Anton, on his third crossing of the Anomaly, knew exactly what to expect and how to deal with it. By gaining enough altitude long before he came to that impossibly high wall, he was able to fly over it without getting caught up in the rush of wind at its top, or the downdraft that had driven the airship to the ground when he and the Professor had first cleared it, though he still felt a surge of speed as the cloud-capped top passed beneath him.
He had more confidence in his navigation now that he had successfully found Elkbone, and drawing on the careful bearings and notes taken on his way out of Evrenfels, he confidently turned the prow of the airship toward New Cabora. With the sun lowering behind him, and the propeller beating its steady rhythm in the cold air, he watched the snow-covered landscape beneath him fade from white to blue, pass into darkness, and then begin to gleam silver as the rising moon took over from the sun and spread its own ghostly light across the plains.
Here and there lights shone, the yellow glow of burning oil or tallow in Commoners’ farms and villages, far less often the distinctive blue glow of magelights in homes belonging to Mageborn. His path did not take him over Falk’s manor, but he passed another MageLord’s estate at one point, the great house ablaze with light to rival the new electric-lit Crystal Castle in Hexton Down. There were several carriages drawn up in front of the house, some with horses, some without, and he thought he saw a footman glance up as he passed high overhead, no doubt puzzled by the throb of the propeller. But he himself was showing no lights, and he doubted the man saw anything.
Nor would he believe it if he did, Anton thought. For everyone on this side of the Anomaly, this airship is as unbelievable as the existence of magic was to me.
I suppose once you advance technology enough it’s pretty hard to tell it apart from magic, really, he thought. They both involve manipulating matter and energy. The methods differ, but not the results.
He wondered what would really happen in a clash between the armies of Evrenfels, armed with primitive weapons but also with magic, and the forces of the Union Republic, with their cannons and steam-guns and armored crawlers. It had been a long age since the MageLords had last faced Commoners in combat. He suspected they might get a surprise.
But then he remembered uneasily that Falk had destroyed New Cabora City Hall single-handedly, and knew the surprise could cut both ways.
There is no place for magic in the modern world, Anton thought. It will only bring chaos and bloodshed…
Unlike technology? an opposing thought intruded.
Anton had no answer.
These things were beyond him, anyway. He had done what he could to prepare his world for the possible emergence of Falk’s army. Mother Northwind would have to look after the destruction of magic. His focus now had narrowed to one purpose-to save Brenna, pull her out of the web of intrigue that had trapped her, and take her far away from whatever happened here over the next days, weeks, or months.
If she will come with you, spoke that inner voice of doubt once more. And once more, he had no answer for it.
The sun had been down for four hours or more when at last he saw, dead ahead, a greater glow than any he had passed thus far. First he saw the blue magelights of the Palace, then the dimmer yellow glow of New Cabora’s lanterns and gaslights; then he began to make out individual buildings, the Palace a marble jewel surrounded by dark foliage and the glitter of water, the city an untidy sprawl of smaller buildings at the edges leading to a few grander structures, several stories tall, at the center.
The wind was from the west, as it almost always was in these latitudes. Anton reached over and pulled back on the throttle levers, silencing the propeller. As its steady thrum subsided to a whisper and then to nothing, he lit the burner one more time, the roar filling his ears as hot gas filled the envelope and lifted him higher. Then, in silence, slowly descending, he drifted on the breeze toward New Cabora, using the rudder to turn the nose toward the open space at its center, the Square. He reached for the binoculars hung inside the gondola, not far from the rifle and handgun.
This time, he would not land without knowing exactly what he was getting himself into.
Vinthor listened to Karl and Brenna in silence. When they had, between them, told him everything they knew about the Patron-Mother Northwind-and her Plan, he got up suddenly and went into the back room without saying anything.
Karl glanced at Brenna. She still looked exhausted, but at least she had stopped shivering. She didn’t meet his eyes, staring instead into the fire.
For himself, he felt… exhilarated, if he were honest. When he had so impetuously followed the two strangers out through the Barrier on the night of Verdsmitt’s arrest, he had simply exchanged one captivity for another. But this time he was not a captive. This time, he was, at last, not only acting on his own, but acting with full knowledge of what he was doing, who he was, and who the players were in the intrigues that had swirled around him his whole life, oblivious though he had often been.
If Mother Northwind was dead, then many elements of her plan must be collapsing… but one thing remained: he was the Magebane, and he was with the Heir. Together they could, on the death of the King, bring down the whole corrupt edifice of MageLord rule.
The death of the King. Karl had shied away from thinking about that element of the plan, but it could not be denied. Just as Falk’s plan had hung upon the failed attempt to assassinate the King, so Mother Northwind’s must also rely upon the King’s death at a moment of her choosing. Which must mean yet another assassin was waiting to strike. But who? And would that assassination proceed without Mother Northwind to give the order?
