Dark Lord's Wedding (67 page)

But she couldn’t, not when it meant going back. The world was on fire, inside her. The air buzzed. Everything sizzled with the smell of cooking oil. It would only be worse if she faced the Winged Flame.

She sped downward. The stairs twisted around then flipped upward. The steps gnashed over her. Stone smashed into her shoulders and legs, punching, clobbering, battering. Oh no, oh no, oh no! She was falling.

The tower spun away and left her in the sky. She was back in the Cloudcrusher Mountains. Her family had forced her from the cliff because she was worthless bad disgrace. Now she had nothing to hold onto but the sky.

And the whirling clouds.

And the sun god.

He streamed by with all his macaw wings. Too many to count. They made the sky blue. Blue death. Blue flame. Blue despair. They were all around her, pushing her downward to the rocks.

The god had come back to punish her. He cursed her with pain and fire.

Celaise slammed down. She landed at the bottom of the stair. The darkness was wet with her blood.

Hiresha would die. Her intestines felt clogged with a slurry of diamond grit. Death reflected between her worlds, from one facet to the other. Tethiel had been broken in the sunset facet by her magic. In this one, she would be killed by the uninvited god.

The Winged Flame dominated the sky. He was a fissure of brightness weaving over the city. His light had roused the bees. They swarmed after his color, seething in furious bedlam.

Above this new fog of black bodies rose the tower topped with Hiresha, the guests, and her dragon. The drone of the bees pulsed whenever the god changed direction in his winding flight. He dove around the spire. His length sped by, and at the end of his tail, a second head turned and gazed at Hiresha.

She couldn’t be seeing correctly. Her mind filled with a crackling, humming, burning nonsense. But it was true. The god had two craniums, both snouted and fanged like a feathered reptile.

He had more than two eyes. That idea sounded familiar as if Hiresha had dreamed it. She might’ve glimpsed a glyph of the god before as a snake with a head on either end. Someone might’ve spoken of it within her hearing. She couldn’t remember how, yet she had always known how much the god’s anatomy would offend her. Speculating on how he excreted would only infuriate her further.

She would not be killed by such an illogical being. He had invaded her wedding. “I warned him. A god should know better.”

“My heart, wait!” Tethiel left her side. He bounded down from the crystal dragon.

Very well, if he insisted on wasting time at this critical juncture, she wouldn’t have to mind him while she taught the Winged Flame a lesson. “He is lacking in omniscience.”

Hiresha launched herself off the tower with her dragon. Amethyst claws lifted to pierce and rake. They would rip through that meager armor of feathers and maul the god until he learned some manners.

His hind head saw her. The innumerable wings swiveled, faced the other direction. His plumage ruffled and turned from blue to green. She couldn’t theorize how the god could reverse all his momentum, and yet he did. He coiled toward her. He lunged. He struck.

Hiresha realize she should’ve changed the angle of her attack. It would’ve meant delaying sinking her talons into the impertinent god, and now was too late. She floated through a wash of dream and reality at a reckless velocity.

The god swerved around her crystal claws. He batted his head against her construct’s side, and it was all she could do to hold her creation together. The impact boomed against her mind. The horizon flipped around. City lights blurred into stars. She couldn’t tell which way was up.

No, she couldn’t fall like this, disoriented and newly wed. She let gravity pull on her blue paragon and orient her. She only had to right her dragon. One of its wings ripped.

The god glared overhead. His feathers shimmered in flame patterns. He dove toward her, jaws open and vomiting an opalescent haze. He had accelerated to a lethal velocity, and she had lost.

She must do something. If only she could think fast enough. Her head thudded with nearing doom.

A figure sprang into view. It wasn’t Tethiel but Fos. He had leapt off the tower with his enchanted greaves. Fos had put all his power and her magic into his jump. He flew with scimitar raised at the Winged Flame.

The god snapped at him.

Fos slashed the jaws away. A fang tumbled free as Fos somersaulted onto the god’s snout. The man stomped a beady red eye and kicked clear. “‘He’ll better countless fools …’”

Fos was reciting his prophecy. Even near the god’s brain-melting heat, Fos had maintained his grace. Displaying deft spellsword training, he pivoted around his blade midair for another attack on the god’s bleeding head. She remembered why she had proposed to him in her other life.

“‘And lions will run from his—’”

The god’s other head bit Fos in half.

The Winged Flame had curled around to strike from the side. Hiresha should have seen it. She should’ve reacted fast enough to warn Fos. Nothing could surprise her like this, and in a manner of speaking it hadn’t. She had known someone would die.

Fos’s head and torso slurped into the god’s gullet. The legs that had been snipped off now tumbled toward the city streets. Bee clouds parted around them then resealed their throng of blackness.

Death quaked her worlds. A shrilling of denial reached a pitch of resonance. All could shatter. All was breaking beyond repair.

Hiresha wouldn’t permit it be so. She focused on the one existence, where she floundered on her crystal dragon. Nearby, Fos’s sister screamed. The other Bright Palm had deserted her on the tower. Alyla lay paralyzed, weeping glowing tears that defied explanation. Bright Palms shouldn’t feel grief.

