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

by Ian Irvine

  TWENTY-TWO

  Hours had gone by. After Phrune finally padded down the corridor, extinguishing the lanterns, Nish went to his door. It wasn’t locked. He watched until the dull fan of light from beneath the acolyte’s door was extinguished, waited a few more minutes, just in case, then returned to the pavilion. All was dark there too, save for the faint radiance from the depths of the crater.

  He stood on the brink for a while, looking down and thinking about all that might have been, then took a step onto the glassy plank that stretched out over the abyss. The plank was a couple of spans long, but after his second step he could feel it bending. If he went much further he would slide off, and he didn’t want his demise to be by default. It had to be a conscious, deliberate choice.

  Besides, the plank was Monkshart’s instrument of execution and it didn’t feel right that he, Nish, should escape from his troubles that way. Going back into the pavilion, he stood at the far corner, looking up. A guard was just visible at the top of the crater.

  Nish turned to the path that ran from the other side of the pavilion down into the depths of the crater. The dark was thicker here and he could barely make out the glassy rock beneath his feet. He went down slowly, trailing his right hand along the wall and feeling with each foot before lowering his weight onto it. Ironic, the lengths to which he was going to stay alive, so he could kill himself further down.

  As his eyes adjusted, he began to see into the vitreous surfaces of the pit, which in daylight had exhibited such ever-changing, shimmering colours and patterns. Something moved there now – images just beyond the boundary of recognition, like straining to remember dreams after waking.

  They worked powerfully on his psyche, though. At one point he found himself moved to such melancholy that tears pricked in his eyes, while another shadow-image spoke to him of all those great and glorious creations – priceless art, poems of the most exquisite sensibility, the Great Tales – lost forever during the reign of his father.

  Shaking his head, Nish continued and, not far below, made out a smooth bulge protruding over the abyss like a glassy tonsil. Was that where the young messenger had met his end? It seemed probable. He made his cautious way to it, stepping extra carefully as he moved out onto the bulge, but the mess made by the impact had been cleaned away.

  He sat on the broadest part of the overhang, which seemed a fitting place for him to meet his end, and to atone for the murder done in his name. Far below lay the still-fuming core of the destroyed node – its dead heart. What perversion of reality had the destruction of the node created here? He would never know.

  There was no point putting it off, for the longer he postponed his end the harder it would be to act. Nish rose suddenly, took a deep breath then bent his knees to spring. As his feet left the floor, something jerked him away from the edge and he landed flat on his back on the bulge, hard enough to knock the wind out of him. The moment he got his breath back, Nish tried to throw himself forwards.

  ‘Stop!’ said Monkshart, and with three fingers of his other hand he tapped Nish across the forehead.

  Nish was overcome by a dreamy lassitude and couldn’t think what he was doing here, or what had seemed so urgent and final. It only lasted a few seconds but, when it passed, so had the urge to hurl himself into the pit.

  He sat up, rubbing his throat, which felt bruised. ‘How – how did you know I was here?’

  ‘Sensing a self-destructive urge in you, I set Phrune to keep a covert watch.’ Monkshart put a hand under Nish’s elbow and easily lifted him to his feet, turning him away from the brink. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘Where?’ said Nish numbly.

  ‘Down to the dead heart. I do understand what you must be going through, Cryl-Nish, but that way is not and can never be the answer to your troubles.’

  ‘There is no answer, save that life is an empty, futile torment.’

  ‘There is always an answer, but first you must ask the right question. The dead heart of the node is the place to ask such questions, for it contains all possibilities and all things become clear there.’

  With that cryptic statement Monkshart unshuttered a lantern and held it up in his free hand. Nish allowed the zealot to lead him down the path and asked no more questions, for he felt oddly empty of curiosity, or interest. What was to be would be.

  The base of the crater was knobbed and speckled with glassy lumps, many of which had shattered to litter the floor with curved shards that crunched underfoot. Every sound was drawn out to extended echoes.

  ‘Careful here, Cryl-Nish. The rock-glass floor is full of bubbles and the larger ones won’t support your weight.’

