The Fate of the Fallen (The Song of the Tears Book 1)

by Ian Irvine

  She was already. The flappeter was slowing, twisting its body this way and that, and not even the sharpest jabs made a difference now. Had it realised that she lacked the will to sever it? Had Vomix?

  LOOK BACK, LITTLE ONE, AND SEE YOUR DOOM.

  Maelys couldn’t help herself; she looked back and saw flappeters rising up everywhere, hundreds upon hundreds of them: red ones, grey ones, black and gold ones, so many that they darkened the sky. Her chest cramped and for a few seconds she couldn’t breathe. The tent peg slipped; she just caught it before it went over the side.

  ‘It’s no use, Nish. There are hundreds of them. We’re beaten.’

  He looked back, frowned, then unfastened his safety line, scrambled over the saddle horn and slipped into her saddle behind her.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He put his hands on her shoulders and the pressure eased. ‘Maelys, it’s Vomix.’

  ‘They’re everywhere, Nish!’ She had to bite down on a scream.

  ‘Hallucinations! Father doesn’t have hundreds of flappeters. I see to the heart of things, remember?’

  He sounded so calm and, for the first time, so strong. Like the Nish of the tales she’d so loved. She still saw hundreds of flappeters but she had to trust Nish. Settling back in the saddle, she allowed him to put his arms around her, and it did help. The hallucinations were still there, the mucosal voice in her mind was as threatening as ever, but she no longer felt that she was fighting a mighty opponent all by herself.

  Flappeter hallucinations appeared in every direction, surrounding them in a vast doughnut of whirring feather-rotors that began to form an enclosing shell, densest in front of them. Even Rurr-shyve seemed to be seeing them now, for the beat of its feather-rotors was faltering, its long neck turning this way and that as if it were afraid to go on.

  ‘Keep going,’ said Nish.

  ‘Which way?’ she wailed. ‘I don’t know where to go.’

  He pointed ahead. ‘That way.’

  ‘But that’s where they’re thickest.’ It was so hard to trust his eyes over her own.

  AHA! I KNOW YOUR FAMILY, AND I HAVE THEM WITHIN MY GRASP. TURN BACK.

  SIXTEEN

  Maelys gasped and reached through the loop to turn the flappeter back. Nish caught her arm. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘He’s got my family! I have to give myself up.’

  ‘He’s lying. They must be a hundred leagues from here.’

  ‘I can’t escape at their expense.’ Maelys knew it was a stupid, emotional reaction which would do no one any good, but she couldn’t act any other way.

  ‘What about me? You’ll be giving me up too.’

  She could think of nothing save Vomix getting his filthy hands on Fyllis. ‘Not to death, Nish.’

  ‘There are lives far worse than death.’

  She squeezed her head in her hands. ‘I don’t know what to do. Whatever I choose it will be wrong.’

  ‘Then keep on, because even if you give yourself up he won’t let your family go. Father is merciless, but Vomix is depraved.’ He thought for a moment. ‘What did he say, exactly?’

  She told him.

  ‘But he didn’t identify any of your family by name? Not even Fyllis?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then he’s bluffing. Believe me, if he knew who they were, he’d name them and gloat.’

  ‘And if you’re wrong …?’ Her stomach knotted with dread, for Fyllis.

  ‘You can’t believe a word he says. Father is the very God of Liars and his servants ape him in every way.’

  And you’re the son of the father. Would you sacrifice my family to your freedom? The noble Nish she’d hero-worshipped would not have, but she wasn’t sure about this stranger. As she hesitated, Rurr-shyve slowed and looked back at her, and she could feel her control leaking away. The pursuing beasts were closing fast and she didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Maelys!’

  Nish’s arms were crushing her ribs. She turned; his teeth were bared, his eyes staring. He pushed himself up out of the saddle. What was the matter? Surely he wasn’t going to jump? No, for he put his hands around her head and laid his forehead against hers. What was he doing?

  A trace of his clearsight must have passed to her, for she recognised the mental paralysis as another of Vomix’s Arts, and it faded. Giving herself up was pointless, whether he had her family or not. She seized back control. ‘Fly, Rurr-shyve! Fly as you’ve never flown before.’

