Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (14 page)

That was their first night, and the most sensual of their dalliances. Since then, they’d used sex as a recreation for forgetfulness. In a slight turn for the better, Erik now drank less, though still regularly, and she slept with fewer terrors, though still fitfully. During the evening hourglasses, he took on hazardous jobs: the kind for which laborers weren’t asked for proper papers, as they usually ended up injured or dead. While she never asked, she had an idea about what kind of work he did—protection and brutality for hire. Lately, with the horns of war wailing from west to east across Geadhain, men had much need of procured violence.

When Erik went off to break noses and bones, and on the days when Lila could drag herself from bed, she had taken to doing a bit of charity work at the Order of St. Celcita. The sisters at the old basilica found Lila quite useful, with her knowledge of nursing, herbology, and potion-craft. The latter was a passion of hers. Back in the secret groves of the palace gardens, there were plots of some of the rarest plants on Geadhain—herbs that would now die without her knowledge and care. Carthac’s market, even its most exotic brokers, had a dearth of green mysteries. Still, the most basic plants one needed to aid with restlessness, pain, and tremors could be found. She used her herbology to tend to the dying and the ill.

She felt no squeamishness toward her charges. When she helped those who suffered to feel a shade less terrible, it was not under any illusion of piety—for she could never be redeemed. Instead, she wanted her eyes rubbed with the sand of suffering, so that she might never forget her crimes. Those who lingered near the veil of death evoked the strongest feelings of remorse in her. At times, she imagined them to be those she had doomed in Menos. She assumed Erik was similarly possessed by hatred and depression while wetting his fists with blood.

“I should be leaving shortly,” said Erik, suddenly.

Another moment, and he was up making noise: stomping to the lavatory, splashing water, taking a piss, walking around the room on a treasure hunt for his garments. Sleepily, Lila listened from the bed. Eventually, Erik’s shadow and tidier self hovered nearby, and she woke herself to see him standing over her, a bit sinister with his frown, dark clothing, and half-cloak. She repositioned her body in the sheets—into an alluring pose, from the way his mouth hung—and they played a game of stares before speaking.

“Will you stay in for the evening?” he asked.

“I think I shall see if I am needed at the Order.”

“Be safe.”

What he meant was, stay unseen, speak to no one. They were, after all, hiding in plain sight. Clever but risky. Fleeing to Carthac, using the same path Magnus had instructed his adopted son to take should the queen be threatened, might seem the riskiest road to travel for two genocidal fugitives avoiding justice. Excessively paranoid about the arrangements, Magnus had long ago ensured that any assistance available to them would come through anonymous partners—men who did not know from whom the coin came, men who would be loyal out of fear of that same anonymous, potentially wrathful sponsor. At roadside inns, Erik had whispered passwords to faceless strangers, who then gave him horses, supplies, and coin. In total, it had taken around a month to reach Carthac. First, they had trotted south through the long, empty green hills of Meadowvale, hardly encountering another soul; then, they’d made a push through the withering Salt Forests. They’d arrived in Carthac thanks to the generosity of no less than three unnamed shadowbrokers and perhaps a dozen merchants, who would know it would not be safe to remember the large warrior and his hooded companion.

Surely, Magnus didn’t even suspect they were in Carthac. They certainly hadn’t reached out to any of the king’s most powerful allies in the city—the council of aldermen—for fear of his getting wind they were here. Even in Magnus’s most devious moments, he would likely not suspect they would head to the City of Waves. It seemed probable, given the lack of wanted posters about the realms and bounty hunters hounding them, that Magnus hadn’t mounted a pursuit. In a sense, knowing that was worse
than being on the run, for it implied the king thought she and Erik were either irredeemable or inconsequential.

While Lila’s mind wandered, Erik left, giving her neither a kiss nor a wave goodbye. After all, they were not lovers, only fellow sufferers. If he’d stayed, it would have been to roll with her in angry, savage forgetfulness. There would be more of that when he returned in the early dawn, drunk, and bearing the spiced and not unpleasant body odor gained from crushing skulls. Until then, she could ponder the notes of his smell, his fragrance of violence, which reminded her of an Arhadian clove she’d sniffed in her childhood a thousand years past. Before getting out of the sheets, she took a sniff of herself and smelled violence upon her flesh as well. They were in her nature now: blood and death. Her body, at last, had become as tainted as her soul.

