by Ian Irvine
Flydd called Nish, Flangers, Maelys, Karan and Clech down below. ‘Gather round. Keep your voices low. Tell no one. Not even Chissmoul.’
‘What’s the matter?’ said Nish.
‘I know why the Merdrun abducted Tiaan. They want a thapter desperately.’
‘But they were all destroyed when she exploded the nodes,’ said Nish.
‘Except the one she and Malien were flying,’ said Flydd. ‘They had enough power stored in a crystal to bring it down safely.’
Nish frowned. ‘Where was that? I don’t remember.’
‘In the desert eighty leagues south-west of Ashmode. Four hundred leagues from here.’
‘Ashmode!’ Nish went still, eyes staring into nowhere.
‘Sorry,’ said Flydd, and to Karan’s astonishment the hard man put an arm around Nish.
‘That afternoon in Ashmode, after she destroyed the nodes and my father came with Gatherer and Reaper, was the worst day of my life.’
Maelys’ face hardened. She turned away.
‘One of my worst, too,’ said Flydd.
Nish shook himself. ‘Ah, well, fourteen years ago.’
‘We saw Irisis again, at the end. And retribution was delivered.’
‘The destiny of the dead.’ Nish managed a faraway smile. ‘But the thapter will have been robbed of everything useful long ago.’
Flydd shook his grizzled head. ‘The desert dwellers saw it as a sacred object fallen from the heavens, and protected it. But with the fields regenerating it might be repaired and flown again. We’ve got to stop the enemy getting it.’
34
What Is This Abomination?
The gate ejected Llian into a gloomy, cavernous space partly filled with huge curved objects like metal eggs and snail shells. He skidded across a hard floor, raising billows of dust, and fell over. The gate flashed dark green and disappeared.
The stump of his little finger, though excruciatingly painful, was not bleeding. The red-hot edge of the gate had cauterised the stump. He sat in the dust, cradling his maimed left hand in his free hand and wanting his finger back.
And wishing, uselessly, that he could return to the age of twelve and defy Mendark, even if it meant he never went to the College of the Histories. Just to grow up with his mother and father and sisters.
But all were long dead and he had to come to terms with it, in the unlikely event that he ever got out of here alive. He felt sure he had been abducted by the Merdrun. What he could not work out was why.
The dusty air was warm and stale. Llian sensed that he was well below ground. The floor was a quarter of an inch deep in fine, soft dust, surely the accumulation of centuries. The dim light was the same in every direction and showed no tracks but his own. The floor was vibrating ever so slightly, as if a gigantic mechanism was slowly ticking over. He could feel it through the seat of his pants.
He reached out to touch the nearest object, a dusty metal curve like the pointy end of an egg but twice his height. Pain speared through the stump and he froze, hand in the air. Someone was watching him.
Llian turned slowly, straining to see. The enemy’s interrogation methods were cruel and inventive, and they had plenty of reasons to torture him.
During their previous invasion, at the climax of the battle on the Isle of Gwine, he had helped to destroy their most powerful magiz, the mind-linked triplets Jaguly, Unbuly and Empuly. And not long afterwards Llian had been the one to cast nivol onto the summon stone, the source of most of the Merdrun’s magical power, allowing Yggur and Shand to trap the stone in a force cage and cut off its connection to the field.
Oh yes, the Merdrun wanted him badly, but if they had brought him here they would be torturing him right now. He reached out to the curved surface again, stroked his fingers across impossibly smooth black metal, and knew.
‘Rulke!’ he yelled. ‘Where are you?’
White light appeared a long way away, outlining a number of flat, corrugated coils that resembled monstrous metal ammonites, and casting long streaks between them that steadily brightened. After a minute or two Rulke appeared, right hand upraised, holding a luminous stone the size of a lemon. His left hand was pressed to his side, over the scar left by the wound that should have killed him, and he was moving slowly and painfully. He came up to Llian, puffs of dust rising with every footstep, and dimmed the stone to a glimmer.
‘Why did you bring me here?’ Llian snapped. His stump was excruciatingly painful.
