Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (11 page)

Amunai
.

The name is written at the top of the letter, its addressee. Morigan admires the beautiful writing: forests of long, tall letters, inconceivably intricate lines, surrounding pictographs similar to the scrawling in the Mother-wolf’s cavern—an ancient language, then. Morigan can read any language in this otherworld, and she scans flitting expressions of desire: my darling songbird…my dearest…another kiss, another whisper. A love letter, she realizes, of a kind any young girl would like to receive if the suitor was pleasing. Perhaps Amunai does not care for boys and their advances. Certainly, Morigan had no interest in young fools. Still, Amunai’s agitation seems inconsistent with the frustrations of early love: she looks mortified and torn. Within, Morigan senses Amunai punishing herself for these flushes in her breast. Amunai flogs the images of a trickster’s crooked smile from her mind faster than Morigan can see the rest of that face. Regardless of her apparent age, Amunai seems to possess incredible willpower, so ruthlessly does she repress her emotions
.

She burns the note on one of the hundred candles surrounding the chair and dais upon which she presides and wriggles her fingers through the ashes, as if saying goodbye. Then Amunai closes her eyes and listens. She falls into a well of thought so deep and vacant that Morigan worries about following the girl
.

B
ZZT
!

Morigan floats away from Amunai to seek out the noise. She drifts down the aisles of ancient lore, wishing she had fingers with which to peruse the enticing texts. These many books with inscribed metal covers, these scriptures that hum with secrets from within their leather tubes…Morigan feels as if all the information of the world resides here—or at least all the information one would wish to know. She realizes that this young sage—a Keeper, suggest the bees—holds the knowledge of this entire library inside her small
self. After finding nothing of interest, no disturbance but for the wind ruffling through the oval windows that scares candle flames and papers, Morigan returns to the Keeper. The alcove is empty; the throne is bare. Papers drift in the air, suggesting the Keeper has just vanished in a gust of wind
.

B
ZZT
!

A fly lands on Morigan’s shoulder. Wait—how is it that she has a shoulder? she wonders. In Dream, she is most often a ghost, one that cannot touch or be touched by the past
.

B
ZZT
!

A glimmering green friend joins the insect, and they crawl in a figure eight on her naked white skin. Morigan hears more buzzing behind her. Her bees spark the air like firecrackers, warning her too late of the danger. It takes much to scare Morigan, a woman who has delved into Death and confronted Dreamers. Although she musters her strongest steel and girts herself as she turns around, her bravery scarcely holds upon seeing the picked skull and fly-weeping eyes of the monster that greets her. Flies swarm all over the creature, like bees on a doomed honey-tender. More flies flurry toward Morigan, and she waves them off while stepping back from their master
.

Morigan has managed not to scream; that would only let the vermin into her mouth. How is it that she has a mouth? Or a heartbeat that threatens to tear apart her chest? Among other aspects of the waking world, though, she can feel the Wolf. However distant, he still roars his anger at whatever frightens his mate. Caenith’s heat makes her sweat, then glow with light. Morigan’s silver aura blazes through the buzzing dark. In the wash of light, some of the hideousness of the monster is dispersed and exposed as a facade, as a veil of flies and evil. The creature wears a mask
.

“This past is not for you to see,” warns the cicada monster
.

“I am the Daughter of Fate,” declares Morigan, supremely radiant, and no longer afraid. “I see what I choose. Dream is my queendom, and I go where I please.”

The Wolf’s flame rages in her, and she shines even brighter. More chinks in the monster’s horrid pretence reveal purplish clothing under the crawling mantle of flies, the glittering darkness of a gaze. Even the damp funeral-pyre stink is another layer of the monster’s disguise, and hides scents
that Morigan’s part-wolf nose discerns as sweat. “Who are you?” demands Morigan
.

“You will know.”

“Tell me.”

“Blindly, you swing the sword of the righteous,” says the Dreamstalker, with what Morigan thinks is pity. “You do not see how cold Geadhain can be. You look only to her summer and never her winter. You will know this season, Daughter of Fate. You will see that love is the same as pain. You will know darkness in your heart and murder on your hands. You cannot be clean of sin forever.”

