The Perilous Sea (40 page)

“Wish they had picked easier stories to use for portals,” she said, knowing very well the point of selecting difficult locations was to decrease the likelihood one would be followed from one Crucible to another. “I can beat the Big Bad Wolf to a pulp on any given day.”

“And I daresay the seven dwarfs are no match for my prowess,” said Titus, turning carefully to look behind them.

“Anyone chasing us?”

“Not yet.”

“I guess we can't ever go back to school again.”

“No.”

It was probably the last she'd see of the boys. She hoped Cooper would still remember her, when he was a portly, middle-aged lawyer, coming back to school each year on the Fourth of June to celebrate the memories of his youth.

And Master Haywood. She had one of her Wyoming Territory calling cards in her pocket—in case she couldn't go to Paris in person, she was going to send it to him, to let him know not to expect her for a while. She wondered if she could still post it somewhere, so that he would worry less.

She turned to Titus. “I hope Kashkari and Mrs.—”

The carpet spun wildly along its long axis, the world a stomach-churning kaleidoscope of earth and sky. She screamed. He swore and reached for a corner of the carpet. With a sudden yank the carpet stabilized—upside down.

But it hadn't stopped—it was still cruising at top speed upside down. Her view of the sky was obstructed, but when she tilted her head back, the ground below zoomed by, making her feel dizzy.

“On the count of three,” shouted Titus, “kick your feet up and throw all your weight toward your head. One, two, three.”

Their combined motion flipped the carpet over. They were no longer upside down, but the carpet had screeched to a stop, since they now faced the opposite direction.

And coming at them, in Wintervale's body, was the Bane, riding a carpet of his own.

Unfortunately, the Bane already knew how to get into the Crucible when it was in the middle of being used as a portal, and there was no one at school with the ability to stop him.

Titus and Iolanthe's carpet juddered to restart itself. They leaned their weight to one side. The carpet banked, turning.

A gust roared toward them and the carpet was blown end over end several times—they would have fallen off if it weren't for the safety harnesses holding them in place.

“Do not let the Bane play with us,” shouted Titus.

She called for a bolt of lightning, aimed at the Bane. But the lightning only struck a shield, and the Bane passed under unharmed. She kept calling for more thunderbolts, which flashed and sizzled as if they were in the middle of a thunderstorm.

Skillfully, easily, the Bane wove between the currents of electricity, dodging Iolanthe's attacks.

And he was too fast. They would not reach Forbidden Island before he caught up with them.

She threw down several huge fireballs, setting the landscape beneath aflame.

“What are you doing?” Titus shouted.

“Making him have to come through smoke, at least. If only Wintervale suffered from asthma.”

No sooner had she finished speaking than the carpet swerved north.

“Where are we going?” she asked, startled.

“Asthma,” Titus said tightly. “Or perhaps something even better.”

 

The season inside the Crucible almost always reflected that outside: there were no flowers on the trees of the orchard, which had also been picked clean of their fruits. In the distance rose a house shaped like a wicker beehive, small at the bottom, bulging out at the middle, and then tapering again toward the top.

Titus had brought Iolanthe here in the very early days of their acquaintance, before she could control air. In that house he had tried to force her, and she had almost drowned in honey.

Or rather, the sensations had been those of a near-drowning, but she had never been in real danger: the vast majority of the time they used the Crucible as a proving ground, and injuries—or even death—inside the Crucible had no bearing on the actual world outside.

But now they were using the Crucible as a portal, and all the rules changed: injuries caused actual harm and death was irreversible.

They flew low, between rows of neatly pruned apple trees. Iolanthe, a long branch in hand, overturned every skep they came across, releasing swarms of buzzing, agitated bees. Behind the carpet the bees billowed, kept together—and away from Titus and Iolanthe—by currents of air that trapped them like fish in a net.

The Bane was closing in. Iolanthe divided the bees into two groups and, forcing them close to the ground, dispatched them to the periphery of the orchard.

