The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 752

For two days the United State of Magic could not talk about anything else, and it kept getting stuck on the same three things.

The first was simply that Black had lost.

Every person in that country had gone to bed that night knowing how it would end.

Thirty thousand magicians against a school for poor children. Two hundred and fifty branches against thirty.

Nobody had even been able to get odds on it, because nobody would take the other side.

They woke up and Black Tower did not exist.

The second thing was worse, in a way, because it was so hard to hold in the head.

It had taken one night. Not a siege.

Not a season of skirmishes and lawyers and negotiated withdrawals, the way tower wars had always gone.

Six and a half hours, start to finish, and by sunrise two hundred and fifty black buildings were standing in white paint with white light burning gently in their grounds.

People drove out to look at them. Whole families, in the middle of the week. There were queues on the Dunmoor road.

The third thing was the one nobody laughed about.

…

The prisoners started coming home on the second day, and the state broadcaster had a crew on the road outside Cardew when the first group walked out.

Thirty thousand magicians had woken up asleep on somebody else’s grass. Now they were being released.

They were not being released for nothing.

“Sir. Sir, can we talk to you?”

The young man stopped. He was maybe twenty-four, still in the same clothes he’d fought in, and he had the specific hollow look of a person who has been awake for a while thinking about the rest of his life.

He turned his head and pulled his collar down.

“They put something on me,” he said. “Here. On the back of my neck.”

The camera came in close. It was a thin strip, barely there, clear as a fingernail and no bigger than a plaster.

“What is it?”

“They called it a life-and-death contract.” His voice went. “That’s what they said. A life-and-death contract.”

…

“Then what’s the agreement?” the reporter asked. “What did you have to accept, to be let go?”

The young man looked at the road for a moment.

“I have to destroy my black magic,” he said. “All of it. Everything I’ve learned since I was eleven. They forced me to learn white magic instead, from the beginning, like a child.”

“For how long?”

“Ten years.” He wiped his face with the back of his wrist and didn’t manage it. “Ten years as a White Tower disciple. After that I’m free.”

The reporter actually stepped back half a pace.

“Wait — you’re a black magician. You’ve been a black magician your whole life. You can’t just turn into a white one. Isn’t that dangerous? Doesn’t that do something to you?”

“I don’t know,” the young man said. “Nobody knows. Nobody’s ever done it.”

He was crying properly now and not bothering to hide it.

“They gave me two choices. Two. Become their disciple, or die.”

…

“Hold on.” The reporter had her professional voice back on, because this was going out live. “Are you certain those were the only two? Executing prisoners isn’t legal in this country. No tower is permitted to do that. The state would—”

“They never said they’d kill me.”

“Then—”

“They put a price on my head.” He looked straight into the crystal for the first time. “Twenty million dollars. That’s what my life is worth. If my family can’t pay it, I’ll be forced to work as a slave for ten years. I don’t want to be a slave.”

Nobody said anything.

He walked away down the Cardew road, and the crew let him go.

…

It was happening everywhere.

That was the part that took hold of the country over the next week, more than the war itself.

For five hundred years these had been the men you crossed the street to avoid. The ones you hired when you wanted a rival’s cargo to rot in the hold.

The ones who charged four thousand dollars to take down a warehouse and twice that to take down a man, and who had never once in five centuries had to explain themselves to anybody.

Now they were in the halls of the branches they used to own, sitting in rows, learning to knit a bone.

A woman who had spent eleven years laying hexes for merchants was photographed on the steps of the Coldbrook branch with a manual on her knees, mouthing the words.

A man who had broken three people’s minds professionally was assigned to the healing wing and taught, over four days, to run white energy down a farmer’s ruined shoulder with both thumbs, slowly, the way you’d work dough.

“He’s giving him a massage,” somebody said, on a broadcast that went out to four million people. “Is that — is that what he’s doing? Is that a massage?”

The country came apart laughing.

…

And then, underneath the laughing, it started to say something else.

Black magic had been thirty percent of everything that went wrong in the United State of Magic.

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