The Immortal Heights

by Sherry Thomas

  Inside the other containment cell, Fairfax was getting up. “You all right, Kashkari?”

  Kashkari was slower to rise to his feet. “I’m fine,” he said, wincing.

  Fairfax’s gaze landed on Titus. She raised her hand and rested it against the wall of her cell. “Your Highness.”

  Titus could only shake his head, trying not to break down and weep openly.

  “Where is Durga Devi?” she asked.

  From her spot, the pillar upon which the Bane had dashed Amara blocked the line of sight to where the latter lay.

  “She is here.”

  “Is she . . .”

  “I do not know.”

  Her containment cell glided across the floor toward the Bane. Kashkari gave a cry as they rounded the pillar and he saw Amara’s crumpled form. Fairfax’s throat moved at the sight of her own face on that too-still body.

  The din of battle rose to a deafening pitch outside—the defenders of the Commander’s Palace were throwing themselves upon the marauders of Skytower. But Titus scarcely heard anything, his attention fixed on Fairfax. There was a smear of dirt on her face and bits of rock dust in her hair, and he was reminded of the day they first met, seven months and forever ago.

  The cell stopped six feet from the Bane. At last she looked upon the monster himself. She did not appear afraid, only weary beyond words.

  “My dear, dear Fairfax,” murmured the Bane.

  “My lord High Commander,” replied Fairfax, in her low, rich, slightly gravelly voice. “Or is it Palaemon Zephyrus? No, I forgot. Your real name is Pyrrhos Plouton, you nasty old man.”

  The Bane’s good humor apparently could not be dampened by a few barbed words. “About to be an even nastier, even older man, thanks to you.”

  “You will not have me,” she said flatly. “Nor will this cell hold me.”

  “This cell is built to be strong enough for me.”

  “I thought so,” she said. “Step behind me, please, Kashkari.”

  A bolt of lightning left her hands and struck the wall of the containment cell, which lit up and crackled. The Bane’s expression changed. He had built the cell to be strong enough for him—but he was not capable of lightning.

  Suddenly Titus felt the Bane’s wand at his temple.

  “Stop or the boy dies,” snarled the Bane.

  “Keep going!” Titus shouted. “It does not matter if I die. Finish him!”

  Fairfax hesitated.

  “Do not think. Do as I say!” he shouted louder, even as his voice turned hoarse. “Break free now!”

  A pain like ice gored him in the stomach. He fell down. Ice turned into fire, charring all his nerve endings.

  “Be a good girl,” came the Bane’s honeyed voice, “and he won’t suffer any more.”

  “No . . .” The possibility that she might listen to the Bane horrified Titus. “No . . .”

  Her jaw worked. An agony like having his spine ripped out skewered through him. He convulsed, but he kept his eyes on her, willing her to hold firm. Her hands shook. Her whole person shook.

  The Bane lifted his wand. Titus braced himself for worse. The Bane half dropped his hand, raised it again, and slid it to the side. Titus blinked, so confused and taken aback he only faintly noticed that he was no longer in pain.

  The Bane waved his wand about like the conductor of an orchestra. A sneer twisted his lips, an expression of sheer disdain. Yet as Titus watched, that disdain turned into consternation. Then, outright anger.

  The next second the walls of the containment cells disappeared. The Bane knelt down and lifted Titus. “Get off that base,” he said to Fairfax and Kashkari, both flabbergasted. “I can’t keep him away for long.”

  No, not the Bane. This was Titus’s father, and Titus was looking into the kind, beautiful eyes that his mother had loved. “Father. Father!”

  “You look just like your mother,” said his father, hugging him tight. “You look just like Ariadne.”

  He kissed Titus on the forehead. “Someone stun me right now and put a spell shield around me. The Bane can’t use me if I’m unconscious.”

  Fairfax and Kashkari raised their wands. But whereas Kashkari fulfilled Titus’s father’s request, Fairfax lifted a chunk of stone and sent it flying toward—

  West, who was just sitting up on his platform. He promptly tipped over and fell onto the floor.

  “Good thinking!” cried Kashkari.

