The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (60 page)

One of the prisoners, who was hauling blocks well down the
stair, let out a screech and ran on the spot, his bare feet slipping on ice. He
made it up a couple of steps, but a dark shape lunged, sank its teeth into his
calf and dragged him down into the darkness. Rending and crunching sounds
ensued. The remainder of the workers fled up the steps, leaving the stair
unblocked, and nothing could induce them to go down again.

Shortly the first of the animated corpses appeared. She
would have been a pretty young woman had her skin not been a sickly green. She
was followed by a large, shaggy fellow with claws for nails and body hair as
thick as felt, though it was falling out in patches across his barrel chest
like the coat of a dog with the mange.

Flangers struggled to his feet. He was even paler and had a
shake in his good arm.

‘You can’t fight a corpse, Sergeant,’ said Flydd.

‘Fighting is all I’m good for.’

‘The dead don’t feel pain or injury; you can’t harm them.’

On the other side of the roof, the prisoners began to
scream, then stampeded across. More shaggy figures were clambering out of the
second stair.

‘What about fire?’ said Colm. ‘
Real fire
, I mean.’

‘We haven’t got anything to burn.’

‘Sorcerous fire then.’

‘I couldn’t light a splinter at the moment.’

Flydd tried not to listen to the screams as the animated
dead attacked the prisoners. There was nothing anyone could do. He held
Flangers back.

‘Stay with us, soldier, and that’s an order.’

‘It’s my duty to protect the weak and the innocent, surr.’

‘It’s your duty to be here when I need you. The fate of the
world may depend on Yggur and me getting out of here, and that depends on you.’

Flangers remained where he was, though he did not look
pleased about it.

The prisoners had worked out a way of attacking the corpses:
a dozen men and women would take hold of each one and hold it down until its
head could be cut off and hurled over the side. It was crude and moderately
effective – the headless bodies blundered about in circles, attacking
whatever they touched, whether human, ice or other corpses. But more dead were
coming up all the time and soon they would outnumber the prisoners. Flydd could
feel the tension gnawing at him, the familiar burning pain in the middle of his
chest. He didn’t have the strength for it, but if he couldn’t save them now, no
one could.

‘There’s only one way left,’ he said to Yggur. ‘Assuming I
can make it work.’

Flydd withdrew the mimemule from an inner pocket, stripped
his concealing illusion from it, and laid it on his palm while he tried to
prepare himself. This was really going to hurt.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ said Yggur, perking up
visibly.

‘I have no idea what you think it is,’ Flydd said evasively.
‘Quiet. I’ve got to think.’

‘I think it’s a
mimemule
.’
Yggur hauled himself to his feet. ‘And to the best of my knowledge there was
only ever one mimemule on Santhenar.’

‘Not now, Yggur,’ Flydd said warningly, for Colm was walking
their way and the last thing Flydd wanted was for him to discover the truth.
Too late – he’d seen it.

‘What’s a mimemule?’ said Colm, gazing at the grubby,
battered ball of wood.

‘A mimicking device,’ said Yggur, ‘and therefore forbidden
to the Faellem, but Faelamor –’

Colm’s head shot around. ‘Faelamor?’ He sniffed the air.

‘She brought it from Tallallame,’ said Yggur, ignoring
Flydd’s frantic efforts to shut him up. ‘It was one of her greatest treasures,
for it could be used to mimic almost anything, even devices of great power.
Where did you get it, Flydd?’

‘I’ve had it for ages,’ lied Flydd. ‘Hush, this is a
difficult Art to master –’

Colm snatched the mimemule from Flydd’s hand, put it under
his own nose and sniffed deeply. ‘You bastard!’ he roared, his eyes starting
out of his head. ‘You stinking, thieving mongrel. I know that smell – it
must have been buried in Faelamor’s cave. This is part of my heritage, and you
stole it from me.’

Flydd flushed. ‘You renounced your heritage, if you recall,
and stormed out of the cave.’

‘You hid the mimemule, you filthy liar, then took advantage
of me. And you … you …’ Colm was almost incoherent with rage. ‘You provoked me
to renounce my heritage! You must have been plotting to take it from me all the
time, even back in the Nightland.’

Yggur was staring down at Flydd from his lofty height,
looking faintly disgusted.

