The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (20 page)

He shuddered at an echo of the pain and his knife hand
tingled; the blade was alive again. He cut an experimental arc in the air
between himself and the soldiers coming up the stairs. The knife screamed
– no subtle weapon this – and carved the leading soldier’s head and
shoulders off his torso as though it had been no more than a joint of meat at
the dinner table. The man to his left lost the top half of his head. The
soldier below them fell down several steps, trying to scrub the blinding blood
out of his eyes, and the rest retreated to the floor.

Flydd, shocked, turned it towards the robed mancers and the
cold-eyed scrier behind them, who was studying him via a wisp-watcher mounted
on his back. Jal-Nish selected his scriers from the most depraved men in his
realm, and Flydd had no compunction about cutting him down.

The mancers ducked for cover and the scrier slipped behind a
column, out of reach. Klarm alone had not moved; it was as if he was testing
Flydd. Flydd couldn’t kill his former friend in cold blood but he waved the
shrieking blade at the wall above Klarm’s head: a warning.

He somersaulted backwards through the double doors, then
thrust his head and hand around the left-hand one, the knoblaggie out, and its
blast tore chunks from the stairs below the butchered soldiers. With a
shrilling swish, Flydd gave him a haircut. Smoke rose from Klarm’s hair and he
ducked out of sight.

Flydd cut down a pair of soldiers crossing the body bridge and
they fell into the flames. Another two died at the base of the steps. ‘Up,
Colm,’ he gasped. ‘All the way.’

A wing-ray shot at them out of nowhere, eyes green with
reflected flame, wing tips rippling. He carved it in two and it fell into a
squad of soldiers, bringing half of them down. The others dragged the pieces
off the crushed and thrashing men.

Colm plodded up, out of sight. Flydd followed painfully, for
his bones seemed to be slipping and sliding inside his leg muscles again, and
his bruised feet hit each step with a thud.

He couldn’t work out what he’d seen through the eyes of the
woman in red. She’d been crouched behind a brass-mounted lens the size of a
small cartwheel, swinging it this way and that, and staring frantically through
it, but at what? He’d seen only billowing mist shot with shifting, wraith-like
shadows – ice-white and soot-black. Did the lens look into another place
– or another
dimension
? Her
heart had been thundering. What was she so afraid of?

He vaguely remembered seeing those peculiar shadows before,
back in the cavern with Jal-Nish. Or had it been earlier, during renewal? He
could not recall. Flydd’s unease deepened. She was manipulating him to do
something she could not do herself, or was afraid to, and he could see no way
out of it.

The stair appeared to terminate a span up through the
circular opening in the ceiling, where Flydd made out entrances to left and
right. Another knoblaggie blast shattered the step below him, slamming chunks
of broken rock into his left leg.

He scrambled up around the curve of the steps until he was
sheltered from Klarm’s line of fire. Flydd felled two more soldiers walking
across the body bridge, though it would not delay the others long. Jal-Nish
could call upon thousands of men, and would not care how many lives he wasted.

Klarm kept blasting with his knoblaggie, but the range was
long now, and Flydd was not hit directly, though by the time he crawled up the
last steps into the ceiling opening he had been peppered by stinging fragments
of stone and the lower half of his body was a mass of bruises.

He leapt off the stair, through a gap in the flames, onto a
sloping ledge with passages running to right and left. Below, at least a
hundred troops had lined up to cross the body bridge, while Klarm, the two
mancers and the scrier were in conference behind them. Flydd crept up to the
right-hand opening, keeping low, but ran into a solid wall. The way was sealed,
and so was the passageway to the left. He could cut through, but the enemy
would only follow. He had to stop them.

Flydd put his back to the wall, still puzzling about what
he’d seen through the woman’s eyes, and whether she’d meant him to see it. He
didn’t think so, and that was chilling, for it implied that something was out
of her control.

He was watching the soldiers when he felt her presence
within him again. Flydd could feel the tension in her, and sense a fear that
all her plans were going to come to nothing, for some shadowy nemesis was
drawing ever closer to her.

