The Burning Sky tet-1

by Shelly Thomas

  He smiled. “Thank you.”

  Her heart slipped from its mooring, as it always did when he smiled. “Only this once. And you owe me.”

  As she turned to leave, he said, “English household management magazines.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That is what I read in my leisure time.”

  “You like household management?”

  “I like the authoritative answers the magazines give. Dear Mrs. So-and-So, all you need to have hair that shines like the moon is to mix olive oil and spermaceti in a proportion of eight to one and apply liberally. Dear Miss So-and-So, no, you will not wish to serve soup at your wedding breakfast. One or two hot dishes if you must, the rest should be cold.”

  Solvable problems, that was what he liked. The pleasure of ordinary concerns. The resolute lack of real danger.

  Someday, she thought. Someday.

  Iolanthe felt like a seed after a good long spring shower, soaked to bursting—yet somehow unable to break through her shell. Her capacity for elemental magic might be grand, but her ability stubbornly refused to improve.

  At least the latest news offered some consolation. After a brief interval during which she’d seemed on the verge of consciousness, the Inquisitor had slipped deeper into her coma.

  Iolanthe settled into a familiar cadence of classes and sports, a rhythm she had dearly missed in Little Grind. Sometimes it was almost possible to believe she was living only a slightly skewed version of normal life.

  With the lengthening of the days, lockup happened much later in the evening, and boys were allowed outside as long as one last shimmer of the sun still remained above the horizon. For hours every day, she pitted herself against the boys on the pitch—where she could apparently do no wrong.

  This athletic prowess earned her a ridiculous level of approval. She had always been careful to fit in wherever she went. But it was more than a little ironic that she had never been as popular as a girl as she was now as a boy, as someone who bore little resemblance to the real her.

  This particular evening, after practice, many of the boys stayed behind to watch a game between the two best school clubs. Iolanthe packed up her gear and started toward Mrs. Dawlish’s. She enjoyed the camaraderie of her teammates, but she was always the first one off the pitch at the end of a practice: as much as she refused to believe the prophecy of the prince’s death, somehow it felt more ominous when she was away from him.

  Kashkari fell into step beside her. They walked together, discussing a Greek assignment that was due in the morning. She remained somewhat wary of Kashkari, but no longer felt nervous in his company—he was most likely not a spy of Atlantis, only a shrewd and observant boy.

  “What about dative or locative?” asked Kashkari.

  “You can use the accusative, since they are going to Athens—makes it Athens-ward,” Iolanthe answered.

  She’d discovered that her grasp of Greek, inferior in her own eyes, was considered quite proficient by the other boys.

  “Accusative, of course.” Kashkari shook his head a little. “I wonder now how we got by when you weren’t here.”

  “I have no doubt the devastation was widespread, the suffering universal.”

  “Indeed, it was the Dark Ages in the annals of Mrs. Dawlish’s house. Ignorance was thick on the ground, and unenlightenment befogged all the windows.”

  Iolanthe smiled. Kashkari grinned back at her. “If ever I can do something for you in return, let me know.”

  You can pay a little less attention to me. “I’m sure I’ll be banging on your door as soon as I take up Sanskrit.”

  Eton didn’t have such a course, but mages in upper academies were usually required to master a non-European classical language. Iolanthe, in her before-lightning days, had aspired to Sanskrit for its wealth of scholarship.

  “Ah, Sanskrit. I dare say my Sanskrit is as good as your Latin—my family put me to it when I was five,” said Kashkari, rolling up his sleeve to check his elbow, which he had scraped on the ground in a fall during practice.

  On his right arm, just beneath his elbow, he sported a tattoo in the shape of the letter M—for Mohandas, his given name, she supposed.

  “What about Latin? Your Latin is good. Did you have a tutor for it before you came to England?”

  He nodded. “Since I was ten.”

  “Was that when you knew you’d be sent abroad for schooling?”

