“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.
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