The Chaos Crystal

by Jennifer Fallon

  Admittedly, he had time to perfect his lies. The only soul in Cycrane who really cared about the fate of Boots and her pups was Elyssa, and she had left the palace several days ago with Warlock in tow to put into action his grand plans for defending Cycrane. He wasn't sure his idea would work, but the immortals seemed to like his suggestion, despite how strange it felt to him to be advising the leaders of a foreign country on the best way to protect themselves against his own people.

  Elyssa had gone south of the city to where the largest of the Caelish tar seeps were located. If Tryan and the other immortals couldn't find a hot spring or some other orifice into the ground that they could manipulate with the Tide, Stellan's plan might be their only chance to protect themselves against invasion.

  Of course, Tryan had appropriated the idea and made it his own when he realised it actually might work, but the immortals still hoped for a way to melt the ice now forming a land bridge between Caelum and Glaeba.

  Although Stellan had originally voiced the idea of melting the ice by channelling some natural force into the lake to heat the water, in truth he thought the idea optimistic in the extreme. He had suggested the tar seeps as an alternative, thinking it a better option in the short term. There was no way to prevent Jaxyn's army from marching on them. He knew nothing of the workings of the Tide, but suspected the sort of power required to melt the frozen Great Lakes was far more than a Tide Lord could muster, unless it was High Tide and they didn't mind causing another Cataclysm. Nobody wanted that. Destroying the kingdom that the Empress of the Five Realms and her kin had earmarked as their own before the Tide had even peaked was the last thing anybody — mortal or immortal — wanted.

  No, even if it was possible, melting the ice was a last resort, not their first line of defence. For that, they had an army gathering all along the Caelish coastline, preparing to face the superior Glaeban numbers.

  This war, Stellan feared, would be fought the hard way.

  He had advised the Caelish against taking the fight onto the ice. The further Jaxyn's army — he never for a moment considered Mathu behind this invasion — had to march on the ice, the more exhausted and less ready to fight they would be when they arrived.

  As for using magic — well, the ice needed to be shattered now, not slowly melted. Jaxyn and his army were already on their way.

  But even if they couldn't turn back the Glaeban army, Elyssa would be gone long enough for him to save Boots and her pups, as he'd promised Warlock he'd do.

  It was dark by the time he reached the edge of the city, and the tavern — named The Wounded Grasshopper for no logical reason Stellan could discern — where he'd dumped his guards earlier in the day. He had human guards now, which meant they were much more corruptible than felines. Fortunately, several days ago Ricard Li had replaced the felines ordered to guard Stellan on his arrival in Cycrane. The Caelish spymaster claimed they needed all their Crasii troops for the coming fight, and couldn't waste them guarding a man who clearly didn't need guarding. Tryan had agreed to the change with an absent wave of his arm, his attention focused on the news that the Glaeban army was finally on the move. The men were still in the taproom where he'd left them, although they were considerably drunker than when he'd ordered them to stay here this morning.

  'Your graish!' the only one of his guards still conscious called out, when he spied the duke entering

  The Wounded Grasshopper's smoky taproom. 'You're back!'

  Stellan wove his way between the tables to where the men were sitting. The low-ceilinged room was warm, crowded, and full of men discussing the possibility of war. Of the three guards assigned to protect and watch over him, two were either asleep or passed out drunk. The third man was well on his way to being in the same condition. Stellan was a little afraid to find out what their bar tab might be, particularly as he had agreed to pay it.

  'We got caught in the snow. I lost the bitch and her pups.'

  The man shrugged. 'What's one less flanking canine and her litter, eh? Wanna drink?'

  'No, thank you. If you're able to rouse your companions, I'd like to return to the palace. Losing Tabitha Belle and her pups has quite upset me, I fear.'

  The guard was too drunk to care about the tender sensibilities of the man he was guarding. He elbowed the guard next to him, whose face lay in a puddle of beer on the table. The other guard was slumped in the seat opposite, softly snoring. 'Hey, wake up! His lordship's back. Time to go.'

  The man mumbled something incoherent but didn't seem inclined to move. 'I'll settle up and meet you outside,' Stellan said, and turned for the bar, hoping he had enough on him to pay the tab. Unless they were particularly cheap drunks, the guards must have drunk a heroic amount of ale to get into such a state in only a few hours.

