Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (57 page)

A chamber—domed, echoing, grand, and constructed of crystal tubes and technomagikal struts—gleamed through the glitter-dappled golden fog breathed from the mouth of the giant divinity above. She could immediately feel some kind of presence: there was a rhythm to its puffing tubes, a pulse in the glassy floor that encased the starry void at her feet and a full-bodied hum that gave her the kind of tremors she had not known since she’d last tumbled in bed with her now-deceased husband. It all had to be illusion, unless Magnus had somehow trapped the universe below. Yet, the Iron Queen was certain that the Hall of Memories was somehow alive. Gustavius escorted the still gawking queen over to where Magnus sat on a glass bench worthy of royalty. There, she rested and whipped her astonishment back into poise.

“Quite splendid. But what’s the point?” she asked.

Magnus looked up at the storm softly rolling overhead. “I have thought deep and long on this war: on how it began and how I was defeated in Zioch. My brother has attained power he should not possess. He has mastered magik that bends the elements, fuses together flesh and metal and souls. He is not a sorcerer as I am. Therefore, this magik must stem from another source. I believe I know from where he has claimed this power. I almost remember a cry…”

It is the moment of his capture and doom at Zioch. Fiery cyclones whirl around him, the earth splits, flames and lava burble forth from below. Through the cascading, roaring decimation walks the shivering shadow of his giant brother. What is the maddened chant that Brutus shouts? An incantation? A summoning? What is this word that brings an earthquake with every syllable? Ig-ni-fax!

“When he and I battled, I heard a word,” said Magnus, his mind returning once more to the hall. “A name. The name of a creature, a force. I believe Brutus has harnessed its power, and we must discover how he has done this. I am hopeful that in one of the many learned minds that have shared their knowledge with the Hall of Memories, we shall find the answer to this mystery. In our past, we may find the key to our future, or so I hope.”

The Iron Queen watched as Magnus’s alabaster complexion became even paler. What could an Immortal possibly fear? She needed to know. “What kind of creature?” she asked. “What is this force?”

“An elemental. A wyrm,” he replied.

Gloriatrix had heard of the great wyrms that burrowed in the far-off reaches of Geadhain, although she’d never seen one. They were so foreign to her culture as to be almost mythic, and as they could not be easily chased or exploited, they were of no use to Menos. She knew that earthspeakers and sages traced the causes of natural phenomena such as tidal waves and seismic disturbances to the movements of wyrms in the earth: when larger wyrms rose too high in the strata, they displaced the magma and waters of the world. A few of the smallest wyrms had reportedly been seen swimming in the shallows of Kor’Khul’s sandy ocean. These creatures were considered a vital part of Geadhain’s ecology; functioning much like antibodies, wyrms
defended the Green Mother from infection. The accidents brought about by the movements of wyrms could often be traced back to some manmade catalyst, some disruption in the environment that demanded a response. The legendary city of Veritax, which was an abomination against Nature as the tales said, had been destroyed by the wrath of these elementals.

“You’re thinking about Veritax, are you not?” asked the king, staring at her.

“Perhaps,” replied the Iron Queen. “Although that is just cautionary balderdash that was no doubt invented by dramatic historians.”

The king touched her leg as if reassuring an innocent child, and for a brief, deplorable instant, Gloriatrix felt as if she were twelve again and full of curiosity and life. “When I was building my kingdom,” he began, “when it was barely a plot of sand and populated only by whatever tribes had wandered into my company, Veritax was at the zenith of its achievements. Its people had mastered magik and technologies that appear new to us even today, but they had less care and compassion than the most notorious of Iron masters—no offence.”

“None taken,” replied Gloriatrix, hoping, in fact, that he had indeed been referring to her.

Taking a moment, she recalled old history books in her father’s library that told of the City—the Empire—of Truth. Ritual blood sacrifices. Coats of mortal skin worn as the latest fashion. And the image, drawn in black ink, of an atelier hundreds of stories tall and made entirely of bones. She was almost certain she was not imagining the picture, that she’d actually seen it. The empire sounded glorious, if horrific. “As I said,” she said. “Cautionary tales. Fluff.”

