By placing the Slave in the Blood Pits, Moreth knew he’d made the first payment toward his grand debt. The Slave would not fail, and the odds were a gambler’s dream: an unknown, single gladiator against the Blood Pits’ finest warriors. Although smaller than all of his opponents, the Slave moved like an evil hummingbird and downed two of Moreth’s strongest and longest-serving champions in a day. After that, the crowd became even hungrier, and coins rained into the betting pools whenever the Slave was to fight. Months and months of showering blood followed, the tally of the dead grew to battlefield proportions, and Moreth started to send in duos, trios, and wild animals in order to make the bookers happy.
No matter the odds, the Slave won. He never celebrated his victories. Sometimes, if he had met with even slight resistance from an opponent, he would bow to the corpse of his foe. Otherwise, he would simply set his weapon—he was proficient with every swinging, cutting instrument of death—down upon the sodden earth and walk to his quiet space to await the next battle.
Moreth broke age-old rules and allowed the Slave to live with him rather than keep him in the barracks with his fellows. Such a move was good for Moreth’s profit margin, as this apparent advantage riled up those living in the Undercomb, those forced to share bunks, bath, and quarters. The favoritism shown the Slave encouraged men to challenge him, even those who really should have known better: the higher ranking one’s opponent, the faster one moved up the ladder toward freedom. Although he appreciated the boost to his coffers, Moreth kept the Slave near mostly so he could watch the beast navigate this unfamiliar habitat. Much to the discomfort of his servants, Moreth allowed the man to wander the estate.
Sometimes, Moreth would realize the Slave had been sitting in a room with him for hourglasses, as still as one of the curtains. Some nights, Moreth would wake in a cold sweat and look for a glint of white in the darkness—he knew the Slave’s eyes were upon him. But never did he wake and see the glint of metal, although knives were freely available in the kitchen and many swords were mounted on the walls. The Slave had granted him life, and now, Moreth realized, appeared to be grooming him.
He was always lurking about somewhere nearby, ready to test the senses and reflexes of his host. Moreth began to survey rooms before he entered them, trying to sense the Slave with his ears and eyes; like all gladiators, the man powdered himself with unscented talc, and so couldn’t be detected by his odor. Moreth and the Slave were playing an endless game of kitten and cat, student and teacher.
While the two animals played in Moreth’s estate, Elsa had regained her health. As he prowled about, checking every corner of the estate for his hunter-teacher, Moreth often came across the fair lady. Now and then, she took lessons with her governess—on language, grace, and poise. The lessons appeared less frustrating for her as summer became autumn. Elsa began making rapid progress in her studies, and come winter, began addressing him as Master El whenever their paths crossed. Moreth, however, felt shy whenever she spoke to him. Wherever Elsa was, Boris was not far away—his responsibility to care for her hadn’t ended when she’d risen from her bed.
At first, Moreth noticed only that his valet was teaching Elsa the ways of the waitstaff: polishing, scrubbing, and waxing. Such activities were foreign to her, yet she learned them fast. Then Moreth began noticing that in the darker hourglasses, she and Boris would often sit chatting by lamplight in the kitchen, practicing Ghaedic together. Indeed, many times each week, valet and maid would meet and busy themselves with notes and quills. Moreth, whose hearing had improved since he’d begun tracking his Slave, caught whispers from them well into the night. Their laughter, too, occasionally disturbed Moreth’s meditative hunts through the estate. Therefore, it was no real surprise to Moreth when one day, while Boris dressed him, the valet nervously struck up a conversation.
“Master El…If I may?” said Boris. “Uh, speak for a moment. Sorry, I’m not quite sure how to ask this, or even if I should ask this. However, I was wondering…I mean, I’ve been spending time, a lot of time, with our new maid-in-waiting—she doesn’t have a lady to serve just yet, but I assume that title will be fine—”
Moreth arranged his cravat himself, as Boris’s hands were fumbling. “What are you on about, man?”
The sword of love emboldened Boris, and he straightened his shoulders. “I would like to marry Elsa. We’ve been courting for some time. I have asked for her hand. I’ve never asked you for anything except the continued privilege of working on your estate…But I must ask you this: would you, being an Iron Sage and legal authority, officiate the ceremony?”
