“Then why don’t we kill her?” Carra demanded, sooty fists still clenched at her sides, still very much ready for a fight.
“Yes,” Sciona said quietly, meeting Thomil’s eyes. “If you can’t forgive me, then why not kill me? Hell, you have access to the fourth floor of the High Magistry. You could probably take out half the mapping department before you were caught.”
“Because you thought about what I said… and I thought about something you said. The content of a person’s soul does matter. It matters that a person’s soul can inspire them to change their actions. So, Highmage Freynan, where is your soul taking you? What are we going to do to change this?”
“What kind of question is that, Uncle?” Carra said, incredulous. “She’s one of them! She’s obviously not going to change anything!”
But, for the first time in days, a genuine smile had spread across Sciona’s face. “I have a few ideas.”
Carra snarled something Sciona didn’t understand. For a heartbeat, Sciona was sure the wild girl was going to lunge for the attack again. But she just turned in a swish of red locks and left. The apartment door slammed shut behind her, extending one of the cracks in the wall.
“Is she…？” Sciona trailed off, unable to decide whether to ask, ‘is she going to be alright?’ or ‘is she going to come back with a bigger knife?’
“Please don’t worry about her,” Thomil said. “She’s more Caldonn than I ever was, fiercer, more stubborn. It can be hard to change her mind about anything. If you could just… not mention that”—he gestured after Carra—“to any authorities, knowing it would get her put in a work camp for the rest of her life.”
“God, of course not!”
“I won’t let her attack you again, Highmage, I swear,” Thomil said, and Sciona was disturbed to recognize a note of fear in his words. He didn’t trust her not to use this information against him. It stung, but after the things she had said to him back in that Magistry stairwell, why should she expect his trust?
For her part, Sciona didn’t have full confidence that Thomil could control his feral niece, but she had bigger concerns than a homicidal teenager. “Assuming you can keep her from stabbing me in the next week, I think I can approach the High Magistry about this problem.”
“Really?” Thomil looked thoroughly unimpressed. “That’s your plan of action? Go running to the men responsible for this evil magic system?”
“Yes, but hear me out,” Sciona said. “The High Magistry will be interested in the clarity of my new mapping methods. That isn’t a question. And, once they put my spellwork into broader use, all mages will be able to see which potential energy sources are human and which aren’t. We can find sources that don’t hurt anyone. And this is to say nothing of alchemy! There will be so much less waste when alchemists can see the physical material they’re siphoning. Things will get better in the Kwen.”
Thomil’s cold wall of skepticism hadn’t budged an inch. “Your optimism is cute, Highmage Freynan, but I think you haven’t slept in a few days, and you’ve grossly oversimplified the problem.”
“How have I oversimplified?”
“Well, for one thing, Kwen don’t just die from Blight hitting our bodies. During my lifetime, about a quarter of the casualties in my tribe were from direct Blight. The rest died of starvation because resources on the plains are finite, and when all the deer and plants are also dying of Blight, the humans end up starving. But, setting all that aside, I think the more pressing question is why would your precious highmages care about any of that? Why would they give up a good source of energy—human or otherwise?”
“Because it’s obviously horrific to siphon human beings!”
“So is forcing five-year-old children into labor, but they don’t have a problem with that—so long as those children have enough copper in their hair to set them apart from civilized Tiranish children.”
“Alright—but—highmages are inventors and philosophers. They don’t control labor in the city.”
“Respectfully, ma’am, that’s a load of caribou shit.”
“Excuse me?”
“The highmages are this city,” Thomil said in exasperation. “If they want something so, then it is so.”
Sciona couldn’t deny that. Between the Magistry’s influence in the government, the clergy, and the press, there was little of the city they didn’t control. It hurt to think, but it was true that if they cared at all about improving the lot of the Kwen in Tiran, they probably could have done so many times over. Sciona was ashamed that the thought had never crossed her mind. When she—or any mage—thought of improving Tiran, it was only for their fellow Tiranish. The Tiranish men thought about their fellow Tiranish men. Sciona very occasionally thought about her fellow Tiranish woman. But the Kwen? The Kwen were the very last of afterthoughts, if they came up at all.
“I know Carra lacks tact,” Thomil continued, “but I think she’s right about one thing: you figured this out within a few months of starting your research in the High Magistry. Yes, you’re a prodigy, but you can’t have been the only mage in history to uncover this.”
“Oh, I wasn’t,” Sciona said. “That’s one of the things I put together when I was thinking back through my research. The traitor mage knew.”
“Sabernyn?”
“Yes. Remember how he mysteriously murdered all those people in their homes? The reports from the murder scenes describe total carnage with no discernible bodies. Just blood, and hair, and bone.”
“So, he killed using the Forbidden Coordinates?” Thomil grimaced. “Which we now know to mean that he siphoned directly from his rivals’ homes?”
“That’s my theory. I mean, it seems like he wasn’t perfect at it. He definitely didn’t have the mapping abilities I do.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because if he’d had access to anything like the Freynan Mirror—the ability to see his prey in color—he wouldn’t have flubbed his assassination so many times. He missed his mark and killed a lot of family members and servants—even some unrelated neighbors—before getting to his actual targets.”
“I see,” Thomil said. “He’d pieced together that the Forbidden Coordinates corresponded to locations in Tiran, but he was still using fuzzy traditional mapping methods to find his targets.”
“Exactly,” Sciona said, “mapping methods by which one human body would be indistinguishable from another. But my point isn’t that I’m a better mapper than Sabernyn”—although that was gratifyingly indisputable. “My point is that he was put to death for what he did. The High Magistry at the time called it an ‘abomination against God,’ so it’s not as if they condone the use of that magic against people.”
“Well, not against their own people.”
“Alright, maybe the Tiranish do treat the murder of their own more seriously than the deaths of Kwen, but—”