The Burning Sky (30 page)

A ruling prince was required to master the execution curse. If he sentenced any subject to death, he was to perform the deed himself, so that he must look the condemned mage in the face as he took the latter's life.

Titus had never thought he would use the curse. He was a liar, a schemer, and a manipulator, but not a murderer.

Not like his grandfather.

For Fairfax's safety, he was willing to give up his life. But was he also willing to give up what remained of his soul?

The wyvern landed on the meadow. He pushed aside his agitation to concentrate on what needed to be done. Under normal circumstances, when a mage exited the Crucible, it did not matter whether he had filled his pockets full of objects from the tales. Nothing could be brought out; the slate was wiped clean. But using the Crucible as a portal changed all the rules. The book would not close, so to speak, if he left with something that belonged inside.

He had already decided he would keep Helgira's cuff on his person. Should he escape the library of the Citadel unscathed, he would need a ready steed, and he could not find a better one than Helgira's. All he needed to do to keep the wyvern in place and waiting, her groom had informed him, was to take the stake at the end of the long chain attached to the beast's leg and push the stake into the ground.

The wyvern, however, did not seem to like the spot Titus had selected, on the bank of the stream that bisected the meadow. It bellowed plaintively, its claws clutching at the edges of Titus's tunic.

“What is the matter? Do you smell something?”

Wyverns had extraordinarily sensitive noses and could smell prey from miles away.

“You cannot be hungry, can you? I thought they fed you fresh meat all the time.”

The wyvern hissed.

“I would not worry. Nothing menacing ever comes to the meadow. Not that I have seen, in any case.”

Then again, he had never before physically inhabited the Crucible and did not know how it behaved in this state. He looked around. Everything was familiar enough, including Sleeping Beauty's castle on the hill.

Or was it? The castle glowed not with the usual coppery light of torches and lamps, but with something akin to the blue-green luminescence of deep-sea creatures.

This copy of the Crucible had been his grandfather's. It would seem Prince Gaius had made changes. While one could not alter the underlying thrust of a story—Sleeping Beauty, for example, would never come downstairs on her own and help her rescuer battle the dragons—almost all the incidentals of a story could be modified.

Turning Sleeping Beauty into Fairfax was only the latest of the changes Titus had made in his particular copy of the Crucible. There had not been wyverns in the great hall when the Crucible first came to him. Nor had the pair of dragons that guarded the castle gate been colossus cockatrices.

The changes Prince Gaius had made, however, felt more unsettling. But Titus could not pay much attention—not when he had murder on his mind.

Or ought to, in any case.

“And they lived happily ever after.”

He was now in the Citadel, next to the Citadel's copy of the Crucible, which sat on a pedestal at the exact center of the dimly lit library. He slipped between the shelves.

The doors opened, and in came Alectus's voice. “And here we are, the library. Very soft lighting, exactly as Madam Inquisitor requested.”

Titus held his breath.

“It will do,” said the Inquisitor coldly. “You may leave us.”

Who were
us
?

Titus had hid himself behind the end of a set of shelves. He peered around the edge, but could only see Alectus bowing and scraping on his way out.

“You should not have been so solicitous, sire,” said the Inquisitor, her tone so soft and deferential Titus barely recognized it. “I would have handled the Inquisition at the Inquisitory itself.”

“But we both know how sensitive a mind mage is to her surroundings, my dear Fia,” replied an extraordinarily mellifluous male voice. “The Inquisitory still holds too much pain and fear for you.”

“But it is a far safer place for you, my lord High Commander.”

Titus's knees buckled.
My lord High Commander
. The man was the
Bane
.

“I am already overwhelmingly in my lord High Commander's debt for wresting me from death's grasp and restoring me to full health. How can I forgive myself exposing my lord High Commander to the likely perils of this place? Hesperia built it—it must be full of traps and snares.”

“Fia, Fia, speak not from fear. Our mages have already inspected the library from top to bottom—sometimes a room is just a room. Now stop worrying about me and concentrate. To think, all these years we've misapplied your rare and wonderful talents, using you like a hammer when you are a fine scalpel. We will waste no more time. Tonight we slice past all the layers of magic Haywood has applied to hide his memories. Tomorrow, our young prince.”

Titus shuddered.

“I cannot wait, my lord. And to think, since his mind will be perfectly whole afterward, he won't even be able to raise a diplomatic ruckus.”

Titus leaned against the shelf, unable to support his own weight.

The doors of the library opened again. “Won't you care for some refreshments, my Lord High Commander, Madam Inquisitor?” said Lady Callista.

