The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (51 page)

‘We could take the heads off and just throw the shafts,’
Hoshi said brightly.

‘The balance and weight will be wrong. When they have to
throw the real thing, they’ll throw short.’

‘Then we’ll make straw men for targets and hang them from
the branches.’

‘Good idea; at least the spearmen can get in some practice
tomorrow afternoon.’ He raised his voice. ‘Slingers, aim and fire.’

This time none of them hit their targets.

‘Forzel,’ said Nish, ‘keep them at it as long as there’s
light.’

He walked away, trying to calm himself, but the pain in his
gut was back, worse than ever.

‘It’ll be all right on the day,’ Hoshi said encouragingly.
‘What else could possibly go wrong?’

And that was the worst omen of all.

 
THIRTY-SEVEN

‘Where the devil is Maelys?’ said Flydd, looking around
irritably.

‘It’s not like her to get lost,’ said Colm from behind him.

‘It’s just like her to get lost,
actually
. Maelys was always going off on her own when she travelled
with Nish, and for someone who pretends to be so meek and mild, she’s got a
reckless streak.’

Flydd turned, cursing her under his breath, though it was
his fault. He’d pressed on too quickly, and she might easily have taken a wrong
turn in this blackness.

Clap.

Colm nudged his arm. ‘Whelm!’ he whispered.

‘And not far from the junction of the three corridors, I’d
say.’

Flydd began to ease his way along the wall. They were on the
side of the tower shaded from the moon now, and there was no light at all, but
he had a feeling that there was more than one Whelm at the other end.

He put his ear to the wall and subvocalised a spell of
enhancement, hoping it would work. You never knew in a place like this,
pervaded by another mancer’s Arts.

‘There’s an odd tang in the air,’ said a thick-voiced Whelm,
a male. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘Our master is hard at work in her eyrie,’ said a woman with
a husky voice. ‘Never question our master’s work.’

‘I do not,’ the first Whelm said hastily. ‘But the master
looked shaken after she questioned the black-haired girl.’

‘Because the Nightland still exists?’ asked the woman.

‘No – because there’s someone hiding in it.’

‘Did you hear that?’ whispered Colm.

‘I wondered why Maelys was behaving so oddly,’ Flydd said
quietly.

‘She was distracted for ages after she got lost in the
Nightland.’

‘So she met someone there and kept it from me, the stupid
little cow. I’ll kill her!’

The Whelm female spoke again. ‘There’s an odd smell in the
air. It’s that old conjuror, Flydd.’

‘Old conjuror indeed!’ sniffed Flydd. ‘If they come this way
I’ll conjure the very life out of them.’

‘Run and check on the prisoners!’ cried the thick-voiced
male. ‘I’ll search these passages.’

Flydd cursed. ‘They’ll soon discover my holes in the walls.’

Before they could move, a tocsin pealed in the distance.
‘We’ll never get back to Maelys now,’ said Flydd. ‘This way.’ He turned down
the corridor, trailing his fingers along the wall.

Colm grabbed him by the shoulder. ‘We can’t leave her,
Flydd.’

‘I thought you despised her.’

‘I do, but I’m not the kind of man to leave a companion behind.’

‘Neither am I; but we can’t fight seven hundred Whelm on our
own.’

‘Then what’s the plan?’ Colm hissed.

‘We rouse the other prisoners and fight our way out. In that
diversion, we may be able to find Maelys.’ Flydd pulled free and pressed on.

He nearly fell down a set of steps, cursed and felt his way
below, trying to make no noise. ‘Get a move on,’ he muttered at the bottom.
‘There’ll be Whelm everywhere in a minute.’

‘It goes four ways here. Which way?’

‘Hmm,’ said Flydd. ‘I lay awake for most of the night,
making a mental plan of the tower. The hall of the bloodline registers was on
the left at the bottom, and the rooms with all the preserved bodies further on,
then down. The level below that surely holds the prisoner’s cells and, if there
are guards, we’ll have to overpower them as quietly as possible, then free the
prisoners and run.’

‘If they’ve been here for years, they’ll be as cowed as
slaves.’

‘They’re all we’ve got.’