She sent another bolt of lightning the Bane's way. And, to further distract him, she ripped off smaller branches with high winds, set them on fire, and hurled them at him.

All the while she pushed the bees farther out of view.

The Bane waved away the flaming branches as if they were so many toothpicks. And he retaliated by uprooting entire trees in their path, forcing Titus to fly the carpet above the tree line, giving the Bane a clear line of sight.

“Just a little farther,” Iolanthe implored under her breath.

Titus yelled and banked them sharply to the left. Something passed so close to Iolanthe's head that it lifted her hair. A fence plank, its triangular tip deadly at high speed.

One plank hurtled at them from behind, one from the right, one from the left, while a tree, clumps of dirt still falling off its roots, shot up in the air and came at them from the front.

With a scream Iolanthe called down another bolt of lightning, splitting the tree in two just in time for them to fly straight through, almost blinding herself in the process.

“Are the bees ready?” Titus demanded.

“Almost.”

The ground itself swelled and almost knocked them from the flying carpet. A huge ball of fire appeared all around them. Iolanthe barely had time to punch a hole through the conflagration for them to fly through. Her own jacket caught on fire, but she put out the flames before they could hurt her.

It was now or never.

She looked back. Yes, she had managed to raise the swarm of bees to the height of the Bane's carpet. With the most powerful current she could generate, she sent them toward the Bane.

He laughed and fire rippled across the air surrounding him. Bees fell like raindrops. But among the entire swarm there was a smaller number that Iolanthe had protected. They punched through the fire and landed on his person.

The Bane stopped laughing. He gazed with something akin to incomprehension at his hand, upon which were not one, not two, but three bees. His hand swelled before Iolanthe's eyes.

He clutched at his throat. The carpet lost altitude, snagging in the branches of a tree before falling to the ground.

The mind that controlled Wintervale's body might be unimaginably powerful, but Wintervale's body had one great frailty: it was allergic to bee venom.

Titus landed the carpet and dug through the emergency bag. He had prepared antidotes for Wintervale, in case there were bee stings in the future. He pulled out a small case, which contained a few vials.

“No!” shouted someone. “Do not help him!”

Lady Wintervale
.

She scrambled off a carpet of her own and set herself between Titus and Wintervale.

“We can't watch him die!” cried Iolanthe.

“Do you believe for an instant the Bane would leave him before then? No, as long as there is a chance that he can get you to believe that he is Leander Wintervale again, he will remain and it will be to the ruin of all.”

On the ground Wintervale jerked and writhed. Iolanthe shook. She pressed her face into Titus's back. But she still heard Wintervale, gargling, like a mute trying to speak.

At last, silence.

“No, do not
assume
he is dead,” cautioned Lady Wintervale. “Do you have any instruments?”

The prince found the Kno-it-all gauge. With a levitating spell he laid it on Wintervale's person. The tip of the gauge showed green.

They all three threw up shields at the same time, Titus for Iolanthe, Iolanthe for Titus, and Lady Wintervale for them both. Even so Titus stumbled backward, clutching his chest.

“I am all right,” he said, already pointing his wand to set up another shield.

The Bane twitched again. His hand fell atop the gauge. The green slowly faded into a dark gray. The dark gray turned red.

Wintervale was dead.

 

Lady Wintervale had her son's hand in hers. Her lips trembled. “He had such a beautiful soul, my Lee. He worried that he would not be as great a man as his father, but he was always a far better man.”

She looked about the orchard. “When we were small, Ariadne sometimes brought me in here to play. I never thought this is where my son would meet his end.”

Titus knelt down and kissed Wintervale on his forehead. “Good-bye, cousin. You saved us all.”

He had tears in his eyes. Tears were already spilling down Iolanthe's cheeks. Wintervale, by being so open, trusting, and artless his entire life, had made his more cynical friends hang on to their secrets. And in doing so, they had preserved themselves from the Bane.

Wintervale's body disappeared. The Crucible keeps no dead.

“Do you want to come with us, ma'am?” Iolanthe asked Lady Wintervale.

