though it weren’t there.”
Magebane, Mother Northwind thought. As if there were still any doubt after the assassination attempt…
She waited a moment before speaking, thinking. The Prince’s disappearance would certainly put a kink in Falk’s Plan, though it might or might not be a fatal one, depending on how cleverly he managed it. But as for her own Plan…
It made no difference, she decided. In fact, if anything, things would be easier to manage with the Prince in her hands.
I’d have ordered him kidnapped myself if I’d thought we could get away with it, she thought wryly.
“Very well,” she said at last. “An interesting development. Vinthor, you must get the Prince out of the city tonight, before he is missed from the Palace. Lord Falk will tear New Cabora apart to find him. Use the safe house in Mouse Valley. You must get him there before daybreak. Can you do that?”
“Yes, Patron,” Vinthor said.
“Good. Also, warn all of your contacts, and have them warn theirs , that Falk is about to launch a crackdown on the Commons unlike anything we have seen thus far. We may be advancing the timetable.”
“Yes, Patron.”
“Thank you for contacting me, Vinthor. And congratulations on the successful completion of your mission. Death to the MageLords-liberty for the Commons!”
“Death to the MageLords-liberty for the Commons!” Vinthor echoed, and the magelink vanished with a soft pop.
Endgame, Mother Northwind thought. Though perhaps not playing out quite as I foresaw. Still, I can make it work. She lay down once more. So Prince Karl had passed through the Lesser Barrier as though it weren’t there. Could he do the same with the Greater?
She suspected he could. Magebane, she thought with great satisfaction. The only weapon with which one can strike at the tyranny of the MageLords…
… and a weapon that now is firmly in my grasp.
CHAPTER 13
In the morning, it was as though the strange midnight visit with Brenna had never happened.
Anton sat in the same breakfast nook as he had two days before, eating the same breakfast, albeit with slightly less desperation. In fact, he found he was hardly hungry at all this morning, and picked at the food.
For her part, Brenna chatted blandly about the weather, and the upcoming Springfest, and would Anton like to visit the village of Overbridge, and what kind of music did they play in the Outside world, and…
Anton understood why she was doing it, with one of the few human servants standing by, but it still almost drove him mad to talk about such inconsequential things after what Brenna had told him in the night.
But after what seemed an eternity, though it was really only about an hour, Brenna dabbed her lips with her handkerchief-Anton gave his own a quick wipe, as well-and got to her feet. “Well,” she said. “Let’s see how those mageservants have gotten on with your airship, shall we? I’m sure Lord Falk will want a progress report magelinked to him.”
Magelinks, Anton had guessed, must serve the same purpose inside the Anomaly as electromissives did outside. “Yes, let’s,” he said with false brightness to match Brenna’s own, which earned him a slightly annoyed but also amused warning look in return.
Despite Falk’s assurances, Anton had not really believed the mageservants could repair all the damage to the airship in… what, a day and three quarters? But when he and Brenna, after nodding to Gannick, bent in concentration over that eerie desk of his, emerged into the back courtyard, he gasped.
There was the airship-the Professor’s airship-looking exactly as it had when the Professor had first showed it to him, just before terrifying him by informing him that someday soon he would be flying in it.
“I don’t believe it,” Anton said. He circled the gondola, examined the connections between it and the burner and the engine, noted the fresh sandbags hung on the outside of the wicker basket like heavy brown fruit, checked the rigging, the rudder, and the propeller. “It’s
… perfect.”
“Then it will fly?” said Brenna, still brightly, but with an undercurrent of the urgency she had expressed in the middle of the night.
“No,” Anton said. “Not until we can fill the envelope.” He pointed to the long, flat blue worm of cloth lying on the ground beside the gondola.
“And that’s what the burner does?” Brenna gestured at the copper stovelike device in the middle of the gondola.
“Yes,” Anton said. “But it needs fuel.”
“Fuel?”
“Rock gas,” Anton said. “Compressed rock gas. We were out when we crashed. Without it…” He shook his head. “Without it, the airship won’t fly.”
“But it’s got to,” Brenna said, the false cheeriness replaced by naked desperation. “We can’t be here when Lord Falk returns. Either of us.”
“I can’t just snap my fingers and make it fly,” Anton said. “It’s not…” He bit off the last word.
“Magic?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes.” She stared at the airship. “So what you really need,” she said slowly, “is hot air.”
“To fill the airship, yes,” Anton said. “But we also have to have a source of hot air on board. Otherwise, we go up, but we come down very fast… about seven hundred feet a minute. You can slow that some by throwing out ballast. If you can lift with a lot of ballast, you can stay aloft longer, because you have more ballast to toss away as you lose altitude.”
“And this ‘ballast’… that’s the sandbags?”
“Yes,” Anton said. He studied the gondola, hung with new sandbags the mageservants had somehow made. They didn’t look like the sandbags they’d left Elkbone with, but they were bags, and they were filled with sand, so they’d do. “Twice as many, if we can get them. There’s a water tank in the base of the gondola, too, but I don’t think we should fill that; in this weather, it would freeze and it would be impossible to empty it… but, Brenna, this is all impossible. If we don’t have the burner, we can’t fill the airship, or stay aloft long enough to get very far away. We’ll have to risk escaping on foot.”
“Suicide,” Brenna said. “Even if the men-at-arms don’t get us, the cold will.” She glanced over her shoulder; a man-at-arms, no doubt sent by Gannick, had emerged and was watching them. “I’ve been remiss in my duties as host,” she said, brightly and loudly. “I have yet to complete your tour of the house.”
“But-”
“I’m sure you’ll find it ‘uplifting,’” Brenna said. Anton got the hint, though he couldn’t imagine what she could show him that would solve their problem…
… until, after touring him past some rather pedestrian statues on the front lawn and the covered hulk of what he was told was a magical musical fountain, Brenna took him through a door in the kitchen into the servants’ corridors, and from there through another door and down a long flight of stone stairs.
As they started their descent, Anton heard a distant roar. It grew in volume until, as they emerged into a vaulted underground chamber, it sounded like an enormous waterfall. But Anton couldn’t see anything except for a strange blue glow, like and yet very unlike the glow of the ubiquitous magelights. Brenna didn’t try to talk above the noise, just led him through the first strangely warm chamber into an adjoining one that was more than just warm: it was stifling.
Anton gaped at the source of both the heat and the noise: a massive torch, a shrieking, howling blue flame, balanced over a fissure in the rock and splaying tentacles of fire across the ceiling above. “The energy source for all the magic in Lord Falk’s demesne,” Brenna shouted. “The manor was built here because of this natural outpouring of rock gas. It was set alight more than seven hundred years ago and has never faltered.”
“The biggest burner of them all,” Anton shouted. If he took even half a dozen steps forward, he was sure its
