The Gods of Amyrantha

by Jennifer Fallon

  “We’ll have to take him to Jelidia. Store him somewhere he’s not likely to thaw out.”

  “What happens next High Tide? Won’t he be able to thaw himself out?”

  Cayal shook his head. “Lukys thinks if we freeze his brain, and it stays frozen, even at High Tide he won’t be aware enough to do anything about it.”

  “And the Holy Warriors? They’ll all pack up and go home, I suppose, when they learn Kentravyon is no longer a threat?”

  “He claims he’s the One God,” Cayal said with a shrug. “And the Warriors happily buy into that. Kentravyon had to explain the rest of us away, so he told them we draw our power from him. If he goes, the rest of us—according to his doctrine—cease to exist.”

  That seemed a reasonable assumption, although I still wasn’t convinced. “And when were you planning to do this thing?”

  “The sooner the better,” Lukys said. “The Tide slips away a little more each day. If we leave it much longer, there won’t be enough power left to try it.”

  I looked at the two of them, with their smooth, reassuring smiles, certain there was some ulterior motive behind this rare act of civic-mindedness. I wasn’t sure if either Lukys or Cayal really cared that much about the fate of the other immortals and the Tides know they’d done nothing to stop the slaughter of the millions of mortals Kentravyon was responsible for in years gone by.

  And it wasn’t as if they were being persecuted. They were Holy Warriors, for pity’s sake. For all intents and purposes, these two scoundrels were helping to organise the persecution of the immortals. Surely, there was some other reason they wanted to end it.

  On the other hand, someone had just tried to burn me alive. I wasn’t feeling all that fond of the mortals of Amyrantha right then, either.

  “If I help you do this,” I asked, “what’s to stop you doing it to me, or one of the others?”

  “The very nature of this enterprise requires us to cooperate, Maralyce,” Lukys pointed out. “How often do you think that’s going to happen?”

  He had a point.

  “Count me in then,” I told them with a sigh. “Let’s put an end to this nonsense.”

  We shook hands on the deal and then Cayal passed a flask around to seal our agreement.

  Barely two months later, we were standing at the foot of Kentravyon’s mountain in Corcora—Lukys, Cayal, Brynden, Pellys and I, with the Holy Warrior army at our backs under Kinta’s command—bracing ourselves to bring down a Tide Lord.

  Chapter 22

  “Tides, you can’t stop there,” Declan complained, when Maralyce abruptly stopped talking, rose from the table, and headed for the door.

  “I’m a Tide Lord, Declan Hawkes,” she reminded him, jerking the door open to a blast of icy air. “I can do anything I like.”

  With that, she stalked out into the darkness, slamming the door behind her, leaving Declan alone with his grandfather.

  “You shouldn’t aggravate her, lad.”

  He turned to stare at the old man. “You’ve heard this story before, I suppose?”

  Shalimar nodded. “And quite a few others.”

  “You and the Tide Lord seem to be pretty thick.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t understand, Declan,” the old man replied.

  “I’m getting that.”

  “You shouldn’t judge things when you don’t know the whole story,” Shalimar advised, draining the last of his tea, which must have been stone cold by now.

  Declan was rapidly losing patience with his grandfather’s evasive answers. “So tell me the whole story, then.”

  “It’s not mine to tell.”

  “You’re a member of the Cabal, Pop. Worse…you’re a senior member of the Pentangle. You’re sworn to protect the Lore. To add to it, with every scrap of knowledge you can find. How long have you been keeping your friendship with Maralyce from the Keeper?”

  “I’ve not kept anything from Tilly that would make much of a difference to the Cabal.”

  Declan gasped at his grandfather’s words. “If what Maralyce is saying is true, they found a way to destroy a Tide Lord. What part of that do you think the Cabal isn’t interested in hearing about?”

  Shalimar shook his head. “Weren’t you listening, boy? It took five Tide Lords to take Kentravyon down. And he’s not dead. He’s just frozen.”

  “So Maralyce claims.”

  Shalimar snorted at Declan’s implication. “She’s not lying.”

  “How can you be certain?”

  “I just am.”

