The Fate of the Fallen (The Song of the Tears Book 1) (24 page)

She told him.

‘But he didn’t identify any of your family by name? Not even
Fyllis?’

‘No.’

‘Then he’s bluffing. Believe me, if he knew who they were,
he’d name them and gloat.’

‘And if you’re wrong …?’ Her stomach knotted with dread, for
Fyllis.

‘You can’t believe a word he says. Father is the very God of
Liars and his servants ape him in every way.’

And you’re the son of the father. Would you sacrifice my
family to your freedom? The noble Nish she’d hero-worshipped would not have,
but she wasn’t sure about this stranger. As she hesitated, Rurr-shyve slowed
and looked back at her, and she could feel her control leaking away. The
pursuing beasts were closing fast and she didn’t know what to do.

‘Maelys!’

Nish’s arms were crushing her ribs. She turned; his teeth
were bared, his eyes staring. He pushed himself up out of the saddle. What was
the matter? Surely he wasn’t going to jump? No, for he put his hands around her
head and laid his forehead against hers. What was he doing?

A trace of his clearsight must have passed to her, for she
recognised the mental paralysis as another of Vomix’s Arts, and it faded.
Giving herself up was pointless, whether he had her family or not. She seized
back control. ‘Fly, Rurr-shyve! Fly as you’ve never flown before.’

The beast seemed to leap forwards in the air. She pointed it
at the dense knot of flappeters in front of her, holding her breath as they
converged at a shattering pace, and flinching to avoid the impact, but at the
very moment of collision the hallucinations vanished and Rurr-shyve streaked
away.

It had the advantage of height over the six real flappeters,
which were labouring up after them, and now began to lengthen its lead. By the
time the pursuit reached their altitude Rurr-shyve was a good league ahead,
though the fresher beasts soon began to peg back the gap. The town disappeared,
then the tower. They were flying over rugged country now: steep ridges covered
in scrub, topped with angled outcrops of grey limestone dotted with black
sinkholes.

TURN BACK, TURN BACK …

Vomix was just a whisper in her mind now, easy to resist,
though her strength was failing with Rurr-shyve’s, while the sympathetic echoes
of its pain and fatigue were growing stronger in her. Her bones ached and it
was all she could do to sit up. Her eyes were watering from the cold wind. She
wiped them on her sleeve, trying to focus on what lay ahead – an oddly
shaped mountain whose top seemed to have fallen in.

Rurr-shyve was tiring so rapidly that the end could not be
long in coming. Thick, slimy lather extended in streamers from its mouth, while
yellow mucous oozed along its neck in wind-blown threads from its breathing
tubes. Every breath came with a gurgling suck and the feather-rotors were
battering at the air rather than curving smoothly through it. The gap was
closing too quickly. Maelys couldn’t see any way of escape.

‘Rurr-shyve is nearly done for,’ she gasped, sagging against
Nish. ‘And so am I.’ Her muscles were a throbbing mass of weariness. Her head
felt fuzzy and it was incredibly difficult to concentrate. ‘I can’t take much
more, Nish.’

He held her up. ‘You’ve got to hold out. Just a few more
minutes. Even one minute.’

What for? She did her best but she had nothing left. She
felt as though she were consuming herself. ‘Food, quick!’

He felt around in the saddlebags, then thrust a crumbling
biscuit into her hand, one she’d baked the previous day from mashed grass seed,
egg and honey. She crammed the whole lot in and gulped it down. A little
strength came back. She spat out grass husks.

‘Thanks,’ Nish muttered as they were blown into his face.

‘Sorry –’

TURN AWAY, RURR-SHYVE.

The flappeter’s feather-rotors stopped for a second. This
order was so overpoweringly loud that it blocked Maelys’s thoughts and, before
she’d recovered, the beast was turning away from the mountain.

Wearily, she forced it back.

‘I
heard
that,’
Nish said wonderingly. ‘It must have hurt Vomix to have used such power. He’s
desperate, Maelys. But why, when he’s within reach of his goal? It doesn’t make
sense.’

She didn’t have the strength to answer. Holding Rurr-shyve
on course, and enduring the echoes of its pain, were taking everything she had.

‘What if we’re close to some place he doesn’t want us to
go?’ He scanned the landscape. Maelys’s aching eyes saw nothing save scrubby
limestone ridge country and the collapsed peak. ‘Can it be that mountain? Keep
straight on, Maelys.’

