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.
The lake was greedy. It swallowed everything. Or almost. Melyobar came to himself in the murderously cold water. An object nudged him. It was King Narbetton’s glass sepulchre, floating serenely by. The look of inscrutability on his father’s face was the last thing the Prince saw before the water took him.
A head broke the surface.
Andar Talgorian took great gulps of air, his lungs burning. He was so numb from the cold that he couldn’t feel his body except as pain. Somehow, the bonds tying his wrists had broken.
He didn’t imagine surviving for more than a couple of minutes in this cold. The irony of escaping death twice in succession, only to fall at the last hurdle, was not lost on him. Perhaps the gods were set on him dying.
It was getting harder to keep afloat, or even to think straight. His stamina was draining away, and his limbs were growing weaker. The cold was beyond cold, and seeping into his very bones. What he found amazing was that the equivalent of a sizeable town had just dropped into the lake and you wouldn’t know it. He couldn’t see anyone or anything else.
Then he heard a sound. Or thought he did; his ears might have been cut off for all the feeling he had in them. There it was again. A voice. Correction, voices. Shouting. He saw nothing the way he was facing. So laboriously, painfully, he turned himself about.
Something was coming towards him. He couldn’t make out what it was. As it got nearer it began to look like two figures walking on the water. Crouching, more like, the closer they got. They were calling and waving. They hauled him out. He lay gasping on their makeshift raft, the hangman’s rope still about his neck. One of his rescuers put a pocket flask to his lips. The fiery alcohol brought back some feeling as it burned its way through his system. As his senses returned, he realised that the sodden clothes the two men wore were uniforms.
‘Nechen and Welst, Palace Guard Auxiliary,’ one of them said. ‘How are you, sir?’
‘Thank…you,’ Talgorian managed.
‘Glad to share our good fortune, sir,’ the other told him. ‘Why, if it hadn’t been for this piece of wreckage, we wouldn’t be here ourselves.’
Talgorian focused on the slab of wood supporting them. It was the trapdoor from the gallows.
Many stories were told about the day destruction swept the empires and their many protectorates. Some would become legends.