  “On my tenth birthday, in fact. I remember that day because my relatives kept telling me about the night I was born, all the shooting stars.”

  “What?”

  “I was born in the middle of a meteor storm.”

  “The one in November of”—she still had trouble with the way the English counted years—“1866?”

  “Yes, that one. And then they’d tell me about the even greater meteor storm in ’33.”

  “There was one in 1833?”

  “The most magnificent meteor storm ever, according to—”

  “Look, it’s Turban Boy and Bumboy.”

  Iolanthe looked across the street to see Trumper and Hogg, snickering to each other.

  “Somebody ought to give them a thrashing,” she said, not bothering to keep her voice low.

  “Do you thrash for your prince every night?” said Hogg, moving his hips obscenely.

  Other boys on either side of the street were stopping to see what was going on.

  “Ignore them,” Kashkari said calmly.

  “Go home to your idol-worshipping, sister-marrying family,” said Trumper. “We don’t want your kind here.”

  That was it. Iolanthe gripped her cricket bat and crossed the street.

  “What a big stick you carry,” sneered Hogg. “Is that what the prince likes to use on you?”

  She smiled. “No, just what I like to use on your friend.”

  She swung the bat. Not very hard, since she didn’t want to kill Trumper, but still it connected with his nose in a very satisfying way.

  Blood trickled out of Trumper’s nostrils. He howled. “My nose! He broke my nose!”

  “You too?” she asked Hogg. “How about it?”

  Hogg took a step back. “I—I have to help him. But you are going to regret this for the rest of your life.”

  Several boys from nearby houses had stuck their heads out of their windows. “What’s going on?” they asked. “What’s that caterwauling?”

  “Nothing,” said Iolanthe. “Some idiot walked into a lamppost.”

  Trumper and Hogg took off amidst a volley of laughter—no one, it seemed, liked them.

  When Iolanthe returned to Kashkari’s side, he looked at her with something between alarm and admiration. “Very unhesitating of you.”

  “Thank you. I hope they’ll think twice now before insulting my friends in my hearing. Now what were you telling me about the meteor shower in 1833?”

  Titus winced as he pulled himself out of the scull in which he had spent the past three hours rowing up and down the Thames. Fairfax was on the pier, waiting for him.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked as they walked out of earshot of the other rowers. She usually did not come to the pier.

  She tapped her cricket bat against the side of her calf in an agitated cadence. “Thirty-three years before I was born, there was another meteor storm, wasn’t there, an even more spectacular one? Were there no prophecies then concerning a great elemental mage?”

  “There were. Seers fell over themselves predicting the birth of the greatest elemental mage of all time.”

  “And?”

  “And he was born in a small realm in the Arabian Sea. When he was thirteen, he caused an underwater volcano long thought dormant to erupt.”

  Fire was a flamboyant power—as was lightning. But the ability to move mountains and raise new land from the sea was power on a different magnitude altogether.

  She emitted a low whistle, suitably impressed. “What happened to him?”

  “The realm was already under the d
ominion of Atlantis. The boy’s father and aunt had both died while taking part in a local resistance effort. When agents of Atlantis arrived to take the boy away, his family decided that they would never allow it. They killed him instead.”

  This time her response was a long silence.

  “What were the consequences to the boy’s family?” she asked, her voice tight.

  “To the family specifically, I am not sure. But the Bane’s displeasure was great, and the entire realm suffered a battery of retaliatory measures. My mother believed that the Bane’s failure to obtain the boy caused a loss of vigor on his part, which in turn led to a slackening of Atlantis’s grip on its realms.

  “Mages did not quite notice at first—not for years—but when they did, they began to test the leashes. There were minor infractions, which became rebellions, which became full-scale uprisings.”

  “The January Uprising.”

  “Baroness Sorren timed it to take advantage of the general chaos. The Juras was already a bloodbath, with heavy casualties on both sides. Atlantis was also having trouble with both the Inter-Dakotas and the realms of the subcontinent. And there were rumors of discontent in Atlantis itself. The leaders of the January Uprising thought they would be the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  “But they themselves were crushed instead. Atlantis must have found a way to harness a new power.”

