The Chaos Crystal (48 page)

There was a smattering of applause for Boots when she finished speaking. It came mostly from the mothers in the room. Mothers suddenly faced with the prospect that their offspring — as soon as they were old enough — might want to leave their home, seek out an immortal, and then betray the families who raised them in order to please the masters they couldn't help but serve.

Warlock understood Boots's pain. He understood the principle for which she was fighting. He even agreed with it, up to a point. But he couldn't see the logic of allowing the immortals to tamper with such powerful forces of nature, if it meant they killed everyone else on Amyrantha along with themselves.

Principles were something you could really only afford if you were, well, alive.

'I realise the price, Tabitha,' Hawkes said when the applause died down. 'And if I thought for a moment that there was a way to kill the immortals and keep Amyrantha intact, I'd do it. As it is, I don't see how.'

'It's not that you don't see,' the feline standing next to Boots said. 'It's that you don't
know.
Isn't it at least worth a try?'

Hawkes looked to Aleki for support as the Scards murmured their agreement, but Lord Ponting either didn't want to help or couldn't think of anything constructive to say.

'Why can't you do both?' Boots asked. 'Why can't you let them open the portal, kill a few Tide Lords and then close it down again before they do any permanent damage to our world?'

Hawkes shook his head. 'Even if I could do that, what guarantee do you have that the immortals who survive will make your life any easier than the immortals we manage to kill?'

'There are no
good
immortals, suzerain,' someone behind Warlock called out. 'It makes no difference which ones you kill, so long as you manage to thin out their numbers!'

The gathered Scards agreed with that comment so wholeheartedly they burst into applause again. Hawkes was looking frustrated. Warlock thought he understood the newly-minted suzerain's problem. He'd come here for help, to find Scards who were willing to take on the Tide Lords — as they all believed they'd been trained to do — but here they were, when it came to the crunch, telling him,
so what? Let the bastards
kill themselves. We don't care.

'Can
you stop them, though?' Warlock asked, his deep voice cutting through the general chatter that filled the room as they applauded the sentiments of the last speaker.

Hawkes looked straight at him, a silence descending on the hall as they all waited for him to answer. 'I think so.'

'How?'

'By countering them with equal force.'

'But you say you've only got Jaxyn on your side, and that by the time you meet up with him in the Chelae Islands, hopefully he'll have brought Tryan along to help. Even assuming he can somehow manage to get Tryan and the Empress of the Five Realms onside after being at war with them so recently, including you, that's only three Tide Lords against — what?' Warlock did a quick count on his fingers. 'Cayal, Lukys, Maralyce, Kentravyon, Elyssa and probably Pellys. Against six? And you say they'll be amplifying their power through the Bedlam Stone. You haven't a hope in hell of stopping them. You won't even get near them.'

'Getting near them isn't the problem,' Hawkes assured him. 'I can get into the ice palace. I can get into the chamber. Tides, they're
expecting
me to help.

And I seriously doubt Pellys will be taking part in the ceremony, because he has no control over the Tide. Once I'm in the chamber, I can destroy the crystal. That means, if we can get Brynden on board, we're down to four against five, and given we'll have all the lesser immortals on our side — with the exception of Arryl and Taryx — it should be close to an even fight at that point.'

'It's the bit where you say
should
that worries me.'

'It's not as impossible as it seems, Warlock,' Aleki said. 'I mean, they have to find the crystal before —'

'They have it,' Warlock cut in.

'How do you know?' Hawkes asked.

Warlock realised his mistake as soon as Declan asked for further details. Admitting how he knew that they had the crystal meant admitting how he'd been healed by the Immortal Prince. It meant admitting they'd been prisoners of the Immortal Maiden and had been let go. Warlock couldn't risk that happening. When they arrived in Hidden Valley, they'd told Lord Aleki the truth about how they escaped Caelum, right up until the part about meeting up with Duchess Arkady.

Neither did they mention anything about how Warlock had nearly died, and how she'd bartered her own life for their freedom. He was certain the news they had been released by the immortals without any apparent harm, only to appear in Hidden Valley a few weeks later, would make them the object of mistrust and suspicion, perhaps even see them denied shelter here. Warlock and Boots had agreed there were some things that simply had to remain unsaid.

And they would have — if only he'd learn to keep his big mouth shut.

'Elyssa knows where the map is,' he said, carefully editing the truth to fit the story they'd given everyone when they first arrived in Hidden Valley. 'She has a map of its location. If not for being distracted by the

war with Jaxyn, she'd have had it months ago. It's been what? Three, almost four weeks, since the battle on the ice? The chances are good that they'll have the crystal and be halfway back to Jelidia with it by now.' It was the best Warlock could do; the safest way to deliver the warning about the crystal without actually letting on how he knew they had it.

'Even so,' Aleki said, 'you can't be sure
...'

'Is it about this big?' Boots asked, holding up her hands to indicate the size. 'Shaped like a skull? Glows in the dark?'

Aleki glanced at Hawkes, who shrugged. 'I suppose. I haven't —'

'Then they have it already,' Boots said, as Warlock looked at her in surprise. All their secrets, all their late- night discussions were apparently meaningless.

'How do you know?' Aleki asked.

'The Duchess of Lebec traded our escape from Cycrane for it.'

Now she's done it.
Hawkes seemed flabbergasted, but not because they'd seen the Chaos Crystal, which — because of his near-death delirium — Warlock only vaguely remembered. 'Tides, you saw Arkady after the battle?
Alive?'

Boots nodded and answered for them. 'She found us hiding in some ruins north of Cycrane. That's where the pups found the Crystal. A couple of days later, your precious duchess tried to kill my mate when he came looking for us, and then when the immortals arrived, she made Cayal heal Warlock and set us free in return for the crystal.' Boots looked around at the silent, concerned faces of the other Scards, who were all staring at her with deep suspicion. 'What? I told you all this when we arrived!'

