The Chaos Crystal (31 page)

Warlock had no doubt about who was responsible for breaking the ice-sheet. Cayal, Kentravyon, Elyssa, and perhaps even Declan Hawkes had done it, conspiring together to wield more Tide magic than any one immortal could handle on their own.

And it had stopped the war in its tracks.

But the cost in lives was horrendous. Even if the bulk of the dead were felines, whom Warlock instinctively felt ambivalent about, they didn't deserve to die without warning like that. And the immortals
could
have warned the Glaebans they were going to break the ice. Confronted with such a coalition of Tide Lords, Jaxyn may have even backed down, had someone given him the opportunity to withdraw.

But the immortals didn't work like that. They didn't care about mortal lives.

However, the Tide Lords had inadvertently done Warlock a huge favour. Now the lake was flowing again, he should be able to find a boat, seek out the ruins, retrieve his family and sail them back to Glaeba without having to wait out the winter. When he realised that Warlock changed his plans and decided to risk going through the city after all, rather than trying to get around it.

* * *

The confusion of the battle's aftermath was such that nobody noticed a single canine wearing a tunic bearing the palace insignia. He left his horse to fend for itself on the city's southern outskirts and made his way toward the wharves, sickened at the consequences of the sudden disappearance of the ice, now he was close enough to see the damage for himself.

Someone had organised rescue parties who still worked by torchlight, even though it was well past midnight before Warlock deemed it safe to approach the water's edge, hoping to steal a boat.

There were no boats to be had, however. Anything that could float had been commandeered for the rescue effort. He stood there for a time, watching them drag the bodies ashore. There were only corpses to be found this late in the day. Anybody who'd survived the breaking ice had made their way onto dry land in the first few minutes or they'd managed to cling to something buoyant, like a wooden shield, until they were rescued. By now, anyone left in the water was long dead from hypothermia.

'You there!'

Warlock turned, wondering if the barked order was addressed to him. 'Are you talking to me?'

The man who'd hailed him was human, wearing the insignia of a captain and the colours of the Caelish Palace Guard. 'Don't just stand there gawking, Dog Boy,' the officer said. 'Get down there and help.'

He was pointing along the wharf to where a barge heavily laden with bodies was tied up. Warlock had no desire to help, but it might be a good excuse to stay close to the water. He had no hope of finding a boat if he was sent on his way.

'I... er
...'

His hesitation made the officer suspicious. The man stepped a little closer, noticing Warlock's tunic for the

first time. He threw his hands up. 'Tides, Dog Boy, why didn't you say you worked at the palace? What are you doing here, anyway, standing around like a lost puppy?'

'I
...
I have dispatches to deliver,' Warlock said, falling back on the same story he'd been using all evening to get through the city. 'I can't find the command post.'

'Follow me,' the captain said, turning away from the wharf. He stopped a few moments later when he realised Warlock wasn't following. 'It's this way. Come on.'

Warlock couldn't afford to refuse the offer of directions without raising suspicion, so he followed the captain along the wharf and out onto the main thoroughfare that ran along the waterfront. The officer said nothing as they walked, his breath frosting in the chilly night air, although he turned a few times to yell orders at other men or Crasii who didn't seem to be pulling their weight. All around them, cold, exhausted men and weary Crasii laboured to stack the dead in mind-numbingly large piles, awaiting the steady stream of wagons that were taking them — well, Warlock didn't know where they were being taken. A mass grave perhaps, somewhere on the edge of the city? Or maybe they'd just throw them in a ravine and cover them over, the way those bodies at the foot of Deadman's Bluff had been covered over and forgotten so many centuries ago.

Can one forget this many dead?

Finally they reached a building that Warlock thought looked more like a brothel than a military headquarters. Then the canine was forced to concentrate on more immediate concerns. The building had an overhanging balcony and a wooden veranda at the front; Warlock could smell the suzerain inside before they even stepped onto it.

'He has dispatches from the palace,' the captain informed the feline on guard. She nodded and opened

the door for him. Warlock had no choice but to step through it.

The door closed behind Warlock, leaving him in a chilly, narrow, darkened hall. There was an immortal nearby — Warlock could smell the rank aroma of him — but there was no other sign of life. Which immortal it turned out to be was immaterial. Whoever it was would almost certainly report his presence to Elyssa. She would know by now that he was a Scard because he'd run away. Unless he got out of this building in the next few minutes, he was dead and the only thing left to be determined would be the time, place and manner of his demise.

Warlock stared down the dark hall, wondering if there was a back door through which he could escape before the suzerain even realised he was here. He decided he had no choice but to assume there was another exit. There was nothing else he could do. Before he'd taken two steps in the direction of freedom, however, the door on his right opened and the suzerain stepped into the hall, colliding with Warlock, who barrelled backwards and dropped to his knees.

'I am so sorry, my lord,' he gushed, his head lowered, his hands on the floor in the most submissive pose he could assume. 'To serve you is the reason I breathe.'

He was expecting a kick in the head, or something equally punitive, but nothing happened. After a moment, Warlock looked up, daring a quick look at the immortal he'd collided with.

'To serve me is the reason you breathe, eh?' Declan Hawkes remarked. 'Didn't used to be.'

Warlock's heart slowly relocated from his throat and back into his chest where it belonged. But even though he was relieved to find this immortal was someone he knew, he didn't know how to take Hawkes's comment. He didn't understand how

Hawkes could be immortal, either. Or why, after devoting a lifetime to saving the world from the Tide Lords, he had somehow found a way to join them. Still on his knees in the dark, freezing hall, Warlock studied the former spymaster warily. 'You're one of them.'

'So everybody keeps reminding me. Get up.'

