brought with them, for the four boats usually moored at the pier at the foot of the garden for the use of pleasure- seeking Palace dwellers bobbed right where they always were. Karl climbed into one, undid mooring ropes fore and aft, then unshipped the oars and pulled away from the shore.
It was cooler on the water and there was a little dampness on the seat. But he put the slight discomfort out of his mind. Rowing would soon warm him up, he thought, and so it did; by the time he had traveled a hundred yards, he was sweating.
With his back to the bow, he had a good view of the receding Palace, lit, like a jewel set in black velvet, by giant magelights. He watched for signs of alarm at his absence, or an attempt to rescue Verdsmitt, or anything at all out of the ordinary, but saw nothing. The Palace appeared serene, calm, and utterly unconcerned about possible threats.
The reflected Palace lights sparkled off the water all around him, his wake a glittering broken V-shape within it. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw the shore as a nearing band of black. Some distance beyond, he could see the sparse yellow lights of New Cabora on the other side of the Barrier, slightly distorted by its shimmer, but between the Barrier and those lights was more parkland, a kind of snowy moat symbolizing the impassable divide between the Commons and the Mageborn.
He was suddenly horribly aware that he must be as visible as a wart on an actor’s nose, cutting through the reflections on the water, but there was nothing he could do about it except hope that the Commoners he pursued were looking ahead, and not behind.
A few moments later he stole another look over his shoulder, saw that he had almost reached the shore, backwatered with his left oar to spin the boat around, and then shipped his oars and used just one to scull over the stern until the bow grounded, with a wet squelching sound, on the lakeshore.
He clambered over the bow and promptly sank kneedeep into thick, gooey mud. He struggled forward, lost one boot and then the other, fell forward and plunged elbowdeep into the black muck. Crawling, he finally reached firmer, weed-grown ground beyond. Giving up his boots as a lost cause, he forced his way barefoot through a thick hedge of bushes that grabbed at his clothes like grasping fingers, trying with every step to be silent and horribly aware just how miserably he was failing.
Once he was through the hedge, thankfully, the going became easier. He could see almost nothing, though, the lights of the Palace cut off by the hedge, the lights of New Cabora more emphasizing the darkness ahead than alleviating it.
He stopped and listened. Was that a murmur of voices? He stretched out prostrate on the grass, lowering the horizon, raised his head slightly-and perhaps another fifty paces ahead saw the silhouettes of men against the city glow. They seemed to be working on something, heads close together. Light flared, so bright it hurt Karl’s dark- accustomed eyes, and must have hurt the mysterious men’s eyes as well, since he heard a sharp curse. The darkness that followed seemed even deeper and more impenetrable than before, but then there came another flare of light, softer, and a different color, too, a dim blue that Karl associated with magic… except that around its edges it flared red. As he watched, it swelled, expanding like the glowing rim of flame spreading out through a piece of paper set alight by a candle.
And suddenly he realized what he was seeing: a hole, an opening in the Lesser Barrier, burned through it by something the two men carried.
The moment the hole was big enough, the two men slipped through. They turned, and pointed the whatever- itwas at the Barrier. The hole began to shrink, like a puddle draining from the middle. Without waiting to see it closed, the men turned away and began crossing the snow-covered parkland toward the city.
Suddenly realizing that he knew nothing about them, that he had no proof to show Falk of their existence, much less their ability to slip through the Barrier, Karl scrambled to his feet and dashed toward the Barrier, determined to make it through that impossible breach before it closed.
He might have made it, if the Barrier had closed at a steady rate. But when it was just big enough that he thought he could still fit through it, it suddenly collapsed, the red rim racing in toward the center of the blue glow like the last dregs of water slipping down a drain.
It was too late for Karl to stop his headlong rush. Knowing he was about to crash into the Barrier, hard and cold as a wall of ice, he turned himself at the last second so that his shoulder would take the brunt of the blow, steeled himself for the impact…
… and went sprawling into the snow on the other side of the Lesser Barrier, passing through it as though it was so much thin air.
The sudden cold took his breath away. He yelped, heard a surprised shout ahead of him, and then the two men he had followed across the lake were on him, one slapping a hand over his mouth and twisting his arm behind his back, the other holding a dagger to his throat.
A light flashed in his eyes: not a magelight, but something yellower, a lick of flame attached to a short piece of wood. It only lasted a moment, then was blown out.
“It’s the Prince!” hissed the man who had lit the flame. The dagger point pricked his skin, and he held perfectly still.
“That’s impossible,” said the one holding Karl. “How did he get through the Barrier?”
“It must not have closed…”
Karl felt, rather than saw, the first man shake his head. “No. You know how it closes with a rush at the end. He couldn’t have made it through.”
“But he did.”
“Yeah.” A pause. “So now what do we do with him?”
“Not our call. Gag him, bind him, bring him with us. The Patron will decide.”
“Then let’s be quick,” said the first man. “We’ve been here too long already, and this damned snow makes it too light. One of Falk’s bloody patrols could be by at any second.”
“Right.” Karl, already shivering, was rolled over and his face pushed down into the snow. He felt his hands seized, jerked behind him, and bound together with rope or cord of some kind; then he heard a ripping sound as his own shirt was torn apart, exposing even more of his skin to the chill air, but providing a strip of cloth that a moment later was pulled over his mouth and tied tightly behind his head.
His legs were left free. His captors hauled him to his feet and forced him to walk, his bare feet sinking into the snow with every step, already moving beyond cold to a kind of agonizing numbness.
After a few more steps, though, he had no words at all, and few thoughts. There was only one unbearable step after another, shivering so hard his teeth would surely have smashed themselves to flinders if not for the gag keeping them apart, as he was driven like a Commoner criminal away from the Palace and into the streets of New Cabora.
CHAPTER 11
Falk’s preliminary interrogation of Davydd Verdsmitt was unsatisfactory. The playwright didn’t seem to know what kind of trouble he was in, and simply sat there, a slight smile on his face, not responding to any of Falk’s questions. “Your celebrity status in the Commons will not protect you against charges of sedition,” Falk warned him at last.
“I do not expect it to,” Verdsmitt said. “But it does protect me against you doing what you would really like to do, which is torture me into confessing… something. Probably being behind the assassination attempt on Prince Karl.”
“Does it?” Falk growled.
“Not indefinitely,” Verdsmitt said. “I’m not naive enough to suppose that. But even you, Lord Falk, must hesitate before flouting the law so publicly as to torture a political prisoner-a very popular prisoner, if I do say so myself-who was arrested in full view of so many witnesses. I have many fans among the Mageborn-even among your fellow MageLords-as well as among the Commoners.” Verdsmitt shrugged. “If I had been writing the scene, I would have had the seditious playwright arrested in secret after the play had ended, and spirited away somewhere while a fictitious story of his being suddenly taken ill was spread about. No one would have believed it, but it would have provided cover. But you…” He shook his head. “Who writes your material, Lord Falk?”
