Eve of Destruction (7 page)

He chuckled lightly before offering her his arm. He led her out of the back offices and back to the stairwell above the party below.

“The common people are not our enemies,” he said, his smile widening as he looked down at his quasi-worshippers. “The magi, on other hand, are too reserved to resort to assassination—for the moment, at least. Just deal with DeShane, and everything will work itself out.”

Amaya didn’t agree, but she knew how futile it was to argue with him once he had made up his mind. Besides, at least it would get her out of this cesspool for a while. “I’ll send word to our men there to expect me.”

“Good,” he replied, kissing her on the cheek. He was playing to the crowd; he knew that the newsmen below were watching them carefully, and he wanted to give them something to speculate about. But despite the pleasant smile he kept up for their benefit, his tone abruptly chilled. “Do not let her escape again.”

“She won’t.”

Chaval turned and headed back down the stairs. Amaya stood there for a long moment, wondering how she was going to get close enough to the owner of a brothel to peep in on his conversation with the younger DeShane. The prospects weren’t thrilling, and she wondered if it might just be easier to kill the girl and her escort at the train station and tell Chaval it had been necessary. It was a tantalizing opportunity. She had a feeling that if the girl actually had a chance to talk to this Danev, she might end up with even more protection.

But she also considered Chaval’s potential fury if she didn’t follow his instructions. She couldn’t afford to have her payment withheld; her family was depending on the money now more than ever. Talam might have been slowly dying, but she didn’t want them to die with it. And unfortunately, having them come here wouldn’t really be any better, not if a civil war did indeed break out across Arkadia. At this point, it seemed like a foregone conclusion.

Amaya stood alone in silence for several minutes before continuing up the stairs to her chambers to pack for her journey.

Chapter Three

“I can’t believe people actually read this drek,” Eve commented as she flipped through the pages of the previous day’s newspaper. She sat scrunched into her plush cabin seat, her legs pulled up next to her.

“Read it and believe it,” Zach muttered. He had adopted his “rebel” pose, as she called it: arms crossed, boots perched on the table between them, and hat tilted down over his eyes as he slipped in and out of consciousness. She smiled at the thought but decided not to harass him for it. It was a long ride to Vaschberg, and she didn’t need to get on his nerves just yet. Especially not after Radbury.

Eve sighed and tossed the paper down in disgust. It seemed like every other article was about some new “innovative triumph” by the Dusties, and reading about those was about as satisfying as cleaning up the freshman dormitories after orientation day. Instead she reached into her satchel and pulled out the book Maltus had given her.

She had already flipped through enough of it to be utterly awed by the formulae and theorems inside; most of them explained spells she hadn’t even conceived of before. She wanted to bury herself in it, but she had also brought her class books with her. Before leaving Lushden, she’d made a promise to herself to read through them as much as possible during the ride. It was a token consolation that made her feel a bit better about abandoning her studies mid-semester, but so far she had barely opened them. They were like children’s books compared to the one Maltus had given her.

Either way, it was a moot point. She hadn’t been able to concentrate on much of anything for the last several hours. If she wasn’t wallowing in grief, she was struggling to bury flashes of rage like the one bubbling inside her now.

“This election scares me,” she murmured.

“I’m pretty sure it scares anyone with half a brain,” Zach replied, sighing and tipping up the brim of his hat. “You wouldn’t believe what I put up with overseas.”

“You mean dealing with the Esharians?”

He snorted. “Goddess, no. Most of the locals were great—nice, helpful, everything you could want. I meant the soldiers in my unit.”

“I still can’t believe you did it,” she told him, smiling. “You actually went and became a shuvo.”

His face darkened, and she immediately wished she could take it back. It was a term her father had used a lot when they were younger, an old slur magi used to describe a military hardhead. It implied they had no ability to think on their own, among other, less flattering things.

“You have no idea what it was like,” Zach said. His voice had an edge to it, but it sounded more like annoyance than anger. “I grew up with your family in our nice little neighborhood…but it was never real to me until I saw it first-hand.”

“What do you mean?”

“This conflict, this festering resentment between the magi and everyone else,” he explained. “A lot of the guys were from the west coast, well past Vaschberg. The things they said were just…well, worse than anything you’ve ever heard, and it wasn’t just mealtime drek. They meant what they said. I felt like I had to lie about where I was from.”

“Why? It’s not shameful to come from a nice, educated town, you know.”

“You don’t get it,” he insisted. “It doesn’t work like that, not with a group of soldiers. You bond in really odd ways. Hating someone or something keeps them sane; it lets them justify what they have to do. There are certain realities you just have to accept living like that.”

“Like dumbing yourself down so you can fit in?”

He shot her a cold glare and then turned away. He was sitting up fully now, arms crossed even more tightly, and Eve knew she’d hit a sore spot. She should have regretted it. This wasn’t an inquisition; he had nothing to prove to her. But the rage twisting in her gut begged her to make it one. She just wanted someone to fight so she could let it all out, and he was a convenient target.

“I’m sorry,” she breathed. “That was stupid.”

Zach took a deep breath and seemed to blink his annoyance away. “I’m just saying it’s real, and you need to remember that. The moment we get off this train you’re going to be surrounded by thousands of people who hate you—and a lot of them would hurt you, given the chance. I know everyone is sick of hearing about it, but Kalavan really did change everything.”

