The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (72 page)

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.

‘You!’ said the Stilkeen. ‘Thief? Where –
white-ice-fire?’

‘I d-don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Jal-Nish thrust
Reaper out at it and began the spell anew.

Yalkara shifted her weight slightly, as if preparing to
spring. When she struck the Numinator down in Emberr’s cottage, she had been
inhumanly fast.

The Imperial Guard swung their weapons from the Stilkeen to
her, but Jal-Nish’s spell failed as the Stilkeen wrung its hands together. With
red flashes bursting from the tops of their skulls and their smoking eyes
sliding out of their sockets, the guards fell dead. Klarm was hurled down the
slope, clinging to his knoblaggie, then slowly rolled over, breathing steam
from his nostrils. The archers on the ridge fired but their arrows exploded in
mid-air.

‘You – thief!’ The Stilkeen caught Jal-Nish with one
arm, tossed him high and whirled under him, the frilled membrane spinning out
like a wing and lifting it off the ground, then caught him in mid-air.

‘Stilkeen claims – God-Emperor – and … world.’
Each word was like the throbbing of air sucked into a furnace, then it hurled
the caduceus straight down so hard that it blasted grass and earth away, and
penetrated half a span into solid rock. Its shaft glowed white-hot; the eyes of
the entwined serpents were like red coals. Maelys could feel the heat beating
on her cheeks.

‘Hostage,’ rumbled the Stilkeen. ‘For –
white-ice-fire.’

It shivered with pain, then spun faster and faster until it
and Jal-Nish were just a blur. Suddenly the tears flew out and landed fizzing
and shrilling at Klarm’s feet.

‘Klarm, my one honourable lieutenant,’ came Jal-Nish’s
fading voice. ‘Guard the tears; maintain my realm until I return.’ In a reverse
explosion of black flame streaking in to a point, they were gone.

Yalkara threw herself at the tears but was too late –
Klarm had already taken them.

‘Oh, I see it now,’ came the Numinator’s voice from just a
few steps away.

Her outline became an image hovering on a disc above the
grass, though the Numinator maintained a slight transparency. She wasn’t taking
any risks; wasn’t fully appearing until she was ready – for what?

‘I see it all now,’ she went on, and the bitter edge to her
voice was even stronger than it had been in her tower. ‘Everything fits; the
terrible story is complete.’

‘Terrible indeed,’ said Tulitine. ‘And no one would know
better than you, grandmother.’

The Numinator turned her way, started visibly at seeing a
youthful woman where, evidently, she had expected a crone, then turned away
without acknowledging her granddaughter. Maelys was shocked, and it brought
home, as forcefully as anything she’d seen in the past days, just how inhuman
the Numinator had become.

‘Perhaps you’ll enlighten us, Numinator,’ said Yggur, again
stroking his corroded bracelets. ‘Though I don’t see how it can be worse than
your awful tale.’

‘Oh, it’s worse – Yalkara’s crime began all the tales
of the Three Worlds, including my own. I know about the Stilkeen and its loss;
Rulke told me. It was the most beautiful and enigmatic being in all the void,
one whose constantly changing form, indeed its very existence, was its art and
craft; and its Art. It could roam across all of the eleven dimensions of space
and time, even the ones rolled up to infinitesimal coils; and for millions of
years it did – until someone stole its soul-core at the only moment when
it was vulnerable – as it
shifted
to cross from one set of dimensions to another.

‘That awful sacrilege
severed
the Stilkeen’s body from the higher parts of its being and left what you just
saw – its physical self – trapped in our universe, while its spirit
aspects were lost in dimensions it could no longer reach. The Stilkeen suffered
the most terrible pain and grief for the loss of its other aspects, that it
might never join with again. It might never become whole again.’

The Numinator’s eyes met Yalkara’s, challenging her.

‘I found chthonic fire hidden in the core of an exploded
comet,’ said Yalkara arrogantly. ‘No one –’

‘You knew what white-ice-fire was,’ said the Numinator, ‘and
what it meant to the Stilkeen – its soul-core; the force that bound its
physical and spiritual aspects together. Rulke warned you not to touch the
chthonic fire, but you stole it anyway, for it was a treasure beyond any price –
it offered an escape from the void that you dwindling,
insufficient
Charon had been looking for all your lives.’

‘And why shouldn’t I take it?’ Yalkara flashed. ‘In the
void, life was a constant battle: survival or extinction. I chose life for my
kind.’

‘You gave them life – escape to the Three Worlds
– and began a thousand tales that echo to this day; but in another,
deeper irony, you robbed them of their future.’

Yalkara drew a sharp breath, and seemed to dwindle. She
could not meet the Numinator’s eyes. ‘We did not know it then.’

‘On Aachan, something had rendered almost all the Charon
sterile,’ the Numinator explained. ‘No one knew why; they thought the tragedy
was due to Aachan itself, for on Santhenar, Rulke and Kandor did father
children. But the problem wasn’t Aachan, was it, Yalkara? It was the stolen
chthonic fire, which existed in many dimensions and could never be truly
contained. That’s why, when you worked it out, you brought the white fire to
Santhenar and hid it where no one would ever find it. You did not tell the
other Charon what you’d done to them, though, did you?’

‘I could not,’ said Yalkara in a bleached voice. ‘It would
have destroyed them.’

The Numinator, who looked completely solid now, stepped down
off her hovering disc onto the grass. ‘It would have destroyed you in their
eyes, and you could not bear that, for you’d always been hailed as one of the
greatest. The Charon would become extinct because you’d stolen the fire, but no
Charon must ever know what you’d done.’

‘And no one would have known, had you not tried to take
control of Flydd’s mind, Yalkara,’ said Yggur, ‘and unwittingly allowed him
into yours, where he saw the hidden fire.’

‘I had no choice. I had to get Emberr out of the Nightland
before …’

‘The Stilkeen found it,’ said Yggur. ‘No wonder you left
Emberr there, terrified of its revenge.’

‘It wasn’t the Stilkeen I was worried about. I’d hidden the
Nightland from it.’

‘What then?’ Yggur grated. ‘Please tell me that you haven’t
done something even worse.’

‘No; everything springs from my first folly,’ said Yalkara
with bowed head. ‘When I took the white fire, the Stilkeen’s severed
spirit-aspects, or
revenants
, fell
into another dimension, a netherworld, and brought it to life. Flydd calls it
the shadow realm, and it’s the place where the dead from many worlds go. There
the lost revenants roam like mischievous spirits, giving the dead a kind of
life for their own amusement, and tempting living necromancers and corrupt
mages –’

‘Like Vivimord,’ said Maelys, remembering his threats.

‘The revenants grow ever more desperate to rejoin with
Stilkeen. I could not hide the Nightland from them much longer. I had to get
Emberr out before they found it.’

Maelys had an unpleasant thought. ‘I pushed dead Phrune into
the column of chthonic fire on Mistmurk Mountain. His body fell down the shaft
but five wraiths came up, looking just like him, and they were all laughing at
me. Have I done something bad?’

Yalkara froze. ‘The white fire would have burned his dead
flesh away, reducing him to his corrupt essence – those wraiths, and they
would be drawn inexorably to the shadow realm. Once they reached it, Stilkeen’s
revenants would soon have detected the tang of the chthonic flame on them. By
now the revenants must know that the white-ice-fire – the one force that
can rejoin their severed selves to the Stilkeen – has been found. They
can’t know where – Phrune can’t tell them that – but they’ll be
struggling to break out of the shadow realm and find the flame.’