Every mage of rank must create and carry on his person a versatile conduit with military capabilities. No less frequently than once a week, the mage must train himself in the use of his conduit out of the public eye, for Leon said, “doomed is the mage who lets his power fade,” and the mage who cannot deal death is unfit to protect life. Whatever weapons arise from Tiran’s magic, the mage’s staff must remain supreme among them all.
For if the nation’s fathers will not protect her in times of evil, then who will?
Our Lord Prophet won our basin from the darkness and his descendants must be ready to defend from that darkness whenever it rises again. So, hone your instruments, mages of Tiran, for threats are ever present.
—The Tirasid, Magely Conduct, Verse 43 (56 of Tiran)
Made Monstrous
reynan Mirrors blinked in and out of existence across Tiran’s barrierF from skyline to skyline. The white edifices of the campus had turned shades of red and pink in the light as though they had morphed from stone to shifting flesh. All around, students and staff screamed, some falling to their knees, others running for shelter as though afraid the contents of the Freynan Mirrors would turn tangible and begin raining blood across the campus.
Beholding the bleeding sky, the guard holding Sciona’s left arm faltered.
“God save us!” he whispered, even as his fellow guard urged him on down the Magistry steps, reminding him that he had a job to do. “God save us!”
Too far from the barrier to see the details of the Freynan Mirrors dotting its surface, Sciona focused on the rate at which they seemed to open and close. She had written her spells so that a visual would activate only while siphoning was in progress and deactivate once it had finished. Based on a painful discussion with Thomil, she had estimated that each ten square feet of the barrier required a small animal death—a bird, a rodent—every few minutes, or a large animal death—a wolf, a deer, a human—every hour to stay operational. But before she could count the seconds between mirrors to see if her estimate had been correct, the guards were pulling her forward again.
A steel-reinforced police vehicle had pulled up in front of the Magicentre, the driver looking as gaunt with terror as any of the panicking civilians—and Sciona couldn’t blame him. While the Freynan Mirrors on the barrier were too far overhead to make out more than light, a mirror had opened above the car’s idling engine, not obscuring the driver’s view of the road but stretching horizontally across the hood before him.
Sciona couldn’t quite see into the mirror until the guards loaded her into the back seat, and she peered through the bars to the front of the car.
“Drive,” the calmer of the two Magistry guards said as he took a seat beside Sciona.
When the key turned in the ignition, the car’s engine tapped the Reserve, and with the forward acceleration, Blight tore through a scaly creature that thrashed so violently with the siphoning that Sciona couldn’t tell what it was—a great snake, a lizard, or some monster she had never heard of—before light reduced it to blood-drenched bones.
The driver—a trained policeman, based on his uniform—shook and gibbered to himself in horror as he accelerated down the street off campus.
Panic dominated the city passing by the car windows as carnage flashed from every vehicle, streetlamp, and porch light.
“What is this?” and “What is happening?” were common refrains whenever Sciona made out words, as was every form of prayer.
“Hell is upon us!” a woman wailed as she ran into traffic, causing cars to swerve dangerously around her. “Hell is upon us!”
The outer perimeter of the barrier wasn’t the only Reserve siphoning zone, but Thomil had theorized that all Reserve siphoning zones shared a key characteristic with the crossing: they were all places where living creatures—the richest source of energy—had no choice but to venture. And as Sciona took in one mirror after another after another, she saw that he had been right.
Many of the Freynan Mirrors pictured river passages, where migrating fish massed in thousands, attracting the bears and birds that fed on them.
Just as common were narrow land passes between rock formations, cluttered with stripped bones that tripped the new animals bounding over
them, desperate to get from one side to the other. Some zones were ice bridges over fast-flowing water, so stained with blood that they were more red than white. A few were natural traps of the terrain, deep mud or ditches at the bases of steep embankments where it was clear that large animals routinely fell and could not get out fast enough. All were sites where humans and animals seemed compelled to risk the crossing in search of food or escape from the seasonal conditions of their environment.
Over the car engine alone, Sciona glimpsed a dozen creatures she had only ever seen in ancient artists’ renderings—deer with antlers as wide as the car that siphoned them, moose taller than a man at the shoulder, speckled wild cats, birds of every color. She got to behold each creature for only a moment—the worst moment of its life—before Blight reduced it to a contorted skeleton.
