The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (59 page)

He tried to dismiss her from his mind, but the look in her
eyes kept breaking his concentration, and then he realised that her face was
vaguely familiar, though from a long time ago.

He’d once had a brilliant memory for faces, though that had
gone with renewal. He could not think why he knew her of old. Too late; the Whelm
had rounded the curve of the stair directly below and seen him.

From the ranks below the leaders a stream of spears arched
up at him, shining in the dim light. He thrust his arm up, directed all the
power he had left at the weak point in the stair roof, then scrambled backwards
as the ice fell in gigantic blocks, smashing the treads to rubble.

Most of the spears were brought down by the falling ice, but
one shot over his shoulder and slammed into the steps above him. He scrabbled
up on hands and knees, desperate to get out of the way. He didn’t think he’d
completely blocked these stairs, but it would buy them time.

Yggur had brought down the second walkway. The third was
only connected to the inner tower by one cable, but seven Whelm were pulling
themselves across it, clinging upside down by their hands and feet. Terror was
etched deep into their faces but they were determined to do their duty.

Yggur lay flat on his back, barely able to move. He’d taken
more from himself than he could spare. Colm and Chissmoul were hacking
furiously at the remaining cable with jag-swords, one on either side, but their
blows were having no effect on it.

Two more Whelm clambered onto the cable, hanging upside down
like gangly sloths, .

‘Surr!’ cried Flangers, who was staring down the first
staircase. ‘They’ve found a way up!

‘And more will follow,’ said Flydd. Which should he attend
to?

He left them to Flangers and Chissmoul, staggered across to
the cable end and touched the stopper of his fire flask to it.

Crack! The cable snapped with such force that the Whelm
clinging to it were catapulted in all directions. Flydd didn’t see what became
of them, though not even Whelm could survive such a fall.

The tower tilted left, rocked to the right and plunged down
at least five spans before it steadied, tilted at an angle of twenty degrees.
The rubble blocking the first stairs disappeared as though it had slid down a
plughole, carrying the Whelm with it.

‘If the inner tower keeps this up, we’ll be in the basement
by breakfast time,’ Colm said wryly.

Flydd went over to Yggur and helped him up. ‘When I drew
power then, I saw the woman in red again; and I know her face from somewhere
– from long ago.’

‘I didn’t recognise the image I saw earlier.’

‘It wasn’t a good likeness. She changes her face from time
to time.’

‘Well, don’t use chthonic fire again,’ Yggur said limply.

‘I’ll try not to.’ Flydd walked away. The immediate threat
of the Whelm had eased but they would soon find another way to attack. They
were relentless.

He found the prisoners against the outer wall by the second
stair. A few still held ice spears and other weapons, though most were
blank-faced and apathetic. They were no use to him, yet he could not abandon
them.

Flangers lay slumped against the wall further around, a red
stain flowering below his right shoulder. Chissmoul knelt in front of him,
attending to the wound.

‘That looks bad,’ Flydd said, crouching over him.

‘I’ve taken worse,’ said Flangers. ‘It was a clean spear and
it hasn’t hit anything vital. It’s damn painful, though.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Flydd. Flangers wouldn’t be swinging
his sword anytime soon. The odds were lengthening.

He leaned on the wall, taking advantage of the brief respite
to run through his options. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said to Colm, who was
hanging over the outer wall and appeared to be throwing up. ‘We can’t fight
seven hundred. If the Numinator comes back soon, I’m tempted to surrender and
pray that she’s merciful.’

Colm wiped his mouth on his bloody sleeve and straightened
up. ‘She won’t be.’ He bore a gash on his forehead and a bloodstained bandage
was wrapped around his left wrist.

‘I suppose not. I –’

The tower tilted so far to the left that the prisoners came
sliding across the roof towards Flydd. It swayed back to the vertical and
slumped another four or five spans in one stomach-lurching rush, before
steadying briefly, then slipping down a little further.

Colm began to throw up again. Flydd looked over the wall.
The inner tower had dropped about fifteen spans since they’d reached the roof,
and was now only half its former height. The ring-shaped area between it and
the surrounding Tower of a Thousand Steps was filled with water, floating
pieces of ice, bloodline registers, and bodies.

Ice coffins containing those less-than-human corpses, plus
jars and amphorae of all sizes with their gruesome contents, were floating
amongst pages from the registers. The lower levels of the inner tower must be
completely flooded, and every subsidence forced coffins and frozen corpses out
into the water. At least the Whelm could not get in from below, unless they
swam. Unfortunately, it left Flydd with no way to escape.

