Here at last are the kingdom’s serfs—the ones who oil the lanterns, feed the fat little sheep, and probably also build the glass churches for their masters. As he thought this, he watched a large seed like the ones from the highway-of-the-sky touch down in a paved, stripped area of the forest. In a speck, he saw the ant-like forms of many men filing out of a crack in the vessel. They wore tools and craftsman’s belts and had the sagging shoulders of people who worked as slaves. However, this place clearly reanimated them, and they laughed as they hurried away from the vessel and off into the hills, the woods, and towards the music. The salt of the soil. The sweat that lubricates the grotesque machinery of this city. You are its muscles, noble folk. I have seen Eatoth’s fat. Now I shall see her heart and her soul.
Indeed, his hunt felt guided not only by the trio of scents, but by a tingle from groin to brain—a thrum of his bloodmate’s prescience guiding him. Still, before moving on, the Wolf stayed for a while in the natural but still uncanny vale, a place surely affected by both magik and science. There was a grit to these people and to the way they lived that the Wolf respected. Leaping from rooftop to rooftop, hiding in the growing concealment of dusk, he hunted for anything else that might be of use to him and his pack. These people haggled loudly. They drank. Lovers romanced each other, although never too indecently, in the streets. Whoever these folk were, they weren’t like either the vagrants in the Ramble or the pious residents of the glass towers. Once, the Wolf watched as a naked toddler daringly dashed away from his father, out of an apartment, and onto the street. The child was immediately stopped by a congenial neighbor, who then shared a laugh with the father. He remembered the outcast children running from the legionnaires that afternoon, and wondered at the difference. Who were these folk? They weren’t fat and faithful sheep. They weren’t vagabonds, either. Another caste entirely, then, which was offered Eatoth’s protection but none of its temptations. Perhaps they were second-generation Amakri, and had been born or offered themselves to service. Perhaps the unfortunates in the Ramble were simply too proud to serve; or perhaps they were unable to. Many of them had been missing limbs or the fitness necessary for labor.
Although the Wolf discovered little else in the rural ring of green, at least he’d found people in Eatoth whom he believed deserved protection against his mad father. Content with his discovery, and ready to chase the other secrets of Eatoth, the Wolf looked around while waiting for instinct to seize him. Night had just fallen, and fast. The Wolf spotted a small tower upon the reclaimed keep where he stood—it was now a tavern that reeked of ale and jostled his soles with song. From the roof, he could leap to the lowest strut of the silver-and-glass highway and climb once more onto the bridge.
Suddenly, the bells rang.
They weren’t musical instruments. Beneath the metal dinging and donging—far louder and stronger than that of any normal bell—was a crackle of power. The voice of lightning and music commanded him to bow, but he did not. He planted his feet, grunted, and roared up into the sky as the magik’s insistence and weight grew and grew. In the end, his scream won out. The beast in him felt that he had chased the song away.
People stirred from their dreamy prostrations: waking upon floorboards, rising from their sore knees, rubbing their foreheads free of dirt from the street. Like a true hunter, the Wolf scurried up an old turret on the roof and studied the creatures as they woke. They were sleepy and disoriented, as if shaking off the thrall of an enchantment. What sort of rulers bespelled their citizens? And to what purpose? The Wolf heard shuffling from the tavern, and leaped up into the sky and was climbing a great metal ladder before the music started.
Once upon the sky bridge, he dashed into the current of traffic. This artery would lead him all the way to the ring of the city where the crystal towers reigned. The moon glowed on high, a pure and virginal half-circle. His blood began to pump faster. It engorged his veins, inflated his head, and filled him near to bursting with strength and perceptions. In the distance, one tower in the ring rose taller than the others and shone like a spear of ivory. The moon had blessed it with light and revealed its importance. If he could have, he would have torn himself free of his man-skin and run down the highway as a wolf. Unfortunately, he would be in need of hands and manual dexterity. His nature, though, could not be wholly restrained, and many times as he bounced from silver egg to tract of gleaming road, he landed with clawed hands and a snarl in his mouth. Wherever Morigan was in the city, he felt she was also lost in the rush and glory of the hunt. He did not call out to her, nor did she speak to him. They were apart and yet one. They would find one another soon.
