The Chaos Crystal (5 page)

'It's a pity there's no way to melt the ice,' Stellan said with a sigh, wondering if he could prompt one of the others into seeing the solution without him having to spell it out for them. Thinking of Engarhod's breakfast made him realise he'd not eaten yet this morning. Nor would he get to eat until they were done here. If he didn't do something soon to move things along, this could drag on for hours. Immortals might be able to go forever without food, but he couldn't.

Tryan's lips pursed thoughtfully at Stellan's suggestion. 'If we timed the melting right, we could drown their army, then sail ours across the lake and be in Glaeba before word even reached Herino Palace that their army was defeated.'

Tides, that was easy.

Stellan nodded in agreement, hoping he looked encouraging but not too enthusiastic. 'Perhaps if we send amphibians back under the ice to seek out weakness and built large enough fires along the fault lines, we'd be able to break up the ice —'

'You can't break up the ice with bonfires,' Syrolee cut in. 'That's a stupid idea.'

'We
could
melt it, though,' Elyssa said thoughtfully, staring at Stellan. 'In theory.'

Finally!
Stellan thought.

'How?' Syrolee asked. 'And I know what you're going to say, so don't bother. You do anything catastrophic, Jaxyn will respond in kind, and we won't spend the next High Tide ruling this damned country; we'll be rebuilding it.'

Elyssa glared at her mother, as if she knew as much and didn't appreciate the reminder. For himself, Stellan

was appalled to realise that the only thing staying the hand of these magicians was laziness.

'I meant we'd have to heat the ice; do it slowly.'

Tryan rolled his eyes. 'And how, exactly, does one melt a sheet of ice roughly the size of the Chelae Islands in a couple of weeks? That's about how long we have, I estimate, before Jaxyn gets here.'

Stellan let out a dramatic sigh, hoping his next words wouldn't sound too contrived. 'The mountains that gird the Great Lakes were volcanoes once. What a pity we can't just make one of them erupt
...
I mean, hot lava would do the trick, wouldn't it?'

Tryan and Elyssa exchanged a glance before answering. 'I imagine it would do the trick very nicely. How do you expect us to accomplish it?'

The former duke shrugged, looking around the room at the Tide Lords and treated them to an ingenuous smile. 'I was speaking hypothetically, of course. A fortuitous volcanic eruption controlled enough not to destroy us while saving Caelum from invasion, and yet powerful enough to facilitate our own invasion of Glaeba would be so unlikely it would almost make one believe in the Tide Lords.'

'Be careful what you wish for, your grace,' Elyssa warned with a thin smile as she rose to her feet. 'Are we done here? I have something to take care of.'

Tryan shrugged. 'Do whatever you want. Desean and I will be going over the Glaeban defences for the rest of the morning. It'll bore you to tears, I'm sure.'

'Then I'll see you later. Come, Cecil, let's go visit our babies.' Warlock — or Cecil as he was known to the immortals — stepped forward at her command. Stellan marvelled at the big canine's patience, amazed that he'd not given himself away, even for a moment, the whole time he'd been here in Caelum. Elyssa nodded in Syrolee and Engarhod's direction. 'Mother. Engarhod.'

'Given that we're about to go to war, my dear,' Syrolee said with a displeased frown, 'I'd think you'd

be able to find more useful ways of spending your time than playing with a litter of wretched Crasii pups.'

Elyssa ignored the aside, turning on her heel to head for the door with Warlock obediently at heel. Stellan watched them leave, noted the simmering anger brewing in the eyes of the canine slave, and wondered how long it would be before the Cabal's Scard spy posing as a loyal Crasii finally snapped and brought them all undone.

CHAPTER 4

The grand entrance to the ice palace was a marvel of both architecture and magic. Tide-wrought beams constructed of translucent ice held up a vaulted ceiling, which was all but lost in the faint fog that lingered in the shadowed nooks and crannies of the vast building. The floors were darker, made of a substance that looked like granite, but proved, on closer inspection, to be polished permafrost. The temperature was warmer here in the main hall than outside — mostly because of the reduced wind-chill — but that didn't seem to bring any comfort to the Crasii slaves who hurried to attend them. They were rugged up against the cold in furs and thick, sheepskin-lined boots, carrying trays with steaming cups of mulled wine for their masters. Declan accepted a cup and sipped it distractedly. His mind was on other things.

