The Perilous Sea (26 page)

“Did you think he was hallucinating?”

“No, I did not. He was very much lucid. But the incident made me remember that when I used the Kno-it-all gauge on Wintervale, he was still under the effect of the panacea, sleeping all the time. At the time I had thought the gauge gave a reading of impairment on gross motor skills because he could not move without being carried—that the gauge had been fooled by the panacea, if you will.”

“And you hoped that the reading of mental instability had also been influenced by panacea,” she said, “because it isn't normal for someone to sleep all the time.”

“Except the gauge turned out to be quite correct on his trouble moving around.”

He half wondered whether she would again blast him for his lack of commitment to Wintervale, but she only said, quietly, “Nothing has ever been easy for you, has it?”

Something in her tone caught his attention: the absence of anger. Ever since the day of the maelstrom, no matter how politely she spoke, he had always heard, loud and clear, the fury underneath.

But not this moment. This moment she was just his friend.

“No, you are wrong,” he said. “I have been immensely fortunate, especially in my friends.”

In you.

She gazed at him for a long moment, then she reached into her jacket and took out a small envelope. “Take this. A birthday present.”

It was his seventeenth birthday, a day that he had meant to let pass unremarked, but it thrilled him that she remembered. When he opened the envelope, however, he saw that it contained the vertices of the quasi-vaulter.

“No,” he said in shock. “No, I cannot. They are to keep you safe.”

She came around the desk and pushed the envelope into his pocket. “I'm safe enough. You need to take care of yourself.”

After he had seen her safely back to her room, Titus lay in bed for a long time, the envelope upon his sternum, thinking about how immensely fortunate he was in his friends.

In her.

CHAPTER
23

The Sahara Desert

IT TOOK THE TWO HUNTING
ropes several trips each to satisfy the sand wyvern's appetite. While the beast dined, Titus looked it over, as a rider's courtesy, to make sure that the steed did not have any injuries or discomforts.

He almost did not see the slight discoloration on the wyvern's spine ridge. A sensation of chill at the back of his neck made him look again: a tracer that had been made the exact same color as the wyvern, except it had faded slightly from exposure to the elements.

Almost numbly, he checked the rest of the oddly shaped ridge bumps. Two more tracers. How many more that he had not found?

He destroyed all the tracers and glanced up. Nothing loomed in the sky yet. The group he had dispatched with distance spells earlier had probably come across them by luck; the kind of tracers that had been put on the sand wyvern took some trial and error to track down.

Indecision paralyzed him: half of him wanted to leap atop the wyvern and take flight; the other half recognized that there was no point in going anywhere unless he cleared the steed of all the tracers.

He searched, inspecting every square inch of the creature's scaly exterior and its entire wingspread. He found a tracer attached to a talon, another one at the tip of a wing bone.

Was that all?

It was turning dark, but there was no mistaking the storm cloud that fanned out from the horizon, which was no storm cloud at all, but hundreds of wyverns flying in close formation.

Fortune shield him, for nothing else would.

Instead of destroying the last batch of tracers, he threw them down. He took his seat on the saddle behind Fairfax, already strapped in and fast asleep, and urged the sand wyvern to take flight, but as close to the ground as possible without the tips of its wings striking the surface.

When he had gone perhaps a mile, he landed the wyvern, made it lie down, and performed a hypnosis spell. The wyvern snorted a couple of times and closed its eyes. He lifted Fairfax out of the saddle, removed the saddle from the wyvern's back, and hid it under one of the wyvern's wings. Next he set a sound circle and a tensile shield beyond, so that the wyvern's presence could not be detected by either its smell or its snore-like breathing.

Fairfax and himself he hid under the wyvern's other wing. He should distance them from the wyvern, but if the beast proved to be still tracked, they were doomed in any case, as he could not dig them into the dunes and the camouflage tent was not something he dared rely on when a bright light might be shined squarely upon it.

With a noise like thousands of banners streaming in a gale, their pursuers arrived. He held his breath and lifted the sand wyvern's wing just enough for a peek. Wyverns and armored chariots darkened the already shadowy sky. Some circled overhead, some swooped in crisscross patterns, and others headed straight toward the spot where he had dropped the tracers.

The scale of the hunt took his breath away.

A wyvern landed two hundred feet away. He took Fairfax's hand. It did not make him any less afraid to have her hand in his, but it made the misery of being fearful more bearable.

Another wyvern landed, even closer.

A commotion went through the Atlanteans. Shouts rose. “The base is being attacked!” “We must head back!” “We must protect the Lord High Commander!”

The Lord High Commander. Fairfax whimpered—Titus was crushing her hand in his. He forced his fingers to unclench. The
Bane
was in the Sahara?

“We will go nowhere!” countered a gruff, authoritative voice. “Our order came directly from the Lord High Commander and that order is to apprehend those two fugitives.”

Something streaked through the air. It was followed by a piercing scream, as if a rider had been gored in the stomach.

More projectiles, a forest of long, thin objects, hurtled toward the Atlanteans. For a moment Titus thought he was looking at hundreds of hunting ropes. But no, they were spears, bewitched to chase and impale enemies.

