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

  Maelys felt the cold creep up her legs. Fyllis’s talent couldn’t hide four walls and a roof from a wisp-watcher, not this close. The fog thinned momentarily and she saw something she’d never seen before – stark terror in tough old Aunt Haga’s eyes. Maelys looked away. If Aunt Haga had given up there was no hope at all.

  An axle squeaked as a cart was hauled their way, its iron-shod wheels crunching through the rubble, and Maelys made out the faint, hackle-raising buzz of a wisp-watcher. As it came closer, she began to feel that familiar unpleasant itchy sensation inside her head, along with a distant raspy whisper that she could never make out.

  ‘Back, you useless dogs,’ said the scrier in a dry, crackling voice. Maelys smelt a foul odour, like burning bones. ‘Give the watcher room.’

  The soldiers scrambled away across the rubble and the buzz rose in pitch. She struggled to control her breathing. Her mother was panting. Fyllis let out a little gasping cry. The buzz became an irritating whine.

  A sudden wind wailed around the ragged fragments of wall, muffling the wisp-watcher for a second, but it returned louder and more chillingly than before. Outside, the hammers had fallen silent.

  It knew they were here. It was playing with them, deliberately delaying, storing up their torment for its master’s pleasure.

  ‘Nothing!’ crackled the scrier. Another whiff of burned bones drifted under the door. ‘I didn’t think there could be. It was just the soldiers jumping at ghosts again. Get on with it – Seneschal Vomix has a lot more watching for us tonight. Bring down that last bit of wall.’

  The cart creaked and grated away. A fury of hammers attacked the masonry nearby, chunks tumbled with a series of thuds, then silence fell.

  Maelys got up and went for the door. ‘No!’ hissed Aunt Haga.

  Maelys stopped. Everyone was staring at Fyllis, whose face had gone blank. She swayed from side to side. Her mother steadied her, then Fyllis looked up, bestowing a childlike, innocent smile on them as if it had all been a game. Returning to the corner she took up her animal figures and soon was immersed in her play as if nothing had happened.

  Aunt Haga drew her two sisters over to the brazier and began to whisper urgently. Every so often, the three would turn to stare at Maelys before putting their heads down again. She tried vainly to ignore them but the knot in her stomach grew ever tighter.

  Maelys was woken from a restless sleep by her mother’s cracked sobbing. Lyma often wept in the night when she thought the girls were asleep. Maelys scrunched up into a tighter ball, for her straw pile was always furthest from the embers and her toes felt as though ice crystals were growing on them.

  At the movement Lyma broke off, and Maelys heard a rustle of clothing from the direction of the hearth as the three women turned to stare at her. She pretended to be asleep.

  Lyma took a long, shuddering breath. ‘Why did it have to be Rudigo?’ she whimpered. The girls’ father had fallen into the God-Emperor’s hands long ago and was now dying in Mazurhize.

  ‘Get a grip on yourself!’ hissed Aunt Haga. ‘We’ve been over this a hundred times. The cursed clan talent put him in Mazurhize, and just be thankful none of us have got it, or we’d be as dead as our useless husbands. Who would look after Fyllis then? Not her, you can be sure, the troublemaking little slattern.’

  Her aunt meant Maelys, of course, and she could feel the sisters’ hard little eyes on her. They blamed her for every misfortune and Maelys didn’t understand why. She worked harder than any of them, never complained, and always thought of Fyllis before herself. Maelys felt as if she had to make up for some awful crime, though for the life of her she couldn’t think of anything she’d done wrong. Even as a little girl she’d been a dutiful, obedient child.

  ‘Just be thankful she hasn’t got a talent,’ said Aunt Bugi venomously. ‘Imagine the trouble the little cow would have caused us if she did have one.’

  Until the war ended, having any kind of ability for the Secret Art had been a precious, special gift, but since the God-Emperor came to power it was more often a death sentence. Maelys squeezed her eyelids tightly closed, clutched her taphloid to her chest and gave thanks that she had not a skerrick of talent.

  Lyma began to sob again and this time her sisters couldn’t console her. Maelys wanted to cry as well, but she wasn’t going to give in to her loss. Someone had to be strong and it always fell to her.

  They ate a frugal breakfast of cold mash speckled with chopped, mouldy nuts. After washing up, Maelys put the last crumbling stick on the fire and returned to her book, though she couldn’t concentrate.