Maralyce's arrival in Jelidia worried Declan a great deal. His great-grandmother was not, in his experience, particularly interested in socialising with the other immortals. And he was quite certain she hadn't come here just to gawk at Lukys's fabulous ice palace. Her decision to abandon her mountain home in Glaeba and join the others here in Jelidia was as drastic as it was unexpected and, Declan feared, didn't augur well for the future.

Lukys used the excuse of seeing his guest settled to escape with Maralyce in almost indecent haste after they returned from the coast, leaving Declan staring at the others, wondering what the Tides was going on.

Apparently he wasn't the only one finding that Maralyce's arrival was cause for concern. Taryx had wandered off on his own business, while Kentravyon had left them some way back on the ice, for reasons he felt no urge to explain. But Arryl was looking as worried as Declan felt.

'Have you considered the possibility, Cayal,' Arryl remarked as Lukys and Maralyce, their heads close together in conversation, disappeared down one of the long broad halls of the palace, dwarfed by the majestic size of the building, 'that Lukys's agenda is so far removed from what
you
want that he may have no interest in your problems at all?'

Still lost to the melancholy that had gripped him earlier as he had watched the ice disintegrating, Cayal seemed unconcerned about Lukys's motives. He'd said little on the return journey from the coast, other than to greet Maralyce as if he wasn't surprised to see her. He watched her leave with Lukys now, and then glanced at Arryl with a shrug. 'What Lukys tells me about the Chaos Crystal makes sense, Arryl. If it focuses the Tide and it's the Tide that makes us immortal, then why shouldn't it be the Tide that unmakes us?'

'Lukys told me he had a way of effectively
putting an
end
to an immortal,' Declan said, downing the last of his mulled wine before handing the cup back to one of the waiting canine slaves hovering about, 'I might be splitting hairs, but Arryl's right. He didn't actually say he could kill one.'

Cayal glared at him for a moment and then stalked off without saying a word.

Declan looked to Arryl. 'Was it something I said?'

'He doesn't want to hear you questioning the possibility that he might die soon.'

'Do
you
want to die?' Declan asked, wondering why more of the immortals weren't afflicted with Cayal's particular form of madness.

'I get bored sometimes,' Arryl said. 'We all do. But I haven't run out of things to do yet.' 'Cayal has.'

'No,' Arryl said. 'Cayal wants to die because he's afraid he
might
run out of things to do, not because it's already happened.'

'He should just do what I do,' Pellys said, coming up behind them. 'Make the memories go away.' He'd been perched on one of the palace's many tall, thin spires when they arrived, something he seemed to do a lot lately. Declan looked over his shoulder to find Pellys walking toward them from the entrance, holding what looked like Kentravyon's incomplete carving, but that wasn't possible because the madman had tossed his handiwork into the sea before they headed for home several hours ago.

'What's that you have there, Pellys?' Declan asked. The Tide Lord was covered with a thin layer of snow and ice. Declan wondered if that meant he'd simply taken a dive off the tower, rather than climb down. If one didn't mind a short period of intense pain while one's broken bones healed, it was certainly the quickest way down.

'Kentravyon made it for me. He says it's the face of God.'

Declan stared at the ice carving, shocked to realise it wasn't a human face but a perfectly formed skull constructed of ice. It was a little disturbing to think that was how Kentravyon saw himself.

'Do you recall anything about the time before you lost your memories, Pellys?' Arryl asked.

Pellys shook his head, studying the carving with great interest. 'No. I mean, I
know
there was a time before then. But I don't remember any of it. So I must have started again. Cayal could do that. Then he'd be happy.'

'I think there's the minor issue of causing a global catastrophe in the process,' Declan reminded him.

