there.
Malia, though relieved to see Mother Northwind was not dead, as had been rumored, was still understandably upset to hear that Falk had murdered her sister in a fit of rage, but Mother Northwind did not have time to allow her to grieve for very long before laying a sympathetic hand on her arm and guiding her anger to a more productive purpose: helping Mother Northwind escape from the Palace.
It proved to be less of a challenge than she had feared. The Palace was not a fortress, after all, but a glorified apartment and office building, with numerous entrances and exits, some of them quite
… obscure. Mother Northwind’s quick rummage through Malia’s mind revealed one known to only a few. In fact, it was not officially an entrance at all. Certainly it would not show up on any map of the building or the grounds.
Most of the MageLords preferred to stay within the immediate vicinity of the Palace, but the Lesser Barrier was a full two miles in diameter. Southeast of the Palace, a sheltered grove grew close to the Barrier. Screened by bushes from passersby… although almost no one ever did pass it by… it was a place where the Commoner servants who lived in the Palace could slip for assignations forbidden by their Mageborn masters. Malia had made much use of it, in the company of the personal manservant of Lord Athol.
Ignoring the glimpses of those passionate encounters she found in Malia’s surface memories, Mother Northwind focused on getting Malia to show her how she got to the grove unobserved… and so found out about the woodshored tunnel that led from a dark corner of the MageFurnace’s blackened chamber to a trapdoor hidden beneath dirt and leaves beneath the low-hanging branches of a spruce.
With a little encouragement, Malia insisted on showing Mother Northwind to that tunnel. The servants’ hall gave them access down to the MageFurnace level, where they passed through a brick corridor that ran parallel to the Furnace itself, the heat radiating from one wall so great that Mother Northwind, panting for air as she followed Malia, thought her fingers would blister if she touched it.
Blessedly the corridor was short, and they were soon climbing up through the cool tunnel, emerging into the quiet darkness beneath the spruce and then hurrying through the manicured grounds to the lovers’ nest in the bushes.
Inside its confines, Mother Northwind turned to thank Malia, taking her hand in hers.
Five minutes later Malia suddenly started and looked around her, Mother Northwind forgotten, thinking her lover had just left and she had best hurry back to the Palace before she was missed. She returned the way she had come, and when the First Servant came to her room shortly thereafter, he found her sewing a ripped blouse by lantern light, unaware that Mother Northwind had vanished… or that her much-loved younger sister had died in the blast unleashed in Mother Northwind’s chambers.
By the time Malia heard the news and dissolved into wailing sorrow, Mother Northwind, who had slipped through the Barrier without incident using the device Verdsmitt had enchanted, was already en route to the nightsoil collector’s stable to join the Heir and the Magebane, the pieces of her Plan once more, she thought with satisfaction, firmly in her hands.
Tonight, she thought. There is no need to wait longer. Tonight I will tell Verdsmitt to strike, the King will die, the Keys will come to Brenna, the Magebane will break them… and the rule of the MageLords ends.
And then, she thought, pulling her cloak tighter around her against the cold blasts as she slipped like a gray ghost through the shadows of the alleyways, far from where Falk’s guards were tearing houses apart in their search for Karl and Brenna, then, I can finally rest.
Falk, standing in a street of New Cabora that ended in the snow-drifted parkland surrounding the Lesser Barrier, watched yet another Commoner family being rousted out into the icy street, this one consisting of a young couple with two children, a wailing babe in arms and a small girl who clung to her blanket-wrapped father, silent and wide-eyed. The guards searched the tiny house with ruthless efficiency, overturning beds and tables, opening cupboards and dragging their contents onto the floor, thrusting spears into the attic through the thin plaster of the ceiling, ripping up floorboards. They were in and out in five minutes, leaving behind chaos and wreckage and the door hanging loose from one bent hinge, and moved on to the next. The young father gave Falk a look of pure hatred before taking his family back into the shattered remains of their home. Falk ignored it. The hatred of Commoners meant nothing to him. Finding Brenna was all that mattered.
They were moving rapidly through the city, but he was painfully aware that their quarry could have already fled ahead of them. He had sent men to guard all of the roads into and out of the city, but New Cabora, which sprawled four or five miles in every direction, did not have a wall, and so there was nothing to stop anyone from simply heading out into the prairie… nothing except for the winter cold itself.
Still, Mounted Rangers were patrolling the city’s perimeter, and since neither Brenna nor the Prince were outfitted for or accustomed to the harsh realities of winter travel, Falk believed they would hide in the city instead of risking the open. But he could not be certain, and that uncertainty ate at him, driving him to periodically yell at the guards to move faster.
With speed came, of necessity, brutality, and it wasn’t long before the first Commoner, bodily hurled from his home, clad only in a nightshirt, got to his feet with a scream of rage and charged at the guard who had manhandled him. The guard responded with a quick flick of his hand that hurled the man across the street with a flash of blue flame. The foolish Commoner hit the wall of the building opposite with a wet, crunching thud, blood spattered bricks and snow, and a naked corpse, nightshirt ignominiously twisted around its ruined head, slid to the ground and lay still.
It was the first corpse in the streets that night. It would not be the last.
And yet, three hours later, with half a dozen Commoners dead and a hundred Commoner homes and businesses left in near-ruins, no sign of the missing Heir and Prince had been found, and none of those questioned, no matter how thoroughly, had admitted to knowing anything about them.
Then, as the guards started down yet another street and the first doors on it were kicked open, a guard on horseback galloped up to Falk and reined his horse in sharply, its sides steaming and great clouds of vapor rising from its flaring nostrils. “A report, my lord,” the guard panted. “A Commoner near the Square, late home from a tavern. Saw three people, two large men, one a much smaller boy or woman, slip into the nightsoil collector’s stable. Couldn’t imagine why anyone would go into any place that vile, he said.”
“Was he sober?” Falk snapped.
“Sober enough by the time we started questioning him,” the guard said.
Falk turned in his saddle. “Call off the search!” he cried. “Captain Fedric, to me.”
Fedric shouted to his men to halt the search. Up and down the street the orders repeated. As some Commoners ran back into their houses and others farther up the street peered out of their doors with hope and relief plain on their faces, Falk ordered the captain to surround the nightsoil collector’s establishment. “No one gets in or out,” he said.
“Understood,” Fedric said, and issued his orders.
Falk turned to the man who had brought him word of the sighting. “Take me there,” he said.
CHAPTER 31
The streets of New Cabora were far from deserted this night, Anton realized as he moved the glasses back and forth across the approaching town. There were guards in the streets near the Palace, and one or two buildings seemed to be on fire, their smoke rising thicker and blacker than the moon-silvered smoke from the city’s many chimneys. Here and there Anton glimpsed movement in open spaces, and, of course, he had no way of knowing what was happening in between the buildings where he could not see. Dogs seemed to be barking everywhere. Some of them were no doubt barking at the strange object in their sky, but anyone hearing them would surely think they were barking at the guards in the streets. They wouldn’t look up. Why would they? Until very recently, there had been no possibility of anything being in the night sky but the moon, stars, and clouds.
He focused on what seemed to be the main locus of activity. The airship was drifting closer and closer, but also lower and lower, which in turn hid more and more of the streets behind the walls and roofs of buildings. But in an intersection he saw a man on horseback whose posture and bearing seemed familiar even without the binoculars. With them, there could be no doubt:
