“Yes, Lord Falk,” snapped Fedric. He turned, barking orders. The guards started to form a protective cordon around Karl, but he pushed his way out from among them. As he confronted Falk, Falk noticed for the first time that the Prince’s eyes were now level with his own. When did that happen? he wondered.
“I will expect more definitive answers from you very soon, Lord Falk,” Karl said. “You may consider that a Royal Command.”
Anger boiled up in Falk, but he let none of it show on his face. “Of course, Your Highness,” he said. “Now, please, I must insist. Return to the Palace, and remain in your quarters until we have searched the entire grounds.”
Karl took one more look at the corpse in the water, then turned and let his guards lead him back toward the bridge, leaving Falk with Tagaza. Once the guards had passed beyond the screen of bushes, Falk pulled the Unbound symbol from his pocket and held it out toward Tagaza. “She was wearing this.”
Tagaza took it, and immediately said, “This was the storage device. Exhausted now, but I can feel a trace of power still clinging to it.” He raised an eyebrow at Falk. “Is there a traitor among the Unbound?”
Falk took the emblem back and glared at it. “I can’t believe that,” he said. “Mother Northwind has examined every one of them. If any harbored thoughts of treachery, she would know.”
Tagaza nodded. “Indeed she would.” He looked back at the corpse. “You will have her examine the body?” he said. “That’s why you put it in stasis?”
“Of course.” Falk sighed. “That means a trip to my manor.”
Tagaza shrugged. “You were going to have to go there soon anyway. Brenna…”
“… must be brought to the Palace, yes, I know.” He frowned. “Why would a Commoner be carrying an Unbound symbol?”
“To throw you off the scent,” Tagaza said promptly. “To make you look to the Unbound instead of the Common Cause, or whoever is really behind the attack.” He smiled. “Everyone knows of your bitter hatred of the Unbound. You have executed several of their leaders.”
“Perhaps,” Falk said. “I hope you are right. Because the other possibility is that someone knows that I am actually the Master of the Unbound, that the Unbound I have executed were ordinary criminals enchanted to lie about their membership in the Order, and that this assassin carried the Unbound symbol so that, after Karl was dead, I would know why he was murdered.”
Tagaza frowned. “You have a devious mind, my lord.”
Falk snorted. “That should hardly be a surprise to you, old friend.”
“If you’re right,” Tagaza said, “then this attack was not really aimed at the Prince at all. It was aimed at you. At us.”
“Someone who does not want the Barrier to fall,” Falk said, “and knows how close we are to making that happen.”
Tagaza shook his head. “An unsettling thought, my lord.”
“Indeed.” Falk glanced at the corpse once more, then up at the bridge. The Prince and his bodyguard were bright specks at its far end. “I’ll leave for my manor tonight and take the corpse to Mother Northwind to examine. And when I return, I’ll bring Brenna with me. I want all the pieces we need for our endgame close at hand. It may be we’ll want to advance the date. I can easily give some excuse for why I want to inspect the Cauldron early this year.”
“I concur,” said Tagaza.
“Wait here with the body until the men come to collect it,” Falk said. “I must get back to the Palace.” He took one more look at the snow-wrapped world outside and let his anger boil up again. “When this storm clears, the Commoners will face one that is far worse!”
He reared back and hurled the Unbound symbol as far as he could out into the lake. The silver circle glittered as it spun end over end, then vanished beneath the waves with a tiny splash of foam.
Falk turned his back on Tagaza and strode toward the bridge.
Tagaza watched Falk stalk away, and sighed. He had left a large and particularly tasty glass of wine in the garden, not to mention a plate of his favorite cheese and some freshbaked crusty bread, and now he was stuck on the far side of the lake from the Palace-howling wilderness, as far as he was concerned-waiting for guards to come and collect a crispy corpse.
He’d also been left quite alone (if you didn’t count the aforementioned corpse), which he found a not-particularly pleasant state of affairs so soon after an assassination attempt. Especially, he thought uneasily, one that Falk suspects may actually have been aimed at disrupting his plans.
He supposed he should say “our” plans. After all, there would be no plans if he hadn’t figured out, over years of research, how the First Twelve had created the Barriers, and-more importantly-how to bring both of them crashing down.
But although he and Falk both wanted the Barriers to fall, their reasons differed. Far more, in fact, than Falk knew.
Tagaza had seldom been as near to the Lesser Barrier as he was now. With a glance at the corpse, which he was reasonably confident was not going anywhere, he strolled north from the lake the hundred yards or so to the Barrier, and looked through its faint shimmer into the swirling storm beyond. Such an amazing achievement, he thought in admiration. Not as amazing as the Great Barrier, which absolutely was impermeable to magic, completely and totally… and, not coincidentally, to light as well. The Lesser Barrier was something you could see through. It was not the dome it appeared, but a giant sphere, half a mile in diameter, the Palace at its center, extending as far beneath the ground as it did into the sky above.
Even more remarkably, it somehow had been carefully tuned to allow air to pass through it, and the stream that fed the lake, without also allowing rain and wind and snow. A very fine piece of magic indeed, and Tagaza knew that the skills of the ancient MageLords that had accomplished it were long lost.
But the skill to bring it crashing down remains, he thought with pride. It remains in me!
And a good thing, too, because the ancient MageLords had badly miscalculated when they’d set an arbitrary expiration date for the two Barriers at a thousand years after their creation. Did they not know? Tagaza thought, reaching out a hand, not to touch the Barrier, but just to feel the power emanating from it.
Perhaps they didn’t. The Old Kingdom, the histories agreed, had sprung up on an “inexhaustible” lode of magic. Tagaza did not believe such a thing existed, but if it were sufficiently large, the ancients might have, since they had never run up against its limit.
But this lode, the one on which the Palace had been built, the one to which they had transported themselves and all their more-or-less loyal followers eight centuries ago, was certainly not inexhaustible: not when the Barriers were drawing incredible amounts of magic from it day and night, and had been for centuries.
Tagaza had stumbled on that hard truth during his student days at the College of Mages. There were methods for measuring the amount of magic available in any particular location. The central lode in the Old Kingdom had been surrounded by many secondary lodes, avidly sought by magic miners. Cities sprouted where those lodes were found (making the miners who found them immensely wealthy).
But this lode, directly opposite the Old Kingdom on the sphere of the world, had no secondary lodes. It existed in solitary splendor, spread through the Kingdom only by a few veins, stretching out into the countryside like the spokes of a wheel. It was on the strongest of those veins that the First Twelve had established their demesnes.