THE REVELRY

The monster on my chest twitched its whiskers, which was unthreatening enough to keep me from yelling.

“Holy shit,” I said sleepily. “I know you.”

Remus squeaked, tumbled off my chest, and slithered off the side of my bed. I rolled to the edge in time to see him disappear into my overnight bag, which was still lying on my bedroom floor from where I’d dropped it after the night in the Manse.

“You’re a stowaway,” I accused my handbag. “Have you been hiding there all along? You know, Brand told me if I adopted one more kid, he was going to lock me in a room with everyone under the age of twenty and a twelve-pack of soda.”

The bag shimmied a bit, but Remus didn’t reappear.

“You probably don’t know this,” I told him while groaning my way out of bed, “but I think there’s this really weird prophecy about you. You may want to stay away from Max.”

I’d barely caught four hours of sleep and it was dawn, combining into two of my least favorite things. (Except for the nagging memories of Jabuela, who loved sunrise, but it fucked with my head to think of that.) Most of the afternoon yesterday had been spent in my sanctum, meditating over an array of spells to store in my suddenly sufficient personal sigil armory. It felt bizarre to have that many on me at once. The average scion was rarely without a dozen of their own, which meant, for the first time since I was fifteen, I was nearly on the same playing field.

When I’d tried to explain that to Brand, he’d snorted and glared, saying, “You can do more with one sigil than most do with five. Jesus Christ, Rune, these are not the days to act fucking humble.”

I took the advice to heart, and spent the extra hours storing some of my most powerful spells. If it took a little longer than usual because I kept stroking my new sigils lovingly, no one needed to know.

Fifteen minutes later I was geared up in my best field outfit, including my black leather jacket and boots, all fitted with basic wards to give me a slight edge in combat. I spent a final minute smiling at my double-Companion symbol belt buckle sigil, and headed downstairs to meet up with Brand and Addam.

Anna waited for me in open ambush, splayed across the bottom step of the second-floor stairway with an open iPad.

She gave me the teenage look of long-suffering. “I want to talk to you,” she said.

“Can we talk later? Addam and Brand are waiting.”

She gave me her blank look, which meant she knew I was heading into the field, and maybe that was why she was camped out on the bottom step of a stairway landing.

“Here,” I sighed, and walked into an empty room. It’d been a guest room, once upon a time. The estate contractors had removed the rotted and mildewed furniture, leaving behind stained wooden floors and scabrous patches of wallpaper.

“I need to help,” she said once I closed the door.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Why don’t you pick up where Addam left off? You know he’s been researching the Warrens and Lowlands.”

“You’re heading into the Warrens today, aren’t you?”

“I don’t think we are. We’re going to try to find Lord Fool at the Revelry.”

“Which may lead to the Warrens or the Lowlands, right?”

“Anna, you’re not ready for the field. This isn’t a discussion I’m prepared to have with you.”

“But I can be useful!” she hissed, lowering her voice. “I can help you! I can use the—”

She bit off just before mentioning the Arcana Majeure, which we’d agreed was a topic that would not even be breathed between us until she was a little older.

I bent my knees so that we were at eye level. I felt the warm presence of my Aspect turn my eyes orange. “Go on. Finish the sentence. I double-dog dare you.”

She shook her head but maintained a stubborn look.

“Do we need to have this talk again?” I said.

The thing was, my cousin had potential. Massive, massive potential. I’d only learned what the Majeure was myself over the last year, and I’d only manifested my use of it in the last few years. According to Lord Tower, for Anna, at her age, to be showing the ability was exceptionally rare. She was destined to lead a court—mine if not another. At the very least, her use of the sigil-less Majeure magic marked her as a budding principality.

“I haven’t told anyone,” she swore. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. I can help! They . . .” She trailed off and wiped stubbornly at one eye. “They left me. I thought they were my friends. But they left me.”

“We don’t know how it happened. I don’t think Quinn meant for Max to go with him. It’s not a field trip, Anna—they put themselves in unspeakable danger. Do you—”

“Your eyes are on fire,” she whispered as I saw my flames reflected in her eyes.

I closed them and banked my Aspect. This was exactly why I hadn’t given her the sigil yet. She was as headstrong as I was. “Please do not do anything stupid, Anna. I couldn’t bear it.”

