The Perilous Sea (42 page)

“The Lord High Commander of the Great Realm of New Atlantis hails His Serene Highness, the Master of the Domain,” the sonorous voice came again. “Atlantis and the Domain currently enjoy a peaceful and mutually beneficial association. Deliver Iolanthe Seabourne into the care of Atlantis and that friendship will continue.”

“Do you not enjoy how it has been phrased?” Titus said softly.

“I would like to. But every time that voice speaks, I rather choke on fear.”

Even the might of Validus in her hand was not sufficient to expel that fear.

“And I grow ever more incensed that anyone still thinks I am going to give you up.” He murmured a spell. When he spoke again, his voice, though not raised in the least, carried for miles. “The Master of the Domain will consider delivering a cubic mile of elephant excrement into the care of Atlantis, but nothing else. And he extends his warmest greetings to the Lord High Commander. Soon may the Lord High Commander depart for the Void, where he is long overdue.”

Iolanthe was thunderstruck: Titus had just told the Bane to go to hell. Angry shouts erupted from the wyvern riders. The rebels, like Iolanthe, were overawed.

The sonorous voice was now both darker and scabbier. “The Master of the Domain is an impetuous child. But the Lord High Commander is willing to overlook the folly of youth for the greater good. Forfeit Iolanthe Seabourne and you may yet keep your throne.”

“The Master of the Domain is no doubt the stupidest boy who ever lived,” replied Titus. “But he prides himself on not being a vile old man who practices sacrificial magic, as the Lord High Commander does.”

Iolanthe might have fallen off the carpet if she hadn't been strapped in. This time, the Atlanteans were stunned into silence; the rebels cried out in shock.

“Every word the prince says is true,” rose Kashkari's voice. “I will vouch for it with my life.”

What Iolanthe had come to think of as the voice of Atlantis spoke again, and it sounded like stones grinding together. “Atlantis is ever on the side of peace and friendship. But you have brought war upon yourself, Titus of Elberon.”

Titus's hand came to rest on Iolanthe's. He was afraid—his fear pulsed inside her blood. But as she looked upon his profile, she was reminded of the day they met, that fateful conversation by the Thames River. She had thought him impossibly brave then, as if he had been born under the wings of the Angels—now she knew it to be so.

“I'm with you,” she said softly. “Always.”

His hand tightened on hers and he said to the Bane and all his minions, “So be it.”

But he was not done yet. With his voice still audible for miles, he added, “Fortune favors the brave.”

Another moment of utter silence. And then, Iolanthe found herself shouting at the top of her lungs, her voice nearly drowned by the bellow of all the rebels present, “And the brave make their own fortune!”

The rallying cry of the January Uprising, taken up again after all these years.

Tears fell unchecked down Iolanthe's cheeks. She pulled Titus to her and kissed him hard.

“Forgive me,” he said, between kisses, “for being so wrong about everything this Half.”

“There is nothing to forgive. And you weren't wrong about my not being the Chosen One, since there is no Chosen One.”

“Still, when I think how close I came to losing you—”

“But you didn't. I'm here—and I love you. I have always loved you.”

He kissed her again. “And I will love you until the end of the world.”

With a roar a wyvern spewed a bright flame. A hundred more wyverns followed suit. Instantly the air turned hot and acrid. The wyverns swooped down upon the rebels, raining fire.

Iolanthe raised the wand that had once belonged to Titus the Great and summoned lightning, a white-hot flash that lit up the sky.

The war against Atlantis had begun at last.

NOTES

1
.
THE DOMAIN
is the common term for the United Principality of the Pillars of Hercules, so called because the two ends of its territory at the time of the unification, the Rock of Gibraltar and the Tower of Poseidon, a basalt column jutting out of the Atlantic, some thirty miles north of the northernmost tip of the Siren Isles, had been collectively known as the Pillars of Hercules.

