The Immortal Walker

by McKellon Meyer

  This wasn’t the Sorcerer. Nor was it a mad Ikaros with torn robes squabbling over baubles. It was an immortal Ikaros as king of the Five Ruling Cities. King of the Phoenix and Serpent Houses. And, Kaislyn was convinced, entirely, dangerously, insane. More so because he hid it.

  She tried to take a deep breath, forgot she couldn’t anymore, and took two shallow breaths. Her hand flew to her necklace, touched her own prize from the Sorcerer. It didn’t seem such a wise plan to flaunt the earring anymore. Not here anyway. Not now.

  The phoenix perched on the back of a chair near the fireplace. It was an enormous red bird with a knobby head and black, intelligent eyes. It really did look more like a vulture than a tropical bird from the jungles around the Fourth City. Its eyes were even more intense than Ikaros’.

  “So.” Kaislyn licked her lips. “How’s this going to work? Can’t very well push me over a cliff here can you?”

  “By your own mouth you have admitted to treason by plotting to corrupt the phoenix, the symbol of my throne and authority. By your own mouth you admitted to conspiracy with this woman to overthrow my rule.”

  How could Ikaros possibly know what she was planning? She eyed Athalia, who looked quite sick. Oh. Her. Ikaros must have read her mind. Kaislyn straightened her shoulders. “The only conspiracy going on here is you wanting to kill her.” She jabbed a finger at Athalia, who hadn’t moved but for her gaze to flick between the two of them. “You look ridiculous! And you reek. What’d you do, smash a perfume bottle over your head or something? A little goes a long, long way.”

  Ikaros’ lips lifted in a sneer. “Far better than the fat grease you smell like. It looks like you rolled in it too.”

  Ah, this was familiar ground. Kaislyn relaxed so much as to smile at him. “Specially for you, darling.”

  His eyes narrowed to slits. “Why can I not see your mind?”

  “See me? I’m right here.”

  “Your mind,” said Ikaros with feigned carelessness. “It’s not there.”

  “Oh, it’s never been there. I lost it years ago.” She tried to ignore the phoenix watching her. Its eyes shone with recognition, but Ikaros... Her smile vanished and she didn’t feel so flippant anymore.

  “You’ve never met me before now have you?” she whispered. All her interactions with Ikaros until now must have been after this meeting. A fleeting, wild hope filled her. Did that mean he’d only Shifted recently? It was replaced by a new, despairing thought: Did she do this? Did she start everything between them by provoking Ikaros here before she had even met him?

  No. That couldn’t be true. Ikaros started it first.

  “I am descended from the House of the Serpent. That is why you cannot touch my mind.”

  “Indeed?” Ikaros barred his teeth at her. “Then you are even more of a threat than I originally thought.”

  “Catching on are you?” Kaislyn turned toward the phoenix. She tried to keep her gaze soft, earnest. Don’t glare at the bird, don’t glare at the bird.

  “You don’t need him. He’s insane. You know it. I know it. The cities are stable, sure, but think how much better they’ll be with Athalia! He wants to kill her. How is that fair? How is that right?”

  Ikaros’ face turned red with rage. “How dare you try to supplant the phoenix! How stupid are you to attempt a coup in front of me! The phoenix is mine! Your words are meaningless to us! You have no power or influence here!”

  “The phoenix belongs to the Phoenix House, of which Athalia is a part,” Kaislyn said, aware her voice was rising to match his, but unable to control it anymore. She added to the phoenix, “Athalia doesn’t smell like he does either. You represent the ruler of the Five Cities. Ikaros can’t force you to stay with him. Aren’t you tired of him?” The phoenix tilted its head to the side as it regarded her.

  “You... you...” Ikaros sputtered. His fingers curled and uncurled. Well, that was a familiar enough gesture. If one that meant he was about to lose control. She couldn’t tell if she was making any progress with the phoenix. At least it seemed to be listening to her.

  “He’s insane,” she continued. “There is no way you can stay with him if everyone knows he’s crazy. No one will tolerate an insane ruler, even if he has you. And he won’t have you. Look, I’m being flexible here. It can be a quiet transition. No one but the three of us will really know what happened. Isn’t that better for everyone? I promise not to make a scene either.”

