The Immortal Heights (25 page)

“That's correct,” answered Kashkari, if a little reluctantly.

“Have you thought about how you might obtain a wyvern?”

Stop
, Titus wanted to say.
Do not help him make any part of his dream come true.

But she was right. If they all had to sacrifice everything to get Kashkari inside the Commander's Palace, then that was what they must do.

“I have,” said Kashkari, “but I don't see how—not yet, in any
case. They are flying in much bigger groups than I was expecting. And I'm sure that the moment we attack one group, the riders will alert everyone else.”

For the next ten minutes, they discussed various possibilities. But no one could come up with a plausible scenario where the benefits of commandeering a wyvern outweighed the overwhelming disadvantages.

After they climbed back on the carpets again, they had not gone two miles when Amara said, “I hear them again. Behind us.”

There were no perfect hiding places immediately nearby. They took cover in a crease of the ground and hoped that the darkness of the night would safeguard them from unfriendly eyes. A squadron of wyverns shot up from the lowlands. They circled. And circled—right above where Titus guessed the knocked-over pile of bones must be.

“They know we are here,” said Kashkari.

They debated whether to get on the carpets again or to proceed on foot. The question was settled when Amara swore. “They are dropping down hunting ropes.”

As they took to the air again, Titus and Fairfax gripped each other's hand tight. On the next carpet, Amara and Kashkari did the same.

The end is near.

The next escarpment came all too soon. They tried to find a way up that did not require them to leave the protection of the carpets.
Above the openings leading into possible giant serpent lairs, however, the cliffs were as even and vertical as a wall, with barely a toehold for a goat, let alone a full-grown mage. And they dared not use a hunting rope again, for fear it would disturb something far worse than a stack of bones.

“We have to move forward somehow,” said Amara, her face set. “No point going back, and we can't st—”

Kashkari gripped her wrist and pointed down. From the shadows at the base of the cliffs, almost directly below them, something was emerging. Its head was the size of an omnibus, and its body even thicker around.

In the distance, from beyond the top of the cliffs, came the sound of dragon wings.

Was that what giant serpents ate between long bouts of inactivity? Wyverns—and wyvern riders?

The flapping of dragon wings grew louder. The giant serpent below came to a stop. Titus stared, unable to help himself: the bulbous head, the stillness, the dimly metallic glint of its scales.

He braced himself for the emergence of an enormous forked tongue. It never came. He frowned. The castle in the Labyrinthine Mountain housed a small collection of local reptiles. And every time he saw the snakes, they were always flicking their tongues in the air.

He looked around, hoping not to find any more giant serpents. But what were those things silently slithering up the face of the cliff? Juvenile giant serpents, lured by the scent of a nice, fresh meal? His
heart stopped. No, they were long, mechanical claws, far bigger and longer than those extending from the armored pods chasing Fairfax and Kashkari in Eton, but of essentially the exact same structure.

And they came out of the giant serpent.

Which was no serpent, but a mechanical contraption of Atlantis's. Of course the real giant serpents were already extinct. Of course the Bane would have a counterfeit one. Of course he would want Atlanteans to believe that giant serpents still existed: it became so much easier to not only keep civilians away from his stronghold, but to explain an occasional disappearance, like that of Mrs. Hancock's sister all those years ago.

“Fairfax!”

Titus barely managed to squeeze the word past his throat. But she had seen and understood. Two great boulders flew up from the plain below and smashed the claws right at their “wrists,” breaking them off altogether.

The claws scraped along the cliff as they fell, and met the hard rock of the plain below with an enormous clamor.

“We have to hide,” said Fairfax, her voice shaking.

Amara was already steering her carpet lower. “Follow me.”

She led them into one of the openings on the face of the escarpment. It was easily the worst hiding place possible, except their only other option was to remain in the open—an unacceptable choice.

Amara listened at the mouth of the cave. “More than just
wyverns are coming. I can hear bigger beasts.”

Titus could not hear anything over the frenetic beating of his own heart. He had not wished to meet any giant serpents. But he had trained in the Crucible for battling such straightforward monsters his entire life. The ferocity of a beast was always, always preferable to the cunning and treachery of anything devised by the Bane.

