The Destiny of the Dead (The Song of the Tears Book 3) (67 page)

‘But Ryll,’ Nish added, ‘during the war, old lyrinx were
proud to die in the line of battle, protecting their young.’

Ryll gave another little cough as he skirted the dead,
heaved one of the spears out and carried it with him, still dripping.

‘Old lyrinx remain strong and vigorous until their end, my
friend, while your kind grow fat and feeble twenty years before you die. Truly,
old humans are decadent, helpless creatures. How you climbed to the top of this
world remains a mystery to me.’

The lyrinx was teasing him again but Nish didn’t mind. It
was a welcome distraction.

‘We used our brains, not our brawn,’ Nish said pointedly.
‘M’lainte,’ he called up to the old woman, who was sitting on the bow of the
sky-galleon, sketching a device on the skirt of her grubby gown, ‘we need your
advice.’

The fighting was moving in their direction, a squad of
atatusk charging through a company of Vomix’s fleeing troops as if they were
field mice, flinging bodies to right and left.

‘You’d better come up.’ She tossed a rope ladder over.

When they reached the deck, M’lainte lifted the sky galleon
out of spear range.

‘We can’t beat the atatusk unless we can stop them coming
through,’ said Nish.

M’lainte rubbed her fingers vigorously through her thin
hair, leaving it sticking up in all directions, and raised her eyes to the
semicircular opening in the void barrier. ‘I don’t see how you can stop them.’

‘If we can’t,’ said Ryll, ‘Santhenar cannot survive.’

M’lainte studied the opening. ‘Even supposing the enemy
could be kept back, can it be sealed? That would depend on the nature of the
barrier.’ She raised her voice. ‘Lilis?’

Lilis emerged from the cabin, spectacles perched on her thin
nose, studying a book as she walked, but she did not resemble a librarian now,
nor a little old lady. She was dressed in a yellow blouse and red velvet knee
britches held up by a broad black belt, with long black knee boots folded over
at the top. Her hair was covered by a cap, and a scarlet bandanna with white
spots was loosely knotted around her neck.

‘You’re looking most piratical today, my dear,’ said
M’lainte, who wore the same ill-fitting and grubby clothes as ever –
indeed, they might have been the same clothes she’d been wearing when Nish had
first met her, more than thirteen years ago.

He thought the librarian looked more like a messenger boy
than a pirate. Lilis might have passed for a boy, being so small and slight,
had it not been for her lined face and hands, and the silver hair peeking out
from under her cap.

‘I feel a hundred years younger,’ cried Lilis. She glanced
over the side, looking down at the bloody battlefield and said, more soberly,
‘And even if I am to die today, I would not go back.’

‘We’re thinking about attempting to seal the opening,’ said
M’lainte. ‘What do you know about such matters?’

‘A hole in the barrier is a violation of the natural order
of the universe,’ said Lilis.

‘The natural order?’ said Nish.

‘So the philosopher Melochtes wrote, two thousand years ago.
He spent a lifetime meditating on the nature of the Forbidding.’

‘Do you remember everything in the Library?’ said Nish.

‘Of course not,’ said Lilis, smiling at the thought, and
held up the book. ‘But after Stilkeen made its public threat I read everything
we had pertaining to the void, including this book, and I discovered that, in
nature, each thing has its own order and its own pattern. The barrier between
the worlds and the void forms a smooth surface which resists puncture and, if a
breach is made, the barrier yearns to repair itself.’

Below them, the sounds of battle grew louder and more
violent, and Nish hurried to the side. Six atatusk with heavy spears were
attacking a company of some thirty Imperial Guard armed with spears and
scythe-shaped blades. The Imperial Guard were holding firm; they were the best
fighters here, and surely that number could separate the enemy, surround them
and finish them off. And if they couldn’t …

‘Then why hasn’t the barrier repaired itself?’ said
M’lainte, but answered her own question. ‘Because it can’t while atatusk are
continually passing through it.’

‘Melochtes wrote that a sizeable hole might take days to
heal,’ said Lilis.

‘I wonder that Stilkeen didn’t make a gigantic opening,’
said Nish, ‘so more atatusk could come through at once.’

‘When it was cutting the hole, its light beam stopped
suddenly,’ said Ryll.

‘It would have been a corrupted form of chthonic fire,’
M’lainte surmised, ‘the stuff Stilkeen took from one of the dimensionless
boxes, perhaps. Nothing else could cut such a barrier, but it must have been
painful to use.’