  The beast seemed to leap forwards in the air. She pointed it at the dense knot of flappeters in front of her, holding her breath as they converged at a shattering pace, and flinching to avoid the impact, but at the very moment of collision the hallucinations vanished and Rurr-shyve streaked away.

  It had the advantage of height over the six real flappeters, which were labouring up after them, and now began to lengthen its lead. By the time the pursuit reached their altitude Rurr-shyve was a good league ahead, though the fresher beasts soon began to peg back the gap. The town disappeared, then the tower. They were flying over rugged country now: steep ridges covered in scrub, topped with angled outcrops of grey limestone dotted with black sinkholes.

  TURN BACK, TURN BACK …

  Vomix was just a whisper in her mind now, easy to resist, though her strength was failing with Rurr-shyve’s, while the sympathetic echoes of its pain and fatigue were growing stronger in her. Her bones ached and it was all she could do to sit up. Her eyes were watering from the cold wind. She wiped them on her sleeve, trying to focus on what lay ahead – an oddly shaped mountain whose top seemed to have fallen in.

  Rurr-shyve was tiring so rapidly that the end could not be long in coming. Thick, slimy lather extended in streamers from its mouth, while yellow mucous oozed along its neck in wind-blown threads from its breathing tubes. Every breath came with a gurgling suck and the feather-rotors were battering at the air rather than curving smoothly through it. The gap was closing too quickly. Maelys couldn’t see any way of escape.

  ‘Rurr-shyve is nearly done for,’ she gasped, sagging against Nish. ‘And so am I.’ Her muscles were a throbbing mass of weariness. Her head felt fuzzy and it was incredibly difficult to concentrate. ‘I can’t take much more, Nish.’

  He held her up. ‘You’ve got to hold out. Just a few more minutes. Even one minute.’

  What for? She did her best but she had nothing left. She felt as though she were consuming herself. ‘Food, quick!’

  He felt around in the saddlebags, then thrust a crumbling biscuit into her hand, one she’d baked the previous day from mashed grass seed, egg and honey. She crammed the whole lot in and gulped it down. A little strength came back. She spat out grass husks.

  ‘Thanks,’ Nish muttered as they were blown into his face.

  ‘Sorry –’

  TURN AWAY, RURR-SHYVE.

  The flappeter’s feather-rotors stopped for a second. This order was so overpoweringly loud that it blocked Maelys’s thoughts and, before she’d recovered, the beast was turning away from the mountain.

  Wearily, she forced it back.

  ‘I heard that,’ Nish said wonderingly. ‘It must have hurt Vomix to have used such power. He’s desperate, Maelys. But why, when he’s within reach of his goal? It doesn’t make sense.’

  She didn’t have the strength to answer. Holding Rurr-shyve on course, and enduring the echoes of its pain, were taking everything she had.

  ‘What if we’re close to some place he doesn’t want us to go?’ He scanned the landscape. Maelys’s aching eyes saw nothing save scrubby limestone ridge country and the collapsed peak. ‘Can it be that mountain? Keep straight on, Maelys.’

  She gritted her teeth and endured the pain. The peak, from a distance, resembled drawings of volcanoes she’d seen in a book in the clan library, except that water gushed from a cavern a third of the way down, forming a stream linking a series of pools. It wound around the mountain three times, like the thread of a screw that grew ever wider, before disappearing int
o another cave near the bottom. The stream looked as though it had been deliberately carved into the mountain.

  ‘It’s just a volcano, Nish.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Nish said thoughtfully. ‘I flew over dozens of them during the war and none were like this. It looks –’ He broke off, staring ahead over her shoulder.

  Rurr-shyve broke away. Exhaustedly, Maelys turned it back on course. ‘What … is … it?’ She could barely choke the words out.

  ‘They’re almost on us. Go harder.’

  Rurr-shyve shied away from the peak. She turned it back; it shied away again. Her amulet hand began jerking through wild arcs; the amulet’s metal legs had unfolded and it began scratching at her closed fingers, trying to get out. Nish couldn’t hold her arm steady. ‘It doesn’t want to go there, Nish.’

  ‘Then that’s where we’ve got to go; any way you can.’

  ‘Doing my best,’ she grunted.

