Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (58 page)

As she and the other ghosts drifted lower, closer to the bases of the bone towers, she caught sight of winding arrangements that spun outward from the massive towers like the layers of a fossilized shell. Despite their horror, they felt a sense of awe that men had built an empire so grand and monstrous. The Iron Queen knew that a civilization such as this could not have been built in mere decades. Even with their magik, the Mortalitisi and their bone-grinding artisans must have needed centuries to produce this empire that predated all other known cultures.

Gloriatrix’s head whirred with questions and suppositions.
From where had the Mortalitisi knowledge come?
Gloriatrix wondered. At the time this remarkable culture had flourished, the kings had been wandering with and amongst the savages of Central Geadhain…How had these diabolical geniuses established supremacy during an age when most of the world had still barely mastered the secrets of fire? The king had been right to bring her into this past. There was a mystery here. She tasted the sweet blood of it in her ghostly mouth along with the rain.

G
UROOOOH
!

Something gargantuan and wailing blew through them, flapping slow, leathery wings, and sending their ghosts into a spiral. They spun and spun. Sheets of lightning startled them, and once more they were twirled by the flying, fleshy steam engine. It had tubes of meat, mouths, tentacles, and rubbery membranes stretched between bony autopods. Gloriatrix knew not what else to call it but
Mallum Eruca
—caterpillar of evil. As her spin slowed to a steady descent, she saw a swarm of the creatures weaving through the red skies above.

Although now numb to fear, she was nevertheless unnerved by the sound of the keening of thousands of dying slaves, a noise that was growing louder and louder. All the tribes on this side of Geadhain must have been rounded up, bound in chains, and then lined up in front of presses and conveyor belts in the mortal-mortar factories. Gloriatrix wondered if the tribes were forced to breed so that they might continuously feed the Mortalitisi empire with the flesh and sacrifice it needed for its power. What was it that Magnus had said? About the essence, the extract, of death
that the Mortalitisi coveted? That was it—he’d stressed that it was unusually potent. So potent a resource, she figured, could well be capable of raising a million tall towers, of binding elementals. What they needed to learn, however, was how it was that all this had been lost.

Bone buildings now came into focus. Some were conical, others squat and square. Gloriatrix saw structures like giant eggs with cracks in them that glowed with red light. As her spirit-wind floated over these hatcheries of horror, the gristliest of cries confirmed these were indeed the factories she’d imagined. Gloriatrix peeked inside one as they floated past, but couldn’t discern much beyond gleams of red light and hints of movement. Crystal? Metal? She couldn’t tell.

She could, however, now better see the mortar of which the Mortalitisi empire was made: a papier-mâché of white paste and jutting bits in which traces of remains could be glimpsed. An intact skull grinned at her as her wind caressed the curved shell of the hatchery. Then the wind swept them up once more and sent them speeding along the great egg’s curve so fast that its details blurred, before depositing them into a street.

Immediately, a shadow strode directly into them on all fours. Gloriatrix was able to stifle a scream, but the king’s foppish knight gave a cry as the monstrosity lumbered through and past them. If she and her fellows had possessed bodies, it would surely have crushed them. As the dust kicked up by its passage subsided, she studied one of its stomping feet: three toed, about the size of a tree stump. She couldn’t crane her spirit-neck around to follow the creature with her gaze, and had time to note only its swaying armored body that was fused with plates of hard bone, and the lashing shadows that flailed upon its back as it moved farther away. It bleated like a sea king, and other colossi answered in the red mist. But it was not the queerest of the terrors in the street.

Wandering in packs, one of which followed the trail of the colossus, were things that looked like men. However, as the things shambled closer, she could see that their skin was loose and quivering, that patches of it had been roughly stitched together. Fumes of black sorcery leaked out through their eyes and the seams of their sewn-up bodies, forming a lingering black exhaust around each pack. While this made it difficult for Gloriatrix to clearly make out anything below their waists, from what she
could tell, these un-men had no genitals. Those who were un-women had deflated, raisiny flops for breasts. The things’ mouths were sewed closed; their eyes, too, she realized. Sight and speech were apparently unnecessary for creatures stripped of their individuality and sexuality. These must be worker drones, balloons inflated with dark Will, servants of a make far more efficient than Menos’s reborn.
How clever
, she thought.
Not an ounce of flesh wasted. A person’s skin itself turned into a slave. I suppose in a cannibalistic, all-consuming society, measures must be taken to fully exploit one’s resources
. Not as interested in the horror as she, Magnus Willed them along.