Mother Northwind had never explained exactly how his powers as the Magebane would work to destroy the Keys. But he remembered how they had passed through the Lesser Barrier together, moving from the warmth of a Palace night to the shocking cold of the Commons winter in an instant. The Barrier had made no impression upon either of them. While he held Brenna to him, she had been as impervious to magic as he.
If she should feel the call, he thought, I will embrace her again, and we will see what happens.
He rather wished he could embrace her anyway. She’s pretty, he thought, glancing sideways at her profile, given a rosier glow by the firelight than her exhaustion and fear would have otherwise allowed. But then he laughed at himself. You only just met, he thought. And the first thing you did was drag her across the lake, armed guards in pursuit, and throw her sock-footed into the snow. Not much to build a romance on!
Vinthor came back. “I activated the magelink with the Patron,” he said. “Mother Northwind is alive, but in hiding in the Palace. She hopes to escape from the grounds this very night. We are to meet her.”
“Here?” Karl said.
“No. Falk’s men are forming up to begin a building-bybuilding search of the city, starting in this area, close to where you emerged through the Barrier. They will certainly find this place. We need to get out of the city before they do.”
“Horses?” Karl asked. “The old inn?”
“Burned after Jopps betrayed us,” Vinthor said grimly, “though for whatever reason he doesn’t seem to have told Falk about this little hidey-hole. No, we’ll take a different way. Early each morning, wagons travel around the city to collect nightsoil. The man who runs the business is… or, at least, was… a member of the Common Cause. And some of his wagons have been modified to take passengers beneath a false floor.
“We’ll get inside a couple of those wagons. They will make their rounds as usual, and leave the city before dawn to dump their loads. Once we are outside of the city, there are still safe houses I can get you to. Mother Northwind, if she escapes, will meet us at the wagons and ride out of the city with us.”
Karl groaned. “You want us to escape the city by burying ourselves in shit?”
Vinthor’s mouth quirked. “More or less.” That hint of a smile faded. “But believe me, Your Highness, with Falk’s men in the streets, if we stay here even another hour we’ll be neck-deep in shit anyway.”
“Anything,” Brenna said suddenly. “Anything to get out of here. But I won’t share a wagon with Mother Northwind. I won’t let that hag near me!”
Vinthor started to speak, but Karl interjected. “If it is two to the wagon, I will lie with Mother Northwind…” He winced. “Um, so to speak. She can do nothing to me.”
Is that true? he wondered suddenly. I’ve assumed that the Magebane can be no more influenced by soft magic than hard… but is that really true?
Better ask Mother Northwind. I’m sure she’ll tell you the truth. He snorted.
“It’s settled, then.” Vinthor went into the room with the beds and came out with boots and a coat for Brenna. “Too big, both of them, but better than nothing,” he said. “The man they belonged to is dead, so he won’t begrudge your use of them. And they’ll serve as a disguise, as well.”
He looked at Karl. “There are other clothes in there,” he said. “Get rid of your finery. Blacken your face with soot. If we’re stopped, let me do the talking.”
Karl nodded, and went into the other room. There were several sets of nondescript work clothes, black pants, flannel shirts, boots. He undressed and dressed again, found a coat that fit him, and, remembering what Vinthor had said, plunged one hand into the cold ashes of the fire and rubbed the black soot on his cheeks and forehead.
When he returned to the front room, Vinthor gave him a critical once-over, then nodded. “Best we can do.”
“Wait,” Karl said. “Is there a sword I can wear?”
Vinthor gave him the look of a man pitying an idiot. “Commoners don’t wear swords. Not much point disguising yourself if you’re going to carry a whopping piece of illegal steel on your hip, is there?”
Karl blinked. “Good point. A dagger, then?”
“Daggers we have.”
Vinthor nodded and went to the wall, opening a cabinet to reveal several scabbarded blades. Karl picked two at random, one for himself, one for Brenna. As he held it out, belt and all, the girl’s eyes widened, making her look very young for a moment; then her expression hardened. She took the dagger without a word, fastening it on beneath her coat.
Karl did the same. “All right,” he said.
Vinthor led them out into the dark, snow-filled streets.
To get to the King’s quarters, one climbed the broad staircase of green marble that swept up from the south side of the echoing, pillared rotunda. As Verdsmitt climbed it, he thought he heard Falk’s voice, shouting something down by the main entrance, but he ignored it: the shouts weren’t intended for him, and that was all that mattered.
On the broad platform at the top of the stairs stood four pikemen, two on either side of the closed, gold-leafed double doors, their weapons glistening with the frost of enchantment, eyes reduced to glitters of light in the eye holes of face-covering helms.
