The Fate of the Fallen (The Song of the Tears Book 1) Read online

  Tales of the Three Worlds

  THE SONG OF THE TEARS TRILOGY

  Book 1 – The Fate of the Fallen

  Ian Irvine

  THE SONG OF THE TEARS TRILOGY

  Book 1 – The Fate of the Fallen

  (published in Australia as Torments of the Traitor)

  Copyright 2006, 2014 Ian Irvine

  (First published by Penguin Books Australia, 2006)

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  MAP

  The Continent of Lauralin

  PART ONE – THE DUNGEONS OF MAZURHIZE

  PART TWO – THE PIT OF POSSIBILITIES

  PART THREE – MISTMURK MOUNTAIN

  First Chapters of Book 2: The Curse on the Chosen

  About the Author

  Other Books by Ian Irvine

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank my editor, Nan McNab, for all her hard work and insights. Thanks also to my agent, Selwa Anthony, for guidance and counsel in all sorts of ways. And to Cathy Larsen for the lovely design, to Janet Raunjak for patiently answering all my queries, and to my publishers Laura Harris at Penguin Books and Tim Holman at Orbit Books for support over many years and millions of words. I would also like to thank everyone at Penguin Books and Orbit Books for working so hard on all my books and doing so well with them. Not least, thanks to my family for putting up with me while I write these bloated epics.

  PART ONE – THE DUNGEONS OF MAZURHIZE

  ONE

  After checking that the loop-listener in the corridor was facing the other way, Nish gouged another line into the damp wall of his cell. ‘Three thousand, nine hundred and fifty-nine days.’ Tomorrow would make it ten years, and his sentence in Santhenar’s grimmest dungeon would be over. Tomorrow meant the beginning of a worse nightmare.

  Ten years in prison leaves scars on the toughest of men, but Mazurhize wasn’t just any prison. It had been designed to break the most treacherous and irredeemable criminals of all: those who dared to oppose the Almighty, the Most Exalted One, the God-Emperor himself – Jal-Nish Hlar.

  Nor was Nish just any prisoner, for Jal-Nish, his father, had sentenced Nish to Mazurhize as the first act of his vicious and tyrannical reign. Nish’s only way out, once his time was up, was to swear absolute obedience – to become his father’s lieutenant and enforce his every cruel whim on a world exhausted from a hundred and fifty years of war, then shattered, at the moment of an unexpected victory, by the loss of the Secret Art.

  With callused fingers Nish crushed out his glowing rushlight before the snoop-sniffer down the corridor detected it, and lay back on the reeking straw to run through his feeble plan again. The mould got up his nose but he suppressed a sneeze. Down here, sudden noises provoked violent retaliation.

  Tomorrow was his doomsday and he wasn’t sure he would pass the test. Be strong, Nish told himself. Father will taunt and belittle you, as he’s done all your life. You’ve got to stand up to him.

  If only it were that easy. During the war Nish had overcome terrors few people had ever faced. He’d been a leader of men in several hopeless struggles, yet through sheer determination had triumphed. He’d stood up to the most powerful people in the land, for what he believed in. But those successes were long ago and the loss of everything he’d fought for, and everyone he’d cared about, had brought him low. The stifling tedium and mindless brutality of prison had completed his fall and, though Nish had spent years strengthening his will and building up his courage for tomorrow, he feared it wouldn’t be enough. He’d also need all the luck in the world, though luck had been running against him for a long time now.

  His plan was simple. If he could keep his cool under the most extreme provocation, he might get a chance to snatch the two sorcerous quicksilver tears which were the mainstay of Jal-Nish’s power. But he’d have to remain focussed. Jal-Nish had never been a great mancer, but with the power of the tears he didn’t need to be, while Nish had only the smallest talent for the Secret Art.

  And what he did possess – a certainly clarity of sight, an ability to see through surface deceptions to what lay at the heart – had slowly developed from the alchymical compulsion his father had cast on him when he’d thrust his son’s hands into the tears long ago, in a previous attempt to bend Nish to his will.