  Stellan shouldered his way to the bar and waved his hand to attract the attention of the barkeep. The man nodded when he saw Stellan, finished serving his most recent customer and then headed down the bar to speak with the duke.

  'M'lord,' the man said, wiping the bar in front of Stellan with a grubby cloth he kept tucked in his

  apron, as if it made any sort of difference to the general state of his establishment. 'Those boys of yours have been puttin' a fair hole in my ale barrel.'

  'For which I'm more than happy to pay,' Stellan assured him. 'I hope they've not been too much trouble?'

  'No more'n the rest of these reprobates,' the barkeep assured him. 'That'll be —' 'They're here!'

  Stellan and the tavern owner both turned at the shout coming from the entrance of the taproom. A lad of about sixteen stood in the doorway, clutching his cap in his gloved hands, his face flushed with excitement. 'They're here!' he repeated loudly, to make sure everyone heard him. 'You can see them on the lake!'

  'Who's here?' the barkeep demanded. 'What are you prattling on about, Seth?'

  'The Glaebans!' the boy answered impatiently. 'You can see them coming!'

  Stellan's tab was forgotten as everyone in the taproom clambered to their feet and headed for the door. Swept along with the crowd, Stellan soon found himself standing in a slight rise at the back of the tavern, looking out over the frozen waters of the Lower Ryrie. It was dark, the surface of the lake a grey, featureless sheet of ice stretching away into the distance. The air was bitterly cold, the recent snow coating everything in white.

  'Where are they?' someone asked, as the rest of the tavern's patrons lined up to get a look at the invaders.

  'There!' Seth called, pointing toward the ice.

  Stellan spied them a few moments later. Not men, but torches; specks of distant golden light stretching in a line as far as the eye could see in either direction. They were a fair way from the shore yet. Stellan doubted the army would be here before morning, but the line of torches was disturbingly long, and moved

  slowly and relentlessly forward at a pace that spoke of an army on the march.

  The crowd fell silent as the reality of impending war pierced their ale-fogged minds.

  'Tides,' somebody else remarked. 'There must be thousands of them.'

  'I never thought they meant to actually invade us,' someone else said. 'Told my brother-in-law that the other day when he suggested we should join up and fight. That's what we got felines for, I told him.'

  'How many felines do you suppose the Glaebans have out there?' a rather worried-sounding voice a little further along the slope asked.

  'All of them, by the look of it,' somebody else replied.

  Stellan stared at the invaders, feeling sick to his stomach. Those were his countrymen out there, and this war was — in no small part — because of him.

  'Should we raise the alarm or something?' another man asked.

  'They'll have lookouts at the palace,' the barkeep said. 'Don't need us to tell 'em the Glaebans are comin'.'

  'Bastards,' somebody else muttered, which prompted a general murmur of agreement from the patrons of The Wounded Grasshopper regarding the dubious parentage of all Glaebans.

  Stel
lan stayed watching the advancing line of torches for a long time, until his lone, almost-sober guard found him in the crowd and tugged on his sleeve.

  'Your grace,' he said in a low voice, so as not to attract the attention of the men around them. 'We should be gettin' back to the palace.'

  Stellan looked back over his shoulder to find the other two guards conscious, if not exactly alert, standing with their horses, waiting for him.

  'Yes, we should,' he agreed. Stellan looked around for the barkeep and found him standing a few feet

  away, staring at the invaders. He made his way over to him, fished a silver piece out of his purse and pressed it into the man's hand. 'This should cover everything.'

  The tavern owner glanced down at the silver coin glinting in the starlight and nodded. 'Should cover it nicely, m'lord. Not a lot in this world can't be fixed with the application of the right number of silver pieces, I always say.'

  Stellan smiled at the man's simple philosophy and then turned and followed his guard back toward the tavern where the other guards and their horses were waiting, wishing the tavern owner was right about being able to buy his way out of anything.

  It was going to take a lot more than the simple application of the right number of silver pieces to stop the Glaeban invasion of Caelum.

  CHAPTER 22

  'They're coming, my lady.'

