The Chaos Crystal (62 page)

CHAPTER 57

Pellys was thrilled to see Declan and the other immortals, assuming, Declan supposed, that they were here to help. He had no notion of the politics of immortality, it seemed or that the world was about to come to an end, and Lukys had left him out here to perish with it, instead of taking him inside.

'You came!' he cried, waving at them gleefully as they made their way down the ridge to meet him. He did a quick headcount and beamed at them. 'You all came!'

'Tides, you'd think we'd been invited,' Jaxyn muttered beside Declan.

They slipped and slid the last few feet until Pellys reached them. He was grinning broadly. 'Look! Everyone is here! Did you come to help?'

'We certainly came to see what we could do,' Declan agreed. 'Where are Lukys and the others?'

'Inside already,' he said.

'Did they have a mortal woman with them? Dark hair? Tall

'Arkady, you mean?' Pellys said. 'She was very pretty. Did you know her?'

Declan's heart sank at Pellys's use of the past tense when referring to her. 'Is she still in there?'

Pellys shrugged. 'How would I know? Hello, Brynden, Kinta
...
Ambria
...
Tides, I can't believe you've all come! What brings you all the way down here?'

'We have come to view Lukys's remarkable chamber,' Brynden said, in a tone that indicated he wasn't comfortable with subterfuge, even with a half-wit like Pellys. 'Hawkes tell us it's quite impressive.'

'You'll have to wait until later. They've sealed the chamber.' Pellys spied Syrolee in the group and smiled at her coyly. 'You came to visit me too.'

'Not by choice, I can assure you,' the Empress of the Five Realms grumbled. 'Stop looking at me like that.'

'She's right,' Tryan said, stepping between his mother and Pellys. 'What do you mean — they've sealed the chamber?'

'What I said,' Pellys replied, trying to look past him. 'They sealed it.'

'Then we'll unseal it,' Declan announced, fearing what that meant for Arkady, but before he could take a step in the direction of the palace, Jaxyn stopped him by grabbing his arm. 'Wait a minute, spymaster.'

'Why?'

'Can't you feel it?'

'Feel what?' Diala asked.

'Feel
it,' Jaxyn ordered.

Declan closed his eyes for a moment. Through his feet, he could feel a slight vibration. He opened his eyes and looked to Jaxyn for an explanation. 'Am I the only one who thinks it odd that the Tide seems to have retreated in the past few minutes?'

'It hasn't retreated,' Pellys said. 'It's the crystal.'

'Then they've started,' Kinta said.

'Show us the way into this legendary underground lair, Pellys,' Brynden commanded. 'We have business with Lukys.'

'Can't it wait until after he's finished?' Pellys asked. 'I mean, if you're not here to help, he'd probably rather you waited.'

Declan stared up at the palace while Pellys was talking, doing a quick calculation in his head. 'We may

not need a way inside,' he said, stepping sideways a little. He wondered if it was his imagination, or he could feel a difference in the ground vibration? 'What do you mean?'

'I mean I think we're right over the chamber here.' 'You mean we're standing on top of it?' Ranee asked.

Declan nodded. 'We might be able to break through from here. Probably easier, too, than trying to get through a barricade.'

Tryan was staring at the ground now, too, trying to sense the edges of the chamber. 'If we crack the ice, we might be able to get into the chamber from above.'

'How big is it?' Ambria asked, staring at the ground. They were all examining the ground now, trying to feel out the chamber beneath them — even Warlock and Stellan and they probably couldn't feel a thing.

'Big,' Declan said.

'Huge,' Pellys confirmed with a grin. 'Are we really standing over it out here?'

'We must be,' Jaxyn said. 'We're right on the edge of it, I reckon. There's a slight difference in the vibration here from back there where I was a moment ago.'

'Then we should be able to feel the edges of it,' Tryan said, moving a little further to the right, to see if he could find the outer limits of the chamber. 'It's circular, you say?'

'Like standing inside a pumpkin,' Pellys informed them cheerfully. 'If you took the seeds out. And it was made of ice.'

'But I can barely feel the Tide,' Medwen said, looking very concerned. 'Up on the ridge it felt close to peaking. Down here, it's dwindled away to nothing. How is he doing that?'

'The Chaos Crystal,' Pellys said. 'It makes everything feel soft.'

That's not exactly how Declan would have expressed it, but it was an accurate enough description. Everything did feel soft around the edges, as if the crystal's power dulled the sharp edges of the Tide.

'You can feel it up there,' Pellys told him, pointing to the palace's elegant spires. 'That's why Lukys sent me up there to keep watch. To tell him when the Tide peaks.'

Jaxyn stopped staring at the ground long enough to clap Pellys on the shoulder. 'If he's sealed the chamber, how were you supposed to get back inside to tell him about it?'

Pellys frowned. He hadn't thought that far ahead, apparently. 'I don't know
...
you should ask Lukys.'

'We intend to,' Brynden assured him ominously. 'What is it, Hawkes?'

Declan was staring up at the spires thoughtfully. 'Could we channel the Tide from up there and direct it at the chamber?'

'Provided we knew where the chamber was,' Brynden said with a nod. 'And provided some of us were prepared to climb those spires.'

Kinta was considering the palace thoughtfully, 'Do you think, if we marked out the edges, you'd be able to focus on it?'

Declan glanced up at the spires. 'We'd see it better from up there, that's for certain. It would be easier to focus —'

'The fatal flaw in that plan,' Tryan cut in, 'being the words
we
and
focus.
You're not going anywhere, Hawkes. If you start trying to focus the Tide, who knows where it'll finish up. Jaxyn, Brynden and I will climb the spires. You can stay down here with the others and give us something to aim at.'

