Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (75 page)

“My Queen,” he says. “We must get you to the palace. The king will want to know that you are safe and sound.”

She said nothing, not even a thank-you for her safety, as if she was embarrassed to speak. Nor was he ever to see her again, more than in passing, until the day she fled her bloodmate’s chambers—when she begged him not to bring his sword upon the king, and he listened at once, for he would have done anything she demanded. However distant their crossings between those two points in time, he had thought of her almost every night for many years. He remembered the warm honey of her sorcery, the touching of their souls, and he could sense in moments when they met, where he bowed and she smiled, that she had never forgotten it, either. Whatever that was, that moment of theirs away from the world, he did not deceive himself that it was anything more than illusion. A fantasy, an image for when the rod needed to be oiled, which he found himself doing more and more since that union. Still, when thoughts of Lila
and sex intertwined, the result was guilt, as she should not be thought of that way by any man, ever. He had married himself in spirit and commitment to the bride of his king. He had damned himself from love. Nonetheless, when he reasoned with himself, if that one memory of the queen and him was all that he would ever have, it was enough to last him a lifetime.

“The Fangs of Dawn,” said Magnus.

Days had it been since the king had spoken; Erik sat up in his saddle and dropped any thoughts of the queen into the wasteland. He looked for what the king spoke of and saw a range of mountains rising up like the teeth of a titanic snake buried in sand: the tips of Mor’Keth, chewing at the red sun of dusk. Into massive canyons they descended, through bleached steeps and walls that should have been hummocks and gullies of the deepest green. Still, they had come too far and seen too much to let the Sun King’s new sorcery daunt them. The pass between the Fangs would take them toward Zioch, and that was all they cared about. With renewed vigor, they rode ahead, and would camp one final troubled evening outside Fangs of Dawn before moving onward to strike the heart of the Sun King’s realm.

V

“Riders!”

The cry came from ever-watchful Erik as he surveyed the land from beside his master, and was confirmed by a scout rushing into the warmaster’s camp a sand later to tell them what they already knew. A red sun, a warring sun, was upon them, and the king was shortly seated on Brigada and racing to meet their visitors in the darkness of the Fangs of Dawn. Accompanying the king came three legion masters, a small cavalry, and the hammer, who rode at the head of the line with Magnus. The hammer darted his suspicious eyes to the three mounted figures that they approached, as well as to the tumbled spires of stone and the shadowy canyon beyond them, watching for signs of an ambush. When they arrived at the mouth of the Fangs of Dawn, the riders did not approach, and the king reined Brigada from going farther. For a while, the two forces held a cold silence with the other. The king was the first to break this.

“I am King Magnus, brother to the master of the Summerlands. Come forth and announce yourselves.”

The riders did not move, but stayed draped in the heavy gloom of morning shadows. While details of the trio were evasive, their hunched and thorny shapes—one quite smaller than the others—bespoke of strangeness. Their steeds, too, for they did not neigh or hoof the sand as horses should and could have been a nekromancer’s reborn; only the king did not sense any of the icy magik of death clinging to them. Another power was present, however, crawling in the shadows, webbing the three in menace, which, while the king could not name it, was far more chilling than any nekromancy.

“I ask again that you present yourselves!” he commanded, afraid of neither Brutus nor his tricks.

At that, the third and littlest of the riders detached itself from the others. The king’s men drew their weapons as it slowly trotted forward into the crimson morning light. At first, the Watchmen were taken by pity, for this was a child, as young as those the fathers among them had sired themselves. Though as it continued to near, they noticed the black greasy pits where it should have eyes, the arcane scars carved into its hairless forehead, and the tarnished armor that had been affixed through fleshcraft to its skin: a metal jaw, a pauldron of razors, a golden cage fused across the ribs and groin. Once, this armor had been a whole suit of the bladed, gilded plumage, like rays of sunlight and the feathers of a metal peacock, in which the Sun King’s men would preen and strut proudly. Now, it had been reconstituted and perverted, the same as this child. Before it stopped and addressed them, the king knew that this child was nothing more than a mouth for a Will that was elsewhere.

“I bear a message from the Sun King and his master, the true queen of Geadhain,”
said the child in a sexless, rasping voice that upset the mounts of the king’s cavalry as though a snake were loose among their hooves. The child’s gray colt was unmoved by its rider; though from its oily stare and the black froth spattering from its muzzle, it was clear that the beast was also infected by dark magik.

“I recognize no queen of Geadhain!” challenged the king. “Nor do I bow to faceless cowards who would hide in the skins of children!”

“You think yourself virtuous. You think yourself a defender of life. I shall show you how wrong you are, my son.”

My son?
thought the king.

The child slid off the horse and walked ahead a few paces, causing the king’s retinue to bear their arms. When it saw their defensiveness, its face jerked into a grimacing display of teeth, as though it was a marionette. The child did not move farther forward, but knelt before its mount.

“What is a child but meat that has not matured to flavor?”
said the Black Queen.
“What are any of you but grains of sand in the desert? Meaningless. Each of you. As passing as the leaves in the seasons of death, the seasons of my Name, for I am Change and Chaos. Quiver in your metal skins, warriors, for you are nothing to me. Except for you, my son. You are a vessel of promise, and I shall give you purpose. I shall fill you with my Will once you surrender to me, and we shall remake the world.”

“Surrender? I shall never surrender!” exclaimed Magnus, and a spiral of winds rose about him, pushing his cavalry away.

“You will surrender,”
said the Will inside the child.
“If it makes you feel better to choose, then choose to come to Zioch and stand against the armies of your brother. Come to your defeat. It will be one of many that will smooth away your hard wall of ice until it is too weak to stop me. You will surrender. You will be mine. Greatness awaits, and you will have greatness, willingly or not. See how little life means to me, how insignificant these meats are, and you will begin to comprehend the glory of the designs that I have for you.”

