The Perilous Sea

by Thomas,Sherry

  Ishana and Shulini left with her, leaving Kashkari, Titus, and Iolanthe by themselves on top of the massif.

  “Is it true, what you said about Fairfax? And about your uncle?” asked Titus, sounding doubtful.

  “No, I made up everything.”

  “Oh,” said Iolanthe. She hadn’t believe Kashkari completely but he had sounded so impassioned, so certain of himself, that she had very much wanted what he had said to be true.

  “At least you are safe for the moment.” Kashkari laid a hand over his chest. “My heart hasn’t pounded so hard since that business with Wintervale.”

  Iolanthe and Titus exchanged a glance.

  “I’m more than a bit embarrassed to tell you,” said Iolanthe, “but His Highness and I are under a memory spell and we remember nothing from before the desert.”

  “What!” Kashkari exclaimed. He looked from Iolanthe to Titus and back. “How do you not remember Wintervale?”

  They both shrugged.

  Kashkari gaped. “I don’t believe this. Have you really forgotten everything?”

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  CHAPTER ♦32

  England

  THE NEXT DAY WAS SUNDAY and morning service was mandatory for all the boys.

  The chapel at Eton, though impressive-looking, had become too small for all the thousand students. Usually the senior boys were given seats in the pew, and the junior boys had to stand in the aisles, at the back, and even spilling out the door of the sanctuary. Today Titus and Fairfax made sure they were standing at the very rear of the crowd, and when no one noticed, they slipped away.

  Fairfax went to see Lady Wintervale—she thought the latter ought to know her son would not be at the school much longer. Titus returned to the laboratory for one last sweep for items that he might wish to put into the emergency bag.

  He came across a pouch in an otherwise empty drawer—the remedies he had taken from the laboratory to give to Wintervale, when the latter’s condition suddenly worsened, that day at Sutherland’s uncle’s house looking over the North Sea.

  Wintervale had gone into a seizure, and Titus, in a panic, had rushed back into the laboratory, tossed the pouch of useless remedies aside, and grabbed the panacea. Usually he never left remedies lying about. But the next few times he came into the laboratory had been some of the unhappiest hours of his life. Instead of putting the remedies back where they belonged, he had shoved the whole pouch in an unused drawer so he would not have to look at it again.

  But now that he and Fairfax had repaired their rift, there was no more reason for him to avoid the sight of the pouch. He opened the drawer that held abdominal remedies and set the vials from the pouch back in their places, one after another. Vertigo. Appendicitis. Bilious complaint. Infection-caused emetion. Inflammation of the stomach lining.

  The last was the very one that had sent Wintervale into convulsions. Titus turned it around in his fingers, shaking his head at the mayhem it had caused.

  He stilled. He had thought the label said Foreign extraction, but in fact it was Foreign expulsion—he must have misread it in his panic. The vial did not contain a remedy that would cause harmful substances to be precipitated and expelled, but a remedy for getting rid of parasites and such.

  He pulled out a thick volume of pharmacological reference and looked up the remedy.

  Foreign expulsion. An older remedy, now no longer common. Good for the purging of parasites. Can also be used to expel swallowed objects and objects stuck in various bodily orifices. May aid in the divestiture of intangible tenure.

  What in the world was intangible tenure?

  He wanted to look it up. But a quick pulse from his pocket watch reminded him that that morning service was almost finished. Kashkari would bring Wintervale back to Mrs. Dawlish’s, and Titus was to give Wintervale the vertices of the quasi-vaulter to carry on his person, with a suitably dire report of the dangers rising all about them, without mentioning anything specifics.

  He made a mental note to look up intangible tenure later and left the laboratory.

  “Things are moving so fast, we don’t know what will happen in the next hour. Or even in the next minute,” said Iolanthe, seated in the drawing room at Windsor Castle that Lady Wintervale had taken for her own use. “Likely we will have to take your son away from school—and likely soon—for his safety. I thought you might like to know that.”