Declan wanted to argue, but unfortunately Tryan was right. He knew in principle how to focus the Tide, but had no practical knowledge of how to do it.

He did, however, have some notion regarding the size of the underground chamber, which meant he had some chance of figuring out exactly where it was. And if he were down here, once they cracked open the chamber it would be easier to get in to find Arkady.

The others understood it immediately too. 'How long will it take us to reach the top?' Brynden asked, shielding his eyes against the rising sun as he stared up at the palace towers. Declan was wondering the same thing, the sense of time slipping away from them becoming a very real feeling.

'You don't have to go all the way to the top,' Pellys said cheerfully. 'About two-thirds of the way up you can feel the Tide again.'

Brynden nodded and turned to Declan. 'That should give the rest of you time to find the centre of the chamber down here. If you mark the ice, we'll know where to focus the Tide, which should break us through the ice in no time at all.'

Tides, we don't have time for this.
'Then what?'

'Let's see what happens when the roof caves in,' Jaxyn said. 'The look on Lukys's face at that point will be something to behold. Cayal's too. Race you to the top, Bryn.'

Without waiting for the others, Jaxyn turned and ran toward the palace. Tryan followed, as did Brynden a moment later. Pellys stared at the rest of the gathered immortals for a moment, and then he shrugged. 'Better view from up there.' He turned and bolted after the Tide Lords, waving his arms wildly, yelling, 'Hey! wait for me!'

Kinta smiled as he left and then turned to Declan. 'We've a little while before they're in position,' she said. 'What are we searching for exactly?'

'The centre of the chamber,' Declan told them, her words doing nothing to ease his sense of urgency. 'I think we're on the edge of it here.' He turned to the

Warlock and Stellan, who'd been hanging back and watching them talking, hugging their arms around their bodies against the cold. 'Desean, can you stand here? Warlock, come with me. We'll try to pace out the rest of it. Can the rest of you feel anything?'

Ambria nodded, frowning. 'Faintly. It's much stronger over there than near the canine.'

'It's a circular chamber, remember, about fifty paces across. If Desean is standing on the edge of it, then it should go this way
...
and that.'

Syrolee nodded at the direction he was indicating. 'Let's do it then,' she said a little impatiently. 'Hopefully, before they reach the Tide, we'll have something for them to aim at and we can be done with this nonsense.'

'Saving the world isn't nonsense, Syrolee,' Medwen said as she began to pace out the edge of the chamber under them.

'It is when the wretched mortals you left behind start to think they have a say in their own future,' Syrolee complained as she reluctantly began to do the same as the others and pace out the ground. 'Tides, Engarhod
...
go that way!'

The immortals on the ground spent the better part of the next ten minutes marking out the edges of the chamber. Declan glanced up occasionally to check on the progress of the Tide Lords climbing the palace towers, wishing they'd thought to bring the boards with them they'd used to travel across the ocean. Then it would have been a simple matter to float to the top
...

Or maybe, he decided on reflection, it wouldn't have worked at all. There was barely enough Tide down here to start a fire. Maybe, even if they'd had the wherewithal to fly, it wouldn't have been possible.

It might also account for why, earlier, when Pellys had first spotted them on the ridge, he'd fallen from

the spire instead of floating down to the ground to greet them using the Tide.

'I think that's it!' Kinta called.

He turned to look at her. The others were spread out in a rough circle, a line trampled in the snow between them, marking the outer limit of the underground chamber. Declan guessed that from high on the palace spires, where the others were almost to the point where Pellys assured them they would be able to feel the Tide, it would be easily visible.

'We need to mark the centre point!' he called back. Kinta nodded in agreement and began to walk forward. Declan signalled for Warlock and Ranee to do the same, the four of them heading toward the centre.

'Are we done now?' Warlock asked when they met in the middle. The canine looked rather agitated. Declan couldn't blame him. After being dragged across the world at a speed that made him dizzy, his entire contribution to saving the world since arriving in Jelidia had been pretty much standing around doing nothing at all.

Kinta glanced up at the spires and waved to the others. 'I'd say so. Are you sure this will work, Hawkes? I mean, shouldn't we have at least made an effort to get in through the door?'

'Pellys said it was sealed,' Ranee pointed out.

'And something is going on,' Desean added, 'because even I can feel the vibration now.'

Declan looked at him with concern. The trembling had increased markedly in the past few minutes, but in theory, if it was merely the other immortals channelling the Tide in the chamber beneath them, it shouldn't have affected a mortal human at all. That Desean could feel something did not augur well for any of them.

A distant shout caught Declan's attention. He turned to see one of the others waving from the spires.

There were four of them up there now, two on either side of each spire, clinging like dark limpets to the icy surface about two-thirds of the way up. Although Declan wasn't particularly afraid of heights, he had not yet mentally adjusted to immortality well enough to let go his instinctive, very human — and not unreasonable — fear of plummeting from a great height to a crushing death on the hard ground below.

There would come a time, he supposed, when he'd be able to scale a tower made of ice and not care about the consequences, but he wasn't there yet.

And if Lukys succeeds in killing Cayal this day, I
may never have to worry about it.

He pushed that thought away, deciding the implications of his own immortality were something he didn't need distracting him. What would happen would happen. The only thing Declan could do was act in accordance with his conscience.

Stopping Lukys and Cayal from destroying Amyrantha was his first priority. Finding Arkady came a very close second. And everything else came a poor third to those two goals.

Kinta waved back at the men on the towers and then the group on the ground moved out of the way. Not because they were in danger, so much as to give the Tide Lords a clear aim at the centre of the chamber. Beneath them, the trembling increased as they backed up.

Stellan looked at Declan worriedly as they took their places on the edge of the circle. 'Are you sure you're going to be able to get into the chamber in time?'