Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (67 page)

He would not disappoint her with his service.

Another heave, another pull, a thousand burning breaths, and abruptly the Wolf became aware that they were descending. Although a grand gorge pitted with shadows and cruel holes still remained to be challenged, they had beaten half the range. Night was racing to hinder their travel with darkness, and the wind was a bitter slap to their faces. Thackery quickened their pace.
Accidents can happen in the dark
, he reminded himself, and on nearly every trip across the Iron Valley, this dire prophecy had fulfilled itself.

The sun has been eaten, and there are no stars to light their path—not that there has ever been starlight in the Iron Valley. The group’s progress was slow today, as one of the refugees is with child and has a boy and a girl already brought into this world that travel with her. Ten of them started this journey, and now only he, Bethany, and six others remain. On top of the range, one man was taken into the abyss by a violent breeze; later on, another unfortunate wandered off the path and slid amid a rockslide to his doom. Yet the worst of the journey has ended, and they are in the foothills that will guide them to freedom. They dare not make a light without it calling attention to the Crowes, so Bethany soothes their trembling souls with the humming of her voice
.

A girl’s scream interrupts Bethany’s music
.

Oblivious of his own security, he spins and pulls Bethany to himself. Commotion has broken out along the line, and he is counting heads and faces in the gleaming dark. Two are missing, and he can tell from the girl sobbing near a coughing hole, who has met their ends. “My mother! My brother!” she cries, and her words quickly devolve into sobs. While Bethany pulls the girl from the pit, he helps the other folk around the obstacle, which is still crumbling and looks as if it is ready to give way some more. Once they are back on the path, huddled like scared cattle, he leans over the yawning grave and wishes for the
mother, her unborn child, and her son to find peace in the mystery that comes after this
.

As he turns, he sees it: a glimmer of something blacker than the night up the hillside. He can’t be sure of what it is, now or when he will look back on it in future years, although it could be a figure. If it is a person, it might be one of those he thought they’d lost. However, he does not call out to it. The words freeze in his throat, and his heart plays a frantic drum. He knows in that place of intimate knowing that this is not something he should reach out to, but a presence to be left alone
.

Bethany is shouting his name, telling him to hurry. He blinks and the wrinkle in the darkness is gone. A figment, he tells himself. A figment and nothing more
.

He had buried that story within himself, and how odd that it should resurface at this moment. His mind had done him the charity of clouding over a lot of what transpired in the Iron Valley. No escape from Menos was free of casualties, and no trip across the Iron Valley came without the cost of more bones for the hungry darkness down below. Forgetting was the easy part, he realized. Remembering was what brought the uncertainty and fear.

There are no ghosts
, he scolded himself.
Only darkness, which is just as dangerous, and a lack of caution. No ghosts
.

From behind stirred a grumbling that Thackery strained to hear over the wind. Perhaps Caenith had spoken. “Pardon me?” he called back.

When no answer came, Thackery whipped around. Neither the Wolf nor his tiny charge was there, and a dusty rip in the mountain, a wound into darkness, was where the two had certainly been.

III

A person. Or what approximated one. That is what had drawn Caenith’s keen eye on the dusky peaks. From a great distance, the figure rose from between two rocks: it shuddered to uprightness in a jerky way, and its appearance was so immediately shocking that Caenith stopped.
What are you?
he wondered, and could not pry himself from solving this riddle. What is dark as the immanent night and man-shaped? What has misty flesh and
blurs like a shadow brushed between two rocks on an oil painting? What are those glistening accents where a face should be? Did he really want to know?

Pinning an eye on the aberration, he stepped forward quickly, trying to signal Thackery without raising an alarm. Had he not been so engrossed, he would have noticed it sooner, the step into nothingness, and next, the sudden pitching of his weight forward. He was falling, and without a moment to scream. He tossed out his free arm, yet anything to hook his fingers into was well out of reach, and his body somersaulted over itself. While he could have spread his limbs and flailed for handholds, that would have come at the forfeiture of Macha’s life—something he never once considered. Instead, he held the whimpering child closer, shielded her with his enormous arms, and then did his best to straighten his body as he plunged through the shrieking void. For a man plummeting to his apparent death, Caenith was rather composed. Concentration was essential to the mastery of his flesh, and to achieve perfection, one had to fade out the world: the rattling darkness, the slash of air to his ear, the boom of his heart, and the panting of poor Macha. As a youth, when he had first discovered his uncanny resilience and power, he had jumped from the foamy heights of the Weeping Falls and landed without even a red mark from the water upon his skin. He could be harmed, yes, but he had still to find anything in Geadhain that could kill him. Macha’s survival was another matter entirely.

The chasm did its best to end him, bouncing him against ledges and outcroppings in ways that would shatter a slow-walker like an egg, while he somehow held straight and true as a rod of steel. He hardly winced from the pain as his body was carved into. Abruptly, the ripping at his meat ended, and he was soaring through cavernous space. To his nose came the reek of stagnant water, and he tensed his every muscle, and cast out his every nerve and sense. In one broad net of sentience, he absorbed every drip and creak of the space he was in, tasting currents and calculating impossible mathematics—though he would never perceive them this way—information that was fed to his consciousness as mere instinct: a single miraculous effort of muscle and movement. In the air, he leaned and twisted acrobatically, realigning himself for a softer landing than rude stone.

I shall not break
, he thought. The Wolf took a hearty breath.

