every side. She could see the glint of each individual scale on the nearest wyvern—and the eagerness of its rider, shoulders forward, fingers all but tapping against the reins.
She had given the wrong answer to the prince’s benediction earlier. She exhaled and recited the correct response: “For I shall bear testimony to the might of the Angels. For I am power, I am mastery, and I am the hammer of immortality.”
Titus snatched the two remaining hunting ropes out of their emergency satchel. “As the world endures.” He completed the prayer as the first hunting rope left his hand. “As hope abides ever in the face of the Void.”
The hunting rope caught the outstretched claw of a wyvern and twisted it back.
“Heads down!” Kashkari bellowed as he wrenched them out of the grasp of another wyvern.
Their last hunting rope shot out and missed the incoming wyvern altogether—the beast pulled in its legs and swatted the hunting rope out of the way with its wing. You cannot surprise Atlantis twice.
But the hunting rope wasn’t aiming for the wyvern at all, but its rider, slapping itself around the latter’s wrists and forcing the rider to jerk on the reins.
“Behind you, Fairfax!” called Kashkari.
She glanced back, expecting to see a pair of talons swooping down. They were, but Kashkari had put himself between the wyvern and her, facing the beast. He flipped backward, kicking his carpet toward the wyvern as he did so, and with a twist in midair landed behind Iolanthe, grabbing her by the middle so he wouldn’t fall off the narrow ledge on which she stood.
“Come on,” Titus shouted. “Bring down that hammer of immortality, will you?”
Ever since she’d been a little girl, friends and neighbors had asked her how it felt to wield direct power over the elements, without the intercession of words and incantations. She’d found it difficult to explain until she’d visited Delamer’s Museum of Nonmage Artifacts on a school trip and had held a compass in her hand, lining up the quivering little needle with the magnetic north. That was what it felt like when she was in control of the elements, the alignment of her person with an invisible longitude of power.
Her previous attempts had wobbled wide of that perfect calibration. But this time she felt it, the difference between approximation and exactitude. She double-tapped Validus. Light radiated from the seven diamond crowns along the length of the blade wand.
She pointed it down and looked at Titus. “For you.”
A flick of her wrist and a white-hot burst of electricity reared up from the floor of the desert.
CHAPTER 2
FOR YOU.
Time slowed. The syllables stretched out in Titus’s ears as the lightning built spark by spark from the dark sands below, a spawn of brilliance hatching into a creature with claws, claws that lashed on to the nearest wyverns. The wyverns seized and fell, their wings lax and open, tumbling through the air end over end like paper dragons that had been carelessly flicked from a high balcony.
Silence, punctuated by the thuds of half a dozen wyverns crashing into the ground.
And another eternity of silence—which was probably only a fraction of a second—before the roar erupted, the screeching of wyverns mixed with the astonished cries of the rebels.
“What was that?” asked Kashkari, his left hand raised near his ear in an involuntary gesture of stupefaction.
This jolted Titus out of his own amazement. He put into effect a spell that gave his voice the amplitude to carry for miles. “Behold. Here is one who wields the divine spark, beloved by the Angels.”
There were few followers of the Angelic Host in the Sahara. He was speaking not so much to the rebels as to the Atlanteans, who took their faith seriously.
“Remember,” countered a high, clear voice that Titus recognized as belonging to the woman brigadier who had been on their heels since the moment he and Fairfax arrived in the desert, “usurpers often claim to be beloved by the Angels.”
“And your Lord High Commander does not claim to be favored from above?” he retorted.
Atlantis’s response was a clarion call. The wyvern riders regrouped. But instead of resuming their assault, they and their steeds left the bell jar dome entirely.
“Fortune favors the brave!” yelled a rebel.
Those closest to her shouted, “And the brave make their own fortune!”
“Fortune favors the brave!” she yelled again.
This time, almost everyone cried, “And the brave make their own fortune!”
It was noisy and jubilant. The rebels were beginning to laugh, from awe, excitement, and the draining of