In what seemed like specks to the Wolf, the ivory tower loomed before him. The shrieking wind should have told him something of his speed, but he was beyond the notions of care, measurements, and caution. Leaping from the highway, he sailed in a weightless acrobatic arc—so light he felt he could fly forever—and then rolled onto a smooth deck. Legionnaires and silver seeds dotted the windy landing pad; none of them had sensed his gently ruffling appearance except in the form of a breeze. All spidery slowness and grace, he crawled on his fingertips and toes.
He distracted two dull legionnaires by tapping on the shell of a silver seed. As one moved to investigate and the other turned to watch, he entered the passage they guarded. The leg hair of the remaining sentry may have prickled, and he may have smelled sweat, wood, and musk, but he thought nothing of it. Inside the tower, all appeared strange to the Wolf: everything was filmed over with gray grain and moving with red and orange hues. The walls were not clearly defined, and he could see through them as if through a fog. The Wolf knew he was perceiving in ways that his bloodmate could, as well as with the heat-tracing and obscurely detailed vision of an animal. How grand a creature she’d made him. How invulnerable and omniscient he felt as he prowled through the tower of mist and glowing souls.
The Wolf’s hunt took him through places of study rife with the incense of thought. A being with a less animal mind might have wondered what secrets these purveyors of ancient knowledge hoarded in these vast multi-floored libraries. But the Wolf cared for none of that. Elsewhere in the tower were places of reflection with gleaming gray circles that he thought were pools, fuzzy clouds he interpreted as benches, and a kaleidoscopic scattering of auras—mostly shades of green—that he knew to be plants thanks to their chlorophyll waft. He caught the sounds of eating halls and barracks in the gray echo, though he did not go too near places bustling with people. Instead, he stuck to the shadows and hallways.
As if he were a jungle lizard, he crept invisibly along the walls and ceilings with his hooked claws. The crystal-and-metal skin of the tower was soft as clay to him. At most, he left behind a small trail of powder as he skulked. Even the quietest in this tower would have shrieked upon seeing him in that state—feral, pinching the tiles, his neck twisted round, his eyes gray and compassionless, and on his face a snarl of dagger teeth. He wasn’t spotted, however, and what miniscule tracks he left remained undiscovered. Although the Faithful had trained themselves to be silent and contemplative, the Wolf was so attuned to his body that he was able to match his breath and pulse to the single, dominating throb resounding throughout the tower. Under cover of that divine heartbeat, his own would not be felt. He crept toward the beat, wanting to see the beast that possessed such a tremendous organ.
The Wolf’s hunt led him downward in a winding fashion. There were lifts that could have aided him in his descent, but the Wolf preferred to take the stairs, as he was wary of making any unnecessary noise or having to dodge elevators. On each floor, rooms ringed the outer edge of the tower’s circumference, and an antechamber filled with meditative blue robes and legionnaires sat in the tower’s center. In order to reach that antechamber, and the next descending staircase, he had to wind all the way around the main curving passage of the tower. Through these antechambers, he crawled carefully, managing to slip by every guard and supposedly all-knowing sorcerer; they heard nothing of the
predator that passed above their heads. He could have slaughtered all of them, and he reveled in the knowledge of his own might. Although he was moving stealthily so as not to be seen or sensed, he was nonetheless able to move quickly. Soon, he came to a point where he could go no lower in the grayness.
There was a lift in the domed swell of a chamber. Several pulsing beings of light, a few so bright that they reshaped reality with their Wills, stood in the space. From his perch, hugging a curved beam in the ceiling, he considered dropping down and killing them all. But he was not his father, and Morigan would not approve of his murdering innocents—and he supposed they might still be considered that, despite their forced indoctrination of others and the caste systems they employed.
