by Ian Irvine
‘That’s pointless, and you know it,’ said a deep, somewhat rasping voice. ‘You can’t keep me out, nor can you fight me here, for this place is mine and I maintain every part of it.’ The hand fell away. ‘Stand back.’ A tall, statuesque woman entered.
‘Bel?’ said Maelys, for there was a hint of Bel in her now. Had Bel come to save her? Maelys hardly cared; nothing seemed to matter any more, not even her own family.
The tall woman’s eyes took in Maelys, and the Numinator behind her, and she nodded stiffly, as if she knew her.
‘Yalkara!’ said the Numinator coldly.
Yalkara? Maelys was in the presence of a legend, probably the most powerful and dangerous woman in all the Histories. Her heart was thumping like a great drum. Of course Yalkara hadn’t come here for her; she’d come for Emberr – her son.
‘Granddaughter,’ said Yalkara.
Maelys stared at the Numinator. ‘She’s your grandmother?’
‘You don’t seem pleased to see me,’ said Yalkara.
‘You stole Rulke’s body and took it to the void,’ said the Numinator.
‘That would have been his wish. Besides, you did not complain at the time.’
‘I was sick with grief.’
‘And you have been brooding about him ever since. You always were obsessive.’
‘You were going back to the void as well; and to extinction. Why are you still here?’
‘You know why. My people went, and I would have gone with them, had I not previously given birth to a child – here in the Nightland.’
‘You never said.’
‘I dared not reveal my secret, not to anyone, for my son was in deadly danger. Where is he?’ said Yalkara.
Maelys jerked one hand down the hall, shivering in terror. What would Yalkara do when she discovered that her son was dead? The Charon had been the mightiest of all the human species, and the most barbaric. They believed in vengeance, she recalled; to the utmost degree.
‘Go before me, both of you,’ said Yalkara. ‘Keep your hands where I can see them.’
‘You don’t trust your own granddaughter?’
‘I know what you’re like.’
To Maelys’s surprise, the Numinator headed back to the room where Emberr’s body lay. Maelys could not bear it. She could not bear to see him again; nor could she bear to leave him.
The Numinator let go of Maelys’s arm and she went backwards until she came up against the wall. Yalkara entered slowly, her face tight with anticipation. She scanned the gloomy room, saw Emberr lying there as though asleep, and sighed.
‘Beloved son,’ she said softly, as if apologising for her failure. ‘The past two hundred and twenty years since I conceived you have been the best of my life, and the worst.’ The Numinator let out a hiss through clenched teeth. ‘The best because I had a child at last. And the worst – because I conceived you here, while the Nightland was under prohibition, I had to bear you here, alone, then leave you. You were of the Nightland, and without the prohibition being broken you could not leave it.’
The Numinator quivered, but did not speak.
Maelys had to tell Yalkara. She opened her mouth to say, ‘He’s dead. My Emberr is dead,’ but could not choke the words out.
‘I could not tell anyone about it, least of all the father,’ Yalkara went on. ‘As Rulke escaped for the final time, all unknowing that he had a son, the Nightland was collapsing into a singularity. Even then, I could not break the prohibition and get you out. Instead, I spent my strength and my Art on the mightiest work of my long life – reversing the collapse of the Nightland and rebuilding it to shelter, protect and nourish your body and your mind for as long as it took, until I could find a way to return for you.’
The Numinator was making little stabs with the small blade, but Yalkara paid her no heed. She went to her knees beside Emberr. ‘I’m sorry. I thought it would take a few years at most. I never thought that building the Nightland, and maintaining it, would take so much from me that I could not return. After I took your father’s body back to the void, and saw my people to extinction, I spent all my days, for two hundred and twenty years, trying to find a way back. But there was none – until recently, when –’
‘His father was Rulke,’ the Numinator burst out. ‘You mated with Rulke! Right here!’
Yalkara stalked across to her. ‘Who I have mated with is my business. I knew Rulke three thousand years before you were born.’
‘You hated each other! There was a feud between your clans, because of a terrible wrong done in ancient times.’
Maelys looked from one woman to the other. ‘What terrible wrong?’
