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

by Ian Irvine

  He did not reply. ‘I knew Irisis well.’ Flydd smiled at a memory; momentarily it lit him up from within. ‘She was a wonderful woman, but perfection – far from it! She would have been the first person to tell you her faults. What happened when you tried to seduce him? I assume you did try to do your duty?’

  ‘Surr!’ she cried. ‘I can’t – please don’t ask me about such things …’

  ‘But I am asking you, Maelys, and I must insist that you answer me. This is the most important question anyone has ever put to you. Nish’s fate may rest on it, and yours. And your family’s.’

  ‘It was wickedly wrong,’ she whispered, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘I knew that, despite that it was my duty and I was doing it to save my family. But I had no choice, did I?’ He didn’t answer, just continued to look into her eyes as if he could read the tiniest falsehood, and shortly she continued. ‘I’ve never been with a man, Xervish, not even a kiss at the midsummer fair, and this was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But I did my duty. I tried my best, just as my aunt had instructed me in the arts of … of seduction.’

  She covered her face but he took her hands away and tilted her face up so the misty light fell on it. ‘I don’t need to know the embarrassing details, but I do need to know how Nish reacted.’

  ‘He went into a cold rage and accused me of trying to steal him away from his beloved, then told me never to come near him again. I felt that I disgusted him; that it made him sick to look at me. It was the most awful moment of my life, Xervish … worse than anything that’s happened since – even with Phrune.’

  Flydd didn’t embrace her, or say anything until she had cried herself out, for which Maelys was grateful. She turned her tear-stained face to him. ‘I suppose I deserved it –’

  ‘Stupid fool!’ He crashed a fist into his palm and swore a series of oaths she’d never heard before. She shrank away. ‘Not you, Maelys. This is worse than I could have imagined. Irisis is ten years dead and nothing but mouldering bones in a coffin. What can be the matter with him?’

  He got up and splashed through the swamp, limping around and around the rock, heedless of his surroundings. On the third circuit his meandering path took him near a well-hidden stink-snapper, and as he went by it shot up out of the mire, its yellow-spined jaws gaping.

  ‘Xervish!’ she yelled as it snapped at his thigh.

  He directed a wobbly but well-aimed kick at it, whereupon it withdrew until just the yellow spines were visible. He finished the circuit then came back to sit beside her. ‘We’re old adversaries, the stink-snappers and I,’ he said with a rueful grin, and sat head down, deep in thought.

  Maelys didn’t want to interrupt his deliberations, but she’d remembered something that could be vital. ‘Irisis is more than mouldering bones, Xervish.’

  His head jerked up. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The God-Emperor has her embalmed body in his quarters, with her head sewed back on. He showed it … her to Nish, and Nish said she looked just as she did in life. As if she were but sleeping.’

  Flydd hooked his bony fingers into claws. ‘This is bad, Maelys. Very bad indeed, and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.’

  ‘Are you going to tell him?’

  ‘Tell him what, girl?’

  ‘About … you know.’ She was flushing again.

  ‘Use the words, Maelys, and they’ll begin to lose their power over you.’

  There was something about Flydd that made her feel so much better; more confident in herself. ‘Are you going to tell him that I … was trying to seduce him, so as to get his baby into my belly?’

  ‘No. Why should I?’

  ‘You’re his oldest friend. Don’t you think he needs to know?’

  ‘He doesn’t need me to hold his hand. Besides,’ he eyed her up and down again, ‘I like you, Maelys. You could be just what he needs.’

  A man who’s in love with a corpse. She compared it to the way Thommel had cared for her on the journey, always being there when she needed him and asking for nothing in return. And making her laugh, too. ‘But is Nish what I need?’

  FORTY-THREE

  Nish was not exactly drunk but, leaning back against the wall of the hut with a full belly, the liqueur singing warmly through his veins and even an occasional ray of late afternoon sunshine breaking through the fog, he felt pleasantly tipsy. He had absolute faith in Flydd now. Of course he’d think of something. He always did.

  Where was Flydd, anyway? He’d gone off with Maelys hours ago. Nish got up, staggered and had to support himself on the wall of the hut. His touch on the crumbling red amber-wood released a drift of its enchanting aroma, which helped clear his head.

