The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (33 page)

Maelys, footsore and too weary to stand up, sat on the cold
floor, unable to think of anything but Emberr, Emberr, Emberr. In his arms she
had felt complete for the first time in her life, and all she wanted was to be
there again.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ said Flydd, staring down at
her. ‘You’re mooning about like a love-struck calf.’

Colm laughed cynically.

‘Nothing,’ she lied. ‘Just tired.’

Flydd walked away, rubbing the stubble on his jaw, then
stopped abruptly. ‘Wait!’ he cried. ‘I remember now.’

‘Remember what?’ asked Maelys, afraid of what he might be
thinking.

‘An important detail. Rulke escaped from the Nightland after
Tensor exploited a flaw in it, trying to lure him out so as to kill him. But
Rulke was too strong. He got away, returned briefly to the Nightland, and Karan
Kin-Slayer and Llian the Liar ended up here as well.’

‘I’d prefer that you called them Karan and Llian,’ Colm said
stiffly. ‘We know what murdering scum the scrutators were, and to my mind, they
were the liars when they rewrote Llian’s tale. Most of them, anyway,’ he added
hastily as Flydd clenched his fist.

‘Whatever keeps you happy,’ Flydd said coldly. ‘The tale
states that the Nightland was collapsing, and there’s no reason to doubt Llian
the –
him
in this matter, at
least. Over time the Nightland had leaked power into the void, and at the end
there wasn’t power enough left to sustain it …’ He frowned.

‘What’s the matter now?’ said Colm.

‘I repeat my earlier question. Why is the Nightland still
here, two hundred and twenty years later, seemingly as vast and whole as ever?’

‘Perhaps it’s a new one, just recently made.’

‘Not with all Rulke’s relics in it. This is the original Nightland,
sustained for all this time at an incalculable cost of power. Why?’

To protect Emberr, who was trapped here, Maelys thought, but
dared not say so. If she mentioned his name, Flydd would go after him and try
to use him in some way. She felt terrible, keeping such a vital secret from
Flydd, but Emberr was already in danger and Flydd would only make it worse. She
could not put Emberr at risk; she’d given him her word.

Flydd’s glance rested on her. He knows I’m keeping something
back, she thought. I’ll never keep the truth from him.

He turned away, muttering, ‘I’m worried now. Every minute we
spend here increases the risk of discovery.’

‘Who by?’ said Colm.

‘The one who owns the Nightland.’

They tramped back and forth for many more hours, without
finding any sign of Rulke’s virtual construct. Maelys followed their footsteps,
eyes closed, stumbling with weariness. Her previous sleep could not have been
more than an hour, for she was quite overcome by drowsiness.

‘Aha!’ Flydd was squinting off to her right. ‘I think we
should go this way.’

‘Why?’ said Colm. ‘It looks the same in every direction.’

‘Intuition tells me that this is the right way.’

‘Intuition? You?’ Colm’s voice dripped scorn.

‘It surprises me too,’ said Flydd, ‘but I’m going to follow
it.’

After ten or fifteen minutes they came to a broad, curving
crevasse filled with smoke-like vapour and spanned by a cracked arch of some
hundred rising steps, and as many descending into the mist-shrouded distance of
the other side. They climbed the bridge one at a time, in case their weight
proved too much for it, and entered another section of the Nightland where the
floor smoked like ice, and luminous vapours swirled up and around them with
every movement. Pools of water black as ink lay in holes so deep that they
seemed to have no bottom.

After negotiating a path between hundreds of such pools they
came to the remnants of a once magnificent palace, now broken and distorted as
if it had been compressed into a mote, then expanded again. And this part of
the Nightland had colour: sombre reds, browns and yellows which were like a
rainbow compared to the unrelieved black of everywhere else.

‘What happened here?’ said Maelys.

‘This must be the part of the Nightland that collapsed,’
said Flydd. ‘Rulke’s part. Someone tried to restore it, though not very
successfully.’

‘How could one section collapse and the other not?’

‘I have no idea.’

They went inside, through great halls all twisted as though
they’d been wrung out like washing, and imposing audience chambers that were
equally deformed. One was the size of a dog kennel on the inside, though its
outside walls joined seamlessly with the normal-sized rooms surrounding it.
They entered the most magnificent library Maelys had ever seen but the books
were all crumpled and ruined; they had expanded to full size but the shelves
had not.