At last, inevitably, the Freynan Mirror over the engine hit on a human. A bent old man, hobbling to keep up with a distant cluster of figures who seemed to have moved ahead of him too fast. And this was too much for the driver. He lost control—or perhaps lucidly decided that he just couldn’t bear any more—and veered off the road. Sciona put her arms up to protect her head—not fast enough. The car hit a newsstand, crashing her forward into the bars and making the world go dark.
Everything after that was unclear except for the throbbing bar-shaped bruise on Sciona’s forehead. She didn’t know what had happened to the original driver, only that a different man was at the wheel when the severely dented car pulled up to the jail closest to the University.
The warden personally showed Sciona to a spacious cell on the highest floor, separate from the masses of Kwen pickpockets and working-class murderers clamoring in the squalor of the lower levels. For her safety, he said, which Sciona found rather ridiculous. Physically, yes, she was nothing dangerous. But weighed against the most prolific street murderer in Tiran, she was the greater threat by orders of magnitude.
Alone in a windowless cell smelling vaguely of mold, she pressed an ear to the wall and strained to hear what was unfolding on the streets below.
She had set the Freynan Mirrors to last only half an hour, meaning the
images of the Kwen should have faded shortly after she entered the jail, and she had assumed that the chaos would fade with them; the people of Tiran would settle down to digest what they had seen. But she had never been adept at predicting humans the way she was at anticipating abstracted blobs of energy. There was no settling. If anything, the shouts intensified in the absence of her mirrors. No longer as shrill but just as frantic. She couldn’t make out words, but one thing was clear from within her cell: the unrest had just begun.
She paced the length of the cell for hours—maybe a day, maybe longer —waiting for the commotion to die down, but it didn’t. It only rose and fell in waves, which seemed to get louder with each swell. Disparate shouts eventually came together in a foreign harmony that made the hair stand on
her arms. Kwen throat singing.
Then gunfire.
“What’s happening?” Sciona called to the guards at the end of the corridor, but they didn’t answer.
No one spoke to her until, finally, the cell door scraped open. A familiar shape solidified in the dim light—straight hair pulled back into a braid and a work pinafore hanging on wide, square shoulders.
“Alba!” Sciona’s voice broke in relief as she started toward her cousin.
“What’s happening out there?”
“What’s happening?” Alba repeated, and Sciona pulled up short. She had never heard Alba’s voice sound so cold. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re saying on the radio that you did this.” Alba’s voice was still quiet, shaking. “That was your spell that everyone saw…Is it true?”
“Yes.”
A pause. In that moment, Sciona would have siphoned if it just brought her enough light to make out Alba’s expression.
“Sciona…What have you done?”
“I don’t know,” Sciona confessed. “What’s happening out there?”
“What’s happening?” Alba’s voice rose from the icy whisper, but it didn’t warm. It only hardened. As Alba stepped forward, the light from the
hall finally hit her face, illuminating eyes red from crying. “Tiran is on fire, Sciona.”
“On fire? What— But are you all right? What about Aunt Winny?
Where is she?”
“She doesn’t want to see you.”
“But I…” But I’m hers, a tiny, broken part of Sciona thought. I’m her girl.
“Sciona, I saw men’s bodies coming apart! And women and little children! Everyone saw it!”
“I know,” Sciona rushed to explain. “I know, but don’t you understand?
This is what I’ve been working toward, a spell to let people know what I know and see it for themselves. This is the cost of Tiranish magic.”
“That’s not the kind of thing people need to have put in front of their faces! Are you insane?”
“Alba, I’m sorry you had to see it,” Sciona said impatiently. “I’m so sorry, but this is exactly the kind of thing people need put in their faces.”
“Did you know my shop got wrecked?”
Sciona blinked in shock, thrown. “What?”
“The Kenning repair shop. It’s gutted. I don’t have a job anymore! The Widow Idin from down the block. Her house is being looted! She and her girls are huddling in our kitchen, terrified, waiting to see if they’ll survive
the night!”
“Wait—why?”
“Because the Kwen are rioting, you idiot! Looting! Tearing down anything they can!”
God, the Kwen…Sciona hadn’t stopped to think about how they would react. Even when Thomil had tried to make her think about it, her mind had slid past the thought. Of course the Kwen would be more stricken than anyone, more furious.
