The Immortal Heights (24 page)

“You'll see.”

“All right,” said Iolanthe. She didn't see how that would matter one way or the other, for a question answered at least two decades ago about a baby girl's life expectancy. “I solemnly promise to never mention it to anyone.”

“The Prayer Tree said, ‘Amara, daughter of Baruti and Pramada, will live long enough to be embraced by the Master of the Domain.'”

“What?”
The waterscape disintegrated altogether and fell with a loud splash to the boulders far below.

“Quite an answer, eh?”

Iolanthe sucked in a breath. “So that's why you crashed the party at the Citadel.”

“Wouldn't you, if you were told that you would be embraced by a prince? I'd outgrown the curiosity I had about him when I was younger. And of course Vasudev and I were already engaged, and I couldn't imagine ever letting another man embrace me, unless it was a quick hug from someone like Mohandas. But still, I was curious.”

“And then you met him and realized he was a man who embraced no one.”

That was an exaggeration, but not by much. Iolanthe was certain that after his mother, and maybe Lady Callista when he was a tot who didn't know any better, she was the only person he had ever touched at length.

“Which bodes well for my life expectancy, does it not?” Amara laughed, a high, abrupt sound.

Iolanthe gazed at her for some time, perhaps at last seeing behind the perfect surface. There was an adamant resolve to Amara, but at the same time, a bleakness that nearly rivaled the desolation of these mountains.

“Why have you come with us?”

Kashkari would not have denied Amara anything. And Titus most likely had been too distraught from having to leave Iolanthe behind to object to a replacement. But why had Amara decided that she wanted to be part of their hopeless venture?

And
when
?

She certainly had expressed no such interests when they had all been in the desert together. And it wasn't as if she had led an idle, useless life: the woman commanded an entire rebel base; she had already dedicated her life to fighting the Bane. Could the massacre in the Kalahari Realm really have changed things so much for her that she was willing to abandon not only her new husband, but all her longtime colleagues, for something that was at
best
a suicide mission?

“I have come to help you, of course,” said Amara, her voice quiet and sincere.

A chill ran down Iolanthe's spine, not because she didn't believe Amara, but because she did.

They sat quietly for some time. The sun disappeared behind the higher peaks to the west. A shadow fell upon the ravine.

“I mentioned that there is an oracle inside the Crucible,” said Iolanthe. “She specializes in helping those who seek her advice to help others. Would you like me to take you to see her?”

Amara pulled her cloak more tightly about her. “No, thank you. I already know exactly how I will contribute.”

“How?”

“You'll see.”

Silence fell again. They each nibbled on a food cube. Iolanthe stared at the great cascade, her mind as agitated as the pool at its base—and that was before she remembered what Dalbert had told her. On Ondine Island, after they'd met, she'd pressed him for more information on the massacre of civilians in the Kalahari Realm and the subsequent threat aimed at Titus and herself.

It happened about two hours after midnight
, Dalbert had said, to start his account.

That particular detail had not leaped out at her then. But now it did. The massacre had taken place in the small hours of the morning, whereas Amara must have left the Sahara Desert the night before to begin her long flight to Scotland.

Whatever had caused her to leave everything behind to join them had not been the mass killing of her kinsfolk.

Then what had it been?

The question was on the tip of her tongue when Kashkari bolted up, thrashing. Instinctively she called for a current of air to press him toward the wall of the cliff, pinning him in place, so that he wouldn't lose his balance and plummet from the ledge.

Kashkari held up his hand to shield his face from the fierce wind. “I'm all right. I won't fall off.”

Iolanthe stopped. The air turned still, the only sound in the ravine that of water leaping toward the sea.

“Another prophetic dream?” asked Amara.

Kashkari glanced at Iolanthe. Her chest tightened. “About me again?”

He didn't answer, and that should have been answer enough. Still she heard herself say, “Tell me.”

Kashkari folded the sheet-like flying carpet that he had used to cover himself. “It's you, on your pyre. And the pyre is already burning. Above the flames I can see the outlines of a great cathedral—it has wings extending from its roofs.”