'You told us you'd escaped the battle in a rowboat after the ice shattered, Tabitha,' Aleki reminded her. 'You left out the bit about the immortals and the Chaos Crystal.'

'It didn't seem important,' Boots said with a shrug. She pointedly didn't look at Warlock who'd warned her repeatedly — right up until he'd agreed to go along with it — that lying about their escape from Caelum would eventually bring them undone.

'Well, it's important now,' Aleki said, and then he turned to Hawkes. 'And I think you have your volunteer, Declan.'

All eyes in the room turned to Warlock. It took him a moment to realise why. 'Me? You want
me
to go? Tides, you are unbelievable! Absolutely not! I'm
not
going to leave my family unprotected again!'

'You know what the crystal looks like, Cecil,' Aleki said in a reasonable tone.

'It's a flanking glowing skull,' he shot back. 'Trust me, you won't miss it.'

'You can identify the other immortals —'

'Any Scard with a nose can do that.'

'You've met them before, you've dealt with them,' Aleki continued.

'And they know I'm a Scard,' he added. 'They'll kill me as soon as look at me.'

'Brynden won't,' Hawkes said. 'And that's the main reason I need a Scard to help me. I have to contact Brynden and because of the magical barrier he's set around Torlenia, I can't do that without provoking a fight. But I can't send a Crasii in to deliver my request for a parley either, because a Crasii messenger can too easily be subverted by another immortal.'

Warlock shook his head. 'You can't ask me to do this.'

'Given your previous dealings with the immortals,' Aleki said, 'and that you've brought three Crasii pups into our stronghold, I'm not sure you're in a position to refuse, Warlock.'

He was shocked at the suggestion. 'Are you saying I'm
not
a Scard? That I can't be trusted?'

'There is no doubt you're a Scard, Warlock,' Hawkes said. 'No question you have free will. But that free will works both ways. Just because you're not magically compelled to obey an immortal doesn't mean you won't. Or that you haven't done some sort of deal with them to secure your family's escape.'

'The Duchess Arkady helped us escape,' he insisted, unable to believe that after everything he'd done for the Cabal, they were accusing him of being a traitor.

'And yet everyone else in Glaeba believes she perished during the battle.'

'That's not actually my fault.' He folded his arms across his chest defiantly. 'I'm not going. I won't do it.'

'Yes, he will,' Boots piped up in the silence that followed his adamant declaration.

Warlock turned to her, horrified. 'Boots!'

She didn't look at him. Instead, she turned to Hawkes and Lord Ponting. 'He'll do it. You're leaving at first light, aren't you?'

Declan nodded, looking at Boots and then Warlock uncertainly. 'Are you
...?'

'He'll be there!' Boots insisted, and then turned on her heel, grabbed Warlock by the arm as she passed and dragged him through the gathering into the chilly air outside.

As soon as the door closed behind him, he turned on her. 'I can't believe you just did that to me! What happened to "Don't you ever leave us again, Farm Dog? Don't you even think about haring off to be a hero, I need you here with me and the pups"?'

'Killing those bastards is more important,' she said savagely.

'Hawkes wants to
stop
the immortals killing themselves, Boots. That's what this is all about. That's why he wants someone to go to Torlenia with him.'

'Then he's wrong, Warlock,' she said, her voice a low growl, her tail defiantly high under her coat. 'Although he is right about one thing. We do have free

will. We have the will to do whatever it takes to see as many immortals as possible perish in that rift when they open it.'

'What if it really does destroy Amyrantha in the process?'

She looked up at him intensely, her eyes shining in the darkness. 'Think of a future where your own children are destined to betray you to the suzerain, Warlock, and then tell me you
wouldn't
rather see an end to this world than wait for that to happen.'

CHAPTER 45

'My lady, do you have a moment?'

Arryl looked up from the table where she was working. Not long after they'd arrived, Lukys had brought her a number of samples of moss — he'd used the Tide to encourage it to grow on the ice. Tiji recognised it as the same moss growing on the staircase leading down into the secret chamber beneath the palace. Arryl was fascinated by it, and had spent much of her time experimenting with the various strains in large trays filled with ice, to see what sort of light she could coax from it.

Lukys has that much right,
Tiji realised with a sinking heart.
He knows what makes the others tick,
what will pique their interest.
Since providing Arryl with the luminescent moss samples to play with just after Declan, Cayal and Kentravyon left, she'd barely emerged from her chamber to question what else might be going on inside the palace.

The immortal smiled, and indicated the stool next to the table. Arryl's chamber, like the rest of the palace, was built on a grand scale, with permafrost floors that looked like polished granite, and white ice walls decorated with colourful rugs and hangings to make it feel more homely. The bed, a raised platform made of ice, was against the far wall, softened by luscious white baby-seal furs.

'Certainly, Tiji, what's the matter?'

Tiji entered Arryl's chamber and took the seat she offered, not sure how she was going to broach the subject she'd come here to discuss.

'Have you seen Lady Oritha lately, my lady?'

'Lukys's wife?' Arryl shook her head, poking the moss about in the tray with a slender wooden skewer as she talked. She was prepared to listen to Tiji, but she was far from giving the Scard her undivided attention. 'Not for a while, now you come to mention it. However, that's hardly surprising.' She scooped a small amount of moss from another container and placed it in the tray, then began to gently pat it down flat. 'This is a very large palace. One can go days without encountering another soul. Why do you ask? Are you afraid something has happened to her?'

'I think she's dead.'

Arryl looked up from the moss-filled tray and stared at Tiji curiously. 'What in the name of the Tide would make you think something like that?'