The Destiny of the Dead (The Song of the Tears Book 3)

by Ian Irvine

He was watching them head down the hill when he saw the bobbing light again. It shot up at Boobelar’s face, flared to a dazzling, spiky ball, then Nish heard a double thump.

  ‘Got the swine,’ Flydd said with quiet satisfaction. ‘Run up to the camp and send some men down, lad. We won’t harm him.’

  Huwld ran off.

  When Nish could see clearly, Flydd was tying Boobelar by the fading light of his spiky globe. ‘So those lights were you, wandering around the battlefield?’ said Nish.

  ‘Told you they’d be useful,’ said Flydd. ‘I saw him earlier, robbing the bodies, and remembered you saying Boobelar had only come for plunder. I guessed it was him and set a trap.’

  ‘I wonder you didn’t kill the bastard! I wish you had.’

  ‘He’s going to show us the way over Liver-Leech Pass,’ said Flydd.

  ‘You’d better hang onto him, then,’ said Nish, taking back his sabre and resisting the urge to carve Boobelar up with it. ‘He’s the slimiest thug I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter. He’d steal your eyeballs if you weren’t looking.’

  Shortly the militia had packed up camp, and they headed up the ridge in the dark.

  ‘All right, Boobelar,’ said Flydd to the stumbling, reeking soldier, who was securely tied, with a rope leading from his bound hands to the muscular militiamen behind him. ‘Show us the way to Liver-Leech.’

  ‘Stuffed if I will and you can’t make me.’

  Flydd reversed the staff and pressed its open serpent mouth up against the soldier’s chest. Boobelar looked at it blearily but did not flinch. He met Flydd’s eyes.

  Flydd grinned. ‘We’ll see about that.’ He lifted a half-full wineskin off Boobelar’s back, sniffed the contents, grimaced and tossed it over the steep edge of the ridge. ‘Hey!’ cried Boobelar, ‘that’s neat brandy.’

  ‘And now you’ve lost it. Throw him down on his face, lads, and search him thoroughly. Take everything.’

  They did so, while Boobelar cursed them in a slurred monotone, and recovered several small packets which had been overlooked earlier. Flydd sniffed them one by one, ‘Nif sap,’ and began to toss them away.

  ‘It might be an idea to keep some,’ Nish said quietly. ‘As a bribe, if all other means of coercion fail. Besides, I’m not sure he’s ever been fully sober; he might not be able to function.’

  Flydd nodded, slipped the last packet into his pocket and said, ‘Which way, Boobelar, my friend?’

  ‘Follow this ridge up until you reach the cliffs,’ he snarled. ‘Then jump!’

  ‘How do you feel about being tied to a tree and abandoned without any drink or nif?’ said Flydd pleasantly. ‘It could take you a fortnight to die, and it’d be the worst fortnight of your miserable life.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare!’ Boobelar grated, straining at his ropes. ‘I’m the captain of the Rigore militia.’

  ‘We’re not in Gendrigore now, and I just caught you robbing the honourable dead, which is a capital crime.’

  ‘Kill me, then,’ said Boobelar. ‘What do I care?’

  ‘Don’t tempt me,’ said Flydd, taking the last packet of dried nif sap from his pocket and holding it over the edge. ‘Shall I drop it, or keep it until you take us across Liver-Leech safely?’

  Boobelar cursed him into eternity, then said in a saliva-choked voice, ‘How do I know you’ll keep your word?’

  ‘Because I’m unlike you in every respect.’

  ‘All right, you bastard!’

  ‘Which way?’

  ‘I’ll show you!’

  ‘Tell me first, in case you have an accident on the way,’ said Flydd nastily. ‘Or get tied up.’ He chuckled.

  Boobelar made a gurgling sound in his throat.

  ‘And it’d better be the right way,’ Flydd added. ‘If you don’t give me the right directions, you don’t get the nif.’

  ‘Up there,’ said Boobelar, pointing with a foot. ‘Veer along the base of the cliffs to the left until you see a goat track running across the mountainside. Follow it towards the gap between a pair of small peaks shaped like clothes pegs – if you can see them.’

  ‘You’d better see them.’

