Vile brutes of the Kwen are ever given unto their basest ills. Woe unto them! God has reserved for these the darkness, in which they will dwell in eternal savagery.
—The Tirasid, Foundation, Verse 48 (56 of Tiran)
Common Cursework
or a long time, Sciona didn’t hear the pounding on the door throughF her own screams.
“Miss Freynan!” voices called from outside.
“Freynan, open up! Speak to us! Are you all right?”
One of the voices belonged to Archmage Bringham. Someone must have gone to get him when she wouldn’t open the door for anyone else. But Sciona couldn’t move from where she knelt on the floor. At some point, the mapping spell had run its course, and the image had faded to nothing. But Sciona was still staring into the coil, the lifeless girl seared into her eyes, when the door broke down.
A rush of bodies overwhelmed the room, voices rambling in concern and anger. Meaningless hands took Sciona’s arms, pulled her up, bore her to a quiet, empty classroom on the third floor, wrapped a blanket around her shaking shoulders, and pressed a mug of tea into her hands. She couldn’t drink it. All she could do was watch the leaves bleed color into the water and think of all that red in the ocean shallows. What life had paid for this tea? To bring the leaves here from their native range, to push the water through the pipes, to make it hot enough to sting her burned hands?
“Sciona.” Archmage Bringham’s voice finally pierced her stupor, and she looked up. They were alone in the deserted lecture hall, dim light from
the barrier filtering through the film on the great windows. “Speak to me.
Please.” There was so much concern in his voice.
Did he know? Did all the archmages know the real cost of magic?
“Sciona,” he repeated even more softly.
No, she decided as she finally met his eyes. No one who looked at another person with that kind of compassion could know such evil and keep
living.
“Are you all right?” he said again.
“Did you see?” she whispered.
“See what, my dear?”
Of course. Sciona’s mapping coil had deactivated before the other mages burst into the room. He hadn’t seen the girl in the water. The blood was just there every time Sciona blinked, filling the dark insides of her eyelids, seeping across the gray of the barrier light through the windows.
“Freynan, what happened back there?”
“I was…Th-there was a girl…” Just saying the words brought tears back into Sciona’s eyes. “A young girl. Fifteen or sixteen. She had hair the color of ink. I…Feryn, forgive me, I killed her!”
“You killed someone?” Bringham said in alarm. “When? Where?”
“B-back in my lab. Sh-she…” Sciona shook her head, trying to clear it of the swirling viscera. Focus. She had to tell Bringham, make him understand. “Listen, Archmage Bringham. The Otherrealm isn’t what we thought. It’s not a separate realm. It’s the Kwen and the lands beyond it. I saw it!”
“Don’t you see the Otherrealm every day, Freynan?”
“No, not like this. I mean I actually saw it—like I’m seeing you now.
The girl in my mapping coil. When I siphoned, sh-she…” Emotion and nausea seized Sciona’s throat. She just managed to set the teacup down before pitching forward and vomiting all over the floor at Bringham’s feet.
When she came back to herself, she had been moved to a different seat while a Kwen janitor cleaned up the vomit. This one was younger than Thomil—just a boy, really, judging by the way his uniform hung off his small shoulders. Sciona couldn’t see his face. Like Thomil, he kept his
copper-haired head down, his eyes obscured beneath his cap. As Bringham spoke kindly to Sciona, offering her water, she couldn’t hear him. All she could hear was the scrape of the boy’s cleaning brush on the floor. All she could see was his wiry little form coming apart in spirals of light again— scrape—and again, with each circle of the brush on the tile.
It was only when the boy had finished and faded away that Bringham’s voice pulled her back.
“Listen to me, Sciona.” His hand gripped her shoulder. “Are you with
me?”
She nodded weakly.
“From what you describe, I think you’ve run afoul of a curse.”
“What?”
“Not the common variety of cursework with which you would be familiar,” Archmage Bringham said. “There are darker magics that even the whole of the High Magistry hasn’t purged or come to understand. It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve delved deep enough to trigger one of these antique curses so early in your career, you clever little devil.”
