The Immortal Heights (23 page)

No one looked overjoyed at what she proposed. But they all obeyed immediately. She leaped in after them.

“Wait,” said Titus, as Iolanthe readied an air bubble.

He took out a hunting rope from his own satchel, rubbed it across the back of her hand a couple of times, and then flung it onto the far bank of the river. She hoped his trick would keep the other hunting ropes busy for a while.

Taking another deep breath, she let the river resume its thunderous progress toward the sea. The air bubble she had anchored to the riverbed held, keeping them safely in place.

But staying in place was not their goal. Sooner or later those who sought them would circle back to this spot: they needed to move.

“Put away the carpets,” she said. “Then we levitate one another an inch or two above the riverbed and make our way upstream.”

It would have been far easier to go downstream, but that would only wash them out to sea.

The carpets were put away. Iolanthe and Titus, who each carried an emergency raft, took out the oars that came with the kits. Fully unfolded, the oars would measure six feet in length. But they only let the oars out to eighteen inches or so.

In the Sahara, Iolanthe and Titus had used levitating spells to get through a tunnel she excavated in the bedrock. Here the trick worked again: floating three inches above the riverbed, they each used an oar to push themselves forward.

Iolanthe reduced the size of the air bubble as much as possible without suffocating everyone inside—the more water going over them, the less likely they would be seen. Kashkari coordinated their moves. Titus kept an eye on their speed, altitude, and oxygen supply—reminding her regularly that it was time to bring in some fresh air—as she wrestled with the air bubble, pushing it along the bottom of the river at the rate of their progress.

Amara remained silent, except to ask once, “Is it difficult keeping the air bubble intact?”

“No,” Iolanthe answered. “The hard part is keeping it underwater. This much air exerts a lot of buoyancy.”

And it was a constant struggle to keep the air bubble down and not let it bounce them all up to the surface.

Their progress was slow, torturous—and often taking place completely in the dark. When Titus deemed the water deep enough, he would allow a bare flicker of light. Otherwise they proceeded without any illumination, groping their way forward.

It felt to Iolanthe as if she'd spent her entire life crawling in this cramped and unnatural way, her shoulders aching, the back of her head throbbing, when Titus said, “Our levitation spells are weakening. We might have to stop for a bit.”

They happened to be traversing a relatively flat stretch of riverbed. Titus took out an emergency raft, which, when inflated, made for a decent mattress. “The water here is fifteen feet deep. You can make the air bubble a little bigger.”

“How far have we come?” asked Iolanthe, collapsing onto the raft.

Not far enough, that much she already knew, as the same bluish light that illuminated Lucidias elsewhere filtered down from the funnel she had made to the surface for the exchange of air.

“About a mile and a half. But the river's course turned a couple of times. So as the crow flies, we are only about four-fifths of a mile from where we started.”

“Still in Lucidias?”

“Yes.” Titus handed her a small vial of remedy. “The good news is I have been studying the map of Lucidias Mrs. Hancock gave us,
and I am certain that one, the river will take us out of Lucidias, and two, it will do so at a spot where there is no checkpoint. The bad news is, of course, since Atlantis did not think it necessary to install a checkpoint, we will find it punishing in some other way.”

The contents of the vial, when she tipped it into her mouth, tasted quite familiar, with its burst of orange flavor. He had given her the exact same wellness remedy on the day they'd first met.

The day she had sat inside a dark trunk, read Master Haywood's letter, and learned just how much he had given up to keep her safe.

There would be no triumphant return to the Conservatory for him, no life of ease and plenty. And they would never share another sunrise on the Siren Isles, leaning into each other as the birth of another day suffused them with hope.

She knew she was crying, but she didn't realize she was shaking until Titus wrapped his arms around her and held her against him.

“He wanted to keep you safe, and now he has.”

“For how long? I won't leave Atlantis alive—we all know it.”

“We can never judge the full effect of any action in the immediate aftermath. But remember, it was not only you he kept alive and free, it was the rest of us too.”

