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

by Ian Irvine

  The Whelm led them through a small door at the base of the inner wall, and onto a broad staircase of diamond-clear ice that ran up inside the wall of the tower in a series of flights to form a pentagon shape. Here he ushered them past and she identified his smell – fish oil mixed with onions.

  ‘Is this the Tower of a Thousand Steps?’ said Maelys.

  He pointed up, and up they went. The Whelm’s sandals clapped against the treads; he was slow but tireless. They climbed until even Maelys’s travel-hardened legs were aching. She began to count, but lost her way at four hundred and sixty, and after that there was no point.

  The ice walls of the tower were like vast, sloping panes which might once have been transparent, but were now so fretted by time and wind that they were like sand-blasted glass. They allowed light in, but revealed nothing of the surrounding land.

  After a seemingly endless climb they came out onto the uppermost floor of the tower. The roof soared above them like a five-sided glass steeple, the ice a russet colour that let in even less light. Flames flickered in a dish the size of a circular bath, and the misty air above it swirled up lazily, the mist changing from red through all the colours of the spectrum to violet at the top of the spire, then falling in slow whorls and eddies down the steeple walls to the floor and rolling in to the centre again.

  As Maelys’s eyes adjusted she saw a simple bed and dresser against one wall, and a table against another, to her left. The table was piled high with bloodline registers and she didn’t realise that someone was sitting behind it until they moved.

  She jumped. It was a woman with shoulder-length hair the colour of spun gold. Maelys stared. She’d expected to encounter a cold-eyed mancer, or even some fierce, intelligent creature from another world. It had not occurred to her that the Numinator, who had ruled over the most powerful mancers in all the world, might be female.

  The woman stood up and came out from behind the table, and Maelys was in no doubt that here was the Numinator at last, for her presence was like a freezing wind, a blow in the face, a shard of ice through the heart. She wasn’t tall, or physically imposing – Colm towered over her – and was dressed in a simple, dark gown which concealed rather than revealed her slender figure. Her face was neither young nor old, but extremely forbidding. There were crinkles at the corners of her eyes, and lines curving down from each side of her mouth. Flydd stiffened beside Maelys. Even he was intimidated.

  The Numinator held herself poker-rigid. She had once been a striking woman, but Maelys did not think she had ever been a likeable one. She radiated an aura of vast self-control and intense dislike. Maelys also knew, without knowing how, that the Numinator was nothing like any other power in the world. Indeed, the very fact that she had cut herself off from the world showed how indifferent she was to the things that powerful men like Jal-Nish and Vivimord pursued so desperately.

  ‘Why have you trespassed on the forbidden Isle of Noom?’ The Numinator’s voice was overly precise and formal. Everything about her seemed controlled – almost frozen in time.

  Maelys glanced at Flydd. He was staring at her as if he expected her to speak first.

  ‘Go on, Maelys,’ he said. ‘Coming here was your idea.’

  Maelys clenched her jaw but bit her tongue painfully. Tasting blood, she swallowed. Why had Flydd put her forward? Was it his promised revenge because she’d pressured him to take renewal? She no longer understood him, if she ever had. No, it could not be that. He must be working to a plan and she had to go with it. What could she say that would sway the Numinator? Nothing, so she would simply tell the truth.

  ‘The God-Emperor holds the last of my clan.’ She met the Numinator’s glacial eyes and tried to hold them. ‘If I can’t save them, no one can, and my story has been repeated many times since the God-Emperor came to power. He must be overthrown and –’

  ‘You’re overly bold for your age,’ said the Numinator. ‘How old are you, girl?’

  ‘N-nineteen, Numinator.’

  ‘I can’t ever remember being so young,’ the Numinator mused. ‘I don’t recall having a childhood.’ The eyes focused on Maelys again. She could not tell their colour – they might once have been grey, or green, or even blue, but they were leached of all colour here. ‘I know of no way to touch the God-Emperor.’

  ‘But you controlled the Council of Scrutators for more than a hundred years,’ Flydd said quietly. ‘Indeed, you created the Council.’

