Now for something different.
“I’ve made it as easy as possible for us,” said Iolanthe. “If we can’t get the better of these wyverns, we don’t deserve to ride them.”
Kashkari exhaled. “Then what are we waiting for?”
“We meet again at last, Fairfax. Welcome to my not-so-humble abode,” said the Bane, all graciousness and suave manners.
The woman who looked exactly like Fairfax regarded him with loathing.
“Are you all right?” Titus shouted. “Are you hurt?”
Briefly she closed her eyes. Of course she had been in pain—the Bane had tortured her in his effort to rouse her. But she had willed herself to remain perfectly silent and still to buy more time, giving up the pretense only to save Titus from certain mutilation.
“Hmm, you don’t seem as delighted by our reunion,” said the Bane. “I suppose I can’t really blame you, considering what is about to happen.”
Fairfax shuddered but did not speak.
“As much as I would love for you to say a few words of your own volition, I will hear from you soon enough when you begin to scream. Shall we, then?”
Titus stumbled—without notice, the containment domes had begun to move.
“Are you all right?” he called again to Fairfax.
She winced and leaned against the wall of the containment dome.
“This is not the end,” he said desperately. “Not yet.”
“Not for you,” said the Bane. “You will live, with as many missing parts as it is possible to have and still remain alive.”
Titus shook. Or perhaps he had not stopped shaking since he was first captured.
“Father, can you hear me? He already killed the woman you loved. Please do not let him harm the one I love. Please!”
“Oh, young love. How touching,” said the Bane.
“We met because of one of Mother’s visions. She had written that I would see a feat of tremendous elemental magic when I woke at two fourteen one afternoon. So I would have Dalbert wake me up at precisely that time whenever I was home in the castle. About seven months ago, on a perfectly clear, cloudless day, a bolt of lightning burst into being. It lasted and lasted until the shape and brilliance of it was imprinted on my retinas. I got on my peryton, vaulted to where the lightning had struck, and that was how I first saw her, half of her hair standing up.”
The Bane, walking behind them, displayed nothing but a polite interest. So Titus kept on talking, telling his father everything about his entire time with Fairfax, the setbacks, the heartbreaks, the triumphs—everything except that it was not the real Fairfax in the containment dome gliding alongside his.
Corridors, ramps, stairs. He would have marveled at how perfectly the containment domes coasted along—or the countless intricate and expansive wood carvings that lined their path. But the only thing gripping his attention was the fact that they passed no one on their endless descent.
It was not surprising that the Bane should have a private route through his stronghold—both the Citadel and the castle were full of secret passages known only to the family and maybe a few of the senior-most staff. But this meant it would be nearly impossible for Kashkari and Fairfax to find them.
Titus’s voice was wearing out. “I forgot to tell you, remember the copy of The Complete Potion that my mother defaced, the day she met you at the bookshop? What she wrote in the margins led Fairfax to bring down her first bolt of lightning. We are all connected in destiny, all of us.”
They were no longer descending but in a straight passage, narrow enough that he and Fairfax were proceeding single file. A door opened to an enormous chamber.
An enormous chamber with a huge mosaic of the Atlantean maelstrom on the floor—exactly as Kashkari had described.
They had arrived at the crypt.
At the far end of the crypt, an elaborate sarcophagus sat on a raised dais. Before the dais were arrayed six plain, raised platforms in two columns. Five of the platforms were empty. On the last one lay West, the Eton student who had been abducted because he, like Titus’s father, bore a striking resemblance to the Bane.
The containment cells stopped in the middle of the crypt.
“Only the worthy may proceed farther,” said the Bane.
With a lightning-fast motion, he struck at Fairfax. Titus did not even have time to cry out before the Bane pulled back. Fairfax, her face contorted in pain, gripped her right arm. The Bane held a thick pick aloft and, an ever-delighted expression on his face, examined the blood that had been extracted.
