Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3)

by Christian A. Brown

  III

  In Eatoth, skycarriages were called theikospor—“divine seeds” was the closest translation Adam could find—and the vessels weren’t permitted anywhere near the ground except in military stations. As the others learned from their busily working translator, the divine seeds ruled the airspace above the city proper, which was more colloquially referred to as the Metonia, or Ring of the Repentant. Apparently, theikospor were reserved only for passengers of divine prominence, such as wards. As they were in the company of a legionnaire, an earthly agent of the divine, they weren’t permitted to use the seeds for transit. Instead, they had to walk like the common folk of Eatoth. At least that gave the four plenty of opportunity to study the culture that Brutus sought to conquer.

  The division drawn between those who traveled by sky and those who walked on foot was not the only sign of how deeply ingrained faith was in Eatothian society. Thackery spied a pantomime occurring behind a line of green-wound pillars in a crumbled amphitheater set back from the street. Several actors wore frightening black costumes and performed primal, sexual gyrations around a half-naked man. The crowd was as quiet as the actors. Some of the watchers closed their eyes and swayed, lost in zealotry or bliss. Of that strange scene, Thackery caught only a glance. Nevertheless, the sense of the silence, the obedient receptiveness to whatever lesson was being taught, stayed with him.

  Afterward, he became aware of the significance of other behaviors that he’d previously dismissed. Eatothians often tapped their foreheads, then their shoulders, in a triangular fashion. This everyday blessing seemed used in place of a handshake. He’d seen people make the sign when they bumped into one another, or when they dropped something. He deduced the gesture was intended to invite good fortune and ward off evil.

  As the sun was finally pulled away by dusk’s red hand, and the shadows of the towers became thick as black lace, bells tolled. The sound was loud and came from some divine belfry, or belfries, concealed in the towers of glass. Like a coat of thunder, the music fell upon the bodies of the company, making them shudder. It reminded Morigan of the voice of a Dreamer, which was all noise, sensation, and a stirring of fear. Indeed, her legs trembled, and she felt tempted to kneel to ease the pounding pressure. But she resisted, knowing the desire was an unnatural one.

  She and her pack-mates grasped this truth, even as all those along the Ramble buckled at the knees and prostrated themselves upon the street as if they were a river of domino men and women. They lowered their hands, foreheads, and chests to the ground, allowing the divine weight to oppress them. The three stubborn travelers gaped. On the bells tolled, growing louder and louder. With every beat, the magik from above hammered their heads further into their necks and shoulders. Nonetheless, they didn’t submit. They would not submit to magik and rule. They leaned against one another like three hobbled gray dames. In time, the choral judgment faded into echoes, and their bodies were able to unclench. After righting himself, Longinus gave them a disgusted glare.

  “We do not bow,” said Morigan with enough venom that even though he couldn’t understand her, he flinched.

  They resumed their walk and continued for a while without speaking. While still muddling through the experience in their heads, they crossed paths with an old woman who had yet to find her feet. She gasped and clawed her way up the low rising wall on the side of the street beyond which citizens sat in a sunny garden drinking and lounging. No one appeared willing to help the woman. Morigan stepped in and quickly hoisted her up, then brought her through an arch into the outdoor arboretum. The old lady smiled at the enchanting stranger, and invoked the three-pointed blessing. Morigan left her sitting on a stone bench from where she could watch the spitting, pissing nymphs of a gaudy fountain. Longinus grumbled a few words, apparently disapproving of the solicitude she’d shown.

  “A true believer must stand on her own,” said Adam, and thumbed the air in the direction of their guide.

  “A truly compassionate kingdom would not slam its people to the ground,” replied Thackery. “What do these people even do? Other than contemplate, wander, and shop away their lives? This nation is absurdly lazy for one so technomagikally advanced. I see eating and indulgence but very little work. I’m assuming there are people, somewhere, doing the necessary menial labor. Without contest, I would take Eod and its less-complicated hubris over this nation of fattened sheep.”

