The Fate of the Fallen (The Song of the Tears Book 1) (6 page)

She chuckled. ‘I know how to fool the watchers and the
listeners, silly! Hurry up or we’ll be late.’

Late for what? That traitor, hope, rose in him again, but he
didn’t ask.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I forgot. Mother sent you these. They were
Father’s.’

She handed him a cloth bag. Inside were two pairs of knitted
socks plus a pair of worn boots. He put them on. They were a good fit apart
from pinching a little on the outsides, and it was this which convinced him
that it was really happening.

‘Come on.’ She held out her hand.

He took it and went with her. Nish knew they wouldn’t get
away, but even a few minutes’ freedom would be a highlight in his unchanging
existence.

‘What’s your name?’ he said as they reached the door.

‘Fyllis. Shhh now.’

Her blonde hair was an aching reminder of Irisis, all they’d
made together, and what they might have … He couldn’t think about such things;
it was too painful. Instead he focussed on the child and for the first time in
ten years forgot his own troubles. He was terrified for this slender, serious
little girl, so proud of the job she’d been entrusted with, so oblivious of the
risk. Fyllis couldn’t imagine what Jal-Nish would do to her, but Nish could.

She edged through the door and turned towards the
wisp-watcher. The filaments of its iris stirred and its black centre contracted
to focus on them. Nish felt the painted target again, but on her this time, and
his skin crawled as he imagined the alerts going off in the guardhouse and in
his father’s palace.

‘It’s watching us,’ he said out of the corner of his mouth.
‘Run!’ Run where?

Fyllis jerked his hand as if she were cross with him and
kept walking, wearing a slightly vacuous smile. He kept on as well, for he
couldn’t abandon her, whatever the next few minutes held. Besides, there was no
turning back now.

They passed beneath the wisp-watcher and began to climb the
stairs, and only then did Nish realise that it wasn’t making its normal buzzing
noise. Whatever it was seeing, it wasn’t sending it to other wisp-watchers, or
to the tears. His heart surged – maybe this child
could
fool them, and if the wisp-watcher didn’t store what it had
seen to send later, Jal-Nish would never know how Nish had escaped.

He was running far ahead of himself. Mazurhize was thick
with vigilant guards, and many other kinds of traps and defences. Perhaps
Fyllis did have a talent for fooling his father’s uncanny devices, but she
couldn’t conceal their escape from sharp-eyed human sentinels.

At the top of the first flight, Fyllis stopped. Letting go
of Nish’s hand, she made a tube with her curled fingers and peered through it,
up the stairs and down, then along the dimly lit corridors. They were longer
here, for each higher level was larger than the one below it. Shortly she took
his hand again and continued up, repeating her action at the next level and the
one after. Nish couldn’t imagine what kind of talent she was using. He’d been
told that all Arts had been lost when the nodes were destroyed, save his
father’s, but clearly that had been a lie. He found a little hope in that, too.

At the fourth level, Fyllis peered through her rolled
fingers again, started then snatched at Nish’s hand and hauled him along a dark
corridor, almost running, until she came to a cell whose door stood ajar. She
pushed him inside and crouched behind the door.

‘Shhh!’

He was panting from the effort of keeping up – with a
kid! Nish squatted down beside her, trying to breathe slowly, to control his
rising panic.

‘You’re very smelly,’ said Fyllis.

He was sweating, despite the chill. ‘Sorry, they don’t give
us water for washing. What’s going on, Fyllis?’

‘The aunties are making a fuss over on the other side.’
‘Aunties!’ Nish had to restrain a peal of hysterical laughter. An attempted
rescue by a little girl and a bunch of mad aunties? Was he dreaming a farce?

She patted his hand, as if
he
were the child. ‘Don’t worry. They’re very clever.’

He could see the disaster coming and there was no way to
avoid it. Little Fyllis was going to die horribly, along with her ridiculous
aunts, all their friends and associates, and every one of her relatives down to
the fourth cousin. When his father made an example, no one ever forgot it.

Something went thud, like a heavy weight being dropped some
distance away. Fyllis began to count under her breath.

‘Where are we going?’ said Nish.