‘Rulke must have had a colossal ego,’ Colm observed, ‘to
have created all this when there was no one else to see it.’

‘He was a great man who had been used to the best of
everything,’ said Flydd. ‘He liked to build things, and he had infinite
patience. I might have done the same, had I been sentenced to a thousand years
here.’

‘You spent nine years on Mistmurk Mountain,’ Maelys pointed
out, ‘and you were satisfied with a little wooden hut.’

Eventually they came to a glorious, though to Maelys’s mind
intimidating, bedroom that was hardly deformed at all. The floor was tiled with
red marble, the walls draped in rich velvets and silks, while the bed was a
head-high platform supported on six posts of carved ebony, with a canopy so
high that it could barely be seen.

‘I couldn’t sleep there,’ she said, ‘no matter how tired I
was.’

‘I doubt he used this room for
sleeping
,’ said Flydd with a sly grin.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ frowned Maelys.

‘I heard the Charon were lusty devils, men and women,’ said
Colm.

‘He could create anything he wanted for his pleasure,’ said
Flydd. ‘Or
anyone
.’

I wouldn’t want to lie with Emberr
here
. Maelys, realising what a shocking, wicked thought she’d just
had, flushed so red that her cheeks burned.

‘Now we’ve embarrassed innocent little Maelys,’ Flydd
chuckled. He ruffled her messy hair and walked through into the next room.
‘Hello! What’s this?’

It was roughly the size of a large covered wagon, though it
hung in the air as if weightless. It had a skin of blue-black metal, shaped in
alien curves and ominous bulges that no blacksmith of Santhenar could have
duplicated. Oddly shaped levers and knobs protruded from the top.

Flydd exhaled loudly. ‘It’s Rulke’s original model for his
construct – the very first construct of all, and still the most potent.
With such a perfect plan as this, and unlimited power, another could be made.
This belongs in the Great Library – if it still exists.’

Maelys pressed her burning cheek against the cold doorway.
‘Shouldn’t you destroy it? After the last war –’

‘I doubt that I can influence it in any way.’ Flydd swept
his arm against the side of the construct and it curved straight through.
‘Besides, after the nodes failed, Lauralin was littered with dead constructs,
and I never heard that Jal-Nish had succeeded in activating one, for all the
power of his tears. Did you, Colm?’

Colm shook his head. ‘The God-Emperor has air-dreadnoughts,
and he had his sky palace, but his only other flying devices are flesh-formed.’

There was a faint noise in the distance, like a piece of ice
shattering on a hard floor. Flydd spun around, tiptoed to the door and looked
out.

‘I keep forgetting that any kind of depraved being could be
held in such a secure prison as this.’

‘And any kind of evil prison warder,’ said Colm.

Maelys could only think of Emberr, trapped here for as long
as he should live. If only there was a way to get him out.

‘Let’s see if the construct can be made to work,’ said
Flydd.

He withdrew the pyramidal ice flask from his coat, wincing
as frost formed around his fingers. That had not happened in the real world.
The chthonic flame was moving sluggishly. He walked around the virtual
construct, studying it from all angles. Maelys followed him at a distance, not
because she had any interest in the device – she’d experienced far too
much of the Art lately – but because the floor here was so cold that it
hurt her bare feet if she stood still.

He began to trace the shape of the construct with his
fingers, as high as he could reach, circumnavigating it again as if trying to
imprint it on his memory. Maelys reached out to touch it, but felt nothing at
all. It was just patterns of light and shadow.

Flydd walked into it, and from outside she could see his dim
outline holding the ice flask up like a lantern. Colm yawned, strolled away and
stood leaning on the wall with his eyes closed.

Maelys suppressed a yawn of her own and followed Flydd in.
Her skin tingled as she passed through the skin of the virtual construct;
everything was a formless blur for a few seconds, then the farthest layers
faded and she saw a pair of high-backed seats, plus a confusion of levers,
knobs and glassy plates, all illuminated by dark red light.

‘That’s odd,’ said Flydd, who was to her right.

Maelys turned towards him but was assailed by such an attack
of vertigo that she staggered. Everything swam sickeningly across her field of
vision for a moment before settling down again.

‘What is?’ she managed to gasp.

‘I don’t know. It’s different to the constructs I travelled
in during the war, and it’s going to take time to understand how it works. Go
and get some sleep, Maelys. There’s a bed in the next room.’

