by Ian Irvine
Maelys swallowed, pulled down the sleeve of her coat to protect her hand and grasped the ice cudgel, following them into the next cell. Shortly they were out in the corridor. It was lighter here, for the rays of a half-moon came dimly through the right-hand wall.
‘This way, I think,’ said Flydd, turning left.
Colm followed close behind, then Maelys, taking little notice of their surroundings, which in this gloom looked ever the same. From high above she kept hearing the shrill crackle of tearing ice, and felt sure the Numinator was constructing a portal to the Nightland. If she was, it could only be because of Emberr; he was in danger from his mother’s enemy, and who could that be but the Numinator? Was she planning to kill him? And if she was, it was all Maelys’s fault.
She froze in the middle of the corridor, staring upwards. Flydd’s last gate hadn’t taken long at all, and maybe, powered with chthonic fire, the Numinator’s portal would be just as quick.
She took a couple of steps back the other way, trying to hear, but the tower was silent now. What if the portal was finished; what if the Numinator was already going through it? Emberr! She’d only met him for a few minutes but felt she’d known him always. He’d spent his life all alone, yet his only concern had been for her. She couldn’t bear to think of the Numinator harming him.
She would have to tell Flydd. Maelys could only imagine his fury when she revealed that she’d deceived him so terribly, but it must be done. She turned down the corridor, rounded the corner, and stopped. Halls ran in three directions and she could not tell which way Flydd and Colm had gone.
‘Xervish?’ she said softly, afraid of alerting the Whelm.
There was no reply. In the distance she heard the unmistakable clap of a wooden sandal against the floor, though she wasn’t sure which hall it had come from. Maelys hesitated. She had one chance in three of finding Flydd now; less if the hall she took branched again. And she had at least one chance in three of blundering into a Whelm.
The odds were against her. It’s a sign, she thought. I’m meant to go the other way. But she hesitated, more afraid of the Numinator than she had been of Jal-Nish. Ever since childhood, Maelys had been intimidated by powerful, dominating women.
Courage, Maelys. It was as if old Tulitine were speaking to her, and Maelys had never known her to be afraid of anyone. Drawing the taphloid from between her breasts, she squeezed it in her fist and cried silently, Tulitine, give me strength.
It helped a little. She had to take on the Numinator, for Emberr’s sake, and she’d better hurry. Testing the weight of the club, she turned and headed towards the Thousand Steps, following the path Gliss had used last time. She reached the stair without encountering anyone and began to climb, not thinking about what she was going to do once she reached the top. She couldn’t plan that far ahead.
Halfway up, as Maelys stopped for a breather, the sound of tearing ice echoed down the stairs. Was the Numinator nearly done? Ready to go through?
Clap, clap. It was a Whelm on the steps below her, and coming up rapidly. ‘Master?’ called a woman’s voice, higher than Gliss’s, and less gurgling. ‘Master, there’s someone on the Steps.’
The wooden sandals clapped once more, not so heavily, then Maelys heard a faint, swift padding. The Whelm was coming after her, barefoot. Maelys began to run but could not keep it up. A thousand steps was a mighty climb and she’d already done it twice in the past day. Her legs hurt, right into the bones.
She looked down but there wasn’t enough light to see anything below her. She had to climb faster. The Whelm were slow, Flydd had said. We can outrun them. But they were also iron-hard and could keep going forever. She couldn’t tell how far there was to go – perhaps four hundred steps. She’d never make it.
Maelys pressed on, step after exhausting step. The ice cudgel grew heavier every second, and its cold was burning through her sleeve. She didn’t think she could hold it much longer. She swapped it into her other hand, used it as a cane for a moment, and continued.
As she reached the next landing, a triangle of glassy ice between two steep flights, Maelys caught sight of something moving below her, just a fleeting change to the pattern of dull light and pitch darkness. The Whelm was less than fifty steps below, and gaining. She wasn’t that slow. Maelys’s throat was raw from gasping the dry, frigid air, but she had to press on. She might be Emberr’s only hope.
