Magebane (42 page)

And she, of all people, knew that.

He clearly remembered the rainy night, more than two decades gone, when she had presented herself at his door in the slightly shabby-but-still-respectable neighborhood of New Cabora where he had lived at that time. He hadn't been Davydd Verdsmitt, famous playwright, then, but Davydd Verdsmitt, barely-making-ends-meetby-sweeping-floors playwright.

His first play was just then about to take the boards at the Paragon, whose name was a better joke than anything he'd written. A bat-infested old firetrap that mostly staged ancient farces—interspersed with equally ancient strippers—it had had the undeniable attraction of being cheap to rent.

He'd been so young then. Only half a dozen years had passed since he had so violently removed himself from the ranks of the MageLords, “drowning” in a tragic boating accident on the Great Lake, body never recovered. Not that he supposed his father, Lord Athol, now Prime Adviser to the King, had looked very hard. After all, a few days before he had all but suggested to his son that he quietly commit suicide.

Mother Northwind must have been younger then, too, but in his memory she looked the same as she did now, leaning on her stick, standing in the rain. “Aren't you going to ask an old woman in?” she'd said.

And then she had offered him her grand bargain.

Before he could even ask her who she was or where she came from, she said, “I know about you and Kravon.”

He had physically started. “How—?” And then, belatedly, had attempted to recover. “The King? I'm a Commoner. What is there to know about me and the King?”

“Let us dispense with these games right now,” Mother Northwind had said. “You cannot deny anything to me, you cannot hide anything; I know everything you and Kravon did together. I know what your feelings for him were, and his for you. And I know how much it devastated you when he renounced you, renounced the love you thought he felt for you, and revealed and reviled you as a homosexual.”

Verdsmitt remembered how the blood had drained away from his face and head, making him so dizzy he'd had to collapse into the nearest chair to keep from falling to his knees. “That's—”

“I don't care in the slightest that you prefer your own sex,” Mother Northwind said. “If it would amuse you, sometime, I will tell you just how many of the MageLords who shunned and laughed at you after King Kravon made the truth known are also bedding boys—and each other—in the privacy of their own estates, usually with their poor wives none the wiser.” A flicker of anger had touched her face, quickly smoothed away. “But you have something I need, Davydd Verdsmitt: magical ability of a kind that comes just once a century, if that.”

He couldn't deny being a MageLord; why deny
that
? “Much good it has done me.”

“Your skill as an enchanter, while you were still a boy, awed your tutors,” Mother Northwind said. “It was so great, so extraordinary, that had you not chosen so precipitously to drown in the Great Lake, the scandal would soon have been forgotten, papered over as such things are for MageLords.” She shook her head. “Well, it is too late for you to return to your father's estate . . .”

“I would die first,” Verdsmitt growled. “My father threw me out, told me to—”

“I know,” Mother Northwind said, though again, she didn't say
how
. “But listen to me, Davydd Verdsmitt. It is not too late for you to take revenge.”

He had stared blankly at her. “Revenge?”

“On your father. On all the MageLords who laughed at you, scorned you, made you an object of ridicule in taverns and manor halls around the kingdom.” She poked at him with a bony finger. “But
especially
. . . revenge on King Kravon.”

And then she had explained something of her plan, her grand scheme to grow a Magebane—Verdsmitt still found it hard to believe such a thing even existed, much less could be created, like a play or a piece of pottery—and with him bring down the entire rotten edifice of Evrenfels . . . a scheme that required only one thing: a way to kill the King at the precise moment he needed to die.

“An ordinary mage couldn't do it,” Mother Northwind said. “The magical defenses woven around the King are too strong.
I
could do it, were I in physical contact with him . . . but I must be elsewhere when the deed is done. A simple physical attack such as Commoners might launch would be thwarted by the same defenses that protect him from a magical one. But an enchanted device, so subtly made, so carefully constructed that it leaks nothing of its magical nature to those searching for such things, one that looks like an ordinary, unthreatening object, something the King might even carry on his person, something that can be triggered at just the right time . . . such a device could do the trick. But to create it would take the greatest enchanter the Kingdom has ever known.” She cocked her head, eyes on his, and said softly, “You.”

The appeal to his pride had helped to lure him in. The chance to take revenge on the MageLords, and on the man he had once loved but now hated with even more passion, might have been enough for him to agree. But what had really sealed the deal was the final offer from Mother Northwind: if he agreed to help her, she would fill the Paragon with paying patrons for a week.

“A week is all I can give you,” she said. “I have contacts enough to arrange for that. After that . . . your play must stand on its own merits.”

“It will,” Verdsmitt had said fiercely. “It will. Give me an audience, Mother Northwind, and I will do the rest . . .” He'd stood and held out his hand to her. “
All
of the rest.”

She'd smiled, and taken his hand. She'd held it for a long moment, squeezed it hard to support him as a brief bout of dizziness made his knees inexplicably sag. “I am confident of it, my boy,” she'd said, and as the dizziness passed, she'd disappeared once more into the wet night.

Since then he had never wavered, never doubted that what he and Mother Northwind planned had to be done . . . and never let dim or waver the bright flame of his hatred of his one-time friend and lover Kravon, now King.

Which was why, he told himself, he had reacted with anger to Mother Northwind's naming of him as a MageLord. So he had been, but so he was no longer. And if their plan succeeded, as they both hoped, soon there would be no MageLords or Mageborn: all would be equal, all would have to face the vagaries of the world without magic and the arrogance it bred.

“Sorry, Davydd,” Mother Northwind said now. “I cannot help baiting people. It is a bad habit and will land me in trouble someday, I fear.”

