The Burning Sky

by Shelly Thomas

  “You arrived fast. How did you locate the precise spot of the lightning so quickly?”

  Her tone was even, but her eyes bore into his. He blamed his mother. By all means the Inquisitor should believe in Titus’s frivolousness, but for the fact that the late Princess Ariadne too had once been deemed docile—and had proved anything but.

  “My grandfather’s field glass, of course.”

  “Of course,” said the Inquisitor. “Your Highness’s vaulting range is commendable.”

  “It runs in the family, but you are correct that mine is particularly extensive.”

  His immodest self-congratulation brought a twitch to the Inquisitor’s face. Fortunately for him, the ability to vault was considered analogous to the ability to sing: a talent that had no bearing on a mage’s capacity for subtle magic.

  “What do you think of the person who brought down the lightning bolt?” asked the Inquisitor.

  “A person brought down the lightning?” He rolled his eyes. “Have you been reading too many children’s tales?”

  “It is elemental magic, Your Highness.”

  “Rubbish. The elements are fire, air, water, and earth. Lightning is none of them.”

  “One could say lightning is the marriage of fire and air.”

  “One could say mud is the marriage of water and earth,” he said dismissively.

  The Inquisitor’s jaw tightened. A bead of sweat rolled down Titus’s back. He played a perilous game. There was a fine line between irritating the Inquisitor and angering her outright.

  He set his tone slightly less pompous. “And what is Atlantis’s interest in all this, Madam Inquisitor?”

  “Atlantis is interested in all unusual phenomena, Your Highness.”

  “What have your people discovered about this unusual phenomenon?”

  The Inquisitor had come out of the house. So she would have seen the interior already.

  “Not very much.”

  He began to walk toward the house.

  “Your Highness, I advise against it. The house is structurally unstable.”

  “If it is not too unstable for you, it is not too unstable for me,” he said blithely.

  Besides, he had no choice. In his earlier hurry to get out, he had not had time to remove all traces he might have left behind. He must go back in and walk about, in case his previous set of boot prints had not been sufficiently trampled by the villagers.

  The January Uprising had failed for many different reasons, not the least of which was that its leaders had not been nearly meticulous enough. He could not afford to make the same mistakes.

  The Inquisitor in tow, he strolled through the house. Except for the number of books, there was nothing remarkable about it. The Inquisitor’s agents swarmed, checking walls and floors, pulling open drawers and cabinets. Nearly half a dozen agents crowded around the trunk, which, thankfully, seemed to be a one-time portal that kept its destination to itself.

  On the front lawn, guarded by more agents, the girl’s guardian and the housebreaker were laid out, both still unconscious.

  “Are they dead?” he asked.

  “No, they are both very much alive.”

  “They need medical attention, in that case.”

  “Which they will receive in due time—at the Inquisitory.”

  “They are my subjects. Why are they being taken to the Inquisitory?”

  He made sure he sounded peevish, concerned not so much about his subjects but about his own lack of power.

  “We merely wish to question them, Your Highness. Representatives of your government are welcome at any time to see them while they remain in our care,” said the Inquisitor.

  No representatives of the Domain had been allowed into the Inquisitory in a decade.

  “And may I call on you this evening, Your Highness,” continued the Inquisitor, “to discuss what you have seen?”

  Another drop of sweat crept down Titus’s spine. So she did suspect him—of something.

  “I have already mentioned everything I saw. Besides, my holidays have ended. I return to school later today.”

  “I thought you weren’t leaving until tomorrow morning.”

  “And I thought I was quite at liberty to come and go as I wish, as I am the master of all I survey,” he snapped.

  They were there in her eyes, the atrocities she wanted to commit, to reduce him to a witless imbecile.

  She would not. The pleasure she would derive from destroying him was not worth the trouble it would incite, given that he was, after all, the Master of the Domain.

  Or so Titus told himself.

  The Inquisitor smiled. He hated her smiles almost more than her stares.

