Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (81 page)

“You left Alabion?” asked Morigan.

The Broker nodded; he continued quite sulkily. “I tried to make friends, but you know how slow-walkers can be. They buy you a drink, you tell them
your sorrows, and the next thing you know they’ve got you in felirons and performing for scraps of meat. Many names, many cages. Gorgo the Swallower. The Jaws of Doom. Kashar the Gnashar. The slow-walkers all thought that I was an experiment gone sour. Always sour, always wrong! Ghaaa!”

Morigan decided not prod the man’s lunacy further, afraid of what she had already stirred. Also disturbing was that he had unfastened his cloak and was now unlacing his shirt. She assumed that he was undressing himself.

“I had many names and many masters, dear daughter. Until I’d taken my last whip. They should have thought better of Gorgo’s jaws. Even in our slowest skins, we have many times the power of a fleshling. It took me all night and shattered every tooth I had, but perseverance wins the race, and I chewed those chains to pulp. The masters and handlers then made for a better meal. These new teeth are just fine, just fine. Now I rule. I command. I mete out life and death. That’s what you were after, isn’t it? My story? A little pathos that you could use to
heal
me? Therein lies your mistake, in thinking that I need your compassion, when I am beyond those sentiments.”

With his clothing in a pile, he approached Morigan again. His sinuous body glistened with a sweat of excitement, and the heat of his repulsive desire was thrust upon her not only from his throbbing member. This lust wasn’t for her, not entirely, but directed more toward the things he spoke of: domination, pain, rulership. She knew that the Broker would never find salvation, by her or anyone else. He was a monster, and he reveled in that as a pig among the mud and filth.

Very near to her face and reeking of an animal’s heavy musk, he said quietly, “Do you fear me yet? I feel you fluttering. I am a nightmare. I am the sickness of the seed. I am…
Jabberwok
.”

One of Mifanwae’s grimmer Eastern tales rose in her mind and would not be silenced. She could almost hear her mother reading the poem to her while tapping the horrible depiction on the page: the sketched charcoal image of a pit scattered with bones and twined with the body of a great wriggling lizard, its mouth ragged and distorted as a clown’s messy smile, its talons long as swords.

Beware the Jabberwok, dear one
.

In darkling coves and slithering groves
,

it hunts with coruscating eyes and trilling cries
.

Running is fair, though death has its flair
,

and is the enviable endebum to the affair
.

For you cannot bescramble, and are better to amble—gleefociously

into the curlivanting claws and the goobering maw
.

A mouth to eat yer toes and feet
,

to swallgag you down like a soup of meat
.

In the bellybosom it’s warm
,

and there you shall warn

with every belch of your bones
,

those of bravery prone
,

who dare the bloodscotched dark of the Jabberwok’s home
.

“This has been nice, our chitter-chat,” said the Broker, and turned his heated passion away from her. “Mice—yes, one Mouse in particular—appear to have gotten into my lair. I can hear them scampering about. My sons are out looking for them; seems that they were looking in the wrong holes. You and your friends cost me so many of my boys. Spread too thin, too thin. I shall have to take care of this matter personally. I haven’t stretched from my skin in a slow-walker’s age. This will be enjoyable. Once I deal with the mice, maybe we will have an occasion to speak again before the Ironguards take you. Or after, I suppose. There won’t be much of you left when the Ironguards are done, but I’ll ask for the scraps, lovely as they are.”

