The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2)

by Ian Irvine

‘It took a gigantic column of white fire to break into the Nightland,’ Colm pointed out, ‘and even then you barely managed it. How do you expect to get us out with that piddling flame?’

  ‘I was opposed by Jal-Nish and Vivimord, if you recall,’ Flydd said mildly, ‘and I’d never done it before. But if we can find Rulke’s virtual construct, the most subtle engine for making portals that has ever been devised, the tiniest amount of power should suffice. The chthonic flame trapped here ought to be enough for several such portals, and that’s just as well, if we’re going to Elludore first.’

  ‘But you said …’ began Colm, confused.

  ‘I’ve decided I’m not yet ready to face the Numinator. A trip to Elludore would give me the chance to grow into my renewed body and get it fit for the task. By then the rest of my memories may have come back, too, and hopefully my Arts.’

  They searched for what felt like a day and a night, though Maelys found it impossible to keep track of time here – it did not seem to run the way it did in the real world. Flydd inspected all the virtual devices they’d encountered previously, and every other one they came to, but none proved to be what he was looking for.

  Maelys, footsore and too weary to stand up, sat on the cold floor, unable to think of anything but Emberr, Emberr, Emberr. In his arms she had felt complete for the first time in her life, and all she wanted was to be there again.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ said Flydd, staring down at her. ‘You’re mooning about like a love-struck calf.’

  Colm laughed cynically.

  ‘Nothing,’ she lied. ‘Just tired.’

  Flydd walked away, rubbing the stubble on his jaw, then stopped abruptly. ‘Wait!’ he cried. ‘I remember now.’

  ‘Remember what?’ asked Maelys, afraid of what he might be thinking.

  ‘An important detail. Rulke escaped from the Nightland after Tensor exploited a flaw in it, trying to lure him out so as to kill him. But Rulke was too strong. He got away, returned briefly to the Nightland, and Karan Kin-Slayer and Llian the Liar ended up here as well.’

  ‘I’d prefer that you called them Karan and Llian,’ Colm said stiffly. ‘We know what murdering scum the scrutators were, and to my mind, they were the liars when they rewrote Llian’s tale. Most of them, anyway,’ he added hastily as Flydd clenched his fist.

  ‘Whatever keeps you happy,’ Flydd said coldly. ‘The tale states that the Nightland was collapsing, and there’s no reason to doubt Llian the – him in this matter, at least. Over time the Nightland had leaked power into the void, and at the end there wasn’t power enough left to sustain it …’ He frowned.

  ‘What’s the matter now?’ said Colm.

  ‘I repeat my earlier question. Why is the Nightland still here, two hundred and twenty years later, seemingly as vast and whole as ever?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s a new one, just recently made.’

  ‘Not with all Rulke’s relics in it. This is the original Nightland, sustained for all this time at an incalculable cost of power. Why?’

  To protect Emberr, who was trapped here, Maelys thought, but dared not say so. If she mentioned his name, Flydd would go after him and try to use him in some way. She felt terrible, keeping such a vital secret from Flydd, but Emberr was already in danger and Flydd would only make it worse. She could not put Emberr at risk; she’d given him her word.

  Flydd’s glance rested on her. He knows I’m keeping something back, she thought. I’ll never keep the truth from him.

  He turned away, muttering, ‘I’m worried now. Every minute we spend here increases the risk of discovery.’

  ‘Who by?’ said Colm.

  ‘The one who owns the Nightland.’

  They tramped back and forth for many more hours, without finding any sign of Rulke’s virtual construct. Maelys followed their footsteps, eyes closed, stumbling with weariness. Her previous sleep could not have been more than an hour, for she was quite overcome by drowsiness.

  ‘Aha!’ Flydd was squinting off to her right. ‘I think we should go this way.’

  ‘Why?’ said Colm. ‘It looks the same in every direction.’

  ‘Intuition tells me that this is the right way.’

  ‘Intuition? You?’ Colm’s voice dripped scorn.

  ‘It surprises me too,’ said Flydd, ‘but I’m going to follow it.’