“Do you understand what you’ve done?” Alba demanded. “People are dying!”
“People have been dying the whole time,” Sciona said quietly.
“Then they’ve been dying for a good reason!”
“What? No, Alba, you don’t mean that.”
“Don’t tell me what I mean!”
“Look, I was upset about this at first too,” Sciona said as patiently as she could. “I tried to deny it, just like you are now, but think about it.
You’re a good person, a kind person, Alba. You can’t really enjoy what you have, knowing that it was bought with the lives of others.”
“I’ve earned everything I have!”
“It’s…Alba, it’s not a matter of what you’ve earned or not. Just because you’ve worked hard for something doesn’t cancel out what the mages have done to achieve the technology. It doesn’t entitle you to another person’s flesh and blood.”
“Oh really?” Alba’s voice pitched up, sounding as hysterical as Sciona probably had in the throes of her breakdown. “Really? That is rich, coming
from you!”
“Alba, I—”
“Since when do you care about other people?” Alba demanded. “Since when have you ever cared about the work Mama and I put in for you? Now other people matter? Now that they’re a way for you to get attention for your magic?”
“That’s not why I did this!” Sciona protested. “I did this to help people.”
“How is this helping anyone? The Kwen have all gone mad, turned into animals! And what about your people, Sciona? What about the people who loved you when no one else would, who sacrificed everything so you could have your unmarried, intellectual life exactly the way you wanted? How could you do this to us?” Tears were running down Alba’s face, catching glimmers of the faint light from the hall. “You don’t even care, do you?
That you’re attacking everything we’ve built! Everything we are!”
“It’s not an attack to tell the truth,” Sciona protested. “Tiran is built on truth. Our religion is built on truth. What’s more important than upholding that?”
“Your family is more important than that!” Alba was almost screaming.
“Tiran is more important than that!”
“Tiran was founded on ideals of knowledge, enlightenment, and integrity,” Sciona said, frustrated that Alba couldn’t seem to understand this very basic line of logic. “If we can’t live by those ideals, then who are we as a nation? What is this place?”
“It’s our home! For Feryn’s sake!” Alba was undone, pacing, tearing at her hair. “It’s not some—some theoretical thing for you to sit around and ponder in your tower and prod at for your experiments! It’s people, Sciona!
It’s the people that gave you love! Who are you to turn around and spit on that?”
“I’m the one who saw Truth and didn’t look away.”
Alba stopped pacing. Her eyes narrowed in a terrible expression Sciona had never seen there before. “And there it is,” she breathed. “That’s what this is really about, no matter how much you try to deny it. All this…It’s about you being the smartest, the best, the chosen one. All this agony for your Goddamn ego.”
Sciona could have shrugged the words off from anyone else. Not Alba.
Not Alba, who had always told her she was a good person when no one else believed it. Not Alba, who had pulled her from that window ledge and held her tight until she found the will to live.
Alba’s voice dropped to a lethal whisper. “I always knew you were selfish, Sciona. I was always fine with that. Because what was the harm?
But this…the Founding Mages gave you this city, Mama gave you a home, the archmages gave you opportunities no other woman has ever enjoyed in the history of our nation. And this is what you do with all of it?”
“You don’t understand. I—”
“I can’t believe I ever called you my family.”
Sciona’s heart broke. “Alba—”
“Shut up, Sciona! Shut up! I never want to speak to you again!”
“You—” Sciona choked on emotion, tears burning her eyes. “You don’t mean that.” She was staggering forward, reaching for her cousin like a child seeking its mother’s arms. “You don’t mean that. Please—”
Pain cracked across Sciona’s face, knocking her sideways.
In the ringing aftermath, she blinked, unable to accept in her heart that Alba had slapped her, unable to deny the needle sting on her cheek.
“When the Kwen burn Tiran to the ground, it will be your fault.
Congratulations on making your mark.”
Before Sciona could find any words to respond, Alba left, slamming the cell door behind her.
And Sciona had not known she could feel more off-balance than she had the day she opened the first Freynan Mirror. But before Sciona had been old enough to practice magic, her aunt had loved her. Alba had loved her.
She didn’t realize she had started reeling back until she hit the wall. She was crying, but there was an emptiness to these tears. Somewhere in the past two weeks, crying had become like a reflex, her body impotently trying to prove she was still human when everything that made a human was gone.
