Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (9 page)

“Oh, stop,” scoffed Mouse, tired of the man’s self-flattery and insults. “I attended every one of your briefings, and I found them light on substance and heavy on scorn. I think you’re withholding certain facts, because you know that without that reservation you’d have nothing to offer us. I’m still not certain that you do. We’ve faced worse than whatever picture you’re trying to paint. I see loveliness amid the strange.”

Life had enveloped them from the moment of their landing. Although the crabs, cinder-bugs, desert herds, and clay birds were the most notable fauna, countless other creatures also claimed the lands through which the company walked. At this very moment, a family of blue-furred rodents, long and sleek as marmots, flowing over one another in a stream of bodies, chattered nearby. They’d been following the company, slyly, though none slyer than the Wolf and the glances he’d kept to them out of the corner of an eye; he didn’t consider them harmless, and they had regrouped and begun to follow the party again after scattering from Thackery’s explosion. Persistent, possibly hungry, felt the Wolf. Realizing they’d been noticed, the creatures paused, rose onto their hind legs, and squealed. For a speck, Moreth and the company all stared at the creatures.

“There is nothing lovely here, remember that,” Moreth said, and whipped a pistol from its holster.

B
ANG
! B
ANG
! B
ANG
!

Each burst of blue fire sent a shell into the swarm. Apparently a flawless marksman, Moreth shattered three tiny skulls. The squealing of the pack became higher pitched—eardrum-piercing to the changelings—but the creatures did not flee. Instead, they opened mouths much larger than their tiny heads should allow, bared shining rows of serpent teeth, and began tearing their departed number into jellied shreds. Astonishingly speedy, they ate the dead in specks, and then returned to their squealing and watching of the company. They looked red and repellently adorable, like a band of cannibal squirrels. Mouse started counting them now; there seemed to be dozens. Dozens more could be watching from places unseen. To keep the creatures busy, Moreth emptied a few more bullets into the swarm; his shots caused an orgy of rending and devouring. He slid his pistol back into its holster. “Corpse-weasels,” he said. “I don’t know their official name, but that is what I call them. They’re harmless until provoked or aroused by the scent of blood. They are like the monster peasantry of these lands—vermin no better than the rats that crawl through Menos’s sewers.
Crawled
through, I suppose…”

Morigan shivered from the psychic ache of Moreth’s regret; Caenith sniffed a rosy fragrance, too. Absurd to think an Iron Sage might feel any kind of remorse or empathy, yet the evidence of their senses could not be denied.

“They will eat you while you sleep,” continued Moreth, walking on. “The slightest bit of fresh blood drives them berserk. If anyone starts bleeding profusely, or if one of our ladies, whose womanly cycles I’ve been tracking as best as I can”—Morigan and Mouse gasped, but Moreth paid them no heed—“happens to have a particularly heavy day, we may encounter a problem. Blood is law in the Old World, for its witches, rituals, and monsters.”
—Suddenly Morigan spins through a curtain of silver, buzzing light and sees a gorgeous icy woman, white from head to toe, brushing her frost-spun, glittering hair before a mirror. Morigan trips, twirls with her bees again, and returns—
“I believe Pandemonia is the oldest of all the lands in our world, and here that law reigns the strongest.”

By now, the companions knew that Moreth’s reticence was a calculated manoeuvre, adopted to secure his position. They had themselves
to blame, too, for any dismissal of his warnings. Many felt that Moreth was vile, arrogant, and only tenuously attached to the company’s welfare. However, until the rest of the company had learned the rules and dangers of this land, he was all they could rely on for survival. The six followed the agile master to the bank of the river, where they undressed to check themselves for bleeding scrapes. On his calf, Adam discovered a red gouge, likely sustained during the rocky climb—it must have been the scent of his blood that the beasties had followed. “They should have attacked you,” said Moreth coolly, and was otherwise uninterested in the miracle. Wading through the cold, salty water sealed Adam’s wound and broke the trail between the company and the corpse-weasels. Once, Adam looked back to the meadow to see where the corpse-weasels were. Numerous black-eyed things watched him from behind a veil of green.

