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

by Ian Irvine

  ‘The Numinator is still here,’ said Flydd, his eyes darting again. ‘Were he, she or it gone, the tower would have collapsed into a formless rubble of ice.’

  ‘The destruction of the nodes might have destroyed the Numinator,’ said Maelys.

  ‘That tragedy undoubtedly weakened it,’ said Flydd, ‘but would have angered it too. Beware! This tower is maintained by the Art and, whoever the Numinator is, its power is far greater than mine.’

  ‘Then why did we come here?’ said Maelys. ‘How can we hope to prevail?’

  They went in slowly, the crusted ice crunching underfoot, until the entrance could no longer be seen. The spaces were dimly lit by light transmitted through the ice and all had an eerie grandeur, a majestic simplicity, but there was something vaguely familiar about the place, too. Maelys was studying the glyphs etched deep into the ice along a wall when she realised what they were.

  ‘Xervish, these characters are also like the ones we saw on the obelisk. Does that mean this place is … Charon?’

  ‘The Charon are extinct, I told you; had they built it, here, the ice would have collapsed long ago.’ Flydd’s voice was a trifle hoarse.

  ‘Like the Nightland was supposed to?’

  He did not reply to that, but went on, ‘The Numinator may not be human. And if not, that would explain something I’ve always wondered about.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Maelys.

  ‘How it has lived so long. We know it’s at least a hundred and seventy years old, for it was a cunning, experienced sorcerer when it took on the original Council of Santhenar, and it was powerful enough to defeat the combined mancery of the greatest mages of all. Only the Charon, Faellem and Aachim were naturally long-lived, but both Charon and Faellem are gone.’

  ‘The Numinator must be Aachim, then,’ said Maelys. ‘There are still plenty of Aachim on Santhenar.’

  ‘No Aachim would decorate their architecture with Charon characters.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Colm, who had come up behind them.

  ‘Because a hundred Charon took the Aachim’s world from them, and held them in thrall for thousands of years. They hated their masters with a passion we could never understand, therefore the Numinator can’t be Aachim, either.’

  After walking through one featureless ice hall after another, they entered a large rectangular room, a good hundred spans long and wide, and at least ten spans high. Its walls were lined with shelves, stretching from floor to ceiling, that had been formed from clear ice, and upon them stood row upon row of large books, like merchants’ ledgers, bound in red or brown leather.

  ‘Ah!’ said Flydd. It was a deeply felt sigh of understanding.

  ‘What?’ said Maelys.

  He didn’t answer, nor did he go to the shelves. Flydd stood inside the doorway, staring towards the far end of the room and wearing an enigmatic smile. Maelys waited for a minute or two, but when neither he nor Colm moved she went towards the nearest shelves; she had to satisfy her curiosity.

  To her surprise, she could read the writing down the spines of the ledgers. The nearest one said, Bloodline Register 13,809, Thurkad. The ledgers on the shelves nearby bore different numbers, but all had the same place name, for Thurkad had once been the greatest city in the world.

  ‘Bloodline register?’ said Maelys aloud. ‘What does that mean?’

  Flydd did not reply, so she eased the register from the shelf and opened it. It was huge and very heavy – she could barely hold it. Inside, the page was ruled into columns, with names on the left – women’s names and dates, notes on their monthly cycles, state of health, male names with descriptions as well as lists of abilities, talents and ancestral charts, details about sexual congress, and a variety of symbols. Occasional rows contained details related to pregnancies – weight changes, complications, miscarriages and births. The last column was headed Gifts and Talents, but she could not tell what the symbols meant.

  Maelys knew what it was immediately, for Clan Nifferlin had kept such records for their prized breeding animals.

  She snapped the register closed, feeling ill. ‘It’s a stud book, but for people. This is what the scrutators were doing for the Numinator. Why, Xervish?’

  He was still staring into the distance. ‘I don’t think anyone ever found out – not even Chief Scrutator Ghorr, may he still lie rotting in the sump of the Uttermost Abyss.’