“Very lovely blood,” said the Bane, as he walked toward the sarcophagus. “I hope it will tell me that you will be an extremely effective sacrifice. But of course it’s only formalities—we both know how powerful you are, my dear.”
But of course the blood would reveal nothing of the sort. And as soon as that was done, the Bane would learn the truth.
“Are you sure you have body parts remaining that can be used for a sacrifice?” jeered Titus, even as his palms perspired.
“Trying to stall for time, prince? No, the time for talking is done.”
Behind the sarcophagus, with only his head and his shoulders visible, the Bane busied himself with his infernal procedures.
“Do you ever dream of your children?” Titus made a last-ditch effort. “Do you ever see their bloody remains? What about your little granddaughter? Do you ever see her begging you to please not hurt her anymore?”
“That reminds me, it will give me great pleasure to remove your tongue, Your Highness,” said the Bane, completely unruffled. “I will be doing the mage world a service, I bel . . .”
His voice trailed off. He raised his head and stared at Fairfax. She stared back at him. He returned his attention to his task, seeming to be repeating the procedure once more.
Again, he looked up.
Titus felt his blood turn into ice.
The Bane knew. He knew he had been duped, that the one who stood before him was not the one he had moved heaven and earth to find.
Slowly, he came toward them.
“Do not let him hurt my friend!” Titus cried. “Father, do not let him. Help us!”
The Bane stopped before Amara’s containment dome. “Who are you?”
“I am but another one of your sworn enemies,” said Amara, rising to her feet, her voice clear and proud. “There is no end to us. Every time one falls, another one will take her place. Your days are numbered, you vile old man. In fact, you will not live to see another s—”
The Bane lifted his hand. She slumped over.
“No!” Titus screamed. “No!”
The slight distortion in the air that had marked the outlines of her containment cell disappeared. The Bane lifted his hand again—and flung her twenty feet into a support column.
“No,” Titus whispered.
The Bane was before Titus. “Where is she? Where is Iolanthe Seabourne?”
Titus heard himself laugh, a soft, half-crazed sound. “I do not know. You can pour any quantity of truth serum down my throat, and you will get the exact same answer. I do not know where she is.”
The Bane’s eyes burned into Titus’s. “Then you will die too.”
With the black tunics and half helmets Iolanthe had borrowed from the costumes being readied for Sleeping Beauty’s fancy dress ball, she and Kashkari were scarcely distinguishable—at least in the dark—from any other pair of Atlantean wyvern riders. Half an hour into their flight, she saw, as he had dreamed, a faint pool of light in the distance.
She was scarcely breathing, and her heart felt as if all the blood had drained out hours ago. But she was long past any need for courage: desperation was a far better impetus.
A few minutes later, Kashkari said, “The light is coming from the top of a mountain. From inside the top of a mountain.”
He was right—light was spilling out of the summit of a big, conical peak. Iolanthe sucked in a breath. Now she at last understood the description of the Commander’s Pal
ace. “It’s inside the caldera.”
“Any chance you can awaken the volcano?”
As his uncle had.
“I wish that were the case. If there’s magma anywhere near I’d have sensed it—nothing but solid rock underneath this one. Sorry.”
Kashkari grimaced. “It wasn’t as if the Bane would make anything easy for us.”
Wyverns wheeled above the caldera, far fewer in number, however, than she’d been led to expect—even the Bane could not replace the hundreds of experienced wyvern riders he had massacred in the Sahara with a quick wave of his wand. But colossal cockatrices carried by oversize armored chariots were every bit as jaw-dropping and intimidating a sight as the description suggested.
Many guard towers stood upon the circle of peaks that surrounded the caldera—the brim of the erstwhile volcano itself. Soldiers patrolled various sections of the rim, and from time to time wyverns would land for a few minutes before taking to the air again.
“Let’s put the wyverns down. Wyvern riders seem to do that regularly enough—we shouldn’t attract too much attention.”
