Magebane (25 page)

The Commoner's face went blank. “If you say so, Your Highness.”

“I'm not trying to trap you,” Karl said tiredly. “It's obvious, and everyone knows it. But nobody cares.”

The Commoner raised his left eyebrow. “But you do, Your Highness?” he said softly.

“Yes,” Karl said. “I do. But I'm still only the Heir. When I'm King . . .” He spread his hands. “I don't know what I can do then, either, to tell the truth. But I hope to do better than our current King. And I hope to craft a Council that does better as well.”

The Commoner's right eyebrow went up as well. “I would . . . welcome that, Your Highness.”

“Well . . . I'll let you get back to work,” said Karl, and headed for the big oak doors, Teran close behind.

In the Great Hall, Teran said, “That was an interesting conversation.”

Karl glanced over his shoulder. “You don't think I should talk to the Commoner that way?”

Teran smiled. “Hardly. I think that's
exactly
the way you should talk to him. But not many Mageborn would, and no MageLords. It's particularly interesting considering Falk seems to think the Commoners were behind the attack on you.”

Karl shrugged. “All the more reason to try to make the point with any Commoner who will listen that I hope to be a different kind of King than they're used to, isn't it? Not that the MageLords will make it easy.” He reached back and rubbed his rear end with both hands; it was tingling now that blood flow had been restored to it. “Damn, I hate that chair.”

Teran laughed. “Not very Prince-like, Your Highness.”

“Even Princes get sore butts, Teran.”

As they strode through the corridors leading to Karl's quarters, they passed the Royal Theater, a grandly named but rather small auditorium that held no more than a hundred audience members. The doors stood open, and Karl, glancing in, saw workmen on the stage, hammering away at set pieces lying facedown on the black-painted wood. He felt a thrill of anticipation. A new Verdsmitt play! He could hardly wait.

Falk had never shown any interest in plays of any kind, by Verdsmitt or anyone else, as far as Karl knew. He wondered why the Minister of Public Safety was making a special effort to be back for the performance.

He snorted to himself as they moved on down the hall, the sound of hammering following them. Of course, with a moment's thought, he
knew
why. Verdsmitt was widely whispered to be sympathetic to the Common Cause, though how much of that was truth and how much merely a smear campaign by his less-known (and less-talented) rivals Karl did not know. Nevertheless, if
Karl
had heard those rumors, surely Lord Falk had, as well.

So why hasn't he canceled the performance?
Karl wondered. If he hadn't, he had good reason for it. Falk did not simply overlook things.

“It should be an interesting evening,” Teran said, voicing what Karl had been thinking, and while such a thought could sometimes fill him with excitement, on this day, it filled him with foreboding.

Three hours later, following a light supper of hot barley soup and cold fresh walleye (there would be a surfeit of food at the reception following the play), Karl entered the Royal Theater, dressed in his finest white tunic and scarlet trousers. A featherweight gold cape floated from epaulets on each shoulder, and a golden circlet, with an enormous ruby centered in the middle of his forehead, proclaimed his rank. Glittering black calf-high boots and a ceremonial sword completed his faux-military ensemble.

He felt like a fool, really, but it was his duty as representative of the Crown to dress the part and impress upon the Verdsmitt Players the honor a Royal Performance represented.

Of course, for
real
honor, the play should have been attended by the King, but once again, the King was “indisposed.”

Karl had vague memories from when he was a small child of his father laughing uproariously at performances in this very theater. When had all that changed? He hadn't seen his father in the flesh for . . . what? Two months? In fact, the only reason he could be certain the old man was still alive was that the Keys had not come to him, an event which Tagaza had assured him he would not overlook.

“When the King or Queen dies,” the First Mage had told him, “the Heir to the Keys immediately feels faint and may even black out. There is reportedly a feeling of disconnection, as if the mind and body have been separated. Next, consciousness enlarges. Previous Heirs have reported that for a brief but overpowering moment they felt connected to every Mageborn in the Kingdom, a feeling followed by an equally overpowering sense of loss as the sensation passes and mind and body reunite. All of this frequently is followed by a splitting headache and nausea.”

“Charming,” Karl had responded. “The effect of becoming King appears to closely mimic the effect of eating bad mussels.”

Tagaza had diplomatically ignored that comment. “Next comes the Call, an irresistible urge to journey to the Great Hall, no matter how far away the Heir may be. In your case, of course, you will most likely be in the Palace, but even should you be, oh, driving a dog sledge across the northern wastes—”

“That seems unlikely.”

“—you will instantly turn your steps toward the Palace, and will not be able to rest until you sit upon the Throne. The compulsion will be lifted. And you, my prince, will be the new King. After which, of course, comes the coronation, but that is a mere formality.”

Karl sighed and settled himself in his high-backed, nicely padded (unlike that cursed Council Chamber chair) theater seat. None of that had happened; therefore, the King still lived.

But still he felt a pang as he glanced at the empty seat to his left, always reserved for the King, but never filled.

When had his father withdrawn so completely? And why?

He heard the rustle of brocaded gowns and courtly robes as those MageLords present in the Palace and some of their favored Mageborn followers took their seats behind him, as had Teran.

The house lights, magelights all, dimmed, leaving only the curtain warmers, flushing the rich red curtain with a dim glow. A lone figure, silhouetted against that glow, stepped in front of the curtain from stage right and made his way to the center. An instant later a spotlight, a particularly powerful magelight magically focused to a tight round circle of light, lit his face. The crowd murmured as they, like Karl, recognized Davydd Verdsmitt, the most famous playwright, Commoner
or
Mageborn, in the Kingdom's history.

