to control a populace is to keep them tired. Tired, hungry, drunk.
“And the more obsessed with Pala Lord Martin became, the more afraid he became that this power—this simple power that simple people had, to keep a fire burning or a well flowing—would be used against him somehow. His people were beginning to question his own power, after all. They always do, after a while. So he gathered together his most loyal scholars and told them to study the problem, the power and the questioning and how they were connected. They sequestered themselves for months, and when they finally emerged, they told him that they’d devised a way to bind the power, and restrict its use to only those who would use it according to the Lord of Highfall’s wishes. We don’t know how they planned to do it, if it was a ritual or a machine. Whatever it was, it took all of them working together.”
Judah broke off another piece of chocolate and let it melt on her tongue. “Did they succeed?”
“They did.” Now his voice was soft. “But they erased themselves from existence in the process. Like a wet rag on chalk-covered slate. The scholars, the tools they used—even part of the tower where they worked.”
Judah looked at the neatly sheared edges of the gap, the smooth gray slices of exposed wood where the shelves ended. “This tower?” she said. “Is this story true? Is that what happened here?”
“I believe it is,” he said, and smiled at her. It was a sad smile. “That’s why I’m here. And I believe that’s why you’re here.”
A funny feeling spread inside her, a shivery something she couldn’t quite identify. The remnants of chocolate were sickly in her mouth. “Magic power and secret rituals. You’re as crazy as Theron is.”
“Why is it so crazy?” he said. “If I go downstairs and stab Elban’s son in the throat, you’ll bleed to death as sure as he will. Is it any stranger than that?”
Something about the way he said Elban’s son struck her oddly. “That’s different.”
“Why? Because you’ve experienced it firsthand? I was with him while you were caned, you know. I watched the marks appear on his back. If I tell somebody else about it, should they assume I’m a liar, because they didn’t experience it firsthand?”
“I don’t think you’re a liar. I think you’re insane.”
“Like Theron is insane.”
“Yes.”
“Theron’s not insane.” The magus’s eyes glittered, his voice cold and sure. “I know the poison Arkady gave him. People use it because they think it’s painless, but they only think that because they don’t know what it really does. There is something inside us that makes us us, Judah. Individual and unique in all the world, a song sung only once and never again. Call it conscience, call it essence, call it soul. That poison drives it out of the body. Sends it away—” Judah shivered “—to wherever we go when we die, the river of black water or the waiting place or the roots of the great tree. Whatever you believe. By the time you gave him the antidote, most of Theron was already there. Not all of him came back.”
“Stop it.” Tears pricked at Judah’s eyes. That long moment of indecision. Her fault.
“Why?” the magus said rudely. “I’m only telling you about it. You have no proof that it’s true, no firsthand experience. Arkady wanted Theron dead, that’s all. That he wasn’t a good enough magus to know what he was really doing, that nobody in this wreck of a city could know—that’s probably just a story. Probably part of Theron’s brain got too much or too little blood, and that’s why he is the way he is.”
“I was scared.” The tears were falling now, leaking from her eyes and running down her cheeks. “For all I knew, the poison was in what you gave me. For all I knew, you wanted me to kill him myself.”
The hardness melted out of the magus. “I’m sorry.” His voice was tired. “I had no way of proving myself to you. You did the best you could under the circumstances.”
And it hadn’t been good enough. “Theron wouldn’t agree. He would hate the way he is now.”
She expected the magus to argue, but he only nodded. “Theron is half in this world and half out of it. In a way, he’s far more unnatural than you and Gavin. He shouldn’t exist. He can sense things that most people can’t, though, like the cats.” He looked thoughtful.