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

by Ian Irvine

Rurr-shyve plunged all the way to the bottom, carrying them with it, then rolled onto its side and began to drift downstream with the current. The feather-rotors were still feebly trying to turn, churning the water to brown foam and moving the flappeter this way and that. Nish struggled free between their beats, kicked well away and reached the surface.

  He couldn’t see Maelys anywhere. She must be trapped underneath, still tethered by her line, unconscious. And she couldn’t swim. He cursed, took a deep breath and plunged under, feeling his way down the long body. Something struck him on the cheek, hard enough to cut the skin. It was one of those giant lice, and there were others all around, abandoning their dying host, whose breathing tubes were sucking and squelching as it tried to breathe.

  Rurr-shyve bobbed to the surface momentarily but the breathing tubes on its left side were still under the surface and it was sucking in water with each intake. He couldn’t see Maelys and now Rurr-shyve was sinking again.

  He dived and swam along its trunk. A convulsive thrash of the dislocated rotor blade whacked him on the back of the head. Nish kept going and made her out in the murky water, tangled among the twitching sets of legs. She was conscious now but couldn’t free herself. Bubbles trailed from the corners of her mouth and one clenched fist was feebly beating at the legs.

  Nish found where her line was caught around one of the thorny protrusions and slipped it over. He couldn’t free her from it; there wasn’t time to untie the knots. He yanked on the buckle that held down the front saddle and pulled it off. It began to float up, buoyed by air trapped in the saddlebags. Nish kicked away from Rurr-shyve, now rolling onto its back, and dragged Maelys up to the surface.

  ‘Can’t swim,’ she gasped.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said soothingly. ‘I’m a brilliant swimmer.’

  ‘Liar,’ she murmured.

  Rurr-shyve, who was floating upside-down twenty spans upstream, gave a convulsive heave then went still. Maelys cried out and sagged in his arms. He hoped she’d just fainted; that Rurr-shyve’s death hadn’t killed her too.

  Nish supported her with the buoyancy of the saddlebags while he scanned the sky. The flappeters were circling, still keeping their distance from the mountaintop. Their riders were urging them down but they kept shying away.

  The water swirled around a fallen tree. Nish kicked hard to avoid becoming tangled in its roots. They were drifting downstream towards a set of jagged rocks, gathering speed. Nish was thankful for the saddlebags; he couldn’t have supported Maelys without them. He wasn’t sure he could have saved himself. He felt terribly weak.

  He was towing Maelys towards the shore when he realised they were on the wrong side of the river. If they were to have a hope of reaching the dubious safety of the village they’d have to cross the water. He began to kick outwards, though not very effectively.

  Bubbles gushed from the saddlebags, which were losing buoyancy and tugging Maelys down. He felt around her waist but the knots had pulled tight under the constant jerking and he didn’t have a knife.

  He whipped the little taphloid out, flipped open its secret catch as he’d seen her do and began to saw at the rope with the metal edge. It wasn’t an effective blade but he eroded the strands enough to snap the rope with a jerk. He dropped the taphloid’s chain over Maelys’s head, heaved her away from the sinking saddlebags and began to tow her towards the centre of the stream.

  The current was stronger here, and boiling with eddies that tried to pull them under. Nish, never far from panic in the water, had to talk himself into staying calm. An eddy whirled them around then shot them out on the other side, fortunately closer to the far bank. Scooping desperately with his free arm, he managed to drag Maelys into the slower water and from there to the bank.

  He couldn’t rest now or he’d never get going again. Nish hauled her out, gasping. Her forearm was still bleeding, though it wasn’t a dangerous injury, so he left it and scanned the sky. Two more flappeters were flying up from the south. They were larger and carried what looked like baskets suspended beneath them – troop carriers. Behind them, its brass fittings shining in the sun, was an object he hadn’t seen for ten years, and it raised such ambivalent memories that for a moment he couldn’t breathe.

  It was an air-floater – no, this craft deserved a grander title, so baroque was its extravagance of shining brass, polished ebony and tar-sealed silk – an air-dreadnought; a flying vessel suspended from three gigantic ovoid balloons filled with explosively deadly floater gas, and propelled by three spinning rotors at the stern. Air-dreadnoughts had been common in the last years of the war, and Nish was responsible in a minor way, for he’d had the idea for hot air floaters in the first place.

