left for his bed hourglasses ago. Rhiannon wondered if she should do the same. Only the dregs were left, and unless she wanted to make herself a fourth wheel of that trio, she wouldn’t be making any coin tonight. They wouldn’t pay for it, anyway. Why buy the spinrex when you can get the milk for free? went the saying in Eod. In short order, the pair of gents and their giggling spinrex made a windy exit through the door. Rhiannon shivered from the winter they let in and pulled up her stole, then turned back to the cider she would finish before heading upstairs to her chamber.
“That it for tonight, Rhiannon?” asked the apish barkeep.
In rural places, the servers and valets were never as handsome as the ones she’d once seen in Eod: oiled, shirtless brutes of pure muscle who juggled bottles and uncorked them with their teeth. One had been a firecaller and had lit his liquor—and later, her loins—on fire. Rhiannon had been to the western capital only once, and hadn’t been able to stay as long as she’d wanted, as she had frivolously spent every bit of coin from her father’s inheritance in a span of three days. Even before setting out for Eod, she’d bled money, losing more than half of her fortune’s valuation in the currency exchange before she’d even spent a penny. But she cared not. Igor, her father, had been the most worthless kind of man: weak, drunk, abusive. He’d beaten her mother into an early grave and done even worse to Rhiannon. She desired none of his cursed crowns, did not want to preserve his misery-made fortune. When he died, she had thrown him into a wooden box and burned the body. She had been deliriously drunk at the service, and shouted slurs at his ghost, if memory served. Not that any decorum had to be maintained at the funeral—Igor’s family had hated him, too, and no one else had come. She’d left his ashes in a heap on the farmland she had sold. Rhiannon was thinking of fists, and flinching from the thought of unwanted touches from meaty hands, when the barkeep nudged her elbow.
Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) Page 49