And refugees from both Alta and Tia continued to trickle in—by ones and twos and small family groups now, rather than entire Great Houses or temples full of priests. Kaleth and the priests of both nations had managed to establish escape organizations for those who were desperate enough to try hunting for a myth rather than endure another day in lands in which the Magi were growing ever more powerful. There were still Tian temples—those in which there was not, and never had been, a tradition of magic—where the priests still remained in place. The Temple of At-thera, for instance, the goddess who, in one of her aspects, was the Divine Cow, the Holy Nursemaid who nurtured the rest of the gods as children with her sweet milk. She was a minor deity, and her priests and priestesses often came from rural and modest backgrounds. There was no great prestige in serving her, so no great families ever offered their children to her service. But there were small temples to her scattered across the countryside, and it was easy to move escapees from one to the other, as humble pilgrims looking for the blessing of children, unnoticed, until one moved out of Tia altogether.

Most of these new refugees were Healers, the sort who, like Heklatis, used magic in their Healing, and to say that they arrived in Sanctuary profoundly divided in their emotions was something of an understatement. Healers had a sense of duty so powerful it bordered on the suicidal, and it took a great deal to persuade them to abandon their patients and their duty. But many of these men and women also reported disturbing encounters with Magi, encounters that were disturbing because afterward, they could neither remember what had happened, nor exercise their magic for a time. A typical example—a call would come concerning a brain-storm, the sort of thing that only a Healer who used magic could cope with. He or she would follow the servant ostensibly sent to fetch him; the servant would lead him to a veritable wreck of a house that looked utterly abandoned—