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

by Ian Irvine

  ‘After flash and boom. Had – idea. Sent her – obelisk – charge crystal – flame.’

  A chill made its way up Nish’s spine. ‘But that was Monkshart on the flappeter, earlier, not Vomix. So the other rider must have been …’

  ‘Phrune,’ Flydd gasped.

  Maelys’s nemesis, and she didn’t know he was there.

  FORTY-NINE

  Maelys had been moistening Flydd’s mouth with water, careful not to let him swallow any since his renewed stomach would not be able to take it yet, when the plateau shook. A blue flash came through the doorway, followed by a distant, echoing boom.

  ‘What – that?’ croaked Flydd.

  She went to the door. ‘I can’t see anything save Nish and Zham over by the rim, halfway to the main cleft. They’re staring up at a flight of flappeters – looks as though they’re going to attack. I can’t see Colm.’

  ‘Boom?’ said Flydd. ‘Obelisk?’

  ‘What? Oh, I don’t know where the sound came from, though I can see a blue flicker out in the mire. I can’t make out the obelisk, but the flicker comes from that direction. What is it, Xervish?’

  ‘Take – last crystal.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘To cursed – flame. Obelisk.’

  ‘But … you said no one can get to the power contained beneath the obelisk.’

  ‘Jal-Nish – destroy – so can – can – come down. Chance. Take crystal. Go. Go!’

  Maelys’s mouth went dry. ‘I don’t know what you want me to do. What is the cursed flame? Is it safe to go near it?’

  ‘Charge crystal – flame. Only chance. Go …’ His head slumped forwards and his eyes closed.

  Maelys felt dreadfully afraid. She didn’t know enough – no, she didn’t know anything save that the obelisk was deadly and the flame cursed. How was she to charge the last crystal?

  She would have seized upon any excuse to remain here, but she’d pressured Flydd to take renewal against his sworn oath, so how could she back out now?

  Maelys got the crystal out of the box – it was the size of her thumbnail and perfectly clear, like diamond, though it had no sparkle – put it in a secure pocket and turned to Flydd. ‘I’m off, then.’

  His head was still slumped; he looked asleep or unconscious, but he wheezed, ‘Take – amber-wood coat. All rests – on you. Hurry!’

  Hanging on a hook behind the door was a long coat made from thousands of little shaped pieces of amber-wood threaded on knotted cords. The pieces made up an intricate, swirling design which she couldn’t identify in the dim light. The detailed work would have helped Flydd pass the endless, solitary hours, though perhaps the design had a purpose, too.

  The coat came down to her heels and had a hood as well. She put it on and fastened the amber-wood toggles. It was light but warm, and the fragrance released by the wood was overpowering. As soon as she’d fastened the last toggle she felt an amazing sense of security – as if she’d just been removed from the physical world. The coat was greater than the sum of its parts. But would it hide her from the direct gaze of Gatherer?

  She took a lantern, though Maelys did not light it, and ran out. On the rim, Nish and Zham had their swords up and a flappeter was heading in towards them. Maelys froze, one foot in the air, but there was no time to make sure they were safe. She grabbed her staff and scuttled into the mire towards the obelisk.

  She hoped she’d meet Colm on the way – she’d feel so much safer looking for the cursed flame with him – but there was no sign of him. What if he’d been caught; killed?

  She had no trouble finding the obelisk this time, for its covering of grey lichen shone silvery in the faint light of the luminal, and she could hear the wind howling around it. She even found a way to get to the obelisk without plunging up to her nose in a dark pool. The stone looked as though it had been struck by a bolt of lightning. Half of the moss and lichen had been charred off and it was tilted at an angle of fifty degrees. At the point where its base had been bonded to the living rock she found a neat, triangular hole, not much wider than her shoulders, from which a stream of warm, musty air issued.

  Only now did she remember the second rider – the one who had dropped from Vomix’s flappeter and headed into the mires. Had he been coming to the obelisk? She had seen no footmarks in the moonlight, though walking in this country rarely left good tracks. Even moss soon sprang back up to obliterate them.

