Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (53 page)

“The stones are slippery,” warned the dead man as they walked—the first words he had said in ages. “Be careful with your step.”

We’ll be quite the opposite of that
, thought Mouse. She wasn’t sure if Morigan was listening, but as the Raven and the Broker disappeared into the shadowy entrance and the numbermen showed a similar fleetness in approaching the estate, Mouse knew that this was their golden moment. She slowed a tad, as if cautious of the dead man’s words, and tugged her chain twice—firmly and noticeably—as a sign to her companion. Quicker and more dramatically than expected, Morigan dropped like a stone. Mouse nearly went with her, yet was rescued by the dead man’s reflexes. On the ground, Morigan moaned in pain and kept her face pressed to the disgusting cobbles; she wasn’t imagining it: the contact was burning her skin.

“Hurry, help her up,” insisted Mouse.

Being a gentleman, the urge to assist the fallen woman conquered any reservations, and Mouse’s doe-eyed insistence tipped the last of the scale in
Vortigern. The dead man held up a hand to Mouse and then dipped to hoist Morigan under the armpits. He remembered coming face-to-face with her and, suddenly, her pressing into his flesh as if they were lovers, and seeing a queer smile and a stranger sparkle in her eyes, and then—

Go! she Wills her bees, as soon as their touch is made. They pierce their stingers against her prison, against the cold iron that traps her Will. They do not have far to go, passing only from skin to skin, from gaze to gaze, and they buzz deep into the soul to which they are connected. An empty space exists in the dead man, where things have been forgotten or locked away from a vacancy beyond mere absentmindedness. This is death, she feels, this blank and echoing void. He has been here, her host. This is why he cannot remember, because he has not crossed death with his mind, only his flesh. None but the most masterful traveler can do so, and in her silver cloud of Will, she soars from the darkness and into brilliance. Into recall
.

Mouse, she thinks, at the woman in an ebony gown who stands in the gray light of a long window. Yet this is a misconstruction, for the nose is a touch larger, the hair fuller. This is not Mouse, but someone close to her. She bobs around the room—no more attached to the host, but to the memory itself—and watches a man enter the hall and take his place next to the woman. While it is dim in the hall, Morigan’s spirit self can see the feelings that they share: they burn as white torches for the other, though nothing of this is expressed in the reservedness of their bodies. Morigan floats nearer, and is not surprised when she sees that the man is a harder-featured version of the nekromancer; rugged where the other is foppish. He is not as pale as the dark sorcerer is, and his vibrancy declares him as being alive. He is formally dressed and Morigan knows that he is a master
.

(“One of two,” the bees hum, and Morigan apprehends that he is the brother of the nekromancer, of course. Twins, surely identical, given their extreme likeness to the other.)

“One more night, Lenora,” whispers the man to the window, without turning his head. “One more night and Whitehawk flies for us. You must be ready.”

“I am ready,” says Lenora, and dares to touch her lover’s hand
.

Morigan quivers like a plucked harp from the yearning between them. They are fortunate that the servants have yet to catch them, as discreet as they have been for two people whose souls scream for the other. Not sexually,
for they have only consummated their sin once, but spiritually. In the library was where it began, as they caught the other reading books of forbidden—Western—poetry. That was where the promise and trust was seeded. Thereafter, he would see her in the gardens, and they would walk with a shrub between them and whisper heretical ideas or prose through the branches. One day, he found Lenora tending to the broken wing of a sparrow, cradling it in her skirt and whistling to it, instead of crushing it, as a Menosian should. The speck that she placed the injured creature down, he kissed her, right there, and she did not stop him. She had a softness that he had never seen. She was a flower in the black garden of Menos; and his brother, who lusted for her, who had been handed her through a conceived marriage for their mother’s ambition, had never seen her true beauty. He shivers as Lenora traces the veins on his hand, not with desire, but merely from a need to hold her, which he cannot
.

“Where shall we go?” asks Lenora
.

“Anywhere,” he says, smiling. “My uncle will arrange for passage to anywhere in Geadhain. Bless him for pitying his cursed family. I did not think we would be given such mercy.”

