Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3)

by Christian A. Brown

  “No,” replied Talwyn.

  “I have not either,” said Pythius. “When you find the one for you, West Sun, you will know no greater pleasure.” Pythius removed his hand, and Talwyn noticed a gray flush on the shaman’s cheeks and forehead—embarrassment. “Or so I am told by those who are joined.”

  I am comforted to know you are as confused as I am by the strange serendipity of our meeting, thought Talwyn. It mystified Talwyn, but it also gave him purpose—something to pursue once they’d plumbed the Veins of Death.

  On they walked without food or rest. O’er the gloom of thickening dusk, the stain spread on the horizon. From it rolled forth a dark mist that soon welcomed the company into blackness. What remained of the sun nearly vanished. The iced monuments lost all semblance to buildings, and waves of frozen water rose on either side. Through the crested valley they walked, shivering and clawing their way over this wind-battered land that was determined to break them. They could not stop. They had to race against the setting of the sun they could no longer see. They needed to reach the Veins of Doom before the hourglass of the blood eaters.

  Among the hunters and champions, many ears hummed with more than frostbite. The winds echoed with high-pitched whistles, sounds not of nature—the yawning cries of horrors. The smell about which Moreth had warned Mouse started to manifest itself. She found herself looking around the shining black wasteland trying to figure out where something recently alive could be rotting so putridly. Alas, there was nothing, and she knew that the rot spread up from below like the reek of a body in the cellar. The smell underground would be unimaginable. She ripped two long shreds from her cloak and tied a mask around her nose and chin, then offered the remaining material to Moreth. He gave her a smile for her courtesy, but it was strained by terror.

  Although their minds and stomachs would not settle, their masks at least warded off some of the stink and protected their cheeks from the snow, which attacked their skin like shavings of glass scattered from the monoliths looming over them. These icebergs were the oldest, blackest things Mouse had ever seen. She glanced at them many times, squinted her eyes against the flurries, and wondered if they were the first mountains ever formed on Geadhain. Moreth, less enamored, battled for footholds and supported Mouse with a necessary hand here and there, as a gentleman should. If it hadn’t been for the cold clenching his guts, or his hunger, he might well have vomited from the fear he felt. However, a gentleman kept such concerns to himself. Memories of black-and-white hallways, cloisters of bone hung with tapestries of skin, and songs of a shrieking horde of ravenous women flashed behind his narrowed eyes.

  Just before night conquered the land, Pythius discovered another crack in the ice: a part in the waves, a triangular aperture leaning sideways through which they squeezed themselves. Somehow, probably by instinct or the voice of the Green Mother, the shaman knew it would open up again farther on. They huddled in the hollow he’d discovered, which was dimly bright with the funhouse glimmer of so many mirrored-ice surfaces. The faces they saw in the walls were distorted and grim. Everyone knew not to speak this close to the lair of the blood eaters. The Doomchasers seemed to be expecting something. After a time, Talwyn’s curiosity could no longer be restrained.

  “Are we waiting for something?” he whispered to Pythius, who had hunkered down beside him. Pythius pressed a finger to Talwyn’s lips, a gesture kinder than the shaman’s usual rough behavior that quieted the scholar at once. Then the shaman tapped his ear and pointed to the gray crack leading back into the waste. It appeared they were to wait and to listen.

  They settled back on their haunches and watched the clouds of their breaths. Mouse found the patterns calming until she heard—and felt—a rumble. Once, Mouse had disturbed a belfry of nesting bats while waiting for Alastair in one of his clandestine meeting spots. This sound was similar, though amplified and drawn out with torment and hunger. The tremors that shook the cavern came from the stir of hundreds or thousands of ghastly, undying monsters rising out of their nesting holes. Mouse pictured the horde crawling on peaked knees and elbows as webbed-winged things did, then shivering themselves upright at the mouth of their reeking caves and keening to the moon. She didn’t need to imagine that shrill thunder, for she and every other member of the war party now plugged their ears to protect them from the cacophony.