  They had only survived this long because of Fyllis, or rather her instinctive talent for deceiving Jal-Nish’s wisp-watchers, and the mealy-mouthed aunts had nothing but praise for her. Their father had been on the run since Maelys was twelve and she’d only seen him fleetingly over the next four years, but he’d finally been taken by the Militia three years ago and was now dying in Mazurhize, three days’ walk away down the steep mountain paths. Rudigo wasn’t expected to last the week, though, after grieving for him so long, she mainly felt relief that his torment would soon be over.

  Her last two surviving uncles, Haga’s and Bugi’s husbands, had disappeared when Maelys was thirteen, not long after they’d passed a loop-listener, and their bodies had never been found.

  The farms, estates and vineyards of Nifferlin had been confiscated when she was fifteen, and two years later the manor had been torn down, save for this small section which Fyllis had, in some incomprehensible way, hidden even from the wisp-watchers. But they kept coming back.

  Even though it meant death to be found here, Haga and Bugi had refused to leave their ancestral lands. Lyma had no choice but to stay with them, for she had nowhere else to go. Maelys and her mother had dug out the demolished pantries and storerooms but their last storage bins had been scraped bare in early autumn. The family now survived on what they’d gleaned from under the nut trees, though the last mouldy barrel would be empty by mid-winter. And then, unless a miracle happened, they’d starve. Maelys still didn’t know what Clan Nifferlin had done to offend the God-Emperor.

  She smoothed down her threadbare skirt, rubbed a goose-pimpled arm and turned another page, though she hadn’t taken in the previous one. She longed to be like the brave heroines in the tales she loved – those girls and women who could fight any enemy and cheerfully resolve every crisis. They were clever and resourceful as well as brave.

  Unfortunately, Maelys had grown up expecting to marry well, then manage her home, estate and vineyard. It was all she knew, but that prospect was long gone. No respectable man would have her now. The family was tainted.

  The muttering died away; her mother and aunts turned to stare at her again. Maelys, unsettled, ducked her head, watching from the corner of her eye until they turned back to Fyllis, smiling, stroking her hair and offering her the last of the honey nut cakes made from a honeycomb Maelys had found while gleaning in the forest. She salivated but there would be none for her. Even Maelys’s mother treated her like a servant. What had she done to make them resent her so? It was as if she were cursed.

  Maelys tried not to resent her little sister, but it was hard sometimes. Fyllis was eight, eleven years younger than Maelys, and they were as different as two sisters could be. Fyllis wasn’t clever but she was exceedingly pretty – an ashy blonde, blue-eyed, golden-skinned beauty who one day would be as tall, slender and elegant as their mother had been. And as the heroines of my tales always are, Maelys thought ruefully.

  She took after their father. Maelys was little and pale, with hair as black as char, eyes the colour of bitter chocolate and eyebrows so dark they appeared to have been brushed on with ink. And she was inclined to be buxom, which was most unheroine-like.

  As she turned the next page, her mother and aunts stalked across and gathered around her like fluttering birds – all beaks, claws and long, bony shanks. Her mother plucked the book from her hands and cast it into the fire. Maelys started up with a
cry of dismay but the aunts pushed her back on her stool and held her down until she gave up the struggle.

  ‘We can’t take any more,’ said beaky Aunt Haga, staring at her, head to one side. ‘Your time has come, girl.’

  ‘The men have let us down, as men always do,’ said fluffy-jowled Aunt Bugi. ‘It’s up to the women now.’

  Maelys thought that was a bit rich, since the men of the clan had died in agony trying to protect them or, in the case of her father, were soon going to die. She didn’t say anything. The three sisters were immune to any opinions other than their own, and they’d put her down so consistently since her father fled that she knew they wouldn’t listen to her now.

  ‘It’s up to you,’ said Lyma, the youngest of the trio. She still managed a hint of elegance, though hard times had turned her once slender figure to stringy sinew and wasted muscle, and she was losing teeth. ‘You’ve got to save the clan.’

  Though Maelys was a dutiful daughter, and she’d been expecting this for months, a chill ran through her as she confronted the relentless aunts. They must be planning to marry her off to some disgusting old lecher, or worse, one of the brutal sub-sub-minions of the God-Emperor. Whoever it was, there was nothing she could do about it. The aunts had worn out what little influence they’d maintained a year ago, pleading vainly for her father’s life. Maelys was their only hope and if she failed her family they wouldn’t survive.