  The phoenix actually shrugged its shoulders. It reminded her so sharply of Zarif when he laughed at her, she was certain the gesture was the same here. “Don’t laugh at me! This is serious. What’s it going to take to convince you that staying with Ikaros is a bad idea?”

  The phoenix stretched out a foot and bent to nibble a toe.

  “You’re as bad as he is!” Kaislyn shouted at it.

  “Insults, treason,” Ikaros hissed. “I’ve had enough of you!” He clapped his hands together.

  Kaislyn pivoted back to him. “Really? Clapping? You should leave him just for that embarrassing display,” she snapped at the phoenix even as guards appeared around the doors behind her.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Athalia hide a smile.

  Ikaros’ face turned dark red. “Take her and throw her in the cells,” he commanded. “Keep her alive, but just this side of living until I decide what I want to do with her.”

  “Good luck with that,” Kaislyn taunted as the guards marched her from the room.

  Ikaros glared at her.

  The phoenix turned to preen its feathers.

  The cell was small and damp and covered with dirty straw. Kaislyn pushed the straw into a corner and sat on the cleanest part of the stone floor she could find. She wasn’t sure why she bothered. The only light came from a flickering torch in the hall on the other side of the metal-barred door. It gave her a headache.

  It went with her ears. They rang cheerfully of keys rattling in locks. She thought of Falan’s cell and the echoing key rattles. She was certain that Shift attack came from here. It was not a comforting thought.

  Reasoning with the bird had been a colossal mistake. “Stupid bird,” Kaislyn growled. How could it be so blindly loyal to Ikaros?

  Not that loyal, girl.

  Kaislyn thought back to the First and Second Bloody Years. It went to Hezere after Nakia died. It didn’t return to Ikaros and it could have. Why?

  A giggle escaped her. Weren’t they all playing a game here? And what did they always do? They cheated. The phoenix was just like them. It was cheating too.

  She was certain she was right about the loyalty of the bird, why else did it stay with Nakia all those years when she was so easily deceived by Ikaros? It was loyal, and it did crave some kind of stability. But it also wanted to win. Just like everyone else. It wasn’t going to win with Nakia, so it looked the other way? Let Ikaros think he had won and then cheated at the last moment and chose Hezere, forcing Ikaros back to the mountains.

  Kaislyn fiddled with her necklace. It was what she’d do if she thought she was losing. Give the appearance of defeat and then neatly slide out from under it. Ha! That’s where she went wrong tonight. Words weren’t enough. She needed to force the phoenix to choose between winning and losing. Which meant she needed to make Ikaros lose spectacularly in a very public setting. The phoenix would have to abandon him so it didn’t lose too.

  So how was she going to achieve all that?

  Despite having new ideas and plans to occupy herself with, the night and following day passed in mind-numbing slowness. No one came near her cell and Kaislyn decided that “this side of living” involved starving her first.

  She’d starved once while fleeing from the Fourth City back to the mountains. At least then she’d had the Dead to keep her company. Or to make sarcastic comments at, really. But it was something to distract her. Here? Here it would be much harder.

  She ran a hand over her hair, over the thick braid folded and tucked against the nape of her neck. She stopped. Pulling h
er braid loose, she freed the tiny dagger she’d concealed there. How long ago had she done that? Long enough, she’d forgotten. Kaislyn settled more purposefully against the wall. She wasn’t going to wait for Ikaros to make the next move. She was getting out of here.

  They brought her a little food the following morning. The grey paste made her stomach rumble. Kaislyn forced her attention away from it and onto the two guards. She tottered to her feet, as if already very weak.

  “Food,” she mumbled.

  “It’s your last,” said one of them.

  “Good.” Kaislyn turned her stumble into a dash, drawing her dagger as she ran.

  The guards weren’t expecting her to have a weapon. They went down and stayed down. She ran down the hallway, turned into two other hallways and sprinted for the stairwell at the end.

