But the best way to strike, the best way to kill the King, would be up close and personal, and his own survival, he suddenly realized, was not only unnecessary, it wasn’t even something he desired.
The King would know, in that last moment, Verdsmitt thought, who was killing him, and why.
He may have thought he could not be with me in life, but I’ll make damn sure he’s with me in death.
Decision made, Verdsmitt took off his clothes in the dark, climbed into his empty bed, and slept a deep, untroubled sleep.
CHAPTER 28
As the airship approached the top of the Barrier from the east, Anton wished more fervently than ever that the Professor was still alive.
The burner was roaring, a blue flame ten feet long reaching up into the envelope; the propeller was a blur, spinning at top speed as it had been for the last half hour while Anton watched the needle of the fuel gauge almost visibly declining. They had been climbing steadily almost since they left the Palace, and yet still the wall of cloud that marked the Anomaly rose higher than they had yet reached.
The wind streaming over the Anomaly from the west formed a layer of tattered cloud above them. If it had been at all a windy day it would have been impossible, Anton thought; they would have had to return to the Palace and try again some other time. But the chattering propeller could still give them headway against today’s light breeze, and though fuel was low, they weren’t out of it yet, and so they continued to rise. Now the gray wall of the Barrier was so close Anton thought he could have had a good chance of hitting it with a rock, if he’d had one close enough to throw, and he could feel the chill of it.
He watched the streaming cloud marking the very top of the Barrier coming closer and closer above them. They would hit a strong headwind at that level, he knew, and if it threw them too far to the east, they might run out of fuel for the engine before they were able to regain the ground lost.
“Gotta dump ballast,” he muttered. “Pop through that, get to the quieter air above it.”
He glanced at Spurl, the Mageborn guard who had accompanied him. He’d hoped the man might at least take instruction as they flew, but Spurl had spent the whole journey cowering in the bottom of the gondola, unwilling to even look over the side. He sat there now, eyes closed, moaning, rocking back and forth.
I wish Brenna were with me, Anton thought again. Though she had no experience in flying an airship, at least she had shown herself to have a cool head.
But Brenna was back at the Palace, and Anton was heading the other way.
The ragged gray clouds streaming over the Barrier were close above them. The envelope would enter them within minutes, and almost certainly they would be thrown back when that happened. He had to act now.
He scrambled over the legs of the guard. He didn’t want to repeat what he had done when he and Brenna were fleeing the manor and release all the ballast at once; if he did, they might find themselves so high they’d not only be gasping for air, they’d pass out and could even asphyxiate before the airship dipped back into thicker air.
But releasing too little would be almost as disastrous.
He hesitated, then decided to follow the simplest course. There were four rows of sandbags on each side of the gondola. He released two buckles on each side, letting half the ballast fall.
Instantly the airship surged upward. Within seconds the envelope was inside the streaming layer of cloud, and as Anton had feared, they were pushed away from the Barrier despite the propeller’s best efforts; but they were rising so rapidly that they were through that layer of cloud and wind within half a minute, and above it the air was much calmer. Almost at once they began to regain their lost ground.
Anton anxiously watched the fuel gauge. It seemed he could almost see it dropping toward empty… but now they were over the Barrier itself. He could look straight down at that enormous wall of fog, and then suddenly he was looking down at the land outside the Barrier, terrain very much the same but completely uncultivated, wild prairie with grass so tall that even after three months of snow the fields were more brown than white.
Anton cut the burner. They wanted to descend now, not climb, and they quickly began to do so as the cold air sucked heat from the envelope. He searched the ground below them anxiously. His navigation had been iffy at best, and he wasn’t entirely sure where they had crossed the Anomaly. But he hoped…
Ah! There, a smudge of smoke near the horizon, a dark stain on the snow-covered prairie. Elkbone, the town he and the Professor had left what seemed like a lifetime ago, though in fact it had been less than two weeks. He looked at Spurl, and smirked. The hand-picked minion who was supposed to enforce Anton’s deliverance of Falk’s reassuring lies to the poor deluded Commoners on this side of the Barrier was currently throwing up his guts over the side of the gondola.
Welcome to my world, Anton thought. Let’s see what survives of MageLord arrogance when the gentlemen of the press descend on us with flashbulbs popping.
Anton had every reason to believe they would still be there. It hadn’t been all that long, really, and since no railpath ran from Elkbone to Wavehaven, travel in winter was fraught with danger. Most of the reporters who had covered the launch had traveled here before the snow fell in the same caravan as he, the Professor, and the airship. They would be unlikely to go back until the weather warmed in spring.
They could send their words and images, though, thanks to the electromissive lines that had been strung along the road that would someday be a railpath, and that meant that whatever was said here would, before nightfall, be making news in Wavehaven. Two or three weeks later, when ships reached Hexton Down across the ocean, the President of the Union Republic would know of it. What he would do about it was out of Anton’s hands.
What wasn’t out of his hands was what he would do about it.
He would not leave Brenna at the mercy of Falk and Mother Northwind one minute longer than he had to.
The engines sputtered and the propeller stopped spinning as they swung low over a treed ridge just northeast of Elkbone. They’d obviously been spotted. People were streaming out of the town to meet them, pouring into the open field they were now drifting across. Anton watched the ground approaching and hoped the fools directly beneath him would be smart enough to move out of the way before several hundred pounds of gondola, burner, engines, propeller, and passengers landed on their heads.
At the last moment, with trees approaching and the ground still a little farther away than he would have liked, he pulled the ropes that opened the vents on the top of the envelope. Air rushed out, the envelope sagged, and with great finality, the gondola dropped the last few feet to the snow, hitting with a thump that Anton, holding on tightly, managed to weather standing up.
Spurl wasn’t as prepared, nor as fortunate. He went sprawling, banging his head on the burner and opening his scalp. And so, as the crowd swarmed around the gondola, Anton climbed out to face them while Lord Falk’s chosen emissary moaned and clutched his bloody skull in the bottom of the basket.
As he’d suspected, the reporters were there, shouted questions bombarding him so quickly he couldn’t have answered them if he wanted to, flashes from bulky black imagers half-blinding him. He looked around rather desperately for someone official, and saw him: Ronal Ferkkisson, the Lord Mayor, a short, round man with a red face, pushing his way through the crowds with the help of a quartet of beefy policemen in green capes. “Clear the way, clear the way,” the policemen growled as they approached, shoving people aside with oak truncheons. They managed to open a space next to the gondola for Ferkkisson, “Anton?” he said, peering up at him.
“Lord Mayor,” Anton said.
“Where’s Professor Carteri?”
“Dead, Your Honor,” Anton said.
“Dead!” Ferkkisson shook his head. “I knew it was suicide to cross the Anomaly.”
Um, hello, I’m right here and very much alive, Anton felt like saying, but didn’t. “Your Honor, I have urgent news,” he said. Then he raised his voice. “News that needs to get to the entire Republic!” he said loudly enough for all the reporters to hear.
Ferkkisson licked his lips. “News? What kind of news?”
“There are people on the other side of the Anomaly,” Anton said. “A giant kingdom, hidden from us… until