“So…” Hope flickered back on in the depths. “You think I’ve been tricked?” she asked weakly. “This has happened to other highmages?”
“Oh, yes,” Bringham assured her. “Archmage Orynhel has some truly chilling tales from his early days in the High Magistry. Of course, his was the generation of mages directly following the traitor mage, Sabernyn.”
Sciona tilted her head, not understanding what Highmage Sabernyn had to do with any of this.
“The public knows Sabernyn as the mage who murdered his colleagues,” Bringham said. “That’s how you know him.”
“Right.” Sciona’s brow furrowed as she recalled the details of those murders: mages and their families eviscerated behind the locked doors of their own homes. “Right.”
“Among highmages, he’s just as infamous for the curses he left around the University. When he suspected others of conspiring against him, he— well, for starters, he killed many of them with forbidden magic, but that’s the part of the story everyone knows. He also attached curses to texts,
spellographs, and any powerful conduit he could get his hands on. Not many outside the High Magistry know this, but the library fire of 252 was a
Sabernyn original.”
“Really?”
Bringham nodded. “A curse he wrote to activate if anyone ever tried to remove his life’s work from circulation. But that’s a highmage for you. His work comes before anything else.” Bringham paused to chuckle as though hoping Sciona would join him the way she normally might. When she was quiet, he cleared his throat and continued. “Sabernyn’s curses were never well known outside the High Magistry because he didn’t design them to affect the public—or lesser mages, for that matter. He set them for future generations of highmages to blunder into. Not that I’m accusing you of blundering—just of being young, ambitious, and in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is my fault, Freynan. I should have warned you that this was a possibility.”
“What was a possibility?” Sciona demanded, straining toward that glimmer of hope. Maybe this had all been a misunderstanding. Maybe none of it had to be real. “What do you think happened?”
“Sabernyn and malicious mages who came before him could be skilled in trickery, illusory magics.”
“Illusory magics?” Sciona repeated. “So, you’re saying…there could have been a curse that showed me images in a mapping coil that weren’t really there?”
“Well, since a mapping spell has never produced a lifelike image— violent or otherwise—in the Magistry’s history, I would say yes. What you saw was not really there.”
“Oh…” Sciona breathed out, trying to feel relief—but found that she couldn’t. A barricade of questions blocked her way. If the black-haired woman wasn’t real, where had the image come from? Why had Thomil recognized the field in her first spell?
“Sabernyn, especially, set curses to scare mages out of pursuing deeper magic.”
“But…” Sabernyn had never set foot outside Tiran. He wouldn’t know what Kwen plains looked like in the snow, let alone how to conjure one from nothing. He had never seen the ocean. “How? And why?” she asked, even as another part of her screamed not to question, to just accept the lifeline Bringham had thrown her. He was the mentor. Let him tell her that she hadn’t seen what she thought, that everything was fine, that she was the victim in this madness, not the murderer. “I mean—I thought Sabernyn’s primary motivation was jealousy,” her tongue went on against her will. “His crimes were against his rivals and anyone else who impeded his work, right? I haven’t touched his work in my research. Why would he care about future mages delving into spells that had nothing to do with him?”
Bringham shrugged. “Who can fathom the mind of a madman?”
“I can,” Sciona said under her breath. While she couldn’t imagine physically stabbing someone to death, she had thought at times that she would kill for the opportunity to succeed in the Magistry. According to Thomil, she already had killed for that opportunity. Many, many times.
“What did you say?” Bringham leaned in with that softest of concern in his green eyes.
“Nothing,” Sciona murmured. “I just don’t see how this could have been a Sabernyn curse.”
He had been a mapping specialist, yes, but also a deeply Tirasian one.
Sciona had read his work, and it had been some of the most religiously restricted mapping she had ever seen. No Stravos influences, no fancy modifications, no imagination at all.
“You may be right,” Bringham said. “It’s hard to know the culprit.
Curses can sit dormant for centuries. Your attacker may well have been a mage who lived long before our time or Sabernyn’s.”
“Right…” Except that, as far as Sciona could tell, Andrethen Stravos had been the only mage in Tiran’s history who could produce lifelike images in a mapping coil. How could anyone else have used such imaging in a curse?
