now.”
Astonished murmurs and whispers ran through the crowd, followed by the hisses of people shushing each other so they could hear what he would say next.
Here goes, Anton thought. Taking a deep breath, he added, “They call themselves the MageLords.”
That brought an enormous rush of sound, from gasps to catcalls to outright laughter. Reporters scribbled furiously in their notebooks, smirking. Anton remembered when he would have reacted the same, when “MageLords” had been nothing more to him than the villains in children’s fairy tales.
“Can they do magic?” someone shouted.
“Can they make things disappear?” yelled someone else.
“Did they pull a rabbit out of a boot?” someone else called.
Anton hesitated, wondering how to convince them-
– and then Spurl took care of the problem for him.
The Royal guard looked like something out of a nightmare as he pulled himself to his full height inside the gondola. Blood had streamed down his face, masking his features in red, and then poured down his silver breastplate, giving him the look of someone who had survived, by the skin of his teeth, a horrifying beating. He stared around at the assembled people. They stared back.
And then, as one, the reporters with imagers raised them and started capturing pictures.
Brilliant white flashes exploded all around. Anton winced and turned his eyes away. But Spurl…
It was probably inevitable, Anton thought later, that a Mageborn guard would interpret flashing lights as a magical attack. And inevitable, too, that someone who had just discovered a terror of flying and a tendency to airsickness and had just hit his head would react so instinctively to that perceived attack.
Spurl screamed and thrust out his hands, palms up. A flash of blue hurled everyone within fifty feet of the gondola onto their backs as though struck by a giant fist. Men, women, and children sprawled into the snow. Bones broke as people slammed into each other. Blood ran from scalps and noses, staining the snow. Spurl looked beyond the fallen, moaning spectators to those outside the circle of the attack, who stood in frozen shock. He raised his hands again-
A rifle shot rang out, loud even above the screams of the people scrambling to their feet now and trying to flee.
Spurl jerked. Eyes wide, he stared down at the neat round hole in the middle of his breastplate. As blood pumped from the hole he gave Anton a bewildered glance… then his eyes rolled up in his head and he dropped like a stone into the bottom of the gondola, dead before he hit the wicker.
Anton felt something running down his cheek and wiped away a dribble of Spurl’s blood. For a moment, everything had fallen still, the sudden violence freezing everyone in place; but now chaos erupted.
It was much, much later before Anton had the opportunity to continue his story, officially to the Lord Mayor, unofficially (and very much against Ferkkisson’s wishes, but tough luck) to the reporters. After Spurl’s display, he suddenly found it much easier to convince them all of the reality of the magical kingdom on the other side of the Barrier-and the threat that Kingdom would pose if Lord Falk succeeded in lowering the Barrier and moving into the Outside world.
The stories flew out along the electromissive wires long before Ferkkisson’s official report was ready. Anton had watched the news cycle long enough to know what would happen. The stories would hit the papers. The government would have no comment because no official report had yet been received. When it did arrive, the government would be a day behind, playing catch-up as editorial writers demanded action against this new threat. Maybe they’ll build a whole fleet of airships , Anton thought. Wouldn’t the Professor have been thrilled to see that?
It would take weeks to get much in the way of military to the Anomaly; it was simply too remote. But Falk did not intend to act until after the snow was gone, Anton knew. And when he did emerge, he would find, not a small populace completely unprepared for his assault, but fully trained military armed with the same kind of modern weapons-and far more-that had just made short work of Falk’s hand-selected emissary.
If you want to set up your nasty little magical dictatorship in our world, Anton thought savagely, you’re going to have to fight for it.
But Anton didn’t intend to sit around and wait. He told Ferkkisson he would take the airship west to Wavehaven, to give the governor there an eyewitness account of everything he had seen in Evrenfels. In response to that promise, Ferkkisson spared no expense outfitting the airship for the journey. It took a few days, but at the end of it, the fuel tank was full, the engine cleaned, tuned, and freshly oiled, the burner polished, the ballast replaced, the envelope mended, frayed ropes replaced, stores loaded. Spurl’s blood had been mostly cleaned from the wicker, although a dark stain remained that Anton thought would never come out. And there were new additions, “in case of being forced down in the wilderness,” Anton had explained. A pistol, a rifle, and plenty of ammunition for both; and, at his hip, a long hunting knife with a bone handle.
On a morning whose mild air held a hint of the spring to come, Anton shook Lord Mayor Ferkkisson’s hand, waved to the crowd that had come out to see him off, posed for some final pictures, and then climbed into the gondola.
“Cast off!” he shouted to the men at the tie-down ropes, and as one, they released them. The gondola began to rise. Anton fired the burner, and lifted faster. He waved one last time to the crowd.
No doubt there was great consternation twenty minutes later when Anton fired up the propellers, seized the tiller-and steered, not west toward the distant mountains and the coast beyond, but east toward the Anomaly.
He hoped the Lord Mayor wouldn’t have an apoplectic fit, but either way, Anton was heading back to where he really wanted and needed to be:
Wherever Brenna was.
For Brenna, the journey from the Cauldron back to the Palace was as silent as before… but the silence had a different quality. Falk’s anger seemed to infuse the very air in the magecarriage. Anniska sat sunken in gloom, obviously regretting he had ever become involved, but trapped without hope of escape now. The guard sat impassively as always, but Brenna thought even his face showed more strain than before: something in the set of the jaw and the frown lines between his bushy black eyebrows.
As for herself, she had far too much time to think, far too much time to see, over and over in her mind’s eye, that horrible moment when the boy had slit his own throat, and far too much time to second-guess her decision, driven by anger and disgust, to tell Lord Falk how Mother Northwind had betrayed him.
Mother Northwind at least meant to keep her alive. Falk’s Plan, if it were to succeed, required her death. Had she committed suicide as surely as the boy by telling him the truth?
Well, if I have, she thought, at least I did so of my own free will!
It seemed cold comfort, more bravado than bravery, as she remembered Falk holding her in a tight embrace at the very edge of the platform over the Cauldron, his body pressed against her in a travesty of affection. Falk had every intention of returning her to that spot, to stand once more above the heaving lake, and next time to, she supposed, to slice her throat as wide open as that boy’s.
Maybe, she thought. But not right away. I’ve escaped him once. I can do it again.
But last time she had had Anton’s help… and now he was Falk’s twisted tool, and SkyMage-knew-where on the other side of the Barrier. It seemed doubtful he would ever return.
Mother Northwind still needs me, Brenna reminded herself. And she may not be as easy to defeat as Falk seems to think. With the two of them battling, perhaps there will be an opportunity to…
But her imagination failed her. She couldn’t plan, because she couldn’t even guess what awaited her at the Palace.
All she could do was try to remain ready, try to remain alert, try to remain…
… angry, she thought.
And with that thought, she found something to keep her occupied during the rest of the long journey back to the Palace. She sat in silence, and whenever her thoughts began sliding toward despair or self-pity, she turned them again to anger, anger at her supposed guardian, for whom she was nothing more than a vessel in which to capture the Keys, a vessel he would then smash and discard like a badly made pot to claim the Keys for himself; anger at Mother Northwind, manipulating, killing, twisting, so convinced of the righteousness of her cause that any evil she might commit could be excused; anger at King Kravon, lost in a hedonistic haze for decades, blind to the machinations going on all around him; and, finally and ultimately, anger at the Mageborn, convinced that their ability
