The Palace of Impossible Dreams

by Jennifer Fallon

  The door slamming shut, ever so slightly, made Arkady stir. Pulling on his shirt, Declan squatted down beside the bed and kissed her forehead.

  “Shhh . . .” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

  “I heard voices,” she mumbled.

  “It’s nothing. You should sleep while you can.”

  She snuggled down in the middle of the narrow bed contentedly. “I love you, Declan.”

  “Even in your dreams?”

  Her eyes still closed, she smiled as he pulled the sheet over her to keep the insects at bay. “Apparently.”

  “Go back to sleep, Kady.”

  “I never got to sleep in . . . when I was a slave.” Her voice was muffled by the pillow and had a dreamy quality that indicated she was only half awake.

  “Then sleep until midday, if you want, sweetheart. You’re not a slave anymore.”

  “Mmmmm . . .” she replied.

  Declan kissed her forehead again and stood up. He studied her for a moment longer, wondering at the good fortune that had finally brought Arkady to him, a little disturbed to realise Tiji’s suspicions about his reasons for becoming immortal weren’t that far off the mark.

  Although he’d had no choice in the matter, Declan wasn’t entirely certain that, had he been offered one short lifetime with Arkady in return for his mortality, he wouldn’t have taken the deal.

  “How many senses do you have?”

  Declan shrugged, fairly certain this was going to be a trick question. “Five.”

  “Name them.”

  He rolled his eyes, but answered Cayal’s question. Declan was learning, very quickly, that Cayal had his own unique way of teaching, which mostly involved making the student feel like a complete imbecile. “Taste, touch, sight, hearing and smell.”

  “What about the others?”

  “What others?” Declan asked, as he knew Cayal expected him to.

  “You can sense the Tide, can’t you? You can’t feel it. It’s not tangible so you can’t touch it. You can’t see it, or hear it. And you certainly can’t smell it.”

  Declan had to concede he had a point. “So we have six senses?”

  “Not even close.”

  “What else is there?”

  “What about your understanding of where you are?”

  Declan looked around the clearing the Immortal Prince had led him to in order to continue their lessons and then fixed his gaze on Cayal. “I hardly think knowing I’m standing in a jungle clearing, a half-hour walk from some tiny village in the Senestran Wetlands, counts as a sense.”

  “Are you trying to be an ass, or are you really that stupid?”

  “I must be stupid,” Declan said. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  Cayal studied him in silence for a moment, the Tide rippling around him, perhaps debating how to proceed. When he spoke again, it was in a much more conciliatory tone, which drove home to Declan just how much more Cayal needed him than he needed Cayal.

  “I was talking of proprioception—your awareness of where you are in relation to everything else around you. Most people don’t even spare it a thought, but there’s a reason you bump into things when you’re drunk that you’d miss if you were sober.”

  Declan considered the idea for a moment and then nodded. “All right, I’ll pay that one.”

  “You’d better,” Cayal warned. “It’s far more important for a Tide Lord to be conscious of himself in relation to everything around him when he’s wielding the Tide than for some poor sod getting pissed at the local tavern before he goes home each night.”

  “There are more, I take it?”

  “Equilibrioception: the sense of balance.”

  “Isn’t that the same as proprioception?”

  “Not at all,” Cayal said. “Proprioception is about what’s around you. It’s external. Equilibrioception is internal. It’s what keeps you upright. And like proprioception, it’s very easily disrupted by alcohol—among other things—which is why, when a man is drunk, he falls over just as much as he bumps into things.”

  Despite himself, Declan found himself intrigued by Cayal’s lecture. And surprised by the depth of Cayal’s knowledge. It was easy to forget this man had been alive for eight thousand years. Clearly, he’d not spent all of them sleeping around, stealing other men’s wives or causing cataclysmic natural disasters.

  “What are the other senses, then?”

  “Nociception,” Cayal said, a little less abrasively, now that Declan was paying attention. “The ability to feel pain.”

  “I never thought of that as a sense.”

