The Chaos Crystal

by Jennifer Fallon

  CHAPTER 4

  The grand entrance to the ice palace was a marvel of both architecture and magic. Tide-wrought beams constructed of translucent ice held up a vaulted ceiling, which was all but lost in the faint fog that lingered in the shadowed nooks and crannies of the vast building. The floors were darker, made of a substance that looked like granite, but proved, on closer inspection, to be polished permafrost. The temperature was warmer here in the main hall than outside — mostly because of the reduced wind-chill — but that didn't seem to bring any comfort to the Crasii slaves who hurried to attend them. They were rugged up against the cold in furs and thick, sheepskin-lined boots, carrying trays with steaming cups of mulled wine for their masters. Declan accepted a cup and sipped it distractedly. His mind was on other things.

  Maralyce's arrival in Jelidia worried Declan a great deal. His great-grandmother was not, in his experience, particularly interested in socialising with the other immortals. And he was quite certain she hadn't come here just to gawk at Lukys's fabulous ice palace. Her decision to abandon her mountain home in Glaeba and join the others here in Jelidia was as drastic as it was unexpected and, Declan feared, didn't augur well for the future.

  Lukys used the excuse of seeing his guest settled to escape with Maralyce in almost indecent haste after they returned from the coast, leaving Declan staring at the others, wondering what the Tides was going on.

  Apparently he wasn't the only one finding that Maralyce's arrival was cause for concern. Taryx had wandered off on his own business, while Kentravyon had left them some way back on the ice, for reasons he felt no urge to explain. But Arryl was looking as worried as Declan felt.

  'Have you considered the possibility, Cayal,' Arryl remarked as Lukys and Maralyce, their heads close together in conversation, disappeared down one of the long broad halls of the palace, dwarfed by the majestic size of the building, 'that Lukys's agenda is so far removed from what you want that he may have no interest in your problems at all?'

  Still lost to the melancholy that had gripped him earlier as he had watched the ice disintegrating, Cayal seemed unconcerned about Lukys's motives. He'd said little on the return journey from the coast, other than to greet Maralyce as if he wasn't surprised to see her. He watched her leave with Lukys now, and then glanced at Arryl with a shrug. 'What Lukys tells me about the Chaos Crystal makes sense, Arryl. If it focuses the Tide and it's the Tide that makes us immortal, then why shouldn't it be the Tide that unmakes us?'

  'Lukys told me he had a way of effectively putting an end to an immortal,' Declan said, downing the last of his mulled wine before handing the cup back to one of the waiting canine slaves hovering about, 'I might be splitting hairs, but Arryl's right. He didn't actually say he could kill one.'

  Cayal glared at him for a moment and then stalked off without saying a word.

  Declan looked to Arryl. 'Was it something I said?'

  'He doesn't want to hear you questioning the possibility that he might die soon.'

  'Do you want to die?' Declan asked, wondering why more of the immortals weren't afflicted with Cayal's particular form of madness.

  'I get bored sometimes,' Arryl said. 'We all do. But I haven't run out of things to do yet.' 'Cayal has.'

  'No,' Arryl said. 'Cayal wants to die because he's afraid he might run out of things to do, not because it's already happened.'

  'He should just do what I do,' Pellys said, coming up behind them. 'Make the memories go away.' He'd been perched on one of the palace's many tall, thin spires when they arrived, something he seemed to do a lot lately. Declan looked over his shoulder to find Pellys walking toward them from the entrance, holding what looked like Kentravyon's incomplete carving, but that wasn't possible because the madman had tossed his handiwork into the sea before they headed for home several hours ago.

  'What's that you have there, Pellys?' Declan asked. The Tide Lord was covered with a thin layer of snow and ice. Declan wondered if that meant he'd simply taken a dive off the tower, rather than climb down. If one didn't mind a short period of intense pain while one's broken bones healed, it was certainly the quickest way down.

  'Kentravyon made it for me. He says it's the face of God.'

  Declan stared at the ice carving, shocked to realise it wasn't a human face but a perfectly formed skull constructed of ice. It was a little disturbing to think that was how Kentravyon saw himself.

  'Do you recall anything about the time before you lost your memories, Pellys?' Arryl asked.