She shook her head, kept counting, and when she reached
thirty, crouched in front of him and put her hands over his ears. He didn’t ask
what she was doing; he knew it wouldn’t make sense anyway.

At forty, she screwed up her pretty face.

And then the world fell in.

FOUR

Maelys knew something had gone wrong. The aunts had set
off their only weapon, a long-hoarded rimlstone, and the
brainstorm
it had caused had faded ages ago. The rendezvous time
had long passed but there was still no sign of Nish. Fyllis must have been
caught, and the aunts too.

She crouched in the dark, almost weeping with terror for
them, and rubbing her throbbing temples. Aunt Haga had said that the brainstorm
couldn’t harm anyone in their clan because of a peculiar gift they had, yet its
implosion had been like boiling oil poured through a hole into Maelys’s head.
That agony had passed in a minute or two, but now she had a splitting headache
and her thoughts were fuzzy, as if she’d gone a night without sleep.

On the good side, since she was hiding in the foothills half
a league from Mazurhize, it must have hurt everyone down there far worse. She
prayed that it had brought down Jal-Nish as well, though she didn’t think that
was likely. If anyone on Santhenar were protected against the Secret Art, he
was.

Maelys still didn’t know how the aunts had done it. Aunt
Haga had been more offhand than usual about their plans, saying only that the
rimlstone was a clan treasure charged with power long ago, so it wasn’t
affected by the destruction of the nodes. Jal-Nish had sent out his scriers to
hunt down and destroy all such devices, but their rimlstone had been so well
hidden that it had gone undetected.

Crunch
. The sound,
as if someone had broken a piece of slate underfoot, came from further up the
slope. It must be a sentry pacing down the ridge, and he’d probably come
straight past. No, it sounded like a squad of them. The whole area must be
patrolled. Her quest was going to fail before it began. She would let the whole
family down and confirm their worst feelings about her.

Maelys realised that she was breathing heavily but still
couldn’t get enough air. Quiet, before they hear you! She tried to talk herself
out of the panic, but she’d never done anything like this before; how could she
elude the God-Emperor’s eagle-eyed guards? If she moved, they’d hear. If she
stayed where she was they’d walk right over her. The very idea of her rescuing
Nish was a joke. She’d be caught before he even got here, and what would happen
to Fyllis then?

She scanned her surroundings, though it was too dark to make
out more than the outline of the steep slope rising up to the endless mountains
the family had climbed down over the past three days. Anyway, she’d already
looked over the area at sunset. The dry ridge contained a few scanty bushes,
none big enough to hide her from the most cursory search, and was littered with
fragments of flat rock which made it almost impossible to move quietly.
Scattered boulders and a few angular, rearing outcrops of slate were too far
away to conceal her.

The footsteps were crunching down the path. Why had she
waited so close to it? And why hadn’t she moved when she’d first heard them?
They were only a hundred paces away and every step made her slim chance of
survival slimmer. Maelys bit her finger until it hurt; it helped to control her
panic. She didn’t think there was any hope but she was going to do her pathetic
best. Think! Was there anywhere at all she could hide?

The rocks and bushes were too far away; she’d never get
there in time, but ten or twelve paces from the other side of

the path she recalled a little shallow depression, not much
bigger than a crumpled eiderdown. If she lay down in it and pulled her coat
over her, it might blend into the dark surrounds sufficiently to hide her. But
could she get that far, unseen, unheard?

The sentries were tramping down, not making a lot of noise
but not hiding it either. And why should they? The God-Emperor’s guards acted
as though they owned the world.

You’re hesitating again – go now! It was hard to force
herself to action, for daring and desperate deeds were far outside her
experience. Maelys took a careful step towards the path she had to cross,
feeling the grit squeaking under her boots and her heart battering at her ribs,
then another step. She was beside the path, and about to step onto it, when
from the corner of her eye she caught a movement further up.

She froze. If she could see him, surely he would see her
too. Should she run? Hide? Wait to die? Whatever she did, it was bound to come
to the same thing in the end.

