“A few people were hurt by falling stone, all but one of them servants,” she said, “but not badly. This compound is built to handle shakes. The dragons are all fine. One of the pools cracked and drained, and the poor dragon in it spent a miserable and cold night so far as he was concerned, but there are spare pens, and we’ve already moved the dragon there. It’ll be worse in the city,” she added with resignation. “There will be people killed, I’m sure, several hundred, if not several thousand. And a lot more will be hurt and probably half of those will die, too, eventually.”

“Um—why?” he asked.

“Because they weren’t warned!” she snapped. “I told you, we know what to do when there is going to be a big shake! With warning, we all move out to sleep in our gardens! Even if you don’t have a garden, when there’s a shake warning, people sleep in the temple gardens, beside the canals, anywhere that there’s no walls to fall on them. Without warning—people are inside, their walls come down, their roofs collapse—” He heard the mounting anger in her voice, and she must have realized it too. She stopped for a moment, and closed her eyes. He could hear her breathing carefully, taking several slow, deep breaths before opening her eyes again, and continuing in a more controlled voice. She was still angry, though; he knew her well enough to understand that her stony expression meant that she was just controlling herself. He had first seen it when she was trying not to show how afraid she was of the Magi; now he doubted that she was hiding fear. “That’s the thing, you see. If we have warning, an earthshake doesn’t hurt anything but buildings, and buildings can be mended. It will be bad in the Second and Third Ring, but in the Fourth and Fifth—it will be horrible. The poorer the district is, the worse it will be. The wealthy have homes built to account for shaking, but the poor build of mud brick, on land that becomes like quicksand when there’s a shake. That’s why there must be a warning—”

Her voice trembled with rage, and her jaw was clenched. “The Magi,” she said, her facade cracking again. “The Magi did this.”

“If the Magi are to blame,” he ventured, “then surely the Great Ones will act?” He couldn’t imagine the Great Ones not acting. They were the guardians of their people. How could they ignore something as egregious as this?