Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (104 page)

As she and Beauregard climbed a small hill, they lost sight of Gustavius, who’d just descended a mound. A moment later, Tabitha clutched her son’s arm, and the two of them reeled back as the Iron lord charged toward them. Gustavius’s shout blasted through the drizzling howl of the weather. “Back, you fools! Back to the skycarriage!”

Tabitha and her son had survived enough terror to know not to question a call of danger. Smaller and nimbler than he, they were able to match the furious racing of the Iron lord. Behind them, the land roiled with unwholesome sounds: thunder, which shouldn’t really occur in a winter storm, and noises that reminded Tabitha of gargling beasts. But from how many throats? The noise was loud enough to suggest legions. The fishy scent crept over them now, as if a wharf’s worth of gutted fish was blowing in from the East. She wouldn’t look behind them to see what caused the smell. Part of bravery was the ability to mentally retreat from madness, and she now did just that.

All around them, the storm pummeled the world: under a distorted shroud of white, they could see only figments of houses and landmarks. A sparkle lay off to the left, beyond the brown watercolor shacks. Tabitha knew it must be one of the king’s glorious skycarriages. As they hurried toward the sparkle, the storm smothering the land grew catastrophic: the wind tore in all directions and was a force against which they had to push. Something awful had come to Bainsbury. Something rotten, vile, and—or so the stink suggested—possibly dead. Most definitely, she caught the sounds of burps, half-gasps, and wheezes from a thousand throats: a horde. Although she wondered what a rotting army looked like, she stayed her course in bravery and refused to test her courage with a glance. Whatever the horde was made up of, it moved fast, nearly as fast as the three of them. The skycarriage seemed agonizingly far away.

How they reached the vessel, which had landed in one of the farmer’s meadows that rolled between split-rail fences, was a mystery, nearly a miracle. From inside the carriage, a watchman and an Ironguard shouted and waved to them. They, too, must have seen the wave that was crashing down upon Bainsbury.

Beguiled by her moment of safety, seduced by morbid curiosity, Tabitha turned. The hills were writhing and nearly black. An undulating,
dark-gray scab was spreading over the whitened-green as quickly as paint running over glass. It colored and defiled everything it touched. Blurred as they were by the storm, it took Tabitha several specks to realize that the uncountable oscillations were the movements of many forms. Every twist and shudder seemed like the spasm of a flagging, decomposed arm—or some other wiggling part of a stumbling, maggot-filled, jaw-dangling, chewed-up monster draped in seaweed that had pulled itself from the depths of the Feordhan.

“The dead!” barked Gustavius, spitting with horror and confirming Tabitha’s dread. “Get inside the craft! Now!”

“The dead?” exclaimed Beauregard, also watching as the blackish wave consumed the hills at a pace impossible to believe. Wildly, he waved his arms. “I don’t even understand what’s happening. And the people of Bainsbury! We cannot leave them! We cannot—”

Beauregard never saw the punch coming—unlike his mother, who had watched silently as the Menosian clenched his fist. In that moment, she had measured the value of her child’s life against that of others—many others—with the kind of pitilessness only a mother could possess. Tabitha prayed that her child would never learn of her decision, or that he would forgive her if he did. There was simply no way to save these people from this tsunami of death. Like a wave, it had crested and was now rolling down the valley to her home. The wave of raging, shambling shapes spat from a sea of the darkest doom would be at the nearest house in specks. Within a few sands, all of Bainsbury would be consumed by whatever unholy enemy had just shown itself. Tabitha took what felt like a long look at the churning, wavering atrocity. The scent drove her into the sterile steel skycarriage before the Menosian could decide to round her up as he had her son. The skycarriage shot away from Bainsbury.

