Magebane (33 page)

Gingerly, expecting more pain, Karl pulled on the scratchy socks, then slid his feet inside the scuffed-up footwear. The boots proved to be a big-toe's-length too long, but were far better than nothing.

Vinthor also produced an equally scruffy-looking brown leather coat lined with sheepskin, a knitted woolen cap, and a pair of gloves with holes in the palm. Once he'd put them on over his own clothes, Vinthor examined him critically. “You'll do,” he said. “You don't look like the Prince.”

“No, he looks like a cutthroat,” the Healer put in unexpectedly. “He could get arrested on general principles.”

“He looks like far too many Commoners look,” Vinthor growled, and the Healer, who was, after all, Mageborn, though obviously a sympathizer to the Cause, wisely held his tongue.

The Healer left shortly thereafter. Vinthor waited another half hour past that, then doused the fires, blew out the lanterns, and led the way into the frosty alley, locking the door behind him. “Horses,” he whispered, and that seemed to be enough for Jopps and Denson to know their destination. They moved through the deserted streets of the midwinter night, so dark and still and frigid it was hard to believe the sun would ever warm them again. They kept mostly to back alleys, slinking from shadow to shadow, Vinthor leading the way. Once he stopped at the corner of a dilapidated house and held up a fist. Instantly Jopps' big hand clamped itself over Karl's mouth and Denson seized his arms. He started to struggle, thought better of it, and relaxed. A frozen minute crept by, then another . . . and finally Vinthor lowered his fist. “Patrol,” he mouthed, barely audible. “Gone past. This way.”

After what seemed an eternity but logically must have been less than an hour—New Cabora simply wasn't that big—they reached the outskirts of the town, where a very unprepossessing inn stood guard at the intersection of two roads that, judging by the lack of either ruts or hoofprints in the snow, and the weeds sticking up through that snow, were seldom used by anyone. The slate roof sagged, but not as much as the porch; the wood had obviously not felt the touch of a paintbrush since before Karl was born, and even the light of the welcome lamp the law required inns to display had a sickly quality, glowing wan and yellow behind the paper used to replace several panes of the front window.

The inn sign hung askew above it. In the urine-colored light, he could just make out the faded image of a fat man holding his apron-covered belly and laughing uproariously. “The Jolly Host,” Karl read.

They didn't go into the inn, though. They went around it, into the fenced yard at the back. Here, trampled snow and an unmistakable smell announced the presence of horses, and a third road, which had been much more heavily trafficked, led away through a copse of trees and between two low hills.
The inn's just cover
, Karl realized.
So the Common Causers can come and go unobtrusively
.

Like now
. As he watched the horses, all of whom seemed grumpy at being woken (he really couldn't blame them), being saddled and bridled, he thought he should point something out to Vinthor.

“I can't ride,” he said.

“What?” Vinthor turned to look at him in disbelief.

“Never had any reason to learn,” Karl said. “You can walk around the Lesser Barrier in an hour, and when I've gone into the Commons it's always been in a magecarriage.”

Vinthor sighed. “Then you'll have to ride double with Denson . . . he's the smallest. All you'll have to do is hold on. Can you do that?”

Karl nodded.

Riding, he soon discovered, was almost as painful as frostbite . . . though it involved different parts of his body. He jolted and bounced on the saddle, unable to find the rhythm of the horse's stride . . . if it had one . . . as they moved at a trot away from the lights of New Cabora along a road that by the looks of it no one else had traveled all winter. Then they began to gallop, and that seemed better at first . . . better until the cold started to find its way into his coat and boots, resharpening the dull ache left in his feet by the Healer's touch. But there was nothing he could do but hold on to the solid, wiry form of the little man behind whom he rode, and press his face to the back of his coat to keep off the wind.

Karl had no way of knowing how long they rode, alternating galloping, cantering, and walking. But at some point he noticed that he could see more of the other horses riding alongside; and then that he could distinguish the horizon; and then ever-so-slowly after that, dawn broke, the sun poking a semicircle of orange fire above the black rim of the prairie.

Before it had completely cleared the horizon, though, it was hidden again, as they abruptly came to a little valley and followed the road down into its depths.

A house nestled there among willows lining a frozen line of ice that in warmer times would be a stream. Karl realized he must be almost asleep in the saddle, because he first saw the house off in the distance, then blinked and suddenly discovered they were riding into its yard. And then Vinthor and Jopps were helping him down from the horse in the yellow glow of a lantern shining through the windows. He could barely walk, but the light that streamed out of the open door promised shelter and warmth, and that was enough of an incentive for him to force his aching muscles to propel him forward.

He'd expected to find another hard-faced man, some soldier for the Common Cause, inside the cozy farmhouse kitchen; but instead, it was a woman who greeted him, a woman as welcoming and comforting as her house. She said her name, but he didn't hear it, barely noticed as she helped him take off his boots and coat and hat and gloves. He climbed the stairs like an old man, turned to the bed she pointed him to, and two minutes later was blissfully asleep.

As the sun set on the day after Verdsmitt's arrest and Prince Karl's disappearance, Lord Falk stood in the central square of New Cabora, on the broad stone base of the larger-than-life bronze statue of some Commoner whose name Falk neither recognized nor cared about. He had sent his guards into the streets an hour ago, rousting people from their homes and the businesses they were just locking up, ordering them to assemble. They stood in silent throngs all around him now, their breath creating clouds of steam that the last orange rays of the sun, finding their way between buildings, slashed through in ever-shifting lines of fire.

