Dark Lord's Wedding (68 page)

“A toast to the fleeting. To lives over only too soon. To decay. To rot and ruin, for onrushing oblivion brings revelation. We exist only through pleasure.”

More and more of the little morsels below him heard. He knew they witnessed the wine pouring from his bottle. The flow could only increase. It would only stream faster. A red waterfall crashed down. Cries rose, of dread and joy. From his height they sounded the same.

The matriarch Elbe gripped his shoulder. “Tethiel, you will stop this. Wine poisons wombs and is illegal.”

“Wonderful! Let them enjoy it for the first and last time.”

Pall shoved the matriarch back. The dandy’s filigree carapace reflected firestorm light, but his bronze mandibles clattered together in anticipation of a Feast. Tethiel would give it to him and all his children. His wine roared out.

“Raise your glass high and drink deep. Lest you drown too soon.”

The streets filled with the richest and spiciest of wines. The flood broke through doors and into homes. People were climbing onto rooftops. Their eyes no longer were full of the Winged Flame but their own mortality. And to Tethiel they smelled like the meaning to life.

They could not swim. They could not escape. They could only give themselves to him. The Bright Rats were wallowing with the rest. The soulless had swarmed into the city to oppose him and his Feasters. They hadn’t expected the Winged Flame, and the immortal had burned off their emotional shields. Now they could fear.

The Bright Palm girl was sobbing on the tower for her dead brother. She should be rejoicing, to taste exquisite grief one last time.

The soulless further below in the city smelled raw. Their worries were undercooked, but Tethiel would savor them most of all. He would save his bride, and the wedding would be a success.

Tethiel could only relish one regret. He shouldn’t have had the Bleeding Maiden killed. She had been right.

To eat was to exist, but to indulge was to live. Black wine wasn’t a problem. It was a solution. Tethiel would enrich a new age with terror.

The only true gods were pleasure and fear. The Lord of the Feast devoted himself to both.

Jerani caught up with her outside the tower. Celaise’s feather cape fluttered. She floated with her waist as high as his head. Her walk had all the dignity of a herd leader, unhurried and confident. No, Celaise was slower than that. A tarantula passed her to scuttle across the street and pounce on a roach.

She looked strong as a goddess, but Jerani knew she was hurt. She was limping, crawling, somewhere Jerani couldn’t see. That’s why she didn’t go faster. He had to help her. Reaching closer was like sticking his hand into a burrow full of darkness and fangs, but she needed him.

No, no she didn’t. Jerani stepped back. She wouldn’t want his help, and she had sworn to kill him if he touched her.

He walked past. She didn’t even glance his way. A rain drilled down around them. It burned his nose, and it looked red like hippo sweat.

Jerani guessed his place wasn’t beside her anymore. She had survived without him before they had met, and now she was even stronger. No use staying when this was his chance to get away. The wedding had finished. Jerani could go.

Every part of him pulled back toward Celaise. Another step away from her could make him collapse, but he had to leave. Before the Talon or someone else thought to sacrifice the tribesman to their dragon god.

In the sky it looked like a long bolt of lightning, the kind that lit wildfires. The heat of blazing grasses already pressed on Jerani’s brow. The red-sweat rain didn’t help. It blistered his eyes. He blinked and shielded them with a hand. He took another step from Celaise, then another.

No, he couldn’t do this. He had promised not to leave her, and a second time he had sworn to take her away from all the lord’s plans. The Lord of the Feast was a giant crouching atop the tower. His weight might crush the world. He upended a tub, and out crashed a river of redness.

The smell of the waters grated at Jerani’s throat and battered his stomach. The flow splashed up to his ankles.

“It’s flooding,” a woman screamed. She clutched a baby that had been painted like a butterfly. With her other hand she tugged at a child who refused to move. “Please, please come. Not now. Not now.”

The boy rolled onto his back, wailing and kicking.

The woman’s face turned ugly. She raised her foot over the boy’s head. Jerani wondered what she was thinking. The dragon’s light filled her eyes with fire. She moved to break the child’s skull. “You are a curse!”

Jerani caught her in time. He dragged her from the boy. She tried to punch Jerani, and the waters were rising, and the child changed into a gilled monster, and what could Jerani do except run? He pulled himself onto a roof and hopped from home to home.

He passed a Bright Palm fighting a Feaster. A terror bird had been chasing some people with its axe-sized beak. A Bright Palm had leapt on the monster, and it had shriveled down to a Feaster man. He was nailed through the leg against a building. Jerani could’ve hopped down to stop it, but the Feaster might just attack him too. Then a sunset tide swept the Bright Palm away.