  Pellys shook his head, studying the carving with great interest. 'No. I mean, I know there was a time before then. But I don't remember any of it. So I must have started again. Cayal could do that. Then he'd be happy.'

  'I think there's the minor issue of causing a global catastrophe in the process,' Declan reminded him.

  'Didn't you sink Magreth into the ocean when you lost your head?'

  The Tide Lord shrugged. 'That's the price you pay for peace.'

  'You call that peace?' Declan asked. 'A lot of innocent people paid for your peace, Pellys, not you.'

  'And what if they did?' Pellys replied unapologetically. 'Mortals are going to die anyway, Declan. I mean, it's not as if we're doing much more than giving nature a bit of a hurry-on.' He put the skull in his pocket and smiled at them. 'I like to watch things die.'

  Declan was chilled by Pellys's cheerful homicidal- mania. And anxious to be gone from it. He never knew what to say to Pellys. 'I think I'm going to find Maralyce and ask what she's doing here.'

  'If she'll speak to you,' Pellys warned. 'She's a crabby old bitch.'

  'She'll speak to me,' Declan said. 'I'm family.'

  It proved harder to locate Maralyce than Declan anticipated. Although they had only left the main hall a few minutes ago, neither his father nor his great- grandmother was anywhere to be found when Declan went looking for them. Declan baulked when he thought of them as his relatives. Arguably, Lukys was older than Maralyce, but when one was talking of life spans that crossed millennia, he supposed one's chronological age wasn't really a consideration.

  He'd expected to find Maralyce with Lukys in the expansive wing where the guest suites were located. However, he could find nobody in the cavernous white halls but the Crash slaves brought here by Lukys to keep the palace running.

  It was Jojo who finally located his great- grandmother for him. Although Declan could feel the others on the Tide, with so many of them gathered in the one place, he lacked the experience to sort one from another, or even determine the exact direction

  from where the sense of them was coming. Jojo, with her ability to sense a Tide Lord from across a room and her sharp feline sense of smell, was able to pinpoint the direction and informed him there were two immortals in the lower levels of the palace, somewhere to the east of where they were currently standing in the palace's massive entrance hall.

  Declan ordered her to stay put and headed through the ice-carved halls, with their fanciful arches and impossibly beautiful polished-ice walls, into the lower levels of the ice palace, which he assumed was where the palace storerooms were located.

  The labyrinthine underbelly of the ice palace was much more functional than the upper chambers, which seemed designed simply to overawe. The walls were much less polished down here and behind each burning torch a small hollow had formed in the wall where the flames had melted the ice. Every few feet, beneath each torch, was a cascade of frozen droplets forming a decorative frieze as the melting ice re-froze once the droplets had escaped the heat of the flames.

  From the moment he'd first arrived here at Lukys's palace at the bottom of the world, Declan had wondered at the need for anything so massive. It seemed too pretentious for a man who liked to portray himself as a pragmatist.

  Declan took another set of ice-carved stairs downward, the sense of the other two Tide Lords somewhat clearer now that the bulk of the ice forming the upper floors dulled the interference of the others. He followed the torchlit hall for some way, past the storeroo
ms he was expecting. The flickering light reflected off the icy walls in a rainbow of fractured light. All the while Declan could feel the sense of Maralyce and Lukys drawing closer, even though the sensation remained oddly muffled.

  And then, at the point where Declan had walked for so long he was starting to wonder if he was even

  still under the palace, he came to another staircase, glowing with a bright, faintly green-tinged light that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

  As soon as he began to descend the wide, curved steps, the sense of the other two Tide Lords became clearer. He headed downward, on a seemingly endless descent, wondering how far below ground he was. Before he saw the other Tide Lords, however, he heard them, their voices funnelled to him with startling clarity by the unique acoustics of the curved stairs.

  '... going to be enough?' he heard Maralyce ask.

  Declan stopped. He could feel Lukys and Maralyce on the Tide, but hoped they might be distracted enough by their discussion that they wouldn't notice him.

  'It's nearly twice as many as we used last time,' he heard Lukys reply.

