The Destiny of the Dead (The Song of the Tears Book 3) (74 page)

Again she had that flash of memory – the rain, the
caduceus steaming on the hillside, and Yggur falling down – but now she
remembered what had happened next. Skidding to a stop outside the gate, hidden
by a pillar where Vivimord could see her but the revenants could not, she
hissed his name.

He approached the gate. ‘You’re too late, Maelys. I’m coming
back from death.’

‘The true fire has been found,’ she said softly. ‘It’s just
outside. You must convince them to come out
now
,
else Stilkeen will take the fire and Santhenar will be no more.’

Vivimord looked over her head and his eyes widened.

‘But I can be the only dead man ever to return from the
shadow realm, to life,’ he said softly, yearningly. ‘How can I give that up?
How can I give up
life
?’

‘What would be the point?’ she said. ‘If Stilkeen isn’t
stopped, there won’t be anything to come back to.’

He knew it, too. Vivimord stalked back and forth; he
groaned, he clawed at his hair and rubbed the egg-shaped excrescence on his
cheek, but nothing could rearrange the facts. It was a choice between his life
and the fate of the world.

Finally, the tension eased in him, and he seemed to come to
a resolution that must have offered him some sense of inner peace, for the
lines on his face smoothed and he let out a small sigh.

Vivimord bowed to Maelys. ‘I salute you, for you have beaten
me, over and again.’

Thrusting out his right arm, sabre extended, he cried the
spell he’d made long ago to cut open the black gate. The sabre blazed blue and
brilliant, the lock sagged, the gate swung open and he spoke, using all his
rhetorical Art.

‘The way is clear, revenants. The true fire you have been
seeking all this time lies within reach, and now Stilkeen comes. Fly, fly to
Stilkeen. Complete yourselves at last!’

Maelys glanced the other way. Outside, the white fire was
raging upon Yalkara’s dying body, calling to the revenants across all the
dimensions of space and time, and such was the voice in his words that they
burst forth, so desperate for the ecstasy of rejoining with Stilkeen that they
were blinded by it.

Maelys ducked aside as they rushed the gateway, passed
through, and hurtled towards the fire. Vivimord ran after them, raising the
sabre to hold open the gate so he could return from death, but the sabre flowed
like water in his hands and vanished.

The gate slammed and she saw his anguished face as he
understood that his choice was irrevocable, then the shadow realm disappeared.
He too had atoned for his crimes, but unlike Yalkara he regretted it bitterly.

Maelys ran after the revenants, unheeded. They had no
interest in consuming spirits now, living or dead. But she did, for Maelys
thought she knew the one way to destroy them.

Like red-streaked moths around a fire, they began to circle
the conflagration feeding on Yalkara’s spirit.

Maelys ran up to Flydd and Yggur. ‘…
and burn them to nothingness
!’ she panted.

‘What?’ cried Flydd.

‘It’s the one phrase we recovered from Kandor’s lessons in
the taphloid.’

‘But what does it mean?’ said Yggur.

‘Burn the revenants with chthonic fire,’ Maelys guessed.
‘Stilkeen ordered them to stay in the shadow realm until it called them,
because outside they were in peril.’

‘Then why don’t they rejoin with it?’

‘Chthonic fire is the force that binds flesh and spirit
together. Until Stilkeen holds the fire, the revenants can’t rejoin with it.’

He looked up at the trembling, flame-shrouded
being
. ‘All it has to do is jump down
onto the fire, snatch it up, and call them to it. So why doesn’t it?’

‘It can’t bear the pain, I suppose,’ said Maelys.

‘It’ll soon find a way to protect itself,’ said Flydd.

‘Nadiril said there was one single way the revenants could
be destroyed, and it must have to do with pure fire – Yalkara said we’d
have to use it, remember? If Stilkeen doesn’t personally hold the pure fire, it
must burn unbound revenants to nothingness.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Flydd said ruefully. ‘But
how
do we use it? They aren’t going near
it.’

‘Go back to the shadow realm! Fly!’ choked Stilkeen from the
third level, but the revenants did not look up. It was as if they hadn’t heard.
They continued to circle, hungrily eyeing the pure fire, yet wary of it.

Maelys whispered, ‘Yggur, I think you’re the key. You’ve got
to use the fire.’

‘I don’t know how,’ he said.

