Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (80 page)

“Be gentle,” he urged.

To that, the Wolf made an endearingly innocent whimper. Once Macha was secure in his jaws, the Wolf bobbed his head up and down. As unsuitable as the image of a small child in the mouth of a monstrous wolf was, the bundle hardly moved. Thackery gathered up Caenith’s pants and shoes into a pack and then mounted the changeling. With two fistfuls of fur and a prayer that he would not fly off, they were moving. The Wolf did not travel with the swiftness that he could, but a constant running pace. They avoided getting close to the roads, skulking across only the one that led to the new mines north of Menos. Here and there, when spotlights cut the night sky from the turrets of the Iron Wall and swept over the land, the Wolf stopped to plant himself like a great black boulder while Thackery struggled to breathe under his mass. Then the old man would climb back up and the game of hide-and-sneak would continue; deadly if they were to lose, for Thackery knew of the technomagikal bombardments that could rain from the Iron Wall—he had invented a few of them himself. Thackery wondered what awaited them in Menos: tragedy and death, surely. He was excited in a foolhardy way. Even if one of those deaths were to be his own, he would ensure that Sorren would join him in oblivion. Death was an end, after all, and that is what the saga of his past needed. Finality.

Perhaps we’ll see each other again, Gloria. A family reunion
, he laughed.
I would like you to watch your son die for all the pain you have caused me. Sorren is brilliant, but not so much for social engineering and duplicity. That was always your forte. I know you had a hand in Bethany and Theadora’s ends. You simply can’t keep your hands out of things. That’s always been your problem. And you will suffer, just as I have. If there is any justice in this world, we must all pay for our sins, and your price will be great indeed
.

By the time his brooding ended, they had already circled the Iron Wall and had entered a deep misty cleft that crashed on one side with water, and where the only safe ground was a beach of shattered rock as slick as an
ocean’s front. At least in here the scouring lights of Menos did not seek them, and Thackery dismounted; in a roar and a twisting of flesh, Caenith joined him in his body of two legs. Thackery handed the man his clothing while he tended to Macha. She had survived the trip comfortably, though she was pale as a white worm in the darkness, and her breathing was but a flutter. Her injuries were a concern, as they were pustules, and there was a sweetness and sourness to the girl that was some kind of infection. Caenith came over to cradle the child, and he and Thackery shared a knowing look: a warrior’s and a physician’s understanding, respectively, of a body close to death.

Thackery led the Wolf. Old trails are never forgotten, and Thackery recalled the pocketed faces of certain wet stones he stepped upon. Occasionally, he pictured Bethany racing ahead of him and had to halt to shake the memories from his head.
She is dead, and Morigan might be, too, if you don’t hurry
. In time their path curved around the waterfall, and the land continued in a quiet foggy canyon that narrowed and narrowed, ending in an incline that ran steeply upward. Pressing on, the journey became slippery and tedious. However, even as Thackery hunched and fumbled for hand-holds, the Wolf’s hand was ever there to hold him up—despite having a child to bear and his own balance to worry about. Repeatedly, Thackery cursed his age, which was all the more evident from this climb, as well as rejoiced that Caenith was here with him. If he had the breath or time to spare, he would have thanked the man for countless compassions, for this was a trip he would never have survived alone. Together they made it out of the wet darkness and onto a deeply shadowed plateau beneath the Iron Wall. Trees were abundant here; the sad shapes of willows and tangles of bushes and wildflowers gasped their perfume toward the travelers. Although this was some of the first real verdure that Caenith had seen since the woods west of the Iron Valley, and it was quite unexpected in its appearance, they did not need a reminder of their cause and hurried into the overgrowth before the lights of the Iron City discovered them. On the other side of the small copse, there was a pool exactly as Thackery had said, and at the end of that was a screen of reeds and a cloistering of vines that dripped with water. Caenith had to look twice with his incredible eyes to note that a metal tube behind the vines extruded from the base of the Iron Wall: an entry into an impregnable city. As they waited for the flurry of lights and Crowes to die down,
Thackery read the puzzlement on his friend’s face and told the Wolf how he had found this place.

