The Destiny of the Dead (The Song of the Tears Book 3) (13 page)

‘And now you’ve lost it. Throw him down on his face, lads,
and search him thoroughly. Take everything.’

They did so, while Boobelar cursed them in a slurred
monotone, and recovered several small packets which had been overlooked earlier.
Flydd sniffed them one by one, ‘Nif sap,’ and began to toss them away.

‘It might be an idea to keep some,’ Nish said quietly. ‘As a
bribe, if all other means of coercion fail. Besides, I’m not sure he’s ever
been fully sober; he might not be able to function.’

Flydd nodded, slipped the last packet into his pocket and
said, ‘Which way, Boobelar, my friend?’

‘Follow this ridge up until you reach the cliffs,’ he
snarled. ‘Then jump!’

‘How do you feel about being tied to a tree and abandoned
without any drink or nif?’ said Flydd pleasantly. ‘It could take you a
fortnight to die, and it’d be the worst fortnight of your miserable life.’

‘You wouldn’t dare!’ Boobelar grated, straining at his
ropes. ‘I’m the captain of the Rigore militia.’

‘We’re not in Gendrigore now, and I just caught you robbing
the honourable dead, which is a capital crime.’

‘Kill me, then,’ said Boobelar. ‘What do I care?’

‘Don’t tempt me,’ said Flydd, taking the last packet of
dried nif sap from his pocket and holding it over the edge. ‘Shall I drop it,
or keep it until you take us across Liver-Leech safely?’

Boobelar cursed him into eternity, then said in a
saliva-choked voice, ‘How do I know you’ll keep your word?’

‘Because I’m unlike you in every respect.’

‘All right, you bastard!’

‘Which way?’

‘I’ll show you!’

‘Tell me first, in case you have an
accident
on the way,’ said Flydd nastily. ‘Or get tied up.’ He
chuckled.

Boobelar made a gurgling sound in his throat.

‘And it’d better be the right way,’ Flydd added. ‘If you
don’t give me the right directions, you don’t get the nif.’

‘Up there,’ said Boobelar, pointing with a foot. ‘Veer along
the base of the cliffs to the left until you see a goat track running across
the mountainside. Follow it towards the gap between a pair of small peaks
shaped like clothes pegs – if you can see them.’

‘
You’d
better see
them.’

‘Climb along the crest of a ridge, very steep on both sides,
then crawl along several narrow ledges, with a hundred-span fall on the left,
for half a league, and in through the gap between the peg peaks – that’s
Liver-Leech. Cross the pass then keep to the right-hand track behind the
white-thorn peak for about four or five hours, then take the left-hand spur
down to the main track across the range. You’ll see Blisterbone Pass above you,
not a quarter of a league away.’

‘That’s all the directions you have?’ Flydd said quietly.

‘All I can remember.’

Flydd bestowed a mirthless smile on Boobelar. ‘Lead on,
Captain
.’

‘I’ll see you dead first,’ said Boobelar.

‘I doubt it.’

Nish resisted the urge to wallop Boobelar’s backside with
the sabre – that would be petty. ‘It might be better if I lead,’ he said.
‘The sot might take us over the edge just for the hell of it.’

 
NINE

It wasn’t completely dark, for the starlight was bright
at this altitude, but every footstep had to be placed with care on the steep,
wet rock.

‘Take it slowly,’ Nish said over his shoulder to Flydd.
‘Test every step before you put your weight on it. The first part looks the
worst.’

He adjusted the serpent staff, which was digging into the
small of his back. The night was cool and the staff pleasantly warm, sometimes
too warm. He could sense the roiling heat inside it, presumably the same force
that had caused it to blaze white-hot earlier. How much,
or how little
, would be required to release it? And if it was a
trap, what kind of a trap, and how could they avoid it?

It was not possible to think of an answer. He swallowed and
looked ahead. Starlight touched the wet ledge here and there, a perilous path
of broken stone no wider than his shoulders. Nish tested his first step. The
rough rock sloped outwards but was not slippery. Then his foot slid sideways
– well, not dangerously slippery. So far.