“Some of these old mages were skilled in magic the best of us are still struggling to understand. Some dealt more in emotion than in fact, playing
on weak souls like…well, I know you’re not weak,” Bringham amended, and Sciona realized what he had been about to say: weak souls like women and Kwen. “From what your colleagues told me, your assistant saw these images, too, and was similarly traumatized. I hear he ran out of your
laboratory in distress?”
“Yes.”
“Poor boy. No one should have to deal with cursework, but least of all one as simple as a Kwen.”
“Thomil’s not simple.” Sciona had no idea why her tongue jumped to defend a man she had slapped in the face not an hour earlier. “He’s not stupid.” Disrespectful, maybe. Mistaken, certainly. Not stupid.
“For a Kwen, no. Of course not,” Bringham said kindly. “But come on, my dear. He is what he is. And if this curse shook you, with your reasonable mind, imagine the effect it could have on him.”
“That’s not why…” Sciona trailed off. Because how could she even begin to explain Thomil’s rage? All the terrible claims he had made were sitting like knifepoints in Sciona’s flesh. To repeat them to Bringham here —to give them that weight—would drive the blades into vital organs. And who could say whether she would survive the damage?
“You should pay him a visit and apologize,” Bringham said. “Explain that what he saw was a fabrication, a cruel trick of magic that can befall the
best of mages.”
“But—” But it wasn’t.
Sciona wanted to believe Archmage Bringham. She wanted it with every wretched inch of her soul. But the cogs of her traitor mind wouldn’t stop turning, processing the raw information at her disposal. She had tried her mapping spell on two different spellographs—both of which she had used for months without incident, both of which had been manufactured after Highmage Sabernyn’s execution, both of which she had checked extensively for curses following the suspicious explosion in Halaros’s lab.
And granted, not all curses were concealed in spellographs. A mage could also place a curse on paper with invisible ink compounds or in the lines of an old spell with subtle tricks of composition. But Sciona hadn’t
used anyone else’s spellpapers, nor had she copied anything from Stravos’s work verbatim. The spells had been her own composition, tight and without artifice, like all her work. Any language she had borrowed, she had
understood in its entirety.
“Archmage, I don’t think—”
“Take the rest of the day off, Highmage Freynan.” Bringham put a calming hand on her knee. “And tomorrow too. I know that’s not easy for you, but you’ve just been through a terrible ordeal. You need to rest and clear your head before the presentation next week. Make amends with your assistant, spend some time with your aunt, maybe sleep in for a couple days. As hard as you’ve been driving yourself, you’ve earned a break. Now I am”—he glanced at the lecture room clock and winced—“very late for my next meeting. I can call someone to make sure you get home safely if you’re still feeling unsteady.”
Sciona was far—irretrievably far—from steady. She was miles out to sea beyond the edge of the known world, where no rope could reel her back
and no one would hear her scream.
“No, thank you, sir. I’m fine.”
—
Sciona’s colleagues and their assistants didn’t bother whispering their snide comments as she returned to the fourth floor to collect her things.
“Typical of a girl to have a meltdown after three months of real work.”
“And people wonder why the High Magistry doesn’t admit women!”
“Hey, Freynan,” Renthorn needled as she left the office with her bag, “do you think if I throw a tantrum, they’ll give me a paid vacation too?”
It had never been easier to ignore taunting. All the meaning had bled out of the world with that girl in the ocean.
“What’s the matter?” Renthorn called after her as she picked up her pace and found herself running. “Freynan, what did you see?”
Sciona had spent her entire life as a beam of energy, made of the burning, at times bitter, need to reach the next level of magic. She had never
been without that need before. In its absence, she was hollow. She was nothing. And the world was black.
She had barely been able to think about the magical energy behind the teacup in her hands. The train was too much to contemplate, and it was her only way home. She buried her head in her arms for the whole ride, shutting off sight, blocking out sound, and trying not to feel the sheer power driving the machine forward.
