“Told me what?” Declan asked, glaring at the two of them across the table.
She shook her head. “I don’t need to justify myself to some young stud who just happened to stumble onto my claim. You want him to know what happened? You tell him.”
“It’ll sound better coming from you.”
“You spin a yarn better than anybody I know, Shalimar.”
“But I wasn’t there,” the old man reminded her.
“You weren’t where?” Declan demanded impatiently.
“At the death of Amyrantha’s one true God,” Maralyce replied.
Chapter 21
Was a time we thought immortality was a gift. Some of us still do. Others…well, some people just can’t deal with forever. Makes ’em crazy.
Some, it makes crazier than others.
The first among us to lose his mind completely was Kentravyon. Your wretched Tarot calls him the Sleeper, doesn’t it? Tides, you’ve no idea how true that is. Or the effort it took to make him that way.
I’ll tell you this much, though—when a Tide Lord becomes completely detached from reality, nobody is safe, not even the immortals.
Kentravyon started out innocently enough. I’m not sure how he became immortal. Not all of us were made by that little bitch Diala and not all of us feel the need to make our origins known, either. The when doesn’t matter anyway. Not now. Immortal is immortal.
He seemed a nice enough lad at the outset, as I recall. Quiet. Studious, even.
Course he was common-born like the rest of us, and plain to look at. His features were too rough to be handsome, but he wasn’t particularly unattractive. Nondescript is the best way to describe him, I suppose. He never cut the dashing figure Cayal or Jaxyn or Tryan did, with their pretty-boy looks or their highborn manners and their unshakeable belief in the value of their own opinions. Of the three, I’ve always thought Jaxyn is the worst offender, but then, I suspect he was an arrogant ass before he was made immortal. Tryan’s a petulant fool who’s never been able to wander far from his wretched mother. And Cayal…well, he was well-intentioned enough in the beginning. Still is, on occasion, which is most of his problem and could account for why he wants to die.
But I’m getting off the topic. I know you think we’re all evil monsters and I suppose, from where you sit, we are. But it’s not that simple. Truth is, until we run afoul of each other, we’re a fairly benign bunch.
Oh, I know you’ll disagree. You’ll start reminding me about how as soon as the Tide turns one or another of the immortals always ends up trying to rule the world—or a fair portion of it—but that’s just because when you’ve lived as long as we have, you’ve seen it all before. You’ve not the energy left to watch some power-hungry, ambitious human megalomaniac scrabble for power, in the mistaken belief that only he can make a better world.
It’s quicker, easier and less trouble, sometimes, just to do it yourself.
Kentravyon, now…he just went a little too far. So far, in fact, that the rest of us felt compelled to put an end to him. Permanently. Or at least as permanently as you can stop a Tide Lord.
The trouble started, as it usually does, with the turning of the Tide.
We didn’t always hide out during Low Tides. Was a time we used to brag about our immortality. Course, it didn’t pay to perform too many miracles—as Kentravyon discovered—even when the Tide was up, because people started to expect them and then it got a bit sticky during Low Tide, when you couldn’t produce the goods.
Anyway, it all began innocently enough. Kentravyon and Lyna were a couple in those days. Lyna’s a nice girl, although I’m not sure what she ever saw in Kentravyon. She used to be a whore, you know, back before she was immortal. Worked in the same brothel as Syrolee. I always thought him a bit dull for her tastes. A bit too intense, too serious, to warrant her attention.
Maybe the rumour about him saving her from a mob of crazy mortals bent on putting every plausible method of disposing of us to the test was true. I heard a story that Lyna was captured by the Holy Warriors once and they’d used her to test their theories. I don’t know for certain, but they always seemed an odd couple to me.
They set themselves up in the northern hemisphere. The place is split into two nations now, you call them Caelum and Glaeba. Back then everyone just called the land Corcora.
