make out gullies and fissures, as if someone had hacked away at the land with an enormous broadsword.
Little wonder the interior of Atlantis remained almost as empty as the day mages first settled the newborn island, barely cooled from the paroxysm of its creation. Had they been on foot, they would still be stuck in the Coastal Range, trying to find a way out of a pathless land.
But as daunting as he found the terrain behind him, it was the landscape yet ahead that filled him with dread. Ten miles or so northwest another escarpment reared, even higher than the one they had just scaled. Much of its surface was as smooth as fondant on a cake, but nearer its base, the cliffs seemed to be riddled with darker patches. Were they caves of some sort? Lairs for giant serpents? The desire to turn back, to hide forever among the hard-gouged ravines of the Coastal Range, grew ever more potent.
Fairfax put a hand on his elbow and gave him his waterskin. They stood together for some time. Then, wordlessly, they made ready to go on.
They were airborne barely seconds before she leaned over the side of the carpet. “Wait! What’s that? Did you see?”
Titus swung the carpet around for a better look.
“Are those . . . bones?” she whispered.
They were bones indeed, spread over a relatively even area, perhaps three hundred feet or so from the edge of the cliffs, hidden from their view earlier by several large boulders. The bones were scattered, but some seemed to be still stuck together, not as part of an animal or human skeleton, but as if they had been set with mortar.
“Do you think they’d been in a stack earlier, those bones, and that the hunting rope knocked it over?” Fairfax asked Amara.
Amara swallowed. “It’s possible.”
A stack of bones. What had Mrs. Hancock told them? Sometimes hikers come across bone piles characteristic of those left behind by giant serpents—usually as territory markers.
Kashkari raised a few of the bones with a levitating spell. “How old are they?”
Or rather, how fresh?
“Fairly weathered,” judged Amara. “I would say they’ve been in the elements several years, at least.”
“Let’s be careful,” said Kashkari. “Giant serpents shouldn’t be an obstacle if we stay airborne.”
But he, like Titus, was looking at the great precipice that loomed in their way, and the openings that seemed a perfect size for giant serpents.
Fairfax tapped Titus on the shoulder. “I hear something.”
Visions of giant serpents swarmed his head. But the sound was only that of beating wings—wyvern riders on patrol. They landed in a hurry and hid themselves in the cracks between overlapping boulders, wands at the ready. The wyvern riders, however, passed high overhead, swooping down toward the lowlands.
It was the first time they had seen wyvern riders since their arrival on Atlantis proper. Yet another sign that they were most assuredly getting closer to the Commander’s Palace.
Titus glanced at Fairfax. If she was thinking of her lifeless body in the Bane’s crypt, she gave no sign of it. Amara, beside her, showed more strain, her fingers digging into the boulder.
But after the wyvern riders had disappeared from sight, it was Amara who said, “Let’s go. The end is near.”
Titus kept one eye on the ground for bone stacks. He saw no more of them, but that did not comfort him: if the piles marked the boundaries of a giant serpent’s territory, did it mean that they were now deep inside what the beast considered its private dominion?
His other eye he kept on the sky. They flew higher off the ground than he liked—the fear of an unexpected attack from below manifesting itself. This greater altitude made them more visible from every angle.
At the sight of a team of wyvern riders far to the northeast they landed and concealed themselves. Fairfax set a sound circle. “Do I remember you saying, Kashkari, that in the first part of your prophetic dream concerning me, you were riding a wyvern?”
“That’s correct,” answered Kashkari, if a little reluctantly.
“Have you thought about how you might obtain a wyvern?”
Stop, Titus wanted to say. Do not help him make any part of his dream come true.
But she was right. If they all had to sacrifice everything to get Kashkari inside the Commander’s Palace, then that was what they must do.
“I have,” said Kashkari, “but I don’t see how—not yet, in any case. They are flying in much bigger groups than I was expecting. And I’m sure that the moment we