The Palace of Impossible Dreams

by Jennifer Fallon

  “Thank you, Lord Stellan,” Tryan said, giving Nyah an irritated glare. “If we find anything interesting, you’ll be the first to know.”

  The duke nodded and smiled and took Nyah by the hand. After ordering her to say good morning to her stepfather and her step-aunt, he led her from the room.

  It wasn’t until he’d closed the door on them that Warlock realised Stellan Desean had not only stopped the immortals from asking any questions of the little princess, but had found a way to distract them from her—and his own Scard-born disobedience—without raising any suspicion at all.

  On the down side, in the process he may have given the immortals access to something far worse.

  Warlock didn’t know what the map was for, but if Tryan the Devil and the Immortal Maiden were anxious to get their hands on whatever treasure the cards were hiding, it was unlikely to be a good thing for anything mortal living on Amyrantha.

  Chapter 59

  House Medura sent a fleet of fifteen, shallow-draughted, amphibian-towed ships into the wetlands to confront the Tide Lords who’d dared challenge their authority. Cydne’s family was not alone in their endeavour. Several ships in the armada carried the colours of the House Pardura and there was even one carrying the colours of the Physicians’ Guild. The ship in the lead, however, although it wore the colours of House Medura and the guild, was an entirely different problem because standing on the deck were a dozen clerics wearing dark, flowing robes and the pious expressions of true believers.

  “Tides,” Arryl muttered when she saw them. “I should have anticipated this.”

  “Who are they?” Declan asked.

  “Clerics. From the Church of the Lord of Temperance.”

  Tipped off by Azquil and Tiji, they were waiting on the dock when the ships arrived. The three immortals were standing across the end of the wharf as the lead ship threw out lines, which the amphibians hurriedly pulled out of the water to secure to the pylons. The rest of the ships hung back in reserve, waiting to see the outcome of the negotiations before they moved in.

  “They’re the priests from Jaxyn’s cult?” Although Declan knew of the Church of the Lord of Temperance, and could identify some of its members who’d passed though Glaeba, they were a secretive bunch. Almost as secretive as the Cabal. He’d never actually met one of their clerics before.

  “They’d be a joke if they weren’t so deadly serious,” Cayal told him, as they watched the gangway thump down onto the dock. “They’ve been known to order adulterous women stoned, punish members of the Church for questioning their doctrine. They believe all sex is sinful, except for the purposes of procreation—although apparently the men can take as many slaves to their beds as they want, because they’re not actually people. Drinking to excess is forbidden; any sort of fun, really.”

  Declan smiled at the irony. “Clearly, they’ve never met the Lord of Temperance in person.”

  “Doubt they want to,” Arryl said. “They’re entranced by the idea of him, not who he really is.” Then she noticed the two naked women tied to the mast and Declan felt the Tide surge angrily around her. “There’s Ambria and Medwen. Bastards.”

  Declan studied the women curiously, a little surprised at how young Medwen looked. Ambria seemed to be in her mid-thirties, but dusky-skinned Medwen seemed little more than a girl. Neither woman looked particularly bothered by their predicament, however. Ambria seemed annoyed, Medwen quite bored.

  How many other times had they found themselves in similar situations? he wondered. How many times in the past had they been run out of towns as witches, tortured for not growing old . . .

  Tides, how many times do you have to be tied naked to a stake and paraded around for all to humiliate you, and ridicule you, to become bored by it?

  With the gangway secured, the priests began to disembark in single file and array themselves across the dock facing the immortals. As they did, another two clerics untied the two immortal women and dragged them down the gangway too, forcing them to kneel in front of the clerics. Ulag Pardura and the others on the ship stayed where they were, apparently content to let their clerics deal with these presumptuous immortals. The last man to disembark wore a long black robe, a tall pointed hat and carried a gloriously jewelled staff, which to Declan’s mind, didn’t seem very temperate at all.

  The cleric stepped forward, pointing to the naked immortals. “The spawn of evil is upon us!”

