Magebane (64 page)

“What other purpose could that be?” Mother Northwind said. “Power? I'm too old to be interested in power, Lord Falk. I wouldn't live long enough to do anything with it.” She went over the fireplace and pulled a tasseled rope hanging beside it. “If we are going to have a long chat, Lord Falk, I simply must have my tea.”

Falk grimaced, but said nothing.

“I want the Barriers down, Lord Falk. I wouldn't have worked twenty years to achieve just that if I did not. And when the Barrier comes down, the MageLords will emerge,” Mother Northwind continued. “How can it be otherwise? I do not care if you rule the whole world, Lord Falk . . . as long as the Barrier falls. And you alone know the way to make that happen. If I turn against you, the Barrier will not fall, and what would I then have been wasting my fading energies on for so long?”

“Tagaza worked at my side even longer,” Falk growled. “He turned against me at the end. And he paid the price.”

Mother Northwind's face took on an expression of false horror. “Is that a threat, Lord Falk?”

“Your powers are great, Mother Northwind,” Falk said. “But they are soft. You must touch me to use them against me. Whereas I can summon power in an instant that will flay you to your bones. It is more than a threat, it is a promise. If I become convinced you have acted against me, you will die.”

A servant entered, the same girl who had been sweeping in the corner when Falk first came in. She brought with her, on a polished wooden tray, a silver pot from which wafted the pungent scent of herbal tea. “Thank you, Pilea,” Mother Northwind said. She patted the girl on her hand. “You're a good girl.”

“Thank you, ma'am.” The girl curtsied, turned, and walked past Falk on her way to the door.

Only luck saved him. On the corner of the mantelpiece stood a glass vase, surface shiny and bright as a mirror. In that surface, Falk caught, out of the corner of his eye, a hint of movement, enough to make him turn his head—which was just enough to bring into his peripheral vision the sight of the girl lunging at him with a dagger.

The dagger should have gone into his back. Instead, as he lurched to the side, it sliced along his right flank, laying a strip of fiery pain against his skin. As his doublet turned red, he roared and lashed out with his fist, but the girl moved faster than he would have thought possible and came back at him with the knife, though she was just enough off-balance that he managed to jerk his head out of the way as the blade lashed the air beneath his chin. Grabbing her wrist, he pulled her hard across his body with all his strength, flinging her away from him. She almost flew across the room, her head made a horrible crunching noise against the edge of a marble-topped table, and she fell to the carpeted floor, twitched, and lay still, blood pooling beneath her shattered skull.

Falk spun back toward Mother Northwind, seizing power from the MageFurnace as he turned, forming a spell in his mind. He released the spell. A wall of sun-bright blue flame slammed furniture to kindling against the far wall, crushed the plaster into dust, and blew out the far windows in glittering blizzards of glass. But of Mother Northwind there was no sign.

Falk strode to the gaping window openings and peered out, but no mangled body lay on the gravel path beneath or on the bushes below, and dust obscured his view a moment later as the facade collapsed, roaring, from the eastern wall.

Falk turned away. Perhaps the blast had reduced the old woman to nothing more than red mist, scattering now on the winds . . . But he wouldn't have wanted to lay money on it.

Hand to his bleeding side, Falk went to the door and flung it open. Servants were running away from Mother Northwind's quarters and guards were running toward it, but Mother Northwind had vanished without a trace.

Bellowing orders at the approaching guards, Falk stalked away from the shattered room. If she lived, Mother Northwind could not leave the Palace grounds. He would find her. And then he would take great pleasure in personally crushing the life from her wizened old frame.

Mother Northwind had known from the moment Lord Falk entered the room that their alliance was at an end. Somehow, he had had a hint of the truth about who had sabotaged his attempt to seize the Keys. She could think of only one way that would have happened, and as they talked, he confirmed it. Brenna, the little fool.
Youth
, she thought bitterly.
You can't trust them to act wisely
. An older Heir would have kept her counsel once she realized Falk intended to kill her, would have realized that Mother Northwind had told her the truth and her own survival depended on doing what Mother Northwind told her.

But Brenna, little more than a child, had let her anger get the best of her and risked her own life—and now Mother Northwind's, too.

Well. Perhaps it was for the best. Mother Northwind had known that sooner or later this moment would come. She sparred with Falk, buying time, then reached up and pulled the rope to summon Pilea. She had long since primed all of the Commoners who served her here. Much like Falk could direct the mageservants in his manor, she could direct her human servants. All it took was a touch. She had issued her initial instructions as Pilea had left the room. When she returned, she would be bringing more than tea.

Pilea arrived, and set down the tea. Mother Northwind patted the maid's hand and
twisted
, just a little. It took very little energy.