Kentravyon’s reign began as a religion, naturally. It’s the best way to bend any population to your will. You can conquer a country if you have the mind to. But that takes an army and it takes money, resources and a great deal of energy, and even when you’ve won, you have to fight to hang on to it. Empires are such hard work. Religions are far more efficient. You own more than a man’s body when he believes you’re divine. You own his heart and soul, and that’ll win out over brute force, any day.
The trouble with Kentravyon’s religion is that he got a bit carried away with it. A few thousand years of immortality and the fool starts to think he’s invincible as well as immortal.
Trust me, the two are nowhere near the same. Unfortunately, he didn’t get that.
Anyway, Kentravyon started to believe in his own propaganda. Started to think he was God. And then he got this thing in his head about the racial purity of the Corcorans. He began by banning foreigners from owning anything in Corcora. Then he banned marriages between Corcorans and outsiders. Then he started deporting all the foreigners, and finally he started killing them.
I’m not sure how many of the other immortals knew what he was up to. Not sure any of us would have cared, even if we had known—there were none of us with much humanity left by then—although we’d come to seriously regret not paying attention.
But even if you ignored the atrocities, which got progressively worse as the years rolled by, Kentravyon’s big mistake, really, was the miracles. Once a year, sure as sunrise, all the faithful would gather at the foot of the mountain where he’d built his temple and he’d stage a miracle for his disciples to witness. It might be a lightning bolt smiting some hapless foreigner or sending a tornado to strike down some distant village foolish enough to question the will of their god…it didn’t really matter, although I always wondered if Lyna had a hand in the whole miracle business. She doesn’t have the power to perform that sort of thing herself, but I wouldn’t have put it past her to give Kentravyon the idea. It always seemed far too theatrical to be something he thought up on his own.
Anyway, it must have gone on like that for three or four hundred years. It was a long High Tide, I remember that, and by the time the Tide turned, Kentravyon’s religion had spread beyond Corcora’s borders.
It’s not surprising, really. Humans are tribal by nature and territorial along with it. Fear is the most basic human emotion and xenophobia is ridiculously easy to encourage. It’s not hard to convince them someone who looks different or sounds different is a threat to all they hold near and dear. Give them a religion that makes hating anyone who looks different a virtue and you’re on to a real winner.
By the time we realised the Tide was waning, half the world worshipped the god Kentravyon and the killing was getting out of hand.
And then the miracles stopped.
It was his own stupid fault, you know. I mean, he must have felt the Tide retreating. He must have known his power was fading. Or maybe he didn’t. Lyna told us later that she’d tried to talk him out of doing anything so foolish, but like I say, he’d lost touch with reality by then. Mind you, it could have been Lyna’s way of distancing herself from what happened afterward, but I’m inclined to believe she had the right of it. Kentravyon didn’t know what he was doing by then.
Anyway, Kentravyon’s last few miracles had been less than spectacular. With the Tide on the way out, each year he had less and less power to call on. He certainly knew his grip was waning. After years of progressively less spectacular events, the natives were getting a bit restless, so he must have decided to go for broke. To quell the disappointed mutterings following a fairly pitiful thunderstorm, he ann
ounced at his annual festival that the next time he’d make the very world shake.
Lyna says she warned him he didn’t have the power for it, but nothing would deter him, and by announcing it at the festival, he’d made sure the whole damned world knew about it, too. They reckon there were nigh on a half a million turned up the following year to witness the next miracle.
Course, it never happened. Oh sure, he made a few mountains smoke a bit and the ground rumbled for a day or so, but that was about the strength of it. The Tide was too far out to do much of anything else.
The reaction of the faithful was hard to judge at the outset. I mean, faith is all about believing in something, even without proof. And for a lot of people, that was enough.
But the seeds of discontent had been sown. The Tide was retreating. And Kentravyon was losing his ability to put down the opposition.