  She checked all around but saw no sign of him. Nonetheless, she wasn’t going to be taken unawares. Crouching low, Maelys lit the lantern, unshuttered it a fraction and inspected the triangular hole. A small stream of water swirled into it from the nearest pool.

  Hot air gushed up. The cursed flame had to be down there, protected by the obelisk until Jal-Nish had, evidently, toppled it with Reaper. Had he done so to destroy the power here, or because this monument to the ultimate failure of all endeavours gave the lie to his own life’s purpose?

  Thump! This time the impact felt closer. It shook the plateau, churning the water in the nearby pool and sending a surge past her into the triangular hole. The obelisk moved a little further towards the horizontal. Another shock and it must fall, which would close the hole again.

  Something went whistling and hissing through the air high above, though at first she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. It looked like a gigantic cable snaking across the sky, running up from the far edge of the plateau, its coils slowly straightening as though a winch in the clouds, whence it originated, drew it tight. Jal-Nish was definitely here now.

  Maelys didn’t wait to see what he was going to do. She put her feet into the hole, lowered them as far as they would go and wriggled in, supporting herself on the edges with her forearms while she peered down. She couldn’t see much, for the lantern’s rays were at the wrong angle, but there appeared to be a fall of about a span onto a flat rock. She picked up the lantern, took a deep breath and dropped.

  The flat rock was covered in a yellow growth. Her feet went from under her and she landed on her bottom, which was just as well, as the surface was only a few paces across. It was the foundation stone for the obelisk, and extended straight down into darkness on all sides. If she’d slipped …

  Water showered on her head. She wiped her face and looked around. A hole in the centre of the stone was blocked with debris. To her left across the gap Maelys made out another triangular opening, this time in a gently sloping rock face, about the size of the surface she was sitting on. The hole looked like the top of a tight triangular staircase and warm air wafted from the opening, though there was no way to get to it except by jumping the gap and she wasn’t sure she could do it.

  But everything depended on her, so she had to get across.

  It wasn’t a difficult jump for an athlete, or even a foolhardy youth, but it looked an awfully long way to a bookish girl who preferred reading about adventures to having them. If she missed she’d fall and break her neck. If she landed on top of the stairs the result would probably be the same.

  What if she sprang for the stair hole but held the staff out above her head so she couldn’t fall through? It might work, though the impact would probably tear her hands off.

  Maelys swiftly unknotted the cords from the bottom of Flydd’s coat, plaited them into two short lengths of rope and tied it around her wrists. She bound the other ends to the staff, then stood up and scuffed the slime off the rock with the side of her boot to get a better footing. She estimated the jump, moved the staff so it wouldn’t hit the wall, and flexed her legs.

  It looked such a long way. She wasn’t sure she could jump that far from a standing start. In fact, she was sure she couldn’t. Maelys flexed again. The gap looked even wider.

  Just go! She tied the lantern to her belt and tried to jump; she bent her knees and sprang almost all the way up, but baulked at the last second. She was too much of a coward. Maelys tried to talk herself into the jump, but thinking about it only made it worse. She could imagine all the things tha
t might go wrong, fatally.

  So don’t think about it. Just do it. Jump!

  Maelys jumped, though as soon as her feet left the ground she imagined the staff breaking under her weight. The jump was almost perfect – her feet passed through the sides of the stair hole, her thigh and shoulder scraped along its edge, then the staff whacked down on top. Her weight tore her hands off the staff, just as she’d expected, and she hung from the creaking, splintered wood by the plaited ropes.

  The staff held, just, though it took a long, painful time to untie her right wrist one-handed. Maelys hadn’t thought about that difficulty beforehand. She slid along until she could get her feet onto the top step, then untied her left wrist and manoeuvred the staff in. Holding out the lantern, she began to make her way down the triangular stair.

  It was incredibly steep and coated with slippery yellow fungi, as well as silver marks like gigantic snail trails. She couldn’t see how far down the stair went, though it was a lot further than her lantern’s rays extended.

  The howling of the wind dwindled as Maelys descended. She looked up after a few minutes and couldn’t see the way out, but what she could see, clinging to the undersides of the stairs, were hundreds, no thousands of swamp creepers, their glistening antennae stirring in the light like white eggs on black stalks.

