The Destiny of the Dead (The Song of the Tears Book 3) (79 page)

‘What doesn’t he know about them?’ said Yggur. ‘What’s he
trying to find out?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Flydd. ‘But if he succeeds he’ll be
impregnable
and
immortal, so we’ve
got to strike soon, and hard. Maelys, you must find out what he’s up to.’

‘What if he sees me watching him?’ Maelys could not stop
thinking about the narrow seam around Irisis’s neck. Had Haga and Fyllis not
acted so quickly, she, Maelys, would now be preserved in another crystal box
with an identical seam around her throat, where her severed head had been
reattached. ‘You can’t imagine how much he hates me, Xervish.’

‘I can imagine it, but if he gets what he’s looking for it’s
the end for us all,’ said Flydd after a long interval. ‘And you’re the only one
who can do it.’

‘All right!’ She crept back to the tent.

When Maelys located Jal-Nish a few minutes later, he was
crouched over the iron pedestal. Now both tears stood on it, but the uncertain,
pacing God-Emperor of before was gone; he was confident and commanding again.
What had he seen in the intervening time? Could he have raised Irisis, and
wrung the truth out of her so quickly? It hardly seemed possible – and
yet, with the tears, anything might be possible.

Plunging both hands into one of the tears – Gatherer,
surely – he said cajolingly, ‘Cryl-Nish, my son, I was in pain earlier
– the most terrible pain from the torments Stilkeen had inflicted upon
me. A madness came over me, and for a few minutes I was out of my mind, but
I’ve come to my senses now.’

Lifting the tear, he held it up before him, and momentarily
Maelys thought she saw Nish staring at his father, but Jal-Nish moved the tear
closer and the image disappeared.

She shivered in the cool night. Could that really be
happening? No, Nish wasn’t in Morrelune; he was just outside the tent.

‘Join me and become my lieutenant, beloved son, and all will
be forgiven,’ said Jal-Nish to Gatherer. ‘I give you my word that I will
restore Irisis to you, whole and unblemished, and never threaten her again as
long as I shall live.’

Another figure appeared within Gatherer, but this time
Maelys saw it clearly. It was Irisis, wearing a flowing gown of blue silk.
There was no seam around her throat; she was gliding gracefully around a large
chamber, looking back at someone and smiling, and her smile lit up the room. No
wonder Nish can never get over her, she thought. Maelys wanted to wish them
well together, but the thought nearly choked her.

‘No!’ cried Flydd from outside the tent. ‘Nish, he sent that
image to us deliberately. He’s manipulating you, as he’s done so many times
before. You can’t –’

So Jal-Nish had sent the image of Irisis to the others. Did
he know she was watching him? Suddenly Maelys felt exhausted, and so cold that
the taphloid could not warm her. She allowed it to spill from her fingers,
breaking her envisioning, and crawled to the flap.

‘Let me go!’ hissed Nish. ‘It’s nothing to do with you. This
is between me and him.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Flydd. ‘It’s exactly what he wants
you to do.’

‘And I’m still going to do it.’

Maelys scrabbled out of the tent and saw Flydd wrestling
with Nish in the starlight. He fought Flydd off, scrambled over the edge of the
pit and she heard him going down the steep slope like a madman, heading for the
palace.

‘Isn’t anyone going to stop him?’ said Maelys in a small
voice.

‘We’ll never catch him,’ said Yggur.

‘He spent ten years in prison, brooding about Irisis,’ said
Flydd, shaking his head, ‘and I’ve often wondered if the experience had turned
his mind. No wonder he isn’t interested in becoming emperor. He’s totally
obsessed; he’s got to have her, no matter what it costs. He can’t think about
anything else.’

‘What
is
it going
to cost?’ Maelys whispered.

‘More than I can bear to think about,’ said Flydd. ‘Would
you wait here, please?’

He drew Yggur and Tulitine aside, leaving Maelys standing by
the tent, wondering how everything could have fallen to pieces so quickly.

She made out a low, furious argument, and shortly they
returned.

