The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (38 page)

Maelys choked. ‘They’re going to mate!’ It had been bad
enough next to Flydd and Bel last night, but these flesh-formed monstrosities
– yuk! ‘Bel?
Bel?
’

 
TWENTY-EIGHT

Maelys could see right through Bel – she was
barely there. What was the matter?

She solidified fractionally as Rurr-shyve settled on a
sturdy branch in the crown of a spreading tree, then bent its knees and raised
its yellow tail. Pores along its flanks dilated, gushing a greenish vapour
which drifted into their faces. Maelys caught a whiff; it had hardly any smell,
but she felt more intoxicated than she had after drinking that beer last night.
The male was boring down towards them, bellowing with lust, its paired horns
throbbing red. The rainbows of colour pulsing across its tail discs lit up the
tree’s canopy.

The thought of being caught between a pair of mating
flappeters made her feel ill. She tried to heave Flydd out of the saddle onto a
nearby branch, though she had no idea how she was going to get him down to the
ground. She wasn’t sure she could get herself down.

‘On, Rurr-shyve,’ said Bel ineffectually. ‘Hurry.’

Rurr-shyve didn’t take any notice, for Bel was no longer in
control. Maelys took back the amulet and tried to speak into Rurr-shyve’s mind
the way she had done months ago, but couldn’t reach her. In the intoxication of
the mating ritual the flappeters must be oblivious to anything else –
rather like Flydd and Bel last night, Maelys thought sourly.

‘Help me with Flydd.’ She tried to haul his weight out of
the saddle.

Bel made a distressed sound in her throat, but managed to
partly solidify herself and dragged Flydd across a small gap onto the wildly
shaking branch. She wavered there and nearly went over the side, until Maelys
steadied her.

‘This way,’ Bel said limply, backing down the steeply
sloping branch, holding Flydd.

Maelys didn’t understand how she could stand upright without
falling off; clearly Bel was a brilliant mancer, though perhaps lacking in
judgment.

Rurr-shyve’s feather-rotors came to a stop and drooped. In
the light from her lurid tail, Flydd’s face was the colour of mud. Maelys held
him as best she could, her feet slipping on the damp bark, as the male
flappeter hovered above Rurr-shyve. The brilliant colours racing across its
tail fans could have been seen back at Plogg. The male gave a steamy hiss,
settled on top of Rurr-shyve, and it began.

Their mating made a racket that must have been audible a
league away; such roaring, bellowing, grunting and bleating Maelys had never
heard before. Their pores issued more intoxicating vapours until the crown was
shrouded in a green-tinged mist; vile-smelling gunge dripped from their gaping
mouths, and their tails thrashed so wildly that a windstorm of shredded leaves
drifted down. The whole tree was shaking as Maelys scrambled from branch to
branch, occasional flashes from the male’s tail lighting up the forest floor.

‘Hold him steady.’ Bel’s voice was barely audible above the
racket. ‘I’ll do the rest.’

Maelys had no choice but to trust her, though she could not
imagine what Bel wanted, or what she was planning to do to them. But if Bel
collapsed, or faded away, Maelys had no hope of getting Flydd to safety before
the troops arrived.

Slipping on the wet bark, they slid down into a fork just
wide enough to hold all three of them. Bel was no more than a shadow slumped
against the trunk, breathing shallowly.

‘Are you all right?’ said Maelys.

‘Too weak – can’t hold myself here …’

Why not? Maelys didn’t have a clue what was the matter with
Bel. Above, the bellowing appeared to be coming to a climax. A rainbow ray
briefly penetrated the clouds of shredded bark and leaves, revealing thin grey
strands dangling towards them and oozing down the trunk. Maelys shuddered.

‘On!’ With a gasp of pain, Bel resolidified, took Flydd over
her shoulder and scrambled down, one-handed. Maelys followed, feeling for every
foothold, for she could no longer see anything.

The tree shook. ‘Aah!’ Bel cried weakly.

There was a rustle and a thump. Flydd groaned. Maelys
reached the ground and groped around in the dark. Flydd lay on his face in a
thick bed of dry leaves, but Bel had vanished.

Maelys felt his back. Bel’s healing spell had scarred over
the wound, though the area was inflamed and she could feel something hard
underneath – a crossbow bolt. The moment they reached somewhere safe it
would have to come out. She hauled him to his feet.

