The Immortal Heights

by Sherry Thomas

  She knew she was crying, but she didn’t realize she was shaking until Titus wrapped his arms around her and held her against him.

  “He wanted to keep you safe, and now he has.”

  “For how long? I won’t leave Atlantis alive—we all know it.”

  “We can never judge the full effect of any action in the immediate aftermath. But remember, it was not only you he kept alive and free, it was the rest of us too.”

  A soft lament floated to her ears. For a moment she thought she had imagined it, but it was Amara, singing quietly. “It’s a paean to those who have led worthy lives,” said Kashkari, a catch to his voice. “Your guardian and Mrs. Hancock neither lived nor died in vain.”

  For as long as Amara sang, Iolanthe let herself weep, her head on Titus’s shoulder. When the final note of the lament had drifted up to the ears of the Angels, she wiped her eyes on her sleeves. They had a long way to go yet, and she must focus on the tasks at hand.

  But Amara sang again.

  “A prayer for courage,” murmured Kashkari, “the kind of courage for facing the end of the road.”

  It was quite possibly the most beautiful song Iolanthe had ever heard, as haunting as it was stirring.

  “‘For what is the Void but the beginning of Light?’” said Titus, quoting from the Adamantine aria. “‘What is Light but the end of Fear?’”

  Iolanthe heard her own voice joining him in the rest of the verse. “‘And what am I, but Light given form? What am I, but the beginning of Eternity?’”

  You are the beginning of Eternity now, she said silently to Master Haywood. You have arrived at the end of Fear. And I will love you always, for as long as the world endures.

  CHAPTER 19

  THEIR PAINSTAKING PROGRESS CONTINUED THROUGH the night. By midmorning they came to a huge waterfall, and Fairfax declared that it was time for everyone to get out of the river.

  Titus was accustomed to mountains—he had grown up in the heart of a great mountain range. But the mountains north of Lucidias—the Coastal Range—were like none he had ever seen. There were no slopes. Everything reared up at a near-vertical angle. Even the banks of the river were precipitous and strewn with enormous and sharply edged boulders. They had to fly out of the riverbed, after Fairfax once again parted the currents.

  Titus made a number of blind vaults until he was high enough to see the dense, crowded city that consumed every square inch of feasible land between the sea and the mountains. Above Lucidias hung several floating fortresses, slowly rotating. Between them wove squadrons of armored chariots. As for the intensity of the search on the ground, he could only imagine.

  Or it could all be a spectacle put on to fool them into thinking that Atlantis still believed them trapped in Lucidias.

  Unfortunately, the mountain rose higher behind him and he could not see what was happening elsewhere in Atlantis. And to think these mountains were but gentle hills compared to what awaited them farther inland.

  He returned to find Kashkari and Amara, despite their skill, thwarted by the flying carpet’s other great intrinsic weakness: it could only travel so high above ground. They could see a ledge some two hundred feet up. But it was on a sheer cliff without a foothold anywhere, and they simply could not ascend that high on the strength of the carpets alone.

  In the end, an exhausted Fairfax summoned a strong and precise air current to lift them past the required height, which allowed them to more or less glide into place—and collapse en masse.

  Titus volunteered for the first watch. But the ledge was not big enough for more than two persons to lie down.

  “I’ll join you for the watch,” said Kashkari.

  Titus tucked a heat sheet around Fairfax. The ledge was not exactly smooth and even; he could not imagine that she was comfortable, even with the thicker battle carpet beneath her. But she was already asleep, her fingers slack in his hand.

  Behind him the great waterfall thundered down, generating so much spray that even a quarter mile away stray droplets occasionally struck them. He wiped one such tiny bead of water from her cheek and wished for the ten thousandth time that he could protect her from what was to come.

  Eventually he took a seat beside Kashkari and handed the latter a food cube. “The ladies forgot to eat.”

  “If I could, I too would sleep now and eat later, rather than the other way around.” Kashkari bit wearily into the food cube. “What did you see?”