II

On the other side of the river, the land boasted rock and copses of emaciated trees in which no scurrying hordes could lurk. There, Adam’s tension blew away like the brisk wind that stirred the new plain. The six were soon challenged by another elevation, a steady rise to the land, and they conquered it with spirit. Soon they stood on a new summit and took in a broad view of Pandemonia. The quilt of the land rolled wide, stitched with patches of the fantastic.

One region fumed with black smog, as if the whole of it had been razed. Another wavered with misty billows and sparkled with lush dells and lakes. A third was pale as if with snow and wreathed in golden clouds. Indeed, the sky and earth before them appeared stitched out of a riot of colors, textures, and elevations. Far off seemed the glass desert and rubber forest at the fringes of the vista now—wonders to be crushed beneath these new ones. Pandemonia’s wind was as unsettled as its other elements. As they surveyed the vista, it raged and calmed, turned hot and then bitterly cold. Again, the profusion of flavors nearly overwhelmed the Wolf. He’d never encountered such a fecund and fetid musk in any city of man or realm of nature he’d wandered, but at least it smelled of life—of beast, water, sweat, and fur. No steel or grease soured his tongue, and no echoes of industry did he hear.
Or is that a distant din and shuffle of commerce and
people?
he wondered, straining. The fickle wind seemed to raise a prickle of magik upon his hide.

“Eatoth,” said the Wolf, frowning. “I recall your mentioning a city, son of El.”

“Aye, Blood King,” replied Moreth. “As I’ve said, in Pandemonia there are a few constants—eyes in the storm, so to speak. I’m only a road-scholar, so I’ll leave the theorizing on these phenomena to those of you best at postulating magikal theory. There are pockets in Pandemonia where life exists unchanged—or, I should say,
places where certain elements rule in such excess that a kind of balance is upheld
. I speak of the fundamental energies of our world: earth, fire, wind, water. Great civilizations have been built on sites that possess particular elemental power; the tribes of Pandemonia have histories, cities, and hieroglyphs that make the Sisters seem young.”

“
Claeobhan
. That’s what the Sisters Three called this place. The Cradle…” mumbled the Wolf. Suddenly, the glut of sensory information compressed into a thought. “The cradle of life—all life.”

“That may be true, Blood King,” agreed Moreth. Each time he used Caenith’s old title respectfully, without disdain, it bothered the Wolf less. “Eatoth is one of the four great cities of Pandemonia. It is known as the City of Waterfalls. The lands around Eatoth might change, but the city remains the same. On my last expedition, I marked its coordinates by the stars, which do not shift as the land beneath them does. Assuming the distance inland has not changed too drastically, I think we are a week’s travel from Eatoth. I shall know better once night falls, and I can see our markers in a darker sky.”

Moreth strode down into the valley. Theirs was a perilous trail, with slippery plates of mossy stone and entangling thorny growths that could tear a traveler’s flesh. The skeleton trees grew here as well, often in tighter copses in which gaunt-fingered branches twined into one another. The pitiable scrubland went on for many spans. They hiked lower and lower, now unable to see what lay beyond this valley.

It’s as if we’re not really in the nightmare of Pandemonia at all
, thought Mouse, comforted. Only the rumbles of thunder from clouds out of sight and occasional odd-smelling gusts of wind challenged this impression. After many sands of quiet, Mouse’s churning Thule mind ruined her peace.

“Four cities,” she said. “You’ve only ever mentioned Eatoth. What are the others?”

“Three cities, actually,” replied Moreth. Once more the wind was hot, and he stopped and fanned himself with his hat. “Only three cities remain standing, one lies in ruins. There’s Eatoth, the City of Waterfalls. It is home to poets, scholars, technomagik so astonishing the mind melts. There, men in blue robes contemplate the eternal mysteries in silence, and they are ruled by a queen of sorts: cold, equally silent as her consorts and sitting on her throne, I assume, in a tower of glass and silver. From what I gather, Eatoth is the capital of Pandemonia, and we shall likely be able to plot a course from there—one that might lead us to Intomitath, the City of Flames…What wondrous industry they have there: forges of pure magik and flame, arts perfected from generation to generation over the course of thousands of years. Or Ceceltoth, the City of Stone. My expedition never made it that far east. Think of the cities like points on a compass: West, North, and South. These points aren’t quite at the edges of Pandemonia, though; they’re still many spans inland, and are further separated from one another by a chasm, an uncrossable, forbidden terrain at the heart of this continent: the Scar.”

