Magebane by Lee Arthur Chane

at either end to form the two wings of the manor house that wrapped the central Great Hall in their embrace. There were broad, curving staircases at either end as well, leading down to the main floor.
    Doors opened only off the side of the corridor where her room was located. The other side of the hall was punctuated by tall, vertical slits, about two hands’ breadth in width, filled with delicate wooden latticework. As Brenna pulled on her coat, she glanced idly down through one of those slits into the Great Hall, expecting to see it empty and dark.
    Instead, it blazed with light. Servants, both human and mage, wove around it in a complicated dance, cleaning floor tiles, polishing tabletops, buffing brass candlesticks, never duplicating one another’s efforts or getting in one another’s way.
    All that bustle could mean only one thing: Lord Falk was coming home.
    Which made it even more urgent that Brenna go outside now . Once Lord Falk arrived, she would be expected to be close at hand. It also meant she couldn’t, as she had planned, simply cross the Hall to the antechamber on the other side and go out from there through the big double doors of the main entrance. If Gannick, the head of the household, saw her, he might not—almost certainly would not—allow her out at all, on the theory that Falk might wish to see her the moment he arrived. Even if she weren’t stopped, Falk would not be pleased to hear, as he certainly would, that she had chosen to leave the estate knowing his arrival was imminent.
    Better to plead ignorance than beg forgiveness , she thought.
    Fortunately, there was more than one way out of the estate, and she knew them all.
    So rather than go to the end of the corridor and down into the Great Hall, Brenna went only halfway along it and through a door that opened into a servants’ staircase, very narrow to make it easier for servants to lean against the wall and support themselves while carrying laden trays.
    Once in the basement, she followed the corridor of whitewashed brick that ran beneath the lavish rooms that visitors saw. Brenna knew all these behind-the-scenes corridors like she knew her own face in the mirror, having roamed them since she was a child. At regular intervals she passed steps leading up to between-room hallways that allowed the servants to access rooms unobtrusively to change bed linen or feed the heating stoves, without troubling Lord Falk or his guests.
    At one point she passed another staircase going down. It led to the only part of the manor she rarely visited: the sub-subbasement, deep beneath the manor, where Falk’s Magefire roared, a brilliant tower of blue and yellow flame, fed by a constant flow of rock gas from a reservoir untold fathoms beneath the ground. That reservoir of gas was one of two reasons Falk Manor had been built where it was: the other, of course, was the even more important fact that beneath the manor ran one of the veins of magical power that spread out from the lode beneath the Palace like the tentacles of one of the monsters that supposedly swam the oceans of the world . . . oceans Brenna had read about in Falk’s extensive library but never expected to see, cut off as they all were from the outside world by the Great Barrier.
    In the Palace, Brenna knew from her annual visits there, the MageFurnace both provided energy for magic and heated the hundreds of rooms and dozens of corridors. The Magefire in Falk’s basement could surely have done the same for his much smaller manor, but Falk preferred to heat his home with coal, reserving the Magefire’s energy for other uses—such as charging and programming the mageservants.
    Once, as the corridor she followed testified, the manor had boasted a full staff of actual living humans, but unlike his ancestors, Lord Falk seemed to prefer to have as few people about the place as possible. Besides Gannick, there were only a half-dozen servants in the entire manor,