Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (12 page)

“Forgive me, Lila,” grunts Magnus, and there is a shimmer of empathy between the golden beauty and her violator before he hits her again
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A black beast is driving him, a monster, and Morigan can sense it in Magnus’s skull. The bees are intrigued by this, by the wildness of the black beast’s presence and its raw, unadulterated urge to hate and consume. The evil is delicious and they chase it, wanting a deeper taste. With that, the king and his victim fade into silver sparkles and Morigan is freed from the agony of watching. Fast as shooting stars, the bees travel, soaring through the gray mists of the Dreaming as if it were the canvas of space, and in instants, they have tracked the smell of the black beast and torn into another head
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She needs a moment to adjust to the senses of her new host, as they are incredible. First to his vision, which sees with telescopic clarity in the bloodred luminance: the gothic curves of the architecture, the tapestries of stretched mortal skin hung as hunter’s trophies, and the glistening garlands of entrails wrapped on the pillars of the vaulted chamber. Then with her nose, which is as acute as a hound’s, she can smell the fresh death, the iron of blood, the manure and methane sourness of shite, piss, rot, and sex. And lastly, with her ears, which beautifully capture the screams and sighs and grunts of a sadist’s orchestra of sex and murder
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Bodies are everywhere: males and females, young and old, some living, some dead, some unknown in their states. They spill beneath her host in a carpet that rolls down a regal flight of steps and into the grand hall. The ones that certainly live groan and clutch their groins, mouths, and anuses. Others that are mobile walk about, but they are altered, unclean. They have been wiped of expression, and there is a redness, a bleeding, and a blackness to their stare, as if their eyeballs were scooped out and replaced with tarry eggs. The black-eyed things—for Morigan does not feel that they are men or women, not anymore—walk around mechanically, inspecting those who have fallen, or herding stumbling, pleading victims into a corral at the base of the stairs
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At random, one is chosen; a lad, scarcely old enough to have a beard. He drops to the ground and wails as he is dragged by his feet by two Blackeyes up the sloppy steps. He grasps the bloody appendages of those he slithers over, but his strength is no contest for the Blackeyes’ relentless grips. Closer and closer to the top he comes, to a throne where Morigan’s host, the king of this gory nightmare, the monster of all monsters, sits
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The king stands to meet his meat
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Come this point, Morigan has been holding her thoughts as still as she can. Even the bees buzz low and cautiously in this host. For she can feel the passions of this monster, his thirst to breed and conquer, to rape and devour. It is the same gruesome desire that poisoned Magnus, only infinitely stronger, infinitely more pure, and it rises in an animal musk about her: the rage, virility, and supremacy. She is aware of her host’s power in that moment and of her own insignificance. Of how he could hunt her and crush her like all those who fill his hall, and she dreads even the slightest awareness of his that she exists. The bees whisper what he intends to do to the boy, how he will trap him under his extraordinary
mass and impale him with the horselike hanging of meat between his legs until his seed spreads like a poison, changing him to a Blackeye or a corpse. There are only two results. Just as the king has done or will do to all the others that enter his breeding ground. A gift, as he sees it
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The lad is thrown at the massive feet of her host. He tries to scamper off, but a bronze hand as large as a foot grips him, encompassing his whole back, pinning him to the slippery ground
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“My gift. May it change you, as it has changed me,” says her host, and his voice echoes thunderously in the chamber and in his skull. What size is this creature? she wonders. As her host squats over the boy, lowering his obscene shadow and dripping rod, Morigan loses her restraint and shrieks for freedom from this depravity
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No! I shall not watch! I shall not watch this! No! No! No! No more!

The bees are not marshaled by her demands; they have their own agendas. Still, her outcry has poked a different nest. What rises amid the mad-dog rage of the king is a blackness and a bleakness all the more terrifying: a voice. So powerful is the speaker that although it whispers, it has the menace of an earthquake happening far enough away to feel the tremors and imagine the screams: a grace with death that is barely escaped. Morigan has no flesh, but her soul shivers anyhow
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Begone, little fly. This is not your place. These children are my flesh, my puppets, my slaves. Come to my Dreaming again and I shall trap you in my web and suck out your insides. Flee, little fly. Flee and await the coming of my reborn son, the Sun King. Await your turn with his gift and worship me as I rise eternal to the throne of Geadhain
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Flight is wise, agree the bees, and in a flash of brightness, the rocking grayness of the Dreaming is around Morigan again. She pleads with the bees to lead her nowhere else, to see no more grisly sights. She sobs in the emptiness between here and there, wishing she could wake
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V

“A popped lock, a flower, and a gift of tears…not bad for a single breath. She always has such hearty lungs, our Eean,” praised Elemech, as the image of
Magnus’s tears caught on Eean’s breath faded in her pool. “I still don’t know how much any of it will help. We’ve done all we can, I suppose. Anything more and we’ve overwatered the garden, and the roots will be too drowned to grow. It is time to see what the seeds of possibility bear.”

“Hmm?” said Ealasyd, who wasn’t listening to her sister. She was instead at her workstation, sticking her tongue between her teeth in concentration as she whittled away at a piece of wood. The older sister stood, her feet protesting—already swollen from the alchemy of pregnancy, though her belly had yet to change—and wandered over to Ealasyd. She took a seat on the bench where Ealasyd crafted, and saw other wood figurines already carved and lying beside her sister. The child inside her was encouraging her motherly nature, and she stroked Ealasyd’s golden locks while she asked her about her creations.

“I feel that these three scoundrels should have proper names. Something sinister, Elemech, as none of them is nice.”