He was speechless—it must have been a millennium, at least, since bewitched spears were the most advanced weaponry in a mage battle.

But the advantage to raining down antique armaments was that few modern soldiers had been trained to deal with them. The spears sought out riders, instead of wyverns, the hide and scales of which were too tough for them to penetrate. The riders ordered their wyverns to bat at the spears with their wings, but a spear that had been knocked down to the ground simply sprang back up again and went after the nearest rider.

Some wyverns breathed on the spears, but wyvern fires were not hot enough to melt the spears, only hot enough to heat them to a glowing red, making them even more dangerous.

“Fly!” rose a clear, sharp voice above the chaos and the confusion. Titus recognized it as the brigadier's, from the first day of Atlantis's hunt. “The bewitchment on these spears cannot last more than a few miles in distance. We can outrun them!”

The din grew more distant as the Atlanteans followed the brigadier's advice. Titus listened tensely. It could be a feint, to make him come out of hiding. But he did not have many choices. To flee was dangerous; to remain in place, equally so.

He murmured a quick prayer before he got to his feet and set the saddle on the sand wyvern's back again. Lifting Fairfax in his arms, he carried her to the saddle and strapped her back in.

“Come on, old girl. If we are lucky, we could see the Nile before sunrise.”

If not, they might see the Bane instead.

CHAPTER
24

England

“IS WINTERVALE ANY BETTER?”

The question came from West, at the end of practice, as Iolanthe put on a wool coat over her kit. In the last few days, the weather had turned chilly, almost harsh. The twenty-two had practiced in a light misting of rain, with the spectators rubbing their hands and leaping in place to keep warm.

“Same as before, more or less,” said Iolanthe, buttoning her coat.

“How is he taking it, not being able to get about on his own?”

“With commendable stoicism, I must say.”

She had heard about his ease at wielding his power from the prince, who had accompanied him into the Crucible. Which was likely the reason that an otherwise active, almost restless Wintervale had been able to handle his loss of mobility with such grace. What did victories and losses on the cricket pitch matter anymore, when the boy who had always feared a life of mediocrity now had the opportunity to be a hero for the ages?

“I'll call on him in a few days,” said West. “Don't want Wintervale to think he stopped mattering when he stopped being one of the twenty-two.”

West had shaved off the mustache he wore at the beginning of the Half. Without facial hair he looked quite different. And it struck her for the first time that he resembled the prince somewhat—not like brothers, but they could pass for cousins.

“I'm sure Wintervale will be thrilled at your visit.” Or at least the old Wintervale would have been.

Iolanthe gathered up her equipment and started for Mrs. Dawlish's, Cooper and Kashkari beside her. After a minute or so, it occurred to her that Kashkari was walking with a slight limp.

“What's the matter with your leg?” she asked.

“You wouldn't believe it if I told you.”

“I would,” Cooper said eagerly, as he wrapped a muffler around his neck. “My brothers always tell me I'll believe anything.”

Iolanthe shook her head in fond exasperation. “At least you
don't
want to be a lawyer—there's something to be said for self-knowledge.”

“Well, here's the story,” said Kashkari. “Wintervale and I stopped by the library yesterday—since he has to spend so much time off his feet, he wanted something to read. So there I was, browsing, and this enormous book fell off the opposite shelf and hit me on the back of the calf.”

Books didn't just fall off shelves, though they could be made to, easily enough. At Iolanthe's old school in Delamer, there had been a prominent notice in the library:
No summoning spells allowed. Violators will report directly to the headmaster's office.

“Did someone push it off on the other side?” asked Cooper.

“Nobody was on the other side. I was lucky I'd moved just then, or it could have fallen on my head.” Kashkari glanced at them. “Will you two disbelieve me now?”

“I don't remember you limping yesterday,” said Iolanthe. Kashkari had supported Wintervale both going into and coming out of supper, last evening.

“I feel it more today. And the practice has made everything worse.”

“You don't think the book fractured a bone, do you?”

“No, but it certainly left a big bruise.”

“Sometimes poltergeists do that,” said Cooper in all seriousness. “I haven't heard about the library being haunted, but this is an old school. There must be disgruntled ghosts of old boys roaming about.”

A fierce wind blew. Iolanthe pressed down on her cap to prevent it from being carried away.

“Maybe Mrs. Dawlish has something for it. You know, old ladies and their aching muscles,” Cooper continued.

“I might ask her,” said Kashkari, not sounding overly enthused about being physicked by Mrs. Dawlish. “If this gets much worse, I won't be able to haul Wintervale to his classes.”

Cooper, always looking to be of use, leaped at the opportunity. “I'll do it. You've already done so much.”

“Thank you,” said Kashkari. Then, after a beat, “I'm afraid Wintervale finds my company rather stale, these days. A change for him might be welcome.”

Wintervale used to be quite indiscriminate: he spent a great deal of time with Kashkari, but he was equally happy to pass time with other boys from Mrs. Dawlish's house. Now, he seemed to crave only Titus's company.

It was perfectly understandable—only with Titus he could be himself. All the same, Iolanthe felt bad for Kashkari.