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

by Ian Irvine

  Maelys looked down at him lovingly. His skin was so fine and pale, and the lines of chthonic fire that had been flickering on her skin now moved in ghostly patterns all over him. He seemed so contented and peaceful that she couldn’t bear to wake him, but he was in terrible danger. She went to the front door, eased it open and looked out. And jumped.

  The Numinator was not far from the gate, standing with her head cocked to one side, staring at the cottage, though Maelys did not think she could see it. The stiletto was still in her hand and yellow fumes were writhing up from its hilt. Heart crashing in her chest, Maelys tried to ease the door closed, but at the movement the Numinator’s head shot around and she saw her; saw everything. By opening the door, Maelys must have broken Emberr’s enchantment and revealed his cottage.

  She leapt backwards, slammed the door and tried to lock it, but there was no lock or bolt. She ran to Emberr, shook him and hissed into his ear, ‘Quick! The Numinator is here; she knows where you live. I’m sorry; I’m sorry!’

  Maelys ran back, clothes in hand, and put her back against the door. She was trying to scramble into her pants when a blow on the front door forced it open and sent her skidding across the floor.

  The Numinator stepped in, and there was a peculiar light in her eyes, an inner glow that Maelys could not quite reconcile with the satisfaction of imminent revenge. She got up, gathered her fallen garments and backed down the hall to where she and Emberr had lain together. The Numinator followed her in. She glanced at Maelys, then at Emberr who lay naked on the rugs with his back to her, dimly illuminated by the white fire on his skin. The Numinator took a deep, shuddering breath; the stiletto hung loosely from her hand as if forgotten. What was going on?

  Maelys dressed hastily, her face flaming. The Numinator walked around Emberr, studying him in a way that made Maelys smoulder. How dare she look at her man so! The Numinator crouched to look at his face, then gasped and rocked back on her heels, the stiletto rolling across the floor towards the fireplace. Maelys watched it all the way, wondering if she could dive on it before the Numinator realised what she was doing. She was too far away, but if she edged along the wall a bit …

  ‘So like!’ the Numinator whispered. ‘He is so very, very like.’ She stood up and her stern face was ablaze with an incandescent joy that stripped decades off her and revealed a trace of the stern beauty she had been long ago.

  ‘Like who?’ said Maelys, not understanding.

  ‘Rulke, of course. My Rulke; my precious, only love, who died in my arms. He was bigger, of course, and darker, but in other respects – oh, Rulke, Rulke!’ A tear winked in her left eye but the Numinator dashed it away. ‘He’s gone forever, but now, out of two hundred and twenty years of failure I see a new and better way – the perfect way. And Emberr has been here all this time, preserved in youth by the Nightland, never ageing, waiting for me to come. If only I had known of him before.’

  Chills radiated out from the centre of Maelys’s back. This didn’t make sense, but whatever the Numinator had in mind for Emberr, it wasn’t good; Maelys could feel the little hairs on her arms and legs standing on end. ‘He was waiting for his mother to return, but she could not. Why not, if she was so powerful that she could create this place, and maintain it for all this time?’

  ‘I know who his mother was,’ said the Numinator through her teeth. ‘I can see her in his face. It can only be Yalkara!’

  ‘Yalkara?’ said Maelys. ‘The Charon from the Histories?’

  ‘The same. She pretended to treat me kindly after Rulke was killed, but I now know that she was my enemy – she stole Rulke’s body and took it back to the void! Yalkara, who claimed all down a thousand ages that she hated Rulke, and that their clans had been enemies since time began. And now,’ she said savagely, ‘I learn that she mated with him while he was in the Nightland. Mated with my Rulke, and created this beautiful child here.’

  Rage shook her; she slammed her clenched fists against her sides, and for a second her eyes rolled madly, but the age-old self-control reasserted itself and she went on, ‘But she failed, and now Emberr is mine – to fulfil my long-held purpose, and revenge myself on her at the same time.’

  What could she mean? Maelys couldn’t think; couldn’t work it out. All she knew was that Emberr was in danger, and she could not allow it.