“Is there a back wall to this cave?” Kashkari asked.

“I don't think so,” said Fairfax, who had the best night vision. “Not for some distance, at least.”

A good thing, for the unmistakable sound of hundreds of slithering hunting ropes rose to Titus's ears.

“Can we outrun hunting ropes?” asked Amara.

She meant by going deeper into the cave, into the labyrinth of connected tunnels that the real giant serpents of yesteryear had left behind in the base of the escarpment.

“Maybe not,” said Fairfax. “But I can burn them if they come too close.”

Provided they themselves did not run smack into a dead end. There were so many perils of heading desperately down a path they knew nothing about—

Kashkari swore. “Something is coming from the inside.”

Fairfax, always quick to react, brought down enough rocks to collapse the passage.

They barely had enough time to turn away, to avoid the flying
debris brought on by the roof of the passage giving away. They were cornered, with no escape, not even a dark, dangerous, and utterly unfamiliar warren.

The first wave of hunting ropes wriggled up the cliffs. Instead of fire, Fairfax called for a torrent of air to blow them away. But whatever they did now was only stalling for time. Outside the Atlanteans called to one another, advising care as they positioned “cliffwalkers” in place. Titus crept as close to the opening as he dared and saw that cliffwalkers were entities that resembled armored chariots, but had feet that drilled into rock to keep them anchored to the vertical surface—had they been carried up by the bigger beasts Amara had heard?

“Get back here!” Fairfax growled.

Titus made a hurried retreat. Fairfax collapsed the front entrance to the cave. Now they were well and truly trapped. To one side the cliffwalkers were noisily clearing away the rubble blocking the entrance. At the other end of the cave, the unseen entity, either the same counterfeit giant serpent they had seen earlier or a different one, judging by the metallic clangs it made, rammed repeatedly against the rocks in its path.

They had at most a minute or two before their defenses were breached.

A garland of flame came into being, the firelight illuminating Fairfax's stark but determined eyes. “Looks like this is the end of the road for me. I know Titus cannot bring himself to kill me—and
probably not Kashkari either. Will you do me a favor, Durga Devi, and make sure that I am not captured?”

No! No!
screamed a voice inside Titus's head. But he only stood with his hand clenched uselessly around his wand.

“Yes, I will do you a favor,” said Amara, her voice hoarse, yet with a note of triumph. “Just not the one you ask.”

She set her hand on Fairfax. A moment later,
two
Fairfaxes stood in the center of the cave. The one who was Amara in truth cast aside her thick coat, pushed up her sleeve, and revealed an intricately wrought ruby-studded band.

And on your upper arm you wore a gold filigreed armband set with rubies
, Kashkari had said at the lighthouse, as he described Fairfax in his prophetic dream.

But I don't wear any jewelry
, Fairfax had protested.
And I don't have any.

And Amara had been there, sitting quietly among them. Had she felt the metallic pressure of the armband against her skin? The unbearable weight of a future that had been set in stone?

Titus stumbled a step back, shock pounding like a hammer at the back of his head.

The real Fairfax gasped. “You are . . . you are a mutable.”

Kashkari only made small, choked sounds, as if he had been mortally wounded. The one he had seen lying dead in his dreams had not been Fairfax, but Amara in Fairfax's form.

“The three of you hide in the Crucible,” ordered Amara, a beacon
of calm and authority in the rubble heap the cave had become, when everything they had believed about their future had been turned upside down. “I know it might be unstable in there, but you can handle it for a short time. I'll make sure the book is disguised as a rock.”

“I will come with you,” Titus heard himself say.

“What?” exclaimed Fairfax.

He turned to her, deathly afraid yet strangely elated that he was the one headed to his doom, and not the one he loved. “They know I am here. They will keep searching if they do not find me. But if they capture me, I can convince them that everyone else died in Lucidias. If they believe me, they will be more likely to be lax. A better chance for the two of you to reach the Commander's Palace undetected. Besides, Durga Devi might look like you now, but she does not sound like you—and the Bane knows what you sound like. I will speak for both of us and delay that moment of discovery for as long as possible.”