Soon she realised that there was no chance of beating the Whelm to the top. She would have to attack before the woman leapt on her from behind, but how? The Thousand Steps was composed of one steep flight after another, running up a five-sided stairwell, but there was no central column to hide behind; neither had she noticed any doorways through which to strike from darkness. The upper part of the Tower of a Thousand Steps seemed empty, as if it had been built for one purpose only: to raise the Numinator’s eyrie as far as possible from the bleak landscape of the Isle of Noom, and the grim museum and necropolis in the basement of the inner tower.
It was lighter up here, and as she climbed the next flight the moon broke through again, shining brightly through a small patch of clear ice, right into her eyes. Momentarily Maelys couldn’t see clearly and knew she would find no better place for an ambush. She went up a few more steps, crouched low, transferred the club to her right hand and tried to prepare her sore muscles for action.
She would only have one chance. If the Whelm got her nails into Maelys she would not get away, and even up two steps she would have little advantage in height. She would have to strike hard, fast and true, and pray that her first blow was a disabling one.
The Whelm’s feet were slap-slapping against the ice; and she was panting. The tension in Maelys’s stomach was painful now and, as if the Whelm had detected her anxiety, her footfalls slowed. Maelys peered over the step but couldn’t see her. She must be waiting in the darkness lower down. Maelys let go of the club handle and rubbed her freezing fingers against her coat sleeve.
Gripping it again, she tried to calm her racing heart. The moon was drifting in and out of the clouds, the light flaring and fading. The Whelm had stopped panting; Maelys couldn’t hear her at all.
She couldn’t hear anything from above, either, which might mean that the Numinator had completed her portal and was on her way to the Nightland. To kill Emberr? Maelys wanted to shriek, just to break the tension.
Slap-slap. The Whelm was coming on. Maelys could see her now, rounding the lower angle, plodding up with that awkward gait. She stopped one flight below and in a shaft of
moonlight Maelys saw that she was not much older than herself, though thin and bony like all the Whelm. Her short dark hair was cut straight across at the back of her head, and she had huge black eyes.
It made a difference. Maelys wasn’t sure she could attack a young woman. She clung desperately to the ice club, feeling the sweat freezing on the palms of her hands and her heart racketing under her breastbone.
The Whelm moved up; she was almost to the point when the moonlight would shine in her eyes. One more step, Maelys thought. The Whelm was looking up and hadn’t seen her, flattened in the pool of shadow on the step.
She took another step, but as Maelys sprang to her feet the light faded as the moon passed behind a cloud. The Whelm saw her and lunged.
Maelys, taken by surprise, swung the club, but she was off-balance and had moved too late. The Whelm caught her arm, tore the club out of her hand and sent it flying down the steps. Before Maelys knew what was happening her right arm had been twisted up behind her back, the Whelm’s free arm came around her neck and she was caught in an unbreakable headlock.
In the depths below them a tocsin sounded, low and mournful.
‘Master?’ called the Whelm anxiously. ‘It is I, Sitchah –’
‘I said no interruptions!’ the Numinator’s voice came faintly from above.
‘Master, the prisoners have escaped. I – I caught the girl on your steps. She was armed.’
After a brief pause, the Numin
ator, sounding rather strained, said, ‘Bring her up.’
‘Master?’
‘At once, Whelm!’
Sitchah drew a deep breath, as if distressed, then said, ‘At once, Master.’ She smelled of fish oil and onions too, though not as strongly as Gliss and the other males.
Maelys was forced upwards, Sitchah holding her so tightly that Maelys’s feet barely touched the treads. They reached the last flight before the top.
It was much lighter here, for a pulsing glow extended down from the Numinator’s fire, and the steps were littered with shattered pieces of ice, fallen from above and frozen to the treads. Several threads of chthonic flame trickled down the riser of the top step, eating into it. Maelys’s skin crawled.
Sitchah forced her up another step, then sprang sideways, stifling a gasp and looking down at her left foot. She had gashed it deeply on a shard of ice; blood was pouring from her sole to stain the step.
She hobbled up another step, then another, but it proved impossible to avoid the iron-hard, brittle shards, and soon every footstep left a bloody print. Maelys had to admire Sitchah’s determination: no pain, no injury could prevent her from doing her duty to her master.