She held the large tray herself, sauntering toward the Bane and the Inquisitor.

“We have only just now enjoyed your bounteous banquet—my compliments to you, Lady Callista, the Citadel has the world's finest cooks. We might need a little time to recover our appetites.”

The Bane was the ideal guest, honey-tongued and suave, not at all what Titus had expected.

“If only we'd had a little more notice of my lord High Commander's visit, we'd have put on a more suitable feast.”

The Bane probably had not arrived until the Inquisitor sent news that she had failed to secure Iolanthe Seabourne with her ambush. Between the two of them, they were determined not to fail again.

“I will set the tray here,” said Lady Callista, “and let my lord High Commander and Madam Inquisitor continue their preparation.”

She withdrew. Not a minute later an Atlantean soldier entered and, two steps inside, knelt. “My lord High Commander, Madam Inquisitor, we have the detainee Horatio Haywood.”

The Oracle had foretold that Haywood would not remain long in Atlantis's grasp. Did it mean Titus must be the one to whisk him to freedom? But then who would kill the Inquisitor? He could not do both at once.

The blood oath called for him to do his utmost to help Fairfax in her goal of freeing her guardian. He clenched his teeth.

The duration of the time-freeze spell decreased steeply when more than one mage was on the receiving end. What would last three minutes on one person would last only thirty seconds covering three mages. And if he had to cover four mages, he'd have at best ten seconds.

Would that be enough time to drag Horatio Haywood to the Crucible and disappear inside?

Haywood shuffled in with two guards. Four mages to cover. Titus's wand shook. Did he dare? Would his gallantry get himself caught, and result in Fairfax being yanked out of her bed in the dead of the night?

Titus saw his wand lifting. He could not believe what he was about to do. One. Two. Thr—

Haywood vanished before his eyes.

CHAPTER 24

IOLANTHE HUFFED WITH IMPATIENCE.

Sleeping Beauty's castle did not look terribly distant from the meadow, but to reach it on foot, even running at full speed, took far too long. And she'd already wasted enough time earlier, looking for a safe spot, worrying about the Crucible possibly bleeding again, before finally realizing that at this hour of the night, the Crucible could bleed a bucket and no one would notice a book lying in long grass.

But as the castle drew nearer, her impatience turned to fear. The thought of facing the wyverns alone turned her lungs weak—and the single moon in the sky was a relentless reminder that this was no make-believe. But she had to have a steed. Either that, or walk an entire day to reach Black Bastion.

At the edge of the briar forest, she saw the tunnel the prince had left behind. So he had been here. Had he got a wyvern too?

No roars greeted her ears as she sprinted through the tunnel. No warning streams of fire passed overhead. Even the air didn't stink as much. At the other end of the tunnel she saw why. The colossus cockatrices were gone, the pylons anchoring their chains snapped.

She hesitated only a moment before she resumed running. The doors of the great hall were wide open. She entered firing shield spells before her, but nothing attacked her. Only one wyvern was inside, slumped on the marble floor.

Its chest rose and fell. Either it was sleeping, or much more likely, the prince had blasted it unconscious.

She was faint with relief.

Now she could worry about surviving Black Bastion.

 

It took Titus a stunned second to realize what had happened.

Tempus congelet,
he mouthed the time-freeze spell.

The entire Citadel was a permanent no-vaulting zone. With Haywood's disappearance, the library would be searched from top to bottom. He must get out this moment.

He sprinted. Fast. Faster. Still somehow not fast enough, like running from monsters in nightmares. And then he was out of the stacks, and in the midst of a bizarre tableau of frozen mages.

Still running, he pointed his wand at the Inquisitor.
“Mens omnino vastetur!”

It was the strongest, most illicit spell of cerebral destruction he'd been able to find, not the execution curse. Likely he would regret his leniency later, but he was not a murderer. Not yet.

When he skidded to a stop before the stand that held the Citadel's copy of the Crucible, he was scarcely two feet from the Bane, who looked fifty years old, not two hundred. His features were confident, attractive—and familiar, somehow.

There was no time for the usual long password into the Crucible. Fortunately, he did not need to utter it, when the Crucible was already held open, so to speak. “I am the heir of the House of Elberon, and I am in mortal danger.”

The next instant he was back in the meadow, under a night sky that was rapidly disappearing behind the clouds. Upon its hill Sleeping Beauty's castle glowed, eerily phosphorescent.

He panted with relief. But the air he breathed in—he grimaced at the pungency of it. Blood. He murmured a spell for light. Almost at once he saw a thin, sharp stake that had been pulled out of its mooring, a length of chain attached to it.

