“You did your best, Clyden,” Stellan said, thinking that with a four-hour head start they would be well into the mountains by now. “And I thank you for bringing the news. You say this man was in chains when they arrived?”
Clyden nodded, but it was Jaxyn who pointed out the obvious. “She had your Caelish agent with her.”
“How could she? Without a direct order from me, the Warden would never…” His voice trailed off, as he realised there would be time later to figure how Arkady had managed to have Kyle Lakesh released into her custody.
“Let me go after them,” Jaxyn offered, rising to his feet.
“You?”
“I need to appear useful, you said,” he reminded him. “So let me do this. You stay here and entertain your guests, while I take another squad of felines and a couple of canine trackers into the mountains. I’ll have them back by morning.”
Jaxyn’s suggestion made a great deal of sense. Much as Stellan would like to go charging off into the mountains to rescue his wife, he wasn’t entirely convinced she’d actually been kidnapped. The bloody fingertips on his desk spoke of something far more sinister afoot.
“Do you really think you can find them?”
The young man nodded. “I’ll find them, Stellan. You can’t leave now in any case. Not with the king and queen here. And the last thing you want is Enteny or Mathu deciding they’d like to help. Let me do this. For you and Arkady. I can have them back before the king learns anything about it.”
Torn with indecision, Stellan turned to Clyden. “How was Arkady when they left the inn? Was she distressed? In fear for her life?”
The one-armed man shrugged. “To be honest, your grace, she looked stunned, much as anything. I’m not sure she went willingly, but he didn’t drag her off kicking and screaming, if that’s what you’re asking. And them felines…don’t know what this Lyle chap promised ’em, but they were fairly purring every time he looked at one of ’em.”
“All the more reason to handle this quietly, Stellan,” Jaxyn added with infuriating common sense. “If your felines have gone Scard on you, we can’t afford it to become public knowledge. It’ll affect every Crasii in Lebec, not to mention the damage it will do to the resale value of your other Crasii.”
“I’m actually more worried for Arkady, Jaxyn, than the resale value of my slaves,” Stellan informed him, a little annoyed that Jaxyn would think of the slaves’ value first, before Arkady’s welfare. Sadly, he had a point, however unpleasant it might be to admit it. “You might be right about keeping this quiet, though. Would you say nothing of this for a time, Clyden, if I ask it of you?”
The old man nodded. “If you’re going after her, your grace, I’ll keep your confidence as long as you need me to.”
Stellan nodded and turned to his lover. “Then go, Jaxyn. Find Arkady and this Caelish criminal. And don’t worry about bringing him back alive. He’s an escaped convict now, as well as a kidnapper. Even if Caelum wasn’t denying they own him, he lost any protection of the law he might have had the moment he stepped outside of it.”
“I’ll find them, Stellan,” Jaxyn promised, more confident than the duke had ever seen him. And then he added with a dangerous smile, “And trust me, when I do find them, I’ll see the Immortal Prince gets exactly what he deserves.”
Chapter 40
Shaken to the very core of her being by what she had witnessed at the inn, Arkady rode blindly behind Cayal and the escort of Crasii that she had once believed her own, too traumatised to even think of trying to get away.
They rode into the mountains, she registered that much, but even once she began to feel a little more in control of her situation, the question of escape didn’t really occur to her. She had just witnessed the impossible and until she had some satisfactory explanation for what had happened when Cayal hacked off the fingers of his left hand with an axe and for the inexplicable behaviour of her Crasii, Arkady wasn’t going anywhere.
They travelled in a cold, fitful rain; north for the most part, on narrow roads Arkady was unfamiliar with, finally turning off, just before dusk, onto a track that even the Crasii had trouble following. Cayal seemed to know where he was headed, however, and ordered the felines to ride on, which they did without question.
Riding behind Cayal, cold, wet and numb, Arkady fretted at her Crasii’s willing subservience and spent her time imagining ever more complicated plots to explain away their behaviour—plots involving Caelish agitators and highly organised foreign spy rings—not because she didn’t believe what she’d seen, but because the truth was too terrifying to contemplate. She wondered what her colleague at the Lebec University, Andre Fawk, would think when she told him what she’d witnessed. They’d spent so many hours researching the Crasii; trying to document their oral histories, smiling indulgently at the innocent simplicity of their myths.
Only they weren’t innocent, Arkady knew now, or perhaps even myths.
She wished Andre were here now. She wished anybody but her was here now…
Cayal brought their small column to a halt just as the clouds resting on the tops of the mountains to the west were turning crimson. The damp air had cooled rapidly with the onset of night and Arkady was shivering as she dismounted, looking around to find a small cascade tumbling down the rock face behind her, probably snowmelt from higher in the mountains.
“We’ll stop here for the night,” Cayal instructed the Crasii. “Make camp.”
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll catch us?”
He turned to look at Arkady and shrugged. “I know these mountains pretty well.”
“You’ve been here before then?” she asked, clutching at any hope that this was some sort of swindle he was running, that the Crasii were cleverly trained plants sent among them to await the arrival of their Caelish master. She knew she was losing her mind. The chances that anybody had suborned their Crasii, had planted spies among them, and that she had, at random, selected every one of them to accompany her to the prison this morning was beyond improbable.