  The warriors and champions came together, a few stumbling, and buried their heads and formed a circle against fear, cold, and the flock of darkness that was going forth to claim the night. The storm of evil passed without nearing the party’s hiding spot. Its cloud moved elsewhere, hunting. Mouse suddenly realized she was gripping two hard objects for dear mercy—Pythius’s horns. She quickly released them. “My apologies. I needed something to hold onto. Bit of a fright.”

  The shaman was not offended and she had apparently not harmed him, but he did raise a hand and shake his head to reprimand Mouse for using her voice. With another gesture, Pythius bade them to stay, then crept to the fracture and listened to the wind hissing by it. Talwyn sensed the shaman was employing more than simply his senses, and his skin prickled with magik. Whatever the divination was, it forecast safety. Pythius returned to the circle, and his warriors stood.

  “Tell the Vessel and the pale man that we can now proceed safely,” he said, “although our time is limited. We must return to the surface before dawn. We must pray that Feyhazir will guide our steps using both his memory and his vessel. We shall not live if we remain below. The tunnels should be empty now of all but the very young and very old, although they are usually eaten by the pack if they do not grow or die quickly enough. Prepare for the darkest descent of your life.” Pythius paused, fought himself for a thought, and then whispered, somehow, right into Talwyn’s head, for his lips did not twitch beyond their handsome scowl: Should we meet again in the eternal garden of the Green Mother, I would share blood with you, Brother.

  Surprised, Talwyn couldn’t respond in time; Pythius and his warriors were already squeezing themselves through the crack, and his companions were nagging him for instructions. It was time for war, not moony thoughts. Talwyn turned to his friends. “I’ve been told we have until dawn—or slightly before that time, I imagine—to recover the relic and flee the caverns. If we have not extricated ourselves by then, we’re doomed. A thousand blood-hungry fiends will bury us in that tomb.”

  “I guess it’s time then.” Mouse crossed her arms and planted her feet. “Wake up, Feyhazir. It’s now or never. You needn’t steal my flesh, I submit myself as your champion on this quest. Wake and fill me. Together we shall claim your treasure.”

  As if she’d spoken an incantation, a crackling gasp of electric wonder expanded Mouse’s chest; harmless white sparks leaped from her, striking her companions. A pittance of chaos for the men to endure, while she saw blinding flashes of white, and heard tolling, ancient booms that faded into strains of the kind of string music enjoyed with a glass of wine. The Dreamer was a warm and subtle inebriation in her flesh, and possessed her no more than that. “He has woken,” she said.

  An announcement that came as no surprise to the two men now gaping at the girl who suddenly had silver stars in her gaze.

  V

  Mouse drifted. She still felt mostly herself, if a touch drunk, unconcerned, and disconnected from the land around her. This was her destiny, after all: to return to the Forever Stones, to reclaim her treasure. Wait…Whose treasure? Hers or Feyhazir’s? She couldn’t answer that question with certainty anymore.

  Mouse led the warband up something that sloped like a hill, and into a shudderingly warm cave. From where did all the heat come? From where I am going, she thought with an uncanny knowing. She followed the heat down the scabrous pipe that had been carved—or clawed—through icy, translucent rock. Soon the paste that Moreth had described became visible. White and brown spackle had been flung upon the walls and ceiling. It hung like melted cheese and emitted a heady stink: a smell of manure and sour vinegar. In the revolting netting,
or in the stalagmites of regurgitation they stepped around on the floor, she spotted an occasional bone—a rib, cracked skull, or ossified animal talon that had not been successfully digested.

  There was enough space to walk without disturbing the filth: sinewy paths had been made by things worming along the ground, walls, and ceiling. Such horrors were appalling, yet registered with Mouse only as unpleasant. Her master enjoyed all the creatures of the circus, even the hideous ones. More unsettling than the environment was the experience of being two minds in one body.

  She could not tell much about how her companions and the shaman fared, as they were behind her. Occasionally, she heard stifled coughs, people spitting as the saliva pooled in their mouths from the rankness. Mouse had no such concerns. No matter where she took them, no matter how dark and fetid the air, she knew no fear. She had come to claim her treasure. Or he had. It didn’t matter. She and the Dreamer were one: lovers, as well as brother and sister. If she looked into a mirror and saw a woman of smoke, she would not blanch. However, the mirrors of ice soon vanished, replaced by plastered refuse.