  The door at the top was locked. She fumbled at the lock, her fingers shaking with urgency. The door opened from the other side and she blinked at the additional torchlight. She shoved past another guard and kept running. His yell of alarm echoed all around her. There was a guardroom at the end of the hall. Three guards surged out of it toward her.

  She tried to duck past the first guard, swiping at the second one with her dagger. She caught him across the shoulder before the third one tackled her, ramming her arm against the floor until the grip on her knife loosened and she let go.

  They hauled her to her feet and back to her cell where they found their comrades.

  Dead.

  Kaislyn didn’t notice the swearing or the blows as she stared at the two bodies. She’d never killed anyone except Ikaros before.

  “Inform the king. He’ll want to know,” spat a guard.

  Yes, he would want to know, Kaislyn thought numbly. She was still in shock when Ikaros appeared himself. He hardly glanced at the bodies. “Set up the whipping post in the yard.” His eyes shown black in the torchlight as he surveyed her disheveled appearance. “And cut her hair.”

  They left the bodies of the guards with her in the cell, along with her shorn hair. She didn’t notice the hair, staring instead at the sightless eyes of the guards. She’d killed them.

  Did she hurt and trick people? Sure. But not this. They weren’t nice but they couldn’t have been as nasty as Ikaros was. Is. She wanted to shut their eyes, but couldn’t bring herself to touch the bodies.

  She wanted to fight with knives, remember?

  Kaislyn threw up in a corner. Afterwards, she cried.

  They whipped her the next morning in a courtyard. She thought she saw Ikaros watching from a second story window, but that could have been the black spots dancing in her vision. Athalia was there too. She stood at the far end of the yard with an escort of four guards and several officials. There wasn’t a flicker of emotion on the princess’s face as she watched.

  The pain wasn’t nearly as bad as Kaislyn anticipated. The thought lasted until her shirt tore beneath the lashes. This hurt a lot more than dying. Her entire back felt like it was on fire. She lost count of the number of lashes and it only ended when she lost consciousness.

  Kaislyn woke with a groan. Her back felt like it’d been burned in a wrong Shift over and over again. In a way it had been. The worst part was, she still didn’t think this was the full effect of the whipping yet.

  “I’ll kill Ikaros.”

  “That is why you’re here in the first place.”

  Kaislyn jerked in fright and pain rippled up and down her back. She began to swear. First in the Old Language, using every word she’d learned from Ikaros, moved onto the words she’d learned from Zarif and the guards, and finished with a more traditional, “The Phoenix Queen curse you until the mountains fall and the desert withers! The wrath of the Dead haunt you forever! Damnation, but I will kill Ikaros for this!”

  Athalia moved out of the darkness that was the corner of Kaislyn’s vision to kneel in front of her. “There hasn’t been a Phoenix Queen in over sixty years.”

  “Does it look like I care right now? I hurt!”

  “I know. I’ve been waiting for you to wake up. We have to hurry.”

  “Are you arrested too?”

  Athalia’s lips thinned as she helped Kaislyn to her feet. “The king intends to execute you by beheading tomorrow.”

  “That’s going to go well,” Kaislyn said with a hoarse laugh.

  “Are you happy now, you stupid little Immortal Walker? No one has ever seen the Phoenix King like this before! He’s... he’s talking to himself now.”

  “At least part of my plan is working then,” said Kaislyn, unable to keep her mouth shut.

  Athalia’s fingers twitched. Kaislyn thought she might actually slap her but the princess regained control over herself.

  “Lord Fen has used every favor he can to allow me this time to help you escape.”

  Kaislyn tried to focus on Athalia. “Really? You’d do that for me?”

  “You have saved my life many times. I would not deserve to be the Phoenix Queen for even one day if I did not acknowledge such a sacrifice.”

  “And Fen? What does he get?”

  “A short life.”

  Kaislyn looked down. “Oh,” she said, very softly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Come,” Athalia said.

  Kaislyn stumbled after Athalia in a haze. The princess guided her from the cells, strangely absent of guards, to the upper levels, and, finally, to a gate in the palace wall. Athalia removed her white cloak and set it gently around Kaislyn’s blistering shoulders. “So you do not attract attention to your injuries.”

