“You suggest that your god shows us his bounty in the form of our subjective paradise,” Thomil said. “If that’s true, then why would he show me Blight?”
“Maybe it’s because of what you are and what you believe.”
Thomil’s anger didn’t rise. Instead, he blinked, and, for a brief moment, he looked so shattered that it broke Sciona’s heart. She didn’t want to say her next words. She didn’t want to think them. But the alternative was too hideous to contemplate.
“I’ve humored you in your outlandish claims about religion, alright? But the hard fact remains that your people rejected the True God and, by extension, Truth itself. Leon gave your kind a chance to join Him in the light, and your ancestors refused. You continue to refuse Him, despite all evidence of His holiness and supremacy. Maybe you can’t see God’s Bounty because it’s not meant for the eyes of non-believers. It’s for the true seeker of knowledge. You see a nightmare because it’s what God intends for you—what your people brought on themselves through generations of willful ignorance.”
At some point, as Sciona spoke, all the emotion had left Thomil’s face. He was dead stone when he asked, “What did you see, then, Highmage? If I saw only what a heathen sinner deserves, what did your holy mage’s eyes see in that coil? What did God show you?”
“He…” Sciona faltered. Because Thomil had referenced a snow-covered field. She had seen a field, too, unlike any place she had ever been.
“A Tiranish courtyard garden, maybe?” Thomil suggested. “Flowers that make you think of home?”
Sciona couldn’t put names to the evergreen bushes, or the animal, or any of the tracks she had seen in that field. They had been foreign like the moonlit snow. She shook her head, shutting her mind against the impossible.
“I saw Heavenly light.” She lifted her chin. “It was beautiful.”
“Blight is always beautiful,” Thomil said, “from a safe distance. Up close, it’s your father’s blood on your face. It’s wanting to run to him just to hold him one more time before he’s gone, knowing that if you do, the light will unmake you too. Knowing, even as a tiny child, that you must hold yourself still as your only parent peels to pieces in front of you. That’s what Blight does to a person, you know?” Thomil’s face twisted. “It strips them down in a spiral, skin first, then the rest. You saw the leaves and bark coming free of that bush. Imagine that happening to your sweet auntie, your cousin—”
“You’re out of your mind!” Sciona snarled before he could put one more hideous, ludicrous picture in her head. She wished her voice wasn’t shaking quite so badly as she tried to pull Thomil back from this madness. “I understand that you’ve seen terrible things. You’re in pain—but that’s exactly why you need to take a moment and think about what you’re saying. You’re confused.”
“No, Highmage, I think I’m seeing everything for the first time in total clarity.” Thomil’s pupils dilated slightly against their icy irises as though processing something beyond Sciona’s sight. “The coordinates, Highmage Freynan…”
“What?” she asked—though why was she even humoring this lunacy? She was a highmage. She didn’t need to stand for this. She should order Thomil to go home for the day and rethink the way he spoke to his superiors. She should— “What coordinates?” she asked.
“You know, Highmage,” Thomil said without breaking eye contact. “If you think about it, somewhere in that busy little brain of yours, it must have occurred to you.”
“What must have occurred to me?”
“When we first met, you explained the Forbidden Coordinates. I’m an endurance hunter. I place all things on the map in my mind, so I’ve always wondered… why are the Forbidden Coordinates placed the way they are? In a perfect circle. Like a certain city contained within a half-sphere dome.”
“No! You’re making things up. The nature of the Forbidden Coordinates is not for us to know.”
“You don’t believe that, Highmage Freynan.”
“Excuse me?”
“If you really believed there were godly things beyond your understanding, you never would have pushed your way into the High Magistry against the will of your elders. You never would have opened a Faene-forbidden window to the Otherrealm. If you know something is there, you have to peel back the scab, whether or not your god would approve. You can’t tell me this is any different.”
“This is different! It’s heresy!”
“So was opening the window in the first place,” Thomil said—a coaxing demon, drawing her into the fury of those gray eyes. “So, why stop there? Go on, Highmage Freynan. Fire up that superior Tiranish brain of yours and line up the Forbidden Coordinates on your impeccable mental map of the Otherrealm. I know you can. Line them up and tell me I’m wrong.”
Sciona’s lip trembled. She wished that, for just this moment, she could be a soft and pious woman of Tiran. She wished that her logical mechanisms could slow and succumb to the emotional need for safety. She wished she could look away from Thomil, close her eyes to what she was never supposed to know. But she couldn’t.
Unbidden, her mind cracked open to the unthinkable. She cast the numbers on a grid and mapped them out—the full range of places where siphoning was encouraged and the one area where it was forbidden: a circle, placed like Tiran in the middle of the wide and wild Kwen, good siphoning in the south where the climate was more hospitable than in the frozen north, better siphoning still in the spots where Highmage Jurowyn had recorded lush forests, a receding siphoning zone in the winter during which northern areas supported less life…
“No…” Her voice trembled like a reed in the wind, about to break. “H-how could… That can’t be.” She blinked back tears. “Tiran—the archmages, the founding mages—would never build all this at the cost of human life. It doesn’t make sense.”
Thomil laughed. He actually laughed at her tears—a rough, angry sound with no mirth in it. “Have you no knowledge of the way your city works? This makes more sense than any formula you’ve ever taught me.”
“I know exactly how this city works!” Sciona protested. “I’ve been in the labs that—”
“This city eats Kwen alive! It draws us in, breaks our bodies in its gears, and spits us out when it can’t wring any more labor out of us. Literally. Do you know what barrier guards do with Kwen who can’t work?”
“I will not hear this!” Sciona’s fists had clenched at her sides. “You have no right to speak this way about the city that gave you a home! You spiteful, ungrateful—”
“Ungrateful?” Thomil growled low in his throat. “All the gods, Highmage! For once, pull your head out of your runes and numbers, and think about the reality the rest of us live in! Kwen are only allowed in this city so long as we provide a cheap source of labor. Our presence here isn’t charity, it’s conditional, and it is brutal. You Tiranish don’t care when your bridges fall on us, when your chemicals poison us, when your malfunctioning factory equipment grabs us and grinds us into meat. Why shouldn’t your magic also treat us like meat—like bounty—to be slaughtered and consumed?”