Book 4 Chapter 5

INTERLUDE 9C:

SIGNIFICANT LOSSES, PART I

“Open your mind. You have already seen magic enacted, in every second of your waking life. What, you think there could be a world devoid of magic? You know not of what you speak.”

– from ‘The Last Words of Lordimer’, pg. 3

“Come on, you scratters!” he hollerred up the stairs. “Last one down’s a floppin’ fish!”

His younger brother and sisters and cousins – all five of them – came stampeding down in a single, ten-legged shape, shrilling and clawing each other back –

“Sestreya – you were last!” He pointed at the seven-year-old. “You’re a fish!”

“Ewwww!” the others cried, holding their noses and fleeing her.

“I ain’t never!” she retorted, chasing her eight-year-old sister, her closest companion. “Get back here!”

He led the exodus out the front door, then waited while three of them went back for their shoes. Waving farewell to his uncle and elder brother, he locked up and headed out into the streets.

The massive townhouse he’d purchased his family was in Jinglebridge, one of Oldtown’s quaintest areas, a riddle of canals, old trees and older ruins, just south-east of Firenight Square. His mum, uncle and aunts still hadn’t gotten used to the change of scenery, but the kids loved it. They thought he’d won a sizeable sum by gambling, a belief he’d carefully sculpted with both spoken word and hidden spell. This was the best excuse to give them, as it required only the gentlest suggestion to get them to leave the matter well alone – his elder relatives resented him for his newfound wealth, of course, but he could put up with that. They couldn’t know of his true profession, of course. He’d have to erase swathes of their memories, set commands in their minds preventing them from revealing the truth to the wrong person. That just wouldn’t do, especially given the added scrutiny he was under as an arch-enchanter. Henthae herself had inspected his family on one occasion. He had little doubt he could out-magic the supple crone if he had to, but that would just bring disaster down on his head in the end anyway. Better to play the safe game. Keep his family out of the loop altogether, conceal his identity by the most mundane of means.

Lies.

Their cousins sprinted ahead of the other youngsters, sometimes stopping to hide behind a tree. Nebbert and Larrika ignored them – they found sticks and started duelling as they strafed up the path beside the road, facing each other and swinging wildly as they loped along. Borasir increased his pace, striding to keep up. It was alright – his legs were plenty long-enough to make up the difference.

Not like the kids would let him live it down, if they knew. He was famous. He heard his name crop up in conversation five times a day, and a hundred times a day it went through someone’s head near him. Not his real name, of course. But Spiritwhisper? It was popular. He was popular. His warning-sense, catching a reference to him in a passer-by’s mind, had never once triggered on something threatening. One hundred percent admiration.

It went to his head, naturally, but the head was his speciality. He could manage.

You might be a master of lies but your problem, Borasir, is you’re too honest.

He sighed to himself. He knew most people in his position would bend the rules. Use their powers to get ahead in life – in love… Some changes were too subtle to be tracked, the books kept on reminding him… But right from the get-go he’d thrown himself head-first into the chaos of the champion’s life. The sheer appeal of it – dressing up as a masked hero and fighting the bad guys – was simply irresistible. The claws it sank into you – the trauma, the shared experiences – made it inescapable for the truest. Once a champion, always a champion. Only darkness and death released his kind from their oaths. He would choose the latter, and not until it came to claim him. Even still, Vaahn could suck it and swivel. He was Celestium-bound, if anyone was.

But that’s what everyone tells themselves, he reminded himself, and frowned a bit as he walked. There’d been a night, a cold night walking home from the tavern, and she’d pulled back on their linked arms… almost pulling his hand out of his pocket…

They splash together in their high leather boots through the frosty puddles, and she leans away, regarding him archly.

“… reckon we’ll get palaces up there, for doin’ this.”

“For what?” She eyes him in that infuriating way. “Playing fortify? Playing fortify badly?”

“Shut up!”

Her smile eats his heart, and he loses another piece of himself.

“No, for – you know… all the things we get up to. Zadhal…”

“Oi! I did come to Zadhal, if you recall – in fact, I’m pretty sure I saved your big collective behind, with the wheelbarrow stunt…”

He steps up onto a kerb that runs next to a street-gutter, and she steps up with him, her liquid speed preventing him from dragging her through the detritus.

“You know what I mean,” he says surlily; “for bein’ good.”

“If you get a nice place in the Twelve Heavens for being a good boy, were you really being good?”

Her question confuses him. She pulls herself close to him once more, and he can smell her hair again. He feels tempted to enter her mind, not for the first or ten-thousandth time, and resists by rote.

“What you mean?” he asks after a minute.

“If you know you’re going to be rewarded for doing something, you aren’t doing it unselfishly, are you? You’re doing it for selfish reasons.”

“I guess I just don’t see it that way.”

“When your kid brother cleans his room –“

“He ain’t ever cleanin’ that place!”

“I know – gods, I know – but humour me. If your mum tells your brother to clean his room and he’ll get a new ball for it, is he being good?”

“Yeah?”

“Really?”

“Why not?”

“And a man who gets paid to work for a company – can we say he loves his company as much as a man who doesn’t, but still does the work?”

“No one works for nothin’.”

“It’s a thought-experiment.”

“It’s a somethin’-experiment, alright.”

“Gods, aren’t we grumpy today?”

“’We’ aren’t anythin’. We’re all people. We’re all everythin’.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“And I’m supposed to take your word for that, am I? You forget what I am?” He smiles at her, puts his arm around her shoulders and pulls her even closer. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s this: people ain’t simple. No one’s bein’ good for no reason. That guy, in your somethin’-experiment? The one who ain’t gettin’ paid? He might love the work less, but gain somethin’ else.”

“Like what?”

“Like prestige? Fame? The admiration of his colleagues? A future position in an even-more lucrative role? Do you think I’m stupid just cause of my talkin’?”

“Alright –“

“And you’re damn right Nebbert’s being a good boy when he cleans his room for a new ball. Of course it’s good. Why would me mum suggest it as a reward if she wasn’t tryin’ to get him to do it? Why would she want him to do it, if it wasn’t good?”

“Remember this,” she says.

He remembered every inflection, every synchronised step.

It still hurt.

By the time he’d herded his flock of kids to Firenight Square, he could tell they were already opening the arena gates for general admissions – he was tall, and despite the ridiculous morning crowds he could see that a horde of people were crushing in about the gates’ opening, moving through into the building. He hurried the youngsters along through the teeming masses of square-goers; a single incisive thought was weapon-enough to stop wayward idiots from jostling him or the members of his little group. He joined the queue, as much as it could’ve been called a queue, and, thanks to the odd little tickle of enchantment, his wards lined up nice and neatly behind him.

Their voices went back and forth, an incessant prattle his power only sometimes helped him ignore.

“… think we’ll see the Dragonslayer.”

“Cor, yeah.”

“He’s the best!”

“No he ain’t! Lorgno the Lifestealer, she’s top!”

Bor laughed a little to himself. They knew they wouldn’t be seeing any of the big acts, not in the morning games – the early tickets went for cheap, and with good reason. The morning games were the most suitable for kids, anyway. The fighters were less skilled, the encounters less brutal, their antics more amusing. Not one of the little clods had seen Phanar or Lorgno in combat, but they’d all heard the rumours, followed the stories that spread through the streets. There was little doubt in Bor’s mind that Phanar had become the city’s premier gladiator.

It was funny; to talk to the man, you’d have never placed him for being such a showman. The last time Bor ran into the foreigner he was shopping in Hightown with Kanthyre, for shoes, of all things. If Bor hadn’t known better, he’d have thought the warrior a golem – stoic and impassive were descriptors that didn’t even scratch the reality of the man.

If only they opened up their memories to proper inspection. The stories that could be told…

He still hadn’t had opportunity to delve into the greatest duel of a generation, the fabled meeting of Redgate and Ord Ylon. No one had offered, and he’d learnt long ago that an enchanter could never ask. No one with a brain worth perusing ever let him actually read their mind, even if they felt it would be a good idea – they immediately fell into blaming him for their own compulsions, suspecting him of persuading them it wasn’t such a bad notion, infiltrating opinion by spell rather than speech…

It was a fine line to walk, for the mind-mage whose intent it was to retain the appearance of trustworthiness. He had to be more careful than a surgeon cutting away at a tumour – half the time he felt as though that was exactly what he was doing. Brain-surgery, as ludicrous as that sounded.

When they reached the front of the ‘line’, a young man in official arena green-and-black demanded their tickets. Bor produced his handful of little tokens, and they were waved through into the grounds. He led the kids into the structure, up the sunlit stairwells, and out onto the seats.

Their spot for today’s games was pretty good. Eastern side, so the rising sun wouldn’t get in their eyes. He could’ve easily afforded one of the highborn booths, of course, commanding a perfect view of the action, servants on hand with plates and jugs of delicacies – but that just wouldn’t do, not with the kids in tow or without them. The best commoner seats were near the front, just twenty feet above the floor of the grounds – and Bor’s tickets were for seats merely three rows back from the front. He scooted the kids along the smooth stone step serving as a bench and settled them down, letting them swap positions several times until they finally seemed at ease with their neighbours. At last he dared place his own backside down, at one of the ends so as not to upset the delicate balance of their seating arrangements.

They’d traded places at least two more times by the point he’d retrieved the water-bottles from his bag, an action that could’ve taken no more than ten seconds.

It was a bright, clear morning, the skies of unbroken blue glass stretching off into the distance, but Kaile had turned down yesterday’s unbearable heat. In fact, it was pleasantly cool. The opposite side of the arena, cursed with the sun’s glare, was starting to fill up. All about the ring, bloodthirsty children were dragging their guardians to their seats. The place was big-enough to seat tens of thousands, and it was hard to find more than a couple of empty places between the groups of families and friends knotted about the stands.

He looked down and out into the oval, the sand glimmering like an oasis of pearl, and imagined what was to come. The struggle. The violence. All of it carefully tempered for the morning crowd, events staged and scripted so as to provide suitable entertainment for its attention-span challenged audience.

No. There would be no real struggle, no real violence on the sands this morning. Certainly nothing that could compare to the contents of Bor’s own mind, a million milling images and snatches of spine-tingling sounds which, if he let them, could overtake his conscious thoughts, send him broken-winged and plummeting into a pit of half-remembered nightmare.

The heretics had fallen silent. Even the demons had stopped coming. Many took it for a sign of the end-times; those rich-enough or fearful-enough to do so had already fled Mund, and, in the wake left by their absence, darkness had crept into the city. A darkness unlike anything he’d seen before. It didn’t come from the outside, from spell-books and fiends. It came from inside men’s hearts, producing the same vile effects.

Inkatra. It had been a fireball waiting to explode, and they let it go too long, let it erupt right in their foolish faces.

If there’d been a moment of clarity, reflection, the arch-diviners would’ve realised just how effectively the drug masked their foresight. Just how badly they’d miscalculated. But they relied on their power for everything. And now it was too late. Eight weeks ago the proportion of inkatra-addicts in Mund had been estimated at nought-point-nought-two percent. Well within controllable territory, Starsight had said. Four weeks ago it had reached nought-point-two. Bor was planning on quizzing the human abacus on the latest figure in a few nights’ time, in front of everyone left at the Gathering, and at last, perhaps, the remaining champions would see sense.

If Tanra let them.

She had a hold over the protectors of Mund that Lovebright might’ve envied. All without setting a foot near the Ceryad. Without even entering the chamber. By proxy she ruled Mund’s greatest heroes. By her influence over Timesnatcher.

One day, I’ll catch her, he promised himself once more. Catch her, in a working. Get that necklace off her. Figure her out.

Figure it all out.

He was certain it was her. Ninety-nine percent certain.

He no longer cared about Heresy; Everseer put paid to any hopes of staying pure in that regard. He didn’t care about the dragons – if they came, he’d help defeat them, of course, but that was inconsequential in his mind. The real struggle would be getting to the bottom of his ex-girlfriend’s warped mind. Fixing her.