  They returned to the Ramble. However, the systemic zealotry of these people continued to disturb the outsiders. Darkness came on fast and deep, and what stars glittered in the sky behind the veil of perpetual clouds did so like shy maidens. What had been a busy causeway quickly became deserted as folks hurried off to their homes. Musicians packed their instruments into cases. Stages were left draped with cloth like the remains of an abandoned theater.

  Soon only the faithless, miscreants, and other unsavory-looking characters roamed the Ramble. These folk never approached the company, likely because they were wary of their strangeness or sought to avoid the gleaming bronze man who led them. Come true nightfall, their path was lighted only by the glow from the windows of the buildings they passed as well as by the radiance from Thackery’s emblazoned staff—which he’d rekindled. These lights aside, the streets were bare and black.

  Longinus had apparently decided it was time for them to eat, and so led them into a tavern that jutted out of a long arcade. Its solid walls and portcullis suggested it had once been an ancient fortress. The balistrariae, though, had been filled in with tinted glass, and the toothed iron barrier had been capped with pale stone. These touches matched the elegant, white, and plush interior of the tavern. The four drifted between rows of private curtained-off tables, wondering what the mumbling shadows they passed looked like and what the source was of the ethereal harpsichord and flute music they heard. Finally, a silky sheet was swept aside, and they were left alone in an alcove.

  There were a number of pieces of cutlery at their places that not even the former Menosian master knew how to use: implements that looked like a set of fine pliers, a small roasting fork, a miniature lance. Morigan might have enjoyed the swooning ambiance more if her Wolf had been present. Together, they could have laughed at the silliness of these tools and the posturing that seemed necessary even for a simple meal. Although he had been silent and hunting all day, his fire-beast growled as she thought of him.

  “Fancy,” said Morigan, then frowned along with her friends. Poor Adam would be the most hopeless at this culinary guessing game. Morigan turned to the changeling. “I’m not particularly hungry. Can you tell our guide that we don’t need all of this; we have not the time for such leisure. For all we know, Brutus could be tunneling under the city right now while we’re pondering how to use half the steel beside our plates.”

  Adam addressed their liaison, who had chosen to stand guard over the three rather than eat. Longinus shook his head at whatever it was that Adam suggested. “The Exhibition is now closed,” said Adam, and growled unhappily. “Cruel fox. I feel betrayed, for he says he knew all along we wouldn’t reach the place today, given the size of this glass-and-stone forest. Something he calls the holy curfew has begun. We have been told to eat, rest, and only in the morning may we resume our pilgrimage.”

  A thin and nervous waiter chose the worst possible speck in which to appear. Shaking, he placed an ewer of water, in which floated lemon slices and sweet herbs, and a wicker basket of torn fresh bread upon the table. Morigan scared him away with a silver stabbing stare. These people have no notion of doom or urgency, she realized. Utterly clueless. She stood up from the table, and indecorously began to stuff pieces of bread into the small haversack hanging off her belt. Then she guzzled away most of the pitcher and wiped her mouth with her hand. “Pilgrimage? We’re not here for a fuking sacred walk,” she snapped with a bit of Mouse’s bile. “What’s wrong with these people?”

  Morigan stomped over to Longinus, reached up, wrestled with the man—who had only one hand with which to defend himself on
account of his spear—and succeeded in unbuckling and ripping off his helm. The fellow beneath possessed a square, solid handsomeness that matched his physique. He appeared older than she thought he would be and dark from sun, nearly as swarthy as an Arhad. His head, though, clustered with faded-gold curls, and his eyes sparkled with sapphire charm.

  Trembling with wolfish anger and strength, Morigan shouted at him. “The darkest, maddest monster in Geadhain’s history is coming to destroy your city. To enslave the souls of your people. You will all die, or at least most of you will. I shall not be responsible for your deaths by failing to act.” She appealed to her companion, “Tell him to have some Kings-damned sense, Adam.” Turning again to the legionnaire, she stormed, “I don’t care what you have to say, though: we shall not be staying here any longer. He must take us to our destination now.”

