The Palace of Impossible Dreams

by Jennifer Fallon

  The cleric risked an upward glance. “Your servants, my lord?”

  “The Crasii were made by us . . . me . . .” he corrected, hoping the cleric didn’t notice the slip. These people considered everything in creation Jaxyn’s work. No true god, after all, needed help whipping up a whole world and every creature on it, into being. “They are not for you to remove on a whim.”

  “These creatures murdered the scion of House Medura, my lord.”

  “After you sent him here to murder my servants.”

  “That was not the work of your believers, my lord,” the cleric hurried to assure him. “That was the orders of the Physicians’ Guild.”

  “Then bring me someone from this Physicians’ Guild,” Cayal ordered loudly “so he may explain to me why I shouldn’t destroy every man here for disrespecting my handiwork.”

  The cleric signalled to one of his priests, who hurried up the gangway of the ship tied to the dock. A few moments later a man emerged from the crowd, wearing an embroidered waistcoat and a very worried expression. Like a pack of dogs, every man here was bowing submissively to the one behaving as if he was born to rule them. That was something Cayal had learned in Tenacia when he was seeding the Crasii farms. There wasn’t that much difference, really, between the way the pack animals and humans acted when they got together in large numbers. Victory invariably belonged to the one who was able to intimidate the others into believing he had the upper hand.

  The nervous-looking man came down the gangway and stood before Cayal.

  “On your knees,” Hawkes ordered.

  “I do not belong to the Church of the Lord of Temperance,” the physician replied. “I’m certainly not going to bow to some fool claiming to be a god. This nonsense has gone on long enough.”

  Cayal was very relieved to hear it. The cleric had no choice but to believe him, which meant there wasn’t anything to prove. But Cayal needed a show of force. In the end, if the wetlands were ever going to be left in peace, they needed to convince every man here it was unwise to return, not just some easily deluded priest.

  “You are the one who ordered the poisoning of the wetland Crasii to stop the spread of swamp fever?” Cayal asked. He didn’t mind if the man remained standing. The others would be able to see him—and his fate—better that way.

  “We value human life over the life of mere animals,” the man replied, neatly avoiding taking responsibility for actually issuing the order. “And the creatures who murdered a human in cold blood must be called to account for it.”

  “The wetlands and every creature in them are under my protection.”

  “Interesting,” the physician remarked. “I thought the Trinity were the goddesses of the wetlands. Does the Church of the Lord of Temperance now claim them as parishioners too?” The man looked thoughtfully at the kneeling cleric, apparently more concerned with the political implications of such an arrangement than he was with the danger he might be in from the self-proclaimed god he was challenging.

  “The Trinity are merely my agents,” Cayal said, having already thought up an answer to that rather sticky little theological detail. “They protect the wetlands on my behalf. You, on the other hand, send poisoners here to kill my people. Someone must be called to account for that too, don’t you think?”

  The physician cast his gaze over Cayal’s shoulder at the empty village behind them. Only Arryl, Medwen, Ambria, Arkady, the two chameleons that always seemed to be hanging around the Rodent and the feline who’d caused all this trouble were visible.

  “You’re going to call us to account?” the man from the Physicians’ Guild asked, with a short, sceptical laugh. “How?”

  “Ah, finally,” Cayal said, glancing at Hawkes with a grin he couldn’t smother.

  As the man fell headfirst into the trap, Cayal plunged into the Tide, feeling Hawkes following him a split second later.

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Chapter 61

  Guessing the prisoners would want something to wear once they were free, Arkady sent Jojo to find them some clothes during the interminable wait forced upon them by the exorcism ceremony. When they were finally released, Arkady was waiting with a wrap for each of the immortals when Arryl hurried them away from the dock. There seemed to be no reason for the women to be undressed, other than the persistent and disturbing tendency of Senestran men to humiliate women they considered beneath them, by removing their clothes.

  When Ambria and Medwen reached Arkady and the two immortals realised the woman handing them clothes was the same woman they’d condemned to death, however, they seemed mightily displeased.

