Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (78 page)

Magnus roared at the thought, and his rage puffed the flicker of his magik to a flame. In a humming blast of white-cold sorcery, the brothers were scattered strides apart. Magnus was exhausted afterward, as chilled as the snow he lay and bled upon, but he staggered to a knee. Brutus was striding toward him, empowered by foul whispers and smiling sadistically; the fragments of ice that were embedded in his muscled hide sizzled away into steam. The giant stopped as his brother found some untapped reserve of power—his love, perhaps, and his wish to be together beyond all these struggles—for the magik that shone from him was as pure and glimmering as a crystal in the sun.

Mother warned me of your magik
, shouted Brutus.
She said that I would not have the strength to break you on my own. But there are forces in Geadhain that not even your winter can still. Powers as untamed as each of us. Only Mother has shown me the leash, the old whispers to tame the wildest beasts. How much strength do you have, really, brother? How strong is your winter? Enough to stand against the power of fire itself?

Fire?
thought Magnus, his mind scrambling.
Impossible
.

But the impossible was made possible in that moment, and Magnus’s darkest fears were realized. Brutus mouthed a word, an ancient sound, the sort that could not be attributed to language and yet was language still: a groan, a growl, a purring in the throat from which few mortal syllables could be fished among the notes.
Eeeegh…niiii…faaaa…ks!
Magnus now understood how Mor’Khul had been scorched and ruined, and the source of all that
unendurable heat: the firefather. His brother had chained the eldest of the elementals, the Great Wyrm of Flame itself. None of this knowledge would serve him, however, for the ground had already begun to split and glow with red light, steam wavered his vision, and the ice was running like a full season of spring passed in a single speck. Brutus was howling in mad glee as plumes of fire, rock, and ash heralded the rising of the monster that shook the world from below. Magnus called to his light, his love, though he knew it would not protect him.

IX

Once the horde had snuffed out the king’s green fire and begun cascading over the embankment, the mounted Watchmen and infantry had charged ahead to form a new line. Erik was among the first to meet the enemy with his hammer, and he cheered with every soft body that crumpled under his blows or every Blackeye knight that he batted from his saddle. Brigada was unstoppable, and trampled or kicked whatever hands or blades came for her and her rider. For however many moments, as Brigada bucked, the blood sprayed around him, and more and more of the chanting damned were beaten back, he felt invincible. Alive in the purest way a warrior knew, connected to body and to the transit of life and death: balancing one, delivering the other. He came out of this state on occasion, and could tell that the battle was not going as well for others as it was for him. Of the five legion masters who rode the front lines with him, his darting eyes could spot only two that had not been pulled from their mounts or were otherwise unseen. When Brigada spun, he caught a look at the Fangs of Dawn, where the Blackeye horde had pursued a similar tactic to its crossing of the king’s flame, whereby they piled themselves against the taller reaches of rock and climbed over the crispy remains of those blasted by a fusillade of arrows and sorcery. There, the artillery was still under a second assault from the cursed firecallers and their lances of flame, too. He could not tell how many of his men remained clinging to the cliffs. In the pass itself, it was equally difficult to make out much past the stacks of the dead, though Erik noticed the shining tips of Watchmen’s spears, and that gave him hope that the phalanx held. Still, it would not do so
for long. The Watchmen barely clung to the land they had begun with, and beyond their small stake, a wave of the damned, as unctuous as a sea of ants, continued to roll out of the valley. A few sands at best, and he and his men would be pushed back; a few more after that and they would all die.

Hurry, Kingfather!
he thought, as the king was their only hope. By now, King Magnus had surely cast himself into the thick of Brutus’s army. Translocation was always a gamble, but Erik had faith that the transit was safely made. He clutched at that faith and drew power from it when heaviness began to burden his arms and his swings became messy. He believed in his king despite the rising, unitary chant of
Brutus! Brutus! Brutus!
and the dimming of the war-cries made by his allies, who were dying now, undoubtedly.
You will save us, Kingfather!
he trusted, even when the horde shoved Brigada against the scattered phalanx, and sorcerers and archers were falling from the Fangs of Dawn like victims of mass suicide.

His faith was rewarded.

Winter came. Somewhere out in the valley, a storm rose like a flower of whiteness. When it opened, there was a purity of light so bright that it seared the eyes to blindness and spots. A wrathful wind followed: sharp with slivers of ice and snow, and if not for Brigada’s footing and his grip upon her bridle, Erik would have flown off. The whistling quiet was what he noticed first; the song of the Blackeyes had ceased. Erik and his mount bumbled for a bit, Brigada as sightless as he was. Though in the blinks and freckled visions that he had, he saw the miracle of Brutus’s horde, dusted in frost and as still as a portrait of war: their strides and swipes paused, their heads hung like stringless dolls. His wonder did not end, for the escarpment had been made slippery with a gloss of ice and snowy dunes, while in the distance winter reigned. In the valley, none of the black despair of Mor’Khul could be seen, and there ice ran rampant in spirals and spines as tall as trees.
A forest
, thought Erik. His fellows were finding their eyes again, and astonished cries echoed through the glittering wasteland that his king had conjured. While he gaped, Brigada guided him among the desolation, butting over stiffened Blackeyes in her way.

“Have we won?” a soldier whispered behind him.