Agog with sick wonder, they floated down the streets paved in slabs of bone-crete. Gloria was struck by the lack of evidence of technomagikal machinery. Could all this have been made through the labor of the puppet-men and the four-legged gargantuan beasts whose wriggling, humped backs she saw moving in the fog? Through sheer omnipotent Will and the extract generated by generations of blood sacrifice? There were no skycarriages, no obvious waterways or sewers—although the reek of excrement poured from the small, cubed houses, which had no apparent access points or doorways and only slits to admit air and light. Occasionally, dirty fingers poked through these openings, and whimpering lips were pressed against them. Sometimes a whole arm pushed through, desperately reaching for freedom, only to be snapped off by a silently drifting pack of skin-golems. At times, she thought she could hear snatches of bittersweet songs, prayers muttered in foreign languages. Could culture have embedded itself even here, amid such madness?

Once more, Gloriatrix examined what she’d learned, thinking only as a Thule and Menosian could. Hatcheries, echoing with murder. Cubicles, to hold the meat. Workers and oxen of the most horrid sort roaming through organized areas. She hadn’t yet deduced the purpose of the conical silos, which were surely also cogs in this great machine, but the purpose of all this grisly agriculture was clear: mortal harvesting.

“One…great…farm,” she whispered, sharing her thoughts with the others.

Gloriatrix’s logic was convincing, but so hideous it was difficult for them to accept it at first. The king was perhaps most easily swayed, as
he’d already had a sense of the truth of this evil empire. He’d seen enough truth, though, and he now Willed the Hall of Memories to show him its downfall. Up they were swept, then fired back up into the sky. In a blur, they traveled spans across land and sky and approached one of the bone towers. Like divine arrows, they punctured the edifice’s sheath of writhing black flame and soared through its thick wall of crushed death, before finding themselves in a lighter, clearer space aglow with crimson light.

It was an orchestral space, as grand as the opera house in Menos, and equally as refined. Apparently, Mortalitisi social life was largely conducted inside the bone towers. The four visitors saw figures moving throughout the hall. It was difficult to tell whether they were men or women; they lacked hair or defining features, and all wore similar body-hugging, corseted black-leather garments tightly cinched with belts. Gloriatrix doubted that this leather had come from animals. The beings all wore crowns of which the Iron Queen was jealous: thorny whorls that entwined their heads in cages. Whether this was for fashion, or to protect their greatest treasure—their minds—Gloriatrix cared not to wager.

Across the dim chamber, which resembled an open amphitheater, the Mortalitisi busied themselves with their rituals and arts, if their atrocities could be so named. The ghosts of the present drifted toward them. The shadows spared the four the sight of every horror, but even so, they saw too much. Scholarly folk sat around ornate tables ringed with skulls and supported by legs of bundled bone. They focused on red shards, seemingly broken from the iceberg of frozen blood that hovered above each table at the center of their axis of minds. Occasionally, the Mortalitisi would turn to one another—all at the same time—and nod, or in some other way indicate agreement. They were speaking, Magnus knew, in much the same way he and his brother did. Somehow, the Mortalitisi had mastered the art of mind-whispering.

All present seemed to be communicating in this way, and aside from the shrieking of the savages being spread on bone tables and flayed as one would a deer, there was no sound to be heard. Once he and his fellow spirits had floated past the ring of surgeons and crystal enchanters, the agonized cries of the dissected were replaced by harsh and sinister music.
The four then entered a new layer of the amphitheater, one dedicated to art—of a kind.

Here, the four were bombarded by sensory offenses, each one graver than the last, until their souls were forced into hiding, and they gratefully retreated into numbness. Men lay splayed on bone racks, gasping as their skins were peeled back to reveal the glistening feast of organs within. Lounging, mind-speaking Mortalitisi chatted with one another while nibbling on the delicacies offered by these living creatures, or filling bone cups with blood from their wounds. At one disgusting dinner party, a pair of Mortalitisi argued over which one would get the sweetmeats; eventually, the greedier, stronger sorcerer knocked the other down with an invisible fist and then tore off his prize through the force of his mind. The Mortalitisi seemed unwilling to bother themselves with manual labor, and skin-golems could be seen billowing around and attending to the needs of their masters.

