Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (54 page)

“She—” started Mouse.

“I fell,” interjected Vortigern.

“Get them inside. We’ll walk with you, in case your delicate self takes another spill,” snickered a numberman.

“Useless things, you reborn are. They could have run. Though I fancy a good hunt,” boasted another, and he pulled down his balaclava and tried to kiss Morigan’s cheek.

She squirmed away.
So does my mate. I hope you meet him soon
, thought Morigan.

Into the Blackbriar estate, the three were marched. And try as she might to lean or stumble near, Morigan never had a moment to touch Mouse and thereby explain her spiritual wandering. When they were in the echoing foyer, the numbermen unlinked the chain that tied the two women and led Morigan off. She turned to the dazed pair she was leaving behind and shouted the truth she had seen from her muffled mouth, though it wasn’t articulate and only laughed at by her captors. With any hope, Vortigern would recall the honor and love of the man he haunted and, more importantly, the promise he had made. For there was only one explanation, however extraordinary, as to who Mouse was.

II

Morigan’s confinement was a nicer arrangement than any other mortal cargo would find in Menos: a paneled bedroom with an inviting bed, glossy furniture, and a padded chair that hugged her like a friend as she brooded in it, contemplating her dilemma. Outside it had begun to rain again, and she followed the intricate rivers that coursed over the windowpane. Her sooth sayer’s sense looked for meaning in the patterns, though no revelations stood out. Mostly, the rain was reminiscent of tears. She missed Caenith and could not ignore the burning sorrow in her chest that pulsed when she thought of Thackery.

It’s all gone to shite. So quickly. I was so happy three days past. I want them back. Both of them
.

The two numbermen who guarded her were near indiscernible against the black drapes, though their presence killed the tears before they began. She was a survivor. Tears were for the dead, and she wasn’t that yet.
Think. Think
, she demanded. She wasn’t exploring all her options. Would those numbermen have something in their heads worth breaking into? A vice or secret that she could exploit? She was willing to take the risk needed to find out. She moaned against her bonds. All dressed in black and draped in darkness, it was impossible to tell accurately if their heads were turning or attention was being paid, so she increased her writhing until she was rocking the chair and surely a nuisance.

“Feisty bitch,” grunted the numberman who had tried to kiss her in the courtyard. “I’ll go slap her quiet.”

The larger of the numbermen left his post and went to Morigan. He didn’t waste a speck in doing exactly as he said. He cracked Morigan across the face with his hand. Her head exploded with white lights, and as the man materialized, he was leaning over her chair. In his eyes was a gleam of sadistic pleasure, and he shook her manacled wrists as if she were a misbehaving hound.

“I shall need to show you how to behave.”

Close enough
, thought Morigan. Her eyes flickered silver, and the bees passed between them in a spark.

She spins into a cage filled with scrawny natives. For prisoners, they keep their spirits high, chanting and humming harmonies that tell of life and its
beginnings and endings, as if they are not fearful of their own. Her host is clinging to someone, a woman, though that person’s face is as gray as a foggy morning. He cannot remember her, and therefore neither can Morigan. She must be memorable, however, for as the slavers bully their way into the pen and drag him from her, they both scream until she is beaten to the ground
.

Blackness clouds over Morigan’s voyage, and as the bees dazzle it away, she sees the boy chained in a dank cellar of a chamber—a place deep with despair and rank as a sewer. The man with the metal smile is whispering lunacy to him, telling him to escape, escape, that freedom is only his strength of will away
.

“How badly do you want it? Enough to cost you pain? Enough to disfigure yourself?” asks the glittering mouth. “Let us see if you can survive The Binding.”

When the madman leaves him—to die and rot—the boy, who is a hunter and a fighter, grasps the cruel test: he has seen how animals chew their way from traps, and it is a cost of flesh. Tormentedly, for hourglasses, he wriggles and howls as he snaps and squeezes his large hands through the chains. At last he is done. His hands are shattered and limp as reeds, but perhaps they can be fixed. At least he is free. Until the metal smile shines from the shadows, and he knows that he is mistaken
.