After it was finished, the child threw back its arms as if to welcome the wrath of the wind-wrapped king or the lightning that had gathered in single black cloud above. Yet the king had a heart of mercy and could not strike this creature, no matter how foul. He hesitated, and the choice was taken from him. In a blitz of violence, the dead gray mount was suddenly wrenched by an invisible bridle up onto its hinds and came pounding down upon the child beneath it like mortar blocks on a bag of wet tomatoes. The child was killed almost instantly; however, that was not the end of the Black Queen’s malice, and as soon as the execution was over, energy twisted the horse from within
and it toppled in a heap upon its victim. Unceremoniously, efficiently dead, each life as worthless as the Black Queen had promised.

In a gasp the king’s swirling wind and anger left him, and he and his men had only disgust in their stomachs. Fear as well, from the knowing that what they faced was an entity worse than Brutus, any enemy without body or emotion. The Black Queen drove the spike of terror deeper as she spoke through her new mouths: the twin riders that had remained behind in the Fangs of Dawn.

“Your mercy is your weakness, my son
,” they said. “
Once you are hollowed out, I shall show you the glory of a life without pity. Enter to Mor’Keth and accept your destiny.”

The riders turned and made dusty trails into the canyon.

“Do not pursue them,” commanded the king. “Return to the camp. I shall speak to the men once we have crossed the Fangs of Dawn.”

Which was all he was to say on the matter for the moment. No words of reassurance, no explanation for the inconceivable events they had witnessed. No denouncement of the entity’s lies, or truths. Only cold rule. Nonetheless, this is what the soldiers needed, not more confusion to muddy their resolution. King Magnus raced back to his troops and the Watchmen followed: faithful, brave, and unquestioning in their march toward death.

VI

Tanned backs, golden tracks, the paths wend to and fro
.

Into dales as green as the Northern King’s gleam

Streams where the fish leap right to your dish

And fields are as chaste as virgin lace
.

Bring your drum, bring your voice
,

Leave your sorrow and rejoice

For frowns cannot abide the golden hair of dawn
,

Nor can sadness hide from chase and kiss of fawn
.

Here the wind is sweet, and time is sweeter spent

On soil untouched by winter’s lament
.

So bring your song, and clap your hands

For you have come to the Summerlands
.

Kericot, the famed bard of Carthac, had penned that tune upon taking his first breath of Mor’Khul: or the Summerlands, as he had coined it. For there was only one season in Brutus’s lands; it was never winter, hardly wet enough to have a spring, and fall appeared only as a shedding of leaves that even then filled Mor’Khul with an apple fragrance and not the faintest tinge of decay. Kericot had never returned to Carthac, and whittled out his years wandering Mor’Khul and composing poems of its beauty, as in love with the land as if it were a maiden fair. When the bard looked out from the higher points of Mor’Khul, from the mossy nipples of these great breasts of rock, as he was fond of poeticizing, he would speak of the wavy land beneath as an emerald woman. Of the gold and green mountains as a spine he would caress; of the misty folds as pools of sensuous sweat; and of flocks of colorful birds as dreams taking flight. All sights comparable to the woods of Alabion, which he had also seen, though without any of the darkness or fright. Often, he waxed passionate on the smell of Mor’Khul as a woman; and in more lurid poetry, the earthiness was her sweat and the honey-rose, sugar blossom, and all the other saccharine-termed flora were the waft of her womanhood. Magnus had always found Kericot’s poetry accurate in describing his brother’s kingdom; in capturing the raw essence of life that radiated from every rock, leaf, river, and breeze. While his own kingdom had flourished inward and born springs of magik, intellect, and ingenuity, Brutus’s had come to reflect his opposite nature. In the Summerlands, the trees grew taller, the animals meatier and wilder, and every color from glorious green to harlot’s red saturated the land with his brother’s furor. Mor’Khul was the product of millennia of his brother’s passion feeding the soil, flourishing all growth for spans and spans, and there was not another realm in Geadhain that could claim to be as beautiful or bourgeoning. Or at least that was how Magnus and Kericot had remembered Mor’Khul. What he was looking at now was a nightmare that could not be.

Past the escarpment where the king and his closest stood, the land plummeted into a vast smoldering basin. An ocean of lava had once filled this space for sure, and had since cooled to a mottled igneous skin that belched torrents of hot ash onto the faces of the men who gaped at the destruction. Across the land, glowing crevices and spits of fire remained, telling of a great heat that persisted under the ground. They stared and
stared, enthralled at the scale of Brutus’s madness. They stared and stared, and could not see a scrap of green from their vantage point until the highest humps of Mor’Keth: mountains that were no longer gray but black as heaps of charcoal. Coal to feed the furnace that had become Zioch, once a City of Gold, now a City of Darkness. The city could not be adequately captured through the fog of smoke, but an intimation of its sheer sprawling majesty, its chronex-shaped towers of gears and metal, or its great wall of scaffolding and stone could be sensed. The fiery apocalypse had not spared the city; in fact, Magnus believed it was at the epicenter, so dense was the smog. Ghosts of that infernal blast still haunted the Summerlands. They painted the firmament like a storm with clouds of soot and despair, hiding what should be the morning sun. All this gloom, and yet there was no change to the wilting temperatures that bathed them in sweat, or the heat that they gagged like gruel into their lungs. Nor was there cotton enough to wad their ears from the howling wind or the grumble and constant grinding of the earth as if the land were sick. Not one among them had ever beheld a more cursed place. Except the king, perhaps, who had lived through the Age of Fire.