‘I did not; not at all.’ Flydd snatched the mimemule back
and held Colm at bay with his jag-sword. ‘You stormed out of the cave, if you
recall, and it was only then that Maelys found –’ Why, why had he mentioned
her name? He’d made things worse, far worse, and there was no way to get out of
it now.

‘You mean
she
was
in on it too?’ Colm shrieked, so loudly that the animated dead turned their
heads towards him, and so did Zofloc the sorcerer on the distant platform. ‘I
knew there was something sick about you, the moment I met you. And as for
Maelys, the little bitch –’

Yggur, who had been watching Flydd’s discomfort with a
certain amusement, put up his hand and said quietly, ‘That’ll do, Colm. You’re
undermining the prisoners’ faith in us, and it can only make things worse.
Besides, since you did renounce your heritage, the treasure belongs to the
first person to find it.’

‘He knew I didn’t mean it,’ Colm said savagely.

‘Then why say it? How is anyone to know what you intend? Too
late to cry about it now; it’s done. What’s your plan, Flydd?’

‘The mimemule created the portal that brought us here
–’

‘Really?’ breathed Yggur. ‘How did you do that?’

‘I’d brought Rulke’s virtual construct with us. The model on
which his real construct was based.’

‘Clever! How did you know it was in the Nightland?’

‘I must have read about it in the Histories. Or the
Tale of the Mirror
.’

‘That bit wasn’t in the final tale. It was deliberately left
out at my request, just in case.’

Flydd felt another chill, but just shrugged. ‘Who knows
where I might have read it in the archives of the scrutators?’ And yet, he was
sure he never had read it,
so how could
he know
? ‘I tried to get us out of Dunnet with the virtual construct but I
couldn’t get it to work –’

‘Dunnet!’ Yggur looked shaky again. ‘You’ve been to Dunnet.
Were …’

For once Flydd felt for him, for that valley had been the
scene of his most devastating defeat and he was still scarred by it. ‘The bones
of your men lie where they fell.’

Yggur slumped against the ice wall, breathing heavily. ‘I’ll
never forget that day, as long as I live. A whole army dead, for nothing.’

After a decent pause, Flydd went on. ‘Anyway, Maelys
accidentally touched the virtual construct with the mime-mule bag and the
portal opened instantly.’

Yggur stood up again and, with an effort, regained control
of himself. ‘So the mimemule mimicked the virtual construct. How interesting.
Why didn’t you make another portal hours ago?’

‘I didn’t have the strength. And I was afraid that the
Numinator had opened another, up at the top of her tower. Two portals so close
together could be deadly.’

‘Indeed. But the portal could still be there, and you’ve got
even less strength now.’

‘Enough of your confounded questioning! I’m desperate now.
Though I haven’t got much white fire left. If I can make a new portal, it may
not remain open long.’

‘Not long enough for all the prisoners to get through?’

‘Probably not, so what do I do? I’m damned if I go without
them and doubly damned if I can only save half of them. And then there’s
Maelys.’

‘Your partner in crime,’ said Yggur. Colm clenched his
fists.

The prisoners stampeded across the roof again, with forty or
fifty animated dead close behind.

‘Better use the mimemule,’ said Yggur. ‘Quick!’

Flydd upended the fire flask onto the mimemule, clenched his
fist about it, thought about how the last portal had come into being, and
prayed. The funnel of the portal opened with a boom that shook rotten ice down
from above and dropped the inner tower another few spans into the rising brown
water. It had reached the top of the stairs now, and if the tower slipped
another span, water would flood over the wall.

A hot wind boiled out of the portal, condensing to steam
which formed little whirling needles of ice in the frigid air of Noom. ‘It’s
worked,’ said Flydd, staggering with aftersickness. ‘Go through, everyone!’

No one moved. ‘There’s someone at the other end,’ said
Chissmoul.

‘What? There can’t be.’ Flydd peered down the funnel, which
was a good hundred paces long, but his eyes were still watering too much to
see.

‘There is. It’s a woman.’

Flydd cursed. ‘This portal must have intersected with the
Numinator’s one, and she’s coming back from the Nightland.’

‘It doesn’t look like the Numinator,’ Chissmoul said
uncertainly. ‘It’s much taller and bigger all around.’