Flydd came behind him, followed by Boobelar and the three
men who held his ropes, next Huwld, Flangers, Chissmoul and her nervous friend
Allioun, and after that the militia, roped together in groups of eight with the
strongest men in the middle. If the leader put a foot wrong and fell, Nish
hoped that the others could hold him. And if they could not, only eight would
be lost, not the entire militia.

Halfway across the cliff, something skidded underfoot and he
smelled manure. ‘Careful here; goat turds.’

He scraped it off his sole and continued, and heard part of
his words repeated all the way to the rear. ‘Careful turds. Careful turds.’

The trek was a nightmare of rain and wind as they crept
along one precipitous ledge after another, each higher than the previous one
and more exposed to the intermittent rain and the unceasing wind, which grew
ever colder until Nish began to worry that they would get frostbite on their
noses. After an hour a heavy overcast came up, the darkness became absolute,
and every step had to be made by feel. Without Boobelar, who seemed to be
navigating on instinct, they would never have found the way.

‘This is madness,’ Nish said after they had spent half an
hour on the third ledge, during which time they had managed just two hundred
shuffling paces. ‘At this rate it’ll take us days to reach Liver-Leech –
if we get there at all. We’ve got to have light.’

Though the Gendrigoreans were used to climbing in wet and
slippery conditions, this trek was testing their agility to the limits and
there had been several nasty mishaps already. As the night wore on and people
wearied, someone was bound to slip and, if the rest of the group did not brace
instantly, all eight would be lost.

‘Torches will be seen from a long way away,’ snapped Flydd.

‘In this weather?’ Nish was desperately trying to remain
calm and positive, even if everyone else was falling to pieces.

‘There’s nothing to burn, anyhow. There’s no wood up here.’
Flydd had turned surly again. His intestines were troubling him and whenever he
reached the end of a ledge he would disappear behind a rock, though afterwards
his discomfort did not appear to have been relieved.

‘What if you conjured some with the mimemule?’

‘At the moment you’d get more light out of a firefly.’

‘You’ve got to do something,’ said Nish, deliberately
echoing Flydd’s earlier words. ‘Without light, we fail. What about a few of
those little spiky globes you made earlier?’

‘Sorry, they took more out of me than I thought.’ Flydd
stopped, swaying on his feet.

The word was passed back, ‘Stopping, stopping,’ and the
exhausted militia hunched down in their cloaks.

‘I can’t make fire either,’ he added, as if to forestall
Nish.

‘Not even with the serpent staff? I sometimes feel that I
could light a fire with mine, if I were a mancer. Clearsight keeps showing me
something hot and churning inside it.’

‘I can’t feel anything in mine,’ said Flydd.

‘Perhaps we should swap, then.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Flydd said hastily.

‘I thought creating light was an easy charm.’

‘It usually is, though I’ve found it rather difficult since
renewal.’

‘Have you got the strength to
transport
some light here?’ said Nish.

‘From where? The whole range is in darkness.’

‘Toadstools!’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Flydd.

‘Conjure one of those luminous toadstools out of the forest;
we can cut it up and tie it to our boots.’

‘You’re touched in the head ...’ said Flydd. He thought for
a minute or two, then went on. ‘But then again, toadstools don’t weigh much; I
might be able to manage one.’ He snorted. ‘And the good thing is, if that
bastard Klarm happens to be zooming by on his precious air-sled, he’ll think
he’s gone mad.’

He wasn’t the only one. When, ten minutes later, a huge,
greenly luminous and embarrassingly phallic toadstool came soaring through the
sky, bolt upright, three militiamen were so astonished that they nearly went
over the edge.

Aimee, the tiny, bird-like woman sitting next to Clech, went
into a fit of giggling which spread right through the militia. She couldn’t
regain her composure until Clech held her upside down by the legs, a remedy
which, evidently, he had used a number of times before, since Aimee accepted it
without complaint.

Everyone felt better afterwards; the laughter had cleared
away the exhaustion and even helped with their grief. Nish sliced the toadstool
into discs and passed them back, and everyone set to, peeling off the luminous
skin and binding strips to the toes and heels of their boots. In Boobelar’s
case, they also tied strips around his scarred forehead so they would recognise
him in the dark.

