The Immortal Heights (8 page)

She shook the tent open and shaped it roughly to look like two slender, conjoined cylinders. They strapped the tent onto the carpet. Kashkari bewitched it to fly down a long corridor and toward the open door at the other end. “Come with me.”

He led her down to the level beneath the stage, a warren of corridors. They turned and turned, seeming to go around in circles, before Kashkari pushed open a door into a dark and cramped storage room and called for mage light.

He swore. “I don't see it.”

“Are we in the right place?”

“Yes. When I went to England at the beginning of Michaelmas
Half, it was here. It's always been here.”

“What is it, exactly?”

“A double-door wardrobe. Huge. Curlicues and whatnots everywhere. You can't miss it.”

They came across shelves and racks and trunks, but no wardrobes, armoires, or freestanding cupboards, huge or otherwise.

She gripped him by the arm. “Do you hear that?”

They were no longer alone in the basement. They'd taken too long—the Atlanteans had discovered their ruse.

She tamped down her panic. “Wait! Did you say the theatrical season hasn't
quite
started yet? When
does
it start?”

He stared at her a second. “This way!”

They raced up to the auditorium level. The theatrical season was about to start, which meant there must have been rehearsals. Neither of them had ever taken part in Eton's dramatic productions, but Sutherland had and sometimes talked about his experience. The later rehearsals were always conducted with the stage dressing in place, so that the actors would know where the props were and how to negotiate their way across the proscenium.

But there was nothing onstage except a bed, draped in rather garish silks and velvets. They stared at each other, stricken.

Then, with a soft cry, Kashkari rushed toward the stage. He yanked off the red and gold counterpanes and heaved aside several layers of padding. Now it became clear that underneath the
bedcovers had not been a bed frame, but an enormous armoire lying on its face.

Iolanthe lifted it with a levitation spell and set it back down on its feet. They scrambled inside and closed the doors.

“Out of the frying pan, at least,” she said.

Kashkari exhaled. “Here's to going into the fire.”

CHAPTER
7

“SAY THAT AGAIN,” TITUS DEMANDED.

“Lady Callista and Commander Rainstone are half sisters.”

One was the regent's mistress, the power behind the throne, and the other the woman in charge of defending the realm from external threats. And yet Titus, the Master of the Domain, had known nothing of it.

“Who else knows?”

“I don't know, sire. I can tell you that I was never told, but overheard an argument between the two of them. Commander Rainstone was lambasting Lady Callista for having no grasp of the concept of loyalty. For not understanding why Commander Rainstone was so distraught that she had been dismissed from Her Highness's service. ‘To you everyone's value is only in what they can do for you,' she said to Lady Callista. And then she added, ‘I wish I'd never discovered that we were sisters.'”

Commander Rainstone had been let go by Princess Ariadne, Titus's late mother, after the latter caught Commander Rainstone snooping in her personal diary, in which she recorded all her prophetic visions. Neither Titus nor his mother had been able to make sense of this transgression on Commander Rainstone's part. But now Titus was beginning to see how Commander Rainstone could have been pushed into it, by a sister who desperately wanted to know if there were prophecies inside that diary concerning her daughter.

“I never mentioned to either of them what I'd overheard,” Haywood went on. “But I'm fairly certain they stopped spending time together after that—the matter with Her Highness was probably the weight that snapped an already fraying bond.”

Titus thought back. Had he ever seen Lady Callista and Commander Rainstone in the same place? Yes, he had, at the garden party at the Citadel that Amara had crashed. But the two women had been separated by the crowd, and Commander Rainstone was well known for her disinclination to attend social functions at the Citadel.

“But whether they'd reconciled in the years after I gave up my memory, I can't say. I never had any dealing with Lady Callista after that. And even with Commander Rainstone, we gradually grew apart, given my own troubles.”

A silence fell. Titus studied the man who had suffered so much for his devotion to Lady Callista. He could fault Haywood for not having treasured Iolanthe as well as he should have in those latter
years of his “troubles”—and a younger version of himself might very well have done so.

But how could he, when he had hurt her just as much? Perhaps more.

“She thinks the world of you, your ward,” he told the older man.

Haywood smiled, the smile of a man trying to hold back greater emotions. “I don't quite deserve it, but I am beyond grateful that it is so.”