Carefully, he scanned the gray fog for another means of reaching the giant heart that thudded through his bones, nerves, and the metal to which he clung. The men guarding this mystery did not know what they had trapped. They could not have understood it or they would not have kept it. What had lured him this deep was a great Will or a magik so incalculable it was nearly a Will. It perhaps lacked soul, for it did not feel wholly living; it was a body of pure light and wonder without a controlling mind. In the wrong hands, such unshaped celestial power could become an apocalyptic weapon.
Thinking analytically had allowed a sliver of the Wolf’s logic and consciousness to take the reins from the beast, and it now piloted his body across the cupola toward a shrewdly hidden vent. The Wolf felt around the rectangle, determined to fit inside, and then carefully peeled the metal blinds apart as if they were filigreed wire. He slipped into the hole he’d created, and his slink became a slither. After worming himself through a warm gray passage, the Wolf soon reached a wide drop. He stretched himself across the gap, realized that he fit quite well, and then descended in the manner of a starfish or trapeze artist—moving hands and feet in turn, shuffling lower, never making the slightest noise. In his barking, rabid mind, the descent seemed to take ages to complete.
From down below him came both warmth and light—blue light, somehow bleeding color like an aura. He encountered a second flimsy obstacle placed over a rectangular exit and peeled it away as he had the other. Then he dropped into the blue and beating bosom.
His sight became clearer as his beast succumbed to the wonder his man felt. For in this chamber was one of the oldest mysteries of their world, perhaps of all life in the tree of stars. A fragment of the cosmos. A star trapped in the blue amber of a fractured bit of stone. The Eatothians had bound its divinity through science and magik. The Wolf could sense the restraints placed upon it, could feel its blood being drained through the turquoise arteries that flowed out of the object’s cylindrical prison and into reservoirs located elsewhere. He walked over to the arkstone, beguiled by its beauty and hum. With his wolfish ears, he could almost catch the music of stars, the soaring operatic journey this stone had taken past worlds horrific and indescribable.
Abruptly jolted by etheric currents, he realized he’d climbed up the great pedestal upon which the arkstone floated. His hand was curled in a fist, as if he were about to break the glass. He didn’t immediately dismiss the idea, and instead debated the possible ramifications of freeing the arkstone, or even of smashing it. A power like this should not be trapped. Whether it was safe to tap the essence of such a star for millennia as the people of Eatoth had done was not the issue. It should never have been used in this way.
It was this arkstone that had made it possible for these people born in a land of chaos and wild magik to build a society more advanced than any nations of the West. Their power had been stolen from the stars. The Wolf wanted to free it. His beast roared to release this catastrophic rapid from behind its glass dam—as his father’s would have roared. Of course. He had found the answer he hunted: Brutus wanted this fragment of the heavens for himself. The Wolf knew this, with Morigan’s perceptions, with the instincts of his hunter’s heart. The Wolf knew that if he had been a darker version of himself, he would have sought this power, too. The sense that it would prove some affinity between himself and Brutus prevented the Wolf from smashing anything. Instead, he touched the glass softly, with the wonder of a boy seeing true magik for the first time. Then he dashed across the chamber and leaped back up into the vent. He did not bother concealing the signs of his break-in—the people of Eatoth would have greater troubles at their doorstep soon enough.
It was time to chase his final quarry, to track the rose-and-wine scent of regret that drifted down every hallway and vent through which the Wolf had passed in his stealthy exploration of the tower; he’d ignored its reek till now. The mistress of this tower had steeped this place in her tears, and in that scented sorrow. She’d Willed more than a hundred years of pain and tortured dreams into the tower’s bones. In another century or so, this monsoon of sorrow would cause a Caedentriae. Only the darkest, most depraved, and regrettable acts held the power to warp the world in such a way. What have you done? he wondered. Prescience and the insights of the witch’s moon inspired his reflections, and the Wolf thought of the dreadful, punishing oppression of the bells—like a whip brought to a penitent’s hide. For whom was that punishment and flagellation intended? For the people or their sacred Keeper?
