Titus.
It took Titus a moment to remember that he had directed the mind-ruining spell at the Inquisitor while the latter had been under the time-freeze spell. Mages under time-freeze spells were safe from the vast majority of assaults. Little wonder then the Inquisitor was well enough to accompany her master on his pursuit of Titus.
He urged his wyvern to fly even faster, wishing he had brought a pair of goggles. His eyes burned from the relentless wind, his ears ached.
The next second the ache turned into agony, as if someone had threaded a needle between his ears. He screamed. Then he felt it, a sensation like a finger poking inside his head, rubbing against the ridges and folds of his brain.
Was this what the Bane and the Inquisitor had been talking about, a more subtle way to use the Inquisitors talents? It was obscene.
That she was able to do it from several miles behind him frightened him. Her health hadnt been the only thing improved by her trip to Atlantis. Her powers, too.
He could guess what she wanted. For the moment, not secrets buried deep, only his identity, since they could not see his face. But once she had it, what would prevent her from going deeper right then and squeezing everything out of him?
It was now or never.
He double-tapped his wand, unsheathing ithe had not lied about the fact that it was indeed a blade wand. Then, wrapping his sleeve around the wand so the light from the crowns could not be seen, he turned around, his other hand holding the hood shut below his eyes.
The spells left his lips like a paean to the Angels, syllables cascading with a deadly beauty. Such spells were of no use at all in close range, like trying to fell someone with a feather. But as he straightened his arm and aimed, the puff that left his wand would gather strength and momentum, until it became an unstoppable force, all the more lethal for its invisibility.
He wrapped his arms around the wyverns neck. In the nick of timea fresh turbulence tossed the beast upside down. It shrieked. Titus hung on, but only barely, his fingers slipping from the smooth scales. The wyvern fell for an eternity before it righted itself, the two of them both shaking with fright.
A tornado materialized directly in his path.
This was not natural weather. An incredibly powerful elemental mage was at work.
The Bane.
Why had Titus not known that the Bane was an elemental mage himself?
He yanked the wyvern to the left just as a second tornado appeared, also to the left. He swore. Urging the wyvern to the right, he narrowly fitted them between the two tornadoes, ducking as a chunk of debris hurtled by mere inches from his head.
Fairfax might someday be the greatest elemental mage in the world, but today that title belonged to the Bane, who delighted in toying with him.
The finger poking inside his head abruptly disappeared. He peered over his shoulder and deployed a new far-seeing spell, just in time to see the Inquisitor topple from her giant peregrine.
The Banes mouth rounded with a scream. The Inquisitors body stopped falling and rose instead, all the way into the Banes arms. And then it disappeared.
What if you die while you are using the Crucible as a portal? Would your body not rot inside, since you cant get out? hed
once asked Hesperia in the teaching cantos. The Crucible keeps no dead, Hesperia had replied. It will expel the body.
His mothers vision had proved true again. In the library at the Citadel, Atlantean soldiers would surround their superiors corpse while Alectus and Lady Callista spoke words of shock concerning her death.
He had done it. He had killed the Inquisitor after all. He straightened, relief and nausea rising within him, entwined. He didnt know whether to cry or to vomit.
A hissing, crackling rumble behind him, however, made him forget both. He wrenched the wyvern higher and barely avoided a trail of fire as broad as a highway.
The phantom behemoth was still half a mile behind him. No real dragon spewed its fire so far, so fast. But that was the advantage of mythological creatures: they were a law unto themselves.
Fire fell like a meteor storm. The grassland below burned. Rising smoke racked him with coughs and made his eyes water. It was only by his sense of hearing that he dodged the next tornado; and only by the hair standing on the back of his neck that he somehow evaded a quieter tongue of flame that had stolen upon him.
In front and to either side, walls of tornadoes towered, howling with violence. Behind him bellowed a mountain of fire, so much of it, as if a portion of the sun had been torn loose.
Was this itfire, smoke, and dragons? Would he fall to his end, as his mother had foreseen?
He had done what he needed to do. He had lived long enough.
Be safe, Fairfax. Live forever.
The fire the phantom behemoth breathed! The mass was staggering. The beauty. The splendor. As a lover of fire, Iolanthe had never see finer. That was, until she realized the fire was directed at Titus, her Titus. His wyvern weaved between the raging torrents, clinging to safety by a hairbreadth.