Fixing everything, just like she’d always said.

What made someone a heretic? Why would Tanra and Kas and Theor fall prey to such a wicked, pointless philosophy? Why had the apocalyptic news changed her so much?

Did it have something to do with her dreams?

Buried beneath the nightmare-fragments, ground to dust but still present, never quite fading – the memories of he still had of Tanra, memories he wished would leave him forever. The first time he met her, showing up late to net a traitor. The time she pushed a priest through the frozen ruins of Zadhal to save them all from the madness of a death-god… a death-god she’d ended up worshipping.

The three times she’d kissed him, playful and teasing.

The one time she’d let him kiss her. The sudden chasteness of her lips.

The memory was dust but it was glass-dust, brittle and bright, filling his eyes, his mind, a cup of red pain thrown on hot coals.

He blinked away the image of her endlessly-appealing face, replacing it in his mind with the two times he’d spotted Nightfell. Glimpses from afar of the bow-slinging killer, the one who killed Killstop, replacing her not just in mind but in reality. It was as though Killstop had never existed. The months of pacifism, of bringing criminals in for questioning, for punishment and incarceration – that was just a phase, a labour-pain finally giving way to Nightfell’s birth. And now she was out, there was no aborting this dreadful creature, no reverting her back. The old Tanra wouldn’t be able to face the truth of what she’d done since donning the black garment. The old Tanra – she could never exist in the same way again. He knew people, knew how they worked inside. Bor recognised that, even if he could eventually get through to her, the process of recovery would be a long and painful one, reintegrating the various aspects of her personhood… perils would be lurking along the route, threatening to undo all the work that had already been accomplished.

How many years would it take? What would she become, moulded by his hands?

Still – it had to be attempted. His conscience permitted no less.

What was it, Tanra? What did Kastyr do to you to make you like this?

There were no answers – never would be, unless she gave them him herself. Feychilde was dead, or soon would be, in Zyger.

The first cadre of fighters hit the sands. The crowds cheered the heroes and jeered at the villains. Lorgno the Lifestealer was there, would you believe it, arrayed in the fine gold armour and heavy-looking crown marking her as today’s Battle-Princess, one of the main good-guys in the event. The children screamed hardest when her name was announced, and when her signature wavy-bladed sword was raised high to the crowds in salute, Bor’s kids leapt to their feet as one, baying like wolves at a full moon. He couldn’t quite hide his smile, even from himself.

They always made him feel better. Feel closer to what he regarded as his true self. Most people got the impression he was thick, that he wasn’t capable of introspection, wasn’t interested in it. He allowed that. He wanted that. His true self – it was stupid. An animal, flesh and blood and instinct. It was like a warm bath he could sink into and forget the cold, windy world above…

Warm bath.

That brought its own Tanra-related imagery screaming back into the forefront of his brain.

Enough!

The word imbued with overwhelming psychic force, the single straightforward concept that’d been capable of silencing and subduing a hundred screaming inkatra-heads in the last month – it glanced off his mind like a wood-tipped arrow from a burnished breastplate. You couldn’t shoot an arrow at yourself, after all, even if you were the best bowman in the world.

Lorgno charged her three foes, swinging wildly, a style of attack she would never use in the real games. In the here and now, she knew none of her big, burly opponents were actually going to cut her with their spears. She performed a dazzling dance in the midst of the trio, parrying multiple mid-speed strikes, a show of skill which was impressive despite its obviously-rehearsed nature.

If this was for real, she would’ve won, Bor had little doubt. But she wouldn’t have let them encircle her like that – never mind jumping into the middle of them.

When she cut the men’s hands off, the actions were quick and clean, stumps quickly hidden inside clothing to avoid depicting anything visceral. The severed body parts wriggled and waved, crawling finger by finger through the sand, to great comedic effect. He didn’t need his enchanter’s-eye to see through the glamour. Everyone knew it was fakery, even the kids, but they all played along with the illusion. The next time they saw the three burly gladiators portraying Lorgno’s enemies, the reappearance of their hands would be played off as the result of healing… and the show would go on, as it always did.

“You mind if I sit here?” a dry, female voice drawled.

He turned his head in surprise – psychics were rarely taken unawares – but when he saw who it was, he remembered her voice, and understood. The skinny, tattoo-spattered magister might have undergone the warding regimens – her mind was veiled from him, if not quite completely hidden. At the back of his brain, he’d been feeling the discomfort of those who’d spotted her, those who’d moved aside for her to pass.

Ciraya – that was her name. The girl who’d fought the eolastyr with them at Yearsend, when it claimed her mentor’s body. The girl who’d stood in the arch-demon’s face and fearlessly tried to draw out the infernal whip… for all the good it’d done them.

Bor looked up into her cool blue eyes; even the kids glanced over in surprise at the shaven-headed sorceress before returning their attention to the arena-sands.

“Good,” Ciraya said, and before he could actually answer she was spinning about and perching beside him, barely putting her backside on the huge shelf of stone. The sleeves of her black robe hung almost to the ground when she was standing; now their folds spread like dark webs across the pale rock.

“You not get a ticket?” he asked quietly, smiling at her.

“This is my ticket,” she replied, looking down at the arena floor and not gesturing at all, leaving him to read the implication of her inaction.

Her very presence. What she was. The Magisterium wheel on her chest, circle and spokes depicted as long femur bones.

“Here on official business? I –”

“I know who you are, you know.”

Her interruption was an emotionless croak, soft enough to carry only to his ears.

He felt his eyes narrow, and he wrapped an aura of ignorance about himself and the magister. No one was going to eavesdrop on this conversation, be it accidentally or on purpose.

“What do you want with me?” he asked huskily.

“Nothing,” Ciraya replied, sounding amused now. “I’m just saying it so you can relax.”

He shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t quite feel relaxed.

“You aren’t supposed to know who I am,” he said, not quite capable of removing the surliness from his voice. “You –”

“Special Investigations privileges.” She turned to him now and smiled, an ugly little smile. “They’re even less inclined than usual to wipe champions’ identities from my head. And you’re one of the top champions in the city, now – top of your class, since Glancefall…”

Thankfully she didn’t try to put what’d happened to the poor man into words. Just another victim of the insanity gripping the city.

“I’m chief-enchanter, I guess,” he replied. “That shouldn’t mean –”

“After what happened with Killstop – your relationship with her… Henthae didn’t trust you. Even less than she trusts me. The truth is…” The sorceress didn’t quite sigh, but, all the same, she expelled some air through her painted lips while wearing a sour expression. “The truth is, you’re not the only one. There’s been ‘too many damn debacles’ involving the champions.”

He frowned while she imitated her superior’s smug voice.

Why is she giving away secrets like this?

He could find out, if he broke into her mind. The defences were strong, but he could shatter them, draw out the truth…

Or was that the trap? Have him assault an official agent of the Magisterium, then bring him in on trumped-up charges?

He shook his head. Better to ask the question, straight-up, than pull the answers from her head.

“Why are you tellin’ me this?”

“I’m just being honest.” The girl scowled at him. “Take it or leave it as you like.”

“No – I mean… Thanks.” He couldn’t quite figure her out. “So you’re here –”

“I got a friend who gets visions for a living. She said Lorgno would fight in the kids’ games, and I didn’t believe her. She was right. She was actually right.”

“So you ain’t here to do any arresting.”

She dipped her head in confirmation, her eyes not moving from the sands.

“Well, why the robe, then?”

“Why not?” she drawled. “No ticket, remember.”

They fell into a silence that stretched minutes. Bor stopped a minor apocalypse in its tracks when Larrika, during a bout of frantic re-enactment of gladiatorial action, elbowed the woman in front right in the ear. Bor couldn’t heal her but he could sneakily make the pain go away. Such a light touch wouldn’t put him on the wrong side of the law.

With a quick mental glance at Ciraya – no head-turning required – he applied his power warily, and the poor woman with the throbbing ear swivelled back around, a slightly-dazed smile on her features.

The games continued in all their glory, swords twanging off metal shields, spears twisted in nets. Screams of pain filled the air, the slightly-overblown wails of agony cutting off with suspiciously-perfect timing, just to allow a hero their chance to shout a challenge, allow a villain to snarl their contempt.

At last Ciraya spoke once more.

“How’s it all been going, then?”

He cast her a sideways glance. Her purple-painted lips were pressed into an ominous line. The tattoo-ink encroaching onto her face looked angry, blue-black scars inflicted in esoteric patterns by a mad torturer.

She’s troubled, he realised, holding back his instinct to feel her emotions. This isn’t like her.

“You’re one to ask,” he grunted. “Zandrina’s right up your alley, ain’t she?”

“Zandrina.” The sorceress spat the word like it was made of acid. “Yeah. She’s… up my alley alright.”

He grinned despite himself. “It’ll come to an end, one way or another. Timesnatcher –”

“Don’t talk to me about that lunatic. You’re not still one of his fans are you?”

“Timesnatcher was the greatest –”

“He stood by and watched them burn!”

Bor knew the night she was referring to. He’d been there in the aftermath, witnessed the charred pile of timbers left behind by the confrontation of two rival gangs. Almost two dozen corpses of men and women had been recovered by the magisters, smoking corpses dragged by spells from the impenetrable wreckage, husks of bones and blackened leather clothing.

He was about to retort, tow the line:

What choice did he have? They were killing each other. It’s not as though he killed them. He only let them die, and a good riddance!…

Then he remembered seeing the blackened, animated skeletons of the inkatra-heads, picking their way almost gingerly out of the warehouse’s ruins. He remembered them lining up, remembered turning away so that he didn’t have to look at them, think about them…

“It… it was you?” he asked. “You, who was gettin’ them out of it, wasn’t it? The bodies, I mean.”

She didn’t respond immediately, turning her gaze back to the gladiatorial combat.

“It’s from the day Nightfell showed up,” Bor muttered. “He hasn’t been the same since! She helped us, a few times – I didn’t think – well, I didn’t think nothin’ of it – but when he started killin’ ordinary gangers –”

“Everyone knows he’s lost it. No one sane laughs like that. He’s becoming what he hated. Who he hated. Everyone can see it.”

Bor shuddered, closed his eyes – unconsciously he found himself ducking his head, as if in agreement.

He’d heard the laughter. The gentle delight. He’d felt the shivers up his spine, and now he felt the truth of her words.

“And never mind the Duskdown route – he’s going to go the Everseer route, if he hasn’t already,” Ciraya continued in an icy tone.

“Who hasn’t?” he said with a sigh, then immediately regretted it.

He’d never felt so daunted in the face of a mere mortal, the way she looked at him, eyes narrowing to daggers.

“I – I mean –” He hated it when someone made him mumble, and anger quickly replaced fear. “You know what I mean! It’s – it’s in me. It’s in you! It’s in everyone!”

He’d started to become loud, and the people sitting on the step below him turned around to see who was creating all the commotion – he waved a hand at them and they returned their attention to the gladiators, eyes glazed-over.

“Not Heresy! Not… that. But the sickness! She might not’ve made us heretics but she made us sick. Sick in our hearts. You don’t need magic – just look them in the eye! It’s despair, that’s what it is! And until – until we catch her…” He heard the confidence in his own voice ebbing, vehemence fading as he confronted the prospect of impossibility. “Until it’s over, hope’s never coming back.”

“Timesnatcher won’t catch her,” Ciraya drawled. “If these dragons do rise – we’ve hidden it well, but we’re screwed, you do realise that right?”

“You think I don’t?” He glared at her. “You think you’re the only one who’ll go down fighting?”

“So you will.” The black-robed magister inclined her head gravely, respect in her eyes. “I suppose that’s all I wanted to know.”

“Professionally? Or… personally?” His glare softened. “Feel less alone now?”

She didn’t reply, apparently suddenly enraptured by the relatively-bloodless performance taking place on the sand. He wasn’t buying it. He wouldn’t put pressure on her protections to check – he didn’t need his magic to know he’d hit the mark.

She’s lonely.

