Sciona had never considered how heavily the archmages kept their meetings guarded until four fully armed men rushed onto the floor and laid hands on her.
“I did the right thing.” She didn’t know why she needed to say it, especially when no one could possibly hear her amid all the cries of horror and outrage. “I did the right thing!”
As the guards hauled Sciona to the exit, she knew she shouldn’t, but she glanced back at Archmage Bringham, some childish part of her wanting him to acknowledge that she had been right.
He turned away, and she was dragged out of Leon’s Hall.
“I decree that every mage of rank must create and carry with him a versatile conduit with military capabilities, and 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）
FREYNAN MIRRORS BLINKED in and out of existence across Tiran’s barrier 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 were screaming, 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.
One of the guards holding Sciona faltered on the Magistry steps when he beheld the bleeding sky. “God save us!” he whispered, even as his fellow security guard urged him on down the 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 mapping spells so that a visual would activate only while siphoning was in progress and deactivate once it had finished. Based on quite painful discussions with Thomil, she 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 the estimate had been correct, the guards were pulling her forward again.
A steel-reinforced police vehicle had pulled up in front of the Main Magistry, the driver looking as gaunt with terror as any of the panicking civilians—and Sciona couldn’t blame him. While the contents of the Freynan Mirrors on the barrier were too far overhead to make out, 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 writhing scaled 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 jabbered as he accelerated down the street off campus. Panic dominated the city passing by the car windows as horrors 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, 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 places 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 so many creatures she had only ever seen in ancient artist’s 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 only got to behold each creature for a moment—the worst moment of its life—before Blight reduced it to a contorted skeleton.
At last, inevitably, the Freynan Mirror at the engine hit on a human. A bent old man, hobbling to keep up with a group of figures who seemed to have moved ahead of him too fast. And this was apparently 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 particularly dangerous. But weighed against the most prolific street murderer in Tiran, she was the greater threat by a magnitude of thousands.
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 Sciona 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.