Tabitha never made it to a seat, and was thrown around a bit in the short hallway before the vessel reached a decent altitude and steadiness. At that point, she stopped clinging to the handles built into the walls, entered the passenger chamber, and settled on a couch near the feet of her groaning child. Surprisingly, the Iron lord had put a cushion on his thigh for her son to rest his head on. A further shock came when he applied a black satin cloth, with white-knuckled pressure, to her son’s throbbing
nose. “It hasn’t been broken,” said the Menosian, as if that should pardon him. “I shall hold him here for a while until the bleeding stops.”

Beauregard mumbled a few words, nothing intelligible. Sands trickled by without meaning like the pellets of rain or wet snow cast upon the windows. Tabitha unlaced her son’s boots and massaged his feet as she did when he was ill or in need of comforting. This appeared to wake him, but she would have roused him herself, in case of a concussion. He jolted up, threw the rag off his face, batted at the Menosian, and then stumbled to the window. After gazing out at mist and nothingness, he pounded the glass and finally shuffled over to the other couch. There, he collapsed. He snorted blood and mucus. He looked more fearsome than fair. Indeed, as he stared at the two people opposite him, anger and sorrow cast his face in wrinkles that belied his youth.

“How could you leave those people there? To die? At the hands of…I don’t know. Evil.”

“I watched them rise out of the Feordhan,” said the Iron lord, and trembled. “The smell was what drew me, and a feeling, a sense of wickedness. I watched Evil as it rose from the Feordhan. An army of drowned souls. Barnacled, rotten, some of them burned, I believe—though I did not stay to look and linger, and set off running. They could have walked beneath the water all the way from the cinders of Menos. I believe they did.” Gustavius shuddered and was done with words.

Tabitha had still to thank the Iron lord for his intervention, as she knew Beauregard would have charged off thinking to save the day. Perhaps by helping to explain, she could repay some of his charity. “Not everyone can be saved, Beauregard. As much as you wish it, as much as you try. It is not war without death. In this battle, the death, the doom…It’s only now beginning. Come sit with me.”

Tabitha pondered wars, hordes of the dead, and how small she and her light of a child were in this great darkness. With no great solace to offer, she closed her eyes, listened to the rain, appreciated even this bitter moment of safety with her son, and prayed they would have at least a few more days together. Eventually, Beauregard, sniffling and unsure, came to sit beside his mother. They did not speak, though they were together.

XIX

A TRICK OF FATE

I

“I
feel as if we’ve been here countless times before,” whispered Thackery.

No one was certain what he meant, but this surely was a strange place. The sorcerer, Adam, Morigan, and Caenith stood apart from the clusters of warriors gathered in an antechamber of crystal and humming silence. The companions had learned this was the bailey before the Purgatorium. It was the heart and bowels of Eatoth, a place that created an ear-throbbing impression of great depth and made one believe in the myths of damnation and enlightenment as preached by the Lakpoli. Ahead, wards and legionnaires assembled quietly in phalanxes—their weapons and stares gleamed with readiness. Aside from Longinus, who’d been reassigned to the company, the rest of Eatoth’s Faithful maintained a respectful distance from the outsiders. Morigan sensed that while she and her fellows were being tolerated, they still weren’t welcome. She assumed that even a minor change would be viewed as an upheaval by people so used to a smoothly functioning, serene existence.

Morigan’s small company stood guard outside the arch and the sealed, glassy door leading into Purgatorium. Morigan’s bloodmate was at her
side. She shared his frown, his doubts, and even his position—both rested a hand upon the barrier of translucent crystal beyond which throbbed the arkstone. Like the Wolf, she doubted it was any better than a wall of paper. The Wolf had been testing its resilience with slaps of his hands, though, and it appeared to be durable—enchanted and saturated in magik, like all else in Eatoth. As hard as the material was, his father would be able to shatter it in a strike or two. Sullenly, he and Morigan looked at their companion.

“Been here before?” she asked.

