The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (67 page)

Huge, freezing drops splashed onto Maelys’s head. She looked
up, received an icy deluge in the face, then stumbled aside as a barrel-sized
chunk of rotten ice came crashing down. Only one splinter of the ice steeple
remained; the rest had collapsed into broken stubs like the teeth of a
rock-eating giant.

‘What – what’s happened?’ she said, shivering as the
icy water ran down her legs. Maelys couldn’t take it in – in the brief
time she’d been gone, the Numinator’s two-hundred-year-old empire had been
toppled.

The Numinator limped through the portal and her face
hardened as she surveyed the ruin of her eyrie. She splashed to the ice
barricade, looked down and the Whelm cried out, as one.

‘Aiieeee! The Master has returned. Hail the Numinator,
hail.’

They began to thump their weapons on the steps.
Hail, hail!
Maelys smelt their strong,
oily onion odour.

Yalkara stalked out, her red Charon eyes fixed on Maelys,
who edged away towards the fire-licked pond.

‘Chthonic fire burns ice, that’s what’s happened,’ said a
blood-covered man brandishing an odd, jagged sword with a Whelm’s ragged scalp
stuck halfway along the blade. She recognised Flydd’s voice, though not his
face, which was so bruised and swollen that he could barely see.

‘Xervish?’ said Maelys.

‘Where have you been?’ he said coldly.

‘I – I –’ How could she explain the way she and
Emberr had fallen for each other, or what they had done together, or how he had
died? She couldn’t bear to speak of it. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Maelys met Emberr – my son with Rulke, the son he
never knew he had – when you went to the Nightland,’ said Yalkara baldly.
‘They fell under each other’s spell and he called her back.’

‘That’s not true!’ cried Maelys. ‘I followed the Numinator
there because she had a poisoned knife; I was afraid she was going to kill
him.’

‘Why would I kill the one person I’ve been trying to create
since Rulke’s death?’ said the Numinator in astonishment. ‘The hollow knife
contained a potion to test his fertility.’

‘And he
was
fertile?’ said Yalkara.

‘Extremely.’

Yalkara, iron-faced, turned back to Flydd. ‘Maelys and
Emberr lay with one another, but chthonic fire on her killed him, and if she’s
pregnant the child comes to the void with me.’

‘Any child is mine!’ hissed the Numinator.

Yalkara went into a crouch, her fingers formed into blades.
The Numinator whirled and scooped a handful of white fire from the pond.

‘I wouldn’t,’ Yalkara said icily. ‘I brought chthonic fire
to the Three Worlds, and I can make it do what I want.’

‘If only you dared!’ The Numinator shook her flame-covered
fist in Yalkara’s face. ‘I’ve waited two centuries to bring you down.’

Maelys clutched at her taphloid, feeling the painful
thudding of her heart. If two such bitter enemies fought to the death, nothing
on Noom would survive it.

A very tall, strongly built man with frost-grey eyes limped
forwards, staring hungrily. ‘
You’re
the Numinator? No wonder you hid yourself up here and never allowed me to see
your face, since I’m the one person who could identify you,
Maigraith
.’

Maelys knew the name from the Histories but could not remember
which tale it came from.

The Numinator stiffened. ‘I no longer use that name, Yggur.
It died when Rulke was slain. I am the Numinator now.’

Yggur was another legend. He had fought on Flydd’s side
during the lyrinx war. Maelys took heart from it.

‘Numinator, then,’ said Yggur.

‘I owe you nothing,’ said the Numinator. ‘I never cared for
you when we were together; you never met my needs.’ She allowed the excess
flame to drip from her fingers into the pond. Yalkara slowly came upright.

‘And Rulke did,’ said Yggur stiffly. ‘That’s what it’s all
about, isn’t it?’ He swept an outstretched arm around the eyrie. ‘He’s been
dead all this time but you can’t let him go.’

‘Why would I want to?’ said the Numinator. ‘He was
everything to me, yet after he was slain, Yalkara,
his lifelong enemy
, stole his body and took it back to the void.’
She couldn’t maintain her self-control now; her anguish showed fleetingly.

‘Why were you lifelong enemies with Rulke?’ Yggur asked
Yalkara. ‘I’ve always wondered about that.’

‘Some ancient feud, long forgotten,’ she said dismissively.

Maelys didn’t believe her; Yalkara was hiding something.

Flydd turned to the Numinator. ‘What is the purpose behind
your bloodline project?

