The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (44 page)

Flydd came up beside her. ‘Not glass, but ice.’

Maelys shivered. ‘How can anyone live in such a bleak
place?’

‘It would take a particular kind of person. Though I dare
say the tower is a lot warmer on the inside.’

‘But it’s ice!’

‘So is an igloo, yet people live comfortably in them all
winter. Come.’

He stopped by the arch, though, momentarily looking anxious.

‘Xervish?’ said Maelys.

‘Even the faintest of my scars throb at the memories,’ he
said softly. ‘The pain permeates every cell and nerve. Not even renewal could
erase the memory of what the Numinator did to me, and one day I’ll make it
suffer an equal torment.’

‘Xervish?’ she repeated, alarmed. Renewal had definitely
changed him; these days she seldom saw the tough but kindly old man she’d been
so taken with on the plateau.

With an effort, he unclenched his jaw. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t
allow personal difficulties to distract me from what we came here to do. Let’s
go through.’

She caught his arm. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to go around? I
don’t like the feel of the arch.’

‘I’m not going to slink in like a jackal,’ he said, striding
through.

Maelys held her breath, just in case the arch was enchanted
to keep people out, but nothing happened. She followed him down the slope,
struggling to stay on her feet on the icy path. Flydd’s head darted around at
every sound, every shift in the wind eddying across the knotted rock. Despite
his brave words, he was frightened. He must be afraid that the Numinator would
torture him again.

It was darker on the valley floor; mist hung around them,
cold and dank, obscuring the tower and the way ahead. Maelys pulled her furs
more tightly about her but could not keep the chill out. No wind stirred the
air, and they plodded towards the frozen edge of the lake, their boots breaking
through humps of crusted snow to the ice beneath.

At the edge, Flydd stopped. The ice on the lake looked as
solid as stone here, though an irregular ring of clear water encircled the
island. No, the ring of water, and its boundary with the ice, was in constant
motion. Fresh ice was rapidly extending out from some edges, while at others it
was melting just as quickly. Little bulges and embayments were constantly being
created and destroyed as ice and clear water swept around the island, ice
sometimes touching the inner shore momentarily before collapsing into
treacherous water again.

‘How are we supposed to get across?’ said Maelys. ‘There’s
no boat, no bridge …’

‘It’s a puzzle,’ said Flydd. ‘The patterns of water and ice
are meant to keep intruders out, and we’ll have to solve it to get across.’

Maelys was no good at puzzles, so she studied the tower and
waited for him to find a way. Its sides were decorated with arching, pointed
crests and horns of ice. The place looked bleak and forbidding.

‘All right,’ said Flydd at length.

He led them out in a meandering line on the hard ice, which
was almost black, all the way to the shifting grey boundary that marked the
freezing and thawing inner barrier, like a moat around the island and the Tower
of a Thousand Steps. There he stopped, frowning.

‘Flydd?’ said Maelys, looking up at the top of the tower
anxiously.

‘Not now!’

He was still standing there half an hour later, his head
sweeping this way and that, following the shifting patterns, and his lips
moving all the while. Despite the wonderful fur-lined boots, Maelys’s feet were
getting ever colder. She couldn’t feel her toes any more, though she could
sense something at the top of the tower – a cold, hard presence that
surely must have seen them ages ago. Why had she convinced Flydd to come here?
She was completely out of her depth. She turned to look at Colm, still twenty
paces back. He was staring at the cracked ice beneath his feet, as motionless
as ever.

‘I have it!’ said Flydd. ‘Come on, and keep right at my
heels. You too, Colm.’

Colm looked up at him blankly, then shuffled forwards.

‘Ready?’ said Flydd. ‘One, two, three, then run with me, all
right?’

‘Yes,’ said Maelys, gulping.

‘One, two, three.’

He ran out towards the edge and off the hard black ice onto
the thin grey stuff, which rocked beneath him. Maelys leapt after him, her numb
feet hitting the ground as stiffly as wooden legs. She could see right through
the ice she was standing on, and what was that gliding through the water below
it?

Flydd caught her by the arm and yanked hard. ‘Run, you
bloody little fool! Run as though your life depends on it; for surely it does.’