‘I need you.’
‘What for?’
‘I’ve got to do something urgently, and I can’t do it by myself.’
‘I’m sure Flydd would have helped you.’
‘I don’t know him. How could I trust him?’
‘Why did you disappear like that? What’s going on?’
‘I … don’t know. Come with me.’
His uncertainty was disturbing. Rulke had always been so strong and commanding, and he’d always had a plan. Waking from the stasis spell, in a future where both the world and the Secret Art had been radically transformed, must have unnerved him.
He headed back the way he had come. Llian followed. After several minutes they passed through a curved iron door, which Rulke closed behind him, and entered a cubic chamber lit by yellow light coming through diamond-shaped holes in the high ceiling.
A large, lumpy object at the far end was covered in a grey sheet, though there was no dust here. A long table against the left-hand wall was scattered with books with metal covers: some copper, some brass, one tin and one silver. A plan drawing, on orange leather marked with deep blue ink, showed the parts of a complicated mechanical contrivance. At the back stood three vaguely familiar devices that, Llian assumed, Rulke had stolen from the sky galleon. A smaller table to the right held only a slim volume bound in worn red leather. There was no dust here.
Rulke turned and his face grew hard. ‘I also brought you here because you owe me.’
Pain stabbed through Llian’s stump. ‘What for?’
‘As I lay dying in Shazmak, tormented by the knowledge that my people would soon be extinct, I did you a very great honour. I gave you the key to my secret papers, here in Alcifer, and asked you to tell my tale. And you swore you would.’
Llian swallowed painfully.
‘But you did not!’ Rulke thundered. ‘Ten years went by, yet you did nothing. When you finally came to Alcifer it was by accident, because a gate brought you here.’
How did he know so much? ‘I – I couldn’t tell your tale,’ stammered Llian. ‘I was under a ban from the College.’
‘What for?’
Llian felt his cheeks glowing. ‘For breaking one of our greatest commandments and meddling in the Histories. Chroniclers and tellers must remain aloof, but I interfered, more than once. My taunts drove Tensor to attack you and we all thought he’d killed you.’
‘You’re a reckless man, Llian, but a small man for all that,’ Rulke sneered. ‘You willingly broke the chroniclers’ commandments, yet you were too afraid to work while under a ban? How tiny your courage is. How feeble; how limited.’
Llian hated making excuses but he had to make Rulke understand. ‘I was on my last chance. If I broke the ban, the college would have made it permanent.’
‘You could have defied them. What were they going to do?’
Llian could think of nothing to say. He had never forgotten his oath to Rulke. He had often thought about the papers and daydreamed about using them – not just to fulfil his oath, but to write another Great Tale. Had he done so, it would have raised him above every other teller who had ever lived, and he’d craved that, but he’d been too afraid of the college’s power over his life. He had kept putting Rulke’s tale off, expecting the ban would be lifted.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said feebly. ‘I let –’
‘No excuses, Llian!’
Rulke stormed across to the table, picked up the slender red volume, came back and slapped Llian hard across the face with it, the left cheek and
then the right. Tears of pain formed in his eyes.
‘What,’ roared Rulke, brandishing it, ‘is this abomination?’
He reversed the cover, which said in black, Tale of Rulke, by Thandiwe Moorn. And underneath, in larger letters in gold leaf, The 24th Great Tale.
‘Where did you get that?’ said Llian.
‘Am I to believe that you contracted out the story of my people to your former lover,’ Rulke said icily, ‘and this insulting little story is the result? Did you set out to deliberately undermine me? To make the lives and deeds of myself and my people, the greatest of all the human species, seem ordinary?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Llian choked. ‘Thandiwe stole your papers soon after I found them. Before I could translate any of them.’
Rulke’s dark eyes narrowed. ‘How did she get into Alcifer?’
‘She stole the little silver key you gave me and rode here, pell-mell, to find your papers – she was desperate to have her own Great Tale.’
‘And you didn’t stop her? Even for you, Llian, that’s worse than feeble. It’s pathetic!’
