The Immortal Prince (34 page)

And then what? What is left when you speak every language known to man fluently? When you can paint like a master as easily as you can shear a sheep, milk a cow or construct a palace?

Man wasn't meant for eternity.

 

I heard from Maralyce that Lukys was in Torlenia. Maralyce is the strangest of the immortals and the only one I can't pin down on who made her immortal. She was in her late forties, I guess, when she was made, but if she was a crotchety old loner before she became immortal, or has simply become that way after thousands of years of friendless boredom, I don't know. She has little or no time for the rest of us, with the possible exception of Lukys, and lives no differently when her powers are at their peak than she does when she's helpless.

I'd run into Maralyce by accident while I was visiting Glaeba looking for something to distract me. It was a dry, hilly place back then. The old girl had made a home for herself in the mountains surrounding the vast rift valley that separated your ancestors in Glaeba from the Caelish barbarians on the other side. Maralyce looks for gold. She was a miner before she was immortalised and considers her gift simply the Tide's way of handing her unlimited time to look for it. Even then, she'd already dug a vast network of tunnels all through your mineral-rich mountains, hoarding her gold in a hidden cavern that is still the stuff of legend to this day.

Anyway, it was Maralyce who begrudgingly informed me that last she'd heard, Lukys was headed to Torlenia. She wasn't being helpful, I suspect, just trying to get rid of her unwanted guest.

I shared one last meal with my reluctant hostess in her cabin high in the Shevron Mountains and then took the hint and left Maralyce's questionable hospitality and headed south.

 

“You could not have come at a better time, Brother Cayal,” Brynden informed me gravely, when I finally arrived in Torlenia. I was welcomed amicably enough, but after greeting my hosts, I received quite a shock to discover Medwen was also a guest at the palace. She kissed me on the mouth by way of greeting, smiling wanly. Despite the warmth of her welcome, there was a fragile quality to her demeanour that made me wonder if something was wrong.

Lukys—his pet rat, Coron, perched on his shoulder as always—appeared later that day. Over a glass of wine on the battlements, the two of us set about catching up, filling each other in on the highlights of our last eight hundred years. That evening, I was treated to an austere meal in Brynden's austere dining hall with only Kinta, Medwen and Lukys for company. No servants wait on the Tide Lords at Brynden's table. Brynden thinks them an unnecessary extravagance.

Brynden's comment about my timing when I first arrived intrigued me, but it remained unexplained. It was dinner that evening before I finally got a chance to ask why he—who had never shown more than a passing interest in anything I did—was suddenly so glad to see me.

“When I arrived, Bryn, you mentioned something about coming at a good time. Is there something going on?” I enquired, as I broke apart my bread. Black bread, of course, and it seemed to be at least a week old.

“Why do you assume something is going on?” Kinta asked, tucking into her meal with a warrior's zeal.

I smiled. “You actually seem glad to see me.”

Kinta is a statuesque blonde who favours leather over cloth, even in the temperate climate of Torlenia. I'm not surprised she's a warrior in your deck of Tarot cards. I consider myself a competent swordsman, but I've never fought Kinta, something I consider a prudent decision, because I'm really not sure who'd win.

Brynden frowned at my question. “There are evil times afoot, Cayal. It behoves us to take action to free the mortals of this world from the tyranny of our less-than-scrupulous peers.”

I forced my smile away. In all the years I've known him, Brynden's wordy turn of phrase hasn't changed at all. Krydence and Rance tease him unmercifully about it. It's much of the reason, I suspect, that Brynden set himself up in opposition to the Emperor and Empress of the Five Realms and their obnoxious offspring in the first place.

“What he means,” Lukys explained, reaching across the table for the wine jug, “is that Engarhod and Syrolee are at it again.”

“What have they done this time?”

“They're making Crasii,” Kinta explained unhelpfully.

I looked at her blankly. “What's a Crasii?”

“Blended creatures,” Medwen replied, her bitterness surprising me.