“Well done, you have passed the first of many tests, and the most important. Let us see if you can earn a number.”

“Twenty-two?” said the numberman by the window.

For Twenty-two had gone motionless. He held Morigan’s hands tightly, as if they were praying together, and the bees continued smashing the walls in his head like delicate porcelain, each broken object releasing a memory.

Poor lamb
, echoed Morigan into Twenty-two’s mind.
You never had a choice in this, did you? Never stopped being a prisoner. Do you remember your mother? You loved her so, though her face has been scraped from you. What agony can make one forget those he loves?

As she thinks this, the bees carry her flashes of torture.

The boy is choking in a pit of excrement, trying to breathe, while faceless numbermen piss on him. Then he is tied to a table and biting on a wooden bit so hard that his teeth are cracking, while knives and whips lick his flesh. “Do not cry. Endure and grow strong,” demands the metal smile, who is always present and watching, who is the one voice that resounds through the pain. After a spell—weeks or years—it is all that the boy knows: this voice and its reason.
When the pain and abuse have ripped away what it is to live, the voice is his world and the will that he must obey
.

Twenty-two was weeping, silently.

You are doing what has been done to you because you do not know better. You must remember what came before. Remember the lessons you learned from the mother and father you have forgotten. Remember what it is to love and care and be a man
, insisted Morigan, and she pushed her ever stronger and bolder Will farther into Twenty-two, sending her bees for the sweetest nectar of his truth. Images whirled about their perceptions then, so vivid that they saw not the room.

The other numberman sensed an eeriness to his fellow now and moved to investigate.

She floats like a snowflake across a frosty winterscape with the white shadows of Kor’Keth to the south. Two hunters wander beneath her. By morning light, the boy and his father leave the tents and hike far through the woods to fish through holes carved in the lake. They share bits of seal fat, and his father tells him that it will make him strong, and that he will be a fine hunter one day. Come night, they count the stars on the way home and soon huddle inside a shelter: warm from fires, furs, and song
.

Great storytellers are his people, a wisdom kept mostly by the women, who are the curators and leaders among them. His mother is the keeper of his tribe, the wisest of the storytellers. Her throaty songs drone on like a hummingbird’s wings made to music, rising and falling, ever constant and mesmerizing. She speaks of the gifts that seal and fish have given them tonight, how they must be honored for the blood that has passed into the tribe’s mouths. She sings of the Great Feast, this cycle of sacrifice, and how no sacrifice, from the lowly spider to the mighty bear, must be left unworshiped for their flesh and purpose in this life. Sacred, she calls this: the Will of the Green Mother. When the boy listens to her, he hardly thinks of her as his mother, for she is as captivating as the lights that sometimes dance in the north
.

The next morning, the black ships and evil men come and her voice is forgotten. Her face drifts to mist, and all he sees, all he will come to know, is a metal smile and a voice that bids him pain
.

The numbered man was upon them. But Morigan wasn’t finished, not yet. Like Twenty-two, she was grieving at the boy’s transformation from
innocent to monster. She had been seeking a vice to manipulate, only to find mercy. She had one last gift to give him. His name, which the bees found nestled in the thorniest part of his soul.

Kanatuk, that is your name! The name given by your mother and father! Remember who you are! Remember the value of life that you were taught, and ask if you can call yourself their son!

Twenty-two was pulled away from her, and the bees prickled back into their mistress. The numberman was shaking his fellow.

“What is this, Twenty-two? Tears?” exclaimed the killer, who had never known one of his brothers to weep. He knew that something was wrong with his brother. He had watched them break before, and there was only one means to fix it. He reached for a weapon.

“I am Kanatuk, son of the Seal Fang!”

