Lukys noticed it too. “Tides, Syrolee! Don’t you think you should give the boy a chance to catch his breath before you start marrying him and Elyssa off?”
“I suggested no such thing!”
“You’d better watch your step, Cayal,” Lukys warned. “That royal blood of yours makes you almost acceptable enough to be a consort for the maiden princess.”
“Lukys, do you think you could try to go more than five minutes without insulting my family?” Engarhod complained.
“And then what would I do for entertainment?”
Ever the peacemaker, Arryl headed off the argument. “Is that lunch I catch on the breeze, Syrolee? It smells wonderful.”
I couldn’t smell a thing and suspected Arryl couldn’t either. But even Diala seemed anxious to move on. “I think you’re right, Arryl. It does smell wonderful and I’m starving.”
“Then we should lunch,” Syrolee agreed with ill grace. The empress offered her hand to Engarhod and together they rose to their feet. “Lukys, get rid of that disgusting creature. You’re not bringing him to the dinner table. It’s time,” she added, looking down on me, “for our prince to meet his immortal brethren.”
Between them, Syrolee and Engarhod have four children, all of them born of their marriages to other people. There was a rumour, Diala told me once, that the count had once been much higher but the immolation process had eliminated the weaker members of their family, leaving only the strongest to carry on into eternity. I’ve never been able to determine the accuracy of the rumour, but I’m inclined to think there might be a grain of truth in it. Syrolee strikes me as the sort of mother willing to immolate any number of her family members if it gets her what she wants.
Lukys put Coron down and he scurried off across the marble tiles to look for entertainment elsewhere as we headed across the vast throne room, chatting about inconsequential things. Lukys asked me about Kordana and my general impressions of Magreth. It was innocuous enough until we reached the banquet hall, where the remaining offspring of the Emperor and Empress of the Five Realms awaited us.
The first of them to step forward was Syrolee’s daughter Elyssa. I’ll never forget our first meeting. I stared at her in surprise. Like Diala, she was only eighteen or nineteen when the Eternal Flame made her immortal, but she wasn’t exactly preserved in the first blush of womanhood. Despite the rumours that persist down the centuries about the beauty of the Tide Lords, immortality does nothing to improve what nature has naturally endowed one with. Ugly mortals become ugly immortals, and that applies equally to their personality and their physical appearance. Scars might heal, pockmarked skin might recover, but nothing can create beauty where it doesn’t already exist.
Although her complexion is as flawless as any immortal’s, with teeth as crooked as a shoreline and lashless eyes set so far apart they seem to have been placed there by mistake, she’s hardly the matchless beauty your Tarot speaks of. Elyssa curtseyed, eyeing me off like a piece of raw meat. She was wearing thick white powdered makeup like her mother, but it had creased into unsightly clumps along the line of her chin.
“Oooh…,” she squealed, clapping her stumpy fingers together gleefully. “Fresh meat.”
Lukys noticed my alarmed expression and leaned in close to my ear. “And now you understand the reason she’s still the maiden princess,” he chuckled.
“What was that, Lukys?” Syrolee snapped, rightly guessing his comment was less than complimentary.
“Nothing, Syrolee. Just remarking on the weather.” He smiled at Elyssa. “You’re looking lovely today, my dear. Have you lost weight?”
“My weight never changes, Lukys,” she replied, looking a little puzzled. “Nobody’s does. You know that.”
“He’s teasing you,” Engarhod told her, scowling at Lukys. “This is Diala’s newest recruit. Cayal.”
“The Immortal Prince,” Lukys added with a smirk in Syrolee’s direction.
Elyssa smiled at me coyly. “Are you really a prince?”
I nodded. “I was. I’m not sure if I still am. I was banished.”
“Why did they banish you?” the young man standing behind Elyssa asked.
“Cayal, this is Tryan,” Lukys informed me. “Elyssa’s brother.”