He opened his mouth, but was at a loss for what to say. After a few stupid moments he shut his jaw and turned back to see –

A shadow falling across the sand. The morning’s brightness, obliterated in an instant. A sheet of thick, bulbous clouds rippled across the sky, but they weren’t the grey frogspawn clouds of spring for all their shape and texture. These were almost black, their inky fingers stretching out towards the horizon, like dark paint spreading across the face of a pool.

The fighting came to an abrupt halt as everyone in the arena – presumably everyone in Oldtown, in Mund – started staring at the sky, pointing, shouting…

“And if we get hit by an Incursion – we’re screwed then, too,” Ciraya murmured.

She sounded calmer, somehow.

“You mean…”

He craned his head right back and looked up at the heavens, but they could no longer be seen. The blackness of the sky was almost so complete that his instincts started crying out that he should be able to see stars.

“It’s the one we’ve been waiting for,” she breathed, and, as if there were something hallowed in her words, he felt his mind rising with the hairs on his arms. “They say… they say the longer between Incursions, the worse it is when they happen.”

“I’ve heard that,” he replied in a dead voice.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have stopped those Ool cultists.” She sounded calmer. The calmness of the doomed. “Remember that? Could’ve had an Incursion a month earlier. Damn it, Anathta…”

“Bor!” cried Nebbert, yanking on his sleeve. “Bor, look! Hey, Miss Magister! Hey, you!”

Bor kept his eyes on the black skies. “Always knew katra was gonna do somethin’ like this. Stake my career on it.”

“Let’s hope we both continue our careers after today.” It was almost a hiss, and Ciraya slid to her feet, spinning on her heel in a whirl of dark fabric. “Look!”

He copied her, whirling to see.

Before his glyphstone, enchanted to ring only to his ears, could emit a single sound.

Before even the Mourning Bells registered the spectrum of infernal anomalies now dwelling within the city bounds.

It took him a moment or two to gather his thoughts, and in that time he watched fifty civilians die.

They were here – the beasts of the Twelve Hells had already arrived. Over a dozen fiends had scaled the eastern walls of the arena to set upon the hapless crowds in the upper rows behind him.

Huge faces, mottled green, smooth and slick in texture like the detached heads of monstrous, demented toads. Out of their disturbingly-wide maws, whole hosts of diaphanous tongues came shooting, fastening to surfaces and pulling them along, the demons bouncing around behind the ribbons like rope-strung balls in a child’s game. Where some of the glistening strands contacted a person instead of stone – a petrified child’s arm, a screaming man’s hair – their retractions brought the distraught victims, mid-bound, to the gaping mouths instead, where they disappeared with a final, futile thrashing of their protruding legs.

The things had no visible stomachs. Those they devoured were either being destroyed almost instantly – annihilated into pure nothingness – or else being transported, held in some kind of inter-planar gland for later consumption.

Spiritwhisper wasn’t going to find out which – wasn’t going to let any more of his countrymen find out either.

He was no arch-diviner, had no special insight into the correct course of action to take. But he had the instinct of the arch-enchanter to draw upon the best of those near him, and he knew how to motivate others with minimal effort.

“Down to the bottom!” he roared psychically.

Every frozen kid, every panicking parent – as one they finally moved, scrambling down the massive stone steps towards the sands. When he saw knots of people threatening to crush a slower-moving kid, crude bursts of thought were enough to disperse them.

I can do this.

Ciraya was at his side as he started heading down towards the arena-floor with his own flock of amazed, bleating observers in tow. He counted them twice, counting their minds – during Incursions your eyes could deceive you – and they were some of the first to make it to the ground. He hopped down first, then helped Sestreya down to the sand beside him.

The plan, such as it was, had been simple. It was more about the choices that had been closed off – the stairwells within the eastern arc of the building were all located near the top, impossible to reach. The only way out that made sense was to reach the ground-level, then use the tunnels to exit the arena – preferably on the western side. Sheer intuition had propelled him into his decision, and, now that he’d gathered his brothers and sisters and started sprinting with them, he cast a mental backwards-glance and saw that it’d been a good one. The frog-heads were a third the way down the stands, but there were no more targets in their immediate vicinity. People were pouring down by their hundreds, rivers of wailing bodies hitting the sand running.

“Let’s go!” he bellowed.

A multitude followed on his thought.

Ciraya was running next to him, and as she kept pace she hurled something small ahead of them: where it landed a demon suddenly started to grow.

He recognised the fiend, the yithandreng, as her mount – but he knew no one else was going to see it that way. The many-legged, serpentine creature would spread panic, stop the crowds from running at full pace –

No. Her timing had been almost flawless. She sprinted towards the yithandreng in her Magisterium robe, and, even if tensions were running high right now, in times like these it still served as a symbol of protection for the people to rally behind. As the demon neared the minimum size for it to bear a rider, she reached it, and slid atop it, spurring it on into a trot at the very same instant.

The arena floor was under a hundred yards across – they were already half way. The sorceress steered her mount aside as she neared the gaping mouth of the western tunnel –

He reached out a psychic hand for her veiled mind, connecting her thoughts with his, using only a hair of power, the gentlest of possible links.

“Thanks,” he told her bluntly. “I’ll go in with ’em, stop a crush.”

He had to stay with the kids. Get them home, before he could put on his uniform and go to work.

“I’ll be behind you,” she promised, “and I… Oh. Oh man.”

He saw them when she did – the demons of blades and clocks, whizzing and whirring as they descended through the crowds on the west.

Hell’s minions were moving too fast. The citizens of Mund were about to have their escape route cut off – and the chaos of a stampede was about to envelop them all. The mayhem that left the young and the old trampled to death, left the survivors with bloody boots, bloody nightmares. He’d seen it before, and hadn’t been able to prevent it. His psychic hands weren’t large enough to encompass this many. Redirecting one course of thought was as hard as redirecting a trickle of water with your fingers. But influencing this many – it was like correcting the course of an ocean, manipulating a multitude of hidden currents all at once.

He’d failed before but Spiritwhisper could do it now. He was bigger, now. Better. He could stop them.

He extended his arms towards the dark sky and swelled his hands, spreading them over the crowd, settling tendril-fingers across their minds like a net.

“Slow!” he cried. “Stop! Wait!”

The impulses went out across the web, signals that lost their strength the farther they stretched.

It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t going to be enough. The blade-demons on the western stands, the frog-demons to the east, they were all closing in – people were about to start dying and there was nowhere for them to go – already some youngsters had fallen, and one of them thought his neck was broken –

The terror was too real. His cries were, for all the force he gave them, too soothing. Not primal enough.

“Cower,” he said.

The telepathic word, spoken silently, cut through the howls of despair on the air.

The brutality of the command pained him. He said it, shuddering, and they responded.

As one, they halted – they hunkered down, awaiting death.

As assessment with which he found himself incapable of disagreeing.

He sent out his illusions, floods of dagger-armed champions entering the fray, opaque and solid-seeming to all eyes but his. Yet the demons were not deceived. He had no time to craft multi-dimensional tools on the required scale, no time to give the conjurations heartbeats, tasty blood in their veins…

Numb fingers that should’ve gone for the glyphstone long ago now found themselves holding the hands of Nebbert and Dorya. He sank down with them, shuddering as the demons started ripping into people.

He withdrew his net from their minds, saving himself the exponential experience of pain which was all his connection to them would do for him now. He sent out his mind to those of the others like him, to the archmages who were his brothers and sisters in battle.

Fumbling with telepathic fingers no less numb than his physical ones – numb and finding nothing.

The Mourning Bells still hadn’t started. What had happened?

He sensed Ciraya, spell-casting.

It’s too late, he thought. Too late.

He looked up, watching a hell-sword slice through a howling woman not twenty feet from him.

But I still believe in the madman. He’ll be here. He’ll come.

He has to.

* * *

The High Courts of the Realm were contained in ten different buildings, each constructed to a unique, majestic standard. The Hippogriff was a lofty structure of delicate arches, its facades of curves and fletched buttresses. The Sentinel was little more than a circle of pillars, open-aired and tree-ringed, carpeted in leaves. The Troglodyte was half-buried, hidden at the surface level by hedges, but, upon following the ancient steps down into its bustling hallways, one eventually found oneself beneath its marvellous glass ceiling, ensorcelled to enhance the clarity of the skies above.

Despite their differences all of the courts were contained on the same campus, directly north of the Westrise, and were connected by a sprawling maze of verdant paths winding about the gardens – connected to one another, and to the various gateways in from the street. On a day like today, with the sun blazing in the sky and the birds singing in the trees, a whole horde of visitors were walking the well-maintained avenues between the hedges. The trials were open to the public – all but those held in the Troglodyte, at least – and people often came to watch their rivals be excoriated by the legal process, getting the full money’s worth of their freedom. Not that the lowborn had time or cause to attend a place such as this, of course. There were the places in Hightown the unwashed masses were permitted to visit, and those they weren’t, and this was one of the latter. The Old Courts would see to their spats. The High Courts – those were for the real cases, for the making and breaking of the rich and powerful.

He came to a halt at the great green gates on Airbent Road, knowing that just inside the painted iron bars were two waywatchers, standing on either side of the path – knowing that the pair would hear every word his mother said to him when they stopped. He understood that the guards had perception spells folded into their consciousnesses, and he stood out in his lawyer’s austere robe of vertical grey lines, barrister’s black headdress under his arm. They would spot him, and listen, and the smiles they hid when he passed between them would reappear once he’d gone by…

And one of them, the skinny, freckled girl, would follow him with her eyes…

He accepted this with a swiftly-hidden smile of his own.

“Now, Gar,” Mother said, patting him firmly on the arm as she unhooked hers from his, “don’t you be home late today. You know we’re having the Abbershanks for dinner, and I expect you to be bathed and changed before dusk.”

“Mother,” he remonstrated, “this is an important case. I can’t tell you what time I’ll be home by.”

He had a pretty good idea what time he’d be home, truth be told, but telling the truth was never an option. Not for him. The chief magister who’d let him keep his job had drilled that into him from the first meeting.

“And you must remember to comb this nest you call your hair.” She reached up with clawed fingers, red-painted nails raking his scalp above the left ear. “I don’t know how you dare attend work like this. It’s a disgrace.”

She never sneered, never snarled – he’d inherited her soft, melodic voice. That only made it worse as she spoke down to him.

“I wear my headdress, Mother.” He gently shook the big, stiff garment in the crook of his other arm. “No one can see my hair.”

“But as you enter,” she murmured, still dragging her nails across his head. “There. That looks better – a little better.” She patted him firmly again. “Why don’t you put the wig on now?”

“Just after you sorted it out for me?”

“Don’t give me that cheek, Garone. It’s for your own good, like always.”

No, that wouldn’t do.

“It’s not a wig, Mother. It’s a headdress.”

“I know perfectly well what it is, thank you. Put it on, there’s a good boy.”

Even worse.

He sighed, sorted out the stray black feathers woven into the hair, and settled it upon his head.

“Hold on a moment.” She reached under the rim of the headdress, poking at his head for at least ten more seconds before finally releasing him – by the time she let him go, he’d drawn at least a dozen glances from the smartly-dressed pedestrians passing them. “Go on, then. Off with you. I’ll see you presently.”

She spun on her heel and strode away, her gait still strong, her flower-embroidered skirts swishing as she made her way into the crowds.

He waited until her last long, backwards glance concluded, then took the headdress off again. He ran his own fingers through his hair, sorting it out once more. He wasn’t conventionally attractive, with his pallid skin and abnormally-big ears, but he knew that if he fixed his hair back into its scruffy nest and wore his status like a mask he would turn a few heads.

Including the head of the waywatcher, pursing her lips while she smiled at his expense, eyeing him up from behind as he strolled between them. He was slender and not tall, but the robe hung well off his frame – there was plenty of muscle on his physique, and it showed, when she could spot him between the intervening people.

