The Immortal Heights (2 page)

“I do not like this,” Titus said darkly.

“You never like anything, darling.” But she liked it no better than he did.

The wyverns advanced from all directions. The rebels retreated toward the center of their formation. The wyverns pushed in farther. The rebels pulled tighter.

All at once the wyverns on the front line charged. The rebels scattered like a school of fish bombarded by diving cormorants. Kashkari wrested Titus and Iolanthe left and up to get out of the way
of a pair of hard-driving wyverns. Iolanthe, who'd forgotten again to keep Kashkari in her sight, grabbed on to her carpet, its motion a hard jerk in her neck.

More wyverns careened into the rebels, forcing each three-mage squad to fend for itself. Kashkari veered them to the right, to avoid being struck by a wyvern's wing. Iolanthe called for a ten-foot-wide sphere of fire and hurled it at the rider of the nearest wyvern—wyverns could not be harmed by ordinary fire; riders, not so invincible.

The wyvern knocked aside the fireball with its wing. Iolanthe summoned a fireball twice as big in diameter and sent it plummeting from above the wyvern rider.

A few feet from the head of the wyvern rider, her fire went out like a candle flame in a gale. She swore—there were other elemental mages nearby, interfering.

Or at least so she hoped—that it was other elemental
mages
, and not the Bane himself, as powerful an elemental mage as any who ever lived.

A trio of wyverns dove toward them. Kashkari swerved. Iolanthe hung on to her carpet, a string of spells leaving her lips as she zoomed by a wyvern—all of which, alas, were deflected by the wyvern's wings.

“Untether my carpet, Kashkari!” shouted Titus. “You get Fairfax back into the base.”

Her beloved never feared anything without cause. But all Iolanthe
could see were wyvern riders and rebels on carpets wheeling about. A fraction of a second later, however, it became clear that the three of them had been separated from the rest of the rebels and were surrounded by wyverns.

Without thinking, she willed a mass of sand to rise from the desert floor. The riders wore protective goggles, and the wyverns had hardy but transparent inner eyelids that made their vision impervious to flying specks. Still, sand impeded and sand obscured. If nothing else, a tornado of sand would make her feel less visible, less exposed.

But the desert floor seemed to have melted into a sea of glass. Not a single grain of sand leaped into the air at her command. The wyverns pressed in closer. She called for currents of air to push them back. The moment she did so, however, she felt the pressure of countercurrents—Atlantis's elemental mages were neutralizing her on every front.

She was not alone in her failure. Titus and Kashkari were trying all kinds of spells to no avail. She didn't know about Kashkari, but the prince was a veteran of dragon battles—at least in the Crucible, a book of folklore and fairy tales that he and Iolanthe used as proving grounds to train themselves for dangerous situations. But usually, in those stories, the dragons were few in number. And if they should be numerous, as in
The Dragon Princess
, at least the protagonist had a sturdy defensive position, like a dilapidated but still mighty fort, instead of flying carpets that provided no cover at all.

“Can I vault her into the base, or is that a no-vaulting zone?” Titus shouted the question at Kashkari.

“It's a no-vaulting zone!”

Titus swore.

Earlier this very night, he had made the two of them jump to the ground from a height of half a mile, with nothing to break their fall but her powers over air, because he hadn't wanted to risk vaulting her: vaulting so soon after a life-threatening injury could kill her outright.

Were they truly running out of options?

An incendiary idea flared to life. She had always called for lightning from above. But in nature, lightning didn't necessarily originate from the sky. Sometimes balls of electricity wafted from nowhere. Sometimes lightning traveled from the ground to the clouds.

Could she?

She aimed her wand downward, feeling as foolish as she had when she first attempted to summon a thunderbolt from above. “Lightning.”

Nothing happened.

One particularly large wyvern surged forward and extended a claw—it would grab her off the carpet. The carpet dropped straight down and the claw missed her head by inches.

Two more wyverns followed the example of the first, attacking her from different altitudes, so that even if she were to drop or rise, she would not be able to evade both.

She tried again for lightning. Nothing.

Somehow Kashkari tugged them sideways, with the wyvern's talons slicing just past the prince's shoulder.

“Do you want me to vault you to the ground?” Titus yelled.

He and Kashkari shielded her from either side. Beyond the wyverns, the rebels were trying to break through this siege-inside-a-siege, the light of the war phoenix illuminating the anxiety and panic on their faces.

