by Ian Irvine
‘My healers will check them with the utmost thoroughness.’ On recognising Flangers and Chissmoul, who were holding hands, he smiled grimly. ‘Minor fugitives from olden times, but revenge will be tasty nonetheless. Guards, take them.’
The guards had just stepped off the air-sled when the air went storm-cloud black beneath it, thunder rolled and the air-sled was thrown spans into the air. Klarm tumbled head over heels to the left but landed on his feet like a circus acrobat. Jal-Nish, taken by surprise, slammed into the ground on his good arm and shoulder and the tears went flying. He snatched at them but they rolled out of reach down the slope, connected by their chain, making ominous crackling sounds and charring the grass in twin, steaming paths.
Yggur was about to spring for them but Klarm had his knoblaggie out in the twitch of an eyelid, pointing its brassy end at Yggur’s heart. ‘You remember this, I’m sure.’
Yggur remained in his crouch for a few seconds, then raised his hands and stood up, and the chance was lost. Klarm gathered up the tears by their chain, holding them well away from himself.
The air-sled turned over twice and thudded side-on into the ground, bending its frame like a banana. A black mushroom grew behind it – evidently the phenomenon that had thrown it into the air – and Yalkara pushed through its striated stalk.
Maelys moved behind Nish but not before Yalkara saw her. The Imperial Guard lifted the God-Emperor to his feet; he clutched his shoulder with his other hand, winced, then Klarm placed the tears around his neck and Jal-Nish limped across to Yalkara. She was almost a head taller, and inclined her head to look down her nose at him. In other circumstances, Maelys might have cheered.
‘Who are you?’ Jal-Nish said, unsuccessfully attempting to project the God-Emperor’s air of power and invulnerability, though it was evident he was discomfited by her. ‘I know all the great powers of this world, and you’re not one of them.’
‘You didn’t know the Numinator existed,’ Nish pointed out.
The exposed half of Jal-Nish’s face twitched in annoyance. ‘She would not have survived had she not siphoned power from Yggur.’
Yalkara said, staccato, ‘I am Charon! I am Yalkara! I am not of this world, though I dwelt here for a long time. Indeed, I am not of any world. I was birthed in the void, and to the void do I return when my business is done.’ Her gaze touched briefly on Maelys.
Maelys turned away; she could not meet Yalkara’s eyes. To her left, the air was rippling in front of a tree on the edge of the clearing, twenty paces away. What now?
A faint outline formed there, a slender, female shape, not tall but very upright and stiff. It faded into air again, but Maelys knew the Numinator had come for her.
Yggur was looking in the same direction, probing the burned skin under his bracelets and wincing. He’d seen as well, and Maelys was pleased that he knew. Yggur alone had not judged her, but could he protect her?
Jal-Nish plunged his good hand into Gatherer as if he were checking the truth of what Yalkara had said. ‘From the moment I set eyes on you, I knew you had to be from beyond. Indeed, when I recently discovered the Nightland had been restored, Reaper told me that no one on Santhenar had the power to do so. You restored it, didn’t you?’
‘I did,’ said Yalkara.
‘To attack Santhenar and take it for your own.’ His voice had a triumphant ring. ‘I read that threat months ago; I told Nish about it before he escaped from prison.’
‘What a puffed-up little emperor you are,’ she said contemptuously. ‘I rebuilt the Nightland for one purpose only – to protect the son I conceived there with my enemy, Rulke, two centuries ago. Alas, being birthed in the Nightland, Emberr could never leave, and now he is dead. Once I have recovered his body I will allow the Nightland to decay into the nothingness it came from, and Santhenar will never see me again.’
Jal-Nish withdrew his hand from Gatherer, studied it – it shook a little – and hastily thrust it back in. The song of the tears resumed. ‘You speak truth,’ he said.
‘I would not bother to lie to an insignificant worm like you.’
Jal-Nish flushed. ‘You did not protect your son very well.’
‘So says a man who has lost a daughter and three sons …’
Suddenly Yalkara’s cheeks went as hard as sheets of metal, as though something terrible had occurred to her. ‘Oh, irony most bitter!’ she whispered.
Jal-Nish and Klarm looked at one another. Klarm shrugged.