  Titus described the scene over Lucidias and mentioned his suspicion that it could be all for show.

  “While they strengthen the defenses around the Commander’s Palace? That makes sense.”

  “I hope the Bane does not decide to move his real body somewhere else.”

  Kashkari flicked a few crumbs from his fingers. “That would be unlikely. The Commander’s Palace has provided him with shelter and secrecy for close to a century, if not more. That’s where he feels safest. Not to mention, to move the body, he would have to accept the risk of the transit: he’d be more exposed and more vulnerable than he has been in a long, long time. And what awaits him at the other end can’t be as well fortified as the Commander’s Palace.

  “Moreover, the idea of Fairfax coming to him must be terribly exciting. She has proved elusive elsewhere, and the hunt has cost him time and again. But now she’s in his territory. The way he sees it, she’s making a huge mistake and would sooner or later run up against the impenetrability of his defense and be caught. He only has to sit tight and another century of life will fall into his lap—if, that is, he still has a lap left.”

  Titus dropped his head to his knees. “That is exactly what will happen, is it not?”

  Kashkari was silent for a long time. “But you and I, at least, will still be alive after Fairfax is no more. And that is what we must plan for now.”

  Iolanthe must have been asleep for no more than ten minutes when someone shook her on the shoulder. “Wake up, Miss Seabourne. Let the boys have some rest.”

  Amara.

  Iolanthe pried apart her eyelids and shuddered at the precipitous drop bare inches from where she lay.

  “Let her sleep more,” said Titus to Amara, an edge to his voice. “It was not necessary to wake her up.”

  “You need your rest,” Amara answered calmly. “If you’re too tired, you’ll become a liability to the rest of us.”

  Iolanthe carefully got to her feet so she could switch places with Titus. “She’s right. Sleep.”

  As they passed each other, he held her against him for a moment. Nothing of their surroundings seemed quite real, not the roaring waterfall, not the sheer cliffs, not their precarious perch above the scabrous surface far below—and she was so drained she couldn’t even remember how they’d got there.

  “So you were not born on the night of the meteor storm, after all,” he murmured.

  She vaguely recalled something about not being Lady Callista’s daughter, just plain old Iolanthe Seabourne, who was born six weeks before the meteor storm.

  “The arrival of my greatness needed no such gaudy announcement,” she half mumbled.

  He snorted softly and pressed a food cube into her hand. “We missed celebrating your birthday in September. You have been seventeen for a while.”

  “No wonder I’ve been feeling old and tired lately. Age, it creeps up on you.”

  “Then lie down and sleep some more.”

  “Durga Devi is right. If you are under-rested, you’ll be of no use to us. Now vault me someplace where I can see Lucidias.”

  He sighed, kissed her on her lips, and vaulted them both to a nearby peak. She examined the concentration of floating fortresses and armored chariots. “Did it look like this when you last saw it?”

  “More or less.”

  “You think they believe us to be still somewhere in the city.”

  His arm around her shoulder tightened. “That might be wishful thinking.” He expected that more trouble than ever awaited them where they were headed—and that was why s
he would not survive.

  When they returned to the ledge, Kashkari was already asleep, laid out flat. She tucked Titus in and watched as he dropped off into a fitful slumber.

  “So you have forgiven him?” asked Amara.

  Iolanthe sat down next to her. “Provisionally—in case I die very soon.”3

  “And if not?”

  “Then I’ll have the luxury of time in which to hold a grudge, no?”

  Amara chuckled softly. Iolanthe stared: the woman was amazingly beautiful, perfect from every angle. It occurred to her that though they had become comrades in a life-and-death struggle, she knew very little about Amara besides her stupendous loveliness and that she was the object of Kashkari’s impossible longing.

  She summoned some water and offered it to Amara. “Did you say that your grandmother came from one of the Nordic realms?”

  Amara unscrewed the cap of her canteen and let Iolanthe direct a stream of water inside. “You’ve heard of the good looks of the gentlemen mages of the Kalahari Realm, I trust?”

