Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (15 page)

“Possibly.” Lila hands the sachet she’d been generously filling back to the scowling merchant, canceling the sale, and starts to walk away
.

“A dash in one’s tea,” continues the woman, trailing behind Lila as she swims in and around the throng, trying to avoid conversation, “and the aches of arthritis blow away like dandelion dust. More than a dash, however, induces calm and a sleep so deep that death is but a footstep away.”

Angrily, Lila stops and turns, and they stand almost nose to veiled nose. Lila detects a smile under the black veil—a flash of eyewear, too. “I had no intention of killing myself,” spits Lila. She’d already tried that with Erik. She wanted the herb only to deepen her slumber, to deaden her to dreams
.

“I hadn’t considered it,” says Abagail
.

“I merely sought a cure for my restlessness.”

“Oh. Well, come with me, then. At the Order’s sanctuary, we have herbs much better than this ditch-peddler’s tripe at warding off fitful nights. Unless you fancy scoots and a headache.”

Hooking her arm into Lila’s elbow as if they are old friends, the odd woman guides her through the crowd. Men are getting drunk around them; merchants are closing shop and joining in. A herd of children and seemingly wild dogs races across the street, giggling and barking. In specks, the hints of sunlight leave, and the world feels dark, loud and spinning on an axis of giddy chaos. What is going on? Where is this woman taking her? Lila tries to pull away, but the stranger’s grip is fierce
.

“You have the look of the lost,” says the stranger, without stopping. “I tend to the lost; I know what they need. If you want your herbs and the peace of a sleep without terrors, then you must work for them.”

“Work? What?” Lila is aghast at the presumption that she has agreed to perform some kind of service. She hasn’t engaged in manual labor since milking lizard-cows ten centuries ago
.

“Just a bit of blood on the hands and a little sweat. I think you have a knack for it,” replies her gleeful kidnapper
.

The moment is so queer that Lila wonders if she’s somehow already taken a lethal dose of black thistle and is right now lying dead on the floor of her squalid home. Embracing the nightmare, Lila stops asking questions and allows herself to be marched off through dark streets and into the darker reaches of Carthac
.

“Always wandering off in your mind,” said Abagail, tugging at Lila’s arm as she had in the memory. The two had entered a large space separated from the rest of the room by drawn sheets that years of sweat and sickly breath had spotted yellow. This area of the hospice smelled worse than any other ward. In here, the most fevered, pustulant, and leprous sufferers lay waiting to die. Women dressed like Abagail, but also wearing heavy masks, rubber gloves, and splattered aprons, swept to and fro. The sisters carried bedpans, draining needles, and bowls that steamed with aromatic effusions of petal and herb. A nearby sister glared at Abagail for speaking.

Among their many mysterious oaths, Lila knew that for the Sisters of St. Celcita, their vow of silence was paramount.
We hear so much better
when we ourselves do not speak
, she’d explained to Lila. Abagail herself was exempt from this vow, as the order needed an advocate among men. Lila felt that Abagail stretched that freedom further than she should with her frequent palaver, but she made no objection: such talk served her well, as it kept her abreast of happenings here and beyond. Around each other, the sisters communicated through a language of complicated hand gestures, stares, and the occasional written note.

“The Easterner,” Abagail said as they continued to walk. “He came in a night or two ago, definitely after the last time you visited us. We found a wallet and papers on him, announcing him to be a man of certain means…” Her voice dropped low. “A man from Menos.”

Lila stopped, and they huddled behind one of the curtains while a sleeping wretch wheezed nearby. “Menos?” she asked.

“Not just any man. A master.”

“Who?”

Rather dramatically for a holy woman, Abagail waved her hands and said, “Sangloris Donanach, father of the House of Mysteries.”

Someone shushed them. Abagail shushed back.

“Show me,” said Lila.

Abagail nodded, and they moved through curtains and past the resting and nearly dead. They came to the bedside of a direly pale man, who was wrapped up to his neck in wool blankets and sopping wet with greasy sweat. His smell induced a small heave in Lila. He stank like the fish markets of Carthac in the morning, when yesterday’s offal and blood were being washed into the sewers—tangy with death. The man’s lips were chapped and flaked in white. His eyelids flickered like the candle by his bedside.