—From
The Domain: A Guide to Its History and Customs

 

2
.
IN REACTION
to Atlantis's restrictions on travel channels, mages in realms under its dominion turned to older, less advanced modes of transportation that had been largely abandoned in favor of the speed and convenience of more modern means. Dry docks made a comeback in landlocked realms. Airframes were manufactured in large quantities in secret workshops. And flying carpets, in resurgence, reached a level of development that surpassed the glories of their former heyday.

—From
A Chronological Survey of the Last Great Rebellion

 

3
.
A COMMON
misconception concerning blood magic involves its original purpose—that it was first devised to force mages to act against their own will. The truth is far more complex: blood magic, since its inception, has been used to hold tribes and clans together and make sure that individual members did not harm the greater good of the group.

Does this mean that sometimes blood magic has been put to coercive uses? Undoubtedly. It is a double-edged sword, as is every branch of magic.

—From
The Art and Science of Magic: A Primer

 

4
.
I STRONGLY
advise caution to mages who intend to visit the Middle Ridges section of the Labyrinthine Mountains. The reasons are twofold. One, much of the section is a princely preserve not open to the public. Two, the entire region shifts and moves with no discernible pattern—a defensive tactic implemented centuries ago by Hesperia the Magnificent to protect her castle—making it difficult for even nearby inhabitants to act as guides.

Once, some twenty years ago, I managed to convince a local youth to take me for a quick excursion. The excursion turned into seven terrible days wandering in the wilderness. Had we not accidentally stumbled upon a way out, we'd have perished in those unforgiving mountains.

But how beautiful they were, the mountains, as pristine and vivid as the first day of the world.

—From
Labyrinthine Mountains: A Guide for Hikers

 

5
.
LEVITATION SPELLS
are some of the oldest achievements of subtle magic. Like all spells meant to imitate elemental magic, no levitation spell has ever come close to the glorious scale of the latter—only elemental mages can move enormous boulders at will. But whereas elemental magic shifts only earth and water, levitation spells have been adapted for a wide variety of purposes.

—From
The Art and Science of Magic: A Primer

 

6
.
DRY DOCKS
were once commonly to be found in landlocked mage realms—with a dry dock, one could launch a ship directly to sea, even if the nearest coast was a thousand miles away. But with the advent of more instantaneous transits that bypassed sea voyages altogether, dry docks became obsolete as a mode of transportation.

—From
Mage Travel throughout the Centuries

 

7
.
BECAUSE BLOOD
magic is so closely tied to the concepts of family and consanguinity, it is subject to the privilege of kinship. For example, a sister can modify certain spells woven by a brother, just as in real life she can persuade him to change his mind on something.

But if the object of a particular instance of blood magic is the brother's son, then the aunt's influence becomes limited: a father has a far greater claim on his own child.

—From
The Art and Science of Magic: A Primer

 

8
.
AT VARIOUS
points in the history of New Atlantis, its rulers had tried to install Classical Greek, the language, supposedly, of the mythical Old Atlantis, as the official language of the realm. The last king of Atlantis issued an edict that all official communication, both written and spoken, must be in Greek. The inefficiency and miscommunication caused by this policy played no small part in the fall of his house.

One of the legacies from these assorted bouts of Hellenization was that Atlantean ships, both those of the navy and those of the merchant marine, tended to bear Greek names. Around the time of the January Uprisings, vessels from actual Hellenistic realms had been known to repaint their names in the Latin alphabet, so as not to be taken for an Atlantean craft and sabotaged.

—From
A Chronological Survey of the Last Great Rebellion

 

9
.
THE REGULATION
of magic often lags behind the development of magic. Spells enthusiastically introduced to the mage world and just as eagerly embraced might very well be shunned a generation or two later.

Such has been the case with memory magic, which has become frowned upon—and many of its cruder spells declared illegal—for its intrusiveness and the potential damage it inflicts.

