The Perilous Sea (23 page)

He steered the sand wyvern lower. The pursuing armored chariots followed them into the valley, closing in all the while.

“Even closer to the ground,” she said.

He was beginning to have an idea what she planned to do. He looked over his shoulder. The armored chariots were a quarter mile behind and gaining; they too flew close to the ground.

“Come,” murmured Fairfax, peering around him. “Come a little nearer.”

“You might be the scariest girl I have ever met,” he told her.

“Let's not be dramatic,” she said drily. “I'm the only girl you can remember ever meeting.”

Then she bared her teeth and pointed her wand. The dunes rose, like two huge waves cresting, and came crashing down onto the armored chariots, burying them beneath a literal mountain of sand.

He urged the wyvern to fly higher, banking once more toward the east. “If there is a scary girl competition, I would put my last coin on you.”

She only laughed softly and laid her head against his shoulder, asleep again within minutes.

CHAPTER
20

England

January 2, YD 1010

 

It is murky—dusk or dawn I cannot tell. From the back, I see two men—or nearly grown boys—walking, one supporting the other. They move stealthily, constantly looking in all directions.

When they finally stop and crouch down behind a boulder, I see the place they are approaching. A palatial fort, or a fortress-like palace, set atop a rocky hill that dominates the center of a wide valley surrounded by toothlike peaks.

Almost all the peaks have guard towers on them, their narrow windows
glowing like the slitted eyes of nocturnal beasts. The floor of the valley is brightly lit, revealing rings of defenses.

I had written the above in the morning, harried because I was about to be late for a meeting with the high council that Father wished me to attend. All throughout the day I would remember the vision and wonder what in the world I was looking at.

Just now I visited Father in his classroom. He is so difficult in the present, but the old him, the “record and likeness” he had left behind in the teaching cantos of the Crucible—I adore that young man. And it breaks my heart to realize that I consider someone who no longer exists not just a dear friend, but the only person who understands the life I live now and all the responsibilities I will face.

How I fear that I will turn out to be like Father someday, hard and grim, full of anger and recrimination. Being reminded of how charming and exuberant he had once been only deepens that fear.

But I digress. Young Gaius told me that without a doubt I had seen the Commander's Palace, the Bane's retreat in the hinterlands of Atlantis.

The young men I saw in the vision are either the bravest or the stupidest mages alive.

 

After the revelation at tea, what Titus wanted to see was something about Kashkari. But the diary chose once again to confirm that Titus would go to Atlantis with only one other person, someone who needed help walking.

He closed the diary. Across the table, Fairfax was just sitting up, coming out of the Crucible.

“Do you know anyone named Penelope Rainstone?” she asked, with a strange flatness to her voice.

“She is the regent's chief security adviser.”

“What kind of person is she?”

“Extremely capable. Seems devoted to the crown. No evidence of any extracurricular dealings with Atlantis. Why are you interested in her?”

She did not answer, but only looked unsettled.

Could it be? “Did you come across her name while you were searching for clues to the memory keeper's identity?”

For that was how he would find his way to Horatio Haywood, by first unmasking the identity of the memory keeper.

She got off the stool and shrugged into the uniform jacket she had set aside on the worktable. “The Argonin line is her favorite quote. And she and Master Haywood had met many years ago, during a reception at the Citadel, before they even started their university studies. But nothing conclusive.”

He did not know what he had expected, but this was a shock. Commander Rainstone?

“I'm headed back,” said Fairfax.

The house was locked down before supper. After that, to go back in, one either had to climb through a window or vault. And any time one vaulted, there was a chance of being seen. For him it did not matter. For her, everything mattered. Even climbing in through a window, if there were witnesses, could arouse Mrs. Hancock's suspicion.

She had always been scrupulous before. She ought to remember that even though he could not take her on his mission, she was still the most hunted mage on Earth.

But he did not have the heart to lecture her, so he only said, “Let me go first and make sure the coast is clear.”

 

After Titus had seen Fairfax safely back, he looked into Wintervale's room for Kashkari. But he only came across Cooper and Sutherland, already on their way out. Wintervale yawned hugely, his eyes closing.

Kashkari was in his own room. “Have a seat, prince,” he said as Titus entered. “The sound circle has already been set, by the way.”

Titus got to the point. “Who are you?”

“I am no one important, but you might have heard of my late uncle. His name was Akhilesh Parimu.”

Titus stared at Kashkari—the name meant nothing to him. Then it suddenly did. “Akhilesh Parimu, the elemental mage born on the night of the great meteor storm in 1833, the one who reawakened a dead volcano?”

Kashkari nodded. “Then you would also know what happened to him.”

“His family killed him rather than let Atlantis have him.”

“He begged them to kill him, rather than be taken—or that has always been the version told to me,” said Kashkari. “In any case, in retaliation, Atlantis killed everyone else in his entire family, except my mother, who was very young at the time and had been sent away to stay with a friend as soon as Akhilesh's powers manifested themselves.

“The friend, the woman I've always known as my grandmother, convinced her husband that they must take my mother and flee to a nonmage realm, so they did, leaving their island in the Arabian Sea to settle on the subcontinent, in Hyderabad.