Tryan was as beautiful as his sister was unattractive. Tall, dark-eyed and exquisitely formed, it’s as if Mother Nature spooned all the beauty into one basket and all the muck into another and then created brother and sister out of them. The handsome young man stepped forward, offering me his hand.
“Welcome to eternity,” he said.
Tryan was smiling as he said it, but there was something a little too contrived in his welcome and it set my teeth on edge. Would that I had listened to my first instincts about him, Kordana may have seen out the year, but this was all too new and I hadn’t learned to rely on my gut feelings yet. Foolishly, I was still at that point in life where one trusts in others and believes some good will come of it.
“And these two troublemakers,” Lukys added, indicating the two men standing behind Tryan, “are Krydence and Rance, Engarhod’s sons.”
“I’ve already met Rance,” I explained, with a nod of greeting to the younger brother.
The older man eyed me speculatively. “So, what did you do?”
“Pardon?”
“To get yourself banished from Kordana?” Krydence clarified.
“Got into a fight.”
“Did you kill someone?” Tryan asked.
I hesitated, not sure how they would take the news, and then I nodded. There was no point lying about it. If my mission was to return to Kordana to bring word of the Tide, there was no way they weren’t going to learn of my disgrace, sooner or later.
Krydence seemed amused. “This one should fit right in.”
“Don’t you find it interesting,” Lukys remarked, “that Diala never seems to find innocent little doves with pure hearts and unsullied pasts to join our ranks? That says something about immortality, don’t you think?”
“Brynden fancies himself pure of heart,” Diala reminded them with a glare at Lukys. “In fact, he’s quite obnoxious about it.”
“Brynden?” I asked in confusion.
“Another of Diala’s recruits,” Rance explained. “First thing he did was run screaming from Magreth with no notion of how he was going to handle immortality.” He glanced around at his siblings. “Then the stupid fool came back here a couple of hundred years later, trying to tell us we’d been immortalised for some noble religious purpose and should start wearing hair shirts and doing charitable works for the greater good of mankind. Has anybody seen him recently?”
“I saw him about forty years ago,” Krydence told them. “He was living in a cave in the Caterpillar Ranges. I believe he’s now trying to resolve his dilemma with meditation.”
“Better than drinking yourself into a perpetual state of oblivion like Jaxyn, I suppose,” Rance suggested.
“Is Jaxyn another immortal?” I asked. This was all happening far too quickly for me. I couldn’t sort out who was who here in the palace dining room, let alone who the others were.
“Jaxyn was Diala’s first successful immolation,” Lukys told him. “Quite a moment for celebration, it was.”
“Jaxyn certainly thought so,” Syrolee agreed, obviously not happy with discussing the missing immortals. “Jaxyn’s like you,” she added in my direction. “Highborn. Thinks he’s a cut above the rest of us.”
“I never said that!” I objected.
“Good,” Elyssa said with her uneven smile, taking me by the arm. “In that case, you can come sit by me. I want to hear all about Kordana.”
Elyssa’s attention on me seemed to mollify Syrolee somewhat. With the first hint of serious misgivings about what I might have gotten myself into, I allowed Elyssa to lead me to a chair at the long table. As I took my place, I glanced around, catching Lukys’s eye as the older man sat down. He winked at me and mouthed the word later, then turned his attention to something Kry
dence was saying on his left, and paid me no more attention for the rest of the meal.
Several days later, Lukys came by the temple to speak with me. That was the day Pellys killed all those goldfish.
Pellys spotted Lukys first, looking up and grinning broadly when he saw him approaching. “Lukys!”
“Hello, Pellys. You look like you’re having fun.”
“I’m showing Cayal how to catch fish. He’s my new friend,” the big man announced, slapping me on the back so hard that I staggered under the force of the blow. “My best friend.”
“Lucky Cayal,” Lukys replied, smiling.
Pellys grinned and pointed at Coron, perched—as usual—on Lukys’s right shoulder. “Your best friend’s a rat.”
“Which says a lot about me, don’t you think? May I borrow your new best friend for a moment? I just need to ask him something.”
