Free Magebane by Lee Arthur Chane Page A

you each evening.”
    â€œYes, my lord.” Brich blinked at the paper in the text-stamper for a moment, then began pulling again at the padded levers, fingers flicking as though he were scratching a dog behind the ears.
    Falk let the clacking sound drive him into his own office, where he spent the next hour dealing with the most pressing paperwork: arrest warrants, incarceration papers, orders for execution. Toward the end of that time Brich came in with a preliminary report from Captain Fedric on the search they’d conducted inside the Lesser Barrier for anyone who shouldn’t be there. They’d found nothing. Everyone had the proper permissions, the proper papers, or the proper breeding. Falk frowned and went back to his work.
    Half an hour later he had cleared his desk of the most pressing matters, and went into the outer office again. “Carriage?” he said to Brich.
    â€œIt’s ready, my lord.”
    Falk nodded and headed toward the Palace’s west entrance.
    He could understand Brich’s confusion as to why he would leave just after ordering a roundup of suspects, but he did not really anticipate receiving any useful information from the Commoners his operatives would arrest. They might be sympathizers of the Cause, but they wouldn’t be its ringleaders. Some, in fact, would simply be innocent victims of whispering campaigns organized by their enemies.
    The leaders, if they truly existed, would be far more deeply hidden. Most of them were no doubt thought of as fine, upstanding citizens. But the roundup would be a sharp reminder that Falk would not stand by indefinitely while sedition brewed in the Commons . . . and even though he considered it unlikely, there was always the possibility that someone might give him a name or a place, a tiny loose thread he could begin to pull at until he unraveled the whole web, revealing the mysterious Patron crouched like a fat spider at its center.
    A better hope for beginning that unraveling process lay with Mother Northwind, but to see her, Falk had to go home.
    His carriage hadn’t yet pulled up as he stepped out under the pillared portico. The Magecorps had scheduled rain for that evening, and so a thick gray mist was beginning to obscure the magesun. Falk leaned against a pillar, idly slapping his black gloves against his knee with his right hand and holding the briefcase full of paperwork he had packed in his office with the other. He gazed across the broad lawn beyond the drive to the line of trees that marked the edge of the Mageborn Enclave; he could just see the chimneys of the house he maintained there for . . . special guests.
    He would have been returning home soon in any case, he thought. Tagaza was quite right: with the execution of the Plan so close, it was time to bring Brenna to the Palace to stay.
    He didn’t think she would object—not that it made any difference, but it would be easier if she came willingly. She had turned eighteen half a year previously—at the same time as Prince Karl, of course—and he had often told her, setting the stage for the long-awaited culmination of his plans, that when she was of age he would bring her to New Cabora and find a position for her as a maid within the Palace or, if she preferred, in the Commons.
    Falk’s feelings for his ward were not at all fatherly, but neither were they lecherous. He saw Brenna more as . . . an investment. Or perhaps a gamble, though that word carried with it far more sense of uncertainty than he felt about the chances of the Plan’s success. He did have some affection for her, doomed though she was—or perhaps because of that; he wasn’t a monster, after all—and resolved to ensure she enjoyed herself during her final few weeks.
    His magecarriage came rolling up the drive from the outbuildings south of the Palace. Painted black, with no device to mark it as belonging to him, it trailed smoke as it approached. At the tiller