The Chaos Crystal (29 page)

Shivering in the cold, still night, she left the bucket on the steps, deciding to fill it with snow on her way back. It would melt quickly enough in the warmth of the underground cavern where Boots and her pups had made their home. The starlight reflecting off the snow gave Arkady enough light to see by so, following the unexpected sound of water, she hurried as best she could on feet that had no desire to go anywhere, through the underbrush to the shore of the lake.

When she reached it, Arkady came to a halt a few feet from the reeds that grew along the edge of the water and stared at the lake in shock. Only a few hours ago, there had been a solid sheet of ice stretching all the way to Glaeba. Now the ice was gone, broken into millions of smaller fragments which were already being consumed by the relatively warmer waters of the lake. Dark water stretched before her like a black sky

dotted with stars made of ice, lapping at the reeds on the water's edge with a gentle
slap-slap
that seemed innocuous and strange so soon after the violence that must have caused the ice to shatter.

Arkady stood on the shore, trying to comprehend the forces that could have effected such a miracle. She'd seen Tide magic worked before. She'd watched Cayal and Declan use it to scare off the Senestran Trading Houses from the wetlands. She'd seen Crasii healed and limbs regenerated, and been brought back from the brink of death herself by Declan, when the chameleon Crasii of Watershed Falls had condemned her to death and tied her to the Justice Tree, so she could be eaten alive by gobie ants.

Until now, however, Arkady had never really understood what it was to have the power to break the world in half; the ability to affect things so directly.

She was still trying to take that in when she noticed other things bobbing beside the melting icebergs. Darker shapes dotted the water; hundreds, maybe even thousands of them. The regular
slap-slap
noise faltered for a moment. Arkady looked to her right and realised something had washed up a few feet away. She pushed through the reeds to investigate, horrified to discover that a waterlogged and long-dead feline had come to rest on the shore.

She squatted down beside her and turned the body over. Arkady didn't know the feline. She wasn't even certain if the creature was fighting for Glaeba or Caelum. Her fur was burnt off in places, but there were no other visible signs of injury. More than likely, she had drowned or frozen to death in the icy water, unable to swim to safety in time.

Her mind reeling, Arkady rose to her feet and looked out over the lake again. She knew now what those bobbing dark shapes in the water were.

They were Crasii. Tens of thousands of them. Dead because an immortal had waved his magical arm and

decreed they should perish as a by-product of the wars they waged among themselves.

Tides
...
Papa was out on the ice with Jaxyn
...

Arkady was too wrung out to cry; too weary to revisit the grief she'd lived over and over again, every time she'd thought she'd lost him. That her father was truly dead this time seemed more an inevitability than a shock; his insistence on staying behind, almost prophetic.

And Arkady hated herself for being relieved that her father was no longer a weapon that could be used to punish her.

I'm sorry, Papa, for everything I put you through.

It was the best Arkady could do. The closest thing to a prayer she could find within herself.

And the most fitting epithet she could think of.

Sickened at the shape the world was taking with the rise of the Tide Lords, Arkady turned and headed back to the ruins, leaving the dead feline where she was. She hoped her father's body washed up in some place where it might be treated with more respect than she could afford to spare the nameless Crasii she'd discovered. There was no point in trying to bury her and she was too waterlogged to be burned, even if Arkady has been willing to expose Boots's hideaway by lighting a fire.

Besides, by morning there would be more than one dead feline washed up along the shores of the Great Lakes.

It was only fitting they remain there long enough for the immortals to see what they had done.

CHAPTER 28

It took only a few minutes before they were gone — Jaxyn's army, Jaxyn and his endless ranks of felines who had been prepared to march to their death without question. Stellan stared at the lake in shock as an eerie silence descended over the city, pierced only by the occasional cry for help from a drowning feline.

'Tides
...
what happened?' Stellan breathed in awe.