Although this was merely a dream of the past, Gloriatrix could smell the earthy fart of death to which these Mortalitisi had become immune. Even she knew them to be horrible beings.

Next, she and her companions came across the Mortalitisi musicians responsible for the cringing harmony. Now that the travelers knew how and what these people ate, they found these entertainers less shocking. The musicians played in small trios amid the grim feast, and their instruments were, like their meals, made of man. Seated in tall, bone chairs, Mortalitisi cellists swept their bows across hardened vocal chords, from which flaps of skin had been pulled and stitched aside. These throats belonged to men still living, held just shy of death by sorcery, and their wails added to the dry screech of the tune. Limbs had been snapped backward and frozen into tables; the hollow carcasses of men were banged on like drums, producing whimpers, for they were also still alive. The simplest and least repugnant instruments were the bone flutes that were being played here and there.

These atrocities were too much, too overwhelming for the travelers, and even though they knew this empire had later fallen, they couldn’t rid themselves of a sense of horrified, almost paralyzing fascination. Magnus no longer Willed them along; instead, they were drawn by the hand of
the Hall of Memories toward the penultimate moments of this society, of these monsters who had no idea their doom was imminent.

Suddenly, a mind-whisper reached each member of the Mortalitisi collective, and many carcass drums were struck at once out in the dark amphitheater. The guests at this half-living feast, the crystal enchanters, the vile musicians, and all the other wicked beings left their pursuits to hurriedly descend the stairways leading to the stage of this theater of horror. As the four wandering spirits also neared this destination, the Mortalitisi took seats on bone benches, joined hands with one another, and glared down into the red dark with what might have been pleasure, or reverence, on their alien faces. Science, culture, worship, unity…there was an order to this madness, though only Gloriatrix and Magnus perceived it.

A scene had been set in the reddest, deepest depths of the arena floor, in a space surrounded by totem-poles of twisted bodies. Despite all this butchery and doom, Gloriatrix didn’t feel that the Mortalitisi worshipped death: they worshiped their own majesty and magnificence.

Upon the stage stood an emaciated grandmaster waiting for his flock to become attentive and still. Wearing no constricting gear, he was nearly nude but for an undergarment and a mantle hanging over his sharp shoulders. Clearly, the man needed no head cage to shield his intellect or fancy trappings to declare his eminency. Like Magnus, the grandmaster shone with kingship, but in his case, an unholy one. He was commanding, embodying a force as strong as that of the Hall of Memories, a force that pulled his audience, even the travelers, toward his presence. Magnus and his company wanted to see this evil king, too; they wanted to meet him.

Then Magnus realized he already had.

The wide brow, hollow cheeks, and pallor of the Mortalitisi leader made for a bold, attractive face like a stone carving. Still, the man’s charisma was most evident in his sunken eyes; they might have been brown, but they flashed black as he produced and restrained flickers of power. Restrained was the right word, for more than any other Magnus had ever encountered, this man held within him the force of a storm. Hundreds of years after the fall of Veritax, he’d come to Magnus, far less proud than he appeared now. He’d come and asked Magnus to create a record of his people’s vanity. Then, as now, Magnus had felt his power: a magik that no
man should possess, and an evil, too, which was why Magnus had sealed the Mortalitisi wisdom away. But the confessor of Veritax’s corruption—Arimoch, he’d called himself—had been no mere servant to his empire, as he’d claimed. He had, Magnus realized, been its king.

Beside Arimoch, pinioned to a bone altar by an unseen power, was a woman. Even so near the grandmaster and his captivating charisma, she commanded attention. Magnus had never seen her before, but when he gazed upon her, his heart did something queer and unpredictable and leaped into his throat. She was bald—her freshly cropped hair lay scattered about her—and so dark of skin that her movements looked like those of an ebon statuette held to the light. Much more than that he could not tell. She might have been beautiful or hideous. He suspected the former, although he hadn’t yet looked at her body, not all of it. Again, as with Arimoch, something about her eyes held him.