“No,” Thomil said roughly. And Mordra made a truly pitiful noise as Thomil grabbed his wrists and yanked his hands from his face. “Look at me, mage.” Green eyes blinked, sightless with grief and terror. “I said, look at me!” Thomil growled and waited a beat for those bleary eyes to find their focus. “We’re not going to kill you.”
“We’re not?” Carra said. “Why?”
“Because we’re not them,” Thomil said. “We’re Caldonnae. We kill to survive.”
“And you think letting this one live is going to help us survive?” Carra was incredulous.
Truthfully, Thomil wasn’t sure. Surely, it wasn’t justice to spare this man, who had grown and thrived on the blood of Kwen. It wasn’t logical. But it was important, because Jerrin Mordra hadn’t proven himself a knowing murderer, and hope was important.
“As long as he doesn’t forget this day.” Thomil looked down at the only remaining highmage of Tiran. “And you won’t forget, will you, Archmage Supreme Mordra the Tenth?”
“Wh-what?” Mordra stammered.
Thomil was taking a gamble. But Renthorn had been onto something in his hideous way. No matter how many mages died today, someone was going to fill the power vacuum at the top of Tiran. Jerrin Mordra might be the only person left with the credentials and pedigree for the Tiranish to accept his leadership. And, unlike his predecessors and many of his contemporaries, he hadn’t yet spent decades easing into the idea of mass murder as his divine right. There was still a human soul seething at the surface of his being. Raw enough to manipulate, for better or for worse.
“This feeling is energy.” Thomil pressed a hand to Mordra’s chest. “Remember this day you lost your friends and family to Tiranish magic. Remember all this grief and terror—and try to do something good with it. Swear by your god, and I’ll let you live.”
“I swear! By Feryn the Father, I swear!”
“That’s a good mage.”
“I just—I don’t understand. Why? After everything…” Mordra’s voice had turned pleading and taken on a mourning note Thomil knew too well. It was the howl of a wolf still calling for a pack that was gone, Thomil praying to his absent gods inside the barrier. It was the sound of the last surviving creature of its kind. “Why won’t you kill me?”
Thomil answered in quiet honesty. “I watched a woman run herself to death on the belief that there was some good in the High Magistry. She did her best to leave some hope in the world—for your people and mine. I never… Even at the end, I never shared her optimism, but in her honor, this once, I’m going to try.”
High above, the barrier was still rippling with movement, shaking the sky as it crawled westward. With a hand resting on Mordra’s chest, Thomil closed the hunting prayer.
“We have taken so that we may live.
We have taken so that one day we may give back.
And now the taking is done.”
Carra finished the prayer with him in grudging agreement:
“The taking is done.”
Thomil started to stand, but a tearful Mordra caught his hands. “Thank you, Tommy.”
“It’s Thomil.” He pulled from the mage’s grasp. “And don’t thank me. Thank Sciona Freynan.”
Mordra made no effort to stop the two Kwen as Thomil took his niece’s blood-slick hand and pulled her from the rooftop.
“So, what’s the plan now?” Carra asked.
“Same as it was before. We still have to leave the city.” Initially, Thomil had hoped they would be able to hide their hair and move through Tiran without drawing the attention of any authorities. That wasn’t a possibility now that they had a highmage’s blood all over them. “That way.” He turned his eyes westward to the expanding barrier.
“We’re taking that chance?”
“We have no choice.” It was the lakeshore all over again, Blight at their backs, Blight ahead—only this time, Carra was a hunter in her own right, standing on her own two feet. “If anyone can make it, we can.”
Sciona had theorized that when the barrier expanded and disrupted the Reserve’s parameters, the siphoning in the entire area would stop. Functionally, there would be no deadly crossing immediately outside the city. The siphoning around Tiran should resume only when new coordinates were defined—if Jerrin Mordra and whatever mages had escaped siphoning even knew how to do that. But even assuming Blight didn’t take them, fleeing into the cold of the Deep Night was still tantamount to a death sentence under most circumstances. Thomil just hoped that their chosen point of exit might be their salvation.
Instead of a lake, the western part of Tiran’s barrier ran along the ground below the Venholt range. The land passage had been blocked with snow when the Caldonnae had attempted their crossing ten years ago, but at this time of year, right at the beginning of the Deep Night, it would still be passable. And by the time the expansion spell had finished pushing the warming veil westward, it would touch the feet of the mountains, which were porous with caves. Thomil had used those caves as shelter on the few occasions he had risked hunting dangerously close to Endrasta territory. Some of the caverns were shallow, providing only passing cover from the wind, but some ran deep enough to hold their autumn temperatures even as the world around them froze solid. Survival on those slopes was not certain—not even likely—but there was a chance.
“You have your bag, right?” Thomil turned back to double-check with Carra as they crept into the alley behind their building.
“Yeah.” Carra adjusted the heavy bundle on her shoulders with a frown. “Although I still think stealing all the widow’s coats was overkill.”
“Eh, you say that now.” Carra didn’t remember the Deep Nights beyond the barrier.
Thomil had hoped that by taking the darkest of back alleys, he and Carra might make it out of the quarter unnoticed, but no such luck. They had barely made it a block before three guards barred their way down an alley.
“You there!” one of them shouted. “All Kwen are to remain indoors until given permission to leave!”
These weren’t regular city guards, Thomil noted, taking in their armor and brass buttons. They were barrier guards, called in from the edges of the city as reinforcement. City mages and police might be unused to getting their hands bloody. But these men had been killing Kwen long before the carnage of the last few days.
“I’m so sorry, sir.” Thomil opted to play things safe. “I’m trying to get this girl to her mother’s apartment. As you can see, she’s injured.” He hoped they didn’t examine the blood on Carra’s shirt closely enough to determine that it was not her own. “I have a permit from my employer in my pocket if you let me—”
One of the guards grabbed Thomil and slammed him against the grimy alley wall, twisting his arm behind his back. A hand clawed at him, digging into his pocket.
“There’s no permit in here,” the guard said, cranking Thomil’s arm a fraction higher, “and what the hell is this?” He held up a cylinder he had fished out of Thomil’s pocket. The mark on the cap was red for danger. And Thomil was grateful Sciona had tasked him with training a conduit on his voice.