The closer they came to the Outer Canal and the Seventh Ring, the worse the damage, and the greater the chaos, and now it was physically painful to see from the air what he had not been able to see the night of his first experience of earthshake. There were fires everywhere, and not just shouts and weeping, but real screaming coming up from below. He could see places where buildings had canted over and fallen sideways, or where they were sunk up to the roofline, as if the ground had turned to water beneath them.

And that shook him. There had been nothing like that before. . . .

What had they done?

Not us, he reminded himself desperately. We didn’t do this. We didn’t trigger it, we didn’t ask for the riot that made the Magi use the Eye. All we did was take advantage of what the gods showed us the people would do, and the Magi would do, and what would come of it—it wasn’t our fault. And we couldn’t have stopped it.

But his insides were not convinced.

The shake must have been terrible indeed to have reached this far. Up until now, the worst damage had been confined within the first three rings. And what could have made the ground behave in that strange fashion, to swallow up whole buildings?

Ahead of him, the dark, silver-gilt shadow that was Re-eth-ke flew steadily onward. Behind him trailed the rest of the wing, or at least the rest of it up to Orest and Wastet. A new concern; how many of them had made it into the air?

They passed the Sixth Ring; the Fifth. Then, at the Fourth Ring, though there were still fires, was still shouting and crying and chaos, there was, unaccountably, less of it.

And at the Third Ring, there was order again, and he could have shouted with relief. Not surprising; this was where the military were housed and trained. But still, to look down and see people dealing with the aftermath of the earthshake with the same calm as Aunt Re’s people made him feel considerably less guilty.

Then Second Ring, and again, there did not seem to be the same amount of chaos and catastrophe as in the Outer Rings, although there certainly was more than enough—and it suddenly dawned on him why. So much damage had been wrought here already by the shakes before they had left, as well as the ones after, that almost everything that could be knocked down had been, and many people were probably sleeping in the open at night out of hopeless resignation.

For some reason, that realization transmuted his feelings from guilt into anger, and if he could have gotten his hands around the throat of a Magus just then, he’d have throttled any one of them without a second thought.