The trouble was, if she didn’t believe that version of events, the only alternative was to believe that Cayal really was an immortal, and that wasn’t improbable. It was impossible.
“I’ve been alive for eight thousand years, Arkady. I’ve been everywhere before.”
“How did you suborn my Crasii?” she demanded, shivering in the cold air as they made camp around her.
“Blind obedience to the Tide Lords was bred into them,” Cayal told her, as he turned to unsaddle his mount. “They can’t help it.”
“Warlock never did as you ordered.”
“That’s because your pet canine is probably a Scard. Pity, actually. He was a good-looking brute. Would’ve made prime breeding stock back in the old days.” He hefted the saddle from the back of his mount and dropped it onto the ground. Arkady watched him closely; looking for some sign his injured hand was causing him difficulty. Cayal noticed the direction of her gaze and smiled, holding it up before her face, wiggling his fingers. “See? All better?”
She could see that his hand was completely healed. Were it not for the blood he’d not had a chance to wash away, she wouldn’t have believed his fingers had ever been damaged, let alone amputated with a woodsman’s axe.
“That was just a trick,” she insisted, trying to convince herself, as much as him. “You didn’t really…”
“Yes, Arkady, I did. You hungry?”
“Er…I suppose,” she replied, too overwhelmed by the events of the last few hours to think about food. “Do you need to eat?”
“Not really.”
“What happens if you don’t?”
“I get a little hungry.” He turned from her and called Chikita over to him. “Do you hunt, gemang?”
She nodded. “Yes, my lord.”
“Take two others. Find us something to eat.”
“Of course, my lord.” Chikita bowed and hurried off to do Cayal’s bidding.
He smiled at Arkady’s expression. �
�You’re not dealing with this very well, are you?”
“You’re a liar, Cayal. This is just some complicated plan you’ve cooked up to subvert the Glaeban Crasii into believing the Tide Lords have returned.”
“Is it?” he asked, rather annoyed, it seemed, by her stubborn insistence that what she had witnessed in the yard of Clyden’s Inn couldn’t possibly be real. “I really do wish I was as clever as you imagine.”
“I think you are.”
“I think, if I was that clever, I would have let you hand me over to this spymaster of yours, had him escort me back to Herino, escaped along the way somewhere and disappeared into legend.”
“But you didn’t. Why not?”
He shrugged. “I like you.”
“You like me?” she gasped. “You chopped off three fingers because you like me?”
“I didn’t say it was a particularly well-thought-out decision.”
She shook her head, still denying the evidence of her own eyes, trying to tell herself they must be playing tricks on her. “I think I was right the first time. You’re insane!”
“Then explain this,” he suggested, holding up his hand again. “Ah! That’s right. It didn’t really happen, did it, because Arkady Desean doesn’t believe in magic?”
“It wasn’t magic!”
“Then what was it, Arkady? Do you think I somehow arranged to have your friend at the inn replace his real axe with a fake one? That I carry spare fingertips around in case of emergencies? Or do you really think that of all the Crasii you could have brought to the prison this morning, you just happened to pick the ones I had somehow cleverly arranged to infiltrate your estate?” He waited for a moment, but when she didn’t respond, he turned to the girth straps on her mount. “And you say I’m the crazy one.”
“It’s just, I think…” She stopped, not at all sure what she thought. He was right, of course. The absurdity of clinging to the belief this was a bizarrely complex plan concocted by Glaeba’s enemies, simply because the facts presented her with something she didn’t want to confront, was almost as crazy as believing such a plan might actually exist. “Tides! I don’t know what I think…”
“You deny my reality yet you name the Tides as a curse,” he pointed out, lifting her saddle to the ground. “Don’t you ever wonder why?”
She sighed, exhausted by her doubts. “I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“Not if you’re going to be like that.”
“I’m in no mood to entertain you, Cayal. I’m your hostage, remember? Your safe-passage out of Glaeba?”
“Then you have no choice but to humour me.”
She frowned. “Humour you how, exactly?”
“You could start by admitting you believe me.”
“Very well, I believe you.”
“Don’t patronise me, Arkady.”
She threw her hands up impatiently. “What do you expect, Cayal? Respect? Admiration? Do you want me to bow down to you the way the Crasii do?” Her frustration and fear were making her angry, at herself, as much as Cayal. “And I still want to know how you’re doing that, by the way. These are the best-trained felines in Glaeba. I don’t believe they’re simply following you out of instinct.”
“It’s more than instinct. It’s a compulsion. I’m not sure of the details. Crasii farming was never my particular passion.”
“Crasii farming?”
“They didn’t just come into being by magic, you know.” Cayal smiled. “Actually, that’s not entirely true. They were created by magic. But it wasn’t just one of us waving their arm to create a new race of slaves, Arkady. It took a lot of time, effort and Tidewatchers to get it right.”
Wrapping her arms around her body against the cold, Arkady found herself drawn into the argument against her better judgement. “What’s a Tidewatcher?”
