by Ian Irvine
‘Aah!’ he cried out as the pain doubled and redoubled; he just had presence of mind enough to keep rubbing the blood in.
‘No, Nish!’
Flydd came back at a stumbling run and tried to drag him out. Nish kept him at bay with his feet. If his hand could be healed, even partially, it was worth the risk.
‘It’s not a sacrifice if it’s your own blood!’ Flydd added.
Drip, drip, drip. Nish felt sure it was doing some good; the pain was easing and the flesh didn’t seem quite so charred.
‘No, no!’ cried Flydd, trying to climb onto the slab.
A trail of large dark drops fell, but they were icy and burned glacially as Nish smeared them across the back of his hand and down his little and ring fingers, where the cold took away the pain completely.
‘It’s working!’ He held his hand up. Where he’d rubbed the cold blood in, new skin was rising up from charred flesh before his eyes; smooth skin, slightly darker than his own. ‘Another few drops like those and I’ll have my hand back, nearly as good as ever.’
‘Get out, Nish. There’ll be no more.’ Flydd’s voice was granite hard.
‘What’s the fool done now?’ said Colm from the other side.
Nish caught the last drop, rubbed it in and crawled out. ‘But it’s healing me …’
‘Those last drops were Vivimord’s blood, mingling with your own, you fool. And you don’t want –’ His eyes dropped to Nish’s hand, where new skin was still forming. ‘You don’t want any part of him in you; especially not his blood. Hold your hand out, quick!’
Nish obeyed. ‘What are you going to do?’
Flydd grabbed Colm’s sword and swung it high. Nish was slow to react; he couldn’t believe that Flydd was going to do it until the blade started to fall, then snatched his hand out of the way just in time.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he cried, backing away as the blade struck the floor. He was shaking.
‘Better no hand than one tainted by Vivimord’s black blood. Hold it out.’
‘No!’ Nish gasped. What had he done to himself?
Flydd looked as though he was going to come after Nish and amputate his hand by force, but finally he sighed, ‘It’s your funeral,’ and handed the blade back to Colm, who wore a curiously satisfied smile. He wasn’t displeased at what had happened, but Colm had never liked him, and the feeling was mutual.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Nish. ‘How could it be that bad?’
‘How the devil would I know?’ said Flydd. ‘Though I dare say we’ll find out soon enough. Better see if I can recover anything from this fiasco.’
He crawled under the slab, soon humping out again with a small crystal cupped in his hand. The faintest colours moved inside it. ‘She found a powered crystal, but then she encountered her nemesis, and it wasn’t Jal-Nish. So that’s why the soldiers weren’t wearing uniforms.’
‘Vivimord,’ said Nish, feeling faint. ‘That stinking, murderous maniac.’
‘And without her taphloid she’d be defenceless.’
‘Can you find him?’
‘I don’t think that will be too difficult,’ said Flydd. ‘It’s not her he wants, Nish. It’s you – and you’ve just linked yourself to him for the term of your natural life. If not beyond it.’
Taking a small phial made of white crystal from an inner pocket, he carefully filled it at the cursed flame and stoppered it tightly. Through the walls of the crystal the flames licked back and forth, red and black.
‘What’s that for?’ said Nish.
‘I don’t know yet, but it’s what the woman in red wanted me to do.’
And is she still in your mind, Nish fretted, possessing you and controlling your every thought and deed?
EIGHT
Vivimord had tidied himself up since Maelys last saw him. His healed, baby-smooth olive skin had been freshly oiled, including his long hairless skull, and the bloodstains washed away. The dark hollows surrounding his deep eyes were less prominent, while the black, egg-shaped swelling on his right cheek, where Maelys had struck him with her taphloid, had shrunk to the size of a plover’s egg.
He bound Maelys, gagged and blindfolded her, threw her knife away then carried her through the dark, walking with a slow, measured tread. They went down many flights of steps, along a passage with an uneven floor and through a stone door whose hinges hissed as it opened and closed. The swamp-creeper slime became ever more itchy as it dried but she couldn’t scratch herself.