“But—”

“Do not waste time arguing. We have been given an opportunity. Use it.” He exchanged their wands—he did not want the wand that had belonged to both Hesperia and his mother to fall into the Bane's possession. Then he kissed her on her lips and shook the nearly catatonic Kashkari. “You too, Kashkari.
Go
.”

Amara kissed her brother-in-law on his cheek. “Don't think about what you should have done differently. The troth band has
been on my arm since summer. It's all meant to be.”
⁴

Still Kashkari remained frozen in place, shaking. Fairfax had to grab his hand and put it on the Crucible. They disappeared inside. Titus changed the book's appearance, then hid it as best he could.

“Would you mind if I stunned you?” he said to Amara, his voice quaking with both fear and gratitude. “That way I can pretend that I have botched an execution curse—it would make sense to the Bane that I would rather kill you than let him have you.”

And so that her voice, which remained her own, would not give her away.

Amara nodded. He knew that it was Amara. He knew that the real Fairfax was safe for now, inside the Crucible. But it was Fairfax's eyes looking at him, eyes wide with fear yet resolute at the same time.

He hugged her tight. “If I do not have the opportunity to say it again later, whatever happens, we are forever in your debt.”

She smiled strangely. “So I have lived long enough to be embraced by the Master of the Domain. May Fortune guard your every step, Your Highness.”

He did not know exactly what she meant, but there was no time to ask. He pointed his wand at her. She crumpled to the ground just as the cliffwalkers broke the cave wide open.

CHAPTER
21

ON THE MEADOW BEFORE
Sleeping
Beauty's castle, chaos reigned: creatures of all descriptions in melees, dragons spewing fire, swords and maces running amok as Skytower rose from beyond the hills.

An ogre lumbered toward them, only to have its head disconnect from its body as soon as Kashkari lifted his wand. A cyclops belonging to the Keeper of Toro Tower met a similar fate.

Iolanthe had never seen Kashkari in such a rage.

She left the killing to him and busied herself opening the tent she had brought from the laboratory. She covered the tent with a layer of sod to shield it from sharp implements and the view of marauding creatures. When the shelter was ready, she dragged Kashkari inside, hissing at the sight of his blood-soaked trousers.

Hurriedly she cleaned and bandaged his wound. “You are not allowed to be so careless, Mohandas Kashkari. Do you understand, damn it?”

He threw aside his wand and crumpled, his face wet with tears.

She knelt down next to him. “I'm so sorry. I am so, so sorry.”

“I sent her to her death. I told her everything about that dream, even describing the troth band in detail. That must be how she recognized herself. That was why she married my brother and set out to find us all in the same day, not because of the massacre in the Kalahari Realm, but because of my dream.”

Iolanthe remembered now what Amara had said that morning at the lighthouse, about her staunch belief that events that had been foreseen were not so much inevitable as unstoppable.

The prayer for courage that she had sung—it had been a prayer for herself, that she should be brave enough, when the time came.

And her calm, sincere answer only hours ago atop the stone ledge, when Iolanthe had asked her why she had come to Atlantis.
I've come to help you.

I've come to help
you
.

And she had. She had saved Iolanthe and, in that process, saved them all. But at what cost to herself? At what cost to those who loved her?

Iolanthe wrapped her arms around Kashkari and wept too, for him, for Amara, for the husband who had been left behind.

Kashkari dropped his head to her shoulder. “I first dreamed of her when I was eleven,” he said, as if to himself. “In my dream it was night, there were torches everywhere, and she was dancing. She had
on this emerald-green skirt, and over that, a silver shawl with such heavy beading that it sounded like raindrops falling every time she spun around. She wove through the crowd, smiling and laughing, hugging all the women and kissing all the babies—I'd never seen anyone look so happy.

“That would turn out to be the evening of her engagement party. The dancing lasted well into the night—and my brother never once took his eyes off her.” His voice caught. “Now he'll never see her again.”

As a child, a mutable could mimic the appearance of another, and then resume her own without any trouble. But as an adult, if a mutable changed her appearance, it stayed altered. In life and in death, Amara would henceforth always look exactly like Iolanthe.

None of them would see her extraordinarily beautiful face again. Ever.