Erik twisted in his saddle and saw that the speaker was Leonitis. The legion master was pink across his punctured armor with frozen blood, crazy
in his stare, and had the look of a lunatic dervish: bearing a Blackeye hatchet—ripped from the arm of an enemy and with shreds of flesh still attached—and his broadsword. Other men were kicking through the snow behind him.

“I think…I think we have,” replied Erik.

Relief fell from him, and then came the emptiness of purpose that a warrior felt when the battle was over, and lastly the leaden fatigue of a body pushed for weeks and finally realizing its rest. The cold came in as the heat of battle left, and Brigada carefully plodded over the icy terrain, still directing herself, while Leonitis limped along beside her. They were headed toward the howling lip of the arctic valley without a clear sense of why: to see if they could find the worker of this miracle, perhaps, their king. Even in the biting wind and surrounded by the hideous mutated bodies of Brutus’s horde—each twisted specimen more freakish with metal fusings than the one beside it—the warriors found their first smile in a very long time.

Suddenly, the earth lurched, and their smiles died.

Brroooootuuuusss
…came the murmur from the lips of the countless damned, who were not frozen, it appeared; only motionless without their master’s Will: a Will that had returned. Again the land pitched, and out in the valley, the crystalline forest began to crumble in shattering explosions.

Erik jumped from his mount and shook the reins at Leonitis. “Take the king’s charger, round up who you can and flee!”

“We do not flee!” barked Leonitis.

“Your king has commanded that you do! Think of what he had you hold back!”

Brruuutuss!
hissed the horde.

Slowly the damned were moving now, like elders stretching from their beds, only with clattering daggers instead of arthritic hands. One of the abominations sluggishly reached with its sword-arms for Leonitis from behind, and he stuck his hatchet in its head without turning around. He would not unlock himself from the hammer’s stare. Not until Erik shouted at him again, abandoned Brigada, and ran forward through the writhing fields of the damned. He hoped that Leonitis took King Magnus’s steed and saved whomever he could, for a babe of horror was kicking in his belly, and his instincts told him that the darkest hourglass was now upon them. Magnus had failed. Brutus and his dark ally would ravage Geadhain. The war of all
wars had begun. He knew this as truly as a dying man could count his final breaths, and the passion and anger he felt at his kingfather’s defeat turned him into an engine of goring death as he hurtled down the battlefield. The Blackeyes were shuffling into his path, trying to throw their lazy bodies upon him as if he was another fire to be smothered. It was to his favor that the horde was still so sleepy, for he would not have cleared a hundred strides were they not. He still did not make it far enough to grant his wish and learn the fate of his kingfather.

GRAAAAAHHHHHCCCHHH!

A high-pitched explosion of incredible magnitude ripped through the valley and hurled him back. On the topsy-turvy earth, he slid and danced, not only the patches of ice, but the tilting and jostling of the land itself working against his coordination. Blackeyes tumbled into him, senselessly biting at him before he tossed them off. The titanic bellow shook reality once more—
GRAAAAHHHHCCCHHH
—a noise that could be an earthquake’s passion and that Erik irrationally accepted had come from something with a mouth large enough to cause such uproar. Then came the rain of fire, the powdery cracking of the ground, the brume of embers that throttled all of Erik’s senses, and the boiling heat that seared his metal plating into his skin, so swiftly had the apocalypse descended upon him. He was lost in a realm of fire.
Brutus! Brutus!
the damned sang, their swaying choir a whisper to the symbols of destruction ringing out even as the crimson landscape devoured them in tongues of flame.

Please live, Kingfather. Please, somehow be alive
.

That was his final wish.

Hysterically, Erik tossed away his gauntlets and tore at his chest plate, which was soft and pliable, almost ready to be poured back into a mold. Then he wailed as the clothing underneath went up like cotton in a kiln. But his clawing hands found the cold stone he needed, and he squeezed it as if grasping at life itself. He didn’t have the stomp of a boot, as the king had suggested, but the fear and sizzling of his burning flesh made his hands just as hard. The fragile vessel broke, leaking numbing, soothing cold over him: a blanket of the kingfather’s love. Away from the land of fire he spun; to somewhere safe, somewhere calm, somewhere with the sound of waterfalls and echoes.

XX

THE STORM

I

T
he thickness of the air before rain, the feeling of walking into a dark room and knowing that something awaits you there, a tingle of lightning along the spine: all the sensations of forewarning that Mouse possessed were going off at once. She wasn’t an oracle like the woman she sought, and she didn’t need to be to understand that grand events were circling about her like dark water in a drain. Every time she glanced down through the grates they trod over into the filthy, loud streets of the Undercomb, or forgot to breathe through her mouth and could smell shite and tangy fear, she asked herself what she was doing here. Scampering with the rats in piss-rusted ducts, following a man who had abducted her a day ago and a risen corpse that was the father about whom she had never known. Yet whenever Vortigern turned his ghastly white face to her and gave her his creepy yellow smile, she found her rude reminder for this journey.
I am here to save Morigan, the mind witch who brought my father to me. I am here to honor that gift
, she thought. These notions of honor, trust, and family were exciting if foreign to Mouse—as thrilling as hearing Alastair declare her freedom for the first time. While she had been cautious about so many aspects of her life—never trusting, never believing in the promises of others—she had faith
in Vortigern, Morigan, and that strange northern lad, too. So whenever her doubt arose, which was often, she reminded herself of these truths.