Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (84 page)

Ankha sobbed so hard that she heaved, and Morigan lost the last vestiges of her callousness and embraced the woman.
Because of what I have done
, said the Keeper Superior.
I killed them both. Her lover and her unborn son. I killed them both so that I could rule, and then I left her to rot in chains
.

Morigan leaned back, revolted. In response, Ankha stiffened, whipped up her head, and seized Morigan’s arms. Black and silver stares met, and the darker gaze of the Keeper Superior pulled Morigan into its abyss.

Morigan falls for a time through shrieking gray eddies, as if she’s dropped off a cliff and into mist. Although the surroundings seem insubstantial, she lands hard, and her vision clears in a juddering shake. Wait. Someone is shaking her, though she is being rattled too hard to make sense of it. She
fights and cries out a little, and a hand is placed over her mouth. There is no further violence, and the bleariness fades. Her sister’s brown face clouds into view in the nearly black tent. Amunai’s eyes gleam in the dark like those of a terrified animal. Morigan floats out of Ankha’s head to view the scene: two sisters wrangling on bedrolls in a dark tent, one atop the other
.

“What’s wrong?” whispers Ankha
.

“I heard mother and father talking,” Amunai hisses, and then slides under the covers with her sister. Their parents are only a cloth screen away, and they know to whisper. They settle into a familiar snuggle, Amunai hugging her from behind. For as long as they can remember, they’ve held each other like this on nights when Pandemonia roars with rainstorms and tears at their tent with hawks of wind. Tonight, her sister’s arms tremble, and she smells of nervous perspiration. It’s some time before Amunai continues. At last, the words are breathed into the back of Ankha’s head. “A Keeper comes. A great Keeper. She is coming to take me away.”

Ankha musters up a “Sister…” but her words run out after that
.

What comfort can she offer? Amunai’s fate has been sealed. As they share everything as if they were twins and not children born a year apart, she knows that Amunai has been hearing susurrations that do not come from the men and women of their tribe. Instead, these whispers come from stones, sand, water, birds, and bugs. Amunai told only her sister, not their parents, of what she’d been experiencing. But the secret had been pried loose by their shaman
.

He had gazed upon the two of them the other day while they practiced their grappling and wrestling with the other children. He had stopped and stared deeply, then nodded to himself. He must have spoken to their parents soon after. Outside the great cities, gender rules are not strongly enforced. Men and women can tend to war or crafts. There is one rule for the Amakri, though, alongside maintaining one’s honor: women like Teskatekmet who have been cursed with power are sent where they belong. Thus, Amunai will be taken to one of the cursed cities. Her Fate was preordained when she was born a girl who heard the whispers of the world: she will be a Keeper
.

“I don’t want to go,” says Amunai. “I don’t want to leave you. I can’t believe that mother and father would simply give me into the hands of the witches in the cities. They don’t even speak. They stab thoughts into peoples’ heads. They’re monsters.”

“They might be nice, Sister,” says Ankha, although she doesn’t sound convinced. “And there will be wonders unimaginable. Fruits, even. I know how you like the sugar roots and sweet water we sometimes find—there will be much sweeter things in a city. Do you remember the fruits that mother once traded for from a wandering man? Those golden things with the juice and the little seeds? You’ll be able to have as many as you want, I bet.”

Amunai remembers the fruits; they were delicious. She and Ankha had eaten one in specks and then fought over the core. “Apples, they’re called. And I don’t want apples. I want what I know. It’s not right. They can’t just take me.”

But the Keepers of the Great Cities could and would take whomever they pleased. After a girl had been known and marked, her tribe wouldn’t want her, or protect her. The old wounds between Lakpoli and Amakri were too deep
.

Ankha pulls out of the embrace, turns, and wipes away her sister’s tears. “You have always been stronger than I, and smarter and prettier. There is, though, one thing I’m better at: hiding truths.” Suddenly, Ankha starts weeping, too. “It started a while ago, before you confessed you were hearing voices…When you came to me, I could not imagine burdening you with my troubles—”

“Your troubles? Sister, are you—”

“Hearing the whispers? Yes.”