  ‘Force it, cajole it. Seduce it if you have to, but get us there.’

  There wasn’t time to dwell on his unfortunate turn of phrase, as a crossbow bolt whizzed well above – a warning shot. Nish stood up in the saddle, using his weight to hold her arm steady, and together they turned Rurr-shyve towards the mountain. As they neared the crest, a small walled village came into view, set in a depression on the far slope. People were working in terraced vegetable gardens. The top of the mountain had collapsed to form a kind of crater from which shimmering fumes – no, steam – wavered up.

  Suddenly the flappeter shot forwards, though it took a few seconds for Maelys to work out why. ‘Nish, Vomix’s presence is gone!’

  ‘Turn back to the crater,’ Nish cried. ‘I know what it is – it’s all that’s left of a destroyed node from the time of the war – ten years ago.’

  ‘Then what’s the use of it?’ She turned Rurr-shyve sharply, watching the other six beasts. Once they cut across the angle, they’d be upon her.

  But they didn’t. They veered left, away from the crater, and curved in a great circle around it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Nish, frowning. ‘Unless … can it be that Vomix’s power doesn’t hold here …? It must be. Head for the village. Hurry!’

  The flappeter began to turn, but suddenly the wind stilled, the world seemed to hold its breath, and silver lightning sheeted across the sky. Rurr-shyve let out a shrill cry and turned the other way.

  ‘Turn back,’ cried Maelys, but it didn’t respond. Maelys pulled free of Nish, jammed the sharpened peg into the wound and threatened Rurr-shyve with severing, but it kept going as if she wasn’t there.

  ‘Harder,’ said Nish, grim-faced.

  ‘What is it, Nish? What’s Vomix done?’

  ‘It’s Father! He must have been monitoring Vomix, and when he failed, Father took control through the tears. How could he do that from so far away? He doesn’t want us to go near the crater, and that’s the first good news I’ve heard in a long time.’

  ‘Not if we can’t get there,’ Maelys panted. Her insatiable hunger was back, worse than before, but there was no food left.

  ‘Try harder. To convince Rurr-shyve, you’ll have to hurt it.’

  She didn’t want to be the cause of any creature’s suffering, but better Jal-Nish’s flesh-formed beast than her family, or Nish. Maelys thrust the peg in with all the force she could muster.

  Rurr-shyve screamed and tried to buck her off. Nish, who had taken off his safety line earlier, went flying into the air, but his grasping hand caught hold of her line, which had looped out behind her. He clung to it with both hands, slammed down hard and thumped into the saddle as the flappeter tried to tie itself in a knot.

  Untwisting with another great convulsion, it went humping and bucking away towards the other flappeters, which were now slowly circling the mountain half a league out, as if they didn’t dare come any closer.

  Maelys tried to crawl up the neck to prick Rurr-shyve again, but it was bucking too wildly, and now she began to feel pressure building in her mind, like shimmering cords trying to wrap themselves around her brain. A wave of dizziness swept across her as if the blood was being squeezed from her head; pain stabbed in her sinuses, then a drop of bright red blood splashed on the saddle horn in front of her. Another followed it and another, until her nose was streaming blood and it was running down her face and dripping off her chin.

  She felt so dizzy she could barely stay upright. The peg slipped from her hand as she grabbed desperately for the saddle horn. ‘Nish?’ she croaked, feeling the cords tightening, her consciousness slipping away. ‘Nish, what’s he doing to me …?’

  She made one last effort to take back control but her fingers lacked the strength to hold the amulet. It tore free from her hand and ran forwards as if it intended to scuttle up Rurr-shyve’s neck. Unfortunately, at that moment Rurr-shyve lurched wildly. The amulet slid off the bloody saddle horn in front of Maelys, its metal legs scrabbling for a purchase on the scaly carapace, hung for a moment on one spike-tipped forelimb, then fell away.

  Instantly, Rurr-shyve’s long neck twisted around and it snapped viciously at her, the hooked tip of its serrated beak gashing her forearm. Maelys shrieked. Nish began to beat at it with one of the tent poles but Rurr-shyve put its head down and laboured towards the nearest of its fellows.

