The Destiny of the Dead (The Song of the Tears Book 3) (39 page)

In summer it would bake, yet now, at the beginning of
spring, the nights were decidedly chilly, and it would take hours to gather
enough spindly bushes for a decent fire.

Chissmoul guided the craft to a skidding landing on the sand
between the rocks, but it kept sliding and thumped up onto a rounded boulder
before screeching to a stop, canted to the left. Several of the injured slid
forwards on their stretchers and ended up jammed together behind Chissmoul’s
seat.

‘Can I help you with anything?’ Flangers said, polite as
ever.

‘Go away!’ snarled Chissmoul.

He bit his lip, turned aside and jumped onto the sand. The
militia carried the stretchers off and lay down in the sun. They seemed to have
an infinite appetite for sleep and Nish could not blame them.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ said Flydd. ‘You too, Flangers.’

They strolled down the river bed, the grey sand squeaking
underfoot.

‘What’s the matter with her?’ said Flangers. ‘I’d have
thought Chissmoul would be happy, since she’s flying again, but she’s more
cranky every day.’

‘She loves flying; it’s her life and her joy,’ said Flydd.
‘But she’s afraid the air-sled will break down at any minute and that will be
the end of flight for her, forever.’

‘I dare say you’re right,’ Flangers said morosely. ‘There’s
nothing we can do about it, then.’

‘And maybe she feels that she’s letting us down,’ said Nish.
‘She knows how urgent it is that we get to Roros, and if the air-sled fails she
might blame herself.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Flangers. ‘It was having problems
even when Klarm was using it.’

‘But she’s the pilot. She
can’t not
feel responsible if her craft lets us down.’

 
TWENTY-SEVEN

Maelys could not stop shaking; even on the ice-covered
surface of the Frozen Sea she had never felt so cold.

‘He’s gone,’ she said when Yggur appeared, followed by
Tulitine. ‘Yalkara has taken Emberr’s body and I’ll never see him again. Never
get the chance to say farewell.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Tulitine, folding Maelys in her arms. ‘Let
it out.’

‘I can’t. It’s not finished and now it never will be, and
all because of her, the evil cow. She stole the fire and caused all this
trouble. I hate her!’

There was a long pause, after which Tulitine said gently,
‘Yalkara is his mother, and Emberr was her only surviving child. She also had
the right.’

Maelys wept.

Yggur searched the cottage, the garden and the black forest
behind it, and came back. ‘There’s no white fire here, not a trace. We’ve come
all this way for nothing.’

‘But the caduceus pointed here,’ said Tulitine. ‘Why would
it do that unless the fire was here at the time?’

Yggur squatted down and inspected the indented carpet. ‘The
fibres are slowly springing up. I’d say the body was taken not long before
Maelys came in.’

‘You mean Yalkara is still here somewhere?’

Yggur shook his head. ‘That thud as we arrived must have
been her leaving the Nightland. She realised Maelys was coming and took the
body away.’

‘Where to?’ cried Maelys.

‘Two centuries ago she went back to the void with the
surviving Charon and their dead. She would have taken her son’s body –’

‘You’ve got to take me there,’ said Maelys desperately,
clutching at Yggur’s arm. ‘I have to –’

‘I’m sorry, Maelys,’ he said gently. ‘It’s quite impossible.
I can’t take you to the void, and even if I could, how would you find him? It’s
infinite. Besides, none of us could survive there for a single minute.’

Maelys subsided to the floor, blindly stroking the
depression in the carpet, which was all she had left of him, and even that was
disappearing by the second. Soon there would be nothing.

‘As you said, the days can pass swiftly in the Nightland,
especially when you don’t want them to,’ said Tulitine. ‘Stilkeen gave us
fifteen days to find the true fire, and our time is rapidly running out. Where
to now?’

‘I don’t know where else to look,’ said Yggur.

‘Someone must know. We just have to ask the right people.’

‘I don’t even know where to begin.’

‘Then I’d start where all such searches would have begun in
the olden days,’ said Tulitine. ‘The Great Library.’

‘I’m not sure anything is left of it,’ said Yggur. ‘Wasn’t
it sacked by the lyrinx at the end of the war?’

‘So some people say,’ said Tulitine, ‘though I don’t know if
it’s true.’

