The Destiny of the Dead (The Song of the Tears Book 3) (20 page)

They had never expected to see the enemy, much less fight
them, for the Range of Ruin had, one way or another, beaten every army to
invade their little nation in the past thousand years. Nish had hoped and
prayed that it would defeat his father’s army, too, though deep down he’d known
that it would not. Jal-Nish was too powerful, and too careful. He could not
bear to lose, so he made sure he thought of everything that could go wrong
before he set out.

Everything except Stilkeen!

Distantly Nish made out the gentle tapping of Aimee
inserting her spikes into ice. Nish could tell it was her, because she did it
delicately, while Clech drove his spikes home with a single forceful blow. It
didn’t sound as though they would be back in a hurry and now, studying the
arrangement of forces below, Nish knew the end was not far away. If he was to
bloody Klarm’s nose in a last futile act of defiance, he had to act at once.

Taking the serpent staff off his back and gripping it below
the head, he held it up. Again he sensed that fiery heat churning within it. His
head throbbed twice and the eyes of the serpent appeared to blink, though when
he looked again they were solid iron like the rest of it.

But the ice wasn’t. The light brightened a little and he saw
that, some distance beyond the end of the ledge, the overarching dome of ice
had a flaw in it. It was visible as a faint blue line curving across the base.
Was that the fissure he’d seen from below, with clearsight? He could not tell
from here; he had to get closer.

‘Clech!’ he yelled. ‘Aimee, I think I’ve found it.’

No reply. He called again, but did not expect an answer, for
they must be on the other side of the nose by now and his voice would not be
heard over the wind.

There wasn’t time to go after them – the slot could be
taken in minutes and, once it had been, the pass was lost and their efforts up
here would be wasted.

The serpent staff was even hotter now, almost burning him.
Was it trying to tell him something? It had to be and, acting on intuition,
Nish poked the ice at the end of the ledge with the tail. Ssssss. The ice
liquefied, revealing that the ledge continued on.

Anxious about the time, he unfastened his rope, left it
hanging from the spike and stepped out, his boots taking a comforting grip on
the rough surface. He prodded ahead and again, with a faint hiss, the ice
turned to water, revealing the ledge beneath.

Nish wasn’t consciously doing anything with the Art –
he had no gift for it – so it had to be the staff. To test it he reached
behind him and prodded a wart of ice sticking out from the side. Nothing
happened, yet whenever he touched the ice ahead it liquefied.

How did the staff know where he needed to go? Was it still
linked to the caduceus, or to Stilkeen? Surely it must be. Because he was doing
what Stilkeen wanted?

Afraid that he was, Nish grounded the staff for a moment,
then continued, knowing that he had no choice. The ice grew ever thicker above
him, the curved flaw brighter, but how was he to dislodge the ice from beneath
and survive? Or was he meant to die in the attempt?

He looked back but there was no sign of Clech or Aimee. He
prodded the rock ahead; this time nothing happened. Had he used up the power of
the staff already? Surely not – it belonged to an immortal being.

He reached towards the curving flaw in the ice and it melted
and flowed before he had touched it. The staff was definitely leading him, but
where? How could it know, anyway? And then he had a really unpleasant thought.
What if Stilkeen could see out of the serpent’s eyes?

He shuddered and almost threw the staff away, thinking that
he held a
live
iron snake. Or did its
master maintain a presence within it? He started to turn the head of the staff
towards him, then stopped hastily. If Stilkeen was looking out through those
eyes, Nish definitely did not want to look into them.

With no other choice, he followed the path which the staff
was melting, up through the base of the ice just before that curving fissure.
Now, with each probe of the serpent’s tail, the ice above him turned to water
and gushed down on his head and shoulders.

Nish had to keep wiping his face before the water refroze.
Shaking from the cold, he dragged himself up the slick-walled meltwater cavity
by digging a spike into the ice. His clothes crackled with every movement and
shed tiles of ice below him. His boots filled with water but Nish dared not
stop to empty them. There wasn’t time.