A soft lament floated to her ears. For a moment she thought she had imagined it, but it was Amara, singing quietly. “It's a paean to those who have led worthy lives,” said Kashkari, a catch to his voice. “Your guardian and Mrs. Hancock neither lived nor died in vain.”

For as long as Amara sang, Iolanthe let herself weep, her head on
Titus's shoulder. When the final note of the lament had drifted up to the ears of the Angels, she wiped her eyes on her sleeves. They had a long way to go yet, and she must focus on the tasks at hand.

But Amara sang again.

“A prayer for courage,” murmured Kashkari, “the kind of courage for facing the end of the road.”

It was quite possibly the most beautiful song Iolanthe had ever heard, as haunting as it was stirring.

“‘For what is the Void but the beginning of Light?'” said Titus, quoting from the Adamantine aria. “‘What is Light but the end of Fear?'”

Iolanthe heard her own voice joining him in the rest of the verse. “‘And what am I, but Light given form? What am I, but the beginning of Eternity?'”

You are the beginning of Eternity now
, she said silently to Master Haywood.
You have arrived at the end of Fear. And I will love you always, for as long as the world endures.

CHAPTER
19

THEIR PAINSTAKING PROGRESS CONTINUED THROUGH
the night. By midmorning they came to a huge waterfall, and Fairfax declared that it was time for everyone to get out of the river.

Titus was accustomed to mountains—he had grown up in the heart of a great mountain range. But the mountains north of Lucidias—the Coastal Range—were like none he had ever seen. There were no
slopes
. Everything reared up at a near-vertical angle. Even the banks of the river were precipitous and strewn with enormous and sharply edged boulders. They had to fly out of the riverbed, after Fairfax once again parted the currents.

Titus made a number of blind vaults until he was high enough to see the dense, crowded city that consumed every square inch of feasible land between the sea and the mountains. Above Lucidias hung several floating fortresses, slowly rotating. Between them wove squadrons of armored chariots. As for the intensity of the search on
the ground, he could only imagine.

Or it could all be a spectacle put on to fool them into thinking that Atlantis still believed them trapped in Lucidias.

Unfortunately, the mountain rose higher behind him and he could not see what was happening elsewhere in Atlantis. And to think these mountains were but gentle hills compared to what awaited them farther inland.

He returned to find Kashkari and Amara, despite their skill, thwarted by the flying carpet's other great intrinsic weakness: it could only travel so high above ground. They could see a ledge some two hundred feet up. But it was on a sheer cliff without a foothold anywhere, and they simply could not ascend that high on the strength of the carpets alone.

In the end, an exhausted Fairfax summoned a strong and precise air current to lift them past the required height, which allowed them to more or less glide into place—and collapse en masse.

Titus volunteered for the first watch. But the ledge was not big enough for more than two persons to lie down.

“I'll join you for the watch,” said Kashkari.

Titus tucked a heat sheet around Fairfax. The ledge was not exactly smooth and even; he could not imagine that she was comfortable, even with the thicker battle carpet beneath her. But she was already asleep, her fingers slack in his hand.

Behind him the great waterfall thundered down, generating so much spray that even a quarter mile away stray droplets occasionally
struck them. He wiped one such tiny bead of water from her cheek and wished for the ten thousandth time that he could protect her from what was to come.

Eventually he took a seat beside Kashkari and handed the latter a food cube. “The ladies forgot to eat.”

“If I could, I too would sleep now and eat later, rather than the other way around.” Kashkari bit wearily into the food cube. “What did you see?”

Titus described the scene over Lucidias and mentioned his suspicion that it could be all for show.

“While they strengthen the defenses around the Commander's Palace? That makes sense.”

“I hope the Bane does not decide to move his real body somewhere else.”

Kashkari flicked a few crumbs from his fingers. “That would be unlikely. The Commander's Palace has provided him with shelter and secrecy for close to a century, if not more. That's where he feels safest. Not to mention, to move the body, he would have to accept the risk of the transit: he'd be more exposed and more vulnerable than he has been in a long, long time. And what awaits him at the other end can't be as well fortified as the Commander's Palace.