  “The spawn of evil is upon us!” the line of clerics behind him repeated in a monotone.

  “We curse these evil creatures!”

  The clerics echoed his words again, in the same, dead voices.

  “Not wasting any time on small talk, I see,” Arryl remarked.

  “You don’t negotiate with evil,” Cayal said. “First rule of the religious fanatics’ handbook, Arryl. Engaging a demon in conversation only gives him an opportunity to beguile and tempt you. You should know that.”

  “We call upon the power of the almighty, all powerful Jaxyn, Lord of Temperance, to give us strength!” The cleric chanted over them, making a point not to look any of the five immortals before him in the eye.

  “We curse these evil creatures!” the chorus line echoed dutifully.

  “We call on the power of our deity,” the cleric leading the chant cried out, his voice full of passion now he was really getting warmed up. “We call on his power, his wisdom and his wrath, to banish these minions of evil back to the demonic realm from whence they came!”

  “We curse these evil creatures!”

  “What are they doing?” Declan asked, not sure of the purpose of all this flowery prayer.

  Arryl shrugged, a little bemused. “I think we’re being exorcised.”

  Cayal laughed aloud, which obviously infuriated the head cleric, even though he was trying to give the impression he was ignoring the three demons blocking his way into the village. “Exorcised? Tides, does he think we’re going to vanish in a puff of smoke when he’s finished?”

  “I imagine he’s hoping we will.”

  “How would he know?” Declan asked. “I mean, he can’t have done this before.”

  “Which is probably why he hasn’t discovered yet that it doesn’t work.”

  “We call on the power of the deity,” the cleric repeated, almost yelling now. He raised his staff high. “We call on his power, his wisdom and his wrath, to banish these minions of evil back to the demonic realm from whence they came!”

  “We curse these evil creatures and banish them from our realm!” echoed the line of clerics. Unlike their leader, the priests seemed to have fallen into a trance.

  “Do you think this is going to take long?” Declan asked.

  “No, because I’m putting an end to it.” Arryl made to step forward toward her immortal sisters to aid them, but Cayal held her back.

  “Now, now,” he said. “It probably took these poor fellows years of kneeling on really uncomfortable cold stone floors to learn all this crap, and it would be very unkind of us to stop them now, before they’ve had a chance to treat us to the full benefit of their suffering.”

  “I banish you, spawn of evil!” the head cleric called to the heavens, and then he banged his staff on the dock three times. “Once, twice and thrice do I banish thee from this realm!”

  Right on cue, the chorus line chimed in. “We curse these evil creatures and banish them from our realm!”

  Arryl glared at the Immortal Prince in annoyance. “I’m glad you’re having fun, Cayal, because Ambria and Medwen are—”

  “Just fine,” Cayal said. “Let him finish.”

  “He has a point, my lady,” Declan said, realising what Cayal was getting at. Ambria and Medwen, although naked, on their knees and clearly fed up with being prisoners, were not in any immediate danger. The clerics, however, obviously believed they had the power, awarded them by their god, to deal with any other immortal interlopers. “If they don’t finish the ceremony and learn for themselves that it doesn’t work, they’ll just keep com
ing back to try it again.”

  Cayal glanced at Declan and nodded approvingly. “Tides, Rodent, you may not be as stupid as you look, after all.”

  “By the power of the Lord of Temperance, he who commands the Tide, he who led us from the wilderness and into the light of his pure presence, I command thee to flee back to the darkness where thee belong. Begone, foul demons. Begone, whores and drunkards. I command thee in the name of my Lord!”

  “Fine. Have it your way. Just so long as you know I think this is ridiculous, and we shouldn’t be pandering to these fools.” Arryl folded her arms in annoyance, but made no further move to interrupt the cleric.

  “We curse these evil creatures and banish them from our realm.”

  “Is this the first time they’ve been here, my lady?”

  Arryl nodded. “We’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to keep our presence here secret. That’s what was so useful about being known as the Trinity. Nobody but the people living in the wetlands thought we were real.”

