The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (43 page)

Maelys went with him. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Mancers, or scriers, though I can’t see any. Those men are
just soldiers, yet something is interfering with my Art.’ He began to take
objects out of his pockets: a tiny knife, a wooden comb with half its teeth
missing, a collection of coloured pebbles. ‘Hold these for me.’

He put them in her hands, then drew out the dirty leather
pouch containing the mimemule he’d taken from the cavern, but the instant she
took the pouch, there came a
pfft
behind them.

The envelope of the Nightland split open like a flower and
the construct expanded up out of it, two spans high and floating in the air,
whole and complete. Before Flydd could speak the Words of Opening, a
funnel-shaped portal snapped into being directly in front of it and freezing
air howled out, coating the curving rim of the funnel with frost. Icicles grew
before their eyes, iron hard and sharp as spikes. The funnel kept lengthening
on the inside, though all she could see at the other end was fog. It cleared
suddenly and beyond the small circle that formed the exit of the funnel, Maelys
saw a frozen wilderness of grey ice.

‘Go through!’ cried Flydd over the roar of the wind.

Maelys hesitated, but Rurr-shyve was falling towards them;
the male flappeter was hurtling in to their left and a tight knot of arrows
arching towards them from the right. She ran, caught Colm’s arm and, before he
could resist her, dragged him against the wind into the funnel. The wind
slammed into her, but she pushed harder, harder, forcing herself into the mouth
of the funnel, where a countervailing force caught her and Colm and sucked them
through. Blue lights flashed in her eyes; she felt a gut-wrenching inner twist
that brought the taste of Ketila’s smoked fish up into the back of her throat,
then she and Colm were hurled out the other end into a grey land that did not
look as though it had ever seen the sun.

Flydd came tumbling after her. ‘Get out of the way!’ he
screamed, clawing across the ice to his right.

Maelys looked back as the male flappeter hurtled through the
virtual construct, scattering its myriad intangible components, its
feather-rotors reversing as it tried desperately to brake in the air. Its rotor
beats punched a hot fist of compressed air through the portal, sending Maelys
tumbling across the ice.

The male could not brake in time; it loomed ever closer, a
monstrous winged shadow; its head entered the mouth of the portal, where the
gate-force caught it and dragged it in, but it was too big to fit.

Its feather-rotors were sheared off to a blood-gushing
stalk, its four pairs of legs ripped out and smashed into spindly segments. Its
immensely long body was sucked through in a storm of bloody feathers and
fragments of leathery skin and scale, thrashing wildly, its maw snapping and
its tail swinging from side to side.

It shot out the other end of the portal, bellowing in agony,
shattering lumps of ice and flinging shards in all directions. The remains of
the leather-clad rider, crushed to a paste along its spine, slid off and
plopped redly to the ice. The flappeter’s tail smacked into a boss of ice too
big to break and its front half was swung the other way, right at Maelys. She
tried to run ahead of it but her feet slipped and she went down. The
flappeter’s neck and shoulder came driving towards her, its good eye and ruined
one rolling in different directions, its huge mouth open. Thick blood was still
spraying from its rotor stalk.

The good eye focused on her just before it struck and the
span-long maw twisted around to snap at her. Maelys didn’t have time to reach
for her knife; she just swung at it with the object in her hand – the
leather pouch with the mimemule inside.

The pouch grew so heavy that she could hardly move it, and
momentarily she felt herself to be a warrior swinging a mighty war hammer. It
crunched straight through the eye and the tough carapace surrounding it, into
the flappeter’s fore-brain, splattering grey and white matter in all
directions.

Its ruined head thudded to the ice. The four pairs of leg
stumps waggled back and forth and the tail continued to twitch blindly, then it
went still. Maelys slumped beside it, covered in congealing muck and shaking
all over. She didn’t have the faintest idea what had happened, though she felt
as though she had swung a warrior’s war hammer, and the muscles of her right
shoulder were so strained she could barely move it.

The portal was gone. Colm was standing a few paces further
off, staring at the dead creature, though she did not think he was seeing it.
His eyes were expressionless pits, at least until Flydd got up and limped over.
As he crossed into Colm’s field of vision, his eyes registered such hate as she
had never seen before. Flydd’s dazing spell had worn off.