“Moreover, the idea of Fairfax coming to him must be terribly exciting. She has proved elusive elsewhere, and the hunt has cost him time and again. But now she's in his territory. The way he sees it, she's making a huge mistake and would sooner or later run up
against the impenetrability of his defense and be caught. He only has to sit tight and another century of life will fall into his lap—if, that is, he still has a lap left.”

Titus dropped his head to his knees. “That is exactly what will happen, is it not?”

Kashkari was silent for a long time. “But you and I, at least, will still be alive after Fairfax is no more. And that is what we must plan for now.”

Iolanthe must have been asleep for no more than ten minutes when someone shook her on the shoulder. “Wake up, Miss Seabourne. Let the boys have some rest.”

Amara.

Iolanthe pried apart her eyelids and shuddered at the precipitous drop bare inches from where she lay.

“Let her sleep more,” said Titus to Amara, an edge to his voice. “It was not necessary to wake her up.”

“You need your rest,” Amara answered calmly. “If you're too tired, you'll become a liability to the rest of us.”

Iolanthe carefully got to her feet so she could switch places with Titus. “She's right. Sleep.”

As they passed each other, he held her against him for a moment. Nothing of their surroundings seemed quite real, not the roaring waterfall, not the sheer cliffs, not their precarious perch above the scabrous surface far below—and she was so drained she couldn't
even remember how they'd got there.

“So you were not born on the night of the meteor storm, after all,” he murmured.

She vaguely recalled something about not being Lady Callista's daughter, just plain old Iolanthe Seabourne, who was born six weeks before the meteor storm.

“The arrival of my greatness needed no such gaudy announcement,” she half mumbled.

He snorted softly and pressed a food cube into her hand. “We missed celebrating your birthday in September. You have been seventeen for a while.”

“No wonder I've been feeling old and tired lately. Age, it creeps up on you.”

“Then lie down and sleep some more.”

“Durga Devi is right. If you are under-rested, you'll be of no use to us. Now vault me someplace where I can see Lucidias.”

He sighed, kissed her on her lips, and vaulted them both to a nearby peak. She examined the concentration of floating fortresses and armored chariots. “Did it look like this when you last saw it?”

“More or less.”

“You think they believe us to be still somewhere in the city.”

His arm around her shoulder tightened. “That might be wishful thinking.” He expected that more trouble than ever awaited them where they were headed—and that was why she would not survive.

When they returned to the ledge, Kashkari was already asleep,
laid out flat. She tucked Titus in and watched as he dropped off into a fitful slumber.

“So you have forgiven him?” asked Amara.

Iolanthe sat down next to her. “Provisionally—in case I die very soon.”
³

“And if not?”

“Then I'll have the luxury of time in which to hold a grudge, no?”

Amara chuckled softly. Iolanthe stared: the woman was amazingly beautiful, perfect from every angle. It occurred to her that though they had become comrades in a life-and-death struggle, she knew very little about Amara besides her stupendous loveliness and that she was the object of Kashkari's impossible longing.

She summoned some water and offered it to Amara. “Did you say that your grandmother came from one of the Nordic realms?”

Amara unscrewed the cap of her canteen and let Iolanthe direct a stream of water inside. “You've heard of the good looks of the gentlemen mages of the Kalahari Realm, I trust?”

“Oh, yes.” There had been students from the Kalahari Realm at the Conservatory, and some of them had been spectacularly handsome—all that mingling of the bloodlines produced a most unusual beauty.

“My grandfather liked to joke that as a grass-green immigrant, my grandmother stepped out of her transport, laid eyes on the first nearby Kalahari man, and immediately proposed.”

“Did your grandmother ever admit to it?”

Amara held up a hand, indicating that her canteen was full. “She insisted until the day she died that he was the third man she encountered after her arrival, not the first.”

Iolanthe chortled and absentmindedly spun the remainder of the sphere of water she'd summoned.

