The Immortal Prince (33 page)

Shaken to the very core of her being by what she had witnessed at the inn, Arkady rode blindly behind Cayal and the escort of Crasii that she had once believed her own, too traumatised to even think of trying to get away.

They rode into the mountains, she registered that much, but even once she began to feel a little more in control of her situation, the question of escape didn't really occur to her. She had just witnessed the impossible and until she had some satisfactory explanation for what had happened when Cayal hacked off the fingers of his left hand with an axe and for the inexplicable behaviour of her Crasii, Arkady wasn't going anywhere.

They travelled in a cold, fitful rain; north for the most part, on narrow roads Arkady was unfamiliar with, finally turning off, just before dusk, onto a track that even the Crasii had trouble following. Cayal seemed to know where he was headed, however, and ordered the felines to ride on, which they did without question.

Riding behind Cayal, cold, wet and numb, Arkady fretted at her Crasii's willing subservience and spent her time imagining ever more complicated plots to explain away their behaviour—plots involving Caelish agitators and highly organised foreign spy rings—not because she didn't believe what she'd seen, but because the truth was too terrifying to contemplate. She wondered what her colleague at the Lebec University, Andre Fawk, would think when she told him what she'd witnessed. They'd spent so many hours researching the Crasii; trying to document their oral histories, smiling indulgently at the innocent simplicity of their myths.

Only they weren't innocent, Arkady knew now, or perhaps even myths.

She wished Andre were here now. She wished
anybody
but her was here now…

Cayal brought their small column to a halt just as the clouds resting on the tops of the mountains to the west were turning crimson. The damp air had cooled rapidly with the onset of night and Arkady was shivering as she dismounted, looking around to find a small cascade tumbling down the rock face behind her, probably snowmelt from higher in the mountains.

“We'll stop here for the night,” Cayal instructed the Crasii. “Make camp.”

“Aren't you afraid they'll catch us?”

He turned to look at Arkady and shrugged. “I know these mountains pretty well.”

“You've been here before then?” she asked, clutching at any hope that this was some sort of swindle he was running, that the Crasii were cleverly trained plants sent among them to await the arrival of their Caelish master. She knew she was losing her mind. The chances that anybody had suborned their Crasii, had planted spies among them, and that she had, at random, selected every one of them to accompany her to the prison this morning was beyond improbable.

The trouble was, if she didn't believe that version of events, the only alternative was to believe that Cayal really
was
an immortal, and that wasn't improbable. It was impossible.

“I've been alive for eight thousand years, Arkady. I've been everywhere before.”

“How did you suborn my Crasii?” she demanded, shivering in the cold air as they made camp around her.

“Blind obedience to the Tide Lords was bred into them,” Cayal told her, as he turned to unsaddle his mount. “They can't help it.”

“Warlock never did as you ordered.”

“That's because your pet canine is probably a Scard. Pity, actually. He was a good-looking brute. Would've made prime breeding stock back in the old days.” He hefted the saddle from the back of his mount and dropped it onto the ground. Arkady watched him closely; looking for some sign his injured hand was causing him difficulty. Cayal noticed the direction of her gaze and smiled, holding it up before her face, wiggling his fingers. “See? All better?”

She could see that his hand was completely healed. Were it not for the blood he'd not had a chance to wash away, she wouldn't have believed his fingers had ever been damaged, let alone amputated with a woodsman's axe.

“That was just a trick,” she insisted, trying to convince herself, as much as him. “You didn't really…”

“Yes, Arkady, I did. You hungry?”

“Er…I suppose,” she replied, too overwhelmed by the events of the last few hours to think about food. “Do you need to eat?”

“Not really.”

“What happens if you don't?”

“I get a little hungry.” He turned from her and called Chikita over to him. “Do you hunt, gemang?”

She nodded. “Yes, my lord.”

“Take two others. Find us something to eat.”

“Of course, my lord.” Chikita bowed and hurried off to do Cayal's bidding.

He smiled at Arkady's expression. “You're not dealing with this very well, are you?”

“You're a liar, Cayal. This is just some complicated plan you've cooked up to subvert the Glaeban Crasii into believing the Tide Lords have returned.”

“Is it?” he asked, rather annoyed, it seemed, by her stubborn insistence that what she had witnessed in the yard of Clyden's Inn couldn't possibly be real. “I really do wish I was as clever as you imagine.”

“I think you are.”

“I think, if I was that clever, I would have let you hand me over to this spymaster of yours, had him escort me back to Herino, escaped along the way somewhere and disappeared into legend.”

“But you didn't. Why not?”