Iolanthe closed her eyes and imagined herself at Amara and Vasudev's engagement party: the firelight, the music, the stomping feet of the dancers, the hint of perfume and spice in the air. And Amara, full of love and a zest for life, blissfully ignorant of the deadly prophecy that awaited her.

Despair swamped her—destiny was the cruelest master. Every chosen one was damned. Even those who were simply swept along by the tide were towed under more often than not.

When she opened her eyes again, the bland interior of the tent greeted her, lit by the mage light she had summoned, everything
cool, blue, and utilitarian. There was no joy, no music, and no celebration in her ears, only the din of the pandemonium outside.

She raised her wand, wanting to do something and not knowing what. Only then did she notice that she wasn't holding a plain spare wand. Vaguely she recalled Titus taking that from her and giving her his wand instead.

She had never seen this wand, made from a unicorn's horn. On it was etched the symbols of the four elements, along with the words
Dum spiro, spero
.

While I breathe, I hope.

She had come upon those words the day she first called down a bolt of lightning. And now here they were again, near the very end.

Was it divine inspiration or cosmic joke?

It didn't matter now. With or without hope, they still had work to do.

“Come on,” she said, giving Kashkari's shoulder a shake. “You don't believe in the inevitability of visions. Let's go. If we can reach the Commander's Palace soon enough, maybe it'll end differently.”

Her words were fervent, yet empty for all their urgency. Perhaps at the moment of his prophetic dream, the future had not yet hardened. But now . . .

Kashkari allowed her to wipe away his tears. “You are right. Let's do what we can.”

He sounded as hollow as she had, but his eyes burned, despair with an edge of desperate hope.

She took his hands in hers and said—wishing with all her heart the exit password was anything but—“And they lived happily ever after.”

Dozens of hunting ropes rushed into the cave and bound Titus and Amara tight. Mages holding actual battle shields crowded the cave and stripped Titus of the plain wand that had been in Fairfax's hand a minute ago. Next, they not only blindfolded him, but gagged him as well—presumably the Bane did not want him telling anyone else about the Lord High Commander's penchant for sacrificial magic. He was then put under a temporary containment dome, to be sure he would make no trouble for the Atlantean soldiers.

He was afraid they might plug his ears too, but they did not seem to care that he could still hear perfectly well.

“She is unconscious, but her life signs are strong,” reported someone. “We are readying the astral projector, sir.”

An astral projector would cast her image—and speech also, had she been capable of it—to a remote location. It was a piece of Atlantean wizardry that no one else had managed to duplicate.

The audience at the other location was apparently satisfied, for the next commands that boomed were for the astral projector to be dismantled and packed away, and for the “elemental mage” to be transported with great care.

The gag in his mouth was yanked out. “Where's the book?”

“In her bag, under a disguisement spell.”

Amara carried a book of prayers with her. Titus could only hope that the Atlanteans would buy his answers.

“Turn it back.”

“The spell is hers. I do not know the countersign to it.”

“Where are the others who came with you?”

“They died in Lucidias.”

The gag was shoved back into his mouth. Something like a metallic barrel closed around his torso.

“All right. Let's go quickly,” ordered the same soldier who had interrogated Titus.

Titus was lifted bodily. The barrel was most likely attached to a cliffwalker. Briefly he felt the chill of the open air before he was set down again, the pressure around his chest easing as he was released from the metallic hold. A door slid shut. A few seconds later the cliffwalker was airborne.

He scooted around in his cell—almost certainly a containment cell—but Amara was not there. A debate raged in his head. Should he try to consciously remind himself that this woman who looked exactly like Fairfax was someone else, or would it be safer for everyone if he stopped the reminders and let his instincts take over instead?

Kashkari's prophetic dream had not included the real Fairfax. What would have happened to her by the time he, Amara, and Kashkari were together again? Would she be simply a few steps behind Kashkari or . . .

Knowing that Amara was the one in Kashkari's dream did not eliminate harm to Fairfax. In fact, it took away the one guarantee that she would not be used in sacrificial magic. Now there was no telling what would happen to her. Everything was possible, including the worst failure of all.

