The Destiny of the Dead (The Song of the Tears Book 3) (25 page)

From the top of the ridge the view was vaguely familiar,
though the distant, rounded ranges appeared much the same in every direction.
‘I don’t know if we’re close to the tower, or on the other side of the Island
of Noom,’ Maelys said, her thick black hair fluttering in the icy wind.

Tulitine, who was still struggling up the slope, seemed to
be in greater pain than before. Maelys went back and gave her an arm.

‘I’ve never been to Noom,’ Tulitine said faintly as they
reached the top. ‘As you know, the Numinator is my grandmother, but she wanted
nothing to do with me.’ She shook her head as if, even after all this time, she
could not come to terms with that.

‘From what I know of her, you’ve had a lucky escape!’ Maelys
muttered.

‘I dare say, but still it hurts.’

‘I think we’re close,’ said Yggur, marching down the other
side.

Maelys scurried after him, up the following ridge, and
shortly she made out the old stone arch – at least, part of it – at
the top. The right-hand pillar and half of the arch had collapsed, though the
rest still stood. She went through the arch and looked down on the valley
below.

The Tower of a Thousand Steps had been set on an icy island
in the middle of a lake, protected from intruders by constantly shifting
patterns of water and berg, but the lake had been reduced to a narrow ring of
shallow water and mud around a mound of broken rock and debris. The ice was
gone, and there was no sign that the tower had ever existed.

‘I can’t see any chthonic fire,’ said Maelys, crouching
beside the pillar where there was shelter from the wind. She’d hoped to gain a
little warmth from the stone, which faced the sun, but its feeble light had not
warmed the pillar at all.

‘There may still be some, deep in the foundations,’ said
Yggur. ‘But how are we to reach them?’

‘If you think I’m wading through that water –’

‘Be quiet. I’m trying to think.’

‘What about?’ she said automatically. ‘Sorry.’

‘I’m sorting through my memories of the tower. The
foundations came out past the edges of the lake, below ground, and there might
be a way in.’

‘Won’t it be flooded?’ said Maelys.

‘The lake is practically gone. The collapse must have
cracked the ground below the tower, and the water has drained away.’

They went down and began to circumnavigate the ring of
shallow water and half-frozen mud, which was littered with broken furniture and
timbers, and many, many bodies, the fruits of the Numinator’s dreadful and
ultimately failed breeding program. The exposed parts of many of the bodies had
been eaten by scavengers, down to the bones, though the corpses further out in
the mud and shallow water were still whole. Even in this climate, the smell was
gaggingly offensive.

Maelys was stumbling along, so cold that she began to fear
that her blood would freeze, when the ground ahead of her rose in
irregularly-shaped slabs, like a layer of frozen earth that had been forced up
from below until it shattered.

‘That’s odd,’ she muttered. ‘Yggur, what do you think this
is?’

He peered underneath the slabs. ‘I can see a hollow in
there; no, a hole. Something has broken the frozen ground from below.’

He walked around the slabs, frowning. ‘I think I see what’s
happened. The explosion blew the top of the ice tower to bits but the rest
remained intact until it hit the ground, and part of the frozen foundations
must have been forced up through the earth here, as the buried roots of a tree
break through the soil when it falls. There might still be some white fire deep
down. Maelys –’

‘I’m not going down there,’ said Maelys, who’d had her fill
of underground passages within Mistmurk Mountain.

Yggur tried to raise a slab but it proved too heavy. ‘You’re
a little thing. Squeeze under here, would you, and see how deep that hole
goes.’

‘
You’re a little
thing!
That’s just what Flydd and Nish said when they sent me down that
chimney infested with swamp creepers!’ she muttered. ‘Why is it always me?’

‘It isn’t always you,’ said Tulitine. ‘We’ve all got
strengths and weaknesses, and we each have to do what is required with them.’

Maelys felt like a small child being lectured by a stern
teacher, but Tulitine certainly couldn’t go in. ‘All right,’ she said quietly,
trying to conceal her unease. ‘Can you
at
least
make me a light, Yggur?’

It sounded like a criticism, though she had not intended it
to be, and her mortification deepened when, after several minutes of straining,
Yggur had not produced a glimmer of light. He turned away, shoulders slumped.

