The Palace of Impossible Dreams Read online

  The

  PALACE OF

  IMPOSSIBLE

  DREAMS

  Tor Books by Jennifer Fallon

  THE HYTHRUN CHRONICLES

  THE DEMON CHILD TRILOGY

  Medalon (Book One)

  Treason Keep (Book Two)

  Harshini (Book Three)

  THE WOLFBLADE TRILOGY

  Wolfblade (Book One)

  Warrior (Book Two)

  Warlord (Book Three)

  THE TIDE LORDS

  The Immortal Prince (Book One)

  The Gods of Amyrantha (Book Two)

  The Palace of Impossible Dreams (Book Three)

  The

  PALACE OF

  IMPOSSIBLE

  DREAMS

  The Tide Lords:

  Book Three

  JENNIFER FALLON

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  New York

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE PALACE OF IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS

  Copyright © 2008 by Jennifer Fallon

  All rights reserved.

  First published in Australia by Voyager, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  Maps by Russell Kirkpatrick

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-1684-4

  First U.S. Edition: June 2010

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Fliss . . .

  welcome to the family

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part II

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part III

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Part IV

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Epilogue

  The

  PALACE OF

  IMPOSSIBLE

  DREAMS

  PROLOGUE

  One thousand years ago . . .

  Tryan studied the sorry line of prisoners standing on the edge of the cliff, wondering idly how much wind he would have to call up to blow them off, one by one, and onto the rocks that pockmarked the valley far below.

  None of this would be necessary, of course, if they would just tell him what he wanted to know. Life was easier for everyone on Amyrantha when people did what Tryan wanted.

  He turned and motioned Elyssa forward, noticing the slight hesitation before she did as he bid. Her interest in this little adventure was fading, he suspected; had been for a while—ever since the last time they’d met up with Cayal.

  For now, though, she was still his sister and willing to play her part, even if it was less than enthusiastically.

  “Which one should we kill first?” he asked, in a voice loud enough to be heard by the prisoners. A few whimpers of fear were all they dared, but he could tell his threats were having the desired effect. The twenty or so prisoners were chained together, after all, which meant he really only had to toss a few of their number off the cliff for all to be in peril.

  “We?” Elyssa asked in a voice meant only for him. “Don’t you mean which one you should kill? This is your idea, not mine. I want no part of this, Tryan.”

  “One of them has the Chaos Crystal.”

  “If one of these sorry mortals had the Chaos Crystal, you’d know it by now, I’m quite certain.” Elyssa cast her disinterested gaze along the line of naked men, women and children shivering in their chains on the edge of the precipice. “Tides, it’s not as if one of them is hiding it in their pocket, now, is it?”

  Tryan frowned and cast his eyes over the pile of personal belongings he had stripped from this small group of refugees. Other than their clothing, a few tools and weapons, and a set of tattered, but clearly beloved Tarot cards in a singed leather case, there was nothing to be found. No maps. No instructions . . .

  Which meant one, or perhaps all of these Cabal members, had memorised the location of the Crystal. Tryan was quite prepared to murder every man, woman and child, until one of them confessed who it was.

  “One of you has something I want,” he announced to the group, studying their faces as he spoke, searching for some flicker of comprehension or a whisper of deceit; anything that would indicate one of these wretched humans knew what he was seeking. Trouble was, they all looked universally terrified, so it was a little hard to tell. “If you tell me what I want to know, I will let you live. If you don’t . . .”

  He let the sentence hang. They were standing with their backs to a cliff, after all. Terrified as they were, he didn’t think he needed to belabour the obvious.

  His prisoners remained stubbornly silent.

  Tryan was losing patience with them. And he didn’t have a lot to start with.

  “One of you . . . perhaps all of you miserable creatures . . . knows the location of the Chaos Crystal. Tell me now, or . . .” He scanned the line of prisoners, his eyes fixing on a lad of about fourteen on the right. Thin, pale and shivering, the boy held his cupped hands in front of his shrivelled manhood, in a vain attempt at modesty. He was second from the end of the line, tied next to a plump and equally terrified fair-haired woman in her mid-thirties, who—given the protective way she was trying to shield him—was probably his mother. “. . . or she dies first,” he finished, pointing at the woman, while keeping his eyes fixed on the lad.

  Tryan waited. The boy said nothing.

  “Have it your way then.”

