Go farther northeast, and you were in the Great Lake, and farther northeast still, and there was only wilderness, home to the Minik and no one else, until you reached the Great Barrier again. And it was there, in that great blank expanse, somewhere on the lake but near the northeastern shore, Tagaza judged, that he found one final thread of magic. He peered closer, willing his magical eye to focus as sharply as possible on it… and saw at once that it was different from all the others: white rather than colored, thicker, brighter.
There could be no doubt. It belonged to the Heir. It belonged to Brenna. And she was on the Great Lake.
And then, as though from a great distance, he heard an enormous roar… and an instant later was hurled back from the pipe by a screaming blast of scalding-hot steam, erupting from far below.
His mental image of the Kingdom and the Heir’s whereabouts vanished, brutally severed from him along with his magical senses. The spell he had carefully constructed, the spell drawing on vast amounts of magic from the magic lode and vast amounts of energy from the MageFurnace, collapsed in ruin and blazing agony inside his head…
… and took his consciousness with it.
The pillar of steam erupting from the pipe blew Falk flat on his back, and hurled Tagaza away like a rag doll, to lie in a crumpled heap on the marble floor. The deep chill that had gripped the room as Tagaza worked vanished in the same instant. The temperature began to climb. Falk, staring up at the boiling mass of steam beginning to fill the room, realized that in moments he and Tagaza would be so much cooked meat.
He lunged at the First Mage and dragged him toward the closed doors, throwing his will against them so hard they burst from their hinges and smashed into the far wall, one striking a glancing blow on Charic, spinning him around with a shout of pain, clutching his broken arm. Falk instantly realized his mistake; the steam would soon fill the hallway outside the chamber as well. With another surge of will, he blew out every one of the tall windows set between fluted pillars that encircled the dome. Steam rushed out through the gaps. Coughing and stumbling, Falk dragged the unconscious Tagaza to the stairs, Charic staggering after him, clutching his arm, leaving a trail of blood behind: the bone had punctured the skin.
Leaving Tagaza slumped in the stairwell for the moment, Charic sitting beside him, bleeding, Falk ran down the stairs, emerging into chaos, servants and Mageborn rushing around like frightened quail. Falk grabbed the first servant who passed, a teenage girl. “Get a Healer,” he ordered. “Send him up the stairs to tend to the First Mage and the guard he’ll find there.” The girl gave him a frightened curtsy and hurried off.
Falk ran the other way-to a different stairway whose broad steps descended to the MageFurnace. Mingled steam and smoke poured up those stairs, and before he reached them, men began to boil up them as welclass="underline" men with reddened skin and terrible burns, coughing, slumping against the white marble walls of the central chamber as soon as they were clear of the stairs.
Falk saw Healers arriving at a run and hoped that fool of a girl had been smart enough to send one to minister to Tagaza. He knelt by the nearest man, who seemed shaken but unhurt. “What happened?” he demanded.
“Water,” the man choked. “I don’t know where it came from. A flood of water, pouring into the Furnace…”
“Sabotage,” said a voice from behind Falk, and he straightened and spun to see Brich, grim-faced.
“Sabotage? How?”
“Someone,” Brich said, “found a way to direct the waters of the lake into one of the Furnace’s air intakes.”
“ Who? ” Falk snapped.
“We’ve had… a communication,” Brich said. “From the Common Cause. They claim responsibility. They say it’s in retaliation for the destruction of City Hall. They say they will do far worse if the ‘repression of the Commons’ is not eased.”
“They don’t know what repression is,” Falk snarled. “But they’re about to find out. I want a platoon of guards ready at the bridge in twenty minutes. We’re going back to the Square.”
Brich looked like he was about to say something, but, wisely, did not. Instead he just nodded and turned away.
Anger such as he’d rarely felt blazed in Falk’s heart. Not only had these Commoner criminals disrupted life in the Palace-temporarily, he thought with a mental sneer; the MageFurnace could not be doused so easily, and would soon be blazing at full power again-but, more importantly, they had disrupted the search for Brenna. And that meant that, once again, they had interfered with the Plan.
Falk was getting very tired of things interfering with the Plan.
He couldn’t do anything about locating Brenna… but he could do something about Commoner interference.
And he would take great pleasure in it.
He turned his back on the wounded men and the Healers tending them, and headed for the bridge into New Cabora.
CHAPTER 17
As the dogsled approached, Brenna reached out and gripped Anton’s hand. He squeezed back, and so, hand in hand, they awaited the arrival of their discoverers.
The dogsled told her nothing. This time of year, it was the preferred method of travel, for Commoners, at least, between scattered villages, especially up here, where roads were nonexistent. The three figures on it, two riding, one driving, all heavily swathed in fur, revealed nothing more at first glance. She wished she had that much fur to wear; her own winter coat, which she had always thought so warm, had felt like a thin wrap in the airship and felt like nothing at all now they were standing on the windswept ice. Whoever they are, if they don’t help us, we’ll freeze to death, she thought.
Oddly enough, it was the dogs that gave her the first clue as to what sort of people were coming to meet them, and the realization made her squeeze Anton’s hand harder.
He turned to look at her. His eyebrows were rimed with ice and his cheeks as red as though they’d been scalded. “What is it?”
“The dogs,” Brenna said. “They’re wearing jewelry.”
It sounded absurd, put like that, but she didn’t know what else to call the collars set with bits of silver and glass and semiprecious stones that each dog wore. They made the animals’ necks sparkle as, tongues lolling, they raced toward them.
“So?” Anton said.
“Savages,” Brenna said, and then said nothing more, because then the dogsled was upon them, the driver shouting to the dogs to stop and pulling a lever that jammed spikes into the lake surface to slow the sled. It ground to a halt in a flurry of snow and ice chips, skidding sideways a little. Even before it quit moving, the two fur-swaddled men aboard it had hit the ice and raised the crossbows they carried.
“Minik,” Anton said under his breath, and then, raising his voice, said something in a language Brenna had never heard before, lilting and fluid, like the call of some wild forest songbird.
The crossbows lowered a little, the men’s faces, brown and shiny-smeared with some kind of grease as a protection against the cold, she realized-startled and puzzled.
The driver had jumped down from the back of the sled and came forward. The two other men stepped aside so he could stand between them. He gave Anton an appraising look, and said something in the same fluid tongue.
Anton frowned, then replied haltingly.
The man’s eyebrows lifted. He spoke to the other two men, who nodded and lowered their crossbows completely.
Then the man turned to Brenna. “I am High Raven, leader of the clan of the Three Rivers.” He spoke the common tongue flawlessly, his accent, though odd, easier to understand than Anton’s had been at first. “The boy says he is from Outside the Wall of Sorrows. This is a thing I find hard to believe, but we will test him to see if he tells truth. He says you are a great princess of the MageLords. Is this true?”