“I’ll do the research,” she said.

“Thank you. I really need to go now. Okay?”

She nodded but didn’t meet my eyes. I thought about forcing her into a vow for a wild second, but you just didn’t do that with children. They screwed up too easy, and the consequences of breaking a vow could fracture their abilities.

I continued down the stairs to the main hall. Layne waited there, the second point of ambush.

“No, you can’t come with me,” I told them.

Layne wore jeans and a purple blouse, and their face was flushed with fever. In anyone else that would be worrisome, but Layne fed off infection to power their immolation magic, a rare form of necromancy.

Then I realized maybe it was worrisome. Layne wouldn’t be actively feverish unless they were storing up power for expected use.

“Do you have time to talk?” they asked me, shifting weight nervously from foot to foot. “It’s important.”

“I’ll make time tonight,” I promised them. “Tonight. Addam, Brand, and I are going out now to learn where Max and Quinn are. I really need to go, Layne. Please?”

They gave me a disappointed look and shrugged.

“Tonight,” I said. “I promise. Can you keep an eye on Anna?”

The disappointed look seamlessly phased into an eye roll, and they gave me a much less casual shrug.

“Thank you. I need to go. Do me a favor and tell Corinne and Diana that they’re in charge. I’ll see you tonight.”

When Layne didn’t move, I slunk gracelessly around them, feeling awful, but I could sense the impatience thrumming along my bond with Brand.

I found them outside, parked in the circular drive. Addam had driven one of his sports cars from the staff parking lot. Brand waited for me at the bumper.

I watched his eyes flick across my new sigils in approval. “Loaded for bear?” he asked.

“I’ll hold my own.”

He squinted at the gold sun pendant in particular, then pointed at the chain. “Is that really dwarven steel? Nothing breaks that shit. You could choke out someone with it.”

“Brand, do I need to tell you never to choke someone out with my magical artifact?”

He rolled his eyes. I opened the back door for him. We both got in, leaving Addam to drive alone in the front, which made him turn in the seat and give us a plaintive look.

“I need to watch the rear for attack,” Brand explained.

“And Rune?”

“Who the fuck knows. If he’s smart, he’s remembered you’re rich and is checking the cushions for lost money clips.”

“Look,” I said. “I get it. We’re all ready to hit something. Let’s put the adrenaline to better use. The Revelry awaits.”

Gereja Ayam came from the hills of Magelang in Central Java.

It was a newer translocation from this century. The building had been created by a man who claimed to have communed with the Christian God.

In its original design, it was a temple shaped like a dove facing a nearby volcano. In reality, it looked like a basic stone sketch of a hen. Locals had called it the chicken church, and it had been abandoned before completion.

Lord Fool had translocated the temple onto his private acreage. It was located in a swamp just south of Lady Death’s peninsula, a tract of land formerly known as Squam Swamp. It was both beautiful and dismal: large hardwoods, seasonal ponds, and profuse fern and shrub growth in the underbrush.

The air was brackish, heavy with the smell of mud and vegetation. There were no sounds except what you’d expect to hear in a swamp.

“Lady Death wants us to wait,” I said, showing Brand the text message. My phone had buzzed just after Addam parked the car in a dirt lot.

“Why?” Brand said. “What did you do?”

“Why do you always say that?” I asked. “When exactly are these vast swathes of time I apparently have to screw up when you’re not hovering at my shoulder?”

Addam had pulled out a small but powerful LED flashlight. Shadows and light played tag with each other along the dripping canopy. “I can’t even see the residences from here. Are you sure they have separate dormitories?”

“I’m not,” I said. “I only know that they don’t sleep in Gereja Ayam. It’s hard to know for sure: Lord Fool doesn’t let many outsiders on his land, and he’s got some of the best Shield and Deflection magics on the island. Mainly because he wants to be left the hell alone.”

I whispered the words to a light and lens cantrip, then sent a powerful searchlight beam into the foliage around us. There were at least two well-trodden paths. One led in the direction of the giant bird head of the translocated temple, just visible through the dense canopy. I danced the searchlight along the second path and found only old footprints and overgrown weeds.

“The Arcanum had satellite images of the property,” I said. “Lord Tower seems to think the Fool hasn’t been here in a while.”

“What about his people?” Addam asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. He has a compound underground in the Warrens, but it’s off-map. They could all be there.”

