The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (10 page)

‘Keep watch on the entrances,’ Flydd said quietly. ‘I’ll
look for her.’

Nish moved into the shadows, rapier out. He wanted to use it
on someone, and if they’d hurt Maelys, he would. Colm, keeping well clear of
the cursed flame, went across to guard the unseen far entrance, though it
seemed a useless gesture. Neither of them would be a match for Jal-Nish’s
highly trained Imperial Guard, face to face.

The pain grew ever worse until it was impossible to think
about anything else. In a sweaty daze, Nish watched Flydd moving towards the
slab, eyes sweeping right and left.

He picked up something from the floor. ‘Shards of my
crystal: she overcharged it and it burst. The flame must be more powerful than
I’d thought. And it’s shrunk back? Is that because of Vivimord?’ Flydd bent low.
‘Congealed blood; hours old, so it can’t be hers. It must have come from Phrune
or Vivimord.’

Colm eyed the cursed flame warily. Nish couldn’t blame him;
he felt its power too.

Flydd inspected the slab, and the floor around it, from
which he picked up Maelys’s taphloid by the chain, wrapped it in a rag and
pocketed it. ‘This is bad. Why did she undo the rope? Because the crystal
burst, and she could not return to confess such a failure?’

‘Why not?’ said Colm from the darkness.

‘Her family blame her for the ruin of the clan. In their
eyes she can do nothing right, and she’s always been expected to make up for
the failings of others, but when she tries, it always goes wrong – like
the story she told back in the cavern.’

‘It didn’t sound like a story to me,’ Colm said coldly.

‘She acted to save her family in the only way she knew how.
I’m sure you would have done the same.’

‘Not that way.’ Colm could not contain his disgust.

‘You judge her harshly.’

‘The line has to be drawn; she crossed it.’

‘Let’s all bow to Saint Colm,’ Nish sneered, for his pain
was getting the better of him.

‘Pay your own debts before you criticise me,’ spat Colm.

‘We’ve got enough enemies without you two at each other’s
throats,’ said Flydd. ‘Clearly, Maelys was driven to make her failure good, to
save us.’ He hauled his reluctant flesh onto the slab. ‘These footmarks are too
big for Maelys. She encountered someone here, but not one of Jal-Nish’s big
men. Not with plump, stubby feet like these.’

‘And not Vivimord either,’ said Nish, coming closer. ‘He’s
got long feet.’

‘Come up.’ Flydd reached down to give Nish a hand, and he
scrambled up. ‘Hold your burnt hand just above the cursed flame. It might
help.’

‘Is that how Vivimord was healed?’

Flydd jumped down and began to pace around the slab. ‘Not
exactly; Phrune shed his own blood into the flame, thence onto Vivimord who lay
beneath, and the purified sacrifice healed him.’

‘I don’t suppose …?’ Nish began.

‘I wouldn’t recommend it,’ said Flydd. ‘It’s the cursed
flame, remember, and if any two men were already cursed, it was those two.’

‘I’m equally cursed,’ Nish said bitterly. He held his hand
above the flame, biting his lip as the pain flared to new levels of
excruciation. ‘I don’t see how it can do any harm.’

Flydd walked into the darkness, head down, studying the
floor. ‘Phrune’s sacrifice might have perverted the flame. It will take a long
time to cleanse it.’

Nonetheless, with the possibility of healing right in front
of him, the pain suddenly became unbearable and, desperate for relief, Nish
stabbed his wrist on the point of the rapier and allowed his blood to fall onto
the slab beside the star hole. It began to run into the flame, which flared red
and green. He half-scrambled, half-fell off and crawled underneath, tearing the
moss bandage from his charred and repulsive hand.

Blood began to drip through onto his wrist. It was hot and
made his unburned skin creep as if thousands of stinging ants were running over
it. He rubbed the blood across his burned hand and fingers, where he could see
bone showing through charred flesh. It smelled awful – cooked.

‘Aah!’ he cried out as the pain doubled and redoubled; he
just had presence of mind enough to keep rubbing the blood in.

‘No, Nish!’

Flydd came back at a stumbling run and tried to drag him
out. Nish kept him at bay with his feet. If his hand could be healed, even
partially, it was worth the risk.

‘It’s not a sacrifice if it’s your own blood!’ Flydd added.

Drip, drip, drip. Nish felt sure it was doing some good; the
pain was easing and the flesh didn’t seem quite so charred.