‘Even if you can seal the opening,’ said Yulla through the
open cabin door, ‘Stilkeen might make another.’

Nish turned to face her. She was sitting at a small table,
studying a yellow crystal with her hand lens, and did not look up. ‘How would
you seal it?’ she added.

‘Push the platform back up into place and hold it there
until the barrier seals itself,’ said Nish.

‘Easy to say, not so easy to do,’ said Lilis. ‘According to
Melochtes, the barrier is neither matter nor force, but rather, something than
can be matter at one time and force at another. You might find it hard to take
hold of.’

‘The atatusk stood on the platform,’ said Nish, ‘and they’re
a lot heavier than we are.’

‘They come from the void. The platform could be solid to
them yet intangible to us.’

‘Great!’ said Nish. ‘We’ve got to raise a platform we can’t
feel, and even if we somehow get it into place, the atatusk, who
can
touch it, will simply push it down
again.’

Everyone looked at M’lainte, who was an undoubted mechanical
genius. ‘What’s the one thing around here that’s not of this world?’ she said
distractedly.

‘No idea.’ Nish hated questions like that.

‘The web Stilkeen left behind in the audience chamber?’ said
Lilis.

‘Precisely,’ said M’lainte. ‘The sticky web, partly made of
shadow, with which it protects itself from contact with our physical world.
I’ve a feeling some web might do nicely.’

‘How do we handle a web made of shadow?’ said Nish.

‘You collect it in a dimensionless box, of course,’ she
said, as though that would be obvious even to an idiot.

‘And then what?’ Nish had no idea what M’lainte had in mind.

She did not reply. Her eyes were closed and she was deep in
thought.

‘What if you nudged the platform closed with the bow of the
sky-galleon?’ said Lilis, ‘and held it closed while the opening sealed itself?’

‘The barrier force would tear the sky-galleon apart,’ said
M’lainte. Her eyes snapped open and she began to draw on her skirt again.

‘I’ve got it!’ she said directly. ‘Nish, you’ll have to
stick shadow web all along the edge of the opening, then tie ropes to the web
and heave the platform up. Once you’ve done that, you’ll climb the wall of the
barrier and smear chthonic fire on the edges of the opening, until they
dissolve, stick together and reseal.’

It sounded like a complicated plan, even if they weren’t
under attack, and if anything went wrong it would fail, but Nish had to concede
that M’lainte was a genius for thinking of it. ‘How do we get out if the
opening is sealed?’

‘Leave a small section of the platform unstuck, then come
through and hang from your ropes. We’ll be waiting to pick you up.’

There came a series of triumphant barking roars from below.
Nish ran for the side but Ryll beat him to it. ‘They’re all dead!’ he said
sombrely.

Who? Nish thought, suddenly afraid that it would be Flydd,
Yggur, Maelys and all the others. He leaned over; the thirty Imperial Guardsmen
had fallen, but only three atatusk; the other three were dancing on the
blood-drenched corpses, waving heads and other body parts in the air.

‘The Imperial Guard were our very best,’ he said dazedly.
‘At this rate, we’ll be lucky to survive to lunchtime.’

‘Then we’d better get moving,’ said M’lainte, beside him.
‘Call Chissmoul to fly the sky-galleon, and a squad of troops to defend the
opening while you seal it.’

‘They’ll never hold the atatusk back,’ said Nish, dismayed
by what he had just seen. It was hopeless.

‘I’ll fetch some of my best fighters,’ said Ryll. ‘
We
can fight them hand to hand, but you
little humans haven’t got a hope.’ He thumped Nish on the back. ‘You’ll have to
stay well behind. Bring your most powerful crossbows, and long spears with a
crosspiece on the shaft, otherwise the atatusk will keep coming for you –
even with a spear right through them. Cheer up, Nish. We’re not beaten yet.’

Nish, trying to think of a way to attack the creatures,
forced a smile. ‘I’ll take the small javelard as well, if the platform will
hold it. Let’s see them fight with a heavy spear through the heart!’ he said
savagely. ‘Atatusk do have hearts, don’t they?’

‘Yes, but they’re high up, behind the armoured bulge below
their throats.’

M’lainte flew into Morrelune to gather shadow webs, the
discarded dimensionless boxes and any spilled chthonic fire she could find,
while Nish assembled his team: six Gendrigorean lancers and six crossbowmen to
enter the void and help the lyrinx hold back the atatusk while he, Aimee and
Clech closed the opening and sealed it.