  With Titus’s father unconscious, the Bane had turned to West. But now, with his last spare out of commission . . . Fairfax, Kashkari, and Titus looked at one another: faced with a clear path to the Bane’s sarcophagus, they were at a loss over what to do.

  A wall of flames roared their way.

  The Bane’s original body might not have fingers left to grip a wand, or even a tongue for speaking the words of an incantation, but his mind was perfectly functional. And the mind was all that was needed to power feats of elemental magic.

  While Kashkari and Titus shouted for shields, Iolanthe raised her hands and pushed back against the fire. “Keep an eye on West and your father,” she cried. “Keep them safe.”

  It had amazed her to hear Titus calling the Bane’s current body “father.” But it all made sense. Now if only they could defeat the Bane and get out of here.

  She lifted one of the stone platforms and sent it crashing toward the sarcophagus, and then another—the best way to keep everyone safe was to keep the Bane busy defending his original body. She advanced. The fire he had summoned she kept sweeping toward him. “Do you enjoy being toasty, my lord High Commander?”

  The third platform she smashed into the sarcophagus fractured the lid. With a wave of her hand, the split halves of the lid went flying.

  “The ceiling!” Kashkari shouted.

  Cracks zigzagged across the ceiling. Enormous slabs of stone fell. Iolanthe redirected the tonnage of debris toward a far wall of the crypt. The next moment, half of everything she’d just put away came zooming back, headed for Titus. With a yell she propelled the slabs off course.

  Titus cried out. She screamed too, fearful he had been hurt, only to see that with all her efforts concentrated on keeping him safe, the Bane had managed to hurl a slab into Titus’s father.

  With a sinking heart she lifted up the slab. More fire erupted, a conflagration that engulfed the entire crypt. She hefted the fire upward, so that those who lay on the floor—Amara, West, and Titus’s father—would be spared from the flames.

  “We must keep advancing!” Titus called.

  “The longer he stalls us, the more likely the mages of Skytower will be overwhelmed and he will be rescued,” said Kashkari almost at the same time.

  Iolanthe gritted her teeth and punched a lane through the fire. Titus and Kashkari marched on either side of her, applying shields. The pieces of decor had caught fire and were smoking mightily. The air shimmered with heat from the flames. The Bane’s sarcophagus seemed to warp and wriggle.

  More fire. More flying rocks. Despite the shields, she felt the skin on her cheeks blister, a scalding pain. Grunting with the effort, she again hoisted the flames a few inches higher, not wanting those on the floor to suffer.

  Ten feet. Five feet. Three feet. They leaped onto the dais and stood over the now lidless sarcophagus. But all Iolanthe could see of the interior was a milky fog.

  Kashkari prodded the tip of his wand against the fog. The wand was stopped by an invisible shield. Titus was already trying various incantations.

  “Should I shatter the rest of the sarcophagus too?” Iolanthe asked.

  “You can,” said Kashkari. “But I doubt it’ll help. I think the sarcophagus is just decoration—this inside shield is what truly protects him.”

  But how did they break through this shield, which the Bane must have spent decades, if not centuries, perfecting?

  And they must do it soon. Outside the roar of wyverns was deafening. The stink of colossal cockatrices had already reached her nostrils. And the crew of Skytower were cal
ling for her. “We have to get out of here, Skipper!” “Skipper, we can’t hold them off for much longer!”

  Had they come so far to be thwarted by a shield?

  Titus and Kashkari whispered fiercely, trying spell after spell. She and the unseen Bane wrestled with each other via their command of the elements, locked in a stalemate. Sweat dripped down her face, an indescribable pain where it rolled past the blisters on her cheeks. Cries from the Atlanteans outside were becoming more aggressive, more triumphant. Soon armored chariots would crash through and it would be too late.

  Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of West crawling across the rubble-strewn floor of the crypt. Her heart very nearly leaped out of her rib cage: the Bane had retaken command of West’s body. But when he raised his face and met her gaze, there was no malice in his eyes, only a great determination—it was just West, who had regained consciousness.

