Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (66 page)

Switching roles with his companion, Thackery now skillfully led them up a slide of rubble. Caenith suspected that the old man had taken this path before, as his stride was ever sure. Onward and upward they went, moving into stretches of difficult terrain, huffing around jagged stone talons and hauling themselves over fallen stone logs made to trip and maim. The shadows grew colder and the rocks darker. Even the wind had a subtle hiss and brought only more of that dusty stink. The land did not want them here. The land did not want any living thing here, thought Caenith, for he had seen no birds in the bleary skies, not even a spider scuttling amid the rocks. When they had made fair headway from where they started, Thackery continued his tale.

“There is iron in these foothills, the tremendous vein that fed Menos for centuries, perhaps a thousand years, even. Now, wherever there is iron, if one digs deeper to where minerals and the invisible energy of Geadhain mingle, one might—rarely—find feliron.”

Caenith knew the metal by a different name:
witchburn
. For that is what it did when used upon witches or magikal creatures.

“They did not have the magik of the kings, so they built weapons and walls to withstand such powers,” said Thackery. “Their rifles, their ships, even the great black wall of Menos. All ingenuities that came from the metallurgists and mad alchemists of my people. Here, well beneath where we tread, is the greatest lode of the material that has ever been found. It runs from where we started to the peaks that surround the Iron City. Though the deposits there are weak compared with the richness of what is under us. A tributary of the river below, in a sense.”

Thackery tapped the chalky slate he was walking on, as if to remind himself of something. “Greed, yes. That was the point. The Menosians built up extensive operations. Tunnels and buildings beneath us, and roads—as you recall—for hauling and transporting materials and ore. They were pushing into the West, you see. Establishing settlements and battlements, of a mind to rule from Menos to Blackforge. A success they seem to have achieved, though not as openly or as quickly as their old masterminds envisioned. For their ambitions, they needed feliron, an obscene amount of it, and I am sure
if you listen with your curious senses, you might still hear the screams of the slaves whose blood wet these stones. I do not believe in ghosts, though even I feel that this place carries a particular foreboding: a chill that cannot be placed or blamed upon the weather.”

“A taint,” agreed Caenith.

“Yes, that is it.”

Thackery’s telling was interrupted as Caenith noticed the sudden screech of metal wings slicing wind.
Crowes
, he muttered. In the Iron Valley, there were no shortage of places to find cover, and they walked a few paces to huddle under a stone tent. They waited for the skycarriages to pass. Macha, who the two men had discovered had a sensitivity to the particular frequency of the Crowes’ movements, covered her ears and hid her face against Caenith. Within a few sands, the vessels appeared, dark shapes that rumbled overhead like rolling thunder. When the Wolf could no longer sense the vessels, he nodded for Thackery to continue. Which the old man did, both in hiking ahead and in resuming the cursed history of the Iron Valley.

“The decision to conquer westward took an immeasurable amount of resources. I believe that the Council of the Wise’s ambition exceeded its common sense. More slaves, more tunnels, more feliron. The slaves who fell were
reborn
by sorcerers of the dark arts. Slower laborers they made, these corpses, and, it is said, the mines buzzed and reeked with decay. Understand for a speck how horrid that is, toiling beside the corpse of your fellows.”

Thackery shuddered and sadly hung his head. “As the strata started to deplete, they had to dig deeper, into the veins that beat close to the heart of Geadhain herself. In order to break these crusts, they required explosives and other Menosian magiks. But like any organism that is under assault, Geadhain repels those that try to harm her. She has the elementals, these wyrms that I have been blessed enough to see during our journey together. To those who would poke at Geadhain’s flesh, she defends herself with caveins and pockets of deadly gas, which when struck by the faintest spark, light a fire that cannot be smothered or extinguished by water. Nonetheless, my clever ancestors were prepared for such complications. Therefore, they made their bombs of air, not flame, and were delicate about their placement. What they did not foresee—which no one could, as the depths of the Iron
Valley were a survey in progress—was the massive fault that spread along this entire range.”

“Fault?” questioned Caenith.

