The Curse on the Chosen (The Song of the Tears Book 2) (66 page)

‘Go before me, both of you,’ said Yalkara. ‘Keep your hands
where I can see them.’

‘You don’t trust your own granddaughter?’

‘I know what you’re like.’

To Maelys’s surprise, the Numinator headed back to the room
where Emberr’s body lay. Maelys could not bear it. She could not bear to see
him again; nor could she bear to leave him.

The Numinator let go of Maelys’s arm and she went backwards
until she came up against the wall. Yalkara entered slowly, her face tight with
anticipation. She scanned the gloomy room, saw Emberr lying there as though
asleep, and sighed.

‘Beloved son,’ she said softly, as if apologising for her
failure. ‘The past two hundred and twenty years since I conceived you have been
the best of my life, and the worst.’ The Numinator let out a hiss through
clenched teeth. ‘The best because I had a child at last. And the worst –
because I conceived you here, while the Nightland was under prohibition, I had
to bear you here, alone, then leave you. You were of the Nightland, and without
the prohibition being broken you could not leave it.’

The Numinator quivered, but did not speak.

Maelys had to tell Yalkara. She opened her mouth to say,
‘He’s dead. My Emberr is dead,’ but could not choke the words out.

‘I could not tell anyone about it, least of all the father,’
Yalkara went on. ‘As Rulke escaped for the final time, all unknowing that he
had a son, the Nightland was collapsing into a singularity. Even then, I could
not break the prohibition and get you out. Instead, I spent my strength and my
Art on the mightiest work of my long life – reversing the collapse of the
Nightland and rebuilding it to shelter, protect and nourish your body and your
mind for as long as it took, until I could find a way to return for you.’

The Numinator was making little stabs with the small blade,
but Yalkara paid her no heed. She went to her knees beside Emberr. ‘I’m sorry.
I thought it would take a few years at most. I never thought that building the
Nightland, and maintaining it, would take so much from me that I could not
return. After I took your father’s body back to the void, and saw my people to
extinction, I spent all my days, for two hundred and twenty years, trying to find
a way back. But there was none – until recently, when –’

‘His father was Rulke,’ the Numinator burst out. ‘
You mated with Rulke! Right here!
’

Yalkara stalked across to her. ‘Who I have mated with is my
business. I knew Rulke three thousand years before you were born.’

‘You hated each other! There was a feud between your clans,
because of a terrible wrong done in ancient times.’

Maelys looked from one woman to the other. ‘What terrible
wrong?’

‘I don’t have to explain anything to either of you,’ Yalkara
said indifferently, and turned back. ‘Emberr? Wake now.’

‘Rulke was mine!’ the Numinator hissed, her eyes as hard as
the point of her knife. ‘For all time.’

‘I mated with him here before he ever met you,’ said
Yalkara.

‘He was mine, before and after. Now and forever. Past,
present and future.’

Yalkara shook her head in amazement. ‘You’re out of your
mind.’ She turned to her son again. ‘Emberr?’

She knew something was wrong now. Yalkara went across as
slowly as if she were a pallbearer at an emperor’s funeral, crouched beside him
and touched his bare chest. For a second her aloofness cracked; she let out a
hissing breath, then lifted him with one hand under his knees and another
behind his head to prevent it from flopping. Her jaw tightened but she was as controlled
as the Numinator had been hysterical. Yalkara, evidently, was not one to
display her grief to inferiors.

‘It is a mother’s duty to protect her children, and I failed
you,’ she said quietly. ‘I did everything I could and it wasn’t enough. Beloved
Emberr, this is the end for you, for me, and for all the Charon. But before I
go, I will exact a dreadful retribution for your slaying.’

She laid him down again, ever so gently, then came to her
feet and the look in her eyes was awful. ‘Who did this?’ she said in a voice
deliberately remote, and as cold as the central ice cap of Noom. ‘Which of you
slew my son? Or were you in league?’

‘She killed him,’ said the Numinator. ‘Her name is Maelys of
Nifferlin and I was taking her back for punishment –’

‘I know Maelys. I would not have thought she had it in her
to do such a deed. Well, girl?’ said Yalkara. ‘Did you kill my son?’

‘I loved him the moment I saw him,’ Maelys whispered, for it
would have felt wrong to speak in normal tones beside his cold body. ‘And
Emberr loved me.’