“Dreadful name.” Talwyn trembled. “Hopefully, we can avoid that place. What of the fourth city? The eastern point on this compass? You missed a city.”

“City of Screams,” said Morigan.

Stars glittered in her gaze. Rusty sounds—high, low, and as harmonized as a chorus—had breezed past her ear with the wind. Screams, she’d realized, though very hushed, as though from elsewhere. Morigan did not feel herself shivering, but was grateful when the Wolf enfolded her in a warm embrace. “What happened there?” she asked.

Reluctantly, Moreth replied, “Aesorath is its proper name—the city. What your eldritch senses deduced from the ether is a rough, though apt, translation for the sound the wind makes through the city’s ruin. I don’t know much beyond the more common lore. A woman, whose name is never spoken, betrayed her holy office with the Keepers—think of them as sages, sorcerers, esoteric spirit-men of a kind the West has never truly replicated. I think we have some similar ascetics in the West, in Gorgonath, though
these Pandemonian folk are far more austere and militant. Nevertheless, this Keeper was consumed by madness and destroyed her city. Now the place is cursed, filled with ghosts and terrors that make grown men shake like little women.”

“Madness?” asked Thackery.

“Again, I don’t hunt history,” confessed Moreth. “I hunt animals. Although I am a worldly fellow, what I learn of my environment is only for the betterment of my sport. The politics of nations do not particularly concern me. Not even in the case of my own fallen one.”

The company could not press the master on this or any other issue, for he now resumed walking. New anxieties played havoc with their stomachs as they silently marched behind their guide. Each felt a measure of dread over Black Queens, mad kings, places called the Scar, and now a mad priestess and her doomed city. In their heads, Morigan and the Wolf consoled and counseled each other; after the Menosian’s speech, she had a powerful sense of obscure but nonetheless aligned Fates.

Odd birds circled overhead, jarring her with their cries.
Screams…City of Screams
, she thought. In time, the sun vanished into a purple mist, and Morigan felt as if she walked in a nether-realm between Geadhain and Dream—a purgatory. Her wolfish senses could not hear the brouhaha that her mate endured, although her ears were attuned to the scuffing of the company’s tread and the rasp of their breaths. To this somber music she walked for a time, while the Wolf’s fire-beast tried to settle the unease in her breast with courageous roars and flares of heat and love.
I feel that we are headed somewhere dark, my Wolf
, she mind-whispered at last.
Perhaps darker than any place we have ever trodden
.

The Wolf stopped and kissed her forehead. He offered none of his prose or challenges to Fate, for he felt it, too. The subtle rattle of bones in the wind. Bone dice, inscribed with both their names, shaken in a cup before being cast on the Pale Lady’s table. Until they left Pandemonia’s soil, he would be ceaselessly vigilant.
Vortigern, my friend, I miss you
, he thought, suddenly and before the sentiment could be restrained.
I shall not lose another of our pack
.

Morigan squeezed his hand.

III

The clouds dispersed once the company had passed through the realm of withered life, and they strode out onto a sun-dappled highland. Here the ground rose before them in great green steps. Patches of spiny thistle and garishly pink, red, and orange flowers spilled about like a garden of twisting fire and blood. Most of the day was already gone by this point, and they took their time wading through the flame-like garden and climbing the giant steps. Misery was hard to hold on to in these climes, and the company smiled and talked among themselves. The changelings fared better in these highlands, where the nectars of so many plants dulled nearly every other smell.

Moreth, a stoic black specter in this colorful land, did not partake in conversation. He did speak up once, to confirm that these fields were not the kind that exuded lethal pollen; for him, that was almost sociable.

When the stars came out, he called for a halt. The company settled down in a lonely circle that had been cozily bedded in soft flowers. Vivid white moths—children of the moon above—entertained the travelers when they glanced up while eating their bland rations. Elsewhere on the highlands, singing things that trilled like loons gave the moths an enchanting tune to which to dance. The moths’ wings made a strange thrumming to Adam, as if chanting was hidden behind the beat. After straining to hear a word or two, and drawing Mouse’s perplexed stare from his exercise, he ceased trying to decipher the language to the song—and felt silly about believing there was one.