Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (105 page)

Yes. My mother asked me to forgive him. I do not know how to forgive one so wicked
.

Morigan petted his warm furry chest, then kissed it. She took a long sniff of his wood-and-spice scent. She felt a calm sense of assurance that they’d emerge victorious from any war. She loved him too much to fail.
First, we must best him: only your strength and speed can do that. You must be the one to chain your father, and in that I see a shade of justice. From there, if we succeed, we shall discover our course
.

And if he cannot be chained?

You know the answer to that, my Wolf. What we were made for, what we are capable of doing
.

We shall kill him
, they agreed.

It would be their last course of action; contemplating it, the Wolf drew his bloodmate in for an embrace. As the Sisters Three had warned, undoing an Immortal would not come without a cost: one of them might die. He wouldn’t kill his father if it meant losing her. He’d find another way. He’d beat and bloody his cursed father into such a bleating state of submission that the chains would seem a mercy. While holding Morigan, his heat and growl grew.

As emotions tended to muddle a man that was also part animal, Morigan gently ended their embrace when she felt his rage blurring
into other hotter emotions. There would be time for rolling and biting later. They had an Immortal to defeat and a vile parasite to banish from Geadhain. Now was the time.

For her bees were finally now abuzz in the hive of Morigan’s mind: a moment of Fate was approaching. An electric tingle passed into her bloodmate, and they stiffened and leaned forward like dogs catching a scent. They stared toward the end of the antechamber. Wards and legionnaires formed a sea of bowing heads as a figure approached. The waves of men parted and revealed a small figure in gray. In the bluish hues of the chamber, she wavered like a woman under water. Or perhaps that was a supernatural reality only the bloodmates could perceive: perhaps no others could see the shadow that dwarfed Ankha’s tiny figure or smell the sickening scent of dead love: burnt roses and sweet decay. This was not the Keeper Superior: it was the shade of the Dreamstalker, wearing her skin.

“Who’s that?” asked Thackery, straining.

“The Keeper Superior,” replied Adam.

“No,” hissed Morigan. “It’s Amunai!”

“Foul witch!” roared the Wolf.

Over the murmuring discord, they heard Amunai laugh, then speak—her spiteful voice hollow, haunting, as if cast across a chasm of screams. Her buzzing words, the utterances of a witch, could be understood by all in the chamber. “Your perceptions are keen, Daughter of Fate and her dog. But you’ve misplaced your forces. The Sun King isn’t here.”

“
Na stamat
í
ch t
i
an
! (Seize her!)” cried Longinus, evidently the sharpest soldier in the room. Stumbling legionaries, obviously confused by this Keeper who was somehow not their Keeper and seeing none of the taint of possession that the bloodmates could, took too long to react. The warriors closest to the Keeper leaped and reached for her, but she twisted away and vanished in a wrinkle of black smoke. Somehow, she’d moved as Morigan could, but even faster. The bloodmates next heard her laughing
behind
them, on the other side of the sealed barrier. A great crash and sparking symphony arose from the frame of the arch they’d been guarding, and Longinus and their four companions moved back. The phosphorescent blue veins that lit the antechamber flickered, and the smoke of broken technomagik billowed forth.

After waving their hands through the clouds of singed electrical fumes, the companions quickly determined they were whole and then rushed the door. No amount of prying and grunting from the Wolf or any of the others budged the door upward—as it was supposed to slide—inward, or in any other direction. From the tunnel beyond came another laugh from the spirit that had taken Ankha’s body.

“That door is warded with every magik my people know,” said the Dreamstalker. “Rituals older than the first age of the Immortal Kings. It cannot be broken by the son of Brutus, or even by Brutus himself. Only a Keeper can pass through Purgatorium’s gate. Perhaps you can follow me, Daughter of Fate. Come then, Morigan, if you are brave enough to take the leap. See if you can stop me.”

The Wolf roared and slammed the door with his shoulder; it didn’t even tremble. Amunai cackled, the sound echoing away. In the smoke and commotion, they had mere specks in which to execute a plan, a sand or more before the arkstone would be taken. How had they been so duped? Where was Brutus? His army? Subterfuge, not might, was the thorn that had crippled the mighty giant of Eatoth.