“My mother grew up knowing she was a mage refugee, but she didn't know anything about the history of her biological family. A spate of uprisings in the subcontinent realms brought an influx of mage refugees to Hyderabad. Some of them wanted to form a coherent new community; others simply wished to disappear into the crowd. She married a young man of the latter group. He became a lawyer, they had two children, and they lived a life that on the outside was scarcely distinguishable from those of the nonmages all around them.

“And then she became pregnant again and I was born during the great meteor storm of 1866. This frightened my grandparents, who remembered what had happened the previous time a child of my mother's bloodline was born during a meteor storm. They finally told my mother the truth about her brother and her parents, and even though elemental powers rarely run in families, together they watched me anxiously.

“My power, it turned out, was not in elements, but in prophetic dreams. Did Fairfax tell you?”

Titus debated whether to involve Fairfax in the conversation. “He finds your ability quite novel.”

“When my family realized that I was no elemental mage, they relaxed enough to allow me to make my own decision as to whether I wished to come to England for schooling. We of Eastern heritage do not view visions of the future as something that must be accepted, so I leaned toward staying with my family, until I had a new dream that tipped my decision.

“The dream was only a fragment, of a number of people in a room—your room, in fact—and one of them saying to me, ‘By staying close to Wintervale, you saved him.' ”

This was not what Titus had expected to hear. For some reason, because his knowledge of Kashkari's prophetic dreams had first come from Fairfax, and because the Oracle had told her that Kashkari was the one from whom she should seek aid, he had come to anticipate that anything else Kashkari would say to him would also revolve around Fairfax.

But of course he should have known better. From the moment Kashkari began his explanation, even though he had yet to specifically mention it, every word he had uttered had centered on one thing: the great elemental mage not of his uncle's time, but of their own.

And despite everything Titus fiercely wished for, that mage was Wintervale, and not Fairfax. “So you came to save Wintervale,” he said, careful to keep his disappointment out of his voice.

“I knew who Baron Wintervale was—the January Uprising was so successful for a time that his name became synonymous with hope in all the mage realms. My family could not stop talking about all his new victories—we didn't learn until later that he had Baroness Sorren as his strategist; we thought it was all him, singlehandedly outwitting and overpowering Atlantis. And I remember my grandparents whispering to each other about the possibility of finally going home again, to be Exiles no more.

“All that hope came crashing down when the January Uprising was crushed. And by the time I started having that particular dream, Baron Wintervale was already dead. But I thought to myself, what if this means I have some greater role to play than I had imagined? What if I am meant to rescue Baron Wintervale's son from some terrible danger and help him to rekindle his father's dream?”

“And to think I once thought your ambition was to help India achieve independence from Britain.”

“No, my ambition has always been the overthrow of the Bane,” Kashkari said easily, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Justice for my uncle and his entire family. Justice for all the other families that had been sacrificed in the Bane's quest for ever more power.”

“And you think Wintervale is the key to all that?”

“I don't know one way or the other. Just as I can't say my lingering about Wintervale all these years has had any effect.”

Titus had noticed how closely Kashkari stuck to Wintervale in recent weeks. But come to think of it, the two had been nearly inseparable for years.

“Have you told Wintervale?”

Kashkari shook his head. “You know how he is. Either he has to become much more discreet or the situation has to become much more dire, before I'd risk telling him the whole truth.”

“Why are you telling me, then?”

“I need some advice.”

Titus felt a strange premonition. “Go on.”

“I recently had the dream again and this time I finally saw the face of the speaker, the one who said, ‘By staying close to Wintervale, you saved him.'”

“Who is it?”

“Mrs. Hancock.”

“What?” Mrs. Hancock, special envoy of Atlantis's Department of Overseas Administration?

“I have been in her parlor. I have seen the maelstrom symbol on her drawer pulls,” said Kashkari. “I know she is an agent of Atlantis. But Atlantis has many agents, and not all of them are loyal to the Bane.”

“I have seen
nothing
from Mrs. Hancock that would suggest she is not extremely loyal to the Bane.”

Kashkari's face fell. “I'd hoped that you knew something about her that I don't. That perhaps she is sympathetic to our cause.”

“Your cause, not ours,” Titus reminded him, pointedly.

“But Amara told me that Atlantis considers you an adversary. She said Atlantis also believes that you are harboring an elemental mage as powerful as my uncle had been.”

Amara must be the one who had crashed the party at the Citadel, the one allegedly engaged to Kashkari's brother.

Titus made his tone dismissive. “A misunderstanding that got out of hand. When the elemental mage brought down a bolt of lightning, I got on my peryton and went for a look. Agents of Atlantis reached the spot with me still circling overhead and they have hounded me ever since.”

“I see,” said Kashkari carefully.

“But you need not worry that anything you say here will find its way to the wrong ears. I might not have the same ambition as you, but I have no love for Atlantis and will not stand in your way.”

Titus was about to head for the door when he remembered something. “Mind telling me why you were late for school? Knowing what I do now, I imagine you were not stuck on a nonmage ship in the Indian Ocean.”

“No, I was in Africa at my brother's engagement—his fiancée's family moved to the Kalahari Realm several generations ago and even in Exile they did not relocate far from the Kalahari.”

“So the woman really is your future sister-in-law?”

“I'm afraid so.” Kashkari's gaze wandered briefly to the photograph from the engagement fête. “In any case, there we were, talking. Amara related what she'd thought of as heartening news, that Madame Pierredure had emerged to distribute armament and know-how to mages in several realms who were secretly planning attacks on Atlantean installations.”