The Palace of Impossible Dreams (58 page)

“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.”

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 feel 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!”

Cayal was doing a proper job of this, Declan realised. He was making it possible for Arryl and the others to leave Senestra, certain they wouldn't follow him anywhere if they considered the Crasii of the wetlands in any danger of attack once the Trinity was no longer physically present.

“I am your servant, O Great and Fearful Lord,” the cleric repeated, pale and awestruck by this demonstration of power that he was too fearful to admit he needed to witness in order to believe this really was his precious deity. “It shall be as you command.”

Cayal's expression was suitably thunderous. “Then I free you from the terror of my wrath,” he said, as Declan felt him pulling back from the Tide.

With a great deal of reluctance, Declan followed suit.

“Begone from this place! Take word back to your people your Lord walks among you. Tell them of the fever and how I will smite your cities with my wrath if you defy me!”

Sailors and marines were superstitious creatures at the best of times. They didn't need to be told twice. Once the immortals released the Tide, and their equilibrium was no longer being affected, the men recovered quite quickly and began to scrabble aboard their ships. The amphibians, for whom a command from a Tide Lord was irresistible anyway, didn't even need to be ordered to slip back into their harnesses.

The man from the Physicians' Guild struggled to his feet, glared at Cayal and Declan for a moment, and then staggered toward his ship, where he was helped aboard by Ulag Pardura and the man Declan guessed was the one actually in charge of this invasion, who was probably Cydne's father. A short, bitter argument they didn't quite catch ensued, followed by the doctor staggering below and the older man angrily giving the order to cast off.

The invasion of the wetlands, for all intents and purposes, was over.

Pulling back from the Tide left Declan bereft. Cayal must have known it would, because as they waited for the clerics to board their ship, and the fleet get itself organised enough to withdraw, he put a hand on Declan's shoulder. It might have looked like a brotherly gesture from a distance, but his grip was so tight it was almost painful.

“Take a deep breath.”

“I'm fine.”

“No, you're not. Take a deep breath and let it go. Slowly.”

“Get your hands off me.”

“Don't make me make you, Rodent. It won't be pleasant.”

Despite the threat, Declan forced himself to release the last of the Tide. It drained out of him like a wave running back to the sea. He could have wept for the loss of it.

“Rule one,” Cayal said, taking his hand from Declan's shoulder as he felt him letting go. “Never hang on to the Tide a moment longer than you have to.”

“Who made that rule up?”

“The second immortal to touch the Tide, I'm guessing.”

“Why the second?”

“Because he saw what it did to the first one.”

Declan glanced at Cayal, a little surprised to see he wasn't joking.