  Nish had spent years honing his tiny gift, using everything he’d picked up about the Art from the great mancers he’d known, and he thought he’d found a way to use the tears against his father. Evil men never believed themselves to be evil; they invariably thought that they were doing the world a service. If Nish could forge his clearsight into a weapon and reflect it into Jal-Nish’s innermost soul, surely even he must see what a monster he’d become. There had to be some good left in his father, surely.

  If it worked, the realisation might paralyse Jal-Nish long enough for Nish to snatch the tears, if he had the strength. Starvation, beatings and solitary confinement had left him a shadow of the man he’d once been. And though his rage burned as strong as ever, Nish was terrified that he’d break, as he’d broken in the past.

  The self-doubt was crippling, the consequences of his probable failure unbearable. Jal-Nish would send him back to this stinking cell for another decade and Nish didn’t think his sanity could survive it. His iron-hard determination began to waver. Nothing could change the past, so why not agree to his father’s demands? Why not become his lieutenant and eventual heir to all Jal-Nish had created? Nish ached for what his father had offered, yet he couldn’t bear the thought of giving in to the monster, of becoming like Jal-Nish in any way.

  His eyes adjusted to the dark. His cell was a cube four paces by four and four high, the walls solid granite blocks, the roof a single slab of slate with water seeping from dozens of brown-stained cracks. Without thinking, he positioned himself to avoid the drips, for this was the lowest level in an inverted pyramid of dungeons, and the seepage was stained by piss and blood from the cells above.

  An emaciated rat warily poked its head up at the other end of his straw. Normally Nish would have slain it with a lump of rock and eaten it raw, to keep the hunger pangs at bay for another day, but hunger would help strengthen his nerve for the morrow. Besides, he felt a kinship with the rat, which was as skinny as he was. It would find nothing to eat in Mazurhize unless it got to a dead prisoner before the guards discovered him.

  He tried to banish the self-doubt. Be strong. Stay focussed and keep to the plan. You’ll only get one chance. Don’t waste it. You’re his son and that counts for something, even with Father. The future of Santhenar depends on you.

  But his own frailties undermined him every time.

  ‘Judgement day,’ wheezed the asthmatic guard, turning a huge brass key in the lock. ‘Get up!’

  Nish, startled awake, rolled over in the damp straw and swore under his breath. He’d planned to rise early to prepare himself, but the scarlet-clad Imperial Guard were already standing in two rows of three outside his door.

  He stood up, too suddenly, for his head spun and he had to bend over, pretending to brush straw off his rags, until it steadied. Nish cursed his frail flesh. Today he must put on the act of his life. Jal-Nish despised weakness in any form, but most especially in his youngest son.

  At the door Nish looked left towards the base of the stairs where the prison’s most effective sentry stood, a master wisp-watcher. From its broad stone bowl, threads and tendrils wisped up to form the iris of a rotating, all-seeing eye that never slept, never blinked, could see even in this dim light, and reported all it surveyed to the tears. As Nish passed beneath its lifeless gaze, feeling like a man with a
target painted on his back, he heard a faint, eerie buzz. It was sending, telling the tears that he was on his way.

  He shivered as the snoop-sniffer drifted above him, along the ceiling, trailing its glistening brown sensing cords like a decaying jellyfish. It had been created specifically for the ninth and lowest level of Mazurhize, and its movements were constrained so it could never leave. Only this snoop-sniffer, inured by constant exposure to the unbearably putrescent reek, could pick out other faint aromas that might be evidence of treachery. And Jal-Nish, despite holding all the power in the world, was always on the lookout for treachery. It was the thing he feared most, apart from public ridicule. And death.

  The snoop-sniffer’s cords boiled out towards Nish, recognised the smell of the Imperial Guard, then plopped down again. Nish looked right towards his father’s other sleepless spy. Dangling from the dripping ceiling, an ethereal bile-green cord ended in a noose the diameter of a human neck, twisting back and forth in the draught like a corpse dangling from a gibbet – a loop-listener. Within the loop, light reflected off thousands of drifting black specks which danced to the faintest sound, as sensitive as the ears of a bat.

