Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3)

by Christian A. Brown

  When he and the Slave had come to the uppermost reaches of the labyrinth to hunt, they’d found a few of the creatures nesting. Passed out, really, barely a dash into the dark of a tunnel. The creatures had woken when he and the Slave had begun their hacking and shooting. And while the six creatures had proved worthy adversaries, groggy though they were, the match had been weighted in Moreth’s favor from the start. Blood eaters were nocturnal creatures: a man born in Pandemonia would have known the legends told about them. Although the Slave may well have acted out of care for his young hunter, Moreth still felt betrayed. The experience upon which he’d founded his sense of being a man now appeared shaken by dishonesty. I suppose I should feel blessed to have had a man who cared for me. A man who wanted me to survive. You taught me all that I needed to know in order to live in a world gone wild, as ours now has. If I am given the chance to show your spirit how I can truly fight, I shall. Moreth hurried to Mouse’s side. If there was to be a battle, if Talwyn was correct and Mouse’s patron was not to be trusted, he wanted to be front and center in the fray.

  But they found nothing to battle. The fact that they remained unscathed in this labyrinth of primeval abominations troubled Talwyn. In fact, it reminded him of their travel before meeting the three cannibalistic hags in the Pitch Dark. Again, he felt as if a repulsing force or Will were being used to steer the company’s course and manipulate the heinous local fauna. As the war party continued delving into empty nesting chambers, moving ever closer to the heart of madness, he reflected that the only being with a Will powerful enough to repel such evil was the Dreamer who wore his friend.

  Each step farther down was a step into fouler and fouler space. Tunnels swallowed them, shrinking on all sides until the rotten waste was unavoidable and slapped them with wet tendrils. Globs of white paste, fresh and unset, came down in large hunks. These had to be avoided, for some of the excrement had sharp bones that clanged when they hit the roads traveled by the blood eaters. The difference between wall, ceiling, floor blurred. Many a time, Talwyn imagined he was walking inside a giant, diseased squash. The underground possessed a constant song now: the bawling of the wormlings, the splatting and slopping of matter, and other bubbling, licking, and wetly crinkling dissonances. Talwyn and the others were by now immune to the smell, but he doubted that the stink of pigeon shite and compost would ever leave their heads or clothing. Their starved stomachs craved no nourishment and had no urge to empty themselves. Fear was their sustenance.

  Surely, they must be getting closer to wherever Feyhazir was taking them. Talwyn, who kept a constantly trickling mental chronex, calculated they’d been at this misadventure for six-and-a-half hourglasses. If they did not retrieve the chalice and leave within the next few sands, they would never escape the underground alive. And that was assuming that dawn would not come earlier than he’d projected. The specter of impending death motivated him, and he dashed to their leader. “How much farther?” he asked.

  Mouse looked at him, only partly herself—the other force within her seemed cold and remote, a lone moon over a black ocean splashing in rage. The second force answered him, and he felt utterly insignificant. “We are here,” said Feyhazir.

  The tunnel in which they walked led down and then opened into a large space. All except the Dreamer crept cautiously into its deceptive brightness; its illumination came not from the sun, but rather from glowing spires, stalactites, and barnacles of white waste. They were awed by the chamber, which was as grand as a sea cove and filled with a clammy, foggy air that clung to them. Pools lay about the chamber and bled tributaries to smaller puddles in the belching ivory mere. Many of the pools looked quite deep, and churned softly.

  Eventually, a squealing noise emerged from the ghoul’s orchestra of drips, splats, and farts. The squeals were faint and came from immature creatures. In the wicked moonlight—for truly, that was what it resembled, thought Talwyn—the bodies of larval blood eaters gleamed as they floated, whined, and swam in their amniotic pools. One blind fishy being in the pool nearest Talwyn rolled as would a more graceful mammal of the sea. What it revealed of itself as it rose, though, had nothing of that grace: black eyes sealed behind a fishy caul, a socket mouth that collapsed inward, stabbing collarbones and a skeletal torso that twisted into a lumpy mermaid’s tail. Whatever metastasis it would take for this pupal horror to become a raisin-titted shrieking horror, this was the beginning of her evolution. Vomit rose in Talwyn’s throat. He choked it back and whispered what was already clear to all there: “A breeding ground.”