Moreth smiled. His redemption of Elsa was now nearly complete, and soon she would be both happy and free. Or at the very least free, and she certainly seemed happy. “Is that all? I would be honored.”
Thus that winter, Elsa and Boris were wed. It was a beautiful season for a wedding, for the streets of Menos became gray mist-soaked lanes to the afterlife, the gardens were wreathed in fog, and the weeping lilies of the estate cried overly sweet perfumes that caused the eyes to water—though not with stinkeye for once. Only Moreth, a few servants, and the Slave—lurking nearby but unseen—were in attendance. Moreth stamped and sealed the documents related to their union and rights of citizenship. Elsa looked beautiful in her gown of black lace, and she wept beneath her veil—the first emotion Moreth had ever seen her betray. Once her tears had dried, she gave Moreth a slight nod, signaling thanks, perhaps, or forgiveness. Then she and Boris ran off down the treed laneway of the estate to catch a carriage into the Iron City, where they intended to spend many of their hard-earned crowns. They wouldn’t actually end up spending a single coin, however, as Moreth had arranged everything for them: a night of extraordinary pleasures they could never have afforded on their own. Guards, too, he’d paid for, as two fools in love and carrying even a bit of coin would be tempting targets for a Menosian thug willing to slit throats.
Seasons, mostly gray and interchangeable, passed. But the Slave’s life had changed, for he had at last won his freedom. Down in the Blood Pits, a thousand men had been sent to meet the Pale Lady by the Slave’s hand, and so he would now become a man of Menos. There was no celebration for the Slave, no acceptance of his acceptance into society. Rather, he looked at the papers Moreth handed him, crumpled up the parchment into one large ball and then tossed it. Later Moreth unwrinkled the papers, forged a signature and submitted the documents for a John Doe.
Moreth and his hunter-father resumed their game, which had now evolved into a test of strength. After he found him, he must fight him. That was the rule, although as was the case with all of the Slave’s teachings, no formal instructions were given: the action itself was the lesson. Moreth quickly learned of this new find-and-fight approach after touching his teacher and receiving several blows. After spitting out blood and picking himself up, he saw that his teacher hadn’t left: his reward was to try to touch him again.
“Did you need anything else, Master El?” asked Elsa one evening in perfect Ghaedic after bringing him an iced cutlet wrapped in a towel, which she then placed on his swollen eye. Moreth’s agonies had forced them to suspend the game that day.
I need you to forgive me, he thought. He knew she had, in her way. She came from people of the same savage code as the Slave: if she had wanted to poison him or end him with a butter knife, she likely would have. So he didn’t ask for her forgiveness. Instead, he thought of another service she might be able to provide. Moreth sat up in his chair, groaning. “The man from the Pits, can you communicate with him somehow? I’d like to know more about him, about where you and he came from.”
“You’re assuming he can be communicated with at all,” replied Elsa, with fire to her voice. “We are not the same, he and I. We are as different as master and slave. We may come from another realm, and even if that place is far from our bodies, it is never far from our hearts. In Pandemonia there is an order, too, and he and I do not share the same position. I respect him, and he respects me for the journe
y we’ve taken; however, we’re not friends and can form no bond beyond the singular attachment of having been enslaved at the same time.”
“Elsa,” he pleaded, putting down the cutlet, bowing to a knee. “I’ve never asked or demanded anything of you since…since your employment began, though I beseech you in this request: Will you speak to him for me? Just a few words?”
Elsa looked around warily, as if monsters—or the Slave—hid in the shadows. “Be careful, Master El. Words are the most dangerous weapon of man,” she warned. “Indeed you’ve never asked for much nor anything of my past, and for that I thank you. My past was shameful. I was without pride: here I have found pride. I do not wish to revisit my demons, nor the ones that surely chase your friend. I shall not speak to him.” Moreth’s heart sank, then rose as her pursed-lips expression warmed with a smile. “However, if you believe he will hear you, I can teach you—as I have been taught—how to speak in a tongue not your own. Then you may ask him himself whatever it is you wish to know.”
“Thank you.”
Elsa left him.