  “It’s an amazingly useful sense, actually. Particularly when you’re trying to convince someone to do things your way.”

  “You mean you can torture someone by manipulating his nociception with the Tide?”

  Cayal smiled. “You’re going to stay true to type in immortality, aren’t you?”

  “Meaning . . .?”

  “You’ve just worked out that you can affect a man’s perceptions by manipulating his senses with the Tide. I find it fascinating that it took you until the sense that’ll allow you to torture a man, before you came to that conclusion. I’ll bet you were just the bestest little spymaster ever, weren’t you?”

  Declan was intrigued enough with the possibilities of this new-found knowledge that Cayal’s needling barely registered. “I know what pain does to a man,” he said. “And how useless is it. A man will say anything to stop being hurt.”

  “Not if he believes the consequences of you catching him in a lie are worse than what you’re doing to him,” Cayal said. “You have to own him first, break him completely, before you can rely on anything a man under torture will tell you.”

  Declan studied Cayal curiously for a moment. “You say that like you know it for a fact.”

  Cayal smiled. “I didn’t completely waste all those years as a Holy Warrior, you know.”

  “So how do you affect someone’s senses using the Tide?” Declan asked, not sure he wanted to hear the details of how many men Cayal might have tortured over the past few thousand years, and not because he was squeamish. Mostly, it was because the more time he spent with him, the more he discovered how much he had in common with the Immortal Prince, and that realisation was a bit more than he could deal with right now.

  “Ah, now that’s the tricky part.”

  “Is it difficult?”

  Cayal shrugged. “It’s . . . fiddly.”

  “And that’s how you want to deal with the Merchant Marines when they return? By confusing their senses?”

  The Immortal Prince nodded. “That’s the plan. If you’re up to it, by then.”

  “If it’s that fiddly, why not just do what we did to the first lot?”

  “I explained that to you the other night. Tide’s not up far enough to sustain pulling the air out over a wide area for long enough to make it work. And like I said—and you apparently weren’t listening—once you start moving the air around, you’re messing with the weather. We make a few hundred Senestran marines cough and splutter here to prove our point, and before you know it, Jelidia’s melting into the oceans and we’ve got Lukys hunting us down for ruining his Palace of Impossible Dreams.”

  “His what?”

  “Your dear old dad has built himself an ice palace,” Cayal explained, looking amused. “Pellys dubbed it the Palace of Impossible Dreams. A poetic, if somewhat ridiculous title that seems to have stuck, mostly because I think Oritha—Tides, that’d be your stepmother—likes it. You’ll see it when we get to Jelidia. Assuming it’s still there.”

  It was discomforting to hear Cayal refer to Lukys as his “dear old dad,” partly because Declan wasn’t sure he believed it, and partly because he was afraid it might be true. “All right, so doing anything with the weather is out of the question. What are you suggesting? That we make them all fall over?”

  Cayal grinned. “Think about it for a moment, Rodent. Have you any idea how effective that would be?”

 
Despite himself—and Cayal’s insult—Declan smiled. “I suppose it would rather disrupt the invasion if all their marines start falling about like drunkards.”

  “There you go, Rodent,” Cayal said, slapping Declan on the shoulder like a proud father. “Now you’re thinking like a Tide Lord. Minimum magic for the maximum disruption, that’s my philosophy.”

  Declan stared at him. “That’s your philosophy?”

  “Sure it is. Why?”

  “Weren’t you the man who drowned one country and decimated another, just to put out a small flame? Didn’t you wipe out your own country in a disagreement with Tryan? Wasn’t the last cataclysm caused because you ran off with Kinta . . .?”

  “That was Brynden’s work, not mine.”

  “Still, you have an interesting definition of minimum.”

  The smile faded from Cayal’s face. Declan could feel him on the Tide, the angry ripples telling him more about Cayal’s mood than his outwardly calm demeanour, forced on the Immortal Prince by his deal and the need to keep Declan onside.

