by Ian Irvine
‘Maybe there is,’ said Nish thoughtfully, picking up his serpent staff. ‘This served me well up on the ridge … when it wanted me to succeed with the avalanche.’
‘But it failed you at other times,’ said Flydd, who had heard Nish’s tale on the way to Taranta.
‘When it was going to help me it felt hot and heavy, as if it was churning with power. At other times it just felt warm, but empty.’
‘How does it feel now?’
‘As though something is boiling inside it.’ Nish weighed it in his hand.
‘Then get on with it,’ said Flydd.
As Nish hefted the staff, Chissmoul flung the air-sled around violently then dropped it about five spans, and he went sliding towards the side. Flangers caught him by the collar and Nish was bracing himself when there came a shattering boom from overhead, where they had been mere seconds ago, and an umbrella of fire formed from a thousand blazing fragments exploding outwards and falling all around them. Dark smoke drifted in the air, shaping a sickle whose curve surrounded them on three sides.
‘What uncanny Art is he using now?’ cried Flangers.
The militia were cowering on the rear deck, sick with terror.
‘No Art,’ said Flydd. ‘That looked like something the scrutators’ alchymists came up with many years ago – an exploding powder set off by a fuse, inside a brittle shell filled with tar. The tar is ignited by the explosion and sticks to everything it touches; you can’t get it off.’
‘That’s horrible,’ said Nish, who was rapidly revising his earlier thoughts about one swift means of death being much the same as another. He watched the falling fire until it hit the ground and formed a blazing ring in the centre of the square.
‘It was one of many weapons considered during the lyrinx war,’ said Flydd. ‘I dare say that’s where your father got the idea, but it was deemed too barbaric by the scrutators. Even Chief Scrutator Ghorr – may he lie rotting in the most infested depths of the shadow realm – said no. Are you going to stand there all day?’
Nish aimed the base of his serpent staff at the deck behind Chissmoul’s chair.
‘I suggest you do it to one side,’ said Flydd with a wry smile. ‘It wouldn’t do to destroy the mechanism that keeps us in the air.’
Nish slammed the tip of the staff against the deck and, the moment it struck, knew it was going to go through. The staff hissed like a red-hot poker pushed into a chunk of ice, the metal deck around it took on an orange glow, then droplets of molten metal were flung out in a corona, burning pits in his military boots.
He shook the droplets off and pressed harder on the staff. More droplets were flung out then it dropped sharply. He was through.
‘Drag the staff around in a circle,’ said Flydd.
Nish pushed the staff tip sideways and, though neither the Art nor the power that was cutting the thick metal could possibly be coming from him, it was hard, draining work. Before he’d completed a semicircle his knees began to wobble and he felt vacant in the head, as if he’d gone days without food. He clenched his jaw and forced the staff the rest of the way to complete the cut.
The fuming circle of deck fell inside and he pushed it away with the tip of the staff, which felt lighter now, cooler, and as lifeless as any ordinary length of metal. Going down on his knees, he peered inside and saw a complicated, knee-high structure below and behind Chissmoul’s chair, where she’d said it would be.
‘Can you see anything that looks like a speck-speaker?’ said Flydd.
‘No. You’d better go in. You know all about such things.’
‘I’ve never seen one before. I spent nine years trapped at the top of Mistmurk Mountain, remember?’
And I spent ten years in prison, damn you! Nish thought. He was shaking with exhaustion, and as he lowered himself into the hole Chissmoul wrenched the air-sled sideways to avoid another flight of spears, flinging him against the hot metal. A fierce pain shot across his back at kidney height; he smelt burning cloth and the whiff of charred skin.
It was not a serious injury, though it was damnably painful. Doing his best to ignore it, Nish slipped into the shallow space between the deck and the keel and crawled across to the shadowy mechanism.
‘Down flat!’ yelled Flangers.
People thumped to the deck all around and he heard the whoomph-whoomph of more chain-shot; the craft wiggled left and right, then shot away in a steep climbing turn. He held on until it levelled out, his skin crawling. It was bad enough being under fire on the deck; being trapped down here in the dark, unable to see what was going on outside, made it so much worse.