He almost saw it, then, in her mind’s eye – a
wraith-creature (he could think of no other name for it) formed of white shadow
and black fire, creeping, darting and continually changing its form to blend
with its surroundings. He certainly felt it – a rage that had been burning
for an eternity, and a determination to recover … what?

Flydd shook his head and the extraordinary feelings faded
like a dream. He was back in her mind and she, fuelled with a resolve born of
desperation, was trying to find the courage to take a momentous step.
Dare I defend myself with the most awful
power of all? I must!

She was at the obelisk in some past time, for it stood
upright and the glyphs carved into it were fresh and clear. At its base, a
round opening was lit from below by the cursed flame roaring up the chimney
from the flame chamber. The woman in red was looking fearfully over her
shoulder, clutching a handful of flame; she touched it to her forehead, pain
speared through his and he saw her portal spell clearly for the first time.

Springing up, cat-like, she snatched a long spike off a
table and held it out in her extended arm, pointing towards the base of the
flame. The tip of the spike turned red and began to sing in the way his knife
had; a beam carved down through the opening and shortly the flame changed to
abyssal green. She caught some in her hand but did not use it, just pointed the
spike down, growing ever more tense. The flame gushed higher but a shudder
racked her.
I dare not
. She closed
her hand, extinguishing the flame, and her image slowly faded from his mind.

He couldn’t tell what she dared not do, but in that fleeting
moment Flydd had
seen
her Art and
thought he understood it. He could feel power within him now, the power of
her
Art, and he used it to complete his
renewal at last. She was using him but he would worry about that later. His
loose bones settled into their enclosing muscles, his saggy sinews snapped
tight, and for the first time he felt at home in his renewed body. He slid out
into the open.

‘What are you doing?’ cried Colm.

Flydd didn’t answer; there wasn’t time, for half a dozen
troops were on the stairs, holding out shiny shields to reflect any knife-beam
back at him, and the rest were waiting their turn. Leaning over the edge of the
ledge, he focused her Art, though not to shear flesh this time. The knife had
to be forced to cut rock, metal, and anything else in its path. He sent the
power of the shrieking blade slanting down through the annulus to sever
whatever was anchoring the stair below and, with luck, collapse it into the
abyss. Drawing every bit of power the woman had woken in him, he sent it into
the knife.

Its scream made Klarm and the mancers clap their hands over
their ears; the last wing-ray, gliding in circles below the ceiling, dived
headfirst into the floor and did not move. Klarm blasted up at Flydd, knocking
pieces out of the ledge.

Flydd swung the knife and bisected the dark-robed scrier,
who died with a squeal that lasted until the air in his lungs was gone. Flydd
felt no pity for him; scriers were vicious and merciless, and it was fitting
that he die as he had lived.

The stair shook in wild circles, hurling the soldiers many
spans to the floor, or into the abyss; he heard bones break. He cut down
through the annulus again, expecting the stair to collapse, but it stilled,
creaked, fell silent. Only then did he realise that it was fading, parts of it
disappearing as if painted with an invisibility brush.

Klarm sent up another blast, narrowly missing him. He wasn’t
holding back now. Flydd ducked out of sight. Klarm prodded at the lower
invisible sections with his knoblaggie, then ordered another half-dozen
soldiers to climb the stairs, and the rest out through the double doors. The
six soldiers started up, anxiously, and Flydd couldn’t blame them. He allowed
the first to climb halfway before slanting a knife beam in behind the
reflective shield and cutting him down. The second and third fell to their
deaths when the steps they were standing on vanished, leaving a mere skeleton
of stone around the edges. Klarm ordered the surviving three down.

With a grim smile, Flydd turned back to Colm, who was
standing at the entrance to the blocked tunnel. ‘Our first victory.’

‘They’ll soon cut us off.’

Without warning, the cool green flames beside them darkened
to a deep green-black, and grew hotter, though not nearly as hot as normal
fire. Something had changed.

‘What is it?’ said Colm, panting like a dog on a hot day.

‘I should have been more careful. I think I’ve cut open the
reservoir that feeds the flame.’