‘No,
no
!’ cried
Flydd, trying to climb onto the slab.

A trail of large dark drops fell, but they were icy and
burned glacially as Nish smeared them across the back of his hand and down his
little and ring fingers, where the cold took away the pain completely.

‘It’s working!’ He held his hand up. Where he’d rubbed the
cold blood in, new skin was rising up from charred flesh before his eyes;
smooth skin, slightly darker than his own. ‘Another few drops like those and
I’ll have my hand back, nearly as good as ever.’

‘Get out, Nish. There’ll be no more.’ Flydd’s voice was
granite hard.

‘What’s the fool done now?’ said Colm from the other side.

Nish caught the last drop, rubbed it in and crawled out.
‘But it’s healing me …’

‘Those last drops were Vivimord’s blood, mingling with your
own, you fool. And you don’t want –’ His eyes dropped to Nish’s hand,
where new skin was still forming. ‘You don’t want any part of him in you;
especially not his blood. Hold your hand out, quick!’

Nish obeyed. ‘What are you going to do?’

Flydd grabbed Colm’s sword and swung it high. Nish was slow
to react; he couldn’t believe that Flydd was going to do it until the blade
started to fall, then snatched his hand out of the way just in time.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he cried, backing away as
the blade struck the floor. He was shaking.

‘Better no hand than one tainted by Vivimord’s black blood.
Hold it out.’

‘No!’ Nish gasped. What had he done to himself?

Flydd looked as though he was going to come after Nish and
amputate his hand by force, but finally he sighed, ‘It’s your funeral,’ and
handed the blade back to Colm, who wore a curiously satisfied smile. He wasn’t
displeased at what had happened, but Colm had never liked him, and the feeling
was mutual.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Nish. ‘How could it be that bad?’

‘How the devil would I know?’ said Flydd. ‘Though I dare say
we’ll find out soon enough. Better see if I can recover anything from this
fiasco.’

He crawled under the slab, soon humping out again with a
small crystal cupped in his hand. The faintest colours moved inside it. ‘She
found a powered crystal, but then she encountered her nemesis, and it wasn’t
Jal-Nish. So that’s why the soldiers weren’t wearing uniforms.’

‘Vivimord,’ said Nish, feeling faint. ‘That stinking,
murderous maniac.’

‘And without her taphloid she’d be defenceless.’

‘Can you find him?’

‘I don’t think that will be too difficult,’ said Flydd.
‘It’s not her he wants, Nish. It’s you – and you’ve just linked yourself
to him for the term of your
natural
life. If not beyond it.’

Taking a small phial made of white crystal from an inner
pocket, he carefully filled it at the cursed flame and stoppered it tightly.
Through the walls of the crystal the flames licked back and forth, red and
black.

‘What’s that for?’ said Nish.

‘I don’t know yet, but it’s what the woman in red wanted me
to do.’

And is she still in your mind, Nish fretted, possessing you
and controlling your every thought and deed?

 
EIGHT

Vivimord had tidied himself up since Maelys last saw
him. His healed, baby-smooth olive skin had been freshly oiled, including his
long hairless skull, and the bloodstains washed away. The dark hollows
surrounding his deep eyes were less prominent, while the black, egg-shaped
swelling on his right cheek, where Maelys had struck him with her taphloid, had
shrunk to the size of a plover’s egg.

He bound Maelys, gagged and blindfolded her, threw her knife
away then carried her through the dark, walking with a slow, measured tread.
They went down many flights of steps, along a passage with an uneven floor and
through a stone door whose hinges hissed as it opened and closed. The
swamp-creeper slime became ever more itchy as it dried but she couldn’t scratch
herself.

On the other side the passage was smooth and clean; she
couldn’t hear Vivimord’s footfalls, though shortly she made out a repulsive
squelching which indicated that Phrune was close behind. She could smell him
now: a revolting mixture of rancid oil, dead flesh and burst intestines,
overpowering Vivimord’s own faint odour of crisped skin and the balm he’d used
to dress his wounds. Or did Phrune still provide that service, even in death?
And if he did, what other services did he continue to provide for his master?

Maelys shied away from that thought, for it was too
appalling. She had to concentrate on getting free and fulfilling her
responsibilities; she could not allow Vivimord to use her as bait for Nish. If
she could get a hand free, she might draw the taphloid from her pocket, and
then, look out!