“Oh?”

“Rotten as fall fruit and just as smelly. This one here, in particular.” Ealasyd held up the doll she was fashioning: a replica of a grinning skeleton in a robe made of feathers. She sniffed it and made a face. “Stinks, he does. Can you smell it? His soul has gone bad. We shall call him the Rotsoul, then. I would have done a dark sun around his head, because of the hidden light that shines and whispers to him, but I’m not that talented, sadly.”

With her bone knife, Ealasyd pointed at a wooden carving of an emaciated man. He had animal whiskers scratched into his face, and his mouth was opened and wailing. He was naked and tied in chains. “The Bloodmerchant suits that one. Yes. For he buys and sells, buys and sells, like a rat with a hole in its belly scurrying mindlessly for food. He is an empty, sad thing that knows only to eat, eat, eat. And I shan’t tell you what. But it’s certainly worse than those grubs Eean would bring home now and then.”

Ealasyd seemed unwilling to talk about the third figurine. It was a bit gruesome: a woman who looked quite slim and graceful, but as Elemech picked the figure up and turned it around, she saw that an ebony cave spider had been pinned to its back.

“Oh, her.” Ealasyd frowned. “She might seem like a woman, but within her is a crafty she-monster with a thousand legs and eyes. Too many legs and
eyes to do, really, so I felt that the spider would suffice. In fact, let’s just call her the Spider and leave it at that.”

“Rotsoul, the Bloodmerchant, and the Spider…interesting,” said Elemech. But they were much more than that. Each of the three relics resonated with vibrations of fate, and she hungered to throw them into her pool and see what secrets they held. Her matronly kindness won over her craving, though, and she kissed Ealasyd’s crown instead.

“When you’ve played with your toys awhile, I’d like to see them.”

Ealasyd didn’t fancy this notion, as she never got her crafts back from Elemech, but she made no outcry and continued shaving bits from Rotsoul. He was nearly done, and she liked him the most out of the three vile dolls, for he was the wickedest and had an extraordinary tale to tell, she felt. Meanwhile, Elemech returned to her pool to sweep her fingers through it and watch in the ripples the pictures that only she could see. Once or twice, she made a
hmm
of curiosity, and Ealasyd asked her what for, but she did not offend Ealasyd’s innocent ears with the scenes of craven sickness and madness that she saw. The crimson orgy and spreading of a toxic seed. The birth of a new vile race of mortalkind. The Sun King was no more, but hollowed out to become an unholy vessel, and the shadow that drove him would soon thirst for the blood of Geadhain.

IV

THE BLACK QUEEN

I

I
n the pale milk of moonlight, he leaned upon his balcony. He was a creature of contraries held in balance: his hair was a tumble of the blackest blackness, his skin the pale and polar opposite of that; his mouth was a feminine pout set in a masculine jaw; his nose was a slash of crystal between two hard cheekbones; his brow was a cut block of ice; and he had enchanting emerald eyes, with long, luscious lashes that belonged on a temptress. The manner in which he held his chiseled athletic body was a pose of perfect surety. A carriage of superiority not come from arrogance but from an inherent greatness. The bearing of a king.

While it might seem as if Magnus were stargazing, he was in fact speaking. Silently shouting across the vastness of Geadhain to his brother, who had fallen quiet and would not answer in their mind-speak for either of their sins. Nor could he feel any longer the fire of Brutus’s spirit: that gut-warming, purring beast of flame. Since the yawning ages of the world, that fire-beast had nurtured him, had flushed his cheeks against the bitter wrath of the Long Winter, had been the comfort to cling to while Brutus hunted the tundra for their survival. Brutus was his courage, just as he was his brother’s temperance; a cold wind to soothe a wild, flaming animal. Now he was empty.
Brutus had shut him out. And Lila, his queen, his precious desert flower, was cowering elsewhere like a whipped animal. All he had left to echo in his head were the words of that vile monstrosity that had claimed or influenced his brother, and therefore himself, to such despicable heights. Words that were the coldest of comforts.

In an instant, the repellent passion that has consumed him ends, and he is viciously aware of the slickness of vomit, semen, and blood that he swims in; he sees the battered beauty of his queen and knows exactly what his hands have done to her. Even worse, he feels the pain of her body and the misery of her spirit—for they are all connected through blood. Brother to brother, brother to wife. A circle of suffering and guilt. Only Brutus has no more to say. No more grotesque appetites to pollute him with, no feelings of guilt to share. Nothing. It is just Lila and him and the ruin of their love. He tries to speak—not with his mind, but in words—and all he can retch out of himself is a shapeless moan. She slithers out from under him, sobbing. He can only claw the air and then the wet stone as she lurches from the room. He will not pursue her. It would be unthinkable
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When he is alone, well and truly, with no voices or emotions that are not his own, when he does not think it possible to feel more contemptible than he does, the voice comes to him. He seizes as it speaks from nowhere, blasting into his head as if a door within had been shattered by a hurricane
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See the blood, smell your sin, and revile yourself, for you are as pitiful and disgusting as you are weak. Soon you will know a loneliness that scrapes you raw with despair. Soon you will know a sadness that devours you to the bone, one that rips love and honor from you. When you are empty, then you will understand my pain. Then, only then, will you be filled. You have taken what I value, and so, too, do I take all that you love from you. First your brother, then your love. I shall eat it all. Fear your doom, for it shall be an end so mournful that the stars themselves will weep before I eat them, too. Fear your doom, for the queen of Geadhain rises to claim her throne
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