“Sciona!” Aunt Winny exclaimed when she opened the door. “You’re back so soon!” The smile on her face wilted when she took in Sciona’s eyes. “Oh, sweet girl, what happened?”
Sciona shook her head. “Aunt Winny…am I a good person?”
And she must really have looked shattered because instead of anything curt or scolding, Aunt Winny said, “Oh, darling, of course you are!”
“You…” Sciona’s lip trembled. “You don’t know that. How could you know that?”
“You’re my little girl. How could I not?”
Sciona dropped her bag. Then, not caring how childish it was, she ran into her aunt’s arms.
She sobbed without respite. First holding Aunt Winny, then Alba, then her pillow long into the night. She hadn’t meant to cry so long—had never cried so long in her life—but there had never been so much to grieve.
When she had wept all she could for the girl at the ocean, she had to mourn her dream of more than twenty years. She had to mourn the cost of every spell she had ever written in her life. So many that if she shed one paltry tear for each, she would shrivel with the loss and die long before she finished, and it still wouldn’t be enough. Thomil had said that how a person felt about their actions didn’t matter; only the actions themselves mattered.
And adding up the damage of all Sciona’s spells was too much. Far too much. Even if she held to her conviction that God weighed a soul’s intentions, how could any volume of guilt or sorrow possibly cancel all the evil she had done? She was one soul adrift in an ocean of blood. All the tears in the world wouldn’t wash that from her hands or fill her a channel to Heaven.
So, when she physically couldn’t cry anymore, Sciona stepped onto the sill of her window, the breeze cool on her swollen eyes. It was a four-story drop to the pavement below. And beyond it, the city of Tiran was so beautiful, so alive, in the night. Music crackled from a radio on a neighboring balcony as human figures danced against the glow of an interior light. A nearby steel mill ran through the night, fires warm in the dark. In the distance, the train hummed. All those lights and wonders of technology, bought with blood.
Sciona looked down and pictured herself breaking on the cobblestones below, her organs spattering the curb, her brains leaking from her cracked skull. One fewer mage in Tiran to suck the life from the rest of the world.
But it would be like dropping a pebble to dam a river. Meaningless. Worse than meaningless because the High Magistry would promptly replace Sciona with a different mage, one who wouldn’t be able to map as efficiently as she did, who would siphon more to accomplish less.
“So, what does that mean?” she demanded of the night. “I have to stay here?” In this utterly unacceptable reality where all the good I’ve ever done —all the good I’ve ever known—is an evil?
She turned skyward to the starlit glitter of the barrier, from which God and all the Founding Mages were said to look down on Tiran.
“What kind of deal is that? What have you done here?” She tipped forward, fingers straining on the window frame as her face cracked into a snarl. “How could you do this?”
Because they had known. God damn them, the Founding Mages must have known exactly what they were doing. There was no way they could have pioneered this form of magic without understanding where the energy came from. And generations of well-meaning mages had followed in their footsteps, believing their doctrine, obliviously paving their way to Hell with pride. Perhaps, when she got to Hell, Sciona could find the Founding Mages, seize them by their ancient beards, and ask them why.
She tilted forward toward damnation, where Leon, Stravos, and all her heroes would surely be waiting for her.
“No!” Hands jerked back on Sciona’s nightdress so hard that her grip tore from the window frame, and she toppled backwards into Alba’s arms.
“Sciona, don’t!”
Sciona made an undignified noise as she went to the floor with her cousin wrapped around her. “Hey!” She squirmed, but Alba had always been the far stronger of the two. “Let go!”
“No!” Alba crushed her tighter in shaking arms. “No! Sciona, no! I
won’t let you!”
“You don’t understand.”
“I know, sweetheart. I know I don’t understand what’s in your head, and I never will, but you have to stay with me! My darling, stay here with me!”
“You don’t know…” Sciona shook with emotion. Stay here? “You don’t know what you’re asking me to do.”
If Alba knew half of Sciona’s pain, she would have let her jump. She wouldn’t keep her trapped here in this unacceptable world. But Alba’s arms only tightened, and there was no escape. Only Sciona’s screams as the sea of blood closed over her head and consumed her.
