The Perilous Sea (13 page)

A worried-looking Kashkari was in the passage outside the room.

“What is the matter?” asked Titus.

“I went to the water closet. When I came back, Wintervale was on the floor, unconscious. He said he couldn't remember what happened and he wouldn't let me send for a physician. I got him back into bed and I was just about to go down and ask you whether I should disregard his wishes and send for one anyway.”

“Better not. His mother is distrustful of physicians who are strangers to her. Wintervale takes after her in that respect.”

“But what if he has a concussion?”

“And what can a physician do if he does have a concussion?” Titus had only the most rudimentary knowledge of nonmage medicine; he hoped he was correct here.

“True,” Kashkari conceded. “But what about the possibility of cranial bleeding?”

“Let me see him.”

Wintervale was awake.

“I hear you got out of bed and fell down,” said Titus.

Wintervale looked sheepish. “I woke up and nobody was here, so I thought I'd get up and join everyone. Maybe I was just weak from hunger.”

Titus doubted it. Wintervale had mentioned mages falling unconscious in Grenoble. He had been in the vicinity; he could very well have inhaled something.

“Fairfax asked for a tea tray for you earlier,” Kashkari said. “There's still half a smoked salmon sandwich and two pieces of Madeira cake.”

Titus shook his head. “No, nothing more taxing than plain toast.”

Kashkari was already headed for the door. “I can go get some from the kitchen.”

“Would you?” Wintervale said gratefully.

When Kashkari had left, Wintervale asked for Titus's help to walk him to the water closet.

“Do I remember you telling me last Half that Atlantis was hunting for a mage who brought down a bolt of lightning?” asked Wintervale as he shuffled along with the gait of an arthritic old man.

“Last I heard, they are still searching.”

He maneuvered Wintervale into the water closet and waited outside. When Wintervale was done, he leaned on Titus to walk back. “Why exactly does Atlantis want a powerful elemental mage?”

“They never told me and I hope you will not have to find out.”

“So . . . what do I do?” Wintervale sounded fearful.

You go back in time. You leave that square when your mother tells you to. You never encounter the armored chariots. You never sink Atlantean ships. And you never destroy anything that is priceless to me.

“What do you want to do?” Titus said carefully. He was almost sure he did not sound bitter.

“I don't know. I don't want to sit at home and cower. I don't dare ask any Exiles for help finding Mother—she always said that there were informants among the Exiles. I don't know where our money is kept and I don't know anyone who isn't either an Exile or an Etonian.”

“Atlantis watches me at school,” said Titus, helping Wintervale back onto the bed. “So if you are trying to hide from them, school is not the best place for you. I can loan you the funds for you to lie low somewhere.”

Fortune shield him, he was deliberately trying to push Wintervale away.

“Let me think about it,” Wintervale said, biting his lips. “For a moment I was really happy. We were going to join the rebellion and finally I would have a purpose. But now . . . I don't know what to do anymore.”

Titus's chest constricted: Fairfax could have said those exact words.

Kashkari came through the door, bearing a tray with a cup of tea and a few slices of toasted bread.

“You all right?” he asked Wintervale. “Haven't taken a turn for the worse, have you?”

“No,” answered Wintervale. “Not yet.”

 

Food turned out to be a disastrous idea. Wintervale began to retch almost as soon as he had swallowed the last of his tea and toast. Then he emptied the entire contents of his stomach into the chamber pot.

And just when they thought he was finished, the retching would begin all over again, until Titus was sure he must be heaving up his spleen, and perhaps his appendix too.

During a lull between Wintervale's abdominal episodes, Kashkari pulled Titus aside. “He must see a doctor. If it continues like this, he could become dangerously dehydrated.”

“I might have something that could help him,” Titus said. “Let me look in my luggage.”

He left the room and vaulted to his laboratory, where there were thousands of remedies. The problem was that he was not a trained physician. He could not tell what ailed Wintervale and the antiemetics he had on hand each had rather specific applications. He eliminated those having to do with pregnancy, food poisoning, motion sickness, and an overconsumption of alcohol, but that still left him with dozens of choices.

He took a handful of those most likely to be useful and returned to Wintervale's bedside.

“You carry all these medications with you for stomach troubles?” asked Kashkari, sounding both impressed and baffled.

“Delicate constitution, what can I say?”

Titus measured out a spoonful of an antidote—he was beginning to suspect that perhaps the Atlantean frigate that had caught up to the ship launched from the dry dock had put something in the water, so that those who jumped ship would find themselves disabled. And perhaps some of the waves had washed over Wintervale as his dinghy sped away.

Wintervale swallowed the antidote and lay quiet for a few minutes. Titus sighed in relief.

Wintervale jerked up and vomited again.

Titus swore and gave him a remedy intended for magical ailments—perhaps a curse had been directed specifically at Wintervale. Wintervale vomited blood.

“What are you giving him?” cried Kashkari. “Does it contain bee venom, by any chance? He's allergic to bee venom.”

“I am giving him the most advanced German medicine,” Titus retorted, as he grabbed a handkerchief and wiped the blood from Wintervale's chin. “And it contains no bee venom whatsoever.”

“For God's sake, don't give him any more.”

“Surely you have
something
that'll work,” rasped Wintervale.

