The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (49 page)

Maelys pressed on, step after exhausting step. The ice
cudgel grew heavier every second, and its cold was burning through her sleeve.
She didn’t think she could hold it much longer. She swapped it into her other
hand, used it as a cane for a moment, and continued.

As she reached the next landing, a triangle of glassy ice
between two steep flights, Maelys caught sight of something moving below her,
just a fleeting change to the pattern of dull light and pitch darkness. The
Whelm was less than fifty steps below, and gaining. She wasn’t
that
slow. Maelys’s throat was raw from
gasping the dry, frigid air, but she had to press on. She might be Emberr’s
only hope.

Soon she realised that there was no chance of beating the
Whelm to the top. She would have to attack before the woman leapt on her from
behind, but how? The Thousand Steps was composed of one steep flight after
another, running up a five-sided stairwell, but there was no central column to
hide behind; neither had she noticed any doorways through which to strike from
darkness. The upper part of the Tower of a Thousand Steps seemed empty, as if
it had been built for one purpose only: to raise the Numinator’s eyrie as far
as possible from the bleak landscape of the Isle of Noom, and the grim museum
and necropolis in the basement of the inner tower.

It was lighter up here, and as she climbed the next flight
the moon broke through again, shining brightly through a small patch of clear
ice, right into her eyes. Momentarily Maelys couldn’t see clearly and knew she
would find no better place for an ambush. She went up a few more steps,
crouched low, transferred the club to her right hand and tried to prepare her
sore muscles for action.

She would only have one chance. If the Whelm got her nails
into Maelys she would not get away, and even up two steps she would have little
advantage in height. She would have to strike hard, fast and true, and pray
that her first blow was a disabling one.

The Whelm’s feet were slap-slapping against the ice; and she
was panting. The tension in Maelys’s stomach was painful now and, as if the
Whelm had detected her anxiety, her footfalls slowed. Maelys peered over the
step but couldn’t see her. She must be waiting in the darkness lower down. Maelys
let go of the club handle and rubbed her freezing fingers against her coat
sleeve.

Gripping it again, she tried to calm her racing heart. The
moon was drifting in and out of the clouds, the light flaring and fading. The
Whelm had stopped panting; Maelys couldn’t hear her at all.

She couldn’t hear anything from above, either, which might
mean that the Numinator had completed her portal and was on her way to the
Nightland. To kill Emberr? Maelys wanted to shriek, just to break the tension.

Slap-slap
. The
Whelm was coming on. Maelys could see her now, rounding the lower angle,
plodding up with that awkward gait. She stopped one flight below and in a shaft
of

moonlight Maelys saw that she was not much older than
herself, though thin and bony like all the Whelm. Her short dark hair was cut
straight across at the back of her head, and she had huge black eyes.

It made a difference. Maelys wasn’t sure she could attack a
young woman. She clung desperately to the ice club, feeling the sweat freezing
on the palms of her hands and her heart racketing under her breastbone.

The Whelm moved up; she was almost to the point when the
moonlight would shine in her eyes. One more step, Maelys thought. The Whelm was
looking up and hadn’t seen her, flattened in the pool of shadow on the step.

She took another step, but as Maelys sprang to her feet the
light faded as the moon passed behind a cloud. The Whelm saw her and lunged.

Maelys, taken by surprise, swung the club, but she was
off-balance and had moved too late. The Whelm caught her arm, tore the club out
of her hand and sent it flying down the steps. Before Maelys knew what was
happening her right arm had been twisted up behind her back, the Whelm’s free
arm came around her neck and she was caught in an unbreakable headlock.

In the depths below them a tocsin sounded, low and mournful.

‘Master?’ called the Whelm anxiously. ‘It is I, Sitchah
–’

‘I said no interruptions!’ the Numinator’s voice came
faintly from above.

‘Master, the prisoners have escaped. I – I caught the girl
on your steps. She was armed.’

After a brief pause, the Numinator, sounding rather
strained, said, ‘Bring her up.’

‘Master?’

‘At once, Whelm!’

