The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (45 page)

‘Bloodline register?’ said Maelys aloud. ‘What does that
mean?’

Flydd did not reply, so she eased the register from the
shelf and opened it. It was huge and very heavy – she could barely hold
it. Inside, the page was ruled into columns, with names on the left –
women’s names and dates, notes on their monthly cycles, state of health, male
names with descriptions as well as lists of abilities, talents and ancestral
charts, details about sexual congress, and a variety of symbols. Occasional rows
contained details related to pregnancies – weight changes, complications,
miscarriages and births. The last column was headed
Gifts and Talents
, but she could not tell what the symbols meant.

Maelys knew what it was immediately, for Clan Nifferlin had
kept such records for their prized breeding animals.

She snapped the register closed, feeling ill. ‘It’s a stud
book, but for people. This is what the scrutators were doing for the Numinator.
Why, Xervish?’

He was still staring into the distance. ‘I don’t think anyone
ever found out – not even Chief Scrutator Ghorr, may he still lie rotting
in the sump of the Uttermost Abyss.’

Maelys took down another book from a different place, and
subsequently a third from the other side of the room. The places, names and dates
were different, though the contents were the same everywhere. ‘But …’ She
stared down the endless rows of the vast room until they blurred in the
distance, trying to work out how many registers there were; how many names
there had to be. It was beyond her ability to calculate. ‘There must be
millions
of names here.’

‘Every single person who has lived in over a century,’ Flydd
said soberly. ‘It’s the reason why the Numinator set up the Council of
Scrutators in the first place.’

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Colm. ‘The scrutators ran
the world.’

‘And we were very good at it,’ said Flydd. ‘We ran it
ruthlessly, but efficiently – for the Numinator.’

‘Why didn’t you all get together and overthrow it?’

‘The Chief Scrutators never wanted to.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the Numinator is different to every other villain
you’ve ever heard of in the Histories. The Numinator was never a rival for the
power of the scrutators; it didn’t give a fig for power, conquest or wealth. As
long as the scrutators did their job and sent the bloodline registers, the
Numinator never interfered.’

‘Surely some of the other scrutators must have objected to
being told what to do?’

‘Oh, they did,’ said Flydd.

‘What happened?’

‘Do you remember my scars, before I took renewal?’

Maelys shivered at the memory.

‘I was one of the lucky ones,’ said Flydd. ‘I lived.’

‘But surely … the Numinator must have given the Council that
power for a reason …?’

‘The only reason we ever had was to complete the blood-line
registers.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Maelys.

‘That’s all the Numinator ever asked of us.’

‘For more than a hundred years?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Why?’

Flydd shrugged. ‘I didn’t know, but we’ll learn nothing more
here.’

It was incomprehensible to Maelys that anyone could have
pursued such a monumental project so single-mindedly, and for so long. How
could anyone develop a plan that might take hundreds of years to complete? What
could drive them to it? And had the Numinator succeeded, or failed?

They continued through the hall of registers to the far end,
then out and down a broad flight of steps into a lower level. Some colour had
come back to Colm’s cheeks – the mystery had aroused his curiosity.
Maelys prayed it would last, for the cold rage that was his other face was
unbearable.

This chamber was much smaller – no larger than one of
the public halls in Nifferlin Manor. It was divided into a number of cases made
of ice, though here the ice was cloudy and it was hard to make out what was
inside. The shapes were suggestive, though, and despite the cold the room bore
a faint, unpleasant odour of decay.

‘They look
human
,’
said Maelys.

‘It’s a cemetery,’ said Colm. ‘The ground here must freeze
as hard as iron, and when people die there would be no way to bury them
–’ The bitterness was back. He would never bury his sister, nor any of
his lost family.

But the Numinator was more powerful than all the great
mancers of Santhenar put together, Maelys thought. It could easily thaw a plot
of ground to bury the dead. There had to be some other explanation, and it
might lie inside the cases.

The nearest was a rectangular box, rather larger than a
coffin, with walls a hand-span thick; she could see nothing through them. The
lid was thinner, though. She put her hand on it and could feel the cold searing
through her glove.