“Like a crack down low that you don’t want to touch. Make it bigger and it affects everything above itself in the most unpleasant ways. Less hasty and more diligent eyes would have noticed the indications on the surface: rockslides, tremors, striations, and even rifts in the Iron Valley. I imagine that the masters of Menos spat with scorn upon any who presented these facts to them. They wanted the feliron, and quickly; they ignored any contrary voices. With that in mind, and little else, they blasted lower and lower, and eventually they hit what they should not have.” Thackery softly sighed. “Still, that was not the worst of their folly, for at the bed of this deep, earthen river, was something else that they had not the caution or care for which to plan: a vein of truefire. A small one, though that’s all it needed to be. The fault, and the explosion, together—”

Remembering the tragedy made Thackery pause. He was a child when it happened, and with all that had dulled since then, he still recalled the day that Menos was shaken by the hand of Geadhain.

Buildings fall like sandcastles, pulled from their bottom and funneling to oblivion upon themselves. Screams, there are so many screams amid the rumbling, and so much dust that he cannot see from where. He is too hysterical to be as terrified as he should be, perhaps from whatever injury has made his head hum and blood trickle over his eyes. Gloria and Mother are about, somewhere in the storm of filth, and he adds his cry to the racket
.

“Mother! Gloria!”

Nothing answers but destruction
.

While the cobbles turn under him, he stumbles through more of the dusty obliteration. His determination is rewarded, and he sees a pale hand that he recognizes. A moment later, the smoke parts to his sister’s wan face. She is coughing and partially buried in the remains of the carriage, and the rush he has when seeing her enables his small boy’s body to heave debris—great panels of wood and smoldering wheels—off his sister. When she is up and they have hugged each other, he asks where Mother is. To this, Gloria shakes her head and points to the rubble from which he has extracted her. From the smoky pile, a broken axle of the carriage rises: it is red and gleaming as a freshly painted pole. Red with blood
.

“We’ll be all right, Gloria. We have each other,” he says
.

As the world continues its disintegration around them, they weep, hold each other, and promise to survive together
.

Thackery came back to his friend. “The smallest touch, the tiniest spark—which with truefire can come from two motes of dust—and the whole range tumbled. Buried everything for spans and bore its vengeance all the way east to Menos. Twenty thousand were estimated to have died in the mines, another half of that claimed in Menos. My mother, Isabelle, was among those taken. She died pushing my sister and me to safety. My mother was mourned, along with the other masters lost in the disaster, and for a whole week, the city wore shrouds of black. Then we moved on, without memorials or testaments, as grief is the crutch of the weak, and we are people of iron.”

“We?” questioned Caenith quietly. Repeatedly and in many conversations, Thackery had identified himself as a Menosian. All this regardless of the how much that affiliation had cost him.

Dourly, Thackery smiled. “What unites a man with his country—and his guilt—if not shame or tragedy? I cannot separate myself from the sins in my blood any more than you can separate yourself from your bloodthirstiness. Nor should I, and nor should you, for it is these struggles that define us. We are what we are, Wolf, though we can always try to be something better. I know that you understand this.”

“Aye.”

The men held a moment of silence with each other. Once it passed, Thackery waved his stick toward the heights.

“Let’s keep climbing,” said Thackery. “I’m almost finished the story, and it is important that we get to the end.”

As they ascended, the stone heaps grew taller and more tottering, the footholds shakier, and the paths thin as thread. Thackery’s lead was impeccable, however, and he saw routes that the Wolf himself might have missed. Thackery took them into whistling, constrictive chasms that could have been fissures in an arctic glacier if not for the absence of snow. He showed them where to step as they entered a wide field of rock so broken and sharp that it was like navigating a basin of shattered crystal. When they were safe on the other side of that particular hazard, and walking like mountain goats
along a slim path on a steady incline with an echoing drop to their sides, Thackery—fearless, apparently—chose to speak again.

“After the destruction, Menosians’ plans for expansion stalled until they rebuilt their resources and empire. Now, tens of thousands of deaths was hardly a deterrent to the Iron war machine, and at first, they thought to start again, as the truefire vein was now spent, the fault-line was now known, and enough of the tunnels and infrastructure remained intact. Yet that plan was more difficult in execution than in concept on account of the…
occurrences
.”