  ‘Oh, life is sweet!’ said the Numinator. ‘Life is very sweet. Together he and I are going to create a new species of humanity – one with all the strengths and none of the weaknesses of Charon, Faellem, Aachim or old humans.’

  Was she mad? It certainly sounded insane. ‘Rulke is dead, Numinator.’

  ‘But I have his son.’

  The Numinator thrust Maelys out of the way, and again she felt that she was utterly insignificant, even worthless. Only then did the obvious strike her – the Numinator wasn’t planning to kill Emberr at all, but to mate with him to fulfil her age-old plan, whatever it was. But if the Numinator had been Rulke’s lover too, she had to be hundreds of years old, since he had been dead for two hundred and twenty years. This was sick; disgusting; depraved. Maelys wanted to claw her face to shreds, but the Numinator had the poisoned stiletto. Maelys had to be careful, wait for an opportunity, then strike ruthlessly.

  The Numinator went to her knees again, reached out to Emberr and gently stroked the hair off his brow. ‘So like,’ she repeated, ‘though softer; gentler. Rulke had a hard life and he had to be as adamant to survive.’ She touched his cheek with her fingertips. ‘You’re cold, Emberr, so very, very cold.’

  She flicked her fingers at the fire and it sprang to life, then took Emberr’s right hand in hers, rubbing it, but after a few seconds went so still that she seemed turned to stone. Worms crawled up Maelys’s backbone. What was the matter?

  A shudder racked the Numinator; she felt Emberr’s throat; pushed up one eyelid with a finger; laid her ear against his bare chest, on which the last trails of chthonic fire were slowly winking out, like a life.

  ‘No!’ Maelys whispered. ‘Emberr?’

  What could the matter be? She went slowly towards him. Her muscles had gone stiff; she could barely force them to move, and it felt as though every hair on her head was standing up, writhing in horror for what had happened here.

  ‘Dead!’ the Numinator shrieked, letting his head fall with a thump.

  Maelys wanted to strike her down for treating him so rudely. He couldn’t be dead, he was just deeply asleep. She tried to push the Numinator out of the way and was slapped across the face so hard that it knocked her sideways.

  Maelys snapped; she threw herself at the Numinator, clawing at her face. She had to get to Emberr. He couldn’t be dead; he was just cold from lying on the floor, and if she could only hold him in her arms the way he’d held her, she knew she could make him better again.

  The Numinator thrust her back against the wall, holding her away with the Art. ‘You murdering little bitch!’ she said, biting off every word and spitting it in Maelys’s face. ‘You did this deliberately, just to thwart me.’

  ‘I love him,’ Maelys whispered. ‘You came here to kill him, and now you blame me?’

  ‘Kill him!’ cried the Numinator. ‘I came to test him.’

  That didn’t make sense either. ‘W-what for?’

  ‘Fertility, of course. I didn’t know who he was, but since he’d been in the Nightland all this time, there was a faint possibility he was Rulke’s … though I never dreamt it could have been with another Charon – with her!’

  ‘Why not?’ Maelys said dazedly.

  ‘Rulke and Yalkara hated each other. And on Aachan, most Charon had proven tragically sterile. They were becoming extinct. But I thought, just maybe, here …’

  She picked up the stiletto, squeezed a yellow drop of what Maelys had thought to be poison onto a small white disc, and bent over Emberr’s middle. Shortly she rose, holding the disc carefully. The yellow drop went white, then colourless, then in an instant changed to a brilliant carmine. Again that racking s
hudder from the Numinator, and the quivering indrawn breath.

  ‘Fertile – massively so.’ A tear formed in the corner of her eye. ‘And you robbed me. You killed him.’ She stood up straight, forced the emotion down and became the icily controlled Numinator once more.

  Maelys pushed past her and went to Emberr. He was really cold now and his open eyes were glassy. She put her head on his bare chest and felt nothing: no rise and fall, no heartbeat. He was dead. She slumped to the floor, dazed, numb, lost.

  She couldn’t take it in, much less that the Numinator should believe she’d murdered him. She crouched over his body. How could it be? He’d been awake after they’d finished making love. He’d held her in his arms, rocking her tenderly to sleep. He’d spoken to her, though she’d been so drowsy she couldn’t remember what he’d said.