  They climbed stair after stair and tramped corridor after corridor until his knees were wobbling. There was no need for it – Jal-Nish could have fetched Nish to his palace through the sheer power of his Art, but that would be too easy and wouldn’t give the right impression. It wouldn’t display Nish to the staring world. Nor would it prove Jal-Nish’s power and majesty, and he never missed an opportunity for that.

  Finally they reached the surface, emerging from a stone stair onto a vast and featureless expanse of paving with gigantic, tower-mounted wisp-watchers at its four corners. Mazurhize Prison lay entirely underground, to heighten the contrast with Jal-Nish’s Palace of Morrelune, half a league away across the paved plain and framed by the rearing mountains immediately behind it.

  Morrelune had the form of a pyramid, though an airy, delicate one. Nish had never known his father to display good taste or an appreciation of beauty, but Morrelune was stunningly beautiful. It too consisted of nine levels, tapering upwards. Each had the form of an open temple supported on many columns arranged in interlinked circles. There were no walls in Morrelune, not even in the topmost level, roofed over with a spire that pierced the heavens, where Jal-Nish held court. The God-Emperor, at the height of his power, kept even the weather at bay there.

  The bright sunlight made Nish’s eyes water and, as they tramped across the warm paving stones, he began to feel faint. It was a mild day in late autumn but there had been no seasons in his cell at the nadir of Mazurhize, just an eternal dank and foetid chill, and the sun felt as if it were frying his brains. His knee trembled but Nish willed it to hold out, for there was still a long way to go. Ten years you’ve prepared for this day. Keep to the plan! Endure!

  The stairs of Morrelune proved a greater challenge, for they were not just steep, but the risers were twice the height of normal steps and even his tall guards strained to climb them. For Nish, a small man, every step was a mini-battle against his father. Surely the design was deliberate; Jal-Nish didn’t need to use the stairs.

  Though his muscles were screaming, Nish did his best to maintain a confident, careless air until the final flight, but halfway up it his legs gave out and he collapsed, gasping. The guards sneered, then hastily checked over their shoulders. Nish was the son of the God-Emperor, after all.

  Fight on! Damn them one and all. He scrambled up the final steps on hands and knees, all dignity lost. The guards thrust him forwards and turned back smartly. His father must intend this to be a private confrontation.

  The topmost level was entirely open, its golden stone glowing like sun-warmed honey, though parts were concealed by the intersecting circles of columns. The polished floor shone, the columns were waxy smooth, and there were one or two rugs on the floor, but little furniture and no artworks save for a single plain tapestry suspended from the ceiling. Jal-Nish did not require ostentation in his personal quarters. There were no wisp-watchers here either. This close to the tears, none were needed.

  Two-thirds of the way across, at a circular table carved from green stone, sat his father. Nish caught his breath. Jal-Nish was writing and did not look up. Nish hesitated, his throat dry, then forced himself to go on.

  Jal-Nish had once been a stocky, almost plump man, bursting with life and vigour and a charm Nish had envied, but all that had been sacrificed to a seething bitterness at his mutilation, a burning thirst for vengeance and a ruthless determination to prove himself by clawing his way to the top, no matter what it took.

  Nish often asked himself how his father’s corruption had come about. How had the troubled child, then the stern and unyielding father, become the irredeemable monster that Jal-Nish now was? What had been the fateful choice from which there had been no going back? How and why had Jal-Nish crossed that gulf? And how close was he, Nish, to the same abyss?

  Jal-Nish looked up. His figure was now hard and spare. His curly hair was as thick as it had ever been, though the rich brown had faded to a peppery grey. He still wore the platinum mask he’d made long ago to cover the ruin a lyrinx’s claws had made of half his face, but he had two arms now. The amputated right arm had been replaced – flesh-formed with the power of the tears, Nish assumed. That bitter day on the ice plateau was burned into his memory. Jal-Nish had begged to be allowed to die, but Nish could not bear to lose him. He’d pleaded with Irisis to do whatever was necessary to save his father. She’d cut off his arm at the shoulder and sewed his face back together, and from that moment Jal-Nish had been determined to destroy her.