He shrugged. “I like you.”

“You
like
me?” she gasped. “You chopped off three fingers because you
like
me?”

“I didn't say it was a particularly well-thought-out decision.”

She shook her head, still denying the evidence of her own eyes, trying to tell herself they must be playing tricks on her. “I think I was right the first time. You're insane!”

“Then explain this,” he suggested, holding up his hand again. “Ah! That's right. It didn't really happen, did it, because Arkady Desean doesn't believe in magic?”

“It wasn't magic!”

“Then what was it, Arkady? Do you think I somehow arranged to have your friend at the inn replace his real axe with a fake one? That I carry spare fingertips around in case of emergencies? Or do you really think that of all the Crasii you could have brought to the prison this morning, you just happened to pick the ones I had somehow cleverly arranged to infiltrate your estate?” He waited for a moment, but when she didn't respond, he turned to the girth straps on her mount. “And you say
I'm
the crazy one.”

“It's just, I think…” She stopped, not at all sure what she thought. He was right, of course. The absurdity of clinging to the belief this was a bizarrely complex plan concocted by Glaeba's enemies, simply because the facts presented her with something she didn't want to confront, was almost as crazy as believing such a plan might actually exist. “Tides! I don't know what I think…”

“You deny
my
reality yet you name the Tides as a curse,” he pointed out, lifting her saddle to the ground. “Don't you ever wonder why?”

She sighed, exhausted by her doubts. “I'm sure you're going to tell me.”

“Not if you're going to be like that.”

“I'm in no mood to entertain you, Cayal. I'm your hostage, remember? Your safe-passage out of Glaeba?”

“Then you have no choice but to humour me.”

She frowned. “Humour you how, exactly?”

“You could start by admitting you believe me.”

“Very well, I believe you.”

“Don't patronise me, Arkady.”

She threw her hands up impatiently. “What do you expect, Cayal? Respect? Admiration? Do you want me to bow down to you the way the Crasii do?” Her frustration and fear were making her angry, at herself, as much as Cayal. “And I still want to know how you're doing that, by the way. These are the best-trained felines in Glaeba. I don't believe they're simply following you out of instinct.”

“It's more than instinct. It's a compulsion. I'm not sure of the details. Crasii farming was never my particular passion.”

“Crasii
farming
?”

“They didn't just come into being by magic, you know.” Cayal smiled. “Actually, that's not entirely true. They
were
created by magic. But it wasn't just one of us waving their arm to create a new race of slaves, Arkady. It took a lot of time, effort and Tidewatchers to get it right.”

Wrapping her arms around her body against the cold, Arkady found herself drawn into the argument against her better judgement. “What's a Tidewatcher?”

“The half-breed offspring of an immortal and a mortal,” he explained as he led her mount to the cascade to drink its fill.

“You have children?” she asked in surprise.

He rolled his eyes impatiently. “No, Arkady. I took a vow of chastity and haven't been with a woman for eight thousand years.”

Ask a silly question…,
she scolded herself silently. “So, in fact, you might have immortal children, and you just don't know about them.”

He shook his head. “There are no immortal children. Immortality stops the body ageing from the moment it takes hold of you. Two immortals can't create new life because the new life would be immortal, which means it can never progress beyond the instant it was created.”

Strangely, that made sense to Arkady. But the rest of his tale was more than a little disturbing. “And these Tidewatchers? These half-breed offspring? Out of your own flesh and blood, you created your slaves?”

“You say that like you're surprised, Arkady.”

“But that's…well, it's cruel. It's inhuman.”

Cayal shrugged. “That's what it is to be a Tide Lord,” he said.

 

Chikita and her companions returned with a small hind just as the last hint of daylight faded into night. Mercifully, the rain held off as Cayal expertly butchered the deer with a knife he'd apparently had the foresight to steal from Clyden's Inn. The hind's throat had been ripped out, and her withers were scored by a series of deep scratches, but Arkady was so hungry by then she didn't care. The venison tasted as good as anything she'd ever been served in the palace.

After dinner, she wandered toward the edge of the ledge and glanced at the sky. The clouds had dissipated enough to allow a few stars to shine through. Below her somewhere was the rift valley and the Great Lakes that filled it, but the trees blocked her view, leaving her no option but to guess where Lebec might be located.

“You can't see it from Kordana,” Cayal said, making her jump as he came up behind her.

“See what?” she asked.

He pointed at the brightest star just above the horizon, which shone faintly red against the velvet blackness of the moonless night. “The planet, Playnte.”

“I thought that was a star, Trudini.”

