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

by Ian Irvine

  Yalkara went into a crouch, her fingers formed into blades. The Numinator whirled and scooped a handful of white fire from the pond.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ Yalkara said icily. ‘I brought chthonic fire to the Three Worlds, and I can make it do what I want.’

  ‘If only you dared!’ The Numinator shook her flame-covered fist in Yalkara’s face. ‘I’ve waited two centuries to bring you down.’

  Maelys clutched at her taphloid, feeling the painful thudding of her heart. If two such bitter enemies fought to the death, nothing on Noom would survive it.

  A very tall, strongly built man with frost-grey eyes limped forwards, staring hungrily. ‘You’re the Numinator? No wonder you hid yourself up here and never allowed me to see your face, since I’m the one person who could identify you, Maigraith.’

  Maelys knew the name from the Histories but could not remember which tale it came from.

  The Numinator stiffened. ‘I no longer use that name, Yggur. It died when Rulke was slain. I am the Numinator now.’

  Yggur was another legend. He had fought on Flydd’s side during the lyrinx war. Maelys took heart from it.

  ‘Numinator, then,’ said Yggur.

  ‘I owe you nothing,’ said the Numinator. ‘I never cared for you when we were together; you never met my needs.’ She allowed the excess flame to drip from her fingers into the pond. Yalkara slowly came upright.

  ‘And Rulke did,’ said Yggur stiffly. ‘That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?’ He swept an outstretched arm around the eyrie. ‘He’s been dead all this time but you can’t let him go.’

  ‘Why would I want to?’ said the Numinator. ‘He was everything to me, yet after he was slain, Yalkara, his lifelong enemy, stole his body and took it back to the void.’ She couldn’t maintain her self-control now; her anguish showed fleetingly.

  ‘Why were you lifelong enemies with Rulke?’ Yggur asked Yalkara. ‘I’ve always wondered about that.’

  ‘Some ancient feud, long forgotten,’ she said dismissively.

  Maelys didn’t believe her; Yalkara was hiding something.

  Flydd turned to the Numinator. ‘What is the purpose behind your bloodline project?

  ‘The Charon were cursed and going to extinction,’ said the Numinator. ‘I had nothing left of Rulke.’

  ‘You were pregnant to him,’ Yggur exclaimed.

  ‘A child wasn’t enough. I could not allow Rulke’s genius to be lost.’

  ‘And so began your downfall, and the ruin of Santhenar.’

  ‘The war ruined Santhenar; I did not start it.’

  ‘But you prolonged it indefinitely. Or at least the scrutators did, and you controlled them. The war should have been won in the first ten years, when the lyrinx were still few; and weak. Because of you it lasted a hundred and fifty years.’

  ‘My project took precedence. The moment I discovered I was with child, I thought of nothing save mating my offspring with another triune’s, to create a new human species with all of the Charon’s strengths and none of their weaknesses. A memorial to Rulke.’

  ‘What’s a triune?’ asked Maelys.

  No one answered.

  ‘I was there, remember?’ said Yggur, smouldering. ‘At the end of the Age of the Mirror, after Llian told his Great Tale of those times, you wanted to mate Karan and Llian’s firstborn child with yours.’

  ‘It was fitting,’ said the Numinator, her eyes glinting. ‘Our children were an almost perfect match.’

  ‘Why?’ said Maelys. Again, no one answered.

  ‘She was your friend,’ cried Yggur in a fury, ‘and it was obscene! You manipulated everyone weaker than you, as you were manipulated by Faelamor as a child. Karan refused you outright, but you would not give up your twisted plan.’

  ‘You know nothing about the matter,’ she said, standing very still.

  ‘On the contrary – after Karan’s and Llian’s deaths, I took the trouble to learn how she came to be driven to that terrible crime. All she wanted was to live a normal life with her family at Gothryme Manor, and in all the Histories no one deserved it more. But you would not allow it. You pestered her, harassed her, and when she continued to refuse you, you kidnapped Karan’s firstborn, Sulien, when she was just fourteen, and gave her to your thuggish son, Rulken.’

  ‘I had promised her to him,’ said the Numinator, as though that were justification enough.