It would take a great deal more for her to do what she needed to do next, and so she sat absolutely still, summoning her inner resources—and waited.

Pilea walked past Falk, then with sudden, lightning speed, spun, drew the dagger she had procured after Mother Northwind had sent her out of the room the first time, and thrust it at Falk, her aim as expert as a trained assassin.

Somehow, Falk dodged the fatal blow, but he also took his eyes off Mother Northwind, and in that instant, she released the energy she had summoned . . . and vanished.

Even a soft mage had some hard magic to call on, and Mother Northwind had more than most, though unlike mages of Falk's caliber she could only apply it, as with her soft magic, by touch. But that was all right, because this magic was being applied to herself.

She wasn't truly invisible. Rather, she had changed the air close to her body so that the light from objects behind her flowed through it like water. If Falk had been looking closely, he would have seen a . . . distortion, a ripple in the air, moving from the chair where Mother Northwind had been toward the door.

But Lord Falk was too busy not getting killed. By the time he flung poor Pilea across the room, Mother Northwind was past him. She was at the door when he released that killing blast. And she was in the hallway before he realized she had vanished.

By the time he came to the doorway himself and strode away, bellowing, she was across the hall, and going down the servants' stairs. She could feel herself weakening. She had barely enough strength to hold the illusion until she had reached the hallway at the bottom of the stairs that ran the length of the Palace, the kitchens to her left and doors leading to other servants' stairs up to other parts of the Palace on her right. Then she had to let the magic go, staggering as she did so, collapsing onto a hard wooden bench.

For the first time, she felt afraid. Falk should have died in her room. But with him still alive, every square inch inside the Lesser Barrier would be turned upside down until she was found.

She had one trump card, though, literally up her sleeve, in a pocket where she carried another of the enchanted devices Verdsmitt had created to cut a hole through the Lesser Barrier. She had never expected to use it for herself, keeping it on her person only in case she needed to bring someone into the Palace grounds surreptitiously, but now it offered her only chance of escape.

She needed to get to the Lesser Barrier without being seen. How that would be accomplished needed some thought. She heaved herself up. She couldn't stay there, outside the kitchens. Sooner or later a servant would come by—probably sooner; and she could not count all of them as allies.

But some she
could
.

She had taken note long before of the location of the living quarters of those who personally served her. She got to her feet and, weary beyond belief and sorely missing her cane, made her slow way along the corridor that led to the room belonging to a maid named Malia, who would help her escape the Palace grounds . . . and, just maybe, help her salvage her Plan.

Besides
, Mother Northwind thought,
Malia deserves to hear the truth of what happened to her sister Pilea . . .

. . . well, as much of the truth as will serve
.

The news that Lord Falk had apparently killed Mother Northwind raced through the Palace hard on the heels of the wall-shaking blast itself. Verdsmitt overheard it from servants talking in the hall outside his rooms, and felt a deep sense of shock, as though the blast that had taken Mother Northwind's life had ripped his own from its foundation.

But an instant later came a feeling of complete freedom. Mother Northwind was dead. Her Plan had died with her. He no longer needed to kill the King on cue. He could kill the King whenever he felt like it . . .

. . . and he felt like it
now
.

Verdsmitt went to his battered old valise, kindly delivered to his room at Falk's orders after his “conversion” to Falk's cause, and tore open the lining. There, sewn in place, was a small leather pouch with something heavy in it. He ripped the pouch free, then opened its mouth and upended the contents into his palm. A ring glittered in the blue magelight, snakes of yellow-and-white gold twining round each other, each with the other's tail in its mouth. Ruby eyes glittered in the head of the yellow snake, emeralds in the head of the white.

Kravon had given Verdsmitt the ring as a token of undying affection, just two weeks before the Keys had come to Kravon and everything had changed. Six months later Verdsmitt had been denounced, “committed suicide,” and vanished into his new life. But he had never thrown away the ring. And now . . . now it was his passport to the King's presence.

For the first time since he had come to the Palace, Verdsmitt stepped out into the hallway and headed toward the block of rooms at the Palace's rear: the quarters of the King.

Falk found Brich before he found Captain Fedric, and found out why when Brich, who had been searching for Falk even before the blast, said, before Falk could say anything, “Lord Falk, Prince Karl is gone again. And he's taken Brenna with him.”

Falk, who had been on the verge of ordering a search for Mother Northwind, momentarily forgot all about her. “Gone? How?”

Brich swallowed, and glanced around. They were just inside the main entrance of the Palace, where more stairs swept up to the central rotunda whose domed roof suggested the shape of the dome that capped the Palace's center, though in fact there were several more floors above it—including the Spellchamber where Tagaza had been struck down.