Warlock climbed to his feet cautiously, not taking his eyes from Hawkes. The spymaster stood back from the door and indicated that Warlock should step inside. Not sure what else to do, Warlock walked through the door — only to see by the light of some candles, Mathu Debree's body laid out on a trestle in the centre of what looked like the main reception parlour of a very tacky brothel.

Hawkes closed the door and leaned against it. 'It was stupid of you to run, Cecil,' the spymaster said. 'Elyssa's figured out you're a Scard.'

'Then let me go, and I'll not bother you or your kind ever again.'

For some reason, Hawkes seemed to think that was amusing. 'You know, I was impressed when I realised you were still with her. And she was quite taken with you, too. She was livid, actually, when she realised you'd bolted from the lake this morning. You've done remarkably well, not to be caught before now.'

'I'm still not caught,' Warlock said. 'Unless you're planning to hand me over to her. Now you're on
their
side.'

'I'm not on anybody's side,' Hawkes said. 'Can you get a message to the Cabal for me?' 'No,' Warlock said flatly. 'You can't, or you won't?'

'Both,' he said, forcing himself not to look at the dead king beside him. That was a human problem he wanted no part of. 'I'm done with your intrigues, Hawkes. I'm going home.'

'You'll never get near the wharf, let alone near a boat. And don't you have a mate around here

somewhere? She'd have had her pups by now, too, I suppose.'

Warlock didn't trust Hawkes enough to admit to any such thing. Actually, he didn't trust him at all. 'It's of no matter to you where my family is. It's your fault they're in danger. So let me go or kill me. I'm not helping you or the Cabal any more, Hawkes. Or your immortal friends.'

Hawkes studied him for a moment with an expression Warlock found impossible to read in the candlelight, and then the former spymaster nodded, pushed himself off the door, and opened it for Warlock. 'Come on, then.'

'To where?'

'You've got no chance of getting out of Cycrane on your own, Warlock,' Hawkes said, addressing him by his real name for a change, and not the hated moniker 'Cecil' he'd been awarded by the Cabal. But just being called by his given name wasn't enough to make him trust this man
...
or immortal
...
or whatever he was these days. 'Not tonight. And certainly not with Elyssa on the warpath now she's just realised how badly she's been had by a miserable Scard.'

'You're
going to help me get out of the city?' Warlock asked, deeply suspicious of the offer.

Hawkes nodded. 'We'll go down to the wharves and commandeer a boat for you.'

'How? You're a Glaeban —'

'Immortal,' Hawkes finished for him. 'I could commandeer the whole damned Caelish fleet if I wanted to, provided there's a Crasii in charge of it.'

'Won't the other immortals have something to say about this?'

'I wasn't planning to tell them,' Hawkes said. 'Were you?'

This was too easy. 'How do I know this isn't a trap?' 'Because you're not important enough in the general scheme of things to warrant a trap,' Hawkes

told him with brutal honesty. 'Now, do you want my help or not? I do actually have other things to be getting on with, you know, rather than hanging around here offering my help to ungrateful Scards who are too stupid to recognise a flanking escape offer when they're hit over the head with it.' 'You won't try to follow me?'

'I don't care enough about your fate to be bothered,' Hawkes said.

That,
Warlock thought,
has a ring of truth about it.

'I'll need something big enough to make it back to Glaeba once I've collected Boots and the pups.'

'You pick the boat, and I'll order them to hand it over. And to forget they've ever seen you.'

'Why?'

'So they won't report you to Elyssa,' Hawkes explained, as if Warlock was just a little bit dense.

'No — I meant why are you helping me?'

'Because I can,' the former spymaster told him, and then he stepped into the hall, effectively putting an end to the discussion, and Warlock realised that was all the answer he was ever likely to get.

CHAPTER 30

Dawn gilded the Lower Oran, turning the millions of scattered icebergs dotting the lake's surface into golden nuggets gently bobbing in a sea of molten gold. Sickened by the slaughter, and yet oddly detached from it, Declan watched the sun rising over Glaeba in the distance, wondering if his apathy to the death he had witnessed yesterday was the first sign that he was losing his humanity.

When that thought proved too disturbing, he focused on something much more practical — wondering what he should do next.

The chaos left in the wake of Jaxyn's unsuccessful attempt to invade Caelum still went on behind him along the wharves, the job now that of lesser mortals who were charged with cleaning up the mess. Much of the work was done, or the workers had finally given in to fatigue and sought their beds. To his right, another exhausted work party was dragging the last of the bodies that had washed ashore overnight into a pile that a party of tired canines, wearing numb expressions and slumped shoulders, was loading onto a flatbed wagon to be taken away for disposal.

Declan understood why they were still working to clear the lake. It wasn't just aesthetics that made them devote so much effort to clearing the bodies out of the water. The Great Lakes were the lifeblood of both Caelum and Glaeba. Nothing but disease and even more death could follow if that many rotting bodies

were left to pollute the main source of potable water on the continent.

Declan glanced over his shoulder toward the city for a moment, his breath frosting in the early-morning chill. The temperature seemed to have risen somewhat, now the ice was gone, but it was still cold. They were still in the depths of the coldest winter anybody in Caelum or Glaeba could remember.

Stellan Desean was up at the palace, Declan supposed, fighting for the crown that was rightfully his. He wondered how the negotiations were going. If Stellan played his cards right, Syrolee and her clan might even let him have the crown. For a time. They were immortal, after all, and Stellan wasn't likely to produce any heirs to muddy the waters of succession a few years from now, even if they left him on the throne until he died of old age.

Declan smiled. Perhaps they'd suggest that Elyssa marry Stellan and become his queen. That would suit everybody, he thought. Except Stellan, who was already married. And Arkady, who would likely have to die to facilitate such an arrangement. Assuming they could find her.