He was sobering up; he also appeared to be coming down from
the nif intoxication he’d been under for weeks, and was behaving very oddly,
one minute shouting and waving his arms, the next whining and wailing, or lying
down and refusing to get up. Only the promise of a healthy dose of nif at the
end of the trip could get him moving, and that lure was taking longer to work
each time.

Light made all the difference and they headed on at a good
speed, up ledges so high that patches of ice began to appear on them, and the
rain turned to sandblasting grains of sleet. They trekked along a knife-blade
ridge, then another at right-angles to it, heading towards the invisible peg
peaks that framed the precipitous Liver-Leech Pass, until it was all Nish could
do to put one glowing foot in front of another.

The immensity of the mountains contracted to the span or two
he could see in front of him, the night lowered until it was a blank shroud
over his head and shoulders, and time stretched out until it could only be
measured by one step, then another, and another.

But with the light, and Boobelar’s blasphemously snarled
directions whenever they looked like going astray, they reached Liver-Leech
well after midnight, a good hour later than Nish had hoped.

‘We’ll rest briefly on the other side,’ he said, ‘and then
we’ve got to get a move on, or it’ll be dawn before we’re in sight of
Blisterbone. Attacking in daylight would be suicidal – they’d shoot us
down before we got close.’

Liver-Leech Pass was a vertical-sided ravine between the peg
peaks, hundreds of spans deep but only one span wide at the bottom, and floored
with slick ice. It was also hundreds of paces long and the wind howled so
furiously in their faces that they had to get down and crawl.

Once they’d crossed the pass, and were sheltering out of the
worst of the wind on the ledge that ran around the range to their right, Nish
called a brief halt. Everyone needed food and hot drink but there was no fuel
up here, so they munched on their hard rations, sipped the icy water from their
half-frozen water skins and took what rest they could.

There was no cloud on this side of the range and starlight
illuminated the ledge relatively well. Nish could see it curving more or less
horizontally around the mountainside and knew that they were now on the other
side of the white-thorn peak. It was still hours to the track that led up to
Blisterbone, but by comparing his mental image of Curr’s mud map with
Boobelar’s directions, he felt sure he was going the right way.

Boobelar ate and drank nothing; he had even stopped whining.
He took off his boots to shake stones out of them, but the smell was so
nauseating that everyone near him, even Huwld, cried, ‘Put them on again.’

He did so, then passed his hand to his mouth, chewed, then
turned a malicious, broken-toothed smile on Nish and Flydd.

‘Must have had some nif in there,’ said Nish as they set out
again. ‘I wonder what he’s planning?’

‘Well, we won’t need him much longer,’ said Flydd, miming a
slash across the throat.

They hadn’t been going for more than ten minutes, however,
when there was a ruckus behind Nish and he turned to see Boobelar hurl himself
over the side of the ledge, dragging the nearest roped man with him.

Nish scrambled back to grab the rope as the second man
braced himself, but he was close to the edge and the weight pulled him over as
well. The third man cried out and toppled just as Nish caught the flying rope,
but had to let go or it would have taken him.

‘Light, quick!’ he yelled. Huwld was staring over the side
in horror. ‘Quick, lad,’ said Nish kindly. ‘Run and collect some lights.’

Huwld did so and they attached strips of glowing fungus to a
rope, which took several minutes, and lowered it over. There was a narrow ledge
only a span below, but it was empty. A broader ledge ran along out of sight,
far below.

‘There they are,’ said Nish, ‘down about fifteen spans, on
the broad ledge. I’ll go down.’ He pulled the rope up and began to tie it
around himself, though he had little hope that anyone would still be alive
after such a fall. ‘I’m sorry, Huwld,’ he said, giving him a quick hug, but the
boy pulled away and covered his face with his hands.

‘Not you, Nish,’ said Flydd, taking the rope. ‘Who’s a
climber?’

‘I am,’ said Clech’s bird-like friend, Aimee.

‘Are you really?’ said Flydd. ‘Come here.’

Clech personally tied the rope around her and lowered her
down. The lighted rope end moved back and forth, then she called. ‘I –
they’re dead, Nish.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ she said faintly. ‘I mean, our three are dead …’

‘What about Boobelar?’ Flydd said in a strangled voice.

‘The rope’s been cut.’ Aimee checked all around with her
light, and over the side. ‘He’s gone.’