  Declan rolled his eyes, starting to wonder if Maralyce really had ensorcelled his grandfather. He was about to say as much, when the door opened again and the Tide Lord stalked back in clutching an armful of split logs, accompanied by another blast of chilly mountain air, slamming the door behind her with her foot.

  “You still here?” she demanded of Declan, as she walked to the fire, dumped the wood on the floor and began to stoke some life into it again.

  He looked up at her, his gaze flat and unfriendly. “I’m waiting to hear the rest of the story.”

  Unaccountably, Maralyce smiled as she turned from the fire. “You think I’m going to tell you how to kill a Tide Lord, do you?”

  “Assuming it’s possible…”

  “It’s not,” Maralyce informed him flatly. “You should listen to your grandfather.”

  “Then tell me what happened to Kentravyon.”

  “All in good time. Why don’t you tell me something?”

  “Like what?”

  “What’s your favourite colour?”

  He stared at her as if she was mad. “What?”

  “Your favourite colour. I wouldn’t have thought it a hard question.”

  “Why would you care?”

  The immortal shrugged. “I might yet decide to kill you, boy. I’ll need to know what colour to paint your headstone.”

  He shook his head, quite convinced that like Kentravyon, immortality had driven her crazy. “You’re insane, aren’t you?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  Declan looked at his grandfather, hoping for help, but the old man was staying determinedly neutral.

  “Your favourite colour,” Maralyce insisted. “What is it?”

  “Blue,” Declan snapped.

  “We distracted him.”

  “What?”

  Maralyce took the seat she’d vacated a few minutes before and continued as if she’d never left. “That’s how we defeated Kentravyon. Brynden, Pellys and I distracted him. Blew the top off his wretched mountain, actually, so he got his ground-shaking after all, just not the one he was hoping for. That gave Lukys and Cayal the opportunity to sneak up on him. It took the two of them together to do the deed. And they didn’t have long. I know Lukys was fairly certain they wouldn’t be able to do it while Kentravyon was swimming the Tide.”

  “You said the Holy Warriors went with you to confront him. Didn’t they know who you were?”

  The immortal smiled in remembrance. “Now you see that was the true brilliance of Lukys’s plan.” Clearly, she had a great deal of admiration for the Tide Lord. “After I agreed to help them, they trussed me up again and we returned to the Holy Warriors’ camp where Lukys announced they’d been able to torture the secret of killing an immortal from me. I played along, of course, and let them keep me chained as a prisoner, spitting and cursing with great gusto every time someone came near me.”

  “And they believed him?” Declan asked.

  She nodded. “You have to remember, Lukys hadn’t just joined up a few days before. He’d been working this scam for years. The Warriors trusted him implicitly, and Cayal, too. When your most loyal and decorated officers ride into camp with a Tide Lord in tow, claiming they’ve discovered the secret you’ve been hunting for the past few hundred years, why would you doubt them?”

  “That explains three of you,” Declan said, finding himself being drawn into this fascinating tale, despite his doubts about the truth of it. “How did t
he others become a part of the invasion of Corcora without being discovered?”

  “Interesting creatures, you mortals.” Maralyce shrugged. “Keep falling for the same old tricks, over and over. Ever noticed that?”

  “What do you mean…”

  “Brynden and Kinta did the same as Lukys. They posed as high-ranking Holy Warriors visiting from Torlenia—no stretch for someone with their military background—and brought Pellys with them. I’ve no idea what Lukys said to him to get him to cooperate, but he seemed quite calm about posing as their prisoner. When Brynden arrived claiming they’d also managed to extract the secret of killing an immortal from their prisoner, all it did was confirm Lukys’s story. They had their stories worked out in advance, of course, with enough similarities to verify their account and enough differences to make them appear unrehearsed. It was a masterful performance. You really should be thankful we don’t get together more often, my lad. We can be pretty dangerous, when we’re getting along.”

  “Didn’t the Holy Warriors figure it out?”

  She nodded. “Of course, they did. Eventually. It was too late for them to do anything about it, by then.”