  The Numinator sprang at her, the stiletto upraised and her wrist wreathed in yellow fumes. Maelys saw her coming but couldn’t focus; couldn’t react; too late she tried to swerve out of the way but the stiletto caught her in the fleshy part of the left shoulder. It was so sharp that she barely felt it pierce her until the yellow fluid began to burn, spreading in a red-hot line down her arm. Sweat burst out on her forehead and the soles of her feet; she slipped and fell down.

  The Numinator stood over her, her face a frozen mask, then bent and raised the knife again, as if to stab Maelys in the neck. She tried to scramble out of the way but her sweaty palms kept slipping on the floor.

  At the moment the shining, hollow point of the ice stiletto was about to tear through her throat, the Numinator twitched it aside and bent over Emberr again, studying his naked body in a calculating way.

  ‘What if a child should come of their union?’ she mused, even more controlled. Pushing Maelys against the wall, the Numinator felt her belly. ‘It’s the right time of the month, I see, and it is clear that she was a virgin, so there can be no doubt any child would be his. Ahh, but the potion is inimical to new life!’

  She sprang at Maelys, threw her onto her back, squatted over her and thrust the point of the stiletto into her shoulder wound. Maelys screamed; she couldn’t help it this time.

  The Numinator put her lips to the hilt of the ice stiletto and began to suck and spit the yellow, fuming potion onto the floor, where it fizzed like water on a hotplate. Maelys’s bright red blood began to ooze, thread-like, up through the hollow stiletto into its hilt, followed by blood that was a murky yellow-brown. When the oozing blood turned red again the Numinator wrenched the stiletto out of the wound and stabbed it into Maelys’s inner arm, near the elbow.

  She sucked the potion from there as well until red blood reappeared, then did the same at Maelys’s wrist and the back of her hand, before casting the stiletto aside. It shattered on the floor, making a small puddle of icy blood there.

  The Numinator wiped blood off her lips, smiled and extended her hand to Maelys. ‘Come. We are going home now.’

  ‘I have no home,’ Maelys managed to gasp.

  ‘My home is your home. We have nine months to get to know each other.’

  FORTY-SIX

  The next two days were a nightmare of mud, mosquitoes, rain, exhaustion and diarrhoea so bad that Nish felt his bowels were dissolving, then more mud, and food which grew steadily worse with every meal. A third of his men had dysentery and he’d had to leave another thirty-five at the previous camp, for they were too ill to walk. The militia numbered just over five hundred now, counting Boobelar’s drunken and abusive eighty, but at the current rate Nish would be lucky to have two hundred and fifty capable of fighting by the time they reached the pass. If they ever did.

  They waded through mud, ate in mud, even slept in it. The remaining bags of flour and nut meal were threaded with black and green mould like smelly old cheeses; the haunches of meat were covered in a layer of grey slime and smelled worse each day; the onions and garlic were sprouting from their centres yet rotting on the outsides, and what was left of their other food was also on the turn.

  Though they’d been on short rations since the seventh day, three-quarters of their supplies were gone. Nish now faced the terrifying prospect of engaging the enemy with only two or three days’ food left, and still they hadn’t reached Blisterbone. He felt that they were crawling up a monstrous quagmire-coated treadmill, to nowhere. In his worst moments, he doubted that their guide had ever crossed The Spine.

  It was the most inhospitable place in the world, and he now understood why it had protected Gendrigore for so long. His only consolation was that his father’s army would be struggling too, for the southern climb was even steeper and more rugged and, churned by the hard boots of thousands of soldiers, their track would become an even deeper wallow.

  The only man untroubled by the conditions was Curr, whose wiry legs drove him ever upward, even after everyone else had collapsed. Despite his earlier words he was often well ahead, scouting, and sometimes Nish did not see him for a day, though he always returned as the cooks were dishing up the evening’s ghastly meal. With his light weight and flat feet Curr skated over the mud wallows into which everyone else plunged to their thighs, and his leathery skin, which was always plastered with mud, resisted the attacks of all but the most aggressive mosquitoes.

