The Fate of the Fallen (The Song of the Tears Book 1) (42 page)

‘I don’t know this land but we’re a long way north of
Tifferfyte, near the city of Guffeons. I suggest we head there, and on the way
I’ll try to contact our allies. Let’s put some distance between us and the
soldiers, Deliverer.’

Nish couldn’t argue with that, so after a frugal meal of
withered berries he fell in behind Phrune. They tramped through the night until
he was so weary that he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

Not long before dawn, Monkshart and Phrune set up camp at
the top of a stony ridge while Nish slumped against a rock out of the wind.
They ate fat wood grubs baked in the ashes of the fire, spitting out the tiny
hooked segment spines and the gritty mouth parts, drank stagnant water from a pool
at the base of the ridge and finally, blissfully, wrapped themselves in their
coats and slept. Nish didn’t even dream.

He was woken by whispering in a singsong accent he
didn’t recognise, though it wasn’t Monkshart or Phrune. Had they been
discovered already? He schooled himself to remain still. It was mid-morning and
he could feel the sun’s heat through his clothes.

‘Can that really be the
Deliverer
?’
a youth whispered in awed tones.

‘Shh, you’ll wake him,’ said another, a young woman. ‘The
poor man. He looks so thin, so tormented.’

‘The Deliverer has suffered mightily for his people,’ said
Monkshart. ‘The God-Emperor treats his son as cruelly as any rebel or criminal.
See how he had Cryl-Nish flogged when he was still a boy?’

Nish felt his shirt being drawn up, and there came a
collective gasp as the scars were revealed. He sat up, irritably jerking his
shirt down. He didn’t like his body being on public view, and especially not
his whipping scars, which he still felt ashamed about. He’d richly deserved
that punishment, the callow, unpleasant youth he’d been at the time, and wanted
to forget it.

Eight people stood in a semi-circle around him, peasants
dressed in brown homespun. Most were young – three young women and two
youths – but there were also two older men and a tall but shrivelled,
white-haired crone.

His overwhelming urge was to snarl at them but Nish bit down
on it. ‘Good morning,’ he said with forced politeness, wondering how they’d
found him so quickly. If the word had got out already, his father’s troops must
know it too, and the garrison wasn’t far away. ‘How did you know I was here?’

No one spoke. They looked too awed, until one of the girls,
a buxom, sturdily built lass with black hair and laughing eyes, said boldly,
‘Master Monkshart came for us, surr, so we could worship –’

‘Worship!’ Nish bellowed, forcing himself to his feet and
directing a furious scowl at the zealot. ‘You went down and rounded up these …
peasants in direct contravention of my orders,
to worship me
?’

The peasants took a collective step backwards, save for the
crone and the young woman. She bit her lip, but did not lower her eyes as the
others had. The crone was watching him, though he couldn’t read her expression.

‘Not exactly,’ Monkshart said blandly, ‘though at the
nearest village I did seek out those who believed in you.’

‘Why?’ Nish could hardly contain his rage.

Monkshart drew him aside, saying quietly, ‘The God-Emperor
knows you’re at large, Deliverer, and it won’t take him long to discover where
you came out of the maze. You’ve been lucky, uncommonly so, but you can’t rely
on it. You’ve no choice but to begin the uprising, and for that you must have
supporters. These are the first. If you act the part here, by tomorrow the word
will be spreading as fast as people can walk. Faster! Within a week you’ll have
a small army, and you’ll need one. It will take an army of bodies to protect
the core of the Defiance from your father’s wrath.’

An army of living, breathing and disposable shields, he
meant, and Nish was having none of it. ‘I’m not hiding behind anyone!’ he
snapped. His earlier moral flexibility still bothered him. There had been
little choice but to leave the villagers of Tifferfyte to die, but Nish felt
ashamed that he’d agreed to it with so little protest. He felt complicit;
tainted.

‘Then, what is your plan, Deliverer? Do you have one?’

Nish’s only plan was to give Monkshart and Phrune the slip
as quickly as possible and make his way to the rain-shrouded plateau he’d seen
in the Pit of Possibilities, but he wasn’t going to give the merest hint about
that. He never stopped thinking about it, though.

