The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (46 page)

They had to compile lists of names from the registers, but
only those few who had a five-digit number beside them. It was tedious work,
and often there would only be one such number in the entire register, but a
Whelm stood behind each of them and, whenever a page was turned too quickly, or
someone missed a five-digit number or noted one down incorrectly, the sharpened
nails dug into their neck.

‘If they know when we’re making a mistake,’ said Colm,
rubbing his stinging, nail-scored neck at the end of a painful and miserably
cold day, one of many that had all been the same since the Whelm caught them,
‘why don’t they do the damn job themselves? It’d be a lot quicker.’

‘I don’t think that’s the point,’ said Flydd.

‘Then what is the point?’ said Colm.

‘We’re finally going to find out.’

Another male Whelm had appeared in the doorway. ‘You will
come now,’ he said in a voice like bubbles rising through a vat of mud. Maelys
thought it was the Whelm they had first encountered, but couldn’t be sure.
Whelm features were of a kind.

‘Where are you taking us?’ she said.

He didn’t reply, but led them down a long hall, then out
into a broad open space whose ceiling was so high that Maelys could not make it
out. Maelys looked back and the building they had been held in was revealed as
a slab-sided, flat-roofed bastion, perhaps ten floors high, completely enclosed
by the gigantic Tower of a Thousand Steps. Ahead some hundred paces was the
inner wall of the tower, curving all the way around the bastion, and rising up
in a sheet of ice which slanted back over their heads as though they were
inside an enormous cone standing on its base.

The Whelm led them through a small door at the base of the
inner wall, and onto a broad staircase of diamond-clear ice that ran up inside
the wall of the tower in a series of flights to form a pentagon shape. Here he
ushered them past and she identified his smell – fish oil mixed with
onions.

‘Is this the Tower of a Thousand Steps?’ said Maelys.

He pointed up, and up they went. The Whelm’s sandals clapped
against the treads; he was slow but tireless. They climbed until even Maelys’s
travel-hardened legs were aching. She began to count, but lost her way at four
hundred and sixty, and after that there was no point.

The ice walls of the tower were like vast, sloping panes
which might once have been transparent, but were now so fretted by time and wind
that they were like sand-blasted glass. They allowed light in, but revealed
nothing of the surrounding land.

After a seemingly endless climb they came out onto the
uppermost floor of the tower. The roof soared above them like a five-sided
glass steeple, the ice a russet colour that let in even less light. Flames
flickered in a dish the size of a circular bath, and the misty air above it
swirled up lazily, the mist changing from red through all the colours of the
spectrum to violet at the top of the spire, then falling in slow whorls and
eddies down the steeple walls to the floor and rolling in to the centre again.

As Maelys’s eyes adjusted she saw a simple bed and dresser
against one wall, and a table against another, to her left. The table was piled
high with bloodline registers and she didn’t realise that someone was sitting
behind it until they moved.

She jumped. It was a woman with shoulder-length hair the
colour of spun gold. Maelys stared. She’d expected to encounter a cold-eyed
mancer, or even some fierce, intelligent creature from another world. It had
not occurred to her that the Numinator, who had ruled over the most powerful
mancers in all the world, might be female.

The woman stood up and came out from behind the table, and
Maelys was in no doubt that here was the Numinator at last, for her presence
was like a freezing wind, a blow in the face, a shard of ice through the heart.
She wasn’t tall, or physically imposing – Colm towered over her –
and was dressed in a simple, dark gown which concealed rather than revealed her
slender figure. Her face was neither young nor old, but extremely forbidding.
There were crinkles at the corners of her eyes, and lines curving down from
each side of her mouth. Flydd stiffened beside Maelys. Even he was intimidated.

The Numinator held herself poker-rigid. She had once been a
striking woman, but Maelys did not think she had ever been a likeable one. She
radiated an aura of vast self-control and intense dislike. Maelys also knew,
without knowing how, that the Numinator was nothing like any other power in the
world. Indeed, the very fact that she had cut herself off from the world showed
how indifferent she was to the things that powerful men like Jal-Nish and
Vivimord pursued so desperately.

‘Why have you trespassed on the forbidden Isle of Noom?’ The
Numinator’s voice was overly precise and formal. Everything about her seemed
controlled – almost frozen in time.

