The Destiny of the Dead (The Song of the Tears Book 3) (77 page)

‘The best way to heal the empire,’ said Tulitine, ‘is for
everyone to get on with their ordinary lives.’

‘And so to you, Nish,’ said Flydd. ‘At our last feast, you
didn’t say what you wanted for your future, but the heir to the empire can’t
get off so lightly.’

‘Don’t dare say that you’re going to tear it down,’ said
Yulla from the end of the table. ‘That would only set off worse violence, and
it would last a lot longer.’

A piece of rock broke away from the pit wall behind Nish and
went tumbling down the slope, making a small splash as it landed in the water.
How long before the whole palace crumbled? How long before he had to face the
grim task of burying his father? He clung to the hope that the collapsing
palace would entomb the body for him.

‘I think
you
should be God-Empress, Yulla,’ Nish said irritably, for people never stopped
telling him what to do. ‘I’m sure you’d be a lot better at it than I would.’

Yulla’s little eyes gleamed with greed, but she shook her
head. ‘Every realm requires an able administrator, and few were better than I
was, when I was Governor of Crandor. But that was long ago and my time has
passed. The empire needs youth, and vigour – and heirs. The stability of
the realm must be maintained.’

Gravel crunched behind Nish, the song of the tears rose and
fell, and he smelt a foul, decaying odour. Someone gasped; opposite him,
Tulitine’s eyes widened, and Yggur cursed. Flydd thrust himself to his feet,
his mouth agape. Finally, reluctantly, Nish rose, already knowing, though it was
quite impossible, what he was going to see.

‘Indeed it must,’ said his father, Jal-Nish, emerging from
between the rocks at the edge of the pit, ‘and clearly, since you’ve all
underestimated me
yet again
, none of
you have what it takes to maintain my empire.’

‘But … we saw your body,’ said Nish. ‘You’re – you’re
not …?’

‘I’m not reanimated, if that’s what you’re worried about,’
said Jal-Nish, ‘for I was never
completely
dead.’

He looked it, though. His skin still had that hideous
green-purple tinge, like a long-dead corpse; his flesh was bloated and shiny;
slimy, stinking muck was oozing down his chin and he was limping badly on both
feet. The God-Emperor’s imperial robes were draggled with dust and mud, yet the
mask was back over his face and the Profane Tears hung from his neck, and Nish
knew that all the agony of the past half year had been for nothing.

‘Stilkeen slew me,’ said Jal-Nish, who spoke thickly, as if
his bloated tongue filled his gluey mouth, ‘the moment he discovered that I
knew nothing about chthonic fire. And I would have died instantly – had I
not already taken precautions.’

‘Then what we saw up on the ninth level … your … corpse
–’

‘It was real,’ Jal-Nish said with a shudder. ‘My body
was
a rotting corpse, and you can’t even
imagine what a horror that was. There can be no worse feeling on this side of
death than to live on – in a dead body.’

‘How?’ Nish croaked. ‘How could you live?’

His father smiled thinly. ‘The instant I saw Stilkeen, even
before it caught me, I withdrew part of my life force into Reaper and, as long
as a single living cell remained in my corpse, I clung to life. Weeks passed in
that ghastly state, until finally, late last night, faithful Klarm brought me
the Tears. Once I had them, Reaper revived me and repaired the worst of the
damage. Now here I stand – somewhat decayed, and with much work to do to
slough off the rotted flesh and restore myself, but very definitely alive.’

He favoured Nish with a grotesque smile. Through the
half-mask his gums were grey; his good eye oozed a sticky fluid and even from
five spans away his breath was foul.

Nish opened his mouth, but closed it again. There were no
words for what he was feeling, and there was nothing he could say to his
father.

‘I’m particularly disappointed in you, Son,’ Jal-Nish said.
‘I’d thought, after your mighty deeds since the Range of Ruin, that you were
fit to succeed me after all. Clearly, I
overestimated
you.’

‘I don’t want to be God-Emperor,’ said Nish. ‘I never did.’

‘Which proves beyond doubt your unfitness for the throne, in
the unlikely event that it should ever become vacant. Had you been fit to
succeed me, you would not have stopped until you had burned my body to ash and
taken the tears for yourself. But what do
you
do? Sit down to a picnic without taking the slightest precautions!’ Jal-Nish’s
voice dripped contempt.

And he was right. How could Nish have come so far, then
failed so badly in the final moments? Because he could not bear to go near his
father’s corpse and do what had to be done.

‘You set up this feast to be as much like the last one as
possible,’ Jal-Nish went on. ‘Did it not occur to you that it might also end
the way the last one did – in
every
particular?’

That had not occurred to Nish, but it should have, for
Jal-Nish had turned up to ruin the feast at the end of the war as well. And
since he’d had the tears for more than half a day, he must have timed his
appearance to coincide with this feast.

He glanced at Maelys, whose brows were knitted; she hadn’t
worked it out yet. But then, she had been just a kid ten years ago; and she had
not been there.

‘How did you get here?’ Nish said dully. His stomach
throbbed with jagging pains, as if he had swallowed fish-hooks and someone was
trying to pull them out.

‘Did Maelys not tell you that she’d encountered faithful
Klarm in the lower levels of my palace, and that he was looking for me?’

Jal-Nish beckoned and Klarm hobbled out from behind the
rocks, walking on one foot and the knob-ended rod bound above the stump of his
amputated leg. The dwarf looked dreadfully haggard.

Nish glanced at Maelys, whose small hands were raised now,
as if to hold back the horror of Jal-Nish. ‘We haven’t spent much time together
lately,’ said Nish.

At the tables further off, people were talking, laughing, clinking
their mugs and celebrating the victory as though nothing had happened, for they
could not see Jal-Nish.

‘Clearly,’ said the God-Emperor, ‘since she didn’t give you
the one piece of information that should have set your alarm bells ringing
instantly.’

‘It would have made no difference,’ said Nish. ‘We’d all
seen your rotting corpse.’

‘Then you’re a bigger fool than I thought.’

The militia scrambled out of the way as Jal-Nish approached.
He clambered up onto the left-hand end of the table, pallid and blotchy and
reeking like the corpse he had been, but utterly determined to take back what
was his.

‘The God-Emperor has returned,’ he said in a ringing voice.
‘All hail the God-Emperor!’

The revelry broke off instantly, and Nish heard someone
throwing up. A shocked silence spread across the banquet tables like a ripple
across a lake, then everyone began to shout at once. Jal-Nish raised the tears
above his head until their churning quicksilver shimmer was reflected in every
eye.

‘The God-Emperor has returned,’ he repeated, more
commandingly. ‘All hail the God-Emperor!’

Many soldiers rose to their feet, some eagerly, most slowly,
and began to chant and bang their swords on their shields. ‘All hail the
God-Emperor! Hail, Hail!’

‘Imperial Guard, you have sworn to me and me alone,’ called
Jal-Nish. ‘Your God-Emperor needs you. Come forward and renew your oaths.’

The surviving Imperial Guard, eleven white-clad, battered
and bloodstained men, came forwards.

‘Only eleven?’ said Jal-Nish. ‘Out of eight hundred? Still,
eleven of my loyal guards are worth three times as many common soldiers.’

They renewed their oaths, not entirely without hesitation
and, once they had, Jal-Nish gestured them to stand around Nish’s end of the
table.

‘This time I won’t be bothering with an heir,’ he said with
a meaningful glance at Nish, and a darker look at Maelys that sent another
jagging pain through Nish’s belly. ‘I don’t need one, because neither my flesh
nor my powers will ever wane!’

Klarm dropped his knoblaggie but did not pick it up. Maelys
gave a muffled cry, reached for Nish’s arm, then drew back, and he knew what
she was thinking.

Months ago at the Pit of Possibilities, after she had seen
into Jal-Nish’s mind when he’d been using the tears, she had said,
He needs only three things to become
invulnerable for all time: perfect knowledge of the tears; complete mastery of
himself; and a clear understanding of the Art by which he uses Gatherer and
Reaper. And he’s close to gaining all three
.

‘I learned a lot from Stilkeen,’ said Jal-Nish. ‘I now know
enough to master the tears and leap further than any other mancer can dream.
I’m going to become an immortal
being
.’

And we can’t stop you, Nish thought, for they had never
found what they had originally gone all the way to the Tower of a Thousand
Steps for – the antithesis to the tears, the one power, process, spell or
device that could unbind them forever.

But then it got worse – so terribly, agonisingly worse
that Nish wished he could die, anything to escape the agony renewed a thousand
times over.