Shortly they reached the hall of the bloodline registers and
hurried through its darkness. The spines of the individual registers glowed
green all around them. Despite his words, Flydd was fretting about Maelys as
they pushed through the doors at the other end, then into the chambers with all
the jars and coffins. The ice-clear lids shone a milky yellow, eerily
illuminating the faces and bodies below.

What single-minded determination the Numinator must have,
Flydd thought, to have followed her plan all this time, every idea and action
directed to a single purpose. Not even the destruction of the nodes had stopped
her. He could admire her for that, if nothing else.

He reminded himself of the scars she had given him, and the
pain he would not forget even if he took renewal a dozen times. No, he had to
put all extraneous thoughts out of mind and concentrate on breaking out of
here. With his flask of chthonic flame, and the mimemule, that was still
possible, but what then? Noom was unrelentingly harsh, and almost impossible to
survive during the winter.

Clap-clap.

‘They’re on their way,’ said Colm.

They ran through the dark for some minutes, Flydd turning
this way and that following his mental map, then down another set of stairs to
the lowest level. The clatter of running Whelm grew ever louder.

Flydd reached a door and jerked at the latch but it did not
budge. ‘It’s locked, and in a way I can’t fathom.’ He pressed his nose to the
ice, which seemed extremely thick here.

‘Use the flame,’ said Colm. ‘Burn a hole though it.’

‘I’m having second thoughts about that.’

‘It worked beautifully last time.’

‘It worked a trifle too well, and that makes me
uncomfortable.’ Flydd looked up sharply. ‘Did you hear a faint fizzing sound?’

‘Yes,’ said Colm. ‘I don’t know where it came from, though.’

‘I don’t like it. This place is a little too strange for
me.’

‘They’ll be here any second.’

It sounded like a hundred Whelm, and taking no trouble to
disguise their coming; the clatter of their wooden sandals was deafening and
they were making a dull grinding sound, as if they were all moaning and gritting
their teeth at the same time.

‘Something must have gone wrong,’ said Flydd. ‘Something’s
happened to the Numinator, and they’re afraid.’

‘Afraid for her?’

‘Of course. And equally afraid that they’ll be bereft of
their master yet again, and left alone in a hostile world. They’ll fight to the
death to prevent that happening.’

‘Can’t you blast the door off its hinges or something?’ said
Colm.

‘Even if I could, we may need to shelter behind it to hold
them off.’

Flydd pressed his forehead against the door, ignoring the
biting cold. What was he to do? The more he thought about the chthonic flame
and where it had come from, the more perilous it seemed. Who had put it in that
crystal casket at the bottom of the shaft, and why had they hidden it so
carefully? Questions he should have asked himself before breaching it, but it
was too late for regrets now.

‘There’s nothing for me here,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve got to get
away. The world is at stake and I must be just as focused as the Numinator
– but on bringing the God-Emperor down.’

Feeling in a pocket, he discovered a splinter of precious
amber-wood, left there from one of his walks across the top of Mistmurk
Mountain before renewal. Amber-wood had an enchanting fragrance, and it helped
to conceal the user from watching eyes, especially those watching with the
Secret Art. But it also brought good fortune and he had never needed it more.

Unstoppering the flask of chthonic flame, he dipped the
splinter in and traced a circle on the wall, just wide enough to squeeze through,
some twenty paces beyond the door. White fire licked up from his trace marks
and he heard that fizzing sound again.

The fire soon ate through the ice. He pushed the circle in,
climbed through the hole and, as soon as Colm had squeezed his lanky frame in,
wiped away the cold fire. Coating the edges of the circle with meltwater, he
fitted the circle of ice back in place.

‘It’ll freeze to solid wall within a minute,’ Flydd said,
rubbing his hands furiously to warm them.

‘But they’ll see the circle in the ice. They’ll know we’re
in here.’

‘In the dark, it may be some time before they notice it.
I’ll just jam the lock.’ He went to the door, melted ice in his hand with white
fire and poured the water into the lock, where it froze instantly. ‘Come on.’

They were in an empty cell whose door was open, one of many
along a corridor. Most of the other cells looked unused; walls, floors and
ceilings were pure, clean ice.

‘This had better be the place,’ said Flydd anxiously. The
racket of the Whelm’s wooden sandals could be heard through the thick walls.

‘
Anywhere
could be
the place,’ Colm said gloomily. ‘I don’t think the Numinator is predictable.’