Moreth’s days became busy, and he neglected both his duties in the Blood Pits and his political responsibilities. His enemies on the Council of the Wise plotted, sensing his distraction. He received a shadowbroker-delivered missive from Gloriatrix in which she warned him they would attempt to fill his seat with an ally of their own, and summoned him to a private meeting at the Blackbriar Estate. It hadn’t seemed wise to refuse, so he’d attended. Without saying anything definite or incriminating, she offered to assist him in dealing with the vultures who wanted his seat. Moreth agreed, mostly because he wanted to rush back to his manor and sequester himself with Elsa and the Slave. In accepting Gloriatrix’s aid, Moreth knew he’d allowed himself to be bought, though she wasn’t the worst choice of confederate. By the time the Council met again the following week, two seats were empty, and a handful of potential candidates supported by his enemies had gone missing. Gloriatrix would soon make her move to become not only First Chair but also the first and only queen of the Iron City. However, Moreth was only distantly aware of such developments, picking up occasional tidbits of information from rumormongers, paper-gossip, and shadowbrokers.
He and Elsa finished their lessons in a matter of weeks. At last, he knew the language of the far, far East. Or at least part of it: from one tongue had grown as many broken dialects as shards of clay from a shattered vase, and he possessed only a single shard. She’d taught him what she suggested was the more civilized Lakpoli tongue, as well as a bit of the mishmash that was the broader Amakri dialect of one of the nomadic tribes she’d known. Moreth still couldn’t speak either fluently, though he’d learned how to read and write Lakpoli reasonably well. What a curious language: elegant and simple, with small symbols and long rows of black lines.
One day, armed with Elsa’s old notepad—stuffed with two languages’ worth of scribbles—and an endless ink quill, he went to find the Slave. The man no doubt knew what Moreth and Elsa had been doing. Moreth supposed that was why the Slave had made himself scarce—to avoid this conversation. Search high and low as he might, Moreth couldn’t find the Slave anywhere in his estate. He wouldn’t have left, that much Moreth knew. Exhausted, he fell asleep in his parlor in the very chair from which he’d first watched the Slave watching him.
It was morning. Eyes were on him when he woke. Before even looking to see where the Slave stood in the gloomy gray room, Moreth fumbled for his pad and quill, but they were not where he had left them. Another test, he realized. He spotted his missing items at the feet of his master, who stood near the window. Moreth understood the game: he’d have to fight to claim them. He assumed this would be the fight of his life, the ultimate lesson—and he was correct. Bookcases were toppled, furniture flung, clothing and skin shredded as the battle raged inside the El manor. The servants stayed clear of the shaking doors to the parlor. Instead, they whistled and went about their business, pretending that a screaming tornado wasn’t tearing through the house.
When the dust had wafted away, Moreth and the Slave were as tattered and limp as the bent rod and fallen curtains hanging down like a banner of surrender. The room had been destroyed: Moreth had no hope of finding or even seeing with his bruised eyes the parchment and quill over which this fight had erupted. Then he was lifted and helped to his astonishingly still-intact chair by the Slave, who’d already recovered his strength. Moreth could feel the shadow’s breath. He sensed that the Slave was assessing his bruises, his punches, his valor. Moreth despised his original father, and yet he hoped that the man standing above him—the man who had no name and with whom he’d never broken bread, never broken anything but bones—was pleased by the wounded animal he saw.
A note was slipped into Moreth’s hand. It appeared to have been written in calligraphic Lakpoli—prettier than anything he or Elsa had ever penned—and he whimpered as he struggled to read it. “You fought well,” it read. “You have promise. I shall teach you more. However, you’ve already learned the most important lesson, which is to fear neither pain nor death.”
The shadow abandoned him there: sagging in his chair, bleeding, rasping, and smiling.
Thunder threw him from a dream. Moreth woke in the gloomy salon, having slept in the chair. Ruin surrounded him and he listened to the pelting of rain on glass for a time, then limped to his chamber and cleaned his wounds. He needed to find the Slave. Today, the man allowed himself to be discovered. From his bedroom window, Moreth spotted a black shade haunting the base of the glistening iron-clad tree that stood in the center of the estate’s labyrinth of hedges. The Slave looked up at the window, of that Moreth was certain. Moreth threw on a bowler to keep away the stinkeye and hurried through the many corridors of his grand home and then out into the drizzling outdoors. The Slave hadn’t moved. He was dressed in leathers and a hooded cloak that had a leafy, stitched quality to it, as if it had been made by and for a hermit.
