Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3)

by Christian A. Brown

  Mouse and Moreth’s dark silhouettes, though, remained beside him, and he could see Pythius running ahead, so at least those nearest to him were alive—for the moment. At least those already dead had been spared the unpleasantness of being eaten by an angry brood queen. And there was still a chance the living might be spared, too, for a black eye winked at Talwyn in the shaking chamber; it was a cave. Where did it lead? Was it still intact? It looked small enough that the Brood Queen would not be able to follow them through it. Within a speck, they had all seen the wavering spot, and as one, they dashed toward it. Suddenly, Pythius, acting as if he were a pugilist, threw out his arms and brought Mouse and Moreth tumbling down. A clothesline, that’s what the move is called, Talwyn thought as his mind worked faster than his flesh and he slammed into the man, too. All four of them fell into a tangle of limbs. Getting up proved a challenge, as Pythius—as remarkable a wrestler as any of Moreth’s gladiators—was attempting to pin them all down.

  “Meínei káto (Stay down)!” shouted the shaman.

  A speck later, a whirlwind of shadow passed over their scuffle. The dark storm landed with a thud that shook them apart, and they rolled helplessly about the chamber. Still, they found their feet in a moment, and spotted one another as outlines in the dusty chamber. Another roar echoed and threw rock down into the just settling hollow. Soon the dust cleared, and the four—no longer afraid, but bitter with warrior’s mettle—stared at what prevented their escape. A throw from where they might have been, the brood queen coiled, turning in a circle and half rearing her caterpillar body. The mere sight of the creature was enough to spark hysteria again. A rainfall of destruction concealed her many faces for the moment. Pythius’s agility had saved the companions; the four of them would have been crushed if they’d run any faster. None of the champions was shocked to see the flapping, smoldering wings—like those of a dragonfly of evil and darkness—that had sprung up along the back of the horror. They looked too ragged, too flimsy to allow for flight. It was clear, though, that the brood queen was capable of great leaps. One more leap and they might not be so lucky as to escape its tonnage.

  “Shite,” cursed Mouse.

  “Unexpected—or perhaps not, given the winged nature of adult blood eaters. In any case, not good,” said Talwyn, stiffening up. He pulled out his gun and aimed, impressed by the steadiness of both his hand and voice. “Moreth, shoot the faces, breasts, and wings. I believe those are the fleshiest parts, the ones most likely to sustain damage.”

  Mouse already had her blade in hand and was ready to speak the word that would bring fire. “Let’s send it to the afterlife. I need cover—a distraction—so I can get close,” she spat.

  They all knew her Dreamer’s blade possessed untold powers. Pythius needed no war marshaling. He felt the urge to spill blood beating like a drum in his heart. He had his tribesmen to avenge, all of whom now wandered the Great Mystery. Although he’d lost his sword, several long splinters of rock lay nearby, and they would do. He roared and threw a granite javelin with a strong, true arm. He summoned his Will, too, and as the fragment left his hand, it glowed like a splinter of volcanic rock. The javelin sailed in a flickering line and speared one of the twisted, shrieking faces in the brood queen’s head-of-heads. For an instant, the monster was silenced by pain or perhaps surprise. Pythius roared again, grabbed a second spear, emblazoned it with magik, and hurled it as well—then another and another. Following his lead, Talwyn and Moreth began their salvo of blue fire. In specks, breasts were torn off by bullets, faces were shredded into black pulp, and dragonfly wings were blasted into cinders and smoke.

  The brood queen writhed under the assault, perhaps knowing pain for the first time in centuries. She buried her head in her coils, and thrashed her gargantuan tail. Her weight came down as a club of thunder on the land, shaking loose showers of stalactite and petrified shite. A shingle of rock fell and embedded itself in Moreth’s forearm, throwing him to the ground; if he didn’t remove it and bind the wound, he would almost certainly bleed to death. But instead of doing so, he staggered to one knee, transferred his pistol to his other hand, and began firing. Beside him, the scholar turned marksman loosed a firestorm of bullets. The rapidly emptying chamber of his gun had begun to burn Talwyn’s fingers; soon, flesh would sizzle and he’d lose his aim. As for Pythius, he fought, rabid and shrieking, for the honor of his dead clansmen even as the hail of stone fragments cut him and painted him in blood.