‘I thought not,’ said Monkshart quietly. ‘You’d better go
along with
my
plan, Deliverer, for
without it we’ll be screaming in the God-Emperor’s torture chambers before the
week is out. Go to your followers and sway them, and do it quickly, for they’re
looking uneasy. Once they lose faith they’ll start to focus on the perils of
following the Deliverer, and soon someone will decide that there’s more to be gained
by betraying you than supporting you. They cannot be allowed to lose faith. The
Defiance must either grow like an avalanche, or fail and be crushed. There’s no
middle way.’

He was right. It was the only course and for as long as Nish
was stuck with Monkshart he’d better follow it. Could it work? He had no idea.
Nish took a deep breath and turned back to his followers. Could eight people
really start a revolution? Or would they, and all who followed them, fall to
his father as every other rebel had?

It reminded Nish that Maelys had seen into his father’s
mind, and that he believed he was close to becoming invulnerable and immortal.
He had to be stopped, every second counted and for the moment Monkshart’s way
was the only way.

Nish noticed that Phrune was staring greedily at the buxom
young woman, his tongue flicking across his lips. Nish felt an urge to kick his
feet from under him, but he suppressed it. If he were to become the Deliverer
he had to make use of whatever tools came to hand, even Phrune, though he felt
cheapened by the man.

Nish looked into the eyes of each peasant in turn, then
focussed on one. Not the lass with the flashing eyes, to whom he was
instinctively drawn, physically at least, but the crone with the thin white
hair and a face as seamed as saddle leather. Her eyes were clouded and he
guessed that she was nearly blind, but they never left his face, as if she were
searching for something in him. If she found it, she would sway the others.

‘Just over ten years ago,’ he said softly, so they had to
stretch forwards to hear, ‘we won the war that humanity had been losing for a
hundred and fifty years. And despite the conniving and treachery of some of the
most powerful people in the land, we won it honourably.

‘We did not crush our enemies, thus making them hate us all
the more. We made peace with the lyrinx, who had sprung from humanity in the
distant past after being exiled to the void for their beliefs. We gave them
their own world, Tallallame, to wrest back from savagery, and they took it and
departed in friendship. The invading Aachim, sadly weakened by the folly of
their leader, we gifted with the desert land of Faranda to make it bloom. Once
all that was done, we sat down to plan a new and better world,
for everyone
.’

No one spoke; no one fidgeted. Their hungry eyes were fixed
on him. ‘But in the very moment of our victory, peace and freedom were snatched
from us by my father and his sorcerous tears, Gatherer and Reaper, aided by the
folly of one of the heroes of the war who caused all the nodes in the world to
explode, one after another.’ Brilliant, unhappy Tiaan. He wondered what had
happened to her. Dead at his father’s hand, he felt sure. ‘We tried to stop
Jal-Nish but we allies were scattered, slain or taken.

‘My father didn’t just want supremacy, though. He also
wanted revenge and he hated my beloved Irisis most of all. She should have fled
with the others but Irisis could never run away. She gave her life to save mine
– the greatest gift any person can give – and remained nobly
defiant to the end. When Father had her slain, I swore to endure the worst he
could put me to, for however long it took. I swore to help build the resistance
in her name.’

His voice strengthened. ‘I swore that one day I would
return, and that together we would tear down the tyrant and all his evil works.
That promise has troubled me ever since, for I am just a man, no braver than
any of you. Many times I’ve wavered, and many times my courage has failed me,
but the day has come and here I stand, ready to fulfil my oath. The Defiance
has been formed, and blooded. The villagers of Tifferfyte, two hundred leagues
to the south of here, gave their lives just the day before yesterday so we
could win free.’

There was a stir of disbelief in the crowd.

‘It’s true,’ Nish said, looking into the cloudy eyes of the
old woman. ‘We travelled two hundred leagues in one day,
on foot
, from the Pit of Possibilities at the dead heart of an
exploded node of power, a place not even the God-Emperor’s Gatherer and Reaper
could reach, all the way to the cliffs near Gundoe. And how did we do it?
Through an unknown force; a new Art the God-Emperor knows nothing about. He
told the world that he held all the Arts there were, didn’t he?’

