The Immortal Heights Read Free Page B

said Fairfax.
    He turned to the girl in whose strength and character he had entrusted his fate. “I am an open book before you.”
    â€œIf you are an open book,” she answered, a hint of mischief in her voice, “then you resemble nothing so much as your mother’s diary—hundreds of blank pages, followed by a few life-changing lines.”
    He could not help smiling a little. “By the way, you never cease to amaze me.”
    She steered her carpet closer and took his hand. “I admit to being rather amazed myself. But the part of me that is your protégée—you know, the eternal pessimist—wonders whether I haven’t made even more trouble for everyone.”
    â€œIt’s all right,” said Kashkari. “We are all here for trouble.”
    The rebels quieted as a drumroll came, followed by the pleasant female voice the base used for public announcements. “Armored chariots sighted.”
    Armored chariots, which were impervious to the power of a lightning strike.
    Titus deployed a far-seeing spell: five squadrons, at the very limits of his enhanced vision. Three minutes then, possibly five, before they were on top of the bell jar dome.
    Amara, the commander of the rebel base, zoomed over andhanded a new carpet to Kashkari, who was still standing behind Fairfax and holding on to her.
    â€œSomething strange is going on,” said Amara. “I distinctly recall, while we were still inside the base, a warning about incoming lindworms. Where are they?”
    It took Titus a moment—the warning had come before all his suppressed memories had emerged en masse, which produced a curious effect of distance on the immediate preceding events. But now that he cast his mind back, he did remember hearing the same pleasant female voice announcing the sighting of armored chariots, wyverns, and lindworms, when he and Fairfax still believed they could outrun Atlantis.
    â€œCome to think of it,” said Kashkari, “when the wyverns first entered the bell jar dome, there were lindworms to their rear—and circled by an odd sort of armored chariots, much smaller than any I’d ever seen.”
    Lindworms had terrible vision. In the wild they formed symbiotic relationships with mock harpies, which guided them to forage. Perhaps the much smaller armored chariots served the role of the symbionts, herding the armored chariots to Atlantis’s purposes.
    â€œDo you think the lindworms and those small armored chariots could have been dispatched to intercept our allies?” asked Fairfax.
    â€œThat wouldn’t be a good use of the lindworms,” said Amara. “I expect they had been brought because Atlantis meant to make a direct assault on the base itself—in close quarters, lindworms areterrifying. But for pursuits and such, they are so slow they are hardly useful.”
    â€œThe armored chariots that are coming toward us now, are they the same ones you saw earlier?” Fairfax asked Kashkari.
    â€œNo. They are the usual kind.”
    Titus exchanged a look with Fairfax. Atlantis never did anything without a good reason. What, then, was the reason the lindworms and their accompanying small chariots were no longer on the battlefield?
    â€œShould we—”
    Fairfax stopped. He heard it too: hundreds of objects streaking through the air.
    Her face lit up. “Bewitched spears!”
    Five or six hours ago, wyvern riders had come quite close to Titus and Fairfax—and had been chased away by an ambush of antique bewitched spears. Titus had puzzled over the identity of the mages who used such weapons, until he recovered his memory and realized that they were forces from the Domain, and the spears those kept in the Titus the Great Memorial Museum for reenactment of historical battles.
    From south of the bell jar dome the bewitched spears arrived, hissing like a storm of arrows, slender and lethal. Titus closed his fingers more tightly about