The Destiny of the Dead (The Song of the Tears Book 3) (33 page)

He tried again, and this time the stalk snapped. The little
noose shattered and the sparks went out.

Chissmoul let out a shriek of agony.

 
TWENTY-THREE

‘I thought you said Zofloc was dead?’ said Yggur, after
climbing back to the surface with a dimensionless box of chthonic fire, and
Maelys’s boots.

‘I thought he was.’ Maelys was huddled against Tulitine in
the meagre shelter of the uptilted slabs above the shaft, shivering violently.
‘He must have fallen twenty spans, and when he hit it sounded like … like a
melon bursting. It was horrible. Did he attack you?’

He shook his head. ‘The body was gone. All I saw were some
unpleasant white smears where he dragged himself away – or something else
did.’

‘
White
smears?’
said Maelys.

‘Do I have to spell it out? Spilled brains, girl! Zofloc
cracked his head open.’

‘Then he could hardly have dragged himself away,’ said
Tulitine, blowing into her cupped hands. ‘And whatever did, I don’t want to
meet it.’

‘I should never have sent you down there alone,’ said Yggur.

‘Well, we’ve got the fire,’ said Maelys. ‘You’d better take
us to Stilkeen.’

‘I don’t think it’s quite that easy,’ said Yggur.

‘It never is!’ she muttered. ‘What’s the matter now?’

‘I’m worried that this chthonic fire might not be any good.’

‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘Fire changes when it’s used, and the stuff Flydd took to
the Tower of a Thousand Steps didn’t seem powerful enough. We touched it, if
you remember, and it didn’t harm us. You even had some on your skin when you
went to the Nightland –’ He broke off.

Maelys stiffened. She had been trying not to think about
Emberr’s death, which had been caused by contact with chthonic fire, and her
unwitting role in it. Getting up, she stumbled away from the jumbled slabs and
the mud with its half-eaten bodies, so distracted that she gave no thought to
them.

After reaching the Tower of a Thousand Steps with Flydd and
Colm, she had discovered that the Numinator was planning to enter the Nightland
through a fire portal. Desperate to save Emberr, Maelys had followed her but
had ended up with a residue of the fire on her skin.

It had done her no harm, and was gradually dying, but when
she and Emberr had made love in his cottage, the last of the fire had
transferred to him, and because he had been born in the Nightland, it had been
inimical to him. Instead of saving him, Maelys had caused his death.

In an even more dreadful irony, the Numinator had not been
hunting Emberr anyway. Suspecting that he had Charon blood, she had merely
planned to test his fertility, in the hope that he might be used to fulfil her
two centuries’ long plan – to create a superior human species as an
eternal memorial to her dead Charon lover, Rulke.

Too late, the Numinator discovered that Emberr was Yalkara’s
only surviving child, fathered by Rulke in the Nightland and left there because
it was the only place where Emberr would be safe from Stilkeen’s vengeance.
Now, if Maelys should be pregnant by him, both Yalkara and the Numinator were
determined to take the child, and Maelys was equally determined that they
should not have it.

And, she realised, Emberr’s body still lay where he had
died, and it wasn’t right. It was her responsibility, surely, to send him on
his final journey with respect and all due rites. How could she properly grieve
for him when she had not taken care of his final needs, though the thought of
returning to the cottage where she had been so happy, knowing she had caused
his death, was almost unbearable.

She headed back to Yggur and Tulitine, sick at heart. ‘What
about the fire I took to the Nightland?’

‘It too might have changed for the better – or the
worse – but I don’t have the strength to go there now, and neither does
Tulitine.’

‘What other fire is there?’

‘There’s the distilled fire that Zofloc made,’ said Yggur.
‘It was certainly stronger, but it’s hard to imagine Whelm sorcery making it
better.’

He glanced at Tulitine, whose lips were blue. ‘I’d better
get you somewhere warm, while I still have the strength.’

‘Flydd found the original chthonic fire below Mistmurk
Mountain,’ said Maelys. ‘It’s good and warm there.’

Yggur made a portal to Mistmurk Mountain, a
thousand-span-high, cloverleaf-shaped plateau rising out of tropical
rainforest. The portal opened in the steamy forest near the base of Mistmurk,
where, for as far as they could see, the ground was littered with broken rock,
shiny white pieces of sky-palace, and the gnawed bones and fire-scorched armour
of the God-Emperor’s personal Imperial Guard.