The Slave gestured him into the shelter of the tree’s metal branches, and they sat on a bench together. The day possessed a foggy, maritime odor and brought with it a chill that numbed Moreth’s aches. A note appeared in Moreth’s hand. He unfolded and read the message, which was written in exquisitely penned Ghaedic rather than Lakpoli this time. “You are a lord of many riches in this Iron land, and yet you do not seem content with your power. I know what you seek, but you must declare it for it to be true. Only once it is true may you hunt it.”
“You speak my tongue?” Moreth exclaimed.
The Slave nodded. He scribbled another note while holding Moreth’s attention with his wide, piercing stare—so compelling it seemed almost like a form of magik or a natural enchantment, such as a snake’s charm. Stirring, Moreth examined the paper; he wasn’t sure what had happened to the one he’d held in his hand only a speck ago; he couldn’t even tell where the parchment and quill were being kept, as the Slave’s hands rested neatly in his lap. “I was once very close with one who listens,” read the note. “She taught me how to hear many of the hidden voices of the world and how to speak Geadhain’s many tongues—even if mine has been cut. We all have a bit of magik inside of us, and communion with another is a spell any can learn.”
“I have spent all this time trying to communicate with you…” mumbled Moreth.
Scribbling. This time, Moreth broke the gaze-trance and saw that small square sheaves and a feather lay under the Slave’s palms. The man wrote with the speed of a possessed printing press, moving his hand from left to right, left to right, and filling a line in mere specks. A note was passed. Moreth read it. “If not for the efforts you’ve made, I would have believed you to be no different from the Iron tyrants of this city. I would not have opened my voice to you. But you helped me find life after I believed myself sentenced to death. Although your quest is dangerous, it is also noble—more noble than the whispers and desires of all others in this cruel place. I will help you find what you seek.”
“What is it that I seek?” asked Mo
reth.
A final note: “You will not find it here. These creatures are too weak for a man of your kind.”
Silently, they breathed in the burning air of the city and watched as the fog took gray bites out of the land. The Slave’s words inspired Moreth. What Moreth wanted and needed was out there, beyond Menos, beyond all realms he knew. At last, the time had come for him to leave this iron cage. He would set forth and hunt his destiny…
“I hadn’t realized the hourglass,” said Moreth, abruptly breaking off his story and turning onto his side. “Soon it will be dawn. Again.”
Moreth had learned how to exist without introspection, to be a creature only of instinct and the present tense. These forays into his history had taken a toll, and a mighty exhaustion clouded him. He wanted to sleep. But Talwyn wasn’t about to let such a good yarn end on a cliff-hanger. Having stayed up so late already, drunk with fascination, he felt as enlivened as Moreth was spent.
“Come now, you can’t be serious,” said the scholar. “What were you seeking? What happened with you and the Slave?”
“I thought I told you that already,” replied Moreth grumpily, before burrowing deeper into his bedroll. “I have read you the scroll of my sorrows and sins. I wanted to be nothing like my father. I wanted to find something to challenge me…Thus we came to Pandemonia. I hunted my happiness. I found Beatrice…Not as she is now, but as she was then—like one of those you saw tonight. Or last night, rather—whatever bloody day it is. But everything has a fuking price. I found love, but it came at the cost of a friendship: the Sisters must always balance their scales.”
Mouse guessed what it was Moreth was trying to avoid speaking of, and she seized Talwyn’s hand and pressed it, trying to stop him from pestering the man. Moreth had returned from Pandemonia with a most exotic animal, a monster in the guise of a lady. He had not returned with the Slave. Mouse had seen the necklace he’d inherited from the Slave, the kind of memento that would be presented only as a dying gift. A few questions remained, but she wasn’t sure they needed to be answered. Almost asleep, and now totally free from inhibitions, Moreth spoke once more and resolved a few of her remaining questions. “I shall kill you for what you’ve done…” he mumbled. “Cage you and torture you and bleed you till you die…Beatrice. My magnificent monster…Bleed you…You beautiful, horrible beast…”
Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) Page 55