‘Explain!’

‘When I first came here he called me, directly into my mind,
and I went to him. I was never afraid. I knew I was safe –’

‘He would never have harmed you,’ said Yalkara, bending over
Emberr again. ‘He was a gentle soul, my son, unlike his father – unlike
me! Answer the question – did you kill him?’

Beside Maelys, the Numinator’s knuckles were white on the
hilt of her knife and her throat was quivering. She was building up to
something.

‘I loved him,’ Maelys wept. ‘Of course I didn’t kill
–’ But then something awful occurred to her.

‘How did he die?’ said Yalkara.

‘I don’t know –’

‘But?’ said Yalkara.

‘I still had a trace of chthonic fire on me, from the
Numinator’s portal. And … after we lay together it was gone from me, and all
over his skin.’

Yalkara’s olive skin went a muddy colour, all the blood
draining from her face. ‘Did I doom my son,’ she said to herself, ‘by bringing
the fire of damnation to Santhenar?’

‘It didn’t harm me,’ said Maelys, bewildered, aching with
her loss, and suffused with horror that she might have unwittingly brought
Emberr’s doom upon him. ‘Or the Numinator.’

‘Nor me,’ said Yalkara, staring at her son. ‘Nor any other
person. But Emberr was engendered in the Nightland, a place remote from the
laws which govern the real, physical worlds, and the Nightland would always be
a part of him. The chthonic flame is a force like no other, one that can slide
between the many dimensions of space and time as easily as you slide between
the sheets of your bed. It is one of the few natural forces that can punch a
portal through the Nightland, and for the same reason it was inimical to him,
and so he died.’ She turned to Maelys. ‘How did he die?’

‘I didn’t know he had, at first. We were lying in each
other’s arms and I just thought he was cold; the fire had gone out.’

‘But Emberr died content?’ Yalkara gripped Maelys’s
shoulders and stared into her eyes.

‘We were delirious with our love for each other. It was
meant to be.’

‘Was it the first time for you as well?’ Maelys nodded
stiffly, feeling her cheeks burning again. The Numinator went very still.

Yalkara wiped her eyes and crouched beside her son,
examining him carefully. ‘From the blood on his thighs it would appear so, but
there is no end to the duplicity of scheming young women. I must be sure
–’

Without warning, the Numinator sprang at her, raising the
knife high as if to stab her grandmother in the back. She landed like a cat and
was bringing the blade down when Maelys shrieked, ‘Yalkara, look out.’

Yalkara whirled in a rising spiral, faster than the eye
could follow, and her stiff right arm struck the Numinator across the chest so
hard that she was lifted off her feet and flung backwards, to crash into the
wall. The triangular knife went flying and Yalkara scooped it up. The Numinator
slumped to the floor, groaning.

‘You have Charon blood in you, granddaughter, but that is
not the same as
being
Charon.’

Maelys was darting for the door when Yalkara’s voice rang
out. ‘Hold!’

Maelys froze, for not even in battle had she seen anyone
move as swiftly as Yalkara had – the Charon were a race apart and she had
no hope of escaping her.

‘On the floor!’ rapped Yalkara. ‘Take down your trousers.’

‘What?’ Maelys whispered, shocked witless, for Yalkara still
had the knife in her hand. ‘What are you going to do to me?’

‘I’m going to make sure of you,’ Yalkara said grimly.

Maelys shrank away. ‘Please, no. I didn’t mean to hurt him.
He was everything to me.’

‘Stupid girl! I’m not going to kill you. What would be the
point of that?’

‘What, then?’ she bleated.

‘I’m going to examine you intimately, of course, to make
sure you were a virgin. There might be a child.’

Pain sheared through Maelys’s chest – not Yalkara as
well. Ever since her mother and aunts had sent her after Nish, no one had ever
cared about her for herself. Her family
and
Jal-Nish wanted the child she could give them – the only grandchild of
the God-Emperor. The Numinator and Yalkara both wanted the offspring of the
last Charon. I’m just a worthless body, she thought,
an incubator
.

She lay on the cold floor, completely numb, while Yalkara
completed her mortifying examination and stood up.

‘You were a virgin. Should a child come of this union, it
will be mine, and I will take it with me back to the void.’

