The Palace of Impossible Dreams

by Jennifer Fallon

  Declan clenched his fists in frustration, unable to believe he was so close to Arkady, and yet had still missed her.

  “Then I shall follow them,” he said, rising to his feet. “Can you tell me where they went? I would really like to get my slave back.”

  Geriko grinned broadly, “You seem pretty anxious to get her back. What she do? Steal the family jewels?”

  “She’s . . . important to my family,” Declan said, not sure if it was a good idea to admit such a thing, even to another slave.

  The big man seemed amused. “She’s gettin’ to be important to a whole lotta people, that girl. Don’t see that too often. ’Specially not with someone so skinny. Still, the missus is gonna be happy if you take her away.”

  “The missus?”

  “The doc’s wife,” Geriko explained. “She don’t like Kady. She ’specially don’t like that the doc seems to prefer his wii-ah’s company to hers.”

  Declan didn’t want to think about what that meant. The idea that Arkady had been sold into slavery and was being taken against her will on a daily basis by some cheating Senestran bastard who didn’t get along with his wife was horribly reminiscent of their days in Lebec.

  He’d not been able to save her from Rybank. He was quite determined, however, to save her from this Cydne Medura.

  “How do I find them?” he asked, hoping none of his slow-burning rage was seeping into his voice. This man seemed a reasonably loyal slave. He certainly wasn’t going to tell Declan anything about how to find his master if he thought Declan’s intention was to kill the man as soon as he laid eyes on him.

  “You’ll need to hire a boat. Down by the river docks. The amphibians know the way. I think they was headed for Watershed Falls.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Few days northeast of here. Horrid place it is, all damp and humid and filled with lizards watching you, all the time, even though you can’t see them. You can feel it though, know what I mean?” The man shuddered. “Makes ya skin crawl just thinking about it.”

  Declan’s ears pricked up at the mention of lizards. As far as he was aware, the only reptilian Crasii to have survived through the last few Cataclysms were the chameleons, and he’d never heard of them gathered in any numbers.

  “Then I shall follow them to this Watershed Falls place and conduct my business with the doctor there.”

  Perhaps, in addition to finding Arkady, he’d be able to offer Tiji some news about her origins. Assuming he ever found her again.

  And assuming she’d even speak to him if he did, now he was immortal.

  Geriko opened the office door for him. “He’s not gonna be happy ’bout this. You rich?”

  “Rich enough.”

  “You’ll need to be. He likes Kady a lot.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be able to make it worth his while to part with her.”

  “Kinda hope you don’t,” Geriko said, as he escorted Declan back through the clinic to the front door. “I like Kady too. She’s got nice tits.”

  This time, Declan didn’t even make a pretence of trying to control his fury. He slammed a punch into Geriko’s face with all the force his rage-driven fist could muster.

  Howling in surprise and pain, the slave dropped to his knees, blood gushing from his broken nose. Declan’s hand was stinging, he may have even broken a few bones, but he didn’t care.

  “Don’t you even think about her like that, you Senestran pile of shit,” he said in Glaeban.

  And then, shaking his stinging hand, which had begun to hurt out of all proportion to the injury he’d inflicted on it—a sign that he probably had broken something and the agonising healing powers of his now immortal body were at work—he left the man where he’d fallen and let himself out of the clinic.

  He had a boat to catch, it seemed. And another journey ahead of him to some wetland village called Watershed Falls.

  Chapter 28

  “Give the youngling a dose of the tonic and then send them on their way before they infect everyone else.”

  Arkady smiled comfortingly at the chameleon and her young standing on the veranda, hoping her warmth would alleviate Cydne’s appalling bedside manner. She desperately wanted to talk to the chameleons who seemed, if not prolific, then certainly not rare in this steamy wetland. Not that knowing anything about them would be much use to her. Who was she going to tell? The only person who’d really be interested in the fact that she’d discovered a whole region full of chameleons was Tiji, and she was probably back in Glaeba by now, apologising to Declan for losing track of his duchess.