The wyverns advanced ever closer. The force of their wingbeats buffeted her from every side. She could see the glint of each individual scale on the nearest wyvern—and the eagerness of its rider, shoulders forward, fingers all but tapping against the reins.

She had given the wrong answer to the prince's benediction earlier. She exhaled and recited the correct response: “For I shall bear testimony to the might of the Angels. For I am power, I am mastery, and I am the hammer of immortality.”

Titus snatched the two remaining hunting ropes out of their emergency satchel. “As the world endures.” He completed the prayer as the first hunting rope left his hand. “As hope abides ever in the face of the Void.”

The hunting rope caught the outstretched claw of a wyvern and twisted it back.

“Heads down!” Kashkari bellowed as he wrenched them out of the grasp of another wyvern.

Their last hunting rope shot out and missed the incoming wyvern
altogether—the beast pulled in its legs and swatted the hunting rope out of the way with its wing.
You cannot surprise Atlantis twice
.

But the hunting rope wasn't aiming for the wyvern at all, but its rider, slapping itself around the latter's wrists and forcing the rider to jerk on the reins.

“Behind you, Fairfax!” called Kashkari.

She glanced back, expecting to see a pair of talons swooping down. They were, but Kashkari had put himself between the wyvern and her, facing the beast. He flipped backward, kicking his carpet toward the wyvern as he did so, and with a twist in midair landed behind Iolanthe, grabbing her by the middle so he wouldn't fall off the narrow ledge on which she stood.

“Come on,” Titus shouted. “Bring down that hammer of immortality, will you?”

Ever since she'd been a little girl, friends and neighbors had asked her how it felt to wield direct power over the elements, without the intercession of words and incantations. She'd found it difficult to explain until she'd visited Delamer's Museum of Nonmage Artifacts on a school trip and had held a compass in her hand, lining up the quivering little needle with the magnetic north.
That
was what it felt like when she was in control of the elements, the alignment of her person with an invisible longitude of power.

Her previous attempts had wobbled wide of that perfect calibration. But this time she felt it, the difference between approximation and exactitude. She double-tapped Validus. Light radiated from the
seven diamond crowns along the length of the blade wand.

She pointed it down and looked at Titus. “For you.”

A flick of her wrist and a white-hot burst of electricity reared up from the floor of the desert.

CHAPTER
2

FOR YOU
.

Time slowed. The syllables stretched out in Titus's ears as the lightning built spark by spark from the dark sands below, a spawn of brilliance hatching into a creature with claws, claws that lashed on to the nearest wyverns. The wyverns seized and fell, their wings lax and open, tumbling through the air end over end like paper dragons that had been carelessly flicked from a high balcony.

Silence, punctuated by the thuds of half a dozen wyverns crashing into the ground.

And another eternity of silence—which was probably only a fraction of a second—before the roar erupted, the screeching of wyverns mixed with the astonished cries of the rebels.

“What
was
that?” asked Kashkari, his left hand raised near his ear in an involuntary gesture of stupefaction.

This jolted Titus out of his own amazement. He put into effect
a spell that gave his voice the amplitude to carry for miles. “Behold. Here is one who wields the divine spark, beloved by the Angels.”

There were few followers of the Angelic Host in the Sahara. He was speaking not so much to the rebels as to the Atlanteans, who took their faith seriously.

“Remember,” countered a high, clear voice that Titus recognized as belonging to the woman brigadier who had been on their heels since the moment he and Fairfax arrived in the desert, “usurpers often claim to be beloved by the Angels.”

“And your Lord High Commander does not claim to be favored from above?” he retorted.

Atlantis's response was a clarion call. The wyvern riders regrouped. But instead of resuming their assault, they and their steeds left the bell jar dome entirely.

“Fortune favors the brave!” yelled a rebel.

Those closest to her shouted, “And the brave make their own fortune!”

“Fortune favors the brave!” she yelled again.

This time, almost everyone cried, “And the brave make their own fortune!”

It was noisy and jubilant. The rebels were beginning to laugh, from awe, excitement, and the draining of tension. They ribbed their friends for how afraid they had looked and boasted of their own fearlessness, only to be mocked in turn for trembling hands and misdirected spells.

Yet in the middle of this celebratory camaraderie, Titus's blood was turning cold. Atlantis did not give up so easily—or it would not rule the mage world.

“Let me guess, you like this even less,” said Fairfax.

He turned to the girl in whose strength and character he had entrusted his fate. “I am an open book before you.”

