Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (13 page)

For over a thousand years, the grand watchtowers of Carthac, battlements left over from a forgotten war against the world, had stood under the
assault of the Blue Mother’s catastrophic waves. The Lordkings, migrant Menosians, even more corrupt than their maleficent countrymen of the era, had built these towers when once Carthac’s people bowed to their will. The Lordkings were all dead now—neither Lords nor Kings as they’d wished, and ruling only the earth cast over their burned remains. Gazing from afar upon Carthac, its bastion of salted stone, its sky-scraping pillars driven like pikes into a sheer plummet of rock, brought any observer to humbled awe. Many outsiders wondered how even so sturdy-seeming a wall could endure in the face of the wrathful elements, how it could protect a city of brick houses, which were as delicate as little gingerbread creations. Such speculations, though, were bandied about only by those who were not Carthacians.

Indeed, as far as the people of Carthac were concerned, there existed no livelier a place than the City of Waves. Anywhere less clamorous or dangerous, they thought, must be a sad place to live. To the Carthacians—men and women white with salt, pale of hair, blue of stare, and as tempestuous as their climate—a nearness to death defined life, making laughter bolder, music and wine sweeter, and lovemaking a bliss fit for kings. In Carthac, where drowning and doom were the order of the day, mere survival had a special reverence worthy of celebration. Come nightfall, the city became a carnival of lights and sounds that rivaled even the festivals of Willowholme—and its bravado hushed the pummeling of the sea.

II

A rhythm different from the beat of celebration echoed in the stuffy chamber of a barnacled, tired inn that eve. It was music of man and woman: their gasps, their grunts, the slapping together of their wet thighs and stomachs. Erik was a powerful lover, the fallen queen had discovered. After her assault, she had never thought she would touch a man again—or let one touch her. Still, this had been her choice. Like his father, the fallen hammer of the king was a storm of his own kind, one that drove deep lightning into Lila’s loins. His whisky kisses roved over her flesh like the black, fulminous clouds he personified. When he wasn’t clasping her wrists or twining their fingers together, his gritty hands coursed like stone over her caramel flesh. Often, during their extensive exercise, they slowed
and changed positions. They stood and stumbled around; he would pump, while she stuck to his body like a spider. Later, they would each stand and take turns bowing like slaves while they ate—or swallowed—their master’s sex.

There was no end to their deviancy, and neither the queen nor the hammer thought of any of their contortions as lovemaking. Their sex was torment given form; it was their punishment. Not unlike the veiled priests of the City of Waves, who flogged themselves to purge their minds of the sins they’d heard, Lila and Erik were sinner, confessor, and forgiver to each other. They were the queen of Eod and the hammer of the king no more. Their titles they had left in the ash under the Iron Valley. Now he was Erik, and she was Lila. They were the murderers of thousands, bound together by criminality and guilt, which, when shared, became an intoxicating and vile elixir, an impulse as grand as love.

Sometimes when they made not love, but loathing, a tear would threaten their numbness, a hitched breath of Lila’s would tremble on the verge of becoming a sob. In these instances, Erik would hold her face as if she were a child about to be lectured, though never too hard, for he knew of the brutality of her rape. If it was his turn for weakness, rare as that was, Lila was less kind. She would claw her nails into whatever hunk of his hard back, buttock, or chest she could reach, usually drawing blood. Always, her violence acted as an aphrodisiac for this man drunk on self-punishment. Whenever she hurt him, he would increase the vicious tempo of his hips and the rude exploration of her body with his fingers. While she took little pleasure in it—except for the moments his hands tenderly caressed her raw nipples during the act—he occasionally drove his fat sausage of a prick into the place from which she shat. She remembered a similar violation from Magnus, but this was different, for she wanted it; she wanted to be punished. When they were alone in their squalid room, where rats scraped at the walls, the sheets reeked of month-old sweat, and the stink of a fish-market wafted in through the shuttered, rattling windows from the streets below, there was no hedonistic perversion in which they did not wallow.

They had become monsters to themselves and to their world.

They had no other roles to play, no more kindness to pretend to feel, no other recourse. They had attempted suicide when they first arrived in
Carthac. Facing a red dawn, they’d held hands, intending to throw themselves from the ancient salt-wall—but neither had had the strength to take that ultimate leap. Were they cowards? Perhaps. But perhaps what honor they once possessed, the faint ghost of virtue that wept in their hearts, had kept them alive to see them punished for their crimes.