‘Take me back to Ketila,’ Colm ground out.

‘I can’t,’ said Flydd. ‘When the flappeter went through the
virtual construct, the mancery at its core tore it apart. Without it I can’t
reopen the portal.’

Colm stalked across, drew his knife and put it to Flydd’s
throat. ‘My sister lies dying at the bottom of the crag.
Take–me–back.’

‘She fell fifty spans onto rock,’ said Flydd. ‘She died
instantly.’

‘Take–me–back.’

‘Do your worst,’ said Flydd limply. ‘I couldn’t open the
portal again if the Profane Tears lay unguarded on the other side.’

Colm’s knife hand jerked, and a thin line of blood appeared
on Flydd’s throat, but he did not move nor acknowledge it in any way. After a
couple of frozen minutes, Colm hurled his knife into the ice, stumbled away and
fell to his knees, weeping in broken, choking sobs.

Flydd, rather wobbly at the knees, helped Maelys up, saying
softly, ‘How did you do that?’

She rubbed her sore shoulder. ‘I have no idea. I imagined I
was attacking the flappeter with a war hammer and, momentarily, I was.’

He frowned, checked that Colm wasn’t looking – he
wasn’t – and held out his hand. Maelys gathered a handful of the gritty,
crystalline snow, scrubbed bloody muck and scales off the leather pouch and
handed it to him. Flydd slipped it into his pocket without looking at it, but
Maelys couldn’t stop thinking about the mimemule. It had brought the virtual
construct to life and, in an instant, created a portal that had previously
taken Flydd an hour and a half to make. Not to mention the war hammer. Did it
make whatever one imagined, or really wanted? No, there had to be more to it
than that.

‘It might have been better to let him go down to Ketila,’
she said quietly. ‘He’s a broken man, Xervish. He’s lost everything.’

‘He knows where we’re going,’ said Flydd, ‘and what we’re
looking for. The Numinator is a secret the God-Emperor may not be aware of and
I could not allow Colm to reveal it,
under
any circumstances
.’

She shivered at the meaning behind his words; the ruthless
scrutator inside Flydd was not entirely dead. She’d liked and admired Flydd
from the moment she met him, and knew that he felt the same way about her. Now
she wondered what he might do to her if she ever stood in his way.

Her teeth chattered; it was desperately cold here. The blood
and brains of the flappeter had frozen already; her toes were aching in her
boots and icicles were forming on Flydd’s short beard. Colm began pacing back
and forth, stamping his feet in a vain attempt to keep warm. The sun hung a
hand’s breadth above the northern horizon but there was no warmth in its rays,
and it was as dark as an overcast winter’s day after sunset.

‘My directions weren’t too wide of the mark, in the
circumstances,’ said Flydd. ‘We’re on the inner edge of the Kara Agel, the
Frozen Sea, and if I’m not mistaken that’s the Island of Noom just over there.’

Maelys looked in the direction he was facing and did not
like what she saw. The Frozen Sea was a mass of ice, smooth in places, heaved
up into broken slabs in others, with a dusting of snow which the wind had blown
into dune-like drifts, rippled like sand. Elsewhere the snow had been scoured
away to reveal bare grey ice. The Frozen Sea extended further than she could
see in all directions, save to the south, the direction in which Flydd was
pointing, where a low, rocky shore could be seen perhaps a third of a league
away. Snow-covered hills ran off into the distance, yet she could not see a
single tree, nor any signs of life.

‘What a miserable place. Why would anyone choose to live
here?’ She rubbed her arms, shuddering with the cold; every breath hurt her
nose and throat and lungs. Their clothes were utterly unsuitable for this
climate, and they had no food with them. Wherever they were camping tonight,
she hoped it was not far away.

‘To hide from the world?’ said Flydd. ‘Or to work on a great
project unhindered? I cannot say, but here the Numinator has dwelt for more
than a hundred years.’

‘The Tower of a Thousand Steps had better be nearby or we’ll
freeze to death before we find it. How long until nightfall?’

‘Not long. The days are only a few hours long at this time
of year, and the nights are eternal. Let’s get to shore. We might find
something to eat there.’

‘Can’t we eat the flappeter?’

