The Fate of the Fallen (The Song of the Tears Book 1) (54 page)

It went on for an agonisingly long time. Like childbirth in
reverse, she imagined, in the moments when she was capable of thinking. It felt
as though Thommel was tugging a barbed eel out of her. He got part of it up
through the opening between her stomach and throat, but the pain was so great
that Maelys shrieked and doubled up, nearly tearing the cord out of Thommel’s
fingers. He released the tension suddenly, the slurchie slipped back down and
when she could think clearly again she knew that he would have to do it all
over again.

‘I’m sorry, Maelys,’ he said, putting his arms around her,
and he was, for she saw his tears splash on the leaves below her face. He
massaged her lower back and began again, though this time he tied the cord
around his wrist and made another turn there each time he’d drawn enough cord
out, so the slurchie couldn’t slip back.

It was coming up her gullet now, which wasn’t numbed at all,
and suddenly it no longer felt like good pain. It was agony worse than anything
she’d ever imagined. It felt as if her gullet were being shredded.

The slurchie filled it so completely that she could hardly
draw breath, for the passage to her lungs was squashed flat. She couldn’t
breathe; she could feel herself blacking out, her knees giving. She was going
to choke to death.

‘Hold on, Maelys. Hold on, my love. It’s not long now.’

She held on, he pulled harder on the cord and she managed to
draw a tiny breath – just enough. The creature’s head came up into the
back of her throat and cut off her wind again, scoring her as if it were
wrapped in brambles.

Maelys’s consciousness was fading. He was shouting at her
but she couldn’t make out what he was saying. ‘Open your mouth!’ he shouted in
her ear. ‘Open your damned mouth, quick.’

Her jaw was clenched tight. He tugged harder, the head of
the slurchie came up into the back of her mouth, she felt herself falling as
she fainted from lack of air, then in a panic he jerked too hard and the cord
broke.

Thommel let out a cry of despair. Maelys hit the ground with
her left cheek, hard enough to feel it, then he was down beside her, crying out
as he threw her over onto her back, prised her locked jaw open and thrust one
hand into her mouth. Maelys could hear horrible sucking and gasping sounds
coming from her, and repulsive gurgles and squelches, followed by a thin squeal
like no sound she had ever heard, as Thommel caught the slurchie around the
head and in one desperate, agonising heave, ripped it out of her.

Maelys sucked in three breaths worth of air and it was the
sweetest she’d ever drawn, though her mouth tasted foul and slimy, and her lips
were burning. She tried to spit it out but the slurchie’s mucous was so thick
that it wouldn’t move.

Something popped in her stomach, then it heaved
uncontrollably and she threw up all over herself, bringing up a bucketful of
watery slime flecked with black ovoid specks. It burned too, though at least it
washed away the muck that had coated her mouth and tongue.

Maelys sat up, dripping but too relieved to worry about the
spectacle she must make. After what she and Thommel had been through together
it didn’t matter at all.

He was crouched on his haunches, still holding the
squirming, flapping slurchie out in his bloody right hand, and he wore the
biggest, most beaming smile she had ever seen. It warmed her.

The creature was enormous – the length of her forearm
and outstretched hand. Its small head, which was still burrowed inside the cord
basket, was covered in feelers and sucker discs, and what looked like a ring of
tiny, transparent teeth. Its black and yellow body was shaped like a stubby
eel, with dozens of little legs ending in clinging barbs, and it had a row of
raised spines down the centre of its back. The barbs on the front feet had
latched on blindly to the cords of the basket, fortunately.

‘When it’s numbed by slugwort it likes to burrow its head
into something, though …’ Thommel looked up at her, ‘… it doesn’t always burrow
into the cord basket.’

She knew what he meant. ‘And I suppose it can pull out of
it, too.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

She didn’t need him to say how fortunate she’d been. ‘It’s
so big. How long has it been – in me?’

He shrugged. It jerked in his hand as if trying to get back
to Maelys. She pulled away hastily. ‘I don’t know. A week or two? They grow
quickly, feeding on your food, until their needs are more than you can eat. And
then they start to eat you, from the inside. Do you want a closer look?’

