tilt the other way, they crouched down next to a boulder—more to shield themselves from the nearest guard tower than anything else—and looked down upon the Bane’s redoubt.
It was much, much bigger than she had anticipated. Even against this grand natural setting, the palatial fortress, on its own hill at the very center of the caldera, dominated by its sheer aggressiveness. She had imagined it would be foursquare like Black Bastion, but there was something maritime about the architecture of the Commander’s Palace. Its walls seemed to meet at angles sharper than ninety degrees, its roofs looked like unfurled sails, and both its northern and southern extremities jutted out like a ship’s prow.
Kashkari swore. “No wyverns land on or near the actual palace—if we try to approach that way, we will be immediately marked as suspicious. Carpets will be a dead giveaway. We can’t vault and we can’t walk across the floor of the caldera past all those rings of defense. How the hell do we get in?”
Iolanthe took a deep breath. Her heart pounded and her hands shook, but it was as if the quantity of fear and anguish that had washed through her this night had somehow anesthetized her.
“We’ll get in exactly as you foresaw in your dream,” she replied with something that was almost equanimity. “How would you like to be the first mate of Skytower?”
Kashkari stared at her, probably thinking back to his prophetic dream. I was in the air again, on a huge terrace or platform that floated forward. “Skytower? I was standing on Skytower?”
“I don’t know,” Iolanthe answered. “But now you will.”
When they had last gone into the Crucible to hide, some part of her mind had noticed the silhouette of Skytower. If she were to stand at the front of the command deck, she would not see the great rock formation below, in the shape of an upside-down peak, but would think herself on a floating platform.
And that was good enough for her.
Kashkari’s jaw clenched. “Well, let’s go take over Skytower.”
Which was a far easier task than otherwise, given that now the Enchantress of Skytower and her second-in-command looked exactly like Iolanthe and Kashkari, respectively, after the modifications Iolanthe had made to the illustration that accompanied the story, affixing their own likenesses, captured by the Oracle’s pool, onto the characters’ faces.
A short time later, they stood on Skytower’s command deck, their crew of bloodthirsty marauders waiting for orders. But how did one take a tower the size of a mountain out of the Crucible?
By its steering helm, Kashkari recommended. The handling of the helm wasn’t usually the second-in-command’s task, but no one was going to deny him the use of it, especially not when the mistress of Skytower herself accompanied him, her hand on his arm.
“And they lived happily ever after,” she said.
The night sky in the Crucible was replaced by the far brighter night sky above the Commander’s Palace, which looked a good deal less impressive when viewed from the lofty vantage point of Skytower.
They had succeeded—they had taken out the entire Skytower.
The sudden appearance of this colossus stunned the Atlanteans. The wyvern riders gaped from their mounts; two armored chariots almost flew smack into Skytower; and cries of alarm and dismay echoed from below, from the guard towers and the rings of defenses.
Kashkari summoned his carpet. They had laid the Crucible carefully atop a battle carpet, so they could retrieve it immediately: anything brought out from the book would evanesce if it moved more than a short distance away.
Iolanthe caught both the carpet and the book.
“Where’s the helmswoman?” asked Kashkari. “She can—”
He cried out and fell against the helm. Skytower rammed directly into the side of the caldera. The entire structure shuddered. The crew shouted. Iolanthe grabbed on to the railing.
Kashkari screamed. Skytower skidded starboard, its enormous base now scraping and scoring the inside slope of the caldera.
She pried him off the helm. “What’s the matter? What’s going on?”
He bent over, his fingers digging into her forearm. “Pain. Everywhere.”
She gasped. “You are still connected to Titus via a blood oath, aren’t you? You are feeling his pain. The Bane—the—”
If the Bane was torturing Titus, then he already knew Amara was not the elemental mage he wanted. What had happened to her?
She grabbed the helmswoman normally in charge of Skytower’s navigation. “You see that building down there? Plow it flat. Flat. I want to see deep into its bowels.”
Pain racked Titus. His internal organs were raked over burning coal, his sinews shredded