Magebane (13 page)

Instead he heard footsteps, crunching through the snow, coming nearer at a run. And then a girl appeared beneath him. She wore an enormous fur coat, its hood thrown back to reveal tumbling curls of dark brown hair. Her eyes, just as dark, peered up at him from a pale, heart-shaped face. She said something to him. It sounded like a question, but he couldn't quite understand the words . . .

“I need . . . help . . .” he said, and then promptly threw up all over her. The retching seemed to tear something loose inside him, and agonizing pain bludgeoned him once more into darkness.

Brenna gaped at the . . . thing . . . that had appeared from nowhere in the ragged gray sky. It was a huge bag of blue cloth, shaped like a loaf of bread, with a round opening at the bottom. A kind of giant wicker basket, badly broken, hung from it on ropes, and as it swept away from her, she glimpsed a white face inside that basket. A tall chimney rose from something like a heating stove in the center of the basket, but instead of belching smoke, it shot a roaring tongue of blue flame, like the manor's Magefire, into the interior of the blue loaf-shape, lighting it up like a lantern but somehow not setting it on fire. At the back something like an overgrown version of a child's whirligig spun lazily.

She took all of that in in an instant as the thing shot past. She heard shouts from inside the basket—there had to be a second passenger she couldn't see—and then, suddenly, the fire turned orange and went out. For a few seconds the thing flew down the slope in eerie silence, lower and lower . . .

. . . and then it crashed into the forest at the bottom of the hill.

The big blue loaf-shape, which she now realized was made of cloth, collapsed in on itself. The basket upended. The Magefire-like burner ripped free with a tremendous noise and smashed into the ground, releasing a huge cloud of steam that obscured everything even before the blue cloth settled over the scene like a shroud. Yet even as the thin fabric drifted into place, Brenna was scrambling down the slope as fast as she could. There had been people in that basket. They must be hurt . . . or worse.

But even with that horrible thought in her head, another part of her jumped up and down like a little girl at her first Moon Ball.
They were flying!
she thought.
Like birds ... well, like dandelion seeds, anyway. But still, they were flying!

No one that she had ever heard of—not Lord Falk, not First Mage Tagaza, not even the First Twelve—had ever been able to use magic to fly.
I'd give half my life to fly like that
, she thought.
Fly right out of Falk Manor. Fly right over the Great Barrier, even . . .

The possibility, if it were a possibility, both thrilled and horrified her. If people from outside the Barrier could fly over it, then Brenna's whole world—the whole kingdom of Evrenfels!—was about to change forever.

All this time she had been hurrying down the slope, slipping and half-falling more than once, catching herself with her hands, sliding a few feet, then running once again. Ahead she could see the blue tentlike canopy the loaf-shape had made as it deflated and settled over the treetops. A confused heap of metal, ropes, and crates lay beneath it. She pushed through the undergrowth and cautiously stepped under the hanging fabric. She looked up to see a young man, her own age or slightly younger, tangled in a mass of ropes like a fish in a net. Blood dripped from him, flowing steadily from a hole in his leg. It wasn't spurting, though—she knew enough to know
that
would have quickly meant his death.
Punctured the muscle but no major blood vessels
, she though clinically, pushing the horror of the blood and the wound into the back of her mind by concentrating on what her tutor, Peska, had taught her of anatomy.
He might have a permanent limp.

His eyes were open. He was looking at her, though he seemed to be having some trouble focusing.

She opened her mouth, not sure what to say to him. She didn't even know if he spoke her language. Maybe that was why what actually came out was quite possibly the most inane thing she had ever said to another human being. “Are you all right?”

He didn't seem to understand her. He said something, his voice a hoarse croak—and then he groaned, his eyes rolled back, his mouth opened, and bloody vomit poured down on her head.

She ducked at the last instant to keep it out of her face, but she felt the hot stickiness foul her hair and dribble down the back of her neck. Screaming, she threw herself backward and promptly tripped over something in the snow.

When she saw what it was, she spun away and threw up her own breakfast.

The glazed, open eyes of the body on the ground watched her dispassionately, the viscera and pooled blood that had spilled from the enormous gash in its belly still steaming in the cold air.

After several minutes of cleansing her mouth and hair with snow, she regained her composure enough to go back under the blue canopy and look up at the surviving passenger of the . . . flying device.

He remained unconscious, and still dripped blood, not only from his leg, now, but also from his mouth and nose.
I've got to get him down from there
, she thought, but she knew she couldn't do it alone.

Fortunately or unfortunately—she had a feeling she wouldn't know for some time—she didn't have to. While she still dithered, Lord Falk and a half-dozen men-at-arms came crashing through the wood, swords drawn.

Her guardian skidded to a halt, his lean, sharp-angled face so startled he looked almost comical—well, as comical as the supremely
non
comical Falk ever could. “Come away from there!”

“Lord Falk, there's someone hurt!” She pointed up at the dangling youth. “Look!”

Lord Falk looked, then turned to the men-at-arms and began snapping commands. In short order they had cut the boy down, laid him on a travois made of spruce boughs, bound up his wounds, and begun dragging him toward the manor. Brenna doubted that was the best way to treat someone who might have internal injuries, but on the other hand, what choice did they have? One of the men-at-arms had already been dispatched to fetch Healer Eddigar. With luck, the Healer would reach the manor at almost the same moment as the boy.