  According to the gossip of the guards at Mazurhize, only Jal-Nish and his most trusted lieutenants had air-dreadnoughts now, and they were only used to strike fear into the cowering populace.

  This one certainly struck fear into Nish, for an air-dreadnought could carry fifty heavily armed troops. Creatures like flappeters, which depended on the Art, and even mancers might be afraid to approach the uncanny mountaintop, but his crack troops feared nothing save the displeasure of their master.

  Maelys stirred and pink water dribbled from her mouth. Nish helped her to her feet. ‘Come on. They’re after us.’ She swayed; caught at his arm. ‘Can you walk, Maelys?’

  She clenched the taphloid so tightly that her knuckles stood out. ‘I think so.’ Her voice was hoarse, reedy; her eyes unfocussed.

  The first of the battle flappeters rotored towards them, and if it crossed the stream there was no hope of escape. It attempted to do so, but as it approached the stream its feather-rotors slowed almost to nothing and it turned away sharply, coming to ground further down. The other flap-peter tracked it. Now the air-dreadnought was sailing up majestically, brightly armoured troops leaning over the sides, eager to hunt down the prize. Nish held his breath. Nothing could stop it now.

  Then, a bare hundred spans out from the river its triple rotors stopped with a shriek of torn metal. The suspended troop vessel swung forwards on its cables, then jerked sideways as the wind caught the airbags. The craft lost way suddenly and was driven downslope by the wind. The pilot pulled the emergency floater gas release; the air-dreadnought dropped sharply and crunched into the rocks below the stream, hurling several men overboard. The remaining troops piled over the side.

  ‘We’d better get a move on.’ Nish took her hand and began to run, though before he’d gone fifty paces he was out of breath. Running up the mountain was beyond him, and Maelys, still dazed and in pain, could only manage a stumble.

  Troops from the first flappeter were pounding along the far side of the river. Two went to their knees, pointing wickedly ornate crossbows at Nish and Maelys, while the others headed downstream towards the rocks where they might cross.

  A bolt struck sparks off a boulder just above Maelys. Nish jerked her around in front of him, shielding her, and pushed her forwards.

  ‘Stop or we’ll shoot,’ boomed a bemedalled officer.

  Maelys froze. ‘What are you doing, Nish?’

  ‘They won’t harm me, but they’ll kill you. Keep going.’

  There were at least seventy troops on the ground now, all clad in the iridescent, beetle-shell armour of his father’s Imperial Militia, and the leaders were starting to cross.

  On he laboured, and up. Crossbow bolts spanged off the rocks to either side; arrows whistled over their heads. None came too near, save when, after some ten minutes of desperate, scrambling flight, Maelys tripped and fell sideways out of Nish’s shelter. A bolt slammed into a boulder between her clutching fingers, shards of stone cutting little crescent shaped gashes there. An ell either way and it would have taken a finger off.

  Nish hastily hauled her in front of him, though he knew that a skilled archer, if prepared to take the risk, could go out to one side and pick her off. Behind them, he heard the officer shouting again.

  They’d gained a few hundred paces while the s
oldiers slipped and skidded across the stream over the half-submerged rocks, though once they reached the other side they began to gain rapidly. There was still a steep climb to the low wall encircling the village, which surely couldn’t hold these soldiers out long. The leading troops were going three steps to his one and would be on them within minutes.

  He forced himself through the pain and ran harder, pushing Maelys ahead of him, but his wasted muscles were giving out and she couldn’t keep it up either. Ahead, a house-sized boulder offered temporary shelter. They rounded it and stopped abruptly.

  Before them stood a tall, imposing man whose long black hair hung down past his shoulders. He had black eyes and a thin, hooked nose and, though only in early middle-age, the weathered skin of his face and neck looked as though someone had taken a wood rasp to it, for it was as corrugated as the bark of an old tree. He looked as solid as a tree, too, and utterly implacable.

  ‘Go back!’ he said in a deep, hypnotic voice. ‘Whoever you are, you have no business here.’

  ‘Sanctuary!’ gasped Nish, staggering forwards.