  “Or an old one. My mother believed that the Bane had to deplete his own life force, something he had been careful to preserve throughout the long centuries of his life. Which would explain why he is so desperate to locate you.”

  She turned the cricket bat around a few times, her motion growing more steady and deliberate. “I am not his to be had. And someday, he might just regret coming after me—after us—and not leaving well enough alone.”

  It was not until Titus was in his room, changing, that he realized the significance of what she had said: she meant to wrap her hands around the reins of her destiny. Around the reins of their destiny.

  An unfamiliar emotion surged in his chest, warm and weightless.

  He was no longer completely alone in the world.

  Titus stood a long time outside Prince Gaius’s door. Beyond awaited his mother’s murderer, who had died comfortably in his bed, in the full of old age.

  Even now anger and hatred simmered in him. But the Oracle had said that he must visit someone he had no wish to visit, and he could not think of anyone, other than the Inquisitor, whose presence repelled him more.

  He shouldered open the heavy door. Music spilled out, notes as sweet and succulent as summer melons. A handsome young man sat on a low white divan, surrounded by plump blue cushions, plucking at the strings of a lute.

  “Where is Prince Gaius?” Titus demanded.

  “I am he,” answered the young man.

  But you are supposed to be an old man. All the other princes and princesses looked as they had close to the end of their lives. Hesperia in particular, though the gleam in her eyes remained undiminished, was as wrinkled as a shelled walnut. “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  Only a few years older than Titus. “And you are qualified to teach everything you listed outside your door?”

  “Of course. I am a prodigy. I was finished with volume two of Better Mages by the time I was sixteen.”

  Titus had not yet progressed halfway through volume one of Better Mages, the definitive text on higher magic. Gaius teased another few bars of music from his lute, each chord more plummy than the last.

  “How can I help you?” asked Gaius, who clearly believed in his own superiority, but was not particularly tedious about it. In fact, there was a glamour to his assurance—a charm, even.

  The hard, grim old man Titus remembered had once been this winsome, carefree youth.

  “Do you know anything about your daughter, Ariadne?”

  “Please,” laughed Gaius, “I am not married yet. But Ariadne is a lovely name. I should like a daughter someday. I will groom her to be as great as Hesperia.”

  He had hated the petitions that landed on his door yearly for him to abdicate in her favor. There had been a huge chasm between father and daughter.

  “Do you know anything of your future?”

  “No, except I am set to knock Titus the Third out of the triumvirate of greats. There is nothing anyone can do to dislodge the first Titus and Hesperia, but I should easily surpass the third Titus’s achievements. What do you think they will call me? Gaius the Grand? Or perhaps Gaius the Glorious?”

  They had called him Gaius the Ruinous. And he had known it.

  “Care to hear a piece I wrote myself?” asked Gaius.

  He began without waiting for a reply. The piece was very pretty, as light and sweet as a spring breeze. His face glowed with enjoyment, blissfully ignorant that he would later ban music from court and destroy his priceless instruments one by one.

  When he was done, he looked expectantly at Titus. Titus, after a moment of hesitation, clapped. It was good music.

  The prince—who would someday have no music, no child, and only tatters of his youthful dreams—graciously inclined his head, acknowledging the applause.

  “Now, Your Highness,” said Titus, “I would like to ask you some questions about Atlantis.”

  CHAPTER 20

  IN THE DISTANCE, SWORDS, MACES, and clubs bewitched by the Enchantress of Skytower continued to hurtle toward Risgar’s Redoubt. Titus went through a cascade of spells to lock, steady, amplify, and focus his aim. The missiles must be struck down when they were more than three miles out, beyond the outer defensive walls of the redoubt. The moment they crossed over the walls, they would dive to the ground to wreak havoc on lives and property.