“It’s an old access tunnel, built by my father to use in cases of emergency. Father told me about it, as I was the eldest male of our family. I doubt Gloria knows of it; if she had, it would have been sealed or heavily guarded for her own personal use. The architects that my father hired for its make were all… silenced. The passage leads to the Drowned River, near the old reservoir, and I am pleased to say that it appears my gamble was not in vain and that it has not been discovered. I suppose we shall confirm that in a speck. The lights are no longer hunting us for the moment. Let’s move.”

They darted out into the night and splashed their way toward the wall. Once through the whipping reeds, the two men ripped at the vines—Caenith’s one arm moving faster and doing more than both of Thackery’s—and soon revealed a heavy black gate, like that of a prison cell. Just as the watchtower lights swooped past, they hauled themselves up onto the rim of the pipe and pressed their bodies against the bars. As soon as they were in shadow again, Thackery turned and clutched the lock that sealed the gate. Caenith would have simply kicked the metal in, but Thackery muttered something—a woman’s name,
Bethany
, heard the Wolf—which opened the lock with a crisp click. The gate screeched as it swung into the dripping tunnel beyond.

“We should cover up the entrance in case it is spotted by the patrols.”

Thackery had to ask again, for the Wolf was distant and staring into the pipe. While he still could not feel his bloodmate, her scent of wind and flowers and the soils and sweetness of the West was somehow wafting toward him. She was close. His heart stirred from the rush of the chase.

“Morigan, I can smell her,” he said.

Thackery didn’t ask what miracle this was, or how it had come to be, for he had learned never to question good fortune. In a flurry, he pulled the greenery over the pipe and then waved the Wolf on. With that, two men and their tiny fading charge sped into the bowels of Menos to find the one woman who could right almost everything that was wrong.

They fled before the storm began, though Caenith absently heard the drumming and thunder echoing after them. He did not see the magnificence of the weather: the sky as it ran black as ink, the droplets as large as stones, or the winds that clawed hunks of earth and hacked the green from the
sanctuary of the trees they had recently left. The land was angry; the land was in sorrow. A sadness greater than either of those two could have guessed had occurred, and Geadhain was about to mourn.

The storm had started.

III

He’s coming
, the bees whispered.

Morigan rattled her chains when the message was delivered. She hadn’t meant to; it was the surprise that made her do it, and she had been pretending to be quiet until this point with relative effectiveness. Or so she believed.

“It’s about time we ended the charade, no?” said the Broker. “I don’t get many guests, and my sons don’t tend to converse much. I wouldn’t say I’m lonely, but I’m certainly lacking for an ear. Well, maybe not an ear, per se—I have a collection of those. C’mon now, let’s have a little chitter-chat. I imagine this will be the last civil discourse you have before the Iron sages take you. They’re not the convivial sort. You won’t much care for their conversation, I’d say. Go on. Open your eyes. Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared of you,” declared Morigan, and she meant it.

Inside her, the spirit of the Wolf growled, and she sat up as dignified as she could while being chained by the wrists and ankles—more of that feliron, she could tell, from the way it aggravated her skin with itching and chill. A bit of the Wolf’s senses were with her, and she could construe the particulars of her dingy imprisonment: the strange stucco walls made of metal and trash; the high roof and its dying yellow lights; the tables and their piles of coin, weapons, and instruments heaped with a mad child’s incompetence for organization; and the sugary decay of the withered things—bodies—hanging from sets of chains like her own along the wall.
More children like young Kanatuk. Only they were spared the disgrace of a life in his service
, she thought with solemnity.

“Sons. Weak sons. Failed sons. They didn’t survive The Binding,” the Broker said, sighing, when he noticed her staring.