“They were my father's parents. My mother was born and raised on the Ponives—the same archipelago Vasudev and Mohandas's grandparents hail from, incidentally, though not the same island. My father visited the Ponives on some sort of official business, and he met my mother while he was there. The way my mother told it, she nearly fainted with wonder when she first saw him—but only after they were married did she realize that among other Kalahari, his looks were considered mediocre at best.”

Iolanthe chortled again. Until this moment, she hadn't been sure whether she liked Amara. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that until this moment she had never seen Amara as an actual person. “You said your parents left the Kalahari Realm when you were very small.”

“True. I never got to experience this overabundance of male pulchritude myself.”

“Why did they leave?”

Amara shrugged. “Atlantis, what else? The Kalahari Realm has the first Inquisitory Atlantis ever built overseas.”

Iolanthe was embarrassed: she hadn't known that—and she
probably should have. “Why did the Kalahari Realm interest the Bane so much?”

“I never understood it myself until I learned about Icarus Khalkedon from Mohandas—he wrote a great deal when he was flying to us in the desert. The Bane wanted control over our realm because he wanted our oracles. We are—or were—famous for our oracles. That's why so many mages from all over the world had come there in the first place, to consult the oracles.”

“You mean there are others like Icarus Khalkedon?”

“No, I'd never heard of another human oracle like him, but there was the Prayer Tree, the Field of Ashes, the Truth Well, and a number of others throughout history. I imagine the Bane probably inquired at every one of them when and where he could find you.”

“Not me, just the next potent elemental mage—that was probably long enough ago that even Kashkari's uncle's powers hadn't yet manifested themselves.”

Amara nodded. “You are right. It was forty years ago that the Inquisitory was built. He must have learned something from all our oracles, because he took over the Ponives just in time for Akhilesh Parimu to come into his powers.”

The story of Kashkari's uncle never failed to give Iolanthe chills: killed by his own family, so that he did not fall into the Bane's hands.

“After the establishment of the Inquisitory, did Atlantis become the only entity that could ask questions of the oracles?”

“No, ordinary mages were still allowed to consult them, but far less often. And of course all questions had to be approved by the acolytes, who were now either Atlanteans or those allied with Atlantis—to prevent just what Mrs. Hancock was able to do: using the power of an oracle to ask how the Bane could be brought down.”

In the Beyond, was Mrs. Hancock already reunited with her sister and Icarus Khalkedon? And Master Haywood—who welcomed him on the other side? His parents? His sister who had died early? When Iolanthe arrived, would he be happy to see her—or sad that she had outlived him by mere days?

She brought her mind back to the present—the ways and means of the Beyond she would know soon enough.

“The only oracle I've ever consulted is in the Crucible—there is no queue of supplicants waiting for answers. But a real oracular site must be swamped with mages desperate for answers. How do the acolytes choose which supplicants they will favor?”

“It runs the gamut. Some decide on the relative merit of the supplicants' questions; some, obviously, on who can pay the most; and some charge a nominal fee and let the oracle itself decide.”

“So the supplicants just toss their questions to the oracle and see if they get an answer?”

“That's how the Prayer Tree worked. One gave a few coins in alms for the needy, then wrote a question on a leaf that had fallen from the tree and dropped it anywhere among the roots—and those roots cover a large, large area. If the tree decided to answer a question, a
white leaf would grow on the branches, and an acolyte would climb up to record the answer and copy it to their register.

“By the time my parents asked their question about me, they could probably have paid with the leftovers of their lunch. Oracles don't last forever. The Prayer Tree had largely withered, and hadn't answered any questions in years. But my parents thought they might as well try it, since they didn't have the means to afford a more robust oracle.”

“You were ill?”

“Very. The physicians weren't sure whether I would live past my first birthday, and my parents were frantic. But the Prayer Tree roused itself to give one last assurance.”

“So what did the Prayer Tree tell you?”

Amara took a sip of water from her canteen. “I will need a vow of silence from you.”

Without quite noticing it, Iolanthe had created a complicated waterscape in the air, slender streams threading in and out of a shallow pool of water, the entire thing bright and sparkling under the early afternoon sun. And now, in her surprise at Amara's request, the waterscape dropped ten feet straight down. “Why?”