The Immortal Prince (22 page)

By the seventh day, I was convinced I was about to die. My hands were blistered and bloody, my body wretched, thin, worn out and dehydrated from the constant vomiting. My back was a slab of raw meat exposed by the lash of the oar-master who had no sympathy for any man who couldn't take the pace. My life blurred into such a litany of pain, misery and woe that even the memory of Gabriella's rejection seemed less painful in comparison.

I doubted I had the strength to go on, not even for another day. Unfortunately, Magreth was a couple of thousand nautical miles from Senestra and I came to this conclusion several hundred miles from the nearest coastline, so there wasn't much I could do but endure.

The voyage took another thirty-seven endless, nightmarish days.

Somehow, I made it. It would be an exaggeration to claim I began to enjoy the cruise, but by the time we docked in the island harbour of Taal, I'd come to terms with the notion of hard physical labour. My hands were calloused, my back scarred from the oar-master's lash, and I was quite determined never to set foot on an ocean-going vessel ever, ever again.

 

I soon learned another valuable lesson in Taal. One could, I discovered, run away from their problems, but one could never really escape them. I was just as unemployable in Magreth as I had been in Senestra, only now I had the added complication of not speaking the language.

Magreth was a breathtakingly beautiful place. A cluster of volcanoes had grown up out of the ocean floor over the eons until they formed a small island continent, the rich soil fertile enough for seasoned timber to take root. Surrounded by treacherous reefs, startlingly white coral sands encircled the continent, stretching for miles with pristine beaches shaded by tall palms and populated by laughing, naked, brown-skinned children who thought the tall, pale stranger sleeping on their beach was quite a novelty.

The children poked fun at my fair, sunburned skin and told me I'd never survive the heat. They also taught me enough of the language to discover that even getting in to see the High Priestess was next to impossible.

I scoffed at their warnings about the High Priestess, but they were right about the heat. I soon abandoned my Kordanian leathers for the sensible local custom of wearing a wrap. The only difference between the male and female mode of dress in Magreth, in fact, seemed to be the place at which one tied on their garment. The women wore theirs tied just above the breast. The men wore them tied around their waists. They were bright and colourful, but most importantly, they were cool. I felt ridiculous and self-conscious at first, wearing nothing but a scrap of cloth tied around my middle, and it was a stolen scrap at that, but common sense and the risk of sunstroke won out over fashion sense. I decided I'd rather be cool than care if anybody noticed my lash-scarred back or my pitifully protruding ribs.

The Temple of the Tide was located in the foothills of the Hanalei Mountains, a fabulous place built of marble and gold, some two hundred miles from Taal, no distance at all given how far I'd already travelled. By the time I reached it, I was tanned almost as brown as the beach children, thin to the point of emaciation, but healed from my ordeal on the galley, although I still bore the scars on my back and the calluses on my palms.

And I was driven. Driven by the thought that every day I spent as an exile was another day closer to Gabriella marrying my undeserving brother; another day closer to the end of hope. I had no idea if the High Priestess was even in residence, certainly little hope she would agree to see me, but such is the power of self-delusion that still I dared to dream.

 

After ten days on the road, within sight of the Temple of the Eternal Flame, I was set upon by bandits.

I never understood why they attacked me. Perhaps it was because I was a foreigner. I had nothing of value. Anything I had ever owned worth selling was long gone, sold or bartered in exchange for food.

But attack me they did, and when the bandits realised I had nothing worth taking, they beat me some more, as if that somehow made ambushing this weary traveller worth the effort. I tried to resist, but the fight had gone out of me by then. Months of lonely exile and near starvation had left me a mere husk of my former self. As I lay on the ground, blows raining down on me, I was certain I was going to die and for the first time in my short life, the prospect didn't bother me unduly. As I was battered, punched and kicked without mercy, even the pain faded into the distance after a time. I barely felt the boot that ruptured my kidney, or the punch that burst my spleen.

I did see the foot coming that ended it all, however. A boot in the face is a memorable thing, even for a man in the process of being beaten to death.

I felt nothing after that, convinced I was dead, a feeling that only got stronger when I felt gentle arms lifting me from the road. The pain receded. Oblivion beckoned. I opened my eyes to find a woman leaning over me. She was smiling. Dressed in a white wrap, her fair hair glinting like gold in the sunlight. She was more than beautiful. She was exquisite.

“Rest easy, young traveller,” she murmured in a voice woven from silk. “You are safe now.”

“Who…who are you…?” I managed to stammer through my broken jaw. I remember tasting the metallic tang of my own blood, the jagged feel of my broken teeth, the odd thickness of my swollen tongue, but I was in no pain—a sensation (or lack of it) which merely exacerbated the feeling that I had died and crossed into the afterlife.