They landed in the dark hollow of a ridge near but not at the top of the rim, on the outside of the caldera, and led the wyverns back into the Crucible. The meadow was again in an uproar, with Skytower already at its edge. They left in a hurry, taking a brass key someone had dropped in the grass, to keep the Crucible “open.”
Behind Iolanthe, Kashkari limped. She turned around. “You all right?”
“A little more time and I’ll be good as new.”
She braced her arm around his middle; he did not refuse her help. They stuck to the shadows as much as possible as they climbed to the brim of the dead volcano, looking around constantly.
The ascent was steep, but not particularly treacherous; no loose stones or little depressions perfect for spraining ankles. In fact, near the top, the land flattened noticeably. Even with Kashkari leaning on her, they made good time.
As the terrain underfoot began to tilt the other way, they crouched down next to a boulder—more to shield themselves from the nearest guard tower than anything else—and looked down upon the Bane’s redoubt.
It was much, much bigger than she had anticipated. Even against this grand natural setting, the palatial fortress, on its own hill at the very center of the caldera, dominated by its sheer aggressiveness. She had imagined it would be foursquare like Black Bastion, but there was something maritime about the architecture of the Commander’s Palace. Its walls seemed to meet at angles sharper than ninety degrees, its roofs looked like unfurled sails, and both its northern and southern extremities jutted out like a ship’s prow.
Kashkari swore. “No wyverns land on or near the actual palace—if we try to approach that way, we will be immediately marked as suspicious. Carpets will be a dead giveaway. We can’t vault and we can’t walk across the floor of the caldera past all those rings of defense. How the hell do we get in?”
Iolanthe took a deep breath. Her heart pounded and her hands shook, but it was as if the quantity of fear and anguish that had washed through her this night had somehow anesthetized her.
“We’ll get in exactly as you foresaw in your dream,” she replied with something that was almost equanimity. “How would you like to be the first mate of Skytower?”
Kashkari stared at her, probably thinking back to his prophetic dream. I was in the air again, on a huge terrace or platform that floated forward. “Skytower? I was standing on Skytower?”
“I don’t know,” Iolanthe answered. “But now you will.”
When they had last gone into the Crucible to hide, some part of her mind had noticed the silhouette of Skytower. If she were to stand at the front of the command deck, she would not see the great rock formation below, in the shape of an upside-down peak, but would think herself on a floating platform.
And that was good enough for her.
Kashkari’s jaw clenched. “Well, let’s go take over Skytower.”
Which was a far easier task than otherwise, given that now the Enchantress of Skytower and her second-in-command looked exactly like Iolanthe and Kashkari, respectively, after the modifications Iolanthe had made to the illustration that accompanied the story, affixing their own likenesses, captured by the Oracle’s pool, onto the characters’ faces.
A short time later, they stood on Skytower’s command deck, their crew of bloodthirsty marauders waiting for orders. But how did one take a tower the size of a mountain out of the Crucible?
By its steering helm, Kashkari recommended. The handling of the helm wasn’t usually the second-in-command’s task, but no one was going to deny him the use of it, especially not when the mistress of Skytower herself accompanied him, her hand on his arm.
“And they lived happily ever after,” she said.
The night sky in the Crucible was replaced by the far brighter night sky above the Commander’s Palace, which looked a good deal less impressive when viewed from the lofty vantage point of Skytower.
They had succeeded—they had taken out the entire Skytower.
The sudden appearance of this colossus stunned the Atlanteans. The wyvern riders gaped from their mounts; two armored chariots almost flew smack into Skytower; and cries of alarm and dismay echoed from below, from the guard towers and the rings of defenses.
Kashkari summoned his carpet. They had laid the Crucible carefully atop a battle carpet, so they could retrieve it immediately: anything brought out from the book would evanesce if it moved more than a short distance away.
Iolanthe caught both the carpet and the book.
“Where’s the helmswoman?” asked Kashkari. “She can—”
He cried out and fell against the helm. Skytower rammed directly into the side of the caldera. The entire structure shuddered. The crew shouted. Iolanthe grabbed on to the railing.