He squelched up and up, feeling the water turning to a
churned-up mush in his boots; he had to stamp harder to keep the blood
circulating. He had climbed several spans up into the ice sheet, following a
path coiled like a corkscrew, and with every step it grew darker.

What would happen if he reached the flaw – indeed, in
such gloom, how would he know he had? What if he broke through it? If the ice
at the tip of the nose began to slide, with him inside, there would be no way
out. Stilkeen’s revenge?

And yet, one quick death was much the same as another and
there was no point dwelling on it. He continued corkscrewing up and shortly
realised that it was lighter above him than below – he must be near the
top of the ice sheet. Quick, now! Nish thrust up the tip of the staff as hard
as he could and, with a hiss like water spilled on a hotplate, broke through.

He scrambled up onto the top of the ice and found that the
rising knob at the end of the great nose was not far below him, like the wall
of a dam holding back the monumental mass of ice.

He scuttled down the slippery surface, over a narrow, deep
crevasse a couple of spans from the end of the ice sheet, and thence onto the
solid, secure rock of the knob. Behind him, the crevasse in the ice went down
for spans; it had to be the flaw he’d seen from below.

But would the staff unbind the ice below the crevasse and
make it fall? He crawled to the tip of the knob and peered over, careful not to
make a silhouette against the sky.

His militia still held the slot, but bands of the enemy were
hauling up scaling ladders made from slender tree trunks, which they must have
carried for leagues, since there were no trees within sight. Nish could not
imagine how the enemy would stand their ladders against the barricades on the
steep ground on either side of the slot, but with enough men they could hold
them in place by hand. Why didn’t the militia shoot them?

None of Nish’s archers were firing; they must have used all
their arrows. Gloom settled over him – the pass must fall within minutes.
Aimee and Clech weren’t visible from the left side or the right, nor did they
answer his calls. He presumed they were still on the other side of the nose,
looking for a way up.

After emptying out his boots and wringing the water from his
socks, he tried to decide what to do. He could not wait, for hundreds of the
enemy had massed far below him in the broad, shallow bowl where he had almost fallen
in the assault on the slot. The instant the scaling ladders were up, they would
rush the slot and burst through by sheer weight of numbers.

‘Clech, Aimee!’ he called, as loudly as he dared. Still
there was no reply.

Nish paced back and forth on the centre of the knob. If he
freed the ice at the end and they happened to be climbing it, they would die.
But if he waited much longer, the pass, the battle and the war would be lost.

Besides, the ice could take a while to get going, and in the
unlikely event that Clech and Aimee were on the small wedge at the end, they
should have time to scramble back to safer ground. At least, he hoped so.

He had to act now. He went back to the crevasse, which ran
across the ice for three or four spans. Ice must fall every summer, he thought,
although that was still some months off. Yes, that must be how the bowl had
formed below him, the successive impacts of thousands of years of ice smashing
the surface to dust and grit.

‘Here goes,’ Nish muttered, and raised the staff.

Again the serpent’s eyes glittered, but this time a pearly
drop appeared at the tip of each fang. He shook the drops off before they
landed on his wrist and they fell into the crevasse.

He checked the fangs, which thankfully were clear of any
more venom, and was lowering the tail of the staff into the crevasse, hoping it
was the right thing to do, when he made out an echoing, satisfied ssss. The ice
let out a mournful groan, and the whole ridge shuddered.

‘Nish?’ came Aimee’s voice from way below him, echoing
hollowly up the hole he’d melted in the ice.

‘Up on the centre of the knob,’ he said in a low but
carrying tone.

‘What have you done?’ She sounded afraid.

‘Nothing yet, but I’m about to. Are you spiked on?’

The ice gave a deeper groan.

‘No, we’re coming up your tunnel.’

Nish had a sudden vision of coming disaster, and nearly
choked. ‘Go back to the ledge and spike on,
quick
!
Keep your heads down and hang on tight.’

He heard her speaking to Clech, then their scrambling
footsteps. Was she going down or coming up? Either way he could do nothing to
help her for, with a crack, crack, crack, the crevasse lengthened to left and
right, breaking the tight weld of ice to rock, then widening and deepening
until he could see down three spans, five, now all the way down.