‘When she stole your papers, she was with Maigraith, who –’
Rulke stiffened. ‘What was she doing here?’
‘Hunting me and Karan,’ said Llian.
‘Why?’
‘Long story.’
‘Shorten it.’
‘Maigraith wanted your son, Julken, to be mated to Sulien once they came of age.’
‘I have a child?’ Rulke whispered. ‘A son?’ He stumbled to a five-legged stool and sat down.
‘You had two sons. Maigraith had non-identical twins by you,’ said Llian. ‘Julken and Illiel. Illiel took after Maigraith’s Faellem side, Julken after you. In looks, at least.’
‘I – don’t understand. Why did she want him to be paired with Sulien?’
‘She was crushed by your death, and the extinction, as she believed, of the Charon, and she wanted to do something about it. Who else can a triune’s son mate with but a triune’s daughter? she said to Karan when they were both heavily pregnant. From our loins spring a new people, a new species, perhaps with more of the strengths and fewer of the weakness than those that engendered us. Let us agree to pair them now.’
‘Monstrous!’ said Rulke. ‘And Karan rightly refused.’
‘But Maigraith was obsessed and kept at her. When Sulien was nine, Maigraith pressured us to allow Sulien to live with her and Julken. She wanted them to grow up together. We refused, of course, but it didn’t end there –’
‘Where was my other son? Where was Illiel?’
‘Maigraith didn’t want him.’
‘What?’ Rulke bellowed.
‘She sent him to live with the Faellem side of the family, somewhere in the forests of Mirrilladell.’
Rulke’s jaw tightened. He stalked across the chamber and back, picked up the five-legged stool and raised it high as if to smash something with it, but winced and clutched at his side and sat again. ‘Go on with your story about Thandiwe.’
‘When she got here, Maigraith compelled Thandiwe to help her trap Karan –’
‘Same long story?’
‘I’ll make it brief. Thandiwe was choking Karan, on Maigraith’s orders, and the reward was to be your papers. I warned Thandiwe that what she was doing would destroy her chances of ever gaining a Great Tale, but she –’
‘Really?’ said Rulke more calmly. ‘What did you tell her?’
Llian quoted from his perfect teller’s memory. ‘If you steal the tale or kill for it, in your own mind that’s what your real identity will be when you tell your tale to the masters: not a teller, but a thief or a murderer. You can’t be both. In reaching for the prize, you will have put it forever beyond your reach.’
‘But she got her so-called Great Tale,’ Rulke said icily. ‘How did that travesty come about?’
‘The College of the Histories had become corrupt, and I didn’t count on the hunger of the masters to gain another Great Tale, to their own honour and glory. Thandiwe’s tale was in no way worthy of the honour, and she told it poorly, but –’
Rulke heaved Llian into the air by his shirtfront. ‘You were there?’ His eyes radiated shards, and he picked up the Tale of Rulke in his free hand and whacked Llian across the ear with it. ‘You heard this miserable tale told?’
‘Yes,’ Llian squeaked.
Rulke held him out at arm’s length, effortlessly. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ he said in a deadly voice, ‘but I understood that a tale could only become a Great Tale by the unanimous acclamation of the masters.’
The pit yawned before Llian’s feet and he had no way to avoid it. ‘That’s – right.’
‘And you, being a master of the college, had the right to vote.’
‘I … umm … abstained.’
Rulke might have been turned to his granite statue, so hard and still did he go, then he dropped Llian. He wanted to run into the dark and hide.
‘You knew Thandiwe’s tale was unworthy to be a Great Tale,’ Rulke said, very softly.
‘Yes.’
‘In fact, an utter travesty that insulted and diminished me and my people.’
Llian’s cheeks were burning. ‘Yes.’
‘You could have voted it down … but by abstaining, you collaborated to make it a Great Tale.’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘I’m trying to.’
‘Thandiwe could have destroyed me.’
‘How?’
‘When Maigraith captured Karan in Alcifer, the only way I could save her was by telling Maigraith an untrue tale –’
‘A lie!’
