Anton stared at her. “Magic? You… the people here… you believe in magic?”
From the expression on her face, you’d have thought he’d suddenly sprouted horns and a tail. “Do we ‘believe in magic?’ What an odd question. It’s like asking, ‘Do you believe in the sun?’ There’s not much choice, is there? I mean, it just is.”
Anton felt like a shipwrecked sailor floundering in a tossing sea. “But… magic… it doesn’t exist. Not where I come from. There are legends from long ago, and some people enjoy reading magical-adventure novels or going to the wonder plays, but those are just stories. You’re saying that here magic is real?” The mageservant stood by, impassive. Anton suddenly got up and limped around the mannequin, looking for strings or pulleys. “It’s not a trick?” He reached out a finger toward the glowing blue symbol on the mageservant’s “face.”
“Don’t-” Brenna said sharply, but not before Anton’s finger contacted the blue-glowing paint. He jerked it back at once.
“Ow!” For a moment he thought the symbol had been hot, and he’d burned himself; but when he examined his fingertip he saw a dead-white patch and realized it had actually been intensely cold; he’d frozen the skin.
“-touch it,” Brenna finished. She sighed. “Most children learn not to touch symbols when they’re toddlers.”
“I can see why.” He shook his hand ruefully. “You can actually use magic!”
“Not me personally,” she said softly. “I am a Commoner, not Mageborn. But Lord Falk, whose house this is… and whom you’ll meet shortly… is a very powerful mage. And this house is built on one of the veins of the Evrenfels magic lode, and above a great source of energy, an eternally burning rock gas flame deep in the cellars. Falk has more mageservants than any other MageLord in the Kingdom, I’ve been told. More than the Palace, in fact, where they prefer to use Commoners.”
The mageservant, which had stood as still as furniture while Anton examined it, suddenly came to life, making Anton jump back. It turned on its spindly wooden legs and clattered on oversized wooden feet to the sideboard, where it filled a glass with red-purple juice from a moisture-dewed crystal decanter. It brought the glass back and held it out to Anton. As he took it gingerly from the three-fingered hand and stared again at the convoluted glowing symbol on the blank wooden head, he thought, Magic is real.
He could almost see the Professor’s scowl. “No, it is not,” he would have said. “There is a rational explanation. We just have to find it.”
Just as he had been convinced that the Anomaly must also have some natural explanation, Anton thought. But then, if magic works… and it obviously does… than I suppose it is natural. By definition: anything that exists is natural. He smiled a little sadly. Though it had been his thought, that had sounded very much like Professor Carteri.
The Professor would have been the first to admit that natural philosophers did not yet know all the secrets of the workings of the universe. Confronted with the undeniable, he would have made room within his beliefs for magic… and then he would have set about learning everything he could about it.
Grief, momentarily forgotten, crashed in again. Professor Carteri was dead. Anton was alone, utterly alone, in a place far stranger than either of them had ever dreamed of finding inside the Anomaly. Anton stepped away from the bizarrely animated wooden figure and sat down hard in his chair. Head down, he blinked furiously to clear the embarrassing evidence of weakness from his vision, then raised his eyes to see Brenna looking at him compassionately… and curiously
… from across the table. She smiled, and a bit of the strangeness receded. At least he seemed to be a guest, not a prisoner, in this strange new world… and to have found a most pleasant guide to its mysterious ways.
And at least they weren’t going to starve him. The delectable smells wafting from his plate drove away his fears and doubts, at least for the moment, and he gave himself over to filling the deep, empty pit his stomach had become while he slept.
When the need to eat had become a little less urgent, Anton began to ask questions. The answers he received sounded like they came straight from one of those cheap magical-adventure novels he’d mentioned to Brenna. He would have dismissed it all as ludicrous fantasy if not for the unmistakable, solid fact of the mageservant, quickly and efficiently clearing away the dishes while Brenna talked.
What she told him boiled down to one astonishing fact. Within the mysterious Anomaly he and the Professor had come to this remote part of the world to investigate lay a hidden Kingdom where magic worked-a Kingdom, in fact, ruled by magicians: the MageLords.