‘Nadiril said revenants are blind in the real world,’ Maelys
remembered. ‘And they can barely hear. He said we might be able to fool them.’

‘How?’ cried Yggur.

Stilkeen shot inside, then reappeared, wrapping layer upon
layer of its ragged shadow webs about it. It was twitching and shuddering with
pain, but it must have been bearable now, for it began to clamber onto the rail
of the third level.

‘It’s going to jump,’ hissed Maelys, and suddenly she knew
there was only one way. ‘They can’t see you, Yggur. Act as though
you’re
Stilkeen.’

Without a word, Yggur leapt into the pure white fire roaring
up from Yalkara’s body, wrapped it around himself and it flared even higher.
Cloaked in white fire, he looked enormous, powerful, eternal. Yggur looked like
a
being
, and he extended his long
arms to the revenants as if to envelop them.

‘Come, my spirits, it is time.’

Letting out ecstatic cries, they whirled around him like
black and red dervishes, spiralling ever closer.

Stilkeen was on the rail now, teetering there in agony. And
it jumped.

The revenants circled Yggur, closer, faster, until they were
no more than streaks – and then they touched. Yggur enfolded them in his
arms and drew them within the fire.

Too late, as Stilkeen came hurtling down, they realised that
they had been tricked. The revenants tried desperately to burst free but Yggur
crushed them to him and ran with them. White fire exploded out for many spans
in all directions as it fed on their pure, spirit selves and seared them into
annihilation.

As Maelys scrambled out of the way, a tongue of fire touched
the back of her left hand and a sizzling pain shot across it; her hand
blistered, went numb, and she fell down.

Stilkeen was screaming as it hit the promenade beside
Yalkara’s smoking remains, enormously lengthening its arms towards Yggur and
the last fading wisps of its revenants, but they burned away just as it touched
the fire.

Yggur collapsed and Stilkeen let out a shriek of uttermost
agony, a shrill, ululating scream that went on and on as if it were trying to
split Santhenar apart, down to its very core.

Maelys blocked her ears but the sound gouged through her
head until it boiled and the backs of her eyeballs throbbed. Flydd’s nose was
bleeding; a trickle of blood had started from Tulitine’s right ear; and even
the men and atatusk fighting on the paved plain had clapped their hands over
their ears, but no one could keep out the dreadful sound.

It cut off as suddenly as it had begun, for the severing of
Stilkeen’s physical and spirit aspects was now permanent, and it was forever
lost, forever abandoned, never to be free of the agony of separation.

It tore the last wisps of the dying fire from Yalkara and
Yggur, wrapped them around itself like a shroud, and whirled up and up, and the
fire grew until it formed a twisting column more than a league high.

Other tongues of white fire were drawn to it, including a
vast streak that came from the Antarctic south, the fire that had been eating
the ice there. All formed into a prodigious white javelin racing up towards the
celestial sphere. At its very apex the fire burst apart, punched a
white-starred hole through into unknown dimensions, and then the hole healed
itself without a trace.

A colossal boom thundered down, shaking the palace and
echoing and re-echoing off the mountains.

‘It’s done,’ said Flydd when the last echoes had faded.
‘Every trace of white fire, all across Santhenar, is gone.’

Shortly, a faint flush began to spread across the eastern
sky. Dawn was breaking. Yalkara’s body formed an elongated pile of ash and
Yggur lay not far away, his arms and body smoking and most of his hair burned
off. Tulitine stumbled across and crouched over him, cradling him in her arms.

Maelys did not see how he could still be alive, but Yggur
sat up painfully, his charred garments falling to pieces.

‘I hoped my Art would come back if Stilkeen was defeated and
the caduceus was destroyed,’ he said hoarsely. ‘But it’s not going to, is it?’

‘No,’ said Tulitine, ‘and your long life is also going to
end, for both must have come from the pure fire Kandor put in the taphloid when
you were a baby. As long as it lasted, so would you. Now it is gone, your Arts
will fade to nothing, and you’ll soon be an ageing, ordinary man.’

‘An ordinary man!’ he said softly. ‘Me! And yet, when I’m
nursed by the most beautiful woman in all Santhenar, how can I regret it?’

‘Hush your foolishness,’ said Tulitine, but she was smiling,
and she did not seem to be in as much pain as before.

She bent over Yggur, put her hands on the worst of his burns
and began to heal them, as well as chthonic fire burns could ever be healed.

 
FORTY-NINE

‘Where’s Nish?’ Maelys said quietly, for battles still
raged all across the plain as the soldiers hunted down the surviving atatusk,
and the other creatures from the void; several humans were dying for every
beast dispatched. ‘I haven’t seen him in ages.’

She rubbed her blistered left hand, feeling very afraid.
Thousands of soldiers were dead, and hundreds of the mighty lyrinx. How could
one small man have survived against such terrible foes?

‘I don’t know,’ said Flydd, pacing anxiously.

With Stilkeen’s disappearance, the barrier between the world
and the void had also vanished and the caduceus, which was still embedded in
the marble at the front of the palace, had sagged and run like molten iron.
Maelys had felt the power drain from it as it became a cooling puddle of
lifeless metal.

The tongues of yellow and orange flame wreathing the palace
slowly went out, and underneath, the beautiful white and golden stone of
Morrelune had gone a dingy brown, like the smoke stains around the top of a
chimney; the stone had been eaten away like decayed teeth.

Yellow fumes still oozed from the deepest and most rotten
cavities, to fall in slow coils down the fluted columns and spill across the
pitted floors. Maelys caught a whiff and choked, for the fumes reeked as though
all the dead from Mazurhize had been interred below the palace.

As the sun rose over the distant ocean beyond Fadd,
Morrelune began to shake. The needle-tipped tower swayed back and forth in ever
increasing arcs and waist-high waves formed on the Sacred Lake.

‘We’d better get to safer ground,’ said Flydd.

Maelys helped Tulitine down from the promenade and two
soldiers, from the few surviving Imperial Guard, lifted Yggur between them. The
broad steps were cracking by the time they reached the bottom and, only moments
after they laid Yggur on the paved plain, one of the corroded columns of the
grand entrance cracked and fell.

‘The foundations must have been eaten away,’ said Flydd.
‘The palace is coming apart.’

Its base shifted, the nine levels grated against one
another, distorting its beautiful symmetry, and several stones toppled, but
Morrelune remained intact, as if some greater binding force held it together.
However the paving surrounding it broke in a ragged circle and began to slip
downwards, ell by ell, until, after twenty minutes or more, it formed a deep
trench around the palace, like a dry moat.

Now the palace began to subside as well, in a series of
small but wrenching jerks, as though cavities were continually forming and
collapsing beneath it. It settled slowly, floor by floor. The stone edge of the
Sacred Lake cracked and spilled part of its contents into the moat; steam rose
in wreathing clouds.

The palace settled a little further, leaving only the spire
standing above the paved plain, and then, as if satisfied that it had
demonstrated its superiority over the tyrant and all his works, the ground gave
a faint, satisfied grumble and all went still.

Maelys felt so worn that she could barely stand up, but she
tottered ten steps to the brink and looked down. The rickety palace was
surrounded by a circular, steaming trench at least forty spans deep, bounded by
steep walls of fractured rock.

‘It doesn’t look as though it’s going to last much longer,’
she said faintly.

‘And good riddance,’ said Flydd, coming up beside her. ‘When
it’s gone we’ll fill the hole with rubble to form Jal-Nish’s tombstone –
a fitting memorial to a monster.’

The sky-galleon came sideslipping in, the wind whistling
through its lines.

‘And look who turns up when all the work is done,’ Flydd
said loudly as
Three Reckless Old Ladies
settled beside them, Tiaan at the helm. ‘Where the blazes have you been, Nish?’
But Flydd was beaming.

‘Oh, you know,’ Nish said airily, and vaulted over the side
like a true hero, though the grand gesture was marred when he landed hard on
his bloodstained leg and would have fallen had Flydd not caught him. Nish was
filthy, soot-stained and covered in green blood. ‘Going up to the void opening,
mopping up the last of the atatusk. Nothing special. Do it all the time.’

Flydd burst out laughing, and Maelys could not restrain her
joy as she stepped out from behind him.

Nish’s eyes met hers and the most extraordinary expression
of longing crossed his dirty face. His eyes took on a liquid shine; he whispered
her name, staring at her as though she was a precious, lost jewel that had
finally, after years of wild goose chases, been found.