Kanatuk’s outburst was as striking as his speed, and he had produced his blade and thrust it before the numberman ever touched his belt. With an expert’s grace for killing, he held his hand over the man’s mouth, twisted the knife upward, and then dropped the body and the blade once the shuddering stopped. He fell to the carpet and pulled off his mask. Morigan saw nothing but his dark hair and could not sense his state of mind. While this moment was a precious opportunity, it was also volatile; she would not risk it by pressing him further. She wasn’t sure how much time passed, the moment felt drawn into forever, though he gradually, wearily stood. Even unmasked, the man was a mystery, shrouded in tumbled hair as dark as a raven’s feathers. His eyes were exotic and his features thick and handsome, yet crooked and wild, not only from the scars that crisscrossed his beard, lips, and cheeks, but also from an inherent tribal quality. Here was a boy who had combed and run among the winter wastes beyond even where the Northmen made their homes. She could see that boy again, and not the murderer that had been beaten into his body. His tall frame was grander now with pride and respect, and Morigan felt that he would not hurt her. He assured her of this as he removed her gag.

“Thank you, mind speaker,” he said. “The spirits of Estuuya and Tuuq—my mother and father—thank you, as well. I owe you an eternal debt.”

“You’re welcome,” she croaked. “A key to these shackles is what I need most at the moment. Let’s start with that.”

“I do not have one.” He threw a thumb to the corpse. “That one does.”

He hurried to the body, rolled it over on the sticky carpet, and searched its pockets, returning with an unusual key that looked like a square peg of metal. It fit into a matching hole on Morigan’s wrist clamps. With a snap and a fizzle of magik, the feliron chains sprang open and fell in clattering relief to her lap. While she rubbed her wrists, Kanatuk released the bindings on her ankles and then tossed the coils of metal aside. She was about to stand up when the bees suddenly buzzed in warning.

Crash!

Something moved with lethal speed into the chamber.

Though he may have just forsaken his life as a murderer, Kanatuk’s muscles were still tuned for assassination, and he had thrown up an arm and pulled out a second, hidden dagger, which was driven upward into the throat of his attacker as two powerful arms came for him. His strike did not bear blood, but a spicy dust, and he was forcefully batted to his rump by a creature much stronger than he was.

“No! Vortigern! No!” implored Morigan, jumping up.

The dead man, empowered by nekromantic vigor, had shattered the door and rushed across the room as Caenith might. A hooded figure, whose wisps of brown hair and frowning face identified her as Mouse, peeked into the room while hanging off the splintered remains of the entrance. She slipped in as Vortigern extracted the weapon in his neck and calmly examined the scenario, from the body to the unmasked servant of the Broker.

“I see that you weren’t in need of rescue,” said Mouse. “You certainly know how to charm a man. Impressive.”

“I am grateful that you came,” Morigan said. She hadn’t expected to see Mouse again.

Kings know I’m not going to drop a woman who can poke about in people’s heads and convince them to do any sort of madness. What a dear friend you are, Morigan. At least until Menos is behind us
. “I promised you that we would part ways once we were out of this,” said Mouse. “And we’re not out yet. I have a safe house, with money and papers. We should head there before we try our luck at escaping the Iron Wall.”

Kanatuk stood. “We must move quickly before the avenues I know are closed to us.”

Vortigern cleared his throat. “Can he be trusted?”

“Yes, as much as you,” declared Morigan.

The two men eyed each other uneasily, and Vortigern cautiously handed Kanatuk back his weapon. Vortigern guided them down servants’ passages and across dusty wings. Admittedly, Morigan had not spent much time with the dead man, yet she felt qualified enough to say that he was different, closer to the noble master she had known in her visions and not a specter without a past. Not a soul among them dared speak, for it was inevitable that they would be discovered as missing, and the slightest whisper might betray them. Sorren’s neglect of his estate aided in their stealth, for much of the manor was untended and cobwebbed, ruled by spiders and faded memories. A mirror of this past caught Morigan as they raced down an abandoned corridor: a picture of Lenora—or Mouse wearing a curled wig—lay amid covered furniture. The image was torn as if in angry passion, and Morigan knew by whom. Seeing the painting raised questions about their current flight. Since they could not speak, she sent her bees into Mouse’s head.