Magebane (31 page)

“Yes, Patron,” Vinthor said.

“Good. Also, warn all of your contacts, and have them warn
theirs
, that Falk is about to launch a crackdown on the Commons unlike anything we have seen thus far. We may be advancing the timetable.”

“Yes, Patron.”

“Thank you for contacting me, Vinthor. And congratulations on the successful completion of your mission. Death to the MageLords—liberty for the Commons!”

“Death to the MageLords—liberty for the Commons!” Vinthor echoed, and the magelink vanished with a soft pop.

Endgame
, Mother Northwind thought.
Though perhaps not playing out quite as I foresaw. Still, I can make it work.
She lay down once more. So Prince Karl had passed through the Lesser Barrier as though it weren't there. Could he do the same with the Greater?

She suspected he could.
Magebane
, she thought with great satisfaction.
The only weapon with which one can strike at the tyranny of the MageLords . . .

. . .
and a weapon that now is firmly in my grasp
.

IN THE MORNING, it was as though the strange midnight visit with Brenna had never happened.

Anton sat in the same breakfast nook as he had two days before, eating the same breakfast, albeit with slightly less desperation. In fact, he found he was hardly hungry at all this morning, and picked at the food.

For her part, Brenna chatted blandly about the weather, and the upcoming Springfest, and would Anton like to visit the village of Overbridge, and what kind of music did they play in the Outside world, and . . .

Anton understood why she was doing it, with one of the few human servants standing by, but it still almost drove him mad to talk about such inconsequential things after what Brenna had told him in the night.

But after what seemed an eternity, though it was really only about an hour, Brenna dabbed her lips with her handkerchief—Anton gave his own a quick wipe, as well—and got to her feet. “Well,” she said. “Let's see how those mageservants have gotten on with your airship, shall we? I'm sure Lord Falk will want a progress report magelinked to him.”

Magelinks, Anton had guessed, must serve the same purpose inside the Anomaly as electromissives did outside. “Yes, let's,” he said with false brightness to match Brenna's own, which earned him a slightly annoyed but also amused warning look in return.

Despite Falk's assurances, Anton had not really believed the mageservants could repair all the damage to the airship in . . . what, a day and three quarters? But when he and Brenna, after nodding to Gannick, bent in concentration over that eerie desk of his, emerged into the back courtyard, he gasped.

There was the airship—the Professor's airship—looking exactly as it had when the Professor had first showed it to him, just before terrifying him by informing him that someday soon he would be flying in it.

“I don't believe it,” Anton said. He circled the gondola, examined the connections between it and the burner and the engine, noted the fresh sandbags hung on the outside of the wicker basket like heavy brown fruit, checked the rigging, the rudder, and the propeller. “It's . . . perfect.”

“Then it will fly?” said Brenna, still brightly, but with an undercurrent of the urgency she had expressed in the middle of the night.

“No,” Anton said. “Not until we can fill the envelope.” He pointed to the long, flat blue worm of cloth lying on the ground beside the gondola.

“And that's what the burner does?” Brenna gestured at the copper stovelike device in the middle of the gondola.

“Yes,” Anton said. “But it needs fuel.”

“Fuel?”

“Rock gas,” Anton said. “Compressed rock gas. We were out when we crashed. Without it . . .” He shook his head. “Without it, the airship won't fly.”

“But it's
got
to,” Brenna said, the false cheeriness replaced by naked desperation. “We can't be here when Lord Falk returns. Either of us.”

“I can't just snap my fingers and make it fly,” Anton said. “It's not . . .” He bit off the last word.

“Magic?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes.” She stared at the airship. “So what you really need,” she said slowly, “is hot air.”

“To fill the airship, yes,” Anton said. “But we also have to have a source of hot air on board. Otherwise, we go up, but we come down very fast . . . about seven hundred feet a minute. You can slow that some by throwing out ballast. If you can lift with a lot of ballast, you can stay aloft longer, because you have more ballast to toss away as you lose altitude.”

“And this ‘ballast' . . . that's the sandbags?”

“Yes,” Anton said. He studied the gondola, hung with new sandbags the mageservants had somehow made. They didn't look like the sandbags they'd left Elkbone with, but they were bags, and they were filled with sand, so they'd do. “Twice as many, if we can get them. There's a water tank in the base of the gondola, too, but I don't think we should fill that; in this weather, it would freeze and it would be impossible to empty it . . . but, Brenna, this is
all
impossible. If we don't have the burner, we can't fill the airship, or stay aloft long enough to get very far away. We'll have to risk escaping on foot.”

“Suicide,” Brenna said. “Even if the men-at-arms don't get us, the cold will.” She glanced over her shoulder; a man-at-arms, no doubt sent by Gannick, had emerged and was watching them. “I've been remiss in my duties as host,” she said, brightly and loudly. “I have yet to complete your tour of the house.”

“But—”

“I'm sure you'll find it ‘uplifting,'” Brenna said. Anton got the hint, though he couldn't imagine what she could show him that would solve their problem . . .

. . . until, after touring him past some rather pedestrian statues on the front lawn and the covered hulk of what he was told was a magical musical fountain, Brenna took him through a door in the kitchen into the servants' corridors, and from there through another door and down a long flight of stone stairs.