“I thought you hadn’t heard me,” replied Thackery. “I feel as if we’ve already been in this situation. Peril. Doom. Standing around waiting for tragedy to strike. Another thin edge of hope along which we must walk. Remember, we always find our balance on that precipice. We always make the journey. We shall survive whatever comes.” Thackery rose from his hunch and stretched his legs. Adam stirred from his sulk and came over to his companions. The two fellows and Morigan gathered and smiled for the first time since they’d descended to Purgatorium to await the coming of the mad king. Hourglasses had passed while restlessness frayed their nerves. Thackery’s hope was a tonic for each of their private despairs.

“It’s all coming together,” he continued, almost cheery. “Once we’ve repelled this madman and subdued him, we can cast his demon out. Assuming, of course, that the Keeper Superior stays true to her word and allows us—well, you—to handle their precious arkstone.” Now that the company of heroes realized a piece of the corrupted Dreamer lay just in the other chamber, Morigan would soon know everything about their foe: the Dreamer’s deepest, darkest truths. “We are ready, my friends. Today will be our moment of triumph.”

Inside his bloodmate, Caenith’s beast growled and paced. While the others engaged in wistful chatter about Mouse and whatever antics their missing companions might be experiencing, Morigan reached out to her bloodmate.

My Wolf? You fear this moment, don’t you?

I know not if I have the strength to conquer him. I know not if I should be here or out on the field of battle
.

She understood his anxiety. They knew very little of Brutus’s plan. How would he enter the city? How would he—or his army—circumvent the wall of pounding water, or the flooding of the catacombs? Why couldn’t she sense anything in the currents of Fate—anything aside from the bodily beat of her fear? If she dwelled on the possibilities, she’d drive herself mad. Morigan didn’t insult her bloodmate by attempting to placate him with suggestions that Brutus wouldn’t reach the antechamber. Brutus needed the treasure behind them to complete his conquest of Geadhain—that was why they were stationed here. Besides, the wondrous skycarriages of Eatoth could ferry them nearly anywhere in a speck. Brutus might possess speed and ease of movement, but his horde did not—if there were to be a frontline, the Wolf could be on it in sands.

My Wolf, you are not alone. The Keeper Superior is safe, under more guard than we ourselves could give her, and we are close to the only place we know Brutus will strike
. At her feet lay a set of great shackles made of crude black iron. The chains looked simple and old-fashioned, but they produced a jolt of power when held against bare skin. Morigan kicked the feliron snake and her companions jumped before realizing there was no threat and returning to their conversation.
Once he has been subdued, these chains should work to bind him and his power until he can be purged of the Black Queen and judged for his crimes
.

Do you truly believe that he can be chained? How can one chain fire and madness?

Once, Morigan would’ve doubted that even technomagik forged by the Keepers of Pandemonia could bind the king—but earlier on, before they had assembled for war, Ankha had insisted it could. When the Keeper Superior had shown him the shackles, the Wolf had huffed in disbelief and slipped one manacle around his wrist, then abruptly slumped to the floor as if sapped of all strength. The feeling of nausea and lassitude he’d suffered was extraordinary.
Reverse etherocurrent distributors
, Ankha—slightly gloating—had called the technomagikal witchery. Then she’d ordered one of the wards to aid the lethargic Wolf in removing the relic, which were harmless to handle, other than being quite tingly, so long as you weren’t the one in the manacle. She’d explained that the technomagik intensified and redirected power away from itself. Essentially, when clasped on a
man’s wrists, the bindings turned him into a grounded conduit, a lightning rod that discharged magik—his own magik—into the earth. Whether the shackles would affect a full-blooded Immortal as they had his son, whether they’d even be able to restrain a raging giant long enough to place the shackles on, were questions that would be answered only when they confronted Brutus himself. Ankha insisted that the distributors would function as desired and would, through molecular reorganization (which only Thackery understood, slightly), fit a wrist of any size, too, when the time came.

However, these worries were less pressing to the Wolf than thoughts of encountering his father in the first place. As his mind wended through these tangles, Morigan—creeping about her bloodmate’s head, not entirely intentionally—sensed the root of his fear.
Ah. I see, my Wolf. It’s not the war itself, but what will come after it that concerns you most
.