“If you are an open book,” she answered, a hint of mischief in her voice, “then you resemble nothing so much as your mother's diary—hundreds of blank pages, followed by a few life-changing lines.”

He could not help smiling a little. “By the way, you never cease to amaze me.”

She steered her carpet closer and took his hand. “I admit to being rather amazed myself. But the part of me that is your protégée—you know, the eternal pessimist—wonders whether I haven't made even more trouble for everyone.”

“It's all right,” said Kashkari. “We are all here for trouble.”

The rebels quieted as a drumroll came, followed by the pleasant female voice the base used for public announcements. “Armored chariots sighted.”

Armored chariots, which were impervious to the power of a lightning strike.

Titus deployed a far-seeing spell: five squadrons, at the very limits of his enhanced vision. Three minutes then, possibly five, before they were on top of the bell jar dome.

Amara, the commander of the rebel base, zoomed over and
handed a new carpet to Kashkari, who was still standing behind Fairfax and holding on to her.

“Something strange is going on,” said Amara. “I distinctly recall, while we were still inside the base, a warning about incoming lindworms. Where are they?”

It took Titus a moment—the warning had come before all his suppressed memories had emerged en masse, which produced a curious effect of distance on the immediate preceding events. But now that he cast his mind back, he did remember hearing the same pleasant female voice announcing the sighting of armored chariots, wyverns, and lindworms, when he and Fairfax still believed they could outrun Atlantis.

“Come to think of it,” said Kashkari, “when the wyverns first entered the bell jar dome, there were lindworms to their rear—and circled by an odd sort of armored chariots, much smaller than any I'd ever seen.”

Lindworms had terrible vision. In the wild they formed symbiotic relationships with mock harpies, which guided them to forage. Perhaps the much smaller armored chariots served the role of the symbionts, herding the armored chariots to Atlantis's purposes.

“Do you think the lindworms and those small armored chariots could have been dispatched to intercept our allies?” asked Fairfax.

“That wouldn't be a good use of the lindworms,” said Amara. “I expect they had been brought because Atlantis meant to make a direct assault on the base itself—in close quarters, lindworms are
terrifying. But for pursuits and such, they are so slow they are hardly useful.”

“The armored chariots that are coming toward us now, are they the same ones you saw earlier?” Fairfax asked Kashkari.

“No. They are the usual kind.”

Titus exchanged a look with Fairfax. Atlantis never did anything without a good reason. What, then, was the reason the lindworms and their accompanying small chariots were no longer on the battlefield?

“Should we—”

Fairfax stopped. He heard it too: hundreds of objects streaking through the air.

Her face lit up. “Bewitched spears!”

Five or six hours ago, wyvern riders had come quite close to Titus and Fairfax—and had been chased away by an ambush of antique bewitched spears. Titus had puzzled over the identity of the mages who used such weapons, until he recovered his memory and realized that they were forces from the Domain, and the spears those kept in the Titus the Great Memorial Museum for reenactment of historical battles.

From south of the bell jar dome the bewitched spears arrived, hissing like a storm of arrows, slender and lethal. Titus closed his fingers more tightly about Fairfax's and held his breath.

A huge net sprang up and caught the bewitched weapons, as if they had been a school of fish, swimming directly into a trap.

Amara grunted in frustration—it was a reminder that what seemed too good to be true usually was.

“Would the spears have lifted the siege, even if they reached the bell jar dome?” asked Fairfax with a frown. “I thought inanimate objects had no effects on such sorcery.”

“Not under normal circumstances,” said Titus, “but there are ways around it.”

If there was some clever blood magic involved. And if the drop of blood at the tip of the spear was from a mage bound by blood to someone under the bell jar dome.

“One way or the other this siege will break,” said Amara. “Mohandas has seen the future, and his visions have never led us astray.”

When they first learned that they had been trapped under a bell jar dome, Amara had intimated that the rebels would take whatever measures necessary to keep Fairfax out of Atlantis's hands—including killing her themselves, if it came to that. And Kashkari, in what amounted to an outburst for him, had told Amara in no uncertain terms that a prophetic dream had let him know that Fairfax would not only survive this night, but venture as far as Atlantis itself, in a quest to finish the Bane in his lair.

Except Kashkari had been lying outright, as he had later admitted to Titus and Fairfax outside Amara's earshot.

Kashkari, as good a liar as Titus had ever met—and Titus was a world-class one himself—nodded gravely. “Thank you, Durga Devi.”