“It is only because we mirror his own torment, his own story,” mutters Lenora. She touches her stomach, remembering a life that is no longer swimming inside it. “He has a child, too, does he not?”

The host scatters his caution and places his face to Lenora’s neck, kissing it once. “Yes. Perhaps they will play together. Our children. Children of freedom.”

“Sorren suspects nothing?”

“My brother is too full of his ego to see whatever does not fan it. He did not see the beauty under his nose, the light in your heart. He does not know that the babe he ignores is not his own.”

“Good. I would die before I endanger her,” says Lenora, a deadly and heartfelt promise
.

“As would I.”

So you will each, thinks Morigan, who understands more than the specters she visits do. The two pull apart, secretively slinking from the hall, and this memory is over for Morigan. The bees wish to take her elsewhere, and they swarm her consciousness and dive into the golden threads of memory. They swim like fish against the flow of this soul—going backward in time and space—and spill her out into another scene
.

A child. The child of this union slumbers in a nursery as grim as a thorn garden in the moonlight. Lenora is at the metal crib that should house a beast and not a child, and the host of these memories lurks like an assassin near the velvet curtains of the window. He yearns to come close, though it is foolish for him even to be here; who knows what assumptions might be made? Lenora apparently cares not, for she beckons him to the crib
.

“Come see our daughter,” she whispers
.

The host creeps forward
.

“She is beautiful. She looks…so much like you,” he gasps. “What have you called her?”

“Fionna.”

Enough of this, declare the bees. No time, no time, and still much to see. Morigan is plunged into the memory river again and sent along with the current to the nearest memories. The ones before the darkness of death
.

The host is in a deep rainy channel roofed in bridges and lined with grates of metal that reek of shite. Miserably, he wades in rancid water and shelters from the downpour under an overhang. As often as he wipes his wet face, he is certain to have stinkeye by now. But still he peeks and stares boldly into the rain. Lenora is late, and not by a few sands, but by several hourglasses. No matter, he will vigilantly await her, with the pitiful optimism of a man who will not consider reality. For they have made a promise. They love each other. They have a child who must see the world beyond these iron walls. He checks his chronex again for the hundredth time, as if it has stopped or has given him an incorrect reading. He waits. Shivers. Rubs his eyes. Then waits some more, until the chill and dampness has moldered his spirit, and he cannot deny that something is wrong. Desperately he scans the murky streets above, hoping to see a woman—any woman—and her bundle of a child appear
.

A groomed figure looms atop the underpass, cozy beneath an umbrella
.

“Vortigern,” says the nekromancer. “How fitting that you should scurry in the sewers among the waste like the rat that you are. And here you will die, too. Nameless filth to be swept off with the shite and piss of our nation.”

Braver than he should be, the host splashes out of concealment and waves a sword at his brother. “Where is Lenora?”

“She is mine! She was promised to me! My right! Our mother’s will!”

“By the kings! You cannot own a person! You cannot force someone to love you! You are no man, but a child!” screams the host
.

“Children…yes.” The sneer is apparent even if it is not seen. “Shall we talk about those? Yours, I suppose. As I’m not the father I thought I was. Be grateful that I’ve picked a pleasant tree for her to be buried under.”

Morigan watches the host collapse in the waters; sorrow wafts off him in a black cloud. He is shaking his head. “You wouldn’t…a child? What have you done?”

“I simply removed what should not be. Well, Mother took care of it for me. Now Lenora and I can start over. Should be easier without you in the picture. It never mattered how smart or powerful I was, that I was the one with magik and you were only good with wit and a blade. Somehow, you always managed to achieve what I could not. You grew stronger and more handsome than I did. You could hold your own in a fight as well as a debate. Were it not for your treachery, I might never have seen the simplest solution to this problem. The problem of always being in your shadow. Killing you.”