“And I believe she much prefers having grown up with you than with Lady Cal—”

He carried his half of the pendant in his trouser pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief. Even through the fabric, the sensation of cold had been unmistakable. But all at once the temperature of the pendant changed enough for him to notice. He pulled it out of his pocket, unwrapping the handkerchief impatiently.

The metal half oval inside was barely cooler than the ambient temperature.

Her location had changed thousands of miles. What happened? Had Atlantis snared her at last? Was she en route to the Commander's Palace?

“Sire?” asked Haywood tentatively.

Titus leaped up. There was a map on the wall of the apartment, a nonmage map. Nonmage maps were by their very nature inaccurate, but he should still get an approximate idea of her location.

He pressed the pendant against the map and recited a long
cascade of spells. A dot appeared off the shore of Corsica. “What the hell.”

“If I may, sire,” said Haywood. “I haven't been very busy of late, so I've tried to convert this map into a mage map. Though I'm afraid my accuracy leaves much to be desired.
Revela omnia.
”

The lines on the map wriggled and writhed as continental mage realms squeezed themselves into place and land masses that had never been seen by nonmage eyes appeared in the oceans.

Now the dot fell in the middle of the English Channel.

What the hell.

Then he remembered what Kashkari had said:
In Cairo there is a one-way portal my brother rigged up that goes directly to Mrs. Dawlish's.

The odor of quicklime assaulted Iolanthe's nostrils the moment she and Kashkari materialized in the dark, crowded broom cupboard. She attempted to vault, with Kashkari's hand on her elbow. They went nowhere—the no-vaulting zone was still in place.

Already footsteps pounded in their direction, swift and ominous. Iolanthe and Kashkari burst out of the broom cupboard, she calling for illumination, he shaking open a spare carpet.

The room was crammed with soaking tubs, cloth presses, and drying racks. She didn't bother to try the door or the flat window set high on the wall. The laundry room was a later addition to the house, stuck onto one end. She raised her hand, and a flash of lightning shot up and blew a hole in the ceiling.

They climbed onto the carpet and sped up into a drizzling and cold night. Mist closed in, the vapors vaguely orange in the light of the streetlamps.

Windows opened in nearby houses. A voice that sounded very much like Cooper's rang out. “What's going on? Did we get struck by lightning?”

Iolanthe closed her hand. All the flame illumination within a two-hundred-foot radius went out. The night turned pitch dark.

“Head west,” she told Kashkari.

The carpet sliced through the night, out of the town in seconds—Eton was much longer than it was wide, and the residence houses were already near its western boundary. Iolanthe let the fire return to the lamps and sconces—it would not do to mess with gas-burning devices.

“How far west?” Kashkari asked.

The question stumped Iolanthe. She had vaulted many times to the abandoned brewery that housed the southern entrance into Titus's laboratory, but had never traveled there by conventional means. She, in fact, had no idea exactly how far it was or whether she could even recognize the place from outside in broad daylight.

Then she felt it, the half pendant on her person abruptly heating up. “Titus is here!”

She pressed the pendant into Kashkari's hand. “Keep going in the right direction and it will continue to get hotter.”

The night turned bright as day—a squadron of armored chariots
had arrived, shining their harsh, merciless light upon the countryside. From their metallic bellies dropped the desk-sized pods that had chased Kashkari and Iolanthe all over Cairo.

In Cairo they'd had the advantage of the urban landscape. Here it was open and flat, with no places to hide—and not even darkness to help them disappear.

Already, despite the tailwind she'd applied to the carpet, the pods were closing in. She willed the soil beneath a clump of trees to loosen, hoisted the trees with levitating charms, and sent them toward the pods.

The pods dodged her missiles.

She summoned the water of the Thames and erected a wall of ice. One chariot ran smack into the wall, but the others pulled up in time.

Instead of throwing up another ice wall, she ripped apart the existing one and threw boulder-sized shards at her pursuers. Two of the chariots were hit broadside and knocked off their trajectory. But the rest extended their mechanical arms and either caught the ice chunks or swatted them aside.

And there were so many of them, an entire swarm. Where was the brewery? If they didn't find it now, they might never be able to.

Even more pods fell from the sky, a particularly pernicious hailstorm. Their long mechanical arms reached for Iolanthe from all directions, and Kashkari was already flying them as low as possible without scraping the ground.

“Do something!” cried Kashkari.

But what else could she do? She looked about wildly and saw nothing but claws and metal underbellies.