He shook his head. “You might call it that now, but we used to call it Playnte when I was a child. And it's a planet, not a star. So is that one,” he added, pointing left to the next brightest star, which had risen above the mountain tops while they ate. “That's Carani. Although the inhabitants might call it something else.”

Arkady shivered, but smiled at his words. “The inhabitants?”

“Sure. Why shouldn't there be inhabitants? Do you think we're the only living creatures in the universe?”

“I never really thought about it.”

“Shame on you,” he scolded. “And you call yourself an academic?”

Arkady glanced at Cayal, surprised to find he wasn't joking. “How do you know they're worlds like ours?”

“Lukys has been there.”

“Really?”

“So he claims.”

“How did he get there?”

Cayal shrugged. “I'm not sure exactly how he does it. It has something to do with rifts and thunderstorms, I think. He needs one to create the other, or something like that. He did try to explain it to me once, but I wasn't really paying attention.”

“Someone was explaining a way to travel to another world to you, and you weren't paying
attention
?” Arkady shook her head in disgust. “No wonder you want to die. For that you
ought
to.”

He glared at her, rather put out by her lack of sympathy. “I was rather preoccupied at the time.”

“With what?” she asked. “What could possibly be more important than learning something like that?”

“I was busy,” he explained, a little defensively. “Busy doing a friend a favour, actually.”

“Must have been some favour.”

“It was,” he agreed. “And I wish I'd never done it.”

“Because you missed your chance to travel to another world?”

He shook his head and turned to stare at the distant planets. “Because it led—eventually—to something far, far worse.”

Arkady looked at him, wondering at his strange tone of voice. “What happened, Cayal?”

“Are you sure you want to know?”

“Yes.”

So he told her.

Like a great many other innovations that changed civilisation, the Crasii were an accident.

The story I heard was that Elyssa was responsible. The Immortal Maiden wasn't a maiden any longer by then, but immortality hadn't done much for her love life, either. Irritating and shrill, even in her most benign moments, there are few men willing to commit to Elyssa for any length of time; certainly no immortal is going to promise her his heart until “death us do part.”

The only immortal who's ever made the mistake of getting seriously involved with her is Taryx. He was another of Diala's recruits; a Senestran sailor who considers immortality, and its attendant immunity to disease, a licence to spend eternity getting laid. I swear, he's spent most of his time since surviving the Eternal Flame trying to sleep his way through every brothel on Amyrantha.

Lukys used to joke that Taryx turned to Elyssa because she was the only female between the age of fourteen and eighty-four left on the planet that Taryx hadn't slept with yet.

Their relationship didn't last long, only a few months, by all accounts. And it was very one sided. Taryx was amusing himself. Elyssa was painfully in love, and given that her paramour was immortal, she was quite convinced her happiness would last forever. Taryx didn't see things in quite the same romantic light. He left the palace one morning a few months after he moved in and never bothered to go back.

They were living in Tenacia at the time. After Pellys destroyed Magreth, the Tide ebbed for a long time and we had once again faded from human memory. When the Tide returned, Engarhod and Syrolee looked for something a little less unstable than a continent formed from a chain of volcanoes to re-establish their empire, and finally settled on Tenacia, the continent north of where Magreth used to be.

Being powerless when the Tide was out doesn't sit well with Engarhod and his clan, and there's always a scramble when they feel the first glimmering of the returning Tide to reclaim their dominion over the world they believe they rightfully own. At the risk of mentioning your dreaded Tarot again, for the most part you have the names of the immortals right. I could introduce you to a few of them. You may even like some of them. On his own, Taryx is harmless enough, although Jaxyn's a sleazy little opportunist. You should meet Kinta, too. You'd like her, I suspect, although Brynden can be a bit of a bore. Kinta's a trifle tetchy, but compared to Elyssa, she's a real lady. And then there's Ambria. She's Krydence's wife. The two of them had a falling out about four hundred years after they married and they haven't spoken since. For that alone, I like the woman. Lina and Medwen are fine, too, provided you keep them away from Engarhod's boys. Lina's a survivor of the brothel fire in Cuttlefish Bay, Medwen the result of a nasty little accident that happened in Magreth.

Anyway, Tenacia filled their requirements for a base quite comfortably, in that it had a temperate climate, plenty of natural resources and a large population with no central government to get in their way.

Such are the raw materials from which empires are fashioned.

Using the reliable fallback of religion, the Emperor and Empress of the Five Realms were busy gathering followers at an impressive rate among the unsophisticated rural folk, while Elyssa and Taryx engaged in their affair. The new palace wasn't quite as impressive as the last one. The people of Tenacia weren't the builders the Magrethans of old had been. But it was impressive enough, and Elyssa was having a high old time playing house with Taryx until he wandered off, looking for something more titillating.

