allies. Horrible crashing sounds and billows of dust came from Kalarus’s upper chamber. More alarm bells began to ring. Amara heard screams from within the tower, terrible, terrible sounds of men and women in mortal agony, and she realized with horror that the tower must have held many more gargoyles than the four in the bedchamber. She heard someone blowing a signal horn, the notes crisply precise-the Immortals, she supposed, immediately reacting to the alarm and organizing their efforts.
Amara shot back up to the chamber, hovering at a distance she hoped was out of the leaping distance of any of the gargoyles. “Lady Placida!”
Ten feet down the wall from the first hole, the stone exploded outward again, this time creating a much larger opening, and one of the gargoyles flew out with the debris. It fell, thrashing wildly, all the way down to the ground below, where it shattered into shards and pebbles.
Amara jerked her head back up again just in time to see one of the gargoyles leap to the first opening in the wall, green eyes glinting, and crouch to fling itself at Masha.
Amara bobbed to one side in an effort to evade the gargoyle’s pounce-but before the fury could attack, an enormous block of stone attached to a heavy chain slammed into its posterior, flinging it out of the tower to fall to the stones and share the fate of its companion.
Lady Placida appeared in the opening, the chain still attached to her collar. She held it about two feet above the section of stone attached to its end, as if it were a flail. She gave Amara a curt nod, set the heavy stone down, and snapped the chain with all the effort a seamstress might use to snap thread. “Done! Get to the roof!”
“See you there!” Amara shouted. She soared upward while Lady Placida drew Rook back up into the bedchamber. Amara heard another crash a moment later, presumably the sound of bedchamber’s locked door being smashed down, and she landed on the roof of the citadel, eyes searching for the presence of any further gargoyles or guards, but the roof was devoid of them-at least for the moment.
The tower’s roof was quite plain, its surface broken only by two distinct features. The first was a square opening in the floor in its center, where stairs led down into the tower. Amara heard steel ringing on steel inside the opening.
Not far from the stairway down was Kalarus’s aviary-a simple dome of steel bars perhaps five feet across and only waist high to Amara. Inside it was a young woman who could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old. Like Lady Placida, she wore nothing more than a white muslin underdress, and her dark hair was straight and listless in the heat and humidity atop the tower. There were blankets strewn about on one side of the cage, the subject of the letter she and Rook had found, no doubt.
The girl crouched in the center of the cage, eyes wide-and Amara was somewhat startled by her resemblance to Gaius Caria, the First Lord’s second, quasi-estranged wife; though this child did not have the sense of bitter petulance to her features that Amara had generally seen in Caria’s. The girl stared at her with a mixed expression of despair, worry, and confusion.
“Atticus Minora? “ Amara asked quietly.
“Call me E-Elania,” the girl said. “W-who are you?”
“Amara ex Cursori,” Amara said, simultaneously holding a finger to her lips, urging the girl to silence. “I’m here to take you from this place.”
“Thank the furies,” the girl breathed, keeping her voice down. “Lady Placida is inside. I don’t know where.”
“I know, “ Amara said.
The clash of steel nearby was suddenly drowned out by an enormous hissing sound, and Amara turned her head to see the head and shoulders of an armored Immortal emerge from the hole in the floor, still facing down the stairs. But before he could emerge fully, there was another chorus of hissing sounds, and what Amara could only describe as white-hot raindrops shot up from the tower’s interior in a cloud that pierced the doomed Immortal soldier wherever they struck his armored body, streaking through him as easily as needles piercing cloth, leaving small, glowing holes in the steel of his armor. The man staggered, but grimly kept his feet, thrusting his blade down at someone below him.
A woman’s voice rang out in an imperious tone, then a second swarm of streaking firedrops flashed through the doomed Immortal. This time, the attack left half a dozen red-hot holes in his helmet, and the man fell.
“Hurry!” called Lady Aquitaine ‘s voice. Aldrick emerged from the stairway first, hard-eyed gaze sweeping the tower’s roof. His eyes widened a bit at the sight of Amara, and the Cursor found herself unconsciously tugging down the hem of her tunic.
“Move!” insisted Lady Aquitaine. “Kalarus is about to-”
Then Amara heard a man speak in an impossibly loud, roaring voice that literally shook the stones of the tower beneath her feet.
“No man makes a fool of me in my own house!” boomed the fury-enhanced voice.
Then a woman’s voice answered, every bit as loud, nowhere near so melodramatic, and drily amused. “While the rest of us hardly need
Kalarus’s answer was a roar of pure rage that shook the tower, raising dust in a choking cloud.
“Move, move!” Lady Aquitaine shouted from below, then Odiana appeared, shoving frantically at Aldrick’s back. The big swordsman stumbled onto the roof, while Odiana and Lady Aquitaine hurried frantically up the stairs, diving to either side of the opening.
Less than a second later, a titanic roar shook the tower again, and a column of white-hot fire exploded from the tower below, roaring up from the stones and rising for hundreds of feet into the sky above Kalare. The air turned hot and dry in an instant, and Amara had to throw her arms across her face to shield her eyes from the blinding light of the flame Kalarus had crafted into being.
The fire passed swiftly, though the bloom of heat from so much flame had parched the air and left several of the bars in the domed cage glowing with sullen fire. Amara looked up at Odiana, Aldrick, and Lady Aquitaine. “Bernard?” she cried, hearing her own voice shaking with panic. “Where is he? Bernard?”
“No time!” Odiana spat.
Lady Aquitaine pointed at the cage. “Aldrick.”
The big swordsman crossed to the cage, set his feet, and swung his blade in three swift strokes. Sparks rose from the steel bars, and Aldrick stepped back. A beat later, a dozen sections of iron bar fell to the stones with a metallic clatter, their ends glowing with the heat of parting, leaving an entire triangular section of the dome-shaped cage missing.
Aldrick extended his hand politely to Atticus Elania, and said, “This way, lady, if you please.”
Lady Aquitaine gave the girl a narrow look, then turned to Odiana, and said, voice sharp, “Fire crystals.”
Odiana’s hand dipped into the low neckline of her slave’s tunic and she tore at the lining, one hand cupped. She caught something as it tumbled from the neckline and passed it to Lady Aquitaine-three small crystals, two scarlet and one black, glittered in the palm of her hand. “Here, Your Grace,” Odiana said. “They are ready.”
Lady Aquitaine snatched them from Odiana’s hand, muttered something under her breath, and cast them down onto the far side of the tower’s roof, where they promptly began to billow with smoke-two plumes of brilliant scarlet and one of deepest black, the colors of Aquitaine.
“Wh-what’s happening?” Elania asked, her voice shaking.
“The smoke is a signal,” Aldrick told the girl, his tone briskly polite. “Our coach should be here in a moment.”
“Lady Aquitaine!” Amara snapped. After pausing a deliberate beat, the High Lady turned to Amara, one eyebrow raised. “Yes, Countess?”
“Where is Bernard?”
Lady Aquitaine gave an elegant shrug. “I’ve no idea, dear. Aldrick?”
“He was holding the stairs below us,” Aldrick said, his tone short. “I didn’t see what happened to him.”
“He couldn’t possibly have survived that firestorm,” Lady Aquitaine said, her voice practical and dismissive.
The words drew a spike of anger such as Amara had never felt before, and she found herself standing with her hands clenched into fists, her jaws clenched while tiny spangles of light danced in her vision. Her first instinct was to hurl herself bodily at Lady Aquitaine, but at the last instant, she remembered the child still clinging to her back, and she forced herself to stand in place. Amara took a second to control her voice, so that it would not come out as an incoherent snarl. “You don’t