That explained why she’d been so ravenous, and often felt
ill after eating. She shuddered. ‘No thanks.’

‘I’ll get rid of it then.’ He got up and went to the fire,
unravelling the cord from his wrist. The slurchie began to thrash in his bloody
hand; more blood was running down his wrist. He leaned over the fire and tried
to shake it off but it dug in its barbs, twisted and pulled its head free of
the basket. Its head curled around on itself, squirmed at his palm and dug in.

Thommel let out a cry of pain and lurched backwards, trying
to pull it off with his other hand. The barbs on its plump little legs dug in
there too and the yellow markings on its back began to flash on and off like a
firefly.

For once Thommel’s calm self-possession had left him. He was
reeling around, panicking as he tried to fling it off, but it wouldn’t let go.
Maelys scrambled up, picked up a stout stick and stumbled towards him.

‘Hold your hands away from you,’ she croaked, for the
slurchie was flipping back and forth and she was afraid it would go for his
mouth or his belly.

He did so. She crept closer, afraid that it might go for
her, too. Don’t think; just do it. She took careful aim, whacked down with the
stick, and her blow tore the sucker mouth off his palm, skin and all. It clung
on to his other hand with its barbs, squirming its body around to get a better
grip, and she had to whack it again and again until finally a lucky blow knocked
it into the coals. She pressed the slurchie down with her stick until it
stopped moving and began to char, then raked more coals over it just to make
sure.

‘Don’t know what happened there,’ said Thommel, shaking his
bleeding hand. ‘I just panicked for a moment. Ugh!’ He shuddered and held out
his arms then, heedless of the vomit and slime all down her front, she went to
him.

Things were never the same between them after that.
They couldn’t be. When Maelys woke in the morning and looked across the embers
to Thommel, it felt like she was seeing an old, trusted friend. They did
everything together for the rest of the trip and it was a wonderful time, the
best Maelys could remember since her childhood. She’d never been friends with a
man before and, after all the bitter talk of her mother and aunts, had not
imagined that such a thing was possible.

The remainder of the journey proved uneventful, however, and
the only blight on it was her lost taphloid. She cursed herself for missing her
one opportunity to regain it.

Fifteen days after hearing the news about Nish’s flight they
stopped on a rock-crowned hill, staring at Thuntunnimoe peak. It stood alone,
though many similar peaks rose singly or in scattered clusters out of the
rainforest. All were sheer-sided and many needle-narrow, at least in their
upper sections, more or less as Nish had described his vision in the pit. It
was sunny over the rainforest, with just a few scattered clouds in a washed-out
blue sky, but the plateaux were so tall that they created their own weather,
and the tops of most were concealed by clinging cloud.

‘How can you be sure this is the one?’ said Maelys. ‘They
all look the same.’

‘You said Nish kept talking about his luck turning, and
riding his fortune while it lasted.’

‘Yeees,’ she said dubiously.

‘In my wood-cutting days I walked around every one of these
peaks, searching for the rare timbers that grow nowhere else. The other needle
plateaux are circular in outline, or oval, or have ragged edges, but
Thuntunnimoe is in the form of a cloverleaf and I always felt lucky when I was
here. I was lucky.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I came to the plateau country searching for the precious
red amber tree, whose timber is more valuable than gold. The base of
Thuntunnimoe peak is one of only three places on Lauralin the red amber tree
grows, and no one knows it’s here but me. That’ll change once Monkshart follows
Nish here, of course. He brings ruin wherever he goes.’

Nish was the one topic she didn’t want to raise, for she
didn’t want Thommel’s bitterness to blight their friendship. She assumed there
was a good reason for it but since he still hadn’t told her and it was his only
failing, she made allowances. ‘How did you get the timber out?’

‘I cut part of the trunk’s heart into slices and carried it
on my back.’

‘All that way?’

‘You don’t need much. Red amber-wood isn’t used as timber
– it’s too valuable. I stacked the rest carefully so it would season, for
I planned to come back for it.’

‘But you never did,’ she guessed.

‘I fell foul of one of Jal-Nish’s labour gangs – slave
gangs, really – and spent two years of my life on it, though it felt like
twenty. They drive you until your bones crack, Maelys. The other slaves were
dying all around me and I wanted to die too, just to escape. How I envied Nish,
idling his sentence away in a comfortable cell.’