She ran after him. Just ahead, the berg they were on thinned
to nothing, and beyond that was a patch of open water, about a span across. If
she fell into it she would die, even if they got her out, for the cold would
stop her heart. Flydd sprang high, rocking the berg beneath them. Maelys
followed, landing a little shorter and skidding on slick ice. She just caught
herself before she slid off the thawing side into the water, let out a squeal
at her narrow escape, and pounded on.

Flydd was thumping up a shallow rise, but at the top he
propped and turned sharply to the left. Maelys almost went over, for the rise
ended in a crevasse where the berg was splitting in two, and this gap was spans
across, too far to jump. She scrambled down and raced after him, jumped another
gap, then another and another.

Flydd was constantly twisting and turning, and sometimes
doubling back on himself, never running in the same direction for more than a
few paces. It was like a competition as well as a race, for as fast as he ran,
the bergs were forming in front of him and thawing behind. Ice a third of a
span thick simply dissolved away in seconds, and ice of similar thickness
formed in an instant on otherwise clear water.

‘One false step,’ he panted, ‘one miscalculation, and we’re
gone.’ His cheeks were red and his eyes were glowing. He was exhilarated by the
contest.

He went skidding sideways, then raced around a boss of ice
like the dome of a citadel, emerged on the other side and tried desperately to
stop, but slid down a glassy slope towards an uncrossable gap. He could not
stop; the ice was so slick that he might have skated on it. He was going to end
up in the water, and so was she.

At the last second Flydd propped on a chunk of nodular ice,
managed to turn towards a slightly narrower gap, though one that was still far
too wide to leap, and sprang for all his might. He soared high in the air and
Maelys’s heart was in her mouth – he was going to land in the water.

At the last instant the water froze beneath him, just as he
must have predicted; he struck the little berg with both feet, rocking it in
the water, stumbled, then sprang for the berg on the other side of the gap.

‘Haaaiiiii!’ he roared in triumph, raising his fist to the
sky, then ran on without looking back.

Maelys followed him across, her heart pounding and her knees
weak. She was sweating in her furs already. The race went on for another few
minutes, and Flydd nearly went into the water many times. Maelys had more
narrow escapes than she cared to think about before she finally lurched off the
last recrystallised berg onto solid ground and fell to her knees. Shortly Colm
came after them, lathered in freezing sweat, and stopped twenty paces away.

‘That was brilliant, Flydd,’ she said, panting. ‘Or is the
Numinator’s power fading?’

‘It isn’t,’ said Flydd.

‘Oh! You mean it let us in?’

‘Do you really think the Numinator became so powerful, and
survived so long, without knowing when there were trespassers in its domain?’

Above them loomed the monstrous ice tower, topped with
blade-like laths of ice towering into the brittle heavens. The low sun, picking
its way through gaps in a lead-grey overcast, threw glittering reflections off
every crystal face. Shielding her eyes, she peered between her fingers. The
Tower of a Thousand Steps was magnificent; awe-inspiring; terrible, and surely
its master must echo it.

‘How can any one person need such a vast dwelling?’ she
whispered.

‘The Numinator has very great needs,’ Flydd intoned. ‘
Terrible, desperate needs
.’

Maelys swallowed hard.

Colm broke his long silence. ‘You should not have come here.
You will not get out alive.’

She stared at him. ‘Don’t you mean,
we
will not get out alive?’

‘What do I care whether I live or die?’

Maelys wanted to shake him. There wasn’t a trace left of the
Colm she’d once admired. I’ve lost plenty too, she thought, but you don’t see
me whining about it all the time. Maelys bit her tongue. Had she just seen
little Fyllis fall to her death, and been able to do nothing about it, and
blamed her companions, she might have felt the same.

‘We’ve got to go on, no matter what,’ she said. ‘There’s no
other way.’

‘Hush.’ Flydd had his head up like a dog sniffing the air. A
shudder shook his muscular frame, then he turned towards the arched opening in
the blue ice on which the tower was founded. ‘That will be our way in.’

A path of crushed ice curved down towards the opening. The
razor-crested ice ridges hemmed it in on either side, rising ever higher as the
path fell.

