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

by Ian Irvine

  ‘Enough of your confounded questioning! I’m desperate now. Though I haven’t got much white fire left. If I can make a new portal, it may not remain open long.’

  ‘Not long enough for all the prisoners to get through?’

  ‘Probably not, so what do I do? I’m damned if I go without them and doubly damned if I can only save half of them. And then there’s Maelys.’

  ‘Your partner in crime,’ said Yggur. Colm clenched his fists.

  The prisoners stampeded across the roof again, with forty or fifty animated dead close behind.

  ‘Better use the mimemule,’ said Yggur. ‘Quick!’

  Flydd upended the fire flask onto the mimemule, clenched his fist about it, thought about how the last portal had come into being, and prayed. The funnel of the portal opened with a boom that shook rotten ice down from above and dropped the inner tower another few spans into the rising brown water. It had reached the top of the stairs now, and if the tower slipped another span, water would flood over the wall.

  A hot wind boiled out of the portal, condensing to steam which formed little whirling needles of ice in the frigid air of Noom. ‘It’s worked,’ said Flydd, staggering with aftersickness. ‘Go through, everyone!’

  No one moved. ‘There’s someone at the other end,’ said Chissmoul.

  ‘What? There can’t be.’ Flydd peered down the funnel, which was a good hundred paces long, but his eyes were still watering too much to see.

  ‘There is. It’s a woman.’

  Flydd cursed. ‘This portal must have intersected with the Numinator’s one, and she’s coming back from the Nightland.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like the Numinator,’ Chissmoul said uncertainly. ‘It’s much taller and bigger all around.’

  Flydd rubbed his streaming eyes but only saw a red blur.

  Yggur laughed. ‘It’s your woman in red, Flydd. You get to meet her in the flesh at last –’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Flydd felt a deep unease.

  Yggur took a couple of steps forwards, staring down the tunnel, his jaw slack. ‘I know her,’ he said wonderingly. ‘But … that’s not possible.’

  ‘How could you know her?’ said Flydd.

  ‘Because that woman was in the Tale of the Mirror, which I lived through. I thought she was dead. I thought the lot of them were dead.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Flydd. He could see her coming now. She resembled the woman in red, though only slightly.

  ‘They went back to the void to die, but at least one of them did not die,’ said Yggur. ‘Your woman in red is Yalkara.’

  ‘Yalkara?’ Flydd said dazedly. ‘The Charon?’

  ‘After Rulke, she was the greatest of all the Charon, and one of the few survivors of The Hundred who came out of the void all those thousands of years ago and seized the world of Aachan for themselves. That’s why her face was familiar – you would have seen engravings of her image in the Histories. How did she survive; and what is she doing here?’

  A very good question, Flydd thought, and here’s a better one. Why did I hallucinate about her during my renewal, and why have I seen her shadowing me since?

  And what can the second most powerful of the Charon possibly want from me?

  FORTY-FOUR

  Water surged up the stairs as the inner tower slipped down another few ells. Fragments of rotten, honeycombed ice showered down from on high. Those animated corpses who still had heads stirred; from the platform where Zofloc had built the copper still a lone archer fired arrow after arrow. The surviving prisoners, reduced to half their original number, surged out of the line of sight, a terrified, mindless herd.

  Flydd only had eyes for the figure walking slowly down the portal tunnel. He could see her clearly now – a tall, statuesque woman of no particular age, wearing dark magenta robes that would have looked terrible on anyone else, though the colour suited her olive skin perfectly. They trailed out behind her, rippling in the blast. No one would have called her beautiful, for her long face was too strong-featured for that. Her hair, the colour of fine white silk, was worn shoulder-length and barely moved as she walked.

  ‘Yalkara?’ he croaked as she approached the mouth of the tunnel, for his mouth had gone dry.

  ‘That I am,’ she said in a deep, raspy voice.

  ‘I am Xervish Flydd –’

  ‘I have known you.’ As she stepped out of the tunnel onto the roof of the inner tower, steam rose around her boots. The staring prisoners moaned and backed away. The Whelm archer stopped firing, his bow hanging loosely from its string. Even the sorcerer Whelm, Zofloc, laid down the chunk of chthonic fire-riven ice he had been hefting into the still to stare at her.