The Dreamstalker moves forward, like a leech, shivering flies and dropping globs of maggots that squirm where they splat onto stone. Impossible, thinks Morigan, that this should-be-phantom can influence an echo, an illusion of time past. Is that an illusion too, she wonders—the way the Dreamstalker’s glinting, skeletal teeth bend into a smile? What is truly real here? The sweat beading her body? The tremble in her legs? The reeking, rolling, buzzing, nightmare cloud? The Dreamstalker thunders now, shuddering in violence, as if about to explode
.

“Back!” screams Morigan
.

“I am not trying to hurt you, Daughter of Fate.” The Dreamstalker shuffles nearer and extends a sloppy tendril of an arm. “You wish to see? You want to know what your devotion will cost you, its price in blood? Give me your hand and I shall give you the gift of knowledge. I shall show the seer her future.”

Again, Morigan senses pathos, which she does not care to contemplate; she wants to flee. She does not understand Dream’s new rules, or how they are being bent by the Dreamstalker; but she realizes that she, too, should be able to play this game. Desperately, Morigan calls to the bees that sting and dazzle her with warning bursts of pain. “Unmake my body,” she Wills them. “End this nightmare; take me away before—”

“Begone, terror!”

Was that a shout? From whom? A sudden whirling rampage of light and wind smashes into the trembling Dreamstalker, who then erupts into a fountain of black flecks and filth. Morigan chokes on waves of crawling darkness. Her eyes squeezed shut, she blindly thrashes her hands from ears
to nose to mouth. The insects, though, cannot be purged, and their legs tickle and scratch as their innumerable bodies form a torrent into her mouth. At last, terror triggers Morigan’s magik, birthing a silver pulse she does not see, but feels as an explosive heat, and that scatters the Dreamstalker’s horde. In another instant, Morigan is cast into Dream’s gray currents
.

Morigan wishes to wake, yet she cannot find the right path. Lost as a trout in a filthy stream, she swims from memory to memory: her mother’s arms as a child, she and Thackery dirty from making her mother’s grave, she and Caenith’s first kiss in Eod. Cruelly, no matter the sanctity of these visions of her past, a buzz ever haunts her ears. So Morigan leaps again and again into the river of Dream, trying to flee the horrid Dreamstalker by immersing herself in these most sacred of memories. She tries not to feel fear, even though she is hunted
.

No matter where Morigan goes, the cicada music follows her
.

V

As promised, the Wolf stirred the Menosian while Pandemonia still lay in darkness. Moreth woke to a chipper and grinning Blood King, and for a speck considered the possibility that he was to be eaten. However, the Wolf had already taken care of his appetite during Moreth’s nap—the master could smell blood somewhere on the man.

“What did you kill?” asked Moreth.

“Something furred and fast,” replied the Wolf.

“It seems to have agreed with you,” said Moreth with a yawn. For a man who’d slept a mere wink, Moreth seemed quite refreshed. After putting on his bowler, Moreth pointed at the stars with his cane. “Oria, Demeter, Prosperae…Under the last—the third and slightly red star—we shall find Eatoth.”

The Wolf gazed at the red gem hanging in the heavens. It felt a thousand spans away.

“Have you been practicing what I taught you?” asked Moreth.

Indeed, the Wolf had practiced and honed the skill of funneling the maelstrom of Pandemonia into smaller channels. It was this new clarity that had allowed the Wolf to hear his supper snorting its way through the fields. That distilled concentration, still tied to Morigan’s presence—focus
on one thing before focusing on all—was also how he had known, from the clean ammonia musk of his kill, that its meat would not upset his stomach with poison. Once the Wolf had learned to use Morigan as his anchor, just as she so often held fast to his spirit while she wandered the nether-realms, he had discovered he could roam quite far on his new chain. Admittedly, he could not, and would never, hunt in Pandemonia with the same surety he could in the woods of Alabion. Nonetheless, he
could
hunt, which was all that mattered.

“Yes,” he said. “Your lesson was valuable. I shall lead us, if you like.”

Moreth shrugged, then woke the company with clapping and prods from his cane. Morigan would not wake, but the Wolf dismissed Moreth’s concern. This was not the most unusual behavior for the seer; she was probably witnessing a grand Fate. Settling her in his embrace, the Wolf looked for the white sparkle of Oria, and then they set out into the highlands.