Maelys shuddered. Bodies, everywhere we’ve been. Will there
ever be an end to it?

‘What’s happened here?’ said Tulitine.

Yggur glanced up at the peak. ‘Jal-Nish’s sky-palace fell
onto the plateau from a great height, smashing to pieces, and everyone on board
it must have been killed.’

It had also gouged a canyon a hundred spans deep across the
formerly cloverleaf-shaped plateau, and now two small flat-topped peaks, one on
either side of the rubble-filled chasm, were all that remained of that
rain-drenched place. A waterfall discharged from the end of the canyon,
cascading halfway down the cliffs before the spray was carried up again by the
unceasing updraughts.

‘Those poor men,’ said Maelys, for the image of the sky-palace
falling would be forever embedded in her memory.

‘They weren’t nice fellows,’ said Yggur, who was shaky on
his feet now. ‘And it would have been quick.’

‘I suppose so. Are you feeling all right?’

‘I’ll just sit down for a minute. Portals take a lot out of
me.’

‘I thought the caduceus was doing all the work?’

‘It is, but each time I make one, I get such aftersickness
that it’s as though I’d worked the spell unaided.’

He sat down on the spreading roots of a large tree. Maelys
walked back and forth, luxuriating in the tropical heat until the chill of Noom
was only a memory.

‘Do you know where to look for chthonic fire?’ she said
after they had set up camp and eaten, and Yggur was feeling better.

‘As Flydd told the story,’ said Yggur, ‘it was deep below
the peak, so we’ve got to find a way in, and down.’

The following morning, they began the long search for a way
to get inside the mountain, which had once been riddled with tunnels and
chambers. Tulitine went with them, but scrambling up the steep ravines was so
painful for her that Yggur told her to go back to the camp. Tulitine hated
anyone telling her what to do, but to Maelys’s surprise she complied without a
murmur.

After more than a week of searching the overgrown lower
parts of the peak, Maelys and Yggur found a fern-choked crevice that led
inside. They went into the moist darkness for a few hundred spans. Even here,
the walls of the cavern were cracked from the impact of the sky-palace, and
there were piles of rubble all over the place, but the way down appeared to be
open.

‘It looks
fairly
solid,’ said Maelys, holding up a blazing torch which was burning all too
rapidly, and wishing she still had her twinklestone. ‘And it goes down.’

‘Very good,’ said Yggur. ‘Off you go, then.’

Her stomach clenched. ‘You want
me
to go? Again? Down there?’

‘No, I want you to go back to the camp and take care of
Tulitine. Her bones seem to be shrinking more every day, and I’m really worried
about her.’

Maelys was too. Though Tulitine was a master of the healing
Arts, she could do nothing for herself. She did not understand what was
happening to her, or why the Regression Spell was reverting this way, but she
knew it was going to get worse.

‘You can’t go alone,’ Maelys said feebly. ‘Not after what I
went through at Noom. There could be anything down below.’

‘It’s because of what you went through at Noom that I’m
sending you back, though I don’t expect to have any trouble here, apart from
the odd falling rock. Go on, I don’t want to leave Tulitine alone any longer
than I can help it.’

Maelys turned back and Yggur headed down into the riven
depths, to search for the remains of the casket in which Yalkara had originally
stored the stolen white fire, the fire that Flydd had liberated, and which was
now spreading out in all directions from the Island of Noom. What if it did
consume all the ice in the frozen south?
Would
the seas rise and flood the world?

‘I found some,’ Yggur said wearily when he finally
returned, days later. He sat down by the camp fire in the warm rain, tossing a
second dimensionless box from hand to hand. ‘We’ve done all we can. Now the
only thing we have to do is find Stilkeen.’

‘And survive,’ muttered Maelys, ‘after we give it the fire.’

Tulitine barely looked up. She was huddled under a waterproof
military cloak Maelys had found among the scattered bones and broken armour,
holding her hands out to the flames and looking thoroughly miserable.

Though it was a sweltering tropical night, and Maelys was
sweating in just pants and shirt, Tulitine’s hands and feet were cold. She was
always cold now, and Maelys was afraid that her heart was going, as well as her
bones. She studied the healer across the fire.