  ‘Aiieeee!’ a Whelm cried, distantly.

  Flydd stared at Yalkara, trying to work out what she had meant.

  Yggur chuckled. ‘She used you, Flydd, and you never knew.’

  Flydd flushed as he took Yggur’s meaning. ‘You were Bel?’ When she turned her head he could see the resemblance, just, though Bel had been plump and soft. There was nothing soft in Yalkara; she was as hard as the Whelm’s black metal jag-swords.

  ‘At the time,’ said Yalkara, ‘I was so weak the only guise I could manage was the one you lusted after so desperately. Where is the other portal?’

  Flydd looked up. The underside of the Tower of a Thousand Steps, fifty spans above, was faintly webbed with white fire now, and he could see another platform there. ‘Right at the very top of the tower, I assume.’

  ‘Show me the way.’

  ‘Why did you use me?’ Flydd grated. It irked him that she’d used him as the woman in red, and as Bel. Maelys had tried to talk to him about Bel on the way to Dunnet, he recalled, but he’d refused to listen, refused to believe that she wasn’t one of Jal-Nish’s mancers, using him for some cunning purpose the God-Emperor didn’t dare do himself. It irked him even more that he didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on. He’d known everything, once, and he didn’t like being kept in the dark.

  ‘Because I needed to,’ said Yalkara, turning away.

  ‘Yggur.’ Yggur inclined his head to her.

  ‘You appear to have developed a backbone since our last encounter,’ she went on. ‘You were anguishing over some woman, as I recall.’

  Yggur flushed, ever so faintly, and Flydd took a grim pleasure in seeing it.

  ‘I thought she mattered to me,’ said Yggur. ‘I must have been wrong, since I can no longer remember her name.’

  Yalkara smiled knowingly. ‘You will never forget her name. Take me to the other portal.’

  ‘Answer my questions, first,’ said Flydd. ‘Why me?’

  She grimaced. ‘I don’t have time for this.’

  ‘Make time. You came to me when I took renewal. Why me?’

  ‘Oh, very well! You were the only mancer of any consequence I could touch. I dared not go near your God-Emperor, or his acolytes, and nothing would have induced me to approach Vivimord. I could not risk becoming entangled in such a depraved mind in my helpless state.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Trapped in the void, which touches all places equally. Besides, Thuntunnimoe, which you call Mistmurk Mountain, was mine once, and I have a special bond with it. It is one of the few places on Santhenar to which I am still linked.’

  ‘So you entered my mind during renewal, seeking to influence me.’

  ‘I sought to take control of you at the moment you were weakest. I tried to meld my mind and yours but it did not go well – there’s always a risk of that with renewal – and the trauma caused you to forget your Art. My intervention made things worse. You would have been easier to control if I had kept away until renewal was complete.’

  ‘Why did you need to control me?’ cried Flydd. ‘What do I have that you could possibly need?’

  ‘You were planning to use the shadow realm to escape, and that place is not so far removed from the Nightland. I schooled you in the Art so, instead of the shadow realm, you might o
pen the way to the Nightland for me. I invested everything in you. I led you to Thuntunnimoe in the first place; I put the idea into your mind that it was a perfect refuge for you; I came to you in your vapour-induced sleep and taught you about the cursed flame. At every critical stage of your escape I was beside you, making sure you had the Arts you needed to survive, but you proved difficult to control and kept thwarting me.

  ‘Then, at the critical moment, and despite all my earlier suggestions, when you opened the portal you forced it towards the shadow realm after all. I had to tear it out of your grasp and point it to the Nightland by myself. It nearly killed me; the pain was so awful I could not reach the portal in time, and you went without me. After ten years of striving, I had failed.’

  The anguish was visible on her face, but she did not seem the weaker for it. On the contrary, Flydd thought.

  ‘I kept seeing you,’ he said. ‘Just flashes of red shadow and a fluttering of robes. I was sure you were hunting me.’

  ‘I was, but there is no way into the Nightland from the void.’

  ‘So that’s why you came to Flydd as Bel,’ said Colm, mouth twisted.