The city wasn’t safe. Jerani could see he had to leave, even if another Bright Palm might try to stake Celaise. Jerani didn’t need to be there for her. She had escaped them on her own. The lord’s flood might not harm her.

One rooftop canopy had been set on fire. A man and a woman sat beneath it in the flower garden. They didn’t seem to care about drifting hot ash. They didn’t mind the red rain. The dragon god’s light fell full on them. The man spoke something in her ear. She ran hands through his hair. Their happiness stabbed Jerani to the marrow.

Jerani stopped at the edge of a rooftop. It was too much. He needed to go back to Celaise. He could find Bright Palm Gio. He had healed Celaise before. He might again, that or kill her.

Turning around, Jerani faced the tower, the Lord of the Feast, and the firestorm sky. Jerani knocked his head against the side of his spear. The other way was right, toward the emptiness beyond the city. That road would lead him to the grasslands. He belonged there. He could be happy. He could live.

The dragon god’s light burned across his back. Jerani could run under the worst of the sun’s heat, but now he was sizzling. He didn’t even cast a shadow on the brick wall. The blaze went all the way through him.

And he went back to Celaise. He knew it was wrong. He might die here tonight, but he would be with her. Even if she had changed forever—even if she never spoke to him again—he could stay in the blessed shade of her shadow.

His knees trembled from the distant shake of hooves on the grasslands a lifetime away. His ears rang with the cries of his sister and his brother and his tribe. He was leaving them forever. Jerani waded against the flow of red.

Hiresha had chiseled herself into one purpose: Kill the god. She lashed out with dragon claws. She bit with crystal fangs. Tearing through his feather hide, she ripped out a jiggling spiral organ. This would be the first she catalogued. She would extract them all before she let the Winged Flame die.

The god bellowed. He cried a melody of breaking gemstones. He mocked her. That ringing blare was him laughing at her.

“I’ll find your heart.” Hiresha clambered over the god. All his cuts vented gas.

The Winged Flame snaked away. She clacked her amethyst claws together, yet he had escaped, for the moment. Gods and people alike enjoyed their futile gestures. The Winged Flame was trying to hide one of his heads behind his coils or something equally foolish.

She had the option to wait. Analyzing his motions might tell her something. Or it might waste her time, and this false god had taken far more already than he deserved. She had discerned where he kept a heart. His serpentine torso pulsed there with its beat. No human would’ve seen the slight difference in diameter in this winged confusion, yet Hiresha was greater than any mortal.

She beat her remaining good wing and twisted her scaled frame. Her tail lashed through the air. She spun through a loop of wings and reached toward the heart. The god might have more than one, she knew, yet soon he would have one fewer. Her claws were polished and enchanted to gleaming deadliness.

Their points stopped short. The god had tightened a coil of his body around her waist. She reached to gouge him. He spiraled faster and pinned her arms to her sides. She wriggled with a scraping of scales until she couldn’t move at all. The god constricted.

Her wing snapped. No! Her chest collapsed. She willed this to stop.

His noose tightened. Her spine shattered.

She Repulsed the god with all the force of life-changing dreams.

He broke her, and amethysts cracked into white chunks that plinked down to the city streets to explode against bricks and gash the unfortunate masses.

Hiresha was destroyed. She had been undone, ruined, and wrecked. Genius, she understood now, was no match for brutality. Hiresha could create nothing lasting. She was merely mortal.

And there was Jerani. Celaise didn’t know if he would ever stop pestering her.

She would’ve passed him by faster if she could. The lord father’s flood soaked up her True Gown, slowing her. His wine would stain her. She pushed it away. It came back, lapping, dripping all over.

She should fight him shadow for shadow. Celaise knew she could best him, but not tonight. He had caught the minds of too many people. The sky rippled with his black wine. For now, he was stronger. When it mattered, he would win.

He had given her so much, and he could take it away. She feared she must always do as he asked. She would never be free. He would rule through her. The lord was leaving his title behind, so it must not be all banquets of tasty souls.

And there was Jerani.

She needed to escape. More than the lord’s silly wine flood was holding her back. The Winged Flame engulfed the sky. The cascade of his heat smothered her. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t be. How could she ever live? The sun god could swoop down and gobble her up, even at night.

His curse had left her broken ever since she became a Feaster. She had also known she would carry its weight until she died, and the worst of it was, most people loved the Winged Flame. He didn’t bother them. They didn’t care who he persecuted, when they could bask in his gory power.

His scouring light fell on a rich woman and a poor man. She wore beautiful beetle earrings and had a trove of flower tattoos all over her oiled skin, but she still knelt to him. She kissed his mud-spattered fingers one by one.