  Mouse, the most agile of the four, sidestepped the showers of debris and waited for her opportunity to dash ahead into the bedlam. She couldn’t wait any longer—any more thunder from the monster, and the collapsing cavern would bury them all.

  To near certain death and through clouds of stirred filth ran Mouse, braver than she had ever been—or rather driven by fear. Thank the Kings she possessed such a small body, wore little to no armor, and moved with the nimbleness of a cat. All of the traits that had assisted her as a shadowbroker conspired now to keep her whole. She danced between ground-sundering slams of a fleshy whip, and her calm nature, refined through negotiations with nefarious folk, allowed her to softly speak the correct incantation—Imperatrix—while tumbling under the brood mother’s rocky talons. She emerged from beneath the shadow of the beast quite wet from its secreting under-slop, but she was dried in an instant by the flame that jetted from her dagger. White at its core and black as its halo, the weapon’s flame, the teardrop of its blade, was a manifestation of wrath: cosmic wrath, the wrath of a Dreamer. In the deepest hues of the flame sparkled lights like stars.

  The magik’s dazzling wonder nearly struck her dumb, but then the shadow of the brood mother came down again, hard and fast. Still, she was the girl that moved through stars and worlds. Wasn’t she? Her memory was clouded by another layer of thought, for a flicker of the Dreamer’s passion woke within her. The conflict had roused him, or perhaps Mouse had somehow called him forth; either way, he’d decided this was a show in which he must partake. Feyhazir took his vessel’s hand and they became partners in this dance. In the strangest twist on the laws of master and vessel, neither Dreamer nor girl knew who led their waltz. Their dance was grand, full of fire and black rain. Together, she and the Dreamer twirled, embraced, and reminisced about distant worlds, people, and places Mouse had never seen. They shared lovers’ kisses under showers of noxious gore. They consummated their passion while slicing into heaps of hard fat and shivered, head to toe, from the orgasmic exertion. Mouse wanted the dance to continue forever. She was in love. In love with this power. In love with the Dreamer. How else to describe such joy?

  As for the others, the men providing her cover, they watched the nimble girl dodge the smashing bulk of the creature several times while closing in on it, then vanish suddenly. They refused to consider her dead. As soldiers who would accept nothing less than triumph, they fired and threw their hopes and anger at the horror standing in their way. The next instant, Mouse rolled out from beneath the twisted tail of the brood mother; each man swore he heard a song and felt a tingle of melodic music, a harp being played somewhere. Then a light was summoned by Mouse or her master, and the gloom of the chamber was eradicated. With that, something that must be Mouse but looked like an insane firefly with a tail of white heat darted left and right, up and down. The brood queen roared as the firefly scaled the grotesque heights of its body, weaving a pattern of sizzling agony over her flesh so quickly that it took a moment for the pieces of the monster to drop. Finally, there came a monsoon of smoking legs—carved off like rotten fangs—whole gatherings of tits, flaps of skin as long as sails, and dozens of dark dragonfly wings. The firefly shone in the brume it had created. The men ceased their assault and watched.

  Mouse, who held the hand of her beloved, realized it was time to end their dance. She returned from her waltz across the universe as easily as if she were waking from a cozy summer nap. Abruptly, she faded into the ugly, confusing scene, saw herself floating above a jiggling, oozing mountain of coils. I know you,
she thought. Or he does, rather. From the center of the mound leered something of a face. It trickled black, its features cauterized; it took her a moment to recognize the head-of-heads. The sound it pushed out from its one working sore—the fissure of teeth, all broken now—was a plea for death. Thank you for your loyalty, Teskatekmet, said the Dreamer in Mouse’s skull. Now sleep. Upon the shattered brood mother, the fallen first Keeper Superior, she descended as a star of vengeance.