‘No,’ Maelys whimpered. She was too young; she didn’t want
to have a baby, all alone, but if that came to pass no one else was having
anything to do with it. No one!

‘A child should have a mother,’ said Yalkara, ‘but, puny
little thing that you are, you wouldn’t survive an hour in the void. It’s a
pity, but there it is. Besides, you may bear many more children, but I never
will. I am the sole survivor of the Charon. I’m sure you understand.’

Her arrogance cut right through Maelys’s grief, and it was
only with the utmost effort that she bit her tongue and maintained her
self-control. She wanted to scream at Yalkara. No, she wanted to punch her
teeth down her neck. Don’t give way, she told herself. Pretend to be meek, and
compliant. Let them all underestimate you, but never give in until you’ve
beaten them all.
Never give in
.

Yalkara studied her, head to one side. ‘There’s something
about you. Something odd.’ She pulled on the chain around Maelys’s neck and
heaved the taphloid out from between her breasts.

‘What is this?’ Yalkara said, studying it.

‘Father gave it to me when I was a little girl, to suppress
my aura and stop my gift from developing.’

‘What gift?’ Yalkara said idly.

Maelys explained about the family talent for detecting
Jal-Nish’s wisp-watchers and his other spying devices, and the nature of her
own tiny gift, including what she’d seen in the Pit of Possibilities.

‘So you have a latent talent for the Art,’ said Yalkara,
‘but it was never developed in the vital years when you were young, and now
it’s too late to master it.’

Maelys knew that already and was resigned to it. ‘My aunts
said the taphloid contained a secret that could help me in the future.’

‘You certainly
need
protecting.’ Yalkara opened the taphloid, and momentarily Maelys saw little
dials spinning, though not ones she remembered seeing previously.

The Numinator groaned and tried to sit up.

‘Not least from her,’ Yalkara added quietly, ‘and I must do
what I can.’ She closed the taphloid, wrapped one long finger around it and
pressed it against her own forehead. For an instant Maelys felt so dizzy that
she could barely stand up.

Yalkara caught Maelys’s arm with her left hand, steadied
her, then touched the taphloid to her forehead with her right hand. The
dizziness passed but Maelys felt a sharp pain lance through her head from front
to back, so fiercely barbed that she had to close her eyes.

Help!

The hoarse, whispery cry seemed to come from an impossible
distance. Maelys cocked her head, listening, but it wasn’t repeated.

Yalkara thrust the taphloid, which was now uncomfortably
warm, back into Maelys’s cleavage and took her arm. ‘Come!’

Maelys locked her knees and tried to hold on. She couldn’t
leave Emberr lying there all alone, dead. It wasn’t right, or decent. She had
to take care of him and prepare his body the way the dead had always been
prepared at Nifferlin – gently, carefully, respectfully.

Yalkara jerked so hard that Maelys stumbled.

‘No!’ she wailed, but Yalkara would not desist. The
Numinator followed, silently, the door of Emberr’s little cottage banged, and
the cottage vanished. Maelys wept all the way back to the portal, and was left
to contemplate the irony, bitterest of all, of her lie to Jal-Nish about being
pregnant coming true after all.

 
FORTY-EIGHT

Yalkara thrust Maelys in the back and she stumbled out
of the portal into the eyrie at the top of the Tower of a Thousand Steps, and
into utter devastation.

Its steepled roof, now shattered, lay open to the elements,
and in the grey daylight that washed all colour from the bleak icescape she
made out a low, snow-clad range to her left. To the right was the scarred and
crevassed surface of the Kara Agel, the Frozen Sea. Below her, the moat which
had once protected the tower with shifting patterns of water and berg was a
seething morass of brown sludge filled with floating bodies, bobbing ice
coffins, drifting pages from the bloodline registers, and all the other
detritus of the Numinator’s failed project.

The circular eyrie, formerly so elegantly spare, was
littered with the bodies of human prisoners and Whelm, bleeding onto heaps of
smashed ice, along with broken weapons and greenly malodorous, unhuman corpses
speckled with chthonic fire. Some thirty prisoners crouched behind a barricade
across the top of the stairs, hurling chunks of ice, and bodies, at a band of
Whelm clustered on the steps below. The Numinator’s dish-shaped fire bowl was
overturned and the spilled chthonic fire had eaten a pond-sized hole in the
floor.