  “Come see me when you’re eight thousand years old, Rodent, and we’ll see if you’ve done any better.”

  “Won’t you be dead by then?” Declan asked, wondering if Cayal had forgotten about his plan to return to Jelidia to die—with Declan’s assistance—or if he just didn’t really believe it was going to work.

  “Not if you don’t learn something about controlling the Tide,” Cayal warned. “So pay attention, Rodent. I’m going to teach you how to manipulate the senses, and you’d better learn good, because if I miss my chance to die when the Tide peaks, thanks to your incompetence, I’ll spend my every waking moment until the next High Tide, a thousand years from now, making you regret it.”

  Chapter 57

  Azquil volunteered to keep watch for the returning fleet, and Tiji offered to go with him. It was too difficult being around the cottage. Between Declan smelling like a suzerain and mooning about over Arkady, the Immortal Prince, the disturbingly likable Arryl, and that wretched feline, Jojo, with her watchful, unblinking stare, it was the last place she wanted to be.

  Fortunately, the best vantage to watch the southern channel was from the large flat rock near the hot springs where Azquil had first shown Tiji the delights of the Genoa moth. They’d spent rather a lot of time since arriving at the springs, trying to catch another one. They’d made love since that first time, of course, but it was never quite the same and Tiji was anxious to try it again, with the aphrodisiac effects of those delicious melting wings tingling on her tongue.

  They had the time to indulge in a bit fun. The round trip from the Delta Settlement would take their enemies two days at least, although Arryl’s assessment had been that it would be considerably longer. If Ambria and Medwen had been sent to Port Traeker, it would add another day to the trip, and was she fairly certain they wouldn’t come back without reinforcements, which meant even longer before the invaders arrived.

  And so it had proved. It was nearly five days now since the Tide Lords had confronted Ulag Pardura and the doctor’s wife.

  And a few hours ago, Azquil had caught another moth.

  “What will you do after this?” Azquil asked, when the elation of their moth-enhanced coupling had calmed. Tiji was curled into Azquil’s arms, her head resting in his chest, their skin the same shade as the warm rock beneath them.

  She stirred sleepily. “Catch another moth.”

  “Not that, silly,” Azquil said. She could hear the smile in his voice. “I mean after Lady Arryl and the Tide Lords secure the wetlands for us. They’re leaving, you know.”

  “Good riddance to them,” Tiji murmured, wishing Azquil would find something a little more romantic to discuss after making love to her than the wretched suzerain.

  “Lady Arryl has asked me to go with her.”

  That announcement brought Tiji back to reality with a jarring thud. “She what?”

  “She wants me to go to Jelidia with her.”

  “Why?”

  “She needs a servant and wants one she can trust.”

  “Then let her take that horrid cat!” Tiji said, sitting up abruptly. “She can’t help but follow a suzerain’s orders. That should be enough trust for any immortal.”

  Azquil pushed himself up on his elbows to stare at her unrelenting back. “A Crasii can be subverted by any other immortal. Lady Arryl wants me because I am loyal to her and the Trinity, and I’m a Scard so I can’t be ordered otherwise.”

  “Tides,” Tiji grumbled. “Are you sure you’re not a proper Crasii?”

  “If I was, Lady Arryl would not have bothered to ask. I do have a choice, Tiji.”

  “Then say no.”

  “Why?” he asked, sitting up beside her. “This is the chance of a lifetime—a chance to travel, a chance to see things I’d never see otherwise . . .”

  Tiji turned to look at him. “You travel plenty,” she reminded him. “That’s how you found me, remember?”

  “And why do you think it was me, and not one of the thousands of other chameleons who live in the wetlands who found you? Because I’m one of the few who wants to leave this place occasionally. That’s why I was recruited into the Retrievers. I’m one of the few who wants to see what else this world has to offer.”

  “Fine,” Tiji said. “So travel. See the world. But do you have to do it with a suzerain?”

  “Yes,” he said with determination. “And I want you to come with me.”