‘All that time I spent trapped in the void, trying to free Emberr from the Nightland,’ she said softly. ‘Maintaining it was draining all my strength and I knew it must soon fail; and he would die. I had to get Emberr out, but I could not force a portal through the Nightland’s defences.’
‘Why didn’t you use the chthonic flame?’ said Flydd.
‘I dared not; not to go there. It could have killed Emberr, and alerted … others to the Nightland’s existence. But when the nodes were destroyed, and Jal-Nish concentrated the world’s power in his tears, an opportunity came.’
‘Really?’ said the God-Emperor. He did not look pleased to hear it. ‘Pray go on. Tell me everything.’
‘I saw an old mancer running for his life, hiding in ditches and living off voles and wood grubs.’
Flydd’s head jerked up and he stared at Yalkara. Jal-Nish chuckled.
‘He had once been one of the great,’ she went on, ‘and with a suitable source of power he might be great again. I influenced him – it wasn’t hard; his mind lay wide open – to take refuge on top of Mistmurk Mountain. I’d once made portals from its obelisk, so it would be easiest to recreate one there, and power was available from the cursed flame. The mountain’s seeping vapours would assist me to get into his mind and make him think my plan was his own.’
‘What took you so long?’ said Yggur.
‘Flydd proved more stubborn than I’d expected. It’s hard to influence anyone from the void, very hard; it took me years, but by that time he was close to the end of his life and no longer had the strength to make a portal. He was soon going to die, and my last chance to save Emberr would die with him.’
‘But then Nish and Maelys came,’ said Flydd. ‘Maelys pressured me to take renewal, and you struck.’
‘I entered your mind during renewal, when your will was weakest. I taught you the great portal spell and showed you how to use the abyssal flame to do what I could not: open a two-part portal: one part to bring me from the void to Mist-murk, and the other to take me to the Nightland.’
‘Ah,’ said Flydd. ‘I wondered why there were two linked spirals.’
‘But the renewal went wrong. You lost your memories and your Art with them and, in trying to help you regain it, I unwittingly allowed you access to my memories.’
‘Ah,’ said Flydd.
‘When Vivimord blocked you from opening the portal, you looked deeper. You saw the hidden chthonic flame, the last thing I would have allowed near the Nightland, or Emberr, and you opened the portal with it. But that flame is far too powerful; it created the two-part portal in an instant and, before I was ready, Vivimord seized my portal and fled with it, leaving me stuck in the void.’
‘He directed the portal here to Gendrigore,’ said Nish. ‘With me, to set up the Defiance anew.’
‘But you got away from him,’ said Flydd. ‘We’d all like to hear that tale.’
‘You can relate it in my torture chambers,’ said Jal-Nish, though he made no move to enforce the threat.
Maelys eyed the God-Emperor uneasily. Why didn’t he attack? Because he loved to toy with his victims, of course. He had them at his mercy; he could draw out the moment for as long as he liked.
‘Flydd went to the Nightland and I was terrified for my son,’ said Yalkara, ignoring Jal-Nish, ‘but I managed to divert him away from Emberr towards Rulke’s virtual construct. If Flydd used it to escape, I might still find a way into the Nightland. It never occurred to me that Maelys was the real danger, for I could barely see her – the ta
phloid concealed her from me.’
‘Poor Emberr,’ said Maelys aloud, remembering their first meeting.
‘He had been locked into the age of a young man for more than two hundred years, and he was desperately lonely. Emberr was a romantic!’ Yalkara said it as though it was a weakness. ‘He yearned for the love of a good woman. I had shaped him thus, for he could only escape by trapping a young woman to take his place and passing his Nightland essence to her. I never thought he would be so weak as to put his feelings for another above his own needs.’
‘I’m sure no other Charon was ever so weak,’ said Maelys.
‘If we had been, we would not have survived. Emberr scented you, and drew you to him, but instead of trapping you and escaping, as I’d taught him to do, he fell for you, and you for him. When the opportunity came, and the Numinator made her portal to the Nightland, Maelys went back to Emberr, lay with him, and killed him.’
Hundreds of heads, including the entire militia, turned Maelys’s way, staring at her in horror and disgust. The God-Emperor’s fingers sank, black-nailed and claw-like, into Reaper and she knew it was the end, for her and her family.