Way down there, something as pearly as snake venom
shimmered, ssss. With a deeper groan, the last ice-weld tore and the wedge of
ice below the crevasse cracked in the middle and began to slide to left and
right.

‘Aimee?’ Nish shouted over the noise. ‘Run!’

There was no reply. She would not have heard him over the
grinding and crackling. The whole out-jutting nose seemed to be shaking now,
its knobbly tip shuddering so hard than he fell to his knees. Icicles were
falling from the fringes of the ice sheet. He scrambled down towards the
steeply sloping tip of the nose, heedless of the danger, and looked to left and
right, but Aimee and Clech were still concealed by overhanging ice.

The troops gathered in the bowl were staring up – he
could make out the ovals of their upturned faces. Could they see him? There was
no point in concealment now – indeed, they should know that the coming
ice fall was no accident, but the deliberate action of their enemy. And so
should his militia, who needed all the help they could get.

Finding a secure place to stand on the tip of the quivering
knob, he stood up straight and waved his arms. The enemy troops cried out, and
pointed. Someone aimed a crossbow up at him, but Nish gave him the finger;
being an expert with that weapon, he knew that he was out of range.

A chunk of ice the size of a mammoth separated from the
left-hand side, below the crevasse, and fell. He watched it dwindling in size
as it hurtled down, and the soldiers frantically scrambling to get out of the
way.

It was too late for the dozen directly underneath, for the
ice slammed into the ground, smashing to fragments which knocked down every
surviving soldier in the bowl and many on the track above. The shattered ice
turned red.

The rest of the soldiers got up again and stumbled for the
sides of the bowl, but a horn sounded and, like the disciplined troops they
were, they pulled together into a line. At the slot the fighting had stopped,
for the impact had brought down the scaling ladders and broken rungs off two of
them. The attackers drew back some fifty paces, out of rock-throwing range, to
repair their ladders, but that would not take long.

More ice fell from the left, and then the right, the last of
the mass below the crevasse. Nish looked over and cursed. The twin impacts had
knocked the soldiers lined up around the bowl off their feet again, but few
seemed to have been harmed this time. After all the effort it had taken to get
up here, he’d hope for a bit more damage.

The horn sounded and officers shouted orders. The ladders
had been repaired, the attackers were advancing towards the barricades again,
and the soldiers in the bowl were about to move up for the final onslaught.

Suddenly the ice sheet went
creak-crack
as if it had been twisted in two hands; crisscross
cracks appeared on its upper surface, and Nish felt a sudden and terrible
foreboding.

It had never occurred to him that the whole vast ice sheet
might fall, and if it did, he would almost certainly be thrown off the knob.
The ice groaned and hundreds of icicles, each longer than a man, broke away.
Most shattered harmlessly on the rocky slopes, but one or two soldiers
collapsed in red, silent messes.

Another few chunks of ice fell into the bowl, missing the
soldiers crossing it, though the impacts knocked one or two down. They soon got
up and appeared to be unharmed.

‘It’s safe now,’ Nish heard an officer bellow. ‘A thousand
pieces of gold to the squad that takes the pass. Go!’

The scaling ladders were being carried up and the leading attackers
were approaching the slot. Nish eyed the ice, which was still groaning, still
creaking. The crisscross cracks over the top had widened a little, but the ice
sheet had not moved at all. It must be still frozen tightly to the bridge of
the nose.

Nish clambered off the knob, down several spans, then up the
steep end of the main ice sheet, where it had been split by the crevasse. At
the top he prodded the ice, hoping to dislodge some more, but nothing happened.
Why not? Why had the staff showed him the way, and assisted his passage through
the ice sheet, then stopped helping him?

A great mancer might have been able to free the ice, but he
could not, for he did not know how to use the power locked within the serpent
staff.

Unless he was being too timid. Perhaps that was the answer
– Stilkeen certainly wasn’t timid. Raising the staff high, Nish speared
the tail-tip of the iron serpent down, the way Stilkeen had buried his caduceus
deep in rock.