The stake that he had used to keep Helgira's wyvern waiting for him. He increased the intensity of the light and broadened its radius. Something dark lay on the grass. He ran toward it and stopped in his tracks, his stomach twisting. It was not a whole wyvern, only one bloody wing, crumpled like an old jacket.

Wyverns were terrifically agile creatures, both in body and in mind. They had vicious teeth, vicious claws, and vicious spikes—and could fly for hours at speeds in excess of one hundred miles an hour, with bursts of more than one hundred forty miles an hour. Titus could not think of a single beast both swift and brutal enough to hunt wyverns.

Yet one had.

He began to run toward Sleeping Beauty's castle. He needed another steed right away. With Haywood's disappearance, Atlantis might very well not wait until morning to come after him. He must get back to school as soon as possible, let Fairfax know what had happened, entrust the Crucible to her, and hide himself in the Crucible until such time as she could move him somewhere safer.

He could only pray his own copy of the Crucible was not such a perilous place as this one was proving to be.

The ground sloped up. He ran harder to maintain speed. His legs protested. His lungs too. In the nearly pitch-dark night, the thick, rich smell of wyvern blood continued to linger in his nostrils, feeding his nausea.

He stepped on something at once hard and soft. Instinctively he leaped away. The smell of blood intensified. He had been hot from running; now he was cold, his perspiration beads of fear rolling down his neck.

He tapped on his wand. A light flared, shining on a black limb in the grass—the lower portion of a wyvern's leg.

From the direction of the castle came an unearthly roar. The ground trembled, a vibration he felt in his shins. His heart raced as if it could escape; his breaths overshadowed all other sounds of the night.

Had this been a regular session in the Crucible, he would have hurried forward to find out just what fearsome creature now prowled the castle. But this was real. And he could not afford to end up in pieces all over the landscape.

On his way from Black Bastion to the meadow, he had passed over a market town not too far to the north. If he was not mistaken, it was the setting for “Lilia, the Clever Thief.”

He had not practiced in that particular story in years, but he remembered it opened with the town being terrorized by an untamed wyvern. Not at all what he needed at this juncture, but as nonmages would say, better the devil you knew.

 

The wyvern would not respond.

Iolanthe had gone up to the costume room next to the ballroom, found a white dress that looked as if it could have been worn in times of antiquity, and slipped it on over her nonmage clothes. Then she'd snatched a black wig from underneath the sleeping wig master and set it on her head with a heavy application of adhesive spells, so it wouldn't fly away while she was airborne.

She'd read “The Battle for Black Bastion.” She knew that Helgira had put out a call for assistance at some point. She would pretend to be one of the mages coming to aid her.

Her disguise in place, she approached the wyvern with extreme caution, leaped atop it, grabbed onto its skinny, scaly neck, and steeled herself to be violently tossed about.

Only to have the wyvern drool a little.

This was not a problem for which she'd prepared herself. On the one hand, she was thrilled that the prince had used the heaviest spells. On the other hand, she was faced with a comatose steed when she needed a lively one that would fly fast enough to rip off all but the most meticulously adhered wigs.

“Revisce.”

Nothing.

“Revisce forte.”

More of the same.

“Revisce omnino!”

Still nothing. This last was supposed to be a spell that came just short of making the dead walk.

She smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead. The next second the wyvern let out a glass-shattering screech and shot up. She screamed and threw her arms around its neck.

The wyvern careened about the great hall with her hanging from its neck. She didn't know whether it had been traumatized by the prince's spells or whether it was her weight that made it frantic. Either way, it was doing its best to shake her loose.

She swung one leg up its back. The wyvern flipped upside down. She yelped and lost her footing.

The wyvern, one of the most ferociously intelligent beasts, must have noticed how her legs swung out as it banked a rapid turn. It threw itself at a pillar, pulling away only at the last possible second. She had to yank her legs up to her chest to avoid smashing them on the pillar—and losing her grip on the wyvern.

The beast tried again. She tucked herself into a fetal position and cleared the pillar by less than an inch.

All of a sudden she remembered that she now controlled air—how could she have forgotten? Time to make this struggle a little less one-sided.

She willed a gust of headwind. The wyvern was not expecting that. With its wings spread wide, it was pushed by the current to a nearly vertical position.

She hooked her legs around its body—finally, a better perch. Now how to get the creature out of those doors without any reins.

Well, the prince kept calling her the great elemental mage of their time. She had better come up with something.

Once the wyvern had leveled, and once she was sure her seat was secure, she hit the wyvern with a hard current that forced it to bank left. Then, a three-pronged approach that more or less hurtled the beast toward the front doors of the great hall.