Anton had never been very good at history back in Sutton Sterling’s Preparatory School, even before he’d run away and taken to the streets of Hexton Down. He’d focused most of his intellectual powers on the considerable challenges of evading the unwelcome attentions of the older boys, and sneaking off the school grounds to run wild through the streets. But he’d learned a few things during his apprenticeship with the Professor over the past three years, and he’d always been a voracious, if indiscriminate, reader. “MageLords” was a word he had come across before; it was the name given to the tyrannical rulers of an ancient empire that had once held sway over the great island now known as Krellend and a large portion of the west coast of the First Continent, including what was now the city of Hexton Down but had then been a tiny fishing village.
The MageLords had been driven from the mainland to Krellend, pursued by an army, retreating at last to their capital city of Stromencor. Presumably there had been a siege, and perhaps even a final battle. Stromencor might have fallen, or the MageLords might have rallied to push back the attackers. No one knew, because the city, the MageLords, and the surrounding armies of Commoners were all destroyed by an enormous natural disaster of some kind, a vast explosion-presumably volcanic-that had reduced the city to rubble, flattened forests and fields with a scorching wind, and burned every living thing caught within it to charred bones and drifting ashes. To this day, nothing grew on Krellend, where the very soil had been turned to glass and cinders.
On the mainland, the alliance against the MageLords had been short-lived. Petty kings had arisen and fought, towns were built, laid waste, rebuilt, abandoned. Gradually larger kingdoms had coalesced; and finally, some two hundred years ago now, the Union Republic had been forged from a dozen of those squabbling kingdoms. After a couple of civil wars, a new era of peace had unleashed a golden age of science, philosophy, art, and history.
From the very beginning of their study of the MageLord Empire, historians had been divided over exactly who or what the MageLords had been, and what the old records meant by “magic.” Since, self-evidently, magic was not real, the MageLords could not really have been the powerful wizards of the old stories. The prevailing opinion was that the MageLords had somehow leaped past their neighbors in technological know-how, their greater ability being interpreted as magic by those they conquered. The successful rebellion had supposedly been led by someone calling himself “The Magebane” (obviously a nom de guerre), who apparently stole the MageLords’ own “magical” technology and outfitted his own armies with it, allowing them to use their superior numbers to overrun the kingdom. The final cataclysm had simply been a coincidence, an astronomically (or perhaps geologically) unlikely coincidence, but a coincidence nonetheless.
But if Brenna spoke truth, the MageLords had been exactly what their name implied: lords of magic, with inborn abilities to manipulate matter and energy simply by force of will. They had used that power to create and then rule an empire. Cruelly, according to the history Anton had been taught; benevolently, according to Brenna. She claimed those long-gone MageLords had used their magic to help the nonmagical “Commoners” they ruled live happier and healthier lives. According to her, the uprising had not been against oppressive government, but based on religion. A new cult had sprung up that saw magic as a tool of the King of Demons, and had used the latent resentment of the MageLords among the various conquered peoples to eventually ignite the revolution that forced the MageLords to flee for their lives.
Anton had never heard of such a religion, but said nothing.
The conflagration that had destroyed Krellend, Brenna said, must have been the backlash of the enormous energy the MageLords had expended in transporting themselves and their loyal followers instantly to the other side of the world… here!… where they had founded the Kingdom of Evrenfels, and hidden themselves safely behind the Great Barrier.
That Barrier, Brenna said, would stand for at least another two centuries, then the MageLords would emerge peacefully into the larger world once more, a world hopefully purged of the superstition that had driven them into hiding, and once more bend their magical abilities to the betterment of all humanity.
“At least, that’s what I was taught,” Brenna said as she finished. Anton looked at her sharply-was that doubt in her voice?-but her expression was smooth and with her accent, he couldn’t be sure. He reached for another scone, wondering if Brenna shared his feeling that they were both skating on thin ice, circling the open water of the