'Didn't you sink Magreth into the ocean when you lost your head?'

The Tide Lord shrugged. 'That's the price you pay for peace.'

'You call that peace?' Declan asked. 'A lot of innocent people paid for your peace, Pellys, not you.'

'And what if they did?' Pellys replied unapologetically. 'Mortals are going to die anyway, Declan. I mean, it's not as if we're doing much more than giving nature a bit of a hurry-on.' He put the skull in his pocket and smiled at them. 'I like to watch things die.'

Declan was chilled by Pellys's cheerful homicidal- mania. And anxious to be gone from it. He never knew what to say to Pellys. 'I think I'm going to find Maralyce and ask what she's doing here.'

'If she'll speak to you,' Pellys warned. 'She's a crabby old bitch.'

'She'll speak to me,' Declan said. 'I'm family.'

It proved harder to locate Maralyce than Declan anticipated. Although they had only left the main hall a few minutes ago, neither his father nor his great- grandmother was anywhere to be found when Declan went looking for them. Declan baulked when he thought of them as his relatives. Arguably, Lukys was older than Maralyce, but when one was talking of life spans that crossed millennia, he supposed one's chronological age wasn't really a consideration.

He'd expected to find Maralyce with Lukys in the expansive wing where the guest suites were located. However, he could find nobody in the cavernous white halls but the Crash slaves brought here by Lukys to keep the palace running.

It was Jojo who finally located his great- grandmother for him. Although Declan could feel the others on the Tide, with so many of them gathered in the one place, he lacked the experience to sort one from another, or even determine the exact direction

from where the sense of them was coming. Jojo, with her ability to sense a Tide Lord from across a room and her sharp feline sense of smell, was able to pinpoint the direction and informed him there were two immortals in the lower levels of the palace, somewhere to the east of where they were currently standing in the palace's massive entrance hall.

Declan ordered her to stay put and headed through the ice-carved halls, with their fanciful arches and impossibly beautiful polished-ice walls, into the lower levels of the ice palace, which he assumed was where the palace storerooms were located.

The labyrinthine underbelly of the ice palace was much more functional than the upper chambers, which seemed designed simply to overawe. The walls were much less polished down here and behind each burning torch a small hollow had formed in the wall where the flames had melted the ice. Every few feet, beneath each torch, was a cascade of frozen droplets forming a decorative frieze as the melting ice re-froze once the droplets had escaped the heat of the flames.

From the moment he'd first arrived here at Lukys's palace at the bottom of the world, Declan had wondered at the need for anything so massive. It seemed too pretentious for a man who liked to portray himself as a pragmatist.

Declan took another set of ice-carved stairs downward, the sense of the other two Tide Lords somewhat clearer now that the bulk of the ice forming the upper floors dulled the interference of the others. He followed the torchlit hall for some way, past the storerooms he was expecting. The flickering light reflected off the icy walls in a rainbow of fractured light. All the while Declan could feel the sense of Maralyce and Lukys drawing closer, even though the sensation remained oddly muffled.

And then, at the point where Declan had walked for so long he was starting to wonder if he was even

still under the palace, he came to another staircase, glowing with a bright, faintly green-tinged light that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

As soon as he began to descend the wide, curved steps, the sense of the other two Tide Lords became clearer. He headed downward, on a seemingly endless descent, wondering how far below ground he was. Before he saw the other Tide Lords, however, he heard them, their voices funnelled to him with startling clarity by the unique acoustics of the curved stairs.

'...
going to be enough?' he heard Maralyce ask.

Declan stopped. He could feel Lukys and Maralyce on the Tide, but hoped they might be distracted enough by their discussion that they wouldn't notice him.

'It's nearly twice as many as we used last time,' he heard Lukys reply.

'What are you talking about?' Maralyce sounded impatient. 'The addition of Cayal and Declan isn't going to double the effect. Arryl and Taryx's contribution will be minimal at best. Even together, they won't make up the power of a full Tide Lord. If Medwen and Ambria had come with Arryl, as you claimed they would, then they may have made a difference
...'