  Maelys took down another book from a different place, and subsequently a third from the other side of the room. The places, names and dates were different, though the contents were the same everywhere. ‘But …’ She stared down the endless rows of the vast room until they blurred in the distance, trying to work out how many registers there were; how many names there had to be. It was beyond her ability to calculate. ‘There must be millions of names here.’

  ‘Every single person who has lived in over a century,’ Flydd said soberly. ‘It’s the reason why the Numinator set up the Council of Scrutators in the first place.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Colm. ‘The scrutators ran the world.’

  ‘And we were very good at it,’ said Flydd. ‘We ran it ruthlessly, but efficiently – for the Numinator.’

  ‘Why didn’t you all get together and overthrow it?’

  ‘The Chief Scrutators never wanted to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because the Numinator is different to every other villain you’ve ever heard of in the Histories. The Numinator was never a rival for the power of the scrutators; it didn’t give a fig for power, conquest or wealth. As long as the scrutators did their job and sent the bloodline registers, the Numinator never interfered.’

  ‘Surely some of the other scrutators must have objected to being told what to do?’

  ‘Oh, they did,’ said Flydd.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Do you remember my scars, before I took renewal?’

  Maelys shivered at the memory.

  ‘I was one of the lucky ones,’ said Flydd. ‘I lived.’

  ‘But surely … the Numinator must have given the Council that power for a reason …?’

  ‘The only reason we ever had was to complete the blood-line registers.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Maelys.

  ‘That’s all the Numinator ever asked of us.’

  ‘For more than a hundred years?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Why?’

  Flydd shrugged. ‘I didn’t know, but we’ll learn nothing more here.’

  It was incomprehensible to Maelys that anyone could have pursued such a monumental project so single-mindedly, and for so long. How could anyone develop a plan that might take hundreds of years to complete? What could drive them to it? And had the Numinator succeeded, or failed?

  They continued through the hall of registers to the far end, then out and down a broad flight of steps into a lower level. Some colour had come back to Colm’s cheeks – the mystery had aroused his curiosity. Maelys prayed it would last, for the cold rage that was his other face was unbearable.

  This chamber was much smaller – no larger than one of the public halls in Nifferlin Manor. It was divided into a number of cases made of ice, though here the ice was cloudy and it was hard to make out what was inside. The shapes were suggestive, though, and despite the cold the room bore a faint, unpleasant odour of decay.

  ‘They look human,’ said Maelys.

  ‘It’s a cemetery,’ said Colm. ‘The ground here must freeze as hard as iron, and when people die there would be no way to bury them –’ The bitterness was back. He would never bury his sister, nor any of his lost family.

  But the Numinator was more powerful than all the great mancers of Santhenar put together, Maelys thought. It could easily thaw a plot of ground to bury the dead. There had to be some other explanation, and it might lie inside the cases.

  The nearest was a rectangular box, rather larger than a coffin, with walls a hand-span thick; she could see nothing through them. Th
e lid was thinner, though. She put her hand on it and could feel the cold searing through her glove.

  ‘Come away, Maelys,’ said Flydd, who was standing in the middle of the room, head tilted to one side as if listening to something on the edge of hearing. ‘Whatever is inside, it’s the Numinator’s private business.’

  It seemed an extraordinary thing for him to say, after bringing them all this way. Maelys couldn’t hear anything, and she wasn’t going to stop now. ‘If we can’t look around, we should never have come here.’

  ‘We should never have come here,’ echoed Colm.

  Maelys forced her gloved fingers into the gap between the lid and the case, and lifted. The lid was very heavy, and she could only raise it halfway. She gasped.

  A young man lay within. He was naked and his skin was a blotchy purple, as if he had been out in the cold for hours, but there were blue-grey patches of decay here and there, and the smell of corruption was stronger. His yellow eyes were open and staring, though he was undoubtedly long dead, but there was no sign of what had killed him.

  ‘What strange eyes.’ They were oval, and more catlike than human, with pupils that were contracted to vertical slits. He had a long face with a bulging forehead and a raised crest running across the top of his shaven skull, though his chin was just a minuscule bump. Ice crystals clustered on his lips and at his nostrils; feathers of ice hung from his lower eyelids.

  ‘Maelys, come away,’ said Flydd, taking her elbow and dragging her aside.

