Magebane (28 page)

“But why?” Anton cried, forgetting to keep his voice down. Brenna shot a frightened look at the door, and he dropped it to an agonized whisper. “Why would he do that to me? What possible use could I be to him?”

“He wants you to fly that airship for him,” Brenna said. “And he thinks you might be useful later . . .” She shook her head. “It's hard for me to believe this part, either, but I think Lord Falk is of the Unbound. They're a . . . a cult that wants to destroy the Great Barrier. It's impossible, of course, but I think he thinks he can do it. He wants the MageLords to rule your world as they do this one, as they did centuries ago.”

Anton would have said that was a fool's hope, knowing what he did of the modern might of steamships and airships, of repeater guns and explosive shells . . . but he had seen too much already here in Evrenfels of what these MageLords could do, and knew he must have seen very little of what they were truly capable of. And on this whole continent, there were just a few troops and maybe a couple of cannon in Wavehaven, weeks away. The true military might was on the far side of the world, where the Union Republic squabbled with the Concatenation in a hundred ways, battling by surrogate in small, splintered countries or staring each other down along long, heavily fortified borders. If the Anomaly fell and the MageLords emerged, it could be weeks before word of it even got back to the Union Republic's government, and quite a bit longer before any major military campaign could be launched. Who knew what deviltry the MageLords would have in place by then?

“But I don't understand,” Anton said. “The Anomaly has stood for centuries. How can he bring it down?”

“I don't know,” Brenna snapped. “It's not like methods of destroying it were part of my education.” She paused. “I'm sorry,” she said more softly. “But time is short. You have to escape the manor . . . and you have to take me with you.”

Anton sat cross-legged on the bed, carefully arranging the blankets to preserve his modesty, though it sounded like he had already been stripped naked by Mother Northwind. “I'll agree
I
need to escape,” he said. “But why do you?”

“I'm part of this Plan of Lord Falk's, too,” Brenna said. “I don't know how . . . but I don't want anything to do with it. I can't imagine I'm a crucial part, but maybe if I'm not here when he needs me, it will jam a tree branch into his spokes.”

“But this is your home. He's your guardian.”
Yes, he is
, an inner voice whispered.
How do you know this isn't all some trick of Falk's?

He mentally thrust the doubts away. He had to trust
someone
in this bizarre kingdom where wooden puppets walked and worked and a little old woman could rape your mind with a touch of her hand. Brenna was the only candidate.

“He's my guardian, and I'm his ward. But he's not my father, and I'm not his daughter,” Brenna said, her voice rising a little with emotion. “I'm his prisoner, and he's a monster.” She held up the candle so that he could see her face more clearly as she met his eyes squarely. “So be a good fairy-story hero and rescue me.”

“But how?” Anton said. “How do we—”

There was a noise outside the door; very slight, but enough to tell them both that one of the guards had shifted position. Anton could almost picture it, the guard turning, putting his ear to the door . . .

“Airship,” Brenna whispered. “Fixed. Only hope.” And then she fled for the servants' door in the corner, closing it silently behind her just as the door into Anton's room opened.

By that time, of course, he was fast asleep again, though tossing and turning and even mumbling out loud. After a moment he stopped and lay still. A moment after that he heard the bedroom door close.

He sat up and waited to see if Brenna would come back. When she didn't, he lay back down again. Putting his hands under his head, he stared up into the darkness.

The airship fixed! All well and good . . . but could he really fly it without the Professor? Could he even get it off the ground? How would they fill it with hot air? Where could they get rock gas for the burner and engine?

And even if they did get it airborne, as his own painful and tragic arrival here had proved, flying the airship wasn't the problem: landing it was.

But Brenna was right. It was their only hope.

He just wished it was a brighter one.

Though Karl had been into New Cabora many times, as representative of the Crown, he had never been in this part of it, far away from City Hall and the other grand public buildings that were his usual venues for official appearances. At any other time he would have been fascinated by the narrow streets, the four- or five-story buildings leaning over them, the coal-oil streetlamps casting yellow circles of illumination on snow-covered cobblestones, but otherwise doing little to alleviate the gloom, the darkened shops with half-glimpsed goods, mysterious and alien to Karl, displayed in their windows....

But this was not any other time. Barefoot and lightly dressed, all Karl could think of was pain and cold. His feet had become blocks of ice he could no longer feel, though once when he looked down he saw blood on them and knew he must have cut them on the sharp stones of the streets. His ears felt like knives were slicing at them. Even his lungs hurt.
I'll be dead before we get where we're going
, he thought, but he wasn't. They didn't really penetrate very far into the city streets before he was pulled down a narrow passageway between two grim, unlit brick hulks. One of his captors rapped a rapid-fire knock in a complicated sequence on a rusty metal door. The door opened silently. Beyond was pitch-blackness, and Karl hung back for an instant as he was propelled into it . . .

. . . but only for an instant, because inside it was warm.

He reveled in that warmth for a moment, though he still couldn't feel his feet. The door closed behind them, shutting off the pale gray rectangle that proved however dark it might have seemed out there, it was far darker in here.

The space had the feeling of somewhere small. No one spoke, but they moved a short way down what felt like a narrow hall and rounded a corner. Another knock, different from the first, and another door opened. Beyond this one, there was not only warmth, but light.

It seemed blinding, though it was really, Karl realized a moment later, only the glow of a small fire burning inside a tiny hearth, combined with the gleam of a single oil lantern sitting on the mantelpiece. Together, they illuminated a small room furnished with a table, four chairs, and nothing else—unless you counted the burly, grim-faced Commoner facing them with a drawn sword, who had just stepped back from opening the door. His eyes, brown beneath bushy black brows, widened as he saw Karl. “Creator! What the rutting hell are you doing with
him
?”