  “Oh, yes.” There had been students from the Kalahari Realm at the Conservatory, and some of them had been spectacularly handsome—all that mingling of the bloodlines produced a most unusual beauty.

  “My grandfather liked to joke that as a grass-green immigrant, my grandmother stepped out of her transport, laid eyes on the first nearby Kalahari man, and immediately proposed.”

  “Did your grandmother ever admit to it?”

  Amara held up a hand, indicating that her canteen was full. “She insisted until the day she died that he was the third man she encountered after her arrival, not the first.”

  Iolanthe chortled and absentmindedly spun the remainder of the sphere of water she’d summoned.

  “They were my father’s parents. My mother was born and raised on the Ponives—the same archipelago Vasudev and Mohandas’s grandparents hail from, incidentally, though not the same island. My father visited the Ponives on some sort of official business, and he met my mother while he was there. The way my mother told it, she nearly fainted with wonder when she first saw him—but only after they were married did she realize that among other Kalahari, his looks were considered mediocre at best.”

  Iolanthe chortled again. Until this moment, she hadn’t been sure whether she liked Amara. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that until this moment she had never seen Amara as an actual person. “You said your parents left the Kalahari Realm when you were very small.”

  “True. I never got to experience this overabundance of male pulchritude myself.”

  “Why did they leave?”

  Amara shrugged. “Atlantis, what else? The Kalahari Realm has the first Inquisitory Atlantis ever built overseas.”

  Iolanthe was embarrassed: she hadn’t known that—and she probably should have. “Why did the Kalahari Realm interest the Bane so much?”

  “I never understood it myself until I learned about Icarus Khalkedon from Mohandas—he wrote a great deal when he was flying to us in the desert. The Bane wanted control over our realm because he wanted our oracles. We are—or were—famous for our oracles. That’s why so many mages from all over the world had come there in the first place, to consult the oracles.”

  “You mean there are others like Icarus Khalkedon?”

  “No, I’d never heard of another human oracle like him, but there was the Prayer Tree, the Field of Ashes, the Truth Well, and a number of others throughout history. I imagine the Bane probably inquired at every one of them when and where he could find you.”

  “Not me, just the next potent elemental mage—that was probably long enough ago that even Kashkari’s uncle’s powers hadn’t yet manifested themselves.”

  Amara nodded. “You are right. It was forty years ago that the Inquisitory was built. He must have learned something from all our oracles, because he took over the Ponives just in time for Akhilesh Parimu to come into his powers.”

  The story of Kashkari’s uncle never failed to give Iolanthe chills: killed by his own family, so that he did not fall into the Bane’s hands.

  “After the establishment of the Inquisitory, did Atlantis become the only entity that could ask questions of the oracles?”

  “No, ordinary mages were still allowed to consult them, but far less often. And of course all questions had to be approved by the acolytes, who were now either Atlanteans or those allied with Atlantis—to prevent just what Mrs. Hancock was able to do: using the power of an oracle to ask how the Bane could be brought down.”

  In the Beyond, was Mrs. Hancock already reunited with her sister and Icarus Khalkedon? And Master Haywood—who welcomed him on the other side? His parents? His sister who had died early? When Iolanthe arrived, would he be happy to see her—or sad that she had outlived him by mere days?

  She brought her mind back to the present—the ways and means of the Beyond she would know soon enough.

  “The only oracle I’ve ever consulted is in the Crucible—there is no queue of supplicants waiting for answers. But a real oracular site must be swamped with mages desperate for answers. How do the acolytes choose which supplicants they will favor?”

  “It runs the gamut. Some decide on the relative merit of the supplicants’ questions; some, obviously, on who can pay the most; and some charge a nominal fee and let the oracle itself decide.”

  “So the supplicants just toss their questions to the oracle and see if they get an answer?”