She had already lost her dream, her career, and her reason for living. Why not her family too? As she sobbed for the loss of Alba and Aunt Winny, an even darker thought threaded its way through the tears. That slap across her face had all but confirmed her worst fear: Thomil was right. Sciona had miscalculated. Because if Alba—kind, giving, infinitely patient Alba—met the truth with violent denial, what chance did the rest of Tiran have?
Slumping back against the wall, Sciona slid down until she was curled up with her knees clutched to her chest. She had thought—had hoped— better of her city, and she was the fool again. Thomil had been right again.
Archmage Orynhel had been right. The people of Tiran were not ready.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured to her knees but knew that her guilt did no one any good. Not Alba and Aunt Winny. Not Thomil and Carra. And here Sciona was in a cell without a spellograph or notepaper or any of her instruments of power to turn the tide.
When the tears dried up, the solitude slowly set in and began to drive Sciona mad. Her twitching hands had never gone this long without a pen or spellograph—certainly never during times of stress—and she picked at her nails until they bled. The prison cot was hilariously softer than the one Sciona used in her laboratory—if a little mustier—but sleep was impossible. She gave it her best effort, lying back and closing her eyes, but
each time calm seemed to be falling, the sounds of fresh violence would rise from the streets below, and her bloodshot eyes would fly open again.
It’s your fault, Alba’s voice whispered through the pounding of her heart in her ears. When the Kwen burn Tiran to the ground, it will be your fault.
A scream built in Sciona’s throat over hours, writhing and clawing to be free. She was about to let it out, just to release some of the tension in her body—when the door opened.
“Highmage Freynan,” said a guard with deep circles under his eyes, “you’re being relocated.”
“What? Why?” she asked as he put a hand on her back and pushed her ahead of him down the narrow hallway between cells.
“For your own safety…and because the prisons are at capacity.”
“At capacity?”
“From the Kwen being arrested en masse.”
“What? But—if all the prisons are at capacity, then where am I going?”
“You’re being placed under house arrest.”
“But my aunt said she didn’t want to see me…” A childish hope flickered to life in Sciona’s chest. Maybe Aunt Winny had changed her mind; Sciona would get a chance to explain herself, to make Winny and Alba understand what she had been trying to do— The door at the end of the hall opened, and she stopped, her back
bumping against the guard behind her.
“Archmage Bringham!”
“Come.” Bringham took Sciona’s arm to guide her onward, and that was when she noticed the instrument clutched in his other hand. In the dark of the jail corridor, it looked like an oversized walking stick, but Sciona knew
better.
“My God. Archmage, is that—?”
“Stay close,” Bringham said as the two of them descended the stairs to the front gates. “I’ll keep you safe.”
The jail itself was protected by a magical barrier that allowed only guards and approved visitors to enter and exit. Beyond the selective shielding spell, the city roiled with bodies.
Sciona had never known there were so many Kwen in Tiran—enough to make great copper-headed waves in the streets. Most of the time, these people were invisible servants, cleaning chimneys and sweeping streets, working in the mines out of sight, tending to gardens behind fine houses.
They had risen from those mines and kitchens in their thousands—and it was terrifying.
“We’re not going out there?” Sciona’s feet slowed.
“What’s the matter?” Bringham asked. “Surely, you’re not afraid of a few of your precious, innocent, put-upon Kwen?”
Sciona had no answer. She had opened herself up to the barb. And Bringham had a point, as Alba had had a point. How had Sciona not seen this coming? The Kwen were human. They felt anger. They could be vengeful.
“Is this how I’m being executed?” Sciona asked as Bringham’s hand tightened on her arm, forcing her toward the gates and the bounds of the shielding spell. “Is that why you’re here? To throw me to the Kwen?”
“Don’t joke about that,” Bringham said, and in the weak light of the lamps, he looked genuinely hurt.
It would be a poetic end to Sciona’s life, one that would seem to invalidate everything she had tried to prove to Tiran. If the Kwen were themselves brutal, undiscerning murderers, what did it matter if they died for Tiran’s ends? Whatever happened to her, Sciona doubted the legitimacy of the Kwen’s grievances would matter to the Tiranish now that they had risen in violence.