‘You lied to me, didn’t you?’ Jal-Nish said to Maelys.

‘I – don’t – I …’ she said.

‘You told me that you gathered up my son’s spilled seed when
you nursed him in his delirium,’ Jal-Nish grated. ‘And inserted it within your
virgin body so as to become pregnant to him. Do you deny it?’

Aunt Haga was staring at Maelys, so astonished that for once
she was speechless.

‘No,’ whispered Maelys. ‘I said that –’

‘And I believed you, because, fool that I was, I was
desperate for a grandchild. But it was a lie, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was barely audible.

‘Worse than a lie – it was a monstrous insult to the
majesty of the God-Emperor, one that requires the most dreadful punishment.
Then, subsequently you became pregnant to Emberr, son of Rulke and Yalkara, the
two Charon who, together and separately, brought ruin upon Santhenar many
times.’

‘Yes,’ said Maelys.

Now Aunt Haga’s mouth was opening and closing like a dying
fish.

‘So you fully understand what I must do now,’ said Jal-Nish.

Maelys didn’t answer. Clearly she did not know what he was
talking about, though she feared the worst. But Nish knew, with a shrieking,
scalding horror worse than anything he had ever felt, exactly what Jal-Nish was
planning to do. He’d already said so.

Did it not occur to
you that it might also end the way the last one did – in every
particular?
Jal-Nish had said, but Nish hadn’t fully taken it in at the
time. Now he understood, and the horror was magnified a hundredfold because he
already had the entire scene in mind. He’d been replaying it for more than ten
years and the agony never grew any less.

‘Guards,’ Jal-Nish said to the nearest Imperial Guards-man.
‘Drag Maelys out between the tables and bare her neck. You,’ he said to the
second man, ‘raise your sword and do the business.’

 
FIFTY-ONE

The two guards hesitated, but only for a second, before
the closest man took hold of Maelys. She was just sitting there, her eyes
staring – she finally understood what was going to happen. Everyone did,
with the exception of Fyllis, who was moving her little wooden figures about on
the table and talking to them in a range of voices, totally immersed in her
world of make-believe.

‘Hold them,’ cried Jal-Nish, pointing to Nish, Flydd, Clech,
Flangers and especially Ryll, and the other nine Imperial Guardsmen, who had so
recently sworn allegiance to Nish, sprang to obey. ‘Bind the lyrinx –
he’s the one who maimed me thirteen years ago and I have a special punishment
for him.’

Before Nish could draw his sword he had been taken from
behind, and so had Flydd and the others. Three guards held Ryll, a naked sword
across his throat, while a fourth bound him. Clearly, Jal-Nish knew exactly who
had power and who, like Yggur, was no longer a threat.

The people from the surrounding tables were on their feet,
staring, but many had already hailed the God-Emperor and, while the Profane
Tears sang their dreadful threnody, none dared to oppose him.

He clambered down, directing the first two Imperial
Guardsman to take Maelys to the open space between the table and the edge of
the Sacred Lake. They held her tightly and she put up no resistance. She must
have known it was futile.

The guardsmen were heaving her from her chair, under
Jal-Nish’s gloating, oozing eye, when little Fyllis set down her toys, picked
up a long serving fork, turned around and plunged it bone-deep into his left
thigh.

He let out a sharp cry, staggered a couple of steps and
bellowed, ‘Guards!’

The guards behind Nish and Clech turned to defend Jal-Nish
but Clech knocked the first down with an elbow to the nose, while Nish thrust
his sword between the legs of the second, gashing him badly on both thighs and
sending him reeling to the ground in twin sprays of blood. The rest of the
guards, save those holding Ryll, ran around the end.

Jal-Nish wrenched out the bloody fork, dropped it, and
turned to face Fyllis, slowly moving his hand towards the churning surface of
Reaper. ‘You’re going to die for that, little girl,’ he said viciously.
‘Guards, seize her as well. You can take both heads off with the one stroke.’

Now Maelys began to struggle desperately, but she was
powerless in the hands of the guardsmen. One carried her away while another
went for Fyllis.

As he lifted her from her chair, Aunt Haga, a tall, stringy
mass of fury, sprang up, swinging one of the large golden fish by the tail, and
smashed Jal-Nish across the face so hard that it lifted him off his feet.