  The closer they had come to the Exhibition, this repository of history and fate, the more it had pulled at her like a call of the wild. Perhaps Morigan was simply feeling wild herself, for she threw Longinus’s helmet to the floor bringing the music to a sudden halt. While Morigan huffed—in much the same way her bloodmate would have, noted Thackery—Adam explained in hushed tones the urgency of their task.

  “I have a duty,” protested the legionnaire.

  “To your pack, a wife, a child, what?”

  “To all of those things.”

  “I lost my wolf-mother in an instant to a woman that pales next to Brutus’s evil. He will eat your mate, and rape your child, then eat it, too. He is the greatest monster of all time. If there was ever a moment to listen with your senses and not your sense, it would be now. Sniff the air, commune with the animal in your soul. Protect your pack.”

  Longinus didn’t sniff the night air, though his skin prickled as Adam spoke. The weary sadness wrought on the faces of the folk surrounding him further caused the hairs on the back of his neck to rise. They’d seen murder, atrocities, and things worse even than what he’d known in the darkest realms of Pandemonia: their expressions betrayed as much. What would the cost of his stubbornness be? Longinus realized he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, place the lives of his wife and child upon the gambling table.

  “I shall take you there. But we do so with stealth, and you must tell no one. If I am asked, and not interrogated by mind-magik, I shall tell them I was coerced.”

  “Fine.” The changeling sealed their understanding by extending an olive branch—Longinus’s helm, which he retrieved from under the table.

  In a moment, they were again moving through the silk-swaying space of the tavern. On the way out, a waft of something singed to rare, bloody deliciousness seduced Morigan’s senses. Today, her bloodmate prowled and succumbed to his primality, and his passion was affecting her as well. Only half-aware of her actions, she slipped behind a curtain, snatched a filet from the plate of one of two shrieking diners, and then rejoined her company. Longinus either ignored the commotion or was no longer concerning himself with Morigan’s disruptive behavior. She’d moved too quickly to be stopped, anyway. She was gone and back in a wind with a handful of meat and a bloody smile.

  “Are you feeling all right?” asked Thackery as he hurried her outside.

  “Fine. Better than fine.” She swallowed what remained of her meat in a gulp, then wiped her fingers off on her tunic. “I feel alive.” She looked down the bronze-tiled street and up to the fingernail of the moon pushing through the clouds. This was their moon: that of a Daughter of the Moon and a Lord of Fang and Claw—the same one that shone the night they met in Eod. Gazing back to the Ramble, where the witch-moon’s shine sparkled off certain stones like shimmers on a lake, Morigan noticed certain steps that were brighter than the others. A path. She knew where they had to go, and would leave the others to catch up. The blood in her belly, the river of fire in her veins, demanded that she hunt. She passed Adam her stolen satchel of bread; she’d heard his stomach rumbling. Thackery knew she was about to leave them, for her form had begun to waver and course with silver light. “Meet me at the Exhibition,” she said. “You’ve been wise, my friend, and something awaits me there. I can wait no longer to hunt and consume it.”

  She vanished in a shrinking ripple of light, and Longinus uttered what was surely a curse. He’d now lost two of the people it had been most necessary for him to watch. Thackery went to the soldier and patted him on the shoulder. “They don’t have much patience, my Morigan and her mate. They’ll likely break as much as they fix while they’re here. We had better catch up with her to stop the worst of it.”

  Longinus did not understand what the old man had said, but he set off running down the street towards the Exhibition.

  IV

  Like a growling wind, the Wolf flew above the heads of Eatoth’s witless sheep, who rubbed their arms in the humid day and sometimes looked up as they heard the noise. They never caught sight, though, of the beast himself.

  The Wolf prowled the roofs and upper reaches of the city. Below were smells and trails aplenty, but none with the ripped moss and earthy aroma, the bookish spice of ancient secrets, or the rosy fragrance of lies: three scents, three truths, each of which he’d hunt in time. Looking down, he could see the stream of people flowing along the Ramble, which itself ran all around the enormous circular disc of the city. Not a soul amongst the great flock of sheep interested him. They all smelled of sugar and butter. Fat, lazy odors. Their minds were as soft as toddlers, and their spirits were like honey mead—easily drunk, but too sweet and prone to upsetting one’s digestion and rotting one’s teeth.