It did not take long to find the little device he was looking for. It was mounted on top of the air-sled’s mechanism and resembled the speck-speaker Maelys had cut from Rurr-shyve, save that it was made of metal and glass. A brain-shaped protrusion was topped by a luminous yellow noose filled with little dark specks.
The air-sled changed course abruptly and momentarily the specks glittered like cold fire, then dulled. Chissmoul changed course again; again they glittered. It had to be the device that was linked to Gatherer.
But what if it also relayed Chissmoul’s movements to the mechanism? If it did, and he destroyed it, the air-sled would fall from a great height.
‘Get a move on,’ growled Flydd.
‘I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing and killing us all.’
‘If you don’t do it now, we’ll all be dead anyway.’
Nish had left the staff on the deck, but the thick circle of metal lay nearby, and it had cooled just enough to pick up. He slammed the circle into the speck-speaker’s stalk. The device flicked back and forth at great speed, showering dark and bright specks everywhere, but the moment it went still they reappeared in the noose.
He tried again, and this time the stalk snapped. The little noose shattered and the sparks went out.
Chissmoul let out a shriek of agony.
TWENTY-THREE
‘I thought you said Zofloc was dead?’ said Yggur, after climbing back to the surface with a dimensionless box of chthonic fire, and Maelys’s boots.
‘I thought he was.’ Maelys was huddled against Tulitine in the meagre shelter of the uptilted slabs above the shaft, shivering violently. ‘He must have fallen twenty spans, and when he hit it sounded like … like a melon bursting. It was horrible. Did he attack you?’
He shook his head. ‘The body was gone. All I saw were some unpleasant white smears where he dragged himself away – or something else did.’
‘White smears?’ said Maelys.
‘Do I have to spell it out? Spilled brains, girl! Zofloc cracked his head open.’
‘Then he could hardly have dragged himself away,’ said Tulitine, blowing into her cupped hands. ‘And whatever did, I don’t want to meet it.’
‘I should never have sent you down there alone,’ said Yggur.
‘Well, we’ve got the fire,’ said Maelys. ‘You’d better take us to Stilkeen.’
‘I don’t think it’s quite that easy,’ said Yggur.
‘It never is!’ she muttered. ‘What’s the matter now?’
‘I’m worried that this chthonic fire might not be any good.’
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘Fire changes when it’s used, and the stuff Flydd took to the Tower of a Thousand Steps didn’t seem powerful enough. We touched it, if you remember, and it didn’t harm us. You even had some on your skin when you went to the Nightland –’ He broke off.
Maelys stiffened. She had been trying not to think about Emberr’s death, which had been caused by contact with chthonic fire, and her unwitting role in it. Getting up, she stumbled away from the jumbled slabs and the mud with its half-eaten bodies, so distracted that she gave no thought to them.
After reaching the Tower of a Thousand Steps with Flydd and Colm, she had discovered that the Numinator was planning to enter the Nightland through a fire portal. Desperate to save Emberr, Maelys had followed her but had ended up with a residue of
the fire on her skin.
It had done her no harm, and was gradually dying, but when she and Emberr had made love in his cottage, the last of the fire had transferred to him, and because he had been born in the Nightland, it had been inimical to him. Instead of saving him, Maelys had caused his death.
In an even more dreadful irony, the Numinator had not been hunting Emberr anyway. Suspecting that he had Charon blood, she had merely planned to test his fertility, in the hope that he might be used to fulfil her two centuries’ long plan – to create a superior human species as an eternal memorial to her dead Charon lover, Rulke.
Too late, the Numinator discovered that Emberr was Yalkara’s only surviving child, fathered by Rulke in the Nightland and left there because it was the only place where Emberr would be safe from Stilkeen’s vengeance. Now, if Maelys should be pregnant by him, both Yalkara and the Numinator were determined to take the child, and Maelys was equally determined that they should not have it.