She swung her knee up, so as to feel the comforting weight
of the taphloid in the pocket of her pants, but it wasn’t there. It must have
fallen out during her struggles. She was unarmed; helpless; lost without it.

More doors opened and closed, the last with a brittle crack
as though stone had become frozen to stone over the depths of time. Warm, dusty
air billowed out, and a faint smoky odour, though it wasn’t the chamber of the
cursed flame this time. They had gone down many flights and up none, so she
must be far below it now.

Vivimord’s footsteps echoed hollowly, indicating that this
was a much larger chamber, deep within the mountain. As they went in she heard
a faint whistling, which grew louder. Maelys counted fifty-four paces before he
laid her down on a warm floor and removed the blindfold.

Some twenty paces away, a much larger, green-black flame
whistled up from a structure of carved greenstone – a pedestal or
circular altar big enough for a temple – and its light illuminated the
whole chamber. She caught her breath, for she could have been in the audience
room of a palace from the Histories, one suited to an emperor. Why was it
hidden in an insignificant plateau deep within an empty rain-forest?

The chamber was painted with murals that, even in their
barbaric brutality, were beautiful, though this was not the vicious brutality
of the God-Emperor’s realm. Even Maelys could tell that. It was the glorious
barbarism of a people who had fought for survival for so long, against
impossible odds, that they knew nothing else.

The flame flared higher, emerald tongues within the black.
Dead Phrune squelched to a stop behind her, his regurgitated entrails dangling
and dripping. Maelys rolled away across the floor; Phrune came after her and
stopped her with his fat foot.

Vivimord stared at the characters inscribed around the
altar. ‘
All endeavours fail
,’ he read
haltingly. ‘
Time undoes all things
.
And rightly so. The Charon were great, but fatally flawed, and now they have
gone to extinction.’

Maelys knew enough of the Histories to understand what he
was talking about. A few Charon, the Hundred, had escaped out of the terrible
void between the worlds thousands of years ago and taken Aachan, another of the
Three Worlds, for their own. At that time, Aachan was inhabited by the great
and powerful Aachim, but the Hundred, led by the greatest Charon of all, Rulke,
had seized their world and kept them in thrall for thousands of years. The
Charon were extremely long-lived but, in some cosmic irony no one had ever
understood, most had been sterile on Aachan, and over the aeons the Hundred had
slowly dwindled.

Three Charon had subsequently come to Santhenar: Rulke,
Yalkara and Kandor. Kandor had been killed in ages past. Rulke had eventually
been incarcerated in the Nightland, a special prison remote from the laws that
governed the real world, but had escaped and brought the
Tale of the Mirror
to its dreadful climax some two hundred and
twenty years ago. He had been slain and the handful of surviving but sterile
Charon, led by Yalkara, had gone back to the void, and to extinction.

‘Why did they build this place
here
?’ she said, speaking her thoughts aloud.

‘For the abyssal flame, I expect,’ said Vivimord. ‘It’s far
more powerful than the cursed flame, and more difficult to use, but I’ll find a
way.’

Phrune made a hideous gurgling noise. Maelys’s hackles rose.

‘Why, Phrune,’ said Vivimord teasingly, ‘are you trying to
tell me something?’

Again the disgusting noise.

Vivimord smiled thinly. ‘You want to kill her – no, to
skin
her for me? You’ll have to wait,
my dear Phrune. Maelys is bait; you know that. Come, we must set the trap.’

He dragged Maelys by her bound wrists into a smaller room
which lay in darkness. ‘This was once a great lady’s bedchamber and will do
nicely for the purpose I have in mind. But if you fail me, Maelys, a surprise
awaits you below.’

Phrune gave another squelch; Maelys sensed dismay in him, or
anger.

‘Surely I don’t have to remind you that you’re
dead
, Phrune?’ said Vivimord. ‘You have
no feelings now – if you ever did. You may think that tormenting her will
give you the same sadistic pleasure as before, but it’s not going to happen.
You’ll never feel anything again.’

Squelch-squelch
,
quick and agitated.

‘Don’t be like that,’ Vivimord said with mock sorrow. ‘We
can’t allow our base lusts to get in the way of the greater plan, can we? I too
want Maelys to pay for what she did to us – I shudder for retribution
– but we must keep to our purpose if we’re to get out of here
alive
, and turn Nish into the Deliverer.
My Defiance are only leagues away, but first we have to reach them.’