The Immortal Prince Read online

  “Ready?”

  What if I say no? Cayal wondered. What’s he going to do? Wait until I’m in the mood?

  “I want to be decapitated,” he complained, his voice muffled by the hood. “Hanging me is just wasting everybody’s time.”

  “Do you forgive me?” the hangman asked in a barely audible voice. Cayal got the feeling that of all the questions the hangman asked of his victims, this was the only one to which he genuinely craved an affirmative answer.

  “No point,” Cayal assured him.

  Blinded by the hood, he couldn’t tell what the hangman’s reaction was to his reply, and in truth, he didn’t care. Cayal was beyond forgiveness. He was beyond despair. Just to be sure, he reached out mentally, wondering if there was any trace of magic left, but he could sense nothing, not even a faint residual hint of the Tide he once commanded. The magic couldn’t save him from the pain he knew was coming…

  Almost before he finished the thought, the platform dropped beneath him. He plummeted through the trapdoor without any further warning.

  The rope tightened savagely, cutting off his breath. Cayal thrashed as the air was driven from his lungs, the knot under his left ear pushing his jaw out of alignment, snapping his neck with an audible crack.

  Filled with frustration, Cayal jerked viciously on the end of the rope, choking, asphyxiating, hoping it meant he was dying. His eyes watered with the pain. His very soul cried out in anguish, begging for death to claim him. He thrashed about, wondering if the violent motion would complete the hangman’s job. The agony was unbelievable. Beyond torture. White lights danced before his eyes, his heart was racing, lightning bolts of pain shot through his jaw and neck, he couldn’t breathe…

  Cayal cried out in a language nobody in Glaeba knew, pleading with the powers of darkness to take him…and then, with his last remaining breath, his cry turned to a wail of despair. He’d been thrashing at the end of the rope for far too long.

  His cry had driven the remaining air from his lungs. His throat was crushed. His neck broken.

  And still he lived.

  They left him hanging there for a long, long time, waiting for him to die. It was the nervous clerk who finally ordered him cut down when it was clear he wasn’t going to.

  Cayal hit the unforgiving ground with a thud and lay there in the mud, dragging in painful breaths to replenish his oxygen-starved lungs as the noose eased, already feeling the pain of his dislocated jaw, broken larynx and neck beginning to heal of their own accord.

  “Tides!” he heard the clerk exclaim as they jerked the hood from his head. “He’s still alive.”

  The hangman was leaning over him too, his expression shocked. “How can it be?”

  Cayal blinked in the harsh spring sunlight, glaring painfully up at the two men. Rough, unsympathetic faces filled his vision.

  “I can’t die,” he rasped through his crushed larynx and twisted jaw, not realising that even had he been able to form the words properly, he still spoke in his native tongue; a language long gone from Amyrantha. Realising his error, he added in Glaeban, “I’m immortal.”

  “What did he say?” the clerk asked in confusion.

  “Something about a portal?” the hangman ventured with a shrug.

  Cayal took another deep breath, even more painful than the last, if that was possible, then lifted his head and banged his face into the ground, jarring his jawbone back into place.

  “I’m immortal,” he repeated in his own tongue. Nobody understood him. Even through the pain, with the failure of these fools to give him the release he craved, he found himself losing patience with them. “You can’t…kill me. I’m a…Tide…Lord.”

  It wasn’t until later—when the Warden came back down to see what was going on—that he’d recovered sufficiently to repeat his announcement in a language even these stupid Glaebans would understand.

  “I’m…a Tide Lord,” he’d announced, pushing aside the agony for a moment. He’d been expecting shock, perhaps a little awe at his news—after all, they’d just borne witness to his immortality—certainly not scepticism. “And as I’ve now proved…you can’t hang me, I demand…to be decapitated!”

  The Warden had been far from impressed. “A Tide Lord, eh?”

  Ignoring the throbbing in his neck and jaw, trying to sound commanding, Cayal nodded. “You must…execute me again. Only this time, do it properly.”

