Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (17 page)

As silkily as one of the Broker’s numbermen, the dead man materialized behind Mouse. He didn’t breathe, and she was only aware of his presence from the slightest ruffle of clothing and the floral potpourri of whatever he had been preserved with—not altogether unpleasant.

“Good day to you,” she said to the Raven with a bob of her head. In the motion, the Raven must have caught a flash what her hood concealed, for his unpleasant smile deepened, and he asked her to stop.

“Wait. Wait a speck. Come here. Let me look at you.”

An odd request, and Mouse wasn’t obliged to entertain it. She flapped her hand at the dead man to move.

“Come here.”

“I have appointments to keep. Our business is done—”

“Come here,” demanded the Raven, without kindness.

Few actions provoked a reaction from Mouse, with all her composure. Being ordered about was an incivility that she suffered no longer, and she stormed toward the hall.

Whoosh!

A wash of glacial wind prickled her back, and a power rudely seized her, holding her still as ice. She could breathe wintry breaths and dart her eyes about in horror—seeing the dead man looking on, vexed, even compassionately—but she could not move, nor could her tongue wag to intimidate her captor with reprisal. It lay dead as a slug in her mouth. She then remembered her weakest moments in the charterhouse in which she grew up, those times when the masters would beat her, chain her, and leave her in a basement beneath a drainage pipe because of her disobedience. The water that drummed on and numbed her skull was always cold, and soon the poison of Menos that it carried would get into her eyes, gumming them. Soon she could see nothing but darkness and knew nothing but the locking of her fingers, spine, and jaw, or the coughing agony as her body took each gasp. And yet that coldness was never as cold as the ice in her bones now. Momentarily,
the nekromancer was in front of her; he was nonplussed, there was not even a drop of sweat on his contemplative brow from maintaining her complete paralysis. He robbed her of her hood and examined her face with his cold bloodstained fingers. He was pleased with what he found, for another sick smile broke over him.

“The perfect shade of brown, like the first of the autumn leaves. But the notes of a golden summer are still there.” The Raven caressed Mouse under the eye. “Nose, as fine as a sliver of silverwood. The redness to your cheeks, the sharp and noble chin.” He stroked her jaw and neck sensually. “And the rest… you…you could be her. What is your name, Voice? Your true name?”

The Raven snapped his fingers, and a wintry cloud blew from Mouse’s mouth. She could use it again to speak, or to threaten, in this case.

“The Watchers will hear of this!”

This neither fazed nor offended the Raven. Disinterested now, he walked away to sit in one of the posh chairs near the fire. His face was etched in profound thought.

“Yes, yes, the Watchers
will
hear of this. At the moment, I am not equipped to deal with the development you present. You may go. We shall see each other again soon,” declared the Raven, and snapped again.

In a sigh, the magik was off Mouse, but the blood had not yet returned to her tissues. She fell, only to be caught by the dead man. More chivalrous than Mouse would ever have assumed, the dead man carried her from the room and set her down when she regained enough strength to slap at him.

How dare he touch a Voice! I’ll gut the bastard!
she raged within. However, the likeliness of her being able to stand against a man able to stop her with a thought was the wildest of delusions. She took a few breaths, and then several more after that. Along with her sense, she was reminded of the nekromancer’s foul promise to see her again. Suddenly her legs were moving—not running, but almost—and her heart was pounding with the red rush of fear. How long had it been since she had felt so bare? So crippled and powerless? In one instant, that man had revived every weakness and terror that she carried in her heart—emotions shoveled under years of discipline and coarsening of her virtues. She was a Voice, an instrument of the Watchers. She was supposed to be beyond fear, just as she was outside the reach of law. Yet she was afraid of the nekromancer, and rightly so.

For all my achievements, I am still nothing more than a commodity to be bought and sold. That man will use me if he pleases, and there is little I can do to stop it
.

“I summoned a carriage for you,” said the dead man, keeping pace.

Mouse might have given a reply—snappy, grateful, or otherwise—but the painting on the wall that had earlier caught her interest claimed it once more, and she tripped to a halt. She stared at the woman and her banqueting ravens, and was agog at how she had not seen it before: who this woman was. Even if she only glanced in the mirror to see how low her hood fell each day, she could recognize her own face. The Raven’s words fluttered back to her, kissing her ear.
The perfect shade of brown, like the first of the autumn leaves. Nose, as fine as a sliver of silverwood. The redness to your cheeks, the sharp and noble chin
. The woman in the tapestry had longer hair, but their faces were similar enough to make them sisters. In his sad, watchful way, the steward observed the moment of epiphany.

“Your carriage, dear Voice. You should
go
,” he stressed.

Ravens, gory experiments, sentient reborn; she didn’t know the black game in play and wanted no role in it. She thanked the dead man with a nod and hurried along. At the doors, which loomed grand and frightening, she paced while the steward flipped a lever beside the entrance to grind it open. She did not say a farewell, but ran out into the burning rain, her hood flapping to the wind and welcoming a case of stinkeye—a pittance to pay for freedom from the black manor. Once inside the coach, she huddled into the cushions and did not glance back. If she had, she would have seen two pale men, almost identical, watching the carriage roll down the lane. One from under the arch of stone guardians; the other from a tall window above, his hand pressed to the glass as if waving or longing.

IV

All the pieces are in play. The Raven will fly, the Broker will follow. Mayhap we shall at least bring vengeance to my brother. The whispers howl like holes in your sinking ship, Everfair King. Our ears have heard of your leaving. The City of Wonders is ripe for the picking with only its golden queen to protect it.
We shall finally see what treasures of the ages lie buried in Eod’s vault, and once the two kings have destroyed each other, we shall harvest from the ruins of Zioch, too. My success in this venture should at last silence the tongues that I have not yet cut
.