It started small. At first nobody paid the dissenters much attention. Frankly, I’m a little surprised it took people as long as it did to start complaining about some of the things Kentravyon had them doing in the name of their god. But his people believed he was the One God. He’d even convinced them that all the other immortals drew their power from him, that his existence was essential to the rest of us; even that he could destroy any immortal he chose. Problem with that logic is that once you believe an immortal can be killed, they ain’t immortal any longer, just hard to kill.
So that’s what they decided to do. Kentravyon’s opposition—and they were an organised force by then—figured if Kentravyon could kill the immortals there must be a way for them to kill us too, and trust me, even if the story about Lyna wasn’t true, the many and varied ways you might think of killing us were all put to the test in the next few score years.
We were hunted down like animals. The smart ones went to ground; actually, the smart ones always did. It was the fools like me who hung around wearing their immortality like a badge of honour who suffered most. Until then, I’d honestly never given it much thought, reasoning nobody cared that much about me one way or the other.
But I was wrong, and eventually, they found me.
It wasn’t here in Glaeba. I had another claim then, further south in what you call the Commonwealth of Elenovia these days. The locals knew I was an immortal, but it didn’t bother them and generally they left me alone.
At least, I thought it didn’t bother them.
Turns out that even the nicest people can turn on you when they’re all liquored up.
A bunch of Holy Warriors—Tides, can you believe that’s what the movement to rid the world of immortals were calling themselves—came to town, looking for the immortal they’d heard about living in the mountains. With the Tide on the way out, I guess the townsfolk figured the Holy Warriors a bigger threat than me. Handed me over with barely a twinge of guilt, they did.
And then they tried to burn me at the stake.
It’s a hideous way to die, being burnt alive. Even less fun when you’re on fire and there’s no end in sight. It’s hard for a mortal to grasp, but the more dire the threat, the harder we are to maim. Chuck an immortal into a volcano or toss them in a pot of boiling acid, and they’ll walk out—extremely pissed off with you, but unscathed, because our bodies seem to understand the need to heal something like that so rapidly that it becomes almost instantaneous. It’s as if the magic that made us immortal understands the danger. Our bodies react to the immediacy of the threat. But try to kill an immortal slowly, do it so it takes time, and you won’t kill us, but Tides, you can make us suffer. I stood there screaming, tied to that stake, wishing they had chucked me off the lip of a volcano.
I can’t begin to describe what it felt like, being burned alive. Tides, it was agonising and the smell…indescribable. It still makes me shudder, just thinking about it. I didn’t even lose consciousness, and the bastards kept stoking the fire, and drinking and chanting and cursing me like I’d done something personal to each and every one of them. I could call in the Tide to blow the fires out, and I did a few times, but remember, the Tide was waning, and they’d been at me for days. I was exhausted, in agony and losing my power.
If you were wondering how I escaped, it wasn’t anything I did. Got saved by something far more mundane than that…Cayal and Lukys turned up.
Those two had been paying far more attention to the goings-on in the world than I was. And they were smart enough to hide who they were as soon as they realised the danger. Very smart in fact.
Tides, the cheeky bastards had actually joined the Holy Warriors.
Lukys had attained the rank of colonel, can you believe the gall of the man? Cayal—who for a time there was Lukys’s willing accomplice in pretty much anything he dabbled in—was acting as his aide, or something like that. I never did really work it out, exactly.
Whatever…they were having a high old time strutting around in those ridiculous red cloaks, hunting down the other immortals. I think they even found a few they didn’t like, and set the Holy Warriors on to them. I’m fairly certain Tryan was tossed off a cliff near Port Gallow by a raging mob because Cayal tipped off the Tenacian chapter of the Holy Warrior Order as to his whereabouts.
Anyway, there I was, smoking and crisping like an overdone roast, when this pompous Holy Warrior colonel and his arrogant aide turn up and order the mob to put out the fire because they want to interrogate me themselves. Took me a few moments to realise who my saviours were…as you can imagine, I was a trifle preoccupied at the time. They dragged me off the pyre, tied me across the saddle of a packhorse, and carted me off, while I was still crisping around my extremities.
