The Gods of Amyrantha (3 page)

The sharp crack of Elyssa's hand striking her brother's face almost startled Tiji into revealing herself.

'Bastard.'

Her brother smiled, sending a chill down Tiji's spine. Such malice, such inhuman malevolence, was more than she'd bargained for. Tryan the Devil, the Tarot called him. Tiji began to understand why. She felt her camouflage slipping, but forced it under control. With their attention fixed on each other, neither Tryan nor Elyssa seemed to notice.

'Bastard I may be, Elyssa, but soon I'll be king. And this time, I'm not planning to share it with anyone.'

'Syrolee might have something to say about that.'

'Let her say whatever she wants. Let her find ' somewhere else to play Empress of the Five Realms, if it comes to it. I'm a Tide Lord. I'm fed up with being a minion.'

'Maybe that's all you're good for, Tryan.'

'We'll find out soon enough, Elyssa.'

His sister didn't seem to have an answer to that. Tossing her head, Elyssa swept up her skirts and headed for the door. Tiji closed her eyes in relief, expecting Tryan to follow, but the booted footsteps she heard didn't dwindle into the distance.

They seemed to be getting closer ...

A strong hand closed around her throat before she had time register what that meant. Tiji's eyes flew open. Her camouflage vanished in fright, leaving her naked and vulnerable, dressed in nothing but her silver-scaled skin. She couldn't breathe. Tryan's face was only inches away, his eyes boring into hers.

'What are you doing here, you Crasii scum?'

'To serve you is the reason I breathe, my lord,' Tiji gasped. Scard she may be, but she knew the forms. If she remained a quivering mass of terror — which required no acting on her part at all — he would have no reason to suspect she was anything but just another Crasii, probably a spy set on the Grand Duchess of Torfail by the Queen of Caelum.

'Why were you spying on us?'

Tiji didn't answer. All her breath had been spent swearing allegiance to him.

It seemed Tryan wasn't interested in an explanation anyway. He shoved her away as he let her go, turning his back on her. 'It doesn't matter why. You will repeat nothing of what you heard today.'

'To serve you is the reason I breathe,' she managed to wheeze, as she fell.

Heading for the door, Tryan didn't even acknowledge her reply.

But then, why would he? The Crasii were slaves, bred with unquestioning obedience to the orders of their masters. Tryan had no reason to doubt her, believing, as did all the Tide Lords, that the reptilian Crasii had been purged of any rebellious tendencies several thousand years ago. He had no reason to assume every word he and his conspirators uttered would not remain secret because the Crasii were incapable of doing anything else.

Unless the Crasii was a Scard.

Unless the compulsion wasn't as assured as Tryan assumed. And if the Tide Lords had a weakness, it was their inability to tell a Scard from a loyal Crasii until the Scard disobeyed a direct order.

And Tiji
was
a Scard, recruited, trained and loyal to the enemies of the Tide Lords. And if it killed her, she would get word to Declan Hawkes and the Cabal of the Tarot, that Tryan the Devil was planning to take the reins of power in Caelum, and that Engarhod, Krydence and Ranee probably weren't far behind them.

The Empress of the Five Realms was among them once again.

CHAPTER 2

Declan Hawkes flexed his fingers, hoping to ease the sting, while silently cursing his own stupidity for hitting any man on the jaw with a closed fist. His men had been at this prisoner for several hours, down here in the gloomy basement cells of Herino Prison, where the screams of prisoners under interrogation were unlikely to disturb the good citizens of the capital. Declan knew he was wasting his time. It was optimistic beyond imagining to risk breaking the fragile bones in his hand on the off-chance a single frustrated blow from the King's Spymaster would be the defining moment in this man's interrogation.

Battered and bruised, but still defiant, the prisoner's head had snapped back with the force of Declan's punch. His eyes watering with the pain, he slowly turned back to stare at his tormentors. 'I won't betray my country.'

