Nobody in the Arcanum State slept that night.By two in the morning it was the only story in the country, and it was still pitch dark, and that was somehow worse — every picture coming in was a picture of something happening in the middle of the night, half-lit, shaky, filmed by people who should have been in bed six hours ago and were instead standing in fields.Every paper had someone outside a tower gate.The state broadcaster had gone to continuous coverage at eleven and never gone back.There were forty people camped on the ridge above the Black Tower headquarters with long-lenses and no light to use them in, and a smaller crowd outside the White Tower in New Avalon with nothing to film at all, because the White Tower was dark and quiet and had been all night.And there was betting, all of it done before the sun went down.Open, loud, entirely legal betting in every hall and market in the country, on a war that at midnight had been three hours from starting.Black had two hundred

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.

Red Tower had three hundred red tower and thirty thousand magicians in the Arcanum State.That night, there were almost none of them in a Red Tower.…It was not carelessness. It was the business.Red sells fire by the month. Every forge, every bakery oven, every kitchen stove in the state runs on a flame-charm, and a flame-charm has to be renewed by hand, at the customer’s door, by a man who walks there.Red’s people lived in their own houses. They slept above shops in the market districts, in rented rooms near the harbour, in cottages on the roads out east, so they could be at the first door by seven in the morning on the first of the month."White Tower had summoned every fighter drone, every ex-black-magic recruit, it commanded to attack all of the Red towers."Red Tower never summoned anybody, because it was ambushed.…At the Halloway branch there were twenty-six people inside at midnight.Four cooks. Nine record-keepers. Two men on the gate. A duty elder named Corliss who had d

The recording glass hummed once, the way it does when a voice comes in loud, and the sound carried all the way down the table.“Do you want to die?”Minister Penn’s face went white, then red, and he put both hands flat on the wood to stop them shaking.“How dare you,” he said. “How dare you threaten me. In this hall. I am the Minister of Magic.”“Then let me ask you a better one.” Alex hadn’t sat down.“Three hundred Red Tower magicians came to a private dinner two nights ago to kill me, my chairwoman, nine White Tower elders in their eighties and two hundreds our guests,” Alex said.He leaned in slightly.“So I want to hear you say it clearly, Minister, because the glass is running. Are you standing with them?”“I stand with justice—”"We are on the side of justice. We never strike first. You have to pick a side, because if you stand with them, you stand against us—and you need to understand what being our enemy truly means."Penn straightened his coat. He had prepared this part."I

Garrick Vail let out a breath that was almost a laugh.“Somewhere warm,” he said. “You’re threatening a fire magician with warmth.”His own front room. Nine feet between them. The lamp turned low on the wall, the ashes cold in the grate.“For people like me, kid, warm is nothing—warm is bathwater.” He clenched his fists, unleashing twin coils of fire around his hands.“You’re right.” Alex nodded. “I should have been clearer. The invitation is to hell.”Vail stopped smiling.“They tell me it’s very hot down there,” Alex went on. “And you being what you are, I thought — well. At least he’ll have something to play with.”“What do you want?”“You spent tonight in a room above a restaurant arranging my death.” Alex stood up. “You commanded three hundred men to burn us. So of course I came here to kill you. What else did you think this was?”Vail’s hand was already coming up.Nineteen years as the strongest fire magician in the Arcanum State, and he did not hesitate, and he did not waste a