‘This
can’t
be
allowed to happen,’ Flydd was saying. ‘Whether Nish joins his father, or even
takes the tears for his own, they can’t be allowed to exist any longer. That
was our original aim up on Mistmurk Mountain, if you recall – to find the
antithesis to the tears and use it to destroy them. We lost track of that
purpose after Stilkeen came, but we have to get rid of the tears, and surely,
with the best minds on Santhenar gathered here, we can find the way.’

‘Suppose you do find the way,’ said Maelys, trying to think
through the implications. ‘What if Nish is near the tears when they’re
destroyed?’

‘The conflagration that formed them laid waste to everything
within half a league. I can’t imagine their destruction will be any less
violent.’

‘But Nish would be killed, Xervish!’

‘I expect he would be,’ Flydd said evenly. ‘Yet the tears
must
be destroyed, or Santhenar’s
oppression will never end. Surely we agree on that?’

‘Yes,’ said Yggur slowly, and so did Tulitine, and Malien,
whom Maelys had not realised was there.

‘And if Nish has gone over to his father’s side, to get her
back, he’s made his choice,’ said Flydd, sounding more like his old, hard self
every minute. ‘Well, let’s see what our collective minds can do. Come away
– we’re too close to Morrelune. Who knows what spying devices Jal-Nish
might be able to activate, now he holds the tears again.’

They headed out into the middle of the plain, but Maelys did
not follow; she was too stunned. How, after all they had done together, could
Flydd be talking about sacrificing Nish? She sat on a boulder and stared across
the Sacred Lake, feeling helpless and trapped. Even if Nish
had
gone to Morrelune for a woman raised
from the dead – an abomination Maelys could not bear to think about
– she wasn’t giving up on him. He meant too much to her and she had to do
something.

‘Maelys?’ Flydd had come back. ‘Get a move on; there’s no
time to waste.’

‘No!’

‘I beg your pardon!’ he said in the famous scrutator’s voice
that few people dared to defy.

‘I’m not going with you. You can all go to hell.’

Flydd raised the right half of his continuous eyebrow. ‘Very
well. I don’t expect you’d have had anything useful to contribute, anyway.’

‘Probably not. Go away.’

As soon as he was out of sight, she returned to the tent and
took up her taphloid, fuming. Nothing to contribute, indeed! Maelys had also
been thinking about the antithesis to the tears, and the search that had taken
them all the way to the Tower of a Thousand Steps.

The Numinator had said that she hadn’t heard of the
antithesis but, when Maelys had asked the question for the second time, the
Numinator had replied,
All knowledge
collected by the God-Emperor’s spies passes through Gatherer. Look within the
tears
.

Look within the tears
.
It had seemed such a useless answer at the time, but the more she dwelt on it,
the more she thought that the Numinator had been telling the truth.

Dare she use the taphloid one final time, to peer into the
tears themselves? If she was to do anything for Nish, she had to, but what if
Jal-Nish was waiting? He had tailored Gatherer to be the perfect spy, and if
she looked, he must surely catch her, and kill her.

Nonetheless, Maelys had to try. If Jal-Nish wasn’t stopped,
the empire would be in his thrall, as it had been for the past ten years, and
no one would suffer more than the surviving members of Clan Nifferlin.

She used the taphloid as she had done before, and saw
Jal-Nish at once, which was worrying. Yet even if it was a trap, she had to go
on.

He was sitting at a circular table carved from green stone,
writing in a journal. The tears must be to his left, on their pedestal, though
she could not see them from here. She could not see Nish, either, and her heart
gave a hard thump, but settled; he would not have reached the palace yet. It
might take him half an hour to clamber down the steep walls of the pit, cross
the water and climb up to the ninth level.

Over the past ten
years
, Jal-Nish had written in a beautiful copperplate hand,
I have absorbed all captured powers, forces
and Arts into the tears, to strengthen them even further, but I did not
understand what I was doing. That was always my failing, as Flydd told me many
years ago. I was greedy; I snatched at the power without troubling to
understand it
.

The nihilium tears
were created with no power nor Art of their own, but an infinite ability to
absorb the Art from elsewhere, and I was so eager to make them the mightiest
artefacts on Santhenar that it did not occur to me to only absorb
compatible
Arts. Is that why the tears are
increasingly unstable? It’s a lesson my study of the Histories should have
taught me.