  The chameleons were looking haggard and wrung out. They were locals, these Crasii, not the visitors most of their other patients had been. The female, a small silver-skinned creature, held a dull grey pup in her arms, who was only two or three years old and almost unconscious. Arkady’s heart went out to them. The older one, a slender silver male, clung to his mother’s side as if he was afraid she might disappear, which, if his brother’s swamp fever infected her, may well be the case.

  “Come on,” she said, pouring the tonic onto the spoon. “It tastes awful and it makes your eyes sting, but it will help.”

  The mother moved the youngling’s body in her arms to make it easier for Arkady to spoon the tonic into him. Limp and unresponsive, the creamy liquid trickled into his mouth. He coughed and swallowed. Arkady waited for a moment to see if his sensitive stomach would keep the medicine down.

  When it appeared he wasn’t going to reflexively vomit the tonic back up again, she smiled at the mother. “Keep him cool and try to get him to take as much water as you can. He’s going to be fine.”

  The chameleon nodded gratefully and left the veranda, her other youngling close behind her, still clinging to her side.

  “That seems to be the last of them for today,” Jojo said, stepping onto the veranda.

  It was their second week here and as word spread through the wetlands of the presence of a Port Traeker doctor and free medicine in Watershed Falls, more and more patients were lined up outside the house each morning, waiting to be treated.

  They were seeing swamp fever victims almost exclusively now. Arkady marvelled that she’d yet to catch the disease. Maybe she was naturally immune. Swamp fever didn’t attack everyone who came in contact with it. It was an opportunistic sort of disease, attacking the very young and the very old first. A normal, healthy adult had a fair chance of resisting it. Once infected, one still had an even money chance of surviving it too, if they managed not to die from dehydration.

  Fortunately, Arkady also had access to Cydne’s tonic. She hadn’t needed to take it yet, thankfully, but intended to down a whole bottle of the wretched-smelling concoction at the first sign of an upset stomach or a loose bowel movement.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Cydne said, rising to his feet.

  “Do what?”

  “Tell these creatures they’ll be all better soon. You don’t know that.”

  “The youngling seemed over the worst of it.”

  “It’s still not your place to predict recovery,” he said. “Don’t do it again.” With that, Cydne left the veranda and walked back inside. Arkady turned to Jojo, throwing her hands up in disgust.

  “Tides, I was just trying to be nice.”

  “You’re setting up an expectation the doctor can cure everything,” the young—and tiresomely loyal—feline explained. “Patients should always expect the worst, Kady. That way, if it happens, they’re prepared. If they get better, then it’s a bonus.”

  She rolled her eyes, understanding Jojo’s logic, even if she thought it absurd. “Are all felines so pessimistic?”

  The Crasii shrugged. “We are pragmatic.”

  “That’s not what I would have called it.”

  The feline smiled and held out the tray for Arkady. “This is why you’re such a troublesome slave.”

  “Who says I’m troublesome?”

  “Everyone.”

  Arkady began clearing Cydne’
s instruments off the veranda table so she could take them inside and boil them on the stove, ready for tomorrow.

  “Well, we must be doing something right. They don’t come back for a second dose. Mind you,” she added, stoppering the bottle of tonic she’d used to dose that day’s patients, “it could have something to do with the smell. I’d be tossing up taking a second dose of that stuff against dying a horribly painful death, if it were me.”

  Jojo followed her inside, shutting the door behind them against the insects that would start to swarm as soon as they lit the lamps. Cydne looked up as they entered, frowning at Arkady. “You haven’t tried to taste the tonic, have you?”

  “Tides, no,” she said, following Jojo through the front room, past the locked door where the rest of the tonic was stored and into the small kitchen at the back of the house where the feline put the tray on the table. “I think I’d have to be dying first.”