While the company walked, they drank and picked at what remained of their rations. During the night, the moths had prodigiously reproduced, and white, fluttering clouds filled the highlands. The moths tickled the travelers as they passed and left a shimmering dust upon them. According to the Wolf, this was a nontoxic powder. Their great leader appeared to have rediscovered his sense of authority, something for which all were grateful.

Talwyn murmured to Thackery about the marvel of the moths’ procreation and proliferation, and cited earlier discussions on the fecundity of Pandemonia. Of course, neither scholar had thought of the other side of life, of how, to continue a cycle of rapid evolution, death must forerun each new lap. Pandemonia revealed this lesson to the travelers as the sun shined its greeting in a golden dawn. The light grew, and the flowers wilted, then wrinkled. The moths dropped in droves to the ground, and soon the company trod over a skin of dead life that had shriveled to blackness—an aromatic mulch. Soon, even that had decayed into dust that clouded around their feet. Noon arrived and the land was as dead as a desert. The elevations changed as well: the many steps in the land wore down into piles of stone, then sandy patches. When the land was stripped and whirling in dust, black clouds gathered, loomed, then finally released
a rain gentler than anticipated, considering the fearsome rumblings that had preceded it. The misting, warm veil shrouded much of the land in fog. Eventually, that cleared and the company walked in a strange new realm.

Here, Pandemonia flourished at the peak of a season of life. A green and precipitously rising highland emerged from behind the rain’s gray curtain. The company avoided the land’s many vales—chasms that were rent like claw-marks across the land and that belched pungent winds of clay. Silver threads of rivers gleamed in the muddy dark of these crevasses, and angry life teemed and chattered within. Taking to the safer and higher flats of the land, the company wandered through rocky foothills crowned in woodlands. In these forests, songbirds chirped, wildflowers festered, and the trees shone silver, gold, and copper in the dim sunlight.
Metal plants?
wondered Talwyn. He investigated a few of the fallen leaves, which disappointed him with their pedestrian crinkling and left only pewter dust on his fingers, before Moreth reminded him, again, not to touch anything. Down from these hillocks and on the misty plains between tall hills, they mingled with herds of eyeless, hairy creatures—beasts as large and bulky as buffalo—that foraged the ground with prehensile snouts. Undoubtedly, the beasts used senses other than vision to scan their environment: the musk of the Wolf caused a lazy fear in their number, and they ambled out of the company’s path.

In time, heaven donned the gray cloak of dusk, and Moreth suggested that they stop. He even broke one of his rules and proposed they make a fire, as a remedy for the dampness in their clothes. The company huddled near the heat of the flame and of the Wolf. They warmed their hands, picked at rations, and talked in whispers in a night that had fallen fast and dark.

“Will she ever wake up?” asked Moreth, suddenly, gazing at the seer.

The Wolf looked to his bloodmate. He brushed her hair with his hand, caressed her face and lips. She murmured and turned deeper into his body, yet did not wake—he could feel her wandering far from this world. He had felt her terror a number of times that day, and had sent her roars of strength to embolden her in whatever trials she endured. Sands passed as he observed his mate, as he read the pattern of her light, which was palpitating erratically in his chest. She was anxious and afraid; she was likely
watching a dark Fate. As the Wolf did not reply to Moreth, and showed no intention of doing so, Thackery spoke up.

“Morigan goes away at times,” he said. “As a witness. She will return when she has seen what she needs to see.”

“Hmm,” replied Moreth, and walked over to gaze at the seer. “Pandemonia has a strong connection to those with magik. We saw this with your fire starting, Sage. I believe we may be seeing it again. I think you should wake her.”

The Wolf challenged the master with a glare. “I know my bloodmate. I feel her heartbeat, her passions, and terrors. I know how to care for her; you do not.”

“Do not be blinded by your pride,” snapped Moreth. “You know I can be trusted.”

Could he? Since when?
wondered Mouse, Thackery, Talwyn, and Adam. Flabbergasted and wary of intervening between a coyote and a wolf, the four watched in fascination. The Wolf pulled Morigan closer to his chest.

“Look at her,” suggested Moreth. “Tell me if she seems like she’s simply dreaming, witnessing, or whatever she does.”