Read The Destiny of the Dead (The Song of the Tears Book 3) Online
Authors: Ian Irvine
The Destiny of the Dead (The Song of the Tears Book 3)
Tales of the Three Worlds
THE SONG OF THE TEARS TRILOGY
Book 3 – The Destiny of the Dead
Ian Irvine
THE SONG OF THE TEARS TRILOGY
Book 3 – The Destiny of the Dead
Copyright 2008, 2014 Ian Irvine
(First published by Penguin Books Australia, 2008)
I would like to thank my editor, Nan McNab, and my
agent, Selwa Anthony, for their hard work and support over many years and many
books. Thanks to Laura Harris at Penguin Books, and Bella Pagan and Darren Nash
at Orbit Books, for support, encouragement and assistance in so many ways. I
would also like to thank everyone at Penguin Books and Orbit Books for working
so hard on the eleven books of The Three Worlds series and for making such a
success of them.
CONTENTS
RUIN ON THE RANGE
ONE
There’s no way out this time, is there?’ said Maelys,
wiping the teeming rain from her eyes.
Nish glanced at her and managed a smile, for she was even
grubbier than he was; her small figure was clotted with mud from head to foot.
‘I can’t think of one.’ He rubbed his nose and winced. His battered face was so
swollen that he was almost unrecognisable.
It was mid-morning on the Range of Ruin, and everyone had
gathered in a ring around him, hoping for a miracle, but it wasn’t going to
happen. The enemy held the surrounding ridges, trapping them in a clearing in
the forested valley; they had been ordered to take Nish and Maelys alive, and
put everyone else to death. All their struggles over the past weeks, and all
Nish’s agony, had been for nothing.
He and his Gendrigorean militia had driven themselves to the
limit of human endurance to climb the rain-drenched range and reach Blisterbone
Pass before his father’s army, and they would have succeeded had their
treacherous guide, Curr, not led them astray. The pass was only a league away
in a direct line, yet it was as unreachable as the moon, for the enemy’s
advance guard had beaten them to it and the rest of that monstrous army could
not be far behind.
For supporting Nish and daring to oppose his corrupt father
– the God-Emperor Jal-Nish Hlar – the peaceful little nation of
Gendrigore was going to be obliterated and its men, women and children taken
into slavery. Nish felt responsible, for the Gendrigoreans had not wanted to go
to war; he had talked them into coming and now he bitterly regretted it.
Their situation was hopeless, yet he could not give in.
During the lyrinx war they had snatched victory from defeat many times, and
surely there had to be a way to do it again. But they could not win by force of
arms, which left only the Secret Art.
‘Flydd?’ Nish said quietly. ‘We really need your help.’
‘What if you made another portal with the mimemule?’ said
Maelys, for Flydd had used that little mimicking device to create the portal
that had brought her, Flydd and Yggur here.
Xervish Flydd, the mancer who had led humanity to an
impossible victory in the war against the lyrinx ten years ago, swayed on his
broad feet. Though he had regained some of his lost gift for the Art, he had
never been the same after casting that terrible Renewal Spell upon himself
almost six weeks ago.
It had replaced his aged and failing body with that of a
bigger man in middle age, but Flydd was in constant pain and he seemed meaner,
harder and … Nish resisted the thought for as long as he could – less
trustworthy. A few minutes ago, Flydd had been gazing at the Profane Tears,
Gatherer and Reaper, the source of the God-Emperor’s power, as though he wanted
to snatch them for himself.
‘I can’t!’ Flydd said, clutching at his belly. ‘Bringing so
many people through that second portal took everything I had, and the
aftersickness
–’ He doubled up as
though he was going to vomit, gagged, and straightened painfully. ‘I don’t have
the power to use the mimemule again.’ He looked around blearily. ‘I don’t know
this place. What’s our line of retreat?’
‘There isn’t one,’ said Nish. ‘We’re in a valley shaped like
a tilted oval bowl. It’s a good league long and half a league wide, and the
upper end runs up to the white-thorn peak, the mountain guarding this side of
Blisterbone Pass.’
With his sabre, he gestured towards the towering mountain,
barely visible through the blinding rain. ‘The upper part of the valley ends at
the cliffs; I don’t think anyone could climb them. The enemy holds the ridges
to either side of us and they’re bare, rain-washed rock with no cover –
we’d never fight our way up. They also guard the only way out, a gorge spanned
by a natural arch of stone.’
He pointed downslope, though nothing could be seen in that
direction save a wall of rainforest marking the lower edge of the clearing.
‘The valley floor is covered in forest, apart from another clearing lower down,
near the gorge.’
‘Is it more defendable than this one?’ said Flydd.
‘I don’t know. What do you think, Tulitine?’ Nish said to
the tall, striking woman to his left.
The old seer had used a Regression Spell to temporarily
restore herself to a relatively young age, then made a desperate attempt to
reach Nish’s militia and warn them that they had been betrayed, but she had
arrived just as the trap had been sprung.
Tulitine thought for a moment. ‘I don’t think so, for the
valley narrows down there. The enemy archers could fire into the clearing from
the stone arch, and from the nearby ridge.’
‘Forget it,’ said Flydd. ‘We’ll make our stand here.’ He
turned towards the river that ran down the centre of the valley; it could just
be made out through the trees. ‘Can they cross the river and attack us from
behind?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Tulitine. ‘It’s partly dammed by
fallen trees just upstream; that’s how I got here.’
‘Can you stop them crossing with your Art?’ said Nish.