  ‘You had no right!’ Yggur thundered. ‘But Karan stole her daughter back then hid all her children, so you destroyed Llian’s name as a Teller. You made him out to be Llian the Liar and had his Tale of the Mirror, the greatest and most truthful of all the Great Tales, banned, then rewritten by the scrutators.’

  Flydd’s head whipped around. Maelys had never seen him look so outraged. ‘You used us to turn a Great Tale into a lie?’

  The Numinator did not reply and Yggur went on. ‘Finally Karan could take no more. You drove her insane and, in that madness, she killed Llian and her children, and herself.’

  ‘Oh!’ whispered Maelys, cold with shock and barely able to take it in. The day was already too full, with love, with dreadful revelations, and with untimely and undeserved death. ‘How?’

  ‘One day, at dawn,’ said Yggur, ‘she hurled them from the top of the ruined city-tower of Shazmak, where they had been hiding from you, into the terrible flood of the mighty river Garr, which no one has ever survived. I questioned the witnesses, Idlis and Yetchah, two Whelm who had once served me.’

  ‘I also questioned them,’ said the Numinator. ‘Karan killed her family just to thwart me.’ She bit off each word. ‘She always resented me.’

  ‘I knew Karan well,’ said Yggur. ‘She was the best friend anyone could have had, and you destroyed her.’

  ‘I wish I’d known her,’ Maelys said softly. She felt a closer kinship with Karan, dead two hundred years, than with anyone here, for they were both linked by the Numinator’s monstrous scheme. If she was prepared to destroy a friend to get what she wanted, what would she do to Maelys?

  ‘I only wanted one of her children,’ said the Numinator. ‘She had three.’

  It was impossible to come to terms with such a wicked act, or with the Numinator’s justifying it as though it was her right. And now she was doing it again, she and Yalkara fighting over the fruit of Maelys’s body like dogs over a corpse. I will never let it happen, she thought. I’ll fight the whole world for what is mine.

  The taphloid burned between her breasts. Help! The Numinator cocked her head as if she had heard the cry as well, but her face froze and she turned away.

  Help! There it was again, stronger this time, and fleetingly Maelys had a vision of booted feet squelching through calf-deep mud. Who could it be? The taphloid cooled and something began to spin inside it, shaking it like a spinning top, before slowly running down.

  ‘So that’s what all this is about,’ Flydd was saying. ‘Karan thwarted you, so you took revenge on the world by creating the Council of Scrutators.’

  ‘It had nothing to do with revenge, Flydd,’ Yggur said wearily. ‘Maigraith and I were lovers once, and I know her better than anyone.’

  ‘You never knew me at all,’ she snapped. ‘That was your problem.’

  ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘though in my seven years as your prisoner I’ve worked out what you were up to down below.’

  ‘With the bloodline registers?’ Flydd squinted at Yggur through swollen eyelids.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Yggur. ‘When Karan thwarted you, Numinator, it only stiffened your resolve to find another way to achieve your goal, didn’t it?’

  She did not reply. Maelys watched her out of the corner of her eye, but could not tell what she might be thinking. More rotten ice fell, peppering them with fire-webbed fragments, though none touched Yalkara.

  ‘You devoted yourself to the mastery of your Arts over many years, Numinator,’ said Yggur, ‘until a time came when the guiding Council of Santhenar grew weak. You crushed it and set up your own, the Council of Scrutator
s.’

  ‘Why?’ Colm ground out.

  Maelys hadn’t noticed him in the shadows to her right. She gave him a tentative smile, but he returned a look of such cold fury that she flinched. Thief, he mouthed. He must have found out about Flydd taking the mimemule, and Colm was not a forgiving man.

  ‘I’m beginning to understand,’ said Flydd. ‘Maigraith – the Numinator – and Karan were incredibly rare people. They were both triune – they bore the blood of three of the four human species – and it gave them unique but very different talents.’

  ‘And by breeding their children together,’ said Yggur, ‘the Numinator hoped to create quartine children; ones having the blood of all four human kinds. If any quartines survived, and weren’t cursed by the madness that is the fate of most triune, they might become the foundation of a new human species, one greater than all the others put together. That was the Numinator’s goal, as an eternal memorial to Rulke, and she has never given it up.’

  Was the Numinator one of the mad ones, Maelys wondered. If so, it was a most particular, directed and obsessive kind of madness, completely lacking in empathy for others.