“The half-breed offspring of an immortal and a mortal,” he explained as he led her mount to the cascade to drink its fill.
“You have children?” she asked in surprise.
He rolled his eyes impatiently. “No, Arkady. I took a vow of chastity and haven’t been with a woman for eight thousand years.”
Ask a silly question…, she scolded herself silently. “So, in fact, you might have immortal children, and you just don’t know about them.”
He shook his head. “There are no immortal children. Immortality stops the body ageing from the moment it takes hold of you. Two immortals can’t create new life because the new life would be immortal, which means it can never progress beyond the instant it was created.”
Strangely, that made sense to Arkady. But the rest of his tale was more than a little disturbing. “And these Tidewatchers? These half-breed offspring? Out of your own flesh and blood, you created your slaves?”
“You say that like you’re surprised, Arkady.”
“But that’s…well, it’s cruel. It’s inhuman.”
Cayal shrugged. “That’s what it is to be a Tide Lord,” he said.
Chikita and her companions returned with a small hind just as the last hint of daylight faded into night. Mercifully, the rain held off as Cayal expertly butchered the deer with a knife he’d apparently had the foresight to steal from Clyden’s Inn. The hind’s throat had been ripped out, and her withers were scored by a series of deep scratches, but Arkady was so hungry by then she didn’t care. The venison tasted as good as anything she’d ever been served in the palace.
After dinner, she wandered toward the edge of the ledge and glanced at the sky. The clouds had dissipated enough to allow a few stars to shine through. Below her somewhere was the rift valley and the Great Lakes that filled it, but the trees blocked her view, leaving her no option but to guess where Lebec might be located.
“You can’t see it from Kordana,” Cayal said, making her jump as he came up behind her.
“See what?” she asked.
He pointed at the brightest star just above the horizon, which shone faintly red against the velvet blackness of the moonless night. “The planet, Playnte.”
“I thought that was a star, Trudini.”
He shook his head. “You might call it that now, but we used to call it Playnte when I was a child. And it’s a planet, not a star. So is that one,” he added, pointing left to the next brightest star, which had risen above the mountain tops while they ate. “That’s Carani. Although the inhabitants might call it something else.”
Arkady shivered, but smiled at his words. “The inhabitants?”
“Sure. Why shouldn’t there be inhabitants? Do you think we’re the only living creatures in the universe?”
“I never really thought about it.”
“Shame on you,” he scolded. “And you call yourself an academic?”
Arkady glanced at Cayal, surprised to find he wasn’t joking. “How do you know they’re worlds like ours?”
“Lukys has been there.”
“Really?”
“So he claims.”
“How did he get there?”
Cayal shrugged. “I’m not sure exactly how he does it. It has something to do with rifts and thunderstorms, I think. He needs one to create the other, or something like that. He did try to explain it to me once, but I wasn’t really paying attention.”
“Someone was explaining a way to travel to another world to you, and you weren’t paying attention?” Arkady shook her head in disgust. “No wonder you want to die. For that you ought to.”
He glared at her, rather put out by her lack of sympathy. “I was rather preoccupied at the time.”
“With what?” she asked. “What could possibly be more important than learning something like that?”
“I was busy,” he explained, a little defensively. “Busy doing a friend a favour, actually.”
“Must have been some favour.”
“It was,” he agreed. “And I wish I’d never done it.”
“Because you missed your chance to travel to another world?”
He shook his head and turned to star
e at the distant planets. “Because it led—eventually—to something far, far worse.”
Arkady looked at him, wondering at his strange tone of voice. “What happened, Cayal?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“Yes.”
So he told her.
Chapter 41
Like a great many other innovations that changed civilisation, the Crasii were an accident.
The story I heard was that Elyssa was responsible. The Immortal Maiden wasn’t a maiden any longer by then, but immortality hadn’t done much for her love life, either. Irritating and shrill, even in her most benign moments, there are few men willing to commit to Elyssa for any length of time; certainly no immortal is going to promise her his heart until “death us do part.”
The only immortal who’s ever made the mistake of getting seriously involved with her is Taryx. He was another of Diala’s recruits; a Senestran sailor who considers immortality, and its attendant immunity to disease, a licence to spend eternity getting laid. I swear, he’s spent most of his time since surviving the Eternal Flame trying to sleep his way through every brothel on Amyrantha.
Lukys used to joke that Taryx turned to Elyssa because she was the only female between the age of fourteen and eighty-four left on the planet that Taryx hadn’t slept with yet.
Their relationship didn’t last long, only a few months, by all accounts. And it was very one sided. Taryx was amusing himself. Elyssa was painfully in love, and given that her paramour was immortal, she was quite convinced her happiness would last forever. Taryx didn’t see things in quite the same romantic light. He left the palace one morning a few months after he moved in and never bothered to go back.
They were living in Tenacia at the time. After Pellys destroyed Magreth, the Tide ebbed for a long time and we had once again faded from human memory. When the Tide returned, Engarhod and Syrolee looked for something a little less unstable than a continent formed from a chain of volcanoes to re-establish their empire, and finally settled on Tenacia, the continent north of where Magreth used to be.
The Immortal Prince Page 33