Tonight, after they’d finished their session of teasing and torment, Lila lay in the crook of Erik’s armpit. Resting her tawny head upon his great scarred chest, she played—not romantically, only absently—with the curled hair around his dark nipples. Once more, without lust, she looked up and pondered his hard, square face, his unruly beard, his broken nose (which matched his slightly curved, cumbersome, and still erect prick), and the dark jewels of his eyes as he watched the creaking ceiling. One of Erik’s hands cupped her breast, rubbing it with the same apathy that she expressed while caressing his stone-hard thigh with a silky leg. Satisfied by their refinement of the art of sex without love, Lila remembered the night the dam had finally broken, and all their anger, pain, and desire had transformed into a new kind of suffering.

Hourglasses before, angry that they could not end themselves, Erik had left her in their dingy quarters: chipped commode, stained sheets, buckled bed, and an air of mothballs, fish guts, and mouse turds. Far from fitting arrangements for a queen, but by then she was only a woman. She’d made peace with that devaluation many weeks past
.

So she’d fluffed the sheets, washed herself in a rusted tub, then had put on a flimsy, cheap undergarment and slipped into bed. The outside world had sounded merry. She’d heard harpists and clapping and a murmur of conversation that tugged at her heart because it was mostly laughter. She hadn’t been able to recall the last time she’d laughed; it seemed inconceivable that she had ever known how. She’d assumed Erik was among those celebrating, or drinking at least. She’d imagined him sitting in the shadows, dour as an old warrior at a ballet, and telling the women who might approach him, “Begone, wench.”

He had been drinking a lot in those days. All down the long road through Fairfarm, particularly while traveling the sotted shores of Riverton and on the ferry ride across the Feordhan, her companion had developed his fondness for the taste she had introduced to him—liquor. Even in the Salt Forest,
he had carried two waterskins and drunk from the one causing more urination and dehydration than his own wisdom had dictated. Aye, he had sulked and drunk away what no amount of poison—save fatal venom—could have smudged from the mind. She had preferred the simpler remedy of sleep, which, even if haunted with screams, explosions, and Magnus’s pale face, had been a deep enough void that she’d recalled only hints of terror. Mostly dark and forgetful, sleep had been her only escape from what she had done. She’d closed her eyes and had been unconscious almost instantly
.

Heavy footsteps had roused her from a nightmare of burned, broken, bone-jutting hands pulling her into a pit of rubble. She’d felt relieved to see Erik leaning over the bed, swaying from drink. However, she might have welcomed an assassin and his blade with the same sighing acceptance. “You’re drunk,” she’d said
.

“I am.”

They’d broken and pissed on the rules of civility by murdering a nation, and she hadn’t felt herself in a position to judge him. She had wondered only whether or not she should give him the side of the bed nearest to the lavatory door. He had not become ill often; sickening him required as much alcohol as it would take to bring down a bull. But when the drink had sickened him, he’d heaved until blood ran from his mouth. She’d wanted not to play nurse and bucket-serf all evening. “Should we switch sides?” she’d asked
.

Erik had performed a one-legged dance pulling off his boots. He’d struggled out of his shirt, then had stared at the crumpled pile of his belongings on the floor. A panting shadow, he’d neither turned to her nor answered. Ignoring her had already become habitual for Erik; for him to acknowledge even half of what she said was miraculous. She had figured that in order to cope with his grief, in order to avoid strangling her in rage, he had decided to block out the poison of her voice. Sometimes, she’d seen the flicker in his eyes of a passion she’d taken for bloodlust when he’d stared at her. It must have been murder he’d felt for he could not possibly have still loved her. Once, flecks of blue had dotted his irises, but his corruption had since turned them black
.

As he’d seethed in silence, in the thin, dusky light of the room, she’d noticed the corded muscle of his back and the gnarled flesh upon his broad shoulders, wounds he’d sustained when he’d saved her from Menosian terrorists in the
Faire of Fates. She had not witnessed beauty in some time, had become almost unable to recall what it looked like, now that her march through life had become somber. But Erik’s scars had beauty. The scratches left by shrapnel and sorcery had healed imperfectly, leaving bold white lines on his brown flesh—a writing almost as fine as the oldest scripts housed in the Court of Ideas
. What would this book of flesh say if its scars were words
? she’d wondered
.