‘Come away, Maelys,’ said Flydd, who was standing in the
middle of the room, head tilted to one side as if listening to something on the
edge of hearing. ‘Whatever is inside, it’s the Numinator’s private business.’

It seemed an extraordinary thing for him to say, after
bringing them all this way. Maelys couldn’t hear anything, and she wasn’t going
to stop now. ‘If we can’t look around, we should never have come here.’

‘We should never have come here,’ echoed Colm.

Maelys forced her gloved fingers into the gap between the
lid and the case, and lifted. The lid was very heavy, and she could only raise
it halfway. She gasped.

A young man lay within. He was naked and his skin was a
blotchy purple, as if he had been out in the cold for hours, but there were
blue-grey patches of decay here and there, and the smell of corruption was
stronger. His yellow eyes were open and staring, though he was undoubtedly long
dead, but there was no sign of what had killed him.

‘What strange eyes.’ They were oval, and more catlike than
human, with pupils that were contracted to vertical slits. He had a long face
with a bulging forehead and a raised crest running across the top of his shaven
skull, though his chin was just a minuscule bump. Ice crystals clustered on his
lips and at his nostrils; feathers of ice hung from his lower eyelids.

‘Maelys, come away,’ said Flydd, taking her elbow and
dragging her aside.

‘Xervish, what is this place?’ She jerked free and stumbled
to the next case. It contained a young woman’s body. Her head was shaven and
she too had the cat eyes and the crest over her head, though hers was not
nearly as prominent as the young man’s had been. And she had three pairs of
breasts.

‘Xervish?’ she said. ‘Who are they?
What
are they?’

The third case held another woman, apparently normal save
that her fingers were twice the length of human fingers and could have wrapped
right around the back of her hand. As with the others, there was not a mark on
her to indicate how she had died.

‘She must be Aachim,’ said Colm, who had followed her. ‘The
Aachim have exceptionally long fingers.’

Flydd was beside Maelys now, staring in, then abruptly he
thrust the lid down. ‘Enough! Come.’

‘Xervish?’ she repeated.

‘I – don’t – know!’ He caught her arm, jerking
her away. ‘Don’t pry into what is none of your business or you’ll end up in the
next box.’

He hauled her down to the other end of the chamber, walking
very fast. Maelys tried to pull free but he wouldn’t let go; she stumbled along
with him, feeling a mixture of fear and resentment.

And the bodies had all smelled, she realised, as if they had
been going off, though that did not make sense either. In the cold rooms on the
south side of Nifferlin Manor, haunches of meat had kept all winter, and there
had been hardly any smell, yet Noom was far colder than Nifferlin. Bodies
should have lain here in their ice cases preserved forever.

They did not need to open the boxes in the next chamber, for
the ice was clearer here and she could see through the walls. Each box contained
a young man or woman who had apparently died in the prime of life, but all had
some oddity: one a flaring crest like a sail growing out of the top of his
head, another a tail extending down to the back of her knees, while a third had
knuckles the size of lemons, but no fingernails.

Maelys no longer wanted to know the truth about the
Numinator. She tried not to look as Flydd led her along through chamber after
chamber on this subterranean level, but could not prevent herself from staring
at each new body, each fresh horror. And they
were
horrors here, for the dead men and women grew ever stranger
until they were scarcely human at all.

 
THIRTY-THREE

Flydd flung her through the door into the next chamber,
then froze, grey-faced and haggard. He looked like an old man again.

A bench of ice ran along either side of the room, and
arranged along it were skeletons no more human than the bodies in the cases.
One had cat feet and a tail with traces of orange fur still clinging to it,
another had fingers half the length of its body. Maelys turned away, sickened,
but in front of her were more skeletons in huge ice amphorae, and others
suspended from the ceiling on wires, the bones held together with fine gold
threads.

‘It looks like a schoolroom,’ said Maelys.

‘Perhaps it was,’ Flydd said sombrely.