Her ears rang. But at the same time, a ray of hope pierced her heart. “That's the Angelic Cathedral in Delamer—I don't know of any other cathedral with a silhouette like that. Only state funerals are held there—we must not have failed too badly, for me to receive a state funeral. Did you see who lit my pyre?”

Let it be Titus. Let it be him.

Kashkari shook his head. “I wasn't shown that.”

Disappointment swelled in her chest, making it difficult for her to breathe. “In that case, no need to mention anything to—”

No need to mention anything to the prince
. But the prince's eyes were already open. And judging by his grim expression, he had heard everything.

“Well,” said Amara, breaking the fraught silence, “since you are awake, Your Highness, you might as well do some more blind vaulting and help us find a way out of these mountains.”

CHAPTER
20

BEFORE THEY LEFT, AMARA ONCE
again asked for time for prayers. While she and Kashkari prayed, Titus took Fairfax to a crater lake he had come across. The day was getting late, and the water of the lake was a cool, dark blue. Reflections of clouds that had been tinted a rich mango hue by the westerly sun floated upon its surface. Along the edges of the lake, wild plants and shrubs grew, some still flowering, festooning the inside of the caldera with garlands of cream and yellow.

“What a beautiful place,” she murmured.

He draped his arm around her shoulders. She looked more exhausted than he had ever seen her, her eyes somber and wistful.

“What are you thinking about?” He could not get the image of her burning pyre out of his head, her still, lifeless body surrounded by flames.

“I was wondering whether Mrs. Hancock ever stood here. Also,
whether she had ever seen anything of Britain.”

“Probably not.” Year in and year out, Mrs. Hancock had waited for the Bane to walk into Mrs. Dawlish's, rarely straying from the resident house, and likely never outside the boundaries of the school.

“I'm glad that this time I left Britain in a hot air balloon—saw more of the country than I ever had before. It's a beautiful island, especially the coasts—reminded me of the northern wilds of the Domain.”

Was she already looking backward toward all the people and all the places she had known and loved?

As if she heard his thought, she turned to him. “Don't worry. I'll keep going.”

“Then I will too.”

She took his face in her hands and kissed him very gently. “I've had an epiphany concerning happiness,” she murmured. “Happiness is never thinking that each kiss might be your last—to be so assured that there will be countless more that you don't bother to remember any single one.”

“For what it is worth, this
is
happiness for me,” he told her. “This is what I have always wanted—that we should be together at the end.”

She gazed at him a long moment, and kissed him again. “You know what I regret?”

“What?”

“My former disdain for rose petals. In the greater scheme of things, they really aren't so evil after all.”

He chortled at her unexpected admission. “If that is all you regret, then yours has been a life well lived.”

“I hope so.” She sighed. “All right, enough philosophical indulgences. Now let's have your confession, Your Highness. Why did you refuse to let me see Sleeping Beauty when we first fought dragons at her castle?”

On the far side of the mountains, the land lay tumbled and broken, as if someone had shrunk the Coastal Range to a fraction of its size and then strewn copies about willy-nilly: the rocky ground was full of cuts, gashes, and stone slabs leaning at drunken angles.

They started after sunset, and still they flew with one eye on the sky. But no pursuers appeared over the top of the Coastal Range, which to Titus served to underscore Kashkari's point: the Bane was more than happy to wait for them to come to him.

Their progress was swift, but not
that
swift. Amara steered the carpet she and Kashkari shared and set the pace for the group. Titus had the sensation that she did not want to hurtle toward the Commander's Palace at a blistering speed.

Who did?

No one spoke. Titus and Fairfax shared a carpet, but they only held hands: everything that needed saying had already been said.
They were past declarations of love, loyalty, or even hope. It now remained only to be seen what they could accomplish before their prophesied deaths.

Titus kept them in a northwesterly direction, stopping from time to time to spread maps on the ground and gauge their progress. A waxing crescent was low in the sky, when they came to a huge, vertical escarpment that the carpets could not ascend.