Magnus brushed off her disbelief and stood, before captivating the three once again with his words. “The empire lay in far Western Geadhain, past the Isles of Terotak. Yet, if its despicable rulers had desired anything beyond hoarding of otherworldly power—arcane atrocities that man should never seek to master—they could have conquered all of Geadhain in a single sand. But they did not. Instead, they built their sky-scraping towers of bone. They sacrificed tens of thousands of men, fueling themselves with the exquisite power produced only at the moment of death, until the streets, stones, and rain turned red. They tainted the land through
their pursuit of greatness, their desire to pass through doorways beyond time and space. I know not all of what they found, but I am glad they did not discover my brother and me as we wandered with the tribes an ocean away. I do know that they twisted the art of windspeaking into storm-calling, perverted firecalling into an incinerating summons so terrible it could rip through the matter of our world and open portals behind which waited ancient forces. The beings that whispered there gave the sorcerers of Veritax more secrets, more power. Their greed makes a Menosian’s venality seem about as corrupt as a child’s desire for his rattler.”

Either the intrigue or the splendor of the king’s tale made Gloriatrix tingle. She leaned forward. She needed to hear more. “How do you know all of this?”

“I did not gather this knowledge through direct experience,” replied the king.

He walked, spreading his arms open to the Hall of Memories, which swirled and pulsed in a dance of mist and lights as if directed by a great conductor. “I have, though, seen glimpses of one man’s life—a shattered, decrepit man, preserved only through some foul sorcery. Centuries after the fall of Veritax, when that city was myth and Eod stood as the world’s pinnacle, he came to me. He confessed himself to be a
Mortalitisi
of the empire, a sorcerer supreme. His pacts and kingdom having been destroyed long before, he was doomed to meet a much delayed death, and he confessed to me—and to this great mind and machine in which we stand—all the horrors and glories of his kingdom. The Mortalitisi wanted his knowledge to be preserved; I wanted to seal it away so that no others would ever be tempted by it. I would like to have kept his story locked away forever. But now, we must peer inside that box of horrors.”

“Incredible,” muttered Gloriatrix.

“I was able to see only fragments of the transmission when it occurred,” whispered the king, bowing down close to the three as if sharing a secret. “In my long life, I have seen crimes, tragedies, wars too numerous to count…but this Mortalitisi’s memories are unequaled in their filth and darkness. Madness, doom, howling storms with tentacles and eyes. It is a history into which I have chosen not to delve.”

“Then why must we do so now?” asked Beauregard, shivering.

“My knight,” said the king, rising and cupping the boy’s cheek with a hand, “Veritax fell because it lost control of its source of power: the elementals. The great beasts whose blood and magik the Mortalitisi had tapped into broke free of the chains of their masters.”

Gloriatrix snapped her fingers as the deduction came to her. “I see: you’re proposing that in this past we shall find a means to eliminate your brother’s control over his elemental pet, which represents his greatest advantage in this war.”

“Indeed.” Suddenly, Magnus crackled with green static and his luminous stare flashed to the Iron Queen. “Do not think that I shall allow you to exploit the twisted wisdom of these madmen. You are here only because you have an eye for darkness, as you are mostly wicked yourself. It is possible that you will see the smaller strokes that I may overlook in these maestros’ works. We shall witness the past together. We shall discover how it was the Mortalitisi enslaved the elementals, and, I hope, how they managed to break free. We can employ the same tactic on my brother’s pet, thus robbing him of his power. We shall make this journey together into the past, as allies. Are you prepared?”

“Yes,” hissed the Iron Queen.

The other men stayed silent.

Opening his arms wide and calling upon his Will, Magnus woke the great presence of the chamber.
Ancient mind, wondrous mind, bring forth the chained and wicked box. Show me the memories we have sealed. At last, I must look into the heart of the Mortalitisi. We must see the final days of Geadhain’s darkest empire. We must learn how this seemingly unstoppable power met its end
.

As the Hall of Memories searched for the entombed box—buried deeper even than the record of the king’s own birth, down so deep that even the Daughter of Fate could not have retrieved it without a map—the chamber grew still, its pipe sounds subsiding into hisses. The Hall of Memories searched its own infinite pathways, traveling through deaths, births, wars, and acts of heart-breaking compassion. Finally, the Great Will found the black tumor nestled in layers upon layers of its oldest, most decayed tissue. These were memories from the demented, senile, and wicked—and among them was the cancer they sought. Although the Great Will was not capable
of feeling mortal emotions, it paused, considering and calculating the risks of opening this pocket of disease, this pulsing knot of evil. After determining various probabilities, it sliced open the tumor with a scalpel of Will, and the bile and blackness leaked out, screeching.