Maelys glanced at Flydd. He was staring at her as if he
expected her to speak first.

‘Go on, Maelys,’ he said. ‘Coming here was your idea.’

Maelys clenched her jaw but bit her tongue painfully.
Tasting blood, she swallowed. Why had Flydd put her forward? Was it his
promised revenge because she’d pressured him to take renewal? She no longer
understood him, if she ever had. No, it could not be that. He must be working
to a plan and she had to go with it. What could she say that would sway the
Numinator? Nothing, so she would simply tell the truth.

‘The God-Emperor holds the last of my clan.’ She met the Numinator’s
glacial eyes and tried to hold them. ‘If I can’t save them, no one can, and my
story has been repeated many times since the God-Emperor came to power. He must
be overthrown and –’

‘You’re overly bold for your age,’ said the Numinator. ‘How
old are you, girl?’

‘N-nineteen, Numinator.’

‘I can’t ever remember being so young,’ the Numinator mused.
‘I don’t recall having a childhood.’ The eyes focused on Maelys again. She
could not tell their colour – they might once have been grey, or green,
or even blue, but they were leached of all colour here. ‘I know of no way to
touch the God-Emperor.’

‘But you controlled the Council of Scrutators for more than
a hundred years,’ Flydd said quietly. ‘Indeed, you
created
the Council.’

‘The puppet master speaks,’ said the Numinator, staring at
him as if to peer right inside his head. ‘There is something familiar about
you.’

Flydd said nothing. The Numinator studied him, her head
tilted, her back held rigid. ‘Take off your coat and shirt!’

‘What?’ cried Flydd, not moving.

‘Or my Whelm will do it for you,’ she added quietly. ‘They
number seven hundred, and obey my every command. Nothing can shake their
loyalty.’

‘A previous master said the same,’ said Flydd, ‘if I
remember the Histories.’

A wintry smile touched her stern mouth, momentarily taking
decades off her age. ‘You dare quote the Histories to
me
, who lived them?’

She gestured to the Whelm standing at the top of the stair,
but before he could move Flydd whipped off his coat, dropped it on the floor
and unfastened his shirt.

The Numinator glided forward a few steps, stopped and made a
twirling motion with her fingers. Flydd turned around, slowly, until he faced
her again. His cheeks were a trifle pink, though that might have been the cold.

Her eyes went out of focus for a moment, as if she were
thinking hard, then the wintry smile fleeted back and she said, ‘Xervish
Flydd.’

Flydd gaped. ‘How can you tell?’

‘You were flogged to the bone for inquiring about me, many
decades ago now, and such scars cannot lie. Even after taking renewal,
Ex-Scrutator Flydd, the deepest scars remain, and they tell me your name as
surely as a print from your finger. Why did you put the girl up to it? What
happened to the courage you were once famed for?’

‘I grew old, and it faded with the decay of my body. I was
ready to die but Maelys Nifferlin pressed me to a renewal I would have done
anything to avoid, and rightly so, for, renewed or not, I am not half the man I
was, even on my death bed. She put me up to it, and she can explain herself.’

‘And you protest too much. You can’t play your scrutator’s
games with me, Flydd, for I read men like books. You may dress.’ She turned
back to Maelys, saying, ‘Well, girl? It seems you are also more than you
appear.’

‘I’m not, but last year, in the Pit of Possibilities, I saw
that the God-Emperor had a weakness,’ said Maelys. ‘If you can tell us where to
find the antithesis to the tears –’

‘Antithesis?’ said the Numinator in an odd, angry tone.

‘The spell or artefact or … or force that can destroy
–’

‘I know what antithesis means!’ The Numinator crooked a
finger at the watching Whelm, who shepherded them into the corner nearest the
top of the Thousand Steps.

She began to pace, eyes closed, hands held up above her head
as if carrying a coffin at a funeral. She turned in a circle, then in a second
circle linked to it, making a figure eight, and a third and fourth – a
cloverleaf. Every footstep was slow, sliding and deliberate, as though it
represented a single, precisely calibrated thought. Watching her feet, which
moved like a metronome below her gown, Maelys saw that the ice formed a slight
depression there. The Numinator had paced the same path so often that she had
worn down the floor beneath her.

