Magebane (11 page)

“Ten more sandbags,” called the Professor, cutting his thought short.

“Aye, aye!” Ten more plunged away.

And still the wall of fog rose above them, so close now that they were within the outer reaches of it, the moisture beginning to freeze onto the rigging and metal, forming ice that would weigh them down, slow their ascent. Anton, squinting up, could see no end to the fog. Yet from a distance he'd been able to see the top. They must be close....

The Professor was glaring up through the fog as though he took the Anomaly's ridiculous height as a personal insult. “Release all ballast, Anton.”

Anton swallowed. Without any ballast, they'd have no way to gain altitude rapidly the
next
time they needed to. A gust of wind swung them farther into the mist, making the Professor go suddenly ghostly in the bow.
On the other hand
, Anton thought, reaching for the quick-release buckles,
we're liable to smack hard right into that thing any minute, and what that kind of sudden freezing will do to the airship . . .

. . . well, he really didn't want to find out, not at this altitude.

He pulled all the remaining quick-release buckles. Just as the last snapped open, an enormous updraft seized them.

It felt like a giant had grabbed them and hurled them, spinning, into the sky. The airship shot up, so fast and suddenly that both Anton and the Professor were flung to the floor of the gondola. Anton struggled up again and grabbed the tiller, but they had no headway, the propeller churning uselessly behind them. He couldn't stop the spin. The world whirled through his vision, wall of fog, sunlit prairie, wall of fog, sunlit prairie. Anton felt his gorge rising. He was going to be sick . . .

The spinning, mercifully, stopped, but hard on its heels came the unmistakable sound of tearing silk. Anton twisted his head around.

The complex network of pulleys and ropes that gave the tiller control over the rudder had come apart in the violence of the spin. The rudder had swung too far, puncturing the envelope. And now, as he watched, the hole grew.

The airship lurched. A powerful westerly wind had them now. All around were the tops of clouds, but there was something odd about them, almost as though they were in a river, rushing toward a waterfall . . .

“Downdraft!” screamed the Professor, who had been clinging to the bow of the gondola. As pale and green as Anton felt, he lurched to his feet and flung himself on the burner, twisting the valve wide open. Flame roared, filling the envelope . . . but the edges of the rip near the stern fluttered, and Anton knew the heat roaring into the envelope was spurting out of it nearly as fast.

And then they swept over the edge of the cloud waterfall, and Anton's stomach leaped up as they dropped like a stone toward the snow-covered ground far beyond. Groaning, Anton clung to the edge of the gondola, stared down at the strange new lands beyond the Anomaly that were rushing up toward them with alarming speed, and threw up into them.

The Professor shoved him out of the way. He grabbed the tiller, wriggled it uselessly, then seized the throttle and shoved it to full ahead. The steam engine sputtered and shook, and the propeller spun into an invisible blur. Anton turned around. “It won't last five minutes at full throttle,” he gasped.

“We've got to get out of this downdraft,” the Professor said grimly. “It will smash us to kindling if we can't.” He peered up at the envelope. “We should be able to maintain some lift if we can only get into still air . . . not enough to stay airborne, but maybe enough to make some sort of landing . . .” He scrambled aft. “I'll take the tiller. Lighten the ship. Everything you can find. Throw it overboard. Start with the stores.”

Anton swiped his leather-clad arm across his mouth, hauled himself to his feet, staggered forward, and began emptying the ship of everything they had so laboriously loaded the day before, while all the while the ground below grew closer.

It's not going to work
, he thought.
It's not.

Since the day he'd fled his abusive father, he'd fully expected to die young. But now that the prospect was imminent, he found he didn't relish it.

You're not dead yet,
he snarled at himself. Grabbing a trunk of scientific instruments, he heaved them up and over the side, the wind roaring in his ears. He glanced toward the stern to see the Professor's face, pale and set, staring bleakly at him. And behind the Professor, the vast bank of fog that marked the Anomaly grew higher and higher.

It looks just the same from this side
, Anton thought.
So why did we bother?

And then he turned to look for something else to toss over the side.

Brenna tugged aside the heavy green drapes that covered her window to peer down into the snow-filled courtyard outside. Nothing moved down there, or on the steep white hillsides beyond the outer wall of Lord Falk's estate: not so much as a bird or a hare, much less a human. “When was the last time we had a visitor?” she asked the mageservant sweeping in the corner, where crumbs from Brenna's justdeparted lunch had somehow flung themselves. “The Moon Ball? That was more than two months ago!”

The mageservant didn't say a word. Brenna would have been terrified if it had, since it was essentially a marionette, animated by magic and programmed to perform the same rote tasks day after day. Its round wooden face, on which the magical symbol that enchanted it glowed faintly blue, remained half-turned away. For a moment Brenna considered smashing something on the floor—one of the delicate pieces of glass fruit decorating her mantelpiece, perhaps—just to get its attention and watch it scurry to clean up the mess, but as usual, the impulse passed before she acted on it.
Just as well
, she thought. She would eventually run out of things to smash, and still nothing would have changed, except her room would be even drearier than it already was.

The door opened and another mageservant entered, carrying a fresh load of wood that it stacked, with inhuman precision, beside the fireplace. “I'm going for a walk,” Brenna told it. It kept stacking wood. “Why, yes, I know it's cold outside. Thank you
ever
so much for your concern. I promise you I shall dress warmly.”

