The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (61 page)

‘I thought she mattered to me,’ said Yggur. ‘I must have
been wrong, since I can no longer remember her name.’

Yalkara smiled knowingly. ‘You will never forget her name.
Take me to the other portal.’

‘Answer my questions, first,’ said Flydd. ‘
Why me?
’

She grimaced. ‘I don’t have time for this.’

‘Make time. You came to me when I took renewal. Why me?’

‘Oh, very well! You were the only mancer of any consequence
I could touch. I dared not go near your God-Emperor, or his acolytes, and
nothing would have induced me to approach Vivimord. I could not risk becoming
entangled in such a depraved mind in my helpless state.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Trapped in the void, which touches all places equally.
Besides, Thuntunnimoe, which you call Mistmurk Mountain, was mine once, and I
have a special bond with it. It is one of the few places on Santhenar to which
I am still linked.’

‘So you entered my mind during renewal, seeking to influence
me.’

‘I sought to take control of you at the moment you were
weakest. I tried to meld my mind and yours but it did not go well –
there’s always a risk of that with renewal – and the trauma caused you to
forget your Art. My intervention made things worse. You would have been easier
to control if I had kept away until renewal was complete.’

‘Why did you need to control me?’ cried Flydd. ‘What do I
have that you could possibly need?’

‘You were planning to use the shadow realm to escape, and
that place is not so far removed from the Nightland. I schooled you in the Art
so, instead of the shadow realm, you might open the way to the Nightland for
me. I invested everything in you. I led you to Thuntunnimoe in the first place;
I put the idea into your mind that it was a perfect refuge for you; I came to
you in your vapour-induced sleep and taught you about the cursed flame. At
every critical stage of your escape I was beside you, making sure you had the
Arts you needed to survive, but you proved difficult to control and kept
thwarting me.

‘Then, at the critical moment, and despite all my earlier
suggestions, when you opened the portal you forced it towards the shadow realm
after all. I had to tear it out of your grasp and point it to the Nightland by
myself. It nearly killed me; the pain was so awful I could not reach the portal
in time, and you went without me. After ten years of striving, I had failed.’

The anguish was visible on her face, but she did not seem
the weaker for it. On the contrary, Flydd thought.

‘I kept seeing you,’ he said. ‘Just flashes of red shadow
and a fluttering of robes. I was sure you were hunting me.’

‘I was, but there is no way into the Nightland from the
void.’

‘So that’s why you came to Flydd as Bel,’ said Colm, mouth
twisted.

‘As you escaped the Nightland, I managed to latch onto your
portal, trying to get in. Unfortunately it only allowed travel one way, so I
rode it to Santhenar, near Plogg, and disguised myself as Bellulah.’

‘You used me!’ Throughout his life, Flydd had used countless
people to get what he wanted, yet he smouldered at the thought of her using
him. He wasn’t blind to the irony, but it still irked him.

‘I paid your price,’ said Yalkara. ‘Bel gave you a night
you’ll remember all your life, and you can’t deny it.’

Again that knowing chuckle from Yggur.

‘Why didn’t you take the flasks of white fire when you had
the chance?’ said Flydd.

‘I dared not touch it. If chthonic fire had been the answer,
I would have gone back to the Nightland two centuries ago, instead of going to
the void –’

A dozen animated dead were advancing towards them. Yalkara
held out her hand, palm upwards; the fire-filled darts slid from their bodies
and they slumped to the roof, lifeless again. On the platform, Zofloc raised
his bow, its dart tip glowing. She snapped her cocked wrist at him and the dart
burst, spurting distilled fire everywhere. He beat furiously at his skin as she
turned back to Flydd.

‘But …’ he said.

‘Chthonic fire is
mine
.
I brought it here from Aachan in ages past, and long before that, I took it
from the exploded core of a comet in the deepest part of the void. Chthonic
fire is a potent force whose essence easily slips between the dimensions of
space and time; that’s why it enables portals so powerfully – and
animates the dead. But it’s a perilous material to handle, especially for us
Charon. Would that I’d known that when I first found it.’

Yggur bestowed a knowing glance on Flydd:
I warned you
.