“I’m here to make sure you’re safe until morning,” Bringham said, “so that you can have a proper trial before the High Magistry.” They had reached the shielding spell beyond which Kwen marched and chanted their anger.
“Are you sure you don’t want an escort, Archmage?” the warden asked at the gates. He looked as pale and haggard as any of his guards. “My men would gladly protect you.”
“No, thank you, Warden,” Bringham said calmly. “Lord Prophet Leon named his mages the keepers of Tiran, so we will keep it.”
“But Archmage Bringham,” Sciona started, “how—?”
“Like I said, stay close to me.”
And they crossed the shielding spell together.
Gray eyes had already fixed on them in rage while they stood within the safety of the gates. The moment they stepped through, that rage turned to violence.
“Mages!” someone shouted. As Sciona had predicted, in their white robes, she and Bringham stood out like energy wells in a mapping coil.
“Murderers!”
“Kill the mages!”
In response, Bringham raised his staff like Leon before the Horde of Thousands and struck the end against the cobblestones. That first stroke was sound only, splitting the darkness like a peal of thunder. A warning shot: come no closer.
But even Heaven’s thunder was no match for the wrath rolling through these masses. Two copper-haired men broke from the group and charged Bringham without a care for their own safety.
“Archmage—” Sciona started, imploring, but she didn’t even know what she meant to beg for. Do something? Do nothing? Just don’t kill them?
Bringham swept his staff in a half-moon before him, and a shock wave exploded from the conduit, blasting both would-be attackers back into their fellows. Along the fringes of the crowd, Kwen staggered from the force. A woman Aunt Winny’s age fell to the cobbles, but most were only slowed for the few furious heartbeats it took to get their feet back under them.
“Burn in Hell!” A woman in a maid’s kerchief hurled a brick at Sciona.
A turn of Bringham’s fingers on his staff, and the brick shot back the way it had come with twice the force. It caught the maid in the shoulder, audibly cracking bone. As she screamed, her voice was one of many. The Kwen roared as one—as though collectively struck—and then surged on the two mages from all sides, silver eyes wild in the dark.
Sciona wished she could dehumanize their anger—tell herself it was as monstrous and senseless as it seemed in her fear—but she couldn’t because it wasn’t inhuman. It was Carra, knuckles white as she gripped her knife. It
was Thomil, hurling her spellograph to the floor, eyes clouded with tears as he spoke of his sister’s death. This was the most righteous, most logical, most human anger that could fill a soul.
A second shock wave crashed through the crowd, and Sciona heard more bones snap, more cries of agony. But the Kwen didn’t stop coming.
Why should they? Their ancestral land was ravaged, their kin Blighted, their future stolen. What did they have to lose? And who in the wide world could tell them to stand down?
The woman who had cast the brick was back on her feet, her broken right arm dangling uselessly at her side, a chair leg clutched in her left hand. Sciona locked eyes with the maid and saw a face her own age but lined with hardships Sciona had never experienced.
There was primal terror in facing someone who wanted you dead more than they wanted to live. But the deeper terror was knowing that there was nothing Sciona could say, no truth she could offer these people to make that anger go away. She had already done what she thought was right, and look where it had gotten her. Look where it had gotten them all.
Bringham’s next shock wave hit the maid full in the chest. Sciona felt as much as heard the woman’s ribs break as she and several other Kwen fell back on the street. This time, the Kwen woman did not get up.
Sciona hated the part of her that was grateful for Bringham’s staff—his stolen magic, bought with human lives—between her and that wall of righteous anger. He reacted to each wave of Kwen with speed and precision that could only have come from years of training. Here, he blasted them back with a bone-breaking shock wave. There, he cast a wall of fire that caught on those who didn’t pull back fast enough. He struck a particularly big man with lightning, burning a hole in his great chest.
“Keep moving,” Bringham urged Sciona as he beat back the Kwen, “and stay close.”
An archmage’s staff was the ultimate conduit, built to channel energy from the Reserve to almost any purpose, depending on cues only the wielder knew. Most mages Sciona had read about wielded their staffs with voice commands—“Fire!” “Lightning!” “Wind!”—but Bringham seemed to
control his through hand position. Each time he turned, his hands shifted minutely on the shaft of his weapon, fingers opening and closing in distinct configurations—the left index finger raised for fire, both fists closed for a shock wave—but even if she were to memorize the hand positions and get the staff from him, Sciona suspected it would do her no good. The conduit likely responded to the size and shape of Bringham’s hands, meaning no other person could wield it.