The mageservant placed two logs from its newly made pile onto the fire, adjusted the remainder so they looked as neat as before, then went out. Brenna went to the closet, grabbed her warmest coat—ankle-length, hooded, and made of wolverine fur—checked to make sure her red woolen scarf and rabbit-fur mitts were still in the pockets, and followed the mageservant, whose passing had left a faint chill in the air by the door.

The hallway outside her ran left and right, turning at either end to form the two wings of the manor house that wrapped the central Great Hall in their embrace. There were broad, curving staircases at either end as well, leading down to the main floor.

Doors opened only off the side of the corridor where her room was located. The other side of the hall was punctuated by tall, vertical slits, about two hands' breadth in width, filled with delicate wooden latticework. As Brenna pulled on her coat, she glanced idly down through one of those slits into the Great Hall, expecting to see it empty and dark.

Instead, it blazed with light. Servants, both human and mage, wove around it in a complicated dance, cleaning floor tiles, polishing tabletops, buffing brass candlesticks, never duplicating one another's efforts or getting in one another's way.

All that bustle could mean only one thing: Lord Falk was coming home.

Which made it even more urgent that Brenna go outside
now
. Once Lord Falk arrived, she would be expected to be close at hand. It also meant she couldn't, as she had planned, simply cross the Hall to the antechamber on the other side and go out from there through the big double doors of the main entrance. If Gannick, the head of the household, saw her, he might not—almost certainly
would
not—allow her out at all, on the theory that Falk might wish to see her the moment he arrived. Even if she weren't stopped, Falk would not be pleased to hear, as he certainly would, that she had chosen to leave the estate knowing his arrival was imminent.

Better to plead ignorance than beg forgiveness
, she thought.

Fortunately, there was more than one way out of the estate, and she knew them all.

So rather than go to the end of the corridor and down into the Great Hall, Brenna went only halfway along it and through a door that opened into a servants' staircase, very narrow to make it easier for servants to lean against the wall and support themselves while carrying laden trays.

Once in the basement, she followed the corridor of whitewashed brick that ran beneath the lavish rooms that visitors saw. Brenna knew all these behind-the-scenes corridors like she knew her own face in the mirror, having roamed them since she was a child. At regular intervals she passed steps leading up to between-room hallways that allowed the servants to access rooms unobtrusively to change bed linen or feed the heating stoves, without troubling Lord Falk or his guests.

At one point she passed another staircase going down. It led to the only part of the manor she rarely visited: the sub-subbasement, deep beneath the manor, where Falk's Magefire roared, a brilliant tower of blue and yellow flame, fed by a constant flow of rock gas from a reservoir untold fathoms beneath the ground. That reservoir of gas was one of two reasons Falk Manor had been built where it was: the other, of course, was the even more important fact that beneath the manor ran one of the veins of magical power that spread out from the lode beneath the Palace like the tentacles of one of the monsters that supposedly swam the oceans of the world . . . oceans Brenna had read about in Falk's extensive library but never expected to see, cut off as they all were from the outside world by the Great Barrier.

In the Palace, Brenna knew from her annual visits there, the MageFurnace both provided energy for magic
and
heated the hundreds of rooms and dozens of corridors. The Magefire in Falk's basement could surely have done the same for his much smaller manor, but Falk preferred to heat his home with coal, reserving the Magefire's energy for other uses—such as charging and programming the mageservants.

Once, as the corridor she followed testified, the manor had boasted a full staff of actual living humans, but unlike his ancestors, Lord Falk seemed to prefer to have as few people about the place as possible. Besides Gannick, there were only a half-dozen servants in the entire manor, and they mostly kept to themselves, usually speaking to Brenna only when their duties demanded it. Like all MageLords, Falk had his own Mageborn men-at-arms to keep order within his demesne; a score of them dwelt in the compound just outside the estate's front gate. They, too, were taciturn in her presence—but then, they rarely
were
in her presence. In the ordinary course of affairs, the only living humans Brenna saw were Gannick and her tutor, Peska, a middle-aged woman with a pinched face, a nasal voice, and no more warmth of personality than . . . well, than one of the mageservants.

Brenna knew all the servants by name, of course, but no matter how informal she was with them, they were always deferential to her. It had to be by Falk's orders: she knew, and they had to know, too, that she was no more Mageborn than they were. As a child, she'd simply accepted things as they were, but when she'd gotten old enough to start to ask questions, she'd wondered why she didn't have parents like the children in Overbridge, the nearby village.

Falk had sat her down in his study one night and told her that her parents had been Commoners in his employ who, during a journey north on his business, had been killed by the Minik savages. Falk, in their honor, had raised her from infancy. But sometimes, she thought, he seemed to forget she had done a considerable amount of growing since then, until now, past eighteen, it was surely time he took her to the Palace to stay. He had promised to help her find a position within the Palace, or, failing that, within the city of New Cabora.

A position in the Palace would mean serving either Falk, one of his fellow MageLords, or, she supposed, the King (and someday his Heir, Prince Karl). Falk seemed to take it for granted that was the option she would most desire. But in her heart, Brenna thought she would prefer the other. New Cabora amazed her every time she visited it. She saw magic every day, but the things in the Commoner city . . . gaslights, water that poured from pipes without magic, fireworks that painted the sky with light . . . amazed and delighted her because they were all created by Commoners. Commoners like her.

She'd met the Heir a few times. He seemed a pleasant enough boy, certainly a
handsome
enough boy, tall, well-built (not that Brenna entertained any fancies on that score; the thought of the Heir of the Kingdom taking a romantic interest in a Commoner was ludicrous), so if she
did
end up serving in his household, it might not be the worst of fates. Still . . .