The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds Read Free Page B

growling up the final slope.
    “There it is,” Garrod said. He pointed to the massive stone pile that loomed among its outbuildings at the crest of a long hill. “Demaizen Old Hall.”
    The driver grunted, unimpressed. “I see it.”
    The main gate stood open in a twist of rusted iron. The groundcar passed slowly through, and kept on until the road ended in front of the heavy bronze doors of the central building. The beams from the groundcar’s driving lamps picked up the Hall’s blank windows, its moss- and lichen-spattered walls. Everything here was untended and overgrown, even the road itself; weeds poked up knee-high through what had once been the gravel surface of a circular driveway.
    The driver switched the engine to neutral, and the sound dropped to a low throb. “Here you are.”
    “Thanks, Yuva,” Garrod said. He pushed open the passenger-side door. The wind took it, smashing it fully open against the front engine cowling. The rain stung like needles and plastered Garrod’s hair flat in an instant. He jumped out of the groundcar, his staff swinging from his belt, and ran the ten feet to the doors.
    The arched opening gave at least some protection from the wind, but the doors were locked. Garrod frowned. The keys had not been part of the inheritance.
    He unclipped his staff. A moment’s preparation, a reaching-out and a pulling-in, and the staff began to give off a steady blue-white light. He touched the door and bent his energies toward persuading it to open, but to no avail—the locks were rusted fast, their mechanisms destroyed by more than a generation without maintenance.
    Garrod sprinted back to where Yuvaen waited in the groundcar. “Back her up to the doors,” he shouted above the howling wind.
    “Got it.”
    The groundcar lurched forward, then swung back and to the left. Its wheels ground and bumped up the shallow steps until the rear towing bar nearly touched the bronze doors.
    Garrod opened the cargo compartment and pulled out the tow chain. He threaded it through the handles of the doors, linked it with a clevis bolt to the rings on the towing bar, and stepped aside.
    “Yuva! Ahead slow!”
    The groundcar sent out a puff of chemical vapor from its upper tubes, and growled forward. Hinges and bolts gave way behind it in a howl of tearing metal, and the bronze doors buckled under the strain.
    “Hold up!” Garrod shouted.
    The groundcar stopped. Yuvaen shut off the engine and emerged from the driver’s side.
    “Give us a light,” Garrod said. “Let’s see how it looks.”
    “Right.” Yuvaen had brought an electric lantern with him from the groundcar. He turned it on and lifted it to shine a yellow light at the doors of the hall—the right-hand one pulled entirely away from the frame, the one on the left tilted crazily and hanging by a single hinge. He cast a gloomy eye over the damage. “It’ll cost you a pretty to have those fixed.”
    “I’ve got all the money I need,” Garrod said. “What I don’t have is time. Come on.”
    The two men entered the Hall. White-sheeted furniture stood ghostlike in the foyer. Dust lay thick, and gnawing creatures had worked on much of the interior woodwork. Garrod pointed through an arch to where a staircase went curling upward.
    “There,” he said, and started up toward the long gallery on the second floor. Yuvaen followed.
    At the entrance to the gallery, both men paused on the threshold. Their rain-soaked clothing clung to their bodies like wet leaves, and the glow from Yuvaen’s lantern cast a swaying circle of yellow light on the space within, where the sus-Demaizen kept their tablets of remembrance.
    Plaques and memorials covered the walls—ancient slabs of grey slate scratched with names in a language no longer spoken by anyone living, and newer tablets of painted wood and cast metal. On the altars beneath them, long-guttered candles spilled out their wax across carven wood.
    Garrod strode into the center of the room, where a small