“My Lords and Ladies,” Verdsmitt said. He was an actor as well as a playwright, and his voice carried easily to every corner of the theater. “Welcome to the first performance of my new play.” His face, boyish and smooth-skinned though he was halfway through his fourth decade, crinkled into a grin. “And possibly the last, if it doesn't go well!”

The audience laughed, Karl included.

“I will tell you nothing about it up front, so that its action and themes may be a surprise,” he said. “But I did want to appear before you to personally welcome His Highness Prince Karl, Heir Apparent to the Keys of Evrenfels. Your Highness, I am particularly pleased you can be with us tonight in light of the recent attempt on your life.”

Around him, the audience had stilled into frozen discomfort at Verdsmitt's effrontery. If Verdsmitt noticed, he gave no indication. “We have a saying in the theater that the show must go on, Your Highness. Your presence here tonight, so soon after the attack, is proof to me that you are, indeed, a true patron of the dramatic arts, which, as an old actor and rapidly aging playwright, gladdens my heart.

“But enough prattle. Your Highness, My Lords and Ladies, Verdsmitt's Masters of the Stage present the premiere performance of
The Unlocking: A Romance of the Far Future
.”

With that, the curtain swept up, and Verdsmitt stepped back onto the stage and into the revealed scene—a representation of the Great Hall.

But not the Great Hall as Karl had seen it just hours earlier. This Great Hall lay in ruins, and ancient ruins, at that. In the foreground broken stone and shattered bricks half-buried one of the great beams from the roof. The painted background showed a crumbled wall, through which could be seen trees and weeds growing wild in the Palace grounds. The sight shocked Karl, like a stinging slap to the cheek. A horrified murmur ran through the crowd.

As the play progressed, those murmurs grew in volume and displeasure.

In Verdsmitt's play, the unthinkable had happened: the Barriers had fallen. That alone was close to heresy, but what was worse was the reason he gave for it. It was not because the thousand years had passed. Rather, in his world, magic had simply . . . failed. Vanished.

No, not just vanished, been
driven
from the world, never to return, by the appearance of . . . a Magebane.

Had the entire play consisted of nude actors engaged in an onstage orgy with farm animals, Verdsmitt could scarcely have offended his audience more. (Indeed, Karl suspected the former would have been wildly, if secretly, popular among the MageLords.)

Worse, the mythical Magebane, in Verdsmitt's play, was a MageLord himself, and not just any MageLord, but the last King of Evrenfels—the last, because he chose to destroy the Keys, magic, and himself in order to usher in a new era in which there would no longer be any distinction between Commoners and MageLords, who, in the play's “happy ending,” decided to build a new land together where there was no magic and no king, the people instead choosing their own rulers from among their own numbers.

The play ended, after only one act, with Verdsmitt's character, the ex-Prime Adviser of the last King of Evrenfels, joining with a young Commoner to lift the beam that had fallen from the roof of the Great Hall and begin, both literally and symbolically, to rebuild the land.

Verdsmitt must have decided to limit the play to one act because he assumed no second act would be allowed to proceed, Karl thought. And indeed, as the curtain fell, the audience grumbled and muttered. No one applauded.

Karl knew he should be as horrified as the other MageLords; more so, in fact, as Heir. And yet a part of him found the play's concept exciting rather than revolting. For him, after all, more than for anyone else, the Kingdom of Evrenfels, its Barriers, and the Keys that would one day come to him were a prison sentence, locking him into a future he did not want but could not escape. To imagine that those bars could be dissolved . . .

Of course it was a fantasy . . . but like many fantasies, it held a powerful appeal. And wasn't theater about fantasy, about challenging what
was
with the possibilities and even the impossibilities of other ways, other worlds?

And with that thought Karl, seized with sudden fury and disgust at the brocade-bound, robed and stuffed Palacedwellers all around him, leaped to his feet and began to clap.

Teran stood first, as duty required, but everyone else followed a heartbeat later. You did not stay seated when the Prince stood. Nor did you refuse to applaud, and so applause there was, just enough to be almost polite, as the eight actors, five men and three women, took their bows. To Karl, they appeared pale and frightened . . .

. . . all but Verdsmitt. He bowed as though receiving the greatest accolades of his career, then joined hands with the rest of the cast and bowed again.

And at that moment, the first Royal guards burst onto the stage.

They rushed on from the wings, down from the back of the theater, from behind the set. Someone screamed, whether on stage or in the audience, Karl couldn't tell, but it was over in a moment. The actors, hands bound, were dragged away. Lord Falk himself took charge of Verdsmitt, who accompanied the Minister of Public Safety into the wings with his head held high and even a hint of a smile on his face.

Karl watched it all in stunned silence, then was furious at himself for saying nothing. He was the Prince! He could have stopped the arrests—

But even as he thought that, he knew that he could do nothing of the kind. Falk would not answer to him. His orders, he would surely say, came from the King, and the King would certainly never gainsay him.

And then, to his shock, Teran seized his arms and pulled him toward the exit, almost as though he were under arrest himself. “What are you doing?” Karl shouted at him, pulling back.

“Please, Your Highness,” Teran said, a note of near panic in his throat. “Lord Falk ordered me to get you out of here when the arrest happened.”

That shocked Karl even more, and he let himself be pulled out into the hallway and toward his quarters, even as the rest of the audience spilled out behind him. But once they were in his sitting room, he rounded on Teran. “You
knew
about this arrest?” He remembered Teran's comment that it should be an “interesting evening,” and his anger burned higher. “You knew, and you didn't tell me?”