“You’re staring at me,” he’d said, turning around. His eyes had glowed with a beautiful darkness
.

Maybe tonight he’ll strangle me and end this sick charade of life,
she’d thought. A sacrifice like that would have been within his code of honor, and would have allowed him to live on and absorb the guilt of her murder into the already pulverizing weight he carried. Thoughts of beauty, suffering, and blood had shaken a bit of prose loose in her head—something once read in the Court of Ideas. She had found herself mumbling the words, “Iron song, blood song, burning in my veins. Iron song, blood song, heathen woe my name. A gash of glory, and ye decry. Fear deep the love of death, have I…”

“What is that?”

“A poem. I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud.”

“You did,” he’d said, climbing onto the mattress, unsettling everything with his mass before flopping on his back; he’d reeked of sweat and whiskey. Staring at the roof, he’d asked, “What does it mean?”

“
Ode in Blood
is a love song, believe it or not,” she’d replied. “A tribute to the beauty and allure of battle.”

“Beauty is a lie,” he’d hissed, his manner that of an angry beast
.

She would have been a fool to stick her finger into his cage. Gradually, as though their old decorum had been part of a fantasy she’d once read, their demeanor between each other had hardened into the coldest ice. Erik had begun to say anything he wanted, to act with the brashness of a young man, and to behave with often dangerous violence. Never toward her, though her safety had come at the expense of a bloodied, toothless inebriate or a pack of groaning, crippled men that Erik had left somewhere. As darkly as his temper might have manifested, as beclouded as he might have become from drink, never, ever had he harmed her. She’d wondered if the shade of the honorable man he had once been had stopped him at the brink of rage. Daring to push him while he had been under the influence of darkness, in that moment
she’d managed to coax forth the man he had hidden, by touching him on his shoulder
.

Erik had snatched her dainty hand, rolled onto his side, and his anger had vanished. His rage had risen into a different kind of fire as he had beheld the golden queen wearing a shift made as thin as paper by her sweat, her curvaceous figure rendered in soft moonlight. She’d felt his eyes wandering over her hips, her bounteous breasts. She’d felt him dotting her long neck with phantom kisses. His desire to touch her candy-red lips and ruffle her golden curls had become as powerful as a vibration. “Beauty is a lie,” he’d repeated
.

She’d waited, trapped in pounding, drawn air, for something to happen; she hadn’t been sure what. Slowly, he’d taken the hand he’d claimed and had pressed it to his hammering heart. He’d left her hand there, and she’d trailed it, lower, to the throbbing snake that had wanted to burst from his pants. “Will you lie to me?” he’d asked
.

Noble even under a carnal spell, he had offered her a choice—to remove her hand, rather than adding another layer of damnation to their souls. If only refusing temptation had been so easy, she would have never listened to the whispers of Death and leveled the Iron City. She’d added one more sin to the pyre of torment and loathing as she’d freed all of Erik’s meaty weight from his pants. She had never touched another man’s hardness, save for the cold icicle of the Everfair King. Erik’s meat had been incredibly hot, and different: the crown of it wider, the rod of it squatter, the balls heavy. Erik and Lila had shuddered from her exploration of his flesh, then had separated for a moment to shuffle out of their garments. The first thing he’d done, as they’d rolled together, was to press them close, so close: hot to hot—which she’d never felt with a man, as Magnus had been only cold. As if a woman on fire, her shame had peaked with the flames rushing along her skin. She had longed to touch him; she had wanted to press caramel to dark brown skin for more years than she’d known
.

Staring into his gaze, she’d seen how deeply she had corrupted him, how powerfully and entirely her love had bewitched this man. Memories—flashes of wood rafters and twirling shafts of light, even distant scents of hay—had come over her as he’d stroked the side of her face. In tune with him, her fingers had played over the rippled tissue on his back. Had that been the instant he’d realized he loved her and would give up everything for her, including his
honor and soul? What then had this moment meant for her? Redemption? Realization? She hadn’t been able to resolve that question, for tenderly, he’d entered her mouth with his tongue and slipped his erection into her womanhood. A perfect fit in each place, like oiled chocolate into molten caramel. Sheer delicacy and bliss, she’d felt, and the revulsion and heat in her body had consumed her in a violent, shuddering fever
.