Flydd rubbed his streaming eyes but only saw a red blur.

Yggur laughed. ‘It’s your woman in red, Flydd. You get to
meet her in the flesh at last –’

‘What’s the matter?’ Flydd felt a deep unease.

Yggur took a couple of steps forwards, staring down the
tunnel, his jaw slack. ‘I know her,’ he said wonderingly. ‘But … that’s not
possible.’

‘How
could
you
know her?’ said Flydd.

‘Because that woman was in the
Tale of the Mirror
, which I lived through. I thought she was dead.
I thought the lot of them were dead.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Flydd. He could see her
coming now. She resembled the woman in red, though only slightly.

‘They went back to the void to die, but at least one of them
did not die,’ said Yggur. ‘Your woman in red is Yalkara.’

‘Yalkara?’ Flydd said dazedly. ‘The Charon?’

‘After Rulke, she was the greatest of all the Charon, and
one of the few survivors of The Hundred who came out of the void all those
thousands of years ago and seized the world of Aachan for themselves. That’s
why her face was familiar – you would have seen engravings of her image
in the Histories. How did she survive; and what is she doing here?’

A very good question, Flydd thought, and here’s a better
one. Why did I hallucinate about her during my renewal, and why have I seen her
shadowing me since?

And what can the second most powerful of the Charon possibly
want from me?

 
FORTY-FOUR

Water surged up the stairs as the inner tower slipped
down another few ells. Fragments of rotten, honeycombed ice showered down from
on high. Those animated corpses who still had heads stirred; from the platform
where Zofloc had built the copper still a lone archer fired arrow after arrow.
The surviving prisoners, reduced to half their original number, surged out of
the line of sight, a terrified, mindless herd.

Flydd only had eyes for the figure walking slowly down the
portal tunnel. He could see her clearly now – a tall, statuesque woman of
no particular age, wearing dark magenta robes that would have looked terrible
on anyone else, though the colour suited her olive skin perfectly. They trailed
out behind her, rippling in the blast. No one would have called her beautiful,
for her long face was too strong-featured for that. Her hair, the colour of
fine white silk, was worn shoulder-length and barely moved as she walked.

‘Yalkara?’ he croaked as she approached the mouth of the
tunnel, for his mouth had gone dry.

‘That I am,’ she said in a deep, raspy voice.

‘I am Xervish Flydd –’

‘I have known you.’ As she stepped out of the tunnel onto
the roof of the inner tower, steam rose around her boots. The staring prisoners
moaned and backed away. The Whelm archer stopped firing, his bow hanging
loosely from its string. Even the sorcerer Whelm, Zofloc, laid down the chunk
of chthonic fire-riven ice he had been hefting into the still to stare at her.

‘Aiieeee!’ a Whelm cried, distantly.

Flydd stared at Yalkara, trying to work out what she had
meant.

Yggur chuckled. ‘She used you, Flydd, and you never knew.’

Flydd flushed as he took Yggur’s meaning. ‘
You were Bel?
’ When she turned her head
he could see the resemblance, just, though Bel had been plump and soft. There
was nothing soft in Yalkara; she was as hard as the Whelm’s black metal
jag-swords.

‘At the time,’ said Yalkara, ‘I was so weak the only guise I
could manage was the one you lusted after so desperately. Where is the other
portal?’

Flydd looked up. The underside of the Tower of a Thousand
Steps, fifty spans above, was faintly webbed with white fire now, and he could
see another platform there. ‘Right at the very top of the tower, I assume.’

‘Show me the way.’

‘Why did you use me?’ Flydd grated. It irked him that she’d
used him as the woman in red, and as Bel. Maelys had tried to talk to him about
Bel on the way to Dunnet, he recalled, but he’d refused to listen, refused to
believe that she wasn’t one of Jal-Nish’s mancers, using him for some cunning
purpose the God-Emperor didn’t dare do himself. It irked him even more that he
didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on. He’d known everything, once,
and he didn’t like being kept in the dark.

‘Because I needed to,’ said Yalkara, turning away.

‘Yggur.’ Yggur inclined his head to her.

‘You appear to have developed a backbone since our last
encounter,’ she went on. ‘You were anguishing over some woman, as I recall.’

Yggur flushed, ever so faintly, and Flydd took a grim
pleasure in seeing it.