‘The Charon were cursed and going to extinction,’ said the Numinator.
‘I had nothing left of Rulke.’

‘You were pregnant to him,’ Yggur exclaimed.

‘A child wasn’t enough. I could not allow Rulke’s genius to
be lost.’

‘And so began your downfall, and the ruin of Santhenar.’

‘The war ruined Santhenar; I did not start it.’

‘But you prolonged it indefinitely. Or at least the
scrutators did, and you controlled them. The war should have been won in the
first ten years, when the lyrinx were still few; and weak. Because of you it
lasted a hundred and fifty years.’

‘My project took precedence. The moment I discovered I was
with child, I thought of nothing save mating my offspring with another
triune’s
, to create a new human species
with all of the Charon’s strengths and none of their weaknesses. A memorial to
Rulke.’

‘What’s a triune?’ asked Maelys.

No one answered.

‘I was there, remember?’ said Yggur, smouldering. ‘At the
end of the Age of the Mirror, after Llian told his Great Tale of those times,
you wanted to mate Karan and Llian’s firstborn child with yours.’

‘It was fitting,’ said the Numinator, her eyes glinting.
‘Our children were an almost perfect match.’

‘Why?’ said Maelys. Again, no one answered.

‘She was your friend,’ cried Yggur in a fury, ‘and it was
obscene! You manipulated everyone weaker than you, as you were manipulated by
Faelamor as a child. Karan refused you outright, but you would not give up your
twisted plan.’

‘You know nothing about the matter,’ she said, standing very
still.

‘On the contrary – after Karan’s and Llian’s deaths, I
took the trouble to learn how she came to be driven to that terrible crime. All
she wanted was to live a normal life with her family at Gothryme Manor, and in
all the Histories no one deserved it more. But you would not allow it. You
pestered her, harassed her, and when she continued to refuse you, you kidnapped
Karan’s firstborn, Sulien, when she was just fourteen, and gave her to your
thuggish son, Rulken.’

‘I had promised her to him,’ said the Numinator, as though
that were justification enough.

‘You had no right!’ Yggur thundered. ‘But Karan stole her
daughter back then hid all her children, so you destroyed Llian’s name as a
Teller. You made him out to be Llian the Liar and had his
Tale of the Mirror
, the greatest and most truthful of all the Great
Tales, banned, then rewritten by the scrutators.’

Flydd’s head whipped around. Maelys had never seen him look
so outraged. ‘You used us to turn a Great Tale into a lie?’

The Numinator did not reply and Yggur went on. ‘Finally
Karan could take no more. You drove her insane and, in that madness, she killed
Llian and her children, and herself.’

‘Oh!’ whispered Maelys, cold with shock and barely able to
take it in. The day was already too full, with love, with dreadful revelations,
and with untimely and undeserved death. ‘How?’

‘One day, at dawn,’ said Yggur, ‘she hurled them from the
top of the ruined city-tower of Shazmak, where they had been hiding from you,
into the terrible flood of the mighty river Garr, which no one has ever
survived. I questioned the witnesses, Idlis and Yetchah, two Whelm who had once
served me.’

‘I also questioned them,’ said the Numinator. ‘Karan killed
her family just to thwart me.’ She bit off each word. ‘She always resented me.’

‘I knew Karan well,’ said Yggur. ‘She was the best friend
anyone could have had, and you destroyed her.’

‘I wish I’d known her,’ Maelys said softly. She felt a
closer kinship with Karan, dead two hundred years, than with anyone here, for
they were both linked by the Numinator’s monstrous scheme. If she was prepared
to destroy a friend to get what she wanted, what would she do to Maelys?

‘I only wanted one of her children,’ said the Numinator.
‘She had three.’

It was impossible to come to terms with such a wicked act,
or with the Numinator’s justifying it as though it was her right. And now she
was doing it again, she and Yalkara fighting over the fruit of Maelys’s body
like dogs over a corpse. I will never let it happen, she thought. I’ll fight
the whole world for what is mine.

The taphloid burned between her breasts.
Help!
The Numinator cocked her head as
if she had heard the cry as well, but her face froze and she turned away.

Help!
There it was
again, stronger this time, and fleetingly Maelys had a vision of booted feet
squelching through calf-deep mud. Who could it be? The taphloid cooled and
something began to spin inside it, shaking it like a spinning top, before
slowly running down.