  Declan still wasn’t convinced. “The Holy Warriors had an army…and the Tide was on the way out. Had been for a century, to hear you tell it. How could the Tide Lords have had the power to do anything?”

  Maralyce frowned. “Combine the power of the Tide Lords and you wind up with something that’s much greater than the sum of its parts, my lad, rather like an orchestra. That’s something you need to remember,” she added in an ominous tone. “As the Tide retreats we lose the ability to do much damage individually, but we can still combine our power for a long while after the Tide’s peaked.”

  Declan glanced at his unusually silent grandfather. “Is that little snippet one of those things you think the Cabal doesn’t need to know?”

  “They know,” Shalimar replied, frowning. “And watch that tongue of yours, lad. You act as if I’m a traitor.”

  “I’m not entirely convinced you’re not, Pop.”

  Shalimar glared at Declan for a moment and then rose stiffly to his feet. “More tea?” he asked Maralyce.

  “Please.”

  The Tide Lord turned her attention back to Declan as Shalimar bent over the fire to stoke it up. “You’re an unforgiving little sod, aren’t you?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Well, I know where you get that trait from. Where were we?”

  “You were blowing the top off Kentravyon’s mountain.”

  “Which we did in quite a spectacular fashion,” she told him with a wistful smile. “I’m not one for throwing the landscape around as a rule, but I must admit, that day was rather…entertaining. I think we took the whole mountain range out in the end.”

  “At which point I imagine the Holy Warriors realised they’d been duped, too.”

  Maralyce nodded. “I suppose. Wasn’t paying much attention, truth be told. It takes a lot of concentration to swim the Tide in concert with someone else. Brynden’s control was fine, but we had Pellys helping us and he was all over the place.”

  “What about Lukys and Cayal?”

  “They were concentrating on finding Kentravyon. Nobody had seen him for decades, by the time we arrived. He’d been holed up in his temple, licking his wounds, trying to find a way to regain lost ground ever since his last miracle fizzled. Lyna had left him by then, too, so there wasn’t much keeping him in touch with the real world. Lukys reasoned he’d be clinging to the Tide like a limpet, too afraid to let it go, for fear of losing even more control. That’s why we had to shock him. We had to do something to make him let go, even if only for an instant. Being something of a loner, it probably hadn’t occurred to him he’d be able to cheat the retreating Tide for a while longer by teaming up with another Tide Lord. And even if he did realise it, we only needed an instant for Lukys and Cayal to strike.”

  “What did the Holy Warriors do when they realised their One God was defeated?”

  “They fled, for the most part. The land around Kentravyon’s stronghold in Corcora was in chaos after the mountain blew, and as Lukys predicted, many of the survivors believed the rest of us immortals must have perished along with Kentravyon. Brynden wasn’t quite so confident, and I’m fairly certain he and Kinta spent the next century or so wiping out every last outpost of Holy Warriors they could find.”

  “Your plan worked well, then.”

  “Like a charm,” Maralyce agreed, “which is something your Cabal needs to remember, my lad. Cayal and Lukys, with the Tide on the way out and only a split second to act, were able to immobilise Kentravyon sufficiently to freeze his brain, and then the rest of him, and do it well enough that he’s not awoken since. There are no more dangerous Tide Lords in the universe than those two, when they act in concert.”

  Declan digested the warning silently, not sure at what point he’d started to believe Maralyce. The warning didn’t offer any comfort, however. It angered him. “You’re only warning us about them now?”

  It was Shalimar who answered him, and his answer shocked Declan almost as much as the discovery of his grandfather sitting in a Tide Lord’s kitchen sharing tea.

  “You’ve got it wrong, Declan,” the old man corrected. “Maralyce has done more than warn us of the danger.” With his hand protected by a scrap of towel, he lifted the cast-iron kettle onto the table with a grunt, and added, “She was the one who retrieved what was left of the information the Holy Warriors had gathered on the Tide Lords during their hundred-year history and passed it on to Lyrianna of Lebeken.”

  Declan stared at Maralyce in amazement. “You gave all that information about how to defeat a Tide Lord to the founder of the Cabal of the Tarot?”