Normally, when the spell reverted, it aged the user quickly
and terribly, but Tulitine had not aged at all. She was as beautiful as ever,
yet more fragile than she had ever been as an old but lusty woman. Her skin had
thinned to translucency, allowing the pink of her flesh and the blue of her
veins to show through. Her joints were stiffening, her flesh wasting, and her
bones seemed to shrink a little each day.

Though she was in constant pain, and could not hide it, she
made not a whisper of complaint, which Maelys found hardest of all to endure.
Yggur felt sure the Regression Spell was being affected by the caduceus, but
they could do nothing about that, either. They had to keep it; it was their
only way to get back to civilisation. Their only way to find Stilkeen.

‘And then?’ said Tulitine, haltingly.

‘I’m sorry?’ said Yggur, frowning, for minutes had passed
since he had spoken.

‘After you’ve given Stilkeen the fire, what then?’

‘We get rid of the caduceus. I’m sure it has a lot to do
with your troubles. And there are healers –’

‘No healer can do anything for this affliction, and I knew
it before I embarked upon the Regression Spell.’ Tulitine forced a smile.
‘Besides, you’re not getting rid of me that easily.’

‘I don’t want to get rid of you … but I do care about you.’

‘Do you?’ Tulitine raised an elegantly sculpted eyebrow.
‘What a sorry affliction that must be.’

‘You know I do,’ Yggur said, restraining his irritation,
‘and I’ll thank you not to mock me for showing my true feelings. It’s not an
easy thing for me and I don’t do it lightly.’

Maelys had noticed how gentle he’d been with Tulitine lately.
He was quite unlike the stern, cool and dominating Yggur she had seen
previously.

After some time Tulitine said, contritely, ‘I do know that
you care, Yggur, and if it wasn’t for the gnawing pain in my bones I’d show you
how much I care about you.’ Her roguish smile flickered on and off.

Maelys felt her blush rising, for even as an old woman
Tulitine had never been short of young and vigorous lovers, and she’d made no
secret about what she wanted from them.

‘Out of regard for you I would not ask for that,’ Yggur said
hastily.

‘And out of regard for you I long to give it, but it cannot
be.’

‘Then let’s not talk about it.’

‘Where are we going next?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Yggur. ‘I’m worried that the caduceus
is bait – and these easy portals a trap.’

‘How else can one look upon a device that takes us where we
want to go so conveniently?’ said Tulitine.

‘Do you mean that the caduceus is telling Stilkeen where
we’re going and what we’re doing?’ said Maelys, looking over her shoulder
instinctively.

‘I believe so.’

‘Then there’s no point putting it off,’ said Maelys. ‘Let’s
take the fire to it.’

‘Unfortunately I don’t know where Stilkeen is,’ said Yggur.

Lightning flashed, reflecting off a white-helmeted skull
lying among the leaves, and Maelys jumped. Another flash lit up the camp,
followed by a dull rumble of thunder, and this time the caduceus, which Yggur
had embedded in the soil beside the fire, shook slightly.

Tulitine let out an uncharacteristic mewling cry and the
back of Maelys’s neck prickled. Yggur half rose to his feet but settled down
again.

‘What was that?’ said Maelys.

‘Just thunder,’ said Yggur, wiping sweat off his brow.
‘Maybe a storm will cool things down.’

‘Thunder would hardly shake the ground.’

‘Perhaps it’s another cave collapsing inside the mountain,’
he said irritably. ‘I’m tired, Maelys. I’ve hardly slept in three days and I
don’t care.’

The caduceus shook again, more vigorously. Yggur stood up,
looked around, but sat down and closed his eyes again.

The ground shook once more but this time the head of the
caduceus revolved in a circle, leaving a blue trail behind, like a smoke ring.
It drifted up and swelled to become a transparent blue sphere that hung in the
air, touched redly here and there by the firelight, and an image appeared on
the surface: a broad, flattened head with flaring bony plates like a winged
helmet, a split nose and yellow eyes covered in nictitating membranes.

‘I am Stilkeen,’ it said, its voice low and soft, like
thunder heard from a great distance. Wisps of red flame dripped from its
nostrils; it snapped at them with needle-sharp teeth. ‘I have roamed the eleven
dimensions of space and time for an eternity and a half. I cannot die, and
nothing –’