To Morigan’s spirit eyes, the grief of her host veins with blackness: a manifestation of the darkest anger. He roars, flips his sword, and hurls it from the handle like a javelin. On his perch, Sorren’s smugness turns to a yelp, and he throws out glowing white hands too late to stop the blade from piercing his gut and toppling him onto the street. Grunting in anger and shuddering with sobs, the conflicted host makes the climb onto the flagstones and stands over his brother’s ruined body. He kneels and closes Sorren’s gaping stare
.

“Forgive me, brother. May you find the peace in death that you could not in life.” He spits on the corpse’s cheek. “But I shall never forget your sins. And I shall hate you, with my soul, for all time.”

The host stands and walks away
.

This can’t be it, thinks Morigan. For Sorren, as she knows him, is quite alive, and his brother is quite dead. Faintly, she hears it then: a faraway whisper, a scratch of leaves over stone, the sound of a tomb from across the stars being opened. It is possible that the host senses an unnaturalness, too, for he halts and glances to the blood-pooled remains—a corpse and nothing more, to him. Only she sees what he does not. She sees the essence of Sorren’s petulant malice clinging to his corpse, unready to leave this world. Great magik this one had, and his hatred is more than emotion; it is a force of potentiality. A Will.
Into the ether the black tendrils of his Will reach, toward the stars, toward the things that sleep beyond. The anger at being forgotten, at passing into decay and dust, at being dismissed and ultimately abandoned to nothingness, which comprises the whole of what drives Sorren, cries to the universe like a bleating child. And his call is answered. By an entity of like Wills and fears. A thing that should fade as a season, but refuses to pass into time. While this voice is light and as morbidly seductive as a funeral dirge, Morigan knows what sort of being this is. A shapeless mass of Will and power. A shadow from which the lesser creatures hide. A daunting presence that she would fear even more if this were not a memory. Nonetheless, she quakes in her metaphysical skin as it croons to the broken soul of Sorren. It is no Black Queen that speaks to the dead nekromancer, but a similar overlord: a queen of bones. A being who talks of the mysteries of flesh as if she wrote them herself
.

“Hush, broken thing. Hush and be still. Your anguish has woken me. What a Will you must have to reach so far. So dark and furious. So weak and supple. You are perfect, but broken. Your meat has been split. The red tides leave you. I know death. I am death. If you will be my instrument, then I shall fill you with my wisdom. I shall show you the hidden pathways of bone, blood, and grub. How to stitch the meat, stem the blood, and make yourself stronger than you can imagine. Revenge? We shall make this offender against us rot and live and die each day. Punishment eternal. I promise you this: the darkest vengeance and knowledge that no man should have. Quick, broken thing. Decide now. That was life’s final beat, and the tolling for your answer. Let me in.”

The pact is made. On the precipice of death, Sorren accepts with his soul, and his body blazes in a black inferno. As the unholy fire crackles low, he steps out of the smoke toward his breathless brother. The sword is in the nekromancer’s hand, and he carelessly discards it with a clatter of steel. While his garments are torn and bloody about his belly, naught but pale skin peeks through
.

“Vortigern,” he says, smiling. “Death will not be enough for you. My new friend has shown me a better way.”

He raises his hands, mitted in cold fire, and Morigan watches the lines of black energy fly from his form like arcs of lightning into her host. The bees whisk her away as the host’s flesh jitters electrically and begins to bleed ebony juices and distort from an abominable alchemy. The last she hears is a scream
.

Abruptly, Vortigern and she were staring at each other, panting—mostly pretend on his part—and trembling. Evidently, the forced entry into his mind had snapped the lock right off, for he cast Morigan down and stumbled away from her while violently trying to toss the images from his head. Morigan wondered what he was seeing, how much she had released, and if she had hindered more than helped their situation. Anxious to know the same, Mouse threw her puzzled glares. However, no one had the chance to make peace with anything, for a few of the straggling numbermen had noticed the commotion and come running back to the three of them. By the time they reached the trio, Vortigern was on the flagstones, swaying and quiet. With pitiable moroseness, he stared between the two women, though mostly at Mouse.

“What happened?” demanded a numberman.