right? And his mother had always been perfectly accurate in what she foresaw—the only mistakes she had made had been in the interpretation of her visions.
But how many ways were there to interpret death?
Fairfax closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, she was once again in charge of herself. “I’m sorry. You are right. You do need to go and we need all the intelligence you can lay your hands on, if we are to have any chance of success.”
“Do not apologize. I am flattered: no one else wants to spend time with me.”
“That’s not true: Cooper does. Desperately.”
He could not help laughing. Then he kissed her. “I will be very careful, because I want to see you again, with a desperation Cooper can barely conceive of.”
CHAPTER 5
TITUS AND FAIRFAX GOT INTO another small disagreement over where to meet again. He wanted her to hide in Luxor and stay out of sight; she wanted to fly to the southern coast of Turkey, to shorten his return journey as much as possible.
“How about Cairo?” suggested Kashkari. “I’ve done the Luxor-Cairo route a few times. It isn’t that difficult to remain unseen, even in broad daylight, provided we stay some miles from the Nile.”
Titus grimaced. The longer she flew, the greater the chances of her being spotted by agents of Atlantis. But just as she reined back her desire to have him by her side all the time, he must also keep in check his need to never let her be seen again by anyone except him.
There was his overwhelming desire to keep his girl safe; but there was also his unwavering respect for the lightning-wielder.
“All right,” he said.
“All right,” she also said, “but on the condition that you sleep between here and Luxor—vaulting is more difficult and potentially more harmful if you are severely under-rested. You rest too, Kashkari. I’ll fly us.”
They did not argue with her. Kashkari had already put away the battle carpets they had flown thus far on and brought out the travel carpets, which were better suited to longer distances. He subordinated his and Titus’s carpets to hers, and she took them a few feet off the ground and started accelerating.
Steering at such minimal altitudes took more skill and required greater concentration. But by staying low, the undulation of the dunes made it difficult for them to be spotted from a distance—and with the sun soon to rise, it was a far safer way to get to where they needed to go.
“Wake us up if you need anything,” Titus told her.
“I will. Sweet dreams, you two.”
Barely a minute later—or so it felt—a hand was gently shaking him on the shoulder. “Titus. Titus,” she called him, first softly, then with greater urgency. “Titus!”
He turned and sat up so abruptly their heads almost knocked. “What—”
What is going on? he was about to demand, when he realized that they were no longer airborne. He was still on his carpet, but the carpet was on the hard floor of a dim, stuffy cave. And Kashkari, not far from him, slumbered soundly.
“We are in Luxor—in the Theban Necropolis,” said Fairfax, as if she had heard his questions. “You and Kashkari were both dead asleep when we arrived. I didn’t want to wake you up to ask where we should stay, so I just came here.”
Still groggy, Titus rubbed his eyes and made a face. “The mummy hotel?”
No self-respecting mage community had tolerated burial as a funerary practice after the Necromancer Wars. And the very idea of bodies preserved to last forever, perfect for serving as foot soldiers the next time a twisted archmage decided to reanimate corpses for his or her own nefarious purposes—he grimaced again.
She laughed softly. “There are piles of pottery deeper in the cave. Maybe they contain embalmed organs.”
He stretched—the hard ground had made his back stiff. “How did you come across this place?”
“I knew about it from talking to Birmingham—he had definite plans to excavate here someday. Wait, you were there that day.”
It took him a moment to remember Birmingham—their former house captain at Mrs. Dawlish’s—and the lovely, lovely days of the latter part of the Summer Half, with the Inquisitor dead and the Bane pondering his options, not yet ready to sally forth again. Life during those miraculously safe weeks seemed to consist entirely of sports, sunshine, and merrymaking. She was never not in the corridor, talking to clusters of boys, either about to set out and do something fun or newly returned