Mouse? Mice? Did he mean Fionna?
wondered Morigan. No sooner had the hope alighted than her skin crawled in horror.
Jabberwok
, she reeled, not quite understanding the monster, if in full appreciation of its menace.
Jabberwok
,
Jabberwok
,
Jabberwok
was all that she or the bees could natter—as the Broker suddenly hunched and groaned before her in the throes of a grotesque transformation. Whereas the shedding of Caenith’s skin was a shocking yet natural molting akin to a butterfly’s emergence, the Broker’s metamorphosis was like watching maggots festering in a wound. From within, he was viciously squeezed and twisted. It must have been excruciating from the cries he made, and he arced and spun and gurgled sprays of crimson and clear plasma. In specks, he swelled and bloated, he pimpled with scales, and bristles tore from his flesh. And when she believed that the shuddering mass could grow no more revolting, what rubbery trappings of skin remaining upon him flew off in splatters, and one such salty treat landed
in Morigan’s gaping mouth. She spit the disgusting thing out, but could not abide the unwashed stench or the gagging heat of the grand shadow pacing the chamber, and the vomit burbled its way out of her. With watery sight and a heaving consciousness, her perception of the monster was fantastical and farcical. Surely, it could not be true, she prayed.

For no creature could be so terrible. The slobbering crocodile jaw was jumbled with tusks and puny silver teeth. The swinging tail as mighty as a giant’s club battered furniture around as its massive body turned itself on stumpy legs—two clawed, two finer-toed and black. Was she imagining the webbed wings, these atrophied things useless for flight that were misplaced all over the creature? Or the black pearls of its eyes under a spiny crest of a brow? Or the long fluffed ears? These qualities belonged on a bat. No, this was actually happening, she grasped, and the upturned, mucus-huffing nostrils that snuffled at her spew affirmed this freakish reality. She jumped away from the head, which could swallow her to the waist as the legend said, and pressed herself to the wall as much as her chains would allow. The Broker had read her well: she was terrified past all reason, quailing and bloodless, not only for herself but also for the others that were rushing to her rescue.
Go away! Please just go away!
she Willed, as if magik or wishes could save her.

Mercifully, fate or another hand intervened, and the Jabberwok trilled a roaring screech, stomped its monster feet, flapped its many vestigial wings, and then vanished as quickly as a foul wind. She could breathe when it was gone, although the air was still polluted with its stench. She used her first breath to scream.

IV

After his episode, Sorren had calmed, as he usually did. Gloriatrix had returned him to his room and ordered the Ironguards to fetch him night willow tea—a nanny’s task, which they frowned at, yet knew not to question. The curtains were drawn, candles lit to flicker on the ominous and overwrought woodwork of the room, and he slept as overexcited children do, which is to say all night and into the following late afternoon. During that
time, Elissandra and then the Broker had come and gone, and Gloriatrix had been taken with the affliction of nostalgia and found herself staying at the Blackbriar estate while her son rested: a situation and place that she tried as often as possible to avoid. When she came in the following afternoon, Sorren was finally awake; up against his headboard, dark-eyed, pouting, and clutching his sheets as though he was naked underneath, although he had slept in his clothing.

“He’s betrayed us,” complained Sorren.

He was referring to Vortigern, of course. Gloriatrix sighed and pulled up a chair to the side of her son’s sprawling bed; the seat was embellished with studs of onyx that uncomfortably poked at her. In a strange burst of sentimentality, she wondered if this wealth had ever done her family any good: driving a rift between Thackery and her, teaching her to love power over people, isolating every member of her family from one another, and ultimately ending in the death of her husband and one of her children.

“Mother, are you listening? He has
betrayed
us. Twice now!”

“Yes, I am thinking of your brother, too,” she said, and threw her emotions back in the cell that kept them. The
iron
for which she was famed stiffened her features. “While you were resting, Elissandra confirmed his disloyalty through whatever airy conjurings she uses to determine these things. The Broker, too, has suffered treachery in his ranks and lost a man to this witch you caught.”

“Who slipped away! With my prize!” shouted Sorren.

Wary of any accusations that might prompt another fit, Gloriatrix was less reprimanding and quite cosseting as she asked, “Your prize? A Voice, I am told. There is easier flesh to buy in Menos, particularly for the price you paid to the Watchers, from whom I did not know bodies could be had. You could have bought a hundred girls for that. Why such an interest in her, my son?”