The ascent was over in sands. In the antechamber preceding the Keeper’s rise, a herd of legionnaires and blue robes had gathered sometime ago; he sensed their steeped-in anxiousness as he approached. Many smelled of sweat and fear; none were down on their knees pondering mysteries. An alert must have been issued—the Keeper was worried for the safety of herself or others. But guards wouldn’t stop the Wolf. He slipped in and out of shadows like a snake of darkness, and slithered and crawled along the dome’s roof. None of the faces below turned in his direction. When he came to the metal caging surrounding the lift shaft, he pried the bars apart as if they were warm and malleable, then slipped through them. He climbed quite freely through the shaft, using the metal cables as ropes. He did not sway them with his great weight or cause any noticeable commotion among the forces he left behind. As he came closer to the gray hole that led to the Keeper’s chamber, he listened.
The Keeper was above; he doubted that she left her gilded glass cage very often. She breathed in short, light gasps: the music of fear. It excited the beast, although he had no intention of drawing blood unnecessarily. Perhaps she knew of his coming, or wisely feared his father’s. Either way, he did not slink up into her chamber, but instead leaped to the narrow landing inside the metal cage. He saw a sparse, bare room encircled by silvery clouds. The Keeper’s settee radiated warmth from across the room, yet the woman herself couldn’t be seen. Her aura, however, glowed and betrayed her hiding place.
The Wolf tore open the grate with one hand and then strode into the seemingly empty chamber while the terrified Keeper watched from behind her invisible screen. First he went to the settee, sniffed around, and then shoved his hand through the fabric and stuffing, and ripped out a piece of stone tied to a leather string. It looked a bit like the necklace Elemech had given Adam. This talisman, though, had a chipped edge, as if it were half of a broken spearhead. Where was the other half? For the Wolf had seen this jewelry before, or another piece quite similar to it. Before he could make the connection, a voice spoke in his head. It was buzzy and echoing—a witch’s voice. The Keepers didn’t consider themselves sorcerers or wielders of Will, but the Wolf knew a witch when he encountered one.
If you have come to rob me of my valuables, you will find I have little other than my faith and the love of my people. You have already done enough damage, left your claw marks all over my tower. Leave now, before I summon my wards. The Keeper Superior stepped out from behind her glass-and-magik wall. She tried to tremble in rage, but the Wolf saw she was merely trembling.
Assuming she would understand him, the Wolf replied, “Summon your wards, then. I call your bluff. If your magik allowed you to sense me clawing up your tower, then you know where I have been, what I have seen.” He stepped forward and sh
ook the necklace at her. “What is this, this talisman of death and sadness? I have never smelled something so infested with grim memories. When you summon your guards, perhaps you can explain to all of us why you keep this thing hidden away—this thing you do not want to touch, yet are still afraid to part with.”
That does not belong to you. Ankha gained a spark of courage and stepped into his great shadow. She reached for the talisman that he dangled above her, but was not tall enough to grab it. Give it back!
“To whom does it belong?” asked the Wolf.
Give it back!
Suddenly, the moon shone like a sun of the night, and the Wolf saw the Keeper for what she was: a girl. Stripped and exposed, she’d regressed, becoming a screaming, bawling child who’d lost something precious. He suffered tearing flashes the likes of which he’d experienced only through Morigan’s transferences. And while his were not as clear as his bloodmate’s lucid journeys to and from Dream, he returned to himself bearing Fates. Impressions of silhouetted trees, a man’s gurgling cry, shivers of lust and horror, and the tickle of a child’s laughter—so distant, though, that it could have been the laughter of a ghost. His strongest impressions, though—he was, after all, a wolf and a creature of physical perceptions—were of the smell of apples, their sweetness, the simple joy of eating them with someone very special, as if indulging in an apple was life’s greatest delight. His scowl softened. He knelt by the Keeper, who was now weeping and whimpering. “What is it, child?” asked the gentle Wolf as he folded the necklace back into the Keeper’s palm. “Who has broken your heart into such tiny pieces? Why do I smell the golden juice of summer apples, which I have not seen growing anywhere in Pandemonia? I shall ask you once more. To whom does this necklace belong?”
Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) Page 62