Standing on his windy perch, surveying a view the others couldn’t see as easily, the Envoy noticed something strange. Ahead, at the mouth of the next valley, a small town clustered, just visible in the greyness because of its lights. As he watched, those lights flickered in unison. Not individually or in segments, which might be explicable, but all of them at the same time. He couldn’t imagine why the town’s entire glamoured lighting should gutter simultaneously. Then it happened again, twice in quick succession. The fourth time, all the lights stayed out.
His guards hadn’t noticed. They were stamping their feet and huffing into their hands. Going by their resentful glances, they were more anxious to see the executioner than he was.
The officials around Melyobar’s throne conferred in groups. Messengers were dispatched.
He looked to the town. There were lights again, but they were different. They flashed, pulsed and shimmered, and they were multicoloured. Some took the form of brief, intense bursts. Perhaps a celebration was taking place. A melancholy thought for a man waiting to be hanged.
Then he thought he saw movement on the mountain slopes near the town. It was hard to be sure, but it looked like a large body of snow sliding earthward. An avalanche?
Another door opened on the battlements. A man hurried to the Prince at speed. He wore the robes that marked him as one of the sorcerer elite responsible for controlling the palace’s movements. He bowed low to Melyobar, then began an animated discourse.
All the palace lights flickered. The lights on the other palaces did the same, and in unison, like the distant town.
An odd noise greeted this unprecedented event. It sounded like the buzz of an enormous swarm of insects. In fact, it was a mass murmur; the startled outpourings of the many people on and about the palace, and the ones following. As the floating buildings made no noise, and the snow-blanketed day was equally silent, it was quite possible to hear such things. People hailing each other from one passing palace to another, using just their lungs, was not uncommon, though there were those who considered it vulgar. The misbehaviour of the lights caused a definite stir among Melyobar’s entourage. Much coming and going ensued, and the sorcerer who had briefed Melyobar left even faster than he had arrived. Watching all this, Talgorian was afraid they’d forgotten him. He spiked that thought. On balance, he was more afraid they hadn’t.
When the lights flickered, Melyobar’s personal bodyguards naturally moved closer to him. The Prince’s instinct was to move closer to his father.
Glamour-heated, Narbetton’s cabinet was pleasant to the touch on a winter’s day. Melyobar embraced it, and began an edgy, whispered dialogue with the old King.
Some of the courtiers went to the battlements and looked down on the army of camp followers. Things seemed to be out of the ordinary there, too. There were more lights than there should have been, many of them overly busy, and some kind of turmoil was evident. Sounds accompanied all this. They drifted up as pure clamour, but there were higher-pitched, faintly distressing chords woven in. The courtiers took to exchanging anxious looks.
‘Father says it’s all right!’ the Prince reported. ‘It’s just a little glitch in the magic, due to…the bad weather,’ he ended weakly.
The entire palace lurched. It took a drop of perhaps a second’s duration, though it felt much longer. Stomachs turned. Breaking glass could be heard, and loud curses. People screamed.
‘Father thinks it might be best if we were to bring the palace down to as near the ground as possible,’ the Prince announced. ‘Not that there’s any danger, of course. I’m issuing an order to that effect.’ A lithe messenger sped off with it as he spoke.
A full half minute passed before the next scare. Another tremor ran through the palace. This time the effect was more violent, with the structure not just descending sharply, as it had before, but drifting alarmingly off-course as well. The sheer wall of the mountain on their right loomed uncomfortably close.
The other palaces had similar problems. Several dropped in height appreciably. One was spinning, apparently uncontrollably. Small explosions blossomed on their surfaces, dislodging debris, and in one case, a balcony.
On the royal palace, the mood was one of barely suppressed panic. One of the military brass in the crowd milling about the Prince remarked, ‘This is a fine time for the executioner to turn up.’
Melyobar caught the remark, and followed the officer’s gaze. Tiers of stone walkways lined the side of the palace above the battlements. On the lowest there was a figure. It somehow gave the impression of masculinity, although there were no obvious signs. He was tall and slender, and dressed entirely in black. The mantle he wore covered him completely. His hood was up, and it was impossible to see his face. His hands were the only visible part of him. They were strikingly pale and long-fingered. Some might say skeletal.
The figure didn’t move. He just stood there, looking down at the Prince.
In many respects his demeanour conformed to the image of an executioner, dressed for anonymity and come to earn his coin.
For Melyobar, there was another, more dreadful possibility.
He pressed himself to his father’s cabinet, their faces inches apart. ‘A fine time for the executioner, father, is that it? Or the perfect time to foil our plan?’ His breath misted the glass.
The palace swung alarmingly. It began unsteadily revolving on its axis, looking for all the world like a demented children’s fairground ride. Columns, statues and strips of filigree dislodged and dropped away. One of the catapults broke its restraints and rolled across the battlements, scattering everyone in its path and crashing into the restraining wall, before beginning the return journey as the palace started to tilt in the opposite direction.
Hysteria broke out. People ran in all directions, aimless, screaming and shouting. The few trying to maintain order were overrun by the panicked majority. Cracks rippled through floors and walls.
The other floating palaces were in just as much trouble. Towers crumbled and causeways collapsed. Fires erupted. Several of the manors bumped each other, the jolting impacts breaking a thousand windows and fracturing their marble facades. Two collided head on with a sound like thunder.
Terror held sway. Giving in to irrationality, or simple desperation, many on the royal palace had deserted the battlements and fled indoors. None, not even his personal guard, had elected to stay with or protect their prince.
‘Father?’ he whispered, hugging the cabinet. ‘Father? What do I do?’ He listened attentively, and at last said only, ‘Oh, yes.’
The Prince again lifted his gaze to the parapet where the figure had stood. He saw what he expected.
Melyobar returned his attention to the cabinet and his father’s severe countenance. ‘Look, daddy, look. Watch me. Watch me, father.’ He smiled. ‘Are you ready? Watch me now. We…all…fall…down!’
Magic deserted them.
The distance to the ground was not that great, being equivalent to a moderate cliff face, or even some of the remarkably tall trees found in tropical regions. But height is irrelevant when plummeting objects weigh untold thousands of tons, and the locality over which the court travelled was not without bearing.
The royal palace and its attendant chateaux, mansions and citadels dropped like a handful of pebbles released by a bored god. They came down in a region dominated by lakes. Lakes much deeper than wide, and very wide indeed.
Not all of the buildings fell on iced-over lakes. Several came to grief on marshes and farmland, and in one case, a road. But that wasn’t the fate of the majority, including Melyobar’s palace. They smashed through ice, breaking up on impact or plunging into the freezing water whole. As they sank, the increasing pressure stove in windows and doors, and a deluge invaded their warrens of corridors, their staterooms, grand apartments and auditoria.