  Every so often, a choice between paths presented itself, but she did not hesitate. She remembered having been here before. A most curious memory, for in it she had meat between her legs and thighs thicker with muscle than her own lean limbs. She’d been a man. These caverns had been less desecrated in that past, too. Still natural, yes, but excavated through glittering sandy-brown stone. Mouse remembered the sparkling aurora cast on the walls by whatever light she’d held. An ethereal fancy, as nothing from the memory was evident now. Now there was but shite and death.

  Mouse avoided much of the crapulence through some supernatural agility. To those behind her, she appeared to dance. Now this is the kind of power I could have trampled Aghna with! she thought. Why can’t I feel this way all the time? She knew why, though. Even as a woman splintered from herself, she understood that such a manifestation taxed both her and the Dreamer. Especially her: she was not a Lord of Creation that dreamed planets and music and species into being. She was flesh and bone. Weak. At the moment, though, she felt invincible.

  The tunnels always led down. At times, they bisected, trisected, or came to a junction with high and low exits; it was total chaos. The rest of the war party did not enjoy the security of a Dreamer’s confidence. Unremittingly proud, the Doomchasers brandished the blades they’d brought and choked on fear and fumes. Pythius bravely conjured a tiny flame in this wicked place, and it hovered in his hand like the ghostly pet of a sorcerer. Moreth fared well enough with a grimace and his gag, and Talwyn quickly made a face-covering for himself, too. Soon, they saw the rancid paste and waste of the blood eaters festered in a guano fungus of ivory grass and toadstool forests, leaning shite-heaps that had accumulated over centuries of defecation. Talwyn decided that Pythius was right: there was no order to the Veins of Death; no brilliant architect had constructed this giant, untended chicken coop. There could be no queen of the blood eaters: no great ruler would ordain such chaos.

  Yet as they passed into wider subterranean boils, they saw clear, drier pockets where ten or twenty leathery things might curl and suckle together. Talwyn realized that the place did have some organizing principle—if only a rudimentary one, determined by the needs of the pack. It was stunning to think that Moreth’s wife had once been one of these creatures. How had it been possible for her to transform from monster into woman? To even begin to cross that line? For there was nothing of mortal decency in this pit.

  And then Talwyn heard the cry of a babe. First one, and then several. The sound pierced the soupy underground and drove into his heart. Mouse didn’t hear it, and if she had, she would not have cared or sought to pursue it. In a moment, the cries gurgled and cracked. Thinking children might be being strangled or eaten, he almost charged off to find them. But Moreth halted him, whispering, “We did not go far, my last hunting partner and I—not this deep. Still, I assure you that those are not children you hear, no matter how much like them they sound. They are worms of horror that will one day grow into their mothers. Whatever breathes down here should feel the mercy and justice only of your pistol.”

  As if on cue, the cries became an undulant warble. Talwyn fingered the gun Moreth had earlier handed him, which hung in a makeshift holster. Quickly, he and Moreth hurried along the weaving roads, and thereafter did not let themselves fall behind for another moment. The wormlings were not the only creatures active in the tunnels. Mouse—with the Dreamer’s guidance and an awareness reminiscent of the Wolf—knew precisely when to pause and motion for their company to remain still, when to hunch down in the bone-and-vomit garden. As shapes cawed and lurched through the darkness, Pythius snuffed the disembodied flame he’d been using to reveal the path—he would not light it again until Mouse moved.

  Talwyn could not block out the endless horror. The ghoulish gardenias, the fungal flowers, blooming about often skittered with gleaming bugs when he was forced to crouch upon them. Within dripping mucosal chandeliers, he spotted the remnants of Pandemonian species he’d begun to catalog. At least his intellect directed him toward analysis rather than fear. His mind formed meat upon the skeletons and reimagined their shapes in spectral detail. He recalled the names given to each animal—amnus ignen coulber, terra serpens, dracomusca bestia. There was no mystery as to how animals so huge and vastly scattered had ended up in a place so deep and low: their dismembered remains told him they had probably been dragged here in pieces.