It took a while for Elyssa to accept that Taryx wasn't coming back and perhaps another year for her to work herself into a frenzy over it. She must have been quite a piece of work by the time her brothers decided to go looking for her missing lover. Syrolee told me later it was her brothers' love for their jilted sister which prompted them to seek out the recalcitrant immortal and return him to Tenacia. I'm more inclined to believe Lukys's version of the affair, which was that Krydence, Rance and Tryan finally tired of Elyssa's whining and went looking for Taryx so he could wear the brunt of their sister's displeasure and spare them.

They found him, eventually, playing house with a mortal woman in a small village on the coast of Senestra. The woman, to add insult to Elyssa's calamitous injury, was heavily pregnant, and even though the Tide was nearing its peak, Taryx seemed happy to indulge her fantasy that he was likely to be a good husband and father to her child.

It was no secret among our kind by then that immortals can only reproduce with mortals. Ambria and Lina had both borne mortal children, but neither of them had particularly enjoyed watching their children wither and die while they remained ageless, so they took precautions, these days, to avoid falling pregnant.

As for how many bastards we immortal males have left in our wake over the past few thousand years—that's anybody's guess. Lukys puts the number in the hundreds, possibly the thousands. He reckons that between the two of them, Jaxyn and Taryx alone are probably responsible for the entire population of Caelum.

Whatever the number, Taryx's child by a mortal woman was nothing unusual. We'd even thought up a name for our half-breed offspring—Tidewatchers—as if that somehow made their existence morally acceptable.

Children of the immortals are human in every respect, a few rare ones inheriting our ability to sense the Tide. Except in extremely rare cases, they wield no magical power of their own. For those born at Low Tide, they live and die without realising they have the gift. For those born when the Tide is rising or ebbing, the effect ranges from mild discomfort for those who can't understand what they're feeling to a fully conscious ability to make the most of their talent.

The Tide was well and truly up when Krydence finally tracked down his sister's missing lover. Rather than confront him, however, he returned to Tenacia to collect Elyssa, figuring she would prefer to deal with Taryx herself.

And deal with him she did. Furious beyond words by Taryx's betrayal, she waited until he'd left the cottage he was sharing with his mortal lover, and then confronted the young woman.

It would have been pointless, of course, to attempt to hurt Taryx physically. She can't kill him. Any physical injury heals within a few hours—at worst, he'd be whole again in a matter of days. But she could cause his woman a world of hurt and she could damage his child, leaving him with a living reminder of the folly of rejecting her.

The unsuspecting young woman was in the small pigsty out behind the stables feeding scraps to a large sow who was nursing a hungry litter of newborn piglets when Elyssa and Krydence found her. It was the squealing piglets that gave Elyssa the idea, apparently. Screeching something about her rival being a fat, ugly old sow, driven by equal measures of anger and jealousy, Elyssa picked up a piglet, held it against the mortal woman's abdomen and magically forced it through her skin, into her womb and then finally into the child she was carrying.

“We'll see how much he likes you and your disgusting mortal spawn now, you filthy pig!” Elyssa announced when it was done.

It's a testament to the young woman's strength that the shock of Elyssa's savage attack didn't kill her outright. Perhaps Elyssa healed her magically as part of Taryx's punishment, more interested in the monstrosity she was now doomed to carry than in killing her.

Whatever her reasons, Elyssa's bizarre revenge left Taryx's pregnant lover traumatised but alive and a month later she gave birth to a creature who was to become the very first Crasii.

It's a measure of how far removed from humanity we had become that rather than react with abhorrence to the horror inflicted upon his lover, Taryx was fascinated by the creature Elyssa created in her anger. Taryx isn't a particularly gifted magician, but he's pretty good at spotting an opportunity when he sees one. More than anything, he wanted to know
how
she had created it, and hurried to Tenacia as soon as the child was born, to show the others the results and learn the secret himself.

I never heard what happened to Taryx's unfortunate lover, or saw the first blended creature. Lukys told me the half-piglet child didn't live long beyond its first few months. But the immortals had a new hobby—once they ironed out prickly little details like the human mothers' tendency to die at a prodigious rate.

The production of Crasii slaves requires only two raw materials, you see: any animal whose characteristics we wanted blended into a human, and all the fertile mortal women we could get our hands on. It wasn't a pleasant business. In fact, it was almost a century before Elyssa hit on the successful method of blending the species and leaving the mothers alive to breed a second or third time, but eventually she found the right formula and the Crasii were born.