Her efforts were inexact. The wyvern did head in the general direction of the doors, but it broke through the large rose window above instead, exiting the great hall in a shower of splintered wood and broken glass.

A messy business, rescuing princes.

 

It must be the fatigue of running five miles at the end of a day during which he had eaten only a handful of biscuits since breakfast. There was no other reason for Titus not to have vanquished the wyvern after a quarter of an hour.

He ducked into an alley. This was not good. Instead of fighting the wyvern, he was running away from it. So he could catch his breath, he told himself. It could not possibly be that he was afraid. Of dying uselessly. Stupidly. Of never seeing Fairfax again.

He crept along the edge of the alley. No sounds emanated from the cowered populace, or the wyvern. He held out his hand to feel his way—the sky had become completely overcast, the night impenetrable. His fingers came into contact with another wall.

He was in a
blind
alley.

He barely managed to throw up a shield as a stream of fire shot toward him—the wyvern had trapped him. He swore. He had not made this kind of mistake since he was thirteen, a lifetime ago.

“Aura circumvallet.”

The wyvern spewed more fire, but his spell acted as a holding pen for the fire. He shot two jets of flames at the wyvern's belly. Subtle magic could not duplicate the scale of elemental magic, but he was decent at it.

The wyvern flew up to avoid his fire. He ran. But the beast again blocked his way at the mouth of the alley. He shot two more streams of fire. This time the wyvern was prepared and shielded itself with the outside of its wings. Dragon fire might singe its wings, but ordinary fire lacked the power.

He dove under one wing. The wyvern's spiked tail came at him. He threw himself to the ground and rolled away. Still the end spike opened a nasty gash on his side.

He screamed in pain. And with that pain came an angry rush of energy.
“Flamma caerula.”

A blue sizzle shot out of his wand into the wyvern's belly. The beast twitched and roared. The momentum of the struggle at last shifted in Titus's favor. Several minutes later, the wyvern was carrying him toward Black Bastion, while he applied salve to his person to stop the bleeding.

He wished his injury had not happened.
If you are cut, you bleed,
Hesperia had told him long ago in her classroom. He could only hope his blood was not dripping out of the Citadel's copy of the Crucible. All those mages in there, looking for the cause of Haywood's disappearance—a bleeding book in their midst would not go unnoticed.

The wyvern could not fly fast enough for him. He kept looking behind himself, watching for pursuers. Theoretically he knew he had no cause to worry: the knowledge that the Crucible could be used as a portal was passed down only to those in the direct line of succession. But sometimes others in the family gleaned such information by trickery or by accident—the Usurper, most famously.

The weather was turning uneasy. High winds ripped. Shearing currents blew the wyvern left and right. Then came a gust of headwind so vigorous, the wyvern was nearly flipped backward.

Titus flew lower, searching for calmer air. He did not find it. Nor did he find it at a greater altitude. A string of expletives left his tongue, only to be drowned by a roar that shook every bone in his body—the exact same roar that had sent him fleeing from Sleeping Beauty's castle.

The wyvern screamed. Despite the uncooperative winds, it accelerated, as if driven by sudden fear. Titus pulled the hood of his tunic over his head, covered most of his face with the edges of the hood, and turned around.

The night sky was empty, save for a luminescent dot. He uttered a far-seeing spell. All at once, a huge winged creature loomed—so monstrously sized it would make colossus cockatrices look like sparrows. Even more grotesquely, the beast shimmered against the turbulent sky above.

A phantom behemoth, the steed of Angels.

Was
this
the change Prince Gaius had made to the story of Sleeping Beauty?

Phantom behemoths were not real. It had been concluded centuries ago that they were creatures of legend, born of the awe and fright of mages witnessing colossus cockatrices for the first time. But when a mage used the Crucible as a portal, everything inside became real.

He countermanded the far-seeing spell. The phantom behemoth faded again to a dot in the sky. It was still miles behind him.

The beast roared once more. The biggest winged creatures did not always fly the fastest. But judging by the roar, the phantom behemoth was closing in so swiftly, Titus might as well be running on foot.

He turned around again and tried to see if the phantom behemoth carried a rider. A smaller creature was tethered to it, a giant peregrine—which looked like a flea next to the phantom behemoth. The peregrine most certainly carried a rider. In the eerie glow of the behemoth, the rider's eyes were entirely colorless.

The Inquisitor!

And the rider who sat on the enormous head of the behemoth, with his handsome and oddly familiar-looking face, was none other than the Bane.