  One enormous serpentine jaw puzzled him, though. And then he recognized it. On his first day of travel with the Amakri—before Mouse’s inhabitant had returned to its sleep—he had discovered a scintillating giant rock, curled up like a twist of something tubed and spooled. The spool had shifted and heaved as he touched it, and Pythius had flown in from somewhere and pulled the scholar away as the massive coil unwound itself and slithered away into a riverbank. A creature of its magnitude could not be hunted or lifted. Its glittering shale skin had felt as rough as chipped rock. This was the same kind of creature.

  How had that armor been penetrated? How had the great serpent been slain and then lifted and carried in hunks of flesh and bone into this repulsive grave? How far did the blood eaters fly in their hunt? Was any creature safe from them? He worried for a moment about the hundreds of Doomchasers they’d left “safely” encamped beyond the foothills. Perhaps fatter, grander prey would tempt the blood-eater swarm elsewhere this eve.

  Despite these concerns, the sleeping hollows they passed vied for his interest. With more than Pythius’s weak light, he could have better seen the designs that beckoned him like tarnished and cobwebbed silver. For there were mosaics beneath the grime, elements of the artisanal flourishes he’d seen sealed in ice above. The underground was not merely a network of random caves, but part of the City of Ghosts itself. Whatever infrastructure might be present was buried in death, but Talwyn saw enough through the slathering accretions to deduce the majesty beneath.

  He noticed curved braces along the ceiling; their symmetry and placement suggested they were supports. At the junctions to which the party came, the tunnels no longer seemed to divide so haphazardly. The higher, unreachable holes all faced forward—and were not in the ceiling or other awkward places—and could once have been reached by staircase or ladder. Later on, the path through the whiteness led them near one of the empty nests, and Talwyn was given a stark glance at an astoundingly clear portion of the floor where fetid bodies had sweated away the filth. In that glinting circle, he spotted a relief of ornate bronze men who burned in engraved pyres, and of a being with wings and radiant lines of carved light who floated above them. Between the divine and the earthbound souls floated a small mark…He strained his eyes to make it out…A cup. Crudely drawn, compared to the rest of the over-elaborate relief. Dumbly, he peered down and into the nest, until Moreth hauled him forward.

  Sin and enlightenment, he thought. The dichotomy of these people. Technomagik—which denies the supernatural—an
d faith. The Amakri resolved the issue by choosing to maintain their primitive ways. The Lakpoli have done the opposite. What did the citizens of the City of Ghosts do when their great magik left them, and they could not bring themselves to live like savages? What choice did they make? Talwyn grew agitated, as he did whenever a deduction began to ripen. In his skull sparked hallucinogenic visions of ruins, ancient people gathering around a bone chalice, and a gray man. Talwyn felt the divine creature was presiding, blessing, giving—

  “What’s the matter with you?” hissed Moreth; the scholar had been babbling to himself, at times loudly.

  “Not me,” replied the scholar in a whisper. “There’s something wrong with this place, this tale.”

  “Obviously.”

  Talwyn risked the war party’s fading into a gray oblivion by stopping and quickly confiding his thoughts to Moreth. “Why would the Dreamer leave a chalice here? In this den of monsters?”

  “To keep it safe, as the shaman said.”

  “Would that really keep it safe? Think. A lair of wild animals as guardians? You’ve seen how these creatures behave. They’re barely sentient. They can’t be kept as pets. They are chaos and hunger unchained. They’re certainly the wildest beasts I’ve known, your converted wife being a miraculous and solitary exception. These monsters are likely to have covered the chalice in a cement of shite that we wouldn’t be able to blast through with a Menosian cannon. So how can the Dreamer be so certain his treasure is safe? After thousands of years? When did he come to this city? After it fell and its citizens vanished, or before?”

  “Why does it matter? If the Dreamer claims his treasure is here, then that is what I shall believe. To think otherwise would be hopeless.”

  Moreth would hear no more of the scholar’s words; their wisdom was another trouble he could not bear on his weary shoulders. For Moreth battled the ghost of the Slave. After all that he had seen of the size and power of the blood eaters’ horde—back at the encampment and now here, deep in the Veins of Death—he realized that the Slave had betrayed him.