Raven-haired and dark-skinned, Medwen looks no older than the seventeen years she had been when Krydence burned her alive. She'd been working in the palace on Magreth when she'd caught Krydence's eye, hundreds of years before I was made immortal. Their affair lasted a little over a year, she told me once. Then Ambria had caught her husband in bed with the young serving girl and ordered him to be rid of her. Krydence assured Ambria he would and, with sweet words and quite malicious intent, had set Medwen alight, promising her immortality, expecting her to die.

When she survived, it was debatable who was more shocked—Krydence, Medwen or Ambria. She'd drifted since then, like me, never really settling in one place for more than a decade or two.

“Blended with what?” I asked. There was an air of ineffable sadness about Medwen that I found quite disturbing.

“Humans,” Lukys informed me before Medwen could reply.

I stared at them around the table, not sure if they were playing a jest on me. “How is that possible?”

It was Brynden who answered. “As best we can tell, they take a human woman, have an immortal impregnate her, and then when the foetus has developed sufficiently, they ram an animal foetus through the wall of her uterus and force it to magically blend with the child, creating a half-human half-beast creature they can use as a slave. Apparently, the emperor's boys are applying themselves with great zeal to their new role as stud stallions for the Crasii farms.”

Oblivious to her pain, I pulled a face and winked at Medwen. “Tides, I wonder what the poor girls think is worse, giving birth to a beast or sleeping with Krydence?”

Feeding titbits to Coron, Lukys smiled thinly, but Kinta was not amused. “There's nothing voluntary in this, Cayal. This is institutionalised rape with the express intention of polluting the human race to create a sub-species of slaves.”

The silence that followed Kinta's declaration was tense. She's a formidable woman, as fair as Brynden, her eyes icy blue, her flaxen hair so pale it's almost white. She can be very intimidating when she wants and now seemed to be one of those times. I looked around the table, frowning. “And what is it you expect me to do about it?”

“We'd like you to go to Tenacia and find out what's really going on.”

I turned to my host. “Why doesn't one of
you
go to Tenacia and ask?”

“It would be more believable if you were to go,” Medwen suggested. “Engarhod doesn't like Brynden. Or Lukys.”

“I'm not exactly his favourite person, either,” I reminded them. “Does anybody remember Pellys and a certain ruined palace in Magreth they still blame me for?”

“But you are young, foolish and male,” Kinta pointed out, which I thought a bit rude given I was over sixteen hundred years old by then. “Even Engarhod will believe you heard what they were doing and couldn't resist the opportunity to stand at stud.”

I looked at Kinta askance, wondering if she was simply being thoughtless, or deliberately trying to offend me. Telling me I was foolish seemed an odd way to elicit my cooperation, never mind the implication that I had nothing better to do with my time than satisfy my carnal needs.

I shook my head. “I can't help you. Syrolee and Engarhod are still mad at me over what happened in Magreth with Pellys.”

“That was almost a thousand years ago.” Medwen shrugged. “They'll be over it by now.”

“I'm sorry. I'm not buying into this. Besides, if Syrolee and Engarhod are involved then Tryan will be around, and it will be better for everyone on Amyrantha if I don't have to deal with him.”

“You can't hide from him forever,” Lukys suggested, cutting a slice of cheese for Coron and placing it on the table in front of him. The creature picked it up in his paws and began to nibble the cheese. Nobody at the table seemed bothered by Lukys sharing his meal with a rat.

“Actually, Tryan is hiding from me.” I looked around the table, wondering why I'd been chosen for this mission. As you may have gathered, I was well and truly over my fascination with noble quests by then. “Why doesn't one of you go?”

I could understand why Brynden and Kinta weren't welcome in Tenacia. Even why Lukys might prefer not to go, but Medwen, last I heard, had no particular argument with Syrolee and her family. I'd been surprised to find Medwen here in Torlenia, in fact. With no magical power to speak of or territorial ambitions of her own, she usually gravitated to wherever the greatest concentration of immortals was during High Tide, and that was often the Emperor and Empress of the Five Realms and their kin.

“I
was
in Tenacia,” Medwen announced flatly. “I left.”