On the other side the passage was smooth and clean; she couldn’t hear Vivimord’s footfalls, though shortly she made out a repulsive squelching which indicated that Phrune was close behind. She could smell him now: a revolting mixture of rancid oil, dead flesh and burst intestines, overpowering Vivimord’s own faint odour of crisped skin and the balm he’d used to dress his wounds. Or did Phrune still provide that service, even in death? And if he did, what other services did he continue to provide for his master?
Maelys shied away from that thought, for it was too appalling. She had to concentrate on getting free and fulfilling her responsibilities; she could not allow Vivimord to use her as bait for Nish. If she could get a hand free, she might draw the taphloid from her pocket, and then, look out!
She swung her knee up, so as to feel the comforting weight of the taphloid in the pocket of her pants, but it wasn’t there. It must have fallen out during her struggles. She was unarmed; helpless; lost without it.
More doors opened and closed, the last with a brittle crack as though stone had become frozen to stone over the depths of time. Warm, dusty air billowed out, and a faint smoky odour, though it wasn’t the chamber of the cursed flame this time. They had gone down many flights and up none, so she must be far below it now.
Vivimord’s footsteps echoed hollowly, indicating that this was a much larger chamber, deep within the mountain. As they went in she heard a faint whistling, which grew louder. Maelys counted fifty-four paces before he laid her down on a warm floor and removed the blindfold.
Some twenty paces away, a much larger, green-black flame whistled up from a structure of carved greenstone – a pedestal or circular altar big enough for a temple – and its light illuminated the whole chamber. She caught her breath, for she could have been in the audience room of a palace from the Histories, one suited to an emperor. Why was it hidden in an insignificant plateau deep within an empty rain-forest?
The chamber was painted with murals that, even in their barbaric brutality, were beautiful, though this was not the vicious brutality of the God-Emperor’s realm. Even Maelys could tell that. It was the glorious barbarism of a people who had fought for survival for so long, against impossible odds, that they knew nothing else.
The flame flared higher, emerald tongues within the black. Dead Phrune squelched to a stop behind her, his regurgitated entrails dangling and dripping. Maelys rolled away across the floor; Phrune came after her and stopped her with his fat foot.
Vivimord stared at the characters inscribed around the altar. ‘All endeavours fail,’ he read haltingly. ‘Time undoes all things. And rightly so. The Charon were great, but fatally flawed, and now they have gone to extinction.’
Maelys knew enough of the Histories to understand what he was talking about. A few Charon, the Hundred, had escaped out of the terrible void between the worlds thousands of years ago and taken Aachan, another of the Three Worlds, for their own. At that time, Aachan was inhabited by the great and powerful Aachim, but the Hundred, led by the greatest Charon of all, Rulke, had seized their world and kept them in thrall for thousands of years. The Charon were extremely long-lived but, in some cosmic irony no one had ever understood, most had been sterile on Aachan, and over the aeons the Hundred had slowly dwindled.
Three Charon had subsequently come to Santhenar: Rulke, Yalkara and Kandor. Kandor had been killed in ages past. Rulke had eventually been incarcerated in the Nightland, a special prison remote from the laws that governed the real world, but had escaped a
nd brought the Tale of the Mirror to its dreadful climax some two hundred and twenty years ago. He had been slain and the handful of surviving but sterile Charon, led by Yalkara, had gone back to the void, and to extinction.
‘Why did they build this place here?’ she said, speaking her thoughts aloud.
‘For the abyssal flame, I expect,’ said Vivimord. ‘It’s far more powerful than the cursed flame, and more difficult to use, but I’ll find a way.’
Phrune made a hideous gurgling noise. Maelys’s hackles rose.
‘Why, Phrune,’ said Vivimord teasingly, ‘are you trying to tell me something?’
Again the disgusting noise.
Vivimord smiled thinly. ‘You want to kill her – no, to skin her for me? You’ll have to wait, my dear Phrune. Maelys is bait; you know that. Come, we must set the trap.’
He dragged Maelys by her bound wrists into a smaller room which lay in darkness. ‘This was once a great lady’s bedchamber and will do nicely for the purpose I have in mind. But if you fail me, Maelys, a surprise awaits you below.’