‘I don’t have to explain anything to either of you,’ Yalkara said indifferently, and turned back. ‘Emberr? Wake now.’
‘Rulke was mine!’ the Numinator hissed, her eyes as hard as the point of her knife. ‘For all time.’
‘I mated with him here before he ever met you,’ said Yalkara.
‘He was mine, before and after. Now and forever. Past, present and future.’
Yalkara shook her head in amazement. ‘You’re out of your mind.’ She turned to her son again. ‘Emberr?’
She knew something was wrong now. Yalkara went across as slowly as if she were a pallbearer at an emperor’s funeral, crouched beside him and touched his bare chest. For a second her aloofness cracked; she let out a hissing breath, then lifted him with one hand under his knees and another behind his head to prevent it from flopping. Her jaw tightened but she was as controlled as the Numinator had been hysterical. Yalkara, evidently, was not one to display her grief to inferiors.
‘It is a mother’s duty to protect her children, and I failed you,’ she said quietly. ‘I did everything I could and it wasn’t enough. Beloved Emberr, this is the end for you, for me, and for all the Charon. But before I go, I will exact a dreadful retribution for your slaying.’
She laid him down again, ever so gently, then came to her feet and the look in her eyes was awful. ‘Who did this?’ she said in a voice deliberately remote, and as cold as the central ice cap of Noom. ‘Which of you slew my son? Or were you in league?’
‘She killed him,’ said the Numinator. ‘Her name is Maelys of Nifferlin and I was taking her back for punishment –’
‘I know Maelys. I would not have thought she had it in her to do such a deed. Well, girl?’ said Yalkara. ‘Did you kill my son?’
‘I loved him the moment I saw him,’ Maelys whispered, for it would have felt wrong to speak in normal tones beside his cold body. ‘And Emberr loved me.’
‘Explain!’
‘When I first came here he called me, directly into my mind, and I went to him. I was never afraid. I knew I was safe –’
‘He would never have harmed you,’ said Yalkara, bending over Emberr again. ‘He was a gentle soul, my son, unlike his father – unlike me! Answer the question – did you kill him?’
Beside Maelys, the Numinator’s knuckles were white on the hilt of her knife and her throat was quivering. She was building up to something.
‘I loved him,’ Maelys wept. ‘Of course I didn’t kill –’ But then something awful occurred to her.
‘How did he die?’ said Yalkara.
‘I don’t know –’
‘But?’ said Yalkara.
‘I still had a trace of chthonic fire on me, from the Numinator’s portal. And … after we lay together it was gone from me, and all over his skin.’
Yalkara’s olive skin went a muddy colour, all the blood draining from her face. ‘Did I doom my son,’ she said to herself, ‘by bringing the fire of damnation to Santhenar?’
‘It didn’t harm me,’ said Maelys, bewildered, aching with her loss, and suffused with horror that she might have unwittingly brought Emberr’s doom upon him. ‘Or the Numinator.’
‘Nor me,’ said Yalkara, staring at her son. ‘Nor any other person. But Emberr was engendered in the Nightland, a place remote from the laws which govern the real, physical worlds, an
d the Nightland would always be a part of him. The chthonic flame is a force like no other, one that can slide between the many dimensions of space and time as easily as you slide between the sheets of your bed. It is one of the few natural forces that can punch a portal through the Nightland, and for the same reason it was inimical to him, and so he died.’ She turned to Maelys. ‘How did he die?’
‘I didn’t know he had, at first. We were lying in each other’s arms and I just thought he was cold; the fire had gone out.’
‘But Emberr died content?’ Yalkara gripped Maelys’s shoulders and stared into her eyes.
‘We were delirious with our love for each other. It was meant to be.’
‘Was it the first time for you as well?’ Maelys nodded stiffly, feeling her cheeks burning again. The Numinator went very still.
Yalkara wiped her eyes and crouched beside her son, examining him carefully. ‘From the blood on his thighs it would appear so, but there is no end to the duplicity of scheming young women. I must be sure –’
Without warning, the Numinator sprang at her, raising the knife high as if to stab her grandmother in the back. She landed like a cat and was bringing the blade down when Maelys shrieked, ‘Yalkara, look out.’