  ‘Who is it?’ she quavered, watching the pages of her precious book curl up and blacken in the fire. Tears formed in her eyes – at this moment, losing the book felt worse than the other, somehow. ‘Who do I have to marry? It’s not … Seneschal Vomix, is it?’ She shuddered with disgust.

  He’d spoken to them on the road once, on their way to market when she was eleven. Vomix was a thin, ill-favoured man whose yellow eyes had seemed to look right through her clothing, and she’d hated it. Maelys had likened his face to the rear of a boar, but thankfully he hadn’t heard. She’d since learned that he was responsible for enforcing the God-Emperor’s will in this province, a task he carried out with unnerving relish.

  ‘Vomix!’ snorted Aunt Bugi. ‘You’ve got tickets on yourself, girl! He may be a vicious brute, but he’s a powerful man who can have any girl in his domain. He wouldn’t look twice at a little dumpling like you.’

  After living on such meagre rations for the past year, Maelys couldn’t be described as plump, but the name hurt.

  ‘Forget those dreams,’ said Aunt Haga. ‘They’re not for you, any more than the silly adventure tales you’re always mooning over.’

  ‘Or scribbling in your sad little diary,’ sneered her mother. ‘You’re just like your father. He had too much imagination and look where it got him.’

  Maelys stood up abruptly. ‘How dare you read my private book!’ she cried, breast heaving. ‘And you’ve told them?’ She glared up at the bony aunts.

  They pushed her down. ‘Of course I’ve read it!’ snapped her mother. ‘If we’re to survive I have to know everything. We all had a good laugh before we put it in the fire.’ Maelys choked, but Lyma went on, ‘Though then we had an idea. We’re sending you on your very own quest.’

  The backs of her hands prickled. ‘Me? Where am I going? What am I supposed to do?’

  ‘It’s a vital mission, Daughter,’ said her mother. ‘A secret journey.’

  ‘It’s a plan so bold and desperate, no one but us could ever have thought of it,’ cackled Aunt Haga, who held a supreme opinion of the sisters’ collective intelligence, and especially her own.

  Maelys gave her a look that said, What would you know? In all your life you’ve never done anything but gossip.

  Lyma slapped her across the face. ‘Show respect for your aunt! The lineage of Nifferlin is one of the oldest in the east, girl. We’re privy to secrets you’ve not imagined in your wildest scribblings, and never forget it.’

  ‘Even a dreamer like you must know about the God-Emperor’s son, Cryl-Nish Hlar,’ said Aunt Bugi. ‘And how his ten years were up two weeks ago.’

  Maelys rubbed her cheek, where she could feel the welts left by her mother’s hard fingers. Of course she knew about Nish, which was the name the common people called him. She’d first been told the great and terrible Tale of Nish and Irisis when only nine, and it had moved her more deeply than anything she’d ever heard.

  She’d read a brief, banned version of the story many times since, though not even her all-seeing mother knew that. Maelys pored over it in secret and hid it carefully in an old pot in the orchard afterwards. If only she’d left her diary there as well.

  ‘Nish was one of the heroes of the war,’ she said softly. ‘As well as an architect of the audacious plan that ended it, and all by the age of twenty-two.’ And he had given up everything for love – no, for just the memory of his dead love. Maelys’s romantic soul was so touched that tears sprang into her eyes every time she thought about the story. Nish was strong. No matter how bad things got, he’d never faltered, and she admired that kind of courage more than anything, for it reminded her of her father. Nish would have had his own place in the Histories, had not Jal-Nish abolished and burned them. ‘What did he do when he got out?’

  ‘The fool refused his father’s offer, tried to seize the sorcerous tears and was sent back to rot in Mazurhize for another ten years,’ Lyma said contemptuously. ‘What a waste.’

  She didn’t mean a waste of Nish’s life – Lyma didn’t give a fig for him. It was the opportunity that had been wasted. But Maelys’s admiration for Nish only grew. He was steadfast beyond all other men; he would never yield; never bend from the principles he held dear. Myth, rumour and, recently, prophecy held him to be the Deliverer who would save the world from the wicked God-Emperor and usher in a golden age of peace and prosperity.