“I haven’t even asked you what the Arcanum’s meeting was like,” Addam said. He gave me a guilty look. “I have not been attentive.”

“Your attention has been exactly where it should be,” I told him. “There is nothing more important than finding Quinn and Max.”

Addam blinked a few times and took a breath. “It must have been strange, being around the table with so many Arcana at once.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” I admitted. “It was so uncomfortable! I didn’t expect that.”

“They were unwelcoming?” Addam asked.

Brand barked out a laugh. “I love how you sometimes don’t take Rune literally. When he says uncomfortable, you realize he’s talking about the lack of stuffing in the seat cushion under his ass, right?”

“Well, it was strange,” I said. “The entire room looked like it came from a yard sale.”

Addam’s distracted look sharpened into a small smile, and he shook his head at me. He was probably about to say something nice and sweet, but at that point the forest’s stillness broke under a sharp sonic whistle.

Zurah Saint Joseph descended from the sky like a bullet and landed with a ground-shaking crack. Our flashlights crisscrossed her as she straightened to full height. She wore deep red leathers, nearly black; hair drawn into a thick braid; and around her waist was a belt fitted with a dozen small silver wands, each half the size of a barbecue skewer. They shimmered with the ardency of sigils.

“You’re coming?” I said in surprise.

“You didn’t think I’d let you have all the fun, did you?”

“Oh, we are going to fuck shit up,” Brand said.

“If needed,” she agreed. “But I’m also friendly with Lord Fool. If he’s here, he’ll listen to me.” She whispered a quick word and manifested a light cantrip above her head. With a sharp flick of her finger, she sent it zooming down the path leading away from the temple. “The RVs are that way. Let’s start there.”

“The what now?” I said.

The dormitories of the Revelry were, indeed, a trailer park. A huge circle of RVs and campers, their wheels long since sunk and dry-rotted in mud, surrounded a fire pit and coal barbecue stands. Holiday decorations from a long-past equinox were still strung along lampposts. The colors were vibrant in the marsh, like the slash of a child’s paintbrush across dirty paper.

Rain had begun to fall in the post-dawn dimness, so light it didn’t even make ripples in the potholes around us. There wasn’t a soul in sight.

“What are we looking for?” Addam asked in the stillness.

“Bodies,” Lady Death said.

I combined my lens and light cantrip again to swing a searchlight around me. No signs of violence. No overturned chairs, no bloodstains, no weapon gouges in the tables or lampposts. “What are you seeing that I’m not?” I asked her.

“People have died here,” she said grimly. “It makes the back of my eyes itch. My bloodline is good at sensing the . . . echoes, I suppose, of a soul’s passing.”

I didn’t question her. My bloodline was unusually good at sensing the presence of magic. Each court had its own little bag of genetic tricks.

“Can you tell where?” I asked.

“I don’t smell rot,” Brand added. “But the swamp fumes may be covering it up.”

“It’s here. There’s been death here recently,” Zurah said.

Brand turned in a slow circle, eyes high, taking in tree limbs large enough to support a person, checking to see if there were any vantage points from the nearby temple that would let anyone spy on us. “I’d rather clear the compound first before we start rooting around.”

“Let’s just check a couple of trailers first,” I suggested. “Look for signs of how people left. Check for luggage, full closets, perishables, personal keepsakes. Zurah, have you been here before?”

“Once or twice,” she said. “It was always crowded. Lord Fool is zealous about privacy, but don’t confuse that with accessibility. His court has long been considered a last resort for the disenfranchised. He takes care of people who have little else. Many struggle with addiction, poverty, homelessness, mental health issues, unemployment. There’s a lot of mobility in and out of these residences.”

“They can’t all be dead,” I said. “We’ve identified some of his members already as being in service of Lady Jade. What the hell happened here? It’s beginning to look more and more like a—”

“Raid,” Lady Death finished. Her mouth set in a grim line. “It’s looking as if there’s been an unsanctioned raid on Lord Fool’s holding.”

“We raid to destroy,” I said. “We raid for material gain. I can’t remember a raid on record where the goal was its people.”

“And yet,” Zurah said, “it’s a quick way to establish your own power base if you have no people of your own.”

