Magebane (47 page)

Two hours later, Falk finally went down to the Blue Lounge. The two Royal guards at the door saluted and held it open for him.

The man seated at the head of the long table of dark wood beneath the blue walls had not only drunk all of the wine provided him, he was well into a second flagon. He stood up when the door opened, but Falk noted with satisfaction that he put out a hand to steady himself.

Falk studied the man without saying anything for a moment. For his part, the man stood with his head cast down, that one steadying hand still on the table. He was breathing unusually hard, as though he had just been running instead of seated in a comfortable chair enjoying cheese and bread and lamb-stuffed pastries. He was also one of the most nondescript men Falk had ever seen, round and somehow soft around the edges, as though only half-formed.

“I am Lord Falk, Minister of Public Safety to His Majesty King Kravon, Keeper of the Keys and the Kingdom,” Falk said at last. “I hope you found the wine and food to your liking.”

“Yes, my lord. Thank you, my lord,” said the man.

Falk sat down at the far end of the long table from the Commoner. “And your name is . . . ?”

“They call me Jopps, my lord,” he said, his face glistening with perspiration, though the room was cool.

“Not your real name?” Falk said.

Jopps said nothing.

Falk shrugged. “No matter. Very well, Jopps. You told my Captain of the guard that you know where Prince Karl is.”

“I do,” Jopps said. “My lord. But I want some guarantees before I tell you.”

Lord Falk's eyebrows rose. “I am not in the habit of negotiating with those who hold information it is their duty as loyal subjects of King Kravon to share,” he said.

Jopps shook his head. “Don't care. No guarantees, you get nothing from me. My lord.”

Mother Northwind could get it from you
, Falk thought, and immediately rejected the thought. It was too easy to rely on her for gathering intelligence—and that was dangerous. For one thing, she was old, and he wouldn't have her skills to draw on forever. For another, relying too much on her would mean his own not-inconsiderable skills at acquiring information could wither. And for a third, he preferred to keep some secrets for himself.

“What guarantees?” Falk said.

“My parents, my lord,” Jopps said hoarsely. “They lost their home, and the shop, when you destroyed the Courthouse. They need a place to live. They need money.” He licked his lips. “And Healers. They're sick, Mom especially. You promise to look after them properly, like they . . . like they were Mageborn . . . and I'll tell you where Prince Karl is.”

Falk studied him. “You want nothing for yourself?”

“No, my lord,” Jopps said. “Nothing.”

How unusual
, Falk thought.
And refreshingly straightforward
. He shrugged mentally. Well, why not? It would cost next to nothing. And if the man's information turned out to be bogus . . . well, it would give him a lever to use to pry the truth out of him. “Agreed. Where is the Prince?”

Jopps took a deep, shaky breath.
He looks
, Falk thought,
like he's going to be sick
. But though it might have been close, Jopps did not spew the contents of his stomach across the shiny surface of the table. Instead he said, “Goodwife Beth's, my lord.”

Falk cocked his head. “Goodwife Beth,” he said carefully, letting a little sharpened steel show in his voice, “is a character in a Verdsmitt play.”

“Also the name of a woman . . . very tough woman . . . high in the Cause,” Jopps said. All of a sudden words came rushing out of him, a different kind of spew as though, now that he had begun to talk, he might not be able to stop. “I don't know where she came from originally. She puts on this whole ‘Goodwife Beth' act but underneath she's hard as nails. Slice your throat in a second if she thought you deserved it. She's got this farmhouse, well, that's what it looks like from the outside, out in a little valley west of New Cabora—closest town is a place called Quillhill. I can show you the exact spot. Thing is, it's not really a farmhouse . . . or I guess it is, but it's set into the hill . . . and there's more house inside the hill than you see on the outside. Got a secret exit up on the hilltop. Got to know that if you're going to go after the Prince. They'll try to take him out that way. I can show you where that is, too.”

He stopped, suddenly; either he was out of breath or a second thought had finally chased down his runaway first one.

“Very complete,” Falk said. “Perhaps you could show us on a map . . . ?”

Jopps nodded.

“And how do you know this, Jopps?” Falk said softly. “Why should I believe you?”

“Been in the Cause a long time,” Jopps muttered, not meeting Falk's eyes. “Verdsmitt's doing. Heard him speak once, secret meeting . . . convinced me we had to fight back, had to try to make things better for Commoners, that King Kravon doesn't care about us, people freezing to death in the streets of the city every winter... it's obscene.

“Anyway, I joined up. Did odd jobs, nothing major. Then I met this girl called Jenna. Beautiful, young . . . I think I was half in love with her. We all were.” He swallowed hard and dashed his hand across his eyes, quickly, as if chasing away a fly.

“We got word from the Patron. Something special planned. Biggest thing the Cause had ever done. The Patron needed a volunteer . . . needed a young woman . . . and Jenna stepped forward. She must have known she'd never get away with it, even if it worked . . . but she volunteered anyway.”

“Volunteered for what?” Falk asked.

Jopps looked up for the first time. “To kill the Prince,” he snarled. “She hid in the bubble under the water where he liked to swim, waited for him. But something went wrong. The Prince wasn't hurt, and Jenna . . .” He shook his head, then went on with a voice grown suddenly hoarse.

“And it didn't do a damn bit of good. All it did was bring the guards into the streets, rounding up people. Made things worse, not better. Jenna died for nothing. The Common Cause . . . the Patron . . . killed her for
nothing
.” His voice was rising now. “I think the Patron
knew
it wouldn't work! I think the Patron threw away Jenna's life for nothing, just to cause a little trouble . . . and the only trouble she caused was for
us
!