  ‘Climb along the crest of a ridge, very steep on both sides, then crawl along several narrow ledges, with a hundred-span fall on the left, for half a league, and in through the gap between the peg peaks – that’s Liver-Leech. Cross the pass then keep to the right-hand track behind the white-thorn peak for about four or five hours, then take the left-hand spur down to the main track across the range. You’ll see Blisterbone Pass above you, not a quarter of a league away.’

  ‘That’s all the directions you have?’ Flydd said quietly.

  ‘All I can remember.’

  Flydd bestowed a mirthless smile on Boobelar. ‘Lead on, Captain.’

  ‘I’ll see you dead first,’ said Boobelar.

  ‘I doubt it.’

  Nish resisted the urge to wallop Boobelar’s backside with the sabre – that would be petty. ‘It might be better if I lead,’ he said. ‘The sot might take us over the edge just for the hell of it.’

  NINE

  It wasn’t completely dark, for the starlight was bright at this altitude, but every footstep had to be placed with care on the steep, wet rock.

  ‘Take it slowly,’ Nish said over his shoulder to Flydd. ‘Test every step before you put your weight on it. The first part looks the worst.’

  He adjusted the serpent staff, which was digging into the small of his back. The night was cool and the staff pleasantly warm, sometimes too warm. He could sense the roiling heat inside it, presumably the same force that had caused it to blaze white-hot earlier. How much, or how little, would be required to release it? And if it was a trap, what kind of a trap, and how could they avoid it?

  It was not possible to think of an answer. He swallowed and looked ahead. Starlight touched the wet ledge here and there, a perilous path of broken stone no wider than his shoulders. Nish tested his first step. The rough rock sloped outwards but was not slippery. Then his foot slid sideways – well, not dangerously slippery. So far.

  Flydd came behind him, followed by Boobelar and the three men who held his ropes, next Huwld, Flangers, Chissmoul and her nervous friend Allioun, and after that the militia, roped together in groups of eight with the strongest men in the middle. If the leader put a foot wrong and fell, Nish hoped that the others could hold him. And if they could not, only eight would be lost, not the entire militia.

  Halfway across the cliff, something skidded underfoot and he smelled manure. ‘Careful here; goat turds.’

  He scraped it off his sole and continued, and heard part of his words repeated all the way to the rear. ‘Careful turds. Careful turds.’

  The trek was a nightmare of rain and wind as they crept along one precipitous ledge after another, each higher than the previous one and more exposed to the intermittent rain and the unceasing wind, which grew ever colder until Nish began to worry that they would get frostbite on their noses. After an hour a heavy overcast came up, the darkness became absolute, and every step had to be made by feel. Without Boobelar, who seemed to be navigating on instinct, they would never have found the way.

  ‘This is madness,’ Nish said after they had spent half an hour on the third ledge, during which time they had managed just two hundred shuffling paces. ‘At this rate it’ll take us days to reach Liver-Leech – if we get there at all. We’ve got to have light.’

  Though the Gendrigoreans were used to climbing in wet and slippery conditions, this trek was testing their agility to the limits and there had been several nasty mishaps already. As the night wore on and people wearied, someone was bound to slip and, if the rest of the group did not brace instantly, all eight would be lost.

  ‘Torches will be seen from a long way away,’ snapped Flydd.

  ‘In this weather?’ Nish was desperately trying to remain calm and positive, even if everyone else was falling to pieces.

  ‘There’s nothing to burn, anyhow. There’s
no wood up here.’ Flydd had turned surly again. His intestines were troubling him and whenever he reached the end of a ledge he would disappear behind a rock, though afterwards his discomfort did not appear to have been relieved.

  ‘What if you conjured some with the mimemule?’

  ‘At the moment you’d get more light out of a firefly.’

  ‘You’ve got to do something,’ said Nish, deliberately echoing Flydd’s earlier words. ‘Without light, we fail. What about a few of those little spiky globes you made earlier?’

  ‘Sorry, they took more out of me than I thought.’ Flydd stopped, swaying on his feet.

  The word was passed back, ‘Stopping, stopping,’ and the exhausted militia hunched down in their cloaks.

  ‘I can’t make fire either,’ he added, as if to forestall Nish.