  She went down hastily and after a few minutes reached a landing beside a level floor. Maelys vaguely made out walls in the distance, though she could not tell if they had been smoothed by human hand, as the floor must have been, or were the walls of caves.

  The nearby wall and ceiling were covered with finger-thick crusts of dried mucous as well as sticky, ropy webs too thick to have been made by any spider she’d ever heard of, while every corner, angle and hollow was clotted with swamp creepers, stirring and crawling over each other until the squelching sounds were magnified ten thousand times.

  The stair continued down, but the air coming up it was cool, while the floor was blood-warm, so Maelys guessed that the cursed flame lay somewhere on this level. She stepped onto the floor, shuttered her lantern and looked for any other source of light.

  There, in the far distance, she caught the faintest wavering blue glow. She opened the shutter a fraction, went three steps and came to a fresh, muddy footprint on the dusty floor. It wasn’t large enough to be Colm’s, so it had to belong to the second rider and she must assume that he was nearby. He was probably going to the flame as well.

  Resisting her urge to panic, Maelys shuttered the lantern and moved twenty steps to her left in case her light had been seen. She couldn’t hear anything above the squelching of the swamp creepers gliding on their mucous tracks. She could smell them, too, a sickly spiciness that contrasted unpleasantly with the bouquet of the amber-wood.

  Maelys went carefully towards the glow, which became a blue flame issuing knee-high from a star-shaped fissure in the middle of a large block of stone itself rising chest-high from the floor.

  The outsides of the block had been roughly shaped, though the makers did not appear to have had any particular form in mind. It was wedge-shaped, about three spans long and one-and-a-half spans wide at the broad end, tapering to just half a span at its narrowest. It was shaped something like a coffin, though one that would have fitted a giant.

  The top of the block was coated with soot, plus sugar sized crystals of sulphur and salts condensed from the flame. Shiny bituminous trails had once oozed outwards from the fissure, though these had set hard and cracked. The sides of the block held more unreadable glyphs, and yet more were carved into the walls and roof, though the latter were blurred to unintelligibility by layers of swamp creeper crusts.

  That was all she saw in the dim light, and there was no time to speculate about the inscriptions. She got out Flydd’s crystal and was moving towards the cursed flame, wondering what the curse was and how she was supposed to recharge the crystal at a flame anyway, when she smelt an unpleasantly familiar oily odour.

  Instantly, a set of plump fingers fixed around the back of her neck and her worst nightmare rewoke. She dropped her staff, though she kept hold of the crystal.

  ‘Perfect timing, little Maelys.’ Phrune pressed his slick lips to her ear. ‘My master is dying at Nish’s hand and only one thing can save him – a blood sacrifice at the cursed flame. There’s no better blood than virgin’s blood. I’ll fill a small bucket from you, and then I’ll have the skin I should have taken from you in Tifferfyte, you vicious little bitch.’

  FIFTY

  ‘Can’t go – after Maelys,’ said Flydd. ‘God-Emperor – coming.’

  ‘I went without her once,’ said Nish. ‘I’m not doing it again. Zham?’

  He was at the door. ‘Surr?’

  ‘Help me get him dressed. I’ve got to go after Maelys and we can’t leave Flydd now. You’ll have to take him to the escape way and wait for me.’

  Zham gathered up Flydd’s clothes. Fortunately the garments had been loose. He drew Flydd’s pants up his muscular legs and tied them at the waist. The shirt barely met around his chest. Flydd’s old boots were far too small, but Nish found a pair of leather sandals that he was able to cram onto the large feet and buckle up, then they helped him to stand.

  ‘Find a pack, Zham. Fill it with food and drink, as much as you can cram in.’

  Flydd was swaying where he stood. Nish held him up. ‘Xervish, where’s the escape way?’

  ‘Rope,’ slurred Flydd. ‘Hidden rope ladder – behind hut – over cliff. Must rest.’

  It was taking too long. ‘Get him down, Zham,’ cried Nish, frantically checking his sword and bow. It could be too late already. ‘I’ve got to fly.’