  Elyssa looked up from the rice-paper map she was studying by the light of a lantern — a diagram of the map Stellan Desean had discovered on the back of the Lore Tarot dug up in a cave at the foot of Deadman's Bluff. The immortal had revised her opinion about the map in recent weeks, certain the landmarks on it — few that they were — were not in the south, as she'd first suspected, but located much closer to Lebec.

  Warlock had no idea how she thought she could tell what it meant. The map was thousands of years old, after all. It wasn't hard to imagine the landscape had changed quite dramatically since the Cabal hid the Chaos Crystal to keep it out of the hands of the immortals — particularly as it was a map drawn before the formation of the Great Lakes.

  'Damn.' Elyssa rolled up the map and rose to her feet before walking down to the lakeshore to stand beside Warlock, who was hugging his arms around himself against the bitter cold. In the darkness, the glimmer of several thousand torches stretched out in a line as far as the eye could see across the ice. They had barely a day before the Glaeban army arrived, Warlock guessed. Hardly long enough to finish the job.

  'He's not wasting any more time then.'

  'He, my lady?'

  'Jaxyn.' Elyssa was so used to Warlock's presence and his fawning Crasii manner that she rarely questioned anything he did or asked any longer, and often answered

  him with a frankness that shocked the canine Scard. Warlock was careful to keep his questions as banal and obsequious as possible, so as not to raise her suspicions. Still, it was sometimes hard to believe he had fooled her so completely that she never thought to doubt him.

  Warlock wasn't sure how he should answer her this time, so he fell back on something suitably Crasii-like. 'You will use the power of the Tide to defeat the invaders, my lady, and we will all be safe.'

  Elyssa glanced sideways at Warlock and smiled. 'If only it were that simple, Cecil.'

  'The Tide rises, does it not, my lady? And you are a Tide Lord and therefore omnipotent?'

  'Yes ... and no. The problem is one of action and reaction, Cecil. If we fight Jaxyn using the Tide, he'll fight back using the Tide. A kingdom is no fun to rule if there's nobody left in it alive once the dust settles.'

  Warlock didn't have to feign surprise at her answer. He never expected restraint from any immortal, particularly not one of Syrolee's clan. 'But are not you and Lord Tryan combined, stronger than Lord Jaxyn, my lady?'

  'If we cooperate, yes, but that's not something I like doing, particularly with my brothers.'

  Warlock fell silent, fairly certain there was nothing a loyal Crasii could say to that. The conflict caused by siding with one Tide Lord over another should be enough to drive a normal Crasii crazy. Elyssa seemed to know that. She placed her hand on Warlock's arm and gripped it in a comforting manner. 'Never fear, Cecil. You'll not be asked to choose between us. But we have work to do. For now, we must see what we can do about defeating those wretched Glaebans, eh?'

  'To serve you is the reason I breathe, my lady,' Warlock replied, which was always the safest way to respond to an immortal.

  'And a much better world it would be,' she replied, 'if everybody thought the way you did, Cecil.' She

  tucked the rolled-up map under her arm, and then, lifting her skirts out of the snow, turned back toward the camp where the rest of the workers were resting after the day's labours, in order to rouse them. There would be no rest tonight for the Crasii she had brought to the tar seeps south of Cycrane. There was war on the way and, by the look of it, it would be starting tomorrow. That meant they had only one night left to work on their defences.

  Warlock hoped it was enough. He didn't know where Boots was, but what he did know was that if the Glaebans won this war, one of the first things victorious invaders did when taking over enemy territory was hunt down every enemy Crasii they could find and kill them. Even the pups. That might not happen now the Tide Lords were in charge ... after all, a Crasii was compelled to serve any immortal they encountered. But Warlock wasn't prepared to take that chance. He was going to find his family and protect them. No matter what.

  By morning, dawn had extinguished the pinpoints of light on the lake and the fifty or more canines responsible for digging the channels from the tar seeps to the lake were exhausted. The sticky black oil that bubbled out of the ground here — and in other sporadic locations along this side of the lake — was slowly working its way down into the channels Elyssa's workers had cut into the ice over the past couple of weeks. The past few days they had cut three shallow channels the width of a mattock blade about ten paces apart. The channels stretched north all the way along the ice past the city of Cycrane, where similar squads of Crasii had painstakingly dug connecting channels to allow the oil to flow along the ice.