She gritted her teeth and endured the pain. The peak, from a
distance, resembled drawings of volcanoes she’d seen in a book in the clan
library, except that water gushed from a cavern a third of the way down,
forming a stream linking a series of pools. It wound around the mountain three
times, like the thread of a screw that grew ever wider, before disappearing
into another cave near the bottom. The stream looked as though it had been
deliberately carved into the mountain.

‘It’s just a volcano, Nish.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Nish said thoughtfully. ‘I flew over
dozens of them during the war and none were like this. It looks –’ He
broke off, staring ahead over her shoulder.

Rurr-shyve broke away. Exhaustedly, Maelys turned it back on
course. ‘What … is … it?’ She could barely choke the words out.

‘They’re almost on us. Go harder.’

Rurr-shyve shied away from the peak. She turned it back; it
shied away again. Her amulet hand began jerking through wild arcs; the amulet’s
metal legs had unfolded and it began scratching at her closed fingers, trying
to get out. Nish couldn’t hold her arm steady. ‘It doesn’t want to go there,
Nish.’

‘Then that’s where we’ve got to go; any way you can.’

‘Doing my best,’ she grunted.

‘Force it, cajole it. Seduce it if you have to, but get us
there.’

There wasn’t time to dwell on his unfortunate turn of
phrase, as a crossbow bolt whizzed well above – a warning shot. Nish stood
up in the saddle, using his weight to hold her arm steady, and together they
turned Rurr-shyve towards the mountain. As they neared the crest, a small
walled village came into view, set in a depression on the far slope. People
were working in terraced vegetable gardens. The top of the mountain had
collapsed to form a kind of crater from which shimmering fumes – no,
steam – wavered up.

Suddenly the flappeter shot forwards, though it took a few
seconds for Maelys to work out why. ‘Nish, Vomix’s presence is gone!’

‘Turn back to the crater,’ Nish cried. ‘I know what it is
– it’s all that’s left of a destroyed node from the time of the war
– ten years ago.’

‘Then what’s the use of it?’ She turned Rurr-shyve sharply,
watching the other six beasts. Once they cut across the angle, they’d be upon
her.

But they didn’t. They veered left, away from the crater, and
curved in a great circle around it.

‘I don’t know,’ said Nish, frowning. ‘Unless … can it be
that Vomix’s power doesn’t hold here …? It must be. Head for the village.
Hurry!’

The flappeter began to turn, but suddenly the wind stilled,
the world seemed to hold its breath, and silver lightning sheeted across the
sky. Rurr-shyve let out a shrill cry and turned the other way.

‘Turn back,’ cried Maelys, but it didn’t respond. Maelys
pulled free of Nish, jammed the sharpened peg into the wound and threatened
Rurr-shyve with severing, but it kept going as if she wasn’t there.

‘Harder,’ said Nish, grim-faced.

‘What is it, Nish? What’s Vomix done?’

‘It’s Father! He must have been monitoring Vomix, and when
he failed, Father took control through the tears. How could he do that from so
far away? He doesn’t want us to go near the crater, and that’s the first good
news I’ve heard in a long time.’

‘Not if we can’t get there,’ Maelys panted. Her insatiable
hunger was back, worse than before, but there was no food left.

‘Try harder. To convince Rurr-shyve, you’ll have to hurt
it.’

She didn’t want to be the cause of any creature’s suffering,
but better Jal-Nish’s flesh-formed beast than her family, or Nish. Maelys
thrust the peg in with all the force she could muster.

Rurr-shyve screamed and tried to buck her off. Nish, who had
taken off his safety line earlier, went flying into the air, but his grasping
hand caught hold of her line, which had looped out behind her. He clung to it
with both hands, slammed down hard and thumped into the saddle as the flappeter
tried to tie itself in a knot.

Untwisting with another great convulsion, it went humping
and bucking away towards the other flappeters, which were now slowly circling
the mountain half a league out, as if they didn’t dare come any closer.

Maelys tried to crawl up the neck to prick Rurr-shyve again,
but it was bucking too wildly, and now she began to feel pressure building in
her mind, like shimmering cords trying to wrap themselves around her brain. A
wave of dizziness swept across her as if the blood was being squeezed from her
head; pain stabbed in her sinuses, then a drop of bright red blood splashed on
the saddle horn in front of her. Another followed it and another, until her
nose was streaming blood and it was running down her face and dripping off her
chin.

