Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (84 page)

In that tunnel of focus she found herself, and when it suddenly expanded and rushed with stale but plentiful air, she knew that they had escaped the nest. Safe, or safe enough, and upon the destitute shores of the Drowned River. But why was the land still shaking? Why was trash bouncing like ticks off the stone? What was the pounding of a hundred drums in her ears? All fair questions, and she had some of an answer as a splitting crack rang out, and she was swiftly wrenched aside by her father and saved from a chalky explosion.
A slab
, she realized, as she and the others staggered upright. A gigantic tile dropped from above. While waving away the smoke, she peered for the source of the accident. Yet as with many events at the moment, there was not the slightest pause for voyeurism—which could be fatal—and her indelibly caring father was tugging her hand anew. However, she did see a swirling window of red and blue light up through the fissure in the ceiling. Was this a window to outside? she wondered, and if that was the case, what strange fires were lit in Menos? Again, mysteries and mysteries, with no time to solve any of them. Running, running was all that there was.

She had never felt so hunted and so trapped in a nightmare as she did right now. The collapse of Menos upon itself became a dreadful strident noise louder than her heart or any of the shouts her companions were making as they dodged more crumbling meteors. Persistence was in all of them, though, these men and women hardened and bitter against death, and they were nimble and alive to the dangers.
We have come too far; only a little farther to go
, Mouse imagined them saying.

They reached the larger dunes without being crushed, and Thackery wound onward—Mouse saw him whispering madly to the little girl he held, the child she had yet to see move. Here, they had greater worries than Thackery’s sanity. For the piles were unstable, teetering, and toppling, transforming into fetid sludge, and water had risen from the Drowned River and arced in gouts that could batter them away like passengers on a sinking ship. While they splashed through brown water, the trills of the Jabberwok and
the howls of the second monster resounded in the caterwauling. Even above the din, she could hear it, and knew that the monsters were close. Still, this was hardly the end of their peril. The company tripped round a shifting mountain and were slammed by surprise.

“Thackery!”

Sorren hailed them from atop a metal platform swimming in garbage. In attendance was the Iron Queen herself. She clung to her son on the unsteady stage; she expressed none of the nekromancer’s bravura, though she possessed a similar sparkle of ire in her gaze toward the sage. A foursome of Ironguards stood beneath them, wading in filth, but with their rifles dry, cocked, and tipped with blue flame.

“Always the rat!” ranted Sorren. “Sneaking off to some tunnel, no doubt! So eager to get to wherever you think you’re going that you ran past us like a frightened herd! Well, I am the hunter today! I shall have my trophy! Your heart! And with it, my
vengeance
!”

Another roar and trill contested this, but it went largely ignored in the groaning of the world and the smashing of boulder-sized objects around them. Although this was a confrontation that Thackery would need to put his soul at rest—this resolution between himself, Sorren, and Gloria—it would not be a fair exchange if he was to lose Morigan and Macha in the process.

Bitterly and with fury, he spat back, “Gloria! Curb your fool son! See how the world turns to ash! I would settle this here and now was Menos not about to drop on our heads! Our debts are old and soaked in blood; they will endure like the mountains of Kor’Keth. Our hate will shine brighter and longer than any love! For we hate with passion! We hate with our souls! But this moment is not the time for us and our violent resolution! Lay down your arms and let us pass, or we shall die in senseless rage together! Crushed under garbage, buried, and lost!”

“Are you asking me to let you go?” exclaimed Gloriatrix.

“I’m asking you to consider your own life! The life of that offal you call a son, even!”

“Never!” shrieked Sorren, losing all control. “You will die! You, as well, Vortigern! And you, Lenora! A hundred deaths, a hundred times for each of you!”

Thus spoken, the nekromancer burst into maniacal laughter, and his figure beamed with rays of shadow. In that instant, Thackery could have ended everything without raising a finger, could have let fate determine the punishment and outcome of his familial war. For the vaults above were gaping with cracks, whole segments of buildings and roofs, carriages, and wailing folk were falling into the Undercomb, so many bodies and bricks splattering the sloshing junk heap in a deluge of chaos. Flames were among the cascade, and shards of ice fell. What could be seen could not be totally understood; reality was out of order. One grand accretion of street signs, burning shingles, furniture, and walls, all packed in hunks of snow, was plummeting toward his darkly fuming nephew. He could have said nothing and let the landslide erase Sorren, Gloria, and all the tangled sins they shared, yet out of a sickening kinship or a need to squeeze the blood from these wretches himself, he called out.

“Gloria! Above you! The roof!”

Snarling, Sorren looked up and saw the barrage of elemental death descending, and he knew that he could have only his vengeance or his mother—not both. His power blazed into a black sphere of hungry sorcery about himself and Gloria. The pitiable Ironguards, outside the ebony shell, screamed for their makers as they were interred in tombs of scorching, frost-burned wreckage. A puff of snow and licks of fire flushed the area, and the stunned companions were dumb as mules for a speck until they threw off their astonishment and remembered to run.

Did they live?
wondered Thackery fleetingly. Who knew? He hoped that they did, so they could finish their pledge of murder to each other. Mouse, at this time, had fully descended into a river of disbelief.
The sky is falling and raining fire and people. Ice and streets and lampposts. Ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha!
She and Kanatuk were guided on like gawking tourists by the only two men who had yet to drop their wits. The waters were deepening, the world rocked and slid out from under them, obstacles floated and flung themselves at them. Somehow, they reached a delicate precipice and were told by the barking old man to climb along it.
Don’t look down, not down
, Mouse cautioned herself, as the rising, frothing maelstrom under her was commanding of her fear. But looking to the storm they were creeping away from was no better, and twice as surreal, as though someone had crushed up toy houses and thrown them into a furnace and a snowstorm.