“Go after her!” snarled the Wolf. “Catch that witch, and carve her up with your blade of promise. I care not if her vessel must die; the arkstone would be a far greater loss. I know another way, a slower way, to join you. Go now, and I shall be by your side soon.” As he barked his orders, the Wolf half-transitioned into his other self: his eyes clouded and glowed silver, his hands warped into partial claws. He gripped the side of the arch and began to scale the wall. “Adam, Thackery, keep these fools safe while we defend their city.”

Neither the Wolf nor Morigan remained to watch how their friends—and the lone sensible legionnaire—dealt with the mob of wards and legionnaires that now charged toward Purgatorium’s door. In a sterling dazzle, Morigan vanished, and the Wolf speedily clawed his way upward and into the ventilation shaft he’d previously used. The hunt was on.

II

After a dash through Dream, Morigan appeared in a whirlwind of silver light. She stood inside a cavernous chamber that trapped the dark weight of the earth under a film of glass.
Fragile
, she thought,
much like Eatoth’s
greatness, which could be undone by pulling a single pin
. The rest of the awesome technomagikal splendor of this sanctum she disregarded, concentrating instead on the pillar of blue starlight—again trapped in glass—and the dark figure that fumed shadow before it.

Morigan pulled out her promise dagger. She took one tortured moment to think. In times of war, morality was an indulgence. On the battlefield, there were winners and losers, the living and the dead. No other distinctions could be made. It was unfortunate, but unavoidable: the Keeper Superior must die if this invading spirit were to be cast out. Morigan felt no great compassion for the wicked sister, as she’d driven Amunai to seek the Black Queen’s evil grace. Perhaps a death sentence for both sisters would be fair.

Morigan took a breath, then stepped into and out of Dream once more. She swung as she glimmered back into the world, and aimed down with such murderous force that whatever her blade met would encounter a blood-fountaining end. Her murderous howl became a scream as she fell to her knees and her dagger struck the crystal floor. The floor remained unmarked, but her assault caused her hand and wrist to shiver with pain. Morigan pounced up, feral, and glared around the chamber.

Amunai snickered from afar—she was now nearly back where Morigan had been. “Daughter of Fate. How special you believe yourself to be. You’re an instrument, a weapon—as you have proven through your attempts to murder me. You’re as much a hound of war as your bloodmate.”

Morigan shrieked and danced into and out of Dream again. She was certain she’d slice the witch this time. Again, she swung blindly into the air. From another safe vantage point, hundreds of strides away, Amunai laughed at her derisively. “Look at you, crude and clawing like an angry cat in a sack. You cannot touch me in the real world, where elements rule! I was the Keeper of Aesorath! The Lady of the Winds. North, South, East, and West all whispered their secrets to me. Our sages had mastered the mysteries of flight before wise men of the West even dreamed they might, one day, fly. We
invented
what you primitives revere as the impossible art of translocation: we sang to the wind and it carried our atoms from one place to the next in an instant. You have no idea what power I possess! I am the wind of the underworld. I blow where I choose as freely as Death.
In Dream, you might be faster, wilier, better aware of which paths to take. But this is my world. My domain. You cannot touch me in the flesh. I am gone, like a breeze, before you can even think of trying.”

“My bloodmate will be here in a moment; you should not test his speed,” spat Morigan.

“More meaningless threats.” The shadow woman flickered about the chamber, leaving trails of black smoke. Amunai gloated, her lunatic laughter resounding in the space like the wails in a funhouse of horror: it was magnified as her shadows appeared and vanished faster than the echo of sound. “I shall thank him, too, when he arrives. For you have done what I could not: unmake Eatoth. As this city falls, I want you to know—and suffer from the knowledge—that
you
have destroyed it.”

“Stop your wicked lies!” screamed Morigan.

Slowly, the many wisps of darkness stilled, and the apparitions faded. Now there was only one distant shadow that mocked her. “Oh, but you have. When I realized how strong you were—your mind, your power—and how that would interfere with my aims, I knew your strength was an opportunity. How does the mouse defeat the scorpion? She leads the scorpion to a pool of water, where it sees and strikes at a reflection. The mouse lets the scorpion defeat itself. That is what I have done with you, Daughter of Fate.