  “It’s not . . . not very effective for humans,” Cydne said, following them into the kitchen. “I’d rather you didn’t take it—even if you get infected. Sometimes, it can make things . . . worse.”

  She looked at him closely and then nodded in understanding. “Is that why you didn’t want me reassuring the patients?”

  He nodded. “The feline is right. Better they expect the worst.”

  She shrugged. “Fair enough. Pessimism is the order of the day from now on. Did you want to eat yet, or can I sterilise these first?”

  “You can do the instruments first,” he told her. “I have to finish my report for the guild and I’d rather do it in daylight. Once the lamps are lit, there are too many insects.”

  “And most of them bite,” Arkady called after him, as he headed back to the front room. “Something people with the benefit of clothing probably don’t notice!”

  Jojo shook her head at Arkady’s impudence, although Cydne ignored her, as she knew he would. Even for a favoured slave, even out here in the middle of nowhere, Cydne Medura wasn’t going to cause a scandal by allowing his makor-di to dress as a free woman. Arkady was stuck with her short skirt and her bare breasts and had to settle for slathering on the foul-smelling lotion one of the whores from the Watershed tavern had given her. It protected her from the bugs, but it was a far cry from a time when she had reigned over the most fabulous social events in Glaeba wearing glorious, custom-made dresses and the Desean family jewels . . .

  “Kady!”

  “Yes, master?” she called, as she helped Jojo heft the large sterilising pot onto the stove.

  “Make sure you bathe before you come to bed tonight,” he commanded distractedly from the front room. “That stuff you’re wearing to repel insects works just as well on humans.”

  Not well enough, Arkady sighed, as she began dropping the medical instruments into the pot to boil. Apparently not well enough.

  It was still dark when a loud banging on the front door the following morning woke Arkady. If Cydne heard the racket, he ignored it, clearly expecting his slave to get up and answer the insistent hammering. He remained unmoving on the bed, probably faking sleep, Arkady suspected.

  In fact, he almost had to be faking. The dead would waken to this racket.

  With a sigh, Arkady, who, thankfully, was relegated to a blanket on the floor beside him once he was done with her each night, threw off the covers, and, still yawning, tied on her skirt as she reached the front door. Jojo had opened the door by the time she arrived in the front room. She was surprised to find the young chameleon whose desperately ill sibling they’d treated the afternoon before.

  “Doctor has to come quick,” the boy said, as soon as Jojo opened the door. “Pedy’s real sick.”

  Jojo blocked the door with her body to prevent the child from pushing his way inside. “Then have your dam bring him back here when we’re open.”

  “No!” the boy insisted. “He has to come now! Pedy’s blind and he can’t stay awake. Mama says he must come!”

  Cydne’s warning yesterday about giving patients false hope flashed through Arkady’s mind for a moment, accompanied by a wave of guilt. She glanced at Jojo, certain the feline’s unreadable white face was silently expressing “I told you so,” and then nodded at the youngling. “The doctor can’t come at the moment,” she said, wondering if blindness was another symptom of swamp fever she hadn’t heard of before. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Kady . . .”

  “It’ll be all right, Jojo. Tell Cydne I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  The feline looked unhappy, but did nothing to stop Arkady from making the house call. Arkady slipped on her sandals and followed the young chameleon through the sleeping village to a small house several streets away surrounded by a surprisingly well kept yard. Inside was not only the female Arkady and Cydne had seen yesterday, but several other females as well. The sick youngling was in the front room, laid out on a bed of woven reeds. The chameleons moved aside for Arkady, allowing her to squat beside the pallet.

  As his brother had warned her, Pedy was almost comatose, whimpering softly in pain, his eyes blindly searching for his mother. His skin was deathly grey, his breathing laboured, and when she put her ear to his chest, his heartbeat seemed thready and tenuous. There was no sign, however, of him vomiting, and no evidence he’d been affected recently by the crippling diarrhoea associated with swamp fever.

  “How long’s he been like this?”