  The man had squinted at Cayal lying on the ground at his feet in a foetal curl, smiling humourlessly. “I must do nothing on your command, my boy. I don’t care who you think you are.”

  Cayal hadn’t actually thought about what might happen if they didn’t behead him. Not in practical terms, at any rate. He had wanted to end things so badly he hadn’t allowed himself to consider the consequences, just in case it jinxed him somehow. Lukys would have called him a superstitious fool for thinking like that. But then, Lukys would have had quite a bit to say about this entire disastrous escapade if he’d known about it. Cayal wondered, for a moment, what had happened to him. It was a century or more since Cayal had seen any of his brethren. Perhaps, if he had, he might not have come to this, but finding the others was nigh impossible if they didn’t want to be found. It was easy to get lost in a world of millions when there were only twenty-two of you.

  So, alone and despairing, Cayal had waited until the lowest ebb of the Tide and then, quite deliberately and methodically, set out to put an end to his desolation.

  And failed miserably; a problem he was only now—as he heard the Warden demanding to know what had gone wrong—beginning to fully appreciate.

  “I am…Cayal, the Immortal…Prince,” he gasped, between his whimpers of agony. The damage done by the noose and his anxious jerking about at the end of the rope was substantial. This wasn’t going to heal in a few hours. Overnight, it might, but it was going to take time.

  “You’re a right pain in the backside, is what you are,” the Warden muttered, turning to the guards who stood over Cayal, watching him writhe on the cold ground in agony as the healing progressed apace. “Take him to the Row while I decide what to do with him.”

  “Didn’t you…hear me?” Cayal demanded as the Warden walked away, wondering if his inability to stand was somehow robbing his words of authority. The Warden seemed singularly unimpressed by the importance of his prisoner.

  “I heard what you said, you murdering little bastard,” the Warden assured him, glancing back over his shoulder at where Cayal lay. “And if you think acting crazy is going to save you from the noose, you can think again.”

  Crazy? Who’s acting crazy?

  “You don’t know…who you’re dealing with!” he tried to yell hoarsely at the Warden’s back. The pain was unbelievable. Healing at an accelerated rate was a very nasty business.

  “You’ve got a lot to learn about Glaeban justice yourself, old son,” one of the guards informed him, hauling him to his feet. “Come on, your holiness. Your royal suite awaits you.”

  Cayal’s legs hung uselessly beneath him, his shins banging against the stone steps as they dragged him up the narrow curving stairs to Recidivists’ Row while they worked out what to do with the man who wouldn’t die.

  The man they refused to acknowledge as an immortal.

  Chapter 2

  Warlock could smell the danger from across the corridor, even in the darkness. It overrode all the other rancid aromas in this place, sharper even than the stench of mouldy straw, the reek of stale urine, human faeces and the sour tang of boiled cabbages that permeated the very stone of his prison walls. Even the smell of distant rain did nothing to mask it. The feeling of imminent danger tugged on a primal, ancestral memory beyond sense or reason, made more ominous somehow by the far-off rattle of thunder as a storm beat uselessly at these thick prison walls.

  He knew what lurked across the hall; could taste the menace as surely as he could feel the rusty bars beneath his paws, as sure as he could hear the guards gaming far down the hall, so far away that not even
the light from the guardroom reached his cell. He could hear the warders, though, his canine senses far sharper than mere human ears, even those belonging to the suzerain.

  Warlock bared his teeth at the cell opposite. Although his moaning had not let up all night, the occupant was probably asleep, given the late hour. He would know nothing of the slight. He probably wouldn’t care, either. But it made Warlock feel a little better. If he couldn’t alleviate his discomfort, snarling in the face of his enemy made it a little easier to bear.

  The danger he sensed had arrived last night in the form of the occupant of the cell across the hall. A foreigner, the guards informed Warlock as they waited for one of the orderlies to clean out the cubicle in anticipation of his arrival. A wainwright from Caelum convicted of murder. Yesterday he’d been awaiting execution.

  And then, oddly, they’d brought him here.

