Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (59 page)

She then seemed to look through the vapors to where his ghost drifted. She couldn’t see him. Such a thing was impossible—as impossible and inexplicable as the feelings of curiosity, wonder, and hope that now swelled within him. Even in this darkest of moments, she shone with glory. With her innocence and passion, she might have been soul sister to Beauregard. Magnus thought of a bird of prey soaring over black mountains, of a stream’s burble and a lion’s roar—beauty and nature, purity and pride.

The woman thrashed against her magikal restraints, and the air hummed with the reckoning force of her Will. She was a sorceress, then—a powerful one. However much she struggled, though, she couldn’t Will herself free of the weight of Arimoch’s mind. Indeed, Arimoch’s sorcery was as powerful as Magnus’s, and enabled him to change the weather with his mood. Arimoch did not want the young woman to rise, and as a result, the air respected his wish and weighed her down like a coat of lead. Arimoch’s Will created reality.

Who are you
? the king asked each of the phantoms before him.

Neither answered, though the woman shouted ferociously, “
Tai tek hei
!” (I shall not become!)

In her barking inflections, Magnus recognized echoes of many of the ancient languages he’d mastered, tongues that sounded much like the
cries of animals or birds. She was from an old tribe, then, one from the lands of the West, which he and his brother had never chosen to explore. Although he stood in a dream and could influence nothing here, Magnus reached out and placed a smoky hand over that of the struggling woman. A person’s bravery could not be determined until she faced death, and this woman was looking into her darkest fate with fury.

But Arimoch intended to break her strength. He placed his hand on the woman’s forehead, and she immediately became rigid and still. The four travelers noticed the crystal then: it had been floating unnoticed in the background between the totem-poles-of-flesh, its presence overshadowed by more captivating events. It struck them as strange even here, even in this realm of appalling strangeness—an irregular red jewel the size of a man’s chest, it was strung up on a thorny metal rack that hung between two pillars.

Arimoch walked over to the crystal, his pace measured and ritualistic. As he approached, he opened his arms wide, and the crystal’s bloody-black heart beat with a lover’s welcome. Small winds and hisses came forth from nowhere, then greater gusts, hammering dins, and languorous, grating noises. Sounds like those of a metal giant awakening from his nap of one thousand years and bursting forth from the earth surrounded the four phantoms. Something was coming. Something was being called forth from a horrible pit. Both the infernal red glow above and the radiance from the crystal intensified into a dull and smearing light.

The four could not fully make sense of what they saw. Events wavered in the undulating tear, the pointed star that had formed in the vertical space containing Arimoch and the crystal. All four phantoms sensed great winds that could tear flesh from bone, infernal temperatures, cold sweats, and gut-roiling terror. Yet each was also confronted by a different impression not received by the others.

In the shivering light, Gloriatrix watched as a gigantic tumorous fetus emerged and unfolded. Now large enough to fill her entire frame of sight, it was so grand that she tried frantically to absorb every massive, dripping detail. Bleating came from the many heads that crowded its surface—unformed skulls set with spidery patterns of unblinking black eyes. The horror babe hovered, wet and gobbed in black matter, and began unfurling a cephalopodic
network of umbilical cords, rubbery fins, veiny feelers, and tubes. Fantastic in its repulsiveness, it made her simultaneously shriek and laugh; she reached for her eyes, intending to pull them out and stop the madness.

Beauregard saw a woman: naked, jet black, and with hair that was a whirlwind of the whitest light. She was the most beautiful creature he’d ever beheld. Then she spoke, and from her mouth came the clanging din that was tearing up the chamber. He reached up to his head, hoping to rip off his ears to stop the noise.

Gustavius dropped to his knees and cowered before a mouth: a moon-sized hole ringed with cracked yellow teeth out of which poured a vomit of skittering, shapeless shadows—roaches of darkness. The wave rolled over him. It scuttled over, nibbled at, burned, and dissolved his flesh. Crazed, he clawed at himself, trying to strip himself of his new crawling skin.

