Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (62 page)

On the other side, her feet splashed into puddles that reeked of swampy stagnancy, and she set them to running across a wide dark chamber of poured stone that was supported by metal columns. As the company sprinted through the murk, it was difficult to perceive any more than the dim silhouettes of her blackly dressed companions. Nevertheless, she felt that she was seeing clearer than she should have and running faster than her usual pace. Rage was not the only gift that the Fuilimean had bestowed upon her, and she grimly recalled her lethal acrobatics in Thackery’s tower.

I’m just about done with running
, she thought.
These fools that are chasing me will soon know the bite of a bride to a lord of fang and claw
.

Her bloodlust attracted the mind that wandered the charterhouse searching for her, and it pierced her skull once more.

Bride to a lord of fang and claw? How interesting. You speak of old dreams of the East. And this passion in you. This violence. It is almost…animal
.

Morigan stumbled but managed to maintain her pace.
Get out of my head
.

I don’t think it’s so simple
, the seeker said with a laugh.
You have power, child; you shine it like the brightest light on a deep winter night. But you don’t have the skill to rebuke me. I know the secrets of the Daughters of the Moon, the Arts of dreams and the immaterial that you fiddle like a fat-fingered child to grasp. I know the path into your mind now, and that door cannot be shut. The Ironguards are closing in. We are not enemies, but sisters. You should surrender, or I cannot promise safety for those who protect you
.

Shots of zinging blue fire lit up the gloom: the Ironguards had breached the doorway. That was warning fire, Morigan knew. The next rounds would be made to maim or kill.

Surrender
, demanded the seeker.

More blue pellets glittered in the darkness. The only one to strike its mark hit Vortigern, running beside her, though he didn’t falter a step, and merely patted out the flames on his shoulder. While the dead man could brush off their peril, the rest of them could not. Each speck, the blood of the Wolf grew hotter, and she became angrier. Caenith’s pride and majesty were taking hold, blurring Morigan’s perceptions. How dare they try to capture her again: she who was meant to roam and rule the Untamed. How dare they herd the hunter, or invade the sacred spaces of her mind. Violators and fools, all of them. She would not be taken. She would not be claimed. If they wanted to know what it was truly like to tame an animal, she would roar like one. She stopped, hunched, and released her rage.

“Begone!”

Although it was said as a word, to Morigan at least, it came out as something else. The oddness that came from her throat could have been a song, as there was a melody to the undulations, though for now the notes seemed distressed. Kanatuk had heard the noises that the great swimming beasts under the frozen sea made: hypersonic and hypnotic when they were peaceful, shrill when they were not. This reminded him of the latter. A cry from a cornered and dangerous monster. Across the chamber and up through the ceilings and walls the spellsong wavered, unhindered by matter. When the sound reached the Ironguards—wherever they were—it drove into their ears like swords. They dropped their weapons and fell, screaming, to the ground. A speck later, they were snoring in heaps upon one another like spent pups.
Far above Morigan in the charterhouse, Elissandra sensed the ripple of tremendous power approaching, and her smugness wilted as she realized that she had underestimated so much of what this maiden was capable. She had time for a shout of surprise as the invisible energy speared her head. The agony lasted only a speck, and then the mistress of Mysteries was slumped and dozing on the floor.

The darkness seemed eerily calm when Morigan looked up. Her Wolf-sharp eyes could pick out the pale faces of her companions, gathered and staring at her.

“What the fuk was that?” exclaimed Mouse.

“I don’t know,” muttered Vortigern. “But I do not hear our pursuers.” Try as he could with his nekromantic senses, the sound of footsteps had faded in the charterhouse. Replaced by the sound of…Snoring!” he said, astonished. “I hear snoring. Plenty of it. I think every soul in the building beside ourselves is asleep!”

“What did you do?” gasped Mouse.

Morigan thought of an answer for a circumstance she could hardly explain herself. She was angry at their chase and filled with the passion of the Wolf. She tapped into something: emotion and force. Was that Will, as Thackery had spoken of? Was that magik?

“Magik?” she squeaked, uncertain.

“I misjudged you, Miss Lostarot,” Alastair said with a smile, ever foxier as his white teeth flashed in the dark. “You are every bit the party. We’ll have time to ponder our little miracle later. The sewer access is just ahead. We can be spans away by the time Elissandra wakes. What a delight it would be to slip her fingers into a glass of water, but alas. Hurry ho!”

The felicitous nature of their escape was lost on no one, and the miracle as proclaimed by Alastair was at the fore of their minds. Well after they had entered the slippery stone intestines of Menos and were almost blindly sloshing among filth, the question burned. For Morigan, it was a slightly different conflict, however, and what she did not tell her companions was that if she needed to, if she was pushed, she could do whatever that inexplicable act was again.

IV

“Mistress Elissandra.”

Heavily, the mistress of Mysteries stirred from what felt like the winter sleep of a bear. She was numb with comfort until she apprehended that one whole side of her body was asleep and her chin was wet with drool. Men were upon her: large faceless fellows with cross-shaped slits in their helmets and full dark armor that fit with leathery sensuousness. They took her to a chair while her swimming consciousness pieced together events, times, and places. Thinking was quite hard at the moment; she could not recall having been afflicted by such grogginess or a pressing desire to sleep. Outside the rain had stopped, and a shy beam of moonlight had squeezed through the pollution and was casting a pale pall over the classroom in which she had fallen.