  Everything faded into a pink mist in which all she could do was cling to the saddle horn, watching the blood running down her arm and mixing with the blood still flooding from her nose, and try not to throw up all over herself. ‘Nish …’

  Nish lunged for the amulet but missed, and it was lost. After beating off Rurr-shyve’s attack with the tent pole, he shook Maelys, trying to rouse her. It was useless. Without the amulet, the beast was uncontrollable and she was doomed.

  There was still a chance for him, though. Nish could sense his father reaching out towards him with a grudging admiration, that his surviving son had eluded the pursuit for so long and evaded every trap set for him. He wouldn’t give Maelys any credit for that. Father’s arrogance could not allow him to think that he’d been bested by a slip of a girl.

  Had something changed for Jal-Nish since the encounter in Morrelune? Nish sensed his father’s yearning, could feel the words slowly crystallising in his mind. Come back, my son, and all will be forgiven. I need you – you’re the only one who can help me now. Come, sit at my right hand and the thing you most desire shall be yours.

  Nish had never heard his father plead before. Something had definitely changed. And his father would give him everything he asked for, for a price ... even the thing he wanted most of all. Everything but the life of Maelys and her family, for he would see them as the blackest traitors. There was nothing Nish could do to save them, unless …

  He didn’t stop to think, but scrambled up Rurr-shyve’s neck, clinging with his legs, then took hold of the wisp-controller and, with a mighty heave, tore it out by the roots. Rurr-shyve shrieked in agony, reared up until it was standing on its tail, then flipped over backwards and came upright again. Maelys echoed its pain in a rending cry that went on and on, before slumping in the saddle, unconscious.

  The presence in Nish’s mind vanished. Unfortunately, Jal-Nish’s command of the flappeter failed with it, and Rurr-shyve’s agony was so great that it lost control of its extremities. The feather-rotors jammed together and it plunged towards the rocky mountainside in an uncontrollable spin.

  SEVENTEEN

  The muscles that drove the feather-rotors were still bunching and contracting beneath him but the blades had jammed. As the flappeter whirled, Nish caught hold of the rotor stalk and, balanced precariously, heaved at the locked blades, which were shuddering under the strain but unable to spin. Each heave opened a small triangular gap between the feathered edges, until another driving contraction of the great muscles beneath him snapped it closed. On his third attempt, Nish was lucky to get his fingers out.

  Just a couple of minutes to impact. He eyed the gnashing rims through which the feathers protruded. If he
caught his fingers between them they’d be crushed to paste.

  He slid down for the tent pole, scrambled up again and forced it between the locked blades at the point where Maelys’s bamboo splint left a small gap. Standing on tiptoe with his arm around the thrumming rotor stalk, he thrust with all his strength. The splint cracked along its length and one side was propelled up in the air like a bolt from a crossbow. Nish caught his breath, but after all, what did it matter? The rotor blade only had to hold for one minute.

  The feather-rotors slipped past one another and began to spin, slowing the descent, though Rurr-shyve’s head was flopping from side to side and it was still whirling as it fell. Was there anything else he could do? Nish scrabbled along the tail, locked his ankles around it and bashed the vertical discs to the left. The flappeter came out of its spin but it was still falling.

  Maelys had slid out of her seat as the beast rolled and was now hanging in mid-air by her line, one arm swinging. Rurr-shyve was humping and jerking spasmodically, and would soon slam into the mountainside hard enough to break every bone in their bodies.

  It rolled to the left. Nish clung on with his legs and, below, glimpsed the stream curving around the mountainside. Could he direct the flappeter into it? He pulled himself upright and, with exhausting heaves of the tail discs this way and that, tried to turn the beast towards the water. Down and down they plunged, falling too steeply now. They were going to overshoot.

  He corrected the other way, overshot again, then Rurr-shyve’s head jerked up. The feather-rotors spun furiously, stopping it in mid-air with a jerk that pulled Nish’s stomach down painfully, then it began to hover about twenty spans above the ground.

  Nish was just thinking that they might survive after all when the beast let out a shrill cry, the injured rotor blade dislocated above his head and the flappeter plummeted towards the rocks. Nish heaved desperately on the tail discs, managed to point the flappeter towards the stream, and they hit the water a few spans from the bank.