Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (41 page)

How foolish I’ve been, to think that you would just leave me to rot in my sadness in a kingdom I thought you could not reach. Of course you can reach here. I forget the malice of the spiders from which I come. One never escapes the family web
, cursed Thackery.

As he neared the fountain, he shooed off a few younger masters laughing at the madwoman. “Worthless Thule, a shame to the name,” berated Mistress Hattersham when he was close. He kept a fair reach from her: she was grimly pale, seemed naked under her overcoat, and her abdomen was distended as if she were pregnant. Without a doubt, Sorren had done something horrid to her. The question was
what
.

“Where are you, Sorren? You spineless whelp! This is what you do? Kill women and children? Enslave the minds of helpless widows? Your Will was
never strong enough to work your Black Arts on me! I have no one to defend, nothing to lose. How dare you blame me for the death of a woman who simply didn’t love you! Who killed herself to get away from your touch! Can you blame her, you monster? You fight and whine as you always have, from behind your mother’s skirts. A coward and a child you will always be! Face me man to man, and we shall see who survives!”

“I don’t believe in fair fights,” scoffed Mistress Hattersham. Her face was warped with the squint-eyed, teeth-baring sneer of Sorren. “That’s a challenge for men who can’t outwit their opponents. You underestimate the value of your holdings, too, if you believe there is nothing I can take from you. Know that before you die today, I will have claimed everything you love, everything you care for.”

Sorren was quite communicative, which wasn’t his style, as Thackery recalled: violence above parley. He scanned the deserted terrace for a black shadow. Sorren would have to be close to control his puppet.

“Why are you stalling, Sorren?”

“Patience,” said Mistress Hattersham.

“The longer you stall, the faster the Silver Watch will arrive to have you in chains.”

“Timing is everything,” the puppet said with a smile.

What was the ploy? wondered Thackery, desperate. He had scoured every shadow in the square, seeking the one that was darkest. Nowhere did Sorren reveal himself, not in the shaded alcoves, or as a peering face from behind a half-drawn curtain. While Sorren gloated in silence, a silver shadow circled over the square: the Watch had arrived.

“Our bird has come,” said Mistress Hattersham. “Time is up, dear Uncle. You’re terrible at hide-and-sneak. So eager to confront the villain that you’ve left your front door open. A hint: the best hiding places are
right behind you
.”

As Thackery whirled about, Mistress Hattersham began to unbutton her coat, freeing her bloated, stitched-up abdomen to the day. With shaky hands, ones that she knew were engineering her death, she dug out the small glass jar that held a red firebug and popped the container into her mouth: chewing on the glass, swallowing the sparking insect into her stomach. The sage was shining with power, ready to cast a spell, and she ran toward him. Sorren’s hold at last broke, or he released a measure of it, and Mistress Hattersham
was able to sob—but not to stop her legs—as she threw her arms wide and prepared to embrace the light.

Up in the tower, Morigan had given up on getting Thackery’s attention and was dashing down the stairs when the damnable bees stung her with another vision. She staggered as her mind was torn open to a gruesome sight.

Mistress Hattersham is lying on a blood-soaked mattress, calm and still bound with a spark of life to a tortured body that has been emptied out like a taxidermy specimen. Organs lie in a tidy bundle beside her, and the nekromancer, this monster Sorren, stuffs her with pouches of a black powdery substance that mingles with the blood on his arms into a muddy paste. As he works, he whistles, as if he is a happy baker watching his bread rise. To him, this is as normal a chore as that
.

“Put out the pipe, you imbecile! Are you trying to level the building? Do it again and I’ll make another explosive out of you, fool,” he snaps to someone in the room, and then gets back to whistling and filling Mistress Hattersham. He has left in her heart and lungs, buried somewhere under the little bags, and her eyes and all the skin bits that she needs to appear normal until it is time for her to detonate. The eyes, trickling tears, are the last Morigan sees as she spins from the vision
.

“An explosive!”
Caenith! An explosion, they’ve rigged an explosion to kill Thackery!

KABOOM!

What started with one cataclysmic explosion became a glorious chain of noises, fireworks, and tremors from outside. Each rumble and rip of the air sent Morigan skidding down the stairs. As she fumbled, she dodged debris dislodged from the walls or the flares of blue magik from sorcerous sconces that dropped; were it not for her newfound agility or the fire of the Wolf racing in her veins, she would have been struck unconscious. When the worst of the shocks was over, she was nearly to the bottom of the tower. She saw shadows moving through the dust and called out to them.

“That’s the witch; seize her,” commanded Sorren. She knew his voice without question.

Out of the smoke they came, swarthy men with cold steel and shrouded faces. She considered racing up the stairs, but her razor senses, as tweaked by nerves as the Wolf’s, detected walls of fire and broken stairs that were
unsafe for flight. A fight, then. She found her dagger and surely stunned her attackers by leaping at the first one to appear. Although he was heavier, she had the ferocity of a woman thrice her size and the advantage of height from her jump. When they clashed, her dagger skidded and sparked along the sword he raised and finally planted itself somewhere in his collarbone, close enough to a jugular to that she was showered in red warmth. She had never harmed a man before, but she didn’t hesitate to dig the dagger in and ensure his passage. Perhaps the Wolf was to blame for her bloodlust; perhaps the shame of murder would come later. For now, rage was all there was. Morigan and her prey tumbled like acrobats down the stairs, and she used him as a meaty pillow to cushion her landing in the tower’s lower chamber.