  For all their culture’s dominance over nature, most Eatothians were as dumb as ants. They followed the Keeper and her wards in the glass towers and possessed little spirit or free thought. He was certain that their art was bland and meaningless. The impressions he received of the rituals and social patterns of the flocks of sheep beneath him made him long for the balanced ethics and sorcery of Eod. At least Eod’s sorcerers, architects, and philosophers understood the need for nature in their environment and respected an actual immortal. They didn’t revere themselves as Immortals as did those living in the circle of glass towers that rose around the city’s core. He would head to those towers, eventually. But the hunt possessed its own cadence, which must be obeyed. First, he must make for the darkened green circle ringed by the glass towers, which called to him; it was a place of woodland and less-tilled, less-developed land. There, a chatter of life and noise played music happier than the bleating songs of the Ramble.

  To make it to the city’s green core, he leaped and swung himself up the struts of one of the arcs running across the sky. The labor exhilarated more than exhausted him. He was huffing and wet from excited sweat as he came to the top of a bridge that was really a highway. It was a grand sterling-and-glass road on which streaked speeding silver pods, ones much bigger and more capable of causing injury than the eggs that flew in the sky. Playfully, the Wolf skipped among the silver bullets. He landed upon one of the hovering vehicles heading east toward the green city center—and startled no one inside, since these vessels were technomagikally and not manually piloted. Indeed, in this vast transit system, he sensed neither the heat nor the odor of man. Much of the city appeared to run on a network of intelligence and operations that did not depend on man’s oversight.

  He thrust his face into the wind. The whistling air seemed as charged as a thundercloud with the static of magik. The Wolf wondered from where the power came and studied the vista before him: the crystal ring containing the towers, the spot of green, the lines like the web of a glass spider crossing over all. The power he sought wasn’t up here, he realized, but beneath all this distracting splendor. Indeed, he could once again sense the heartbeat that had begun this hunt: a weight in his stomach, a withering of his balls. It came from below. Still, he wanted to see the green heart of Eatoth, which was the source of the fragrance of moss and soil—a scent so earthy and pure in this sterile city, it was the most compelling of the three smells.

  The
Wolf stayed atop the bullet until it had crossed the apex of this particular bridge and began its descent. Then, in a fashion that would have looked horrifyingly careless to anyone watching, he sprang and leaped. The Wolf howled as he tore down through the sky in a vacuum of air. Something in the impending night stirred his animalism and recklessness. It also made his beast stronger, and he felt no fear as he fell. As he’d done when he’d dropped into the Iron Mines, he strapped his arms to his sides, flexed the muscles that only he—and possibly his father—possessed, and steered his body through the air as if it were a living glider. When he’d dropped low enough, he abruptly twisted and ripped into a metal strut with a clawed hand. He dangled by an arm, grunting, and then scaled down the underframe and dropped the last hundred paces or so down to a roof beneath him. A cat could not have made a quieter landing. The Wolf looked about. He inhaled the rich pine and soil odors that rose with the steeples of verdant life around him, and let them guide him forward. Then, after creeping to the edge of the flat, tin-shingled square, he looked down.

  Dirty working men and women formed a crawling trail in the streets. Some moved with purpose, hauling sacks of clanging items or lumpy bags of food, or tending to the animals that wandered here and there. Hens clucked from wire coops. The pleasing freshness of vegetables, straw, and manure made the Wolf salivate. The buildings here had been built with less care and possessed a more antiquated charm, having none of the brassy ostentation of the Ramble. Apartments had been shoved into old keeps. Markets coughed smoke from ancient forges used for metallurgy and cooking; he knew this from the smell of hot steel, hickory, and spices. In fact, he could sense the presence of many forges ahead, in between tenements, falling towers converted into flats, and fields transformed into marketplaces, which echoed with coarse laughter and raucous, clapping folksongs. Elsewhere, blue, gray, and deep-green trees flourished in every free acre of this region; distant knolls covered with dots of livestock heightened the Wolf’s longing for the West even more. He froze for a moment, drinking, tasting, and listening to the sensory feast.