I looked at her curiously. Medwen and I shared a cottage once—for about eighteen years during a Low Tide—posing as a married couple in a smallish village on the opposite shore of the Great Inland Sea. It had been a pleasant enough time. Like me, Medwen had taken Lukys's advice to learn a trade or two that would see her through the hard times, and she'd become a glassmaker of some note by then. In the old days, before glassblowing became popular, core forming was the most common method of producing glass and Medwen was very good at it. As livelihoods went, it was among the most benign that I've ever known. I kept the forges hot and watched over the annealing process as the glass cooled, while Medwen created her delicate vessels around a mud-and-dung core she later broke up…you probably don't need the details. But I'll tell you one thing—those cores stank like a midden heap when they were heated…

Such peaceful serenity never lasts, though. People started to remark on how the pretty, dark-skinned glassmaker and her nice young husband hadn't changed a bit in all the years they'd lived in the village. Women who'd purchased gifts for the birth of the first child were coming back to us to purchase gifts for their grandchildren and they remembered things like that. You can't spend your whole life among mortals, never looking older than seventeen or twenty-five, without attracting attention.

Medwen and I went our separate ways when the speculation began to get a little too intense, with a vague promise to do it again sometime, even in another country, perhaps, where everybody had forgotten us. Medwen was keen to try her hand at faïence, you know…making ceramic glazed tiles. She needed someone to grind the quartz for her, but we never followed through with our plans. That pleasant interlude faded into memory, we'd both become involved in other things, and then the Tide returned and all bets were off.

But I still had a soft spot for Medwen and she was one of the few immortals I'll go out of my way to help. Her flat tone of voice when she spoke of leaving Tenacia was something I knew well. There was more going on here, I thought, than Brynden, Lukys and Kinta worrying about the fate of some unknown Tenacian mortals currently being tortured to create these Crasii.

“What happened?” I asked Medwen.

“Rance convinced me to have a child.”

I didn't answer immediately, wondering how Medwen could ever be foolish enough to let Rance convince her of anything, least of all to bear a child. That the father must have been mortal was a given. We all knew by then that there was no such thing as an immortal offspring.

“I wasn't raped, if that's what you're thinking,” she added, taking my silence to mean—rightly enough—that I was afraid to ask
how
she'd fallen pregnant.

“I didn't assume that you had been,” I assured her. “It's High Tide.” Even without any significant magical power, no mortal man was going to lay an unwelcome hand on an immortal woman during High Tide and live to tell of it.

“The name of the father is irrelevant,” Lukys added. “Suffice to say he was a slave in Engarhod's palace, Medwen mentioned in passing that she thought he was handsome, and that gave Rance the idea. He said she could have him if she agreed to have a child by him.”

I stared at Medwen. “And you said
yes
?”

Medwen smiled faintly. “He was
very
pretty, Cayal. Even prettier than you.” Then her amusement faded. “You don't have to look to me like that. I know how stupid it was, but I did it, anyway. You should know being immortal hasn't imbued a single one of us with any more common sense than we were born with.”

There was no arguing with that. I shook my head in despair. “So what happened?”

“In my eighth month, Rance came to me and suggested that if an immortal man could impregnate a mortal woman and blend an animal into the Tidewatcher foetus to create a Crasii, it should work the other way, too. He wanted me to allow him to blend a cat foetus with my unborn child. They'd been trying to perfect a part-feline warrior caste. I don't know the exact details, because I didn't hang around long enough to find out.”

“You refused?”

She glared at me. “Of course I refused!”

“So…what happened to the child?”

“She was born human,” Medwen assured me. “I made sure of that. And then Syrolee took her.” The pain in Medwen's eyes was real, as was the despair in her voice. It was typical of Rance though, and most of the immortals.
If you can't hurt your enemy, hurt those they love.

Kinta picked up the tale when it became obvious Medwen was too upset to continue. “Syrolee refused her access to her child, so Medwen fled Tenacia and chanced into Lukys. He brought her here while we decide what to do. Your arrival has been most fortuitous.”