These days memory magic is usually deployed by criminals who do not want their victims to remember by whom they have been robbed, and occasionally by licensed medical professionals to erase recollection of unspeakable trauma, but only after the sufferer of the trauma has gone through a substantial approval process.

—From
The Art and Science of Magic: A Primer

 

10
.
THE QUASI-VAULTER
had not been invented to circumvent no-vaulting zones, but to make mages who could not vault appear as if they possessed the ability. The four small lumps, called vertices, became activated when they were set on the ground in such a way as to mark the corners of a quadrilateral. A mage stepping inside this quadrilateral would be instantly whisked away to a preset target, and the vertices would disintegrate, leaving no traces behind.

When mages realized that quasi-vaulters could break through no-vaulting zones, they demanded that the inventor give up proprietary information so that new anti-vaulting spells could be formulated to disallow quasi-vaulters. The inventor, an eccentric old woman, pulled her products from the market rather than divulge her trade secrets, which she took with her to her pyre.

Needless to say, quasi-vaulters immediately became sought after on the black market—and only more so when Atlantis began building its Inquisitories in mage capitals around the world.

—From
A Chronological Survey of the Last Great Rebellion

 

11
.
TODAY'S ANNOUNCEMENT
that Princess Ariadne has named her firstborn Titus has caused a stir among palace watchers.

After the reign of Titus VI, one of the most reviled sovereigns in the history of the House of Elberon, the name Titus has dropped nearly entirely out of use among the population of the Domain. The House of Elberon has been hesitant to reclaim the name that had once been associated with several of its most illustrious members: the infant prince is the first boy born to the house to be called Titus in more than two hundred years.

—From “Reaction to Infant Prince's Name Mixed at Best,”
The Delamer
Observer
, 28 September, Year of the Domain 1014

 

12
.
IT SADDENS
me greatly that Titus VI, one of the most principled and courageous mages who ever breathed, is casually referred to by the staff writers of
The Delamer Observer
as “reviled” in the article “Reaction to Infant Prince's Name Mixed at Best.” It saddens me even more that
The Delamer Observer
's general readership accepts that claim without any question.

Yes, we have all learned in school that Titus VI had to abdicate the throne in favor of his younger sister, after he used deadly force against his own subjects. But does no one outside the Sihar community remember the context of Titus VI's decisions?

Those had been some of the darkest days for the Sihar of the Domain: Sihar establishments in all the larger cities razed, Sihar children beaten in broad daylight, and perfectly law-abiding Sihar forced to flee their homes. Unruly mobs were converging on Lower Marin March, proudly proclaiming that they would not stop until they had pushed all the Sihar into the sea.

Titus VI ordered the mobs dispersed by any means necessary. There were 104 fatalities before the mobs finally disbanded, but the number of Sihar who would have perished, had Titus VI stood aside and done nothing, would have been in the untold tens of thousands.

And let it not be said that the name Titus has dropped out of use among the population of the Domain. We the Sihar make up 9 percent of the population of the Domain and we name many, many of our sons Titus, in remembrance and eternal gratitude.

—From “Letters to the Editor,”
The Delamer Observer
, 30 September, Year of the Domain 1014

 

13
.
THE LARGEST
Sihar population in the world lives in the Domain, concentrated mainly in Lower Marin March, although smaller communities are to be found in most sizable cities and towns.

The Sihar had historically been outcasts from the larger mage community for their practice of blood magic. Persecutions, especially in the realms on the Continent, reached a fever pitch during the reign of Hesperia the Magnificent. The oft-recounted story of their arrival in the Domain usually begins with the dramatic plea from the Grand Matriarch of the Sihar to Hesperia, that the latter, then a new mother, would sympathize with the matriarch's desperation and grant the Sihar a place of refuge.

Hesperia acceded to the matriarch's plea. The Sihar were offered special status as the princess's guests and given land in Lower Marin March for their use, the borders of the march secured by the princess's own guards for their protection.