Morigan was having difficulty finding the man’s voice in the shadowy chamber. Whenever she thought she spotted him, it was only out of the
corner of her eye. He moved with a serpentine slipperiness, and the bees warned her with a sting that there was something unusual about him.

“They are not your sons,” she challenged. “I’ve seen what you do to these poor boys, how you nurse them on cruelty. How you beat their flesh until their souls scream. You are the weakest kind of creature. A parasite that feeds on pain and fear. When that is all you have, it is all you are, and that is an empty life, indeed. I do not fear you because you are pitiful. I do not fear you because you will shortly meet your end.”

In a black sweep of motion, the Broker was before her, clacking his teeth in her face. Still, Morigan did not cringe.

“You are right,” he hissed, and licked his scarred lips with curiosity. “You do not fear me as you should. Which means that you have either foolishness or power in abundance. I’m betting on the latter, as I know that you did something to Twenty-Two. He was a favorite son of mine. So strong and diligent, and you
ruined
him. You took him from his father.”

“I did not ruin him. I freed him. If there is a soul to be salvaged in you, perhaps I shall free you, too.”

Morigan smiled, wolfish and dangerous. The Broker had placed himself perilously near—close enough to touch. Ferociously she sprang at him, and while her chains limited her, she was still able to reach and grasp one arm as he pulled away. As soon as contact was made, she called her Will and sent her swarm to attack the man.
Show me your secrets! Show me your sins!
she commanded, and the air rippled with invisible force. But the bees could not penetrate their target, and silver sparks scattered in the air as their stingers bounced off the hard soul of the Broker, his spirit somehow resistant to her magik. While laughing like a tickled man, the Broker viciously slapped off Morigan’s hands and then cracked the witch across the face. He stepped back, creating a distance that she could not cross with her chains, and took a sand to finish his spell of humor. When he was done, he had to wipe the tears from his eyes. Morigan did the same, though from pain. Despite this development, she was no more afraid than before and twice as angry that her magik had failed. She didn’t have to wonder why, for the Broker’s ensuing rambling explained plenty.

“I told you that your tricks don’t work on me,” the Broker said, snickering. “I see now exactly what you’ve done to Twenty-Two. Went into his head
like a technomancer with a wrench and jiggered all the bolts you shouldn’t have. No fixing him now. Should he pop his head out of a hole again, I suppose I’ll just have to lop it off and add it to my ears.” Pensively, the Broker stroked his beard, and his beady eyes worked furiously upon thoughts. “Yes. What power you have. A touch of the East. The lost Arts of Alabion. A Daughter of the Moon? Perhaps, perhaps, though I wager Elissandra doesn’t have the tricks you do. It’s a shame that I must surrender you, for we could have such interesting play together.”

The Broker sauntered over to Morigan and slithered his thin fingers over her neck and bust; she thrashed away from some of it, but by the king’s, his hands were fast.

“What are you?” she spat.

“It has been a while since anyone has asked me that.” The Broker grinned. “These slow-walkers here, they don’t remember the truth to the old legends, only the stories. Of the things that crawled under the bed, gutted their wives and cows, and ate their children. You should know what I am, for you have encountered my kindred before.” The Broker darted his head toward Morigan and sniffed. “A lord of fang and claw…his scent is all about you. Rank as an otter’s piss. How special you must feel, being a mate to such
majesty
.”

Mockingly and with foppish flair, the Broker bowed to Morigan. She understood then what she had been missing thus far: his speed, his animal senses. Of course. Morigan blurted her realization aloud.

“A skin-walker.”

When the Broker looked up, his metal smile was shining. “Cleverness. Wise as the winter owl, you are. A skin-walker, yes, but not like your
noble
lordling. No, not all of us are born to royalty. Some of us are not meant to be born at all! We are abominations. The sins and surprises of two who should not mate. A ratling and a catling. A badger and a bear. We have no clan that will house us, no place in the East. Though Alabion is a wicked mother to her children now—not fit for any but the strongest claws and teeth. I have those, but I would not stay where I was not welcome.”