Verdsmitt ignored them, focusing instead on the man who sat at a simple desk to one side, writing something on the single piece of parchment that was the only thing to mar the desk’s dark, polished wood. “Davydd Verdsmitt to see the King,” he said.
The man did not look up. “One does not gain a Royal audience merely by announcing one’s presence,” he said, his pen, one of the new Commoner-created kind with a built-in ink reservoir, scratching across the parchment. “Particularly not moments after a portion of the Palace has been damaged by a magical attack.”
“King Kravon will want to see me,” Verdsmitt said. “If you show him this.”
He pulled his hand from his pocket, aware as he did so of a subtle shifting of weight on the part of the guards closest to him, and held up the ring.
The secretary put down his pen and leaned forward for a closer look. “Pretty,” he said. “But why should the King care about your taste in jewelry?”
“Because it was also his, once upon a time,” Verdsmitt said. “You might also mention a name: Calibon.”
Verdsmitt had no idea how long this particular secretary had served the King, but he suspected no one at this level of the bureaucracy could have been unaware of some of the more sordid details of the King’s personal history. The secretary did not do anything as gauche as raise an eyebrow, or even blink, but he did nod, and said, “Very well. I will pass your message to the King.” He held out his hand. “I will show him the ring.”
Verdsmitt’s hand closed on it. “No,” he said. “You just describe it to him. I will show him the ring. When I see him in person.”
A brief pause. “Wait here,” the secretary said. He picked up pen and parchment and turned, and a section of the wall behind him swung silently open. He disappeared through it, and it vanished into the marble once more.
Verdsmitt sat down in the chair the secretary had just vacated, and glanced over at the nearest pikeman, who continued to stare straight ahead as though he didn’t exist. “Do you mind if I whistle?” he said, took the guard’s silence for consent, and launched into one of the tunes written for one of his lesser-known comedies, The Bride of Brethan. He suspected he’d have time to get through the entire score before the secretary returned.
But he was equally confident the secretary would return.
After so many years, he would finally see Kravon again, face-to-face… one very final time.
When the call came from Vinthor to the Patron, Mother Northwind was waiting in Malia’s empty bedchamber. She had been panting by the time she got there, and had dipped at last into her precious vials of restorative, downing one of the four. A good thing, too: as she swallowed the last of it, she heard the tumult of the guards racing through the servants’ halls, doors slamming open as they searched room by room, and barely had time to summon up her coat of invisibility once more. Had she not taken the restorative, she wouldn’t have been able to do it at all.
Had the guard who kicked open Malia’s door and stepped into the tiny room with his sword drawn and a magelight globe floating above him lingered even half a minute longer, he would have seen his quarry appear out of thin air, pale and gasping; but he spared only a glance for the obviously empty room before racing down the corridor with his fellows.
To her relief, Mother Northwind had a good hour or more of much-needed rest, sitting quietly in the dark room. Then, much to her surprise, she felt the call from Vinthor.
His news reinvigorated her as much as the restorative and the rest. She gave him his instructions, closed the magelink, and smiled to herself for the twenty minutes more that passed before Malia returned and found her there.
Malia, though relieved to see Mother Northwind was not dead, as had been rumored, was still understandably upset to hear that Falk had murdered her sister in a fit of rage, but Mother Northwind did not have time to allow her to grieve for very long before laying a sympathetic hand on her arm and guiding her anger to a more productive purpose: helping Mother Northwind escape from the Palace.
It proved to be less of a challenge than she had feared. The Palace was not a fortress, after all, but a glorified apartment and office building, with numerous entrances and exits, some of them quite
… obscure. Mother Northwind’s quick rummage through Malia’s mind revealed one known to only a few. In fact, it was not officially an entrance at all. Certainly it would not show up on any map of the building or the grounds.
Most of the MageLords preferred to stay within the immediate vicinity of the Palace, but the Lesser Barrier was a full two miles in diameter. Southeast of the Palace, a sheltered grove grew close to the Barrier. Screened by bushes from passersby… although almost no one ever did pass it by… it was a place where the Commoner servants who lived in the Palace could slip for assignations forbidden by their Mageborn masters. Malia had made much use of it, in the company of the personal manservant of Lord Athol.
Ignoring the glimpses of those passionate encounters she found in Malia’s surface memories, Mother Northwind focused on getting Malia to show her how she got to the grove unobserved… and so found out about the woodshored tunnel that led from a dark corner of the MageFurnace’s blackened chamber to a trapdoor hidden beneath dirt and leaves beneath the low-hanging branches of a spruce.
With a little encouragement, Malia insisted on showing Mother Northwind to that tunnel. The servants’ hall gave them access down to the MageFurnace level, where they passed through a brick corridor that ran parallel to the Furnace itself, the heat radiating from one wall so great that Mother Northwind, panting for air as she followed Malia, thought her fingers would blister if she touched it.