Neither can control her weeping then. Hope flickers through their grief. Perhaps they will be taken together, be allowed to stay together. By the time their parents wake them, they’ve made their decision. They’re even happy about it. They haven’t slept and are blinking against the light of a cold day like captives held long underground. The family, too nervous to eat or move, huddle on the girls’ bedrolls, weep, talk, and remember; they promise never to forget each other
.

Soon, they hear the shuffling of many footsteps, and people enter the tent and tear back the mothy curtain hiding the family. A woman comes forth in a sweep of charcoal gray and a blast of cold wind. Perhaps she has brought the chill with her, this eerie woman—for her eyes are a winter blue, her hair all gray frost, and her lines like rents in an icy tundra. They can tell that she never smiles; those wrinkles are from scowling. Armed and glorious soldiers stand behind her like pillars of steel and might, dazzling in the sunlight that
shines in from outside. The girls’ parents cower. Words are thrust into their father’s head, and he nods, already defeated
.

“The Keeper Superior herself has come,” whispers their father, his voice thick with emotion. “She will take you to Intomitath and teach you how to use your gifts.”

“We know,” says Amunai. “We shall go together.”

As soon as Amunai declares this, the woman in gray turns on the second sister a stare of blades. Something else happens, too—a deep cutting inside Ankha’s head that Morigan recognizes as a cruder form of the magik, the Will, that women like Elissandra possess. The psychic surgery is conducted without any form of anesthesia. It’s brilliantly painful, a ripping inside the skull, and Ankha shrieks and falls into the darkness. Amunai rallies against this injustice, and a second psychic stab renders her unconscious, too. Proud Amakri themselves, the girls’ parents become hysterical, but are held at bay, then beaten quiet by a wall of shining, heartless warriors. The family isn’t given a chance to say any more of goodbye. The girls are simply taken
.

The mists of Dream whirl and part, revealing fragments of time and memory. Morigan sees torment. Teskatekmet’s disciple—Isith, the Keeper Superior of this time—enforces doctrine as strictly as her ancient, dead master: through suffering and penance, through the removal of worldly vices, pleasures, and other voices, until only her Will—her desire—can be heard. Intomitath was Teskatekmet’s first city, and it is a forge in which she hardened and tempered her ambition. Here the girls shall be forged into Keepers. The City of Flames leers out of a smoldering, tattered memory like Brutus’s volcanic beast: Morigan sees geysers of fire and black funnels of smoke that could be towers. Red furnaces and glowing mouths adorn the humpbacked sprawl of this incontestably grand and horrible city. The whole place feels alive, hungry, and red. The girls scream when they see it, but are quickly silenced. When they’ve become so weakened by starvation and beatings that they’re ready to listen to Isith and accept their fate, they spend their days trapped below the scorching city in places that are slightly cooler but still waver in sweltering heat
.

Delirious now, they mumble chants and practice verses, but soon they are no longer allowed to speak. The Keeper Superior cracks them with lash and cane when they do. She’s cruel, this woman. That is why Isith is able to
rule the greatest of the four cities. That is why she is able to command legions of men and tame the storms of Pandemonia with Will—and the might of the arkstone that is Intomitath’s beating heart. She needs to be ruthless and unencumbered by compassion in order to decide who is worthy of saving and who will live in the wilds with savages, raging elements, and death around every corner. This division must be upheld. Except for the blessed few allowed to tend to and feed the Faithful, those who do not agree with Teskatekmet’s decree must never set foot in the sanctuaries the original Keeper Superior founded. Most, however, will never know glory, purity from sin, or life eternal (or at least greatly extended beyond its natural span). The savages will never witness ships that do not sail, but fly. They will never enjoy bountiful harvests, never benefit from any of the Great Cities’ incredible accomplishments. Or so the girls are told, repeatedly, through mind-speech and whip, while chained to a wall and washed in scalding water for their sins—which the Keeper Superior claims can never truly be cleansed from filth of the desert such as these two
.