  In the distance lay a hump, above which a second larger blister dropped from the spiny ceiling. Mouse needed to reach that place. Mouse and her Dreamer dashed between the white rubbish and pools. Stricken by the sight of it all, standing dumb at the point where the tunnel blossomed into the amphitheater of the bizarre, the rest made no move to stop her. Either the path had been blessed by Feyhazir, or they would all soon be dead. Regardless, they followed the Dreamer. Perhaps because of the nearness of death, because there might never be another moment beyond this one, Pythius threw a whisper into Talwyn’s head: If we live, I shall drink to tomorrow with you.

  They had to run, for Mouse and her inhabitant had turned this into a race. It was clear the Dreamer now almost completely possessed his host: she smoldered and burst with silver-and-black fumes. The stumbling war party did its best to focus on the dark beacon. They avoided glancing down at the mewling pools of milk or up at the waxy stalactites amid which hung cawing, shuffling shadows, for if they had, their courage would have shattered.

  Now, though, the existence of the softly warbling roost that hung and swayed from the rafters of this profane cathedral wouldn’t be denied. Clacking hag-women shrilled like crows as they woke, stirred by the companions or the shivering light of the Dreamer. The company had walked into the heart of the swarm, a breeding ground, and over their heads hung an army of maternal defenders. He didn’t dare look up to see, but Moreth remembered that the monsters sometimes rested upside down, like bats, which was how he and the Slave had been able to decapitate so many with ease. Once a blood eater woke, though—even during the day—she was among the fastest creatures Moreth had seen aside from the Wolf. Moreth felt as if the whole living ceiling were about to collapse upon and consume them in a speck. But for the moment, they were either as yet unimportant—which was unlikely as invaders—or they were protected by the Dreamer’s Will.

  Indeed, Feyhazir’s light had grown into radiance, and the chamber now echoed with chimes and harmonies inconsistent with the songs of propagating monstrosities. The music was a manifestation of the Dreamer’s joy and desire. He was excited. Something that was valuable to him was within his grasp.

  When the war party reached the pulsing gray-and-black star that was Mouse and her master, they couldn’t see for the light spearing the room. They stood, shielding their faces, at the center of the chamber and received an impression of elevated steps, or perhaps a rise, set into a mound. Above the mound was a distended belly of shadow that they could not fully distinguish. A few of them were reminded of an enormous veined and beating heart. It was something organic, massive, and fleshy, but the light and their fear rendered everything indistinct. From somewhere now came an ancient and curious wind bearing myrrh and smoke—the attar of mystery. It swept around the company like a snake of the elements and bound them together in wonder. They all watched the star Mouse had become.

  The radiant Dreamer and his vessel ascended the steps to reach his treasure. In the waxen belfries of the hollow, the blood eaters croaked calls not of hunger and bloodthirstiness, but of pleasure and celebration. Atop the mount she’d climbed, Mouse—or the Dreamer—seized the chalice. With that, her world shattered, and she tumbled with the glassy bits down a pit and into the past.

  All Mouse knows of prophecy has come from her travels in Morigan’s shared visions. Here, she receives only a scattered puzzle of images that aren’t nearly as clear—a memory, Feyhazir’s memory? A woman in white
robes kneels before an altar: her eyes are as dark as her heart, the million cracks on her face reflect great wisdom, and Mouse knows she is a woman of prominence—or was, since she’s old and soon to die. A man’s hand—as silver as the light Morigan shines, though wearing a black gauntlet of smoke the next instant—caresses the woman’s cheek. In the dark space of the brassy chamber behind the woman are fuzzy intimations of row after row of kneeling supplicants, also in white. What is this? A ritual? A sacrifice? Mouse is chilled by the sense of each act occurring before her. The vision twists and Mouse is thrown elsewhere; she hovers, seeing a vista in the distance, a city nestled into a wave of stone. The Second City, she thinks.

  As if carried by the wind, a promise is whispered into her ear. It’s in a tongue like the Amakri’s, but slower and more lyrical. Mouse understands the words, the vow, and that the woman seen a moment ago has spoken it: “I have returned to the city I abandoned. I am broken and old, as are those who cling to these ruins. Once more my body withers. The arkstones cannot sustain me. My people believe I have passed. My flesh is too weak for your Will, Master, and you have found a new vessel just as they have found a new queen. To you and to the world I am dead. As dead as these lost souls, gathered before you—those cast from the tribes of this land. We are all ghosts here.