Finally she turned back to them, and her face was cast into
a grimmer curve than before. ‘I know of no antithesis to the tears.’

 
THIRTY-FOUR

Flydd made a faint noise in the back of his throat.
Colm let out a harsh bark of laughter; it sounded half insane. The Whelm
shuffled its wooden sandals.

Maelys felt a shriek building up and had to restrain herself
from giving way to it. The journey had been wasted; everything they’d gone
through since leaving the plateau had been for nothing.

‘She might be lying,’ said Colm.

The Whelm’s right hand closed around Colm’s throat from
behind, the sharpened nails pricking through his skin and causing five beads of
blood to bud there. The yellow nails of its left hand cut through Colm’s coat
and shirt to his belly. Colm went still, his eyes bulging. He definitely wanted
to live now, and Maelys was pleased to see it, though she was afraid his change
of heart might have come too late.

‘Never speak ill of the master,’ hissed the Whelm. His gaze
turned to the Numinator. ‘Shall I tear his throat out, master? Or offer you his
living bowels on a platter?’

The Numinator looked faintly disgusted. ‘Release him, Whelm.
No one can harm me here. His words mean nothing; less than nothing. Take them
down and put them back to work. The great project is behind schedule.’

‘But …’ said Maelys, thinking of the countless days they had
spent going through the registers so far, and the endless work to go. ‘How
long?’

‘Surely you didn’t think you could just leave?’ said the
Numinator. ‘You trespassed on my privacy, deliberately, and you have to pay for
it.’

‘What do we have to do?’ Maelys said dully.

‘When the God-Emperor destroyed all the nodes, he damaged me
and undermined my power. My life’s work, which was almost complete, has to be
redone by the most monumental labour, and I can no longer do it alone.’

‘What great work?’ said Colm, but the claw-nails pricked
into his throat again and he broke off. Five blood-beads oozed down his neck.

‘Never question the master,’ the Whelm grated.

‘Enough, Gliss,’ said the Numinator, and he returned to the
top of the steps at once, though his eyes were staring fixedly at Colm’s throat
and he was trembling.

He wants to kill Colm, Maelys thought. The Whelm are
fanatically loyal and they can’t bear any threat to their master, nor any
insult. The quickest way to eliminate the threat is to kill, so they’ll kill
any of us without compunction. The thought was chilling, for it made them far
more difficult to deal with than the God-Emperor’s soldiers. Nothing would sway
the Whelm; not mercy, kindness, forgiveness, empathy.

‘How long?’ said Maelys despairingly; they’d come all this
way, wasted all this time, for nothing. Her family was in terrible danger now,
for Jal-Nish was unpredictable and might destroy them at any moment. She had to
find the tears’ antithesis; she just had to.

‘Why, as long as you all shall live,’ the Numinator said
with another chilling smile.

The pain swelled into a shrieking knot, as if the Whelm had
torn open Maelys’s chest and clenched its sharpened nails into her heart.

‘No!’ she gasped. ‘You can’t. I’ve got to –’

‘You’re trapped, girl. You can’t do anything. Take them
down, Gliss, and put them back to work.’ The Numinator returned to her table
and began to study her ledgers as if they were no longer there.

‘But if you’re powerless –’ began Maelys.

The Whelm’s right hand thudded onto her shoulder.

‘
Never
think that
I am powerless, girl,’ said the Numinator without looking up. ‘I am diminished,
certainly, but my Arts suffice to maintain my realm; and control everything and
everyone in it.’

The Whelm’s metal-hard fingers turned her towards the top of
the Thousand Steps. Colm followed.

‘I have a gift for you, Numinator,’ said Flydd. ‘Something
you may never have seen before. A gift of power.’

The Numinator looked up sharply. ‘There are few forms of
power that I’m not aware of.’

Flydd drew the white crystal phial from his pocket and held
it up. The red and black flame still flickered there, ominous in the dim light.
‘I trapped this from the cursed flame that still burns beneath the ancient
Charon obelisk on Mistmurk Mountain.’

The Numinator sat stiffly, staring at the phial. ‘I have
been there. I read the glyphs on the obelisk and understood their true meaning.
I have seen the cursed flame too, but it does not have the power to help me
now.’