Falk gathered his will, drew energy from the air, and tossed skyward a glowing ball that hung over the square. As he spoke, the ball, first cousin to a magelink, amplified his voice, throwing it out across the crowd in a booming, inescapable wave of sound.

“Commoners of New Cabora,” Lord Falk thundered. “Last night, an unspeakable criminal act was committed. His Royal Highness Prince Karl, Heir Apparent to the Throne and the Keys of the Kingdom of Evrenfels, was kidnapped.”

A murmur ran through the crowd. Falk was not foolish enough to believe it was an entirely disapproving one.

“This follows, of course, the attempt on the Prince's life three days ago. We have strong evidence that the terrorists behind both of these outrages were members of the criminal organization styling itself the Common Cause.”

Another murmur, this time of denial; a few muttered “No!”, even someone calling “That's the scuttle calling the hearth black!” Falk's eyes narrowed, but he didn't turn to look for the culprit, who would soon see where such petty defiance led.

“We therefore require anyone with knowledge of the Prince's whereabouts, or the method by which he was taken, or the identities and whereabouts of the leaders of the Common Cause, in particular the one known as the Patron, to make themselves and their information known to us.”

He glared around at the crowd. The Royal guard hemmed those gathered with a line of blue and silver, insuring there would be no trouble. As reinforcements, Falk had even called in soldiers from the army barracks, their white winter uniforms harder to see among the snowdrifts around the square, stationed to prevent access to or from the surrounding streets.

The guards had shaped the crowd as Falk had commanded, so that to his right there was a large open space between the wall of the watchful guards and the red-brickand-limestone City Hall with its recently added clock tower, officially opened by Prince Karl just three months ago. That tower, Falk had been told by Brich, boasted the latest Commoner cleverness, mechanical automatons in the shape of men and women and children and animals that emerged with clanging cymbals, jingling tambourines and ringing bells, to mark the passage of time. The Commoners, Brich said, had an inordinate fondness for the clock and City Hall itself, which had just reached the ripe old age of 150 years.

“Lest anyone thinks we are not serious about obtaining this information,” Lord Falk said quietly, “let this prove otherwise.”

He had enchanted the object he pulled from his cloak himself, working for an hour to pour into it the necessary amount of energy from the roaring coal-fed fires of the Palace's MageFurnace. It was a simple wooden ball, such as a child might play with, but even through the heavily insulated glove he wore he could feel its deadly cold. It smoked, the very air that touched it condensing like water on its surface, then falling away in a puff of white.

“For every day that the Commoners of New Cabora fail to tell the MageLords what we wish to know about the disappearance of Prince Karl and the leaders of the Common Cause, this will be the fate of a building.”

And with an effort of will, he hurled the smoking ball out of his hand, above the wide-eyed faces of the Commoners, over the helmeted heads of the guards and, with a tinkling crash, through one of City Hall's multi-paned windows.

Lord Falk waited just the right amount of time . . . and then exerted the very little bit more will required to activate the magic packed so densely into the ball.

Blue-white light, brighter than the sun, flashed through the windows of City Hall. The windows themselves simply . . . vanished, the wooden frames and glass alike instantly vaporized.

In the aftermath of the flash, the sunlight seemed faded. Gloom gripped the square. And then City Hall... collapsed.

The roof went first, falling into the suddenly hollow interior as the beams that had held it crumbled into ash. The walls followed. The tower stood for one moment all by itself, and then collapsed straight down, rock grinding to dust that billowed across the Square. The massive mechanism of the clock hit the stones with a great ringing crash that shook the pedestal on which Falk stood.

Falk heard soft sobs from the crowd of Commoners, then coughs as the dust clouds swept over them. “Every day, another building falls,” he said, his voice thundering from the globe overhead. “Every day . . . until someone tells me what I want to know.”

He raised a hand and flicked the glowing ball out of existence, then nodded to Captain Fedric. The guards pushed the Commoners out of the way, holding them back as Falk strode between them, back toward the Palace. He would not have been surprised to hear them cursing him, even surging forward to try to get their hands on him, but in fact they stood all but silent, as though numbed by the power he had just demonstrated.

We have been too lenient too long
, Falk thought.
This Kingdom belongs to the Mageborn. It's time the Commoners remembered that.

After what he had just done, he did not think they would forget again anytime soon. He allowed himself a small smile at that thought; a smile that vanished as he crossed the bridge that led from New Cabora into the Palace grounds and saw Brich waiting for him, face pale in the blue magelight glowing above the guardhouse at the bridge's far end.

Falk, seeing him, suspected that just when he thought his very bad day was almost over, it was instead about to get much worse.

“Lord Falk,” Brich said as Falk and his bodyguards reached him. “I have . . . disturbing news.”

“Why am I not surprised? One moment.” Falk turned to Captain Fedric. “Dismiss your men with my thanks.”

“Yes, my lord.”

As Fedric turned to talk to his men, Falk nodded toward the Palace. “Let's walk.” Once out of earshot of the guards, he continued. “Now, Brich. What news?”

“Brenna has fled the manor,” Brich said.

Falk prided himself on maintaining a steely composure in the face of almost any provocation, but that simple sentence stopped him in his tracks. “
What?
”

“In the company of Anton, the boy from Outside,” Brich continued steadily. “In his flying device.”

Falk literally did not know what to say. The disappearance of the Prince was a disruption in the Plan. But the disappearance of Brenna was . . . catastrophic. Without her in his control, ready to be slain at the crucial moment, there
was
no Plan.