  ‘No species crafted by a mere human could ever equal our kind,’ sneered Yalkara.

  ‘Yet your kind will be extinct when you die,’ snapped the Numinator.

  ‘I don’t understand why you needed the scrutators,’ said Maelys.

  The Numinator did not reply.

  ‘What happened to your child, Numinator?’ Maelys persisted. She had to know. ‘Why didn’t you –?’

  ‘She had twins,’ said Yggur. ‘Illiel and –’

  ‘No one else tells my story,’ grated the Numinator. ‘I bore twin sons from Rulke’s seed. Illiel came first and I named him for my Faellem father, Galgilliel. Illiel was small and golden-skinned, very Faellem in appearance, and of course I did not take to him.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Maelys.

  ‘Maigraith was brought up by Faelamor, and held in her thrall all her life,’ said Yggur, ‘and she has always resented her Faellem heritage. You need look no further to understand why she’s the way she is –’

  The Numinator flicked her fingers at Yggur and he doubled over, struggling for breath. ‘But next,’ she continued as though he had not interrupted, ‘after three days of the most awful labour, came Rulken.’ Her stern, sad face lit up in memory. ‘He was big and dark and strong, the image of his father, and from birth I taught him that he was the chosen son of a chosen people.’

  ‘He was a spoiled, angry brute,’ said Yggur, thin-lipped.

  ‘Karan robbed him of what was his by right – her daughter!’ the Numinator said, then faltered. ‘But the curse of the Charon continued in him. Rulken spread his seed widely but died young and only ever produced one child. Unfortunately, Gilhaelith proved unsuitable.’

  ‘Gilhaelith?’ frowned Yggur. ‘The tetrarch we knew, who died – turned to crystal – at the end of the war?’

  ‘Tetrarch is another word for quartine,’ said the Numinator. ‘Gilhaelith took that title to mock my failure. He was flawed; the curse was in him too.’

  ‘So you were forced to turn to Illiel,’ said Yggur, ‘the son you’d scorned and sent back to live with his own kind.’

  ‘What kind?’ said Flydd.

  ‘Not all of the Faellem returned to Tallallame at the end of the Time of the Mirror,’ said Yggur. ‘Some remained where they had lived for thousands of years, in the endless cold forests of the south.’

  ‘Really?’ said Flydd. ‘How come the scrutators didn’t know that?’

  ‘I kept it from you,’ said the Numinator. ‘I already knew their bloodlines.’

  ‘Illiel was a quiet, scholarly man, devoted to his mancery, though he never employed it on any useful task,’ said the Numinator. ‘He refused me, and with all the Faellem arrayed behind him I dared not try to take him back. He had only one child, a daughter, Liel, but he hid her from me and by the time I tracked her down it was too late.’

  ‘You mean she was too old to bear children,’ said Yggur, ‘even if you could have found a suitable triune mate.’

  ‘How come you were still fertile after thousands of years,’ Maelys said to Yalkara, ‘yet the Numinator’s granddaughter was not, after, what, fifty years? It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘We Charon are not as other species,’ Yalkara said imperiously. ‘We might only be fertile once in five hundred years, and then only with the right mate. But once we know it,’ she said with a chilly glance at the Numinator, ‘no force in the universe can keep us apart.’

  ‘But you did not give up,’ Yggur continued to the Numinator as though the exchange had not taken place.

  ‘I never give up,’ said the Numinator. ‘I was continuing the breeding project that Rulke began long ago, in a last attempt to save something of his kind. I owed it to him to complete it.’

  ‘There was one other way to create a quartine,’ said Yggur, evidently thinking aloud. ‘Though it would be agonisingly difficult. The Charon, Faellem and Aachim rarely interbred with old humans, but it had happened from time to time and those blendings had many descendants. Few would be suitable, yet if you could assemble a bloodline registry covering everyone on Santhenar, you might, with immense labour, identify which blendings to breed together, and rebreed their triune offspring. It could take hundreds of years to produce the perfect quartines you needed, but you had infinite patience as well as long life.’

  ‘Do you mean that the sole purpose of the scrutators,’ cried Maelys, ‘was to compile the bloodline registers for the Numinator? But … thousands of people must have suffered and died at their hands.’