  It was hard to make out what Monkshart was saying through the echoes. He waved the lantern around. The floor ahead looked like froth set solid, though most of the larger bubbles, the size of melons, had collapsed, and the edge of one was blotched with unpleasant rusty stains.

  Nish trod carefully after Monkshart, who was weaving his way towards a sump in the floor, about a span across, with walls of wavy, flowing, solidified glass. The glow he’d seen from above came from it. A wooden beam had been laid across the sump and a rope ladder was tied to the beam. Nish looked in but could not make out the bottom.

  ‘Down there?’

  Monkshart nodded stiffly. He looked tense now. ‘If you would go first.’

  Nish took hold of the top rung of the ladder and swung himself down. He should have been anxious, especially with the zealot above him, but he felt nothing. He climbed down slowly, trying to avoid looking at the increasingly tortured walls, which resembled a mural made of war victims. It was only five or six spans to the bottom, but by the time he reached it Nish felt as though he’d passed through a gate into another world.

  The collapsed dead heart of the former node had the form of a cluster of gigantic bubbles blown into the glassy rock, though their thin inner walls had collapsed to a litter of shards. Even to Nish’s deadened gaze, the place had an air of unreality. Layers of grey powder lay in an inward spiral centred on a murky hole – more correctly, an emptiness – in the floor. The powder might have been a form of the quick-dust which Irisis had once told him about – at any rate, his foot went straight through it – and a greenish miasma drifted above the emptiness.

  Dark oozes seeped from cracks in the walls, like tar, though each had a mirror-shiny surface. Wisps and phantoms drifted up from the emptiness – fragments of alternative realities, perhaps, each struggling to come to fruition like starving beasts fighting over a corpse. The dead heart had an eerie feel, but there was something else about it, something he hadn’t felt in a very long time, though it took a while to work out exactly what it was.

  He felt lighter here, less burdened, as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. No, not a weight, an influence. This place was completely free of the tears’ influence. Not a skerrick of his father’s Art could reach him here.

  But as if to deny that comfort the moment he’d realised it, something began to seep into the edge of his consciousness, like an image which, no matter how quickly he turned his head, always remained just beyond the edge of sight. He tried to blink it away, thinking that it was his father after all, but it wouldn’t go.

  Nish sat down on the most solid and shard-free piece of floor, half expecting to float up again, and shook his head. The image faded but was replaced by another, clearer this time, of a small band of people walking through an icy wasteland towards a distant tower. It faded too, but his curiosity had returned.

  He looked up through the hole. ‘What is this place, Monkshart? You said all the nodes were destroyed.’

  ‘They were,’ said Monkshart, peering down at him, ‘but as I told you, Nothing goes to nothing. No object or force can ever be completely destroyed – it can only be transformed into something else, and the Tifferfyte node was transformed into this place, which I call the Pit of Possibilities.’

  ‘But it’s not a place of power?’

  ‘Not if you mean uncanny
power, nor indeed any force that can be used to strike against the enemy. The Pit offers nothing but visions of possible futures.’

  ‘Possible futures?’ Nish sniffed. ‘Like the charlatans’ scrying bowls we used to read about in the Great Tales?’

  ‘Not at all. Scrying bowls need not tell you any truth, but the futures you see in the Pit of Possibilities must include the true one, and once you discover which it is, a wise man will know how to make it come true.’

  ‘Just like that?’ Nish said sceptically. All prophecies had an out and here it was in the words ‘a wise man’, which could mean anything or exclude anyone.

  ‘The future is never easy, not even with a map,’ said Monkshart as if he were lecturing a stupid child. ‘And even if the path to success becomes clear, it doesn’t mean you can follow it. That depends on your strength, your resolution, your courage and your skill – not least in swaying others to do your bidding.’

  ‘Then assuming you saw your own future in the Pit of Possibilities, how have your plans gone so wrong?’

  ‘I saw where success lay, and failure, even to the loss of the other Defiance outposts. I took steps to protect them but I failed. I was distracted at the critical moment, and perhaps the enemy had a hand in that.’

