summoned she kept sweeping toward him. “Do you enjoy being toasty, my lord High Commander?”
The third platform she smashed into the sarcophagus fractured the lid. With a wave of her hand, the split halves of the lid went flying.
“The ceiling!” Kashkari shouted.
Cracks zigzagged across the ceiling. Enormous slabs of stone fell. Iolanthe redirected the tonnage of debris toward a far wall of the crypt. The next moment, half of everything she’d just put away came zooming back, headed for Titus. With a yell she propelled the slabs off course.
Titus cried out. She screamed too, fearful he had been hurt, only to see that with all her efforts concentrated on keeping him safe, the Bane had managed to hurl a slab into Titus’s father.
With a sinking heart she lifted up the slab. More fire erupted, a conflagration that engulfed the entire crypt. She hefted the fire upward, so that those who lay on the floor—Amara, West, and Titus’s father—would be spared from the flames.
“We must keep advancing!” Titus called.
“The longer he stalls us, the more likely the mages of Skytower will be overwhelmed and he will be rescued,” said Kashkari almost at the same time.
Iolanthe gritted her teeth and punched a lane through the fire. Titus and Kashkari marched on either side of her, applying shields. The pieces of decor had caught fire and were smoking mightily. The air shimmered with heat from the flames. The Bane’s sarcophagus seemed to warp and wriggle.
More fire. More flying rocks. Despite the shields, she felt the skin on her cheeks blister, a scalding pain. Grunting with the effort, she again hoisted the flames a few inches higher, not wanting those on the floor to suffer.
Ten feet. Five feet. Three feet. They leaped onto the dais and stood over the now lidless sarcophagus. But all Iolanthe could see of the interior was a milky fog.
Kashkari prodded the tip of his wand against the fog. The wand was stopped by an invisible shield. Titus was already trying various incantations.
“Should I shatter the rest of the sarcophagus too?” Iolanthe asked.
“You can,” said Kashkari. “But I doubt it’ll help. I think the sarcophagus is just decoration—this inside shield is what truly protects him.”
But how did they break through this shield, which the Bane must have spent decades, if not centuries, perfecting?
And they must do it soon. Outside the roar of wyverns was deafening. The stink of colossal cockatrices had already reached her nostrils. And the crew of Skytower were calling for her. “We have to get out of here, Skipper!” “Skipper, we can’t hold them off for much longer!”
Had they come so far to be thwarted by a shield?
Titus and Kashkari whispered fiercely, trying spell after spell. She and the unseen Bane wrestled with each other via their command of the elements, locked in a stalemate. Sweat dripped down her face, an indescribable pain where it rolled past the blisters on her cheeks. Cries from the Atlanteans outside were becoming more aggressive, more triumphant. Soon armored chariots would crash through and it would be too late.
Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of West crawling across the rubble-strewn floor of the crypt. Her heart very nearly leaped out of her rib cage: the Bane had retaken command of West’s body. But when he raised his face and met her gaze, there was no malice in his eyes, only a great determination—it was just West, who had regained consciousness.
He inched along, dragging an injured leg behind him, making for Titus’s father. When he reached the latter, he lifted one of the man’s hands and pointed at the sarcophagus. Of course. The Bane’s original body needed to be cared for, and who better to handle the task than his current body? It wasn’t any spell or incantation that Titus and Kashkari could think of that would rescind the shield, but the touch of the current body.
“Stand back,” she ordered Titus and Kashkari.
She aimed a bolt of lightning directly at the shield, then another, and yet another—not to damage the shield, but to keep the Bane worried and jumpy, focused only on Iolanthe’s doings. And as she did that, she poked Titus in the side and indicated West with a tilt of her head.
Titus, after a similar initial moment of dread, understood. He leaped off the dais and brought his unconscious father the rest of the way to the sarcophagus. With Kashkari’s help, they lifted him high enough to place his hand on the shield.