  “Fool,” Maralyce said as she took the kettle from Shalimar and refilled the teapot. “There was no Cabal of the Tarot. Lyrianna of Lebeken didn’t gather the information to create your wretched Tarot. I did.”

  Chapter 23

  It became obvious to Warlock after a few weeks in the royal household that King Enteny and Queen Inala were more than a little suspicious of Kylia’s behaviour, both toward her new husband and around her constant companion, Jaxyn Aranville. She’d come to them—in theory—an innocent young girl, but the effort required to maintain the persona of Kylia was boring the immortal witless and occasionally she forgot herself.

  Diala was starting to let the mask slip and Warlock wasn’t the only one who noticed. Although they never said anything outright, the king’s disapproving looks when the young princess chose Jaxyn’s company over her husband’s, the queen’s less than subtle remarks about inappropriate friendships for a married woman, and their disapproval at some of the comments she made when she was feeling particularly impatient were becoming more and more frequent.

  As the days went by, Kylia seemed less and less inclined to appease her in-laws, which worried Warlock a great deal, and not only because of what it might mean to Glaeba. The Tide was on the way back, which meant the confidence of the immortals was growing apace. The danger Warlock feared, however, was that as he became more and more a fixture in the royal household, Declan Hawkes would be less and less likely to want him to leave. It was only a matter of a couple of months now before Boots was due to whelp.

  Hidden Valley seemed further away now than it had when he didn’t really believe it existed.

  Warlock knew the Tide was on the turn, just as he knew in this unholy alliance it was Jaxyn, not Diala, who wielded the true power. By all accounts—according to Crasii Lore—Diala’s power was limited to healing (or destroying things) on a small scale. The Immortal Prince had confirmed as much when he’d related his tale to the Duchess of Lebec while still a prisoner in the cell opposite Warlock in Lebec Prison.

  Diala and Jaxyn could both manipulate the elements, it was true, but of the two, only Jaxyn was a true Tide Lord. Only Jaxyn could bring about the sort of cataclysmic event that might result in the death of millions. Diala, so the
Lore and the Immortal Prince claimed, could barely raise a storm in a teacup.

  Her increasing willingness to flaut convention, however, risking the wrath of the court gossips and her husband, did not augur well for Glaeba’s future. Particularly as she seemed to care less and less that she was antagonising the king and queen.

  Perhaps the Tide was turning faster than Shalimar anticipated. Perhaps the immortals were getting ready to make their move, not in the year or two that the old Tidewatcher had predicted, but much, much sooner.

  And that meant it wasn’t likely that Warlock was going home anytime soon.

  Jaxyn had developed something of a routine in the palace. It mostly involved keeping the young prince out until the small hours of the morning, which meant Mathu slept a good part of the day away, leaving Jaxyn and Diala to their own devices. Jaxyn was always up and about, bright and cheerful, first thing in the morning, ready to be of service to the ladies of the court. He was supposed to be representing the interests of the Duke of Lebec, but if he actually did any work, it wasn’t when Warlock was around to witness it.

  Today, as usual, Jaxyn was waiting for the king and queen and the princess as they crossed the manicured lawns below the palace and approached the royal barge tied up at the palace dock. It had been decided last night at dinner that everyone would go boating on the lake this morning. The weather had been particularly fine these past few days, so Queen Inala had decided they should make the most of it and take the royal barge out.

  The excursion was for more than recreational purposes. Such an outing would give the royal family an excuse to sail past some of the nearer villages, where their presence would undoubtedly be remarked. They would stop for lunch at one of them—unannounced—bestowing their royal largesse on the village and ensuring the continuing loyalty of their subjects, who considered it an unimaginable honour to meet the king and queen in person.

  The royal barge was quite elaborate, designed for little more than pleasure cruising up and down the lake shore. Painted green, its brass-work glinting in the sunlight, it had a crew of nearly thirty, many of whom were simply on board to serve the royal family and their guests. There were another score of amphibious Crasii responsible for towing the craft, who were already slipping into their harnesses, while the barge’s captain yelled orders at the rest of his crew, the pitch of his calls increasing in urgency when he spied his royal passengers approaching.