by Ian Irvine
There a ring of worn-down hills formed a circle a few miles across, and at its centre a scatter of black boulders stood as much as twenty-five feet above the plain. The ground around the rocks was rust-red. Half a mile away a series of broken walls marked the remains of a cluster of buildings. There were white heaps all around it, and even from the sky ship Aviel’s keen nose caught an ancient foulness that made her shudder. Thus far the journey had been uneventful, but that would change tonight.
Tonight they had to find the ghost vampire, Lumillal, somehow capture that ferociously deadly spirit and attempt to distil the spectral blood—his Archeus—from him while he was still “alive.” But this time it would not be done for her; she had to be present when the Archeus was taken.
“Near the black rocks will be safest,” said Hublees, pointing the nose of the sky ship down. It was close to sunset.
Aviel looked blearily ahead. She had laboured in her workshop all last night, rechecking her work and her preparations, then had not slept a wink during the long day’s flight. She could not stop worrying about what had to be done tonight, and how unlikely it was that the unluckiest girl in the world would survive it.
“What are those rocks?” she wondered.
“All that’s left of a great meteor that crashed here an aeon ago.” Hublees swept a stubby arm around the horizon. “See how its impact heaved the ground up into the ring of hills?”
“And the ruins?”
He hesitated, then shook his head.
“Rogues Render,” said Earnis in a whisper, as if afraid to speak the name aloud.
“But what is Rogues Render? Why won’t anyone say?”
Hublees and Earnis exchanged glances. Hublees’ face was oddly blank, and Earnis’s wavy hair was standing up. Even Nimil looked unnerved; his oval Aachim eyes had a glassy stare and the breath whistled in and out through the slit in his throat.
“Later,” said Hublees, heading down towards a flat grassy area to the left of the boulders.
Aviel heard a faint humming sound and felt a brief sharp pain in her temples. As they landed the pain passed; the humming did not.
There were seven large boulders between fifteen and twenty-five feet in height, plus a scatter of smaller ones. Up close they were dark grey or black, but shiny and metallic, and their outsides appeared to have bubbled and melted and flowed. The ground here had a rusty red crust, the air had a metallic tang and a cold south wind howled between the rocks.
The most sheltered place was a patch of bare ground about thirty feet by twenty, between the three largest boulders. Osseion carried the tent canvases to the space and opened them out, and Aviel drove the tent pegs through a hard ironstone crust into the red earth. It was very cold at this altitude and the hard labour warmed her.
Nimil climbed the tallest of the boulders and perched on top, his coat wrapped around him, and stared towards the broken walls of Rogues Render. Aviel was glad the boulders blocked her view.
“What’s that humming noise? Can anyone else hear it?” She looked around. Nimil had his palms pressed to his ears and Earnis’s face was screwed up.
Hublees laid his plump fingers on the nearest boulder but jerked away as if he had been stung. “This place must have a most powerful presence if even ungifted people can detect it. It must be a mighty place for working the Secret Art.”
“I’ll need all the help I can get,” muttered Aviel.
Osseion had lit the campfire and was preparing dinner. Earnis was studying a scroll in the firelight and scrawling alchemical symbols in a little book. Hublees lay on the ground on his back, his coat wrapped around him, staring up at the sky.
Darkness fell swiftly. After dinner Aviel was staring towards Rogues Render, invisible in the darkness, when a wind-shift brought her that faint unpleasant odour again, as of something that had died a very long time ago. She shuddered and turned her back.
The wind bit like icy iron, stinging the tips of her ears and nose. She returned to the fire and stood downwind where the clean smell of wood smoke blocked out the foulness, then with a sigh she headed through the boulders to begin the night’s work.
“Close the flap,” Shand said quietly as she entered the tent.
As she did so he appeared slowly, hands and boots first, face last. “You want to know about Rogues Render.”
“No,” said Aviel. “I need to know.”