After an uncomfortable interval, Tulitine reached into an
inside pocket and drew out a small object like a miniature dumbbell, which she
tapped three times on the end. It began to shine brightly.

‘What’s that?’ said Maelys.

‘A seer’s light – also called a twinklestone. It won’t
hurt you.’

Nonetheless, Maelys flinched as the twinklestone was laid on
the centre of her palm. It looked searingly hot, yet had the cool, damp feeling
of a pair of soap bubbles, and weighed little more. She blew on it and it
wobbled but did not blow away; it was stuck to her skin, though she lifted it
off easily enough.

‘It doesn’t twinkle and it’s not stone, so why is it called
a twinklestone?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Tulitine. ‘You can stick it to your
forehead if you need to use your hands, but make sure your skin is dry.’

‘Why?’

‘If it touches anything wet, it sticks so tightly you’ll
have to tear the skin to get it off. You can also pull it apart, if you need
two lights for a while. If you need more light, carefully stretch the
twinklestone and it will expand and shine more brightly.’

‘What if I just want a little light?’

‘Squeeze it in your fist and it’ll go back to this size, or
even smaller.’

‘Thanks. All right; what if I find some chthonic fire? How
do I bring it back?’

‘In this.’ Yggur held out a midnight black circle, about the
diameter of his hand and fingers.

‘And this is …?’ said Maelys, drawing away. The circle made
her scalp crawl, for it was far blacker than black, she could not tell what it
was made from and, looked at side-on, it disappeared completely.

‘It’s a dimensionless box,’ said Yggur, who was holding it
by the very edge. ‘I stole it from the Numinator. If you find any fire, push
the dimensionless box onto it and the fire will be sucked inside and
preserved.’

‘How do you get it out again?’

‘You turn the dimensionless box inside out and eject the
fire into a suitable container.’

‘Er,’ said Maelys, ‘is the box dangerous?’

‘Extremely,’ said Yggur cheerfully.

His sudden good humour seemed a trifle macabre. ‘What if it
accidentally sucks
me
inside?’

‘It won’t unless you’re foolish enough to press it flat
against you. If you do, you will be drawn inside and will become a singularity
within the dimensionless box.’

‘And then what?’ said Maelys, afraid to go near it.

‘Nothing,’ said Yggur.

‘What do you mean,
nothing
?’

‘You would cease to exist. When the box was turned inside
out again, there would be nothing recognisable left of you. No living thing can
survive the dimensionless box – and few things that aren’t living.’

It got worse and worse. ‘Then how do I carry it safely?’ she
cried.

‘Just screw it up and stuff it into your pocket, and it’s
harmless,’ he said, as if that were obvious. ‘The box only works when it’s
perfectly flat.’

‘What if it unfolds?’

He sighed. ‘If you put it in a small pocket it won’t be able
to.’

Maelys took the dimensionless box, which was eerily
weightless, gingerly screwed it up and stuffed it into her shirt pocket,
buttoning down the flap to be sure it was safe. She would sooner have carried a
live scorpion there.

‘Off you go,’ said Yggur.

She pressed the twinklestone against her brow and it stuck
– it felt slightly itchy – then she tested the slab in case it was
loose. When it did not move she wriggled in under it. The light from the
twinklestone had a bluish tinge which made her surroundings appear even bleaker
and colder.

The space underneath was broad but low and she had to
flatten her bosom against the icy ground to get through; even so, her prominent
bottom scraped painfully on the underside of the slab. To her right the cavity
continued towards a wedge-shaped patch of darkness.

‘What do you see?’ said Yggur.

‘I think it does go down, though I don’t see how you’re
going to get through. I can barely fit.’

‘Keep going.’

She squirmed to the wedge-shaped darkness, which turned out
to be a hole, leading down. Maelys put her head over the edge. ‘It’s like a
shaft. It goes down further than I can see, and it’s pretty steep.’

‘Can you climb down, and more importantly, back up?’

‘You could if you could get in,’ said Maelys, persisting
with the fiction that she was just having a look around up top, and he was
going to do the dirty work. ‘The sides are like frozen, fractured soil –’

‘Broken permafrost,’ said Yggur. ‘Let’s hope it goes all the
way down. Keep going, as far as you can.’