  ‘But surely, if you saw how to make your desired future come true, you would have seen all the ways that it could fail, and overcome them?’

  ‘The Pit just gives glimpses of the future. It can’t reveal every single obstacle on your road, else it would take as long to show it as it would to live through that future. Besides, the reactions of others in response to your decisions can wreak great changes. I’m a fallible man, I admit it. I allowed myself to be distracted and overlooked a minor event that later became critical. But all is not lost. In every second of time, new possible futures are created. It’s up to us to make ours true – if it is within our power. It may not be. We may fail; I haven’t tried to hide that. Will you look into the possibilities of the pit?’

  Nish shook his head. ‘I see no difference to other forms of fortune-telling, all of which prey on the gullible.’

  ‘What have you got to lose, Cryl-Nish? Just look, and examine what you see.’

  It was tempting, despite his mistrust of Monkshart. ‘How will I identify my real future?’

  ‘You’ll know when you see it, I promise.’

  ‘What if I can only believe in the future I want the most?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here, Cryl-Nish. I discovered the Pit of Possibilities eight years ago, when I still served your father –’

  ‘But you didn’t tell him about it, even though you were his sworn servant?’ It was another chink in Monkshart’s battered moral armour.

  ‘I was never his servant,’ Monkshart said loftily, ‘though I did serve. I’ve spent much of my effort and my Arts since that time, working out how to use the Pit of Possibilities. Enough talk. I’ll wait up here, where I can wield my Art without being influenced by the possibilities, and make sure that you can tell the false futures from the true ones.’

  Nish couldn’t decide whether Monkshart was a charismatic charlatan, a scheming scoundrel or a dangerous fanatic, though it was clear he only wished to use Nish for his own ends, not for any higher cause. Nish had been used so often in his brief career that he could tell a villain on sight.

  Yet that didn’t mean Monkshart was a liar, or the Pit of Possibilities a trick. The most successful schemers were those who manipulated the truth as little as possible, and always retained a kernel of it in even their most outlandish tales. Perhaps the Pit of Possibilities did enable people to see the future, and there was an awful lot of future Nish wanted to see.

  ‘How do I use it?’

  ‘Its vapours are already working on you. Haven’t you noticed?’

  ‘I’ve seen a few images, as if from the corner of my eye, though they weren’t very clear. But the harder I looked, the more they faded.’

  ‘They’ll become clear once I employ my Art and you allow your tension to drain away. You can’t seek out the possibilities, Cryl-Nish. You have to abandon yourself to them and allow them to come in their own time. Are you ready?’

  ‘I’m ready.’ He wasn’t.

  ‘Sit down there, between the outer wall and the Mistmurk –’

  ‘The what?’ said Nish.

  ‘That blur of nothingness with the green vapours above it. Careful! Don’t allow any part of yourself to touch it, or even pass above it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Just don’t!’ Monkshart snapped. ‘Lean against the wall, close your eyes and surrender yourself to the possibilities. I’ll be by the top of the ladder.’

  Nish felt a vague unease, but dismissed it. If Monkshart wished to do him harm he’d had any number of opportunities. He went to the wall, carefully avoiding the roiling Mistmurk, and settled back against the stone. Closing his eyes, he followed the creaking of the rope ladder until Monkshart reached the top and silence fell.

  Utter silence, so complete that it made him uneasy; he realised that he’d reduced his breathing so it wouldn’t make a sound. His thumping heart slowed; he relaxed his muscles one by one, gradually slumping against the wall, and waited.

  Something green and shadowy appeared in the corner of his eye but as he tried to focus on it, it flicked back out of sight. Fool! Just let it come. He relaxed further, trying to remove all expectations from his mind, all hopes, even all dreams. Just let come what will come, though he couldn’t rid himself of every vestige of unease, no matter how hard he tried. Something felt wrong; he really needed his lost clearsight now.

