than down here.” He swung to one side. “You first.”
Brenna hesitated. “I-”
“I’ll be between you and their magic,” he said.
The two doors groaned, folded like paper, and ripped away in a thunder of shattering masonry. Brenna jumped up the ladder as far as she could, then climbed.
Karl followed close on her heels, kicking the trapdoor closed behind them as guards burst into the furnace room. Brenna climbed as fast as she could, the ladder’s rungs slippery in the grip of her borrowed gloves, her too large boots threatening to slip off her feet with every step. She didn’t look down. Instead she kept her head up and headed for the black sky above her, even though she knew at this point it was only empty defiance.
But empty or not, defiance was all that was left to her. To climb was to defy Falk.
And so she climbed.
The guards in the furnace room wasted valuable time hurling magical lassoes at Karl, trying pull him from the ladder. He felt nothing, the insubstantial ropes of blue fire recoiling from him like snakes from a hot stove, lashing back at their casters, who fell out of sight in the room below. Their futile efforts allowed Karl and Brenna to get halfway up the ladder before anyone down below physically came after them.
But even as he watched Brenna’s feet moving from rung to rung just above his head, he knew she had been right. This was a dead end. Once they reached the top of the chimney, their flight would be over. He would turn and try to fend off the guards climbing after them, but.. .
He’d already realized that he was not His Royal Highness to any of these men. They belonged to Falk. Probably Unbound, every one of them. They would laugh at him if he tried to order them to stand down.
Worse, though he was certain they would do everything in their power to avoid harming Brenna, who was vital to Falk’s plans, they must know that he was dispensable.
Though they might not yet have thought of the term Magebane to apply to him, they had learned by now that they could not magic him off the ladder. But they could certainly still pull, shoot, or cut him from it.
And so he, too, climbed, to what he expected to be his last stand.
Down in the courtyard, he heard Falk shout.
“Don’t harm the girl,” Falk shouted. “I don’t care about the boy, but keep her alive.”
He’d watched with satisfaction as Brenna and the Prince had first emerged from the roof onto the chimney and begun to climb, since they were clearly going nowhere. But then he had seen the magical lassoes of his men slip away from the infuriatingly magic-impervious Prince, and his satisfaction turned to annoyance.
He studied the chimney. The distance from where he stood wasn’t so great. And it would give him great satisfaction…
He dismounted, then reached up and pulled his crossbow from its holster alongside his saddle. He ignored the enchanted bolts in the quiver, instead drawing out one of the perfectly ordinary steel-tipped shafts. Deliberately he loaded and cocked, then raised the bow in his right hand, held his left arm across his body, and steadied the bow on it. He took careful aim…
By the time Mother Northwind reached the nightsoil collector’s yard, she had had to call on her spell of invisibility several times to avoid the guards with which the streets of New Cabora seemed to be filled this cold, dark night. But avoid them she had…
… only to reach the place where she had anticipated joining with Vinthor, Brenna, and the Magebane and find it swarming with guards… and Falk himself, standing beside his horse, shouting orders.
She stood very still in the shadows, watching as the doors were blown in and guards rushed into the stables. She heard the horses screaming. Falk’s attention was entirely on what was happening in front of him.
She felt mentally and physically exhausted, more exhausted than she could ever remember. She had already drunk a second of her restorative vials, half an hour before. That had been far too soon after her imbibing of the first vial, back in Malia’s room. She would pay a terrible price when the restoratives wore off. But that didn’t matter. She needed every possible ounce of energy now, and so she reached into her bag, took out the last two of the precious vials, and uncorked and downed them both, one after the other.
A roaring filled her head and for a moment the whole word seemed to recede, as though it would vanish forever… but then it came rushing back, and with it a new surge of energy, enough to do what had to be done.
Falk had long thought she worked to further his Plan. It was time, and past time, she made certain he instead worked to further hers.
Drawing invisibility around her once more, she stepped into the courtyard and stalked toward Falk.
Anton saw the blue flashes and heard the scream of torn metal, the rumble of falling masonry and the crash of wood against stone as the doors at both ends of the two long, narrow buildings that came together at base of the tall chimney were either blown inward or ripped outward. He was very close now, though still a hundred feet or so higher than the chimney. Soon he would have to light the burner to avoid hitting some of the city’s taller buildings, looming ahead of him. The moment he did that, though, he would announce his presence. And right now, with Falk down there and obviously after someone inside those buildings, he preferred to silently watch.
Suddenly a trapdoor opened at the base of the chimney. Anton raised the binoculars and focused on it… and to his astonishment, saw Brenna emerge into the cold air. She began to climb the chimney, a young man behind her… the Prince!
But there’s nowhere to go up there, he thought. Unless…
He studied the envelope speculatively. If he waited until he was almost on top of the chimney, started the propellers, could he hold steady enough and close enough to it to somehow get Brenna and the Prince aboard?
It would immediately betray him to Falk, but so what? What could he do from the ground?
Besides rip us from the sky with magic and hurl all of us to our deaths? Anton answered himself uneasily.
No, he thought. Not with Brenna aboard. She’s too valuable.
To both of us.
He raised his glasses to take one last look at the scene below. There was Falk, off his horse now, standing beside it. He blinked. For a moment, he’d thought he’d seen something crossing the dark cobblestones behind him… but it must have been a trick of the light.
And then he saw Falk reach for the crossbow slung on his saddle, crank it, load it, raise it, aim it at the climbing pair…
With a curse, Anton flung the glasses aside and grabbed up the loaded rifle. The air was still, the basket steady, and the Professor had made him practice his shooting long and hard before they crossed the Anomaly. Kneeling in the bottom of the gondola, he took careful aim…
… and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER 32
The flat, explosive crack of the rifle, a sound never before heard in Evrenfels, rang out across the city, echoing through the streets, bringing those few who had found an uneasy slumber upright and staring in their beds.
Brenna, nearing the top of the chimney, able to see nothing but the curved brick wall in front of her nose, flinched, but kept climbing, as did Karl, close beneath her.
Only Falk, looking almost directly at it, Mother Northwind, invisible behind him and at that very instant reaching up to touch him, and one or two of the guards actually saw the flash of yellow flame from the barrel of the rifle. It lit the underside of the airship’s envelope and Anton’s pale face for just an instant, suddenly revealing the presence of the flying machine and making the guards who saw it wonder how they could have failed to see it earlier.
Falk had no time to wonder anything of the sort, no time even to realize that Anton had returned, because before his eyes had finished registering the flash the spinning lead ball expelled by the rifle ripped through his throat in an explosion of blood and tissue, almost severing his head from his shoulders.
Falk’s crossbow fired as his hand tightened reflexively, the bolt zipping past Karl and striking sparks off the curve of the chimney before ricocheting off into empty darkness.