“HAROOOOOGH!”

The Jabberwok’s trill nearly pulled her off the ledge, too, as it wasn’t far off: down on the submerged shore from which they had come. Two shadows rolled into the mire there, and she was gripped by their conflict. A ball of fur and teeth and a fatty, hideous worm. She paid heed at a critical instance, for the battle that had been raging this whole while was brutally decided, and the Wolf—yes, it was a giant, hulking wolf, she saw—clamped his fangs upon the Jabberwok’s tail and then thrashed it to and fro. First, the Wolf smashed the Jabberwok against the rock wall on which the companions climbed, and it misted the air with blood. Then, as the Jabberwok dribbled out a mewl, the Wolf mercilessly tossed the beast into the Drowned River. Mouse and the others watched it scrabbling against flotsam, bleating and despairing to live. But they gave it no quarter and only a black pity, as the devouring currents eventually pulled it under. When Mouse glanced to see what had become of the Wolf, it had vanished, although a naked and familiar man was now speedily ascending the ledge many strides behind them: Caenith.

What remained of sense in the world dissipated after that, and there was only the trek up the shuddering rock, and the anxiety over every opportunity to fall, which somehow none of them did. The old man, even burdened and one-armed, was admirably agile and well ahead of the rest in reaching the pipe into which they all soon crawled. Twisting and turning through the grating metal guts of Menos they went, ever afraid that the thin walls would suddenly buckle. For a time, Morigan acted as a torch in the darkness, and then her light eventually ran out; she stopped her moaning and struggling, too. When the tubes were tall enough for standing, the naked man ran up to claim his bride from Vortigern. As he brushed by, under the stinking grease and gore of the Jabberwok, she could smell the animal that he had been, as well. She mumbled a dazed thank you to the Wolf, but it may not have ever left her mouth, and he did not act as if he heard. He was too engrossed in the care of the woman he carried. How strong their love was. She could sense it like the heat of his body. If she were a painter, there would not be enough colors to capture their passion: red, if anything, the deepest crimson, a love of blood and sacrifice. Deliberations on her place in this tale—for she felt she inexorably had a role to play—wrestled in Mouse’s mind as the dark trek continued.

Light came at last, though with it not the succor of freedom, for the red and blue glows that glimmered in the tunnel foreran the phantasmagoria beyond. Outside, it was day and it was night and nothing was as it should be. The clouds were a red sunset that had not fallen and were lambent with twists of whiteness. There was rain and sleet, a whipping wind, and a hail of embers. With the vines that had concealed the aqueduct burned away, they could observe the apocalypse in quiet awe. Although they had reached the point in their flight where escape was presented to them, the company could not move past the gate. They waited. For what, exactly, no one said. Only the naked Wolf detached himself and approached the exit: there, he stood as dignified as a tattooed war chief in his firelit wounds and stared with his knowing gaze out into the end. This was an end; he was certain of it. The close of an age. The dawn of something darker.

I saw it
, whispered Morigan to him. He had felt her spirit wake a while back, her light trickling into him, though she was still too spent to stir.

What did you see, my Fawn?

I witnessed the End. I saw one king fall and a shadow take them both. When the Everfair King broke, he broke the world. I saw fire and ice…tears of the Geadhain. How the Green Mother grieves and grieves. Tell me that it is not true
.

The Wolf could not.

The storm will pass, as all things do
, he said.
And you and I shall go on
.

He kissed her cheek, so gently and indifferently to the profane tempest, symbolic of how unshaken he was and would always be, and then he sat. Duly, the others became braver and came forward, as well. They huddled as a pack to wait for the storm to blow over. Then, and only then, would they explore the new world that awaited them.

XXI

THE ROAD AHEAD

I

“M
enos,” announced Galivad.

Off in the dark it gleamed, the stronghold of all sins on Geadhain, as black as the hearts of its masters, with white lights streaking from its ramparts like the spirits of the pure seeking to escape. Both of the weary companions had grimaces upon their faces, though Galivad’s was rather intense. Rowena knew the cast of hatred, and he wore it.

“Have you been to Menos before?” she asked.

“Once. To find my mother’s killer.”

After slapping her with that disclosure, he strode ahead. A storm was brewing on high, and the warmth of the miner’s caravan was sorely missed by Rowena; they had parted at one of the roads wending north. The whistling darkness and desolation of this stripped and rocky place kept the travelers on edge. Moreover, while it wasn’t more than a frightened fancy not worth mentioning, Rowena thought that she had seen a large shadow bounding by them in the fields not too long ago. So there was wildlife hidden here, the ferocious kind, she wagered. Perhaps the beast was hunkering down for the impending weather. The menfolk were surely sparse and hurrying on their steeds and carts toward the city. She and Galivad were mostly alone.

KRAKKLL!

When thunder and lightning suddenly tore up the sky, and the first drops of rain struck them like pellets of ice, they knew that they would not make the city in time for shelter. Fortunately, a flat jut of stone off the road availed them, and they ran to it: soaked as drowned rats and shivering once they arrived. With the rain falling in sheets and unlikely to be relenting anytime soon, the pair settled in on a high cold stone and watched the water slowly swamp the soil about them. Since his cheery farewell to the miners that morning, Galivad had been quite taciturn, and Rowena found herself missing his loquaciousness enough to start up a conversation herself.

“Your mother’s killer…did you find him?”

The question hadn’t come out as she intended; her social graces were as blunt as a mallet, and words never ceased to stumble in her mouth. While the thunder and lightning continued, her companion sank deeper into his sodden cloak. He did not look at her, but at the storm, and Rowena suspected that she was not about to get an answer. Galivad’s quiet response was a surprise.