  After ten or fifteen minutes they came to a broad, curving crevasse filled with smoke-like vapour and spanned by a cracked arch of some hundred rising steps, and as many descending into the mist-shrouded distance of the other side. They climbed the bridge one at a time, in case their weight proved too much for it, and entered another section of the Nightland where the floor smoked like ice, and luminous vapours swirled up and around them with every movement. Pools of water black as ink lay in holes so deep that they seemed to have no bottom.

  After negotiating a path between hundreds of such pools they came to the remnants of a once magnificent palace, now broken and distorted as if it had been compressed into a mote, then expanded again. And this part of the Nightland had colour: sombre reds, browns and yellows which were like a rainbow compared to the unrelieved black of everywhere else.

  ‘What happened here?’ said Maelys.

  ‘This must be the part of the Nightland that collapsed,’ said Flydd. ‘Rulke’s part. Someone tried to restore it, though not very successfully.’

  ‘How could one section collapse and the other not?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  They went inside, through great halls all twisted as though they’d been wrung out like washing, and imposing audience chambers that were equally deformed. One was the size of a dog kennel on the inside, though its outside walls joined seamlessly with the normal-sized rooms surrounding it. They entered the most magnificent library Maelys had ever seen but the books were all crumpled and ruined; they had expanded to full size but the shelves had not.

  ‘Rulke must have had a colossal ego,’ Colm observed, ‘to have created all this when there was no one else to see it.’

  ‘He was a great man who had been used to the best of everything,’ said Flydd. ‘He liked to build things, and he had infinite patience. I might have done the same, had I been sentenced to a thousand years here.’

  ‘You spent nine years on Mistmurk Mountain,’ Maelys pointed out, ‘and you were satisfied with a little wooden hut.’

  Eventually they came to a glorious, though to Maelys’s mind intimidating, bedroom that was hardly deformed at all. The floor was tiled with red marble, the walls draped in rich velvets and silks, while the bed was a head-high platform supported on six posts of carved ebony, with a canopy so high that it could barely be seen.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep there,’ she said, ‘no matter how tired I was.’

  ‘I doubt he used this room for sleeping,’ said Flydd with a sly grin.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ frowned Maelys.

  ‘I heard the Charon were lusty devils, men and women,’ said Colm.

  ‘He could create anything he wanted for his pleasure,’ said Flydd. ‘Or anyone.’

  I wouldn’t want to lie with Emberr here. Maelys, realising what a shocking, wicked thought she’d just had, flushed so red that her cheeks burned.

  ‘Now we’ve embarrassed innocent little Maelys,’ Flydd chuckled. He ruffled her messy hair and walked through into the next room. ‘Hello! What’s this?’

  It was roughly the size of a large covered wagon, though it hung in the air as if weightless. It had a skin of blue-black metal, shaped in alien curves and ominous bulges that no blacksmith of Santhenar could have duplicated. Oddly shaped levers and knobs protruded from the top.

  Flydd exhaled loudly. ‘It’s Rulke’s original model for his construct – the very first construct of all, and still the most potent. With such a perfect plan as this, and unlimited power, another could be made. This belongs in the Great Library – if it still exists.’

  Maelys pressed her burning cheek against the cold doorway. ‘Should
n’t you destroy it? After the last war –’

  ‘I doubt that I can influence it in any way.’ Flydd swept his arm against the side of the construct and it curved straight through. ‘Besides, after the nodes failed, Lauralin was littered with dead constructs, and I never heard that Jal-Nish had succeeded in activating one, for all the power of his tears. Did you, Colm?’

  Colm shook his head. ‘The God-Emperor has air-dreadnoughts, and he had his sky palace, but his only other flying devices are flesh-formed.’

  There was a faint noise in the distance, like a piece of ice shattering on a hard floor. Flydd spun around, tiptoed to the door and looked out.

  ‘I keep forgetting that any kind of depraved being could be held in such a secure prison as this.’

  ‘And any kind of evil prison warder,’ said Colm.

  Maelys could only think of Emberr, trapped here for as long as he should live. If only there was a way to get him out.

  ‘Let’s see if the construct can be made to work,’ said Flydd.