Eventually, their teacher and tormentor’s lessons begin to take root in Ankha’s mind. We are dirty. We are filth. We must be purified, she thinks. In time—whatever days or years have washed away along with her endless sweat upon the floor—she believes almost anything she hears and experiences in the dripping phantasmagoria. She repeats the doctrines without knowing what her mouth babbles into the nauseating humidity. In exchange for her dutifulness, her faith, the Keeper Superior grants her certain freedoms. She’s allowed more water than her sister, and spends less time in chains and boiling showers. Does she have parents? Not that she can recall. Ankha has only Isith’s voice in her head, the heat, and the cant and words of the faithful. Teskatekmet’s ancient Will echoes inside her, and she soon comes to see that it’s all she needs
.

No matter how far from herself she falls, though, Amunai is with her. Enduring. She wishes that Amunai would not resist so much, for doing so brings her only agony and reprisals from the Keeper Superior
.

A steamy twist of years and pain later, Ankha and Amunai are in a garden. They sit on the edge of a square pot that traps a tree resembling a twist of black wire. Other withered, crisped plants bearing bright-red buds form hedges and copses in the rambling arboretum. Everything smells burned in
Intomitath, and the winds are dry and yet somehow sticky. Above them, the sky is tinged crimson-dark by the forges, black towers, and smog. Tonight, though, clear patches float in the darkness like midnight-blue islands, and some stars provide glittering landmarks
.

It took a great effort on her part, but Amunai has completed her training. Ankha hasn’t seen her sister for what feels like weeks, if not months. They had lost both mental and physical closeness when obedient Ankha excelled at her lessons and Amunai did not. Ankha isn’t sure what to feel about her sister. She doesn’t recognize the grown woman who sits beside her. Amunai was once always smiling, but all this woman’s mouth does is turn down and frown. She could be a younger sibling of the Keeper Superior now
.

“Have they said where you will go?” asks Ankha—through mind, not mouth
.

“Aesorath,” replies her sister silently
.

“That is the greatest of the four cities next to Intomitath. They have mastery over wind, music, and the wonders of space and time. You have been given a great appointment. They will build a statue to honor you, I am sure.”

“Where will you go?”

“Eatoth,” replies Ankha. “I look forward to the wonders of art and agriculture that I shall find there.” There’s no enjoyment in her mind-whisper, which is flat and mechanical. “How blessed we have been to take this journey together.”

“Blessed…yes.”

Ankha stands to leave. How sad, thinks Morigan, that love has been beaten and burned from the minds of these women. And yet Fate surprises the jaded seer. Amunai, who appeared as dead in her soul as her sister, now seizes her sister’s wrist. “Wait,” she shouts into the other’s head. “Do not let us part like this. Like strangers.”

Ankha fumes with a rash anger. To touch is a sin. They should not be touching. She pulls herself out of her sister’s grip. “What are you thinking?” she asks
.

“I was thinking that I wanted to embrace my family one last time.” Amunai stands, and all the careful walls she has built—the facades to conceal her indomitable emotions—begin to crumble. “We may never see each another again. I want you to remember me, to remember us. I can’t even
remember our parents anymore. That’s how much they’ve taken. Don’t you care? Don’t you see?” The mind-whispers not seeming to have swayed her sister, Amunai mouths the words ‘I love you.’

But Ankha’s mind and soul have been taken too far down the tunnel of despair. If she confronted the reality of their suffering, she would break—again. She’s not the strong one, never was. She couldn’t hold on to herself through the religious mortifications. Mindwhispering, she says, “I shall forgive your trespass in touching me. I shall not tell the Keeper Superior. Go to your appointment in peace. Hallowed be our place.”

The mists of Dream claim Morigan once more, and she is spared the sight of Amunai’s weeping. Amunai, my enemy, she thinks, before killing any budding compassion. I want to know what turned you into a monster. Love spurned is not enough to entice the Black Queen. She feeds on the deepest, sickest ruin of a soul
.

The bees then whirl their mistress through a number of pasts. In most, she floats with Ankha in her new clouded-window sanctum. Here, in the silences, Ankha’s armor begins to rust, and pain and loss find their way back to her. Ankha never admits this, though, except through an occasional twist of the heart. These pangs come with a certain regularity, however: each season after a harvest, a gift comes to her from Aesorath. It’s always a simple hand-carved box crafted of the white-gold stone of the City of Wind and made as light as paper by magik. Within lies a fruit of the city: an apple with a tartness and sweetness so pure that Ankha’s mouth waters whenever the package arrives
.