Maelys urged herself on. Morrelune was out of sight behind
the curve of the ridge, and if she kept low she wouldn’t make a silhouette
against the dark lower slopes. She stepped onto the path, feeling like a rabbit
in the sights of an archer. The little dip, just a stone’s cast away, felt as
remote as the moon.

She concentrated on lifting her feet and putting them down
carefully, trying to make no sound, though the rasp of gravel underfoot sounded
like army boots, her breath like wind echoing through a cavern, her heartbeat
like pounding hooves.

Maelys had just reached the other side of the track when a
cry echoed down the slope. ‘Hoy, what do you think you’re doing?’

She went rigid, one foot raised, nearly wetting herself with
panic. A scream was building up and she felt an overwhelming urge to bolt,
heedless of the noise it would make. She turned stiffly, like a statue rotating
at a neck joint, to stare up the slope. She couldn’t see anything. Keep going,
you damn fool. Never give up. Maelys edged sideways, her boot scraping across a
rock, and cringed at the sound.

Boots skidded on grit and she knew she’d been seen. They
were running after her; she imagined their long shining blades out, ready to
disembowel her, but this time she kept going, using their noise to cover her
own small sounds, and when she was a few paces beyond the path Maelys realised
that she’d been mistaken. A man laughed – a bray like a donkey –
and another grunted with his exertion. It sounded like two guards wrestling. It
was just horseplay, for she made out a thudding blow, then a low, angry voice,
one used to command.

‘Two days in the iron-toothed stocks each! And if it happens
again, I’ll register your charges with the seneschal –
fools
! Sentry duty for our glorious
God-Emperor is an honour for scum like you, and never forget it.’

They began moving down again, no more than thirty paces away
now. Maelys crouched lower, lifting each foot carefully and putting it down
delicately. Five steps to go; four; three; two. She gained the tiny hollow,
feeling its sparse grass sighing under her boots, pulled off her coat and went
down on hands and knees.

The leading sentry crested a hump just up the slope as she
settled on her belly and drew the coat over her with a bare rustle. Maelys lay
still, breathing into a fold of fabric to stifle her panting, striving with
every ounce of will to stay calm in the face of a terror that was getting worse
every second. She couldn’t take any more. Not one little thing.

The first two sentries had gone past and the next was
approaching when something crawled onto her neck. It had an awful lot of legs
and its feet left a tickling itch behind. She caught her breath, praying that
it would crawl off again, but it continued down the side of her throat. There
it seemed to disappear, only to reappear between her breasts. It had crawled
down the chain of her taphloid. It felt like a centipede, and some were
venomous. Maelys couldn’t do anything about it, for the next guard was
approaching, some distance behind the first two, and if she made the slightest
sound or movement he’d pick it up.

The centipede was now butting into her compressed cleavage,
the bristles on its back segments pricking like needles. She could feel its
tiny feet hooking into her skin and tugging as it tried to move forwards.
Afraid it was going to bite or sting, Maelys raised her chest ever so slightly.
The centipede crawled through the gap, then as she moved, it bit her on the
soft swelling of her breast.

Maelys went rigid, squeezing her eyes shut against tears of
pain and clenching her jaw to stop herself from crying out. It took a
superhuman effort, but she managed to suppress all but a tiny squeak. The
instant she made it, she went cold inside.

‘What’s that?’ called a sentry further up the path.

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ said another man, below her.

‘It was a little squeaking sound. Like someone in pain.’

‘Men in pain don’t squeak,’ said the man below her. ‘They
yell. It must have been a bat. Bats squeak; and mice. Come on. I’m hungry.’

‘Light a lantern and search the area,’ said the sergeant
coldly from above. He tramped down. ‘Good sentries never ignore a sign, no
matter how innocent it sounds.’

This was it. She was finished. No, run, you fool! But Maelys
couldn’t; she stared at the tall shadows, paralysed. A sentry unhooked a
lantern from his pack, raised its glass and struck a flint striker at the wick,
snap, snap. She couldn’t do anything but lie there with her whole breast
throbbing, waiting for them to take her.

A stray breeze carried the smell of lamp oil to her, and the
men’s sweat. She felt sick. The lamp caught, the glass was lowered with a
metallic
tock
, and its light grew.