  He withdrew the pyramidal ice flask from his coat, wincing as frost formed around his fingers. That had not happened in the real world. The chthonic flame was moving sluggishly. He walked around the virtual construct, studying it from all angles. Maelys followed him at a distance, not because she had any interest in the device – she’d experienced far too much of the Art lately – but because the floor here was so cold that it hurt her bare feet if she stood still.

  He began to trace the shape of the construct with his fingers, as high as he could reach, circumnavigating it again as if trying to imprint it on his memory. Maelys reached out to touch it, but felt nothing at all. It was just patterns of light and shadow.

  Flydd walked into it, and from outside she could see his dim outline holding the ice flask up like a lantern. Colm yawned, strolled away and stood leaning on the wall with his eyes closed.

  Maelys suppressed a yawn of her own and followed Flydd in. Her skin tingled as she passed through the skin of the virtual construct; everything was a formless blur for a few seconds, then the farthest layers faded and she saw a pair of high-backed seats, plus a confusion of levers, knobs and glassy plates, all illuminated by dark red light.

  ‘That’s odd,’ said Flydd, who was to her right.

  Maelys turned towards him but was assailed by such an attack of vertigo that she staggered. Everything swam sickeningly across her field of vision for a moment before settling down again.

  ‘What is?’ she managed to gasp.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s different to the constructs I travelled in during the war, and it’s going to take time to understand how it works. Go and get some sleep, Maelys. There’s a bed in the next room.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep there.’ The thought of lying in Rulke’s bed gave her the shivers.

  ‘You’re out on your feet. Get moving; I can’t rely on you the way you are.’

  She went out reluctantly, past Colm who did not acknowledge her, and into Rulke’s bedchamber, where she stood beside the huge bed. Flydd was right; she had to rest and there was nowhere else. Her toes felt like frozen knobs.

  Climbing the bedpost reminded her of climbing the web cord to escape the octopede; her sore muscles screamed at the abuse. Maelys flopped onto the bed and pulled the velvet quilt over her, trying not to think about the lustful acts Rulke must have committed here during his long incarceration, but the only way she could get him out of her mind was to focus on Emberr instead.

  It didn’t help – it made her feel all hot and panicky. Maelys stuffed a fold of the quilt into her mouth to stifle a groan, and it was a long time before she fell into a restless sleep.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ said Flydd when she reappeared. ‘Feeling better now?’ She didn’t look it. Her hair was tangled, her eyes had dark circles around them and her face was flushed.

  ‘Slightly.’

  ‘You should be. You’ve been asleep for almost two days.’

  ‘Two days!’

  ‘This place has an odd effect on some people. And you look as though you’ve been sharing Rulke’s lusty dreams,’ he said cheerily.

  Maelys avoided his eye. Such a modest girl, he thought.

  ‘Have you had any luck with the portal?’ she asked.

  ‘On the plateau you said that making a portal to the real world was perilous,’ Colm observed.

  ‘Indeed, but I’m no longer a novice at it, and I’ve learned a lot from Rulke’s virtual construct,’ said Flydd. ‘I think I can get us to Elludore with it, safely, and possibly make another portal after that … I hope so, for it’s a good seven hundred leagues to the Island of Noom, the way the secret paths run, and that’s the best part of a year of walking, in rough, trackless country.’

  ‘Assuming the God-Emperor doesn’t catch you first,’ said Colm, who was still propping up the doorway. ‘Which he will.’

  ‘It would be devilishly difficult to avoid the notice of his spies and watchers on such a long journey,’ Flydd agreed. ‘Besides, we don’t have time. Jal-Nish’s defeat will only drive him harder to hunt us down …’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Maelys, for Flydd was staring at the construct. ‘Is something about it bothering you?’

  ‘Perceptive, too,’ Flydd said to himself. ‘It should have been dead, but it isn’t.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Colm shot upright.

  ‘It’s been used, and there are still traces of power within it, yet the Histories say Rulke never made a portal out of the Nightland, because he couldn’t. Tensor freed him the first time, and when Rulke returned, through a portal he’d made from the real world, he left it ajar so he could escape again. He didn’t use this construct because he didn’t need to.’