  Another gigantic thump, somewhere in the distance, shook the ground and the hut.

  ‘Surr!’ cried Zham from the door. ‘Quick!’

  Nish couldn’t let go of Flydd, so he lurched him to the door, looked up and gaped.

  A gigantic grappling iron or five-fluked anchor, the size of a horse and cart, had been fired from the clouds. It had hooked over the rim of the plateau not far from the hut, and now the loops of cable trailing in the air after it, wavering in the wild updraughts, were being pulled tight.

  Another grappling iron, fired off to their left, shook the ground as it buried itself in the rocks beyond the north-western cleft. Waist-thick cables trailed in the air towards the far side of the plateau from a third anchor.

  The cables were slowly pulled up into the base of the cloud until they went iron-taut, though Nish could not see what they were attached to. Colm came limping around the cliff edge, covered in mud and old blood, his notched sword in hand. By the look of him, he’d faced a tougher opponent at his cleft.

  ‘Is this it?’ he said in a flat voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  Nish let the bow fall to the ground, realising that he must fail Maelys again. There was no point going after her now, for the raw power of Gatherer, this close, would penetrate all illusions and he would be seen before he got ten paces. Maelys would have to take her chances, which Nish felt were a lot better than his.

  Colm raised the sword. ‘Then I’m ready for it. I’m sick of waiting. Where’s Maelys?’

  Nish explained, wearily.

  ‘And you let her go?’ Colm cried frantically, shaking Nish. ‘What kind of a man are you, Deliverer?’

  Zham peeled them apart with his free hand. ‘We weren’t here, Colm. We were over there by the rim, fighting flappeters and other beasts, and didn’t see her go.’ He stared up at the base of the cloud, which was black and roiling, and swallowed. ‘The God-Emperor is coming. There’s nothing we can do for her.’

  ‘And without that crystal we’ve got no hope of getting away,’ Nish added.

  Colm crouched down and put his head in his hands. ‘Ah Maelys, Maelys.’ He stood up. ‘Is this the end? Must we go over the cliff, then?’

  ‘Not yet,’ rumbled Zham. ‘Have faith. She could be on her way back with the charged crystal already.’

  ‘I can’t see her,
’ said Colm, springing up and staring into the mires. ‘But you’re right. We must have faith, for her sake.’

  The base of the cloud stirred, then something oval, flat and glassy sent it whirling out of the way. It looked like the base of a platter, hundreds of spans long and many spans thick. The ropes slackened momentarily but tightened again; the base jerked down another half span; then another.

  Slender white columns ran up from its ends, sides and middle into the clouds, as if it were suspended from something. Now on the glass base there appeared the most astonishing building Nish had ever seen. Indeed, he wasn’t sure that it was a building.

  A series of arching shells, dazzlingly white, rose from blood-red foundations built upon the glass, but the shells were not held up by beams, columns or any other structure – they simply soared a good fifty spans into the sky, supported by each other.

  And now, as the structure, or craft, jerked lower, he saw that the white columns were topped by tiers of long arching wings like horizontal sails fixed to each other by struts and taut wires. The lowest tier consisted of four such wings. Above the gaps between them stood a tier of three; above that, two; and, highest of all, one, so the wings formed an open roof.

  ‘It’s a sky palace,’ said Zham in wonder.

  As good a name as any, Nish thought. The white palace slowly descended, shuddering in the wind but held against it by the tension of the cables. The gale whistled shrilly through them.

  ‘How can such a weighty craft move through the air?’ said Colm.

  ‘It defies the very principles of flight,’ said Nish, who had studied such matters in the days when air-floaters had first been invented, ‘and all natural laws – intentionally so, I’d say. It’s a demonstration. It’s meant to show the world that, with the power of Gatherer and Reaper, Father can transcend all natural laws. That he truly is a god.’ He felt a touch of awe that his own father, who had not been a great mancer, could have achieved such mastery of the Art.

  ‘Then we’d better hope Flydd’s escape plan works.’ Colm turned to frown at him. ‘I assume this is Flydd.’