Verdsmitt snorted. “As opposed to plotting to murder the King, tear down the Great Barrier, and destroy magic forever?”

“I suppose there is some possibility that that will land me trouble, as well,” Mother Northwind said serenely. “But it hasn't yet.”

She leaned forward. “Listen to me, Davydd. I regret things did not come together as smoothly as we had hoped, but the pieces of the plan are still in play and still under my control. Brenna and Karl will soon be together. The moment for you to strike Kravon is still close at hand . . . very close. Can you sense the devices of yours we have smuggled into the Palace?”

“Yes,” Verdsmitt said. “I know much of what has been happening in the Palace. And if more disruption is called for . . . those devices, too, are within range of my will.”

“Not yet,” Mother Northwind said. “But the time may come.” She studied him. “I did not answer your request for leave to kill Falk. Does he, too, carry one of your devices?”

“No,” Verdsmitt admitted. “And he is powerfully protected. I don't know
how
I could kill him, Mother Northwind, but I would find a way.”

“Hmmm. Well, I'd rather he stayed alive for now. While he pursues
his
Plan with such fervor, he gives me space to pursue
mine
. But to return to these devices. Can you activate them from within the cell?”

“No,” Verdsmitt said. “I can sense them, but these cells carry their own enchantments.”

“How close do you have to be?”

“Anywhere within the Palace, as long as I am free of this cell. The original plan was for me to use the enchantments woven into my clothing to escape when the time comes—”

“There is a better way,” Mother Northwind said.

Davydd Verdsmitt waited for her to go on.

She smiled. “Just how good an actor are you, Davydd?”

Falk, signing what seemed like the thousandth document in the last hour—the worst part about a crackdown on the Commons was the amount of paperwork it generated—paused to clench and unclench his cramped right hand, and then realized that Mother Northwind had just entered the room.

“Ah,” he said. “At last.” He gestured to one of the chairs on the other side of his desk; Mother Northwind seated herself with an audible creaking of joints. “Well?”

“Your hunch was correct, Lord Falk,” she said. “I did not believe it until I saw it in his mind, but Davydd Verdsmitt . . . is the Patron. Well, one of them.”

Falk felt a rush of pleasure. “I knew it!” He leaned forward. “And who was the mage who helped him?”

Mother Northwind shook her head sadly. “Here is another thing I would not have believed, Lord Falk,” she said. “His accomplice was . . . the First Mage himself, Tagaza. Who also sometimes acted as the Patron. Again, as I think you suspected.”

There was no rush of pleasure at hearing
that
suspicion confirmed. “I am not surprised,” Falk said grimly, “but I am pained. What else did you glean from Verdsmitt's mind?”

Mother Northwind laughed. “Much about the sexual proclivities of various members of the acting profession. A great deal more than I wanted to know about the technical aspects of producing a play. But about the Common Cause . . . less than I had hoped.”

Falk's eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“Tagaza, again,” Mother Northwind said. “He is, of course, a master of hard magic, but he is also not completely unskilled at certain elements of soft . . . or rather, of some of those forms of magic that straddle the realms of hard and soft.” She sighed. “His meddling in Verdsmitt's mind was clumsy but unmistakable. He created a . . . wall, a wall that I cannot breach. To do so would kill Verdsmitt, and still I would not gain the information I want. And this wall not only keeps me from accessing information about the Common Cause in detail, it keeps Verdsmitt from consciously knowing it himself.”

“And yet you confirmed he gave orders as the Patron.”

“Only because my skill exceeds Tagaza's,” Mother Northwind said acerbically. “He has built a wall, but it is rough and unfinished enough that here and there light seeps through the cracks.”

“If Verdsmitt has no knowledge we can access, if he doesn't even remember that he is the Patron, then he is useless to me except as an example,” Falk said. “I will hang him from the statue in the Square so that the Common Cause and all their sympathizers know their leader has been arrested and condemned. Even if no one has come forward by then to tell me where Prince Karl is being held, that will open the store-hold of information on their sinking ship and send the rats scurrying out to save themselves.”

“A colorful metaphor,” Mother Northwind said. “Have you thought of writing plays?”

Falk was already opening a drawer on the left-hand side of his desk, in which he kept execution forms. He had pulled one out and was reaching for a pen when Mother Northwind's next words stopped him.

“But would it not be better, Lord Falk, to have the Patron alive . . . but loyal to you? To turn Davydd Verdsmitt's gift for propaganda
against
the Common Cause, instead of serving it? The confusion in the ranks of the Cause would be the same, seeing him alive at your right hand, supporting you, as it would be if he were dead . . . no, worse; because if you kill him, he becomes a martyr. Save him, and the leader of the Common Cause, the man most devoted to its perverse ideology, becomes nothing more than a turncoat, a sniveling coward who saved his own skin. How's that for a symbol?”

Falk put down the pen he had just picked up. “You can do this?”

Mother Northwind smiled a little shamefacedly, like a child caught with her hand in the sugar jar. “It's already done. Once I realized how little information I could retrieve from Verdsmitt, I . . . well. I confess I may have acted in haste, Lord Falk. I beg forgiveness if so.”

Falk had never heard Mother Northwind beg forgiveness for anything.

“I . . . was angry. And since I could not take what I wanted from Verdsmitt's mind, instead I . . . twisted it. To serve you, and the MageLords, and especially King Kravon.” She shook her head. “I should have asked for your permission and advice first, of course. I cannot undo it, but you can still kill him, or I can, if you'd like him dead due to natural causes—”