‘Yes,’ Llian whispered. ‘I invented a story … about your identical twin brother, Kalke …’
Yggur’s dark eyebrows rose; his thick lips started to form a smile, but he did not complete it. ‘Kalke! You live dangerously, Chronicler.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Had Maigraith known the word she would have slain you on the spot.’
Llian tried to speak but his mouth was too dry. He swallowed. ‘Why?’ he croaked.
‘In the Charon tongue, Kalke means gullible fool.’ Rulke shook his head. ‘You’re a treasure beyond price, Llian. Go on.’
‘I told her Kalke had been badly injured in a raid on the Merdrun long ago and still lay hidden in the void, under a stasis spell.’
‘A stasis spell! How did you know about such things?’
‘I … collect knowledge.’
‘So you can abuse it. Continue.’
‘Maigraith was desperate to find Kalke and left Alcifer at once, but later Thandiwe found out about my untrue tale. If I’d voted the Tale of Rulke down she would have told the masters and destroyed my career.’
‘Then the name the future knows you by, Llian the Liar, is well deserved.’
Llian could not speak. He nodded jerkily, the shame burning him.
Rulke shook his head in disgust. ‘You wouldn’t describe yourself as bound by unwavering moral principles, would you, Llian?’
‘I’m flawed … like everyone else.’
‘More flawed than most.’ Rulke looked down. ‘What happened to your little finger?’
‘The edge of your gate cut it off. Can you –?’
‘Get it back and reattach it?’
Llian wanted it back, more than he could have imagined. ‘Yes.’
‘I could … assuming I gave a damn.’
Had it been anyone else, Llian would have begged. But that would only lower him further in Rulke’s eyes. ‘And you don’t.’
Rulke didn’t bother to reply.
‘What do you want me for?’ said Llian. ‘To rewrite your tale?’
‘Do you really think I’d give you the chance to betray me again?’
35
Got A Death Wish, Chronicler?
Rulke sat at the large table, shoved the books and the chart aside, and stared at the three devices he had stolen from the sky galleon.
‘Then
what do you want me to do?’ said Llian after a long interval.
‘Shut your mouth.’
The stub of Llian’s little finger throbbed with every heartbeat. He perched on a stool and watched as Rulke began to take the devices apart. His hands, matching the rest of him, were huge, his fingers long and thick, but he worked with remarkable dexterity.
He was an astounding craftsman. After escaping from the Nightland he had single-handedly built his flying construct, presumably here in Alcifer. Maigraith had taken his body to Aachan with it, and later the Aachim had used what was left as a model for their own constructs, though theirs were mere land transports, incapable of either flying or making gates.
‘Come here,’ said Rulke. ‘Hold this upright.’
Llian took the crystal Rulke was holding. It was blue, with three glowing specks of a deeper blue inside, and disturbingly warm.
‘Hold it still!’ said Rulke.
When working on a manuscript, Llian’s calligraphy, taught by his scribe father as a child and practiced to this day, was perfect. His mother, who had been an illuminator, had also taught him her art and his hand was rock-steady when working on an illustration. Yet whenever he tried to do ordinary things, from fixing a leaking tap to digging carrots in the garden, he was embarrassingly clumsy. Karan had refused to let him chop the firewood for fear he’d cut his foot off. He forced his hands to stillness.
Rulke fitted a cap carved from pale yellow soapstone to the top of the crystal, frowned, took it off and carved small pieces of the soft rock off the inside of the cap with a scalpel. He worked swiftly and when he put the cap on it fitted perfectly.
‘What are you making?’ Curiosity was Llian’s consuming weakness.
‘None of your business.’
Rulke stopped and turned to Llian, studying him minutely, then smiled. It was not a kind smile.
‘Yes?’ said Llian.
‘How come you and Karan only had the one child?’
Llian swallowed. ‘That’s a very personal question.’
‘Indulge me. You know how much issue matters to us.’
The Charon were blessed with extremely long life, but after they escaped from the void to Aachan, and some had subsequently come to Santhenar, they had been cursed by such low fertility that they had almost died out. Rulke might well be the last of his kind.