Yalkara whirled in a rising spiral, faster than the eye could follow, and her stiff right arm struck the Numinator across the chest so hard that she was lifted off her feet and flung backwards, to crash into the wall. The triangular knife went flying and Yalkara scooped it up. The Numinator slumped to the floor, groaning.
‘You have Charon blood in you, granddaughter, but that is not the same as being Charon.’
Maelys was darting for the door when Yalkara’s voice rang out. ‘Hold!’
Maelys froze, for not even in battle had she seen anyone move as swiftly as Yalkara had – the Charon were a race apart and she had no hope of escaping her.
‘On the floor!’ rapped Yalkara. ‘Take down your trousers.’
‘What?’ Maelys whispered, shocked witless, for Yalkara still had the knife in her hand. ‘What are you going to do to me?’
‘I’m going to make sure of you,’ Yalkara said grimly.
Maelys shrank away. ‘Please, no. I didn’t mean to hurt him. He was everything to me.’
‘Stupid girl! I’m not going to kill you. What would be the point of that?’
‘What, then?’ she bleated.
‘I’m going to examine you intimately, of course, to make sure you were a virgin. There might be a child.’
Pain sheared through Maelys’s chest – not Yalkara as well. Ever since her mother and aunts had sent her after Nish, no one had ever cared about her for herself. Her family and Jal-Nish wanted the child she could give them – the only grandchild of the God-Emperor. The Numinator and Yalkara both wanted the offspring of the last Charon. I’m just a worthless body, she thought, an incubator.
She lay on the cold floor, completely numb, while Yalkara completed her mortifying examination and stood up.
‘You were a virgin. Should a child come of this union, it will be mine, and I will take it with me back to the void.’
‘No,’ Maelys whimpered. She was too young; she didn’t want to have a baby, all alone, but if that came to pass no one else was having anything to do with it. No one!
‘A child should have a mother,’ said Yalkara, ‘but, puny little thing that you are, you wouldn’t survive an hour in the void. It’s a pity, but there it is. Besides, you may bear many more children, but I never will. I am the sole survivor of the Charon. I’m sure you understand.’
Her arrogance cut right through Maelys’s grief, and it was only with the utmost effort that she bit her tongue and maintained her self-control. She wanted to scream at Yalkara. No, she wanted to punch her teeth down her neck. Don’t give way, she told herself. Pretend to be meek, and compliant. Let them all underestimate you, but never give in until you’ve beaten them all. Never give in.
Yalkara studied her, head to one side. ‘There’s something about you. Something odd.’ She pulled on the chain around Maelys’s neck and heaved the taphloid out from between her breasts.
‘What is this?’ Yalkara said, studying it.
‘Father gave it to me when I was a little girl, to suppress my aura and stop my gift from developing.’
‘What gift?’ Yalkara said idly.
Maelys explained about the family talent for detecting Jal-Nish’s wisp-watchers and his other spying devices, and the nature of her own tiny gift, including what she’d seen in the Pit of Possibilities.
‘So you have a latent talent for the Art,’ said Yalkara, ‘but it was never developed in the vital years when you were young, and now it’s too late to master it.’
Maelys knew that already and was resigned to it. ‘My aunts said the taphloid contained a secret that could help me in the future.’
‘You certainly need protecting.’ Yalkara opened the taphloid, and momentarily Maelys saw little dials spinning, though not ones she remembered seeing previously.
The Numinator groaned and tried to sit up.
‘Not least from her,’ Yalkara added quietly, ‘and I must do what I can.’ She closed the taphloid, wrapped one long finger around it and pressed it against her own forehead. For an instant Maelys felt so dizzy that she could barely stand up.
Yalkara caught Maelys’s arm with her left hand, steadied her, then touched the taphloid to her forehead with her right hand. The dizziness passed but Maelys felt a sharp pain lance through her head from front to back, so fiercely barbed that she had to close her eyes.
Help!
The hoarse, whispery cry seemed to come from an impossible distance. Maelys cocked her head, listening, but it wasn’t repeated.