  “Of course you may shape your itinerary as you wish, Your Highness,” she said.

  He had been let go. He tried not to exhale too loudly in relief.

  When they were once again on the field behind the house, she bowed. He remounted Marble. Marble spread her wings and pushed off the ground.

  But even after they were airborne, he still felt the Inquisitor’s unwavering gaze on his back.

  This was no instantaneous transportation. Iolanthe kept dropping. She screamed for a while and stopped when she realized that no air rushed past her to indicate speed. She might as well have been suspended in place, only thinking that she was falling because there was nothing underneath her.

  Suddenly there was. She thudded onto her bottom and grunted with the skeleton-jarring impact.

  It remained pitch-black. Her hands touched soft things that smelled of dust and faded lavender—folded clothes. Digging beneath the clothes, she found a lining of smooth, stretched leather. The solid material under the leather was probably wood. Wary of making any unnecessary sounds, she did not knock to find out.

  She continued to explore her new surroundings. Action kept fear—and jumbled emotions—at bay. If she tried to make sense of the events of the afternoon, she might howl in bewilderment. And if she thought about Master Haywood, she’d crumble from panic. Or pure guilt.

  He had not been deluded by merixida. He had not even exaggerated. And she had chosen not to believe him.

  Leather-covered walls rose shoulder height about her, ending in a padded, tufted leather ceiling: she was inside another trunk.

  The trunk seemed tightly closed. She decided to risk a flicker of fire. It shed a dim, coppery light that illuminated a sturdy latch below the seam of the lid.

  The implication of the latch was discomfiting: it was for her to keep the trunk shut. To either side of the latch was a round disc of wood, one marked with an eye, the other, an ear. Reconnoitering was clearly recommended.

  She extinguished the fire in her palm—its light might give her away—and felt for the discs.

  The first one she found was the ear hole, which conveyed only silence. She moved to the peephole but likewise saw nothing. The room that contained her trunk was as dark as the bottom of the ocean, without even the telltale nimbus of light around a curtained window.

  Wherever she was, she seemed to be completely alone. She found and released the latch. Placing her palms against the lid of the trunk, she applied a gentle pressure.

  The lid moved a fraction of an inch and stopped. She pushed harder and heard a metallic scrape, but the lid did not lift any higher. Frowning, she put the latch back and tried again. This time, the lid moved not at all. So the latch in place prevented the trunk from opening. What had caused the trunk to open only a crack after the latch had been released?

  The tips of her fingers turned cold. The trunk was secured from the outside.

  A second vault in such a short time unsettled even a steed as disciplined as Marble. She screeched as they materialized above the Labyrinthine Mountains, her eyes shut tight in distress. Titus had to yank the reins with all his strength to avoid crashing into a peak that suddenly reared in their path—the constant motion of the mountains meant that even one as familiar with them as he must always take care.

  “Shhhhhh,�
�� he murmured, his own heart pounding hard at the near miss. “Shhhhh, old girl. It’s all right.”

  He guided her higher, clear of any summits that might decide to sprout additional spurs. She obeyed his commands, her prodigious muscles contracting with each rise of her wings.

  Beneath him, the Domain stretched in all directions, the Labyrinthine Mountains bisecting the island like the plated spine ridge of a prehistoric monster. To either side of the great mountain range, the countryside was a fresh, luminous green dotted by the pinks and creams of orchards in bloom.

  You are the steward of this land and its people now, Titus, Prince Gaius, his grandfather, had said on his deathbed. Do not fail them as I did. Do not fail your mother as I did.

  Had he known then what he knew now, he would have told the old bastard, You chose to put your own interests above that of this land and its people. You chose to fail my mother. I hope you suffer long and hard where you are going.

  Quite the family, the House of Elberon.

  Since the Inquisitor already knew he had visited the location of the lightning strike, there was no more need to be stealthy. As the castle came into sight, he wheeled Marble directly toward the landing arch at the top.