  ‘The puppet master speaks,’ said the Numinator, staring at him as if to peer right inside his head. ‘There is something familiar about you.’

  Flydd said nothing. The Numinator studied him, her head tilted, her back held rigid. ‘Take off your coat and shirt!’

  ‘What?’ cried Flydd, not moving.

  ‘Or my Whelm will do it for you,’ she added quietly. ‘They number seven hundred, and obey my every command. Nothing can shake their loyalty.’

  ‘A previous master said the same,’ said Flydd, ‘if I remember the Histories.’

  A wintry smile touched her stern mouth, momentarily taking decades off her age. ‘You dare quote the Histories to me, who lived them?’

  She gestured to the Whelm standing at the top of the stair, but before he could move Flydd whipped off his coat, dropped it on the floor and unfastened his shirt.

  The Numinator glided forward a few steps, stopped and made a twirling motion with her fingers. Flydd turned around, slowly, until he faced her again. His cheeks were a trifle pink, though that might have been the cold.

  Her eyes went out of focus for a moment, as if she were thinking hard, then the wintry smile fleeted back and she said, ‘Xervish Flydd.’

  Flydd gaped. ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘You were flogged to the bone for inquiring about me, many decades ago now, and such scars cannot lie. Even after taking renewal, Ex-Scrutator Flydd, the deepest scars remain, and they tell me your name as surely as a print from your finger. Why did you put the girl up to it? What happened to the courage you were once famed for?’

  ‘I grew old, and it faded with the decay of my body. I was ready to die but Maelys Nifferlin pressed me to a renewal I would have done anything to avoid, and rightly so, for, renewed or not, I am not half the man I was, even on my death bed. She put me up to it, and she can explain herself.’

  ‘And you protest too much. You can’t play your scrutator’s games with me, Flydd, for I read men like books. You may dress.’ She turned back to Maelys, saying, ‘Well, girl? It seems you are also more than you appear.’

  ‘I’m not, but last year, in the Pit of Possibilities, I saw that the God-Emperor had a weakness,’ said Maelys. ‘If you can tell us where to find the antithesis to the tears –’

  ‘Antithesis?’ said the Numinator in an odd, angry tone.

  ‘The spell or artefact or … or force that can destroy –’

  ‘I know what antithesis means!’ The Numinator crooked a finger at the watching Whelm, who shepherded them into the corner nearest the top of the Thousand Steps.

  She began to pace, eyes closed, hands held up above her head as if carrying a coffin at a funeral. She turned in a circle, then in a second circle linked to it, making a figure eight, and a third and fourth – a cloverleaf. Every footstep was slow, sliding and deliberate, as though it represented a single, precisely calibrated thought. Watching her feet, which moved like a metronome below her gown, Maelys saw that the ice formed a slight depression there. The Numinator had paced the same path so often that she had worn down the floor beneath her.

  Finally she turned back to them, and her face was cast into a grimmer curve than before. ‘I know of no antithesis to the tears.’

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Flydd made a faint noise in the back of his throat. Colm let out a harsh bark of laughter; it sounded half insane. The Whelm shuffled its wooden sandals.

  Maelys felt a shriek building up and had to restrain herself from giving way to it. The journey had been wasted; everything they’d gone through since le
aving the plateau had been for nothing.

  ‘She might be lying,’ said Colm.

  The Whelm’s right hand closed around Colm’s throat from behind, the sharpened nails pricking through his skin and causing five beads of blood to bud there. The yellow nails of its left hand cut through Colm’s coat and shirt to his belly. Colm went still, his eyes bulging. He definitely wanted to live now, and Maelys was pleased to see it, though she was afraid his change of heart might have come too late.

  ‘Never speak ill of the master,’ hissed the Whelm. His gaze turned to the Numinator. ‘Shall I tear his throat out, master? Or offer you his living bowels on a platter?’

  The Numinator looked faintly disgusted. ‘Release him, Whelm. No one can harm me here. His words mean nothing; less than nothing. Take them down and put them back to work. The great project is behind schedule.’