He explored that subsection of the future – the one where he turned back, spoke to the waywatcher – and found it led nowhere. He understood every part and parcel of her being, making him nothing more than a mirror when he was around her. She could never get at him. Not really. Four months of relative stability would only lead up to the evening he first had to employ enchantment spells to wipe her mind of her doubts about his night-time activities. The evening he’d give up on their relationship on his side.

Garone couldn’t have a pet human. From what he’d seen, most in his position appeared to experience the same discomfort at the notion.

He understood what Duskdown had taken from Timesnatcher, better and better every day. He understood the trap, now. There was no middle ground. The seer knew his lover intimately from the first glimpse, a knowledge the lover could never hope to return, unless the seer should fall in love with a seeress – in which case all such knowledge was forsaken from the outset. There were no mortal tools left for him to grasp at. Fellow arch-diviners were permanent enigmas. Timesnatcher had never been able to see his future, by virtue of she with whom he’d fallen in love, and Lightblind had never seen her own. It was a perfect knot, unbreakable except on the edge of a madman’s sword.

And so it had been broken.

I’m going to stay celibate forever, he mused as he idly picked his way along the paths. He was walking slowly behind a pair of fellow lawyers – enough people were passing in the other direction to make overtaking an awkward endeavour. He turned his head, looking into the treetops looming over the hedgerows, spotting the squirrels in the branches – it was easy for someone with his intimate understanding of the universe to find exactly what he was seeking.

Not that he had to look hard. It was everywhere – the very normality that evaded him. The two lawyers in front of him were subtly flirting, he realised as he pruned their conversation of its valueless content and exposed its future-worth without even trying. They would end up in bed together before the week was out, and –

No, he thought, the darkened room of their tryst’s completion disappearing entirely from his vision suddenly. No, something’s going to get in the way.

Why couldn’t he follow the channel back? Where was the cause of the effect? Ordinarily, the latter entailed the former in an inextricable loop that he couldn’t help but see when he bent his thought thither…

But now…

“If you ask me, Lormon’s lost a wheel at the last lap,” the woman was saying. “If he’d nailed the girl’s testimony, he’d have had it in his hands, but I have it on good authority: it’s over. They’re going to find cause to open it up to Tele-Scry. Knowing she had whitestick in her blood –“

Garone caught the long look the man cast her, understood the meaning of the coy elbow she thrust back at him in response –

“Stop it!” she hissed playfully, and turned back to check whether Garone had noticed their exchange; he was, of course, dutifully staring off into the trees, with a distant expression on his face, well in advance of her backwards glance.

Perhaps it’s the drugs, he considered. They might take inkatra together.

For every window, a wall. For every revelation, an enigma. The fates make of themselves what they will, and it is for us to play our parts.

Play our parts out.

As much as seers were said to put it on a pedestal, worship it in their hidden hearts, Garone despised surprise. Surprise always turned against him. The power of the obsidian tower had startled him, unmanned him and left him out, left Dustbringer to die. The dragon’s enchantment had come without warning and almost despoiled the very Realm.

He felt his frown, recognised the way it would make others intimidated by him, and decided to leave it there. Let them see the way he felt inside. He couldn’t always wear the mask.

When he arrived at the Troglodyte, slowly descending the mossy stone stairs towards its yawning doorway, the guards checked his glyphstone and permitted him into the court’s halls without any lingering looks.

As he walked alone towards his meeting with her, he spent a few moments studying his clerk’s past, reading it without even needing a glance at the fleshy form her spirit inhabited. He wouldn’t ordinarily have done such a thing, and was for his part fond of Ms. Dyrdac, but he knew she was one route someone might try to get at him. Surely not an enemy – not a darkmage – but a professional rival perhaps…

No. She was clean. Sure, there were the borderline-illegal druidic treatments to rejuvenate her wrinkled brows, retract her jowls, smooth her crows’ feet – but he didn’t need his power to see the evidence of that. It was plain there upon her face. No one cared. Half the people her age currently in this building, this esteemed High Court of the Realm, had probably undergone similar magical regimens in a vain effort to claw back some lost youth.

She was clean, in the important ways. No interactions with darkmages or crooks. Even someone of Everseer’s calibre would leave blemishes he could see; it would take an enchanter on Tyr Kayn’s level to shroud her past from him fully.

He had glimpsed that past.

Even she had known love. Unconsummated – and she would likely perish a virgin – but love all the same.

And her future –

Where before there had been light between the aisles of books, there was now shadow. The shelves had been moved. The texts he’d not looked for could no longer be found in the library of her fate. Closer by than ever before.

An arch-diviner. Another such as I, and more powerful.

He shrugged it off. The darkness was always there, when one searched for it. Light would return, unlooked-for.

He met Ms. Dyrdac in their antechamber. She looked up from the paperwork strewn about the desk and it was difficult not to sigh in advance at her antics. He hid his face for a moment more, comporting himself as he closed the door behind him.

“We’ve only five minutes!” she huffed, even though she’d been doing nothing to make her out of breath. “If you want to see him, you’re out of luck! They’re going to immolate him in there!”

He drew a breath, drew in the instant until it stretched, elasticised, a gelatine for him to spread about his surroundings.

When I close myself I dam the flow. I know my page, my place in the universe of existence. I am the conduit through which the waters of time course. Time is not brittle. It is built up not of layers. There are no strata. There is only the flow. I am unique. I open myself, open the flow. It is then that I can direct the course, follow it whither I will.

But I lose my place in the book.

He pressed his eyes closed. It wasn’t working.

What is it? What’s wrong?

He didn’t know.

Something I don’t know. Something… familiar…

“Mr. Corteno, please!” Ms. Dyrdac’s voice suddenly resumed itself; the elastic bubble of chronomancy snapped back. “If you let him answer the summons to the stand, they’re going to ask him about the trip when he took the weapons with him. I don’t think anyone wants…“

He faced her, finally, and she silenced herself.

“Thank you,” he said after enjoying a moment of stillness. “Our client is quite innocent, Ms. Dyrdac. If Mr. Yaneyar can control himself –“

“He won’t!” she cried.

He will, he thought.

“If Mr. Yaneyar could control himself, he wouldn’t be in this mess. We wouldn’t be in this mess! Bragging, about how much he made, when it broke at least three contracts?“

“Ms. Dyrdac.” His quiet voice worked its own magic on her. “Nerifica. If Mr. Yaneyar can control himself, everything will go smoothly.” He tried to be as reassuring as possible – but it didn’t matter that she’d seen it go his way almost two dozen times before, didn’t matter that he’d turned defeat into victory time and again. She was a born doubter, and it’d given her instincts that had brought her far in her chosen career.

Instincts that had robbed the trust from her, robbed her chance at true love decades ago.

Why do we all play our parts? he wondered. What is in it for us to gain, if we are all doomed to die from the start, sent into the next world only half-born…?

He relented, releasing the sigh that’d been threatening to escape him, then spoke the words she wanted to hear. She was, for all her faults, a devout woman.

“Let the gods determine the victor,” he said in the end.

He saw the doubt melting on her face in his mind’s eye.

“Three minutes, Ms. Dyrdac,” he said, already opening the door. “If you please?”

She suddenly seemed to realise how much paperwork she needed to gather up; she started wedging the various sheets into a folder and chased him out of the room, even though he wasn’t going anywhere without her. He took the opportunity to settle his headdress in perfect position upon his head.

Within sixty seconds, they were entering the Troglodyte’s main hall, an ancient grey stone circle festooned with sumptuous crimson chairs and Magisterium drapes. The glass roof was displaying an eager blue sky over their heads. The sun wasn’t overhead but that didn’t make a difference – the spells infused into the slightly-concave dome permitted just the optimal amount of light into the room, shade existing only at the hall’s perimeter.

If he allowed himself, he could go back into this place’s original purpose. It had always been a place of law, of settling scores, but the blood-red silk of the plush seats was a veiled testament to the hall’s history. The High Courts were no less ancient than their lowborn counterparts, for all that the prefix ‘Old’ might’ve led the uneducated to the opposite conclusion. Once – and the dates were indeterminate, thanks to Arreath Ril – this had been a hall of combat. Men and women had come to this place, and lawyers – not such as Garone, but lawyers of a kind nonetheless – had fought on their behalf… Fought to the first bloodshed, or, sometimes, to the last. He could sense the mindlessness of it all, the insanity of the Age of Nightmares echoing back at him from the immutable grey stone. He could hear the gasps of the dying. See the gold exchanging hands over not-yet dead bodies.

If such trials were still permitted, he could get through a few hundred cases a day without causing a single death.

The victory–streak I could amass. It would be a thing of legend.

Then another diviner would become a lawyer, and another…

Was it possible that’s what they’d been, those ancient, gladiatorial proto-lawyers? Could they have been his predecessors? He saw the artistry of their craft, the long knives flashing as they met under moonlight or starlight. When this place had been open to the sky, the stone floor surrounded by the rising grassed slopes on every side.

Before the Founders. Before Mund.

Such glimpses were rare, and more swiftly lost the harder one attempted to cling to them. The moment passed, and the arch-diviner in him experienced a brief but strong wave of sorrow, bittersweet nostalgia drying his tongue, setting his arm- and neck-hairs on end.

Garone found his place near the front, drew his robe about him, and seated himself. On his left, Ms. Dyrdac flopped into her chair, laying her folder on the long table in front of them and trying futilely to smooth her rumpled dress. Garone kept his eyes forward, waiting. The judge’s redebon dais was just ahead of them in the northern third of the room, and the lawyer, the human in him enjoyed this part – the tension in the hall slowly building to a critical pitch as the time for the trial’s conclusion approached. He wouldn’t look back, wouldn’t give the assembled witnesses and esteemed guests a second glimpse of his face until he had to. They could stare at his back. It was his role to be the embodiment of the law in this place, not a person – and he would play this part with aplomb.

The wave of suspense almost broke as Mr. Ixi Yaneyar, their client, entered the room, escorted by an entourage of his family. His mother and father, his wife, one of his brothers and two of his sisters – various cousins, uncles, aunts – two nephews – even his mistress-cum-housemaid –

Not one of his children, Garone observed. He’s afraid about how this is going to play out.

It will play out, and he need not fear.

He stood as the scoundrel finally reached his side, and held out his hand.

Mr. Yaneyar just looked at it, then back at the lawyer’s face, smiling toothily, baldly, as though he were sharing the amusement with Garone rather than extracting it from him.

He’s no lord – and my family is far richer than most – yet still he’s so far above me that shaking my hand would be a disgrace to him.

His diviner’s mind, used to sifting time and space for relevant details, quietly summed the man’s wealth. He found that, since the last time he’d done it, that wealth had increased considerably. Even Yaneyar probably hadn’t the foggiest how much he was actually worth, contained as his funds were in investments, some of which were quite abstract – a merchant company and an ensorcellment laboratory here, yes, but a band of pillaging outlaws or a fledgling outland kingdom there…

The dry estimation-power was Garone’s forte.

Seven hundred and sixty-two thousand, and fifty-four platinum, two hundred and twelve gold…

There wasn’t the coin in existence to support such a hoard – and the scoundrel was far from Mund’s richest man. Top two hundred, perhaps, if the wind was right.

… seven hundred and sixty-two thousand, and fifty-five platinum, thirteen – eighty-four gold…

Garone let go of the moment, and tried to prepare himself after his usual fashion, but still something eluded him, something making him feel apprehensive…

“Corteno,” Yaneyar said, his voice barely better than a snarl. “I hope you’re going to win this thing for me.”

“That is the idea,” Garone said, retracting his hand and smoothing the front of his robe with it as he found his seat once more. “We have a strong case.”

Yaneyar sat down on his right. “I very much doubt that. You really want me to do this?”

“I’m afraid you don’t have much choice, Mr. Yaneyar.”

“They said you was good.” He felt Yaneyar’s cold stare on the side of his head but he wouldn’t turn his face, wouldn’t remove his gaze from the judge’s chair. “Even I know they can’t make me do it. What am I paying you for, exactly?”