Titus attempted a blind vault—and went nowhere. “We must be inside the no-vaulting zone now.”

A hundred miles—or less—from the Commander's Palace. They could be there within an hour, if they were to fly without interruption. Titus felt a weakness in his fingertips: he was frightened, after all.

He had always been.

Fairfax tried to boost them up, but around six hundred feet or so above ground, the force of air she generated was only enough to keep them hovering, not to gain any more altitude. And the top of the cliffs was still two hundred feet farther up.

“Should we climb or should we go around?” asked Amara, her voice tight.

“The fault line seems to stretch as far as I can see,” said Kashkari, surveying the expanse of the cliffs with the help of a far-seeing spell. “You've more experience with escarpments, Durga Devi. What do you recommend?”

Amara clamped her teeth over her lower lip. “I say let's fly a mile
or two toward the southwest—the cliffs in that direction seem lower.”

Unfortunately, the impression of lesser height turned out to be an illusion of perspective. Amara signaled them to stop. “We passed a protrusion. Might be the best we can do under the circumstances.”

The protrusion was barely enough of a foothold for one. Amara pulled out a length of hunting rope from her bag. They all contributed what ropes and cords they carried. The hunting rope, pulling the entire length of the ropes knotted together, shot up the face of the cliff and disappeared over the top.

The end of the rope was attached to Amara, who used the hunting rope's pull to run up the cliff, as graceful as an acrobat. Titus and Fairfax, both still on their carpet, exchanged a look of head-shaking admiration.

“I will probably bruise my face going up,” said Titus.

“No, not that. That's my favorite part of you.”

“Really? You told me something else altogether in the lighthouse.”

It was the first time either of them had brought up their night together. She slanted him a look. But then the hunting rope returned and Kashkari made ready for his ascent, so they had to situate themselves underneath him and pay attention, in case he fell.

Kashkari reached the top without mishap. As they waited for the rope to come back again, Fairfax leaned over and whispered, “When I said that, it was just to make you happy before you died.”

He whispered back, “I am touched. You said it very, very loudly.
You must have been really concerned about my happiness.”

This time her eyes narrowed. Briefly he wondered if there would not be a bolt of lightning in his near future. But she only caught the rope and ascended the cliff, acquitting herself nicely.

Titus did not smash his face during his run up the precipice, but once he was on flat ground again, he struggled to release the rope from his person. The line kept yanking him forward at the pace of a sprint. He lost his balance and was dragged forward on his stomach. Amara hissed to recall the hunting rope. Fairfax and Kashkari threw themselves on him so he would not slam into one of the huge boulders that littered the top of the escarpment. He frantically tried every untying spell in his repertoire.

The knot slipped all of a sudden, leaving him a few feet short of a boulder, with Fairfax and Kashkari each hanging on to one of his boots. Slowly they sat up, panting hard. The knees of his trousers were bloodstained: the trousers had not torn—mage fabrics were stern materials—but his skin was much more fragile.

Fairfax was already seeing to his scraped knees when Amara at last managed to recall the hunting rope. She came and stood next to them, her breath as irregular as theirs.

“Sorry about that.”

“What did you have the hunting rope chase?” asked Fairfax.

She had already cleaned his scratches and was sprinkling a regenerative elixir onto them. He would have told her to save the elixir for more significant wounds—but it was not as if they had a great deal
of time left to accumulate more serious injuries.

“I said to find a snake,” answered Amara. “Maybe one was close by. Hunting ropes accelerate when they are near a quarry.”

“I hope we don't accidentally disturb a giant serpent,” said Kashkari.

No one commented. Titus might not believe in the existence of giant serpents, but he did not want to remark on it one way or the other. He did not want to say anything at all. Even though no one spoke above a whisper, on top of the escarpment their voices carried, a disturbance that he could almost see in the clear, cool air.