  'What are you talking about?' Maralyce sounded impatient. 'The addition of Cayal and Declan isn't going to double the effect. Arryl and Taryx's contribution will be minimal at best. Even together, they won't make up the power of a full Tide Lord. If Medwen and Ambria had come with Arryl, as you claimed they would, then they may have made a difference ...'

  'I did invite them, you know. But they didn't want to join the party.'

  'They might have,' she suggested, 'if Cayal hadn't told them he needed their help to die. What was he thinking, telling them that?'

  'He wasn't supposed to say anything of the kind,' Lukys replied. 'We had a very plausible story prepared about me wanting to conduct experiments on the Tide. Apparently, some mortal woman Cayal got involved with back in Glaeba let the cat out of the bag.'

  Maralyce was silent for a moment. 'What are we going to do?'

  Declan leaned against the icy, glowing wall, settling in to listen to what should prove a very enlightening conversation. 'We need another Tide Lord.'

  'Then you're really expecting it to work this time?'

  'I was thinking of recruiting Elyssa to our cause,' Lukys replied, without actually answering Maralyce's question. 'Particularly given the news you bring. Or rather, getting Cayal to ask her. She'd not lift a finger to aid you or I, but she'd walk through hell barefoot if she thought it might finally get Cayal into her bed.'

  'Why not Brynden?'

  'Because he's a pompous, self-righteous, pain in the arse,' Lukys's disembodied voice replied. 'I'm not going to spend eternity listening to him go on and on about what we're doing wrong with our immortality.'

  'But surely, one of the others —'

  'Who? Tryan? Jaxyn?' Lukys cut it. 'Tryan's a sadistic narcissist and Jaxyn's a lazy, amoral bastard. Elyssa's a selfish cow, I'll grant you, but she's probably the best of a bad bunch for our purposes.'

  'I've always considered Elyssa little more than a self-centred child at heart,' Maralyce said.

  'We're all self-centred children at heart,' Lukys said dismissively. 'Aren't we, Declan?'

  Declan sighed. He should have realised Lukys would know he was there. Pushing off the wall, he continued down the stairs, surprised to find a light ahead of him that seemed much too bright to come from a mere underground storeroom. He took the last few steps two at a time and emerged into a small ante- chamber that opened up into a vista that took his breath away.

  'Tides ..

  It wasn't a room. It was a cavern. Carved from the permafrost beneath the castle, the vast chamber stretched away into the distance, so far Declan was

  hard-pressed to figure out how far away the opposite wall might be. The massive hall was almost perfectly circular, the curved and ribbed walls nearly fifty feet high, lit by a ring of fire that seemed to be burning the very ice itself as fuel. At the very centre of the room there was a raised circular platform made of solid ice. Other than that, the immense chamber was empty.

  Declan stopped and stared, his jaw slack.

  After a moment, he turned from the remarkable sight before him and glanced to his right where Lukys and Maralyce were standing, just inside the entrance to the cavern. 'What is this place?'

  'My cellar,' his father said, looking a little smug. 'Impressive, don't you think?'

  'What's fuelling the fires?'

  'Methane trapped under the permafrost,' Lukys said. 'We hit a pocket when we were digging out the chamber.' His father smiled. 'Taryx blew his arm off when we stumbled over it, in fact. Put him out of action for days. It's contained now, of course, but there's probably enough gas trapped under the ice here to blow the arse out of Jelidia, if it escaped.'

  'So you set fire to it, naturally.' Declan frowned. This is what being immortal did to you, he supposed. You spoke of catastrophic danger to every life on Amyrantha in vague, general terms, with no thought or care for the consequences to mortal existence. He was learning, however, that there was little use in pointing that out. 'Where's the light on the stairs coming from?'

  'It's a naturally luminescent moss,' Maralyce explained. 'It normally grows in some very dark and watery places. Lukys ... encouraged it to grow here on the ice.'

  'Using magic?'

  'No, Declan,' Lukys said, a little impatiently. 'I sat down and held a meaningful dialogue with it, and won over the entire species with the strength of my charming personality.'

  Declan turned to stare in awe at the chamber once more. 'What's it for?'

  Neither Maralyce nor Lukys answered him. He glanced over his shoulder at them. 'Oh, come on, you know I overheard enough to realise you're up to something.''