III

At the base of the sea wall that protected Carthac from the Straits of Wrath, the Order of St. Celcita occupied a partially demolished basilica. It looked close to collapse, with its one ruined dome, two standing towers, and two fallen ones. The towers that remained erect looked as flimsy as bushels of straw. Lila wondered if it would be her destiny to die beneath their inevitably toppled mass. Against the grim sky and gray wall, the ivory basilica appeared as if it were made of clouds and faint light.
Holy
. It felt holy to her, every time she beheld it. Feathers of mist floated about the towers, and the sea beat upon Carthac’s wall like an unyielding drum: it was a pretty and impressive scene. She stood and pondered.

Her trip to the hospice had been unremarkable. Once out of the noisy quarter where she and Erik lived, she had taken a slink down bricked streets, past cube-shaped dwellings with shuttered windows and chimneys piping smoke. She had passed an alley cat or two, and a few singing drunks, though hardly another soul more. Things had seemed rather quiet in the City of Waves. Wryly, she wondered if tales of a face-smashing thug who kept the peace for rich masters were making the rounds.

Chastising herself for thinking fondly of Erik—she was meant to suffer, not fawn—Lila focused on the basilica, which always required a small rousing of courage to approach. The peaked and ruined towers, which
rose like talons toward the sky, and the shattered dome, fallen in like a broken egg, gave her a frightful shiver whenever she neared. If this was a place of divinity, then it stood to reason that here she would also find a gateway to the infernal—although she no longer feared the voice of a dead warlord or the whispers of Death. She had scraped from herself the mercy and love that her attackers had twisted to make her obedient. No more would she be controlled. She hardly knew what fear was anymore. What then spooked her? This was not terror, but…

Lila couldn’t find the word, and the wind swept down over the wall, bringing with it a sudden hail of water. A peal of thunder also rang, and she hurried toward the basilica. Quickly dashing between tombstones and around rusted fences, Lila managed to reach the shadowed arch of the Order’s sanctuary just as rain began dousing the land behind her. From her place of shelter, she watched the weather turn the grave markers slick and black, frowning as it blazed the sky with white rage. Storms reminded her of Magnus, and dwelling on the king summoned unwanted thoughts of Erik, too. She felt moodier today, less set in her resolute darkness than usual.

“Siobhan,” said a woman.

Sister Abagail’s voice was as cracked and ancient as a grandmother’s. When Lila turned, though, she saw a thin, spectacled lass in a black frock. Religion seemed such an odd convention in an age of technomagik—these women, with their peaked hats, half veils, and gloved hands, struck Lila as especially anachronistic. Abagail and her sisters were relics of the past, which is perhaps why Lila had felt so drawn to them in the first place, being a relic herself. “Sister Abagail,” said Lila.

The two women coyly watched each other, like cats deciding if the other were friend or foe. Lila sensed that the sister saw through some degree of her deception, which is why they often engaged in this contest. Then Abagail smiled. Friends, it appeared. Abagail gestured Lila forward into the ornate vestry where she stood.

“Come on in out of the rain, Siobhan. We have enough sickness to tend to in here already and don’t want to have to make up another cot for you.”

If only you knew
, thought Lila, who hadn’t sniffled from a cold in a thousand years.

While the two walked together at an easy pace through spacious dark halls, the fallen queen glanced at the surrounding remnants of a dynasty of yore: tapestries enchanted with witchstitch, torn, yet still garishly red and bright despite their age; pedestals displaying busts of burly men with chipped faces. Lila knew the tale behind these fallen generals, these men who had wanted to be kings—the Lordkings of Carthac. They had been descendants of some of the oldest houses of Menos, the founders of which had come and settled in Carthac when it was barely even a hamlet. The masters had been fleeing some enemy or retribution for their sins—no one knew the exact history anymore. The lords had lavished wealth on the sea-folk, turned a backwater hamlet into a byzantine metropolis. These ancient masters built the wall of the city—a dark reflection of Eod’s achievement. This structure did not exist solely to protect the city from privateers—it also served to seal in the wealth that the populace trawled from the sea: fish, weeds, and ores from the furthest deeps (and, it had been said, even a wonderstone or two, although none was found after the masters fell).