  ‘Go back!’ The man thrust out his right arm and the loose sleeve of his robe slid up. His hands and arms were clad in skin-tight tan gloves made of leather so fine that it was almost transparent, extending up past his elbows. Nish felt a surge of power from the man’s hand and his hair rose up, as it had once years ago when he’d been close to a stroke of lightning.

  ‘This is Cryl-Nish Hlar. Nish!’ panted Maelys. ‘He’s the man who will become the Deliverer. You’ve got to help him!’

  The tall man went very still, then stooped, put one gloved hand under Nish’s chin and turned his face upwards. Nish didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Cryl-Nish!’ the man said, wonderingly. ‘Many men have claimed to be him, but all have been fools or liars in the service of the God-Emperor. Betrayers!’ he spat. ‘But there is a test.’

  Behind them, boots scrabbled on rocks and a pair of soldiers burst into view. ‘Step away, old fellow,’ one shouted, ‘or you’ll taste the steel of the God-Emperor.’

  The tall man raised his right hand again, then pointed it at the soldiers. Nish saw nothing, but a shrill wailing hurt his ears and the troops fell down, blood pouring from their mouths and noses. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘My name is Monkshart. The God-Emperor’s power does not extend into Tifferfyte, but the steel of his soldiers’ swords bites as hard here as anywhere.’

  PART TWO – THE PIT OF POSSIBILITIES

  EIGHTEEN

  Maelys mistrusted Monkshart from the moment she set eyes on him, though she couldn’t have said why. It might have been the arrogant way he carried himself, for he was extremely tall, yet moved so as to make himself seem even taller. He walked stiffly, on just the balls of his feet, with his head tilted back to look down his long arched nose at her.

  Or perhaps it was the fall of black hair, as carefully tended and glossy as any maiden’s, that contrasted so sharply with the rugose skin of his face. The men of her land wore their hair close-cropped, save for highwaymen and other dubious characters, and she couldn’t bring herself to trust a longhair.

  It definitely had something to do with the look in his black and piercing eyes; eyes that seemed to shine when he turned them her way, and especially when he spoke. Not with lust for her, she felt sure. That was not his vice, but he spoke with a fervour that was maniacal in its intensity. Monkshart was a charismatic zealot whose people would follow him anywhere, but a dangerous man too, for once set on a path he would follow it unswervingly, no matter what or who got in his way.

  Yet perhaps, despite her personal feelings, that made him the right man to lead the Defiance. And turn Nish into the Deliverer.

  As they climbed up to the village, more troops appeared around the rock below them, followed by an officer wearing a plumed helmet. He inspected the bodies, studied the layout of the village then watched until Monkshart, Nish and Maelys crossed the wall. Why didn’t he send his troops after them? Was he afraid of Monkshart, or had they been called back by Jal-Nish?

  The sun was setting as Monkshart led them through the village, and everyone stared as they went by. The place was neat and tidy, the paths freshly swept and even the composting piles formed into neat circles, but every structure had an ill-made, temporary look.

  The defensive wall was merely dry-stone rocks loosely fitted together as if by inexperienced hands, and would not have held the God-Emperor’s troops back for a second. The houses must also have been built by novices, being the rudest of stone huts roofed with slabs of crumbling shale. The terraced gardens were mostly bare at this time of year, apart from a large patch of what looked like turnips and leeks.

  The people were thin and work-worn; their dark, staring eyes had a feverish glint which bothered Maelys almost as much as Monkshart had. They looked haunted; trapped. And there was another odd thing. She didn’t see any children.

  A gaunt, ravaged young woman came stumbling out of the next but last hut as they went by, crying and tugging at Monkshart’s sleeve. ‘Surr,’ she wept, ‘it came again last night. It took Milli and we can’t find her anywhere. I’m so afraid.’

  He brushed her off. ‘Phrune will deal with it, Ganni.’

  She wailed and stumbled off. Maelys watched the girl go, feeling her own hackles rising. She expected to be taken to one of the huts but Monkshart led them up a set of steps rudely hacked into the stone all the way to the top of the mountain, then turned aside. Nish stopped suddenly and Maelys’s heart lurched, for one step ahead the ground fell away into the steaming crater, which was nothing like the pile of rubble she had expected.