“Let me be candid with you, Ixi.” Garone chose his cadence carefully. “If you wish to escape this place a rich man, you may walk out now – walk out and never look back. Less rich, perhaps, to be then found guilty in your absence – vastly-so, by your own strange standards. Nonetheless, to the observing eye you would suffer not for it, not even by so much as a single hair from your head, a single thread from your garments… The dogs whose hungers are sated by the crumbs falling from your table would not want for their supper. And still I would blame the loss of repute for your reticence to go – the potential dishonour of such a contemptible disgrace as to walk freely from here with your head held high… if not for the fact that you clearly care little for the tongues wagging away in the corners, trading in gossip. In fact, you parade your dishonour,” Garone cast an obvious glance over his shoulder at the rich man’s not-yet pregnant mistress; “you revel in it. So, then, we come to it – it is the platinum which matters to you. It is the sum itself. It is the greed. You wish to live and die by King Money-Bags. You will not leave. You will stay, and face the reality of the trial.

“Yet your testimony will not be enough. You are innocent. The Chief Audient will not believe it. You must take the oath, or submit to enchantment!”

“I make a point,” Yaneyar said through gritted teeth, “of not swearing oaths.”

Then you won’t actually tell the truth, will you?

Garone found a better avenue to exploit.

“Minus five hundred and eighty-four thousand, nine hundred platinum.”

Yaneyar’s face fell, and sweat sprung out on his forehead instantly.

“Five hundred… minus… wh-what’s that, Corteno?”

“Just a guess.”

“At…”

“Your losses, of course. You’ve accrued a significant sum in the last three years.”

“But you – how could you –“

“I’m very thorough with my research, Mr. Yaneyar. Are you quite ready?”

The scoundrel had never looked less ready in his life, but Garone’s softly-spoken question was just right to bring him back to his senses.

Now he will control himself.

The judge entered, the age-worn gavel at her belt matching the depictions on her amulet. The long headdress went from her brows and temples to the small of her back, its black and white feathers swishing as she strode in from her antechambers, iridescent plum robes trailing the cold stone floor. She was the randomly-chosen representative of the group of five judges, collectively known as the Listeners, whose decision would determine the case’s outcome. Hers, in particular. The Chief Audient always voted last, always tipped a balance one way or the other.

Her face was colder than the floor. This was Elteria Drayne, the worst possible choice for Garone’s client. She was stuffy, respectable, and Garone thoroughly adored her. She detested scumbags like Yaneyar with a fiery passion.

The worst possible choice – but the inevitable choice, as far as Garone’s plans were concerned. Hence the oath. Hence the needless risk.

The trial’s conclusion went much as Garone had foreseen.

His opponent, Henric Obelmaier, was an honourable chap of Northman descent. Henric represented a conglomeration of minor guilds whose combined wealth sought to topple Mr. Yaneyar from his lofty perch… Minor guilds in which the Magisterium had invested large sums over the last five years, according to Garone’s research.

He didn’t like Mr. Yaneyar one bit, but he liked what this legal action implied for the reach of the Magisterium even less. He’d been unable to uncover any particularly-shady looking transfers of funds, but over a dozen Magisterium representatives had encouraged this particular lawsuit in a whole variety of ways.

Henric’s evidence was all but presented by this final hearing, and it was only for Garone’s client to take the stand, rip away the Magisterium’s argument at the knees.

“The Listeners recognise Mr. Obelmaier,” came the severe voice of the judge.

“Thank you, Your Duty,” came the clear, bright voice of Garone’s opponent.

Henric got to his feet and took position in front of his entourage, several of the minor guilds’ leaders to be spotted amongst the array of assistants and colleagues he’d brought with him. Smiling, Henric faced the scoundrel.

“Mr. Yaneyar. I call you to give testimony.” The lawyer raised his hand to his side, indicating the court floor with his palm. “Do you consent?”

The scoundrel turned his hard stare on Garone. Garone merely nodded.

Yaneyar stood, scowling, and crossed to the clear area in front of Elteria Drayne. When he took his place he was standing extremely still, hands gripping one another at the lower back, chest puffed out and arrogance marked into every line on his face.

“Mr. Ixi Yaneyar, of Westrise and Tangletree. Thank you for your presence. You are aware of the prohibition on supplying enemies of the Realm with exotic weaponry, without license two-two-eight?”

Henric had a way of asking leading questions that disarmed even Garone.

Another bead of sweat started on Yaneyar’s brow, and the scoundrel, still scowling, nodded.

“We will require you to give a verbal response, Mr. Yaneyar. This is from the contract between yourself and the Third Armoury Guild, stipulating the extent of your operation’s involvement in foreign aid –”

“I am aware of it.” The reply was barely better than a low growl but the courtroom’s acoustics had been augmented, and everyone heard.

“You have been present now at four hearings. You are privy to our evidence, the use of Dragonite Incendiaries in the Glaustenz Reaches, during the recent Incitement. You were aware of the prohibition on the fourteenth of Belara, Nine-Ninety-Six, when you crossed the Glaustenz borderlands for a six-week expedition?”

“I…” The scoundrel struggled to bring himself to agree. “I’m not sure what that’s got –“

“Do you require that I refresh your memory? You started with a visit to the Glausite staging area, wherein you spent in excess of two hundred platinum in a single evening, at the pleasure-tents –“

“Yes!” Yaneyar barked. His face reddened, the mask of shamelessness slipping. “I was aware of it, damn it!”

“We have outlined at length your involvement in the Dragonite project. We have verified testimony of your outburst at the Mortifost Feast at the Sunset Keep, and the calculations to back up your own words. Would you have the court believe you did not negotiate with the inhabitants of the foreign lands, to supply them with ensorcelled weaponry? Would you have us believe my clients are owed not one single copper?”

Garone met Yaneyar’s eyes across the floor.

Do it. Just like I told you.

Yaneyar blinked, and looked away. The sweat trickled down the side of his face.

“If it pleases the judge,” he mumbled, “I’ll swear the truth to Glaif. May my head be shorn from shoulder if I lie.”

The gasp that cut through the crowd made Garone smile to hear it. A sound no longer merely a concept in his mind, still awaiting shape in the world – but manifest now, in reality. The oath to Glaif which Yaneyar used was a blunt tool, ancient in origin and basic in function. It was not at all like speaking in Kultemeren’s name, which would be illegal here. The oath did not prevent him from lying – but it called death down upon him if he did so with intent to deceive.

“It would please the court,” came the suddenly-alive, suddenly-curious voice of Elteria Drayne. “Please continue your testimony, Mr. Yaneyar.”

“I did take Dragonite Incendiaries with me to the Reaches,” Yaneyar admitted, glumness in his low voice – the loud murmuring his words caused quickly died away again as the crowds struggled to hear him. “I took them with me, and I wanted to discuss a…”

The scoundrel choked, and swallowed audibly.

A kind of almost-supernatural silence descended.

“The barbarian-king I met – it’s not how they tell it in the stories. Sure, the place is a barren land. Cracked earth as far as you can see. I wouldn’t wanna live there. But it’s alright. They aren’t useless. They’ve got bricks and beds and houses… even fine art… steel swords.”

He said the last two words in a harrowed tone, and they hung in the air, ominous.

After a few moments, Garone spotted as Mr. Obelmaier stirred himself to speak – but it was Lady Drayne’s voice that carefully intruded into the quiet.

“Mr. Yaneyar?”

“They… I thought I was safe, but they killed my… Bolax, he was called. My guardian. My best mage. Killed him, just ran him through like that!” Yaneyar suddenly mimed a violent thrust. “Stabbed him in the back when we were eating! Wanted… wanted to know how to make the Incendiaries for themselves, didn’t they?

“You want to know why I was over there six weeks? Six weeks, that should’ve been two? Think I was spending all my time with the harlots, do you?” The scoundrel was becoming increasingly animated, bits of spittle starting to fly from his lips. “I was in jail! I barely escaped with my skin! Bolax, and Phericya, and… that other one… ah-h-h-h…”

He stopped, and stared down at the shadow about his feet. The light of the sky above Yaneyar threw his face into shade.

“Edderic,” Garone whispered.

“They were killed, Mr. Yaneyar?” Elteria Drayne asked gently.

“I don’t know!” The businessman wrung his hands together in front of him and looked back up at the judge with a wild expression. “One of my footmen, he escaped with me – he killed one, one of the ones who were watching us… It was horrible…”

Garone watched the series of events as it had unfolded, and not for the first time. He was in agreement. It was horrible. It was harder to recognise the full horror, when you were so removed from the instant, wrapped up in the consequences – but Garone wasn’t yet so far gone that it took too much effort.

I’m not Timesnatcher yet, he thought grimly.

“I wanted to discuss a deal.” Yaneyar said in conclusion. “I did not do a deal. I know – I knew they weren’t ready yet. Wizard’s Hat would be there, and I had to make a move. It’s not my fault they stole what they stole.”

“But – you should have informed the authorities!” Mr. Obelmaier objected, his voice rising several octaves.

“Mr. Obelmaier!” Garone said, injecting some force, some disbelief, into his voice. His outburst drew the attention of everyone in the room. “You ought know better. You had comported yourself well, until now.”

“The Listeners recognise Mr. Corteno,” the judge said, with almost a twist of amusement, as Garone got to his feet.

“Thank you, Lady Listener.” He regarded Henric Obelmaier across the floor. “Is it a crime, to fail to report being a victim? Indeed, I would direct you to condition three ‘e’ of the errata for license two-two-eight. My client would be incapable of informing the authorities, under your own clients’ terms.”

“Condition three ‘e’…” Henric smiled at him, just a shade of desperation in his grin. “We don’t all have your prodigious memory, clearly. Would you care to remind us all as to its content? I hardly believe we would…”

His voice died away as one of his aides came rushing forward, a heavy binder of papers open, a finger jabbing at the page.

Long moments passed. Garone let them take their sweet time.

“Is it going well?” Ms. Dyrdac muttered out of the corner of her mouth.

The lawyer just smiled.

“Well?” The judge finally sounded impatient. “What is this damnable stipulation?”

“I excuse myself, Lady Listener,” Garone said. “It would only be fairest for you to hear a favourable interpretation of the conditions.” He smoothed his robe and seated himself. “I could not provide one myself. Might you?”

He asked it to Henric directly, but his opponent’s face was buried in the paperwork.

“Well – Mr. Obelmaier.” Elteria Drayne was glaring at the Northman. “Mr. Obelmaier!”

“Forgive me, Your Duty.” Henric’s skin-tone, normally pink, had now transformed to match the splotched, sickly hue of the yellow-white papers he held in his hands. “Forgive me… It seems, upon further consideration, that we will withdraw this line of objection.”

“The clause, Mr. Obelmaier.”

“Erm…” Henric licked his lips. “It appears that the experimental weaponry is kept on a need-to-know basis… Only certain superiors and clients –“

“Are you telling me that the proper authorities are not considered on the need-to-know list, Mr. Obelmaier? The Magisterium is not to be notified?”

Henric Obelmaier melted on the spot, scorched by her scrutiny.

The rest of it played out like a hand dealt by Yune herself. Elteria Drayne excused herself to speak with the hidden Listeners, and a shaking Ixi Yaneyar reseated himself.

“Was that what you wanted?” the scoundrel asked. “What does any of this serve, making me embarrass myself like this…”

“I’m certain you’ll be able to weave the story to suit yourself, Mr. Yaneyar,” Garone replied smoothly. “After all, you were effectively a war-prisoner, whose own bravery saved his skin, no?”

He let his voice drift away, and the wicked smile grew once more on Ixi Yaneyar’s face.

As much as it perturbed him, Garone’s law school could have it no other way. His task was not only to win the case, and ensure no new grounds were opened for further cases against his client – but also to ensure Mr. Yaneyar’s continued ‘good graces’. His continued ever-increasing bank-balance, that was what they really meant. They offered guarantees at the industry’s highest standards, future-proofing their customers’ portfolios, ensuring they continued to receive the best loan rates, the most favourable opportunities.