  “Here” was Recidivists’ Row. At least, that’s what the guards called this dank and dreary place. The residents had other names for it, the kindest of which was hell. Recidivists’ Row was reserved for the worst criminals in Glaeba. Those the authorities had no intention of releasing but couldn’t justify killing.

  And why would they kill us, Warlock wondered, when it’s so much more fun to watch us rot?

  Warlock’s crime was much less impressive. He’d only killed one man. That his victim had killed three of his older sister’s cubs and been raping his younger sister when Warlock tore his throat out with his bare hands had meant nothing to the human magistrates who had stood in judgement of him. Warlock was Crasii. A slave. His crime was raising a hand in anger toward any human.

  The only thing that had saved Warlock from the hangman was that his victim had been a criminal with no family to speak of. There was nobody willing to stand up and beg for justice at the trial. Had Warlock been human, that might have been enough to see him released without penalty. Glaeban justice was all about consequences, which meant the fewer there were the less severe the sentence was likely to be. The man Warlock killed was lamented by nobody and had his killer been human, the court might have dismissed the case out of hand. But a previous black mark—when Warlock was little more than a pup he’d accidentally hit a human in a bar fight and been charged with assault—had landed him here in Recidivists’ Row. The Glaebans were just, but they weren’t particularly tolerant. Attacking a human once could be considered an accident. Twice meant he was dangerous. So dangerous his thread-bare prison uniform was stamped “never to be released.”

  And now, just when Warlock was beginning to come to terms with his incarceration, they’d caught a suzerain and tried to kill him.

  Idiots.

  The man across the hall had spent all night groaning in his sleep. He was still healing, Warlock guessed. Such was the price of immortality. Nature didn’t like being tampered with. Without a doubt, the suzerain would live, but the accelerated healing process was unrelenting. This agony which made him cry out, even in his sleep, was the price one paid for immortality.

  The prisoner screamed hoarsely again, and then began mumbling something in a language Warlock didn’t understand. His knowledge of the suzerain was handed down orally through generations of Crasii, his fear and loathing of them as much instinct as it was reason. It was the same for all the Crasii. The nearness of a suzerain was enough to make them lose all semblance of independence, any vestige of courage or rebellion. Knowing he’d been bred to serve the suzerain, Warlock was surprised to discover he still had the capacity to hate one of them. He’d thought, given the proximity of the man, he’d be a gibbering mass of fawning submission by now. Oddly, he wasn’t. He could feel the suzerain, taste his scent, but nothing in Warlock felt compelled to offer himself up to his master.

  Maybe it wears off, he thought, this need to serve the suzerain. It was a thousand years since they’d been heard from last. Not since the last Cataclysm.

  Or perhaps it’s Low Tide. Warlock had no way of knowing the moods of the Tide Star. He was of a race created by magic, not one able to sense or wield it.

  He was still pondering the mystery when another sound coming from the distant guardroom caught his notice. The faint scraping of a chair, the scuff of leather against stone, mumbled apologies, a promise to return…One of the warders getting ready to do his rounds.

  Warlock glanced through the bars but there was no telltale flicker of torchlight heading his way yet. He took a step back, however, long experience having taught him how threatened the guards were by his mere presence, let alone any stance they judged to be overtly aggressive.

  He didn’t mind that they feared him. If anything, it gave him some small sense of self in this place designed to sap all trace of spirit from a creature’s soul—Crasii or human. Knowing the guards considered him dangerous meant he was still alive; still capable of action. Warlock would rather have died than spend a lifetime cowering in the corner of his cell.

  Booted footsteps against the flagstones alerted him to the approaching guard, even before he saw the light coming around the corner of the narrow stone passage. He could tell by the scuffing rhythm of his walk that it was Goran Dill, the garrulous, fat corporal fond of ale and collecting orchids. It was a strange hobby for a prison guard, the corporal readily admitted, but he was always willing to chat to his charges, as if by befriending them, he somehow lessened the danger to himself. Warlock had wanted to respond that it was a strange hobby for any man, but no sane prisoner upset one of the few even remotely decent guards in this hellhole, so he’d smiled and nodded and tried to sound interested as Dill explained about colours, variations, and habitats of flowers he’d only heard about and never seen.