“Keepers are the cornerstones of their cities. Their astonishing Wills hold all magik and order in their civilizations together. We are chosen for our Will, and for our mental fortitude against suggestion. We are chosen because we cannot be tainted. We cannot be influenced. Our minds can never be breached. Ankha was one of the greatest Keepers. Her wall of Will could not be broken. I could not reach her with my whispers. Yet you…Daughter of Fate…You shattered her wall. You drew out her weakness. You filled her with doubt. Through the door you opened in her mind, at last I could enter her. When I say that Eatoth falls because of you, I tell no lie.”

“No…” muttered Morigan, spinning, though the rush of her bloodmate’s anger kept her from falling into a faint. “I refuse to listen to your deceptions. I know what I have seen: the city of Eatoth in flames, the mad king himself standing in the ruins. This is some illusion or trick of yours.
That is all you possess: lies.” In a shimmer of silver light, Morigan sped down the river of Dream, before emerging from the grayness and swinging her blade at a furl of laughing blackness. She missed, again.

Morigan turned toward Amunai’s fading laughter. She saw the specter hovering near the glass tube that held the fragment of the divine. “Daughter of Fate,” said Amunai. “I am good at tricks, about this you are right. I have challenged even Charazance, the Dreamer of Chance, with my latest gambit. For I have deceived not only you, but Fate itself.”

Morigan trembled. Her bees flew wildly in her skull, their stingers piercing the matter behind her eyes. Visions made her stumble and clench her head. A city in flames. Amunai whispering into the ear of a horrible shadow: Brutus. An army marching through a blasted desert. How could none of this be true? She’d seen the future herself.

“Fate is only possibility,” shouted Amunai, impassioned by her triumph. “If we speak of something enough, if we generate enough Will and unified purpose, then what
could be
becomes what likely
will be
. That is why, instead of sending Brutus to Eatoth, I sent him to Intomitath. I could have sent him to Ceceltoth, too. I wasn’t sure to which place he should march his army. I simply knew that I must deviate from all that he and I had planned. I had to surprise myself—in doing so, I would surprise even you.

“Do you know how I decided which of the great cities to assault? I drew straws. Only a few hourglasses ago, to maintain the suspense. A future based on chance! Even now, Brutus and our army of those reborn in fire and Zionae’s dark Will move to subdue Intomitath. Who knows if he will win? It would mean another fragment of Zionae’s ark, should he succeed. Nonetheless, it doesn’t matter. For Brutus will survive regardless of the casualties of his army, and I shall have the arkstone—perhaps even a pair of them. You have been outplayed, Daughter of Fate. You and your filthy dog of a lover. After so much heroism and sacrifice, you and he have lost. Fate and your own arrogance have been your undoing.”

Glass shattered. The sapphire gleam of the sun that had been trapped behind magik and glass since the dawn of Eatoth was now free. In the blinding glare, Amunai faded to a blue shadow. Growling, fighting the cacophony of silver blackouts and fragmented prophecies in her head,
Morigan tripped over herself to reach that shadow. Fate was furious with her—images spun and stabbed at Morigan like a flock of swords. She had to reach Amunai. One step into Dream, and perhaps she could make it. Morigan called upon the sum of her Will, her love, her determination, and her tie to the roaring Wolf of fire in her heart, and she leaped. Perhaps something else roared, too—she felt a wind before she became one herself.

She soared across the chamber in a scintillation of magik, and she and another snarling wind—the Wolf, who had just dropped from the ceiling—struck the possessed Keeper Superior in a twin bolt of fury. The explosion of power hurled Ankha’s body high into the air, then down to the ground. The twin winds moved with her, ravaging her: claws and dagger repeatedly plunged into whimpering flesh.

Once the two had struck their mark, sands slowed enough to allow understanding. Entwined in the murderous embrace of the bloodmates, the Keeper Superior wheezed her last breath.

Leaving her promise dagger in the glistening abdomen of the Keeper Superior, Morigan crawled away. She couldn’t look at the corpse, which resembled a sputtering, dying fish. Even though Ankha was dead, the nerves of her body hadn’t yet stilled. The lights in the chamber performed a dance like lightning—erratic, flashing, and blue—and Morigan heard a rumble that she imagined was a thunderous hammer of judgment. When Morigan brought her hands to her face and accidentally wiped her cheeks with the Keeper Superior’s blood, she couldn’t summon any more of her rage.