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drunken, and delicious way. More of a brute when under the influence, he’d fallen asleep kissing and softly biting her breasts. Soon, Morigan drifted off to his half-snore, half-growl, and occasional suckling, thinking how much she loved this beautiful creature. One of Alastair’s pretty songs from down the corridor—carried through the great metal halls of the skycarriage like music through a pipe—was her final shepherd to sleep.
    Morigan steps out onto the cracked-dust desert plain and sniffs. Wider, farther do her perceptions reach than the grandest of wolves, her mate—he who sleeps in another place. Who am I? Where have my bees taken me today? she wonders. The land offers only the most mysterious of clues; whirling clouds, hewn steeps, dunes mossed over with spiny, straggling forests, and a rolling sea of sand that creeps toward a starkly red horizon. Rendered in the morning sun are the glittering threads of many rivers branching over the land—they look like pulsing veins of blood. How sweet and unusual is the air that flows through her nose and down her throat. Upon its current, she tastes the chlorophyll of leaves, the chalk of sand, the spice of mildew, and the refreshing salt of the rivers—inland water that bears the taste of an ocean. What place could be so strange as to hold all of these details and elements in harmony? The answer strikes her then: Pandemonia
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    I am here. No, Brutus is here, she realizes, as her enormous galvanized host begins a thundering run across the landscape. It has to be Brutus in whom she resides, as if trapped with a storm in a bottle. For who else has lungs like bellows? Who else climbs gullies in a reach or two, bounding about like a spastic ape, but the King of the Sun himself? With an astonishing disregard for natural laws, the Sun King leaps from butte to butte, jumping so high and so far that he soars like a wind over the irregular valleys and dashes through waterfalls that pour from winding pinnacles of rock. Following his speedy journey is difficult, and Morigan refrains from flexing her Will to see her host’s secrets or feel all that he feels, for she realizes she is not alone in his mind
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    Zionae, the Black Queen, rides in Brutus, too
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    Frozen, as still as a woman hiding in the closet while a murderer creeps through the house, Morigan holds in check her consciousness and her bees—a maddening effort to maintain. Zionae sibilates on every wind that whisks Brutus’s ears. Zionae rushes through his veins like poison. Zionae perks his nipples and groin with infernal arousal: a need to hunt, kill, and breed. From her hidey-hole within the mad king, Morigan listens to the suggestions of the Dark Dreamer. More intimations and emotions than words are these whispers. Still, Morigan discerns enough of her enemy. Zionae’s madness is a paste of crushed spiders, bent nails, broken glass, aborted children, and the tears and blood of those who have died screaming in horror, a madness so thick that it pours over Morigan, blocking her ability to scream. Better that she does not, lest Brutus’s dark passenger hear, and thus know, of her presence
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    Morigan buries herself deeper into the mad king’s soul. She tries to creep elsewhere, to find a piece of his mind untainted by Zionae’s lust. There is no corner of the Sun King’s mind, though, in which wickedness does not fester. A black poison has washed through Brutus’s soul. Even when Morigan flees to what should be sacred memories of Brutus and his brother, she finds no familial sanctity. Instead, she experiences her host pounding Magnus with his fists, tearing him with his teeth, and thrusting into his pale brother with his gargantuan sword of meat. Is this a memory or a dark delusion? She hopes the latter, as the acts Brutus is committing are depraved beyond measure. When she seeks out Brutus’s memories of Mother-wolf, she finds that these, too, have been corrupted. Now the king fantasizes about devouring his mate,