Eve closed her eyes and rubbed at her forehead. Yes, it had changed everything, and it was one of those rare events where everyone could remember exactly where they’d been when they’d first heard the news. She’d been sitting in her room pouring over a treatise on kinetic energy when the headmaster had sent out the announcement. He hadn’t waited for the students to read about the tragedy in the morning paper; he’d called an open forum to explain what had happened to everyone on campus.

She hadn’t believed it at first, and a part of her still couldn’t. She was one of the top students in her class, and she could barely weave enough energy to heat a tub of water. The thought that somehow a single man could muster enough power to eradicate an entire island…

It seemed impossible, but then she was still just a krata and not a real mage. She couldn’t even weave enough power to invoke the Flensing yet, not that she would have wished to if she could. From the time she was eight years old and her mother first began to teach her about the Fane, Eve had been warned about its perils. The Flensing was a constant reminder of the cost of their power, and a mage who became reckless or greedy enough could literally kill herself by weaving too much energy. Many saw it as a curse, but her mother had always told her it was a blessing from the Goddess, a shield to protect the world from those with an endless thirst for power. It was what the magi had told the public for generations, and it was why the Enclave insisted the torbos had nothing to fear.

It was also a lie.

“My father told me once that if the torbo masses ever really understood the power of the Fane, then the whole country would cease to function,” Eve said softly. “Their fear would turn them against us. Even the clergy wouldn’t be safe.”

Zach shrugged. “Honestly, I’m more aghast at how few people know anything about history. It’s all there if you read closely enough. The soldiers I keep telling you about? They believed that magi were dangerous, but they couldn’t really articulate why. They could tell you that magi destroyed Vakar, but not how or why or anything specific. And on top of that, they had no concept of the Fane, not really. To them it was basically mysticism, and that made it even more terrifying.”

Eve nodded distantly. She understood well how ignorance often lead to fear, which could then very easily be twisted into violence. But at the same time, her years at school had opened her eyes to how horrifying some knowledge could be. In the end, her father was probably right; the torbos were better off not-knowing. Especially about the Flensing—specifically, that it wasn’t quite the crippling limitation the Enclave made it out to be.

Every mage had to draw upon her own life-force to touch the Fane, and it was that consumption that ultimately brought on the Flensing. But there was another path to power, and despite the Enclave’s tireless efforts to bury the knowledge of this technique, they had never been completely successful. Her mother had warned her about it for many years, and her instructors at the academy had begun to toss out their own subtle warnings the farther she advanced in her studies. It was essentially the giant balma in the room at any university—the thing weighing on everyone’s mind that no one was willing to talk about.

In academic circles many of the magi referred to it is as “sundering,” but the Edehan priestesses simply called it “Defilement,” an irredeemable desecration of the Fane. It had allegedly been created by Edeh’s long-dead husband, Abalor, and his servants, called Balorites, had used it to try and destroy the Fane many times over throughout the centuries. Eve didn’t know how much of it was true and how much was Enclave propaganda, but she did understand how the technique was supposed to work in theory.

Defilers drew their energy from the living things around them—plants, vermin, even people—all to avoid the effects of the Flensing. Without that check upon their power, even a run-of-the-mill mage could weave enough energy to kill. A master could…well, Kalavan had shown what a master could do. A single mage, Oscar Vacal, had destroyed an entire island to fuel his power.

Maybe it would have been better if the Enclave told the public the truth. Maybe then their rage would be directed at the Defilers themselves, or toward any who helped renegade magi acquire the knowledge. Maybe the Dusties wouldn’t blame every single magi for the weakness of a few. Maybe her mother would still be alive.

Eve sighed. No, none of that was likely. As hard as it was to admit, the Enclave was probably right. The less people really knew about Defilement, the better.

“You know, I never had a chance to ask you something,” Zach said. “Did you actually know Vacal before he went crazy and destroyed Kalavan?”

She nodded solemnly. “Everyone did at Rorendal. He was very popular, at least with the students. His ideas were…controversial.”

Zach raised an eyebrow. “The newspapers made him seem like a magi supremacist. They said he especially despised President Janel.”

“He thought Janel’s election was the beginning of the end,” she said distantly. “First we elect a torbo president, then next the Industrialists rise to power. He said it would destroy Arkadia and possibly the Fane.”

“Sounds like a demagogue to me,” Zach grunted. “Tossing around dangerous hyperbole to a bunch of young students who trust you to be impartial.”

Eve shook her head and locked eyes with him. “But what if he was right? It looks like Chaval’s going to win, doesn’t it? Then the Dusties are in charge, and what happens next?”

He pursed his lips. “There’s a big leap between one election and the country falling apart. We’ve endured a lot since Independence—I’d like to think we aren’t that fragile.”

“Maybe not,” she conceded. “But you can understand how appealing those ideas would be to a bunch of young magi living in the middle of this Dusty revolution.”

Zach studied her for a moment. “Even you?”

Eve closed her eyes and rubbed at her nose. She could lie, of course, but he would see through her easily enough. And besides, he
was
her best friend even if he was a torbo. If she couldn’t trust him, then who else?