Sitchah drew a deep breath, as if distressed, then said, ‘At
once, Master.’ She smelled of fish oil and onions too, though not as strongly
as Gliss and the other males.

Maelys was forced upwards, Sitchah holding her so tightly
that Maelys’s feet barely touched the treads. They reached the last flight
before the top.

It was much lighter here, for a pulsing glow extended down
from the Numinator’s fire, and the steps were littered with shattered pieces of
ice, fallen from above and frozen to the treads. Several threads of chthonic
flame trickled down the riser of the top step, eating into it. Maelys’s skin
crawled.

Sitchah forced her up another step, then sprang sideways,
stifling a gasp and looking down at her left foot. She had gashed it deeply on
a shard of ice; blood was pouring from her sole to stain the step.

She hobbled up another step, then another, but it proved
impossible to avoid the iron-hard, brittle shards, and soon every footstep left
a bloody print. Maelys had to admire Sitchah’s determination: no pain, no
injury could prevent her from doing her duty to her master.

Or could it? Maelys allowed her weight to fall to the left,
forcing the Whelm to move that way. Sitchah winced as her foot came down on
another shard, then began to pick a path up further to the left, heading
towards the faint white flicker of chthonic flame. Maelys kept leaning that way,
hoping Sitchah hadn’t noticed the flame, which wasn’t very bright.

They were just five steps below the Numinator’s eyrie now,
Sitchah gasping with every step. The soles of her feet must have been gashed to
the bone.

Three steps, and Maelys could see into the eyrie, which had
been completely rebuilt. The upper third of the ice steeple was gone, as were
the books and the table. Wind whistling across the open top of the steeple
caused a sobbing reverberation of the air; it was as cold as outside and tiny ice
crystals were drifting down, winking in the light of the fire, which now blazed
in a broad metal dish in the centre of the eyrie. The fire was different, too.
The chthonic flame had been emptied from its ice flask and, well-fed and
unconstrained, burned two spans high.

It was surrounded by five miniature ice steeples, four spans
high at the left-hand end and six at the right, supporting a sloping slab of
ice, like a roof over the white flame. Maelys couldn’t see the Numinator until
she moved behind it. She wore grey-green pants, an ice-grey blouse, and a
stiletto made from ice was strapped to her right thigh. The hollow core of the
blade was a brilliant, poisonous yellow. Maelys’s gut tightened. So the
Numinator
did
intend to kill Emberr.

Her arms were upraised, her hands placed together in a
steeple that mimicked the way her tower top had been, and her fingers glistened
with chthonic fire, though it didn’t appear to be burning her.

‘Guard her until I get back,’ she said without looking at
Sitchah.

The Numinator drew her hands out and down, as though pulling
a bubble over herself, all the way to her feet. Now glistening with white
chthonic fire, she went backwards half a dozen steps, took a running dive
through the flame, and vanished.

‘Master!’ cried Sitchah, pushing Maelys up the steps. Her
shredded foot came down on the chthonic fire threaded across the top step, she
shrieked in agony, and her grip relaxed momentarily.

Maelys tore free, thrust her down the steps and raced
towards the ice steeples. There was no time to think. Emberr was in mortal
danger and she had to help him, but she didn’t know how the Numinator had made
the portal to the Nightland, or even if it could be used again. But surely she
would have left it open so she could return?

Maelys raced between the second and third steeples, under
the sloping slab of ice, and felt a slight shock, and a tingling all over, as
if she were no longer in the normal world. She was within the portal, but where
was the opening to the Nightland? Should she dive through the flame as the
Numinator had? Surely there had to be more to it than that?

The pyramidal ice flask was sitting on the floor, with the
stopper beside it and a tiny drift of fire rising up from it. And the
Numinator’s hands had been shimmering with chthonic flame, as if she’d rubbed
it over herself. Maelys wasn’t sure she dared. The Numinator might have
protected herself with all manner of spells before she used the fire.

A groan came from behind her, and her head whipped around.
Sitchah was staggering up the last steps, lacerated across her chest and legs
from where she’d fallen down the shard-covered steps, but nothing save death
could prevent her from doing her duty.

