glamours. Town streets and hamlets’ cobbled lanes swarmed with exotic, grotesque, surreal, frequently dangerous nightmares. The sky was filled with their flying brethren.
Everything that depended on magic began to malfunction or fail. Lights went out, impossibly beautiful courtesans vanished in puffs of lavender-scented smoke. Public statuary froze, or ran amok. Fountains spewed molten lava. Lavish, shimmering gowns faded to drab rags. And all the while the populace was under siege from running, crawling, flying, swarming, exploding, melting, scalding, freezing onslaughts.
As the magic escaped in ever greater quantities, its absence from the very structure of the environment began to be felt, very much like an earthquake. Tall towers were the first to go, their great weight no longer stable. Buildings collapsed, bridges swayed. Fissures opened up in country lanes and city boulevards, big enough to swallow horse-drawn carriages.
What became apparent, to those able to observe it, was that in fact the magic was being negated; not leaking but ceasing to be. And with it went everything it supported, in all senses, so that public anarchy and civil disobedience added to the chaos in normally well ordered Rintarah.
In the capital, behind the rulers’ forbidding walls, things were no better. Jacinth Felderth, the empire’s most powerful individual, was in his beloved rose garden when catastrophe struck. The spectacle of witnessing his elegant blooms wither and turn to dust was made all the more unedifying for knowing the same was about to happen to him.
All over Rintarah, but most especially in the capital, the families of the ruling elite, which is to say surviving Founders, were suddenly seen as they really were. The rapid onset of the ageing process, making up for the countless centuries cheated, informed an outraged populace. Tyranny they could tolerate. Being ruled by something not quite human was a different matter. The scales fell from their eyes and there was something akin to a general uprising, fanned by remnants of the Resistance. Their task was made the easier with the disappearance of the authorities’ magical defences.
Gath Tampoorians first had an inkling of what was to come when many observed a deep rumbling, of the kind an earthquake makes.
Overall, their experience was very much the same as Rintarah’s. City and countryside saw the wholesale escape of magic. They had their cracks and geysers, too, and a plague of glamours. Their proud buildings and shunned hovels fell, just the same. Dams broke, forests burned and streets were ripped up with the force of it.
Like the citizens of their rival empire, they saw their rulers in their true light. Indeed, some of them met their ends at the hands of their own subjects, notwithstanding the ageing acceleration process would have got them anyway. There was much bewailing of the loss of magic, in common with Rintarah. And here too, the people fell to insurrection, aided by what was left of the Resistance. A prolonged period of uncertainty and confusion was predicted, and the fate of the empire was by no means assured at the end of it. In this respect, Gath Tampoor also mirrored Rintarah.
Empress Bethmilno was at the matrix pit in her palace throne room trying to reach her Rintarahian counterpart, Felderth, when the pit erupted. The subsequent discovery of what was left of her corpse threw no light on the case. Her family suffered similar fates, or speedily aged to dirt.
Commissioner Laffon, head of the infamous CIS, was in Merakasa for an audience with the Empress. He was said to have been identified by a vengeful mob and chased through the streets. His demise came about when the chase took him into the path of a collapsing forty-ton ornamental column.
The column belonged to the headquarters of the Gath Tampoorian Justice Department.
33
In Prince Melyobar’s floating palace they knew nothing about possible earthquakes.
The court was moving above a landscape of almost pure white, and snow was still falling hard. There were steep mountains on either side of the airborne procession, and a network of sizeable lakes, frozen over and snow-covered, not far below. The route had been insisted on by Melyobar himself, for whatever reason that seemed pressing to him at the time. But the weather conditions meant that the sorcerers tasked with steering the behemoth had kept it flying low. Thousands of the camp followers who relied on non-magical transport were finding their way across the ice-bound lakes. But as many chose to take a long detour.
Talgorian had been held in a dungeon, roughed up a little and not fed, although they did give him a small amount of water. He had no idea what had happened to the detail of troopers he’d brought with him, and knew nothing of the fate of Okrael, the young sorcerer who tried to warn him about the Prince’s lunatic scheme. As yet, Talgorian had not suffered the torture that had been threatened when he was seized.
They came for him without warning or explanation. He was given a heavy fur coat to put on, and thick gloves, which surprised him. But it became clear why when he was taken, not to an audience chamber or to the throne room, but outside, onto one of the palace’s upper battlements. It was here that the Prince had ordered the installation of powerful catapults, and it was Okrael who had revealed what they were to be used for. In addition to the catapults, and set well away from them, there was a structure that looked worryingly like a gallows.
It was bitterly cold. He wondered why anyone would want to conduct business of any kind in such a place. Then he remembered that the ‘anyone’ was Prince Melyobar.
The Prince himself sat, incongruously, on a throne mounted on a dais, over which a canopy had been erected. There were various nobles, officials and military types about, as usual, and the higher-ups had their own parasols. Nobody else got an awning, naturally. Or a seat.
Talgorian was frog-marched into Melyobar’s presence like a common criminal. It had been his intention to dispense with formalities like bowing in order to show his displeasure at how they were treating him. Unfortunately, one of the thuggish guards enforced the protocol with a clout to the back of Talgorian’s head.
The Envoy was also frustrated in his next planned snub. He meant to offer the Prince no ceremonial greeting. This was thwarted by the simple fact that Melyobar spoke first and ignored etiquette himself.
‘I trust a night in the cells has helped bring you to your senses,’ the Prince said.
‘My senses about what precisely, Your Royal Highness?’ Talgorian didn’t quite have the nerve to dispense with the man’s correct titles as part of his protest.
‘Your sedition. Your conspiring with enemies of my rule.’
‘Those charges, if that’s officially what they are, Your Majesty, are patently absurd. I’ve not been seditious and I don’t associate with the enemies of authority.’
‘Well, of course you’d be inclined to lie about it, wouldn’t you?’
‘I take great exception to that slight, Your Majesty. And if I may say so, I think this whole episode is an appalling way to treat an Imperial Ambassador. I intend complaining to the Empress about it in the strongest possible terms.’
‘Complaining to my arch-enemy, more like. Complaining to…’ He almost always lowered his voice when referring to death. ‘…Him. Do you deny it?’
‘Yes! That is, what exactly am I denying, sire?’
‘Your attempts to confuse this hearing are typical of the methods employed by your sort.’
‘Hearing? In what way does this represent a properly constituted legal tribunal, my lord?’
‘It’s officially constituted as far as the rules of my court are concerned.’
In other words the Prince was making it up as he went along, Talgorian thought. ‘If this is a form of trial, then I respectfully request the benefit of legal representation.’
‘There’s no need. I afford you something much better than that.’
‘Sire?’
‘You’re allowed to talk for yourself. Who’s more qualified to put your case?’
‘What case? How can I defend myself when I’m unaware of the exact nature of the offences I’m supposed to have committed?’
‘So you admit you have no case. That won’t go well for you.’
Talgorian wanted to scream. Instead he chose to speak as though to a child, which had worked in the past. ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to have done, Your Highness. If it were possible for you to graciously inform me,