All of this happened while I was out of Tenacia, mind you. I put together the story from various other sources, and by the time I ran into Engarhod, Syrolee and their clan again, the Crasii were a well-established fact, farmed and bred in quantities sufficient to establish them as a whole sub-species in their own right.

Of course, not all of us used Crasii slaves. Some of the immortals actively despise them. Were it not for Medwen—Medwen the Guide your silly Tarot calls her, although the Tides know why—I wouldn't have become involved with them, either.

 

By the way, it was Brynden of Fyrenne who first coined the name Tide Lords.

Immolated by Diala several hundred years before me—and in the same fashion—Brynden was a soldier, a mercenary hired to protect the gold shipments from the barbarian mines in Glaeba that Engarhod and Syrolee brought to Magreth to gild their palace. Diala spied him on the wharves and took a fancy to him in much the same way she'd fixed her attention on me.

It doesn't surprise me that Brynden survived the flames. By the age of twenty-eight, he'd already lived through a near-deadly stab wound and numerous other potentially fatal nicks and cuts gained in the course of his perilous employment. What sets Brynden apart from the rest of us, however, is his innate sense of nobility. If there is a single Tide Lord who deserves the title of Lord, in my opinion, it's Brynden.

Tall and fair-haired, he's a native of Fyrenne, which used to be a nation located in the far reaches of the distant northern continent north-west of Tenacia. Although they were competent seafarers and much sought-after fighters, it was rare for his people to venture into the far south, which is probably why he caught Diala's eye.

It wasn't until several hundred years after I left Magreth that I finally met the Fyronnese immortals. Like me, Brynden didn't stay on Magreth after his immolation, although he was smarter about leaving than I was. Shocked and disturbed though he must have been, he didn't ask for a quest that would ultimately destroy his homeland. He was—still is—convinced our immortality has been granted to us for some noble purpose, so he set out to find out what it was. Brynden left Magreth and went looking for his destiny. With him went Kinta, another Fyronnese warrior—she was made immortal by Brynden not long after Diala had immolated him—and a number of other immortals including Krydence's former wife, Ambria.

I think ideology drew the others to him, but it was more than ideology keeping Brynden and Kinta together. They were lovers, even before they'd joined the ranks of the immortals. In fact, it was Brynden who burned Kinta to prove the Eternal Flame was real and not just a wild reason he'd thought up to excuse his affair with a Priestess of Magreth.

They settled in Torlenia eventually, on the shores of the Great Inland Sea. Bryn built himself a palace—as austere as Engarhod's palace was ostentatious—and set out to seek the knowledge he believed immortality meant us to gain. With Kinta at his side, they couldn't help but adopt their Fyronnese warrior ethic and, almost by default, the Torlenians began to first revere, and then finally worship the two immortals living in their midst. The strange ideas they have about women being seen in public, the battle forms practised by Torlenian soldiers to this day…they're direct descendants of ideas Brynden introduced. They still prefer chariots in a world where sprung coaches are the norm in other lands. Even though they don't remember it, the whole nature of Torlenian society is influenced by the memory of the god-like warrior and his queen.

The others drifted away after a time, but Kinta stayed and acquired the title of the Charioteer in your Tarot, probably because that was how most people remember her, driving her chariot along the shores of the Great Inland Sea, going to and from their palace near the northern city of Acern. Brynden eventually acquired the nickname of the Lord of Reckoning, but that was later, during the Scard Wars. It's an apt description of his righteous wrath. Brynden in high dudgeon is a sight to behold. And not something you want to be the focus of.

But if Brynden is noble and incorruptible, Kinta isn't. While she agreed with his vision in principle, even back then, I think she privately leant more toward Engarhod and Syrolee's method of achieving it. But at the height of the Crasii farming era, Kinta was still staunchly by Brynden's side, still certain the Tide Lords had been created to help mankind rather than enslave them, and willing to stand up and be counted.

 

Boredom drove me to visit Acern to seek out Brynden and Kinta, as it did most things I did by then. Immortality seems like such a gift at first. But here's the real problem: you can, given enough time, master any skill, acquire any knowledge and once it's done, there is nothing more. It's the journey that makes life worth living. Getting there is merely a stop along the way, a place to catch your breath until you start something new.

Such notions make mortals pray for more time.

Such notions make immortals go mad.

I was already easily bored by then, something which only gets worse with each passing year, of which I've seen far too many. There are a finite number of things to be done and learned in this world and infinite time in which to do them.