Before Tryan could reply, a cheer rose up — mostly human — from the remainder of the Caelish army gathered on the shore who'd survived the disaster. They were clustered along the docks in front of the balcony, stunned by what had happened and glad to be alive. But the cheer was quickly replaced by the screams of the dying Crasii and the realisation that everyone who'd been out on the ice was in danger of drowning if they couldn't get to shore before the icy water robbed them of the ability and the will to save themselves.

'We have to organise rescue parties,' Stellan said, overcoming his shock.

'Why?' Tryan asked, almost uninterestedly. He seemed preoccupied and worried about something, and it certainly wasn't the death cries of the thousands of felines in danger of drowning right before his very eyes. 'They're only Crasii.'

Stellan couldn't believe Tryan was so dismissive of their miraculous rescue. Given the cracking ice had likely saved Caelum from certain invasion, he would

have expected a different reaction to Tryan's distracted irritation; it was almost as if his attention was elsewhere. But even if the Tide Lords cared nothing for the Crasii casualties, there were other souls out there on the ice — human souls — for whom Stellan expected Tryan to have some empathy.

'Your highness, Jaxyn's envoy said my wife was out there.'

'He also said he was going to kill her if we didn't surrender. We didn't surrender. Chances are she was dead hours ago.'

Tryan's logic was harsh but unassailable. Stellan wanted to scream at him, but knew it was futile. Besides, Tryan probably wouldn't notice his screams against the background of all the other tormented screams going on around them. 'You can't just let them die, my lord.'

'Yes,' Tryan said. 'I can.'

'But isn't every Crasii you save, even those belonging to Glaeba, yours to command, once you order them to follow you?'

That gave the immortal pause. Tryan thought for a moment and then glanced at Stellan impatiently, waving his arm to embrace the chaos below them. 'Tides, if you want to be a hero, Desean, go out there and rescue every wretched feline you can find. I'll be back at the palace if you happen to see my sister.'

Without waiting for Stellan's acknowledgment, Tryan turned and took the stairs down to the street two at a time. He snatched the reins of the horse a canine had waiting for him, swung into the saddle and was gone before Stellan had a chance to respond.

What followed was the longest day of Stellan's life.

He hadn't meant to take charge of the rescue effort; it just seemed as if there was nobody else. Like Tryan, Ranee and Krydence abandoned the battlefield as soon as they realised the battle was, if not won, then at least

over for the time being, leaving a gaping maw in lieu of leadership for the vast Crasii army magically compelled to obey their orders.

They were not magically compelled to obey a word of Stellan's but he soon discovered that — traumatised as they were — issuing order after order in the name of the immortals was almost as effective. He organised work parties, arranged for the dead to be collected, prisoners to be billeted and the wounded to be housed and treated in a couple of empty warehouses along the wharf that he commandeered in the queen's name.

Few humans thought to question him either. Somebody needed to take charge, and even the regular Caelish officers were glad it wasn't their responsibility to sort out this mess.

So Stellan worked long into the night, seeing the survivors saved and confined, the dead piled up for later burial or cremation. While he worked he searched through the Glaeban casualties for a familiar face, of which there were far too many.

There was no sign of Arkady, however. Tryan might have been right about her fate. She may well have been killed earlier in the day or maybe her body was sucked down under the ice when it broke. Stellan had no way of knowing. However, sometime around midnight he was forced to give up worrying about his wife's fate because he received news that overshadowed all the other bad news he'd received this day — news that had much greater ramifications for both Glaeba and Caelum.

Just after midnight, an exhausted messenger finally tracked him down while he was questioning the survivors in one of the makeshift hospitals. He interrupted Stellan to inform him that the body of King Mathu of Glaeba had been dragged ashore.