‘Can you walk?’

‘Have to, won’t I?’ he said limply, sagging on her shoulder.
‘Where’s – Bel?’

‘Drawn back where she came from, I suppose. Where do we go
from here?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘We’ve got to get away, fast. That scrier called for help
and it won’t be long in coming.’

And wherever Bel had conjured the gigantic male from, it was
a staggering feat of mancery that would not have gone unnoticed. Their position
was hopeless, for Flydd was too heavy to carry.

‘This way,’ said a voice from the darkness. ‘Hurry.’

Maelys’s knees sagged with relief, for it was Colm, and few
men were more at home in forests than he was. Realising that she still held the
amulet in her free hand, she weighed up whether to keep it or not. No,
Rurr-shyve would undoubtedly come after it and to escape they needed all the
help they could get. She tossed it into a bank of leaves. Yet even if they got
away, could they trust their good fortune? Jal-Nish might simply be waiting for
Colm to lead him to the trove.

‘Xervish?’ Maelys said that afternoon, looking over her
shoulder to check that Colm wasn’t in earshot. He was twenty paces back, down
on hands and knees, drinking from the rivulet they’d just crossed.

Flydd grunted. Every movement caused him pain and his cheeks
had a rosy, feverish glow. He seemed mortally embarrassed that he’d been taken
in by Bel and would not meet her eyes. She didn’t want to talk about last
night, either, but she had to.

‘About Bel …’ she said tentatively. ‘How could you –?’

‘I don’t want to discuss it. I must have been out of my mind
to let one of Jal-Nish’s mancers get so close to me.’

She realised suddenly that, because Flydd had been under the
enchantment, he didn’t know what Bel had done to effect their escape. ‘I don’t
think she was –’

‘No more! Don’t ever mention her name again.’

He looked so fierce that she moved away hastily.

‘Surr,’ she said quietly.

‘Go away,’ he gritted.

She went.

‘What’s Bel up to?’ Flydd muttered. ‘Or rather, what has
Jal-Nish put her up to? Was everything that happened at Mist-murk Mountain part
of his plan, too, even the woman in red? And if it was, what is he trying to
get me to do that he dares not do himself?’

‘This is it,’ Colm said the following morning, as they
trudged out of the trees onto a bank of pale gravel and saw two towering buttresses
of white limestone ahead, like a wall with a slot cut through it, with the
river tumbling over a shallow sill between them. ‘We’re definitely in Dunnet
now, and I’m sure this is the right valley.’

Bel’s healing charm must have continued doing its work, for
Flydd had perked up during the night, though he winced with every step and she
often noticed him feeling the arrow wound. ‘The test will come when we enter
the valley,’ he said, ‘though it looks like cave country.’

‘The test will be getting out again,’ Maelys muttered.

The only way in was along a narrow, water-washed ledge on
the right-hand side of the stream. It ran up and down, then curved around the
base of the buttress. On the left-hand side, the racing river tore at the
broken rock.

‘A few well-placed troops could keep an army out,’ Colm said
with satisfaction as they headed in.

‘If we had them,’ said Flydd. ‘Ah, I remember now. An army
tried to attack this valley once, though they didn’t attempt to force the
entrance. They came over the razor-topped ridge.’ He shivered in the cold wind
blowing down the river, and fell silent.

To left and right, the valley walls consisted of layers of
cliffs, one above another, separated by steep tree-clad slopes. The valley
floor was gloomy, for no sun reached it at this time of the year. Maelys could
see dozens of caves, several close to the river at the base of the lowest
cliff, but most in the higher cliff layers.

Over the next few hours they searched every cave they came
to, but Flydd detected no illusions, perpetual or otherwise.

‘It could take weeks just to search this one valley,’ Maelys
said wearily, ‘and what if it’s the wrong one? There could be a hundred valleys
just like it.’

Colm wasn’t daunted. ‘I’ve waited most of my life for this
day. I’ll search ten thousand caves if I have to.’

Day after day they climbed up and down to check the caves,
camping in them at night and hiding their tiny cooking fires with screens of
woven reeds, but there was no sign of the enemy. Jal-Nish has to be holding his
troops back, Maelys thought. There’s no way his scriers wouldn’t have found our
trail by now.