Fairfax had finished with her ministrations. She put away her remedies and gestured for everyone to hand over their canteens and waterskins for her to fill. No one objected to prolonging their stop, even though their containers must still be nearly full—the conditions were not the kind that required frequent hydration. Titus thought longingly of the ledge above the ravine. What he would not give to be that far from the Bane again.

He got up, took a few gingerly steps, and called for a far-seeing spell. The moon had set. The land they had flown over, a dark, forbidding expanse that unfurled at the foot of the cliffs, was scarcely visible. Here and there a jagged outcrop of obsidian glinted in the starlight. And if he squinted really hard, he could make out gullies and fissures, as if someone had hacked away at the land with an enormous broadsword.

Little wonder the interior of Atlantis remained almost as empty
as the day mages first settled the newborn island, barely cooled from the paroxysm of its creation. Had they been on foot, they would still be stuck in the Coastal Range, trying to find a way out of a pathless land.

But as daunting as he found the terrain behind him, it was the landscape yet ahead that filled him with dread. Ten miles or so northwest another escarpment reared, even higher than the one they had just scaled. Much of its surface was as smooth as fondant on a cake, but nearer its base, the cliffs seemed to be riddled with darker patches. Were they caves of some sort? Lairs for giant serpents? The desire to turn back, to hide forever among the hard-gouged ravines of the Coastal Range, grew ever more potent.

Fairfax put a hand on his elbow and gave him his waterskin. They stood together for some time. Then, wordlessly, they made ready to go on.

They were airborne barely seconds before she leaned over the side of the carpet. “Wait! What's that? Did you see?”

Titus swung the carpet around for a better look.

“Are those . . . bones?” she whispered.

They were bones indeed, spread over a relatively even area, perhaps three hundred feet or so from the edge of the cliffs, hidden from their view earlier by several large boulders. The bones were scattered, but some seemed to be still stuck together, not as part of an animal or human skeleton, but as if they had been set with mortar.

“Do you think they'd been in a stack earlier, those bones, and
that the hunting rope knocked it over?” Fairfax asked Amara.

Amara swallowed. “It's possible.”

A stack of bones. What had Mrs. Hancock told them?
Sometimes hikers come across bone piles characteristic of those left behind by giant serpents—usually as territory markers.

Kashkari raised a few of the bones with a levitating spell. “How old are they?”

Or rather, how fresh?

“Fairly weathered,” judged Amara. “I would say they've been in the elements several years, at least.”

“Let's be careful,” said Kashkari. “Giant serpents shouldn't be an obstacle if we stay airborne.”

But he, like Titus, was looking at the great precipice that loomed in their way, and the openings that seemed a perfect size for giant serpents.

Fairfax tapped Titus on the shoulder. “I hear something.”

Visions of giant serpents swarmed his head. But the sound was only that of beating wings—wyvern riders on patrol. They landed in a hurry and hid themselves in the cracks between overlapping boulders, wands at the ready. The wyvern riders, however, passed high overhead, swooping down toward the lowlands.

It was the first time they had seen wyvern riders since their arrival on Atlantis proper. Yet another sign that they were most assuredly getting closer to the Commander's Palace.

Titus glanced at Fairfax. If she was thinking of her lifeless body
in the Bane's crypt, she gave no sign of it. Amara, beside her, showed more strain, her fingers digging into the boulder.

But after the wyvern riders had disappeared from sight, it was Amara who said, “Let's go. The end is near.”

Titus kept one eye on the ground for bone stacks. He saw no more of them, but that did not comfort him: if the piles marked the boundaries of a giant serpent's territory, did it mean that they were now deep inside what the beast considered its private dominion?

His other eye he kept on the sky. They flew higher off the ground than he liked—the fear of an unexpected attack from below manifesting itself. This greater altitude made them more visible from every angle.

At the sight of a team of wyvern riders far to the northeast they landed and concealed themselves. Fairfax set a sound circle. “Do I remember you saying, Kashkari, that in the first part of your prophetic dream concerning me, you were riding a wyvern?”