Somewhat to Stellan's surprise, and despite the chaos, the Crasii had had the good sense to separate Mathu's

body from the countless other dead bodies, and had laid the young man out in the front room of the wharf- side brothel Tryan had used as a command post earlier in the day. A small fire flickered fitfully in the fireplace of the main reception room, taking the chill off the air. The walls, painted in a tacky floral pattern meant to emulate the tasteful wallpaper used in the stately houses of Cycrane, only made the room look worse. It seemed almost disrespectful to lay a dead king in this place. The furniture was pushed aside to make room for a trestle table where the young man was laid out. Still dressed in the sopping, heavy winter clothing that would have relentlessly dragged him down once he hit the water, the flaccid corpse looked nothing like the boy Stellan had rescued, time and again, from places like this. Waterlogged, pale and wrinkled like an old man from the effects of the water, Mathu was barely recognisable as human, let alone the handsome, healthy, fit young man he'd been when he started on this quest.

Stellan ordered everyone from the tawdrily decorated, candle-lit room. He stared down at his cousin's body for a long time, wondering if the reason he felt nothing but relief that Mathu was dead was because of exhaustion or anger. It might well be the latter. This easily-led young man had brought Glaeba to its knees with his blind ignorance, after all.

And I almost did the same,
he admitted silently to himself. Stellan was the one who gave both Jaxyn and Diala their entree into the Glaeban halls of power. He'd introduced Mathu to Kylia
...
or Diala, as she was better known among the immortals.

But the war, the invasion — all of that was Mathu's fault, if not his intention. He was their king. He had the power to veto anything the immortals proposed, from the notion of trumping up charges against his own cousin for murder he didn't commit, to marching

an army across the ice to invade a country with whom Glaeba had enjoyed centuries of peaceful coexistence.

'Tides, Mat,' he said softly, moving a little closer. 'It shouldn't have ended like this.'

The king's arms were folded across his chest, the royal signet sitting heavily on Mathu's shrivelled hand. Stellan stared at it for a moment and then reached forward to remove it. The ring slid off Mathu's finger with surprising ease, perhaps because it had been sized to suit his father's larger, meatier hands.

'Looting the dead?' a voice remarked behind him. 'How very common-born of you, your grace.'

Stellan spun around furiously, pocketing the ring as he turned. 'I gave orders I was not to be disturbed!'

'You gave orders to the Crasii, Desean. My will outranks yours these days. At least when it comes to them.'

Stellan stared at Declan Hawkes with open- mouthed shock.
'Hawkes?
Tides, man, what are you doing here in Caelum?'

'Long story,' Declan said, shutting the door behind him. He crossed the room and stared at the dead king for a moment. 'Always did think Mathu Debree would come to a sorry end.'

The spymaster had not changed at all in the months since Stellan had seen him last. Not surprising, he supposed, given Hawkes was immortal now, but his presence was totally unexpected, and no doubt connected in some way to earlier events of the day.

Declan looked up and glanced around. 'Guess this is the last brothel you'll ever have to drag him out of, at any rate.'

'Declan, how did you get
...
why are you here?'

'Now Mathu's dead, I suppose that makes you Glaeba's king,' the former spymaster said, ignoring Stellan's question.

'I suppose it does.'

'Technically, that makes Arkady your queen. Unless

you found time to have your marriage dissolved while I was off searching the world for her.'

Stellan's heart sank at Declan's words. During the last conversation of substance they'd had, he had asked this man to find her. Hawkes's presence here and now meant he'd probably tracked her back to Glaeba.

'Declan ... I'm sorry
...
Arkady was out on the ice
...'

Declan shook his head. 'No, she wasn't.'

Stellan sighed, thinking he understood why Hawkes was in such adamant denial. Stellan was still having difficulty grasping the idea that Arkady was gone, and he didn't even love her the way Hawkes did. He took a step closer, trying to appear sympathetic. 'I know you'd like to believe she's still alive, Declan, but I fear you're letting blind faith take precedence over the facts. I had a message from Jaxyn before the battle started. Arkady was his prisoner. She was out there watching the battle not three feet from where Mathu was standing when the platform collapsed and went into the water. There was no way
...'