They continued, working their way ever upstream, and now in
the deep, narrow valley the forest closed in on them. The trees were even
taller here, the air over the water cold and misty, and the valley had a dank,
silent air.

‘I don’t like this place,’ said Maelys, standing by the dark
stream and pulling her coat around her. ‘It feels as though we’re being
watched. There could be an army hidden up above and we’d never know.’

‘There is, but it can’t harm us,’ said Colm enigmatically.
‘Let’s try that one.’ He pointed up the flank of the valley.

Flydd grunted and led them up the slope, but Maelys’s unease
grew with every scrambling step.

He topped a small rise and stopped abruptly. ‘This is the
place, all right.’

Maelys came up beside him, cold inside and out; Colm stopped
on his other side. Just ahead was a vast tangle of white, brown and yellow
objects – many long and thin, others round as balls. She took a couple of
steps forwards and her teeth began to chatter; she could not stop them. ‘But
they’re bones –
human bones
!
Hundreds of them.’

‘Tens of thousands of bones,’ said Flydd.

Colm went pale, turned away abruptly and sat down, head in
hands. ‘It didn’t seem so bad when it was just an old tale.’

Flydd walked to the base of the pile, where he prodded some
rib bones with his foot. She could not read his expression.

‘Xervish?’ said Maelys. ‘What happened?’

‘Two centuries and more ago, near the end of the Time of the
Mirror, Yggur and Mendark, two of the very greatest mancers in all the
Histories, led an army here secretly to take back a device held by Faelamor.
They employed every concealment known to their separate Arts, and also brought
a team of master illusionists to hide the army and confuse her.’

‘But something went wrong?’

‘The plan failed, utterly. Faelamor discovered them long
before they got here. She broke the concealment and created a counter illusion
that was too much for the illusionists. Most died, the rest went insane, and
she lured the army to its doom. She marched it over a cliff – that
cliff,’ he pointed up the sheer limestone face of the upper cliff ‘– in
the impenetrable fog.’

Maelys could see that day in her mind’s eye and felt sick
with the horror of it. ‘Why did a whole army have to die? If she was the
greatest illusionist of all, why didn’t she hide whatever they were looking for
until they gave up?’

‘I expect she wanted to teach them a lesson – that all
their might, and indeed the towering Arts of Yggur and Mendark, were as nought
compared to her mastery. Two thousand men fell to their deaths that hour, and
neither Yggur nor Mendark ever recovered from the defeat.’

Maelys closed her eyes, but she could imagine it all too
clearly. The terror of the fall, the agony of their smashed bones, the ghastly
waiting of any injured survivors to die.

‘This valley hasn’t forgotten either,’ said Colm soberly.
‘Not a single plant grows within the boneyard.’

‘Plants will, one day,’ said Flydd. ‘Nothing lasts forever.’

‘Save perpetual illusions,’ said Colm.

‘Perhaps. Faelamor’s cave would not have been far from where
the army fell. To the right, I’d say.’

For a few minutes, they followed a trail worn by cloven-hoofed
animals, up and down, around a series of fallen boulders, then along the base
of the cliff. To their right the ground fell away steeply towards the river;
ahead it became a sloping apron before a black opening in the white rock.

‘That’s the cave,’ said Colm hoarsely. ‘It’s got to be.’ His
eyes were streaming and he did not bother to hide it.

Maelys did not follow at once, for again she had the
unnerving feeling that they were being watched. She slid behind a tree, looking
up the valley and down, as far as she could see. Nothing moved in her field of
view, but with all the cover here, Jal-Nish could have an army hidden close by.
Would he make his move now that the cave had been found, or wait until the
illusion had been dispelled?

She followed Flydd up to the cave and stopped just inside
until her eyes adjusted. The cave was well protected from wind and weather,
while a natural groove in its ceiling, somewhat soot-blackened, would have
helped to funnel out smoke from a cooking fire. The floor was scattered with
charcoal from camp fires of long ago and the dry dung of a variety of small
animals. She saw nothing else.

‘This place doesn’t look grand enough for the leader of all
the Faellem,’ said Maelys. ‘It looks like any other cave.’

‘The Faellem lived in harmony with nature,’ Flydd said
absently. ‘They did not care excessively for possessions, or built things. As
long as they were comfortable, the cave’s simplicity would have appealed to
them.’