  ‘Xervish, what is this place?’ She jerked free and stumbled to the next case. It contained a young woman’s body. Her head was shaven and she too had the cat eyes and the crest over her head, though hers was not nearly as prominent as the young man’s had been. And she had three pairs of breasts.

  ‘Xervish?’ she said. ‘Who are they? What are they?’

  The third case held another woman, apparently normal save that her fingers were twice the length of human fingers and could have wrapped right around the back of her hand. As with the others, there was not a mark on her to indicate how she had died.

  ‘She must be Aachim,’ said Colm, who had followed her. ‘The Aachim have exceptionally long fingers.’

  Flydd was beside Maelys now, staring in, then abruptly he thrust the lid down. ‘Enough! Come.’

  ‘Xervish?’ she repeated.

  ‘I – don’t – know!’ He caught her arm, jerking her away. ‘Don’t pry into what is none of your business or you’ll end up in the next box.’

  He hauled her down to the other end of the chamber, walking very fast. Maelys tried to pull free but he wouldn’t let go; she stumbled along with him, feeling a mixture of fear and resentment.

  And the bodies had all smelled, she realised, as if they had been going off, though that did not make sense either. In the cold rooms on the south side of Nifferlin Manor, haunches of meat had kept all winter, and there had been hardly any smell, yet Noom was far colder than Nifferlin. Bodies should have lain here in their ice cases preserved forever.

  They did not need to open the boxes in the next chamber, for the ice was clearer here and she could see through the walls. Each box contained a young man or woman who had apparently died in the prime of life, but all had some oddity: one a flaring crest like a sail growing out of the top of his head, another a tail extending down to the back of her knees, while a third had knuckles the size of lemons, but no fingernails.

  Maelys no longer wanted to know the truth about the Numinator. She tried not to look as Flydd led her along through chamber after chamber on this subterranean level, but could not prevent herself from staring at each new body, each fresh horror. And they were horrors here, for the dead men and women grew ever stranger until they were scarcely human at all.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Flydd flung her through the door into the next chamber, then froze, grey-faced and haggard. He looked like an old man again.

  A bench of ice ran along either side of the room, and arranged along it were skeletons no more human than the bodies in the cases. One had cat feet and a tail with traces of orange fur still clinging to it, another had fingers half the length of its body. Maelys turned away, sickened, but in front of her were more skeletons in huge ice amphorae, and others suspended from the ceiling on wires, the bones held together with fine gold threads.

  ‘It looks like a schoolroom,’ said Maelys.

  ‘Perhaps it was,’ Flydd said sombrely.

  The room after that smelled putrid. It contained smaller jars full of preserved, unborn creatures with huge heads, staring, lidless eyes and unpleasantly non-human features. Many of the jars were cracked, though, and several had leaked brown fluid which had frozen on the shelf around them. Down the far end, the jars were broken and their contents, spilled onto the bench, must have thawed, for all had gone an unpleasant grey-green colour before freezing again.

  ‘Is the Numinator breeding people?’ said Colm, his handsome mouth twisted in disgust.

  ‘It looks that way,’ said Flydd. ‘Or at least, was breeding them.’

  Maelys was thinking of the thousands of bloodline registers and the millions of names in them, every single person on Santhenar. ‘Why would anyone breed people? Is the Numinator trying to create an army?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Flydd. ‘As I said, the Numinator never showed any interest in conquest or power. As long as the scrutators kept sending the registers, it didn’t interfere.’

  ‘Unless people pried into its affairs.’

  He rubbed his chest, eyes closed.

  ‘Flydd?’ Colm said in a low, warning tone.

  ‘What?’ Flydd snapped.

  ‘Behind you.’

  Maelys spun around. Standing in the open doorway, about twenty paces away, stood a figure as strange as any she had seen in the glass cases. It was a man, tall but thin to the point of emaciation, with a narrow head and dark, fixed eyes. Despite the cold he was clad in only a loincloth and sandals which looked as though they had been carved out of wood. His big hands hung by his side and the yellow fingernails were shaped into points. His broad, flat feet also had sharpened nails. She waited for Flydd to use his Art against the fellow, but Flydd did nothing.