  “Was I imagining things or did we not tie this murderous little bitch to the Justice Tree a few days ago?” Medwen asked, her dark eyes studying Arkady with open hostility, as she snatched the wrap from her hand.

  “Forget her,” Ambria said, barely even acknowledging Arkady or Tiji and Azquil who stood beside her as she dressed. “I’m more interested in who that immortal is with Cayal. And for that matter, what in the name of the Tides is Cayal doing here?”

  “Defending us, no less,” Medwen added with a worried frown.

  Arryl smiled reassuringly at her immortal sisters. “The who is Declan Hawkes. The why is because I made a deal with Cayal to help us. As for Arkady, here . . . well, she’s a friend of Hawkes’s. He . . . intervened in her execution.”

  “Intervened? Tides, Arryl, where did he come from? Who is he? What is he? I can feel his power from here,” Ambria said.

  Arkady stared toward the dock, more than a little nervous about what would happen next. It was hard to tell what was going on down there. A portly man in an embroidered waistcoat seemed to be pushing through the crowd toward the gangway on the deck of the vessel tied to the wharf. Declan and Cayal were still standing in front of the clerics, much as they had been for the past few hours. The women were too far away to hear what was said, and Arkady had no way of detecting any movement on the Tide.

  “What deal did you do with Cayal, Arryl?” Medwen asked unhappily as she tied the wrap around her body. With her hair down and her dark, dusky skin, even grubby and dishevelled, she was gorgeous. It wasn’t hard to see why Cayal found her desirable. Arkady imagined this was what she’d looked like in Magreth, when she’d first been made immortal. She seemed little more than an adolescent, which was disconcerting because she had to be at least eight thousand years old.

  “He wants me . . . us . . . to go to Jelidia with him. Lukys is down there and has apparently discovered a way for Cayal to die and claims he needs all the immortal help he can find to make it happen. I agreed I’d go with him, if he helped me rescue you two and ensure the Physicians’ Guild doesn’t come back the moment our backs are turned.”

  Ambria shook her head. “Lukys is having a lend of him, Arryl. He needs all the immortal help he can get for something, I don’t doubt, but I don’t believe for a moment that it has anything to do with helping Cayal die.”

  “Be that as it may, that’s the deal I’ve struck,” Arryl said. “I promised I’d go with him. Although I didn’t make the same promise on your behalf.”

  “A good thing too,” Ambria said. “I’m not going anywhere with that maniac.” She turned to Arkady. “Who is this Declan Hawkes?”

  Arkady took a step backward in fear. Ambria was much more abrupt and much less friendly than Arryl. “He’s . . . a friend. I’ve known him since we were children. His grandfather was a Tidewatcher.”

  “Maralyce’s son, if you believe Hawkes’s tale,” Arryl added.

  “Maralyce gave birth?” Medwen said in surprise. “Tides, I would have thought her long past that.”

  “In the normal course of events, we’d all be long past it,” Ambria said. She turned to Arryl. “Do you believe him?”

  “I suppose,” Arryl replied with a shrug. “It’s all been happening a little too quickly to give the matter too much thought, to be honest. I was worried about you two.”

  Medwen smiled briefly. “
You needn’t have worried. Besides stripping us naked, beating us a bit and threatening to rape us if we didn’t confess to whatever it was they decided we were guilty of, they didn’t hurt us much.”

  “They threatened to rape you?” Arkady said, before she could stop herself. For some reason, hearing that infuriated her. Why did men think they could command such power? What gave them the right to use what was, essentially, the weakest part of their body, to inflict the most pain?

  Medwen didn’t seem nearly as bothered by the notion as Arkady. “Men always threaten that. It’s the last—and sometimes the first—resort of the unimaginative interrogator.”

  “They should have threatened to keep praying to Jaxyn,” Ambria grumbled. “That would have had me confessing to anything they wanted to hear, had it gone on much longer.” She looked past Arkady and beckoned Azquil forward. “Be a pet and find me some wine, would you, Azquil. I could do with a—” She stopped abruptly and turned to look at the dock. “Hello! We’re on.”