“A friend,” she assured me in a silken whisper, smiling, smoothing the blood-matted hair from my forehead.

“I am Cayal…,” I must have told her.

“And I am Arryl,” she said. “The High Priestess of the Tide.”

Once again, the spell of Cayal's story was broken by the appearance of Timms, come to escort the duchess from Recidivists' Row. Arkady acknowledged him with a nod and rose to her feet. Cayal watched her closely, as if he was trying to gauge her reaction to his tale.

“Well?” he asked, when she offered no comment.

“Well, what?” she asked, putting away her notebook. Once again, she had only pretended to take notes, Cayal's hypnotic voice distracting her from her purpose. Once again, the pages were almost blank, her scientific objectivity forgotten as she became engrossed in the world he created with his fabulous tale.

“Do you believe me yet?”

“I believe you've studied the Tarot. Your tale says exactly what the cards say. The Immortal Prince travelled the world looking for adventure.”

“You don't allow for the fact that your wretched cards are based on my truth and not the other way around?”

“Not for a moment.”

“Then more fool you, my lady.”

Arkady turned away, afraid he'd read her uncertainty. It was gloomy in the cells. She shivered a little as the temperature dropped with the setting sun, wondering idly how these prisoners got through the night with nothing but a thin blanket for warmth.

“I'm curious about one thing,” she said, shouldering her satchel and turning to face him, composed once more.

He raised a brow at her curiously. “Only one?”

“If you truly are immortal, then you've known all along, if I understand this correctly, that you can't die?”

Cayal nodded. “Well…yes.”

“And yet you committed a heinous crime in a place where you knew the only punishment is likely to be execution. You must have known your hanging wouldn't work. Why bother?”

“Because they weren't supposed to hang me. Lebec usually beheads their criminals.”

“What good would that do you? You told me Pellys was decapitated and his head grew back. Why didn't you say something when they tried to hang you?”

“I did try. My pleas of I'd rather you didn't hang me because I can't actually die didn't seem to impress the hangman overly much.”

With that, Cayal turned his back on Arkady and walked to his pallet. She stared after him and then glanced across at Warlock and Timms, wondering if the Crasii or the guard had any idea what Cayal meant.

“The suzerain grows weary, I think.”

Arkady looked over her shoulder at the big Crasii. “Weary of what?”

“Living.”

“What do you mean?”

“Decapitation would have taken his memory away, if not his life.”

Arkady turned to look at Cayal. “Is that true?”

He lay back on his pallet, arms folded behind his head. “Truth is an illusion.”

“It is in your world,” she agreed, a little annoyed that he had retreated behind his veneer of disdain and contempt once more. The Cayal who spoke so eloquently of his long-forgotten world seemed a different man entirely to the one incarcerated in Recidivists' Row.

“Will you speak to the Warden, your grace?” Warlock asked, approaching the bars. Timms drew his truncheon with a threatening scowl, warning the Crasii back.

Arkady looked at the canine blankly. “About what?”

“About being allowed out for exercise. As the suzerain requested.”

She glanced across at Cayal, whose gaze was fixed determinedly on the rough ceiling of his cell. She hesitated and then nodded. “I'll see what I can do.”

“Thank you, your grace.”

Timms ordered the Crasii away from the bars, but Cayal made no attempt to echo the Crasii's gratitude. More than a little peeved by his moodiness, she shouldered her bag a fraction higher, pushed the chair aside, and then, on impulse, as Timms headed back down the corridor assuming she was behind him, she stepped up to the bars of Cayal's cell.

“Something else about your story intrigues me,” she said.

“How nice for you.”

“You speak of Magreth as a continent. You talk of a temple dedicated to this Eternal Flame of yours.”

“So?”

“Well, what happened to it? Magreth is nothing more than a series of uninhabited islets, surrounded by reefs and riddled with volcanoes. Where did your temple go? There are no ruins on Magreth that I've ever heard of, and I'm a historian, so I would have heard something about them, if they ever actually existed. Where are they? What happened to the people? Did they just vanish, too?”

“Pellys happened to them.”

“What do you mean?”

Cayal was silent for a moment and then sat up abruptly, rose to his feet and walked back to Arkady, stopping so close only the pitted iron bars separated them.

Before she could stop him, he took her hands in his. His touch startled and surprised her. There were no calluses on his hands, as one might expect on a labourer. They were smooth, unmarked and unscarred, which was odd for a man claiming to be a tradesman. Even Stellan's hands were calloused from holding the reins after a lifetime on horseback.

“You really are too curious for your own good, Arkady.”

She refused to react to him, pretending she didn't notice he was holding her hands.

“You're avoiding my question, Cayal.” She'd never been this close to him before. It alarmed her to realise her heart was pounding. She knew this man unsettled her, but she hadn't expected she might be afraid of him.