  But finally they were only a league from their destination; when the clouds cleared Nish could see the snow-capped peaks of The Spine, and made out a dip between them that was the pass. On its left flank stood an ominous white peak, shaped like an over-curving thorn.

  ‘Time to camp,’ said Nish, for his bowels were bubbling and he was desperate for relief, however temporary. ‘If we start before dawn tomorrow and go hard in the moonlight we can reach the pass just after sunrise.’

  Curr came sliding down the slope, so covered with mud lumps that he looked like a skinny, warty toad. More bad news, Nish felt sure.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he snapped, for Curr had disappeared before they had broken camp that morning and, as usual, hadn’t bothered to tell him.

  The guide skidded to a stop, his chest heaving. The column came to a halt behind Nish and he heard them flopping to the ground. No soldier wasted a moment in standing where he could sit, or sitting when he could lie flat on his back in the mire. There was no sound save for mud plopping to the ground all around Curr. His eyes were red and his reek was worse than ever.

  He took a deep breath, met Nish’s eyes, and said, ‘The enemy is at the pass. We’ll have to turn back.’

  ‘You saw them?’ Nish said stupidly. Curr was an experienced scout. Of course he’d seen them.

  Pain jagged through his bowels. Nish ran awkwardly behind a tree and got there just in time. No one took any notice; most of the militia were suffering just as badly. He hobbled out again. ‘Where are they, Curr?’

  Curr grinned. No matter how bad the food, he ate it with gusto and never suffered for it. ‘Must’ve just topped the pass. Saw three of them among the rocks, climbin’ up to the lookout where they can see down. Two more standin’ guard.’

  ‘But they didn’t see you?’

  ‘Made sure of that.’ Curr scratched his backside, dislodging a mud lump the size of a flounder. ‘Crawled up along the lee side of a fallen log.’

  ‘Leaving a trail they can’t possibly miss as soon as they search the area.’

  ‘Covered it with fallen leaves. Not a fool, Nish.’

  ‘So we can’t attack the pass. We’ll have to go back and find a place we can defend.’

  Nish knew it was hopeless. The enemy’s scouts would soon find them and, with so many men, quickly overwhelm them. He was leading the militia to certain death, and he would die with them.

  Unless Father turns up at the very end, he thought bitterly, striding over their corpses to take me back, just as he did last time. And the time before, when beautiful Irisis – No! He wasn’t going down that path again. Father never gives up, and this time I’ve walked right into his trap, as he knew I would from the moment he discovered I was in Gendrigore. He allowed his armies a
nd fleets to be seen so I would rush off like the precipitate fool I am, right into the trap.

  Once more he saw himself, arse-up over the rock with Boobelar whaling the life out of him with the flat of his sword. Fool! Failure! But this time Nish wasn’t going to give way to his nagging self-doubt. He had been a great leader once and he could be again, as soon as he exorcised this particular demon.

  ‘Or … you could go up the back way,’ said Curr with a cunning sideways glance at Nish, but then shook his head. ‘No, forget it; can’t be done.’

  Nish believed him. A thousand years of history could hardly be wrong, and if retreating meant a slow death, attacking the pass was the quick and brutal version.

  ‘What are you suggesting, Curr?’

  The guide began shaping mud with his fingers, mounding it into a peak-studded, precipice-bounded mountain chain to represent this section of The Spine. He sharpened its cliffs and ridges with a filthy fingernail, pared them even steeper with the point of his knife, and finally made a notch in The Spine to represent Blisterbone Pass.

  ‘Just here,’ said Curr, pointing to a tiny bowl high on the left, or eastern, side of the white-thorn mountain looming high above the pass. The bowl was encircled by knife-edged ridges running up to The Spine. ‘Told you at the beginnin’, didn’t I? There’s a second pass – Liver-Leech.’ He made an insignificant nick in The Chain above the bowl. ‘It’s never used; too steep and dangerous, but desperate men might cross there and circle round the mountain to take Blisterbone from the south. Enemy won’t be expecting that.’

  ‘How do you know?’ said Nish.

  ‘No one knows about the other pass.’

  ‘You know about it. And Barquine also mentioned it, as I recall, so Father’s scouts will, too.’