  Arkady guessed she meant that Cayal or Declan (or maybe both of them) was drawing on the Tide.

  They all turned to watch the gathered ships as a scream split the relatively quiet morning, followed by a splash as someone fell from the rigging on one of the vessels anchored further out in the channel. A few moments later, another man fell, and then another. Astonished, Arkady looked around, wondering if the Tide Lords were creating a wind to blow the sailors off the masts, but the air was still, even the myriad wetland insects pausing for this momentous confrontation.

  “Tides,” Ambria said, as another sailor fell, “surely that’s not Cayal demonstrating restraint?”

  “I made him promise to keep the casualties to a minimum,” Arryl said. She flinched as yet another man hit the water with a resounding splash.

  Arkady had no idea what they were talking about. From her perspective, for no apparent reason men had started falling from the ships. “What are they doing?”

  Medwen turned to Arkady, her expression quite peeved. “Why? Hoping you can use it on the next lot of hapless innocents you want to dispose of?”

  “Leave her be, Medwen,” Arryl said. “It wasn’t Arkady’s fault.”

  “So she says . . .”

  Arryl ignored the comment and turned to Arkady to explain. “They seem to be using magic to disrupt the senses of the sailors. As discouragements go, it’s about as benign as you can get using the Tide.”

  “Not something Cayal would normally do?”

  “Not as a rule,” Ambria agreed. She looked at Arryl, her expression sceptical. “Which means he really wants our help, or your new immortal is actually a good influence on him.” She turned back to watch, frowning at the panic spreading through the armada. There were scores of men lining the rails and quite a few of them appeared to be vomiting into the water. The clerics were chanting again, although it was hard to tell if they were back to trying their exorcism or if they believed the men standing before them on the dock really were gods and they were offering them prayers of worship.

  Within a few minutes, even some of the men leaning on the railings began to fall. The amphibians slipped their harnesses and began to drag the victims to safety. Her heart in her throat, Arkady watched this strange scene unfold, trying to make sense of what she was witnessing. The idea of the immortals using magic to terrify mortals into submission seemed only slightly less ludicrous than the idea Declan was one of them. Was he wielding the Tide like Cayal? With Cayal? Did he have the same sort of power?

  Tides, suppose he has the same potential as someone like Kentravyon? Will he lose his temper some day and destroy civilisation as we know it?

  Will he turn into a monster?

  Arkady’s reconciliation with Declan was too fresh, the realisation they were finally together after so many years apart too fragile to rattle with that sort of doubt. And then a memory flashed to mind, one of those childhood snippets that had an unfortunate habit of clawing its way to the surface when she least expected it. It was a memory from back when they were happy, back when they were free to roam the slums at will.

  They’d been watching a parade, Arkady recalled, she and Declan, one that passed through the slums of Lebec on its way to the more salubrious part of town. She didn’t remember exactly what it was for, only that the king and queen had been part of it, and the old Duke of Lebec. It must have been spring, around the time of the annual King’s Ball, because the king rarely visited Lebec at any other time of the year. They’d watched all those fabulously dressed, wealthy and powerful people ride past for an hour or more, dreaming of a life neither of them ever imagined they would be a part of.

  “You know, Pop says it’s not good for any man to be too rich or too powerful,” Declan remarked after a time.

  “Why not?” Arkady remembered asking, clinging to Declan for fear of falling from the high wall he’d coaxed her into climbing to afford them a better view of the proceedings.

  “He says power corrupts men. And the more you get, the more it corrupts you.”

  “So, what happens if you get all the power in the world?”

  Arkady remembered Declan grinning mischievously. “I dunno. I think it would be fun, though, to find out . . .”

  “The new boy seems to be holding his own on the Tide,” Medwen remarked with a frown, dragging Arkady’s attention back to the matter at hand. “How did you say he was made?”

  Arryl answered Medwen without taking her eyes off the scene on the dock. “He was accidentally immolated in a fire. We think he had more than a Tidewatcher grandfather too. We think he had an immortal father.”