  Lady Wintervale looked out the window toward Eton, just across the Thames River. Her voice had a faraway quality to it. “You mean, after this, I might not see him for a while, perhaps ever?”

  “It’s quite possible.”

  Iolanthe waited for Lady Wintervale to exert her parental right, something along the lines that if they were taking Wintervale out of school, then he might as well be under the protection of his mother. But Lady Wintervale only continued to stare out of the window.

  “Would you like to see him before he leaves? We can make sure no one traces his physical movements to you. And I daresay he would not speak of your whereabouts to anyone. He has become more circumspect of late—certainly he has managed to keep the fact that he is now a great elemental mage to himself.”

  Lady Wintervale clenched her hand and again gave no reply.

  Iolanthe was counting the hours until she and Titus had all the precautions in place, so she could have Titus vault her to Paris to see Master Haywood, who had to be equally anxious for her news. After that, there was no telling when they would meet again. Or if.

  The distance Lady Wintervale insisted on keeping from her child made no sense at all.

  “May I ask, ma’am, why you do not want to see your son?”

  Lady Wintervale moved to a different window. Her jaw worked, but she remained silent. Against the deep vermilion drapes, she was pale as a wraith and almost as insubstantial.

  Iolanthe’s bafflement turned into uneasiness—for now she could feel the fear radiating from Lady Wintervale.

  “Please, my lady, I beg of you. If there is something that matters, do not hold it back. There are lives at stake here, many lives.”

  “You think I do not know that?” Lady Wintervale snarled.

  But nothing followed. After a fraught, interminable interval, Iolanthe had to accept that she would get nothing else out of Lady Wintervale. “Thank you for seeing me, ma’am. Long may Fortune walk with you.”

  As she rose to her feet, Lady Wintervale said, “Wait.”

  Iolanthe sat down again, her entire person tense with anticipation—and no small amount of dread.

  Another minute passed before Lady Wintervale said, “I lost Lee on our last trip.”

  Iolanthe blinked. “I don’t quite understand.”

  “Among the Exiles communities, we have built our own network of translocators. But since spring, Atlantis had actively interfered with the working of those translocators. By early September, when Lee and I set out, all the translocators the Exiles in London had depended on for years were out of service.

  “We had a choice between using carpets or taking a steamer across the English Channel. Lee cares for neither. But nowadays there are excellent remedies for seasickness, so he decided on the steamer. Once I had seen him settled in his bunk—the remedy allowed him to sleep through the crossing—I went above to take in some fresh air, as I enjoy ocean travel.

  “When the steamer docked in Calais, I went to wake him up. He was no longer in his bunk, and his suitcase too was gone. I thought we had missed each other, that he was now on the deck looking for me. But no, he was not on the deck either. And he was not on the pier, waiting for me. I enlisted the help of both the steamer’s staff and the harbormaster’s staff, but nobody could find him.

  “I wrote frantically in my two-way notebook, but he did not answer. At last I went to the railway station, and there someone remembered a young man of his description, asking for a ti
cket to Grenoble. I immediately started for Grenoble, asking at all the stations along the way. And when I reached Grenoble, I inquired at all the likely and unlikely lodging places, to no avail.

  “Not knowing what else to do, I went back home. Only to receive a telegram, of all things, from Lee, from Grenoble, asking where I was. So I rushed back, and there he was, safe and sound. He said that when he couldn’t find me on the steamer, he thought I must have been in a rush to catch the train, and so he’d dashed off to the railway station. But in Paris, where he was to change trains, he realized his mistake and went back to Calais, only to learn that I had taken a train to Grenoble. So he started again for Grenoble, and probably reached just after I had left for home.

  “I was terribly relieved to see him. The events of the next two days you already know. We ended up on a ship in the North Sea, pursued by Atlantis. He didn’t have his carpet with him—just as he didn’t have his two-way notebook with him. So I had to put him on a lifeboat. I meant to get in the lifeboat with him, but we were under attack and I couldn’t get away immediately. Even when I did, on my carpet, I was pursued all the way back to France. And I would have been caught, were it not for a tremendous fog that rolled in from the Channel.