‘She lay with him, then killed him?’ Jal-Nish grated. ‘The callous little bitch.’
‘Unwittingly,’ said Yalkara. ‘In an irony of cosmic proportions, Maelys’s skin bore traces of the chthonic flame she’d leapt through to enter the portal, and when they lay together it passed to him. It could not harm her, but it was deadly to Emberr.’
‘Why so?’ said Jal-Nish, his voice rather high-pitched. ‘I don’t see the irony.’
‘You never could,’ sneered Flydd, as if he had nothing to lose. ‘It’s one of your greatest failings, God-Emperor.’
The rain stopped suddenly. Yalkara spoke more softly yet. ‘Chthonic fire does not exist only in our physical world. It can, or at least it once could, inhabit any of the eleven dimensions of space and time. That is why it’s so useful for making portals, and why it was inimical to Emberr. Because he was partly of the Nightland, the chthonic fire began to unmake him inside. Romantic love had betrayed him.’
Maelys ground her fists into her eyes to keep back the tears, but as she did so, she remembered Emberr looking down at the white fire shimmering on her skin. Bestowing that enigmatic smile on her, he’d said, You truly are the woman who will free me. Had he known what the fire was? Had he lain with her, knowing that it would kill him, rather than obey his mother’s imperative to trap her in his place? He must have, and it was the noblest sacrifice of all. Nothing could stop Maelys’s tears now.
‘I was sure the Nightland had been rebuilt by some beast from the void,’ said Jal-Nish, and now the tremor was reflected in his voice, ‘to attack beautiful Santhenar. I used Gatherer to peer into the void’s darkest recesses –’
‘You did what?’ cried Yalkara.
Jal-Nish began to pace back and forth in agitation. ‘I – I could not do any harm by looking.’
‘The inhabitants of the void hate creeping, sneaking spies far more than they hate intruders, little emperor. You could see no more than the vaguest threat, and a meaningless one, since threats are everywhere in the void. But you, and Santhenar, out of all the billions of worlds in the universe, will have been located by at least one of the creatures that roam the void – the one that sees everything in it. When did you discover the Nightland? Quick!’
‘After Flydd opened the portal there from Mistmurk Mountain, over a month ago,’ said Jal-Nish. ‘But I could not follow –’
‘You could not break into the Nightland even if you expended all the power of the Profane Tears. But it will have seen what you were looking at,’ she said relentlessly. ‘It cannot come straight here, for the Three Worlds are protected from the void, but it will have noted everything you were spying on.’
‘The Nightland forms a weakness in the barrier that protects us from the void, and the desperate creatures that inhabit it,’ explained Yggur, running his fingers around the left bracelet, then the right, then the left again.
‘For one who knows how,’ said Yalkara, ‘the Nightland might be used as a bridge across which to attack Santhenar. And there is one in the void, the very same all-seeing being, who does know how to make such a bridge – indeed, you could say that it is a bridge. At least, it was.’
Maelys looked from Yalkara to Yggur to Jal-Nish. Just when she thought she knew what was going on a new complication confused everything. This future had definitely not been in her vision in the Pit of Possibilities.
‘Who?’ whispered Jal-Nish, agitatedly stroking Gatherer, then Reaper, but finding no comfort in either. ‘Or what?’
‘The shiver-shifter; the ethereal absolute; the shadow of a flame. The Stilkeen.’
FIFTY-ONE
‘What the blazes is a stilkeen?’ said Jal-Nish.
‘Not a stilkeen. The Stilkeen,’ said Yalkara.
‘What is the Stilkeen?’ Jal-Nish snapped.
‘A being above time, beyond place. The Stilkeen has a great hunger – seldom satisfied – for the life forces of sentient creatures from the material worlds that it can no longer reach. And once you revealed the Nightland, and Flydd opened it with chthonic fire, the Stilkeen will not have rested until it found a way inside.’
‘Is that what killed your son?’
‘Chthonic fire killed my son; the white fire I hid in the deepest roots of Thuntunnimoe long ago, because it was too dangerous to use.’
‘Perhaps the Stilkeen put her up to it,’ said Jal-Nish silkily, nodding at Maelys.
Maelys wiped her eyes and saw his simmering fury. Somehow, Jal-Nish knew she’d lied to him.