The mighty Immortal was the last to fall victim to this power. He attempted to maintain a facade of royal power; the ant with the hardest carapace might escape crushing. While he did not succumb to complete madness like the others, he doubled over and retched as he was hit by the stink of tons and tons of ancient oil—fossilized, raw—flowing out of the deepest crack he could fathom. How deep? What was it that crouched there? Frantic, he thought of wells that swirled in stars. He dreamed, while waking, of slithering, wet, force coiling him, pulling him down into the endless dark. With the brunt of his Will, he fought against that pull, which, somehow, regardless of this not being real, threatened to drink his memories, his identity, his power.

In a speck, though, they remembered who and where they were. Although not even a sand had passed, they might as well have endured a decade of torment, considering how debilitated they felt. What had they just witnessed? What was the atrocity that had touched them? This experience inside an ancient memory had somehow felt more real than it should have. Magnus, who’d experienced the Black Queen’s venom and knew the fever of corruption firsthand, understood that whatever they’d borne witness to was even wickeder than she. The four were unable then to speak of what they’d experienced, for there was suddenly more to see.

The crimson brightness ebbed, the tears in reality closed, and Arimoch now walked back to the altar where the woman lay. He held in his hands
a grayish cup, filled with a substance darker than ink, darker than the lightless reaches of space. As the four watched, mesmerized, the horror king and his treacle of evil neared the woman for whom it was intended. Arimoch was going to feed this unholy substance to his victim—for what purpose, they could not yet say. But Gloriatrix had drawn threads between the hair-clippings on the stone, the bald monsters in the audience, the Will of this woman, and the behavior of the Mortalitisi. Perhaps they didn’t intend to end her, but to remake her in their image, as one of their ghastly flock. Gloriatrix, a woman who had scorned pity save for the occasion on which she had secretly saved her granddaughter—the single act of kindness of her life—wished she could help this woman.

Alas, there would be no salvation for the saint upon the altar. She was to drink the milk of darkness. She was to become Mortalitisi. Arimoch held the chalice aloft and looked up and around to the leering creatures on the benches. They communed in the unspeaking way, smiling and showing their teeth, all sharpened for the eating of meat. Once it was time, Arimoch lowered the chalice, and the woman on the bone slab sat up, obeying his Will. She extended her hands and took the chalice. The four phantoms noticed a fire of rage in her eyes; as if she were gathering her strength for some final desperate attempt. Though it would never come, and Arimoch nodded, bringing the chalice to her lips. Tears ran down her face as she drank.

Arimoch closed his eyes and communed with the Mortalitisi watchers and surely, too, with the darkness that had taken her.

But she hadn’t swallowed, realized Gloriatrix, who rarely missed a feint. Although the woman had taken in the draught, she held it in her throat as if she were a vulture. She wept, but her tears were called forth not by sorrow, but by the agonizing effort of clenching the devouring, evil treacle in her esophagus. Then, in the speck that lay between being consumed and remaining herself, in the flickering moment when Arimoch’s arrogant self-absorption had bent his armor to expose a perfect chink—a time when his magik, his Will, was at peace and her telekinetic restraints were weak—the woman struck.

Magik was emotion. Magik was life. The sainted one screamed. A burbling black puke sprayed from her mouth—a vomit that tried to pull itself
with sticky tendrils back into her throat. With her scream came her spell, and her Will was made manifest: a spear of white, sizzling sunshine burst forth from her head as she turned it skyward, and she sloshed herself in sick. She could have aimed her magik at Arimoch’s head, as he was right in front of her. However, the travelers didn’t question her judgment. They watched as the star-spraying javelin of lightning tossed by the Will of a true hero soared high from the altar and came down upon its mark: the heart of crystal.

The heart of this empire, the four phantoms realized. Arimoch spun around in time to watch the impact, shielding himself with a lens of dark magik against the nova of purest white, the waves of fire and smoke that now irradiated the chamber. The four ghosts watched as the nameless hero grinned in defiance and then vanished in a howl of flame. They felt the world beneath them erode into ash. Amidst the shattering detonations, they heard the mortal agonies of the Mortalitisi. Bellows, thunderclaps, and groans rumbled the quickly vanishing floor with the thud of a million tidal waves: the roars of the elementals, at last unchained. An army of rabid wyrms was now loose in their master’s kingdom. The vengeance of the Green Mother had been unleashed.