Yet whatever divination Yaneyar’s enterprises had paid for in the past, it could’ve been invalidated by Garone’s influence upon him here. His choice of words, his turn of phrase… every interaction was a chance for a new element, an unseen possibility to emanate from the present and birth itself as a heretofore undreamt-of future.

His head was turned to regard his client. Ixi Yaneyar was smiling, a tight grin that would become the true villainous smirk once Elteria Drayne returned the verdict, throwing out the guilds’ case.

On his other side, unseen by his mortal eyes, Ms. Dyrdac wasn’t smiling.

And there… there it is…

A destiny in which the newest addition to the Yaneyar brood changed Ixi’s heart. One where his money was given to a number of charitable causes – only a nest egg kept to protect his family from eventual poverty –

He followed where the money went. Saw the lives changed by a temple’s increased ministrations. Saw the new schools educating the young.

Saw past it.

Over four-fifths of Yaneyar’s contribution was wasted. And a small fraction of the waste was put towards evil causes, malice far beyond Yaneyar’s darkest imaginations enacted upon the bodies of the young and vulnerable. The enslavement of the weak and witless. Experiments of a magical nature, or events of a more carnal quality – equally ugly. Equally lethal to flesh and soul, in the end.

It was a vanishingly miniscule percentage of the money, and yet –

How can I judge it? I can’t even see it all. There’s – there’s Shadow, over everything…

He knew how to enact the future. He knew how to let it flow through him, out into the void of nothingness wherein it would inhabit the shape of things to come. But he was no longer certain he wanted to.

“You’re smiling,” Garone murmurs, disgust, abhorrence in his tone, “but Ms. Dyrdac isn’t.”

Even that much might be enough – enough to tip the scales of fate towards the future where so – much – darkness –

No, he thought. Change it.

“You’re smiling,” Garone murmured, naked curiosity in his tone, “but Ms. Dyrdac isn’t.”

He watched the man’s expression change. He saw the villainous smirk slip out of the shelves, falling to the floor, into the consuming shadow below existence.

The drool, the sickening smells – they vanished too.

Breathing a short sigh of relief, Garone then looked up just in advance of Elteria Drayne re-entering the room, her Sheaf of Judgement under her arm. The documents would precisely outline the Listeners’ reasoning and the previous Judgements they referenced; after the case was closed they would be returned to the archive for transcription, and cross-referenced for future use in similar situations.

And the Magisterium will pay for their covert efforts.

There was no way this wasn’t going to end in new law, forcing guilds with monopolies on exotic weaponry to share more information with the governing bodies. The pressure was being applied in the right places. To an outside observer unaware of the nuances of the politics involved, it would look like a zero-sum game. What was the benefit of ensuring that such guild-conglomerates, many of them Magisterium-funded or at least in receipt of Magisterium aid, reported their new developments to the Magisterium?

Scrutiny. Officials from their own organisations with absolutely no notion of such funds, such aid packages, would look at the records. They would see the truth. The subtle practises would be forced to change, or at least find new, cleverer loopholes.

He would pursue them all the same. This victory today was only a small one, but a victory nonetheless. Not quite enough to put a smile on his face, in the current circumstances, but that was alright. Garone could smile later, in private, when it wouldn’t have such a strong effect on the world’s fate.

Lady Drayne approached her seat and turned to face the room; she placed her hands on the red-velvet grips of the chair’s arms and started to lower herself –

What is… what is happening?

It was with a deep, soul-trembling trepidation that Garone noted the darkness sweeping across the room. The sky itself dimmed, the illumination in the room dipping precipitously, and it took a few moments for the glow-globes to compensate for the sudden loss of light, leaving them all almost blind for a moment. Within the space of five seconds – by the time Elteria Drayne’s backside hit the velvet – the courtroom was giving the appearance of an evening hearing, rather than mid-morning.

Garone looked up with everyone else, not privy to the turn in the weather ahead of the others. Along with all the mere mortals in the chamber, he stared upwards into the bank of thick, dark-grey cloud that had blanketed the heavens. Where just moments before there had been a few white wisps contorting against an azure-blue sky, there was now a mountain-range of storm-walls.

The crunching drum of thunder, tearing open the air. The wind screamed like it was aflame, but there was no lightning to be seen.

“This is most irregular,” the only-slightly raised voice of Elteria Drayne came down from the judge’s dais. “Clerk, send a missive to Environmental Wiz-“

Now lightning split the sky, striking nearby this time. The white flash illuminated everything, and Garone found the moment yawning, a whirlpool, drawing him in –

Whilst all the room about him froze – while the world itself waited with bated breath – Garone got to his feet in the lightning’s lifespan, and stared as two figures entered the courtroom, moving with him.

He regarded them as best he could, in the vivid white radiance of the storm’s fire. They crossed to the centre of the floor in a flick-flick of motion even he couldn’t follow, and he only realised who they were once they came to a stop.

It is a good thing they aren’t my enemies.

Pitch-black clothing – one a familiar robe, with white hourglasses, upon a tall masculine frame – one less familiar, featureless and clingy, upon an undeveloped young woman.

The fine, rune-etched bow slung over the girl’s shoulder would’ve announced her identity anyway, even if he hadn’t recognised the hollow darkness inside the hood, the faceless black mask.

She’s here. Nightfell herself.

The lightning’s radiance still clung to the air, blinding.

“Advance it a moment, Celestium!” Nightfell barked.

It wasn’t long enough for any of the mortals in the room to move appreciably, but between them the two superior seers dialled the clock forwards an eye-blink. The head-hurting light faded, replaced with muted shadows, storm-clouds pinned in place to the instant, awaiting another thunderous release.

Garone recognised the voice, though. It had changed – harsher, tougher, yes, but it was the same young girl.

Killstop. It really is her.

At one point, when they’d first met, he’d thought himself on her level. He’d even found her company appealing, in an opposites-attract kind of fashion. But it’d soon become apparent just how vastly she outstripped him. He was to her, as any of these time-locked mortals about them were to him.

Weak.

“Satisfied?” Timesnatcher asked icily.

“It’ll do,” she bit back. “So…” Garone could feel her attention falling upon him, though he couldn’t perceive the eyes behind the mask, inside the hood. “Mr. Corteno, a young, up-and-coming lawyer. Who’d have thought it? I would’ve pegged you for a priest, truth be told.”

“Or a poet,” Timesnatcher murmured.

Garone didn’t answer, leaning into his proclivity for patience.

What do they want with me?

“You know why they let you do what you do, don’t you?” Nightfell asked, her tone jovial, almost mocking.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he answered.

“Why they let you act against them.”

He bit his lip, a reaction he wouldn’t have ordinarily allowed himself to engage in – but his options were limited here, now. He was just a man.

“I have my suspicions.”

She nodded slowly. “They know you won’t live long. You aren’t one of the great ones – not that it would make a difference if you were, really. You’ll never live to become a power in this world,” she tilted her head as if to glance about the Troglodyte, “never live to challenge them. They will allow you the meagre victories you think are so important, and only co-opt them in the end into their larger strategies. You are nothing. No one, Garone Corteno.”

Now he smiled, wore it like a shield.

Can she follow the changes her words produce? he wondered. Does she think she distresses me with this posturing? The girl’s mighty – of that there can be no doubt.

But is she that mighty?

“This whole saga is the bastard offspring of an argument between two members of the Arrealbord. Over zombie trafficking, of all things.”

She laughed, like it was funny.

No. What she found funny was the fact she could see the source of the dispute, and he couldn’t.

“What do you want?” he asked at length.

Nightfell laughed again. “Not nice, not knowing, is it?”

“You come here,” Garone said quietly, “to my place of work, in breach of all known law, custom and social nicety – which records you were forced to steal in order to uncover my true identity I am uncertain, but I have been operating as a champion for nigh on a year, and have achieved great-enough prominence that I very much doubt my file has not been granted the highest levels of confidentiality –”

“You’re reeling in the wrong line, there, pal,” Nightfell cut him off.

He wasn’t used to being interrupted without expecting it. He felt the urge to grind his teeth, but settled for pressing his lips together.

“We’ve always known your name,” Timesnatcher said, in a bored voice.

It was all he’d said to him and, for all Garone knew, all he was going to say. To Garone, who felt he knew the city’s chief guardian as well as any could hope to, Timesnatcher sounded desperately unhinged.

“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” Nightfell snapped, in a rhetorical tone. “Real names, fake names… I don’t know if the katra-heads have pulled it off, but this is it. This is the Incursion.”

“This…” Garone looked up through the glass ceiling at the dark skies once more. “This is an Incursion?”

“Of course,” she spat back.

“The last,” Timesnatcher said with relish.

“The last?” Garone heard his own voice leave its usual husky register, climbing for the heights, surprising him with its intensity.

“Everseer’s done her bit.” Nightfell folded her arms across her chest.

“Everseer failed,” Garone replied instantly. “Do you see an emptied city, or fear and doubt ready to reap? Her speech –“

“Do you think one such as she would not know?” The girl was snarling, real hostility in her voice. “Why leave it until the final year, if there was a hope such a speech would succeed? No… No. She was looking for the unforeseen, praying to… whatever dark gods she worships for a sliver of a possibility.”

“But surely,” Garone looked from her to Timesnatcher, “surely you do not believe her…”

“It matters little.” Nightfell even gave a slight shrug to punctuate her words. “There are no arch-sorcerers left to us – in that, at least, she succeeded. When we fail, the heretics are going to sit safe in the Thirteen Candles behind their shields – behind the twin sorcerers’ shields, you see? – and they’ll protect the archmages they can from the soul-takers. Expecting resistance, the demons will unintentionally run everyone out of the city. Within a month, no one will remain. Then the dragons have their big old Return feast at an empty table. The heretics will win. The Realm will be saved.”

“You… sound like a heretic,” Garone said with difficulty.

Timesnatcher laughed lightly, delicately, and a shiver ran up Garone’s spine.

“How rude.” Nightfell sighed. “We have about eight seconds before the Bells start, and four minutes before it really begins in earnest.” The seeress reached up as if to unsling her bow. “We were going to get into position, but we decided we could really do with your help… Firenight Square’s looking bad, never mind Knuckle Market. Yes, again. Could you take the Sunset Keep off my plate?”

She took her mask in her hand instead of her bow, and removed it. She shook back her cowl.

A relatively plain face with a button nose. Brown hair in loose tangles, streaked with bright white locks. A disarming smile.

“Without you, our city dies tonight. The heretics win. I don’t intend to let that happen. Are you with us?”

Garone stared at her.

And when haven’t I answered the call?

He was on the verge of retorting when she saw it coming – she bared even more of her teeth, almost grinning.

“Tonight would’ve been the night, good old Garone. You’d see what’s in store, and it would be enough for you. But not now. Not anymore.”

He was on the edge of a revelation. The shadow fell aside, and he read the spines of the books, even if he didn’t know their contents.

Not anymore – if only to ensure the city doesn’t end up in the hands of you two.

Words that would never cross his lips. She was no enchanter, and he had an amulet provided by… someone. Someone trustworthy. At least she’d never know the depth of his mistrust.

He’d always fought alongside them as though he were fighting for them, as though he were an employee in Timesnatcher’s pay.

No longer.

He looked between them.

“I did not foresee a need for my daggers.”

The former Killstop’s grin disappeared, replaced with a shocked expression – then finally she gave up the veneer of sanity, cackling like a maniac.

He could barely control his reactions, feeling his eyes widen, his pulse quicken with fear, changes she could hardly help but read –

She didn’t care, and, still crowing, did something with her wrists –

His glittering daggers were there in her hands, silver and gold.

“How…” He halted his tongue, then re-started. “You found my –“

“Oh – oh dear…” Nightfell recovered her breath bit by bit. “You’re killing me, you know that don’t you? You think I – I didn’t br-bring enough w-w-weapons!… And th… these!”

She descended again into laughter, twisting his daggers carelessly in her hands like they were no more deadly than wooden cutlery.