Or could it? Maelys allowed her weight to fall to the left, forcing the Whelm to move that way. Sitchah winced as her foot came down on another shard, then began to pick a path up further to the left, heading towards the faint white flicker of chthonic flame. Maelys kept leaning that way, hoping Sitchah hadn’t noticed the flame, which wasn’t very bright.
They were just five steps below the Numinator’s eyrie now, Sitchah gasping with every step. The soles of her feet must have been gashed to the bone.
Three steps, and Maelys could see into the eyrie, which had been completely rebuilt. The upper third of the ice steeple was gone, as were the books and the table. Wind whistling across the open top of the steeple caused a sobbing reverberation of the air; it was as cold as outside and tiny ice crystals were drifting down, winking in the light of the fire, which now blazed in a broad metal dish in the centre of the eyrie. The fire was different, too. The chthonic flame had been emptied from its ice flask and, well-fed and unconstrained, burned two spans high.
It was surrounded by five miniature ice steeples, four spans high at the left-hand end and six at the right, supporting a sloping slab of ice, like a roof over the white flame. Maelys couldn’t see the Numinator until she moved behind it. She wore grey-green pants, an ice-grey blouse, and a stiletto made from ice was strapped to her right thigh. The hollow core of the blade was a brilliant, poisonous yellow. Maelys’s gut tightened. So the Numinator did intend to kill Emberr.
Her arms were upraised, her hands placed together in a steeple that mimicked the way her tower top had been, and her fingers glistened with chthonic fire, though it didn’t appear to be burning her.
‘Guard her until I get back,’ she said without looking at Sitchah.
The Numinator drew her hands out and down, as though pulling a bubble over herself, all the way to her feet. Now glistening with white chthonic fire, she went backwards half a dozen steps, took a running dive through the flame, and vanished.
‘Master!’ cried Sitchah, pushing Maelys up the steps. Her shredded foot came down on the chthonic fire threaded across the top step, she shrieked in agony, and her grip relaxed momentarily.
Maelys tore free, thrust her down the steps and raced towards the ice steeples. There was no time to think. Emberr was in mortal danger and she had to help him, but she didn’t know how the Numinator had made the portal to the Nightland, or even if it could be used again. But surely she would have left it open so she could return?
Maelys raced between the second and third steeples, under the sloping slab of ice, and felt a slight shock, and a tingling all over, as if she were no longer in the normal world. She was within the portal, but where was the opening to the Nightland? Should she dive through the flame as the Numinator had? Surely there had to be more to it than that?
The pyramidal ice flask was sitting on the floor, with the stopper beside it and a tiny drift of fire rising up from it. And the Numinator’s hands had been shimmering with chthonic flame, as if she’d rubbed it over herself. Maelys wasn’t sure she dared. The Numinator might have protected herself with all manner of spells before she used the fire.
A groan came from behind her, and her head whipped around. Sitchah was staggering up the last steps, lacerated across her chest and legs from where she’d fallen down the shard-covered steps, but nothing save death could prevent her from doing her duty.
There was no time to think; Maelys had to act now. Upending the ice flask, she poured its contents, about five drops, into the middle of her palm. It burned hot and cold at the same time, not just on her skin but beneath it, as if it had penetrated all the way to her bones.
She ran three steps to where the Numinator had stood, rubbing the chthonic fire over her fingers and hands until they burned and shimmered, then raised her arms, steepled her hands as the Numinator had, held them there for a moment and drew them down to the floor, all the way to her feet. To her surprise, it worked and a glittering bubble enveloped her. She went backwards to the point where the Numinator had stood, staring at the chthonic fire in the metal bowl.
If this failed, she would die. If Sitchah got there first, she might also die, for Sitchah had failed her master and it was Maelys’s fault.
Taking a deep breath, she ran and dived through the chthonic fire. It seared all the way along her body, even to the soles of her feet in their boots, then the Tower of a Thousand Steps and the whole world vanished.