As a former companion to Death, Lila now possessed an acute sense of when a man’s life would simply let go. This man was close to that release. Examining him, first with her eyes, then unknowingly with her fingers, she noted that Sangloris shared some of Magnus’s attributes: the ivory skin, the uncommon hue and clarity of the eyes—silver in this case—the fineness of the nose and cheekbones. Abagail cleared her throat as Lila’s fingertips drifted to the man’s dry lips.

“How did he end up here?” asked Lila, and set her wandering hand to combing the man’s white hair.

“We don’t know. The Twelveswatch brought him in. None of the twelve aldermen will claim knowledge of a Menosian master hiding in plain sight. Even today, the City’s hatred of the Iron masters burns as hot as a young man’s passion. If you were here then, you will certainly remember that folks lit bonfires and danced in the streets when they heard of Menos’s sad fall.” The sister clucked. “So you can see why none of the aldermen will utter the faintest peep that could indict them. They’ll likely remain silent until a moment comes when they can take credit for his glorious murder, whether they’re entitled to it or not. I imagine the master of Menos was here doing business—as those iron folk always are. I would assume that events went sour, as he was gutted like a pig and then thrown to his doom in the Straits. A strong man, he must be. I admire that. To have held onto a slippery island—bleeding and wounded—while the world tried to drown him…”

“How terrible,” said Lila, saddened.

“Not for much longer.” Abagail touched the fallen queen’s shoulder. “The rot has set in from his wound. No magik but that of the Everfair King and all the wonders of Eod could cure him in this state.”

Lila shivered.

“You’re trembling like a winter lamb, dear child,” said Abagail. “I’ll get you a blanket and fetch him some more poppy’s blood. I doubt he’ll wake up again. It’s awful when he does—so much thrashing and agony. I shan’t be more than a speck. You just talk to him, and let him know it’s all right, and he can leave whenever he must.”

Sister Abagail’s departure conjured a gust that killed the weak flame by Lila’s side. She could have sat in the darkness listening to Sangloris’s sputtering gasps, but the sound of his ghastly rattle managed to unnerve her. Quickly, before Abagail returned, Lila flung a hand toward the gray smudge she assumed was the candle and readied herself to Will it to life. Trembling once again like Abagail’s winter lamb, Lila found she couldn’t bring herself to summon her magik. Would she summon flame or deepen the shadows?

Since the events at the Iron Mines, her magik had been polluted by its sinfulness; she now eschewed phantasms, preferring to disguise herself with cowls and scarves. On the road once, she had, though, tried
healing a gash on Erik’s shin, one he’d received while stumbling around partly drunk. The task involved only the most basic mending, demanding none of the complex anatomical knowledge of a fleshbinder. She’d frozen then, too. When she’d finally squeezed a bit of Will from herself, the light she shone—her magik and soul—had been so black and burning that Erik screamed. To this day, Erik wore the brand of her brief touch: a five-pronged marking on his leg. In time, she hoped the scar would blend in with his natural pigment.

It’s only a flame, you child
, she chastised herself.

Anger summoned her Will, and with a puff of black smoke and a scattering of sparks, the wick was lit. The act had not been marred by the appearance of dark forces, and that felt like cause for celebration. But then she looked over at the ghoulish man and any exhilaration that might have blossomed was stillborn. He was now sitting up in his cot, the sheets pulled down his torso to reveal a wound like a giant green bee sting on his stomach. His silver stare was locked on Lila, and he reached out and seized the hand she’d been using to conjure the flame. As soon as they touched, a buzzing cacophony and a dazzle of lights assaulted Lila’s senses. She fell.

Onto a slick rock? She scrabbles to her knees, battling wind and salty shrieks, fighting the slippery ground for footing. A strong white hand hauls her up; for a speck, she believes it to be Magnus’s. Then the illusion flakes away, her spinning vision settles to take in a dark night, and she recognizes the extraordinary pallor of her patient, Sangloris. However, he’s not dying on a cot—instead, he’s handsomely dressed in a sharply tailored silk shirt and pants. A fury of wind and spume roars upon the tiny mount of rock where she and Sangloris stand. Black crashing waves circle the island. Nonetheless, Sangloris’s glossy boots have not a scuff of salt upon them, and the wind barely ruffles his free-flowing hair. He might almost be elsewhere. He
is
elsewhere, realizes Lila. He is with her in the basilica, as well as here in this Dream upon the Straits of Wrath. He stands with one foot in each world
.

“What have you done to me, ghost?” she demands, and shakes off his hand, which feels convincingly real
.