That’s right, you fell
, she remembered.
She did something, that witch. Old magik. An invocation of the moon. How could she? Is she the one Malificentus spoke of? The child of the Fates?

Elissandra pushed off the hands of the two Ironguards who had found her and stood up. She regained her composure with a toss of her head and a smoothing of her garments. The Ironguards were anxious for orders. There was an escapee on the loose who had yet to be detained. But Elissandra issued no commands. She paced along the line of moonlight on the floor and appeared wandering in thought. After much time had passed, one of the Ironguards took the liberty of addressing her.

“Should we go after her?”

Elissandra shook her head and looked to the moon, as if it were speaking.

“No. I am to see her again. Alone. Please understand that there can be no witnesses.”

The luminance of the moon seemed to pour over Elissandra, and she whitened to a dazzling saturation. At first, what the Ironguards were beholding was lovely, made more so by the feathering of magik over their skins. That was until the feathers began to scratch and itch, and a terrible heat began in their stomachs. The Ironguards only snapped fully from the enchantment when they realized that they were on fire. By then it was too late to raise their rifles, for their eyes had popped in their sockets and their fingers were scarcely matchsticks.

Elissandra left the smoking corpses and drifted from the room. She had an appointment with the Daughter of Fate.

XVI

CHASING DOOM

I

After hearing the king’s extensive praise of the flowers in the Valley of Fair Winds, Erik was a little disappointed. As the army rode between the great mossy crags, the hammer struggled to spot any blossoms above them. Nor did he see any flowers along the rock-strewn path. The wind was sweet as the king had promised, though perhaps not as
sweet as a mist of honey
, and not as cool as a clouded sky should permit. In fact, he found the air quite hot and tugged often at the straps of his armor. Looking around, he could see that many of the Silver Watch had removed their helmets or gauntlets entirely. He didn’t care for this laxness and the ragtag air it conveyed, and those soldiers he caught with his reproachful stares put on their armaments at once. At war, a soldier was never to remove his protections, not even when he believed himself to be safe, for death held no courtesies or pardons toward the living for their unpreparedness. With that vigilance in mind, he focused his watch upon the king, who rode beside him.

The king had engaged in no more communication than was necessary today: a series of hand waves, nods, and short answers. The deeper tension to the king’s austere self could only be noted by those who knew him as well as themselves. A distance to the stare, the faintest wrinkle on his
marble forehead. Erik wondered if this was the same weakness that he had addressed in the woods rearing itself again or another concern altogether.

“My King, may we ride alone?” he asked.

Magnus responded by moving out of the line and into the shadow of the crags. Erik followed, and the two riders trotted around tall fractured stones; the echoing of their mounts’ hooves made the silence between them thicker. While it was only a suspicion, Erik sensed that his king was angry.

“You are preoccupied,” he stated.

“Yes,” replied Magnus curtly. “We are nearing Mor’Khul. My stomach winds itself in knots when I consider the choices that must be made there.”

“Choices?”

“Of how viciously I shall punish my brother. The line between love and hate is thin, they say. Yet with Brutus and me, the emotions bleed and confuse themselves even more. Even the hate is a passion.”

The lone wrinkle on the Everfair King’s brow pronounced itself further. “I have been contemplating dark, dark torments, Erithitek. Artistries of pain. I won’t tell you the sickness that I dream, for it would taint whatever innocence remains in you. I shall tell you that in these fantasies, I am there with Brutus for every scream and every plea. I weep and I laugh. And when he is so miserably broken—a heap of meat and tears—I feed him my blood to heal him. It continues like that, the delicious cycle of horror, of me unmaking and making my brother.”

Here the hammer had worried that his king was sliding into the doldrums of mercy, when the opposite had occurred. He had sharpened his hate to a vicious edge. This was good, thought Erik, the king had finally become a weapon.

Clip-clop, clip-clop
. At the pace of their masters’ phlegmatic moods, the horses trotted along. For almost an hourglass, the skies darkened with them, and when the king’s cold voice came, it was as unsettling as the first peal of thunder.

“Have you come to a decision on my proposal?”

Erik had not. The mystery surrounding the king’s plan did not sway his opinion for the better, either.

“No.”

“Do you not think yourself up to the task?”

I can protect Queen Lila. I would take a sword for her
, thought Erik. He and the king had no secrets but one, and he was gruff with his reply.

“I have sworn my soul and service to you, my King. However, it is difficult to accept a duty that has not been explained. You are asking me to leap blindly, which is unwise for any man to do.”

“I am asking you to have
faith
,” the king threw back.

Magnus’s cold emerald eyes almost tossed Erik from the saddle, and it was no trick of the mind, but the winds grew fiercer and the clouds rumbled on high. The men stopped their steeds, and the king asked his question a second time.

“You have faith in your king, do you not?”

Erik huffed in his saddle. “I do.”

“Do you have faith in yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Of course you do,” Magnus said, grinning. “Therein lies your true value as a man and as a warrior. You are not some trained beast, soullessly obedient to my commands. You are a thinking, breathing extension of my wishes and your Will. When I am lost, as I was in Meadowvale, you led me from my gloom. When I am cruel, you remind me to be kind. When I am mad…well, you do not fear the madness of an Immortal King. You pick up steel and come at him.”