Maelys felt that she had to defend Nish, though she was
coming to think that he wasn’t the man he’d been made out to be and, guiltily,
that Tulitine had been right and her previous feelings for him had just been a
romantic infatuation arising from reading his tale so many times as an
impressionable child. He didn’t compare to Thommel and that troubled her, for
even now she only knew one certain way to secure her family’s safety.

‘It was a stinking hole,’ she said mildly. ‘I could still
smell it on him days after he’d bathed.’

‘We slept in stinking holes too, and ate slops.’ He wasn’t
bitter now, just matter-of-fact. ‘Then we were whipped awake at dawn, seven
days a week, and broke our backs in hard labour, hauling gigantic logs out of
the forest.’

‘What’s red amber-wood used for?’ she asked.

‘All sorts of things. The wood dust is steeped and mixed
into potions, salves and unguents to fight infections; also in the subtlest of
perfumes and as the rarest and most tantalising of spices. It’s considered to
confer good luck; many people also think that having it in their house is a
blessing on their family and all their endeavours. I wouldn’t know about that,
though I was always lucky when I carried some, and I felt cursed as soon as it
was taken from me.

‘But the greatest value of red amber-wood, from Thuntunnimoe
at least, is as a ward against unwanted spells and charms. Perhaps the trees
take up something of the native magic of this place as they grow, for red
amber-wood from other places is far weaker.

‘I would have made my fortune from it, if only … Anyway,
just a splinter will do, worn on the body. Or burnt in a brazier it will
protect a household for a day or two.’ Thommel sounded like a fairground
spruiker now, though she loved to see him so animated.

‘It’s not proof against strong Arts – only a king
could afford enough red amber-wood for that. But if you could,’ he looked over
his shoulder then lowered his voice, with an uneasy smile, ‘It’s said that you
could walk past a wisp-watcher carrying a sign,
Death to the Tyrant God-Emperor
, and the watcher wouldn’t see you.’

‘Really? I could use some of that. Wait a minute!’ she
cried, staring eagerly at the peak. ‘Thommel, if there is something uncanny
hidden at the top, what if it’s surrounded by red amber-wood? Maybe that’s how
it’s been hidden from the God-Emperor all this time.’

He raised an eyebrow and Maelys realised that she’d said too
much, and perhaps given Nish’s secret away. She prayed that she was right about
Thommel, and that he could be trusted.

They trudged across to the base of Thuntunnimoe and
circled the peak twice, but found no human footprints save their own. They
trekked to the other needle peaks nearby in case Nish had gone to the wrong
one, finding no sign there either. A week of agonisingly drawn-out days went
by. Nish failed to appear. Finally Maelys was forced to conclude that he’d
either been taken or had fallen along the way.

‘We’ll give him a few more days,’ said Thommel. ‘I knew
where I was going, remember? Let’s climb up a bit. We might be able to see
something.’

The cloverleaf-shaped peak was somewhat broader at the base,
and its cliffed walls were indented by four precipitous clefts, though only one
of them looked climbable. They scrambled up it for a hundred spans, struggling
on wet, mossy rocks which often moved underfoot, to a point where they could
see back over the rainforest.

‘Hey!’ cried Thommel, staring.

Just a few days’ march behind them, a flight of flappeters
were circling. Maelys sprang under the fronds of a tree fern, though the
flappeters couldn’t have seen them from such a distance.

‘Only two things could bring such valuable creatures here,’
said Thommel, who hadn’t moved. ‘The Defiance, or Nish.’

‘They’re circling over a big area,’ said Maelys after
watching for a while. Her heart leapt. ‘They’re following Nish.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Thommel. ‘Or the Defiance. And whoever it
is, the God-Emperor’s forces must be shadowing them.’

So even if Nish did turn up, and found what he was looking
for on the plateau, there wouldn’t be time to get away with it. What if he were
out there now, desperately searching for this peak among dozens of similar
ones? That could take weeks, since the cloverleaf shape wasn’t apparent from a
distance. Was there any way to signal him without the flappeters seeing it?