“I am not a ghost,” he says, in a cultivated, gentlemanly voice. “Not yet. But this is where my journey into the Great Mystery began, where I found more clarity than a living mind can touch. The secret moon, the moon of
spirits, shone over me one night as I lay here, bleeding and dying. While I have not my wife Elissandra’s gifts for reading fate—none of the men of our line do—the moon, the magik of my blood, tapped into power from the deepest well: the well of time and eternity.”

“I don’t—” Lila nearly falls again, but the master instantly catches her in a whirl of white. They stare, face to face. “Whatever this is, send me back.”

“I shall.”

She waits and shivers in his arms, on this speck in the sea, while the half-ghost continues gazing upon her. A determining look, he gives, as if he judges her. She wonders how deeply the spirit can see into her heart, and suddenly she wants—needs—to be released
.

“I know what you have done,” he says
.

Lila struggles against Sangloris
.

“I am no wrathful spirit,” he says, calmly. “I am not here to punish you. If you could see the horizons to which I shall soon sail, or hear the quietest voice that calls me to sunset, you would understand the futility of harming yourself with guilt over having ended a society of wicked men. I am one; I was one. I know what I have been. Death would have made her army, one way or another. Dreamers are toying with all these men and women as if they were playthings of glass; they are breaking everything they touch, cutting the flesh of our world with the bodies of the shattered. I am not here to punish you, Lilehum, most used of all Geadhain’s glass creatures. However, there is something I need you to do for me—an act I cannot complete before taking my journey. Cease your resistance.”

Lila has no choice; she feels paralyzed, as if a poison has been seeping into her through Sangloris’s increasingly cold touch. In specks, her throat has numbed too much to shout anymore, and her fingers feel so deadened, they seem likelier to break off than to move
.

He continues. “Open yourself: surrender to and embrace the fact that you are weak and imperfect. Let the tides of Fate wash and drown us both.”

Only in her frozen skull can Lila scream when Sangloris, holding her tightly, leaps into the black water. Liquid ice fills her lungs, bringing hopeless terror with it. Every nerve is on fire. Her body spasms for breath. The ghostly master tightens his arms around her. “Surrender,” he whispers, although it sounds more like a buzz to her water-clogged ears—ears that should not be
able to hear. Bees? she wonders. Then the mystery loses importance, her body goes slack, and she and the master drift gracefully, their garments billowing, through sheer, cold blackness
.

Death
.

“Now you are ready to see,” echoes Sangloris’s voice
.

She’d thought they were dead, so this, naturally, surprises her. The rude brilliance of light and a tremendous movement create a second dissonance. Suddenly, she is no longer underwater: she is hurled through panes of shattering whiteness, then stopped, then hurled and stopped, again and again. Each pause gives her a gasping moment in which to glimpse a scene
.

S
MASH
!

A girl and a lad, both wrapped in furs and skins against the elements, stand on a hill of snow, gesturing toward the distance. Lila feels they could be brother and sister. Their tribal chatter sounds like the whine of a seal or the caw of a crow. She can’t hear most of what they say—the wind beats her spirit ears for trying. Something about north, heading north, where there are glass forests more ice than plant, and mountains like jagged glacial molars chewing at a sky as thick and white as plaster. Oh, what terrible cold must stir there! Yet that is where the brother and sister must go. North. But who are those others with them? Two men and a woman, if their statures are any indication. She feels twinges of suspicion, as if she knows the shrouded trio. Then the vision propels Lila forward again, through darkness, then light, and the winter hill and the small shadows climbing its back are erased
.

S
MASH
!

As another pane of reality shatters, she floats and twists like a wind over a deeply cracked and bleak plain of the coldest, blackest ice. Tormented eddies roar from grand white buttes, rushing under the irregular bridges of ice that arc the land and down into pits of sheer, gray doom. This is the heart of the North—the coldest place in all the world. Perhaps Magnus was born here. The brother crow and sister seal are gone; nothing could possibly live in the tearing, shearing howl that consumes this place. But something has called her there, from down in the blur of white, and she thinks she sees three black dots that could be the wandering trio from before. She’s more intrigued by the noise though: sounds like brittle glass breaking, or grinding—a hundred tons of ice, crystal, and bones. It cannot be a voice, and still it summons
her like a king’s command. Down. A force pulls her through snow flocks and crevasses, pulls her down to the earth—