A minute ago the abyssal flames had been bouncing harmlessly
off the ceiling, but now the stone began to droop. The ring of fire thickened
into a circular column, sending tongues of flame licking out towards them.
White fumes crept along the ceiling.

‘The flame’s out of control,’ Flydd said, ‘and it’s not
going to stop. Run!’

He carved a hole through the wall blocking the right-hand
entrance, and leapt into the tunnel behind it. Colm followed and they raced up
a steep slope into the darkness.

‘Where are we going?’ panted Colm.

‘To the obelisk, as quick as we can.’

A few minutes later a passage ran off to the right, but the
sound of marching feet echoed from it.

Flydd swore. ‘Klarm’s soldiers have found another way up.
They’re trying to cut us off.’ He pressed on hastily, but soon the rising
tunnel curved back and they heard the flame again. They turned the corner and
saw that it had dissolved up through the floor not far ahead, flinging globules
of rock at them, and eating ever upwards.

‘They
have
cut us
off,’ said Colm. ‘There’s no way out.’

Flydd checked the knife in his blistered hand. Rainbow
colours swirled across it, as if the metal had been overheated, and the blade
was bent. Its steel could not withstand the uncanny stresses imposed on it and
if he used it again it was likely to fail, but he dared not take the risk of
swapping it for Colm’s scimitar. It might not sing at all; the blade might even
shatter.

Ahead the roof was sagging, the flame dissolving a circular
shaft up towards the surface of the plateau.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Flydd said. ‘The flame
seems to be unbinding the very forces that hold solid rock together.’

Tramp-tramp
.
‘They’re close!’ said Colm. ‘And I’m not going to be taken alive.’

He seemed to have gained some control over his fire phobia
and could glance at the column of flame without cringing. There was a defiant
gleam in his eyes and an aggressive angle to his chin that Flydd remembered
from the first time he’d met Colm.

Shield.

It hadn’t been a voice in his head this time, just the image
of a transparent cone standing on its base. ‘There is one way out,’ said Flydd.
‘Straight up.’

 
SIXTEEN

Colm’s eyes widened. ‘Look what it’s doing to the rock.
It’s unnatural.’

Liquefied rock formed puddles on the floor of the tunnel and
began to dribble towards them, sweeping up the debris in its path. A piece of
dry grass, blown into the tunnel in ages past, was carried along on top, yet
did not even smoke. The liquid rock wasn’t hot, and that was downright uncanny.

Flydd squirmed at the thought of what the flame would do to
them, but there was no other way. He studied the circular opening. ‘The abyssal
flame isn’t nearly as hot as normal fire, and once it eats through into the
cavern above, a tunnel slopes up steeply towards the surface, as I remember it.
If we can get into it first …’

‘You’re insane.’

‘She wouldn’t have sent me this way unless there was a way
out.’

‘You don’t know this is the way!’ Colm hissed. ‘She might be
trying to trap you.’

‘No, she needs me to do something for her, and I’m sure I’ve
got to go up.’ Flydd edged towards the flame with the tip of the blade out. The
flame was only warm on his skin, but the knife grew so hot that he could barely
hold it. As the tip grew red-hot, bordering on white, the blade bent into a
half twist at the hilt.

Jerking his hand away before the blade failed completely,
Flydd stumbled backwards and reached as high above his head as he could,
praying that he’d understood what she’d shown him. ‘Duck down! Make yourself
small.’

Colm crouched, pulling his arms and legs close together.
Flydd angled the blade down and out, then rotated, careful to keep the tip
pointing out beyond any part of himself or Colm. The blade hummed as it carved
a circle around them, and as he completed it a grey cone sprang into being,
just like the one she’d shown him, enclosing them on all sides. The warmth of
the flame was cut off, though its dazzling light was barely diminished.

Flydd stopped channelling power through the knife and took a
step forwards. The cone moved with him. ‘Come on.’

‘Where?’ A muscle twitched along the line of Colm’s jaw.

Flydd couldn’t blame him. The cone would protect them from
many dangers, but could it survive where he had to take it? ‘There’s a way to
get past the flame,’ he equivocated. He could not tell Colm the truth.