Lady Wintervale shook her head. “No, I'm here only for my son. I will give a proper memorial and offer his ashes to the Angels. Long may his soul soar.”

“Upon the wings of the Angels,” Iolanthe and Titus said together.

“It almost kills me to say this,” said Lady Wintervale, her own tears finally falling. “But . . . they lived happily ever after.”

And she, too, exited from the Crucible.

 

Titus was the one to point out that Iolanthe's clothes were in tatters. She changed into a pair of tunics from the emergency bag and they took to the air again. More pursuers, on wyverns and pegasi, were close at hand—the Atlanteans must have raided the stables in a few stories.

“We will not make it to Forbidden Island in time,” said Titus grimly.

Which left only Briga's Chasm.

They came down at the edge of Briga's Chasm, with the Atlanteans barely two hundred feet behind. The thick fog that filled the entire chasm writhed and flowed, obscuring everything beneath.

“Can we put on fog glasses and ride through that?” she asked as they ran toward the entrance of the tunnels that led to the bottom of the chasm.

He folded the carpet and attached it to the emergency bag, the way Kashkari had shown them. The carpet, which was actually a sheet of canvas with pockets, changed color to match that of the bag. “I tried it once. That is not fog and it is utterly impenetrable even with fog glasses.”

She shuddered as she stepped on the strangely spongy ground in the tunnels. A sickly light filtered down from cracks in the rock ceiling above. All the surfaces looked damp. Slimy.

“Make sure you touch nothing,” Titus said, pressing the vertices of the quasi-vaulter into her hand.

She had never used the locale for training, but she had read the story of Briga's Chasm long ago. Foul creatures lived in the tunnels, not so much guarding them as simply preying on anything or anyone that entered.

Someone screamed. They stopped for a moment and listened. Probably someone who did not know that one should never touch the walls of the tunnels, which secreted a corrosive substance.

Ahead, something slithered across the ground. It could have been a small snake—or a detachable limb of one of the foul pulpwyrms, sent out to scout.

Another scream came from behind them.

“Idiots,” Iolanthe muttered beneath her breath, acutely aware that injuries and deaths were all too real here. Some Atlantean families would be missing beloved sons and daughters on feast days this year.

None of them deserved it, to die for the megalomania of a twisted old man.

A pulpwyrm, with the diameter of a train and almost as long, shot past in a cross tunnel. Iolanthe gripped the prince's arm and tried to not heave.

“Something is coming behind us,” he said.

But the way was still blocked by the slithering monster in front of them. And for all they knew, coming behind them was the exact same creature. They crept as close to the cross tunnel as they dared. Iolanthe didn't know which was worse, looking at the enormous hairy, wrinkly tube of flesh sliding past before them, or watching the head with six pairs of multifaceted, reflective eyes rapidly approaching from behind.

The mouth beneath the eyes opened. There were no teeth inside. Everything was terrifyingly, revoltingly soft—and dripping with what seemed to be bushels of black saliva.

Iolanthe stared, petrified.

The prince yanked her into the cross tunnel—the other creature, or perhaps the back end of this very one, had at last passed. But the one behind them, despite traveling at great speed, managed to turn in time into the same tunnel.

They ran, their boots sinking into the spongy ground.

Only to see another set of a dozen eyes coming at them.

This time there were no cross tunnels.

“Break a wall,” Titus urged her. “You can do it.”

She did it, though the sound of the wall crumbling was less that of stone cracking than the sickening snap of bone crunching. They raced through to an adjacent tunnel.

“Black Bastion feels like a luxury resort by comparison, don't you think?” she somehow managed to say as they ran.

“The occupants there are certainly much prettier, I will grant you that,” he replied.

The tunnel led to a clearing of sorts.

He looked about. “I do not like this. All the tunnels lead up. There should be at least one leading down.”

She swore: from each of the five tunnels that led into the clearing came one small slithering thing. “I hope this doesn't mean five big ones are following behind.”