And, she realised, Emberr’s body still lay where he had died, and it wasn’t right. It was her responsibility, surely, to send him on his final journey with respect and all due rites. How could she properly grieve for him when she had not taken care of his final needs, though the thought of returning to the cottage where she had been so happy, knowing she had caused his death, was almost unbearable.
She headed back to Yggur and Tulitine, sick at heart. ‘What about the fire I took to the Nightland?’
‘It too might have changed for the better – or the worse – but I don’t have the strength to go there now, and neither does Tulitine.’
‘What other fire is there?’
‘There’s the distilled fire that Zofloc made,’ said Yggur. ‘It was certainly stronger, but it’s hard to imagine Whelm sorcery making it better.’
He glanced at Tulitine, whose lips were blue. ‘I’d better get you somewhere warm, while I still have the strength.’
‘Flydd found the original chthonic fire below Mistmurk Mountain,’ said Maelys. ‘It’s good and warm there.’
Yggur made a portal to Mistmurk Mountain, a thousand-span-high, cloverleaf-shaped plateau rising out of tropical rainforest. The portal opened in the steamy forest near the base of Mistmurk, where, for as far as they could see, the ground was littered with broken rock, shiny white pieces of sky-palace, and the gnawed bones and fire-scorched armour of the God-Emperor’s personal Imperial Guard.
Maelys shuddered. Bodies, everywhere we’ve been. Will there ever be an end to it?
‘What’s happened here?’ said Tulitine.
Yggur glanced up at the peak. ‘Jal-Nish’s sky-palace fell onto the plateau from a great height, smashing to pieces, and everyone on board it must have been killed.’
It had also gouged a canyon a hundred spans deep across the formerly cloverleaf-shaped plateau, and now two small flat-topped peaks, one on either side of the rubble-filled chasm, were all that remained of that rain-drenched place. A waterfall discharged from the end of the canyon, cascading halfway down the cliffs before the spray was carried up again by the unceasing updraughts.
‘Those poor men,’ said Maelys, for the image of the sky-palace falling would be forever embedded in her memory.
‘They weren’t nice fellows,’ said Yggur, who was shaky on his feet now. ‘And it would have been quick.’
‘I suppose so. Are you feeling all right?’
‘I’ll just sit down for a minute. Portals take a lot out of me.’
‘I thought the caduceus was doing all the work?’
‘It is, but each time I make one, I get such aftersickness that it’s as though I’d worked the spell unaided.’
He sat down on the spreading roots of a large tree. Maelys walked back and forth, luxuriating in the tropical heat until the chill of Noom was only a memory.
‘Do you know where to look for chthonic fire?’ she said after they had set up camp and eaten, and Yggur was feeling better.
‘As Flydd told the story,’ said Yggur, ‘it was deep below the peak, so we’ve got to find a way in, and down.’
The following morning, they began the long search for a way to get inside the mountain, which had once been riddled with tunnels and chambers. Tulitine went with them, but scrambling up the steep ravines was so painful for her that Yggur told her to go back to the camp. Tulitine hated anyone telling her what to do, but to Maelys’s surprise she complied without a murmur.
After more than a week of searching the overgrown lower parts of the peak, Maelys and Yggur found a fern-choked crevice that led inside. They went into the moist darkness for a few hundred spans. Even here, the walls of the cavern were cracked from the impact of the sky-palace, and there were piles of rubble all over the place, but the way down appeared to be open.
‘It looks fairly solid,’ said Maelys, holding up a blazing torch which was burning all too rapidly, and wishing she still had her twinklestone. ‘And it goes down.’
‘Very good,’ said Yggur. ‘Off you go, then.’
Her stomach clenched. ‘You want me to go? Again? Down there?’
‘No, I want you to go back to the camp and take care of Tulitine. Her bones seem to be shrinking more every day, and I’m really worried about her.’
Maelys was too. Though Tulitine was a master of the healing Arts, she could do nothing for herself. She did not understand what was happening to her, or why the Regression Spell was reverting this way, but she knew it was going to get worse.
‘You can’t go alone,’ Maelys said feebly. ‘Not after what I went through at Noom. There could be anything down below.’
