The Palace of Impossible Dreams (64 page)

The ambassador's wife hurried from the room, leaving them alone. Lyna's gaze hadn't wavered from Arkady's face the whole time she spoke to Loriny.

“What will you achieve by taking me back to Glaeba, my lady?”

“I'll prove to Jaxyn that he can trust me.”

“Why do you even care if he trusts you?”

She shrugged. “I don't fancy spending another High Tide fending for myself. And if you're right about Kentravyon . . . well, all the more reason to find myself a comfortable place to wait it out.”

Tides, these creatures are shallow.
“And for such a spurious reason you'd hand me over to someone like Jaxyn, knowing what's probably in store for me?”

“I have no interest in what Jaxyn plans to do with you . . . or to you. That's his business.” Lyna smiled and it chilled Arkady to the core. “Don't mistake me for someone who cares, my dear. Now, why don't you eat something? You look half-starved and I suspect you'll need your strength in the days to come, so you might as well make the most of Lady Devale's hospitality while you can.”

Boots seemed much happier once she realised Stellan Desean was in the palace and aware of her plight. Warlock supposed it was because she'd been born on his estate and grown up in his kennels. She was used to thinking of him as her master—the human who could make things right for her—even if, in his current predicament, the duke had little or no chance of helping her or her pups.

Still, with the excuse of escorting Nyah down to visit the pups, the former Duke of Lebec was able to check on Boots every few days. It was the only thing keeping her sane, she claimed, when Warlock returned from the dig.

To his credit, even after Warlock returned, the duke kept up his visits. Warlock was more than grateful. There was nothing Stellan Desean could do to free them. Nothing he could do to assuage Boot's fear their pups were Crasii. Nothing he could do at all, really, except offer useless platitudes, but for Boots that seemed to be enough. She was calmer these days, less panicked all the time. More reasonable. More like the Boots Warlock had first met in the slums of Lebec City.

Warlock was thinking as much as he waited in the shadows for the man from the Cabal to show, stamping his feet against the cold to keep his circulation going. Warlock glanced up at the dark, overcast sky, wondering when it would snow again. Hoping that's all it would do. Warlock hated the cold. He wore a blanket over his shoulders, something most of the palace Crasii had taken to wearing, the winter so bitter that even the felines, with their natural fur coats, were feeling it.

Nobody could remember a colder winter, the other Crasii in the palace had told him. Nobody remembered the Great Lakes freezing before, either.

“Psst!”

Warlock turned, a little annoyed at himself for becoming so distracted he'd not heard the man sneaking up behind him. He still didn't know the identity of his contact. Didn't know if he sneaked into the palace for their meetings, or if he was one of the staff here. He didn't really want to know, either.

“Cold enough for you?” the stranger asked from the darkness of the
archway leading down toward the Crasii pens. He couldn't see him, but Warlock could see his breath frosting when he spoke.

“Next immortal I spy on is going to live in Torlenia,” Warlock said, looking around to ensure they were alone. The snow-covered courtyard was empty, the windows above them dark.

He looked back at the shadowy figure and felt rather than saw him smile. “Tides, a Scard with a sense of humour. Who'd have thought?”

“Is there something you want?”

“I'm more interested in what you have to tell me. You missed our last meeting.”

“I was in the mountains. On a job for Elyssa.”

“Doing what?” He could hear the man's teeth chattering in the cold.

“She's financing an archaeological dig up there. It's run by a Glaeban human named Andre Fawk. They've found some sort of mass grave at the bottom of a cliff, but that's not what interested Elyssa. She was looking for a Lore Tarot.”

The man was silent for a moment.

“Did she find it?”

Warlock nodded. “Turns out it wasn't the Lore she was interested in. The back of the cards form a map when you place them together in the right order.”

“A map of what?”

“I don't know.”

The figure moved slightly. Warlock guessed he was shrugging. “Well, I'll let the Pentangle know about it. Maybe they have some idea what she's looking for. In the meantime, can you get a message to Desean for me?”

“Probably.”