‘Emberr was hidden from the Stilkeen by a spell to which only he held the key,’ said Yalkara, ‘but everyone else who entered the Nightland would have been in peril.’
‘Why was Emberr hidden?’ said Yggur, still stroking his bracelets. ‘You didn’t know Jal-Nish had revealed the Night-land. Indeed, why would your son be in danger, in the most secure prison ever built? This tale doesn’t add up. There’s something you’re not telling us, Yalkara.’
The downpour resumed, harder than ever. ‘The Stilkeen may have been close by while you and I and the Numinator were there,’ Yalkara said, ignoring Yggur’s question and looking fixedly at Maelys. ‘Even while you lay with my son.’
‘I didn’t see anything,’ said Maelys. Yalkara’s gaze seemed to look into her, as if to see if she were bearing Emberr’s child. And what if she was? She felt a darker, deeper terror. ‘What does the Stilkeen look like?’
‘It can take on any aspect. A flake of skin on the floor, a curtain moving in the wind, a flea in your armpit.’
Maelys instinctively scratched herself then, remembering the slurchie that had grown in her belly after she’d eaten contaminated meat, an even greater horror occurred to her. What if it had crept inside her while she and Emberr had made love, or when they’d lain in each other’s arms?
‘The Stilkeen might be among us now,’ Yalkara went on. ‘Maelys, or the Numinator, could have brought it back to Santhenar. It would be weak, for in its present state the real worlds are painful to it, but if it is here it’s got to be forced out. The tears, God-Emperor.’ She held out her hand.
Jal-Nish backed away. ‘As if I’d fall for that one.’ His guards closed around him; Klarm pointed the knoblaggie at Yalkara.
‘Imbecile!’ hissed Yalkara. ‘You can’t even touch the menace your folly has brought upon this world.’
‘I’m not afraid of some beast from the void.’
‘The Stilkeen is no beast. It’s a being!’
‘A – a deity?’ Jal-Nish said haltingly.
Her lip curled. ‘If it helps you to think of it that way, false God-Emperor. How are you enjoying this irony?’
He said nothing, and she went on, ‘Give – me – the – tears.’
‘Gatherer and Reaper are the basis of my power,’ said Jal-Nish, shaking his head. ‘The tears have made me what I am.’
‘
An empty, self-titled God-Emperor, no more than a small man’s boast, ruling through terror because it’s the only authority you’ll ever have.’
‘It’s all I need to crush you!’ Jal-Nish snarled, thrusting his good hand into Reaper.
Behind Yalkara, a red pinpoint exploded flames in all directions, throwing mud and smouldering grass high in the air. Maelys was punched backwards against Nish, her head cracking into his chin. His arms caught her, his breath was loud in her ear as some thing swelled to its full, enormous size.
No flea in her armpit, this – in its present aspect it stood head and shoulders above Yggur. It had a broad, flattened head, from the sides of which bony plates flared out and back like a multi-winged helmet; its small yellow eyes were covered in clear membranes that swept slowly from side to side; it had a split nose and a gaping, thick-lipped mouth clustered with needle teeth. Its long clawed fingers were webbed; a broad frilled membrane flared out from the backs of its long arms all the way across its shoulders, and it carried a meteoritic iron caduceus – a spear entwined by serpents – the height of a small tree.
The Stilkeen turned this way and that, its clawed, webbed feet tearing up grass, earth and chunks of rock. The muscles shivered all the way down its massive left leg; the left foot clenched and unclenched; dull red flames flickered on its chest and throat.
Why, it’s suffering, Maelys realised. The Stilkeen is in terrible pain. This was small comfort, because pain would make it even more savage.
‘Where – is – white-ice-fire?’ it said in a thick, reverberating voice, the words barely audible over the furnace-rush of air in and out of its quivering throat. ‘Who – stole – my – white-ice-fire?’
Its head rotated in a full circle on its massive neck and kept turning, staring at each of them one after another. Maelys noticed that Yalkara had subtly shifted her appearance to look smaller, younger, softer, weaker. Why was she hiding? Or what was she hiding?
Then Maelys saw that faint wavering outline again. The Numinator. Coming closer.
The Stilkeen’s eyes fixed on Jal-Nish, who had his hand deep inside Reaper and was trying to choke out a spell, though he kept mispronouncing the words.