Blessedly the corridor was short, and they were soon climbing up through the cool tunnel, emerging into the quiet darkness beneath the spruce and then hurrying through the manicured grounds to the lovers’ nest in the bushes.
Inside its confines, Mother Northwind turned to thank Malia, taking her hand in hers.
Five minutes later Malia suddenly started and looked around her, Mother Northwind forgotten, thinking her lover had just left and she had best hurry back to the Palace before she was missed. She returned the way she had come, and when the First Servant came to her room shortly thereafter, he found her sewing a ripped blouse by lantern light, unaware that Mother Northwind had vanished… or that her much-loved younger sister had died in the blast unleashed in Mother Northwind’s chambers.
By the time Malia heard the news and dissolved into wailing sorrow, Mother Northwind, who had slipped through the Barrier without incident using the device Verdsmitt had enchanted, was already en route to the nightsoil collector’s stable to join the Heir and the Magebane, the pieces of her Plan once more, she thought with satisfaction, firmly in her hands.
Tonight, she thought. There is no need to wait longer. Tonight I will tell Verdsmitt to strike, the King will die, the Keys will come to Brenna, the Magebane will break them… and the rule of the MageLords ends.
And then, she thought, pulling her cloak tighter around her against the cold blasts as she slipped like a gray ghost through the shadows of the alleyways, far from where Falk’s guards were tearing houses apart in their search for Karl and Brenna, then, I can finally rest.
Falk, standing in a street of New Cabora that ended in the snow-drifted parkland surrounding the Lesser Barrier, watched yet another Commoner family being rousted out into the icy street, this one consisting of a young couple with two children, a wailing babe in arms and a small girl who clung to her blanket-wrapped father, silent and wide-eyed. The guards searched the tiny house with ruthless efficiency, overturning beds and tables, opening cupboards and dragging their contents onto the floor, thrusting spears into the attic through the thin plaster of the ceiling, ripping up floorboards. They were in and out in five minutes, leaving behind chaos and wreckage and the door hanging loose from one bent hinge, and moved on to the next. The young father gave Falk a look of pure hatred before taking his family back into the shattered remains of their home. Falk ignored it. The hatred of Commoners meant nothing to him. Finding Brenna was all that mattered.
They were moving rapidly through the city, but he was painfully aware that their quarry could have already fled ahead of them. He had sent men to guard all of the roads into and out of the city, but New Cabora, which sprawled four or five miles in every direction, did not have a wall, and so there was nothing to stop anyone from simply heading out into the prairie… nothing except for the winter cold itself.
Still, Mounted Rangers were patrolling the city’s perimeter, and since neither Brenna nor the Prince were outfitted for or accustomed to the harsh realities of winter travel, Falk believed they would hide in the city instead of risking the open. But he could not be certain, and that uncertainty ate at him, driving him to periodically yell at the guards to move faster.
With speed came, of necessity, brutality, and it wasn’t long before the first Commoner, bodily hurled from his home, clad only in a nightshirt, got to his feet with a scream of rage and charged at the guard who had manhandled him. The guard responded with a quick flick of his hand that hurled the man across the street with a flash of blue flame. The foolish Commoner hit the wall of the building opposite with a wet, crunching thud, blood spattered bricks and snow, and a naked corpse, nightshirt ignominiously twisted around its ruined head, slid to the ground and lay still.
It was the first corpse in the streets that night. It would not be the last.
And yet, three hours later, with half a dozen Commoners dead and a hundred Commoner homes and businesses left in near-ruins, no sign of the missing Heir and Prince had been found, and none of those questioned, no matter how thoroughly, had admitted to knowing anything about them.
Then, as the guards started down yet another street and the first doors on it were kicked open, a guard on horseback galloped up to Falk and reined his horse in sharply, its sides steaming and great clouds of vapor rising from its flaring nostrils. “A report, my lord,” the guard panted. “A Commoner near the Square, late home from a tavern. Saw three people, two large men, one a much smaller boy or woman, slip into the nightsoil collector’s stable. Couldn’t imagine why anyone would go into any place that vile, he said.”
“Was he sober?” Falk snapped.
“Sober enough by the time we started questioning him,” the guard said.
Falk turned in his saddle. “Call off the search!” he cried. “Captain Fedric, to me.”
Fedric shouted to his men to halt the search. Up and down the street the orders repeated. As some Commoners ran back into their houses and others farther up the street peered out of their doors with hope and relief plain on their faces, Falk ordered the captain to surround the nightsoil collector’s establishment. “No one gets in or out,” he said.
“Understood,” Fedric said, and issued his orders.
Falk turned to the man who had brought him word of the sighting. “Take me there,” he said.