“Nice to see you, too, Shiff,” one of Karl's captors said. Karl took his first good look at him. He was smaller and slimmer than Karl, which made him about half the size of Shiff, but he radiated a sense of suppressed strength and energy, like a coiled spring. “And as for him,” he indicated Karl, “he
followed
us.”

Karl's other captor grunted. Nondescript in every way—smaller than Karl, thicker than his companion, graying hair, features that had a kind of blobby, unfinished look to them—he was someone no one would have taken a second look at in any crowd, and couldn't have remembered five minutes later even if they had.
Useful for a revolutionary
, Karl thought. Because he was certain that was what he had fallen in with: radical members of the Common Cause, the ones who wanted to overthrow the rule of the MageLords and let Commoners rule themselves.

The ones
, and his throat and gut tightened at the thought,
who may have tried to kill me once already
.

“Followed us through the Barrier,” the nondescript man said, his voice as unremarkable as the rest of him, a kind of generic baritone. “
After
it closed.”

There was a fourth man in the room, behind Karl, the one who had opened the outer door. Now he slipped around in front, and from the looks the others gave him, Karl guessed he was the leader here. He was about Karl's height, but at least twice his age, with a face as angular and chiseled as an unfinished sculpture, and eyes, in this dim light, as black as coal.

“Prince Karl,” the fourth man said thoughtfully. “Most unexpected.”

“I say we kill him,” growled Shiff. “We already tried once. Jenna died—”

Karl felt cold, and this time it had nothing to do with the weather.

The leader shook his head. “No,” he said. “The Patron was quite clear. No more attempts on the Prince's life. His survival changes things, somehow. I don't know how. But the Patron wants him alive.” He studied Karl. “Although the Patron, so far as I know, did not expect him to just place himself in our hands like this.”

The feeling had at last begun to return to Karl's feet, a burning and tingling progressing rapidly toward pain. His ears and cheeks felt on fire. He could feel the cuts on his soles now, too. He tried to shift his weight from one foot to the other, but that only intensified the pain in the one he stepped down on, and he gasped involuntarily.

The leader glanced down. “Barefoot?” he said. “In this weather?” He glanced at Shiff. “Fetch the Healer.”

“I say we let his feet fall off,” Shiff snarled.

“And I said ‘Fetch the Healer,' ” the leader said softly. Shiff tensed for a moment, then grunted, sheathed his sword, and went out.

“Sit down,” the leader said to Karl, who gratefully complied, collapsing onto one of the rough wooden chairs with a groan. He clenched his fists against the pain in his feet.

The leader remained standing. “Denson, guard the outside door. Jopps, find us something to eat and drink.”

Denson, the wiry one, nodded and slipped out. The nondescript Jopps went through the only other door in the room, on the far side, leaving it open to reveal a slightly larger room with four beds ranged along the walls. Beyond that, through an archway, Karl saw a fire burning. Jopps went through the archway and turned left, disappearing from view.

“How did you get through the Barrier?” the leader said softly.

“What's your name?” Karl countered.

A moment's stillness. “Call me Vinthor.”

“Not your real name?”

A small smile. “It is not the name I was born with. Nor were the other names you have heard given my associates by their parents.” The smile vanished. “Now answer the question.”

“I don't know,” Karl said. “I tried to get through the opening your men made, but I was too late. Yet somehow I went through anyway.”
And how
did
your men make that opening?
he wanted to ask. They were Commoners, so they must have used an enchanted device of some kind, but he would have sworn, and he thought Tagaza would have backed him up, that no mage now living could create such a device.

“Can the Heir move through the Lesser Barrier at will?” Vinthor said.

Karl shook his head. “I have never heard of it.” But in the back of his mind came the thought that perhaps, just perhaps, slipping through the Lesser Barrier was all one with his strange ability to cancel out minor spells and make enchanted objects stop working. But he wasn't about to say anything about
that
to Vinthor.

“‘For even the wisest, the wide world holds endless mysteries and wonder,' “ Vinthor said, and it took Karl a second to figure out why that sounded familiar. It was a quotation from
The Eagle Falls
, one of Verdsmitt's earliest but still most popular plays.

Was Verdsmitt this mysterious Patron, then? But Falk had arrested him. Surely the Patron would not have allowed himself to be captured by the Minister of Public Safety!

Unless there was some reason he
needed
to be inside the Palace . . .

“Could your father have died this very evening, making you King without your knowing it?” Vinthor continued. He asked the question softly, but there was some hidden depth to it that Karl couldn't fathom. “Perhaps the King has the power to pass through the Barrier.”

“I've never heard that, either,” said Karl. “And when my father dies, I
will
know it.”

“Hmmm.” Vinthor glanced at the fire for a moment, thinking. Karl closed his eyes and pounded his fists silently on his legs, willing the agony in his feet to retreat. It didn't work.

Jopps bustled in with a plate piled with slices of bread, cheese, and meat of some kind, though Karl couldn't quite decide what it was aside from gray and slightly slimy. Jopps went out again, returning in a moment gripping four mugs by their handles with one hand and an open wine bottle with the other. He slopped wine into the mugs, put the empty bottle aside, and went to the door, opening it to hand one of the mugs to Denson in the darkness beyond; then he closed the door again, picked up his own mug, and plopped down on the chair closest to the fire, between Vinthor and Karl. Placing a piece of cheese and a piece of meat between two slices of the bread, he ate noisily, apparently oblivious to both his leader and the Prince.