  ‘But …’ said Maelys, thinking of the countless days they had spent going through the registers so far, and the endless work to go. ‘How long?’

  ‘Surely you didn’t think you could just leave?’ said the Numinator. ‘You trespassed on my privacy, deliberately, and you have to pay for it.’

  ‘What do we have to do?’ Maelys said dully.

  ‘When the God-Emperor destroyed all the nodes, he damaged me and undermined my power. My life’s work, which was almost complete, has to be redone by the most monumental labour, and I can no longer do it alone.’

  ‘What great work?’ said Colm, but the claw-nails pricked into his throat again and he broke off. Five blood-beads oozed down his neck.

  ‘Never question the master,’ the Whelm grated.

  ‘Enough, Gliss,’ said the Numinator, and he returned to the top of the steps at once, though his eyes were staring fixedly at Colm’s throat and he was trembling.

  He wants to kill Colm, Maelys thought. The Whelm are fanatically loyal and they can’t bear any threat to their master, nor any insult. The quickest way to eliminate the threat is to kill, so they’ll kill any of us without compunction. The thought was chilling, for it made them far more difficult to deal with than the God-Emperor’s soldiers. Nothing would sway the Whelm; not mercy, kindness, forgiveness, empathy.

  ‘How long?’ said Maelys despairingly; they’d come all this way, wasted all this time, for nothing. Her family was in terrible danger now, for Jal-Nish was unpredictable and might destroy them at any moment. She had to find the tears’ antithesis; she just had to.

  ‘Why, as long as you all shall live,’ the Numinator said with another chilling smile.

  The pain swelled into a shrieking knot, as if the Whelm had torn open Maelys’s chest and clenched its sharpened nails into her heart.

  ‘No!’ she gasped. ‘You can’t. I’ve got to –’

  ‘You’re trapped, girl. You can’t do anything. Take them down, Gliss, and put them back to work.’ The Numinator returned to her table and began to study her ledgers as if they were no longer there.

  ‘But if you’re powerless –’ began Maelys.

  The Whelm’s right hand thudded onto her shoulder.

  ‘Never think that I am powerless, girl,’ said the Numinator without looking up. ‘I am diminished, certainly, but my Arts suffice to maintain my realm; and control everything and everyone in it.’

  The Whelm’s metal-hard fingers turned her towards the top of the Thousand Steps. Colm followed.

  ‘I have a gift for you, Numinator,’ said Flydd. ‘Something you may never have seen before. A gift of power.’

  The Numinator looked up sharply. ‘There are few forms of power that I’m not aware of.’

  Flydd drew the white crystal phial from his pocket and held it up. The red and black flame still flickered there, ominous in the dim light. ‘I trapped this from the cursed flame that still burns beneath the ancient Charon obelisk on Mistmurk Mountain.’

  The Numinator sat stiffly, staring at the phial. ‘I have been there. I read the glyphs on the obelisk and understood their true meaning. I have seen the cursed flame too, but it does not have the power to help me now.’

  Flydd stood there, swaying back and forth on the balls of his feet, then transferred the phial to his left hand and slipped the right into his pocket.

  The Numinator smiled thinly. ‘I won’t leave it for you to work some minor havoc with. Gliss?’

  Gliss came forwards and Flydd, with a show of reluctance, handed him the phial. When Gliss had returned to the top of the steps, Flydd said, ‘But did you know that the cursed flame is fed from a deeper source – the abyssal flame.’ He raised the stone bottle. ‘One that is far greater and more perilous.’

  ‘I have also seen the abyssal flame,’ said the Numinator. ‘The gift is no use to me.’ She gestured to Gliss, who took the stone bottle as well. ‘Take them down.’

  ‘I will lead them below at once, master,’ said the Whelm.

  Flydd held up his left hand, and put his right hand in his pocket again. ‘Ah, but have you seen this? It is the ultimate unknown power, so unlike any other force on Santhenar that I cannot understand where it came from.’

  He withdrew a cloth-wrapped package and held up the oval ice flask containing the trapped, pure white, freezing chthonic flame.

