Anton anxiously watched the fuel gauge. It seemed he could almost see it dropping toward empty… but now they were over the Barrier itself. He could look straight down at that enormous wall of fog, and then suddenly he was looking down at the land outside the Barrier, terrain very much the same but completely uncultivated, wild prairie with grass so tall that even after three months of snow the fields were more brown than white.
Anton cut the burner. They wanted to descend now, not climb, and they quickly began to do so as the cold air sucked heat from the envelope. He searched the ground below them anxiously. His navigation had been iffy at best, and he wasn’t entirely sure where they had crossed the Anomaly. But he hoped…
Ah! There, a smudge of smoke near the horizon, a dark stain on the snow-covered prairie. Elkbone, the town he and the Professor had left what seemed like a lifetime ago, though in fact it had been less than two weeks. He looked at Spurl, and smirked. The hand-picked minion who was supposed to enforce Anton’s deliverance of Falk’s reassuring lies to the poor deluded Commoners on this side of the Barrier was currently throwing up his guts over the side of the gondola.
Welcome to my world, Anton thought. Let’s see what survives of MageLord arrogance when the gentlemen of the press descend on us with flashbulbs popping.
Anton had every reason to believe they would still be there. It hadn’t been all that long, really, and since no railpath ran from Elkbone to Wavehaven, travel in winter was fraught with danger. Most of the reporters who had covered the launch had traveled here before the snow fell in the same caravan as he, the Professor, and the airship. They would be unlikely to go back until the weather warmed in spring.
They could send their words and images, though, thanks to the electromissive lines that had been strung along the road that would someday be a railpath, and that meant that whatever was said here would, before nightfall, be making news in Wavehaven. Two or three weeks later, when ships reached Hexton Down across the ocean, the President of the Union Republic would know of it. What he would do about it was out of Anton’s hands.
What wasn’t out of his hands was what he would do about it.
He would not leave Brenna at the mercy of Falk and Mother Northwind one minute longer than he had to.
The engines sputtered and the propeller stopped spinning as they swung low over a treed ridge just northeast of Elkbone. They’d obviously been spotted. People were streaming out of the town to meet them, pouring into the open field they were now drifting across. Anton watched the ground approaching and hoped the fools directly beneath him would be smart enough to move out of the way before several hundred pounds of gondola, burner, engines, propeller, and passengers landed on their heads.
At the last moment, with trees approaching and the ground still a little farther away than he would have liked, he pulled the ropes that opened the vents on the top of the envelope. Air rushed out, the envelope sagged, and with great finality, the gondola dropped the last few feet to the snow, hitting with a thump that Anton, holding on tightly, managed to weather standing up.
Spurl wasn’t as prepared, nor as fortunate. He went sprawling, banging his head on the burner and opening his scalp. And so, as the crowd swarmed around the gondola, Anton climbed out to face them while Lord Falk’s chosen emissary moaned and clutched his bloody skull in the bottom of the basket.
As he’d suspected, the reporters were there, shouted questions bombarding him so quickly he couldn’t have answered them if he wanted to, flashes from bulky black imagers half-blinding him. He looked around rather desperately for someone official, and saw him: Ronal Ferkkisson, the Lord Mayor, a short, round man with a red face, pushing his way through the crowds with the help of a quartet of beefy policemen in green capes. “Clear the way, clear the way,” the policemen growled as they approached, shoving people aside with oak truncheons. They managed to open a space next to the gondola for Ferkkisson, “Anton?” he said, peering up at him.
“Lord Mayor,” Anton said.
“Where’s Professor Carteri?”
“Dead, Your Honor,” Anton said.
“Dead!” Ferkkisson shook his head. “I knew it was suicide to cross the Anomaly.”
Um, hello, I’m right here and very much alive, Anton felt like saying, but didn’t. “Your Honor, I have urgent news,” he said. Then he raised his voice. “News that needs to get to the entire Republic!” he said loudly enough for all the reporters to hear.
Ferkkisson licked his lips. “News? What kind of news?”
“There are people on the other side of the Anomaly,” Anton said. “A giant kingdom, hidden from us… until now.”
Astonished murmurs and whispers ran through the crowd, followed by the hisses of people shushing each other so they could hear what he would say next.
Here goes, Anton thought. Taking a deep breath, he added, “They call themselves the MageLords.”
That brought an enormous rush of sound, from gasps to catcalls to outright laughter. Reporters scribbled furiously in their notebooks, smirking. Anton remembered when he would have reacted the same, when “MageLords” had been nothing more to him than the villains in children’s fairy tales.
“Can they do magic?” someone shouted.
“Can they make things disappear?” yelled someone else.
“Did they pull a rabbit out of a boot?” someone else called.
Anton hesitated, wondering how to convince them-
– and then Spurl took care of the problem for him.
The Royal guard looked like something out of a nightmare as he pulled himself to his full height inside the gondola. Blood had streamed down his face, masking his features in red, and then poured down his silver breastplate, giving him the look of someone who had survived, by the skin of his teeth, a horrifying beating. He stared around at the assembled people. They stared back.
And then, as one, the reporters with imagers raised them and started capturing pictures.
Brilliant white flashes exploded all around. Anton winced and turned his eyes away. But Spurl…
It was probably inevitable, Anton thought later, that a Mageborn guard would interpret flashing lights as a magical attack. And inevitable, too, that someone who had just discovered a terror of flying and a tendency to airsickness and had just hit his head would react so instinctively to that perceived attack.
Spurl screamed and thrust out his hands, palms up. A flash of blue hurled everyone within fifty feet of the gondola onto their backs as though struck by a giant fist. Men, women, and children sprawled into the snow. Bones broke as people slammed into each other. Blood ran from scalps and noses, staining the snow. Spurl looked beyond the fallen, moaning spectators to those outside the circle of the attack, who stood in frozen shock. He raised his hands again-
A rifle shot rang out, loud even above the screams of the people scrambling to their feet now and trying to flee.
Spurl jerked. Eyes wide, he stared down at the neat round hole in the middle of his breastplate. As blood pumped from the hole he gave Anton a bewildered glance… then his eyes rolled up in his head and he dropped like a stone into the bottom of the gondola, dead before he hit the wicker.
Anton felt something running down his cheek and wiped away a dribble of Spurl’s blood. For a moment, everything had fallen still, the sudden violence freezing everyone in place; but now chaos erupted.
It was much, much later before Anton had the opportunity to continue his story, officially to the Lord Mayor, unofficially (and very much against Ferkkisson’s wishes, but tough luck) to the reporters. After Spurl’s display, he suddenly found it much easier to convince them all of the reality of the magical kingdom on the other side of the Barrier-and the threat that Kingdom would pose if Lord Falk succeeded in lowering the Barrier and moving into the Outside world.