  Marble cried plaintively at his dismount. He gave the rubbery skin of her wing a quick caress. “I will have the grooms take you for more exercise. Go now, my love.”

  Strong winds buffeted the pinnacle of the castle. Titus fought his way inside and sprinted down two flights of stairs into his apartment.

  He greeted the usual huddle of attendants with a snarled, “Am I ready to depart yet?” and waved away those still foolhardy enough to follow him.

  The apartment was vast. Even with the aid of secret passages, it still took him another minute to emerge in the globe room, where a representation of the Earth, fourteen feet across, hovered in midair.

  With a swish of his wand, doors shut, drapes drew, and a dense fog rose from the floor. Only the air between the globe and his person remained transparent. Carefully, he touched the half pendant he still wore to the globe. His fingers brushed against something hot and grainy—the Kalahari Desert, probably.

  A pulse passed between the pendant and the globe. He drew back and looked up. A bright red dot appeared on the globe, a thousand miles east northeast of where he stood—and very much in the middle of a nonmage realm.

  To limit the influence of Exiles, Atlantis had placed a chokehold on travel between mage realms and nonmage realms. Most portals would have been rendered useless. The girl’s trunk must employ startlingly unusual magic—or someone had made sure a loophole had been left open for it.

  She could have been taken anywhere. But Fortune smiled upon him today, and her current location was within twenty-five miles of his school. With luck, he would find her within the hour.

  Waving away the fog, he summoned Dalbert, his valet and personal spymaster. He must leave immediately, before the Inquisitor put more agents on his tail.

  “Your Highness.” Dalbert appeared at the door, a middle-aged man whose round, pleasant face hid a ferocious talent for intelligence gathering.

  He had supplied facts and rumors to Titus in a timely and discreet manner for the past eight years, keeping his master apprised of everything that went on in the Domain and around the world while looking after Titus’s personal comforts. The prince, however, had never taken Dalbert into his confidence.

  “There is a train getting into Slough in twenty minutes. I plan to be on it. Make it happen.”

  “Yes, sire. And, sire, Prince Alectus and Lady Callista await below. They request an audience with Your Highness.”

  The regent and his mistress resided in Delamer, the capital, and rarely called upon Titus’s mountain keep.

  Titus swore under his breath. “Show them into the throne room—and have Berman exercise Marble.”

  Dalbert hurried off. Titus took himself two levels below, shrugging into a day coat as he went. He rarely entered the throne room except on the most public of occasions—it was ridiculous for him, essentially a puppet, to be in a room meant to symbolize the justness and might of his position. But today he wished to get rid of his visitors fast, and the throne room discouraged small talk.

  The ceiling of the throne room rose fifty feet on two rows of white marble pillars. The obsidian throne was set upon a waist-high dais. Titus walked past it to the arched windows. Beneath him was a drop of a thousand feet to a ravine cut by a blue, glacier-fed river. Beyond, purple peaks shifted like slow waves.

  Alectus and Lady Callista appeared on two of the four low pedestals that transported audience seekers from the reception room to the throne room.

  Alectus was the youngest brother of Titus’s grandfather, a handsome, morally flexible man of fifty-eight. Lady Callista was a beauty witch—the greatest beauty witch of her generation. Of the last three hundred years, it had been argued.

  She was on the brink of forty. Unlike many other beauty witches, she had not resorted to questionable magic to keep herself looking half her age. Instead, she had aged gracefully, allowing a few wrinkles to spread here and there while maintaining her sway over legions of hearts.

  Ever since Alectus had been appointed regent, she had been his mistress. Some whispered that Alectus had even proposed to her, but she had declined. She was the capital’s leading hostess, its arbiter of style, a generous patron of the arts—and an agent of Atlantis.

  Alectus bowed. Lady Callista curtsied.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” asked Titus, offering neither seats nor refreshment.

  His bluntness surprised Alectus, who looked toward his mistress: Alectus had no appetite for confrontation, or any kind of unpleasantness.