The tower sank another span, sending fountains of brown
water up on all sides and filling the air with unpleasantly smelling mist. The
fountaining water froze in the air and fell back with a million little
splashes.

More Whelm were scrambling up the rungs; the platform
encircling the inside of the Tower of a Thousand Steps was crowded with them.
From the exaggerated jerkiness of their gait, and the wailing and banging of
closed fists on their bare chests, they were in torment.

‘The master must be dead, else she would have protected her
tower!’ cried a gangly male, standing on the brink of the platform and rending
his clothes in his anguish. ‘She’ll never return now.’

Another Whelm appeared behind him, a gaunt fellow wearing a
black loincloth and a crown of iron barbs. Holding a staff of black iron in his
left hand, he banged it on the floor of the platform so hard that chunks of ice
crumbled away. He stared across the ring of foul water and his glittering eyes
met Flydd’s.

‘There’s no sign of her, and even her eyrie is failing,’ the
Whelm cried. ‘Once more we are masterless, miserable Whelm.’

‘What are we to do?’ cried the other.

‘Bring down the Tower of a Thousand Steps on their heads.
Bring it all down!’

 
FORTY-THREE

‘Can she be dead?’ said Flangers.

‘I doubt it very much,’ said Flydd. ‘Whelm are overly
emotional. They’ll soon discover their error, I’m sure.’

‘Who’s that?’ said Colm, eyeing the gaunt Whelm wearing the
crown of iron barbs.

‘A Whelm sorcerer,’ said Chissmoul. ‘Zofloc; he’s the
closest they have to a leader.’ She shivered. ‘He has no eyelids, and eyes like
worms impaled on fish hooks, and he never takes them off you.’

Flangers rubbed the neat bandage Chissmoul had made over his
shoulder wound. ‘Other Whelm have no interest in us; not even in the women
prisoners. Even the lowest Whelm see us as beneath them, but Zofloc is
different.’

‘It was as if he was trying to look right through my skin,’
said Chissmoul.

Flangers scowled and gripped the hilt of his jag-blade.
‘Where can his power come from?’

‘From
me
,’ growled
Yggur. ‘Via the Numinator’s bracelets. Get down!’

Flydd ducked behind the wall. A flight of arrows, fired from
the platform to their left, skidded across the roof, and screams from the
thronged prisoners told that several missiles had found a mark. They scrambled
to shelter behind the wall, though Flydd noted chthonic fire creeping across it
too. This tower can’t last another hour, he thought despairingly. I can do no
more to defend it and when it fails we’ll be dumped in the icy water, where the
Whelm will pick us off with arrows at their leisure. Our only hope lies in the
Numinator coming back and saving us, and what a feeble hope that is.

And the irony is, the God-Emperor will never know what
happened to his sole remaining enemies. We’ll just vanish. The Numinator won’t
say, if she has survived, and nothing could induce the Whelm to spill their
master’s secrets.

More Whelm were climbing the rungs, carrying equipment on
their backs up to the platform where Zofloc waited, staring unblinkingly at the
inner tower, arms folded across his scarred chest.

‘What are they doing?’ said Chissmoul.

‘They’ve got lengths of twisted metal pipe,’ said Colm.
‘Copper pipe and glass vessels, and – a huge copper cauldron.’

More pipework was set down on the platform, then a frame
assembled from wood, and three Whelm began to fit a contraption together under
the supervision of the lidless-eyed sorcerer. The cauldron, which was a good
span across, was set on a tripod standing on a hearth assembled from bricks,
and filled with ice. A circular copper hood was fitted to the top and clamped
tight; coils of pipe were connected to it, spiralling up before passing through
an enormous block of ice, and down into a large glass flask.

‘It’s a still,’ said Chissmoul. ‘Dad had one at home when I
was little, and he showed me how it worked. He used to make spirits from fruit
and vegetables and grain – well, anything he could get his hands on,
really. He was a bit of a drinker, poor old Dad.’

‘What happened to him?’ said Flangers.

‘He made a bad batch and it killed him.’ She sighed. ‘We had
great fun, Dad and I – when he wasn’t drinking.’

‘What could they distil out of ice?’ said Colm.