“Here. T-take them, damn it… ow ow it hurts…”

She tossed them to him suddenly, with no regard for the difference in potential between them, and it was all he could do to catch them before they impaled him.

“Oh! Bahahaha!” She actually found it hilarious, and she had to gulp down lungfuls of air to regain her composure. “Sorry… sorry about that. Getting a bit… oh, gods… a bit excited.”

“Are we ready?” Timesnatcher grunted. “I can’t hold this forever on my own, not like this. Half a second’s spent.”

“Patience,” she soothed, her voice finally settled. “Garone needs us to turn our backs, for all the good it’s worth. He isn’t used to getting changed in front of people who can see him moving.”

She must’ve had a demiskin there, at her belt or under the folds of her clothing, but he hadn’t a hope of seeing it as she produced his robe from out of nowhere. In the same motion she hurled the cloth garment at him with such eager alacrity that it smacked heavily into him, almost bowling him over.

“There.” She spun about, folding her arms, and Timesnatcher silently copied her.

Garone ground his teeth together, but he did his duty, stripping out of the lawyer’s robe to his undergarments, the thin cotton smock and loose pants that were his custom. He pulled the wide neck of the champion’s robe over his head and slid his hands in the loose sleeves, donning his true work-clothes, becoming Starsight.

Not for you, Timesnatcher. Not for you, Killstop.

For you, Glaif. For you, Illodin.

For Mund.

He‘d retrieved his mask from its hiding-spot at the bottom of the deep hood, and now had the white robe with its faint stars almost in place – he shrugged, getting his shoulders into place –

“So – Starsight – we were just wondering. Well… Timesnatcher here was wondering, really, given his… priorities. How long have you been meeting him?”

She didn’t turn, and he didn’t sense danger in her voice. Just plain curiosity.

“Meeting who?”

He made his final adjustments to the gleaming fabric, and lifted his eyes to regard them once more.

Nightfell’s head twisted about, her cruel eyes impaling him worse than any ensorcelled dagger. Her smile was glorious in its cruelty, its animal enjoyment.

“Why, Neverwish of course!”

* * *

Outside it was barely dawn, but that didn’t matter – more wine than water was going around the room, servants slipping in and out with practised efficiency. Conversation flowed like the grape from the bottle, and there was even a little tense laughter erupting here and there in the corners. When the silver bells rang they all set down their goblets, ceasing their chatter. Twivona stood from the gold-gilt couch, and found Gathel with her eyes. She controlled the trembling of her fingers, folding her hands together demurely and setting the pace. Her Shadow, Justice and Malice fell into place behind her, and she stepped into the narrow corridor of black, reflective stone. In small groups the High Lords and Ladies of the Realm got to their feet, following her as she led them from their antechamber of silk and excess, stepping as briskly as her shoes would permit along the passageway, heading towards the strangest of spaces.

They had no newcomers this morning – everyone knew what to expect. There would be no gasps of awe from a young (or old) replacement as the Arreax door fell open. But she still felt it in her mind as she thought about the shadowed hall, even after taking her place in her ancient seat dozens of times.

Where in many places the Founders and their heirs had opted for grandeur and mood over practicality, here in the Chamber of the Arrealbord they had indulged those instincts for opulence and mystique. Hearths mantled in precious metals and stones blazed forth a vital orange light. From a single piece of milk-white marble a great spiral table had been shaped, yet it was unlike the blemishless Noxway; its honey-gold swirls caught the firelight, ripples in the surface glowing like burning veins. The chamber was drenched in spells that remained poorly-understood and oft-conjectured since the dawn of the age; it smelt of magic; when seated there, one breathed it in, bathed in it.

The hallowed hall had but two entrances: the great door of defence which was never opened, by the decree of Arreath Ril himself; and the small door at the rear wall of the chamber. It was this door which swung open in advance of her as she travelled the last stretch of the escape tunnels, entering the Arreax, the Chamber of the Realm’s Council.

The Arreax was as old as the Realm, and it embodied the Realm – Mund’s Seat at its heart, with Amrana and Ouldern nestled close-by, all the way down to Hezreni and Chakobar and Myri at the tail. They entered in single file out of necessity, and she kept the pace at the front, now passing the great chairs of those three lesser provinces. Practicality dictated the procession – the four representatives of the First Seat, then the four representatives of the Second, and so on. It wouldn’t do for High Lords and Ladies to be shoving past those already seated, oh no. It was tradition, though, which held her to take the long route, traipsing about the outer edge of the spiral – instead of simply cutting around the tail and approaching her lofty chair by a route that wouldn’t even take a quarter of the time. Poor old Wenlyworth two steps behind her was equipped with a flotation device under his clothes, and she suspected he wasn’t the only one. No one revealed the exact nature of their fittings, obviously, but she knew those worn by men differed little from women’s brassieres – which could also be similarly ensorcelled, her research had uncovered. But most eschewed such contrivances, seeking to stride under their own power even into their dotage. There were many legal means by which one might preserve one’s physical potency – for a price. Unlike one’s youth and beauty, much to her dismay.

She understood herself as a creature of charm. Enye’s blessings had come upon her when she reached full bloom, and she still remembered what it was to be an uninteresting waif with bad hair, pale and buck-toothed at the back of every gathering, gaze downturned. Now, despite being older, she couldn’t imagine ageing – not really – and she was introspective enough, honest enough, to understand her vanity. She didn’t want to go back. She didn’t want to lose what she’d gained.

Death changed everything. She’d loved her sister, but she couldn’t deny that the loss of her sibling had been the trigger for the change in her. It was almost as though she became her. Suddenly Litini’s attendants became Twivona’s own; her lips and cheeks were painted to give the appearance of health; her wild hair was tamed. Soon Litini’s suitors were her own, too.

Everybody loved her now – all but one.

Her decision to remain unattainable had been enough to drive men to duel over her, and she’d relished every incantation, every gesture. As that aura crystallised into aloofness, she aged into her confidence, reaching an apex where she was both maiden and mother, desirable and maternal. Yet she was never a mother, never realised the potential of the maiden. She lost herself in her self-image, and she knew it.

She mounted her chair, if chair it could be called, and turned her gaze about the room. Each of the thirty-three great seats were really four chairs rolled into one, and each was a unique edifice, a true work of art shaped from a single piece of near-transparent crystal. Two shallow steps up from the circular platform admitted her Lord Justice into his place on her right hand, and her Lady Malice on her left. Four steps there were for her old Lord Shadow to climb, where he would perch just below and behind her. Five steps for her, from which height the marvellous table, useless-enough as it already was, descended into a glorified footstool. The surface, when touched in the proper way, its ensorcellments called upon, could repeat back the voices of their forebears, making their long-dead decisions and judgements into a living sound. A feature rarely utilised, in these latter days, and even then only by the lords’ underlings. She had no idea how to lift those ancient voices from the ancient material, and she very much doubted any of her peers did either. She’d seen it done once by a team of transcribers after a council session, and it’d seemed involved indeed.

No. The table, with its fantastical spiral shape, was there primarily to reinforce the proper order. Her at its head, at the heart of the room. Everyone else, after her. Beneath her. She was the voice of the Realm, the lips of the world. The others – they were various stops along its digestive tract.

This was what Father taught her. And as she’d aged into her position, she’d felt the truth of his teachings more and more each year that passed. The wilfulness she’d been possessed by, before her sister’s death, before her ascent to the Heir of House Sentelemeth, faded into a shadow of its former self. Her studies in the history of the Realm finally crystallised and she came to understand the value of tradition, institution. It was always the place of youth, to seek to tear down structures. It was the place of experience, the benefit of wisdom, to take those attacks and incorporate them into the whole, seamlessly expand the structure, adapt the practises, reinterpret the tradition. It was what she was best at. It was what gave her the strength to rule, to be heard by all and listened to, even in such a chamber as this. The Peacekeeper Initiative, the foreign policy decision that saw three territories fall back under Mundic control in just twelve years, was all hers – with a little help from her Justice, Malice and Shadow, of course. The notion of moving the armies to an aggressive footing had kept the conservatives happy, despite the pacifist means they employed in their new style of warfare – thanks in large part to innovations in non-lethal weaponry. The diplomatic gains had been massive. The economic gains, massive. And her skills didn’t just lie with outland affairs, wrangling with uncouth negotiators – she’d managed domestic situations with the same aplomb. Satiating the various religious groups, each of whom had a different agenda, a different set of likes and dislikes – blind hatred of sorcery being the most-common gripe, of course – was itself like casting a complex spell. The ability to balance upon the political tightrope… this was what Twivona saw as her greatest asset.

Fast in her high throne of ancient crystal, looking out across the magic-soaked chamber and seeing her near-rivals all about her, the First Lady of Mund couldn’t control her hands any longer. She had them clasped together in her lap but it was no use – they spasmed and she gripped the delicately-shaped arms of her chair, shifting her weight as though the motion were deliberate.

She couldn’t balance. Not when there was no ground upon which to stand. The firmament beneath her had been shaken, and she shook in turn. Her fragile tightrope had thinned to a razor’s edge; she would topple one way or the other, and bleed, bit by bit, until she decided how best to defenestrate herself.

She swallowed, and prayed to Yune that the loudness of it echoed only inside her own head. It sounded like a tree splitting in half. The silence in here was physically painful.

And it was to her to break it.

Nineteen members were missing, exactly as she’d been notified by Gathel two hours in advance of their arrival. One hundred and thirteen pairs of eyes reflecting the fiery glare.

“In Kultemeren’s name,” the words came out passably between numb lips, “I accede we are all in attendance.” She saw them leaning forwards; even those with bored expressions were staring at her, and she fought to raise her voice without it trembling. “The High Council of Chraunost, of the year Nine-Hundred and Ninety-Nine, is henceforth brought to bear upon the world’s ills. Let them be solved before we separate.”

The phrases of age-old tradition spent, she fell back thankfully into silence.

It did not last long enough to become oppressive. Argument erupted, and the crystal thrones worked their magic, permitting each speaker only so long at their turn before their volume was diminished, their shouts reduced in seeming to mere whispers.

“You must recognise my right to speak!” the High Lord of Chakobar cried instantly from the tail of the table, and he seemed to garner the most attention. Everyone knew the pale, anxious young scion of House Daevon would have something to say. “I hereby call upon you to vote! The Magisterium can no longer handle my country’s ills, and they’ll become the world’s in short order!”

Chakobar’s beautiful, brown-skinned Lady Malice placed her hand upon her Lord’s armrest, and he broke off, glancing at her.

The Chakobese Malice spoke, her voice hard. “The Tirremine Incident cannot go unexplored, and our people may no longer even live –”

“Your people!” shrilled Lady Alaphar of Karamar, her fierceness belying her age and wizened frame. “We do not know what has happened to them. Even now the Magisterium’s scouts move on your coasts –”

“Scouts – what songs will their precious birds sing them from the shadowland? Everything that nears my home is slaughtered –”

“We do – not – know that to be the case!” Twivona was close enough to see the spittle flying from Alaphar’s thin lips. “Your people, your home indeed! You have not set foot in Chakobar since last summer, and then it was only for the tan! Were you born there, Zalista? Did you sup the mother’s milk o’ the land?”

“That is irrelevant! You say it yourself – that we do not know is ample, more than ample cause for the utmost concern! Do you not recall what was said of the dragons…”

Twivona glanced between the two exchanging barbs. Most of the people in here would comprehend the nuances of their opposition, and those who didn’t were beneath such subtleties even were they to be explained slowly. The identity of young Lyferin Othelroe had been revealed upon his death, the former champion Redgate, slain on outland sands by Phanar of N’Lem and his cohort. Former champion, as the testimony of the adventurers held him to have been a murderer, a callous and evil man in the extreme. Testimony given under spell and oath, testimony corroborated by arch-diviner…

By Timesnatcher… But could he be trusted, in the end? His predecessor was now leader of the heretics, and, going off his recent behaviour – assuming reports were accurate…

She couldn’t doubt, not now. She had to focus.