“And then Verdsmitt got himself arrested. That was on the Patron's orders, too.”
That
got Falk's attention.
Verdsmitt had
wanted
to be arrested?
“Patron wanted him in the Palace, for some reason. I don't know why. Me and Denson, we were sent in through the Barrier . . .”

“How?” Falk demanded, leaning forward.

Jopps shrugged. “I don't know. Little stick of a thing, colder than an icicle. It cut an opening in the Barrier, like a knife cutting a wax-paper windowpane. Then you had a few seconds to get through before it closed up. Would only work twice, we were told; once in, once out, then it would just be a stick again.

“Well, we got in with our folding boat, came over to this side of the river. Then . . .” He took another deep breath. “My lord, we put some . . . things. Here and there around the outside of the Palace. Stones, sticks, they didn't look like much, but they had that chill, you know, that magic thing.”

“You'll show me exactly where these things are?” Falk snapped.

Jopps nodded rapidly. “Of course, my lord.”

Enchanted objects for eavesdropping . . . or murder, Falk thought.
Tagaza's doing. And that's why he was so willing to do the spell to find Brenna. He had other ways to disrupt the Plan, even if I got her back.

Well, no matter.
Tagaza's dead
, he thought fiercely.
Whatever those devices were intended to do, he's not around to trigger them. We can collect them at our leisure.
He made a mental note to interrogate the Magecorps mages responsible for Palace maintenance. “Carry on.”

“Then we hid and watched to see what happened when Verdsmitt was taken. We thought he was going to do something spectacular, thought he was going to escape and come running out to us, something . . .

“But it was Jenna all over again. Nothing happened, except we didn't have Verdsmitt anymore.” He sounded bitter. “So we rowed back across the lake. Got through the Barrier all right, were packing up to head into the city . . . and out of nowhere, here comes the rutting Prince. He ran right through the Barrier. I could have sworn it had already closed, but . . . there he was!”

He shook his head. “We didn't want him. Could have killed him, but we didn't want to do that without orders from higher up. I figured we were just delaying the inevitable. The Patron had already tried to kill him once, after all. But next thing you know we're dragging the Prince's sorry ass out to Goodwife Beth's.”

“So why did you decide to come to me?” Falk said.

“I heard about what happened to the Courthouse, what happened to Mom and Dad,” Jopps said. “I came back to help them, didn't come back to betray anybody. But then I saw everything that had happened just because the bloody Patron decided to try to kill the Prince and then keep him when he jumped into our hands, and I thought, ‘This ain't worth it.' We're supposed to be about making things better for the Commons, and instead we've done nothing but make them worse.

“And then Davydd Verdsmitt himself, today, telling us to give up . . .” Jopps swiped his hand across his nose. “If he's done with the Cause, then I am, too. That's the simple truth. And so is what I've been telling you about the Prince. You go where I show you, you'll find him, my lord.”

“We'll find your friends, too,” Falk said.

“They ain't my friends. Not anymore.”

Falk considered. “All right, Jopps,” he said, “I'm going to trust you. But you're coming with us on the raid. If things aren't exactly as you told us . . . if you've set us up for some kind of ambush . . . you'll wish you were never born—” he turned his voice ice cold, “—and so will your parents in the few short, miserable days they have left to them.”

Jopps paled, but he nodded once. “I told you the truth,” he said. “You go there, you'll find him.”

Falk smiled. “Well, then, let's go there, shall we?”

FOR BRENNA, the ride south on the dogsled was like a nightmare from which there was no waking, one of those nightmares in which a monster was chasing her and no matter how fast she ran she couldn't get away . . . except in this dream they were chasing the monster, and getting closer and closer to it far faster than she could have run.

She couldn't believe that all their efforts to make the airship flyable and escape from Falk's manor had been for naught. She couldn't believe that High Raven—who she had decided was a fair and honorable man who would not turn Anton over to the fate that Falk and Mother Northwind intended for him—would betray them to the witch just because she used to heal broken bones and chase away fevers for the clan. The Commoners in Falk's demesne also praised her healing abilities, but that didn't make what she intended to do any less evil!

But here they were, sliding across the ice pulled by the panting dogs whose breath-fog swept across them, as though to emphasize just how fast they were moving toward the one place they didn't want to go.

The first night they made use of a rough stone building nestled against a hillside, all of them, men and dogs and Brenna alike, sleeping around a central fire pit, the men taking turns watching through the night. There was little talking.

After another day's miserable travel, they made camp in a sheltered cove, where piles of boulders formed a kind of protective embrace around a curved beach, and the ground inside sloped up sharply into trees. You couldn't say it stopped the relentless, bitter wind entirely, but it reduced it to fretful, swirling breezes that, unlike the wind on the lake, didn't feel like a sharp knife cutting deeper into any exposed flesh . . . until you couldn't feel the flesh at all, of course. Before they had left the Minik camp, their new captors had insisted that both she and Anton spread protective animal grease on their faces and any other skin left exposed by their coats and gloves, augmented by the additional clothing their new captors had brought with them. They hadn't suffered frostbite, but they smelled like last week's breakfast.

A ring of fire-blackened stones on the beach mutely testified that the cove had been used for camps before. As tents were hauled out and set up by one man, fire and food were arranged by another, and the other two tended to the dogs, giving them food and water and thoroughly examining ther feet—two were already wearing little leather booties that Brenna might have thought cute if the dogs wearing them didn't weigh better than half as much as she did and had fangs roughly the size of her little finger, which they enthusiastically showed whenever she got too near.