  ‘Not even with the serpent staff? I sometimes feel that I could light a fire with mine, if I were a mancer. Clearsight keeps showing me something hot and churning inside it.’

  ‘I can’t feel anything in mine,’ said Flydd.

  ‘Perhaps we should swap, then.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Flydd said hastily.

  ‘I thought creating light was an easy charm.’

  ‘It usually is, though I’ve found it rather difficult since renewal.’

  ‘Have you got the strength to transport some light here?’ said Nish.

  ‘From where? The whole range is in darkness.’

  ‘Toadstools!’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Flydd.

  ‘Conjure one of those luminous toadstools out of the forest; we can cut it up and tie it to our boots.’

  ‘You’re touched in the head ...’ said Flydd. He thought for a minute or two, then went on. ‘But then again, toadstools don’t weigh much; I might be able to manage one.’ He snorted. ‘And the good thing is, if that bastard Klarm happens to be zooming by on his precious air-sled, he’ll think he’s gone mad.’

  He wasn’t the only one. When, ten minutes later, a huge, greenly luminous and embarrassingly phallic toadstool came soaring through the sky, bolt upright, three militiamen were so astonished that they nearly went over the edge.

  Aimee, the tiny, bird-like woman sitting next to Clech, went into a fit of giggling which spread right through the militia. She couldn’t regain her composure until Clech held her upside down by the legs, a remedy which, evidently, he had used a number of times before, since Aimee accepted it without complaint.

  Everyone felt better afterwards; the laughter had cleared away the exhaustion and even helped with their grief. Nish sliced the toadstool into discs and passed them back, and everyone set to, peeling off the luminous skin and binding strips to the toes and heels of their boots. In Boobelar’s case, they also tied strips around his scarred forehead so they would recognise him in the dark.

  He was sobering up; he also appeared to be coming down from the nif intoxication he’d been under for weeks, and was behaving very oddly, one minute shouting and waving his arms, the next whining and wailing, or lying down and refusing to get up. Only the promise of a healthy dose of nif at the end of the trip could get him moving, and that lure was taking longer to work each time.

  Light made all the difference and they headed on at a good speed, up ledges so high that patches of ice began to appear on them, and the rain turned to sandblasting grains of sleet. They trekked along a knife-blade ridge, then another at right-angles to it, heading towards the invisible peg peaks that framed the precipitous Liver-Leech Pass, until it was all Nish could do to put one glowing foot in front of another.

  The immensity of the mountains contracted to the span or two he could see in front of him, the night lowered until it was a blank shroud over his head and shoulders, and time stretched out until it could only be measured by one step, then another, and another.

  But with the light, and Boobelar’s blasphemously snarled directions whenever they looked like going astray, they reached Liver-Leech well after midnight, a good hour later than Nish had hoped.

  ‘We’ll rest briefly on the other side,’ he said, ‘and then we’ve got to get a move on, or it’ll be dawn before we’re in sight of Blisterbone. Attacking in daylight would be suicidal – they’d shoot us down before we got close.’

  Liver-Leech Pass was a vertical-sided ravine between the peg peaks, hundreds of spans deep but only one span wide at the bottom, and floored with slick ice. It was also hundreds of paces long and the wind howled so furiously in their faces that they had to get down and crawl.

  Once they’d crossed the pass, and were sheltering out of the worst of the wind on the ledge that ran around the range to their right, Nish called a brief halt. Everyone needed food and hot drink but there was no fuel up here, so they munched on their hard rations, sipped the icy water from their half-frozen water skins and took what rest they could.

  There was no cloud on this side of the range and starlight illuminated the ledge relatively well. Nish could see it curving more or less horizontally around the mountainside and knew that they were now on the other side of the white-thorn peak. It was still hours to the track that led up to Blisterbone, but by comparing his mental image of Curr’s mud map with Boobelar’s directions, he felt sure he was going the right way.

  Boobelar ate and drank nothing; he had even stopped whining. He took off his boots to shake stones out of them, but the smell was so nauseating that everyone near him, even Huwld, cried, ‘Put them on again.’

  He did so, then passed his hand to his mouth, chewed, then turned a malicious, broken-toothed smile on Nish and Flydd.

