Grief, momentarily forgotten, crashed in again. Professor Carteri was dead. Anton was alone, utterly alone, in a place far stranger than either of them had ever dreamed of finding inside the Anomaly. Anton stepped away from the bizarrely animated wooden figure and sat down hard in his chair. Head down, he blinked furiously to clear the embarrassing evidence of weakness from his vision, then raised his eyes to see Brenna looking at him compassionately… and curiously
… from across the table. She smiled, and a bit of the strangeness receded. At least he seemed to be a guest, not a prisoner, in this strange new world… and to have found a most pleasant guide to its mysterious ways.
And at least they weren’t going to starve him. The delectable smells wafting from his plate drove away his fears and doubts, at least for the moment, and he gave himself over to filling the deep, empty pit his stomach had become while he slept.
When the need to eat had become a little less urgent, Anton began to ask questions. The answers he received sounded like they came straight from one of those cheap magical-adventure novels he’d mentioned to Brenna. He would have dismissed it all as ludicrous fantasy if not for the unmistakable, solid fact of the mageservant, quickly and efficiently clearing away the dishes while Brenna talked.
What she told him boiled down to one astonishing fact. Within the mysterious Anomaly he and the Professor had come to this remote part of the world to investigate lay a hidden Kingdom where magic worked-a Kingdom, in fact, ruled by magicians: the MageLords.
Anton had never been very good at history back in Sutton Sterling’s Preparatory School, even before he’d run away and taken to the streets of Hexton Down. He’d focused most of his intellectual powers on the considerable challenges of evading the unwelcome attentions of the older boys, and sneaking off the school grounds to run wild through the streets. But he’d learned a few things during his apprenticeship with the Professor over the past three years, and he’d always been a voracious, if indiscriminate, reader. “MageLords” was a word he had come across before; it was the name given to the tyrannical rulers of an ancient empire that had once held sway over the great island now known as Krellend and a large portion of the west coast of the First Continent, including what was now the city of Hexton Down but had then been a tiny fishing village.
The MageLords had been driven from the mainland to Krellend, pursued by an army, retreating at last to their capital city of Stromencor. Presumably there had been a siege, and perhaps even a final battle. Stromencor might have fallen, or the MageLords might have rallied to push back the attackers. No one knew, because the city, the MageLords, and the surrounding armies of Commoners were all destroyed by an enormous natural disaster of some kind, a vast explosion-presumably volcanic-that had reduced the city to rubble, flattened forests and fields with a scorching wind, and burned every living thing caught within it to charred bones and drifting ashes. To this day, nothing grew on Krellend, where the very soil had been turned to glass and cinders.
On the mainland, the alliance against the MageLords had been short-lived. Petty kings had arisen and fought, towns were built, laid waste, rebuilt, abandoned. Gradually larger kingdoms had coalesced; and finally, some two hundred years ago now, the Union Republic had been forged from a dozen of those squabbling kingdoms. After a couple of civil wars, a new era of peace had unleashed a golden age of science, philosophy, art, and history.
From the very beginning of their study of the MageLord Empire, historians had been divided over exactly who or what the MageLords had been, and what the old records meant by “magic.” Since, self-evidently, magic was not real, the MageLords could not really have been the powerful wizards of the old stories. The prevailing opinion was that the MageLords had somehow leaped past their neighbors in technological know-how, their greater ability being interpreted as magic by those they conquered. The successful rebellion had supposedly been led by someone calling himself “The Magebane” (obviously a nom de guerre), who apparently stole the MageLords’ own “magical” technology and outfitted his own armies with it, allowing them to use their superior numbers to overrun the kingdom. The final cataclysm had simply been a coincidence, an astronomically (or perhaps geologically) unlikely coincidence, but a coincidence nonetheless.
But if Brenna spoke truth, the MageLords had been exactly what their name implied: lords of magic, with inborn abilities to manipulate matter and energy simply by force of will. They had used that power to create and then rule an empire. Cruelly, according to the history Anton had been taught; benevolently, according to Brenna. She claimed those long-gone MageLords had used their magic to help the nonmagical “Commoners” they ruled live happier and healthier lives. According to her, the uprising had not been against oppressive government, but based on religion. A new cult had sprung up that saw magic as a tool of the King of Demons, and had used the latent resentment of the MageLords among the various conquered peoples to eventually ignite the revolution that forced the MageLords to flee for their lives.
Anton had never heard of such a religion, but said nothing.
The conflagration that had destroyed Krellend, Brenna said, must have been the backlash of the enormous energy the MageLords had expended in transporting themselves and their loyal followers instantly to the other side of the world… here!… where they had founded the Kingdom of Evrenfels, and hidden themselves safely behind the Great Barrier.
That Barrier, Brenna said, would stand for at least another two centuries, then the MageLords would emerge peacefully into the larger world once more, a world hopefully purged of the superstition that had driven them into hiding, and once more bend their magical abilities to the betterment of all humanity.
“At least, that’s what I was taught,” Brenna said as she finished. Anton looked at her sharply-was that doubt in her voice?-but her expression was smooth and with her accent, he couldn’t be sure. He reached for another scone, wondering if Brenna shared his feeling that they were both skating on thin ice, circling the open water of the fact that he was descended from those who had driven the Mageborn into exile, and that his presence here meant the Mageborn were no longer safely isolated from their former enemies; and the fact that Brenna, though not herself Mageborn, was the ward of one of the most powerful MageLords in the kingdom.
And then someone came into the breakfast nook from the hallway outside, and Anton suspected the ice had just given way.
Tall, thin, with a sharp-edged face and hair the color of frosted steel, the new arrival wore a gray tunic and trousers, boots so highly polished they might have been covered with glass, and a similarly polished belt into which a pair of black leather gloves were neatly tucked. Around his neck he wore a plain disk of gold on a fine-linked chain.
A cool draft seemed to follow him in from the hall, as though winter had accompanied him into the room. Brenna, seeing him, got to her feet at once. Anton didn’t know why, exactly, but he copied her a heartbeat later, though his leg twinged beneath him.
“Anton,” Brenna said, “Allow me to present my guardian, Lord Falk.”
Anton wondered if he should bow, but settled for raising his hand. “Hi,” he said, sounding incredibly lame, even to himself.
“Welcome to my home,” said Lord Falk. “And to the Kingdom of Evrenfels.”
“Um… thank you.”
“Did you enjoy your breakfast?”
Anton glanced at the all-but-empty table. “Very much,” he said truthfully.
“How is your leg?”
“Still a little sore, but I didn’t expect to be able to walk for a week, so I can’t really complain.”