“Did you store the X-ray spell?” Brand asked me. “Can you use it on the RVs to flush out traps or ambush?”

“Good idea,” I said, and brushed a thumb along the left side of my interjoined belt buckle.

X-ray was a spell with limited versatility. It did one thing very well, unlike an elemental magic such as Fire, which could fold into offensive and defensive capabilities at my command. With my new batch of sigils, though, I finally felt like I had the flexibility to take risks on the spells I stored.

The world jerked back and forth between darkness and lightning-blast white. As the magic balanced, a sharp migraine stirred sluggishly into motion behind my eyes. It wasn’t like comic books—X-ray vision didn’t let me see everyone in their underwear. You can peel away layers with the spell, but you still needed light to see things, and there just wasn’t enough of that under, say, Addam’s tight trousers.

“Flood the RVs with light cantrips,” I said. “Shine them in windows. Follow my point—I only have a minute or two of this.”

I heard Brand order people around through the hammer-hits of my migraine. They placed themselves at the RVs and began to shine cantrips or flashlights through open or undraped windows. I peeled back layers of steel and aluminum to see the trailers’ grayish interiors, occasionally getting lost in grains of wood or Formica.

“Half-filled water glass on the table. Pillows and sheets on the ground. An open closet with just wire hangers in it. A shattered vase. A wall covered in Scotch-taped photographs.” I pointed as I said everything. “Food on the table. Brok—” I stopped midsyllable. “There. What’s there?”

One of the trailers was parked at an angle, an odd misalignment in the rough ring. Crates and trash bags had been piled at the base of it, keeping light from shining into the foundation. It looked sloppy and hurried.

Brand went over, extended a police baton, and used it to hook the trash bags and fling them away from the trailer. “Drag marks,” he called out. “The RV was moved recently. Stains, too. Might be blood.”

“It is,” Lady Death said quietly.

“There’s a hollow under the trailer,” I said. I tried to peel away the mass of metal, but there just wasn’t enough light to make out more than the edges of a pit and freshly turned soil. “Addam, can you move it?”

Addam strode out of my peripheral and joined Brand at the base of the trailer. He ran a thumb along one of the platinum discs threaded through his belt, and a blurry wash of power coated his hands. He began to step away from the RV while lifting his arms. The entire vehicle shuddered with metallic coughs and groans, then lifted a few inches from the hard-packed dirt and slid backward.

Light fell on the mass grave. Too many bodies to count in a single look, though not more than a half dozen.

“Weapon marks,” Brand confirmed. “There’s a thick layer of powder on the bodies. Lime powder or something alchemical. It hides the smell of decay.”

“Infiltration,” Lady Death guessed. “Lady Jade infiltrated my court. Turned one or two key people. I stopped it early enough, but Lord Fool didn’t. That would explain the different signs we are getting. Some people packed and left; others left hurriedly or were harmed. His court was infiltrated and broken, and the greater part of it has been absorbed elsewhere.”

“If it’s her, she took pains to hide the bodies,” Brand pointed out.

“To buy time?” Lady Death guessed. “This wouldn’t go unanswered. The Arcanum must act. Raids are regulated for a reason—they permit power plays and a change of leadership while preventing a loss of total mass from New Atlantis as a whole. Unstructured raids dilute our resources and artifacts. Our society works because power remains in the hands of courts.”

“Does it, though,” I murmured, but loud enough to have Zurah shoot a chagrined look my way. She thought I was upset because she had obliquely referred to my father’s court. I wasn’t. I was just becoming more and more concerned about the way we did things.

Brand’s phone began to buzz. He pulled it out, answered it, and then started rubbing the skin between his eyes. “Thank you for sharing,” he finally said, and hung up.

“What?” I asked.

“Corbie found a green marble.” He put a Bluetooth adaptor in his ear so he wouldn’t need to use his hands again.

Zurah made a sharp sound of discovery. As my X-ray spell flickered and died—taking my headache with it—I watched her go over to a table on the other side of the clearing. A bedsheet had been laid across the top of it. She lifted the hem and reached low, and when she straightened back up, there was a small dog in her arms. It was muddy and brown and seemed to carry the genetic strain of a dozen different yappy-type dogs.

“This is the Fool’s hound,” she said, setting the dog on the ground and checking it quickly for injuries. “She’s rarely outside his presence. This is not a good sign at all, Rune. Lord Fool would never abandon her. He simply wouldn’t.”