  The men saw her light blossom and fade into soft explosions. They stared into the flickering smoke and called for her, their amazement turning to worry. Stumbling out of the billows, she appeared. They hurried to her and carried her away from the slag heap. They might yet face their doom, but it seemed possible the worst was over. They stopped to catch their breath once they’d cleared the thickest smoke and then gazed back to the wafts of embers and ruin. Mouse—hesitantly, Talwyn noticed—sheathed her dagger.

  “Are you all right?” asked the scholar. He knew not what else to say after witnessing an incident of such incredible, divine power. Mouse looked hale and sound, unscathed by the fires she had conjured. Around her eyes, however—which always betrayed so much about a soul—he saw the tightened anxiety of anger or loss.

  “I am fine,” she replied, which was the surface of a truth. Beneath, Mouse was conflicted in every manner imaginable. She loved what she had been—a vessel, a star—though she loathed what she had known as soon as she touched the chalice. However, there was no time to consider that truth or its implications, as whatever cohesion had held this underground chamber together appeared to be failing. White slop and tiles of mucous continued to fall, and the near-deafening dribbling, creaking, and groaning made her suspect the ceiling would soon collapse. “We need to get out of here, and I have no idea how.”

  “Wake up your master,” snapped Moreth. “He sent us on this glorious misadventure; he can damn well send us back.”

  Mouse reached for the hand of her cosmic lover by instinctively touching the dagger. But no answering static ran through her fingertips and bones; no warmth filled her insides; no crystalline music filled her ears. In the battle, she’d somehow managed to summon him, but it appeared he would not be so easily stirred a second time. Perhaps the moment was not right, the fear and passion weren’t enough to stir her master. “I think he’s gone back to sleep for the time being. I may have exhausted him, so to speak.”

  “I have no intention of dying down here!” declared Moreth.

  While boldly said, the trickling hole in his arm from where a rock spine had been withdrawn, and the manner in which Moreth clenched the maimed limb to his stomach—was that another wound there?—was evident and troubling to his companions. Moreth’s behavior seemed especially vexing to Talwyn, who clenched his throat as if aghast while widely eying the man.

  “I may be able to find a way,” said the scholar.

  “How?” asked Moreth.

  Talwyn peered around for a while before answering, then set off away from the devastated corpse; there would be no tunneling through that mess. “I believe that I can retrace our steps and lead us back through the underground.”

  “Impossible,” said Moreth reflexively. Then he recalled to whom he spoke: the man that rearranged and viewed matter, physics, and history on a plane invisible to most mortals. “Do pardon me—of course you can.”

  “There is the entrance we used to enter this chamber.” Talwyn pointed to a dimly seen hole past a long field of rubble, blood eater corpses, and slippery wormlings. None of the creatures moved, and as they walked through the dead, the companions were more concerned about being crushed by the crumbling ceiling. Soon the glow and gas of the chamber disappeared, and they traveled along a path illumed by another of Pythius’s magikal hand-flames, seeing a familiar pastiche of white mucus that seemed less ready to collapse upon them. All this was comforting after the breeding ground, even the reek of guano. Talwyn walked on for a while in silence. Moreth and Pythius concentrated on listening for predators; they twitched at every gust and groan of the decaying underground. Talwyn was preoccupied with matters graver even than another potential attack.

  “You know that the chalice is cursed, do you not?” he whispered to Mouse, who walked beside him. He suspected that Mouse understood the nature of her new treasure. As he’d counted tunnels and cross-referenced them with the three-dimensional phantograph he’d constructed in his mind, he had seen her touch the swinging sack holding the relic many times. She did so lightly, as one would something delicate and dangerous.

