petty defiance led.
“We therefore require anyone with knowledge of the Prince’s whereabouts, or the method by which he was taken, or the identities and whereabouts of the leaders of the Common Cause, in particular the one known as the Patron, to make themselves and their information known to us.”
He glared around at the crowd. The Royal guard hemmed those gathered with a line of blue and silver, insuring there would be no trouble. As reinforcements, Falk had even called in soldiers from the army barracks, their white winter uniforms harder to see among the snowdrifts around the square, stationed to prevent access to or from the surrounding streets.
The guards had shaped the crowd as Falk had commanded, so that to his right there was a large open space between the wall of the watchful guards and the red-brickand-limestone City Hall with its recently added clock tower, officially opened by Prince Karl just three months ago. That tower, Falk had been told by Brich, boasted the latest Commoner cleverness, mechanical automatons in the shape of men and women and children and animals that emerged with clanging cymbals, jingling tambourines and ringing bells, to mark the passage of time. The Commoners, Brich said, had an inordinate fondness for the clock and City Hall itself, which had just reached the ripe old age of 150 years.
“Lest anyone thinks we are not serious about obtaining this information,” Lord Falk said quietly, “let this prove otherwise.”
He had enchanted the object he pulled from his cloak himself, working for an hour to pour into it the necessary amount of energy from the roaring coal-fed fires of the Palace’s MageFurnace. It was a simple wooden ball, such as a child might play with, but even through the heavily insulated glove he wore he could feel its deadly cold. It smoked, the very air that touched it condensing like water on its surface, then falling away in a puff of white.
“For every day that the Commoners of New Cabora fail to tell the MageLords what we wish to know about the disappearance of Prince Karl and the leaders of the Common Cause, this will be the fate of a building.”
And with an effort of will, he hurled the smoking ball out of his hand, above the wide-eyed faces of the Commoners, over the helmeted heads of the guards and, with a tinkling crash, through one of City Hall’s multi- paned windows.
Lord Falk waited just the right amount of time… and then exerted the very little bit more will required to activate the magic packed so densely into the ball.
Blue-white light, brighter than the sun, flashed through the windows of City Hall. The windows themselves simply… vanished, the wooden frames and glass alike instantly vaporized.
In the aftermath of the flash, the sunlight seemed faded. Gloom gripped the square. And then City Hall… collapsed.
The roof went first, falling into the suddenly hollow interior as the beams that had held it crumbled into ash. The walls followed. The tower stood for one moment all by itself, and then collapsed straight down, rock grinding to dust that billowed across the Square. The massive mechanism of the clock hit the stones with a great ringing crash that shook the pedestal on which Falk stood.
Falk heard soft sobs from the crowd of Commoners, then coughs as the dust clouds swept over them. “Every day, another building falls,” he said, his voice thundering from the globe overhead. “Every day.. . until someone tells me what I want to know.”
He raised a hand and flicked the glowing ball out of existence, then nodded to Captain Fedric. The guards pushed the Commoners out of the way, holding them back as Falk strode between them, back toward the Palace. He would not have been surprised to hear them cursing him, even surging forward to try to get their hands on him, but in fact they stood all but silent, as though numbed by the power he had just demonstrated.
We have been too lenient too long, Falk thought. This Kingdom belongs to the Mageborn. It’s time the Commoners remembered that.
After what he had just done, he did not think they would forget again anytime soon. He allowed himself a small smile at that thought; a smile that vanished as he crossed the bridge that led from New Cabora into the Palace grounds and saw Brich waiting for him, face pale in the blue magelight glowing above the guardhouse at the bridge’s far end.
Falk, seeing him, suspected that just when he thought his very bad day was almost over, it was instead about to get much worse.
“Lord Falk,” Brich said as Falk and his bodyguards reached him. “I have… disturbing news.”
“Why am I not surprised? One moment.” Falk turned to Captain Fedric. “Dismiss your men with my thanks.”
“Yes, my lord.”
As Fedric turned to talk to his men, Falk nodded toward the Palace. “Let’s walk.” Once out of earshot of the guards, he continued. “Now, Brich. What news?”
“Brenna has fled the manor,” Brich said.
Falk prided himself on maintaining a steely composure in the face of almost any provocation, but that simple sentence stopped him in his tracks. “ What? ”
“In the company of Anton, the boy from Outside,” Brich continued steadily. “In his flying device.”
Falk literally did not know what to say. The disappearance of the Prince was a disruption in the Plan. But the disappearance of Brenna was… catastrophic. Without her in his control, ready to be slain at the crucial moment, there was no Plan.
“Details,” he grated out at last, and resumed walking, much more quickly, toward the Palace.
But of details, it seemed, there was a shortage. Gannick had been aware that the boy was trying to fix the airship, and had thought nothing of it, since that was the task he and the mageservants had been set, though he had made sure that a man-at-arms kept an eye on both Brenna and the boy. But then the back door had suddenly opened and that man-at-arms had been tossed, bleeding and senseless, into the hallway by a mageservant, which had then slammed the door shut.
Gannick had seized his control wand and tried to run out into the courtyard, but a mageservant, obviously under a command to let no one into the yard, attacked him so quickly he couldn’t use the wand on it. As he scrambled for safety, he glimpsed Brenna and Anton in the gondola of the airship, which was straining at its ropes. He’d called out the other men-at-arms. The mageservants had been quickly dealt with… six destroyed, and despite everything else Falk winced at the thought of how much each of those cleverly made and fiendishly expensive magical marionettes cost… but they had given Anton just the amount of time he needed. The airship had shot skyward, “Quick as an arrow,” Gannick said, rising so far and fast that it was only a tiny blue dot in the sky in seconds. They had watched it start to drift to the northeast. The men-at-arms had mounted and ridden after it, but the heavy brush and snow in that direction had slowed them to a crawl, and soon they had turned back, defeated.
“Are you certain there is no magic in that device, my lord?” Brich said. “Gannick said they opened the back of a chimney and drew on the heat of the Mage Fire.”
Falk snorted. “He needed the hot air, Brich. That’s all.”
Brich frowned, clearly not understanding, but said nothing.
That suited Falk, who was thinking furiously, picturing a map of the Kingdom. Northeast would take the airship to the Great Lake, this time of year an enormous sheet of windswept ice rather than an inland sea. And northeast of that, if they somehow made it clear across, lay only wilderness, home to the Minik, the native people driven from the South by the arrival of the MageLords eight centuries ago.
What those primitive savages would make of a giant airship dropping into their midst, Falk couldn’t imagine.
The trouble was he had no idea how far the airship could go. It had not traveled far in miles from the town Anton had described on the other side of the Barrier before coming down in Falk’s backyard, but Falk suspected a lot of that had had to do with the unusual conditions that prevailed above the Barrier. If he understood the airship’s principle well enough, it would gradually descend as the air in its envelope cooled. If the burner still worked, they could use it to stay aloft longer, but its reservoir of rock gas was empty and they certainly hadn’t been able to fill that in Falk’s manor. They could throw out ballast for a time to stay aloft, but eventually…
If he only knew how far it had risen, how fast the winds were blowing, and the rate of descent, he could easily calculate their approximate landing point. But he knew none of those things.