  They glanced at each other before Maralyce answered his question. 'When we activate the Chaos Crystal, it will open a portal to another world.' He stepped forward, opening his arms wide. 'This is where we'll do it.'

  Declan studied his father and great-grandmother for a moment, as something dawned on him that he probably should have questioned sooner. 'Just exactly how old are you two?'

  'Older than you can imagine,' Lukys conceded.

  'So you didn't become immortal when that meteor hit the ship near Jelidia, did you?'

  Lukys shook his head. 'No. Engarhod did, though. That part of the story is true enough. As is the story about the fire that destroyed the brothel in Cuttlefish Bay where Syrolee worked.'

  'And how did Engarhod become immortal? Is he another one of your random offspring?'

  His father smiled. 'Tides, I hope not.'

  'What makes you unique, Declan,' Maralyce said, in a somewhat more conciliatory tone, 'is that we can trace your ancestry back to the immortals who spawned you. But you're the exception, rather than the rule. There have been immortals out among the mortal population spreading their seed for thousands of years. The circumstances that give rise to a potential immortal are unlikely, but by no means improbable.'

  Declan frowned as another thought occurred to him. 'That means there's a fair chance we're all related in some way,' he said.

  Lukys smiled widely. 'Imagine that — Cayal might be your brother.'

  Declan had no desire to contemplate such an unsettling notion. He wanted answers to other questions. Answers he'd come to Jelidia to find. 'So you find this crystal of yours, wait until the Tide peaks, step through to another world, killing Cayal in the process. Why? What's wrong with this world?'

  'It's getting a little crowded,' Lukys said.

  'What's the real reason?'

  Lukys smiled, but it was Maralyce who answered him. 'There's quite a few more immortals on this world than is comfortable to co-exist with,' she said. 'And this lot in particular are somewhat... difficult.'

  'You mean Cataclysms aren't the norm among your kind?'

  Lukys looked at Maralyce. 'He gets the sarcasm from your side of the family, I think.'

  'And the brains,' Maralyce shot back without even cracking a smile. 'The stubbornness, however, is a
ll yours.'

  Declan ignored their asides, determined not to be distracted from his purpose. Time was ticking on, the Tide was peaking, and he still had no real idea until now — when he'd stepped into this hidden fiery chamber beneath the palace — how Lukys intended to kill an immortal, other than his vague assurances that he could. 'I don't believe the "too many immortals here for comfort" excuse.'

  Lukys looked at him for a moment, as if debating something, and then shrugged. 'It's time, Declan, that's why. We get one Tide in a hundred thousand years strong enough to power the Chaos Crystal. That Tide is on the way and if we don't leave, that's another thousand millennia on Amyrantha, with the likes of Syrolee reducing civilisation to rubble every time the Tide peaks.'

  'And what happens to the people of Amyrantha?' 'They get to be rid of at least half of us. Isn't that what the Cabal's been working toward all these years?

  Isn't it why you're here, pretending you care, when we all know you'd love nothing more than to see the end of every immortal you've ever encountered?'

  Declan frowned. It was a little disturbing to think Lukys could read him so easily. 'Suppose I don't want to go to this new world of yours?'

  'Then stay here,' Lukys said, unconcerned, the firelight on his face giving it a demonic cast that Declan thought quite appropriate. 'Remain here and live happily ever after, for all I care. This is a one-way trip, son; we're taking the crystal with us. It'll be the only chance you'll ever have to leave here. As for what happens on Amyrantha, well ... it won't be our concern once we're gone.'

  'Why are you so certain opening the portal will kill Cayal?'

  'Because,' Maralyce said, 'he'll be holding the crystal when we focus the Tide.'

  CHAPTER 5

  'You know, Chikita, this just might work.'

  'Yes, Lord Jaxyn. It's a brilliant strategy.'

  Jaxyn Aranville glanced behind him at the small ginger feline Crasii standing guard, something she was managing to do while standing close to the roaring fire, rather than near the lord for whose safety she was responsible. He didn't begrudge her the warmth. The council chamber was a cavernous room, almost impossible to heat effectively, and he didn't want her reactions dulled by the cold.