  “A few hours,” his mother told her. “He was acting as if he was dizzy when we first got home, but then he seemed to get better. But about midnight, he started to have trouble breathing. I thought it was just the fever, but then . . . when I realised he couldn’t even see me . . .”

  Arkady stared at the youngling helplessly. Whatever was wrong with him was taking him down fast. Even in the short time she’d been here, his respiration had worsened.

  “Is there anything you can do?” the female asked. “Anything the doctor can do?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “What if you give him more tonic?” one of the other chameleons crowded into the room behind her asked. “Maybe the first dose wasn’t enough.”

  Arkady looked at the reptilian Crasii blankly for a moment and then stared down at Pedy, as a thought occurred to her that was almost too frightening to contemplate.

  Only once before in her life had Arkady ever seen someone like this—dying from a combination of blindness, a weakened heart, and laboured breathing. She was about twelve at the time, with her father on one of his many trips to the mines up around Lutalo, during which she’d assisted him in much the same way she was assisting Cydne now. That time, however, it hadn’t been swamp fever. It was a miner dying from drinking a bad batch of home-made spirits.

  Pedy gasped painfully, his breathing growing more and more shallow. Arkady felt for a pulse at his wrist and couldn’t find it.

  His mother must have read her face.

  “He’s going to die, isn’t he?” she said softly.

  Arkady nodded mutely. Pessimism was the order of the day, after all.

  “It was good of you to come, then,” she added, scooping the limp youngling into her arms. “But you can go now.”

  “I’ll wait with you,” she said, her eyes filling with unshed tears. The female’s calm acceptance of the imminent death of her child tore at Arkady’s heart. “If that’s all right?”

  The female studied her for a moment and then nodded her permission. Her other youngling had ingratiated himself beside her, and was staring at Arkady with dark, uncomprehending eyes. Behind her, the other chameleons began to sit down. They were a family group, she suspected, and would keep vigil together.

  Arkady glanced out of the small window. The sky was beginning to lighten with the onset of dawn. She settled back on her heels to wait, and realised Cydne would have to get his own breakfast.

  Let him starve, she thought. He deserves it.

  Murderer.

  Chapter 29

  The first stomach cramps hit Tiji just
on dawn. At first, she thought it was something she’d eaten, but even as she thought it, she knew it wasn’t the case. All she’d had for dinner last night was bread and cheese. Even had the cheese been bad, she would have felt the effects much sooner than this.

  No, Tiji knew what it was, and cursed herself roundly for not staying out of the village as Azquil had made her promise she would, to reduce the chances of becoming infected. She hadn’t, of course. There were other chameleons in the village and Tiji wanted to talk to them. She wanted to learn about her own kind—about their customs, their lives . . . and how she’d finished up in a circus where she was bought as a slave by a Glaeban named Declan Hawkes.

  The chameleons couldn’t answer all her questions, of course, but they were able to tell her more than she’d hoped for. Apparently, the outlying settlements in the wetlands were often raided by slavers. Chameleon younglings were prized, worth a fortune on the open market. That news made her wonder where Declan had got the money to afford her in the first place. Probably from the Cabal.

  But that also meant they had a purpose in mind for her too.

  Was that all she had been to Declan? Just another tool in the Cabal’s armoury of weapons they might one day turn on the Tide Lords? The idea shook the very foundations of everything she believed about herself and the human she considered her best friend. Every day she wondered about it, the more she came to resent Declan, the Cabal, and everything about her previous life. She discovered she didn’t care what had become of Arkady. The Cabal could all rot, for all she cared . . .

  Another cramp doubled her over, making Tiji wonder if she was more fevered than she thought. She needed help, she knew that, although it seemed a bit early to pay a visit to any of her new chameleon friends in the village, even though Azquil had assured her that if she needed their help, all she had to do was ask.

  Fortunately, she didn’t need to bother anyone. The Port Traeker doctor was still in town.