The Burning Sky tet-1

by Shelly Thomas

  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 into 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—not that she knew how to work a set of reins in any case.

  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 hadn’t happened. If you are cut, you bleed, Hesperia had told him long ago in her classroom. He could only hope his blood wasn’t dripping out of the Citadel’s copy. 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.

  Iolanthe didn’t know how she managed to bring down the wyvern on Black Bastion’s landing platform without killing them both.

  But her feet were on solid stone, and the wyvern was being skillfully led away by a pair of grooms, without erupting into a rage that would roast mages in a hundred-foot radius.

  She expected to be challenged immediately, but everyone on the landing platform who wasn’t busy with the wyvern sank to one knee, with murmurs of “M’lady.”

  Who knew help was so desperately needed at Black Bastion?

  She descended into the bailey. More people paid obeisance to her. And even more dropped to their knees as she marched through the great hall. Who did they think she was? Helgira herself?

  She kept pushing farther into the fort. Each time she was faced with a choice of directions, she chose the one that looked more sumptuous.

  Opposition came in the form of a nondescript maid. As Iolanthe stepped into Helgira’s richly decorated apartment, the maid cried, “That is not our lady!”

  “No?” Iolanthe raised a brow. She snapped her finger, and a bolt of lightning flashed outside the window.

  The maid appeared horribly confused.

  Iolanthe snapped her finger again and another, even more impressive lightning bolt sizzled across the width of the sky.

  “Forgive me, my lady.” The maid sank to her knees, shaking.

  Iolanthe ignored her. Inside the bedchamber, she passed through the prayer alcove to the Black Bastion in the Citadel’s copy of the Crucible.

  This Black Bastion was much calmer, its inhabitants preparing for bed rather than war. Iolanthe thought its mistress away from home until she saw a woman standing before a window, her long black hair fluttering in the strong breeze.

  Helgira.

  A woman who lived in warlike times should be more alert to her surroundings. Iolanthe could be an assassin, waiting in the shadows. Helgira, however, remained oblivious to Iolanthe’s presence, her breaths emerging in a series of trembling sighs and gasps. “An Angel . . . I have been blessed. I have been blessed.”

  She was probably in a bout of religious mania. But out of curiosity, Iolanthe used a far-seeing spell to look out the window.

  The soles of her feet prickled. A phantom behemoth. No wonder Helgira was dazed. In every chapel and cathedral Iolanthe had ever visited, they had been painted on the ceiling, the steeds of the Angels.

  But wait. There was a wyvern, a few miles closer to her, and it carried a rider. She redoubled the far-seeing spell. The rider’s features were still too faint, but she recognized the gray, hooded tunic that Princess Ariadne had specified in her vision.

  Titus.

  It took Titus a moment to remember that he had directed the mind-ruining spell at the Inquisitor while the latter had been under the time-freeze spell. Mages under time-freeze spells were safe from the vast majority of
assaults. Little wonder then the Inquisitor was well enough to accompany her master on his pursuit of Titus.

  He urged his wyvern to fly even faster, wishing he had brought a pair of goggles. His eyes burned from the relentless wind, his ears ached.

  The next second the ache turned into agony, as if someone had threaded a needle between his ears. He screamed. Then he felt it, a sensation like a finger poking inside his head, rubbing against the ridges and folds of his brain.

  Was this what the Bane and the Inquisitor had been talking about, a more subtle way to use the Inquisitor’s talents? It was obscene.

  That she was able to do it from several miles behind him frightened him. Her health hadn’t been the only thing improved by her trip to Atlantis. Her powers, too.

  He could guess what she wanted. For the moment, not secrets buried deep, only his identity, since they could not see his face. But once she had it, what would prevent her from going deeper right then and squeezing everything out of him?

  It was now or never.

  He double-tapped his wand, unsheathing it—he had not lied about the fact that it was indeed a blade wand. Then, wrapping his sleeve around the wand so the light from the crowns could not be seen, he turned around, his other hand holding the hood shut below his eyes.

  The spells left his lips like a paean to the Angels, syllables cascading with a deadly beauty. Such spells were of no use at all in close range, like trying to fell someone with a feather. But as he straightened his arm and aimed, the puff that left his wand would gather strength and momentum, until it became an unstoppable force, all the more lethal for its invisibility.

  He wrapped his arms around the wyvern’s neck. In the nick of time—a fresh turbulence tossed the beast upside down. It shrieked. Titus hung on, but only barely, his fingers slipping from the smooth scales. The wyvern fell for an eternity before it righted itself, the two of them both shaking with fright.