  “But I shall live again. You have given me all that I have ever dreamed, Master. You have raised me from death, and I have built empires that will endure for as long as some of your dreams. So, I shall drink your promise and embrace this new mystery. We shall drink. We praise thee for this new gift, new life, whatever it may be. Remember my name: I am Teskatekmet, the Eternal, and most adoring of your vessels. I wait for your return, Master. I shall wait forever, if I must.”

  A furious flurry of visions and sounds tears through Mouse: the feel of burning fluid in her throat, the sensation of her limbs stretching in their sockets, painfully changing, as if being made taller on a torturer’s rack, and finally there comes a tormented shriek that she knows arises from Teskatekmet. This cry is soon joined by all the newborn shrieking hags birthed in the belly of the Second City, monsters born through a covenant with Feyhazir.

  The light settled, though the frenzied cawing continued. The war party, jarred by the noise, saw Mouse doubled over at the top of a tall dais. Pythius and Moreth ran to her. Talwyn followed, though his eyes roamed over the staircase of elaborate silverwork that they climbed, steps miraculously clean of filth, though with railings of slithery mucus. He read everything, deciphered each story the stonewrights and metalsmiths had wrought into their work. In specks, he had pieced together the imagery of chalices, a winged man, a kneeling woman and her flock, withered hags, and curses. Don’t touch it! It’s cursed! The people of the City of Ghosts drank from the chalice—just as Pythius would do! They were offered its miracles for a price: to watch and to protect the Dreamer’s treasure until he returned. Damn his mind for always working faster than his mouth.

  As he prepared to scream his findings, as he stumbled up to his companions, he looked then at the shadow that dripped warm rain upon him and forgot his every word. He gazed, paled, and fumbled for his gun.

  The others had only just noticed the shadow. Pythius bared his teeth and blade at the atrocity above them. Mouse had recovered enough of herself to shriek; a consummate thief, she’d already stuffed the chalice into her haversack. Slowly, the shape on the ceiling, the incalculable accrual of white and black, began to unfurl. Like the petals on a flower of flesh, wings and layers of moldy white skin peeled away from the core they protected. A rainfall of fluid began, and Talwyn, intuiting what was inside, discovered courage and began to shove his companions down the dais. They were off it in a speck.

  By then, one of the squealing wormlings that churned like maggots on the surface of the bulbous, terrible sac had fallen and splattered to its death. Mouse stopped screaming. She was unpleasantly aware that she was once again a mortal woman. The war party slipped and skidded away as the placenta broke and a torrent of wriggling, bleating, malformed, prematurely birthed blood eaters came down in a deluge.

  Was that the worst of it? The blood eaters hanging in the moldy rafters of the breeding chamber ululated in rage or surprise. “Wake up, you shite! Wake up and get me out of this horror!” shouted Mouse to the Dreamer. However, he would not be roused, producing only a sleepy tingle and an uncontrolled twitch that flung her hand toward her belt. Her knuckles collided with the hilt of her weapon, and she grasped his callous message. You asked for power. Deal with your own danger.

  “Selfish arsehole!” cursed Mouse. She and her companions formed a tight circle.

  “I suggest you ask your master to get us out of this place,” said Moreth as they backed away. The collapsed womb, dangling wet folds, continued to squelch and sway. He wondered if it’d finished its birthing.

  “He shan’t be helping. We are on our own.”

  “Really?” exclaimed Moreth.

  Mouse’s reply was drowned out by the dry creaking, then sloppy crash of the juddering sac detaching itself from the roof. It crushed the ancient dais like a mountain fallen on a teacup. Luckily, the war party were at a safe enough distance that they were able to huddle, turn their backs, and shield themselves from the wave of rolling dust and the splashes of the many birthing pools nearby that expelled their squealing contents. The fall and cascading destruction continued for some time, and the war party crawled away from it, eventually blundering upright.

  When they looked back, the chamber was clouding and beginning to collapse. White brackets cracked and fell inward, splashing down into the chamber like trees felled in a swamp. The blood eaters—who covered the ceiling in a tarp of bodies—were feeble and uncommonly tame in their defeat, and fell from their roosts like bats struck by slingshots. They hit the rumbling ground dead and were then jostled around.