Flydd threw his shoulders back, raised his chin and strode
down the path, hiding his anxiety. Maelys waited for Colm to follow, but he was
staring into space again, so she headed after Flydd, almost running to keep up.
It wasn’t until they’d gone a few hundred paces that she realised she was
treading in his footsteps, keeping directly behind him as if he could shield
her from view.

‘The Numinator’s eyes are everywhere,’ he said without
breaking stride.

She stopped, hand pressed against her thudding heart, then
continued. The entrance was a tall open rectangle at least three times her
height. Within, every surface glowed with the blue of thick ice, though Maelys
could make out nothing but straight-sided shapes fading into darkness.

She took a step, stopped, then another, until she stood
directly underneath the lintel of the doorway, and looked up sharply. Nothing
moved within her field of view. The opening was made of flat ice so smooth that
it might have been freshly planed, but inside, where it was sheltered from the
wind, frost needles as long as nails grew from every surface. The drifts of
snow on the featureless floor were untracked.

‘It’s empty.’ Colm’s voice showed a trace of animation for
the first time since his sister’s death. ‘The Numinator must be gone.’

‘The Numinator is still here,’ said Flydd, his eyes darting
again. ‘Were
he
,
she
or
it
gone, the tower
would have collapsed into a formless rubble of ice.’

‘The destruction of the nodes might have destroyed the
Numinator,’ said Maelys.

‘That tragedy undoubtedly weakened it,’ said Flydd, ‘but
would have angered it too. Beware! This tower is maintained by the Art and,
whoever the Numinator is, its power is far greater than mine.’

‘Then why did we come here?’ said Maelys. ‘How can we hope
to prevail?’

They went in slowly, the crusted ice crunching underfoot,
until the entrance could no longer be seen. The spaces were dimly lit by light
transmitted through the ice and all had an eerie grandeur, a majestic
simplicity, but there was something vaguely familiar about the place, too.
Maelys was studying the glyphs etched deep into the ice along a wall when she
realised what they were.

‘Xervish, these characters are also like the ones we saw on
the obelisk. Does that mean this place is … Charon?’

‘The Charon are extinct, I told you; had they built it,
here, the ice would have collapsed long ago.’ Flydd’s voice was a trifle
hoarse.

‘Like the Nightland was supposed to?’

He did not reply to that, but went on, ‘The Numinator may
not be human. And if not, that would explain something I’ve always wondered
about.’

‘What’s that?’ said Maelys.

‘How it has lived so long. We know it’s at least a hundred
and seventy years old, for it was a cunning, experienced sorcerer when it took
on the original Council of Santhenar, and it was powerful enough to defeat the
combined mancery of the greatest mages of all. Only the Charon, Faellem and
Aachim were naturally long-lived, but both Charon and Faellem are gone.’

‘The Numinator must be Aachim, then,’ said Maelys. ‘There
are still plenty of Aachim on Santhenar.’

‘No Aachim would decorate their architecture with Charon
characters.’

‘Why not?’ said Colm, who had come up behind them.

‘Because a hundred Charon took the Aachim’s world from them,
and held them in thrall for thousands of years. They hated their masters with a
passion we could never understand, therefore the Numinator can’t be Aachim,
either.’

After walking through one featureless ice hall after
another, they entered a large rectangular room, a good hundred spans long and
wide, and at least ten spans high. Its walls were lined with shelves,
stretching from floor to ceiling, that had been formed from clear ice, and upon
them stood row upon row of large books, like merchants’ ledgers, bound in red
or brown leather.

‘Ah!’ said Flydd. It was a deeply felt sigh of
understanding.

‘What?’ said Maelys.

He didn’t answer, nor did he go to the shelves. Flydd stood
inside the doorway, staring towards the far end of the room and wearing an
enigmatic smile. Maelys waited for a minute or two, but when neither he nor
Colm moved she went towards the nearest shelves; she had to satisfy her
curiosity.

To her surprise, she could read the writing down the spines
of the ledgers. The nearest one said,
Bloodline
Register 13,809, Thurkad
. The ledgers on the shelves nearby bore different
numbers, but all had the same place name, for Thurkad had once been the
greatest city in the world.