  He looked around blearily. Zham was slumped against the wall of the hut, snoring. The empty flask lay on the ground on its side, plus another of lesser quality but quite extraordinary flavour. Nish couldn’t imagine what Flydd had made it from. Thommel was nowhere to be seen. Out of the shelter of the hut Nish noticed that a strong cross-wind had blown up from the west and the fog was clearing rapidly, as if one of the peak’s rare clear days, or nights, was approaching. He could see nearly halfway across the plateau.

  Ah, there was Flydd, stalking in from the edge with Maelys on his arm. Nish turned towards him, grinning. ‘What is it with you and women, Xervish?’ he said jovially, realising that he was slurring his words but not caring. ‘You’re the ugliest old coot in the world, yet you’ve always got one on your arm.’

  Maelys gave him a disgusted look and moved away, knotting and unknotting her fingers. What was the matter with her? Flydd turned the other way. The last of the fog dispersed and Nish could see for leagues in every direction, even beyond the rainforest east and north to the coast. That smudge on the northern horizon must be the city of Roros, the capital of Crandor and the greatest city in the world.

  As Nish rotated to admire the view, the sun dropped below the jagged, threatening peaks of the Wahn Barre, and the temperature dropped sharply. He pulled his damp coat around him, the good mood fading.

  ‘I need to talk to you in private,’ said Flydd, frowning, ‘but clearly now isn’t the time. Where’s Thommel?’

  Nish shrugged. ‘I don’t know where he went.’ He had a vague memory of him taking exception to something Nish had said, but couldn’t remember what. ‘He’s a surly brute. I hope he’s up to his neck in the mire.’

  ‘He’s warm-hearted, gentle and brave. He helped me when I was in trouble,’ said Maelys.

  Nish had too, though leaving with Monkshart had cancelled those good deeds out and he felt guilty about it. He covered it by sneering, ‘I’ll bet he did.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she snapped.

  ‘Nothing,’ he muttered, regretting it already. The liqueur had disconnected his brain from his mouth.

  She glared at him, hands on hips. ‘Thommel is a gentleman, which is more than I can say for you. If it hadn’t been for him, you never would have found this place, or Xervish.’

  Her casual use of his old friend’s first name irritated Nish. He’d known Flydd for years before he’d felt comfortable calling him Xervish. He opened his mouth to snap back but Flydd elbowed him painfully in the ribs.

  ‘Stop bickering and come inside, children. This wind cuts right through to my bones.’

  Maelys stirred Zham and they followed Flydd to the hut, Zham carrying the bench for no reason Nish could fathom. There were two lanterns on the wall but Flydd lit a handful of rushlights, which gave the hut a homely glow. It was small and rough-hewn, but more comfortable than Nish had previously thought; far nicer than his cell. The earth floor around the table was strewn with dried rushes. Flydd lit a small fire fuelled with neatly squared blocks of dried peat from a covered stack behind the hut.

  Later, with another meal in his belly, his back resting against the wall and warm hands and feet for the first time since he’d climbed to the plateau, Nish’s irritability disappeared. He sat there, blinking in the firelight u
ntil he found himself drifting off.

  He woke suddenly as the door burst open. Thommel was shouting, ‘Lights! There are lights everywhere.’

  ‘Wha–?’ Nish said stupidly, sitting up. The west wind was howling around the corners of the hut, shaking the walls. His head throbbed and he felt as though he was going to throw up. He bit down on the urge. Everyone was shouting at once.

  ‘Enough!’ Flydd’s voice cut through the babble. ‘What lights?’

  Thommel was breathing heavily, as if he’d been running. ‘Camp fires. Thousands of them, regularly arranged. Like a mighty army.’

  ‘It’s the God-Emperor,’ said Maelys, unconsciously moving away from the firelight.

  ‘Where are they, Thommel?’ said Flydd. ‘They must be close or you wouldn’t have seen them through the rainforest.’

  ‘They’re directly below us, all around the eastern side of Thuntunnimoe. They could be on the other sides as well – I didn’t wait to check. And away to the south-east, I saw the glow of camp fires along the river. That must be the Defiance.’

  ‘How could the army have found this place? Could the Defiance have led them here?’