‘That’s why I hid it deep below Thuntunnimoe,’ Yalkara
continued, ‘and surrounded it with all manner of protections so no one would
ever find it. No one on Santhenar knew it was there – I knew it would
never be safe otherwise, nor would the Three Worlds be safe from it. But I made
a terrible mistake. By trying to possess your mind, and giving you the Arts you
needed to create a portal, I left open a tiny chink in my own psyche. Then,
when you were struggling to escape from the God-Emperor, and you could find no
other way to open the portal, desperation showed you that chink in my mind. You
saw where I had hidden the chthonic fire and broke open the forbidden casket.

‘You should not have brought it here.’ She looked up at the
Tower of a Thousand Steps, its structure threaded with white fire. ‘As you will
shortly discover.’

‘But you could have used it safely at the obelisk,’ said
Flydd. ‘There’s no ice on Mistmurk Mountain.’

‘Chthonic fire is inimical to us, and I no longer have the
power to use it safely. Nothing endures forever, not even us Charon; my once
great Arts are failing. I showed you how to make the portal because I no longer
had the power to do so myself.’

Fool, fool! Flydd remembered how smug he’d felt, that he’d
learned how to make it so easily.

‘Then why didn’t you force me to make a portal at Plogg,
when I was under your enchantment?’

‘It couldn’t be made there – your incoming portal had
twisted the fabric of reality too strongly. The nearest suitable place was the
pinnacle you used at Dunnet. I had to keep you alive to get there, and you must
admit I did my best. Not even the God-Emperor could have done what I did that
night, though it nearly killed me.’

‘But you didn’t seize the portal I made on the pinnacle.’

‘I couldn’t reach it in time either. I was too weak. I had
to gather my strength to take your next portal.’

‘How did you know I would make another?’

‘You weren’t going to
walk
back from Noom. But you didn’t make the next portal – the Numinator did
– and she was gone before I could take it from her.’ Her lips compressed
to a white line. ‘But now I must, for she’s after the same thing as I am.’

‘And that is?’ said Flydd.

‘I’ve answered all the questions you have a right to ask.
The Nightland is my business.’

‘So it was
you
who
recreated it after it collapsed, and held it in place all this time.’

‘I did – to the vast diminution of my powers, and I
maintain the Nightland still, though not even
I
can hold it much longer. That’s why I had to use you. I was
desperate – too desperate.’

‘What are you holding it for?’ said Yggur.

Yalkara did not reply. Withdrawing a brass-framed lens from
her robes, she peered through it, straight up. Colours danced there. ‘Ah!’ she
said. ‘I see how this works.’

She stepped backwards into the portal, spun the lens on its
engraved handle, and a spasm twisted her strong face. Flydd gasped as the
portal was torn from his grasp, then she traced a spiral into the middle of the
lens with a fingertip and the far end of the portal swung vertically. Yalkara
shot upwards through the length of the portal, towards the top of the tower and
out of sight.

‘Aiiieeee!’ cried a host of Whelm, straining forwards like a
pack of wild dogs.

The dead on the roof began to grope blindly for the darts
Yalkara had ejected from their bodies. High above, a bright light flared; a
dull boom echoed down. Every white tracery of fire on the ice flared, before
fading again. The inner tower dropped sharply and a wave of stinking water
surged over the sides.

‘It’s going under this time,’ cried Colm.

‘Let’s get going!’ said Yggur.

‘But the portal only goes up.’

The dead were moving purposefully towards them, even the
headless ones, and in the deep water surrounding the inner tower hundreds more
began stroking in their direction.

‘Up beats under,’ said Yggur. He raised his voice. ‘Into the
portal, everyone.’

Flydd was waiting for the prisoners to go first, but no one
moved. ‘Flydd, Colm, Chissmoul, Flangers, don’t wait,’ snapped Yggur.

Flydd pushed into the funnel-shaped portal entrance,
followed by a jostling throng, and was hurled upwards into the Tower of a
Thousand Steps with a stomach-lurching jerk. He expected to be ejected in the
Numinator’s eyrie, but the portal ended a couple of spans above the upper
platform. Evidently the portal wasn’t meant to carry this many people and, once
they’d entered it, it had contracted to half its previous length.

‘The portal’s shrinking!’ he yelled, jumping down onto the
ring-shaped platform that ran all the way around the inside of the tower. An
oval hall bored through the ice ran off to his right. ‘Jump, or you’ll end up
back where we came from.’