“Vault!” Titus's voice rang out, clear as a church bell. “You are out of the no-vaulting zone now!”

Kashkari's hand already grasped her arm. She closed her eyes and thought of the inside of the brewery. The next instant she and Kashkari were crashing to the floor of the brewery, thrown against a pile of old barrels by the residual velocity of their carpet.

Before they'd come to a complete stop, they were already hauled to their feet. Titus—and Master Haywood!

“Come on. Hurry!”

The door to the laboratory was open, light spilling out of the familiar interior, with its long worktable and walls upon walls of shelves and cabinets. They raced inside. Titus entered last, slammed the door shut, and shouted,
“Extinguatur ostium!”

Iolanthe clung to Titus, her entire person shaking, her breaths in fits and wheezes. He all but crushed her in his arms.

“Fortune shield me,” he said, his voice hoarse. “For a moment I thought they had you.”

Now she was hugging Master Haywood. He kissed her face and caressed her hair. “I thought there had to be some archival magic I could wield. But I drew a complete blank. I was scared witless.”

“We're all right,” she answered, gasping. “Don't worry. We're all right.”

She also embraced Kashkari, who, like her, was still panting heavily. “That was some very fine flying, old bloke. You saved us.”

“I thought we were done for. I thought that was how—”

He stopped speaking abruptly. An unease that was becoming all too familiar coiled around her heart, but he only raised his hand to his temple and gingerly felt around the cut that must have resulted from his having slammed into a cider cask head-on.

Titus had already dampened a cloth with some potion. He ordered Kashkari to sit down. “And are
you
all right?” he asked Iolanthe as he cleaned Kashkari's wound. “Any headache, nausea, or weakness?”

“I'm fine. Are you sure all connections between the brewery and the laboratory have been severed?”

“Yes.” When he had affixed a bandage to Kashkari's temple, he extracted several vials from various drawers and handed them to Iolanthe. “Take these to be on the safe side. You were not supposed to vault within seven days of any trauma severe enough to require panacea.”

She'd forgotten about that altogether. After she had poured the remedies down her throat, Master Haywood once more enfolded her in his arms, his heart thudding a staccato beat against her chest. “Fortune shield me. I think I'm still scared witless.”

“I'm safe now. We are all safe now.”

Inside the folded space the laboratory occupied, they could not be traced or found.

Eventually she let go of Master Haywood and presented Kashkari to him. All the men shook hands.

“What
happened
?” asked Titus. “How did Atlantis find you?”

Iolanthe dug up a charred Validus, handed it to Titus, and recounted the anomaly involving the diamond-inlaid crowns along the length of the blade wand.

Titus's expression turned grim. “Unless I am very much mistaken, Atlantis now has access to Validus's daughter wand.”

“What's that?” everyone else said in unison.

“Most blade wands come in pairs, a mother wand and daughter wand. The daughter wand is not particularly remarkable—it does not amplify a mage's power any more than an ordinary wand—but it does inherit the mother wand's properties should the latter be destroyed.

“When Hesperia the Magnificent held Validus, she made modifications to its daughter wand, so that it could be used to track down the mother wand. Because of this, Validus's daughter wand is kept at a secret location, not to be used unless the one who wields Validus is deemed dead or captured.”

“But you are neither,” said Iolanthe.

“Try telling that to the regent.” He frowned. “Come to think of it, I am not sure that Alectus knows this at all. Someone like Commander Rainstone is more likely to be in possession of such knowledge.”

“Can you ask Dalbert to find out?” It was why he had left them in the first place, to retrieve what intelligence Dalbert might have gathered.

“You do that,” Titus said. “I will go get some water for tea.”

“Surely I may fetch water for you, sire,” said Master Haywood.

“It is dark out. You would not be able to find the pump.”

Even Iolanthe didn't know where the pump was—whenever she came to the laboratory, the kettle was always full. And then, at the confused look on Master Haywood's face, she explained, “The prince isn't going back to where we came from. The laboratory is also connected with a lighthouse at the northern tip of Scotland.”

She tapped out a message on the typing ball Titus used to communicate with Dalbert. Then she inserted a sheet of paper underneath, to receive any messages the latter might have sent during their time in the desert. The keys clacked.

As she was rolling the paper back out, Titus returned. “There is a tremendous fog outside. I walked by the pump twice before I found it.”