  ‘Must have had some nif in there,’ said Nish as they set out again. ‘I wonder what he’s planning?’

  ‘Well, we won’t need him much longer,’ said Flydd, miming a slash across the throat.

  They hadn’t been going for more than ten minutes, however, when there was a ruckus behind Nish and he turned to see Boobelar hurl himself over the side of the ledge, dragging the nearest roped man with him.

  Nish scrambled back to grab the rope as the second man braced himself, but he was close to the edge and the weight pulled him over as well. The third man cried out and toppled just as Nish caught the flying rope, but had to let go or it would have taken him.

  ‘Light, quick!’ he yelled. Huwld was staring over the side in horror. ‘Quick, lad,’ said Nish kindly. ‘Run and collect some lights.’

  Huwld did so and they attached strips of glowing fungus to a rope, which took several minutes, and lowered it over. There was a narrow ledge only a span below, but it was empty. A broader ledge ran along out of sight, far below.

  ‘There they are,’ said Nish, ‘down about fifteen spans, on the broad ledge. I’ll go down.’ He pulled the rope up and began to tie it around himself, though he had little hope that anyone would still be alive after such a fall. ‘I’m sorry, Huwld,’ he said, giving him a quick hug, but the boy pulled away and covered his face with his hands.

  ‘Not you, Nish,’ said Flydd, taking the rope. ‘Who’s a climber?’

  ‘I am,’ said Clech’s bird-like friend, Aimee.

  ‘Are you really?’ said Flydd. ‘Come here.’

  Clech personally tied the rope around her and lowered her down. The lighted rope end moved back and forth, then she called. ‘I – they’re dead, Nish.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said faintly. ‘I mean, our three are dead …’

  ‘What about Boobelar?’ Flydd said in a strangled voice.

  ‘The rope’s been cut.’ Aimee checked all around with her light, and over the side. ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘I still don’t understand how the bastard got away,’ Nish muttered when they headed on. That disaster, and the loss of three more men, had cast a pall over the rest of the trek.

  ‘He must have stolen a knife in the dark,’ said Clech, ‘cut his rope then dropped onto the narrow ledge and pulled the others over. Then got out of sight damn quick.’

  ‘How could he steal a knife? His
hands were tied behind his back.’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Flydd.

  ‘If he knew where to throw himself over safely,’ said Nish, ‘he must know the country really well. Where do you think he’s gone?’

  ‘Down to betray us to Klarm’s army,’ Flydd said quietly, so no one else would hear. ‘And he’ll know the quickest way to find it.’

  ‘We’d better go,’ said Nish. ‘And pray Klarm is a long way away.’

  He pressed on in the starlight, moving as fast as he could without being reckless, but it was never fast enough. What if the army was just down beyond the ridge? If Boobelar reached it before they attacked the pass, Klarm could fly the air-sled up to Blisterbone with reinforcements and warn the defenders, and their faint hope of taking the pass would be lost.

  Four hours later, after an exhausting forced march without a break, they staggered off the final ledge onto the crest of another precipitous ridge and followed it down until it curved back towards the white-thorn mountain, where Nish saw the main path, which ran all the way to Taranta, curving around below them. They’d done it.

  He pulled off the fading luminous strips and collapsed in a heap. He was looking up at Blisterbone Pass from the other side of the Range of Ruin. Now for the difficult part, he thought.

  ‘I smell smoke,’ Clech whispered. ‘The guards at the pass must have a fire, the swine.’

  ‘Swine,’ Nish echoed dully, for the chill had begun to seep through his damp clothes as soon as he stopped moving. He was utterly exhausted after the all-night trek; they all were. He wanted nothing more than to lie down by a fire, wrap himself in blankets, drink half a skin of wine and drift off to sleep for a week, but he could not afford to rest either body or mind; not here. If he lost the edge, he’d never get it back.

  He checked down the mountain, but saw no sign of camp fires nor moving lights, though that did not mean Klarm’s army was far away. And if Boobelar had reached them already he would be leading them up the track, burning for revenge. Nish shivered and rubbed his cold hands.

  ‘Stay low,’ he said quietly to the militia. ‘We’re not far below the pass. Don’t talk. Have something to eat and take a few minutes’ rest, and then we attack.’