“This ancient crater is called Bundash, and one of Mendark’s greatest failures as Magister occurred here—though few would blame him; the Magister’s writ never extended into this part of the world.” Shand paused as if recalling obscure facts to mind. “He came here … ninety-seven years ago, looking for the source of a faint beating sound associated with a series of violent yet inexplicable crimes.”
“But I thought the summon stone only woke a few months ago.”
“Apparently it woke again a few months ago. It first woke more than a century ago, and Mendark spent a good part of his final two lives trying to find out what was going on.”
“Did he?”
“Not entirely. At the end, knowing he had failed, he used the great power released by his own death to put the summon stone to sleep, but a few months ago it woke again—or the magiz woke it—and started to do what the Merdrun had ensorcelled it to do an aeon ago: corrupt and kill people, and suck power from them to open the gate from Cinnabar to Santhenar.”
“What was Mendark’s ‘greatest failure’?” said Aviel.
“He ended up in the middle of a massacre and could not stop it; he was lucky to escape with his own life.”
“Got to get some work done,” she said hastily. She did not want to know about massacres. She had already experienced enough horrors for a lifetime.
“Rogues Render was a rendering plant,” said Shand.
There had been one at Magsie Murg’s tannery in Casyme. They boiled animal bones there to recover the fat.
At the end bench, Shand checked the odours of a line of labelled phials. “There was a monstrous betrayal on the floor of this crater a century ago—and the doomed last stand of a small, proud nation.”
Dread overwhelmed her; she could feel the tragedy in her skin and bones.
“A powerful man turned on his lifelong friend,” Shand went on. “Each was the leader of a nation, one small, one large. The small nation was Tindule, led by Jussell, the large nation Grossular, ruled by Hudigarde, and the two friends had married twin sisters. Hudigarde wed the beautiful but unstable sorceress Lablag, who came to realise that he despised her and coveted her homely twin, a master brewer, philosopher and composer called Tissany. In his lifetime Hudigarde had always got what he wanted, but not this time—neither Tissany, Jussell or Lablag would countenance the idea of divorce.”
“If you swear to someone,” Aviel said primly, “you should keep your word no matter what.”
Shand heaved a heartfelt sigh, and she remembered that he had been rejected by Yalkara, the great love of his life. She flushed; she had been doing that a lot lately.
“Lablag must have been one of the first people to be corrupted by the summon stone,” Shand mused. He sniffed a phial half full of a gluggy brown sludge covered in a layer of grey oil, gagged and hastily capped it. “Embittered by Hudigarde’s contempt, she delved into dark sorceries and was ensnared by the stone. I suspect the magiz of that time was able to link to Lablag through the stone, because she saw a threat in Tindule.”
“What threat?” said Aviel.
“I don’t know, but the magiz ordered Lablag to destroy Tindule. Lablag assumed that meant the people and told her husband that she would give him Tissany if he erased Tindule from the map. And eventually, being greedy, weak and inflamed by her sorcery, and utterly obsessed with Tissany, Hudigarde agreed.
“He challenged Jussell to war games in the crater. Tissany warned him not to go, but Jussell, a pig-headed, trusting man, would hear nothing against his friend. Thinking the idea of war games a great lark he took his entire army, twenty thousand men,
armed with wooden weapons so no one would be killed.”
“What happened?” she cried when he did not go on.
Shand took a jar of green sap from his pocket and drained it into a flask which he put on a ring over a spirit burner then connected to a distillation apparatus. He was distilling off the essential oil of the bubble-bark pine from sap collected as the species went extinct—no, as he’d rendered it extinct. Aviel glared at him; he was a lot further down the dark path than she was. He met her eyes coolly, showing no remorse.
“Hudigarde’s much larger army attacked with real weapons,” he said. “They wiped out Jussell’s army to the last man and killed him too.”
“Twenty thousand soldiers were slaughtered here?” she whispered.
“And it gets worse. Acting on Lablag’s instructions, Hudigarde invaded Tindule, slew every man and boy and male baby, sold its women and girls into slavery to a neighbouring country and incorporated Tindule into Grossular. What’s the matter?”
