The Gods of Amyrantha
Page 52
It was after dark before Maralyce arrived, and although he couldn’t say how, Declan knew she was coming even before the cabin door burst open. She stared at this sudden and unwelcome influx of visitors in her small sanctuary and then glowered at Declan.
“It’s you.”
“Last time I looked,” Declan replied warily. “We weren’t expecting you for days. This is Stellan Desean, by the way. Arkady’s husband.”
Maralyce glared at the man with ill grace. “So we’re to be honoured by the whole wretched royal family, now, are we?”
Stellan rose to his feet and bowed with court-bred grace. “It’s an honour to meet you, my lady.”
Maralyce ignored him. Her gaze was fixed firmly on Declan.
“Outside,” she ordered. “I want to talk to you.”
Declan rose to his feet and followed her to the forge where she turned on him, studying him in the darkness for a time before asking, “How?”
“How what?” he asked, afraid he knew the answer. More afraid of that answer than anything he had ever faced in his entire life.
“Don’t play games with me, boy.”
He looked at her closely, hoping for some sign his fears were groundless. “You can tell, can’t you?”
She nodded. “Felt you before I even reached the surface. What happened?”
“There was a fire…” he said, not sure where to begin. Then he threw his hands up helplessly. “Tides, Maralyce, I don’t know what happened.”
“It’s pretty flankin’ obvious what’s happened, boy.”
Declan shook his head. “It can’t be. The Eternal Flame is gone. The Immortal Prince extinguished it five thousand years ago.”
“Bah! Eternal Flame, my arse. It wasn’t that special.”
He stared at her in shock. “What?”
Maralyce shrugged uncomfortably. “We thought it was better if people believed there was only one way to make an immortal. Kept the numbers down, you see…”
“We? Who is we?”
“Me…and a few of the others…”
“Other immortals?”
“Well…of course…who else would I be talking about?”
“But…but Cayal told Arkady it took him a whole damned ocean to put the Eternal Flame out.”
Maralyce shrugged. “Well, he would, wouldn’t he? Makes him sound much more heroic, that way. Truth is, Cayal wouldn’t have had a clue when the flames actually died. He was so lost to his rage he didn’t know which way was up until it was all over.”
“Why didn’t you say something sooner?”
“Didn’t know you were gonna get yourself toasted, otherwise I might have.” When she saw he wasn’t amused, she shook her head. “Look…you don’t understand, Declan…”
“I understand, Maralyce, believe me, I understand.” He closed his eyes for a moment, unable to accept what was happening, and then opened them and looked at her bleakly. “Is there any chance this is…I don’t know…”
“What?” she asked. “A mistake? Temporary? A big mix-up?” Impatiently, Maralyce grabbed his wrist and pulled the knife from her belt. Before he had a chance to object, she sliced across his forearm with it, cutting so deep he felt the blade grazing bone on its way through.
He cried out in pain, as the blood sprayed from his severed veins, but Maralyce refused to let him go. “Look!” she commanded. “You tell me, boy.”
Declan forced himself to look, forced himself to watch the bleeding stop and the muscles begin to knit together. The pain was unbelievable, almost as unbelievable as what he was seeing.
Declan fell to his knees, Maralyce still gripping his arm, as his flesh repaired itself with alarming speed.
“No,” he whispered through the pain. “Tides…not this…”
It wasn’t Maralyce who said it aloud, however. It was Nyah who put Declan’s greatest fear into words, making it so horribly final. It was as if somehow, by giving voice to the suspicion he’d been living with since waking up in the bottom of Stellan Desean’s stolen dinghy without a mark, not a burn, even the wound Chikita had inflicted on his face a few hours earlier healed without a trace, she had made it real.
He glanced up and saw the little princess through his tears of despair and desolation, standing at the entrance to the forge, her eyes wide. She must have followed them from the cabin.
“Tides, Declan!” Nyah exclaimed. “You’re an immortal.”
Epilogue
Even through the ice, he could feel the Tide returning.
It was a subtle feeling at first, but then everything was subtle these days. His ability to feel anything, to even frame a coherent thought, was so painfully slow that the mere act of forming a sentence meant the first words were lost before the last words were thought of.
He lived on instinct now. And even then he wasn’t sure if you could call this living. Maybe it was. If living was defined by awareness, then he was alive.
That was one thought he could form. The shortest sentence of all.
I am.
Beyond that, he was lost. Somewhere, he suspected, there must be an explanation. Logically, he did not come into being in this state. Somewhere in the frozen recesses of his mind were the reasons for his imprisonment. Somewhere the identities of those responsible for his stasis must be buried.