“Occurrences?”

“Disappearances. Unwholesome noises. Accidents whenever reparative efforts were made to the tunnels. It was not uncommon for entire dig sites and crew to simply vanish: gone like flatulence in the wind. Technomagikal equipment functions erratically in and around these ranges, and if you had a chronex to check, you’d note that the time would be off, or frozen entirely. As steadfast as Menosian tenacity is, they ultimately gave up and sealed the Iron Valley, opting for safer deposits of feliron elsewhere. A decision made from fear, yet also so that their enemies could not sneak into the hollows and set off another city-damning earthquake. Here we are, then, treading over the largest grave in Geadhain. I told you before that I don’t believe in ghosts, and that still holds true. However, even you, at first instinct, sensed the
wrongness
of this place. A shadow of death that no amount of time seems enough to wash clean.”

Caedentriae
, thought Caenith. In Alabion, when great acts of sorcery mixed with blood and tragedy, dark and persistent enchantments could result. Spells where time and reality themselves were scarred and twisted. A sacrifice on this scale could power the blackest of nightmares.

“What you describe, I would call the Long Nightmare,” said Caenith. “A sacrilege against the Green Mother, where there is so much blood, death, and magik that it troubles her innocent mind, filling it with terrors. Only what she dreams, we live, and thus we live in her nightmares, too.”

“An interesting theory,” mused Thackery. “A sound one, too, considering the balderdash that I’ve heard from supposedly learned men. Not a haunting, then, but a memory. A terrible memory conjured within the mind of the great green creature that we crawl upon.”

“Yes.”

“Be that as it may, I’ve been up and down the Iron Valley more times than I can count and have yet to see anything more terrible than this depressing atmosphere. A test on the nerves, but not much else. We should hurry and outpace the darkness, though. Accidents can happen in the dark.”

Soon the two men were off the ledge and on a harsh incline. The heights of the range were ahead of them, crashing upward in twists of black rock like a gravity-defying wave. Here they traversed slowly, for the black stones were brushed with fine and slippery dust that would send them tumbling down the rise to the left or right and into the shadowy crevasses there. Only one path was open to them, and that was ahead. Caenith’s incredible fatigue chose now to harangue him: his feet were throbbing, his thighs were searing, and his spine had knotted above his hips, sending starbursts of pain into his groin.
You shan’t stop. Not until she is with you. Not while you hold this child
, willed Caenith. A punishing wind came over him, gagging his senses with the ash of the Iron Valley. Thackery heard his companion grunting, looked back to see the sweat and unsightly paleness on his overly tanned face, and understood that he was fighting a battle with his spirit.

“I never told you how I know this place, if you haven’t already guessed,” shouted Thackery. “Bethany and I, this is the secret road that took many to freedom in the West. We traveled the paths that no one else would dare. Yet before any of that, we had to learn these roads ourselves. We had to force our feeble flesh to sweat, bruise, and scrape its way from one end to the other. There were times, many times, where we thought it could not be done and that we were to die together: more bones for the Valley. You, Caenith, are the strongest man I have ever known, and as much as you ache, as much as you burden yourself with responsibility, this trial will be a footnote to your ordeals. You will not break, not now or ever.”

“I shall not break,” declared Caenith.

Thus spoken, the fire of determination flared in the Wolf anew, drowning the meager flicker of doubt that had poisoned him, and he assuredly stomped after the old man. The wind was nothing against his hide now but a petty distraction; the agony of his legs, a trifling concern. Not long after, they were up and striding the peaks of the Iron Valley. The air was thinner up here, and their tread still quite unsteady, so they spared the expense of
speaking and lugged themselves across the bluster while the sky began its surrender to night.
Hurry, hurry
, they each thought, but could not force this race without recklessness. Time deteriorated into task without measure: foot after foot, handhold to handhold, and cranny to cranny. All this, Caenith did with a single hand, for to allow Macha to test herself against these elements would have been murder. If he needed any more fire to drive him, the little seal—hanging tight—would whisper into his neck,
Mo riderae
(My knight).