‘It’s because of what you went through at Noom that I’m sending you back, though I don’t expect to have any trouble here, apart from the odd falling rock. Go on, I don’t want to leave Tulitine alone any longer than I can help it.’
Maelys turned back and Yggur headed down into the riven depths, to search for the remains of the casket in which Yalkara had originally stored the stolen white fire, the fire that Flydd had liberated, and which was now spreading out in all directions from the Island of Noom. What if it did consume all the ice in the frozen south? Would the seas rise and flood the world?
‘I found some,’ Yggur said wearily when he finally returned, days later. He sat down by the camp fire in the warm rain, tossing a second dimensionless box from hand to hand. ‘We’ve done all we can. Now the only thing we have to do is find Stilkeen.’
‘And survive,’ muttered Maelys, ‘after we give it the fire.’
Tulitine barely looked up. She was huddled under a waterproof military cloak Maelys had found among the scattered bones and broken armour, holding her hands out to the flames and looking thoroughly miserable.
Though it was a sweltering tropical night, and Maelys was sweating in just pants and shirt, Tulitine’s hands and feet were cold. She was always cold now, and Maelys was afraid that her heart was going, as well as her bones. She studied the healer across the fire.
Normally, when the spell reverted, it aged the user quickly and terribly, but Tulitine had not aged at all. She was as beautiful as ever, yet more fragile than she had ever been as an old but lusty woman. Her skin had thinned to translucency, allowing the pink of her flesh and the blue of her veins to show through. Her joints were stiffening, her flesh wasting, and her bones seemed to shrink a little each day.
Though she was in constant pain, and could not hide it, she made not a whisper of complaint, which Maelys found hardest of all to endure. Yggur felt sure the Regression Spell was being affected by the caduceus, but they could do nothing about that, either. They had to keep it; it was their only way to get back to civilisation. Their only way to find Stilkeen.
‘And then?’ said Tulitine, haltingly.
‘I’m sorry?’ said Yggur, frowning, for minutes had passed since he had spoken.
‘After you’ve given Stilkeen the fire, what then?’
‘We get rid of the caduceus. I’m sure it has a lot to do with your troubles. And there are healers –�
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‘No healer can do anything for this affliction, and I knew it before I embarked upon the Regression Spell.’ Tulitine forced a smile. ‘Besides, you’re not getting rid of me that easily.’
‘I don’t want to get rid of you … but I do care about you.’
‘Do you?’ Tulitine raised an elegantly sculpted eyebrow. ‘What a sorry affliction that must be.’
‘You know I do,’ Yggur said, restraining his irritation, ‘and I’ll thank you not to mock me for showing my true feelings. It’s not an easy thing for me and I don’t do it lightly.’
Maelys had noticed how gentle he’d been with Tulitine lately. He was quite unlike the stern, cool and dominating Yggur she had seen previously.
After some time Tulitine said, contritely, ‘I do know that you care, Yggur, and if it wasn’t for the gnawing pain in my bones I’d show you how much I care about you.’ Her roguish smile flickered on and off.
Maelys felt her blush rising, for even as an old woman Tulitine had never been short of young and vigorous lovers, and she’d made no secret about what she wanted from them.
‘Out of regard for you I would not ask for that,’ Yggur said hastily.
‘And out of regard for you I long to give it, but it cannot be.’
‘Then let’s not talk about it.’
‘Where are we going next?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Yggur. ‘I’m worried that the caduceus is bait – and these easy portals a trap.’
‘How else can one look upon a device that takes us where we want to go so conveniently?’ said Tulitine.
‘Do you mean that the caduceus is telling Stilkeen where we’re going and what we’re doing?’ said Maelys, looking over her shoulder instinctively.
‘I believe so.’
‘Then there’s no point putting it off,’ said Maelys. ‘Let’s take the fire to it.’
‘Unfortunately I don’t know where Stilkeen is,’ said Yggur.
Lightning flashed, reflecting off a white-helmeted skull lying among the leaves, and Maelys jumped. Another flash lit up the camp, followed by a dull rumble of thunder, and this time the caduceus, which Yggur had embedded in the soil beside the fire, shook slightly.