He was sheepish with his reply. “She reminds me of someone.”

“Lenora?”

“Yes.”

Likely because that is her daughter, who should have died years ago in a pleasure house. If she is alive, let that be a miracle, and a second miracle that you should never see her again. She is my mistake. Do not pursue this path,
Sorren. Truths, these bones of the past, can never be placed back once they are dug from their graves
, worried Gloriatrix as she wrung her hands.

“I can see that it is bothering you,” said Sorren, startling her.

“I…indeed.”

“I would shut him off if I could. Snap the cord that brought him back like the spine of the weasel that he is,” sneered Sorren, clenching the bedsheets in angry fistfuls. “But it doesn’t work that way, the magik. Life flourishes, even in a garden of death; it puts down roots and grows. That cold body is as much his as it was before. Now I feel that he has his mind back, too, and he will no longer listen as a proper empty reborn should. I cannot control him. Now, if I could get close to him again…”

The nekromancer’s hands squeezed to whiteness, and his gaze twittered with black thoughts. After thinking for a moment, Gloriatrix was jolted by something he had said amid his rambling.

“My son, are you implying that Vortigern has remembered who he was?”

Sorren slapped her with a look as if she was dense. “I’m not implying anything. That is precisely what has happened.”

While Gloriatrix chewed deeply on her ever-complicating issues, Sorren rambled on. Speaking of Vortigern dredged up his most unwanted memories, but also many of his favorite ones, and he waxed bitter while reminiscing.

“I remember when Vort and I were young. We would play out in the gardens among the thornbushes and climb the highest trees we could find. We pretended to be conquering masters, gone to herd the savages from abroad to the mines of Menos. Mostly, we scraped ourselves terribly. Well, me more than Vort. I never fared well with the physical disciplines, as you know. Yet I always tried to keep up with him. I wanted to win his pride, as if that were a glorious trophy that I could put on the mantel of my achievements: Vortigern’s respect. Harrumph…do you remember the day I fell?”

“Hmm? What? Oh, yes, I remember,” responded Gloriatrix. “That was a mother’s worst fear realized: the screaming of children with not a head in sight. I thought that an assassin had come for you both.”

She is chasing the cries of her children through the clawing hedge-maze. Madness has seized her, instinct has hold of her every sense, and she is moving so quickly that the Ironguards are puffing somewhere behind her, calling for her to slow and be wary. But she will not slow, she cannot, not until she finds her
boys. It is storming and slippery. The rain burns her eyes, and she stumbles into thorns. The thunder trumpets, yet her calls sound louder than the elements. Please, please, she begs, to whatever forces heed the prayers of mortals—even the cursed kings, if they will court her pleas. Then the bushes part, and her sons are painted in lightning: small Sorren is being held by his wailing brother. Her child is not dead, but glazed and placid, perhaps in shock, judging from the angle at which his leg is twisted
.

“You shouldn’t have been playing out there, especially not in a storm. We had the physicians putting those awful drops in our eyes for a week.” The Iron Queen’s mask split with an awkward, much unused smile. “Climbing trees like the apes of Alabion. Really, you two. I knew that one of you would slip, and I’m not surprised that you did.”

Sorren and Gloriatrix saw each other then as they scarcely ever did. Not as nekromancer or queen, but as people. As a child and his mother. Sorren’s honesty welled up, untapped and raw.

“Would it be odd if I said that moment when you found us was the happiest occasion of my life? Even the pain faded for a while. You may have thought that it was both of us screaming, Mother, and I tell you today that it was not. Vortigern was my voice. He was my safety. And when you appeared, that fury, that cold armor that you always wear melted like so much snow in the rain. There was the three of us, and the storm, and yet somehow a peace that no thunder could shake. I would take that moment and frame it, if I could: a phantograph of eternity. That would be all I could ask for, to see, live, and feel that time again and again. How strange you must think I am,” confessed Sorren, and turned away from his mother’s drilling stare.