Colm barred the door of the corridor. They continued,
opening doors to left and right, but it wasn’t until halfway along that they
found an occupied cell. Someone small and dark-haired lay asleep on a narrow
bed formed from ice. Flydd illuminated the cell with finger light. It was a
woman, in her mid-thirties.

‘Hello,’ he said quietly.

She shot up in bed, the thin furs falling away, and put her
hand up to keep the light out of her eyes. Her skin was very pale, as though
she had not seen the sun in years, and she looked vaguely familiar. But then,
most people did, for Flydd had met so many people in his time as scrutator that
it was rare for him to see an entirely new kind of face.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘My name is Chissmoul, surr,’ she said quietly, avoiding his
eye.

Again that familiarity, but he could not remember why. Curse
his fragmented memory.

‘Where are the others?’

‘Further along to the left. You – you’re not a
prisoner, are you?’

‘No, we’ve escaped – this far anyway.’ Flydd gave a
mirthless laugh.

Giving him a puzzled glance, she slipped out of bed. She was
solidly built and wore a woollen shirt, buttoned high, trousers of the same
material and thick socks. She pulled on a pair of boots, and a woollen hat over
her short hair. ‘I’m ready, surr.’

‘Don’t you have a coat?’

‘We never go outside, surr.’

His heart sank. She could not survive on Noom without furs;
none of the prisoners could. ‘Show us the way.’

Chissmoul set off down the corridor, then stopped and said
shyly, not looking directly at Flydd, ‘Do I know you, surr?’

‘I don’t know. Do you?’

‘You look strange, but the way you speak … it reminds me of
–’

‘Spit it out, lass!’ Flydd said peremptorily.

‘The scrutator, Xervish Flydd.’

He stopped short. ‘I am Flydd. I’ve taken renewal –
reluctantly.’ It seemed important he say that. He did not want anyone to think
he’d done it of his own free will, and that was curious. In the olden days, he
hadn’t given a damn for other people’s opinion of him. Must be getting soft, he
thought.

‘Chissmoul, Chissmoul,’ he mused. ‘You look familiar, but
renewal took my memories and many of them have not come back.’

‘I was a thapter pilot in the war.’

‘Of course! You were the really shy one, yet you flew your
thapter as though you were born to it, and with a reckless daring I’d never
seen before.’ In his mind’s eye Flydd could see her laughing face now, after
she’d just pulled off some desperate manoeuvre with ease, which none of the
other thapter pilots could have done without crashing their machines.

‘The war was terrible, yet those were the best days of my
life. I’ve never felt so alive, flying across the sky, at one with my thapter.
But I’ll never fly again.’

‘Those days are gone forever, along with many other
wonderful things that were no longer possible once the nodes were destroyed.’

‘I have my memories,’ said Chissmoul softly, opening the
door of another cell. ‘You will remember this man, too. We came here together.’

The man who lay on the bed was almost as gaunt as a Whelm,
and at first Flydd did not recognise him, for little of his former good looks
remained. His sandy hair was thin and lank, his grey eyes as dull as the eyes
of a fish on a slab. Only the jutting jaw was unchanged, though the bone had
less flesh on it than Flydd remembered.

‘Sergeant Flangers!’ Flydd cried, unable to contain his joy,
for Flangers had been a hero of the lyrinx wars, an honourable man and a loyal
soldier. He had also been forced to betray his soldier’s oath, and had not
recovered from it, though that had been many years ago. ‘Are you all right?’

Flangers stared at him, uncomprehending, until Chissmoul
said gently, ‘It’s Scrutator Flydd, come back from the dead,
renewed
by the mancer’s Art.’

‘Not quite from the dead,’ said Flydd. ‘But very close.’

Chissmoul helped Flangers out of bed. ‘I’ve been better,’
said Flangers, standing up shakily. ‘Old injuries still plague me, surr, and
they’ll be the death of me before too long.’

Flydd thought so too. He hadn’t hoped for much down here, so
he wasn’t disappointed, though a dying soldier and a pilot without her craft
were bound to be liabilities.

‘But I’ll do what I can for you, surr, for old times,’ said
Flangers. ‘The menace of the God-Emperor is almost as bad as the one we fought
ten years ago, and defeated.’