Thousands of holed tubes whistled steam, and mist whirled in the chamber’s heights. Booming golden thunderheads descended from above, raining electric warmth that prickled like dew on the onlookers’ flesh. This was Magnus’s beloved instrument; it was beholden to its master and did not simply present images of the past. Magnus preferred to
live
in the past, not merely to look at it. Lower and lower the storm came. Its magik mist burned Gloriatrix’s eyes like Menosian rain. Its swells swallowed her in a golden typhoon. Scared, she reached for Gustavius’s cold iron mitt. He gripped his queen’s hand tightly as they were buffeted by the worst of the winds and electricity. She leaped up into his arms as the winds blew away their seat; she clung to him as the gusts blew away the Hall of Memories itself and sent the howling golden storm and the passengers whirling off into space.

IV

Through a haze of glittering threads, the Iron Queen saw another storm, this one of nightmares.
This cannot be real
, she told herself.

For one thing, they seemed to be levitating. In between neon flashes, she tried to study the sky whose etheric undercarriage they nearly touched with their heads. It was as black and red with corruption as a cauldron of tar and gore. Bulbous swarms and ripples moved in the clouds, and the night ululated like a living tormented beast of incredible proportions choking on lightning.
Could those be creatures in the clouds
? she wondered.
Snakes of thunder and doom
?

Spinning in awe, Gloriatrix then discovered a new horror below: an ocean. Everything about it was wrong: it was a moaning, gelatinous maelstrom, an assault of tidal waves further distorted by rubbery, flailing tentacles. What she saw made no sense. A jellied ocean filled with octopi? She had no time to absorb all of these insanities, for just then, an appendage of one of the leviathans swept down in groaning, whooshing doom upon the floating ghosts of her company. Gloriatrix screamed and the sores that
covered the thing shrieked back at her, sending out a putrid waft of salty rot like the stench of a barge packed with dead fish. However, they were travelers to this time, not part of its reality, and the leviathan’s tentacle passed through them in a breeze before smashing down into the gibbering orgy of chaos below.

“Save your screams,” warned the king, whose form wavered in front of her. “We have not yet seen Veritax. Nothing here can harm us, as horrific as it may appear. Look deep, and remember every terror.” The phantom king pointed ahead. “That lighthouse of darkness…We head there.”

A lighthouse of darkness
, thought Gloriatrix. How was she to spot a shadow in this blackest of nights? But sure enough, far away, a thin rectangle rose from the horizon, pulsing blackness as a lantern would light. Suddenly, their quartet was moving alongside the howling winds. They crossed tens of spans in moments, and then abruptly stopped. They hovered above what might be a city. The realm’s shadows could be spied only through a crimson gauze—a mist of rain that carried telltale traces of the sharp scent of offal and rust. Blood. It was a rain of blood, as the legends told.

Through the downpour leered grand towers that thrust all the way up into the cumulonimbi clot above. Their vast proportions humbled even the Crucible. Although constructed of white brick, the towers were sheathed in throbbing black ether, which ran upward in currents. Gloriatrix knew that the pale bricks beneath hadn’t been made of the smooth iron her countrymen used: these jagged, irregular blocks were formed of femurs, skulls, spines, and hipbones that had been crushed into mortal mortar and cement. How many men and beasts had it taken to build one tower, let alone this fogged, clustered cityscape of white and black fingers? Gloriatrix could find no words. She was shocked, awed, appalled, and the ethereal body she inhabited played a song of fear in her heart as they descended into the terror, drawn by the truth Magnus sought.

The haze thinned, revealing dwarfed off-white huts clustering around the bases of the Mortalitisi towers. Veritax wasn’t as quiet as it first appeared. She began to hear crackling sounds like whips of lightning, but they were too jumbled to clearly distinguish. A speck later, she realized they were screams—the shrieks produced by Mortalitisi construction.
Somewhere on the red land below must be the factories that stripped skin and technomagikally molded bone.