‘And if anything of value remained, Jal-Nish would have
carried it off when he proclaimed himself God-Emperor.’

‘I don’t think so. If you recall, when he met Yalkara on the
Range of Ruin he had never heard of Stilkeen, or chthonic fire.’

‘Then we’d better get going,’ said Yggur. ‘Each portal hurts
me more than the last, and I’d hate to fail with the one taking us out of the
Nightland.’

‘It would be ironic indeed,’ said Tulitine, ‘if you ended up
a prisoner in the prison you helped to create.’

Maelys knew, because Yggur had told her, that the Great
Library was situated in Zile, a once great city on the River Zur near the north-western
tip of vast Meldorin Island, west of the Sea of Thurkad.

But Zile had fallen into decay long before the war –
when the Sea of Perion became the Dry Sea the climate had changed and the
fertile floodplains of the Zur had dried out and blown away, leaving a desert
crisscrossed by the salt-crusted ancient irrigation canals. The people of Zile
were long gone, save for a few hardy folk who, Yggur had said, lived in the
abandoned city like lizards dwelling in the cast-off shoe of a giant.

‘Yet the Great Library, one of the wonders of the ancient
world, still survives,’ he added as the portal deposited them on its roof many
hours later. He breathed deeply of the dry evening air, as if tasting its
differences to all the other places they had been. ‘I had not thought it
would.’

‘The librarians once claimed that it held the entirety of
Santhenar’s Histories,’ said Tulitine, walking painfully across to the edge.
Yggur went after her and put his arm around her, and she clung to him
gratefully.

Maelys wandered along the side of the enormous rectangular
roof, pleased to have something unfamiliar to distract her from her cycling
miseries. The Library, a simple, classical building built from red marble, had
many storeys, but all the lower levels lay below the drifting sand and the
dunes were almost up to the roof in places. How long until they came over the
top and covered it completely? How long until its magnificence was erased from
human memory, as her own home had been destroyed?

She paced back and forth, immersed in her melancholy
thoughts, for she loved books and could still remember that nightmare night, as
a child, when Vomix had ordered the library of Nifferlin Manor burned.

Maelys took a deep breath, forced both Emberr and the past
behind her, and tried to concentrate on the reason they were here. If they
couldn’t find true fire before the fifteen days were up, Stilkeen had said the
world would be destroyed from the void.

And she believed it, for everyone knew that the void
extended forever and was full of beasts of all kinds, each endlessly evolving
in a desperate attempt to compete with their savage, intelligent predators. The
Histories told that the most vital desire of every intelligent species there
was to escape into the physical universe and find a world of its own. Every
species yearned for that, and there were few worlds better than Santhenar.

Yggur had calculated that six days had passed since
Stilkeen’s proclamation; only nine to go. Time was rapidly running out and,
even if they found the true fire, how could they be sure that Stilkeen would
keep its word?

‘Maelys?’ Yggur called out, sounding pleased about
something.

He and Tulitine were leaning on the rail, looking towards
the city of Zile, and Maelys saw many magnificent public buildings, all with
colonnades and arches, along broad avenues lined with palms and spreading
trees.

‘How come there’s no sand in the city?’ she said.

‘That’s a very good question,’ said Yggur, gazing beyond
Zile to where the River Zur formed a green, fertile ribbon meandering into the
distance.

‘I thought you knew your Histories,’ said Tulitine, who was
more cheerful than she’d been in weeks. ‘There was a prediction made of old,
Not until the Sea of Perion once more
thunders against the jewelled shores of Katazza Mountain will Zile rise again
.
And now that the Dry Sea has become the Sea of Perion again, and is nearly
full, the climate of Zile is changing back. The people must have started to
return years ago, to have scoured the city so clean of sand. See the pennants
flying from that building on the hill?’

‘But they haven’t come as far as the Library,’ said Maelys.
‘How do we get in?’

‘There’s a roof door down the far end,’ said Yggur,
pointing. ‘I’ve been here many times, though not in the past decade, of
course.’

They had just turned that way when a silver head appeared,
climbing a set of steps that Maelys had not noticed. It was an old woman, small
and thin, with a long, rather pinched face and thick spectacles perched on her
bony nose. She wore a shapeless gown that went down to her sandals, and carried
a black bamboo cane with a curved handle. Leaning on it at the top of the
steps, she squinted at them, then let out a delighted cry.