“Then tell him this weather isn't normal.”

“It's winter,” Warlock pointed out. “What's not normal about that?”

“Jaxyn's been giving it a hand.”

Warlock was shocked, not so much because of the Tide Lord's interference in the weather, but that the Cabal knew about it. “How do you know that?”

“We have a Scard close to him.”

Warlock suffered a wave of anger at the news. They'd put him in the Herino Palace, got him into this whole flanking mess, on the grounds they didn't have any other Scards capable of getting close to an immortal. Only it was a lie. He'd been gone barely a few months and already they had
another Scard close enough to Jaxyn to learn he was interfering in the weather.

“Why is he doing it?” Warlock asked, hoping the man took his hesitation as surprise and not bitter resentment.

“He's planning to attack Caelum across the ice.”

“Tides,” Warlock swore. “Can he do that?”

“Another few days and you'll be able to walk to Herino from here,” the man told him. “Won't take much more effort to get an army across.”

“And once I tell the duke your news, what do you expect him to do with it?”

“That's up to him. Our . . .
people
 . . . are of the opinion the news might be a mixed blessing.”

Warlock nodded, thinking he understood. “If the immortals here find out about it, they might be able to stop him, but in the process, they might do something worse.”

“Got it in one, Dog Boy.”

“Then why are they leaving the decision up to Desean?” he asked. “Surely something of that magnitude is best left to the people who claim to know what they're doing?”

“I don't ask for explanations, Dog Boy. I just deliver the messages. Maybe they think he's in the best position to judge the reaction of the immortals here in Cycrane to the news? I don't know. Just pass the message on and keep your head down.”

“But what if—” Warlock began, but then he stopped when he realised he was talking to himself. As silently as he had come, the Cabal man had melted into the shadows. Warlock was alone.

Elyssa looked up from the table as Warlock returned with the wine she'd sent him to fetch. Fortunately, she had a fire going in the room. The warmth enveloped him and began to seep into his frozen bones. Warlock closed the door gratefully and hurried to the side table to pour the wine.

“Tides, Cecil, did you decide to crush the grapes yourself and wait for them to ferment?”

“Forgive me, my lady,” he said, bringing her the freshly filled glass. “The cellarmaster was reluctant to leave the warmth of his room to let me into the cellar.”

Elyssa didn't answer him. She was bent over the map, studying it intently,
something she had done almost obsessively since Stellan Desean had revealed the map hidden on the back of the cards. She was copying the map out in sections, as she satisfied herself of its veracity, onto a large sheet of paper she had laid out on the table beside it. The map was almost complete, the only blank areas in places where the cards were too faded or damaged to read.

The immortal took the wine and sipped it distractedly, her attention firmly fixed on the map. “What do you think, Cecil?”

He looked at the map and nodded appreciatively. “I think you've just about got it, my lady.”

“If only,” Elyssa sighed. And then she smiled unpleasantly. “Tides, I bet that crabby old bitch would give her left tit to get her hands on this.”

Warlock said nothing, fairly certain a proper Crasii would not respond to such a comment. Besides, he wasn't sure who she meant by
that crabby old bitch
, but guessed, as this was purportedly a map of the mountains around Maralyce's Mine, that she was probably talking about Maralyce.

“Thousands of years scraping around in the dirt, and all the time, there was a map.”

“A map of what?” Warlock asked before he could contain himself.

Elyssa looked at him curiously. “Why did you want to know, Cecil?”

“To serve you is the reason I breathe, my lady,” he said, realising his error. “If this is a map that leads to something you desire, then it is my only wish to know how to retrieve it for you.”

The immortal studied him a little longer and then shrugged, apparently satisfied with his answer.

“Do you remember me asking you some time ago, Cecil, who, according to your lore, are those known as the First?”

He nodded. “Lord Kentravyon. Lord Pellys and Lady Maralyce.”

“And you didn't know why they're known as the First, did you?”

“No, my lady.”

Elyssa turned to look at the map. “And you've never heard of the Chaos Crystal? Or the Bedlam Stone?”