She wasted not a speck getting up. Caenith’s river was turbulent in her, flooding her with a shadow of his strength and anger, and she sprang off the corpse and onto the back of the nearest attacker—who smelled of herbs and death—and gored him repeatedly along his spine. He should have died almost instantly. Instead, he merely stumbled, and by the time she realized that her victim wasn’t dying, his cold grip had seized her and thrown her onto the tile with a strength that slammed the wind out of her lungs. By then, other hands were grabbing her, too many to slash, despite how slippery and spidery she was. In the struggle, her wrist was twisted free of its weapon. At that, she growled in defiance and managed to kick one man in the groin. She choked another with his necklace until that broke off with a flash and sent him flailing away, screaming and cooked by blue fire that ran over him as if he was an oil-soaked rag. She was dropped, and her hunter’s instinct identified that her breaking of the chain had somehow killed her assailant. She wasn’t clear on the details and didn’t need to be. Without her dagger, as the shadowmen regrouped in the smoke-plumed antechamber, this knowledge was her only weapon. Escape was an option, too, she saw, for if she could make it past the men at Thackery’s door, she could flee into the flames beyond. She had to shake her head, for she was seeing two Sorrens, not one, if differently dressed. A woman was on the arm of the more dapper twin. Morigan could feel fear rolling off the woman like a chill and understood that she wasn’t an enemy.

“She’s ripped off a ward and my magik isn’t working on her! Brain the bitch!” screamed the twin on the left.

Sorren
, she thought, and memories of Thackery’s anger, of the defilement of Mistress Hattersham and everyone else he had despoiled clouded her sight, and she pounced for the nekromancer to rip at his necklace, his neck, or anything else she could get her hands and teeth on. She wanted to taste his blood. But as prey, even stripped of his greatest weapon, Sorren was far from powerless. His black Will flared, and a well of darkness gushed at his feet. The sticky magik coated Morigan like a jet of tar, gumming her limbs together and leaving her helpless and growling on the ground. Morigan caught a silver smile—a horrible caricature of Caenith’s—and roared to her bloodmate before she was struck on the head and swallowed in oblivion.

On the edge of the blasted terrace, the Silver Watch had landed their skycarriage and were fanning out toward the billowing epicenter of the blast. Through the smoke, they spotted the black-garbed men and shouted for them to halt and make themselves known. Sorren did so with a flick of his hand that sent the men pulling their swords and wailing in confusion as they gutted one another. Once at the skycarriage, Sorren glanced to see if his uncle’s corpse lay anywhere in the pitted courtyard. Unfortunately, he saw only the black crater where his puppet had gone off, still glowing as brightly as a fresh meteor site with embers and kisses of flame, and that satisfied him enough that his uncle was dead or crippled beyond even magik to repair.

Sorry, Mother; this revenge was mine. Not as sweet or as painful as I desired, but I still have Lenora for deeper gratifications
, considered the nekromancer.

“Hurry, Master Blackbriar, before they realize we have stolen one of their craft,” urged the Broker.

“Yes, we are done here,” said Sorren.

Outside King’s Crown, while racing toward the fingers of smoke going up into the sky, Caenith had discarded any pretense of normalcy and was startling the populace like a hurricane’s wind: battering whoever was in his way, leaping and spinning through the streets as quickly as he could to reach Morigan. Her feelings had gone still, and the grimmest awareness in himself that he refused to accept—that she was taken—hammered into his gut as he reached the flame-stripped courtyard. Once, Caenith had seen a star land in Alabion and chased it all the way to its rest to see a scorched and glittering pit that had burned the woods around itself to kindling and soot. Whatever technomagik was wrought here was similar and just as devastating. Caenith
paused, disinterested in the crying and wounded flung around on the flagstones, wanting only a scent. That he found and followed across the fiery wreckage. He climbed to the top of Thule’s smoldering, creaking tower and howled from its pinnacle when her trail vanished into the sky.

XI

THE FORKING ROAD

I

I
n the hourglasses that followed the attack on King’s Crown, the foot of the palace was clouded in smoke, which told all of Eod that a dark time had come to the kingdom, that they were no longer invulnerable as a nation. Word quickly spread from frightened tongue to frightened ear, and the story became so distorted with speculation that each telling of it differed with a new enemy or plot. It was a sorcerer’s experiment performed without proper sanctions and using dangerous elements. Or a mad firecaller come to burn his lover to ash. Many folk did not know that the reclusive sage of the Charter of Nine Laws had lived in King’s Crown, though when that gossip rooted and spread, he seemed the most likely target of terrorism. For his ideals, for the freedom he preached—affronts to the Arhad or any number of secular nations.
Pay heed to the brown-skinned sand devils recently seen entering Eod
, whispered the gossipmongers. Indeed, all signs seemed to lean toward the sage being a target, and these theories were particularly compounded by the absence of Thackery Thule, who was not found during the careful inspection of his crumbling tower or in the charcoaled square there after.
Is that a
Thule
? Was that really his family name? Isn’t that an old name from Menos? Who were those masters again? Descendants of the Iron Queen?
King’s graces!
clucked the gossipmongers. More and more tangled the web grew until the city was drowning in paranoia.

Amid the chatter, only few suspected the most obvious of threats: Menos. With a grudge as old and rote as that between the Iron City and Eod, the people had grown complacent of Menos’s animosity. Menosians were a gag in the common vernacular.
Wicked as a Menosian. Cheap as an iron master
. As enemies, they were never really considered. To believe that Menos had finally struck the City of Wonders was unthinkable. For in doing so, it condemned their entire realm to a bloody war, where each force would be matched by equal and devastating technomagik. No citizen of Eod wanted to consider that option, which ended in the destruction of their paradise.