  One does what one must to survive in this place.

  The light grew steadily stronger as Goran Dill approached. Warlock smelled him long before he came into view. The man reeked of stale sweat, dirty leather and the faint perfume of the flowers he so adoringly tended.

  When he reached the cells, Goran raised the hissing torch and squinted through the flickering light into the gloom.

  “Can’t sleep, eh, dog boy?” he remarked, when he caught the shine of Warlock’s eyes in the torchlight.

  “Not with that racket going on across the way,” Warlock replied, jerking his head in the direction of the cell where the groaning suzerain was incarcerated.

  Goran cocked his head and listened for a moment. The man was babbling incoherently again in some foreign tongue that neither the Crasii nor the guard understood.

  “How long’s he been groaning and mumbling like that?”

  “All night.”

  The guard shrugged. “Should’ve died when he was supposed to. Then he wouldn’t be having these troubles.”

  Goran’s lack of sympathy was hardly surprising and Warlock knew exactly how he felt, but he needed to sleep and that wasn’t going to happen with a man screaming in agony across the hall.

  “Can’t you give him something?”

  “What do I look like? A flankin’ pharmacist?”

  “Knock him unconscious, then,” Warlock suggested. “Better yet, let me in there for a minute or two. I’ll shut him up.”

  Goran seemed amused. “Yeah…right…there’s an idea. I’ll let you at him, eh, dog boy? And how would I explain him being dead in the morning?”

  “Trust me, Corporal Dill, of all the things that you may or may not have to explain in the morning, your friend across the hall there dying isn’t among them.”

  “You buy his story then…about being immortal?”

  “Is that what he’s claiming?”

  “Reckons he’s a Tide Lord,” Goran informed him. “Says that’s why the noose didn’t kill him.”

  “Then a short sharp blow to the head will either prove he’s right or save the executioner the trouble of another hanging, won’t it?” Warlock pointed out, trying very hard not to look surprised at the news. Not that it mattered. Given the dim light and Goran Dill’s poor ability to read Crasii expressions, it was unlikely he noticed anything amis
s. “Either way, if he’s unconscious he’ll shut up and I’ll be able to sleep.”

  The suzerain cried out again, this time a tormented scream that echoed off the walls and made even the other prisoners stir in their sleep.

  Goran sighed heavily, but nodded in agreement with the need to do something. “All right then. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Taking the keys from his belt, he wedged the torch into the bracket set into the wall behind him and fiddled with the lock for a moment before throwing the door to the suzerain’s cell wide open. Through the open bars, Warlock could tell the man didn’t notice his visitor, either still asleep or too consumed by his pain to care what was happening around him. Goran Dill walked to the pallet and stared down at the writhing lump tossing and turning on the dirty straw mattress, and then, with little ado, withdrew his truncheon. One sharp blow to the temple and the man fell silent.

  Warlock breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Might be immortal,” Goran joked as he relocked the cell, “but he ain’t invincible.”

  “Thank you,” Warlock said with genuine gratitude.

  “All part of the service,” Goran shrugged, lifting the torch out of its bracket. “You get some sleep now, eh, dog boy. Don’t want you all snarly and growly in the morning when they give you a bath.”

  “A bath?” he repeated in surprise. “Why am I being made to have a bath?”

  “Everyone in Recidivists’ Row is gettin’ a bath, lad. And fresh clothes. Gotta scrub the cells out, too. And change the bedding.”

  “Why?” he asked, unable to imagine any circumstance that would prompt such an unexpected burst of housekeeping.

  “You’ve got an important visitor coming,” Goran informed him as he headed back up the hall. “At least the Tide Lord does, ’cause he’s coming to visit him. A real important man, he is. Can’t have him getting offended by all you filthy scumbags, can we?”