She felt so dizzy she could barely stay upright. The peg
slipped from her hand as she grabbed desperately for the saddle horn. ‘Nish?’
she croaked, feeling the cords tightening, her consciousness slipping away.
‘Nish, what’s he doing to me …?’

She made one last effort to take back control but her
fingers lacked the strength to hold the amulet. It tore free from her hand and
ran forwards as if it intended to scuttle up Rurr-shyve’s neck. Unfortunately,
at that moment Rurr-shyve lurched wildly. The amulet slid off the bloody saddle
horn in front of Maelys, its metal legs scrabbling for a purchase on the scaly
carapace, hung for a moment on one spike-tipped forelimb, then fell away.

Instantly, Rurr-shyve’s long neck twisted around and it
snapped viciously at her, the hooked tip of its serrated beak gashing her
forearm. Maelys shrieked. Nish began to beat at it with one of the tent poles
but Rurr-shyve put its head down and laboured towards the nearest of its
fellows.

Everything faded into a pink mist in which all she could do
was cling to the saddle horn, watching the blood running down her arm and
mixing with the blood still flooding from her nose, and try not to throw up all
over herself. ‘Nish …’

Nish lunged for the amulet but missed, and it was lost.
After beating off Rurr-shyve’s attack with the tent pole, he shook Maelys,
trying to rouse her. It was useless. Without the amulet, the beast was
uncontrollable and she was doomed.

There was still a chance for him, though. Nish could sense
his father reaching out towards him with a grudging admiration, that his
surviving son had eluded the pursuit for so long and evaded every trap set for
him. He wouldn’t give Maelys any credit for that. Father’s arrogance could not
allow him to think that he’d been bested by a slip of a girl.

Had something changed for Jal-Nish since the encounter in
Morrelune? Nish sensed his father’s yearning, could feel the words slowly
crystallising in his mind.
Come back, my
son, and all will be forgiven. I need you – you’re the only one who can
help me now. Come, sit at my right hand and the thing you most desire shall be
yours.

Nish had never heard his father plead before. Something had
definitely changed. And his father
would
give him everything he asked for, for a price ... even the thing he wanted most
of all. Everything but the life of Maelys and her family, for he would see them
as the blackest traitors. There was nothing Nish could do to save them, unless
…

He didn’t stop to think, but scrambled up Rurr-shyve’s neck,
clinging with his legs, then took hold of the wisp-controller and, with a
mighty heave, tore it out by the roots. Rurr-shyve shrieked in agony, reared up
until it was standing on its tail, then flipped over backwards and came upright
again. Maelys echoed its pain in a rending cry that went on and on, before
slumping in the saddle, unconscious.

The presence in Nish’s mind vanished. Unfortunately,
Jal-Nish’s command of the flappeter failed with it, and Rurr-shyve’s agony was
so great that it lost control of its extremities. The feather-rotors jammed
together and it plunged towards the rocky mountainside in an uncontrollable
spin.

SEVENTEEN

The muscles that drove the feather-rotors were still
bunching and contracting beneath him but the blades had jammed. As the
flappeter whirled, Nish caught hold of the rotor stalk and, balanced
precariously, heaved at the locked blades, which were shuddering under the
strain but unable to spin. Each heave opened a small triangular gap between the
feathered edges, until another driving contraction of the great muscles beneath
him snapped it closed. On his third attempt, Nish was lucky to get his fingers
out.

Just a couple of minutes to impact. He eyed the gnashing
rims through which the feathers protruded. If he caught his fingers between
them they’d be crushed to paste.

He slid down for the tent pole, scrambled up again and
forced it between the locked blades at the point where Maelys’s bamboo splint
left a small gap. Standing on tiptoe with his arm around the thrumming rotor
stalk, he thrust with all his strength. The splint cracked along its length and
one side was propelled up in the air like a bolt from a crossbow. Nish caught
his breath, but after all, what did it matter? The rotor blade only had to hold
for one minute.

The feather-rotors slipped past one another and began to
spin, slowing the descent, though Rurr-shyve’s head was flopping from side to
side and it was still whirling as it fell. Was there anything else he could do?
Nish scrabbled along the tail, locked his ankles around it and bashed the
vertical discs to the left. The flappeter came out of its spin but it was still
falling.