  Somehow, the transgressors in this realm had ruined a delicately balanced ecosystem. Talwyn struggled to determine how. Perhaps now that Feyhazir no longer needed guardians for his relic, the blood eaters’ lives were forfeit. Could a Dreamer be so horrifically callous to create and then exterminate an entire species? Yes, look at what Brutus and the Black Queen had done with their disposable grunts made of man, metal, and fire. Talwyn had not the time to explore this quandary or what it meant for the Doomchasers or even Mouse as a servant of this cosmic tyrant, for right then a blood eater, rolled up like a burned moth, bounced down directly in their path. Its black wings spread out—their smoke evaporating—and he saw that it clutched a wormling in its lifeless arms. The grisly larva was attached to the abdomen of its mother through its tail. Talwyn got just one look before a heave of white rot covered the pair, but it was clear that the life of the young one depended on the continued survival of its host, and that the host was dead. No matter the exact cause or sequence, everything down here was dying—the entire foul ecosystem. This at least suggested that the other horrors beyond this chamber were already dead or soon would be.

  BRAAAWK!

  A combination of dread and his cursed curiosity caused Talwyn to turn back and gaze at the suppuration of rubble and smoke in the chamber they’d left behind. A shape rose out of the haze; it, too, must have fallen with the unholy mass on the ceiling. What was black and white and trembling all over? It felt like a children’s joke, his blundering attempt to describe the abhorrent, fatty mass that barreled toward them. It lurched, slobbering over the rubble like a caterpillar. Some segments of it were armored; others were heaped with a fleshy padding that he couldn’t, for a speck, identify. It scrabbled with its multitudinous setae legs, each as black and hard as a fang of rock, and brought more powder and ruin to the collapsing chamber. Its dimensions were impossible to define. It seemed as large and wild as a locomotive that had veered off its track. He picked out a few details in the commotion, trying to make sense of the seemingly inexplicable. Those fleshy plates? Bulbous tumors with small gray dots—breasts, he realized—that clustered like grapes. A smattering of white, wi
thered, and clawed arms flailed about the creature’s body. Only a mad man could have discerned their purpose in being. He wondered what that same hypothetical lunatic would have to say about the collage of screaming women’s faces—malformed heads with mops of scraggly black hair and wailing mouths—that formed the shrieking head of the beast. He screamed back when the ball of many heads split vertically along a gooey seam, revealing a fissure lined with teeth out of which belched a titanic roar.

  These glimpses he caught before being torn away by a strong hand—probably the shaman’s. Fear cinched his throat and prevented him from throwing up on himself. Inside his pounding skull, his scientific mind prattled on through the madness. Lepidoptera sanguinius regina, she’d be called. The blood eater queen. Naturally, a matriarchal society without visible male participants could not exist without a form of asexual reproduction. Having now observed the nesting grounds of these species, I can determine that these creatures go through many cycles of early development. First, the queen incubates her brood, regularly releasing a flow of nascent offspring. She creates enormous quantities of hatchlings, for the blood eaters often suffer losses in their own ranks when their unquenchable hunger drives them to cannibalism. The hatchlings then progress through larval and pupal stages—the latter of which occurs in pools of collected afterbirth and nutrients—before arriving at a young adult phase in which they are old and formed enough to suckle. It is at this stage that both offspring and mother are most vulnerable—

  Oh, would you shut the fuk up! You’re going to die!

  At last, Talwyn gave in to foaming, screaming terror. He wasn’t alone; the others had now seen what was rising out of the chaos and were screaming along with him. They blundered; they were careless. They splashed into the afterbirth ponds, which were like overflowing tidal pools and could hardly be avoided. It was hard to tell who among them had gashed themselves on toppled stalagmites, so smeared were they with blood eater foetuses. One of the Doomchasers disappeared into a ragged rupture that formed somewhere behind them. He thought it was one of the women—he heard her final echoing yelp. He knew she was gone and sensed she would not be the only one to die. A speck later, more Doomchaser curses and hideous screams floated through the destruction, terminal sounds, each one. Pythius’s tribesmen had perished.