Declan exchanged a glance with Rye Barnes, the man who had — up until now — been unsuccessfully trying to beat a confession out of this suspected Caelish spy. They'd found him in the sewers beneath the palace, claiming to be one of the workers employed to keep them free of debris. It was a foolish claim. No human worked the sewers of Herino. That was a job reserved exclusively for amphibious Crasii slaves. The only plausible reason any human would be lurking around the palace sewers was that he was up to no good.

This defiant declaration was a breakthrough. It was the first time he'd even hinted his loyalties lay somewhere other than Glaeba.

Maybe several hours of relentless beatings
had
softened him up. Of course, the man's rebelliousness could have been for himself as much as his tormenters — a last ditch effort to remind himself of his purpose. Declan consciously fostered a reputation of a ruthless and fearsome spymaster, after all, a piece of advice he'd taken from his predecessor and applied to great effect. He forgot, sometimes, how successful he'd been at that and had to fight the urge to smile.

'You keep telling yourself that, friend,' Declan said. 'I'll make sure Ricard Li knows what a trouper you were.' He turned to Rye Barnes and added in an uninterested voice. 'Kill him.'

Declan turned for the cell door, as Rye pulled a wicked-looking knife from his belt. It was nearly a foot long, curved and serrated along one edge. As a killing tool, it was fairly inefficient. You couldn't fault the psychological effect of it, though.

'No! Wait!' the man cried.

Declan smiled, forced it away and then turned back to look at the prisoner. 'Wait? For what? You've made your position clear. You're never going to betray your country. I respect that. But I've got other places to be, you know. If you're not going to tell us anything, I'm not going to waste any more time beating a confession out of you that you've made it quite clear you're never going to give.' He nodded to Rye Barnes. 'Try not to make too much mess, Rye. You know how hard it is to get blood off these walls.'

Again, Declan turned away. He made it all the way to the door, this time, before the prisoner was convinced they weren't bluffing.

'I was looking for something!'

'Looking for what?' Rye asked, pushing the wickedly serrated blade against the prisoner's neck.

'I don't know!'

Declan waved Rye's blade away and studied the battered prisoner hanging from the chains. 'If you don't know what you were looking for, how did you expect to find it?'

The man met Declan's eye for a moment, the last glimmer of defiance fading from his eyes. 'They said I'd know when I found it.'

'And what exactly is
it
supposed to be?' '

The prisoner shrugged. 'An artefact. Something really old. Left over from the last Cataclysm. It's supposed to hold the key to ultimate power.'

Declan smiled openly this time. 'I see. You were searching the Herino palace sewers for the secret to ultimate power.' He turned to Rye Barnes. 'Because that's where we'd keep the secret to ultimate power, isn't it? In the sewers?'

Rye smiled crookedly. 'Aye. Along with the crown jewels.'

'It's the truth,' the Caelishman said. 'I swear it.'

Oddly, Declan believed him. His story made no sense, but there was a ring of truth about his words. More than that, the man looked defeated. It was that lack of defiance that told him when the fight had gone out of a man.

He wished he had the time to investigate this further, but he was already late for a meeting that — in the grand scheme of things — was far more important to the future of the entire world, than what some misguided Caelishman was up to in the sewers beneath Herino palace.

'Let him rest,' Declan ordered, deciding to reward the man's cooperation. Torture was, in many ways, like training a dog. You rewarded the behaviour you wanted to encourage and punished what you wanted to discourage. He'd told them something useful and it would result in food, water and a cessation of pain. The prisoner would learn very quickly, from this point

on, what it took to stay in Rye Barnes's favour. 'We'll talk to him again tomorrow.' 'Yes, sir.'

He turned to the prisoner. 'You'll tell us more tomorrow.' It wasn't a question.

The prisoner looked at him bleakly and then looked away. However much he might despise himself, Declan could see the surrender in his dull eyes and knew he was right.

'Sorry I'm late.'

