The Chaos Crystal (38 page)

Not all immortals were bent on destroying the world. There were other Tide Lords, other powerful immortals, who seemed quite content to stay here on Amyrantha — Tide Lords Lukys didn't like or trust enough to involve in his plans. Brynden might be a candidate. Kinta had certainly seemed unsettled by what Kentravyon had told her about his plans, and she was sure to have repeated his story to her lover by now. Then there was Tryan. He was busy trying to take over the whole continent, but would he side against his sister if she threw her lot in with Lukys
...
or, more specifically, with Cayal?

That left Jaxyn, the only other truly powerful Tide Lord Declan knew of. Including himself, that meant four Tide Lords. Probably not enough, but what if he could cajole the others into joining them? Would the combined power of the lesser immortals like Kinta, Diala, Lyna, Ambria, Medwen — even Syrolee and Engarhod, Krydence and Ranee — be enough to counteract the power of Lukys's coterie and their Tide- focusing crystal? If Declan could gather enough opposition to what Lukys planned, could they stop Lukys from destroying the world?

And what would be the point?
To
save Amyrantha from destruction, just to ensure this endless cycle of destruction and rebuilding went on forever?

Declan agonised about that for another two blocks before a simple fact occurred to him. Enslaved but still in existence, Amyrantha had some hope — however slim — of eventually finding a way to free itself from the yoke of the Tide Lords.

Destroyed, there was no hope at all.

Tides,
Declan thought, shaking his head as he realised what he must do. I
can't believe I
'm
even
contemplating this
...

He stopped at the next corner to get his bearings. The streets here were achingly familiar. If he turned left at this intersection he'd eventually come to the neat little house with its surgery in the basement, jammed between a dingy apothecary and a delicious-smelling bakery, where Arkady had lived with her father when they were children.
To
his right was the road that led to his grandfather's attic, and if he kept on walking south, eventually he'd come to the brothel where he'd lived with his mother until he was ten.

The Lebec slums were home, Declan realised, in a way no other place ever would be, no matter how long he lived. Draped in a clean blanket of snow that covered the grime and kept the beggars off the streets, the slums looked story-book pretty in the dawn's

feeble light, the flaws hidden behind shadows and snowflakes.

For this, Declan realised, he had to fight. For every lord in this world with a majestic palace, like the one Arkady had acquired when she married into money, there were thousands of people like the citizens of the Lebec slums — Crasii and human alike — whose daily lives filled these cramped and tumbled-down houses, here and in cities all over Amyrantha. People with lives that had as much value as an immortal's life. Perhaps more. Mortals had a time limit, after all. They had reason not to waste what little time fate had awarded them.

Only an immortal could afford to waste his life on frivolous pursuits.

Only an immortal would consider the good of the one to outweigh the good of the many.

Declan threw back the hood of his cloak, and glanced around. He no longer cared about being recognised. Standing here, in these streets where he'd always belonged, he realised something else. While he remembered this place, while he fought for the people who were born here, who lived and died in these grubby streets, he would have some hope of retaining his humanity.

Regardless of the eventual fate of Amyrantha, if this place were destroyed, he would lose a part of himself which he couldn't afford to let go. Even if he fought to save the whole world, it would be because this place — his home — was a part of that world.
To
save one, he would have to save the other.

And to do that, Declan needed help. The worst kind of help.

He needed the Tide Lords that Lukys, in his wisdom, had deemed unfit for his brave new world. The Tide Lords he didn't intend to allow across the rift when he opened it to enable him to draw the power he needed from two worlds to restore Coryna.

To
stop Lukys and Cayal, Declan needed the power of the most malevolent and self-serving Tide Lords he could name. He needed the only three immortals he could be sure would be prepared to do whatever it was going to take to stop Cayal trying to end his life and prevent Lukys opening his rift — Brynden, the Lord of Reckoning, Tryan, the immortal the Lore Tarot named The Devil, and perhaps the most irksome of them all
...

Declan needed Jaxyn Aranville, the badly misnamed Lord of Temperance.

He could feel the other immortals on the Tide.

They weren't close, but Declan was becoming more and more attuned to the Tide, and getting better at identifying what each disturbance on it meant. As he approached Lebec Palace, he knew his hunch had been correct. With the battle lost and his Crasii army mostly floating face down in the Lower Oran, Jaxyn had retreated to Lebec Palace with Diala and Lyna to lick his wounds and plot his counter-attack.

Declan didn't waste time wondering if Jaxyn was planning to fight for everything he'd gained thus far in Glaeba, or if he was willing to cut his losses, cede the continent to the Empress of the Five Realms and her family, and set himself up somewhere else. Brynden had already staked out Torlenia, but Tenacia seemed free of immortals, and the Commonwealth of Elenovia was always ripe for the picking.

For that matter, the Lord of Temperance would be better served claiming Senestra. There were already cults in that country — powerful cults — dedicated to his worship. A god could do worse than to settle down among his already adoring congregation.

It was mid-morning by the time Declan reached the gates of Lebec Palace. He arrived on foot, using the time it had taken him to walk from the city to figure out how he was going to handle this. Declan

was fed up with explaining how he became immortal; it was one of the reasons he'd not hung around Cycrane after the battle. He didn't particularly want to go through the whole spiel again to every immortal he met, and there was quite a gathering of them in Caelum.

Let Kentravyon and Cayal explain about the new Tide Lord. Declan had better things to do.

Still, Jaxyn and his minions were the last remaining immortals to be informed of his admission to their ranks, and if he hoped to get a hearing from them, let alone their active cooperation in stopping Lukys, he was going to have to get their attention first. And he somehow had to explain the situation in a manner that didn't result in the total devastation of everything in a five-mile radius.