  ‘As you escaped the Nightland, I managed to latch onto your portal, trying to get in. Unfortunately it only allowed travel one way, so I rode it to Santhenar, near Plogg, and disguised myself as Bellulah.’

  ‘You used me!’ Throughout his life, Flydd had used countless people to get what he wanted, yet he smouldered at the thought of her using him. He wasn’t blind to the irony, but it still irked him.

  ‘I paid your price,’ said Yalkara. ‘Bel gave you a night you’ll remember all your life, and you can’t deny it.’

  Again that knowing chuckle from Yggur.

  ‘Why didn’t you take the flasks of white fire when you had the chance?’ said Flydd.

  ‘I dared not touch it. If chthonic fire had been the answer, I would have gone back to the Nightland two centuries ago, instead of going to the void –’

  A dozen animated dead were advancing towards them. Yalkara held out her hand, palm upwards; the fire-filled darts slid from their bodies and they slumped to the roof, lifeless again. On the platform, Zofloc raised his bow, its dart tip glowing. She snapped her cocked wrist at him and the dart burst, spurting distilled fire everywhere. He beat furiously at his skin as she turned back to Flydd.

  ‘But …’ he said.

  ‘Chthonic fire is mine. I brought it here from Aachan in ages past, and long before that, I took it from the exploded core of a comet in the deepest part of the void. Chthonic fire is a potent force whose essence easily slips between the dimensions of space and time; that’s why it enables portals so powerfully – and animates the dead. But it’s a perilous material to handle, especially for us Charon. Would that I’d known that when I first found it.’

  Yggur bestowed a knowing glance on Flydd: I warned you.

  ‘That’s why I hid it deep below Thuntunnimoe,’ Yalkara continued, ‘and surrounded it with all manner of protections so no one would ever find it. No one on Santhenar knew it was there – I knew it would never be safe otherwise, nor would the Three Worlds be safe from it. But I made a terrible mistake. By trying to possess your mind, and giving you the Arts you needed to create a portal, I left open a tiny chink in my own psyche. Then, when you were struggling to escape from the God-Emperor, and you could find no other way to open the portal, desperation showed you that chink in my mind. You saw where I had hidden the chthonic fire and broke open the forbidden casket.

  ‘You should not have brought it here.’ She looked up at the Tower of a Thousand Steps, its structure threaded with white fire. ‘As you will shortly discover.’

  ‘But you could have used it safely at the obelisk,’ said Flydd. ‘There’s no ice on Mistmurk Mountain.’

  ‘Chthonic fire is inimical to us, and I no longer have the power to use it safely. Nothing endures forever, not even us Charon; my once great Arts are failing. I showed you how to make the portal because I no longer had the power to do so myself.’

  Fool, fool! Flydd remembered how smug he’d felt, that he’d learned how to make it so easily.

  ‘Then why didn’t you force me to make a portal at Plogg, when I was under your enchantment?’

  ‘It couldn’t be made there – your incoming portal had twisted the fabric of reality too strongly. The nearest suitable place was the pinnacle you used at Dunnet. I had to keep you alive to get there, and you must admit I did my best. Not even the God-Emperor could have done what I did that night, though it nearly killed me.’

  ‘But you didn’t seize the portal I made on the pinnacle.’

  ‘I couldn’t reach it in time either. I was too weak. I had to gather my strength to take your next portal.’

  ‘How did you know I would make another?’

  ‘You weren’t going to walk back from Noom. But you didn’t make the next portal – the Numinator did – and she was gone before I could take it from her.’ Her lips compressed to a white line. ‘But now I must, for she’s after the same thing as I am.’

  ‘And that is?’ said Flydd.

  ‘I’ve answered all the questions you have a right to ask. The Nightland is my business.’

  ‘So it was you who recreated it after it collapsed, and held it in place all this time.’

  ‘I did – to the vast diminution of my powers, and I maintain the Nightland still, though not even I can hold it much longer. That’s why I had to use you. I was desperate – too desperate.’

  ‘What are you holding it for?’ said Yggur.

  Yalkara did not reply. Withdrawing a brass-framed lens from her robes, she peered through it, straight up. Colours danced there. ‘Ah!’ she said. ‘I see how this works.’