‘Yggur!’

‘Lilis,’ he beamed, striding towards her with his arms out.

‘Lilis became the Librarian here after the great Nadiril
finally died, two centuries ago,’ Yggur explained after the introductions had
been made and Lilis was leading the way down the steps. Despite her age, and
the cane, she went down quickly and was steady on her feet.

‘Do you have Aachim blood, Lilis,’ asked Maelys politely,
‘to have lived so long?’

‘No,’ said Lilis. Her voice was high but strong, not a
quavery old woman’s voice at all. ‘The position of Librarian here requires a
mastery of the Art and comes with one benefit, long life, for when a document
must be found we rely almost entirely on the memories of our librarians, and
there is only so much anyone can read in a normal lifetime. I assume you have
come here to consult us?’

‘I was not sure that the Library had survived,’ said Yggur.
‘I’ve been out of the way for the past seven years –’

‘Held in thrall to the Numinator,’ said Lilis.

‘How did you know that?’

‘The Library has many sources; it is our business to know
such things.’

‘Not even the God-Emperor knew of the Numinator,’ said
Maelys.

Lilis paused on a landing. The steps continued down out of
sight. ‘Ah, the God-Emperor. He also consults us at times.’

‘Really?’ said Maelys. ‘I’d have thought he’d just take what
he wanted.’

Lilis gave a delicate little cough. ‘Zile does not lie
within the empire. Surely you knew that?’

‘According to the God-Emperor,’ said Tulitine, ‘the empire
covers all the known world, save the island of Faranda where the Aachim dwell.’

‘Sometimes the God-Emperor exaggerates,’ Lilis said
diplomatically. ‘In any case, the particular skills of my librarians could not
be duplicated with less than a hundred years of training, nor are they readily
coerced. He’s not a fool; it’s far easier for him to pay our fees.’

‘But he’s a monster,’ said Maelys. ‘How can you –?’

‘The charter of the Great Library requires that we provide
information to all, impartially, as long as they can pay the fee, and it can be
high. Even with the few librarians I have left, the cost of maintaining the
Library is prodigious.’

‘What if someone poor needs information?’

‘The fee may be waived for the genuinely indigent,’ said
Lilis coolly. ‘I was a street waif when I was a child; I can always tell the
genuine supplicants from the cheats. But enough chitchat. You’ve come about
chthonic fire, of course. You want to know where to find it.’

‘How did you know that?’ cried Maelys, then saw that Yggur
was grinning.

‘When you’re selling information,’ said Lilis, who was also
smiling, ‘you must always appear to know more than your customers. That’s one
of the first principles my master, old Nadiril, taught me when I came to the
Library as a waif, just ten years old. Stilkeen’s message came here as well,
but if it hadn’t, my sources would have soon told me about it. You’re the first
to arrive but you won’t be the last, and I’ll tell everyone the same thing.’

‘Then I would advise you to take strong precautions for your
security,’ said Yggur. ‘The worst men and women in the world will be after
Stilkeen’s pure fire, and some of them would think nothing of closing your
mouth forever – or even burning the Library – to make sure no one
else can learn what you have told them.’

Lilis looked shocked, though she recovered quickly. ‘Thank
you for the warning,’ she said gravely. ‘The Library, despite its appearance,
is not unprotected, but I will take extra precautions.’

‘You should consider sealing it so no one can enter from
outside.’

‘You forget yourself, old friend,’ Lilis snapped. ‘The
bedrock on which the Great Library was founded, almost three thousand years
ago, was the unfettered exchange of information with all comers.’

Yggur bowed. ‘I’m sorry for the presumption. But come now,
Lilis, you would not hand over a depraved or obscene volume to a child, and
neither would you give a deadly secret to a lunatic. Limits must often be
placed on what information you provide.’

‘That is so, of course,’ said Lilis, more calmly. ‘The past
cannot be allowed to bind the present.’

Maelys expected to be ushered into a vast room crammed with
books and scrolls, but Lilis led the way down a broad corridor, turned off it
into a narrower one, down the steps to a narrower yet, and stopped outside a
plain door, which she opened.