  “Do you think Jaxyn knows about this?” Declan asked, as the cleric ushered a young man with a shaved head forward. He was carrying a small bowl of burning incense. The cleric took the chain from him and started waving it around. The smell, when it reached Declan and the others, was sickly sweet.

  “Let the sacred smoke sear your lungs, as the purity of our Lord’s essence chokes the evil from your souls.”

  “We curse these evil creatures and banish them from our realm.”

  “He knows there’s a church where they follow the Lord of Temperance,” Cayal said. “Not sure if he knows anything about this nonsense. He really doesn’t like being known as the Lord of Temperance, so he’s never been that interested in them.”

  “Let the spirit of the Lord of Temperance imbue thy being! Leave this realm, evil demons, I command thee in the name of our Lord, or risk his righteous wrath!”

  “We curse these evil creatures and banish them from our realm.”

  “Do you think he’d approve?”

  “I think he’d fall about laughing at them, actually,” Arryl said with a frown. “Jaxyn never was one for ceremony.”

  “I’m sure if they were offering up virgins as sacrifices, he’d find a way to cope, though,” Cayal remarked.

  “Begone, wicked whores and drunkards! Begone, men who would lay with their own kind. Begone, women who would seduce righteous men from their wives. Begone, men who would lay with animals. Begone, all who sully our Lord’s gift, by using it for pleasure.”

  The cleric’s face had turned quite red and there was a note of desperation in his voice. Declan guessed the poor chap thought they’d be long gone by now.

  Wonder what’s going to happen when he runs out of chants?

  “We curse these evil creatures and banish them from our realm!”

  “They really don’t know our Jaxyn at all, do they?” Cayal said, starting to sound a little cross. “Tides, how long can one exorcism take? That chanting is really starting to grate.”

  “You were the one who wanted to let them finish,” Arryl reminded him.

  Cayal sighed heavily, but said nothing further. Declan could feel the Tide around him, though, swirling dangerously. For the clerics’ sake, he hoped the ceremony took a little longer, because all hell was going to break loose when they were done and they learned their exorcism ceremony had done nothing but irritate the immortals they foolishly thought they could banish.

  Chapter 60

  It took the better part of three hours for the head cleric to run through his full repertoire of chants, prayers and curses, designed to banish the immortal spawn of evil from this worldly realm. By the time he was done, the sun was high in the sky, the heat was oppressive and Cayal was fantasising about making the cleric bleed to death through his eyeballs in retaliation for forcing him to suffer through this interminable and utterly futile ceremony.

  The cleric banged his staff another three times on the dock and looked around, his expression confused when the immortals failed to vaporise where they stood through the power of prayer.

  “Are we done now?” Cayal asked.

  The cleric glared at him worriedly for a moment and then turned to his priests and raised his staff. “They are impostors!” he cried. “True demons would have been banished with the power of our Lord’s prayers.”

  Tides, Cayal thought. This boy thinks on his feet. No wonder he’s the head cleric.

  “Medwen! Ambria! Come here.”

  The two other members of the Trinity, who’d knelt silently, though with increasing irritation, in the hot sun during the entire exorcism, climbed to their feet. The priests who ran forward to restrain them got no more than a couple of steps before they began to gasp and choke, courtesy of the Rodent who was demonstrating a tad more initiative—and control of the Tide—than Cayal felt comfortable with. Medwen turned, kicked the nearest choking cleric in the head, and then walked up the dock with Ambria.

  Cayal weakened the metal on their chains with the Tide as they approached, watching the clerics pale as the bindings melted away, with a degree of malicious satisfaction. Arryl hurried to them, embraced both women, and then led them back along the dock toward the village, pausing only to tell him on the way past, “Make sure they don’t come back.”

  The other women followed her, gazing with open curiosity and puzzlement at Hawkes. Arryl would explain their new Tide Lord later, Cayal supposed. Right now, they had the Church of the Lord of Temperance and this wretched invasion fleet to deal with.