There was no time to think; Maelys had to act now. Upending
the ice flask, she poured its contents, about five drops, into the middle of
her palm. It burned hot and cold at the same time, not just on her skin but
beneath it, as if it had penetrated all the way to her bones.

She ran three steps to where the Numinator had stood,
rubbing the chthonic fire over her fingers and hands until they burned and
shimmered, then raised her arms, steepled her hands as the Numinator had, held
them there for a moment and drew them down to the floor, all the way to her
feet. To her surprise, it worked and a glittering bubble enveloped her. She
went backwards to the point where the Numinator had stood, staring at the
chthonic fire in the metal bowl.

If this failed, she would die. If Sitchah got there first,
she might also die, for Sitchah had failed her master and it was Maelys’s
fault.

Taking a deep breath, she ran and dived through the chthonic
fire. It seared all the way along her body, even to the soles of her feet in
their boots, then the Tower of a Thousand Steps and the whole world vanished.

 
THIRTY-SIX

Nish was tearing out his thinning hair. He had talked
himself hoarse trying to convince the mayors of Gendrigore to raise a militia,
but they would not listen.

‘A dozen armies have broken on The Spine,’ Barquine kept
saying, complacently quaffing his beer, ‘and the God-Emperor’s forces will meet
the same fate.’

Nish could see the catastrophe approaching like a tsunami,
but what more could he do? No outsider, not even the Deliverer, could raise an
army in Gendrigore without the support of the mayors.

Tulitine maintained her watch from the cliffs, listening to
the birds, bats and dolphins, and reporting on the progress of Jal-Nish’s
forces, though it was not until they had begun to gather in Taranta that she
drew Barquine aside. He listened, looking ever more grave, then set down his
beer unfinished and shouted for the fastest runners in the town.

Scribes set down his message on a dozen tally sticks, and
each runner set out in a different direction to carry the call to arms to the
rest of the province, though it would take days for them to reach the
provincial boundaries and pass the message to the other two provinces.

Before any runners had returned, however, all Gendrigore
knew of the threat, for red-sailed ships could be seen out to sea, well clear
of the menacing rocks and treacherous currents, watching the coast day and
night.

‘What are they doing?’ said Hoshi, an apprentice potter. He
was one of the few young men from Nish’s little militia who had shown any
appetite for training and Nish was grooming him for leadership. He took every
opportunity to teach Hoshi the art of war, though with limited success. He
simply went straight for his opponent and whacked as hard as he could. A
cheerfully unsubtle youth, he had no head for either strategy or tactics.

They were perched at the cliff edge by the fishers’ tripods,
watching the enemy. Nish was peering through Barquine’s battered brass
spyglass, the only one in all Gendrigore. He rubbed his eye with his scarred
hand, winced, and slid the brass tubes further apart to focus better.

‘Spying on us. See them there, up in the basket at the top
of the mainmast?’ He handed the spyglass to Hoshi.

He trained it on the figures at the top of the mast, and
swung it towards the stern. ‘What’s that at the back?’

‘Where?’ Nish shaded his eyes and squinted. Something
dull-black and leathery crouched there, though he could not make out what it
was. ‘It’s not a flappeter.’ He held out his hand and Hoshi put the spyglass in
it.

Nish focused, looked away then focused again. ‘I’ve never
seen anything like it. It looks like a bat, though no bat grows a tenth that
size. Could it be a gigantic bladder-bat?’

The creature suddenly pulled its wings, which were very
bat-like, right in and wrapped them about itself until it resembled a black
ball the size of a beer barrel, though it did not look like a bladder-bat.
‘They’re lifting it onto something … it’s hard to make out in the shadow of the
sails … looks like a javelard.’

‘What’s a javelard?’ said Hoshi, picking yellow potting clay
out from under his fingernails.

He turned to smile at Gi, a sturdy, dark-haired young woman
with a round, cheerful face. She had also trained hard these past days and had
the blisters to prove it. She strode up, swinging a long ivory-wood staff which
the town blacksmith had shod with brass at either end. She was a better
tactician than Hoshi, though her gentle disposition made her a lesser soldier.
She held back when she should have gone for the jugular.