  Lady Callista smiled. It was said that to this day, love letters arrived for her by the wheelbarrowful. There was a great deal of skill in her smile, a smile meant to make a boy who had done nothing with his life feel accomplished and remarkable—virile, even.

  Titus felt only revulsion—she was most likely the one who had betrayed his mother, informing the Inquisitor of the latter’s secret participation in the January Uprising.

  “We received a note from the Inquisitor,” she said, her voice a dulcet murmur. “Her Excellency is concerned that she doesn’t see enough of you. She’s quite fond of you, Your Highness.”

  Titus rolled his eyes. “She is getting above herself. What do I care whether she is fond of me? She was a nobody before the Bane plucked her out of obscurity.”

  “But now she is the Inquisitor, and can cause much unpleasantness.”

  “Why would she do that? Does she wish to incite a new uprising?”

  At the word “uprising,” Lady Callista’s smile faltered slightly, but she was quickly all warmth and concern again. “Your Highness, of course she does not want that. Once you come of age, the two of you will see a great deal of each other. She hopes for a respectful, productive, and mutually beneficial association.”

  “I appreciate your diplomacy,” he said, “but there is no use gilding a turd. I cannot stand that upstart, and she is jealous and resentful of me. Save me the time and tell me what she really wants.”

  Alectus choked at Titus’s language. Alectus never had problems being deferential to the Inquisitor. He was ill suited to wield power himself, but he yearned toward it as a vine reaches for a higher branch. And parasite that he was, he was probably happier the more powers the Inquisitor concentrated onto herself.

  Lady Callista’s next smile was strained. Had the Inquisitor been nasty to her? Usually Lady Callista’s smiles were entirely effortless.

  “The Inquisitor would like to speak to you about what you saw this afternoon.”

  “I saw nothing—I already told her.”

  “Nevertheless, she believes that with her help, you might remember more.”

  “Will I still be continent when I emerge from her ‘help’?” The Inquisitor’s methods were widely feared.

  “I’m sure she would treat you with
utmost courtesy and consideration, sire.”

  Titus assessed his situation. He must leave without delay. Yet the Inquisitor must also be placated somehow.

  “Your spring gala is to take place in a few days. I will attend as the guest of honor. You may invite the Inquisitor. I will grant her a brief audience during the course of the evening.”

  He made appearances at various state and charitable functions during the year, usually those involving children and young people. A gala was not quite the same thing, but he would stir curiosity, not controversy.

  Lady Callista opened her mouth. Titus preempted her. “I trust you are grateful that I will take the trouble.”

  It was time she remembered that he was still her sovereign.

  “Of course,” she murmured, conjuring another smile.

  Now they were down to mere formalities before he dismissed them. “Is there anything else that requires my attention?”

  “My choice of a new overrobe for the gala,” said Alectus, jolly now that his task had been discharged by his mistress. “I cannot make up my mind, and Lady Callista claims to be far too busy.”

  “Thousands of details need to be seen to before the gala,” said Lady Callista, in her you-silly-man-but-of-course-I-love-you-madly tone.

  “Close your eyes and make a random selection,” Titus said, forcing himself not to sound too impatient.

  “Indeed, indeed,” Alectus agreed, “as good a method as any.”

  “I wish you both a good day,” said Titus, his jaw hurting with the strain of remaining civil.

  Alectus bowed. Lady Callista curtsied. They stepped on the pedestals and disappeared to the reception room below.

  Titus let out a breath. He glanced at his watch: still ten minutes to make the train.

  But Lady Callista reappeared, looking suitably apologetic. “I beg your pardon, sire, I seem to have left my fan behind. Ah, there it is.”

  What did she want now?

  “Do you know what curious news I just heard, sire?” she asked. “That by the bolt of lightning you saw, a great elemental mage has revealed herself—a girl of about your age.”

  Of course she would ask him about the girl—what good minion of the Inquisitor’s would not? He acted bored. “Should I care?”