And fall the Lordkings did, for the true nature of a Menosian could never be hidden and would ever be his undoing. After the Lordkings had entrenched themselves as the supreme benefactors and rulers of the City of Waves, they began to demand more and more of the people. Soon the city had swollen with ill-gotten gains and become an untouchable bastion on the tip of Central Geadhain. For a time, Carthac in its foul prosperity rivaled even Menos—until, that is, the sea-folk unseated the lords in a single bloody night. They burned the Lordkings’ temples and dragged the masters and their families out into the streets to be gutted like fish and hanged. The prideful masters of Menos had forgotten that the sea-folk had wills stronger than those of average men. Carthacians were elemental folk, with an almost magikal connection to the Blue Mother and born with her temperaments. One could not truly know wrath until one had seen a storm on the ocean. Aside from the historians, no one in Carthac chose to remember these doomed lords of antiquity. Instead, they made gardens of their grand, toppled manors, and parks and hospices of the ruined temples where iniquity had once reigned.

“We have a strange patient,” said Abagail. “A man from the East.”

From the East
? wondered Lila. They walked on, trading shadows for the occasional halo of firelight granted by a sconce. Overhead, rain drummed and dribbled through millennia-old cracks, filling the hallway with tiny lakes and ripening the mustiness of the building. Lila considered how unhealthy the mildew must be for those trying to recuperate. However, the argument could be made that most men came here only to die.

She and Abagail entered the great hall of the temple, once stunningly ostentatious. Their feet scuffed on tarnished plates of ivory and gold; from beneath the ancient grime flickered teasing glimpses of the gilded friezes upon the walls. Dull golden columns surrounded a wide court, which lay under the deteriorated dome of the temple. The area was sealed off with rope and tarps—tan sheets ruffled in the air like a ship’s sails in a tempest. As they passed through it, making their way toward an arch and holding their garments against the wind and rain bleeding in from the night, Lila wondered how it was the whole place hadn’t fallen down. Perhaps the nameless spirit that these sisters worshipped had truly blessed this temple.

In her great life, Lila had met idolaters and zealots before. These women were different. Neither Abagail nor the other sisters ever gave their patron spirit a name other than the Great Will, the Blue Mother. For religious folk, they were quite lazy about proselytizing. They did not recruit, and they observed little in the way of rituals from what Lila had seen. The sisters kept their beliefs to themselves and, perhaps because of this, the people of Carthac had allowed them to settle in ruins for which the city had no use. There, they carried on with their hedge-healer ways. They calmed the demented with herbal elixirs. They fed those in extremis with the blood of the red poppy that soothed all pains. They acted as wardens for the insane. Sometimes, they released the chronically suffering from the mortal coil—when such was the patient’s wish. The Order of St. Celcita dealt with whatever runoff of sin and social refuse physicians, fleshbinders, and the Veiled Confessors of Carthac could not heal.

Lila felt at home with the sisters. She often wondered, though, what grief or suffering had driven St. Celcita to abstinence and asceticism. Furthermore, what wrongs had the current women of the order suffered
or perpetrated in this age, that they embraced the same self-denying seclusion as Celcita? Perhaps all were secret sinners here.

In the hallway past the arch, the hunger of the wind died, and the women straightened their clothes. Before striding down the damp corridor, Abagail gave Lila a little smile.
Get ready; here we go
. As they continued, additional signs of faded grandeur met their eyes: brass door handles, white stone frames around doors for men as tall as Brutus, the shimmer of silver from spiderwebbed candelabras on the walls. Every door they passed was closed and barred heavily on the outside. Some of the portals thudded as deranged folk requiring sedation bashed themselves against the wood. Rarely was Lila assigned that duty. Lila’s skills, Abagail declared, lay in preparing a man’s soul for the long sleep.

“Black thistle?” asks Abagail
.

Lila turns to see who is speaking to her in the marketplace. When she wraps herself up like a beggar, no one ever notices her, let alone pays her a word, although sometimes they throw coins in her direction. In the dusk, the woman and her loose dark clothing blur together with the shadows of passersby, the darkness cast by tents and their awnings, the smoke curling from outdoor tanneries and ovens. The woman’s face is obscured by a veil, and Lila cannot make out her features. The stranger stands very close and speaks once more, her voice that of an ancient. “Do you know what it is used for?” she asks
.