  Tryan flicked his wrist, sending a violent gust of wind toward the line of prisoners. The woman screamed, stagger
ing under the onslaught, loose stones under her feet tumbling from the cliff’s edge as she scrabbled to maintain her balance. Several of the other prisoners screamed too, as their chains tugged them backwards.

  Not the lad, however. He remained stony faced and unmoved by the threat of impending death, even with his mother barely holding her balance beside him.

  Tryan stepped forward, annoyed at the lad’s determination.

  “I will kill you,” he said.

  The boy slowly raised his head to meet Tryan’s eye. What the immortal saw there disturbed him greatly. The boy was frightened witless, but an edge of defiance lurked beneath the surface of his fear that no amount of threats or intimidation was going to pierce.

  “You can’t kill all of us,” the boy replied.

  “Shows how little you know,” Elyssa muttered behind Tryan.

  The immortal ignored the snide remark from his sister and took a step closer to the boy, convinced now that this defiant child held the key to the information he sought.

  “You know, don’t you?”

  The boy shivered and trembled in the crisp mountain air, but his resolve didn’t waver.

  “There is nowhere you can run, boy,” Tryan warned, leaning so close he could feel the boy’s warm breath on his face. “No place you can hide. No place I can’t eventually find you.”

  “There’s one place you can’t follow me,” the boy said in a trembling voice, his courage all the more impressive for it.

  Tryan smiled coldly. “Is that what you think?”

  The lad nodded.

  “And where is this remarkable place I can’t follow you?”

  The child smiled at him then, his fear falling away, almost as if he had resolved some internal torment and was content with his decision. He squared his shoulders, glanced down the line at his fellow prisoners, looked the other way at his terrified mother, and then back at Tryan.

  “You can’t follow us into death,” the boy said.

  Before Tryan could stop him, the boy stepped backwards off the precipice, taking the line of prisoners with him. His weight alone should not have been sufficient to drag the others with him. He was just a boy, after all. But they’d fallen, nonetheless. Or jumped. Allowing themselves to be pulled off the cliff like that amounted to the same thing. Nobody resisted. Nobody fought to stay upright or tried to cling to the edge. The wind he’d conjured to terrify them into compliance whipped away their screams on the way down.

  Tryan was too stunned to react in time. He never thought to break their fall or had time to cushion it with air. Seconds later, the bodies landed some four hundred feet below him with a series of soft “thuds,” leaving the immortal standing on the cliff staring after them.

  “Well, that plan worked a treat,” Elyssa said coming up beside him. She looked down at the pile of broken bodies for a moment and then at Tryan. “Scared them into killing themselves before they could tell you anything, eh? There’s an interrogation technique I’ve not seen before.”

  Tryan turned from the cliff’s edge. “Shut up, Elyssa.”

  “Didn’t exactly go the way you planned, then?” she taunted.

  He glared at her angrily. “I told you to shut up.”

  She shrugged and turned to look at the ruins of the refugee camp. “And I told you that if you want to find the Chaos Crystal, why not play nice and go ask Maralyce where it is?”

  “Maralyce would have it by now if she knew where it was.”

  “She’s got a better idea than you, I suspect.”

  Tryan stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “She’s not tunnelling through the Shevron Mountains for her health, you know.”

  “Then we must find the Crystal first—before she finds it and gives it to Lukys.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he who controls the Chaos Crystal,” Tryan said, kicking a small box tiled in nacre over the edge of the cliff to join its foolish owner, “controls the Tide.”

  He looked down at the pile of possessions he’d taken from the Cabal refugees, frowning, annoyed by how futile this whole exercise had been. They’d spent a useless hour searching their effects as he stripped them, to no avail. In a fury, he kicked at the pile, sending many of them drifting down after their owners.

  “Oh, well, now that was mature.”

  In a burst of frustration, directed mostly at his sister whom he couldn’t harm because she was immortal, Tryan cried out, drawing on the Tide. His angry outburst caused the edge of the cliff to shatter and crumble, tumbling after the pitiful belongings in a fall of rocks that sealed the graves of these pitiful mortals along with every trace of them.

  Elyssa jumped back with a squeal as she almost lost her footing, and then she turned on her brother. “Feel better now?”

  “Don’t look at me like I’m a fool, Lyssa,” Tryan said. “Because he who controls the Tide . . . controls the universe.”

  PART I

  The tide keeps its course.

  —James Howell (1594–1666)

  Chapter 1

  The heaving motion of the ship was making Arkady queasy. Although she’d sailed often enough on the Great Lakes of Glaeba, it was nothing like the rolling gait of an oceangoing slaver. It didn’t help much that she was crammed into a low, crowded cabin with five other women in a space that could, if one was being generous, be considered room enough for two.