  ‘What is that?’ the Numinator said sharply.

  ‘It came from a crystal chest hidden below the source of the abyssal flame, at the very base of a shaft bored deep into the rock below Mistmurk Mountain.’

  ‘That seems like a prodigious effort for such a little thing,’ said the Numinator, though she seemed wary. ‘I sense no great power in it.’

  ‘As I said, the chthonic flame is a power like no other on Santhenar.’

  ‘Chthonic flame?’ She shot upright. ‘And it was hidden? By whom?’

  Maelys wondered if he was going to mention the woman in red, but Flydd merely shrugged.

  ‘Bring it here.’

  Flydd went forwards with the flask. The Whelm followed at his heels, hands stretched towards Flydd’s throat, until the Numinator rapped, ‘He cannot harm me, Gliss. Flydd, place it on the table.’

  Gliss returned to his position, his jerky movements more exaggerated than before, and staring shard-like at Flydd all the while. If he got the chance he would eliminate the threat to his master, permanently.

  Flydd placed the flask on her table and stepped back.

  ‘What else do you know about the flame?’ Her frosty eyes were fixed on him now, as if daring him to try and conceal anything from her.

  ‘Nothing. I wasn’t aware of its existence until just before we fled the mountain. I found it by the merest chance.’

  She continued to stare at him for a minute or two, then gestured to Gliss. ‘Put them back to work.’

  Late that night, Gliss heaved open the ice door of their cell and crooked a finger at Maelys. ‘Come.’

  ‘Me?’ Her voice went squeaky. ‘What for?’

  ‘No questions. Come!’

  She went. She couldn’t escape the Numinator and her seven hundred Whelm, and even if, by some miracle, she did get out of the ice tower, without shelter she would freeze to death within a day.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  Gliss did not reply, but it became clear once he began hauling her up the Thousand Steps – he was taking her back to the Numinator and it could not be for any good reason.

  The scrutators had flayed the flesh off Flydd’s bones because he had dared inquire about the Numinator, and Maelys’s crime was of a higher order. She was not strong enough to endure a flaying.

  Her legs started to shake, and soon her knees were wobbling so violently that she could barely stand up. She fell down, but Gliss kept dragging her, unheeding, and her kneecap struck the edge of a tread so painfully that she cried out. The Whelm did not stop and she forced herself to her feet again.

  The Numinator had Flydd’s measure; he could do nothing here, and neither could Colm, so it was up to her again. That was the only advantage of being little and young: people underestimated her. Maybe the Numinat
or would too. If an opportunity came, she had to be ready to seize it.

  They finally reached the Numinator’s steeple-topped eyrie and she gestured at Gliss, dismissing him. He glowered at Maelys but left. He did not take her seriously as a threat. Good so far.

  ‘Come here, girl.’

  The Numinator was sitting bolt upright by the fire in a chair formed from ice and covered in the white pelt of a large hunting cat. Her feet were placed on the floor, perfectly aligned; her long-fingered hands rested on the arms of the chair. She reminded Maelys of Mistress Hatyn, the ferocious tutor in the schoolroom at Clan Nifferlin, in the days before the war ended. She had been equally organised and controlled; no one had ever got away with anything while Hatyn was in charge.

  Maelys, realising that she was creeping like a mousy child, straightened her back, forcing herself to meet the Numinator’s eye. The Numinator gave the faintest, derisive twitch of the lips, as if to say, You think you can stand up to me?

  ‘How did you come here, girl?’

  She did not want to answer that. ‘My name isn’t girl. It’s Maelys. Maelys Nifferlin.’

  ‘I know your name, and your clan. Every name on Santhenar is in my bloodline registers.’

  ‘Stud books is what I would call them!’

  ‘And you are a vulgar little trollop.’

  The Numinator was trying to provoke her, which meant that she wanted something. Perhaps they could bargain. ‘Who are you?’ she said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say, and couldn’t bear to be stared at in that unnerving silence.

  ‘I am the Numinator and I hold your fate in my hands.’