As they started their descent, Anton heard a distant roar. It grew in volume until, as they emerged into a vaulted underground chamber, it sounded like an enormous waterfall. But Anton couldn't see anything except for a strange blue glow, like and yet very unlike the glow of the ubiquitous magelights. Brenna didn't try to talk above the noise, just led him through the first strangely warm chamber into an adjoining one that was more than just warm: it was stifling.

Anton gaped at the source of both the heat and the noise: a massive torch, a shrieking, howling blue flame, balanced over a fissure in the rock and splaying tentacles of fire across the ceiling above. “The energy source for all the magic in Lord Falk's demesne,” Brenna shouted. “The manor was built here because of this natural outpouring of rock gas. It was set alight more than seven hundred years ago and has never faltered.”

“The biggest burner of them all,” Anton shouted. If he took even half a dozen steps forward, he was sure its heat would singe the hair from his arms and eyebrows. “But how do we get hot air from down here into the airship?”

Brenna pointed up. Anton blinked, trying to see through the heat-shimmer and licking flames. There were dark openings in the rock above, which made sense; they would have been asphyxiated long before they descended to this level, and the fire would burn itself out in moments, if there were no outlets for the byproducts of its combustion.

“Where do they come up?” he shouted.

“Various places,” she shouted back. “One of which is not far from the airship . . . a chimney on the back of the manor, that heats the servants' quarters.”

“A chimney ?” Anton shook his head. “No good. How do we get the air down from a chimney to the airship?”

“We don't,” Brenna shouted. “We take it from the bottom of the chimney. We knock a hole in it—”

“How?” Anton demanded.

Brenna spread her hands. “My guardian is not the only one who can command mageservants,” she said.

“There's still the problem of replenishing the hot air while we're in the air,” Anton said. “Otherwise it'll be a short trip and a hard landing.”

“I've got an idea for that, too,” Brenna said. She told him what she had in mind, and for the first time, Anton felt a flickering of hope. If they could fill the airship, get away before the men-at-arms realized what was happening, and keep it aloft for a reasonable amount of time . . .

. . . and land it without killing themselves, he thought uneasily . . .

The winds would blow them east, deeper into the Kingdom. With no fuel for the engine, he couldn't take the airship back over the Anomaly. Still, they'd be somewhere else, somewhere far away from Falk and his minddestroying witch.

“We'll need a hosepipe,” he said, thinking.

“We can get one,” Brenna said.

They made their way up to the courtyard. The man-at-arms hadn't followed them down into the cellar, from which there was only the one exit, but he was waiting for them when they emerged. He planted himself on the back steps, looking bored, and paid them little heed as they walked over to the chimney. Even on this side it was hot enough to melt the snow from the cobblestones, so that a ragged semicircle of pavement gleamed wetly despite the icy chill, which had deepened since Anton's arrival.

Anton glanced at the man-at-arms. “Won't
he
try to stop us?” he said in a low voice.

“Why should he?” Brenna murmured back. “He knows we're supposed to be getting the airship ready to fly. He doesn't have a clue how it works, so anything we do . . .”

“ . . . is all right with him,” Anton finished. “Nice.” He touched the chimney's bricks, then snatched back his hand. “Lots of heat,” he said. “Now if only we can get it into the envelope.”

“We can,” Brenna said. Although many of the mageservants had gone back to their regular tasks of household maintenance, a half-dozen stood idle in case more work was required. “I can't just
will
them to act the way Lord Falk does,” she said. “No one else in the household can. We have to use this.” She pulled something from her pocket, a short, narrow cylinder of wood with a glass ball on one end that glowed blue.

Anton couldn't help laughing. “A magic wand?”

Brenna gave him a curious look. “I suppose you could call it that—it's magic, and it's a sort of wand. But I don't know why you find that so funny.”

Anton only shook his head, thinking of street “magicians” he had seen gulling a living from tourists with their misdirection and sleight of hand. They
all
used magic wands. He'd even heard one once claim that
his
magic wand was an ancient artifact of the legendary MageLords. But their wands were usually much longer, much more impressive, than this little stubby . . .

He grinned suddenly.
Well
, he thought,
they do say that size isn't everything.

Brenna was looking at him curiously, and he flushed, glad
she
couldn't read his thoughts. “So . . . how does it work?”

“It's been enchanted to take verbal orders and . . . translate them, I guess is the word . . . to magical orders for the mageservants. It's how Gannick orders them about.” Holding the “wand” in her gloved right hand she went over to one of the mageservants and touched the blue symbol on its polished wooden head. “These orders are for all mageservants within this courtyard,” she said clearly. The five other mageservants suddenly twitched and stood up straighter. She lifted the wand from the glowing symbol and looked at Anton. “Tell me what they need to do, and I'll repeat it to them,” she said. “Be as clear as you can. They're . . . very literal.”

Anton remembered a childhood fable, “The MageLord's Apprentice,” in which the hapless helper of a MageLord learned enough magic to set the MageLord's magical minions to scrubbing the stonework, but not enough to stop them from scrubbing it to dust, so that the MageLord had returned to find his castle in rubble and his apprentice buried within it.

He also remembered that at the end of the story the MageLord turned on his heel and walked away, leaving his apprentice to suffocate beneath the weight of his own folly.

He shuddered. “I'll be precise,” he said, and he did the best he could.

Brenna placed the wand back on the symbol on the mageservant's face, and repeated the instruction almost word for word—almost, because she took it on herself to rephrase some of his clumsier sentences. He thought of “The MageLord's Apprentice” again, and couldn't blame her.