“No, my lady.”

She leaned back in her chair and looked up at him. “We have our own Lore too, you know. Of a sort. According to
our
Lore, Cecil, the First Immortals weren't made by the Eternal Flame, they were made by the Chaos Crystal.”

Warlock said nothing. He was afraid to move a muscle for fear she would
realise she was telling him the secrets of her kind. Of course, to Elyssa, telling him anything wasn't supposed to matter, because he was Crasii and if she commanded him to say nothing, he'd have no choice but to obey.

“Now, for those of us who've taken the time to look into these things, the only three immortals that we can't pinpoint exactly when they were made are, as you so rightly listed, Kentravyon, Pellys and Maralyce. I know what they say about Pellys being made in that brothel fire, but that's nonsense. He was immortal long before he met Syrolee. I have my suspicions about Lukys too, mind you. He seems to know so much more than the rest of us, but he was with Engarhod when the meteor hit, so I suppose . . .” Her voice trailed off for a moment. Warlock got the feeling she was thinking out loud rather than specifically telling him anything. “Of course, we've always assumed the Eternal Flame made him immortal. But if, like Pellys, he was immortal already . . .” She shrugged and looked up, as if it had just occurred to her that she was rambling. “Anyway, Cecil, the upshot of all this is that the Chaos Crystal was stolen, several thousand years ago, by a very irritating group of mortal humans calling themselves the Cabal of the Tarot. They hid the Crystal in the mountains around the old city-state of L'bekken—which is in Glaeba near the place you now call Lebec—and only a few of them knew where. To keep the information safe from us—and from each other, I don't doubt—they incorporated the location of the Crystal into the Tide Lord tarot. Or at least we thought they did. Turns out we were crediting those larcenous little fools with a great deal more intelligence than they actually possessed.”

“
This
is the map of where they hid it?” Warlock asked in awe, thinking any creature, Crasii or Scard, would be surprised by such news.

“This is the map,” Elyssa agreed. “So what we have here, Cecil, is the location of the key to ultimate power.” She smiled and took another sip of her wine. “And when I find it, it will be mine,” she said. “All mine.”

Although he was half expecting it, Declan was still gutted to discover Arkady had left the Outpost for Port Traeker the same day he and the others had headed inland to cure the wetlands of swamp fever.

“Did she say where she was going?” he asked Ambria, when she told him the news over breakfast the morning after they arrived back at the Outpost. The chameleons had gone on ahead to Watershed Falls to speak with the village elders and assure them the swamp fever would not return to cause them problems. In the meantime, the immortals sat down to share a meal and catch up on the news a month in the isolation of the wetlands had kept from them.

It was strange, Declan thought, that even among immortals, they tended to act as if they were normal people and mealtimes were a necessity, rather than a habit.

Ambria shook her head. “She wouldn't say.
Away
, was about as specific as she was prepared to get,” the immortal said.

“You can't blame her, Declan,” Medwen said unsympathetically, helping herself to a slice of bacon from Cayal's plate. “I'd have done exactly the same thing in her place.”

“Except I'd never do a deal with the Rodent for you, Medwen,” Cayal said. “Except maybe one guaranteed to keep you out of my hair.”

Cayal didn't appear surprised by Arkady's decision to leave. He seemed relieved as much as anything, which irked Declan for no reason he could readily identify.

Medwen pulled a face at the Immortal Prince but didn't seem to take offence at the comment. “Declan, the reality of your situation is that Arkady and you have very different paths to follow. You can't blame her for wanting to move on with her life. She's on a timetable, remember, you're not.”

He wished he was as used to seeing people come and go in his life as these immortals were. At the same time, he was horrified to think he might one day be so inured to losing friends and loved ones that he could be just as cavalier about it. “I have to find her.”

“Oh, no you don't,” Cayal objected. “We're heading south, Rodent. The wetlands are safe, the swamp fever is taken care of, and we've done all the good deeds we're going to do. You have a bargain to keep.”