Lady Alaphar was the Lady Malice to the Second Seat. Ostensibly she’d been the Council-member closest to Redgate, the young Lord Shadow, throughout his career, given the advanced senescence of the Second Lord and his Lord Justice. She was slavish in her defence of Lyferin, as if his guilt entailed some besmirchment of her honour. An obvious undercurrent of thought was that this whole fiasco had started with the Lord Shadow’s quest to slay Ord Ylon. Lyferin went to Chakobar and died, and, thus far, it seemed, everything else there had followed him into the grave. Not a word from across the ocean in months.

Lyferin’s meek replacement, some obscure cousin sloped forth from the Ilswent domains, kept to his well-practised silence, allowing Alaphar to do all the work.

“… almost two thousand shipments – did they arrive? They certainly did not return!”

“What a great loss to the Realm. Spices and drugs. However shall we feed ourselves?”

“That, my Lady, is beneath you. These are human lives!”

“What would you have us do, that’s not been done already!”

“Mobilise the army! The Hawks of Myri are on campaign in Aber-Lan –”

“So you would spend the lives of Myric sons and daughters, spill out their precious blood upon your barbaric, infertile soil, all for what?”

“We won’t stand for that!” growled Lord Justice Vernays.

“When I speak of Chakobese lives, you sneer,” Lady Zalista Udur countered smoothly, ignoring Vernays, still staring unblinkingly at Lady Alaphar. “When I speak of action, you speak of Myric lives. Shall I now sneer?”

“Sneer if you will – you are not the expert in such matters. Or would you have us now believe you to be a military genius in disguise?”

“I would have you believe I would prefer us to do something, rather than nothing.”

“It is to the Magisterium to design our policy; our trust in their expertise –”

“Too long have we trod the same paths, back and forth in argument, you and I.” Zalista’s voice quaked now, not in fear but frustration, even anger. “You are no different – you will not change – even here in the face of all your equals. It is not strength you demonstrate – only that you remain frightened, so childish as to put your trust in –”

“– you, who think you know so much, could be so blind. Do you not see so many empty seats as I? As you yourself state, there remains the matter of the dragons, beyond our scope, and you are no seer, no part in the project…”

As their vehemence grew, their volume diminished, and the Lord from Myri started voicing his concerns more loudly. A vote as to whether his province’s forces might be sent trotting over to Chakobar was definitely not on his agenda.

“We are skirting the true issue! The latest missives scarcely mention any success in corroborating the claims of Vardae Rolaine, or in catching the damn fiend. Until this matter’s settled, there will be no peace, only unrest!”

That was Lord Tenthur, Wenlyworth’s arch-rival.

Indeed, Twivona’s old Lord Shadow immediately responded:

“If you read the missives carefully you will, my Lord, already be aware of the reason such topics receive scarcely a mention – you do us no good, only ill, to feed this aura of fear which has fallen upon the city. There have been in the course of Mund’s recorded history some ninety-three such prophets of doom; it is hardly an exclusive club into which Hierarch Twenty-Five now unwittingly inserts herself. We defied fate before, and –”

“She’s going to kill us all!” someone croaked.

“Come Highsummer, I’m gone,” someone else vowed.

This is why we fail, Twivona thought, closing her eyes as all descended into anarchy. She had no special power to bring them to order, no authority beyond that which she had already displayed. The chairs tried to perform their duties, quietening some, providing a voice to others, letting those who needed to be heard break through the hubbub.

It wasn’t enough. Never again would be it be enough, not since Yearsend.

“And there are so few champions remaining!” came a shocked voice from the Twenty-Somethingth Seat. She fancied it to be Lord Melton, but she wasn’t going to bother opening her eyes to check. “Might we not vote to increase their remuneration rates, that more might see their way to such a career?”

“It’s not a career, it’s a calling,” her Lord Haid replied loudly, repeating the trite phrase.

At least he sounded like he believed it now. Gathel’s own appreciation of the city’s defenders had been much improved, deepened, by his timeless spell in Etherium, pursued by the dragon’s agents.

“I am given to believe,” came the low, haughty purr of Cay-Lehan Osordei, “that nigh-all the champions turned heretic that night, when Madame Rolaine spoke to us.”

“I have received assurances,” Twivona replied, “from the Heads of Recruitment and Logistics that the Magisterium will provide the required forces. Over a thousand new magisters have been deployed in the city in the last week, and two thousand more will –”

“In the place of archmages, champions, you will set untested boys and girls –”

She hadn’t meant to become drawn into an argument, yet now she was faced with opposition she felt a coldness come over her.

“The thousand includes three archmages, each of them tried in the field!” she found herself retorting, and she almost bit her lip at that needless, bald lie – one of the three archmages was a former toy-maker, tried in the fields of miniature design and marketing… “The majority of the magisters are being brought in from Disholt and Ferund; a contingent of your own experts are sailing in from Amrana even as we sit here, sparring idly.”

“Is that what you think this is?” Lady Osordei eyed her dangerously, and Twivona realised too late that her comment had been sloppy – she couldn’t afford to give any ground to her rival. The Third Lady had always despised her; she’d been her sister’s oldest friend. She was the one person in the world to have displayed animosity regarding her replacement act. Her sister’s oldest friend, who’d once dressed Twivona in daisy-chains and played hide and find in the palace gardens with her. Cay-Lehan hated her because she wasn’t Litini – a grudge Twivona could never put to rest, or even come to acknowledge as valid.

Memories that had faded to grey pages.

Valid or no, Cay-Lehan’s spite hurt sometimes. The spine of the book ached as it bent open, the recollections of youth accessed against her will, events still burning there in smoking ink upon the creased material of Twivona’s mind.

“You think of this as some game? That our words are as the rocks thrown by children, rather than the bricks laid carefully one by one? Fie, Twivona, and for shame! I –”

“Desist,” Twivona said quietly, yet the chair enhanced her voice, as Cay-Lehan’s shrank away. “Perhaps I sparred too idly; your latest rock has struck me a terrible gash.”

Some laughter rippled at that, and the tension in the room was lessened. The left side of Cay-Lehan’s face bunched up in a scowl, an expression the First Lady was all too familiar with.

Twivona smiled at her rival, and the magical silence of the Arreax stretched between them. Off to the side, Zalista Udur of Chakobar was still duelling her own rivals, and, in the quiet surrounding the First and Second Seats, Lady Udur’s voice grew in strength:

“The Magisterium’s report has been derived from divination, and all they will tell us is that there was a deviation in Tirremuir. A deviation! As though this would be enough to satisfy any of you that your countrymen were safe, that your homes and wealth were protected! No. We cannot sit by and watch our world crumble. Our ancestors demand immediate action! The gods demand it!”

And yet, hours later and thanks in large part to Twivona, they’d done nothing about anything.

The High Council session ended, and, last as she’d been first, Lady Sentelemeth exited the chamber with her Justice and Malice huddled close at her sides in the narrow space, her Shadow floating along behind.

She let a reasonable distance develop in front of her. The black glass of the narrow corridor reflected them like they were ghosts when she glanced from side to side, their mirror images swathed in shadow, outlines broken, details distorted.

“How do you think it went?” Twivona asked.

Wenlyworth chuckled; Haid made something of a gargling sound.

Her Malice, Lady Gwena Rhaegel, alone spoke plainly, her deep, dull voice belying the intelligence working the tongue. “We knew how it would go.”

“But I don’t like it.” Twivona almost felt as though she were on the verge of bursting into tears and she struggled to keep a lid on her emotion, managing to hiss rather than wail: “I say: I don’t like it! These measures… why does everything I do and say have to be pacification? Why can’t we do something –”

“You sound like her,” Lady Rhaegel interrupted; Twivona instantly knew to whom she alluded, and fell silent.

“You sound like her, and you know the answers to your own questions. I gave you the figures myself. The Magisterium is doing what it does best, and if –”

“No, Gwena!” Twivona stopped, turned. “I understand what they’re doing, but what about us? Why can’t we do something? We’re supposed to be the leaders – what’s our rule worth, if we’re worthless?”

“I think my Lady might have missed her daily dose,” Wenlyworth commented dryly, referring to the prohibitively-expensive elixir consumed by all Arrealbord members with breakfast each day. It contained a number of different substances, designed in concert to protect the imbiber from a variety of perils: poisons; enchantments; changes of shape and state… And, as the rumour went, despair.

“I most certainly did not miss my dose, and I will not be pacified. I should’ve permitted Zalista’s request; we could’ve had a force inside Chakobar within the week –”

“The military committee would’ve hated it, as we’ve already discussed,” Gwena said in a light but chiding tone.

“I’m in no mood for your jests, Lady Rhaegel! Ismethyl’s blade! Does it matter what they’d have thought of it? It’s their job to do as they’re told.”

She started walking again, resuming her former pace and, leaving her a bit more room this time, her colleagues fell in behind her.

She’d not gone five steps before she was stopped in her tracks.

A trio of masked individuals in front of her. The one at the front in black could’ve been mistaken for a boy were it not for the form-fitting quality of her clothing. The one at the back, clad in a robe of purest white, gave off a brooding aura. And in between, far taller than his companions, a man whose darkness was punctured by a hundred radiant hourglasses, each displaying just a few grains of sand remaining, already falling through the valves.

The aura emanating from the two at the front was anything but brooding. There was a sense of excitement on the air. Exuberance.

Twivona knew who they were; everyone knew who they were, and she’d met the two gentlemen before. The girl’s identity she could infer from the bow she wore.

She’s finally going public.

Twivona drew in a breath, and that was all she managed.

“First Lady!” The young woman’s voice was strong, confident. “It’s been too long, and I’m afraid it may not be a happy birthday if we spend too long on pleasantries. We estimate six demonic infestations are underway currently, and by the time we’ve dealt with one, another five will have appeared. I’m afraid this is it. The Incursion you always feared. Ulu Kalar has won.”

The Incursion… But there hasn’t been one in…

Some part of her had hoped that they’d stopped altogether, as a few of the rumours reported to her in whispers by her Shadow had suggested. That Vardae Rolaine was wrong in more ways than one.

“I…”

She glanced aside, to check her friends’ reactions, and found herself distracted from her own protests, her words dying in a strangled sound. It wasn’t just the motionlessness of her fellow nobles, cluing her in on the fact she alone had been taken inside a chronomantic construct.

No – it was the walls. For the first time, the blackness reflected. She could’ve been in here a thousand times, and never once had she seen her shadow-eyes staring back at her from the void’s infinite mirrored recesses.

How…?

“Two-point-two seconds,” Starsight said, in a voice that would’ve been melodic had it not been so strained.

“You remember your protocols, First Lady?”

Twivona dragged her gaze back to Nightfell.

“Pr… protocols…”

Her mind swam in the memories, and she closed her eyes. It’d been five years or more since the Palace Guard had last gone over the system with her.

In event of… impending disaster… we…

Oh. Oh gods. The rhyme.

“She remembers. She’ll do it. Come on.”

She felt a slight tug on her clothing – she opened her eyes again and the trio of powerful diviners were gone.

Wenlyworth almost bumped into her as her companions came to a halt about her, glancing at her curiously.

“The bunker,” she breathed. “It will open?”

Gong! Gong! Gong!

The Mourning Bells were pealing out, and even here, inside the buried fastness of the Arrealbord Palace, the sound was cacophony.

Every muscle in her shook all at once, tremors flooding her, and when she glanced again into the depths of the black-glass walls Twivona saw that her reflection was more broken than ever.

“Come on,” she said, folding her arms across her chest and hurrying her steps.

“My Lady!” Haid exclaimed, clutching at his robe and stumbling to keep up. “An Infernal Incursion!”

“Damn! What’s this about a bunker, Twivona?” Lady Rhaegel asked.

“We’ve got to get the others. All of them.” Her trembling subsided, and Twivona focussed on her duty. “We’ve got to get them to the Blackway, as quickly as we can… The very survival of the Mundic Realm may depend on it.”