  ‘You will come with me,’ the man said in a thick, bubbling voice.

  ‘Who are you?’ said Maelys, unable to suppress a shudder. ‘Are you the Numinator?’

  The man’s meagre lips twisted into a humourless rictus. ‘I am Whelm.’ He pronounced it Hwelm. ‘Come.’

  A faint smell seemed to be seeping from his pores. Maelys could not place it. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant, but it wasn’t attractive either. ‘Whelm?’ A vague, unpleasant memory stirred, from one of the Great Tales. ‘Weren’t the Whelm–?’

  ‘They were a race born to serve,’ said Flydd. ‘A race for whom the very idea of freedom was anathema. They were once Rulke’s servants, but after he was imprisoned in the Nightland they eventually swore to the great mancer, Yggur. For many years they served him at his stronghold of Fiz Gorgo, but when Rulke escaped they rejected Yggur to take on their former name, Ghâshâd, and serve Rulke anew.’

  ‘What happened when he was killed?’ said Maelys, staring at the Whelm, who was staring at her.

  ‘The Ghâshâd were broken, and because of their crimes they were forced to swear that they would take no master evermore. They became Whelm again, returned to the freezing southern forests and have not been heard of again unto this day. But you broke that vow,’ Flydd said, looking up at the tall Whelm. ‘You have taken another master.’

  ‘Aye,’ said the Whelm, gravely. ‘We were masterless, desolate and desperate, until the Numinator came and saved us. The Numinator ordered us to serve, and who were we to disobey? To live is to serve. Come.’ He flexed his fingers.

  Maelys studied the yellow pointed nails, then the gaunt face of the Whelm, and decided that she was going to do exactly as he had said. ‘Are you taking us to the Numinator?’

  Again that humourless twitch of the mouth. ‘You a
re trespassers. You do not have the right to ask questions.’

  He extended a skeletal right arm down a corridor to his left. Maelys hadn’t noticed it before. ‘What are you going to do with us?’

  ‘You will do useful work until the master is ready to deal with you.’

  Again Maelys hesitated, expecting Flydd to resist, or at least give her some lead, but he was already walking towards the corridor. Why was he so acquiescent?

  The Whelm’s wooden sandals clapped on the ice floor as he walked, or rather stalked, with an odd, jerking motion, but he would say no more. They went ahead, following his pointing arm, down to a small room lit by a single lantern. There they were set to work at bloodline registers for the town of Banthey, on Banthey Isle in the tropical north. Through thick ice panes in the walls to left and right, Maelys saw other people engaged in seemingly identical tasks, but there was no way to contact them, and each had their own Whelm guard.

  They had to compile lists of names from the registers, but only those few who had a five-digit number beside them. It was tedious work, and often there would only be one such number in the entire register, but a Whelm stood behind each of them and, whenever a page was turned too quickly, or someone missed a five-digit number or noted one down incorrectly, the sharpened nails dug into their neck.

  ‘If they know when we’re making a mistake,’ said Colm, rubbing his stinging, nail-scored neck at the end of a painful and miserably cold day, one of many that had all been the same since the Whelm caught them, ‘why don’t they do the damn job themselves? It’d be a lot quicker.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s the point,’ said Flydd.

  ‘Then what is the point?’ said Colm.

  ‘We’re finally going to find out.’

  Another male Whelm had appeared in the doorway. ‘You will come now,’ he said in a voice like bubbles rising through a vat of mud. Maelys thought it was the Whelm they had first encountered, but couldn’t be sure. Whelm features were of a kind.

  ‘Where are you taking us?’ she said.

  He didn’t reply, but led them down a long hall, then out into a broad open space whose ceiling was so high that Maelys could not make it out. Maelys looked back and the building they had been held in was revealed as a slab-sided, flat-roofed bastion, perhaps ten floors high, completely enclosed by the gigantic Tower of a Thousand Steps. Ahead some hundred paces was the inner wall of the tower, curving all the way around the bastion, and rising up in a sheet of ice which slanted back over their heads as though they were inside an enormous cone standing on its base.