  She stepped backwards into the portal, spun the lens on its engraved handle, and a spasm twisted her strong face. Flydd gasped as the portal was torn from his grasp, then she traced a spiral into the middle of the lens with a fingertip and the far end of the portal swung vertically. Yalkara shot upwards through the length of the portal, towards the top of the tower and out of sight.

  ‘Aiiieeee!’ cried a host of Whelm, straining forwards like a pack of wild dogs.

  The dead on the roof began to grope blindly for the darts Yalkara had ejected from their bodies. High above, a bright light flared; a dull boom echoed down. Every white tracery of fire on the ice flared, before fading again. The inner tower dropped sharply and a wave of stinking water surged over the sides.

  ‘It’s going under this time,’ cried Colm.

  ‘Let’s get going!’ said Yggur.

  ‘But the portal only goes up.’

  The dead were moving purposefully towards them, even the headless ones, and in the deep water surrounding the inner tower hundreds more began stroking in their direction.

  ‘Up beats under,’ said Yggur. He raised his voice. ‘Into the portal, everyone.’

  Flydd was waiting for the prisoners to go first, but no one moved. ‘Flydd, Colm, Chissmoul, Flangers, don’t wait,’ snapped Yggur.

  Flydd pushed into the funnel-shaped portal entrance, followed by a jostling throng, and was hurled upwards into the Tower of a Thousand Steps with a stomach-lurching jerk. He expected to be ejected in the Numinator’s eyrie, but the portal ended a couple of spans above the upper platform. Evidently the portal wasn’t meant to carry this many people and, once they’d entered it, it had contracted to half its previous length.

  ‘The portal’s shrinking!’ he yelled, jumping down onto the ring-shaped platform that ran all the way around the inside of the tower. An oval hall bored through the ice ran off to his right. ‘Jump, or you’ll end up back where we came from.’

  On the rooftop of the inner tower, fifty spans below, the prisoners were forcing their way into the portal-tunnel and being carried up, but there were still about twenty outside and they weren’t going to make it. More dead were churning through the stinking water and clawing over the wall, which was now awash, then pulling the prisoners under as if they were
to blame for the horrors the Numinator had visited upon them.

  Flydd strained to hold his end of the portal in place until the rest of the prisoners could scramble out, but it continued to contract downwards. Its mouth was level with the platform now; if it contracted further, anyone leaving it would fall fifty spans into the water. Another ten prisoners scrambled out, then a clot of five, punching and shoving each other in their desperation to escape, and finally another five or six, one after another.

  ‘Yggur?’ Flydd yelled. He couldn’t see him in the portal, or on the flooded roof of the inner tower, and he couldn’t hold the mouth in place any longer. ‘Drag them out,’ he gasped.

  Colm began to heave people out of the portal and hurl them to the left. Chissmoul was doing the same, as best she could, but the portal suddenly contracted until the exit stood half a span below them.

  ‘Floria!’ shrieked a stocky young man, standing at the edge of the platform. ‘Jump.’

  A yellow-haired woman reached up to him with both arms. ‘I’ll never make it, Gaz,’ she wailed. ‘It’s too far.’

  ‘I’ll catch you. Jump.’

  Floria did her best, and her upstretched hands clasped onto Gaz’s, but he was leaning out so far he couldn’t hold her. Her weight pulled him over and they plunged down, wrapping their arms around each other, and into the water beside the tower. Three of the dead converged on the point where they had disappeared, and dived. None of them came up.

  The tunnel shrank again. Now it was a span and a half below them. Yggur appeared, labouring up its slope, for the failing portal was no longer carrying people all the way. He reached the mouth, picked up a terrified woman and hurled her bodily upwards onto the platform. He did the same with a youth and an old man wearing spectacles as thick as marbles, then turned to the few people below him, but they were sliding down towards the water where the inner tower roof had been. It was completely gone now, breaking apart underwater to form bobbing brown icebergs. The last of the dog-paddling prisoners from the roof were pulled under.

  Yggur tossed up one last prisoner, a slip of a girl clinging leech-like to his left ankle, then perched on the rim and sprang upwards like a gymnast. He would have made it save that his weight forced the portal’s exit down. He hit the edge of the floor with his upper chest, bounced off, fell but managed to catch on with one hand.