  He inched along, dragging an injured leg behind him, making for Titus’s father. When he reached the latter, he lifted one of the man’s hands and pointed at the sarcophagus. Of course. The Bane’s original body needed to be cared for, and who better to handle the task than his current body? It wasn’t any spell or incantation that Titus and Kashkari could think of that would rescind the shield, but the touch of the current body.

  “Stand back,” she ordered Titus and Kashkari.

  She aimed a bolt of lightning directly at the shield, then another, and yet another—not to damage the shield, but to keep the Bane worried and jumpy, focused only on Iolanthe’s doings. And as she did that, she poked Titus in the side and indicated West with a tilt of her head.

  Titus, after a similar initial moment of dread, understood. He leaped off the dais and brought his unconscious father the rest of the way to the sarcophagus. With Kashkari’s help, they lifted him high enough to place his hand on the shield.

  The milky fog cleared.

  Iolanthe knew the Bane’s original body had to be completely mutilated. Even so, she gagged. She didn’t know how anyone could be so butchered and still be alive. The body had nothing below the waist. Both arms were gone. Ears, nose, lips, teeth—none remained. Only one eye stared out at her, with loathing, fear, and a covetousness that was a hundred times more vile than any disfigurement.

  Titus and Kashkari, too, stared, staggered and repelled.

  “Come on. Put it out of its misery!” shouted West.

  She glanced toward Titus—he looked as paralyzed as she felt.

  “What about you, Kashkari?” begged West.

  A muscle near Kashkari’s jaw leaped. He lifted his wand and pointed it at the Bane. As had happened with the ogre in the Crucible, the Bane’s head disconnected from his body with an audible pop and a spurt of blood that sent all three of them scrambling backward.

  They waited for a moment. For so long the Bane’s every footstep had made the entire mage world quake. Iolanthe half expected the floor of the caldera to collapse in a cataclysmic convulsion and bury them under millions of tons of volcanic rock. But except for the spurt of blood, the Bane’s death was as ordinary as anyone else’s.

  Kashkari dropped to his knees and retched. She hurried to him and dug out a remedy from her bag. Once he’d swallowed the remedy, she wrapped her arm around his shoulders and raised her waterskin to his lips.

  Two feet from them Titus knelt next to his father, holding the latter’s wrist in his hand with a grim expression. Then he closed his eyes for a moment, kissed his father on the forehead, and leaped off the dais.

  Kashkari got up too. Most of the elemental fire had cleared, but many decorative pieces made of wood were still burning. Through the haze of smoke he tore across the rubble-strewn expanse of the crypt, his feet pounding on the mosaic of the great maelstrom of Atlantis. At his approach, Titus, who was already at Amara’s side, looked up and shook his head.

  Iolanthe covered her eyes. Kashkari’s prophetic dream had come true, down to its every last detail.

  A hand shook her by the shoulder. “We have to go. Now.”

  Titus. They embraced briefly, then busied themselves getting everyone onto carpets, Amara with Kashkari, Titus’s father with him, and West with Iolanthe.

  The ruins of the Commander’s Palace burned. The scene above was greater chaos than any she had seen on the meadow of Sleeping Beauty’s castle: wyverns shrieking, armored chariots careening, swords and maces from Skytower whirling about the fortress, a tornado of weaponry.

  They darted up to the command deck, put their hands on the Crucible, with Iolanthe’s other hand around Skytower’s helm, and recited the password. As they arrived inside the Crucible, she realized the chaos on the meadow was no less, after all. But since they controlled Skytower, they were above most of the pandemonium, which made it easier to take off on their carpets in the direction of Black Bastion.

  Her carpet had been suborned to Kashkari’s, which allowed her to take a look at West’s leg. Something had definitely been fractured, but she could give him no help beyond a full dose of pain-relieving remedy. “As soon as we get to safety, we’ll have a doctor fetched for you.”

  But would there be safety at the other end? The monastery’s copy of the Crucible most certainly had fallen into Atlantean hands. Was it in the Inquisitory, or worse, in Lucidias?