“Let’s check out the temple,” Brand said. He glanced at the mass grave, and then at Addam.

Addam nodded in agreement, lifted his arms, and moved the trailer back where it’d previously rested. Whether to preserve evidence or show dignity to the dead, I’m not sure. But I appreciated the thought.

The unfinished nature of Gereja Ayam made it seem like an older structure than it actually was. Lord Fool hadn’t made much effort to complete construction. We skirted around crumbling balustrades and let ourselves through a side door. The windows—once glass inside a leaded floral design—were broken, allowing a cold swampish cross-breeze to whistle through the large interior.

The roof overhead reminded me of the hull of an overturned ship. Bright graffiti in neon colors covered large swatches of concrete. I spotted a collection of rooms at either end of the chicken church—ass and beak—and a large circular stairwell led to what once had been twelve rough basement chambers. Birds flew unseen around the rafters, disturbed by our presence.

The windowless walls may have provided dubious shelter, but they did help us in one way: the swamp’s odor wasn’t as overpowering, which gave us the warning we hadn’t had outside.

“Bodies,” Brand said.

“Recent deaths,” Lady Death agreed.

I didn’t need to agree. It was obvious. Fiction never completely gets it right—sometimes death isn’t gore and blood spatter, sometimes it’s just shit. It’s the smell of everything that pours from our bowels at the moment of death, life’s final ignobility.

Lady Death flipped a hidden top off one of her rings, revealing a metal flange. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing until she rotated her arm like a gun, using the flange as a scope.

“Huh,” I said.

“Helps me visualize my aim,” Zurah said, noticing my attention. “You’ve never seen my ice arrows, have you?”

“Would a ring like that improve Rune’s aim?” Brand asked while I loudly said, “My aim is fine.”

Then Brand froze. “Birds stopped making sound,” he whispered.

Lady Death ran a hand along one of her skewers. A whoosh of air ruffled her braid as it spiraled away from her. I felt the gust probe and whip past my face. She was sensing the presence of living beings—a spell I used often myself.

“We’re surrounded,” she breathed. “Six life signs.”

“Take a point,” Brand snapped. “Back-to-back.”

We formed a rough circle, each taking a direction. As she moved, Zurah raised her voice to a shout. “I am Death of the Bone Hollows. By my will and word, Lord Fool’s compound is now under the interim regency of the Arcanum. Step into the light and lay down your weapons or be treated as our enemy.”

Attacking us would be an incredibly smart or stupid action. There was no middle ground. Unless it was Lady Jade herself, the chances of an attack succeeding were so slight that either they would be fools to fight us, or smart enough to know that sudden and decisive action was the only chance they had at winning a battle.

They attacked.

Five figures in unrelieved black, including gloves and balaclavas, stepped from behind hiding spots. They had compound bows in their hands.

Two of them dropped and died before they hit the ground, each with one of Brand’s knives in their throats. The others pulled back on their strings just as Lady Death lifted an arm and expelled a huge burst of magic. A moving Mobius strip of subzero temperatures slithered around the circle we’d made, shattering the arrows that hit it.

Addam released an Earth spell, made a snatching gesture, and pulled a crumbling column down on the head of a third attacker. The assassin vanished in a plume of dust and blood spray.

I uncoiled my sabre from my wrist, hardened it into its sword hilt form, and fired at one of the two remaining attackers. The firebolts hit Lady Death’s protective barrier and turned into hisses of steam.

“I’ve got them,” Brand said, pulling out his dart-bow. “Zurah, can you lower—”

A chunk of ice the size of a cannonball hurtled from the ceiling, passed through the ice barrier, and hit the middle of our circle with concussive force. The next thing I knew, I was on my hands and knees, covered in scrapes, not to mention patches of frostbite from Lady Death’s barrier, which luckily had begun dissipating the moment we were knocked off our feet.

“Rune, man on your left!” I heard Brand shout hoarsely.

Trained instinct had a stiletto boiling up from my sabre hilt. At the same time, I turned and stabbed upwards. The garnet blade slid into the soft space under the assassin’s jaw. I saw flashes of red light from inside his mouth before he slid lifelessly to the ground next to me.

