The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (48 page)

‘Flydd asked that very question,’ said Maelys. ‘He said it
would take an immense amount of power to maintain such a
huge
place, and why would anyone go to all that effort, for nothing
…’ Thinking of Emberr, she felt her cheeks grow warm again and struggled
valiantly to control herself. Not for nothing.

‘A huge place?’ said the Numinator. ‘The Great Tale says
that it was tiny by the time Rulke escaped, and shrinking towards nothingness.’

‘Flydd thought it had rebounded,’ Maelys ventured.

‘No!’ the Numinator exclaimed. ‘Such things do not happen by
themselves. If the Nightland still exists, it’s because someone has made it so.
The God-Emperor? Is it his ultimate prison?’ she mused. ‘Or the best hiding
place of all – his perfect refuge in times of danger? No, I don’t think
so. I don’t believe he even knows of its existence,
so why is it there?
’

Don’t react, Maelys told herself, thinking of Emberr. He was
in danger from his mother’s enemy and she had to protect him.

The Numinator rose from her chair and glided towards Maelys;
she was within reach before Maelys realised what was happening. She turned to
run.

‘Stop!’

Maelys froze, unable to defy the Numinator.

‘You know something. Speak!’

Maelys shook her head and tried to back away. She wasn’t
game to speak, for she knew her voice would betray her. Her feet wouldn’t move,
and she leaned so far backwards that she overbalanced and hit the ice.

The Numinator crouched beside her, her stern, sad face just
an ell away. ‘Speak, girl! What else did you find in the Nightland?
What is it for?
’

Maelys had to remain silent; she’d promised Emberr that she
would keep his secret. But she could not hold out against the Numinator’s
overwhelming power. ‘Emberr,’ she gasped, rolling her r’s just as he had on
that perfect day when they had met.

The Numinator reared backwards onto her heels. ‘But … that
is a
man’s
name. Speak, girl! Tell me
everything.’

‘I met a young man called Emberr,’ said Maelys. ‘He was tall
and handsome …’ The Numinator was frowning at her again. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Why is he there? Who holds him prisoner?’

‘He’s not a prisoner,’ said Maelys. ‘He was born there.’

‘
Born there?
’ The
Numinator was so shocked that momentarily she lost control, her mouth opening
and closing like a stranded fish.

‘That’s what he said. Because he was born in the Nightland,
he can never escape – at least, unless a woman takes his place. That’s
what his mother told him.’

‘Ahh!’ The Numinator’s eyes glittered. ‘And who was his
mother?’

‘He didn’t say,’ said Maelys, really afraid now. The
Numinator knew something and it was not to Emberr’s advantage. ‘He said that
she left him there but could never come back.’

A fire was burning in the Numinator’s eyes now. ‘When was
this?’

‘Emberr didn’t say. A long time ago.’

‘What about his father?’

‘He didn’t mention him.’

‘I wonder …’ said the Numinator. ‘No, it’s not possible,
after all this time.’ She raised her voice. ‘Gliss?’

The Whelm’s sandals clapped up the steps. ‘Master?’

‘Take her down again, then ensure I am not disturbed,
under any circumstances
. I have much to
do and little time in which to do it.’

 
THIRTY-FIVE

Maelys was so worried about Emberr that it took her
ages to get to sleep, but when she did, she began to dream about him at once.
It was a powerful, sensual dream where he had taken her by the hand and was
leading her up a winding path towards a pretty glade …

‘Maelys.
Wake up!
’

It was Colm’s voice. She clutched her furs about her, yearning
to go back to the dream, but it was gone. ‘Yes?’ she said irritably. It was
still pitch dark.

‘Flydd has found a way out. Hurry!’

She felt for her fur-lined boots and dragged them on. In the
cold, the leather had gone as stiff as wood. ‘How?’

‘Just come!’ he hissed.

It didn’t seem possible, but Maelys asked no more questions.
Her mind was already full of them. Could the Numinator be the enemy of Emberr’s
mother? When she had heard about him, her eyes had blazed.

Maelys recalled a series of crackling shrieks in the night.
At first she’d thought that someone was being tortured, but had come to realise
that the sounds had been mechanical in origin – like monstrous slabs of
ice being torn apart and put back together again. The Numinator was making something,
up in her eyrie.