“The wickedness,” gasped Aviel. “The … the infamy! What an evil man.”
“But Lablag had betrayed him; she had already spirited her sister far away and sold her too. Hudigarde had killed his friend and destroyed a country he loved, for nothing. He divorced Lablag and spent his days searching for Tissany, to no avail, and soon his great kingdom fell apart in civil war.”
“I still don’t—”
Watching the green vapour creeping up from his flask, Shand talked over her. “Tindule’s women did not stay slaves for long. Some married into great families; others became scholars, mancers and teachers, and within a generation their children were free. For the bravest of them, Rogues Render became a place of pilgrimage, though a dangerous one—the battlefield is still drenched in the psychic agony of the soldiers who died here … and those who wept over their bones.”
“But why is it called Rogues Render?”
“Sometimes on battlefields the dead are treated as barbarously as the living.”
“What are you talking about?”
“To the most depraved people of all—carrion predators—even corpses have some value. They tore every tooth out of the jaws of the dead soldiers and shipped barrels of teeth to Thurkad, there to be made into dentures for city dandies. But that wasn’t the worst. The carrion predators dragged the bodies to huge cauldrons and rendered them down. Boiled the fat out of them to make corpse candles.”
“C-corpse candles!” Aviel’s skin crawled. “Why?”
“Necromancers and other practitioners of the dark arts will pay a high price for genuine corpse candles. And the more violent the death, and the fouler the treachery that led to it, the more valuable those corpse candles are. Rogues Render is a dark and dangerous place, Aviel, and it’ll be far more deadly when the ghost vampire rises.”
She opened the flap of the tent and stepped out into a night blacker than the bitumen seeps of Grund. “Then how can we hope to beat it?”
Shand did not reply.
“The method says the Archeus must be collected at midnight,” said Aviel.
“Which gives you four hours to make everything ready, so you can leave here by eleven.”
The wind dropped, and for a minute or two there was absolute silence. Then, at the very edge of hearing, Aviel heard female voices singing. No, chanting, though it was not a happy sound.
“Lamentations for the dead,” Shand said quietly from a few feet in front of her.
She started; he had turned invisible again and she had not realised he had left the tent. “I didn’t know there were other people there.”
“There aren’t; it’s just echoes from the past.”
The chanting was replaced by an eerie wailing that rose and fell, rose and fell, and she knew instinctively what it was—a whole nation of women and girls wailing for their slaughtered men and boys.
“I hate this place!” she cried.
“This crater is one of the most psychically active spots in the west—even the ground we stand on, half a mile from Rogues Render, is saturated with treachery, agony and grief. It’s why the battlefield is such a lure to ghost vampires.”
Aviel felt a pang of terror so overwhelming that she could hardly breathe. Why, why had she agreed to this? Lumillal was going to get her; he—or it—would suck her spirit out of her living body and … She could not bear to think about it.
34
WHY WOULD I BE INTERESTED IN LOVE?
“I don’t want you to use this terrible procedure,” said Earnis, holding the scroll at arm’s length.
“So you keep saying,” Aviel said irritably as she rinsed her powdered charcoal for the required fifth time. “I don’t have any choice.”
“The Ombley Parchment sets out a far safer method.”
“And it takes three months to make nivol. We don’t have the time.”
“What if I combined the Ombley method and the one you’re using?”
She gaped at him. “You’ve told me a dozen times that alchemical procedures must be followed exactly as written. Two different methods can’t be lumped together higgledy-piggledy.”
“I’ve spend twelve years studying the theory and philosophy of alchemy,” he said coldly. “I wasn’t planning to lump anything together.”
“But you haven’t studied the practice of alchemy. You’ve never had to follow a method.”
“I’m really worried about you,” he said, staring at her. There was a strange yearning expression on his handsome face, and his eyes were shiny. He took a step towards her, reaching out with both arms.