  No possibilities came to him. Rather, Nish felt so unburdened and free of his father that he slipped into sleep, only to wake suddenly with tears streaming down his face, for he’d been dreaming about his beloved. Irisis was alive; the horror of her execution had never happened and they were going to be together for as long as they both lived.

  He didn’t open his eyes, wanting to maintain the dream for as long as possible. Now Irisis was striding away from him, moving with odd stiffness, and he was hurrying after her, beseeching her to wait, but she broke into a run. He bolted after her, caught her by the arm and whirled her around, but she hid her face from him, and when he looked below her hands he saw the thread-like seam around her throat. He tried to pull her hands away, to tell her that it didn’t matter, but she beat him off.

  And as she did, one of her cheeks was uncovered and he saw a patch of corruption growing there. Nish recoiled in horror. He couldn’t help himself, and a look of the most terrible regret crossed her face.

  ‘I told you, Nish,’ she said sadly. ‘It can never be.’

  She began to walk away and this time he didn’t go after her. He couldn’t bear it.

  ‘Let her go, Cryl-Nish,’ said Monkshart from above. ‘By seeking an impossible possibility, you close yourself to the futures that could come true.’

  ‘I didn’t seek her out. She came in my dream –’

  ‘Never allow yourself to dream in the Pit of Possibilities. Empty your mind, but you must stay awake.’

  Nish slumped against the wall again, but could feel himself slipping towards sleep and yearning for what it could bring him, so he stood and tried to rid himself of the dream memories. It didn’t work; unlike normal dreams they remained perfectly clear. The ache was too great, and in the end he had to forcefully purge the memories.

  At once the futures began, so vividly that even the most absurd seemed as real as life. The first was mercifully short, for it showed him being torn apart on a great wheel, and Maelys burned alive while an angry mob danced around a bonfire and his father looked down, unmoved, from the back of a gigantic flappeter soaring through the rising sparks.

  In the second he was a bald, bearded, toothless wreck, gibbering and dribbling in the cell where he’d spent the past forty years. This future was worse than the first but he steeled himself to neither reach for it nor shy away, but allow it to fade so the next one could come
.

  The third future showed that icy wasteland he’d seen earlier, though there was no tower in it this time. He was alone by a dismal shack, dressed in rags, exhaustedly wielding a wooden pick as he tried to break the iron-hard ground. A body lay on the earth floor inside the doorway of the hut, though Nish couldn’t make out whose it was.

  Death, madness or exile – he didn’t need the Pit of Possibilities to tell him that those were his most likely futures, and little to choose between them. Was the imprisoned madman happy now, or had he suffered so grievously before going insane that he would sooner have died on the wheel? Had the exile found freedom, or was he as much a prisoner as the madman in his cell? Was the Nish being torn apart on the wheel the happiest of them all because it would soon be over?

  Other futures came and went, some as clear as diamond, the others mere suggestions in the corner of his mind, but the alternatives always remained the same – exile, madness or death. He looked in vain for any other fate, including the option he’d been dreading for so long – the one where his father took him back.

  And in every alternative that involved Maelys, her end was a bloody one. Was that because of the way Irisis had died? Could he not rid himself of that curse, no matter what he did? Or had sweet, generous Maelys been doomed from the beginning?

  ‘Empty your mind, Cryl-Nish.’

  Nish started. He’d been so immersed in analysing the possibilities that he’d forgotten about Monkshart. Was he sitting up there pulling the strings like a puppet master?

  No more futures came. Surely that couldn’t be all? There had to be a good future for him somewhere, since he was so bound up in the one Monkshart was pursuing. Unless … unless Monkshart only needed him as a figurehead to get the Defiance rolling, then planned to betray him and seize power.

  Another possibility began to form, slowly this time. He was walking in pitch darkness down what felt like a long corridor, and there was a loud drumming in the distance, like heavy rain on a shingle roof. As he continued the sound grew until it drowned out his thoughts, whereupon the darkness was replaced by brilliant light and he was standing on the steps outside a magnificent palace or temple, dressed in robes of red silk shot with gold.