‘It … it doesn’t look very safe.’

‘Keep a close eye on the sides and you’ll be all right
– the permafrost won’t fall in. If you come to running water or thawed
ground, don’t go any further or you could set off a collapse. Ready?’

‘I was also thinking of other kinds of dangers,’ said Maelys
in a tiny voice. ‘What if the Numinator buried some of her experiments down
below?’

‘It’ll be all right,’ Yggur muttered.

‘I’m scared.’

‘It’s no picnic up here in the freezing wind, and we’re in
more danger than you are, should any of those re-animated corpses still be
around.’ His voice faded; he must have turned away. ‘Keep a weather eye on the
water, Tulitine. They could be lurking under the surface, waiting for us to
turn our backs.’

Maelys wished he hadn’t spoken. She had not seen the bodies
that Zofloc, the Whelm sorcerer, had reanimated with darts full of distilled
chthonic fire, but she had heard all about them.

Shuddering, she plucked the twinklestone from her forehead,
attached it to the middle finger of her right hand and reached down. The shaft
was a good span wide and sloped down steeply, though it was climbable as long
as she did not encounter any smooth ice.

She put her feet in, began to go down backwards, then her
feet slipped on an icy patch and she caught frantically at the top edge while
she scrabbled for a solid footing. The icy patch proved to be small, and below
it was solid permafrost again, but she checked carefully with the twinklestone
before she continued. It would be easy to fall, and if she did, she would go
all the way.

‘I’m halfway down,’ she called a few minutes later, after
she’d descended some twenty spans. ‘I can see the bottom.’

Her voice echoed oddly, and shortly came a reply so garbled
and echoing that she could not make out a word. Had Yggur and Tulitine heard
what she had said, or merely the sound of her voice? Again she hesitated; if
she got into trouble further down there would be little point calling for help.
Not that they could get in to save her, anyhow.

It reminded her of other unpleasant expeditions she’d made
below ground, though thankfully this place appeared free of life; animal or
vegetable.

She continued to the bottom of the shaft, over piles of
broken rock and permafrost into a tunnel that was several spans across and
equally high; it extended in both directions further than the light reached.

Ahead of her, the walls and floor were as smooth as polished
stone. She must be inside the former ice foundations of the fallen tower.
Maelys assumed that the ice had been consumed by chthonic fire and the
meltwater had seeped away.

Sticking the twinklestone to her forehead, she proceeded
slowly in its bleak light, checking each wall for traces of white fire. She
found none, though the floor contained scattered pools of water, now freezing
again. Evidently, after consuming all the ice, the fire had gone out. Every so
often, narrower tunnels ran off to her left, presumably the remains of
cross-foundations. She passed them by.

Further on, the tunnel turned left, then continued. She was
trudging along it when a distorted, unidentifiable roar echoed down. Maelys
pressed herself against the wall, her heart fluttering. It might have been
Yggur shouting, but she dared not reply in case it was someone – or
something – else. Such as the reanimated corpses of those poor people on
whom the Numinator had done her dreadful breeding experiments.

On she went, around another left-hand corner, and after that
two more, which meant that this tunnel formed a square many hundreds of paces
on each side. She could see, distantly, the fractured shaft she had climbed
down; she was heading back to her starting point.

Not far away, another of those narrow tunnels ran off to her
left and she stood at its entrance, uncertainly. She had seen no solid ice so
far, and not a trace of white fire. Was there any point going that way?

Maelys thought it unlikely, but since she had come this far
there was no point leaving the job half done. She dragged her weary body
sideways down the narrow conduit, eventually emerging in a huge open space,
three spans high and further across than the light of the twinklestone could
reach. She struggled to work out what it had been, for she was not good at
imagining shapes in her head.

She guessed that it had once contained the solid ice
foundations supporting the inner tower, the smaller one that Flydd and poor
Colm had climbed after they had rescued Yggur, Flangers, Chissmoul and the
other prisoners. Maelys had been in the Nightland at the time but she had heard
all about it. In the Nightland, lying with Emberr … it had been the most
romantic time of her life; and then the most tragic.