Kashkari screamed. Skytower skidded starboard, its enormous base now scraping and scoring the inside slope of the caldera.
She pried him off the helm. “What’s the matter? What’s going on?”
He bent over, his fingers digging into her forearm. “Pain. Everywhere.”
She gasped. “You are still connected to Titus via a blood oath, aren’t you? You are feeling his pain. The Bane—the—”
If the Bane was torturing Titus, then he already knew Amara was not the elemental mage he wanted. What had happened to her?
She grabbed the helmswoman normally in charge of Skytower’s navigation. “You see that building down there? Plow it flat. Flat. I want to see deep into its bowels.”
Pain racked Titus. His internal organs were raked over burning coal, his sinews shredded apart.
“You interfering little snot,” snarled the Bane. “You think you can keep me from what I want? I always get what I want.”
Titus could not speak. He could not even scream. The pain ratcheted tighter and tighter. He was blind with agony.
He barely felt the shudder in the floor beneath him. The sound, like enormous millstones grinding together, only vaguely registered. But the next second his pain stopped. He collapsed to the floor of the containment cell, gasping.
The Bane stood listening. Titus could hear nothing—they were too far into the center of the hill on which the Commander’s Palace stood. Which made the noise from a moment ago all the more remarkable. What had happened?
“Is Iolanthe Seabourne behind this?” demanded the Bane.
“I do not know.” But he certainly did not think it was beyond her. What had she done? Caused an actual earthquake?
The entire palace lurched, again and again, as if its levels were being sheared off one by one. The jolts went straight to Titus’s stomach. He clenched his teeth against repeated surges of nausea. Yet another hit. The ceiling of the crypt cracked. Stone and plaster rained down; dozens of wood carvings thudded to the floor.
The sounds changed, from those of brutal impact to something almost like a needle scratch, if the needle was the length of a street. Titus sucked in a breath
. Skytower. Its great rock formation had a blunt end, but one of Skytower’s secrets was that it could extrude a huge spike from that blunt end. And the helmswoman who piloted Skytower was said to be an artist with that spike, and could carve her name on a piece of stone no bigger than the seat of a chair.
It must be Fairfax. She had found a way, as she always did. He was on his feet, his face pressed against the wall of the containment cell, his fist pounding. Come on, Fairfax. Come on!
Something that resembled a wasp’s stinger, if the wasp was the size of a phantom behemoth, tore through the ceiling near the southern wall of the crypt. He gasped. Beyond the shredded ceiling was the sky itself—Fairfax and Kashkari had managed to bulldoze the Commander’s Palace.
In that jagged band of the harshly lit night sky, Atlantean forces were madly maneuvering. Titus tried to recall what he could of Skytower’s crew. Did they have enough mage power to hold the wyvern battalion, the armored-chariot-carried colossal cockatrices, and all the other soldiers and war machines the Bane had at his disposal?
He glanced at the Bane, expecting to see the latter’s face twisted with rage. Instead, the Bane was smiling. Titus’s nascent hopes turned to ash. Why was the Bane delighted? What were his plans?
Wildly he looked about. Then he saw it, the round, transparent base of the other containment cell, gliding toward the opening in the ceiling. That very moment Kashkari and Fairfax streaked in on their carpets. Before Titus could shout in warning, they passed directly over the base of the cell.
Instantly the walls of the cell closed about them.
CHAPTER 23
AS FAIRFAX’S AND KASHKARI’S CARPETS struck the invisible barrier, they cried out and fell in a heap.
“No! No!” Titus screamed.
It could not be. They had not demolished the Commander’s Palace to be caught like rats in a trap.
The Bane laughed. “Why, thank you, my dear Fairfax, for taking the trouble to deliver yourself to me.”
Titus fell back against the far wall of his own containment dome, his hands over his face. Not this. Not this bitter, senseless end. Not after everything they had gone through, all the sacrifices that had been made, and all the lives that had been irrevocably lost.
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