‘I only know healing charms. Besides, the Regression Spell
is already fading, and when it comes undone …’
Tulitine had hinted earlier at what it would do to her. The
consequences were going to be horrific and there was nothing anyone could do to
stop the spell failing. That left only Yggur, who towered to Nish’s left,
craggy as an ancient cedar and seemingly as indestructible.
‘I know you’ve got power, old friend,’ Nish said, ‘and we’ve
never needed it more. If you could create a concealing mist or …’
‘Ordinarily, that would be the easiest of spells,’ said
Yggur. ‘Especially here, where there’s water everywhere …’
‘But?’ cried Nish. Yggur had been his last hope.
‘Gatherer is watching everything I do, and the moment I try
to draw power Reaper blocks me. I’m not strong enough to take on the greatest
force on Santhenar.’ Yggur rubbed his inflamed wrists. For seven years he’d
been held prisoner by the Numinator, whose enchanted bracelets had continually
drained him of his powers of mancery to bolster her own. ‘Besides, I feel
strangely hobbled in this place.’
‘What do you mean,
hobbled
?’
said Maelys sharply. She pressed a hand between her breasts, and frowned.
Nish had seen her make that unconscious gesture many times,
and knew that she was making contact with her taphloid, the mysterious little
device she’d worn around her neck since childhood. Touching it normally
comforted her, but she seemed troubled now.
‘I don’t know.’ Yggur’s gaze flicked towards the red-hot
caduceus, the height of a small tree, embedded in the centre of the clearing.
Whatever uncanny force drove its internal fires, it was unquenched by the
teeming rain. ‘There may be a way to hide what I’m doing from Gatherer, but …
it will take time to find it.’ He headed towards the caduceus, shielding his
eyes from its glare.
Time we don’t have. Nish could feel the radiance beating
upon his bruised face. The caduceus, a winged shaft tightly entwined by a pair
of open-mouthed serpents, was made of black iron forged from the heart of a
meteorite and, when Stilkeen had hurled it down, its point had penetrated half
a span of solid rock.
Hostage! For –
white-ice-fire!
that tormented being from the void had cried as it seized
the God-Emperor and carried him off, but what had it meant?
Had Stilkeen meant that Jal-Nish was held hostage until it
regained the chthonic fire – the force that had once bound its physical
and spirit aspects together – stolen from it in ancient times?
Or did the caduceus signify that the whole world was
Stilkeen’s hostage? Either way, Nish had no idea what to do about it. No one on
Santhenar had faced an immortal
being
before and not even Yggur, oldest of them all, knew how to deal with it.
‘Then I’d better organise our defences.’ Nish turned away,
sick at the thought of the coming massacre. The professional soldiers up there
were going to tear his rag-tag militia apart.
His eye fell on the ginger-haired cook’s boy, Huwld, a
cheerful, scrawny lad of eleven.
‘What the blazes are you doing here?’ Nish cried.
‘Got better,’ grinned Huwld.
He had suddenly appeared halfway up the range, as though the
militia had been hiding him from Nish all that time. Nish had sent the boy back
with the third of his militia who had contracted dysentery, but somehow Huwld
was still here, and it made the coming battle so much worse. The boy was going
to die, along with all his people, and Nish couldn’t bear it.
The Gendrigoreans seemed to have no idea what an army was
really for, or how brutal and savage warfare was. And why should they, Nish
mused. No enemy had successfully crossed the Range of Ruin into Gendrigore in
over a thousand years.
At first he’d thought of them as little more than carefree,
pleasure-loving innocents, impossible to turn into a decent fighting force, but
he knew better now. Inside, they were tough as the gnarled roots of an old
tree.
Huwld had vanished again and, as Nish scanned the militia
for the boy, he saw Aimee, a young woman so small and slender that she made
Nish look tall. Whatever had possessed him, allowing her to join the militia?
She was as brave as any warrior, but what use was she going to be when the
fighting started? A heavy blow would break her in half.
Nish shook off the gloom and self-doubt before it became
despair, and looked up. Above the western ridge, Jal-Nish’s deputy, the dwarf
General Klarm, stood spread-legged on a drifting air-sled the size of an
emperor’s bedroom. He appeared to be issuing orders to his troops, who were
lined up along the ridge like pegs on a washing line. Nish estimated their
number at a thousand, three times his militia, and they were big, brutal men,
twice Klarm’s height. The God-Emperor’s white standard, mounted on a wooden
pole at the bow, flapped high above him.
Nish still couldn’t come to terms with the betrayal, for
Klarm, who had been a friend and ally during the war, was one of the bravest
men Nish had met. Yet after Jal-Nish seized power ten years ago Klarm had,
inexplicably, taken service with him and was now his commander-in-chief, even
trusted with the Profane Tears in his liege’s involuntary absence. And because
Nish’s militia had refused to surrender, Klarm would show no mercy.
‘They’ll shoot us down from the edges of the clearing,’ said
Gi, a gentle, sturdy young woman, one of Nish’s lieutenants and his closest
friend in the militia. ‘No need to risk their own lives.’
‘The God-Emperor doesn’t give a damn for his soldiers’
lives,’ said Flydd, ‘but he would not risk his only surviving son’s life, and
neither can Klarm. They’ll have to come on foot, and an agonising death awaits
any soldier who harms you, Nish.’
Nish took no comfort from that, for no one could control the
course of a battle, and in its chaos soldiers were often killed by accident, or
even by their own people. Besides, he would sooner die in battle than be
captured and see all his friends and allies slain.