Nish looked to each of the villagers in turn, and they
nodded.

‘That’s what Father said,
and he lied
. Why did he lie?’

No one answered.

‘Because he’s afraid!’ Nish boomed. ‘He’s terrified that
we’ve recognised his one weakness and know how to attack him.’ Suddenly Nish
felt Monkshart’s curious eyes on him. Better not go any further down that path;
he didn’t want the zealot to wonder about what else Nish might have seen in the
Pit of Possibilities.

‘Despite what Father tells you, there
are
other Arts in the world, and other powers too. Yesterday we used
one to walk the maze, two hundred leagues beneath the very roots of the
mountains, on a path no man or woman has ever dared tread before.

‘But not alone. We were hunted all the way by Seneschal
Vomix, the most feared and hated of all the God-Emperor’s lieutenants, at the
head of a squad of the Imperial Militia. Now the militiamen lie dead in the
maze, and Vomix fell where we came out of it. The God-Emperor’s servants can be
defeated, and so can he. He
will
be
defeated if we can just hold to our purpose.

‘Separately we’re nothing. Together we will make the
Defiance into an unstoppable force that will sweep from one side of Santhenar
to the other. Together we will topple the God-Emperor, destroy his evil works,
and create the new and better world that we’ve been crying for since the end of
the war. Together we will do this, my friends.’

Nish reached out to include them all, met the eyes of each
in turn, and bowed his head. He’d never been much of an orator, and in his ears
the speech sounded awkward, uninspiring; an appeal it would be easy to ignore.

But it must have had something, for the old woman clapped
her hands, once, and as though they’d been waiting for her approval, the
peasants let out a roar of acclamation, then rushed forwards to touch him. She
followed slowly, but as her fingers met the back of his hand he sensed
something in her with his enhanced clearsight.

She was more than a nearly blind old woman – she was a
mover
, one who could help to shape
the future, his future, and it was no accident that his steps from the Pit of
Possibilities through the maze – his vision of the path – had
brought him out near her village.

Monkshart was talking to a grizzled peasant, perhaps the
headman of the village, when the old woman turned away, stumbled and caught at
Monkshart’s arm. He broke off, staring into the distance, though once she’d
steadied herself he resumed as though nothing had happened.

After they’d gone, Monkshart clapped Nish on the shoulder.
‘A competent address in the circumstances, Deliverer. Your sincerity made up
for your inadequacies as an orator and a trifling charm of my own made the
difference. Under my tutelage you’ll improve with every oration, and before we
stand on the golden steps of Morrelune you truly will be the Deliverer, in word
as well as in deed. Now we must move, swiftly and unpredictably.’

The peasants went back to their village and Monkshart
pressed on, following random paths the choice of which he confided to no one.
Nish never went near a village, for they all had wisp-watchers and some would
be secret ones, but Monkshart slipped away each time they camped, to return
with more and ever more awed peasants,
believers
.
His charisma had turned the bloody slaughter at Tifferfyte into a noble
sacrifice and a clarion call whose echoes reached further every day.

On the second day dozens came, while the day after that,
hundreds gathered to hear Nish speak and touch him if they could. By the fourth
evening Monkshart no longer needed to leave the camp, for the word was
spreading like an avalanche.

At the end of a week the camp was surrounded by thousands of
true believers who had brought tents, supplies, weapons and some mounts, and
most never went home. Nish’s hoped-for quiet march had become a noisy
pilgrimage that must have been ringing alarm bells all the way up and down the
east coast.

But it got worse. The pilgrims were beginning to treat him
as a kind of messiah, bringing crippled children to be blessed and pleading for
favours of every kind, including the kind that he longed for desperately but
could not bring himself to accept – the young women whose eyes followed
him everywhere he went, and whom he was constantly having to eject from his
tent in the middle of the night.

Being treated as a messiah was the last thing Nish wanted,
and he now realised that Monkshart had been using him all along. But what did
Monkshart really want?

 
THIRTY-ONE