Should he ever find them, he’d decided—in a process that had taken centuries—should he ever escape this frozen prison, he would devote his time to repaying the favour.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t have the time. That was all he had, in fact.
He dreamed occasionally, immobile in his solid prison of ice. The dreams were sometimes pleasant, more often tormented. In them, he had an identity that seemed real and right.
Because in his dreams, more often than not, he was God.
And the Tide was turning.
He’d felt it come back before, several times. And then he felt it leave again. Each time it peaked, he seemed a little more aware of it. A little more able to understand that it was the Tide and that if he could only grasp it fully, he could be free.
He dreamed more often when the Tide was turning. Sometimes he saw faces. Faces he couldn’t name. Faces whose names must be important, or why else would he dream of them?
Sometimes, too, he heard music. The music of cracking ice. The symphony of the shifting tectonic plates, something he felt through the very core of the planet, as much as heard, as if the music vibrated through him to compensate for his frozen ears.
He had no concept of time here. He couldn’t imagine how long he’d been in this state. The memories of how he got here were frozen and beyond his reach.
But the music had changed subtly since the Tide had begun to turn. There was a different tenor to it now, a shift in the vibrations that heralded something out of the ordinary.
He tried to listen for it, to lean forward for a better chance to hear, but any movement he made existed only in his frozen imagination, so it was impossible to tell if this change was something new, or something he’d created in his own mind to alleviate the boredom.
The answer was too hard.
And it took so long to frame the thought that by the time he’d posed the question, he’d forgotten why he wanted to know.
He slept. And he dreamed of being God again.
And then the tenor of the Tide changed and he felt it.
He felt it.
The Tide swelled on the edge of his frozen awareness. It surged against the ice, surged against his ice-bound mind. Little by little he became aware, and with awareness came the pain.
He’d always understood he was frozen, but until now, the meaning of that was something he didn’t have the awareness to appreciate.
He appreciated it now.
He was frozen. Worse, he was bone-chillingly cold, and it seeped through every frozen fibre of his being until it reached for his very soul. The ice around him crackled and split, but this wasn’t the slow symphony of time, it was sharp and immediate and it hurt and he was
cold…
The Tide swelled again as the realisation began to seep through his mind. The ice was melting. Cracking. Disintegrating around him.
His concept of time was still awry, so he had no idea how long the thawing took. The sound of dripping and then running water as the ice surrendered filled ears that had began to ache as they softened. The cracking of the walls that bound him, the pain and the bitter, blood-freezing cold were all he had the ability to focus on.
If there were memories, or any other thoughts in his mind, the pain overwhelmed them all…
And then a pain split his chest that left all the other agony a pale imitation of torment. He felt his heart force a beat, and then another, and he cried out, surprised to discover he could cry out, that his jaw moved and there was something left in his lungs to force past his vocal cords.
Another loud crack sounded, and the ice let him go. It was almost as if he was being spat out, an irritating seed being spat from the mouth of the ice monster. He crashed to the floor and would have screamed had he had the strength to do so. His limbs cried out in agony as joints immobilised for an unthinkable time were forced to move again. His heart laboured as blood so sluggish it felt like syrup moved through his veins.
He opened his eyes, squinting in the harsh torchlight reflecting off the icy cavern into which he had fallen. After a long moment, his eyes adjusted to the light, muscles unused for so long finding their purpose once more.
A face appeared in front of him, familiar, hated and yet welcome…
“Lukys?” he managed to gasp through his parched and frozen throat.
“Kentravyon!” his saviour replied with a smile more chilling than the icy cavern in which they were enclosed. “Welcome back.”
Tor Books by Jennifer Fallon
The Hythrun Chronicles
THE DEMON CHILD TRILOGY
Medalon (Book One)
Treason Keep (Book Two)
Harshini (Book Three)
THE WOLFBLADE TRILOGY
Wolf blade (Book One)
Warrior (Book Two)
Warlord (Book Three)
The Tide Lords
The Immortal Prince (Book One)
The Gods of Amyrantha (Book Two)
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE GODS OF AMYRANTHA
Copyright © 2007 by Jennifer Fallon
All rights reserved.
Originally published in 2007 by Voyager, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, Australia.
Maps by Russell Kirkpatrick
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fallon, Jennifer.
The gods of Amyrantha / Jennifer Fallon.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1683-7
I. Title.
PR9619.4.F35 G63 2009
823'.92—dc22
2009001509