‘I wouldn’t recommend it, since it’s a creature flesh-formed
by the God-Emperor himself, and he’s fond of his little jokes.’

She was rubbing her freezing arms when it occurred to her
that the word mimemule was suggestive. Did it mimic thoughts, or turn them into
reality? ‘Xervish,’ she said quietly. ‘If the mimemule –’

‘Not now!’

‘What I meant was, we’ve got to have warm clothing. Furs!’

‘I see. Good idea.’ He pulled out the leather pouch, touched
his fingers to it, feeling the shape of the ball inside and subvocalising,
Fur-lined pants and coat and boots and hood
for us all, now
.

Her garments transformed instantly, as did Flydd’s, then
Colm’s. Colm stopped abruptly, looking down at his feet, then plodded on.

‘How does that work?’ said Maelys.

‘Later.’ Flydd surreptitiously closed his hand over the
pouch and it vanished. Withdrawing the containers of trapped fire from his
pockets, he vanished them as well, then looked sharply across at Colm. He need
not have bothered. Colm was oblivious.

 
THIRTY-TWO

They slept in a snow cave dug into a hard-packed drift
between rocks. It was miserable, even in their furs, and they had no fire, for
Maelys hadn’t seen a tree or bush, or indeed anything living bar a crust of
lichen growing on the exposed rocks. But not even the polar cold was as frigid
and unrelenting as the bitterness and rage emanating from Colm. He blamed her
for Ketila’s death as much as he blamed himself; no, more, for she had thrown
away the amulet that might just have kept Rurr-shyve out of firing range. But
more than either of them he blamed Flydd for not allowing him to go down to her
and ease her last moments, then die with her and put an end to his agony.

‘Don’t mention my fire bottles here,’ said Flydd in the
morning. ‘They don’t exist.’

Since he could not conjure food with the mimemule without
alerting Colm, they left as soon as the sun slid sideways over the horizon.
Flydd set off confidently inland, as if he knew where he was going, or
following some lead he did not care to share with them, and within the hour
they were climbing a hill whose dark, nodular stone protruded through a thin
cover of snow.

‘That looks like an arch at the top,’ said Maelys, and it
was, a massive arch of grey, hard stone, different from the rock it was founded
upon. Its pillars were spans across at the base, square in outline, and carved
with curving symbols or glyphs incised finger-deep into the stone. They
reminded Maelys of the ones carved into the obelisk at the top of Mistmurk
Mountain.

‘Curious,’ said Flydd as they climbed a steep track up to
the arch, slipping on black ice. ‘It looks like Charon work. Could the
Numinator be … no, of course not – they’re extinct.’

He was walking bent over. The crossbow bolt was troubling
him but she could not cut it out here, either. Colm plodded along behind, head
down. When they walked, he followed some twenty paces behind. The moment they
stopped, he did too, always keeping his distance.

Beyond the arch, nothing could be seen but grey – grey
cloud, grey sky, and a grey range covered in grey ice. The wind was stronger
here and she had to keep her head lowered, for whenever she looked directly
into it her eyes watered and the tears froze on her cheeks. Colm was standing
down the slope, his hair and beard covered in frost. He had not spoken all day,
and showed no interest in his surroundings.

‘The Tower of a Thousand Steps,’ said Flydd quietly, though
there was a hard edge to his voice.

He had been tortured on the Numinator’s orders, Maelys
recalled. Had he come for revenge? Is that why Flydd had agreed to lead them
here?

‘Where?’ She could see nothing save the ice-hung crags of
knotted schist to either side.

‘Look through the arch.’

‘I am.’

‘Look down.’

She wasn’t tall enough to see over the hump, so she stepped
forward until she stood right in front of the arch, and squinted down into the
shallow valley on the other side. Maelys cried out in wonder. ‘A tower made of
glass!’

Through a low-hanging mist she could just make out what
appeared to be a frozen lake – at least, partly frozen, for there was a
curving rim of clear water in the middle, surrounding a small island. Jagged
ridges ran up to a hill at its centre, from which the tower rose sharply to
form a spire hundred of spans high. Between the two ridges closest to them, low
down and not much higher than the level of the lake, a small opening in the
hill appeared to lead into the base of the tower.