‘If you put ice in a still,’ said Yggur, ‘all you get out
the other end is water …’

‘Unless the ice is laced with chthonic fire,’ Flydd said
dully.

Chunks of black, bituminous material were stacked on the
hearth beneath the cauldron. The sorcerer Whelm kindled them by thrusting the
end of his staff into the pile. Flames licked up around the cauldron, and soon
white fire began dripping into the flask. It looked far brighter than the
chthonic flame in Flydd’s flask had been, and it had a luminous glow.

Shortly the hood of the cauldron was raised and the water
tipped over the edge into the swirling brown flood far below. The cauldron was
refilled with fire-laced ice and the process repeated, over and over.

‘What can Zofloc want with so much chthonic fire?’ said
Flydd a good while later. The sorcerer already had far more of it than Flydd
had brought to Noom in his little flask.

‘He’s planning something apocalyptic,’ said Yggur, who was
sitting up now and looked a little better. ‘You’ve got to stop them, Flydd.’

‘I can’t,’ said Flydd. ‘I’ve got nothing left.’

‘Dig deeper. This is the end of the world.’

It wasn’t like Yggur to indulge in hyperbole. Flydd felt a
chill creep over him, but he could not think of a thing to do. He settled
against the wall, shivering, and with every passing minute felt worse.
Aftersickness, long delayed, was hitting him hard.

Minutes passed. Every so often a flight of arrows would come
at them from a new direction and everyone would scramble around the wall,
leaving one or two more bleeding prisoners behind. None of the arrows were
aimed at Flydd’s little group, however.

‘Zofloc is saving us for a special fate,’ Yggur said
cynically.

The sorcerer Whelm looked like a man who ruled through fear
and took pleasure in others’ pain, Flydd thought.

The distillation continued until the flask was so thick with
white fire that its luminous glow lit up the underside of the Tower of a
Thousand Steps high above them. Zofloc gave orders and the Whelm began to
decant the concentrated chthonic fire into smaller vessels.

‘Flangers,’ said Flydd, ‘you’ve got good eyes. What’s he
doing now?’

‘They’re not as good as they used to be,’ said Flangers.
Chissmoul helped him up and he stared down at the Whelm. ‘Sorry. I can’t tell.’

‘It looks like they’re sealing fire into little rods or
darts,’ said Chissmoul. ‘And fitting them to the tips of arrows.’

Flydd had forgotten that, as a pilot, she’d also had fine
eyesight.

‘What would chthonic flame do if it were fired into human
flesh?’ said Yggur quietly.

Flydd’s scalp crawled. ‘I wouldn’t want to find out.’

The sorcerer took one of the dart-tipped arrows. Someone
handed him a bow. He fitted the arrow to the bow and swung it around. Yggur
ducked hastily, until he realised that the arrow had been aimed down at the
water.

‘What the blazes is he doing?’ said Flangers.

The sorcerer released the arrow, which struck one of the
floating, not quite human bodies. The body jerked; its legs and arms thrashed,
then it rolled onto its back and began to splash clumsily towards the inner
tower. Bubbles dribbled from its open mouth and its eyes shone with the colour
of white fire. Zofloc took aim at another floater.

‘He’s turning the dead into animated corpses, like Phrune,’
said Colm.

‘How do you stop a corpse?’ said Flydd.

‘With another corpse,’ said Yggur.

‘Have you ever animated a corpse before?’

‘Of course not!’ Yggur cried. ‘I abjure the necromantic
arts, in all their forms.’

‘We’d best not try, then, else Zofloc might seize control of
them as well.’

‘Block the stairways.’

‘I haven’t got the strength.’

‘Get the prisoners onto it.’

Flydd dragged himself across to the prisoners and ordered
them to defend the two stairways. They did not move.

‘Look over the side,’ he said. ‘See the dead in the water.
They’re not human, are they? But they’re coming for you.’

The prisoners set to, furiously heaving the shattered ice
blocks into piles to block the stairways at the last turn. Before they had
finished, the tower shuddered and settled another five or six spans, jerking
down in stages. Brown water spurted up the steps like the sea through a
blowhole, sending the workers tumbling over one another and coating everyone in
noisome muck that reeked of death long postponed and well overdue. An ice
amphora was blasted up to shatter against the perimeter wall. Its contents, the
preserved body of an unborn child with a bony crest across the top of its head
and a stubby tail, fell to the roof. Chissmoul stared at it, shuddering, then
edged it down the steps with the toe of her boot.