  “It took me several days to get back to England. If he had made it, he would have gone either home or Eton. I didn’t dare go home, so I tried Eton. And found Mrs. Dawlish’s house guarded around the clock.”

  “It’s the Atlanteans watching the prince,” said Iolanthe.

  “I thought so too. But then I remembered that Lee had been away from me for seventy-two hours on that trip.”

  Lady Wintervale looked at Iolanthe, as if Iolanthe should come to some significant deduction from what she had just said.

  Iolanthe drew a complete blank. “I am not sure I grasp the significance of your words, ma’am.”

  “I am not sure I understand what I am saying either. I am not sure I want to.” Lady Wintervale crossed the room to stand before the roaring fireplace, as if the drafts from the windows had chilled her. “But you are right. I should go and see Lee. It might be my last chance.”

  Iolanthe waited for her to say more, but Lady Wintervale only waved her hand. “Please leave me.”

  Iolanthe rushed into the laboratory. The conversation with Lady Wintervale had unsettled her deeply, and she needed to speak to Titus.

  He was not there, but his typing ball was clacking away. When it stopped, she pulled out the message.

  Your Most Serene Highness,

  With regard to your query concerning the Atlantean naval ship the Ferocious—ΛABPOΣ in the original Greek—a vessel belonging to the Atlantean Coastal Defense once bore the name. From what records I can unearth, it was decommissioned three years ago and recently scrapped.

  Your faithful servant,

  Dalbert

  Iolanthe scanned the message again, and a third time, her confusion growing with each additional read. She had not heard anything about Atlantis being short on seaworthy crafts. Why was a decommissioned ship sent out when there were plenty of vessels in active service?

  She sent back a message to Dalbert. Can you confirm again that there is no Atlantean ship named Sea Wolf?

  Dalbert’s response came promptly.

  Your Most Serene Highness,

  I can confirm that there is no Atlantean vessel, naval or civilian, by the name of Sea Wolf (or ΛABPAΞ, to use the original Greek).

  Your faithful servant,

  Dalbert

  Something rattled in her memory. What had she read in that travelogue the first time?

  She entered the reading room and ran to the help desk. The travelogue was in her hand in seconds. She flipped through the pages with suddenly clumsy fingers.

  The tourists from nearly two centuries ago had sailed to Atlantis to see the demolition of a floating hotel that had been condemned. The method of condemnation had been none other than the dropping of the floating hotel into the maelstrom of Atlantis.

  As spectacular as the destruction itself was, leaving Atlantis, we would come upon the not-so-pretty sight of the hotel’s wreckage across our path, a current of rubbish. But at least, unlike a true maritime disaster, there would be no dead bodies carried alongside pieces of hull and deck.

  A vein throbbed at her temple. When she had scanned the sea after the maelstrom had come and gone, she too, had seen wreckage, but not bodies.

  If the ship that had tumbled into Wintervale’s maelstrom had been decommissioned and empty, then there must have been collusion between some of the parties involved. It would mean somebody deliberately sent an old, useless vessel after Wintervale, so as not to waste personnel or ships in active service, because they knew at some point it was going to be destroyed.

  Who could have known that the ship would be destroyed? Wintervale, according to both the prince and Kashkari, had been the feeblest of elemental mages, barely able to get a fire going in the grate. Who would have predicted, ahead of time, that he would singlehandedly put an Atlantean ship to ruin?

  She bit her lips and reached for the emergency bag.

  Nobody had returned from Sunday service yet—it was not that unusual for the sermon to run long. Titus stood inside Fairfax’s room and looked around.

  He had decorated the room long before she arrived, with a picture of the queen on the wall, postcards of ocean liners, and images that represented Bechuanaland, her supposed home. She had replace the photograph of Queen Victoria with that of a society beauty and put up new curtains, but otherwise left the room more or less as it was.

