flame, decided against it, and murmured a few spells with Validus pointed at the window. The diamond-inlaid crowns along the length of the blade wand were barely visible in the feeble light that drifted in from the other room. The facets of the gems seemed to . . .
She opened her eyes wider. Were the crowns growing brighter and then fainter in turn? The second-lowest one was now perceptibly brighter than the rest, now the third lowest one, going up in an orderly procession, then coming down again.
“Kashkari.”
“Yes?” he answered immediately, his voice reflecting the tightness of her own.
“Extinguish the lantern and come here.”
The outer room fell into darkness. Kashkari arrived silently. “What’s the matter?”
“I need you to take a look at Validus.”
He took the wand from her. She waited, a nameless dread trickling down her spine.
“Is it always like this?” he asked, after a minute.
“I don’t know. The wand belongs to Titus. He gave it to me last night because he thought I might put it to better use.”
“Could it be a signal from him?”
“If it is, he has never told me about such a use for this wand.”
“Have you checked your tracer?”
Titus had a pendant that broke apart into a pair of tracers. At the moment he held one, and Iolanthe the other.
“I have and I can’t tell the difference.” Titus was so far away that the tracer had been ice-cold for hours.
Kashkari was silent for some time. “What does your gut say?”
She was slow to answer, not wanting to speak aloud the words gnawing at her nerves. “That it can’t be good.”
Kashkari did not disagree, but moved closer to the window. She joined him there. The window opened onto a dim, quiet courtyard, illuminated only by light from the surrounding guest rooms.
He opened the window a crack and murmured something in a language she didn’t understand—Sanskrit, probably. She could just make out something dark taking shape in his palms. And then it flapped its wings and took off—a bird made of the very shadows of the night, it seemed.
“Our canary, so to speak,” explained Kashkari.
She had been a canary once, one of the most harrowing experiences of her life. “What dangers would it alert us to?”
“Anything that might imperil a flying entity, or so I hope.” He released several more such birds.
In front of him, a few specks of light came to be. Iolanthe was confused for a moment until she realized they weren’t stray bits of fire that she didn’t remember summoning, but tiny representations of the birds.
“Nice piece of wizardry,” she whispered.
“My brother is working on a far more ambitious version—should he succeed, we’d be able to see what the birds are seeing, a three-dimensional rendering of their surroundings.”
One of the birds disappeared in a microscopic shower of sparks. “Did it fly into something?”
“No, they avoid mundane obstacles like houses and pedestrians—even cats.”
He bent forward, so as to be level with the smidgens of lights that stood for the remaining shadow canaries.
A second bird exploded, followed by a third. She turned cold: the danger was not at Titus’s end, but theirs.
“They are destroyed when they fly higher,” said Kashkari, his voice clenched.
“By what?”
“I don’t know. But it’s fairly certain that we also can’t fly high, at least not nearby.”
“Why is there such a thing overhead? Do you—do you think Atlantis knows we are here?”
“It might, if the wand has been broadcasting its location.”
His words hung between them. Her throat burned with the very idea of such a betrayal. How could Titus’s wand, of all things, turn on them?
She was shocked to hear herself speak in an even, collected tone. “If that’s the case, then we had better be on the move.”
How long had they been in Cairo? In the guest house? Was it long enough for Atlantis to pinpoint their location?
“Leave the wand behind,” said Kashkari.
“But it once belonged to Titus the Great.” A priceless heirloom, not just for the House of Elberon, but for the entire Domain.
“It will be the end of you if you keep holding on to it.”
She bit the inside of her cheek. Then she held the wand aloft with a levitation spell and sent a sphere of lightning crashing toward it. For a fraction of a moment, everything inside the room stood out in sharp relief: the wand, Kashkari’s startled gaze, the line where the wall met the ceiling.
When she grabbed hold of the wand again, it was hot to the touch and smoking a little, but as far as