  She pulled out the two-way notebook Dalbert had given her and wrote, The Bane dead. The prince alive. In the Crucible, headed for the monastery’s copy.

  The Bane dead. The prince alive.

  It was all she wanted. Yet a black anxiety gnawed at the edge of her heart. Kashkari’s prophetic dream had come true. What about Princess Ariadne’s vision of her son’s death?

  She glanced at Titus. He happened to be looking in her direction. It was too dark to see his features clearly, yet she felt the same unease emanating from him.

  Let him be safe. Let us outlive this night.

  She found some burn potion, gave half to West, and applied the rest to her own blisters.

  “That was quite impressive, by the way,” said West. “Lightning bolts—now I’ve seen everything.”

  “How are you? Not too shaken up, I hope?”

  “Completely shaken up. But we are safe now, right?”

  If only she could answer that question with any confidence at all. “Hard to say. The Crucible itself is dangerous, even if—” She looked back and swore. “We are being chased!”

  Kashkari echoed her imprecation. “They are towing spell accelerators.”

  “Are they?” Titus’s question was sharp.

  And his voice was unsteady.

  “Did your mother mention spell accelerators in her vision?” Her voice too had risen an octave.

  He said only, “Give me your wand.”

  Dum spiro, spero.

  What happened to hope, when there was no more breath?

  She handed him the wand and gripped his hand. “It’ll be all right.”

  “I love you,” he said. “And you will always be the scariest girl I have ever met.”

  A lump lodged in her throat. “Shut up and fight.”

  Several miles behind them, three cowl-like nets were being readied. Titus released his spells one after another; Kashkari did the same. After a minute or two of this rapid firing, Kashkari wrenched all the carpets up and to the right.

  West yelped, his fingers gripping hard onto the carpet’s edge.

  “Kashkari has to keep the carpets steady when he and Titus aim, but then he has to swerve to avoid being hit by the spells cast by our pursuers,” Iolanthe explained, panting with relief that they had not been hit. At least not this round.

  West’s response, after a pause, was, “The prince called you the scariest girl he’s ever met. You are a girl?”

  Eton College seemed to belong to the misty reserves of history, but it had been mere days ago that West, Kashkari, and Iolanthe met regularly for cricket practice. Of course West had every reason to continue to think of her as a boy.

  She waved a hand. “That’s not importa
nt right now.”

  They had covered approximately one-third of the distance to Black Bastion. That was important. Also important, that together Titus and Kashkari had stunned several of their pursuers.

  She wiped a hand across her brow. She was perspiring, and not just from nerves—the night, quite cool earlier, had turned unseasonably warm. The weather inside the Crucible always reflected that outside. Why would it have suddenly become hot on Atlantis?

  Skytower had been directly on top of the Commander’s Palace when they brought it back into the Crucible. Which meant the Crucible would have dropped right down into an inferno.

  “Titus, can the Crucible catch fire?”

  “Eventually, yes.”

  “We might be inside the remains of the Commander’s Palace.”

  “Or we might have been deliberately set on fire,” he said grimly, “to finish us off.”

  No matter what had happened, the result was the same. They were in for a broiling.

  Sparks leaped on the grassland below. Smoke was already rising. The air rushing past her face was so hot she might as well have stuck her head into an oven. Titus and Kashkari, however, seemed to pay no attention to these developments, their focus solely on their spell-casting.

  The grassland burst into flames. Distant woods too caught on fire, their burning branches crackling. Smoke obscured the sky, muffling the screeches of the wyverns in the distance.

  What had Titus told her long ago about the vision of his death? My mother saw a night scene. There was smoke and fire—a staggering amount of fire, according to her—and dragons.

  All the conditions had been met.

  “Yes. That’s all of them!” shouted Kashkari.

  She started. It took her a moment to understand that he was talking about their pursuers. While she’d been preoccupied with fire and doom, Titus and Kashkari had stunned every last wyvern rider in their wake.

  And there, ahead, was the silhouette of Black Bastion through the billowing smoke, much closer than she had thought it would be. Hope shot through her, a starburst of happiness. The future that she had given up on was now back in her embrace, full of laughter and promises.