  His gaze fell on the photograph of her that did not look like her at all. She had passed around the photograph the day Sutherland issued his invitation for them all to go to his uncle’s house, which seemed an impossibly long time ago.

  She materialized next to him, the emergency bag strapped across her shoulders. Alarm pulsed through him.

  “Why do you have the bag? What is the matter?”

  “What do you think of my eyesight?” she asked, her tone tense.

  That was not the question he had expected. “Perfectly good. Now tell me why you are already carrying the emergency bag.”

  She ignored his demand. “What do you think of my grasp of Greek?”

  He could shout at the top of his lungs for her to answer his question first, but this was Fairfax, who never did anything without a good reason. He held himself back. “Not bad.”

  “Do you think it is likely that I have completely misread the name of the ship Wintervale sank?”

  “But you just told me last night that you probably misread it.”

  “I mistook it for a similar word—or so I thought. Is it possible that the actual name is nothing like what I thought it to be either time?”

  “Anything is possible.” He recalled the skimmer, whirling around on the outer rim of the maelstrom before being pulled in and under. “But if you were already paying attention, there is no reason you should have been that much mistaken.”

  She gripped his arm, hard. “If I am correct about the ship’s name, then it must be either Sea Wolf or Ferocious. Dalbert had confirmed to you—and to me again today—that there is no Atlantean naval vessel called Sea Wolf. But there was one called Ferocious, and it had been decommissioned three years ago.

  “I saw no bodies when I surveyed the sea that day. Wreckage but no bodies. Do you think it is possible that the ship had been empty? That”—she swallowed—“it was all for show?”

  He stared at her, beginning to feel as if he too had been caught in an enormous trap, with an undertow too strong to escape. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure what I mean, and I am not sure I want to know.” Her hand came up to her throat. “Fortune shield me, that’s almost exactly what Lady Wintervale said.”

  “What? When?”

  “When I visited Lady Wintervale just now, she told me that she and Wintervale had become separated on their way to Grenoble for more than seventy-two hours.”

&nb
sp; With the discussion on the Bane still fresh in his memory, a loud gong went off inside Titus’s head: seventy-two hours was the threshold for the most powerful contact-requisite spells. “You have to be in direct physical contact with someone for that long in order to . . . to . . .”

  A seventy-two-hour disappearance.

  And when he returned, the boy who could barely light a candle with his elemental powers had become mighty enough to create a spectacular whirlpool.

  Fortune shield him. “The remedy I gave Wintervale, the one that made him go into a seizure—do you know what ‘intangible tenure’ means?”

  A choked sound issued from her throat. “I have heard of it before—Master Haywood had a colleague at the Conservatory who researched the occult. Isn’t saying someone is under an intangible tenure just a wordier way of saying that person is possessed?”

  Possessed.

  “Fortune shield us all.” Her voice was hoarse. “Did you give Wintervale an exorcism aid?

  Did he? “What happens if you give someone an exorcism aid by accident?”

  “Nothing. That was how they used to tell whether someone is really possessed or just pretending. You slip an exorcism aid in their food and if they show no reaction, it’s just an act. But if they start seizing—”

  They gaped at each other in horror. That was exactly what had happened to Wintervale.

  And then, in a panic, Titus had forced a king’s ransom of panacea down Wintervale’s gullet. The only goal of panacea was the stabilization of the entire system. It stopped the exorcism and it stopped any other battle Wintervale’s body might have been pitching to rid itself of—of whatever had taken possession of him.

  Titus remembered the nautical distress signal he received, alerting him to Wintervale’s presence. He also remembered what Fairfax had said to him: Had I been Lady Wintervale, I would have disabled the distress signal on the lifeboat. That was probably what allowed Atlantis to track him down.

  What if the distress signal had been deliberately enabled, to make sure that Titus saw everything?