“That reminds me, it will give me great pleasure to remove your tongue, Your Highness,” said the Bane, completely unruffled. “I will be doing the mage world a service, I bel . . .”
His voice trailed off. He raised his head and stared at Fairfax. She stared back at him. He returned his attention to his task, seeming to be repeating the procedure once more.
Again, he looked up.
Titus felt his blood turn into ice.
The Bane knew. He knew he had been duped, that the one who stood before him was not the one he had moved heaven and earth to find.
Slowly, he came toward them.
“Do not let him hurt my friend!” Titus cried. “Father, do not let him. Help us!”
The Bane stopped before Amara’s containment dome. “Who are you?”
“I am but another one of your sworn enemies,” said Amara, rising to her feet, her voice clear and proud. “There is no end to us. Every time one falls, another one will take her place. Your days are numbered, you vile old man. In fact, you will not live to see another s—”
The Bane lifted his hand. She slumped over.
“No!” Titus screamed. “No!”
The slight distortion in the air that had marked the outlines of her containment cell disappeared. The Bane lifted his hand again—and flung her twenty feet into a support column.
“No,” Titus whispered.
The Bane was before Titus. “Where is she? Where is Iolanthe Seabourne?”
Titus heard himself laugh, a soft, half-crazed sound. “I do not know. You can pour any quantity of truth serum down my throat, and you will get the exact same answer. I do not know where she is.”
The Bane’s eyes burned into Titus’s. “Then you will die too.”
With the black tunics and half helmets Iolanthe had borrowed from the costumes being readied for Sleeping Beauty’s fancy dress ball, she and Kashkari were scarcely distinguishable—at least in the dark—from any other pair of Atlantean wyvern riders. Half an hour into their flight, she saw, as he had dreamed, a faint pool of light in the distance.
She was scarcely breathing, and her heart felt as if all the blood had drained out hours ago. But she was long past any need for courage: desperation was a far better impetus.
A few minutes later, Kashkari said, “The light is coming from the top of a mountain. From inside the top of a mountain.”
He was right—light was spilling out of the summit of a big, conical peak. Iolanthe sucked in a breath. Now she at last understood the description of the Commander’s Palace. “It’s inside the caldera.”
“Any chance you can awaken the volcano?”
As his uncle had.
“I wish that were the case. If there’s magma anywhere near I’d have sensed it—nothing but solid rock underneath this one. Sorry.”
Kashkari grimaced. “It wasn’t as if the Bane would make anything easy for us.”
Wyverns wheeled above the caldera, far fewer in number, however, than she’d been led to expect—even the Bane could not replace the hundreds of experienced wyvern riders he had massacred in the Sahara with a quick wave of his wand. But colossal cockatrices carried by oversize armored chariots were every bit as jaw-dropping and intimidating a sight as the description suggested.
Many guard towers stood upon the circle of peaks that surrounded the caldera—the brim of the erstwhile volcano itself. Soldiers patrolled various sections of the rim, and from time to time wyverns would land for a few minutes before taking to the air again.
“Let’s put the wyverns down. Wyvern riders seem to do that regularly enough—we shouldn’t attract too much attention.”
They landed in the dark hollow of a ridge near but not at the top of the rim, on the outside of the caldera, and led the wyverns back into the Crucible. The meadow was again in an uproar, with Skytower already at its edge. They left in a hurry, taking a brass key someone had dropped in the grass, to keep the Crucible “open.”
Behind Iolanthe, Kashkari limped. She turned around. “You all right?”
“A little more time and I’ll be good as new.”
She braced her arm around his middle; he did not refuse her help. They stuck to the shadows as much as possible as they climbed to the brim of the dead volcano, looking around constantly.
The ascent was steep, but not particularly treacherous; no loose stones or little depressions perfect for spraining ankles. In fact, near the top, the land flattened noticeably. Even with Kashkari leaning on her, they made good time.