Page 74

Renthorn considered Thomil for a moment, an amicable smile hanging on his lips while cruelty animated his eyes.

“You know, I should be thanking Sciona Freynan. She’s given me the opportunity to try out all these wonderful combat spells I never would have had the chance to enjoy outside a state of martial law.

” Renthorn shifted his grip on his staff as his smirk widened.

“A while back, I figured out a way to siphon a creature with a touch of my staff and a verbal command. Only, it’s not a quick siphon like Blight.

It goes as slow as I tell it to. Until last night, I’d only tested it on animals, but it turns out to work beautifully on humans.

Would you like to see the muscles in your own arms, Kwen?

What about your ribs? Your own beating heart? ”

“Renthorn,” Mordra said weakly. “This is too much!”

“No, Tenth.” Renthorn touched the tip of his staff to Thomil’s chest. “This is the Light of Truth.”

Thomil blinked down at Renthorn’s staff and found that an eerie calm had come over him. He knew he would scream when it started. His father had screamed. Arras had screamed.

“Start talking, Kwen. The pain will stop when I have what I need.”

“Then this is going to take a while,” Thomil said dryly. “I don’t know where the spellograph is.”

There would be no shame in screaming, Thomil told himself. Loud suffering was exactly the sort of diversion Renthorn couldn’t resist. And Thomil had no doubt that he could stay alive—and suffering—long enough to buy Carra a chance to survive.

Sciona was proof that hope didn’t have to mean living to the end of the story; for Kwen like Thomil, how could it?

Carra’s life was worth fighting for, whether fighting meant dying here or stubbornly living on.

Maeva had understood that: that it was worth dying at the border of salvation if you could push your love before you over the finish line.

“Maybe you really don’t know,” Renthorn smiled, “but I will extract your best guesses before you die.”

“You can try.”

Renthorn opened his mouth to verbally activate his staff when—

“Hey, Archmage Supreme!” a voice called from above.

Thomil looked up just as Carra launched from the ledge of the water tower. She had waited a split second for Renthorn to turn toward the sound of her voice. As she dropped, she slammed the spellograph into his upturned face. Gravity put the heavy machine straight through his skull.

Thomil started, and Mordra screamed as blood, keys, and brain matter burst in all directions.

“Gods, Carra!” Thomil staggered back with shock. “What are you doing?”

“Keeping the tribe together,” she said as she drew herself up, covered in blood.

Gurgling on the ground, Renthorn twitched as if to rise. Carra stomped on what remained of his head with a terrible crunch, and the mage’s reedy body went still.

“Carra!” What is wrong with you? part of Thomil wanted to demand, as Mordra had demanded of Renthorn.

But as she stood over Renthorn, Arras was in the set of her shoulders. In her, the Caldonnae lived, and that was Thomil’s only mission.

“Alright,” he breathed, “now, we really need to run.”

“Not if we kill the witness.” Steel hunter’s eyes turned to Mordra, and Carra unsheathed the knife at her belt.

At the flash of metal, Mordra shifted his grip on his staff.

Carra had started forward, but Thomil moved faster than either of them.

He tackled Mordra at full force, sending them both rolling over the concrete rooftop.

The staff clattered away as Thomil slammed the slighter man down and drew his fist back, heedless of the pain in his bruised ribs.

“Please! Please!” Mordra was gasping, racked with sobs. His hands were open in surrender, forearms over his face so he wouldn’t have to look his death in the eye. “I wasn’t going to kill her! I swear!”

“Forgive me for not taking the word of a mage.”

“I didn’t know!” the highmage sobbed shrilly. “About the Otherrealm—or-or Renthorn’s plan—or Freynan’s! Any of it! Please!”

He was telling the truth, Thomil realized.

Not because he had any particular confidence in the Tenth’s honesty but because it made sense; Jerrin Mordra had been as new to the High Magistry as Sciona, and he wasn’t the intellectual powerhouse she was.

He never would have figured out the truth on his own, and, based on their interactions, it didn’t seem that Mordra the Ninth, Cleon Renthorn, or any of the mages in the Tenth’s circle had been particularly open with him.

“Oh, Father!” Mordra whimpered into his hands. “Father, forgive me, I didn’t know!”

“This again?” Carra said in disgust. “Do they all cry so much?”

“Please, Kwen.” Mordra’s voice had assumed an emptiness through the shudder of his sobs. “Tommy. Please… kill me quickly.”

“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.