  “Cayal suggested it might be Lukys,” Arkady added.

  Medwen and Ambria both turned to look at her briefly. “Lukys found a way to have an immortal son?” The dark immortal smiled sourly at her sister.

  Ambria shook her head. “I don’t care whose son he is,” she said. “I’ve spent too much time caught up in the schemes and plots of the Emperor and Empress of the Five Realms, thank you very much. I’ve seen firsthand what immortality does to a family and I want no part of it.” She fixed her gaze on Arryl. “Go to Jelidia if you want. Take Medwen with you. Take this mortal assassin and this feline here that you seem to have acquired; take all of them with you, if you must. But this reeks of trouble I want no part of. I’m staying here.”

  Chapter 62

  Declan’s blood sang with the Tide. There was nothing comparable in his experience; nothing in his life had prepared him for the exhilaration, the power, the feeling of invincibility that imbued every fibre of his being when he plunged into the Tide.

  But the feeling that somehow it was wrong tainted his elation. All his life, Declan had been taught to hate the Tide Lords, to despise their weakness, their venality. How easily they seemed to succumb to the lure of power, he’d once arrogantly scoffed. How quickly they scrabbled for dominance over each other.

  Now he was here with the Tide surging through him, Declan no longer wondered at how easily men fell victim to its lure.

  He wondered how they managed to resist it at all.

  They were not swimming very deep in the Tide. Declan knew that. They were merely making waves that disrupted the inner-ear fluids of the men arrayed against them, until barely a man among them was able to stand upright, and that took hardly any power at all. Some of the men reacted badly, the disorientation making them ill. Others fell, either from the rigging or where they were standing. The amphibians remained relatively unaffected. Cayal had shown Declan exactly where to pitch his disruptive wave so it would affect only humans.

  He was taking his promise to Arryl about minimum casualties seriously, it seemed.

  There was no sense of time, swimming the Tide; just a feeling of exhilaration matched by nothing Declan had ever experienced in the mortal world. How easy it would be, he realised, to swim out deep, to drown in the glory of this. How easy to call on every drop of magic you could drink and not care about the consequences.

  Tides, what must it f
eel like when the Tide is at its peak?

  “Concentrate!” Cayal barked impatiently beside him, as Declan began to drift.

  He reeled in his senses, glad of the reminder. It was so easy to slip away. So easy to let the Tide take you whole.

  Causing a cataclysm, even accidentally, didn’t seem nearly so implausible any longer.

  “Stop it!”

  Declan opened his eyes at the physician’s cry and looked around in amazement. The water was full of men struggling for air; the ships lined with sick, disoriented sailors.

  “Enough!” the man from the guild cried again, looking around him in horror. He was on his knees, a pool of vomit on the dock in front of him. “Stop this sickness!”

  It was then that Declan realised the physician, even though he’d experienced the same symptoms as the other men, had no notion of what they’d done to him. He thought their magical disruption of his sense of balance an illness, some sort of fast-spreading plague.

  And Cayal, apparently, was quite happy to let him keep thinking it.

  “I warned you swamp fever would seem mild by comparison,” the immortal said, looking down on the man without pity. “So let this be a lesson to you.” He turned to address the cleric and his minions. “You have witnessed my power, priest, and now I charge you to take word back to the rest of your people. The power of the Lord of Temperance must not be denied.”

  “I am your servant, O Great and Fearful Lord,” the cleric said, touching his forehead to the dock.

  Looking more than a little smug, Cayal observed the chaos that had been, until a short while ago, an orderly and dangerous invasion fleet. He opened his arms wide, speaking loudly enough to be heard by every man present. “You will inform your people that the wetlands enjoy my special protection. No man who does not believe in me, and the power I have vested in the Trinity, shall be permitted to set foot in this region.” He stopped for a moment, and then added, “I command you to send clerics here, to enforce my will. They will have no control over the residents of the wetlands, only my permission to destroy any non-believer who dares sully this sacred ground. So sayest I, Jaxyn, Lord of Temperance!”