The room after that smelled putrid. It contained smaller
jars full of preserved, unborn creatures with huge heads, staring, lidless eyes
and unpleasantly non-human features. Many of the jars were cracked, though, and
several had leaked brown fluid which had frozen on the shelf around them. Down
the far end, the jars were broken and their contents, spilled onto the bench,
must have thawed, for all had gone an unpleasant grey-green colour before
freezing again.

‘Is the Numinator breeding
people
?’ said Colm, his handsome mouth twisted in disgust.

‘It looks that way,’ said Flydd. ‘Or at least,
was
breeding them.’

Maelys was thinking of the thousands of bloodline registers
and the millions of names in them, every single person on Santhenar. ‘Why would
anyone breed people? Is the Numinator trying to create an army?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Flydd. ‘As I said, the Numinator never
showed any interest in conquest or power. As long as the scrutators kept
sending the registers, it didn’t interfere.’

‘Unless people pried into its affairs.’

He rubbed his chest, eyes closed.

‘Flydd?’ Colm said in a low, warning tone.

‘What?’ Flydd snapped.

‘Behind you.’

Maelys spun around. Standing in the open doorway, about
twenty paces away, stood a figure as strange as any she had seen in the glass
cases. It was a man, tall but thin to the point of emaciation, with a narrow
head and dark, fixed eyes. Despite the cold he was clad in only a loincloth and
sandals which looked as though they had been carved out of wood. His big hands
hung by his side and the yellow fingernails were shaped into points. His broad,
flat feet also had sharpened nails. She waited for Flydd to use his Art against
the fellow, but Flydd did nothing.

‘You will come with me,’ the man said in a thick, bubbling
voice.

‘Who are you?’ said Maelys, unable to suppress a shudder.
‘Are you the Numinator?’

The man’s meagre lips twisted into a humourless rictus. ‘I
am Whelm.’ He pronounced it
Hwelm
.
‘Come.’

A faint smell seemed to be seeping from his pores. Maelys
could not place it. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant, but it wasn’t attractive
either. ‘Whelm?’ A vague, unpleasant memory stirred, from one of the Great
Tales. ‘Weren’t the Whelm–?’

‘They were a race born to serve,’ said Flydd. ‘A race for
whom the very idea of freedom was anathema. They were once Rulke’s servants,
but after he was imprisoned in the Nightland they eventually swore to the great
mancer, Yggur. For many years they served him at his stronghold of Fiz Gorgo,
but when Rulke escaped they rejected Yggur to take on their former name,
Ghâshâd, and serve Rulke anew.’

‘What happened when he was killed?’ said Maelys, staring at
the Whelm, who was staring at her.

‘The Ghâshâd were broken, and because of their crimes they
were forced to swear that they would take no master evermore. They became Whelm
again, returned to the freezing southern forests and have not been heard of
again unto this day. But you broke that vow,’ Flydd said, looking up at the
tall Whelm. ‘You have taken another master.’

‘Aye,’ said the Whelm, gravely. ‘We were masterless,
desolate and desperate, until the Numinator came and saved us. The Numinator
ordered us to serve, and who were we to disobey? To live is to serve. Come.’ He
flexed his fingers.

Maelys studied the yellow pointed nails, then the gaunt face
of the Whelm, and decided that she was going to do exactly as he had said. ‘Are
you taking us to the Numinator?’

Again that humourless twitch of the mouth. ‘You are
trespassers. You do not have the right to ask questions.’

He extended a skeletal right arm down a corridor to his
left. Maelys hadn’t noticed it before. ‘What are you going to do with us?’

‘You will do useful work until the master is ready to deal
with you.’

Again Maelys hesitated, expecting Flydd to resist, or at
least give her some lead, but he was already walking towards the corridor. Why
was he so acquiescent?

The Whelm’s wooden sandals clapped on the ice floor as he
walked, or rather stalked, with an odd, jerking motion, but he would say no
more. They went ahead, following his pointing arm, down to a small room lit by
a single lantern. There they were set to work at bloodline registers for the
town of Banthey, on Banthey Isle in the tropical north. Through thick ice panes
in the walls to left and right, Maelys saw other people engaged in seemingly
identical tasks, but there was no way to contact them, and each had their own
Whelm guard.