  Did she know that Feyhazir—her savior, her lover, her patron of vengeance—had lied to them? Yes. Did she know that this entire horrid ecosystem had come from a promise made in blood with an elderly, powerless Teskatekmet, and the outcast ancient people who’d never chosen a side in Pandemonia’s war—the people of the City of Ghosts? Indeed, for she’d witnessed the truth herself. Teskatekmet’s desire had been fulfilled by the Dreamer: she wanted to live, to endure as a legend; alas, how twisted the reality had been. What of the lost people of the City of Ghosts? With what lies had Feyhazir seduced them into drinking from his wicked cup? Teskatekmet…she pitied her the most, since she didn’t know these other victims beyond shadows in a vision. Teskatekmet, the brood queen, could have crushed them. Had her obstruction been a plea? An angry demand for recognition after thousands of years of condemnation and horrific servitude? Mouse felt a stomach-pulling guilt at having killed her for her loyalty, and furthermore, for what that act meant for her own future. Now sleep…Was that to be her reward, once Feyhazir was done with her, too?

  “I know enough,” she muttered, miserably confused. Who was friend and who was foe? That, at least, was a question she could answer. Morigan was her friend. Morigan would have insights. The Dreamer inside of her was a selfish, bitter lover from whom she was unable to wean herself. Grimly, she hurried on through the murk, thinking of nothing but her reunion with Morigan.

  XVII

  QUEEN’S JUSTICE

  I

  “I know what I saw, what we survived. The queen of Eod was not the one who destroyed Menos,” declared Aadore.

  She swore that in the Iron City, she and her family had stared into the face of Death herself, and she was unshakable in her assertion that this being had been the true orchestrator of Menos’s doom. She would not be swayed. Not by the compassion and beauty of the King of the North. Not by the cold demands and fury of the Iron Queen. Both leaders stared at her, as if trying to conjure different, more pleasing, truths from her with their gazes and Wills. But she had nothing more to say.

  Now free of Menos’s fog, her workwoman’s mind, always ordering and arranging, had spent the day of air travel and the morning settling into Eod’s gracious accommodations and focused on understanding what she, Sean, and the others had endured. Now Aadore was absolutely certain of what had happened. They’d battled a force from beyond: a creature of death, darkness, and doom. There was one pertinent detail, though, that she and the others had decided to leave out of their accounts: she and her brother were immune to whatever power had felled the Iron City. Sean had already experienced enough torment because of his differences—for what she now realized were her differences, too. Nervous, Aadore hoped that these astute leaders believed her jitters came from her terrible tale and not from any secret she kept.

  Perhaps they did know she was withholding something. They retreated to a corner of the chamber and hid behind a billowing veil of white curtains. The room possessed many such ostentatious details, which Aadore found distasteful after decades of Menosian culture. Ornamentations of waves rolled along the moldings, and along with the hangings, gave the chamber a swaying feel. Wind swept in over a windowsill of sanded mosaic tiles, each one like a chip of glass. The light made the chamber far brighter than Aadore felt it needed to be. She wondered if Sean found his room just as bothersome as she did.

  They hadn’t seen each other since landing on Eod’s rather glorious anchorage—a hint of the bedazzlement to
come. There, they had been met by a group of Ironguards and Silver watchmen. The soldiers had then politely separated the survivors from each other and escorted them to separate chambers. Aadore assumed that Sean, Skar—who refused to surrender Ian—and Curtis were safe, cared for, and just down the hall. But when she’d once peeked out into the hallway—again unnecessarily flashy with its trellis of light and verdure—she’d discovered soldiers, one from Eod and one from Menos, stationed outside her door. Neither man had been willing to let her leave, though they inquired whether anything could be brought for her comfort.

  Later, a physician had come and inspected her for fever and injury. He declared her fit and determined that the wound on her shoulder was healing well. After these events, Aadore had paced and paced. She’d watched the sun stretch its golden arms through the glory of Eod. She’d put her ears to the impregnable walls, which echoed with the earthy hollowness of a canyon but shared no whispers from her family, who might be on the other side. At last, the door had opened. As soon as Aadore had realized who had entered, she’d bowed.

  Aadore had no idea what the monarchs were discussing now—possibly her fate. They spoke in hisses she couldn’t hear. They appeared quite angry, at odds with each other. She assumed this must be a common occurrence.