But if it was really true, then the victories of the Altan troops must have been maddening to them. Victorious armies do not take as many casualties as those that are losing. If they had come to depend on those stolen years, they must have been growing desperate. Desperate enough to take away a primary protection for the city and steal its power?

Desperate enough to take that protection away in the hopes of making up the falling number of available deaths?

Kiron thought it more than likely.

“Consider that our thought was right: they may have been battening on the deaths of Altan soldiers to prolong their own lives,” Kiron said bluntly. “Is it so short a step from stealing the years of dead soldiers to stealing the years of children crushed beneath a falling wall?”

“May the gods save us, if that be so,” Toreth said softly. “I find it hard to countenance—”

He doesn’t know how ruthless the very ruthless can be.

It made him sick, it made him angry. Here he had faced down Tian tyranny only to find it in the place where he had thought to find his sanctuary. He had thought that only the Tians were the evil ones in this war. He had been wrong. Evil flourished on both sides.

Active evil, and passive, in the shape of the Great Ones, who were supposed to protect their people and guard them, and who were happy to leave the real responsibility in the hands of others that they might have only the pleasure of the office, and not the duty. . . .

“Here is another prediction, then,” Kiron retorted, who had seen the fear on the faces of the Magi facing the mob. Men like that did not like being made to feel fear. When they got to safety, their first thought would be of revenge. “And if it comes to pass, then you may take it that the Magi are capable of every bit of that and more. The Eye of Light—”

“What of it?” Toreth replied, absently, still contemplating with horror the idea that anyone in authority could deliberately choose something that would cause so much death and devastation, purely so that he and his could profit from it.