Phrune gave another squelch; Maelys sensed dismay in him, or anger.
‘Surely I don’t have to remind you that you’re dead, Phrune?’ said Vivimord. ‘You have no feelings now – if you ever did. You may think that tormenting her will give you the same sadistic pleasure as before, but it’s not going to happen. You’ll never feel anything again.’
Squelch-squelch, quick and agitated.
‘Don’t be like that,’ Vivimord said with mock sorrow. ‘We can’t allow our base lusts to get in the way of the greater plan, can we? I too want Maelys to pay for what she did to us – I shudder for retribution – but we must keep to our purpose if we’re to get out of here alive, and turn Nish into the Deliverer. My Defiance are only leagues away, but first we have to reach them.’
Light sprayed from the tip of the whippy wooden rod he was holding, illuminating a blood-red bedchamber. Its walls were lined with red marble, the ceiling was shaped like a tent, though draped with several of the cord-thick webs that had so unnerved her previously, and the centre of the chamber was occupied by a large bed with eight posts and a three-spans-high canopy whose velvet curtains, though somewhat ragged and dusty, had lost none of their ancient magnificence.
‘Turn down the bed, Phrune,’ said Vivimord. Phrune slopped forward, but Vivimord added, ‘on second thoughts, I’ll do it myself – lengths of intestine on the sheets would not be conducive to romance.’
‘Romance?’ she said hoarsely.
Squelch-slurp, went Phrune.
‘Nor mere animal lust,’ said Vivimord. ‘Back, Phrune.’
Phrune retreated and Vivimord deftly flicked dust off the covers and turned down the bed.
‘Better test the equipment; it’s many years since I was last here.’
He touched the first of a line of polished platinum stubs on the head of the bed. Nothing happened. He pressed it harder and flames sprang up from engraved glass lanterns mounted on brackets around the four walls. Vivimord stroked his fingers clockwise around the stub; the flames dimmed. He touched another stub; a glow appeared in a pair of brass censers hanging to either side of a dusty chandelier. Trails of drifting fragrant smoke made Maelys’s nose tingle. Suddenly the colours in the room seemed brighter and richer, but she itched worse than ever.
As Vivimord touched the third platinum stub, a faint, mesmerising music began from pipes and drums, like the sound of players drifting up from a distant ballroom to be heard in snatches by a listener on a high balcony. He listened for a minute, head to one side and toe tapping, as if briefly he had been transported to another age, then pressed the stub again and the music faded.
A fourth stub was separate from the others but Vivimord had his hand positioned casually, as if to conceal it from her, and when he took his hand away the stub was no longer visible. She was wondering why when he strolled to the foot of the bed and stood looking down at her, rubbing his chin.
‘I wonder – what creature is it that you dislike above all others?’
Instinctively, she looked up at the tented ceiling, but the dimmed lanterns no longer illuminated it. Maelys shivered.
‘Swamp creepers disgust you, don’t they? I detected your screams when you were coming down the chimney. You can’t bear the sight of them, or the smell. And to have them crawling over you, trailing their slime across your face …’
Maelys clenched her jaw and swallowed. Let him think that; it might give her a chance.
‘They give you the horrors, and if you were trapped in the middle of a mound of them you might go insane, but they’re not what you fear most, are they? I can read you, little Maelys. You’re the bravest girl I’ve met in years, but you have a weakness.’
She didn’t reply.
‘Spiders?’ said Vivimord. ‘You don’t like scuttling creatures with lots of legs.’
‘I’m not afraid of spiders; I used to catch them in little pots and put them out of Nifferlin Manor all the time.’ That wasn’t quite true; she’d been terrified of the huge, warty toad-spiders that she’d sometimes encountered in the old ruins behind Nifferlin. Maelys was reminded of the thick, cord-like webs that had been everywhere in the chamber of the cursed flame. She’d never seen the creatures that had made the webs, but they must be worse than toad-spiders.
‘But you didn’t kill them, did you?’ Vivimord said. ‘You’re soft-hearted, and that’s a weakness.’
‘They were no danger to me.’