  ‘Truly, Nish is a saint,’ she murmured, though she was not so credulous as to think that he could save the world. Jal-Nish was all powerful and could never be beaten. But if only …

  Lyma and her sisters exchanged incredulous glances. ‘He’s a moron,’ Lyma rasped. ‘A selfish little runt of a man who deserves everything he’s got.’

  The tall aunts often called Maelys a runt, and the insult made her feel closer to Nish.

  ‘Can you feed your sister with principles?’ sneered Aunt Bugi. ‘Can you clothe her with honour?’

  ‘Can you shelter and protect your clan with dead icons?’ said Aunt Haga.

  ‘Yet there’s a chance,’ said Lyma. ‘Assuming that the child …’

  Again the aunts exchanged those ominous glances. Maelys wasn’t sure if they were referring to her or Fyllis. No, surely not Fyllis. ‘What is it?’ she cried, feeling quite bewildered.

  ‘It’s a bold, far-reaching plan,’ said Aunt Haga, again studying her in that head-to-one-side, bird-like way. ‘But quite desperately dangerous.’

  ‘It’s treachery, sedition and heresy all rolled into one,’ said Aunt Bugi quietly. ‘Scheming to overthrow the God-Emperor himself. And should you fail, Maelys, we’ll die in the most excruciating agonies his torturers have ever invented.’

  Maelys’s heart missed a couple of beats, then began to race. Everyone knew about the rebellions of a few years ago, and the savage brutality with which they’d been crushed so as to teach the whole world a lesson.

  ‘Dare we?’ said Aunt Haga. ‘Dare we risk all to gain all? Indeed, is the girl up to it?’

  She definitely meant Maelys this time. No I’m not, Maelys thought desperately. How could anyone think I could be? I’ve never been anywhere, never done anything outside the estate, never been trained to use weapons. I’ll be caught, tortured in the most fiendish ways, tell everything and then we’ll all die.

  ‘She’s a dreamer and a romantic,’ sniffed Aunt Bugi, peering short-sightedly at Maelys. ‘And yet, if she can be prevailed upon to use it, she’s got a good head on her shoulders.’ The backhanded compliment was the first she’d ever given Maelys but it came too late. Maelys had been undermined so often tha
t she had no confidence in herself.

  ‘We’re dead if she can’t!’ said Aunt Haga.

  ‘What is it?’ Maelys was finding it hard to breathe. ‘What have I got to do?’

  ‘Cryl-Nish is the only man who has a chance of overthrowing his father,’ said Lyma. ‘But first we’ve got to get him out of Mazurhize, to his supporters.’

  ‘What supporters?’ said Maelys, but they didn’t answer.

  ‘And then ensure his gratitude,’ said Aunt Haga with another assessing glance at Maelys.

  ‘What do you mean, “we”?’ said Maelys.

  All three sisters looked towards the corner, where Fyllis was moving her carved figures about, singing, a vacant look in her eyes.

  ‘No!’ whispered Maelys. ‘You can’t even think –’

  ‘Why was Fyllis blessed with the talent,’ hissed Aunt Bugi, ‘if not to restore Clan Nifferlin to its rightful position?’

  ‘She can deceive the wisp-watchers, and even fool the loop-listeners for a time,’ said Aunt Haga. ‘The God-Emperor believes his spying devices because he can’t bear to trust his officers. It gives us our chance.’

  ‘Do you realise what he would do to Fyllis if he caught her?’ said Maelys. ‘How can you take such a risk?’

  ‘Because we’ve nothing left to lose,’ her mother hissed. ‘What do you think her fate will be, and yours, once we’re not here to protect you? That day grows ever closer, Daughter.’

  Maelys looked down at her fingers, which were knotting themselves in her lap. She’d known it for months, though it had been easier to hide from the unpleasant truth in her beloved books than face up to the future. But if someone had to be sacrificed, she knew her duty. It wasn’t going to be Lyma or the aunts, and it couldn’t be Fyllis. Maelys was strong and if this were to be her fate, she would have to endure it, though she felt sure she was going to die horribly, for nothing. No one could outwit the God-Emperor.

  ‘What am I to do?’ she repeated dully.

  ‘We’re starting down the mountain tomorrow –’ began Aunt Haga.