Novices paced the chamber, handing carafes of foul-smelling fluid to the consuls. Adarin, Rüdiger, and their peers had formed a circle around the interactive viewing map at the center of the chamber. A novice with a carafe approached Adarin.

  Adarin chuckled. Now what is he— The novice abruptly dumped the carafe’s contents over him.

  Adarin froze, clamping down hard on his instincts to strangle the novice, then broke out in laughter. Disapproving looks flickered from the mages. Rüdiger gave a sharp chuckle. Smoke thickened through the chamber, rising from no visible source. Yet figures, ghostly outlines of something just at the edge of perception, seemed to emerge and submerge before one could blink.

  Then the drums started beating. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

  Spots that pulsed in time to the drumbeats formed inside the fog. Adarin felt something brush against his mind, growing with tendrils like an infection. He ran several counter-intrusion protocols, but they didn’t even slow whatever power the system was using. The tendril reached into his avatar’s head—into the divination core where his prefrontal cortex would be.

  His forehead began beating in time with the pulse. Adarin scanned the setup of the chamber again, certain that something had changed. The glowing interactive map. The eight figures standing in an evenly spaced circle around its edges. The three circles of novices walking clockwise, counterclockwise, and clockwise again. The outer circles of drummers standing still. Chanting swelled, rising from too many throats—too many, and yet not enough.

  Rüdiger began to speak in a singsong voice. There were words, but they were beyond the grasp of Adarin’s understanding. Rüdiger pulled out a curved dagger and, with a lightning-quick slash, cut open his palm. Blood arced skyward like a fountain and rained onto the scrying circle. The projection shivered like a child left alone in the forest in winter.

  Then Adarin blinked. Where is that image coming from?

  With the inevitability of a falling moon, they closed in on the upriver region of the Portguard province. The Grand River. Images flashed before him: the River, a city by the coast, blood, a tree with flayed skulls growing in its middle. The same tree breaking a wall, water flooding through it. Adarin heard screams and what he couldn’t identify as moans of pleasure or pain from the fog.

  As the fog formed, the images repeated faster and faster. The tree swelled. Skulls crowned its branches. Water burst through—a dam collapsing, or perhaps rising. He couldn’t tell which.

  They went further up the river, and suddenly there he was: a black spider marching at the head of a holy procession. Gigantic green snakes wove patterns in the air around them as they marched forward in triumph.

  That was when the first thing went wrong.

  The mist froze, and the sound of splintering glass filled the chamber. More than one of the consuls and nearly a dozen of the mages gave a shrill scream and collapsed to the floor. Adarin tried to make out who it had hit, but everyone involved no longer had a face.

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  A figure—a shadow of a human shape—stood at the edge of the room near the door. Observing. Judging. Calculating. Then it was gone, swirled into a gigantic whirlwind. It was sucked into the interactive map, and Adarin screamed, trying to fight whatever had intruded into his mind. This isn’t real. This can’t be real. This is a projection, an illusion.

  The first piercing flash of pain lasted what must have been hours. Another flash of Rüdiger’s cursed dagger. The map shifted like a herd of grazing horses into whose midst someone had unleashed a pack of wolves.

  The heartbeat returned, but with each beat the glowing points of light grew. Root tendrils found each other through the entire network of beating, and for some reason Adarin felt himself at home at the center of it all. He tried to take a breath, but it was as if he were breathing through a mask. A mask of flesh created into a human body.

  Flesh dissolved into fabric, a voice whispering of creation and ruin. Mad giggles filled the hall. Adarin tried to commit the details of it to memory, feeling a terrible significance in those words. In the network, in the hearts.

  Then towering walls of wood surrounded them. A distant storm could be heard. A woman nailed to the keel of a ship, laughing as wave after wave washed over her broken body. Her red hair was like a flame in the middle of the night. What is the point of this magic?

  Adarin tried to move his body and found that he had lost all control. He was writhing on the ground, in his mindspace, writhing like the others did outside, in the real world. Again the slash of the dagger. Again the fountain of blood. Again the swirling maelstrom of the pungent fog.

  Three lines connected—Adarin, Kelvin, and Marquardt—in a triangle of dark fire. A fortress stood in the middle, and it cracked, spilling forth bloodied gold coins.

  Adarin collapsed, blackness taking him.

  He couldn’t say how much later it was when Rüdiger’s voice awoke him. He took heavy, labored breaths.

  “I shall retreat to my chambers and think on this. I would advise anyone to meditate on this prophecy. Predictive scrying is an imprecise art, and most of its truths are only visible in retrospect. But all of you—” He looked sternly at each of the seven others in the inner circle in turn. “Commit what has just happened to memory. Do not ignore the warnings, for such neglect comes at a terrible price.”

  With that, Rüdiger began floating. He swayed from side to side in the air and gestured a novice over to him. She guided the archmagister—who suddenly seemed like a frail old man, no longer the controlling clown—out of the room.

  Adarin looked around. The last fog bled away through unseen vents. Novices dragged their bleeding comrades from the floor. The consuls stood shaken and disheveled.

  Adarin grabbed the sequence of memories, cut it up, and pushed it into a sealed folder in a locked section of his mind. Well, that was something. I need to think on this later. For now, time to take control of this shit show.

  Adarin looked around and already saw Captain Ashfield coldly studying the proceedings in the room at the door. No—Commodore Ashfield now.

  “Commodore,” Adarin spoke out loudly. “Please join us. Francesco, Duchess Viola, please stay. Everyone else, leave and send in Viola, Devin, and Gavin, please.”

  Jacqueline seemed about to argue, but Mathilda made a sharp, cutting gesture, smiled at Adarin, and shooed the other consuls out of the room while guiding Devin and Gavin in, followed by Alyora, who was already busy healing the fallen novices.

  Adarin steepled two of his manipulators together. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, after such an enlightening experience, we have real work to do. There’s an expedition to plan, and apparently some shadowy monster awaits us in the forest. Nothing out of the ordinary.”