“Because nothing they had was blowing up in their faces?” Hakkon hazarded, in tones that were surprisingly timid for the big man, as if he was afraid of being yelled at again. Kordas was irresistibly reminded of one of the big guard mastiffs he had once seen encountering a tiny kitten, which had put up all its fur, spat, and sunk needle-claws into his nose. The poor dog hadn’t known what to do, and neither did Hakkon.

“Gods be praised! It has a brain!” Wis exclaimed, throwing his arms upward. “Yes. Healing still worked just fine as long as it was the inherent Gift and not operating by magic. The same for all of the other Mind-magic Gifts. But real magic of the sort that the High King had come to depend on—” He snorted. “Eh, well, it was scattered and unreliable and very hard to control. It was slow, if it was going to be stable. Unless . . .”

He paused significantly and looked at Ceri, who obligingly took up the thread.

“Unless you are employing the dark magics linked to the Abyssal Plane,” Ceri said ominously. “The Abyssal Plane wasn’t much affected. So, blood, pain, and demonic magics worked just fine. As did Elemental magic, but Elemental magic tends to be the provenance of shamans, and the High King didn’t have any, so he didn’t know that. So the reliable magic was all Abyssal stuff.”

“As the High King soon found out.” That was Dole. “At first, it was deal-making. Then binding. To their credit, the High Kings, and later the Emperors, really did their best at first not to give in to the temptation to use the Black Arts, but—well, they are all powerful people who spend their lives trying to amass more power, and when you do that, you start to look at anything as a tool, no matter how filthy.”

Wis sneered, “And oh, were some of the Emperors filthy tools.”

“And that,” Ponu concluded, “is why the Court of the Emperor is a nest of scorpions, rats, and snakes—with apologies to the wiser ways of scorpions, rats, and snakes. The Black Arts corrupt everything and everyone they touch, and the Emperor and his mages have been wallowing in them for a very long time.”

“Why wasn’t the Abyssal Plane much affected?” Kordas asked.

“That would require a level of understanding of magic you don’t have,” said Ponu, witheringly. “But I’ll try a very simple explanation that is not the true one, but is as close to the truth as you can understand. The Aetherial Plane is ‘lighter’ than we are, and the Abyssal Plane is ‘heavier’ than we are. So just as waves in the sea move seaweed and don’t move rocks, the magic waves moved us and didn’t move them.”