  Athalia closed the gate behind Kaislyn and locked it. “Remember, Kaislyn, that just because you cannot die does not mean that immortality is worth living.” She turned and hurried back to the palace.

  Kaislyn wavered for a few minutes before heading for the nearest city gate.

  It was a wet, slushy walk to the mountains as melted snow transformed the ground into mud. Kaislyn reached the mountains without incident. The snow was completely gone from the hillsides. Blooming Weeping flowers dotted the grass. “If I didn’t hurt so much, I’d say it was actually summer here,” she said and Shifted to her birth life.

  The summer day was identical here but the Shift had intensified the pain of her back, as if she’d bounced between several wrong Shifts. Kaislyn stood still, gasping as she waited for her back to stop hurting as much. Shifting was out of the question until she healed.

  She checked the markers in her head for Ikaros. Blazes. He was nearby. Waiting for her to return from his city so he could stab her again? She didn’t want to see him yet. Not after what he’d just done to her. Not after meeting him as the Phoenix King. And she was in her birth life. She was even more exposed here.

  Gritting her teeth, Kaislyn started for the Second City. It wasn’t as if she was bleeding out or anything. She was feeling reasonably alert too. It should be easy enough to avoid attracting attention and hide in her room until she healed.

  Kaislyn decided it would be safer to use a different gate into the palace to avoid meeting anyone she knew too well. Her plan worked until she’d passed through the gate and skirted along the wall, seeking out quieter hallways, and stumbled right into one of the main courtyards the guards used for training.

  Kaislyn halted, her face draining of color. She blinked her eyes rapidly. The dirt of the yard was clean and bare. It’d been years ago that she’d last been in here tied to a post. The air mangled by the hissing whip. It wasn’t... wasn’t this morning. Not really. She tried to still shaking hands. Why did she have to come a different route?

  The guards were all looking at her. She recognized most of them. Zarif was there too. Nice guards, she told herself. Not Ikaros’ guards. Still, she glanced upwards to make sure there was no black-robed figure watching.

  “Sorry.” She edged stiffly around the courtyard toward the far door.“I, um, got lost there. Don’t mind me.”

  She tried to avoid Zarif’s gaze most of all. His face had gone dark and suspicious. She pretended to ignore t
hat he started following her. Her pace increased, which was a mistake. Her back hurt even more as her shirt brushed against it and she bit her lip. At least the cloak hid everything.

  Zarif could move with annoying swiftness, Kaislyn thought, stumbling to a halt as he blocked her path to the door.

  “Who whipped you, Kaislyn?”

  The courtyard went deadly quiet.

  Kaislyn glared at Zarif, aware that her eyes were beginning to leak. “No one. Stop making things up. Move.”

  He didn’t budge. “I’ve seen a few whippings, and I’ve been on the receiving end of them. I know what that walk is. You’ve been beaten. Who did it?”

  “I broke a law,” she said coldly, her voice loud in her ears. “That’s what happened.” She scooted past him and into the safety of the hallway.

  Zarif followed her.

  “What don’t you get about leaving me alone?” Kaislyn wished her voice didn’t sound quite so shrill.

  “If you don’t want anyone to know about this, or fewer people than already know, then you’re going to need help. My help.”

  Maybe she wasn’t going to suffer a Shift attack later for her back. Maybe it was just going to hurt a lot right now. She couldn’t think of an argument that would get rid of Zarif and neither one said anything else until they reached Kaislyn’s rooms.

  “Let me see,” Zarif commanded.

  Kaislyn began to shrug and stopped as sharp, blistering pains laced her back. She bit her lip again and tasted blood. Fumbling for the ties of Athalia’s cloak, she let it fall, turning her back toward Zarif. “Happy now?”

  Zarif swore.

  “It’s not that bad,” she said, surprised at both the words and the vehemence.

  “Don’t look in a mirror then,” Zarif growled. “Go lie on your stomach. I’m going for bandages and ointments. Don’t even think of locking the door after I’m gone. I’ll break it if I have to.” He glared at her.

  “What?”

  “Go lie down!”