‘I couldn’t sleep there.’ The thought of lying in Rulke’s
bed gave her the shivers.

‘You’re out on your feet. Get moving; I can’t rely on you
the way you are.’

She went out reluctantly, past Colm who did not acknowledge
her, and into Rulke’s bedchamber, where she stood beside the huge bed. Flydd
was right; she had to rest and there was nowhere else. Her toes felt like
frozen knobs.

Climbing the bedpost reminded her of climbing the web cord
to escape the octopede; her sore muscles screamed at the abuse. Maelys flopped
onto the bed and pulled the velvet quilt over her, trying not to think about
the lustful acts Rulke must have committed here during his long incarceration,
but the only way she could get him out of her mind was to focus on Emberr
instead.

It didn’t help – it made her feel all hot and panicky.
Maelys stuffed a fold of the quilt into her mouth to stifle a groan, and it was
a long time before she fell into a restless sleep.

‘Ah, there you are,’ said Flydd when she reappeared.
‘Feeling better now?’ She didn’t look it. Her hair was tangled, her eyes had
dark circles around them and her face was flushed.

‘Slightly.’

‘You should be. You’ve been asleep for almost two days.’

‘Two days!’

‘This place has an odd effect on some people. And you look
as though you’ve been sharing Rulke’s lusty dreams,’ he said cheerily.

Maelys avoided his eye. Such a modest girl, he thought.

‘Have you had any luck with the portal?’ she asked.

‘On the plateau you said that making a portal to the real
world was perilous,’ Colm observed.

‘Indeed, but I’m no longer a novice at it, and I’ve learned
a lot from Rulke’s virtual construct,’ said Flydd. ‘I think I can get us to
Elludore with it, safely, and possibly make another portal after that … I hope
so, for it’s a good seven hundred leagues to the Island of Noom, the way the
secret paths run, and that’s the best part of a year of walking, in rough,
trackless country.’

‘Assuming the God-Emperor doesn’t catch you first,’ said
Colm, who was still propping up the doorway. ‘Which he will.’

‘It would be devilishly difficult to avoid the notice of his
spies and watchers on such a long journey,’ Flydd agreed. ‘Besides, we don’t
have time. Jal-Nish’s defeat will only drive him harder to hunt us down …’

‘What’s the matter?’ said Maelys, for Flydd was staring at
the construct. ‘Is something about it bothering you?’

‘Perceptive, too,’ Flydd said to himself. ‘It should have
been dead, but it isn’t.’

‘What do you mean?’ Colm shot upright.

‘It’s been used, and there are still traces of power within
it, yet the Histories say Rulke never made a portal out of the Nightland,
because he couldn’t. Tensor freed him the first time, and when Rulke returned,
through a portal he’d made from the real world, he left it ajar so he could
escape again. He didn’t use this construct because he didn’t need to.’

‘Perhaps he returned again,’ said Colm.

‘It’s possible,’ said Flydd, ‘though by then he would have
had his real construct, so much more powerful and subtle than a virtual one
could ever be. And a couple of years later he was dead, as was Tensor. By the
end of the
Tale of the Mirror
, almost
all of the great mancers were dead or gone forever, so who came to the
Nightland and used this virtual construct after that, and
why
?’

‘They could have come before the end of that tale,’ said
Maelys.

‘No, else all traces of the construct’s use would have been
wiped clean when the Forbidding was destroyed. This place was made from the
Forbidding, remember, and its destruction should have destroyed everything in
it, including the virtual construct. Why didn’t it?’

‘Because someone protected it.’

‘And I keep asking, why go to such immense trouble to
protect an empty prison?’

Perhaps it wasn’t empty back then, Maelys thought. What if
there was someone in it who could never leave? But that would make Emberr
hundreds of years old, so who was he, and how did he end up here?

‘To keep other prisoners here,’ said Colm. ‘One of them must
have used it.’

‘This construct can only be empowered by a force brought in
from outside,’ said Flydd, ‘but prisoners would have been stripped of all
possessions before they were sent here – no prisoner could have used it.
If someone entered from outside to check on the prisoners, they would have come
via their own portal, so why would anyone need to use this one? And if there
were prisoners here, why would their warders leave the virtual construct
empowered, which would give them a chance to escape?’