There could be no hope for the Mortalitisi. Everything they’d cultivated had been destroyed in one instant by one woman, whose name they’d never know. Magnus thought of her bitter grin as the tides of fire and ruin turned golden and kind, and returned him and the other spirits to Hall of Memories.

V

It took some time for the four to be restored to themselves, to once more recognize their own forms and minds. Wounds were found on three of them: claw marks around Gloriatrix’s eyes, throbbing soreness and blood coming from Beauregard’s ears, and torn fingernails from when Gustavius had thrown his gauntlets away to scratch at his armor. Of all the travelers to the past, the king alone appeared unharmed, though inside he was tormented by what he’d experienced. The memory was too vivid, too engaging to the senses.

He glanced at the others as they examined themselves, and could arrive at no explanation for the harms they’d suffered, as he was unaware
of the apparitions each had encountered. He would have to seal off the Hall of Memories until a team of technomagikal minds could attest to its safety. In a sand, the other three had assembled their wits and bodies on the bench—sharing it equally, all needing to sit. The king remained standing, brooding and glum.

“Who was he?” whispered Beauregard.

“That was the man who came to me,” replied Magnus. “Arimoch. The man whose memories I sealed inside the hall. I see now that he was far more than he claimed.”

“Without a doubt,” said Gloriatrix.

“Who was she?” asked Beauregard.

“I know not,” replied the king.

“She was a hero,” continued the lad. “Perhaps the greatest of any age. Her sacrifice saved us from a future with those…” Monsters? Dictators? Menosians? Defilers? Nothing he could think of felt evil enough to describe what he’d witnessed.

Though Gloriatrix agreed with the lad’s sentiment, she would never admit it. Instead, she stood and straightened out her suit and hair, which had somehow become quite windblown in the unusual illusion. “Whoever she was is unimportant,” she said. “You brought me on this psychedelic nightmare to make use of my masterful deductions. We were to discover how these Mortalitisi chained their elementals; the rest of the experience is best forgotten. And I believe I have your answer, Magnus.”

“You do?” asked the king. He’d been so consumed by thoughts and impressions—that saint, her eyes, her Will—he’d not yet considered the fruits of their quest.

Gloriatrix had now finished smoothing her hair. “Rather obvious, isn’t it? The crystals. The large one, I imagine. While I have never seen technomagik or sorcery of that kind, that is what I must conclude: the crystal was what the woman shattered with her spell, and its destruction was what set the elementals free and allowed them to wreak revenge. Perhaps Brutus has some such crystal.”

“From where or how could my brother have acquired such ancient power?” replied Magnus. “With its loss, Arimoch must have been stripped
of whatever resources and relics he had or he would have raised his empire again.”

Surprisingly, in a room of quiet, pondering, royal luminaries, it was Beauregard who presented his liege with a revelation. He shot to his feet. “Amara…My friend from down south, the Keeper of Sorsetta. We chatted, she and I, before the war came to Gorgonath. She spoke quite openly to me about matters generally kept private by her order. The stone with which I freed you, my king—there are others, larger ones to which she alluded before silencing herself on the matter. I have seen what a wonderstone small enough to fit in my hand can do. Something larger could well possess the power necessary to chain an elemental.”

Magnus and his spellsong had discussed the power responsible for his liberation back in Gorgonath. Magnus had heard legends of the
Ioncrach
, these “wonderstones” that worked miracles, but he had seen none in his lifetime save for the one Beauregard had showed him after the battle: a smoky gray fragment drained of any magik it had once possessed. Sorcerers rarely used talismans, as all of their magik came from within. Such relics and foci were associated only with magikal grade schools, carnival illusionists, and faery stories about witches and vengeful sprites. They would be of no interest to a true sorcerer at the height of his powers. Unless that man were one such as Brutus, who could use magik, but not as well as his brother…

More and more, the king felt as if he were a child still figuring out his feet and words. How had he lived for so long and yet learned so little of the world? Wonderstones. Dreamers. Civilizations that had risen and fallen before his own long history had even begun. Entities that evoked madness in the strongest minds. The list of unknown things fattened every day. Each morning, he saw more clearly that he’d been mistaking contentment for achievement.