Pellys thought on that for a moment and then nodded. “Only as far as the railing,” he warned, pointing to the marble balustrade some thirty paces away that separated the temple gardens from the waterfall and the lake below.
“Not a step further,” Lukys promised. “Cayal?”
Curiously, I followed him across the garden to the balustrade. I remember glancing down at the sheer drop for a moment with a queasy feeling and then turning to Lukys. “I suppose I should get over my irrational fear of heights, now I can’t die in a fall.”
To my surprise, Lukys shook his head. “Tides, no! Cling to every one of your phobias, lad. It’s what makes you human.”
“Am I still human?” I asked. I still don’t know the answer to that question, by the way.
“I haven’t really worked that out yet. Do you have any plans?”
I looked at him in confusion. “Plans for what?”
“For what you intend to do with the rest of this long life you’ve been granted after you’ve brought the Tide to your people, or whatever nonsense Engarhod was spouting the other day. Eternity is a very long time, Cayal. Your worst enemy is no longer a flesh and blood entity. It’s boredom.”
“I haven’t really thought about it.” That was the Tide’s own truth. I was still rejoicing in the knowledge that I was heading home. The wider implications of immortality beyond that hadn’t even occurred to me.
“Then consider this,” Lukys suggested. “There are nearly a score of other immortals out there, my lad, and most of them are already starting to get restless. It’s going to lead to trouble, you mark my words, and given that some of them have the power to manipulate the elements on a rather impressive scale, it could get rather nasty, too.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
Lukys turned to the waterfall and raised his arm. A moment later silence descended over the gardens as the waterfall abruptly stopped. Crystal beads of water hung in midair, waiting for permission to continue on their way. I could feel Lukys warping the Tide around the drops of water like something crawling on my skin; could feel the strain as his control over the elements warred with the natural inclination of all liquids to settle on the lowest possible surface.
“The water is resisting you,” I remarked without thinking.
He seemed surprised. “You can feel that?”
I nodded, unaware there was anything unusual in it. After all, I’d just been made immortal. Nothing seemed impossible after that.
He dropped his arm and the waterfall resumed its interrupted tumble down the rocks to the lake below, the air once again filled with the cooling spray and the ever-present sound of rushing water. Lukys studied me thoughtfully, but said nothing.
His silence worried me. “Can all immortals do things like that?”
“Surprisingly few of them, actually. Have you mentioned this to anyone else?”
“Mentioned what?” I asked.
“That you can sense the Tide? Feel others manipulating it?”
I shook my head. “Is that a bad thing?”
Suddenly, Lukys smiled. “I’d not mention it to anyone around here until you’re certain, lad. And worked out how to deal with it. Such ability is bound to be considered…threatening…to those who lack the same sort of power. You may have noticed the emperor and his clan aren’t exactly endowed with an over-abundance of magical ability, just an endless desire for power and conspicuous wealth.”
“You speak so disparagingly of Engarhod, yet Diala tells me you two were once friends.” I turned and leant against the balustrade. “She told me you and Engarhod discovered the Eternal Flame and brought it back here to Magreth.”
“That’s true enough, I suppose,” he agreed, “if you strip the story down to its bare bones. But we certainly weren’t friends. Far from it, in fact. I wasn’t even a fisherman by trade. I was an astrologer who wanted nothing more than a quiet life spent studying the heavens, but I was also an eldest son and my father was a merchant with very clear ideas about what an eldest son should do with his life. He’d bought Engarhod’s fishing boat the year before we found the flame and sent me along on the trip because he thought Engarhod was trying to cheat us.”
“Then how did you find the flame?”
“The flame found us, actually. We were chasing a catch around the icebergs of Jelidia, praying we’d find something worth selling before the ice closed in and we were stranded there for the next eight months. Being so far south, we were accustomed to the strange lights in the sky at night, but one night, the sky itself seemed to catch fire. It was a magnificent sight. I was actually enjoying myself for the first time since being forced aboard that wretched ship. I stood there watching flames streak the sky for hours, realising too late that the shooting stars were getting much too close for comfort. One of the meteorites hit us square amidships.”