Titus looked through the rest of the tubes.
Vertigo. Appendicitis. Bilious complaint. Infection-related emesis. Inflammation of the stomach lining
.
Foreign expulsion.

He picked the last one, an elixir that should cause any harmful substance in the body to precipitate and be expelled.

“Try this and pray hard.”

They must not have prayed hard enough, for Wintervale immediately went into a seizure.

CHAPTER
11

The Sahara Desert

WIND SHRIEKED, AS FIERCE AS
that of a hurricane. Sand obscured the sky and pelted Titus's person. He and Fairfax were back in the same spot where they had been before she took them below the surface, and thankfully they had not materialized right on top of an Atlantean.

But Titus was disoriented: he thought Atlantis's own elemental mages had cleared the airspace inside the blood circle, in order to facilitate their search.

“It's my doing,” said Fairfax into his ear. “I didn't want us to be seen.”

Except now they also could barely see beyond their outstretched hands.

“
Deprehende metallum
,” she murmured.

Her wand turned some thirty degrees in her hand. He goggled at her—her spell aimed to detect the presence of metal and the only big, metallic items nearby were the armored chariots. But the idea was just mad enough to make sense. And if he remembered correctly, an armored chariot had landed only a short distance away.

He drew a sound circle and outlined a plan of action to Fairfax. She listened, her expression grave.

“You can pilot an armored chariot?”

“It is my understanding that it operates on the exact same principle as a beast-drawn chariot. But that is the easy part.”

Or at least, easy compared to the problem of her survival.

She slowly exhaled. “Let's carry it out, then. May Fortune walk with you.”

“No need to be so noble and stoic.” He squeezed her hand. “Save that for when you are actually dying.”

Which could be in a few short minutes, if everything they had done proved inadequate to preserve her life.

“I am going to be as noble and stoic as I like,” she rebutted, “so that years down the road, you will still grow misty-eyed when you remember that impossibly valiant girl from the Sahara, before you fall face-first into your drink.”

Her words were arch, but her hand trembled in his. Suddenly, the idea of losing her became unthinkable.

“And you, by then a toothless crone, will smack me on the back of the head and shout at me not to fall asleep at ten o'clock in the morning.” He pulled her to him and kissed her on her cheek. “You will die, but not today, not if I have anything to say about it.”

 

They crawled underneath the nearest armored chariot. On the ground, the vehicle resembled a heavy-bellied bird, squat and ungainly. But armored chariots had never been about elegance, only deadliness.

Titus's shoulders almost touched the boots of a pair of soldiers. The soldiers, despite their protective gear, had their arms raised to their faces to shield against the sandstorm, as Fairfax whipped the desert inside the blood circle into an even greater frenzy.

He did his best to breathe slowly, with control—once he made his first move, there was no stopping until he had carried it through.

Or failed altogether.

She laid a hand on his shoulder, signaling that the sandstorm was as violent as she could make it. He took another deep breath and mouthed,
Tempus congelet
.
Tempus congelet
.

The chaos of the scene provided a rare opportunity to apply a time-freeze spell to each Atlantean soldier. This gave Titus approximately three minutes.

He and Fairfax ducked out from underneath the armored chariot, took the soldier's wands, which were in the shape of an octagonal prism, and hurried toward the armored chariot's starboard hatch. The seam of the hatch was barely visible, but when they flipped open two small round covers and pushed the Atlantean wands into the protected openings underneath, the hatched opened quietly.

The interior of the armored chariot was suitably austere for a military transport vehicle, all steel sides and titanium ribs. Titus applied the time-freeze spell to the pilot before the latter could turn around.

He and Fairfax climbed into the armored chariot and shut the hatch. Immediately he applied the time freeze to her. A mage under a time freeze was immune to most spells and curses; he hoped it would offer her extra protection against the blood circle. If not, at least it should delay her reaction for a few minutes.

He strapped her into one of the harnesses attached to the fuselage and sprinted to the pilot, dodging handhold straps that hung from the ceiling. The pilot's wand was already wedged in an octagonal opening next to the seat.

In front of the pilot, rising up from slots on the floor, were a set of reins. Titus wrapped his hands around the pilot's, picked up the reins, and shook them. The armored chariot rose, silent except for the relentless assault of the sandstorm.

He banked and turned the armored chariot's nose around. The place where Fairfax had signaled her location was at the eastern rim of the blood circle. He pointed the armored chariot southwest.

A glance backward showed Fairfax motionless, looking perfectly normal for someone under a time-freeze spell.

Now it was all a matter of luck.

He pushed the armored chariot to its maximum speed, using the clock by the pilot's seat to gauge the amount of time he had remaining. At one minute fifteen seconds into his flight, he yanked hard on the reins. The chariot came to a sudden halt and would have thrown him against the viewports if he had not held on to the strapped-in pilot.

He ran back, opened the hatch, unstrapped Fairfax, and dropped her to the ground. Then he closed the hatch, turned the vehicle around, and raced back toward the blood circle, using the gauges on the dashboard to retrace his path exactly. Upon arrival, he parked the vehicle in the same orientation as earlier, leaped out, closed the hatch behind him, returned the wands to the soldiers, and vaulted.

But when he reached the spot in the desert where he had left Fairfax, she had disappeared without a trace.

CHAPTER
12