The Palace of Impossible Dreams (57 page)

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.”

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.”

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.”