  It was enjoyable, the repetition of the spells. It would have been meditative had his aim been perfect. But his success with moving objects hovered stubbornly at 50 percent. He would hit a few targets in a row, then miss the next few.

  “That’s it for this flock,” shouted the captain. “Eat something quick if you need to. Visit the privy. The next flock will be here in no time.”

  Fairfax appeared next to him on the rampart, paying little attention to the soldiers rushing about. “Sorry it took so long. Rogers’ verses were in terrible shape.”

  He had heard an Eton education described as something that taught boys to write bad verses in Latin and just as awful prose in English.

  “You ought to charge a fee for your help.”

  “Next Half I will. You wanted to see me?”

  He always wanted to see her. Even when they were both in the Crucible together, the sad truth was that they saw far too little of each other, with most of her time spent in the practice cantos, and most of his in the teaching cantos.

  He took her elbow and exited the Crucible. “Remember what I told you about the rupture view?”

  She nodded. “The image of wyverns and armored chariots you saw in your head when I interrupted the Inquisitor.”

  “I cannot be completely sure, but after speaking to my grandfather, I think it is the outer defenses of the Commander’s Palace in Atlantis.”

  “The one in Lucidias?”

  Lucidias was the capital city of Atlantis. He shook his head. “That compound is called Royalis—it used to be the king’s palace, when Atlantis still had kings. The Commander’s Palace is in the uplands. My grandfather had a spy who managed to send back a message in a bottle that traveled a thousand miles in open ocean. He indicated the rough location of the palace and noted that it had several rings of defense, one of wyverns, one of lean, swift, armored chariots, and another of huge chariots that carried dragons.”

  “You didn’t mention dragons being carried.”

  “No, my view was too brief to notice all the details. I knew fire was coming out from some of the chariots, but I did not know what was producing the fire. It makes sense—several of the dragon species with the hottest fires either cannot fly or cannot fly well. By putting them on aerial vehicl
es, Atlantis can better exploit their fire.”

  She rose from her chair, went to his tea cabinet, and pulled out the small bag of chocolate macaroons he had recently purchased on High Street. Slowly, she ate three macaroons, one after another.

  “It sounds as if you mean to tell me we will have to go to the Commander’s Palace. Would it not be to our advantage to lure the Bane out to a less hostile location?”

  He extended his hand toward her—he needed something to fortify him too. “What do you think of our chances at this less hostile location?”

  She placed a few macaroons on his palm. “Next to nil.”

  He took a bite of a macaroon. “And you think so because?”

  “He is invincible. He cannot be killed—or so mages say.”

  “And they are right—for once. Twice the Bane has been killed before eyewitnesses. Once in the Caucasus, where mages are experts at distance spell-casting. The second time when he was on the subcontinent to quell an uprising.

  “In both cases, he was said to have been destroyed—brains and guts all over the place. In both cases, by the next day he was walking around, right as rain. And in both cases, the Domain sent spies to verify the accounts; they returned baffled because the witnesses were telling the truth.”

  She fell back into her seat. “He resurrected?”

  “Or so it seems. That was the reason my grandfather was interested in the defenses at the Commander’s Palace. If the Bane was truly invincible, he could sleep in the open and not fear for his life. But the Bane does fear something. And so does the Inquisitor—or she would not have been thinking about the defenses of the palace, which are vulnerable to great elemental powers.”

  She bowed her head.

  Sometimes, as he lay in bed at night, he imagined a future for her beyond her eventual confrontation with the Bane. A popular, well-respected professor at the Conservatory of Magical Arts and Sciences—she had mentioned the goal several times in the school records Dalbert had unearthed for Titus—she would try to live a quiet, modest life.

  But wherever she went, thunderous applause would greet her, the great heroine of her people, the most admired mage in her lifetime.

  It was a future that did not include him, but it gave him courage to think that by doing his utmost, perhaps he could still make it come true for her.