She picked up her pack and felt for the door. ‘Where are
you, Colm?’

‘Here!’ he said from behind her.

‘How did you get in?’

‘Flydd made a hole in the wall.’

She felt about and found a smoothly scalloped opening in the
ice, leading into the next cell. ‘Ow!’ The ice had burned her, but with a
stinging, freezing fire which had blistered her fingertips. Looking down at the
hole in the wall she noted a faint white flicker there. Flydd had brought two
flasks of chthonic fire to Noom, but had only given one to the Numinator. He
must have used the other and the white fire was eating away the ice.

Maelys raised her stinging fingertips to her mouth, but
thought better of it and wiped them on the wall instead. A lick of flame began
to eat at that ice, too, though it soon went out.

‘Maelys?’ said Flydd urgently.

She scrambled through the hole, careful not to touch the
sides, and into Flydd’s cell. It was identical to hers though faintly
illuminated by a patch of white flame spreading outwards from a hole in the far
wall, into Colm’s cell. Maelys looked askance at the fire. It did not feel
right, or safe.

‘I think she was telling the truth,’ said Flydd. ‘I don’t
believe she knows anything about the antithesis to the tears and there’s no
point us being here.’ He was crouched in the darkness at the rear of the cell;
Maelys could only see the curve of his back. ‘I’m wondering if the Numinator
has spent so long brooding on her obsession with the bloodline registers that
she’s gone insane.’

Maelys didn’t think she was insane at all, but felt too
bruised by her interrogation last night to say so.

‘She won’t harm us while we can do useful work,’ Flydd went
on, ‘but she won’t let us go either. We’ve got to escape, now, while she’s
distracted.’ Another of those ice-tearing shrieks shivered down from above.
‘I’d like to know what she’s up to.’

‘She questioned me again last night,’ said Maelys. ‘She used
some kind of spell on me. I couldn’t hold out …’

‘Her Arts could make the very stones speak,’ Flydd said curtly.
‘What did you tell her?’

‘She seemed really interested in your power to make portals,
one after another. She found it, er, incredible.’

‘As do I.’

‘I also mentioned the woman in red. The Numinator knew I was
holding something back and forced me to tell her about the Nightland. She was
shocked; she couldn’t believe that it still existed, and said some great mancer
must be maintaining it.’ Maelys, guiltily, didn’t mention Emberr. She felt bad
enough that she’d broken her promise and revealed his name to the Numinator.

Another crackling shriek echoed down.

‘What is she doing?’ mused Flydd, looking up. ‘She’s using
mighty amounts of power up there – and my chthonic flame, I think.’ He
stood up. At the base of the wall, the ice twinkled with the white fire that
was steadily eating through it.

‘I don’t like that stuff,’ said Colm. ‘It doesn’t feel
natural.’

‘It’s not,’ said Flydd. ‘And had we possessed any other
weapon, I would have had nothing to do with chthonic fire, either. This way.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘To find those workers we saw the other day. We’ve got to
have help. We can’t escape on our own.’

‘Can’t you make another portal?’ said Colm.

‘Not without the virtual construct.’

‘Where are the other prisoners held?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Flydd, ‘though I don’t suppose they’ll
be very far away.’

‘There will be guards,’ said Maelys. ‘Whelm.’ She was really
afraid of the Whelm, afraid of their obsessive loyalty; even more afraid of
their inhumanity.

‘Seven hundred of them, the Numinator said,’ Flydd mused.
‘And Whelm see better in the dark than we do. They’re relentless in pursuit,
but slow and awkward in a fight.’

‘Plus they’re armed,’ said Colm. ‘We’re not.’ Their weapons
had been taken before they had been put to work on the bloodline registers.

‘Let’s see what I can do about that.’

Flydd swiftly drew three elongated outlines on the wall with
the lip of his pyramid-shaped flask. He stood back while the flickering white
fire ate into the ice, then kicked through in the middle and the lengths of ice
fell into Colm’s cell. Flydd picked one up in a cloth-covered hand and wiped
it. The flames faded and he was left with a rude club, as hard as stone. He
handed it to Colm, wiped down the second, smaller club and gave it to Maelys,
and took the last for himself.

‘A crude weapon, but robust.’