Durga Devi was Amara's nom de guerre. Titus also addressed her thus, but for him it was less a term of respect than of distance: the woman had been willing to murder Fairfax to keep her out of the Bane's reach; he would never not regard her with several measures of suspicion.

Outside the bell jar dome, another net sprang up to catch a forest of—Titus had thought them all bewitched spears, but now it appeared that there were lengths of hunting ropes mixed in.

Why? To make the bewitched spears appear more numerous? Or was there some other purpose?

Amara's expression changed. She reached into a pocket, pulled out a notebook, and opened it.

“Is it my brother?” Kashkari asked immediately.

“You know those who go on raids are not allowed to take two-way notebooks.” She turned to Titus. “It's your allies, Your Highness, requesting that Miss Seabourne be ready to deliver two dozen thunderbolts to the approaching company of armored chariots.”

“Why are my allies contacting
you
?”

“But armored chariots are lightning-proof,” said Fairfax at the same time.

“They said to tell you
‘certus amicus temporibus incertis,
'” said Amara. To Fairfax's query she only shrugged—there was no answer for that.

Certus amicus in temporibus incertis
—
a certain friend in uncertain times
—was one of the code phrases that Titus and Dalbert, his valet
and personal spymaster, had agreed upon. A piece of communication bearing such a phrase signaled that it had originated from someone Dalbert deemed trustworthy.

Titus's preference was to trust as few people as possible. And to never undertake any action without having thoroughly investigated potential consequences. But at the moment he could not afford either luxury.

“You might as well,” he told Fairfax.

They called for even more powerful far-seeing spells. The armored chariots, still several miles away, cut swiftly through the night, almost invisible except for the muted sheen on their underbellies, a reflection of the glow of the war phoenix.

“When?” asked Fairfax.

“Now,” said Amara. “The entire lot, if you will.”

Fairfax pointed her wand toward the armored chariots. The sky writhed with blue-white streaks; thunderbolts crashed as if the gods were drunk.

Twenty-four bolts of lightning in two seconds, followed by a long moment during which no one spoke—or breathed. Then all the armored chariots fell, as if they were so many boulders at last yielding to the might of gravity.

A deafening silence: fear and wonder were alike in their capacity to produce speechlessness. Even Amara, who must know that there was trickery involved, gazed with awe upon Fairfax.

The latter was the only one to appear more confused than dazzled.
“But that shouldn't have been possible. They are lightning-proof.”

Titus signaled her to hold her questions. He raised his voice to speechmaking volume again. “Can anyone doubt any longer the power of the divine spark? Stand no more in the path of the one beloved by the Angels, and you need not fear their wrath.”

Then, at normal volume, for her ears alone, “I could not let pass such a perfect moment for propaganda.”

“Of course not. But do you know what is going on?”

“I might.”

The arrival of yet another cluster of bewitched spears and hunting ropes, whooshing and hissing, roused the Atlanteans from their stupor. Another net sprang up as wyvern riders chased the few loose objects that had not been caught.

“I will tell you what is going on later. Now I need you to create as much distraction as possible. Keep everyone's eyes on high if you can. I will do the same.” He pointed his wand skyward.
“Meum insigne esto praesidium meum!”

The war phoenix had hitherto been a static beacon. Now, slowly, majestically, it flapped its enormous wings and descended toward a formation of wyvern riders outside the bell jar dome. The wyverns spewed fire at the war phoenix; but flame, like lightning, simply passed through it.

“Trust the Master of the Domain to always have something up his sleeve,” said Kashkari, shaking his head.

Before the war phoenix's inexorable approach, the wyverns
scattered. One wyvern rider, who was too slow moving out of the way, screamed as the tip of the war phoenix's left wing brushed his shoulder. The war phoenix did not cause actual damage, but enemies who came into contact with it were said to experience a brief yet intense bout of pain.

“Here's my distraction,” said Fairfax.

A ball of lightning, blue and eerie, hurtled toward a company of wyverns, sending them scattering.

“Send one like that into the war phoenix,” said Titus.

She did. The war phoenix glowed with double the intensity and emitted a call that was wild and harsh, yet oddly stirring.

“Excellent. Keep it up.”

The war phoenix continued its stately progress, while half a dozen spheres of sizzling electricity careened all about, keeping the forces of Atlantis scattered and in disarray. As one more cluster of bewitched spears and hunting ropes arrived, Titus directed the war phoenix eastward.