Reflected in the black glass of the Crucible was a woman’s hard, lined face, once sharp and comely, but ruined by frowning and age. A deep-purple and black gown hung off a similarly wearied frame, and her hair was pulled tight into a gray coronet. At least her stare maintained its vitality, cruel as sapphire daggers and sparkling with a frightful passion: a well of ruthlessness, of skipped kindnesses and unwavering choices, of a woman who feared nothing, not even death itself. She had not celebrated her name day in decades and had lost track of her age. Age was a triviality in Menos, anyhow, to those with power and access to the most potent and dark alchemies of the Iron City that could cure all but the gravest of illnesses. She was over two hundred at last count, whenever that was, and had outlived the oldest of her enemies on the Council of the Wise. She had outlived her husband. She endured because there was no one else who could fill the role she had made. She had no real heirs. One of her sons, the one with a mind to rule, was taken by tragedy before he could provide a successor. Her other child lived on in the old Blackbriar estate, crippled by madness. He was a genius and a ghastly sorcerer without compare, a liniment inherited from neither she nor her late husband—though his accursed uncle shared a similar talent. She wouldn’t want a child from her son’s loins anyway, as tainted as they were. Now the game was all that she had left. Not that she had ever wanted anything else or could reverse any of the damning decisions that locked her to this path.

Would I?
she thought whimsically.
Would I ever have chosen differently?

In the dawning of her youth, she had loved her husband, Gabriel, as deeply as a woman could. This was before she had learned of his other lovers: men and women, for his appetites knew no bounds. Even after these discoveries, her love had persisted, though it grew as dark and perverse as Gabriel’s did. If he wanted to have lovers, she would see how many he could keep. One by one, they met with neck-snapping tumbles, tripped carelessly off bridges, or fell while leaning against the loose doors of skycarriages. When at last Gabriel realized what was happening, he came to love her not just as a dowry bride, but also as a true wife and equal to a Menosian master.
My Spider
, he would say whenever they engaged in violent passion.
What a beautiful web you weave
. After that, it became a game, and the first of many that she was to play and master. For each new lover that Gabriel fetched, she devised a creative demise, and with each passing, her husband would storm to her, feigning rage when his prick spoke otherwise. She could see now how her dalliances had sharpened and shaped the tools of her mind, how inescapable this path was once she had placed her feet upon it. In making these deadly arrangements for others’ ends, she met the mad Broker of the Undercomb, and she had learned the essentials of subterfuge: the secrets of how a woman could sway life and death even within her gilded cage. With that, she began to dream of what she could do if she was free of her bars.

I got that freedom. Though not as I wanted. At the cost of you, Gabriel. I never loved another man after you, if that sick passion we shared ever was love. I think it was, it hurt and broke me like it was. I never took another name for myself, only stole those of my children. I am a Blackbriar now. I have fulfilled our promise together. I miss you
. The face in the glass twisted with bitterness as she thought of why he was gone.
I hope it was worth the cost, brother. The destruction of our old name and honor. The death of my Gabriel. I hope you rot in misery till the end of your days. If I ever catch you, I shall string you up for all of Menos to see, just as my husband was. I would have you die in shame as he did
.

She remembered the day Gabriel had been taken from her.

In this one rare moment of Menosian accord, the rabble has been let onto the grounds of the Evernight Gardens and into the opulence of the Crucible’s plaza. The filthy masses are penned on the wide black arcade, away from the steps and terraces holding masters and their tidy slaves. All have been summoned to witness the cost of betrayal, the price of defying the basic Iron Rule to never curry the West. She and her children do not watch with the spitting masters, but huddle in rags—concealing themselves among the throng of lessers. For as of today, they are no longer those who rule. Such a right will end with the life of her husband: a battered, flayed figure, as red as a fresh cut of meat, who whimpers in the stocks ahead
.

She has pushed herself through the rabble so that she and her children can be at the front of this spectacle of her husband’s death. Firmly, she holds the squirming hands of her boys and demands that they watch. They must learn the cost of failure so that they will appreciate the rewards of success. They must
see the men who have done this to their father and hate them, as she does. Hate and its blossoming thorns, cut as they may, are the only weapons one needs in Menos. Little Sorren is broken by the sight of his father, she can tell, though her other son, the stronger one, has a face of steel
.

He will be the back of our family, then. He will be the one to rule the Iron City next, once we have rebuilt ourselves, once we have a new name, she thinks. For however dark the hourglass, this is still another of her plans. Gabriel’s, too, their final game together. When they learned of her brother’s mutiny against the Iron Rule, they knew that the Council of the Wise would not let such a slight fall harmlessly away—particularly not when the criminal was linked through blood to the wife of the First Chair. Surely, there would be retribution, and if her brother could not pay, then all who shared his lineage would. They would have killed her and her boys. ‘Twas then that Gabriel proved himself the man and father she had loved, despite any of his vices. He offered himself as penance, including his coveted chair on the Council: vacancies that only occur alongside a death, and his would be no exception
.

“I love you, Gloria,” he told her. “See that you and our children survive. I have never known a woman so canny or beautifully complex in her soul. You will use what wealth I have bargained for and take this city back. Make it bleed; make it yours. You will honor me with your survival.”

“I shall,” she swore
.

Yesterday they had made that promise and sanctified it in furious lovemaking, even cried for the first time together. In the evening, the Ironguards came to their estate and dragged Gabriel away. At least his punishment was swift, for here they were, and his life could surely be not more than a gasp from leaving Geadhain
.