Macha screamed at last, and suddenly her mouth and lungs were filled with filthy water. It was not her destiny to drown, however, and as quickly as she was submerged, she was up again, retching fluid out and dragging air in. Her tireless knight was then paddling like a man in a sling, and before she could make sense of the madness, they were out of the soiled lake and onto dry land. Her knight staggered a bit—he was surely wounded—and finally rolled onto his back. His arm slowly loosened about her, yet she continued to lie against him, and whispered for him to stay awake, for she could feel him slipping away. He was the only grace she had known since the slow-walkers had ripped her parents from her, and she was not about to lose him. Fiercely for a child, she slapped his face and pleaded with him.

“
Cos ni fiag, Mactyre
!” (Do not leave me, Wolf!)

When that had little effect, she did what seals do in their most abject moments. She bit him, right on the neck.

“
Mae creach na fiag tu
(I shall not leave you),” groaned the Wolf.

He was far from dead. Aching like a hundred-year-old man thrown off a tower, lacerated across his shoulders, back, and buttocks, with bones that felt wrapped in barbed wire and a gong in his head that resounded with pain, but he was most certainly alive. He healed many times faster than a slow-walker did, and by dawn, these wounds would be but small pink memories on his skin. Fatigue was his greatest adversary at the moment, and he cursed his body for its ponderous size as he tried to move. First, he lifted the delicate child off himself, and then he hauled the rest of his sluggish mass up to sit. He waited a speck for the fireworks to fade, and with his gleaming sight—tuned for darkness—he began to discern the silvery details and outlines of their surroundings.

From what he could tell, they had fallen through a crack in the roof of a domed excavation. He could see dust still raining from the black spot, and he was confident that they would not be returning that way. The space was huge and hollow, with a ringing silence disturbed by his breath and the faint pattering of debris down into the body of water that had cushioned their landing. It was not quite a lake, Caenith realized, but a flooding of water from an unthinkable depth and age that was as black and befouled as oil; the stink of it clung like pond rot to their clothing and hair. The pool filled a good portion of the room, and the shore to which he had dragged them was a twisted
beach, where broken carts were buried in dunes of filth, rusty pickaxes and shovels were discarded with abandon, and hints of metal tracks lay muffled in gray sand. If he followed these tracks, he saw them lead to wood-framed tunnels. These, he was interested in, for one would hopefully bear them to the surface.

He remembered how they had fallen, the creature that had distracted him into this trap, yet could not sense its presence in the cavern. Still, it was doubtful that was the end of their encounter, and he wasn’t in the best state for a fight, if it came to that. They needed to move. He knew his share of field medicine from the blood pits, from the years of maiming and watching the maimed, and he hastily checked Macha for bumps, breaks, and bruises. She was intact, if completely terrified. Standing up was a bigger chore for Caenith than it should have been, and it took him a sand and much staggering and panting. Once he was on his feet, he reached for Macha. She wouldn’t have his gallantry; she crossed her arms and politely refused him.

“
Nae, masiúl. Canna ma iompair tu gualach cannamo
.” (No, I can walk. I would carry you if these shoulders were able.)

“
Si
(Yes),” Caenith said with a smile.

He offered her his giant hand then, and she took a finger, which was all she needed. They set out. Since the back half of the chamber was inaccessible without swimming in the lake, and the tunnels there were likely to be flooded anyhow, Caenith aimed for one of the shafts to the south. He was sure of their direction, for even at this depth his compass was unerring, and south seemed a good way to go. In all his years and vocations, Caenith had never taken an interest in prospecting on this scale: he sniffed out the lodes in animal caves or the veins that hid in waterfalls, but never went too deep into the earth. For Geadhain’s body was a sacred place; a living entity with a plodding, almost undetectable heartbeat of tremors, shifts, and grumbles. Yet here, the silence was deafening. It was as if the Green Mother was asleep or even dead. Acute as his senses were, they did not hear the clacking of rats that should live in dark places, nor the fluttering of bats or the chittering of crawly things. Nothing lived here; not even the smallest mite scuttled from his boots as they waded through the ashy sand.

Green Mother, why have you forsaken this place?
he wondered.

Kuuuheeeeeeee
.

Or had she? His ears perked up to a sound coming from one of the tunnels, though it was dispersed as if from all directions and not one. He could not say what it was, that noise: a warbling whisper of wind, an instrument, or the quavering of a watery throat. Before he could puzzle over it further, the sound faded, though it left a chilly prickling of sweat upon him. Macha had heard nothing. She tugged on him and asked why he had stopped.
Faech
(nothing), he assured her, and hurried on. Macha frowned, for she had not made it so far in captivity without reading the whims of men and knew that her knight was lying to her.

A dozen tunnels awaited the pair when they reached the end of the beach. Some were collapsed entirely; others were split along their beams and sagging from the weight of stone atop them; none of them looked safe to travel. To make his decision of which route to take, the Wolf gently tossed his head and filled his chest with air. Most of what he inhaled was that distasteful, dry mildew and putrefaction that he had come to expect, yet hidden in the corruption was a tease of fresh air. No other nose but his would have found it, and the source was spans and spans away. Where there was air, there was freedom, and he followed that scent.

Kindly as a father, he helped the young seal step over the rubble of the mine shaft he had picked. On the other side of the obstruction, as he guided them into the winding passage, he exhibited the same care. He spotted tools under the dust that she might trip on, or places of the floor and ceiling around which they needed to tread warily. Each of them could tell that they were the first in many hundreds of years to walk these paths, and they moved ahead as cautious explorers of this great tomb.
Where are the bones?
wondered Caenith. For as they wandered this grave of twenty thousand souls, he saw carts, tools, even garments discarded under the ash, and yet no sign of the bodies that once wielded or wore such items.