It was the Crasii standing guard on the main gate who gave him the solution. Despite orders to kill anything that walked up the road, the felines fell to their knees at his approach, assuring this immortal new arrival that to serve him was the reason they breathed.

Declan changed his original plan almost instantly, and once he was admitted to the estate, headed, not to the palace where Jaxyn and the others were holed up, but to the compound where the remainder of the estate workers were housed. Keeping far enough away from the palace so the immortals couldn't sense him in anything but the most general way — and working on the assumption that if he could barely feel them they'd only barely feel him — he made his way around to the village.

As expected, as soon as he arrived, Fletch, the old canine Stellan had allowed to govern the residents of the Crasii village, approached him and fell to his knees. Declan ordered him to stand and told him what he wanted, demanding complete silence from every Crasii in the compound. There were plenty of

amphibians in the pools at the edge of the lake but there weren't many felines left. Most of those had been out on the ice when it broke. The males were still there, however, locked in their cages. Declan freed the two younger males, ordered them to behave themselves when they joined the others, and then headed across the yard to Taryx's enclosure.

With the rising sun, the weather had settled and the bitter wind of dawn had dropped to almost nothing. There was even a glimmer of sunlight breaking through the clouds in a few places, one of which was rather conveniently centred over Taryx's favourite sofa. The old male was sunning himself when Declan spied him across the yard. He watched the Tide Lord approach warily, not moving from the battered sofa where he reclined. Declan stopped outside the cage a moment and watched the magnificent male as he lay there, his genitalia exposed, his expression smug and disobedient. And then he smiled as he realised what Taryx's silent defiance meant.

'Tides, you wily old cat. You're a Scard.'

The male stared at him for a moment and then lowered his head.
'To
serve you is the reason I breathe, my lord.'

'Bullshit.'

Taryx looked up, grinning faintly, and then he shrugged. 'Jaxyn never picked it, you know, the whole time he's been here. You didn't used to be a suzerain, spymaster.'

'You didn't used to be a Scard.'

The male climbed to his feet and walked to the bars to study Declan more closely. 'What do you want?'

Declan looked over at the other Crasii who were currently heading for the gate to stand with the canines gathering on the small village compound. 'I need to talk to Jaxyn. I figured I'd show him how it is now, rather than try to explain it.'

The old male thought on that for a moment, scratching himself behind the ear through his thick, silver-streaked mane. 'I suppose that means if I don't go along with
you,
now you're one of them, Jaxyn will realise I've been playing
him
all this time.'

Declan nodded. 'On the bright side, I intend to give him other things to worry about this morning than his feline breeding program.'

Taryx considered that for a moment longer and then he nodded. 'You're probably right, spymaster. But I warn you. Let me out of here and I won't be going back.'

Declan had known enough Scards in his time to understand how much slavery irked them. This majestic creature had the added complication of being a breeding male, which would have meant not just a lifetime of slavery, but a lifetime of confinement as well.

'Do this one thing for me,' Declan said, 'and you're free. Jaxyn will be none the wiser about you being a Scard and I'll see to it you're never confined again. In fact,' he added, realising he had something truly valuable to this creature, 'I'll go one better. I'll tell you how to find Hidden Valley.'

'You know the location of Hidden Valley?' The feline male was clearly sceptical of his claim.

'I've been there.'

'So it's likely everyone there is dead.'

Declan shook his head. 'I've known about Hidden Valley for a long time. Long before
...
this happened to me. I've no interest in harming the Scards who live there or of informing any other immortal of its location. Believe me or not, as you will, old man. But I can promise you this: if you don't agree to help me now, you're staying in the cage, and when Jaxyn asks me why you're not with the others, I'll tell him.'

Taryx considered that for a time and then nodded. 'Then let me out of here, suzerain. I want to die free.'

It was less than an hour after he arrived at the Lebec estate that Declan figured it was time to move close enough to be sensed by the other immortals in the palace. By then, every Crasii on the estate had silently gathered on the lawn below the terrace where Arkady used to eat her breakfast. Every single Crasii, including the amphibian pearl divers, the field workers, the sick, the nursing females with their pups and kittens, and every house canine not actually on duty, was on their knees with their backs to the palace, facing their new master.

Declan commanded them to silence and waited.

It didn't take long for the other Tide Lords to sense his presence and come to investigate. Declan remembered Cayal's reaction when he'd first met him, how he'd immediately grabbed for the Tide when he sensed the threat from another Tide Lord. Declan was trying to avoid that happening here with Jaxyn.

He wanted to make a point, not get into a fight.

Not surprisingly, Jaxyn emerged onto the terrace bare moments after Declan sensed him, followed a moment later by two women whose gentle ripples were almost swamped by Jaxyn's powerful presence on the Tide. One looked no older than a seventeen- year-old girl. He knew who that was — Diala, the immortal who'd been posing as Stellan Desean's niece and managed to marry herself a king. The other woman he didn't know, but he figured it must be Lyna.

They stared at Declan, and at the scores of Crasii kneeling silently at his feet.

Declan didn't need to say anything. The ripples on the Tide he couldn't help but cause and the prostrate Crasii said it all. When Jaxyn didn't reach for the Tide and start tossing lightning bolts at him, Declan figured it was safe to move closer, the

kneeling Crasii scurrying out of his path as he walked toward the terrace.

When he reached the steps he stopped and looked up at them. He said nothing. At this point, there wasn't much he could say.

'Tides,' Diala said, after a long moment of tense silence. 'It's the spymaster!'

Declan met Jaxyn's suspicious gaze evenly.