‘A knife would be better,’ said Colm. ‘One sideways blow and
the blade would snap. Our cudgels will cave in a dozen Whelm skulls before they
break.’

Maelys let out an involuntary cry. She did not like to be
reminded about how brutal combat was.

‘If you take up a weapon you must be prepared to use it,’
said Flydd, ‘and face up to what you’ve done to another human being with it,
good or evil.’

‘I know,’ she said faintly. ‘It’s just – I was gently
brought up.’

‘Not so gently that you didn’t see animals butchered for
food, or wild beasts killed when they threatened the herds or the children. The
Whelm won’t be gentle if they catch us, and treating them gently will reveal a
weakness that they will exploit ruthlessly.’

Maelys swallowed, pulled down the sleeve of her coat to
protect her hand and grasped the ice cudgel, following them into the next cell.
Shortly they were out in the corridor. It was lighter here, for the rays of a
half-moon came dimly through the right-hand wall.

‘This way, I think,’ said Flydd, turning left.

Colm followed close behind, then Maelys, taking little
notice of their surroundings, which in this gloom looked ever the same. From
high above she kept hearing the shrill crackle of tearing ice, and felt sure
the Numinator was constructing a portal to the Nightland. If she was, it could
only be because of Emberr; he was in danger from his mother’s enemy, and who
could that be but the Numinator? Was she planning to kill him? And if she was,
it was all Maelys’s fault.

She froze in the middle of the corridor, staring upwards.
Flydd’s last gate hadn’t taken long at all, and maybe, powered with chthonic
fire, the Numinator’s portal would be just as quick.

She took a couple of steps back the other way, trying to hear,
but the tower was silent now. What if the portal was finished; what if the
Numinator was already going through it?
Emberr!
She’d only met him for a few minutes but felt she’d known him always. He’d
spent his life all alone, yet his only concern had been for her. She couldn’t
bear to think of the Numinator harming him.

She would have to tell Flydd. Maelys could only imagine his
fury when she revealed that she’d deceived him so terribly, but it must be
done. She turned down the corridor, rounded the corner, and stopped. Halls ran
in three directions and she could not tell which way Flydd and Colm had gone.

‘Xervish?’ she said softly, afraid of alerting the Whelm.

There was no reply. In the distance she heard the
unmistakable clap of a wooden sandal against the floor, though she wasn’t sure
which hall it had come from. Maelys hesitated. She had one chance in three of
finding Flydd now; less if the hall she took branched again. And she had at
least one chance in three of blundering into a Whelm.

The odds were against her. It’s a sign, she thought. I’m
meant to go the other way. But she hesitated, more afraid of the Numinator than
she had been of Jal-Nish. Ever since childhood, Maelys had been intimidated by
powerful, dominating women.

Courage, Maelys
.
It was as if old Tulitine were speaking to her, and Maelys had never known her
to be afraid of anyone. Drawing the taphloid from between her breasts, she
squeezed it in her fist and cried silently, Tulitine, give me strength.

It helped a little. She had to take on the Numinator, for
Emberr’s sake, and she’d better hurry. Testing the weight of the club, she
turned and headed towards the Thousand Steps, following the path Gliss had used
last time. She reached the stair without encountering anyone and began to climb,
not thinking about what she was going to do once she reached the top. She
couldn’t plan that far ahead.

Halfway up, as Maelys stopped for a breather, the sound of
tearing ice echoed down the stairs. Was the Numinator nearly done? Ready to go
through?

Clap, clap
. It was
a Whelm on the steps below her, and coming up rapidly. ‘Master?’ called a
woman’s voice, higher than Gliss’s, and less gurgling. ‘Master, there’s someone
on the Steps.’

The wooden sandals clapped once more, not so heavily, then
Maelys heard a faint, swift padding. The Whelm was coming after her, barefoot.
Maelys began to run but could not keep it up. A thousand steps was a mighty
climb and she’d already done it twice in the past day. Her legs hurt, right
into the bones.

She looked down but there wasn’t enough light to see
anything below her. She had to climb faster. The Whelm were slow, Flydd had
said. We can outrun them. But they were also iron-hard and could keep going
forever. She couldn’t tell how far there was to go – perhaps four hundred
steps. She’d never make it.