  “That’s how the Prayer Tree worked. One gave a few coins in alms for the needy, then wrote a question on a leaf that had fallen from the tree and dropped it anywhere among the roots—and those roots cover a large, large area. If the tree decided to answer a question, a white leaf would grow on the branches, and an acolyte would climb up to record the answer and copy it to their register.

  “By the time my parents asked their question about me, they could probably have paid with the leftovers of their lunch. Oracles don’t last forever. The Prayer Tree had largely withered, and hadn’t answered any questions in years. But my parents thought they might as well try it, since they didn’t have the means to afford a more robust oracle.”

  “You were ill?”

  “Very. The physicians weren’t sure whether I would live past my first birthday, and my parents were frantic. But the Prayer Tree roused itself to give one last assurance.”

  “So what did the Prayer Tree tell you?”

  Amara took a sip of water from her canteen. “I will need a vow of silence from you.”

  Without quite noticing it, Iolanthe had created a complicated waterscape in the air, slender streams threading in and out of a shallow pool of water, the entire thing bright and sparkling under the early afternoon sun. And now, in her surprise at Amara’s request, the waterscape dropped ten feet straight down. “Why?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “All right,” said Iolanthe. She didn’t see how that would matter one way or the other, for a question answered at least two decades ago about a baby girl’s life expectancy. “I solemnly promise to never mention it to anyone.”

  “The Prayer Tree said, ‘Amara, daughter of Baruti and Pramada, will live long enough to be embraced by the Master of the Domain.’”

  “What?” The waterscape disintegrated altogether and fell with a loud splash to the boulders far below.

  “Quite an answer, eh?”

  Iolanthe sucked in a breath. “So that’s why you crashed the party at the Citadel.”

  “Wouldn’t you, if you were told that you would be embraced by a prince? I’d outgrown the curiosity I had about him when I was younger. And of course Vasudev and I were already engaged, and I couldn’t imagine ever letting another man embrace me, unless it was a quick hug from someone like Mohandas. But still, I was curious.”

  “And then you met him and realized he was a man who embraced no one.”

  That was an exaggeration, but not by much. Iolanthe was certain that after his mother, and maybe Lady Callista when he was a tot who didn
’t know any better, she was the only person he had ever touched at length.

  “Which bodes well for my life expectancy, does it not?” Amara laughed, a high, abrupt sound.

  Iolanthe gazed at her for some time, perhaps at last seeing behind the perfect surface. There was an adamant resolve to Amara, but at the same time, a bleakness that nearly rivaled the desolation of these mountains.

  “Why have you come with us?”

  Kashkari would not have denied Amara anything. And Titus most likely had been too distraught from having to leave Iolanthe behind to object to a replacement. But why had Amara decided that she wanted to be part of their hopeless venture?

  And when?

  She certainly had expressed no such interests when they had all been in the desert together. And it wasn’t as if she had led an idle, useless life: the woman commanded an entire rebel base; she had already dedicated her life to fighting the Bane. Could the massacre in the Kalahari Realm really have changed things so much for her that she was willing to abandon not only her new husband, but all her longtime colleagues, for something that was at best a suicide mission?

  “I have come to help you, of course,” said Amara, her voice quiet and sincere.

  A chill ran down Iolanthe’s spine, not because she didn’t believe Amara, but because she did.

  They sat quietly for some time. The sun disappeared behind the higher peaks to the west. A shadow fell upon the ravine.

  “I mentioned that there is an oracle inside the Crucible,” said Iolanthe. “She specializes in helping those who seek her advice to help others. Would you like me to take you to see her?”

  Amara pulled her cloak more tightly about her. “No, thank you. I already know exactly how I will contribute.”

  “How?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Silence fell again. They each nibbled on a food cube. Iolanthe stared at the great cascade, her mind as agitated as the pool at its base—and that was before she remembered what Dalbert had told her. On Ondine Island, after they’d met, she’d pressed him for more information on the massacre of civilians in the Kalahari Realm and the subsequent threat aimed at Titus and herself.