‘It still shows weakness. Do you know what an octopede is?’
She shook her head. To her left, dead Phrune let out a slippery, coughing bark; jeering laughter, perhaps. Vivimord was wrong, whatever he was talking about: Maelys feared no creature on Santhenar the way she feared her own kind, and especially Vivimord and Phrune. Animals could be violent and vicious, but they weren’t malicious and they did not torment other creatures for their own sick pleasure.
‘This is no laughing matter, Phrune,’ said Vivimord. ‘This is retribution, not revenge. Retribution is measured justice and, carried out dispassionately, it elevates us; revenge is a base emotion that eats us away from the inside and, in the end, destroys us.’ He studied his former acolyte. ‘You can’t understand, can you? The senses were everything to you, alas. That’s what brought you undone and robbed me of your service when I needed it most.’
Vivimord raised his right arm towards the ceiling. Maelys heard a faint zzzzzttt, then something long and corpse-white tumbled through the air, trailing a short length of corded web, and thumped down onto the bed.
Maelys gasped and clutched at her chest, for the creature had an elongated body nearly two spans long, rather flabby and warty, a long straight spine or sting at the rear, and short, plump legs extending sideways. A pair of fishhook-like claws jagged at the covers, then it shot over the side of the bed into the darkness underneath.
She shuddered violently and felt like throwing up. She could not have said why it filled her with such terror – Maelys was sure she’d never seen anything like it, even as a child – but it did and she couldn’t conceal it. What if an octopede had come upon her in the chimney? They had definitely been there.
Vivimord gave a thin, satisfied smile. ‘I thought as much. Get on the bed.’ Then he frowned. ‘No, not in that disgusting state. Go through that door; you will find a bathing chamber. Clean yourself up and come back.’ He gestured and her bonds fell away.
She hobbled on numb feet for the door he was pointing to: she had to get away. The squelching noises sounded behind her, but Vivimord said sharply, ‘Stop, Phrune. You’re dead; you no longer feel any lusts.’
Phrune made a mewling gurgle. Jerking the door open, she hurled herself through and banged it, feeling in the darkness for a catch or bolt, but there was none. However her fingers touched a glassy plate which began to glow faintly, as though the power that had once illuminated it was almost gone.
She was in a small triangular room lined with polished pink stone. It must
once have looked magnificent, but all was badly stained by brown seepage, and efflorescences of white and yellow crystals grew from the joins between the tiles. It could not have been used in centuries. Centrally, a tulip-shaped tub made from clear crystal rose from a stalk of the same material. Water with a yellow tinge flowed over the sides and down into recesses at the base; yellow concretions like button mushrooms had formed there and the room had a musty, dusty smell.
Maelys dared not disobey Vivimord; besides, the itching was almost unbearable. She didn’t undress, though: she took off her boots and socks, climbed three crystal steps and was sliding into the tulip tub when the door opened a fraction.
Vivimord’s voice said, ‘Don’t try anything. My guardian is watching you.’ The panel brightened fractionally.
Maelys’s eyes were drawn upwards to the dimly illuminated ceiling. A corded web stretched across it to a corner which lay in shadow, apart from a pair of large, garnet coloured eyes, close together, and the tip of one hook-shaped claw.
Muffling a cry, she crouched until the cool water was at neck level and scrubbed furiously at her clothes and skin, trying to rid herself of every remnant of dried slime. After a hasty glance at the octopede, which hadn’t moved, she ducked her head and washed her face, surfaced like a porpoise, checked on the watcher, then ducked again and raked her fingers through her hair. She wasn’t game to lose sight of the octopede for more than a few seconds. For such a flabby creature, the other one had been terrifyingly fast.
How did Vivimord plan to catch Nish? It looked as though he was planning a seduction, though Vivimord knew that Nish had rejected Maelys months ago, and that he was still obsessed with Irisis, whose perfectly preserved body was held in Jal-Nish’s Palace of Morrelune. Nish would do almost anything to have her back, and what if Vivimord, whose Black Arts had reanimated Phrune’s corpse, knew of a way to restore the dead to life? It was horrible; sick; depraved; so what did that make Nish?