  “Elbow me again like that, ya stupid bitch, an’ I’ll knock y’unconscious,” someone threatened sleepily. The comment wasn’t meant for Arkady. Although she couldn’t see much in the dark, unlit cabin, Arkady was lying on the floor, straight and rigid, between Saxtyn on her left and the youngest of their group, Alkasa, on her right. Both women were sound asleep.

  Arkady couldn’t sleep; she’d barely slept since leaving Elvere. Even if the pain of her newly branded breast hadn’t been keeping her awake, her status as slave, and endless agonising over what her future might hold, were more than enough to fuel her insomnia.

  It was one thing to grow up in a society where slavery was commonplace, quite another to discover she was now the slave rather than the master. It wasn’t the cramped, smelly quarters below decks, where the only sanitation was a rarely emptied bucket; it wasn’t the porridge-like gruel they served the prisoners once a day or the stale, rancid water that did little to hydrate the slaves because it had given most of them diarrhoea; it wasn’t even being branded like a prize mare that made a part of her want to curl up and die inside.

  No, for Arkady Desean, the worst part was the intolerable realisation she was now somebody’s possession—that she was of no value to anybody but her faceless, distant owner.

  The other slaves had informed her that their owner now was one Filimar Medura, a Senestran slaver of considerable means who owned not only Arkady, but all the other slaves aboard, not to mention the ship itself. He ran a fleet of slavers, according to her cellmates. In fact, the entire family’s wealth, for more generations than anybody cared to remember, was based on the trade in living flesh, both human and Crasii.

  The ship lurched again. Arkady shifted uncomfortably on the hard deck, unable to turn because of the press of Alkasa’s dead weight beside her, and unable to breathe because of the stifling heat. A noise distracted her, coming from above. There was a porthole in the cabin, left open to afford some small hint of fresh air. Not that it did much to relieve either the smell or the feeling she was slowly being asphyxiated.

  There was a moment or two when she thought there might be somebody on the ship even worse off than she was. At night, when the only sounds in her cramped prison were the not-so-soft snores of her fellow slaves, the creaking of timber and slosh of the waves against the hull, Arkady sometimes heard voices speaking a language she didn’t understand on the deck above. Often they laughed, apparently taunting one of their crewmen.

  Occasionally, listening at the porthole, she learned something useful. Or rather, one of her cellmates did. Arkady didn’t speak Senestran well; she cou
ldn’t understand very much of what they said.

  She’d learned something useful earlier this evening, however, which was the main reason she still couldn’t sleep. Saxtyn had overheard the sailors talking. They could all overhear the crew talking, but only the debtor slave understood their language well enough to translate it for the others. The captain, according to ship’s scuttlebutt, had told the sailors they could have the batch-bought slaves for entertainment in their off-duty hours, once the ship was clear of Torlenian waters.

  Arkady’s value as a slave, she knew, was defined by her gender. Male slaves in Senestra were generally more valuable, deemed more useful as workers. Females were required for such mundane roles as seamstresses, weavers and nursemaids and the like, but only a rare few were lucky to be chosen for that fate. Generally, human female slaves were kept to entertain the male workers, be they slave or freeborn, in the many mining camps, farms and floating estates belonging to the Senestran nobility. To entertain and to breed the next generation of slaves was their function. It was, according to Alkasa, the only thing women were good for in Senestra, and Arkady had better get used to it if she planned to survive.

  There was a double standard at work here, which peeved Arkady no end. Senestran men would never dream of treating their free women so rudely. Quite the opposite. Senestran men, particularly high-born Senestran men, treated their women with a level of respect bordering on idolatry. That, conversely, was the reason for their fondness for human female slaves.

  Wives are for heirs, slaves are for fun, was a Senestran saying Arkady was only just beginning to appreciate.

  So now, in addition to the pain from being branded with a hot iron and facing a lifetime in slavery as a whore, there was the problem of how she was going to avoid being handed around the crew; hence the reason Arkady was lying here, wide awake, trying to figure out a way to escape.

  She had no intention of becoming a whore. Worse than a whore. Whores, at least, were paid for their efforts. Being pack-raped on a daily basis by the crew of a Senestran slaver for an indeterminate length of time before being on-sold to a mining camp for the same purpose was not a future Arkady was willing to contemplate.