around Alta City under constant watch? But what good would that do? But by the time he gathered his wits, the scholar had finished his lecture, and it was time to feed Avatre. She was putting on another growth spurt of her own and was constantly hungry, and he knew that he didn’t dare delay her dinner for even a single question.
So he hurried off, his curiosity a fire within his belly, his thoughts circling around that tantalizing bit of information. At least now he had a name for the reason why the Altans did not fear invasion of their city, even if he did not know what that name meant.
However, he was, by the gods, going to find out.
“The Eye of Light?” Orest said, and blinked. “Um—actually, I don’t know what it is. I mean, I know what it does, but I don’t know what it is. No one knows what it is, except the Magi. It’s up in the Tower of Wisdom, and no one is allowed up there except the really powerful Magi.”
Kiron sighed. “All right, what does it do, then?” he asked.
Orest licked his lips. “Mind you, I’ve never seen it myself. The Magi don’t show it off all that often—by the gods, they don’t have to! But Father has, and—you know that stretch of slag glass, right by the Haaras Bridge over the Fourth Canal?”
Kiron nodded; it was a strange feature, following the line of the canal itself, a slab of black vitrified earth about as wide as a chariot and as long as three dragons, nose to tail. He’d wondered if it was the remains of some terrible fire.
“The Eye made that,” Orest said, with lowered voice and a sidelong glance, as if he feared being overheard. “Father said this beam of light came down out of the top of the Tower of Wisdom—that’s the high tower in the middle of the Palace of the Magi—and just burned it there. They say it can reach all the way to the other side of the Seventh Canal and do the same thing there. There’s supposed to be the burned footings of a ruined bridge they took down out there; I don’t know, I haven’t gone to look.”
Kiron stared blankly at his friend; if he hadn’t known that Orest wasn’t any good at deception, he would have expected this to be some sort of joke. “Nothing can do that!” he objected. “I’ve never heard of anything that can do that!”
“Well, then, nothing melted the earth right where you can go and look at it yourself,” Orest snapped, nettled. “I can tell you this—it’s the reason why no one crosses a Magus! Once every few years, they decide to put on a show with the Eye, just to make sure that everyone remembers it, and let everyone know it still works. And that’s why, when you deal with a Magus, you are very, very polite. If they can do that, what else can they do?”
Kiron licked his lips, picturing to himself a beam of light moving across the earth, burning everything in its path—or across the sky—“Can it be moved up?”
“Can it cut a dragon and a Jouster out of the sky, you mean?” Orest asked. “If they don’t get out of its way, I should think so!”
Kiron thought about the dragons, ranked in their wings, and a light beam sweeping across the sky. Well. No wonder no one in Alta City was afraid of invasion. And no wonder the Magi were, in their way, the silent rulers of this land. He had to wonder if anyone in Tia knew about this thing. Surely they did—with all the spies and agents they had, with the Altans demonstrating it very publicly every few years, surely they knew about it!
It was very strange, though, that in all of the time he had been in Tia, he had not heard even a rumor of such a thing. So—why not? Why was it that the thing that had terrified people most was only that the Magi could send storms down on them?
Maybe because the Great King and his advisers know that as long as they stay on the other side of the Seventh Canal, the Eye can’t reach them—so unless they find a way to get rid of the Eye, or the Magi, they won’t march on Alta City. And maybe the reason the storms scared them was that if the Magi could send storms, maybe they could reach past the