He wanted Flangers but that would have left his remaining
troops leaderless. Nish passed the word around for Chissmoul to come quickly.

M’lainte returned, and shortly Ryll appeared with a dozen
lyrinx, plus Liett, her eyes flashing. Clearly their relationship was as stormy
as ever.

‘If you think I’m going to let you do this on your own,’ she
raged, buffeting Ryll about the face with her beautiful wings while he grinned
sheepishly, making no attempt to defend himself, ‘you’re a sadder fool than I
thought.’ She rounded on Nish. ‘You know how useless he is. Why do you
encourage him?’

‘All right,’ said Nish, who had been expecting this. ‘You
can come too.’

‘Of course I’m coming –’ Liett went for Ryll again.
‘You scurvy, lying …’ Evidently searching for the worst insult she could come
up with, she settled for ‘… miserable human of a lyrinx.’

She battered him to the ground with her wings until he
rolled onto his face, laughing and crying, ‘Enough!’

‘You said Nish would forbid me to come,’ said Liett, her
crest flushed a brilliant, throbbing green.

‘How could I stop you?’ said Nish, who remembered her
character very well. ‘Besides, you’re the best lyrinx flier as ever was, and I
could use … what’s the matter?’

Liett was shaking her head. ‘In the old days we used the
field
to fly on Santhenar, but the nodes
are gone, and the field with them, and without the Art we’re too heavy to lift
off the ground.’

‘How come Ryll didn’t tell me that earlier –?’ Nish
broke off, realising his blunder, but Ryll had walked away.

‘It wouldn’t have occurred to him,’ Liett said quietly,
‘since he has no wings.’

‘Besides, the nodes were destroyed after the lyrinx went to
Tallallame,’ Nish went on. ‘He didn’t know.’

‘None of us did, until we tried to fly here.’

Nish paced back and forth. ‘What about in the void?’

‘We have little weight there. We can fly, but it’s perilous
to do so near atatusk.’

‘So we’ll also be nearly weightless in the void,’ said Nish.
Would that be a benefit or a handicap? Probably the latter, until they got used
to it.

‘If you were foolish enough to enter it,’ said Liett.

Liett studied him, head angled to one side, and he imagined
that she was seeing him as a pink, squirming grub. He turned away.

‘Where’s your pilot?’ said M’lainte when the human and
lyrinx troops had come aboard and all their gear had been loaded. The small
javelard, which, as well as firing spears could also be fitted with a leather
catapult bucket, had been unbolted from its mount and was roped down so it
could be deployed quickly.

‘I called for Chissmoul but she must be too far away.’ Or
dead, Nish thought gloomily.

M’lainte frowned. ‘That’s awkward.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve got a lot to do before you can close the opening, and
I can’t fly this craft at the same time. Can you call her again?’

‘If she’d heard, she would have come. Flying is her life.’

M’lainte tapped the toe of her boot on the deck. ‘And we
have no other pilot …’

‘Wait! I’m sure Tiaan could do it,’ said Nish. ‘She was the
very first to fly a thapter during the war; in fact, she and Malien worked out
how to make thapters fly.’

They circumnavigated Morrelune and found Tiaan around the
far side, with Merryl; both came aboard at once.

‘Can you fly this craft?’ said M’lainte, looking anxious for
once. ‘I know it’s been a long time, and the sky-galleon is very different to a
thapter …’

Tiaan settled onto the pilot’s seat, clearly glad to take
the weight off her feet. ‘After the war, I swore I would never use such devices
again. But now I have children to protect, I see that was a foolish oath. If
you would give me a couple of minutes.’

Nish and M’lainte walked away to the rail and she leaned on
it, looking across the plain. ‘How did you end up with Yulla?’ Nish asked.

‘I was sent to her during the war,’ said M’lainte
reflectively, ‘to look after the thapter Flydd had given her, and afterwards I
stayed; Yulla always had something interesting for me to do. And when she took
on Persia –’

‘I’ve often wondered how she came to be indentured.’

‘It’s an all too common story under your father’s reign. A
powerful, greedy man wanted Clan bel Soon’s land and manor, so he sent in a
squad of thugs, cut the family down and took everything for himself. Persia was
the only one to escape, and the only witness. He hunted her, caught her, and,
well, you can imagine the rest. Eight years later, she still hasn’t recovered
from it.’