They took me far enough away that I could heal in peace before they told me why I’d been the recipient of their heroic rescue and it had little to do with altruism.
Still, I’ve always had a soft spot for those two troublemakers since then, despite some of the things they’ve done. You can’t help but feel warmly toward the men who save you from being burned at the stake.
“We think we’ve figured out a way to put an end to this persecution of immortals,” Lukys informed me once I’d recovered.
A few days previously, I might have commented “who cares” but that bonfire party thrown for me by my former mortal friends put paid to that idea.
“How?”
“By putting an end to Kentravyon,” Cayal said. It was late and we were sitting around a cheery campfire, safe for the time being from the hounding of the Holy Warriors.
“How do you figure that’ll work?”
“He started it all,” Lukys pointed out. “If we take him out, God will be dead, the mortals will settle down, eventually they’ll forget there were ever any other immortals and they’ll leave us alone.” He grinned mischievously. “Cayal and I have taken some pains to put ourselves in a position where this idea might be encouraged to take hold, you know.”
“How did you two wind up as Holy Warriors, anyway?” The absurdity of having this conversation with those two reprobates dressed in the uniform of our dreaded enemies didn’t really occur to me until later.
“They don’t ask a lot of questions when you sign up,” Cayal told me with a smile. “And we didn’t even have to lie, did we, Lukys?”
“Not once,” he agreed, “has anybody asked us if we’re immortal.”
“You’re incorrigible. The pair of you,” I said, smiling at the audacity of them. Cayal wasn’t nearly so maudlin in those days, and Lukys was always a disarming charmer when the mood took him. I doubt the Holy Warriors stood a chance, once those two decided to join up. “But take Kentravyon out? I hate to be the harbinger of doom here, lads, but Kentravyon’s as immortal as any of us. Taking him out isn’t really an option.”
“We can’t kill him,” Cayal agreed. “But we think we can immobilise him.”
“Which will last right up until the next High Tide and then not only will you have one very pissed off Tide Lord to deal with, but one looking to even the score with you.”
“Not if we freeze him.”
<
br /> I stared at Cayal, not even attempting to hide my scepticism. “Freeze him? How?”
It was Lukys who answered me. “We figure there’s just enough power left in the Tide to do it. But it’ll take a few of us. Kentravyon can draw on the same power as us, so no single Tide Lord could do it alone, because he’d be able to counter anything we threw at him just as easily.”
“And you think if a few of us wield the Tide together, we can do this?”
Lukys nodded unsmilingly. I don’t think I realised how serious they were until then.
“How many is a few?” Cooperation between us is rare. Even if such a bizarre idea might work, I couldn’t imagine how they were going to get enough of us together to make it happen.
“Lukys thinks it’ll take at least four of us. I say we’d be safer with five.”
“I count only three of us.”
“Brynden’s agreed to help,” Lukys told me.
“That’s four. Who were you planning to recruit as number five? Tryan or Elyssa?”
“Pellys,” Cayal replied.
I laughed aloud at the suggestion.
“My sentiments exactly,” Lukys said with a frown. “However, Sparky here didn’t like my suggestion about how to secure Elyssa’s cooperation.”
“I’m not sleeping with her, Lukys,” Cayal said in a tone that made me think they’d had this discussion before, a number of times.
“So, there you have it, old girl,” Lukys said to me. “Sparky’s too shy to get us some reliable help, so we’re stuck with the Lord of the Lunatics.”
I shook my head at the absurdity of the idea of involving Pellys in anything that required coherent thought. “He doesn’t even know which way is up! Tides, you can’t rely on him. Anyway, I thought Pellys wasn’t speaking to anybody at the moment.”
“I should be able to talk him into it,” Lukys assured me. “If we decide we need him.”
I was silent for a time, trying to think through the implications of this unprecedented plan. “Once you freeze Kentravyon, then what?”
The Gods of Amyrantha Page 17