The first mage’s staff in recorded history had belonged to Archmage Stravos. The crippled, Kwen-raised Founder had turned his walking stick into a powerful multi-purpose conduit, which had inspired Archmage Leon to create similar weapons for the rest of his disciples in their holy war against the Horde of Thousands. Ironic, Sciona thought as Bringham yanked her onward through the pandemonium with his staff extended before him, crackling with light. Even this, the most quintessentially Tiranish instrument of conquest, was ultimately stolen from the Kwen.
By the time Bringham reached the end of the block, he had single- handedly repelled the Kwen, incapacitating those too stubborn to flee.
Stepping over a bleeding boy, he pulled at Sciona’s arm, prompting her to do the same. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “We’re almost to the rendezvous point.”
“Where’s the—” Sciona cried out as something jerked at her body. The bleeding boy had grabbed on to her skirt with an iron grip, powerful, like Carra’s, from labor too demanding for a child so young.
“You’re—” the boy cut off with a scream as Bringham’s staff came down on his hand, shattering bone.
Sciona started to kneel to make sure the child was all right, but Bringham had clamped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her to his body. “I told you I’d protect you.”
They reached the corner in a few strides, and Bringham was peering into the dark down the block. “Come on, Duris,” he muttered in agitation.
“Any day now.”
The street was gutted. Homes and businesses burned, windows smashed, streetlamps toppled.
“Hey!” a voice shouted with a Kwen accent. “There are mages over here!”
More Kwen were rounding the corner, a few of them running to attack.
As they closed in, an unearthly mechanical thunder swelled from the opposite end of the street, contrasting sharply with the human roar of the rioting Kwen, and Bringham smiled. “Ah, here we are!”
“What is that?” Sciona demanded as a machine unlike any she had ever seen barreled down the street toward them, weaving between fallen
streetlamps with impossible speed.
“That’s our ride.”
The vehicle screamed to a stop in front of Bringham and Sciona just before the Kwen reached them. It was a horseless carriage but unusually low to the ground, with a coating of shining metal armor and robust wheels made of a strange matte material Sciona had not seen before.
Bringham blasted fire from his staff, making the Kwen reel back just long enough for himself and Sciona to reach the vehicle. The side door opened without anyone touching it, and Bringham shoved Sciona in so hard that she tumbled across the squashy seats and nearly hit her already-bruised forehead on the opposite window.
“Go!” he shouted as he climbed in after her and slammed the door against the mob.
“Thanks for scorching my car,” Duris said sourly from the front seat.
“You know, this is a brand-new paint job.”
“Well, those monsters will do worse to your precious paint job if you don’t get us out of here,” Bringham said, gesturing to the Kwen hammering their fists on the armored exterior of the magic-drawn carriage, hauling at the locked doors.
“Ahead of you.” Duris lay hands on an incomprehensible control array before him, magical engines roared to life, and the vehicle shot forward as fast as a train—faster, squashing Sciona and all her skirts back into her seat.
“What is this thing?” she gasped as the carriage shot over uneven cobbles, her teeth crashing together with the vibration.
“This is the greatest work of conduit design you’ll ever see, you miserable little traitor.”
“It’s Duris’s car,” Bringham said. “Just not the one he brings to work or puts on the market. This one’s more of a passion project.”
“Why does this thing even exist?” Sciona demanded, grabbing the door at her side to steady herself. It seemed that there was an element of fun at play for Duris, who was visibly enjoying the drive. But if it was just for fun, there would be no need for the armor.
“It exists for occasions like this,” Bringham said.
“Right…” Sciona realized that an order of men who subsisted on human blood had to be prepared for their food source to rise in rebellion. “You had all this ready in case there was ever an uprising.” She looked to the staff resting against Bringham’s shoulder—a wartime conduit made to maim and kill enemies. “You’ve always been ready to subdue the Kwen with violence.”
“Hey, I have a wife and children to protect,” Duris snapped. “You think I’m taking chances with these demons about?”
“Demons, Archmage?” Sciona said. “You mean the people who work your factories and make you your fortune? The people of the city you’re sworn to protect?”