  If he could replace an arm, why hadn’t he been able to repair his face? Nish stopped a few spans away from the table and attempted a tentative probe with his feeble clear-sight, but discovered nothing.

  His father laid down his pen, raised his new right hand, a trifle mechanically, and, to Nish’s left, the air formed a curving mirror a couple of spans high and wide. ‘Look at yourself, my son.’

  Nish resisted as long as he could, but he hadn’t seen his own reflection in ten years, so he looked. He was filthy, for there was no water for washing in Mazurhize. The caked grime could have been scraped off him with a knife, while his matted hair hung down past his backside. There were streaks of grey in it, but even worse, it appeared to be receding at the front, though he wasn’t yet thirty-three. He was as thin as string, his back was bent and there was a defeated look in his brown eyes. The mirror also showed a miasma surrounding him like a foetid cloud, his reek made visible.

  He looked away, overwhelmed. Jal-Nish didn’t have to say anything. How could such a shambling wreck as he think to defy the God-Emperor?

  ‘Ten years you’ve served,’ said his father, ‘and it has gained you nothing. You know I’ll never bend, Cryl-Nish, so what say you now? Will you stand at my right hand and help me rule unruly Santhenar, or do you still defy me?’

  Every day of his imprisonment Nish had imagined this moment and tried to prepare himself for it, but now realised he could never be ready. A thousand times he’d weighed up his three choices: to defy his father, go back to Mazurhize and eventually die there in squalid futility; to swear fealty and serve him, surely to become as degraded and brutal as Jal-Nish. Or to follow the flimsy plan and try to seize the tears for himself, though that hope was fading rapidly. Even if he did gain them, the tears would probably withhold their Arts from him. There had been plenty of time for Jal-Nish to bind them to him alone.

  There was a fourth alternative: to swear fealty, but break his oath and work in secret to bring his father down, though how could he hope to deceive the master of deceit himself? And if Nish used his father’s methods against him, could he claim to be any better?

  He didn’t want to think about the final option – to take the coward’s way out and end it all. After Jal-Nish had executed beautiful Irisis, the love of Nish’s life, he’d sworn a binding oath and he couldn’t go back on it.
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  There has to be a purpose behind her sacrifice, he had raged to the shocked crowd in the town square, and I will make it my own. I will survive whatever this monster does to me. I will endure, and you must endure with me, for the coming years are going to be the cruellest in all memory.

  Let the name Irisis become a rallying cry for the resistance. Let the resistance grow until not even the tears can stand against it. And on that day we will tear down this evil tyrant –

  ‘There is no resistance,’ said Jal-Nish as if he’d read Nish’s mind. And for all Nish knew, perhaps with the power of the tears he could read minds. ‘I control the known world. My wisp-watchers stand in every village marketplace, my loop-listeners on every street corner, and my snoop-sniffers creep into the darkest corners of the underworld. I have secret watchers too, and they speak to the tears daily. Nothing escapes me, Cryl-Nish.’

  Nish knew that much already. His father’s guards often boasted of the grip their dread master held on the world, though they looked over their shoulders when they said it.

  ‘Irisis had a destiny beyond the grave,’ said Nish. ‘She died to bring you down.’

  Jal-Nish roared with laughter. ‘Yet ten years have passed and I'm stronger than ever. Abandon that hope, Cryl-Nish. The dead have no destiny – but I do, and you're bound up with it.

  ‘You’re all alone.’ Jal-Nish smiled behind the mask – Nish could tell from the way the muscles moved in his father’s exposed cheek – before he went on, brutally, ‘Every one of your old allies is dead.’

  Nish reeled. His one sustaining hope was the belief that some of his friends still worked in secret to bring Jal-Nish down. But if they were gone –