‘So that’s what all this is about,’ Flydd was saying. ‘Karan
thwarted you, so you took revenge on the world by creating the Council of Scrutators.’

‘It had nothing to do with revenge, Flydd,’ Yggur said
wearily. ‘Maigraith and I were lovers once, and I know her better than anyone.’

‘You never knew me at all,’ she snapped. ‘That was your
problem.’

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘though in my seven years as your prisoner
I’ve worked out what you were up to down below.’

‘With the bloodline registers?’ Flydd squinted at Yggur
through swollen eyelids.

‘Precisely,’ said Yggur. ‘When Karan thwarted you,
Numinator, it only stiffened your resolve to find another way to achieve your
goal, didn’t it?’

She did not reply. Maelys watched her out of the corner of
her eye, but could not tell what she might be thinking. More rotten ice fell,
peppering them with fire-webbed fragments, though none touched Yalkara.

‘You devoted yourself to the mastery of your Arts over many
years, Numinator,’ said Yggur, ‘until a time came when the guiding Council of
Santhenar grew weak. You crushed it and set up your own, the Council of
Scrutators.’

‘Why?’ Colm ground out.

Maelys hadn’t noticed him in the shadows to her right. She
gave him a tentative smile, but he returned a look of such cold fury that she
flinched.
Thief
, he mouthed. He must
have found out about Flydd taking the mimemule, and Colm was not a forgiving
man.

‘I’m beginning to understand,’ said Flydd. ‘Maigraith
– the Numinator – and Karan were incredibly rare people. They were
both
triune
– they bore the
blood of three of the four human species – and it gave them unique but
very different talents.’

‘And by breeding their children together,’ said Yggur, ‘the
Numinator hoped to create quartine children; ones having the blood of all four
human kinds. If any quartines survived, and weren’t cursed by the madness that
is the fate of most triune, they might become the foundation of a new human
species, one greater than all the others put together. That was the Numinator’s
goal, as an eternal memorial to Rulke, and she has never given it up.’

Was the Numinator one of the mad ones, Maelys wondered. If
so, it was a most particular, directed and obsessive kind of madness,
completely lacking in empathy for others.

‘No species crafted by a mere human could ever equal
our
kind,’ sneered Yalkara.

‘Yet your kind will be extinct when you die,’ snapped the
Numinator.

‘I don’t understand why you needed the scrutators,’ said
Maelys.

The Numinator did not reply.

‘What happened to your child, Numinator?’ Maelys persisted.
She had to know. ‘Why didn’t you –?’

‘She had twins,’ said Yggur. ‘Illiel and –’

‘No one else tells
my
story,’ grated the Numinator. ‘I bore twin sons from Rulke’s seed. Illiel came
first and I named him for my Faellem father, Galgilliel. Illiel was small and
golden-skinned, very Faellem in appearance, and of course I did not take to
him.’

‘Why not?’ said Maelys.

‘Maigraith was brought up by Faelamor, and held in her
thrall all her life,’ said Yggur, ‘and she has always resented her Faellem
heritage. You need look no further to understand why she’s the way she is
–’

The Numinator flicked her fingers at Yggur and he doubled
over, struggling for breath. ‘But next,’ she continued as though he had not
interrupted, ‘after three days of the most awful labour, came Rulken.’ Her
stern, sad face lit up in memory. ‘He was big and dark and strong, the image of
his father, and from birth I taught him that he was the chosen son of a chosen
people.’

‘He was a spoiled, angry brute,’ said Yggur, thin-lipped.

‘Karan robbed him of what was his by right – her
daughter!’ the Numinator said, then faltered. ‘But the curse of the Charon
continued in him. Rulken spread his seed widely but died young and only ever
produced one child. Unfortunately, Gilhaelith proved unsuitable.’

‘Gilhaelith?’ frowned Yggur. ‘The tetrarch we knew, who died
– turned to crystal – at the end of the war?’

‘Tetrarch is another word for
quartine
,’ said the Numinator. ‘Gilhaelith took that title to mock
my failure. He was flawed; the curse was in him too.’

‘So you were forced to turn to Illiel,’ said Yggur, ‘the son
you’d scorned and sent back to live with his own kind.’

‘What
kind
?’ said
Flydd.

‘Not all of the Faellem returned to Tallallame at the end of
the Time of the Mirror,’ said Yggur. ‘Some remained where they had lived for
thousands of years, in the endless cold forests of the south.’