  She laughed. “Me? Follow a bunch of suzerain to the bottom of the world to watch one kill himself? You’re kidding, right?”

  “Not at all. I want you to come with me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Tiji looked away. “I just can’t, that’s all.”

  “Is it because of Lord Declan? Because he has rejected you in favour of a member of his own species?”

  Although they didn’t know for certain that Declan and Arkady were nothing more than the friends they insisted they were, Tiji figured Azquil had the right of it. Declan and Arkady had vanished into the bedroom to talk the other night, and still hadn’t surfaced at dawn the next morning when the two chameleons left to take up their channel watch at the hot springs. She supposed that meant Declan finally had what he wanted. She hoped he was happy, but suspected things had worked out a little too easily for his happiness to be permanent.

  In fact, it was guaranteed to be temporary, when she thought on it. Declan might now be immortal, but Arkady wasn’t.

  Of course, that didn’t alter this awkward misconception Azquil seemed to have about her relationship with her former master. Tiji stared at Azquil for a moment and then let out a frustrated sigh. “How many times, you stupid lizard, do I have to explain to you that Declan is . . . was . . . my friend? I never slept with him and never wanted to. And he never once looked at me as anything other than . . .” Tiji hesitated, and then, with the pained realisation it was true, she said, “. . . than a slave. He’s a Tide Lord now, and he can take up with any species he wants. I promise you, I’ll lose not a wink of sleep over it.”

  “But his presence makes you so uncomfortable . . .”

  “That’s because he shows up here, out of the blue, suddenly immortal. That doesn’t make me uncomfortable, Azquil. It terrifies me.”

  “And this is why you don’t want to come with me? Because you are terrified of a former master? Tides, it’s as if you’re still a slave.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You are if you still act according to the wishes of your master.”

  That was unfair. And a quite blatant attempt to play on her guilt. “What? You think Declan doesn’t want me to go with you?”

  “I don’t think he cares about you being with me so much,” Azquil said. “He may even be happy for you. But I think he is pained by the way you look at him now.”

  “I can’t help it. He smells like a suzerain.”

  Azquil nodded in understanding. “It’s a pity. Jelidia is
a very cold place. It would have been much nicer with someone to warm my bed.”

  “That’s why you wanted me to go? As a bed warmer? Thanks a lot.”

  He leaned forward, running a flickering tongue over her ear and then blew on the damp patch softly, sending shivers down her spine. “I’d keep you warm too.”

  She pushed him away impatiently. “You can’t get your own way just by blowing in my ear, you know.”

  “We can have a bit of fun while I try, though,” he said.

  “Tides, that’s all you think about!”

  “Not true,” he said, sitting up with a wounded look. “I think many profound thoughts.”

  Despite herself, Tiji smiled. “Like what?”

  “Um . . . like . . . the best way to catch channel pike, for instance.”

  “Yes, well, that’s a weighty problem.”

  “I think of . . . countless different ways to cook them . . .”

  “Truly, you are the philosopher of your people.”

  He grinned. “If you loved me, you’d come to Jelidia with me.”

  “If you loved me, you’d stay here with me, Azquil.”

  It was flippantly said, but they both fell into an uncomfortable silence. Although they’d been enjoying each other’s company for a while now, neither of them had dared suggest there was anything more going on here than a bit of harmless moth-fuelled fun.

  Finally, after an awkward silence that stretched for far too long, Azquil moved a little closer and took her hand. “Do you really want me to stay?”

  “I want you to follow your heart,” Tiji said, which was as close as she was able to come to asking if he loved her.

  “Then I will stay here,” he said without hesitation. “With you.”

  “But you want to see Jelidia.”

  “I want you more.”

  She wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so she didn’t even try, figuring that at this point, actions would say more than words. So she kissed him, her skin flickering with desire as he took her into his arms, and tingling as if they were sharing a moth. Maybe that was the true magic of the Genoa moth, she thought, allowing Azquil to push her back down on the warm rock, as his flickering tongue danced over her body. It didn’t just enhance feelings, it simulated love.