All too soon, the door of the containment cell opened and he was yanked to his feet.

A wyvern roared uncomfortably close by. But no flame scalded his skin and no talons hooked into his person—only his nostrils were assaulted by a sulfurous stink.

For a moment his imagination ran wild. Atlantis was the most geologically active of all mage realms, was it not? Who was to say that there was not a volcano nearby? The Bane might mistake it as dead, but it was only dormant, waiting for one with the power to reawaken it. And would that not be a worthy spectacle for the Angels to see the Commander's Palace engulfed in lava, swallowed by the earth itself?

But no, the smell of brimstone had been stronger in the desert, when he had faced the wyvern battalion. If any volcano slumbered nearby, it slept soundly indeed.

He was marched up a long flight of stairs, and then the faint odor of rotten eggs was completely gone. The air became bracing—the brisk, salty scent of the sea. He wondered whether he was imagining things. But as he advanced, his footsteps and those of a phalanx of guards echoing against high ceilings and distant walls, the scent
only became more noticeable.

The Bane had grown up on the coast. When he left Lucidias, he had settled on a different coast. But the Commander's Palace was far from the sea. And the one who could not leave, the one who must remain hidden, buried in the bowels of this fortress, missed the scent he loved, the scent from the days when he had been whole and free.

It was terrifying to be reminded that the Bane was still human—it made him only more monstrous. What had Mrs. Hancock said? That he had used his first act of sacrificial magic to cure himself of a fatal disease. So he must remember his fear and anguish before that impending death. And yet he could not care less that he doled out such fear and anguish on an industrial scale.

His humanity extended only to himself.

The timbre of the footsteps changed. Titus's boots had been clacking against hard, smooth stone. But now he was walking across a different material, one that felt and sounded almost like . . . wood.

They came to a stop. Titus's gag and blindfold were removed. He was in another containment cell, a transparent one that allowed him to see that the floor of the chamber in which he found himself was indeed a fine, golden-hued wood, the rain ebony of the Ponives. And on the walls, instead of paintings, murals, or tapestry, hung enormous carved wooden panels. The coffered ceiling too had been fitted with a latticework of fine wood.

What had Mrs. Hancock said?
We never had a great deal of woods on Atlantis, most of the original forest had already been cut down, and importing
timber for pyres was beyond the means of all but a few.
For the Bane, it was not marble that symbolized luxury, but wood, a costly rarity in his youth.

Titus forgot all about wood when he saw that not far from him, Fairfax lay crumpled in another containment cell.

That is not—

He pushed away the reminder from his conscious mind—instincts would take over. He rushed to the side of the containment cell that was a few feet closer to her. “Fairfax. Fairfax! Are you all right? Can you hear me?”

“And what is the matter with Fairfax, if I may ask?”

For a fraction of a second, Titus thought it was West, the Eton cricketer who had been abducted by the Bane, standing before him. But though the man bore a close resemblance to West, he was at least twice West's age.

The Bane's current body, then.

“It isn't like you to be speechless, Your Highness,” said the Bane. “Be so kind as to answer my question.”

Titus looked at the unconscious girl in the other containment cell. The main thrust of the lie would be the same, but he had a split-second decision to make. Did he play the cold-blooded opportunist or the distraught lover?

“She begged me to kill her so she would not fall into your hands. But I—” His voice shook at the sight of her, at the mercy of their
enemy. “But I botched it.”

“The arrogance of the young. To think you could thwart me and get away with it.” The Bane shook his head, his expression almost sympathetic. “And where are your other friends, by the way?”

“They never left Lucidias—they all three together powered the last-mage-standing spell.”

“They value their lives too cheaply.”

“Better that than cleaving to life by any foul means.”

“You, prince, are filled with the sanctimony of the young,” replied the Bane.

“I hope that as the very ancient Lord High Commander lies asleep at night, he dreams of nothing but his own agonizing death—again and again and again.”

Titus had wanted to hit a nerve. But the flicker of anger in the Bane's eyes hinted that he might have gone too far—and been too accurate. Titus could have kicked himself. The longer he kept the Bane talking to him, the longer the Bane's attention would stay away from Fairfax.