  Its almost sheer inner walls were mostly as smooth as glass, as if the rock had been melted in a titanic forge then trowelled flat, though here and there the surface was hung with glassy festoons and dribbles where molten rock had flowed then set. Directly across the crater, where the light of the setting sun struck the wall, the surface glowed in reds, purples and mauves. To her left it had a greenish hue, and colours shimmered across it like a film of oil on the surface of a pond. It was an uncanny place and she didn’t want to go anywhere near it.

  Maelys looked down and wished she hadn’t. The walls fell sheer for a good hundred spans, below which the rising steam blotted out her view, though she glimpsed a blurred yellow flicker in the depths. A faint crackle reached her ears, in waves that rose and fell.

  ‘What is this place?’ said Nish softly, as if speaking loudly would be sacrilege.

  Monkshart smiled thinly. ‘Should you answer my questions correctly, you may ask your own. This way.’

  He extended a long arm to his right, where a glass-smooth path, no wider than Maelys’s shoulders, ran down the inside curve of the crater towards a structure she could not see clearly through the belching steam. All she could make out was a pair of red columns and what looked like a platform extending over the abyss. It was warm though – like sitting by the fire in a well-built house.

  ‘And if we don’t?’ said Nish.

  Monkshart jerked a thumb over the side, then gestured ahead. ‘To the pavilion, if you please.’

  Nish followed the glassy path, slowly and grimly. Maelys went next, treading just as carefully, for it would be easy to slip on the smooth glass underfoot, and fatal if she did.

  Monkshart came a few paces behind and she resisted the urge to glance over her shoulder. She could feel his physical presence smouldering behind her, as if he might burst into flame at any moment. The thought of him watching her made her acutely uncomfortable.

  Nish gained the floor of the pavilion with a gasp of relief and headed towards the rear, putting as much distance as he could between him and the drop. Maelys stepped inside. The pavilion had a semi-circular floor, a domed ceiling the same shape, and five columns equally spaced around the curve of the semi-circle, all carved from the glassy rock as if by the hand of a master, then polished until they shone.

  Clearly the novices who’d built the village had no part in making this place. A
perfectly round opening at the rear led into darkness, while at the front a long plank of thick rock-glass extended out like a diving board between the second and third columns, over the crater.

  ‘What’s that for?’ Maelys asked in a low voice.

  ‘It’s where those who fail my questioning take their last walk,’ said Monkshart, and she knew he was in earnest. He motioned Nish to a stone chair to his right, Maelys to one facing it, and took the central chair. ‘Phrune!’

  ‘What?’ said Nish, evidently thinking Monkshart was speaking to him.

  A brown-clad shadow slipped through the round opening. ‘Master?’ said a treacly voice that made Maelys’s flesh creep. Phrune was a baby-faced, chubby young man whose pale skin shone as if he’d been freshly oiled. His head was shaven, apart from a gleaming queue sprouting from the top, and his face was so plump that his eyes were mere slits. His lips were as red and pouting as a split blood plum.

  Phrune gave Nish a cursory glance before turning to Maelys, studying her from head to foot then licking his swollen lips. Her eyes met his for a second and she felt a physical shock; a revulsion she’d never felt before. And yet she found it hard to look away, for his gaze clung to hers and held it against her will.

  ‘Water for my guests, Phrune,’ Monkshart said sharply, mechanically smoothing the gloves over his long fingers.

  Phrune bowed low and, with another sideways glance at Maelys, oozed back through the opening. After he’d returned with a jug of tepid water and two stone beakers, and been sent away, Monkshart turned to Nish.

  ‘You claim to be the son of the God-Emperor. You would do well to know that I served under Jal-Nish Hlar when he was scrutator, and during his exile in the last years of the war.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it exile,’ Nish snapped. ‘He lost the battle of Gumby Marth through his own hubris, then ran away like the cowardly cur he is, leaving his army to be slaughtered by the lyrinx.’

  Monkshart smiled, though Maelys couldn’t read it. She knew that story, for it formed part of the Tale of Nish and Irisis and marked the time when Nish had first come into his own. Though he’d not led men before, he had taken command of the decimated army, single-handedly led the survivors against a superior force of the enemy, and broken through to safety. The battle had still been a crushing defeat, with most of a once proud army destroyed, but by the manner of the survivors’ escape they had given hope to humanity in the darkest hours of the war.