THIRTY-SIX
Nish was tearing out his thinning hair. He had talked himself hoarse trying to convince the mayors of Gendrigore to raise a militia, but they would not listen.
‘A dozen armies have broken on The Spine,’ Barquine kept saying, complacently quaffing his beer, ‘and the God-Emperor’s forces will meet the same fate.’
Nish could see the catastrophe approaching like a tsunami, but what more could he do? No outsider, not even the Deliverer, could raise an army in Gendrigore without the support of the mayors.
Tulitine maintained her watch from the cliffs, listening to the birds, bats and dolphins, and reporting on the progress of Jal-Nish’s forces, though it was not until they had begun to gather in Taranta that she drew Barquine aside. He listened, looking ever more grave, then set down his beer unfinished and shouted for the fastest runners in the town.
Scribes set down his message on a dozen tally sticks, and each runner set out in a different direction to carry the call to arms to the rest of the province, though it would take days for them to reach the provincial boundaries and pass the message to the other two provinces.
Before any runners had returned, however, all Gendrigore knew of the threat, for red-sailed ships could be seen out to sea, well clear of the menacing rocks and treacherous currents, watching the coast day and night.
‘What are they doing?’ said Hoshi, an apprentice potter. He was one of the few young men from Nish’s little militia who had shown any appetite for training and Nish was grooming him for leadership. He took every opportunity to teach Hoshi the art of war, though with limited success. He simply went straight for his opponent and whacked as hard as he could. A cheerfully unsubtle youth, he had no head for either strategy or tactics.
They were perched at the cliff edge by the fishers’ tripods, watching the enemy. Nish was peering through Barquine’s battered brass spyglass, the only one in all Gendrigore. He rubbed his eye with his scarred hand, winced, and slid the brass tubes further apart to focus better.
‘Spying on us. See them there, up in the basket at the top of the mainmast?’ He handed the spyglass to Hoshi.
He trained it on the figures at the top of the mast, and swung it towards the stern. ‘What’s that at the back?’
‘Where?’ Nish shaded his eyes and squinted. Something dull-black and leathery crouched there, though he could not make out what it was. �
�It’s not a flappeter.’ He held out his hand and Hoshi put the spyglass in it.
Nish focused, looked away then focused again. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. It looks like a bat, though no bat grows a tenth that size. Could it be a gigantic bladder-bat?’
The creature suddenly pulled its wings, which were very bat-like, right in and wrapped them about itself until it resembled a black ball the size of a beer barrel, though it did not look like a bladder-bat. ‘They’re lifting it onto something … it’s hard to make out in the shadow of the sails … looks like a javelard.’
‘What’s a javelard?’ said Hoshi, picking yellow potting clay out from under his fingernails.
He turned to smile at Gi, a sturdy, dark-haired young woman with a round, cheerful face. She had also trained hard these past days and had the blisters to prove it. She strode up, swinging a long ivory-wood staff which the town blacksmith had shod with brass at either end. She was a better tactician than Hoshi, though her gentle disposition made her a lesser soldier. She held back when she should have gone for the jugular.
‘A javelard is like a catapult for throwing heavy spears,’ said Nish.
The javelard snapped and the black beast was propelled hundreds of spans into the air, looping up then down like a cannonball, and flying directly at them.
‘Look out!’ cried Gi.
Nish scrambled to his feet and threw himself backwards as the ball-beast approached at frightening speed. When it was just a few spans away its wings unfurled and swung back like an arrowhead. A jet of brown vapour exploded from its posterior, propelling it at them like a rocket.
It had a feline head with long, vampiric teeth, and it went straight for Nish. He tried to weave out of the way, stumbled, and it would have got him had not Gi, after a momentary hesitation, cracked it over the side of the head with her staff.
It made a high-pitched chittering sound, rotated in its own length, and red bulb-like eyes extended an ell out of its head. Both eyes were fixed on Nish, who had the unnerving feeling that it knew who he was, or was remembering his image, to be shown to the nearest wisp-watcher as soon as it returned to the ship. That could not be allowed. His father must not learn that Nish was hiding here – he would definitely make war on Gendrigore then.