  ‘Perhaps he returned again,’ said Colm.

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Flydd, ‘though by then he would have had his real construct, so much more powerful and subtle than a virtual one could ever be. And a couple of years later he was dead, as was Tensor. By the end of the Tale of the Mirror, almost all of the great mancers were dead or gone forever, so who came to the Nightland and used this virtual construct after that, and why?’

  ‘They could have come before the end of that tale,’ said Maelys.

  ‘No, else all traces of the construct’s use would have been wiped clean when the Forbidding was destroyed. This place was made from the Forbidding, remember, and its destruction should have destroyed everything in it, including the virtual construct. Why didn’t it?’

  ‘Because someone protected it.’

  ‘And I keep asking, why go to such immense trouble to protect an empty prison?’

  Perhaps it wasn’t empty back then, Maelys thought. What if there was someone in it who could never leave? But that would make Emberr hundreds of years old, so who was he, and how did he end up here?

  ‘To keep other prisoners here,’ said Colm. ‘One of them must have used it.’

  ‘This construct can only be empowered by a force brought in from outside,’ said Flydd, ‘but prisoners would have been stripped of all possessions before they were sent here – no prisoner could have used it. If someone entered from outside to check on the prisoners, they would have come via their own portal, so why would anyone need to use this one? And if there were prisoners here, why would their warders leave the virtual construct empowered, which would give them a chance to escape?’

  ‘Does it really matter after all this time?’ said Colm irritably. ‘You’re always chasing thoughts around in circles, Flydd. Get the damn thing working. I want to feel good solid earth under my feet again.’

  ‘I know how to make it work. And since it’s still live, that won’t take long.’

  ‘Will you take me to Elludore? Please?’

  ‘Perhaps I will. I can get back my Arts there as well as anywhere. And I too would like to see Faelamor’s legendary trove.’ His eyes glinted in a most un-Flydd-like way, then he stepped inside. ‘Come through. Colm, tell me everything you know about Elludore. It’s not a land I k
now, and I’ve got to find a safe place for the portal to open, and see the destination clearly, or we’ll never get there.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It felt as though Maelys was sliding down an endless tunnel lined with silk. Half an hour must have gone by before, without warning, she dropped nearly a span into long, dry grass. Her knees folded, she hit the ground softly and opened her eyes. Feathery seed heads caressed her bare arms and tickled her nose; she hastily suppressed a sneeze, not knowing whether it was safe to make a sound. It was late afternoon, clear but cool, and the sun was falling behind snow-clad mountains. It would soon be dark, and cold.

  She was on the upper slope of a steep hill, one of a cluster of five whose crests were grass-covered, though forest on their lower slopes extended out to the horizon in all directions. To her left a brick fireplace large enough to roast an ox was topped with a chimney five or six spans high. Beyond it a broken stone wall ran straight for twenty or thirty paces, with smaller walls extending off it; squared stone littered the grass as far as she could see. It looked like the ruins of a manor or country house, or perhaps a monastery.

  A tear formed in her eye at the thought of beloved Nifferlin Manor, torn down to the foundations by the God-Emperor’s troops. She dashed it away.

  The grass rustled to her left. ‘Colm?’ she said quietly. ‘Xervish?’

  No answer; perhaps they hadn’t come through yet. They’d left the Nightland together but the portal had thrown her into that lightless tunnel and she’d lost them.

  What if they hadn’t come through at all? She suppressed a twinge of panic. She had no coin, no weapon, no boots; just the clothes on her back and the taphloid around her neck, which Flydd had returned before they left the Nightland. And Elludore, if this was Elludore, was an unknown land far from anywhere she knew. It could be a lawless land where an unaccompanied woman would be in peril.

  ‘Xervish?’ she called, more loudly. Her injured calf throbbed.

  The afternoon was absolutely still. She limped across the crest and peered down the other side of the hill, seeing nothing to alarm her, though any kind of predator could be hidden in the long grass. What if Flydd and Colm had ended up somewhere else? Her chest grew tight at the thought, the familiar anxiety of abandonment rising up to choke her. She forced it down again and tried to think.