  ‘Tens of thousands,’ said Flydd harshly, clearly mortified at how he had been used, ‘and hundreds of thousands more died in the senselessly prolonged war. And I played a part in it. I thought I was doing the right thing, aiding the war, yet all my life I’ve been a pawn in a greater game –’

  ‘It was no game. It was the noblest purpose of all,’ said the Numinator, ‘though none of you would have the vision to understand it.’

  ‘There’s not a drop of nobility in you, Numinator,’ cried Maelys. ‘You’re evil; sick!’

  Yellow light shot from the Numinator’s hand and would have burned her eyes out had not Yggur deflected it with his right bracelet. It fizzed; his wrist sizzled; smoke rose from it and he thrust it into the shin-deep ice slurry on the floor, grimly enduring the pain. ‘Maelys, be quiet!’

  ‘So that’s what all the monstrosities in jars are, down below,’ said Colm, shaking his head. ‘And the inhuman creatures in the ice coffins – failed breedings.’

  ‘And the breeding factories were yours as well,’ Flydd said, sparks flying from his eyes. ‘They were set up so enough children would be born to replace everyone killed in the war, but that never rang true to me. The women in the breeding factories never mated with the same man twice, and that was your doing too.’ His voice rose; he was shaking. ‘Everything the scrutators did was a lie!’

  ‘The flaws in your character are gaping, Flydd,’ said Colm. ‘You scrutators ruthlessly used everyone else, yet you can’t bear to discover that you were duped.’

  ‘It was the most far-reaching scheme of all time,’ said the Numinator matter-of-factly. ‘The bloodline registers had revealed a host of blendings; the breeding factories were my way of screening out those few worthy candidates from thousands of useless ones. They were fodder for the war, while those who showed promise were sent to me.’

  ‘Where you callously bred them to produce the monstrosities down below,’ said Flydd. ‘So what went wrong, Numinator? You’d thought of everything; you’d perfected your plan over a hundred and fifty years. Why did it fail?’

  ‘I was so close,’ said the Numinator, tight-mouthed. She wrapped her arms around herself, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. ‘Twenty-five years ago I finally saw born two perfect triune children, and all I had to do was wait until they grew old enough –’

  ‘Then mat
e them like cattle in the barn!’ Maelys burst out.

  ‘I would not have treated them so crudely,’ said the Numinator. ‘They were worthy; they were precious and I did not want to damage them in any way. I planned to bring them together at the critical time, and then their offspring – their perfect, quartine children – would be mine. I came so close. Ten years ago the girl was within weeks of bringing forth her first child when … when …’ Her face crumpled and she covered it with her hands.

  ‘When the war with the lyrinx ended,’ said Yggur, ‘and brilliant, foolish Tiaan, who had never come to terms with her own childhood in a breeding factory, destroyed every node on Santhenar. A bitter irony indeed.’

  ‘A savage blizzard swept across Noom that night, and it raged for weeks,’ whispered the Numinator, shivering as though it was blowing through her eyrie now. ‘I could not use my Art; I was lucky to survive. Had it not been for my loyal Whelm I would have frozen to death.’

  ‘They were my loyal Whelm, once,’ said Yggur, staring over the barricade at the silent gathering on the stairs. ‘Though their oaths proved hollow when a better master came along.’

  ‘They were Rulke’s first of all,’ said the Numinator, ‘and once he escaped the Nightland their oath to him took precedence. Besides, they could have no better master than I, and they knew it.’ She paused, then continued, her eyes wide in the horror of her memories. ‘After the blizzard passed, I discovered that the hundreds of useful blendings I had so painstakingly gathered from the corners of the globe, the handful of worthy triunes, and my perfect pair with their unborn quartine, had frozen to death. I had lost everything.’

  ‘Yet you did not give up,’ said Yggur. Was that a trace of admiration in his voice? Surely he wasn’t falling under her spell? ‘You never despaired.’

  ‘I despaired many times,’ said the Numinator, ‘but how could I give up? I began from scratch, though it was far harder this time, with no scrutators to do my work for me, and little power –’

  ‘Until you enticed me here,’ said Yggur, ‘knowing that my mancery came from an older Art, independent of the nodes and not destroyed when they were lost. Your Whelm bound me with these bracelets, to tap my power for yourself.’ He held up his wrists. The bracelets were somewhat corroded now, but still looked strong.