  The idea was Stellan Desean's, proving once again what a brilliant tactician the Glaeban duke was.

  The Caelish could not hope to match the Glaebans' superior numbers, particularly when it came to fighting felines. But if felines had one weakness, it was their pathological fear of fire. Feline Crasii warriors might baulk at the stench of the oil channels, but Glaeban felines had probably never seen an oil seep, or the gooey — and highly flammable — black liquid that seeped from the earth and bubbled in small pools hidden in the foothills of Caelum, ready to trap any unwary animal or woodsman wandering by. The chances were good that even if they noticed the oil, they'd merely step over the shallow channels and continue on their way.

  Warlock wasn't sure if the Glaebans had rested on the ice overnight or kept walking, but it seemed as if they hadn't moved as close as they might, had they marched through the night. In the daylight, there proved to be thousands and thousands of them in a long line stretching into the distance, their ranks too deep to make a guess at their numbers. Elyssa stood at the lakeshore by the head of the channel they'd cut leading from the oil seep, cursing the slow pace of the liquid, which seemed to progress at a snail's pace once it reached the ice.

  'Will the channels fill in time, my lady?' Warlock asked, guessing the reason for her frown as she watched the sluggish oil flow.

  'They'd better, Cecil,' she said. 'Or you'll be bowing to Lord Jaxyn by tomorrow evening. Tides, if only I could risk heating the oil a little. That would make it move.'

  Warlock guessed she didn't want to draw on the Tide with Jaxyn so close. They could just make out a large podium with a red valance out on the ice in front of the Glaeban troops. It was towed on a sled by a phalanx of canines, and on it stood a number of human figures, surrounded by the flags of Glaeba snapping proudly in the breeze. Jaxyn had brought his

  own stage with him, apparent
ly. Or at least a platform from which to view and direct the battle. Besides the three men on the platform — whom Warlock assumed were Jaxyn and King Mathu, and perhaps a lackey — there were several women, only one of whom appeared rugged up against the cold. Warlock couldn't make out who they were from this distance. He supposed they were servants, or maybe Diala and Lyna — Jaxyn's immortal co-conspirators — here to watch the battle.

  Perhaps the sight of so many Crasii dying in battle was their idea of entertainment.

  'Can you not risk even a small amount of magic to speed the oil on its way, my lady?' Warlock asked, fearing he'd overstepped the mark by asking such a thing. It was important Stellan Desean's plan to scatter the Glaeban army worked. The truth was, Warlock found himself in the unenviable position of hoping his enemies would — if not win — then at least carry the day.

  Maybe, if things get really chaotic, I can slip away. Elyssa will think me dead in the confusion of the battle.

  Warlock consciously stopped his daydream before it could go any further. He wasn't close enough to the battle to have any such luck, and the chances of Elyssa allowing him out of her sight any time soon seemed remote.

  'If Jaxyn feels me swimming the Tide, he'll retaliate with everything he has. That's what he did the last time we argued over a throne.'

  'My lady?' Warlock asked, hoping his question wouldn't make her suspicious.

  'Fyrenne, Cecil. It was thousands of years ago, but Jaxyn hasn't changed much in the intervening years. It wasn't my fault, you know, although the others still blame me for it. Jaxyn just wouldn't let it be. The place was a burnt-out wasteland by the time we finished arguing about it.'

  'He shall not defeat you this time, my lady,' Warlock assured her. 'You will prevail.'

  Elyssa smiled at Warlock. 'Ah, Cecil, if only you had the wit to say that because you knew it to be true, and not because you have no choice but to believe it.'

  Warlock was saved from having to answer her by the blare of a trumpet slicing through the chilly morning. Out on the ice, several heralds had stepped up beside the podium. They played their fanfare, which lasted a minute or two, and then a single sled broke away from the line upon line of feline warriors, most of whom were crouched down, rather than standing. It took a while for Warlock to work out the meaning of that, until he realised the felines were removing something from their feet. Whatever protection they'd worn crossing the ice, they did not intend to let it hamper their fighting. With their sharp retractable claws, a feline warrior needed no weapons at close range to gut her opponents, and their feet were as much weapons as their hands.