Insanity rebounded everywhere. Hiresha had to fight off this winged madness.

She could yet save Fos. He could perhaps be reassembled before brain death. Her magic reached out toward his enchanted greaves, toward the metal coat that had been dragged with him into the god. Hiresha grasped only molten rage. Flames licked at the corners of her vision.

She would rip Fos free. Her amethyst construct slammed into the god’s side. She tore at his flank.

Stop!
Tethiel’s command was distant and of no use. His words didn’t even make sense to her.
The god’s blood is a poison of passion.

The divine flesh resisted her claws. Hiresha screamed and thrashed. She would overpower this god with her anger. Bite, yes, and tear. No telling if it was her battering or her dragon, yet she was hurting him. His wounds did more than bleed. They fumed.

His blood was evaporating, not that it mattered. Maybe she was thinking nonsense. Flames had covered her sight and cast the world in hues of melting yellows and boiling reds. She could scarcely see past her inferno.

Hiresha didn’t need to. Wrath would guide her. She would mangle and ruin. She grappled with a god, and between the two, she was greater. She would commit deicide. Then she would slaughter all the god’s priests. He had offended her, and it was her right.

All the pitiful pantheons and all their stooges would have to die. People were idiots, and she wouldn’t allow them to worship falsehoods. They needed new inspiration.

Through revenge and fire Hiresha would transcend. Soon all would have to bow before the Goddess of Gems.

One terrible hope remained. Tethiel had to Feast.

His castings melted away from the Winged Flame. The immortal would immolate Hiresha’s mind then kill her, unless Tethiel surpassed him in power.

The Winged Flame had enraptured the city. Far below they fought and loved each other. Tethiel could imagine their life force leaking from their mouths with each labored breath, rising in a fountain of specters. The people’s frenzy and passion strengthened the Winged Flame. Tethiel had to free them with fear.

With all the people screaming before him, Tethiel could rival the immortal. Tethiel would devour him. Once Tethiel began a true indulgence, he wouldn’t stop. He would tuck in his napkin and Feast on everyone. A new era of fear would begin. His dreams of wonderful frivolity with Hiresha would go to rot.

So be it, if it would save her life.

He bit open the night. The fabric of the lands tore. Someday the damage might result in a catastrophe, but for now Tethiel knew it was a necessity. He reached into the portal. His grasp spanned hundreds of miles, across continents, from night into shadow, high into the Monastery of the Sacred Cups, deep into their locked and hallowed wine cellars.

In this sanctuary of stone, monks chanted to sweeten their vintages. Acolytes checked the casks twice a day and once past midnight for cracks. To gain the full red robes of their order, they had to hold a vigil before a bottle filled with the most potent of fermented elixirs. The young men knelt in front of the Bottomless Bocksbeutel of Ulthor.

Some succumbed, as the bold must. They flailed at the stopper. Their elders dragged the brave boys up to the roof and left them to die of thirst. The younger acolytes gazed up and swore they would resist temptation. They wouldn’t drink the forbidden.

Only when sweating before the Bottomless Bocksbeutel did some gain enlightenment. The revelation came that true courage meant yielding to their desires. To let Ulthor’s wine go untasted, languishing forever in its glass prison, that was the ultimate folly. No matter if the vintage was cursed. A pittance if opening the engorged bottle would unleash a flood of wine that would wipe away cities and then drown the world. Life was nothing without pleasure. The myth of the afterlife could only be lived in the eternity of a moment’s delight.

The boys’ appetites were in the right place. Tethiel praised them. They only hadn’t set the table. The bottle they had groped had been a false one, a decoy. The true Bottomless Bocksbeutel was hidden beneath a loose tile under the abbot’s bedpost. There Tethiel reached.

The neck of the bottle thrilled his fingers. He rescued from obscurity Ulthor’s greatest triumph and folly. Tethiel pulled it across the lands and through the shadow portal to the tower top. From darkness he brought it into the light of the immortal’s passion. The glass might’ve been the green of ages, but tonight it was tinted. It had the dark sheen of a black scorpion. The poison within would be far more exquisite and deadly.

The Bottomless Bocksbeutel rocked in his hand with the tidal sway of oceans. An abyss filled the glass jug, and the drink swirled with sediments of tabooed bliss.

“This isn’t black wine,” Tethiel said to his dandies, “but it’s the next best thing for all the joyless below.”

Wane unsheathed his sword. “Want it opened?”

Tethiel bit off the top of the bottle himself. His teeth sheered through the glass, and he swallowed shards and cork into the chasm within him.

He held the spurting bottle over the tower’s precipice. Time for his luscious entrance. He would need a chalice, and there one was, waiting in his other hand. “A toast. citizens, a toast to my marriage.”

The wine gushed down into the haze of bees. Some sifted away in time. Others were lost in the sticky sweetness. The wine broke their wings and stung their segmented eyes.

The first drops landed on the people below. It rained unease and drizzled seduction. Women stopped stabbing each other with knives to look up. Two men in the filthways paused their coupling to stare. They saw the Lord of the Feast.