  ‘I don’t see how,’ said Thommel. ‘Their fires are a long way off.’

  ‘I walk the rim of the plateau every night,’ said Flydd. Outlined against the firelight, he looked like a skin-covered skeleton. ‘And every so often the fog thins enough to see down momentarily. If they’d camped around any of the other peaks I would have seen the glow of their fires, but I never have. The army came straight here, so either they followed you or tracked you by some uncanny means.’

  ‘They couldn’t have followed us, surr,’ said Zham. ‘In the first few days we walked up the beds of streams until our boots were rotting.’

  ‘We covered our tracks just as well,’ said Maelys. ‘And saw no one behind us the whole way, save flappeters a long way back, just after we got here.’

  ‘They tracked one of you,’ said Flydd, sitting down. ‘Now how could they possibly do that?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Nish, absently rubbing his scar.

  ‘Why do you keep doing that?’ said Flydd irritably.

  ‘It’s where the nylatl stung me with one of its tail spines. It’s still itchy.’

  Flydd shot upright. ‘You didn’t tell me it had stung you. Why would a nylatl sting you when it could have torn your throat out?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Nish still felt dull from the drink. ‘Now you mention it, it does seem odd.’

  ‘It was just crouching there, staring at him,’ said Zham. ‘It could have killed him easily, but …’

  ‘Maybe it didn’t want to,’ Flydd mused. ‘Yet savage, terrifying killing is the very reason the nylatl were created. Who could have kept one for all this time?’

  ‘What if it wasn’t meant to kill?’ said Maelys. ‘What if the attack was intended to disguise something else?’

  ‘Ahh!’ said Flydd. ‘That’s the answer. The first assassination attempt was intended to fail, Nish, and the assassin to die, so you’d think someone – perhaps your own father – was trying to kill you.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Maelys.

  ‘It does if you’re God-Emperor, and paranoid. As the leader of a popular revolution, Nish would be too great a threat, for not even the power of the tears could save Jal-Nish if the entire world turned against him. Nish, you were meant to think that Jal-Nish wanted you dead so you’d assume the real attack, by the nylatl, was another attempt on your life.’ He lit a couple of lanterns. ‘Give me a look at that scar.’

  ‘What?’ said Nish sluggishly.

  Flydd tore Nish’s shirt open and pressed a fingertip hard against the round purple scar below his right collarbone.

  Nish gasped. ‘That hurts.’

  ‘Of course it hurts, you damn fool. Part of the spine is still in there. Why didn’t you get Zham to take it out?’

  ‘I didn’t know it was there. The wound closed over and it had healed by the next day.’

  ‘And you, of all people, weren’t suspicious?’ growled Flydd. ‘You know nylatl wounds never heal cleanly, or quickly. Zham, you’ll have a sharp little knife on you.’

  Zham drew a small, narrow-bladed dagger from his right boot sheath and handed it over.

  ‘That’ll do nicely. Hold still, Nish.’

  Nish gritted his teeth. Flydd made a quick cut across the scar, inserted the tip of the blade and levered, and the broken end of a bloody spine appeared. He pinched it between finger and thumb and drew it smoothly out. After rinsing the blood off in a stream of water from a jug, he held it up to the firelight, then his face blackened.

  With a swift movement, he dropped the spine into a stone mortar, ground it to powder with a pestle and emptied it into the fire, carefully brushing every last grain of powder out. They sparkled scarlet as they fell into the flames, and Nish felt his unconscious burden ease a trifle.

  ‘You bloody moron!’ hissed Flydd, his old face twisted in fury. For all his age, he was still a powerful man and not to be crossed. ‘That wasn’t a spine, it was a tracker. Of course your father wasn’t trying to kill you – you’re all he’s got left. He’s happy to see you suffer, for he’s endured pain that few people have ever felt and emerged the stronger for it, but he’ll protect you with his life. And than means …’

  He paced across the room, and back. ‘The assassination attempts were just decoys to disguise putting the tracker in you. But why do that, when clearly he could have abducted you at any time? Because he’s had a new plan ever since you got away from Tifferfyte.’

  ‘What plan?’ said Maelys.