But not just unstable,
Jal-Nish wrote
. I worked so hard to
make each tear different that I enhanced Gatherer and Reaper’s intrinsic
antipathy to each other, and it grows worse each day. They cannot trust one
another. They no longer talk to each other, nor cooperate unless I force them,
and whenever I carry them about my neck I can feel their churning rage. If not
for their mutual repulsion, which is far more powerful than trying to hold two
north poles of a magnet together, I believe they would have attacked each other
by now, and what would happen if they did? It does not bear thinking about
.

He scattered fine sand over the page to absorb the surplus
ink, tapped it into a bowl and closed the ledger.

‘No matter,’ he said softly, ‘Once I know exactly how they
were created, I will be able to resolve their mutual antipathy, and then I will
have the power to become a
being
.’

As he spoke, all the clues Maelys had been puzzling over
slid together and the answer sprang into her mind –
the tears must be their own antithesis
. Gatherer and Reaper would
have to be forced together so powerfully that their mutual repulsion was
overcome and they would merge into one roiling mass which, overburdened with
self-antipathy, would be annihilated.

She wasn’t planning to tell Flydd that, though. He was so determined
to end the power of the tears that he might act without care for the
consequences. But Maelys cared very much, and she was going to save Nish, if
she could, then annihilate the tears – assuming she could find a way to
overcome their resistance without killing herself and everyone around her.

It was time to go into Morrelune.

 
FIFTY-THREE

Nish had come to Morrelune because the matter had to be
ended, once and forever … even if he must commit the worst crime of all.

He paced slowly across the floor of the ninth level,
struggling to control the panic he always felt before a confrontation with his
father, for in the past Nish had lost every one of these battles. He wiped
sweaty palms on his pants and took several deep, slow breaths, trying to steady
his racketing heart. I can do this, he thought. I’ve got to, else Maelys and
all her clan will die.

His father was sitting at the circular greenstone table,
though he no longer wore the platinum mask that had concealed his mutilated
face for thirteen years. A closed journal lay in front of him, and a quill
beside it. He appeared healthier than he had at the feast, less decomposed,
though there was still a tinge of green to his complexion and a dribble of
thick fluid from his eye sockets.

When Jal-Nish looked up, Nish wished he had put the mask
back on, for he could not come to terms with the baby-smooth skin on the right
side of his father’s face, nor the quicksilver flicker in the empty eye socket.

‘I hoped you would come, Son. We have had –’

Nish’s palms were sodden. Again he wiped them, then met his
father’s eye. ‘What do you want?’

Jal-Nish’s face hardened, but he forced a smile and slowly
it broadened and became genuine. ‘At last you’re growing more like me.’

‘I’m nothing like you,’ Nish grated. ‘Get on with it.’

‘All right. I need your help.’

‘Beg for it, then.’

Jal-Nish ignored that, with an effort. ‘My plan to master
the tears and become a
being
–
a
true god
, if you like – is
thwarted by one obstacle. I can’t fully understand the tears until I know how
they were created, but only two people know precisely what happened in the tar
cavern in Snizort before the node exploded: Flydd and Irisis –’

‘And Ullii,’ Nish said coldly, for that strange, troubled
child-woman had once fallen in love with him, a love he had not been able to
return, and he could not forget that it had cost her her life.

‘Ullii would not have understood,’ Jal-Nish said
dismissively, ‘even if she had been paying attention. And Flydd will never tell
me.’

‘Neither will Irisis, and you know it. She was prepared to
die for her principles; how can you hope to compel her from beyond the grave?’

‘I can’t,’ said Jal-Nish. ‘I have many failings, Son, but
misreading people is not one of them.’ He thought for a moment, then said
softly, ‘But if
you
asked it of
Irisis, she might tell you out of the love she holds for you.’

‘If there’s one thing I know about the dead, they see more
clearly than the living, and Irisis always saw through you.’

‘I can bring her back, Cryl-Nish. I would do that for you
–’

The temptation so burned Nish that he had to use rage to
fight it. ‘Don’t lie to me, you stinking, maggot-eaten mongrel! You don’t give
a damn about me, and never have. The only thing you care about is your obscene
obsession with power, and what for? What has it ever given you?’