  He nodded and spared the women no more thought, turning to face the clerics with Hawkes at his side, who, for all his faults and ignorance of being immortal, certainly knew how to intimidate men. Of all the professions one could have trained in before becoming immortal, Cayal supposed spymaster was among the most useful.

  Cayal could feel the Tide surging as Hawkes fought to keep it under control.

  “You ready for this?”

  “No,” Hawkes answered honestly.

  Cayal smiled. “Let’s do it then.”

  “Do what, exactly?”

  “Follow my lead. I created the Lord of Temperance, you know. I can take him down just as easily.”

  “You’re going to pretend to be Jaxyn?”

  “In a word . . . yes.”

  “You don’t think they’ll notice that you’re not?”

  Cayal shrugged. “These people don’t know Jaxyn from a pile of horse shit.”

  “How are you going to prove you’re him?”

  Cayal sighed. He didn’t have time to lecture the Rodent on theology. “The trouble with any belief system based on faith is that it’s based on, well, faith. You have to believe, with your heart and soul, something you can’t prove and quite often something you have solid evidence to the contrary. So, if you have faith, you don’t need proof. Confronted with your god, therefore, to ask for proof is to admit you have no faith . . .”

  Hawkes stared at him for a moment and then shook his head. “You’re insane.”

  “Have a bit of faith,” Cayal couldn’t help responding.

  The spymaster looked at him askance and then shook his head. “I’m going to regret doing anything you advise, aren’t I?”

  “Maybe. One day. But not today,” Cayal assured him. “Now . . . front and centre, Rodent. We’re on.”

  Together they turned to confront the head cleric, who was looking quite panicked, as were his followers, who seemed to accept his notion of impostors right up until the chains melted off Ambria and Medwen. On the ships behind them the railings were crowded with silent onlookers. The sailors and marines waiting impatiently to find out how much longer they would have to stand around doing nothing, before they were allowed to disembark and begin wiping Watershed Falls—and any other village in the wetlands they could reach—off the face of the map, for the crime of killing Cydne Medura.

  Pity they’d not brought a few ships full of Crasii felines into battle. Then he could really have had some fun.

 
“How dare you take my name in vain!”

  The cleric looked at Cayal in shock. “What?”

  “Don’t you know who this is?” Hawkes asked, falling in with Cayal’s subterfuge without so much as an eye-blink. “On your knees before the Lord of Temperance, you pitiful fool!”

  “I . . . er . . .”

  Tides, they talk all the time about the will of their gods, but they never spare a thought for what they’d do if confronted by him in person.

  “Why do you think your prayers don’t work on me?” Cayal asked. “You cannot banish the agents of evil unless they are . . . well, the agents . . . of evil.”

  “You are the Lord of Temperance?” The cleric looked very worried, and not, Cayal suspected, because he’d just called his deity a minion of evil. The problem he had now was how to determine if Cayal was telling the truth without appearing to lack faith. Given Cayal had just survived his exorcism and made his prisoners’ chains dissolve, this man standing before him might well be his god, so the cleric couldn’t really afford to give the impression he was questioning his identity.

  On the other hand, he didn’t want to look like a fool . . .

  “If you are the Lord of Temperance, then you will bless our venture this day.”

  “It is not your place to tell your god what he will or will not bless,” Hawkes said. “I am curious, though, about why you’re still on your feet.”

  It was a little bit worrying, how good the spymaster was at things like this.

  The cleric stared at them blankly for a moment and then fell to his knees, motioning behind him to make his priests follow suit.

  “Much better.”

  “My lord . . .”

  “I have not given you permission to speak.” Cayal looked over the kneeling priests, wondering what would make the most impact on these people. Arryl’s insistence he restrict the loss of life to a minimum made the job much more challenging. There must be a thousand men on these gathered ships, waiting to disembark. A thousand corpses washing up against the docks of the Delta Settlement would have sent the message he wanted to get across rather pointedly. “Nor,” he added, looking down at the priest, “have I given you permission to annihilate my servants.”