Falk turned his attention to the dead man. Brenna forced herself to look at the corpse. At least someone had had the decency to close his staring eyes and drape a cloak across his ruined torso, and with that dreadful wound hidden, the man might almost have been asleep . . . if not for the red slush that surrounded his body. Falk knelt beside the corpse, fingering the strangely cut suit of leather it wore. A blood-spattered white scarf of some incredibly fine material was wrapped around the dead man's neck, and he wore a close-fitting leather helmet. Round glass lenses, framed in copper, had been shoved up on his forehead. One of the lenses had shattered in the impact.

Two men-at-arms remained at hand; Falk stood and ordered them to build a second travois and transport the body to the manor for closer examination. “Put him in the coal shed,” he said. “He'll keep well enough in there. No need to waste energy on a stasis spell.”

Brenna had to swallow hard to keep her gorge down again. As the axes of the men-at-arms rang among the trees, Falk gazed up at the wrecked flying device. “Astonishing,” he said. He spotted something in the snow, and leaned down to pick it up; when he straightened, he held a leather, glass-goggled helmet like the one the dead man had worn.
The boy's
, Brenna thought.

And then Lord Falk turned his ice-gray eyes toward her, and she quailed.

Lord Falk might be the closest thing she had to a father, but that wasn't very close at all. He never called himself that; he simply said he was her “guardian.” He was not at all cruel to her. In fact, he was quite generous, frequently bringing her presents from the city, and of course once a year he even took her there. He had introduced her to the other MageLords, even the King and the Heir; sent her shopping (with an armed escort, of course) in New Cabora. But she never sensed any personal warmth from him. He seemed to regard caring for her as a duty, a not particularly onerous duty but not a particularly pleasant one, either. And, of course, most of the time, he simply wasn't there at all, and she was left to her own devices.

When she had been very small, she had been tended to by a woman from the village, affectionate enough in her own way, but always taciturn and withdrawn. She had died “of an influenza,” in Falk's words, when Brenna was eight.

Her current tutor, Peska, spoke to her only about her schooling, but at least she wasn't entirely uninformed about events in the rest of the kingdom, even during the long months Falk left her alone.

The manor had a mageletter, a large sheet of enchanted parchment that filled each day with brief stories about the latest happenings at the Palace. Brenna devoured every word of it, even though it focused almost entirely on court gossip, with events involving Commoners mentioned only when they, in some way, impacted life inside the Lesser Barrier.

The Commoners of New Cabora kept
themselves
informed through a nonmagical thing called a newssheet, printed daily on cheap paper by the use of a clever mechanical device, and distributed on street corners by a network of children who kept a portion of the price of each newssheet sold for themselves. That was what Brenna
really
longed to read each day, but unless Falk chose to send copies to his manor she had no way to obtain one, and Falk did not so choose. And so Brenna had to be content with reading about who had worn what to the latest ball, speculation as to which highborn young lady would wed Prince Karl, and the excruciatingly boring details of the latest shuffling of the undersecretaries of the Council.

Commoner though she was herself, she rarely got to visit the local villages. Twice a year she accompanied Falk to Overbridge, enjoined to sit in strict silence while he heard whatever grievances had accumulated in the months since his last visit.

Falk would dispense justice—and, Brenna had to admit, did so thoughtfully and fairly—then bring her back to the manor. He said the trips were part of her education into the political system of the Kingdom, but sometimes she wondered if they were really meant as a simple but forceful reminder that Lord Falk held absolute sway over this corner of the Kingdom.

And over her. Rescuing the boy and having the corpse hauled away had distracted him for a few minutes, but now he frowned at her. “Brenna. Why are you out here by yourself?”

“I often take a walk in the woods near the manor, Lord Falk,” she said. “I did not know you were coming home today, or I would have been there to greet you.”
Almost true....
“I was up on the hill, enjoying the view, when that . . . whatever-it-is . . . suddenly appeared.”

“From the other side of the hill?” Falk gazed west, up the slope to the rock formation she had climbed to earlier. “From the direction of the Barrier? You're certain?”

“It almost knocked me off the rock,” Brenna said.

Falk squinted up at the crest of the hill, and Brenna knew what he was thinking, because she had thought it herself. On a clear day, when you climbed to the top of that hill, you could actually
see
the Great Barrier, a wall of fog, ten miles away across the bare prairie. To left and right the Barrier dwindled away in the distance. How tall is it? Brenna suddenly wondered. A mile? Two? She'd never heard.

She had never been to the Barrier herself, of course, but she had been told what it was like to come too close. Despite drawing its energy from the great lava-filled Cauldron almost three hundred miles north, it greedily sucked heat from the air as well, creating a chill that deepened to bitter cold within twenty-five feet of it and became unbearable to the point of agony within ten. The cold created the everpresent fog that both hid it from view and revealed its location. You could walk into that fog, until the cold drove you back. If you were dressed warmly enough, you might even get right up to the Barrier itself—but you would still see nothing but fog until the moment your outstretched hand touched it and the excruciating pain of having that hand instantly frozen drove you back.

After which, of course, the resulting amputation would keep you too occupied with your own misery to think much more about the incredible feat of magic the Barrier represented.

The Lesser Barrier was more like a nearly invisible glass wall in the air, or so Brenna had been told. Cold enough to freeze bare skin, but if you touched it with a gloved hand, all you felt was a sensation like running your hand over a sheet of ice. But the Great Barrier was, literally, untouchable. And, of course, impenetrable.

But the Lesser Barrier was a dome, whereas the Great Barrier was only a very tall wall . . . which meant a flying device could, conceivably, pass safely over it.