On the rooftop of the inner tower, fifty spans below, the
prisoners were forcing their way into the portal-tunnel and being carried up,
but there were still about twenty outside and they weren’t going to make it.
More dead were churning through the stinking water and clawing over the wall,
which was now awash, then pulling the prisoners under as if they were to blame
for the horrors the Numinator had visited upon them.

Flydd strained to hold his end of the portal in place until
the rest of the prisoners could scramble out, but it continued to contract
downwards. Its mouth was level with the platform now; if it contracted further,
anyone leaving it would fall fifty spans into the water. Another ten prisoners
scrambled out, then a clot of five, punching and shoving each other in their
desperation to escape, and finally another five or six, one after another.

‘Yggur?’ Flydd yelled. He couldn’t see him in the portal, or
on the flooded roof of the inner tower, and he couldn’t hold the mouth in place
any longer. ‘Drag them out,’ he gasped.

Colm began to heave people out of the portal and hurl them
to the left. Chissmoul was doing the same, as best she could, but the portal
suddenly contracted until the exit stood half a span below them.

‘Floria!’ shrieked a stocky young man, standing at the edge
of the platform. ‘Jump.’

A yellow-haired woman reached up to him with both arms.
‘I’ll never make it, Gaz,’ she wailed. ‘It’s too far.’

‘I’ll catch you. Jump.’

Floria did her best, and her upstretched hands clasped onto
Gaz’s, but he was leaning out so far he couldn’t hold her. Her weight pulled
him over and they plunged down, wrapping their arms around each other, and into
the water beside the tower. Three of the dead converged on the point where they
had disappeared, and dived. None of them came up.

The tunnel shrank again. Now it was a span and a half below
them. Yggur appeared, labouring up its slope, for the failing portal was no
longer carrying people all the way. He reached the mouth, picked up a terrified
woman and hurled her bodily upwards onto the platform. He did the same with a
youth and an old man wearing spectacles as thick as marbles, then turned to the
few people below him, but they were sliding down towards the water where the
inner tower roof had been. It was completely gone now, breaking apart
underwater to form bobbing brown icebergs. The last of the dog-paddling
prisoners from the roof were pulled under.

Yggur tossed up one last prisoner, a slip of a girl clinging
leech-like to his left ankle, then perched on the rim and sprang upwards like a
gymnast. He would have made it save that his weight forced the portal’s exit
down. He hit the edge of the floor with his upper chest, bounced off, fell but
managed to catch on with one hand.

Flangers grabbed his wrist and tried to hold him, but Yggur
couldn’t get a grip on the ice and his fingers were slowly slipping free, and
Flangers was being pulled outwards as well.

Chissmoul ran and caught hold of Flangers with both hands
but couldn’t hold him either, and finally in desperation she stood on Yggur’s
hand with both feet. It held him just long enough for Colm to catch his other
hand, take his weight, and together they heaved him up.

‘Thanks,’ Yggur said, shaking his squashed fingers and
scowling at Chissmoul. ‘For such a little thing, you certainly weigh a lot.’

Demure little Chissmoul put her hands in the middle of his
chest, and alarm shivered across Yggur’s face, for he was standing on the
brink. Flydd chuckled.

‘Thank you, Chissmoul,’ Yggur said, more gracefully. ‘I
thought my end had come.’

She walked backwards and he followed her to safety. ‘But
you’ve lived more than a thousand years, surr. How could
you
die?’

‘I don’t age as other men do, but I can be killed like
anyone else.’ He looked down at the prisoners who had fallen out of the portal
and were thrashing in the water. ‘Poor devils.’

‘It could have been us,’ said Colm.

‘But it wasn’t,’ said Flydd, eyeing the Whelm, who were
scrambling into an opening in the wall behind Zofloc’s still. ‘We’ve been
spared so we can die a different but equally horrible death.’

‘Where do we go now?’

‘They must be heading for the Thousand Steps.’

‘They’re trying to cut us off from reaching the Numinator’s
eyrie,’ said Yggur. ‘How do we reach the Thousand Steps?’

‘They can’t be hard to find,’ said Flydd. ‘The tower isn’t
very wide up here. Follow me.’