Yalkara thrust the taphloid, which was now uncomfortably warm, back into Maelys’s cleavage and took her arm. ‘Come!’
Maelys locked her knees and tried to hold on. She couldn’t leave Emberr lying there all alone, dead. It wasn’t right, or decent. She had to take care of him and prepare his body the way the dead had always been prepared at Nifferlin – gently, carefully, respectfully.
Yalkara jerked so hard that Maelys stumbled.
‘No!’ she wailed, but Yalkara would not desist. The Numinator followed, silently, the door of Emberr’s little cottage banged, and the cottage vanished. Maelys wept all the way back to the portal, and was left to contemplate the irony, bitterest of all, of her lie to Jal-Nish about being pregnant coming true after all.
FORTY-EIGHT
Yalkara thrust Maelys in the back and she stumbled out of the portal into the eyrie at the top of the Tower of a Thousand Steps, and into utter devastation.
Its steepled roof, now shattered, lay open to the elements, and in the grey daylight that washed all colour from the bleak icescape she made out a low, snow-clad range to her left. To the right was the scarred and crevassed surface of the Kara Agel, the Frozen Sea. Below her, the moat which had once protected the tower with shifting patterns of water and berg was a seething morass of brown sludge filled with floating bodies, bobbing ice coffins, drifting pages from the bloodline registers, and all the other detritus of the Numinator’s failed project.
The circular eyrie, formerly so elegantly spare, was littered with the bodies of human prisoners and Whelm, bleeding onto heaps of smashed ice, along with broken weapons and greenly malodorous, unhuman corpses speckled with chthonic fire. Some thirty prisoners crouched behind a barricade across the top of the stairs, hurling chunks of ice, and bodies, at a band of Whelm clustered on the steps below. The Numinator’s dish-shaped fire bowl was overturned and the spilled chthonic fire had eaten a pond-sized hole in the floor.
Huge, freezing drops splashed onto Maelys’s head. She looked up, received an icy deluge in the face, then stumbled aside as a barrel-sized chunk of rotten ice came crashing down. Only one splinter of the ice steeple remained; the rest had collapsed into broken stubs like the teeth of a rock-eating giant.
‘What – what’s happened?’ she said, shiveri
ng as the icy water ran down her legs. Maelys couldn’t take it in – in the brief time she’d been gone, the Numinator’s two-hundred-year-old empire had been toppled.
The Numinator limped through the portal and her face hardened as she surveyed the ruin of her eyrie. She splashed to the ice barricade, looked down and the Whelm cried out, as one.
‘Aiieeee! The Master has returned. Hail the Numinator, hail.’
They began to thump their weapons on the steps. Hail, hail! Maelys smelt their strong, oily onion odour.
Yalkara stalked out, her red Charon eyes fixed on Maelys, who edged away towards the fire-licked pond.
‘Chthonic fire burns ice, that’s what’s happened,’ said a blood-covered man brandishing an odd, jagged sword with a Whelm’s ragged scalp stuck halfway along the blade. She recognised Flydd’s voice, though not his face, which was so bruised and swollen that he could barely see.
‘Xervish?’ said Maelys.
‘Where have you been?’ he said coldly.
‘I – I –’ How could she explain the way she and Emberr had fallen for each other, or what they had done together, or how he had died? She couldn’t bear to speak of it. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Maelys met Emberr – my son with Rulke, the son he never knew he had – when you went to the Nightland,’ said Yalkara baldly. ‘They fell under each other’s spell and he called her back.’
‘That’s not true!’ cried Maelys. ‘I followed the Numinator there because she had a poisoned knife; I was afraid she was going to kill him.’
‘Why would I kill the one person I’ve been trying to create since Rulke’s death?’ said the Numinator in astonishment. ‘The hollow knife contained a potion to test his fertility.’
‘And he was fertile?’ said Yalkara.
‘Extremely.’
Yalkara, iron-faced, turned back to Flydd. ‘Maelys and Emberr lay with one another, but chthonic fire on her killed him, and if she’s pregnant the child comes to the void with me.’
‘Any child is mine!’ hissed the Numinator.