'That's all right, Declan. We were just wondering how another immortal could be under our nose all this time and we not know about it?' Tilly Ponting said as she took her seat at the table, glaring at the small group of men gathered in the parlour of her Herino townhouse. A savage summer thunderstorm rattled the windows as it hammered down outside, lighting the room with occasional flashes, visible even around the edge of the heavy drapes.

Although elegantly furnished, the room was small and felt unbearably close. So close, the bloodstained cells beneath the prison, from which he'd just departed, seemed almost airy by comparison. Crammed with generations of clutter and keepsakes belonging to the Ponting family, the lamp in the centre of the table cast ominous shadows across the faces of the conspirators.

Between the thunderstorm and the secret nature of this meeting, there was no question of opening the windows or the heavy curtains covering them. It had been a hot day building up to the storm, and the low cloud had trapped the day's heat so effectively it felt hotter now, close to midnight, than it had at midday, despite the rain.

Declan loosened his collar before he spoke, certain Tilly's statement was directed at him, although the Guardian of the Lore seemed to be addressing all of them.

'Kylia was in Lebec until the wedding,' he explained. 'The only Scard we had in place at the Lebec Palace was a feline and she never came into contact with the family. We might have had a chance if we'd known about Boots, but she'd already had her run-in with Jaxyn by then and escaped by the time the girl posing as the Duke of Lebec's niece became a fixture.'

'It wouldn't have made any difference,' Aleki said. 'We didn't know about Boots being a Scard back then, either.'

A tall, dark-haired man a few years older than Declan, Lord Aleki Ponting, the Earl of Summerton, was Tilly's only son. He was in town ostensibly for the royal wedding and the start of the court season, but more importantly, he was here to attend this meeting of the Glaeban-based members of the Cabal of the Tarot.

Just as Declan's assigned role was to serve the Cabal as the King's Spymaster, Aleki's was to protect and train the Scards living in Hidden Valley, a place that existed not in Caelum to the west of the Great Lakes, as popular Crasii legend held, but barely fifty miles from the Glaeban capital, tucked away in the heavily forested slopes of the Shevron Mountains, in a remote part of the Summerton Earldom, halfway between Herino and Lebec.

'You
were in Lebec Palace,' Lord Deryon reminded Declan. 'Several times. You met Kylia, didn't you? Did
you
notice anything amiss?'

'I'm not a Scard, my lord. I wouldn't know an immortal if he came up and pinched me on the backside. Would you?' Declan was more than a little peeved to think he was being blamed for this.

Tilly seemed to agree with him. She placed a comforting hand over Lord Deryon's arm. 'There's nothing to be gained by trying to apportion blame, Karyl. We'll do the immortals' job for them if we start

tearing ourselves apart with recrimination. What we should be doing is finding out exactly what we're dealing with. Are we
sure
about this girl being an immortal?' She shook her head in disbelief. 'It seems too incredible to be true.'

'I've had two Scards confirm it now,' Declan assured her. 'They both agree the new Crown Princess of Glaeba is a suzerain.'

'Do we know which one?' Aleki asked.

'It's unlikely she's a Tide Lord,' Shalimar remarked.

Declan's grandfather was sitting in the armchair near the unlit fireplace, settled in as comfortably as if this was his parlour, not Lady Ponting's. It was rare for him to leave his attic in the Lebec slums and he appeared to be making the most of this opportunity to enjoy Tilly's hospitality and the comforts of great wealth for a few days.

'How do you figure that?' Declan asked.

'Jaxyn's not the sort to share power and he was here long before Kylia appeared on the scene. Given there's been no sign of the Empress of the Five Realms, or any of her kin, we can probably discount it being Elyssa.'

'Kylia's too pretty,' Declan said. 'It's definitely not Elyssa.'

Lord Deryon nodded in agreement. 'She's more likely one of the lesser immortals looking for a comfy berth to await the returning Tide.'

'But
which
lesser immortal?' Tilly looked at the four men, expecting one of them to answer.

'I'd take odds on Medwen or Diala,' Aleki suggested after thinking about it for a moment.