And it struck her. Earnis was falling in love with her—or thought he was. She took a hasty step back. “Now you’re being silly,” she said briskly. “Can you fill the cauldron? I’m out of hot water.”
His face fell, then he nodded. “Of course.”
As he turned away, Nimil entered, carrying a little curved object carved from the silky brown and gold burl of a leopardwood tree. Holding it in both hands, he bowed then held it out to Aviel.
She bowed back and took the object, which was coiled like a snail’s shell. It was beautifully carved. “Thank you,” she said. “What is it?”
He turned it round on her palm, pressed the right side, and a small drawer, so perfectly made that the edges were invisible, slid open. Inside, on a purple-black velvet lining, sat the plum-sized yellow diamond.
“I don’t understand,” said Aviel. “I thought you were going to—”
Nimil flicked the top of the diamond, and it rose fractionally. He caught it with a fingernail, pulled gently and withdrew a tapering conical stopper.
“It’s … beautiful. Perfect!” said Aviel.
“Nothing less than perfection would do.” Nimil slid the stopper in, put the phial back in the drawer, closed it, nodded and turned away, then swung back, taking a scrap of papyrus from his scrip. “I finally got through to Malien.”
He stood there, staring at it. The papyrus was pale brown with a thin darker border and a few lines of writing on it in the Aachim script, which Aviel could not read. His breath whistled through the metal slit in his throat; he was agitated.
“Is something wrong?” said Aviel.
“The flow from the stone is rising again and Malien fears the Merdrun are preparing to reopen the gate. She says you must make the nivol with the utmost urgency and bring it directly to Zile.”
“Why Zile?”
“That’s where everyone is now.” He went out.
Earnis reappeared. “How else can I help you?”
Aviel watched him warily, praying he had got over his romantic fit. She didn’t have time for such nonsense. “You can’t. Get some sleep. We have to leave at eleven.”
“All right,” he said reluctantly. “You should also—”
“I need to think.” She shooed him out. “Go!”
His liquid, yearning eyes rested on her, then he climbed the ladder to the sky ship. A lightglass glowed through one of the round windows at the rear, then went out. She went back to her b
ench, irritably.
“Stupid man!” she muttered.
“For falling for you?” smirked Shand, turning visible knees first this time. He was in her canvas chair, and that annoyed her too. Her ankle was throbbing and she wanted to put her feet up, but there was too much to check and recheck. “The hide of the fellow!”
“I’m only sixteen! Why would I be interested in love?”
“I can’t imagine,” Shand said drily. He took the little box from her hand, opened the drawer and stroked the diamond phial. “Nimil has surpassed himself.”
Handing it back, he went to the end bench, opened Radizer’s grimoire, which he had taken back before Aviel left Sith, and checked the procedure.
“How’s it going?” She wished she were working on a fragrant scent potion, not this infernal alchemy.
Shand grunted. Clearly he knew far more about scent potions than he should. He had said he’d been an apprentice when Radizer had blown himself to bits, but Shand carried out the difficult procedures so quickly and effortlessly he must have been a master. Why had he lied about it? And what was he really doing? Could he be trusted?
He cracked the wax around the lid of a small silver-green earthenware pot, prised it up and wafted the air towards his nose, then grimaced. The smell, both pungent and foul, made Aviel’s eyes water and burned her nose like hot mustard.
“What’s that?” she gasped.
“Swamp horseradish, sealed and allowed to rot for ten or fifteen years.” He scooped out two slimy grey lumps with a silver spatula, weighed them on her scrupulously clean scales, added another small scoop and scraped the muck into a distillation flask.
Aviel’s stomach heaved. She wiped her eyes and walked out into the darkness, the frosty grass crunching underfoot. As she looked between the boulders towards Rogues Render, again she caught that faint charnel odour. Jussell’s army had been slaughtered there, and the soldiers’ bodies ill used almost a hundred years ago, yet still the stench lingered. It was a very bad place.