The Immortal Prince

by Jennifer Fallon

  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.

  And then what? What is left when you speak every language known to man fluently? When you can paint like a master as easily as you can shear a sheep, milk a cow or construct a palace?

  Man wasn’t meant for eternity.

  I heard from Maralyce that Lukys was in Torlenia. Maralyce is the strangest of the immortals and the only one I can’t pin down on who made her immortal. She was in her late forties, I guess, when she was made, but if she was a crotchety old loner before she became immortal, or has simply become that way after thousands of years of friendless boredom, I don’t know. She has little or no time for the rest of us, with the possible exception of Lukys, and lives no differently when her powers are at their peak than she does when she’s helpless.

  I’d run into Maralyce by accident while I was visiting Glaeba looking for something to distract me. It was a dry, hilly place back then. The old girl had made a home for herself in the mountains surrounding the vast rift valley that separated your ancestors in Glaeba from the Caelish barbarians on the other side. Maralyce looks for gold. She was a miner before she was immortalised and considers her gift simply the Tide’s way of handing her unlimited time to look for it. Even then, she’d already dug a vast network of tunnels all through your mineral-rich mountains, hoarding her gold in a hidden cavern that is still the stuff of legend to this day.

  Anyway, it was Maralyce who begrudgingly informed me that last she’d heard, Lukys was headed to Torlenia. She wasn’t being helpful, I suspect, just trying to get rid of her unwanted guest.

  I shared one last meal with my reluctant hostess in her cabin high in the Shevron Mountains and then took the hint and left Maralyce’s questionable hospitality and headed south.

  “You could not have come at a better time, Brother Cayal,” Brynden informed me gravely, when I finally arrived in Torlenia. I was welcomed amicably enough, but after greeting my hosts, I received quite a shock to discover Medwen was also a guest at the palace. She kissed me on the mouth by way of greeting, smiling wanly. Despite the warmth of her welcome, there was a fragile quality to her demeanour that made me wonder if something was wrong.

  Lukys—his pet rat, Coron, perched on his shoulder as always—appeared later that day. Over a glass of wine on the battlements, the two of us set about catching up, filling each other in on the highlights of our last eight hundred years. That evening, I was treated to an austere meal in Brynden’s austere dining hall with only Kinta, Medwen and Lukys for company. No servants wait on the Tide Lords at Brynden’s table. Brynden thinks them an unnecessary extravagance.

  Brynden’s comment about my timing when I first arrived intrigued me, but it remained unexplained. It was dinner that evening before I finally got a chance to ask why he—who had never shown more than a passing interest in anything I did—was suddenly so glad to see me.

  “When I arrived, Bryn, you mentioned something about coming at a good time. Is there something going on?” I enquired, as I broke apart my bread. Black bread, of course, and it seemed to be at least a week old.

  “Why do you assume something is going on?” Kinta asked, tucking into her meal with a warrior’s zeal.

  I smiled. “You actually seem glad to see me.”

  Kinta is a statuesque blonde who favours leather over cloth, even in the temperate climate of Torlenia. I’m not surprised she’s a warrior in your deck of Tarot cards. I consider myself a competent swordsman, but I’ve never fought Kinta, something I consider a prudent decision, because I’m really not sure who’d win.

  Brynden frowned at my question. “There are evil times afoot, Cayal. It behoves us to take action to free the mortals of this world from the tyranny of our less-than-scrupulous peers.”

  I forced my smile away. In all the years I’ve known him, Brynden’s wordy turn of phrase hasn’t changed at all. Krydence and Rance tease him unmercifully about it. It’s much of the reason, I suspect, that Brynden set himself up in opposition to the Emperor and Empress of the Five Realms and their obnoxious offspring i
n the first place.

  “What he means,” Lukys explained, reaching across the table for the wine jug, “is that Engarhod and Syrolee are at it again.”

  “What have they done this time?”

  “They’re making Crasii,” Kinta explained unhelpfully.

  I looked at her blankly. “What’s a Crasii?”

  “Blended creatures,” Medwen replied, her bitterness surprising me.

  Raven-haired and dark-skinned, Medwen looks no older than the seventeen years she had been when Krydence burned her alive. She’d been working in the palace on Magreth when she’d caught Krydence’s eye, hundreds of years before I was made immortal. Their affair lasted a little over a year, she told me once. Then Ambria had caught her husband in bed with the young serving girl and ordered him to be rid of her. Krydence assured Ambria he would and, with sweet words and quite malicious intent, had set Medwen alight, promising her immortality, expecting her to die.

  When she survived, it was debatable who was more shocked—Krydence, Medwen or Ambria. She’d drifted since then, like me, never really settling in one place for more than a decade or two.

  “Blended with what?” I asked. There was an air of ineffable sadness about Medwen that I found quite disturbing.

  “Humans,” Lukys informed me before Medwen could reply.

  I stared at them around the table, not sure if they were playing a jest on me. “How is that possible?”

  It was Brynden who answered. “As best we can tell, they take a human woman, have an immortal impregnate her, and then when the foetus has developed sufficiently, they ram an animal foetus through the wall of her uterus and force it to magically blend with the child, creating a half-human half-beast creature they can use as a slave. Apparently, the emperor’s boys are applying themselves with great zeal to their new role as stud stallions for the Crasii farms.”

  Oblivious to her pain, I pulled a face and winked at Medwen. “Tides, I wonder what the poor girls think is worse, giving birth to a beast or sleeping with Krydence?”