“And you survived,” Cayal concluded. “With Engarhod.”
He nodded. “And Coron here,” he said, scratching the rat under the chin. “We named him Coron after the boat, by the way. Anyway, when the meteor struck I remember thinking: It can’t end like this! We were the only three who lived through the explosion, at any rate, which was the most remarkable thing of all, because we’d been standing closest to where the meteor hit.”
“Did you realise what had happened to you?”
“Not at first. And to be honest, we only kept the flames alive because we were stranded on an iceberg, it was freezing and all we had left was the remnants of the boat, a fair bit of which was still on fire. It took a while to realise something had happened to us. I think those first few nights we really thought we were going to die, either of starvation or exposure. But the flames kept on burning, neither of us got sick, or even very hungry, and we began to wonder why. By then my friend Coron here was hanging around a fair bit, so we caught him and tried to kill him for food. When that didn’t work we tried to kill each other. Eventually, it dawned on us that we were immortal but I don’t think we comprehended it fully for a long time after we were rescued. Immortality is not a concept easily grasped by a fragile human mind.”
“How long were you stranded down there?”
“Eight…maybe nine months. Plenty of time to come to the realisation that we weren’t the same people who’d sailed out of Cuttlefish Bay the previous summer.” Lukys turned his pale eyes on me. “Nine months is a long time to be stuck on an iceberg with a man you don’t like. You learn a lot about each other. And when you’re starting to suspect you can’t die, you spend a lot of time making plans for the future, too.”
“Did Engarhod’s plans include becoming Emperor of the Five Realms?”
Lukys rolled his eyes. “Isn’t it a dreadful title? Syrolee thought it up when we got back from Jelidia. It has something to do with having command over the five elements, which is rather optimistic of them. Engarhod can’t command anything, not even his wife. He just wanted to be rich. His wife is the one with the delusions of grandeur.”
“Wasn’t she Pellys’s wife back then?” I’d been at the temple for several months by then. I wasn’t totally ignorant of the story about him and the emp
ress but this was the first time anybody had offered any sort of detail to fill in the gaps.
“Ah, now that was a sordid little affair that rebounded rather unfortunately on everyone involved.” Lukys sat himself on the edge of the balustrade and pointed to Pellys, who was still on his knees, splashing happily about in the fountain trying to catch the goldfish. “Poor old Pellys. He’s not very bright now, but I don’t remember him being much brighter back then, either. He was the bouncer in the brothel where Syrolee worked. She married him because it meant he’d bounce the customers she didn’t fancy before he’d help any of the other girls. Didn’t hurt that he used to hand over all his pay to her each week, either. Although strangely enough, given their ability to wield the Tide, I think he really is the father of both Elyssa and Tryan.”
“Where does Engarhod come in?”
“He was a fishing boat captain, which in the social strata of the Cuttlefish Bay wharf district in those days made him pretty close to royalty. She latched on to him like a barnacle the first time he wandered into that Tide-forsaken brothel and never let go.”
“And Pellys knew about it?”
Lukys jerked his head in Pellys’s direction. “You did notice that he’s not the sharpest hook in the tackle box, didn’t you?”
I nodded, wondering at the dark truths lurking behind Lukys’s tale. He spoke as if he was relating an anecdote about a particularly amusing hunting trip, but what he was telling me was much more important. I probably didn’t appreciate how important at the time, but I was starting to get a sense of the danger. Or maybe I just think that now, because I can’t abide the notion that I might have once been such a blind fool. Whatever the case, I’d been warned. That I didn’t listen, that I allowed Tryan to return with me to Kordana…well, that’s a decision I’ve learned to live with.
Regret and immortality are sorry companions at the best of times.
“So what happened when you got back from Jelidia?” I think I asked, or words to that effect.
The Immortal Prince Page 30