“No,” he said, massaging her hands gently. “I'm not.”

“Then tell me what happened to Magreth.” She wanted to step back, but was afraid the movement would betray her uneasiness, or attract Timms's attention. She couldn't understand why she wanted to protect Cayal from Timms's truncheon. This man was a liar, a murderer and probably a spy. He had no business making her pulse race with fear.

And it
is
fear,
she told herself sternly. She wouldn't allow herself to contemplate the notion that it might be for any other reason.

“Magreth was destroyed,” he told her, studying her face closely, as if he could read every conflicted emotion lurking behind her eyes.

“In the Cataclysm?”

“In a fit of pique.”

“I don't understand.” Arkady was no longer even certain they were talking about the same thing.

“When Pellys's head grew back,” Cayal told her softly, forcing her to focus on what he was saying rather than what she was feeling, “he was a blank slate, just a whole lot of power and no memory of how to control it. The gemang has that much right. Pellys split the continent asunder with a stamp of his foot.”

“He destroyed the temple?”

“He destroyed everything. The immortals survived, naturally—or unnaturally, I suppose would be more accurate—but the rest of Magreth's population wasn't nearly so fortunate. Diala and Arryl were able to protect the Eternal Flame, but Lukys estimates nearly half a million people died that day.”

Arkady searched his face, certain that this close, she should be able to detect some hint that Cayal was lying. But all she could see were a pair of startlingly blue eyes that seemed to devour her very soul. “So you tried to get yourself executed for what, Cayal? Were you trying to
erase
your memory?”

“More or less.”

“Why?”

“If I can't die, then oblivion will suit me just as well.”

Arkady smiled faintly, thinking that at last she'd found a chink in his story. “If that was your purpose, Cayal, why kill seven people? You could have found someone…paid someone…surely, to chop your head off…if that was really your intention.”

“I wanted my head
chopped
off, Arkady, not hacked off. The job needed a professional to do it properly. It's a somewhat specialist profession, you'll find. And it takes a decent axe to do it painlessly. Why didn't I just pay someone? Because headsmen don't tend to advertise their occupation. Too many pissed-off relatives to deal with, I suppose.”

“So you did something that would bring you to the headsmen,” she concluded, thinking, yet again, that either Cayal was the most gifted liar on Amyrantha or he really was telling the truth.

“For all the good it did me.”

“And the power you claim such an event would unleash? What about that? If I'm to believe this sorry tale, your beheading might well have destroyed Glaeba.”

He shrugged. “I would have survived it.”

His callous disregard for human life broke the spell. She snatched her hands away and stepped back from him, more rattled than she was prepared to admit.

“How do you know so much about what happened to Pellys?”

“Because I'm the one who decapitated him.”

Arkady recovered her composure quickly, certain now that he was mocking her. “You really must take me for a fool.”

“I'm not the fool here, Arkady,” he warned. “Word will reach the others, eventually, that I'm here. And when it does, they'll come looking for me.”

She raised her brow sceptically. “The other immortals can't be coming to kill you, surely?”

“I have immortal enemies aplenty and we have other ways of taking vengeance on each other,” Cayal assured her ominously. “They're much more effective than death. Mostly they involve destroying things you think your enemy cares about.”

Far from being intimidated by his warning, Arkady was genuinely amused. This story of Cayal's immortality was getting wilder by the day. “Oh, so now you're suggesting we should release you to protect Glaeba from the wrath of your immortal brethren?”

He smiled crookedly. “There's a thought.”

“I think you really are insane, Cayal.”

He shrugged. “Can't hang a man for asking.”

“No,” she agreed. “We save that punishment for murderers.”

“Now you're trying to hurt my feelings.”

“A tactic that might work, if I thought you had any.”

Arkady turned away, satisfied she had gotten the last word in, but she was still too close to the bars and Cayal was quicker than she anticipated. He snatched at her arm and held it tight, pulling her closer with bruising force, until his lips were next to her ear, the cold bars pressed against her side. Across the corridor, Warlock lunged at the bars of his cell, growling, but there was little he could do to aid her.

“You know
nothing
of my pain, Arkady,” Cayal hissed, his hot breath burning her ear, sending shivers down her spine. “Your narrow, wretched, shuttered,
mortal
mind can't conceive of the true agony of immortality.”

“Let…me…go,” she ordered stiffly, afraid of this dangerous man for any number of reasons, few of which—she was only just beginning to appreciate—were his potential for anger or violence.

“If only you understood,” he added in an agonised whisper, “that release from this hell in which I reside is all I crave.”

He released her then and retreated to the back of his cell, refusing to look at her again, leaving Arkady rubbing her bruised arm, wondering what he meant.

Of one thing, Arkady was certain. When Cayal spoke of the hell in which he resided, he wasn't talking about Lebec Prison.