“I’m sworn to protect Tiran and its true citizens,” Duris shot back, “not the filth that came crawling through the barrier three centuries late to leech off our hard-won fortune.”
Sciona swallowed her ire, caught between wanting to watch Duris’s marvelous vehicle at work and very much not wanting to watch the bodies bounce off the sides as they drove through the crowds toward Bringham’s mansion.
“Really, Duris, you should be thanking Highmage Freynan,” Bringham said with a smile. “When else were you going to get to tear around in this thing without regard for traffic regulations or pedestrians?”
“And what is going on?” Sciona asked as her brain tried to catch up through the pumping mess of emotion and adrenaline. “Why is this car allowed on the streets?” Magical carriages were carefully regulated for
safety reasons. “Why were you two allowed to take me out of that jail when you’re not police or my family?” She turned to Bringham. “Why are the authorities firing on civilians? The city chairs didn’t…”
Bringham confirmed what she was already putting together. “The city chairs have declared martial law. All government agents, including mages, can do whatever is necessary to restore order until the emergency has passed.”
So, breaking a twelve-year-old boy’s hand, Sciona thought.
Electrocuting a man with no trial. That’s restoring order? But if she tried to have this discussion now, she was going to end up screaming, and she didn’t want to give Duris the satisfaction of seeing her break down.
They were roaring through Sciona’s neighborhood now, a working-class area inhabited by both Kwen and Tiranish. Here, the poorest of ethnically Tiranish citizens clashed with the Kwen mobs, and the result was total chaos. Sciona couldn’t see down the darkened street to her own apartment complex as it flashed by, but she got a clear, terrible look at the Berald family bakery at the corner.
Men argued in front of its smashed windows, backlit by fire. It was hard to make out any faces with the bakery burning in the background. God—a thought seized Sciona’s heart in her chest: Were Ansel and his family still inside? Had they managed to escape their third-story apartment before the smoke and flames from the bakery reached them? A moment later, she realized that if they weren’t burning to death, then they were among the men who had rushed to confront the Kwen in front of the shop.
There were no city guards or mages here to defend the “true Tiranish”
Duris claimed to serve. There was only brown hair and copper as men shoved and fought. A fist flew into a jaw. Someone picked up a brick. And what a hideous day, Sciona thought—what a cosmically hideous moment— to realize that she truly did care about the people of this city. Her neighbors weren’t just faceless nothings she passed on her way to greatness. They mattered.
Maybe not all of the Kwen and Tiranish out there were innocent souls, but they had all been ignorant of the cost of magic. None of them deserved
to suffer its fallout.
Sciona felt a lump build in her throat as she watched the shadows of people beating one another in the brief flashes of light from the streetlamps.
Thomil had known this would happen. He had tried to tell her that it wouldn’t be the mages who paid for Tiran’s crimes—and that included Sciona, with her cushy cell and magical guard. It was the poor of Tiran who bore the brunt of this horror on both sides.
“Animals,” Duris muttered, and it was unclear whether he meant just the Kwen or the entire seething mass of common people venting their anguish on one another. “Filthy animals.”
It was how he got to sleep at night beside his wife, Sciona imagined.
The corpses that had made his fortune weren’t girls like his daughters, weren’t ladies like his wife, weren’t old men and women like his esteemed parents. The people he fed on had to be of intrinsically lower quality. They had to be monsters.
Sciona kept her eyes open, even as they warmed with tears, and envied Duris’s powers of denial.
I did this, she thought as she watched figures smashing storefront windows in the dark. Horror tangled with thrill in the pit of her stomach. I did all of this.
That little tingle of a thrill reminded her that she was not blameless like so many of the people taking to the streets or cowering in their homes.
Some fundamental part of her was like Renthorn the Third, a creature of ego and hunger whose personal glory had been more important to her than any of the lives she destroyed.
As they neared Bringham’s mansion, faint red light spilled down the streets. For a moment, Sciona thought her Freynan Mirrors had inexplicably reopened with the stroke of noon. Then she realized it was no spell but the sun over the far hills, making its final appearance for the next two months.
This was the last day of Feryn’s Feast. What should have been a time of community, during which people reaffirmed their faith and their bonds with one another, had turned into a citywide riot. In minutes the sun would set, and who could say if Tiran would still be standing when it rose again?
