heat would singe the hair from his arms and eyebrows. “But how do we get hot air from down here into the airship?”
Brenna pointed up. Anton blinked, trying to see through the heat-shimmer and licking flames. There were dark openings in the rock above, which made sense; they would have been asphyxiated long before they descended to this level, and the fire would burn itself out in moments, if there were no outlets for the byproducts of its combustion.
“Where do they come up?” he shouted.
“Various places,” she shouted back. “One of which is not far from the airship… a chimney on the back of the manor, that heats the servants’ quarters.”
“A chimney?” Anton shook his head. “No good. How do we get the air down from a chimney to the airship?”
“We don’t,” Brenna shouted. “We take it from the bottom of the chimney. We knock a hole in it-”
“How?” Anton demanded.
Brenna spread her hands. “My guardian is not the only one who can command mageservants,” she said.
“There’s still the problem of replenishing the hot air while we’re in the air,” Anton said. “Otherwise it’ll be a short trip and a hard landing.”
“I’ve got an idea for that, too,” Brenna said. She told him what she had in mind, and for the first time, Anton felt a flickering of hope. If they could fill the airship, get away before the men-at-arms realized what was happening, and keep it aloft for a reasonable amount of time…
… and land it without killing themselves, he thought uneasily
…
The winds would blow them east, deeper into the Kingdom. With no fuel for the engine, he couldn’t take the airship back over the Anomaly. Still, they’d be somewhere else, somewhere far away from Falk and his minddestroying witch.
“We’ll need a hosepipe,” he said, thinking.
“We can get one,” Brenna said.
They made their way up to the courtyard. The man-at-arms hadn’t followed them down into the cellar, from which there was only the one exit, but he was waiting for them when they emerged. He planted himself on the back steps, looking bored, and paid them little heed as they walked over to the chimney. Even on this side it was hot enough to melt the snow from the cobblestones, so that a ragged semicircle of pavement gleamed wetly despite the icy chill, which had deepened since Anton’s arrival.
Anton glanced at the man-at-arms. “Won’t he try to stop us?” he said in a low voice.
“Why should he?” Brenna murmured back. “He knows we’re supposed to be getting the airship ready to fly. He doesn’t have a clue how it works, so anything we do…”
“… is all right with him,” Anton finished. “Nice.” He touched the chimney’s bricks, then snatched back his hand. “Lots of heat,” he said. “Now if only we can get it into the envelope.”
“We can,” Brenna said. Although many of the mageservants had gone back to their regular tasks of household maintenance, a half-dozen stood idle in case more work was required. “I can’t just will them to act the way Lord Falk does,” she said. “No one else in the household can. We have to use this.” She pulled something from her pocket, a short, narrow cylinder of wood with a glass ball on one end that glowed blue.
Anton couldn’t help laughing. “A magic wand?”
Brenna gave him a curious look. “I suppose you could call it that-it’s magic, and it’s a sort of wand. But I don’t know why you find that so funny.”
Anton only shook his head, thinking of street “magicians” he had seen gulling a living from tourists with their misdirection and sleight of hand. They all used magic wands. He’d even heard one once claim that his magic wand was an ancient artifact of the legendary MageLords. But their wands were usually much longer, much more impressive, than this little stubby…
He grinned suddenly. Well, he thought, they do say that size isn’t everything.
Brenna was looking at him curiously, and he flushed, glad she couldn’t read his thoughts. “So… how does it work?”
“It’s been enchanted to take verbal orders and… translate them, I guess is the word… to magical orders for the mageservants. It’s how Gannick orders them about.” Holding the “wand” in her gloved right hand she went over to one of the mageservants and touched the blue symbol on its polished wooden head. “These orders are for all mageservants within this courtyard,” she said clearly. The five other mageservants suddenly twitched and stood up straighter. She lifted the wand from the glowing symbol and looked at Anton. “Tell me what they need to do, and I’ll repeat it to them,” she said. “Be as clear as you can. They’re… very literal.”
Anton remembered a childhood fable, “The MageLord’s Apprentice,” in which the hapless helper of a MageLord learned enough magic to set the MageLord’s magical minions to scrubbing the stonework, but not enough to stop them from scrubbing it to dust, so that the MageLord had returned to find his castle in rubble and his apprentice buried within it.
He also remembered that at the end of the story the MageLord turned on his heel and walked away, leaving his apprentice to suffocate beneath the weight of his own folly.
He shuddered. “I’ll be precise,” he said, and he did the best he could.
Brenna placed the wand back on the symbol on the mageservant’s face, and repeated the instruction almost word for word-almost, because she took it on herself to rephrase some of his clumsier sentences. He thought of “The MageLord’s Apprentice” again, and couldn’t blame her.
“Carry out my orders,” she said at last, and lifted the wand.
The man-at-arms watched with interest as two of the mageservants, having disappeared momentarily in the direction of the tool shed in one corner of the courtyard, returned with hammers and chisels. He actually descended the steps to watch as they attacked the chimney bricks with inhuman strength and precision. “Should they be doing that?” he said.
“Yes,” Brenna said shortly. “They should.” He gave her a skeptical look. “Lord Falk wants this flying device operational,” she said. “I don’t think he’ll begrudge a few bricks from a chimney to achieve that.”
“Miss, I personally think you and the young man here are both a few bricks short of a chimney if you think you can get this pile of rubbish to fly without magic,” the man-at-arms said with equanimity, and returned to his post.
Despite having been on the receiving end of that bit of wit, Anton still grinned appreciatively.
While two of the mageservants were dismantling a section of the chimney, the others disappeared inside. In a few minutes, two of them emerged with more of the oddlooking sandbags, which Anton had finally realized were flour sacks. “Where are they getting the sand?” he asked Brenna as he watched the magical marionettes hang the bags on the ropes on both sides of the basket.
“Groundskeeper shed, out front in the gardens,” Brenna said.
The other two came out with something quite different: a small stove, with a tall, narrow chimney. Anton watched them bring it over to the gondola and place it inside, and as they next headed to the coal shed, he climbed into the basket and manhandled the stove into place next to the useless burner, pointing the chimney up into the envelope. The small stove normally resided inside the extra magecarriage Falk kept at the manor, and came with bellows to fire it up when more heat was needed quickly. Brenna had suggested, and Anton hoped, that perhaps, if they pumped the bellows, they could produce enough heat to slow their descent, though he knew it could never put out enough to keep them aloft indefinitely. At least it will be extra ballast we can throw overboard in an emergency, he thought.
The mageservants returned with a bag of coal each. While he lit and stoked the little stove, the two working on the chimney abruptly opened a small hole, scorching air roaring out, creating a plume of white fog that billowed skyward. Anton jumped over the side of the gondola and ran over to where Brenna stood by the chimney.
Two of the mageservants that had been carrying sandbags now emerged from the house with a huge coil of canvas hosepipe, also liberated from the gardener’s shed, Anton figured. The two that had brought him the stove and coal went into the tool shed, coming out after a moment with a piece of heavy wood and an assortment of tools.
Anton’s instructions-at least as modified by Brenna-seemed to have been clear. Within moments the mageservants had cut a round hole in the wood exactly the right size to take the hose, bound the hole in place with