  ‘He was there in an air-dreadnought as you fled, remember? And with the tears, he might have read fragments of your vision in the Pit – enough, at least, to realise his chance. You didn’t know what was at the end of your vision, but Jal-Nish could have worked it out.

  ‘You wondered why he allowed the Defiance to grow so large, unhindered, and why he took so long to attack. What if he sacrificed the army you destroyed so your rise would be all the more convincing? That’s it! He wanted you to lead the Defiance and have a great victory, Nish, because that would coax the last of his old enemies out of hiding. And now you’ve led him straight to me – the enemy he wants to revenge himself on more than anyone.’

  ‘I – I’m sorry,’ said Nish numbly. He’d been used and manipulated from the beginning, and maybe even that great battle victory hadn’t been real, although he didn’t want to think so. ‘It didn’t occur to me that –’

  Flydd waved a hand. The fury had passed as quickly as it came, though his cloudy eyes had a steely shine in the firelight. ‘What does it matter? I’m at the end of my days, anyway. He won’t be taking me alive, and I’ll do him some damage as I go – as much as I can manage in my feeble state. I just hate to be outwitted so easily.’ Shaking his grizzled head, he reached for another flask.

  Nish slumped onto the bench. His every small victory was followed by a shattering defeat, and there was no way out of this one.

  ‘What can you do to him, Xervish?’ said Maelys. ‘I though all power was lost, save the power of the tears?’

  ‘All those Arts which relied on power drawn from nodes failed, yet some of the ancient, more difficult magics linger on, greatly weakened though not destroyed. I haven’t wasted all my time here in drink and regret – nine years ago I laboured up this peak carrying a pack full of ancient spell books and grimoires.’ He waved a hand at a shelf containing half a dozen battered books. Their spines were covered in blue mould. ‘I studied them assiduously in the early days, trying to develop new forms of the Art for the final battle.’

  ‘It won’t be long,’ said Thommel. ‘The soldiers could be on the way up already.’

  ‘You couldn’t bring an army up that cleft in darkness,’ said Flydd.

  ‘He doesn’t need an army. Ten soldiers, good climbers, would be more than our match. He must have hundreds of climbers and spies used to working in
the dark, and we can’t stop them. This is the end.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is, and all we can do is delay it for a few hours.’

  ‘What’s the point?’ said Thommel dully.

  Maelys reached out and touched his arm. He tried to smile at her, to regain what they’d had before, but couldn’t manage it.

  ‘If we have to die,’ said Flydd, ‘defiance in the face of impossible odds is the best way to go out. Our tale will give others hope, assuming they ever hear of it. Besides, you’ll be surprised how precious those few extra hours of life become, at the end. You’ll do anything to stretch them out …’

  He fell silent, looking down at the floor, before continuing. ‘The cleft you came up is the only one suited to a large force. The other clefts could only be climbed, and then with difficulty, by mountaineers.’

  ‘How can five of us possibly delay them?’ said Thommel.

  ‘You’ll see in a minute. I put defences in place years ago.’

  ‘Father could attack from the air as well,’ said Nish. ‘We can’t delay that.’

  ‘But the weather will,’ said Flydd. ‘I chose this place for its natural defences as well as … other reasons. The native power of Thuntunnimoe prevents flappeters and other Art-driven beasts, and perhaps even air-dreadnoughts, from descending on us from above. And the updraughts –’

  ‘What is the power of this place? Has it got to do with the obelisk?’

  ‘Not so much the obelisk as what lies beneath it. It’s an age-old Charon memorial, I believe, built at a site of native power, an uncanny flame. The obelisk is a memorial to failure – a sign that all endeavours fail in the end, and time undoes all things. That won’t please Jal-Nish, of course, since his life’s obsession is to change the world in ways that will endure forever.’

  He thought about that for a moment. ‘The obelisk was built over the cursed flame –’

  ‘I wondered why the stone was so warm,’ said Maelys.

  ‘The obelisk is bonded indissolubly to the living rock, sheltering and protecting the cursed flame, not that it matters to us. The flame used to issue from the top in ancient times, as a sign or a warning, but the conduit must have become blocked in ages past. The power of the flame hasn’t proven usable by mortal humans, so far …’