I wheeled away from where I’d been laying, to put distance between me and an aimed attack. As the world spun with my scramble, I saw Addam helping a dazed Lady Death to her feet. Brand was in hand-to-hand with the fourth and fifth assassins. And floating above us, now just a few feet from the ground and clad from head to toe in scaly green leathers, was someone new—the person who had launched a Frost attack against us.

Oh, please, please monologue, I thought. I ignored the burning, bleeding scrapes on my hands and pushed to my feet. From the side of my vision I watched Brand dispatch his attackers.

“I’ve got strong opinions on people who go around in masks,” I said loudly. “Would you like to hear them?”

The floating figure pivoted with arms outstretched. A thread of pebbles wormed into existence between his palms, forming a boulder with astonishing speed. The figure thrust, and the rock whistled through the air and slammed into the ground a hand’s length from where Addam and Lady Death had been sitting. Addam used Telekinesis to slide them both away at the last second, but Lady Death cracked her head against a pillar in the process and sagged in Addam’s arms.

Brand had trained me to identify obvious weaknesses immediately. Sometimes those weaknesses were psychological. So when a person with a mask attacks you? Their weakness was the identity they clearly sought to conceal.

We’d practiced this moment in training, but never in real life.

I began running while shouting, “Brand, cover! Addam, slide me home!”

A sphere of stone crashed to the ground behind me. I dropped to a slide tackle, felt Addam’s Telekinesis grab my stomach like an iron vice which tripled the momentum of my slide. More skin tore and blood ran down into one of my eyes. I ignored it, focused on the gold chain around my ankle, and let its spell pop loose. The world flickered in color negative.

When I was under the figure, I tensed my muscles and shoved upwards into a jump. I grabbed their ankle and sunk my Psychometry spell into them.

There was a reason that Psychometry magic was only meant to be used on inanimate objects. The echoes of powerful events were difficult enough to face through unfiltered magic; the idea of using a blend of clairvoyance and psionics on a living being was a staggering onslaught of images and sounds.

As I fought through powerful memories of love and location, of breakfast food and rough sex, of fealty and betrayal, I managed to cough out one single word:

“Vadik.”

“Vadik Amberson’s involved!” Brand shouted, his hand against the Bluetooth adaptor in his ear. Two bodies were at his feet. “Send a team to the Amberson family house, Lord Tower!”

The scaled mask turned my way. Our gaze locked for a moment, and Vadik shot upwards to a broken skylight and vanished into the early morning gloom.

“Shit,” Brand said. “I’m really going to call Mayan now.”

I was already on my way to Addam and Zurah. Addam had activated a Healing, and was heating the bleeding wound on her head to a cauterized, thin line.

“Vadik Amberson?” she said to me.

“A House scion,” I said, as Addam turned his healing magic on my head wound. “Once tied to Sun Estate. He was at the gala. I think he’s a principality.”

“I see.” Zurah groaned, took my outstretched hand, and let herself be pulled to her feet. “And I feel like a fucking amateur.”

“You’ll get the next one,” I said, and tried to keep the teasing smile off my face.

Since I have almost no skill at hiding my emotions, Zurah spotted it with narrowed eyes. “Is he always like this?” she said to Brand.

“Oh, I could write a fucking country song about it,” he said.

“A moment, please. A principality?” Addam said. “How would you know that? And how is that possible? Is he rogue?”

“He must be,” I said. It took me a second to realize why my brain was starting to make impatient noises in the back of my head, which was already starting to throb under the weight of active magic. “Shit, I’m burning through my Psychometry spell. Brand, can you guide me around?”

Brand came back over while tucking his phone in his pocket. “Mayan dispatched a team to the Amberson estate. Hands out, Rune. Watch what you’re touching.”

“Wait,” Lady Death said. “The buffer. Don’t forget the buffer spell. Lord Tower taught me it last night.”

The last man to use Psychometry to track the movements of Lady Jade had wound up in the hospital. Lord Tower had mentioned in the Bunker that he was developing a spell to muffle the backlash. Zurah touched another one of her skewers. The release of magic made a wuumph noise, like the inhale of atmosphere before an explosion. She sent the magic streaming toward me, and almost immediately my headache vanished.

“Gods,” I whispered. I backed away from them while moving in an unsteady circle. “Buffer doesn’t begin to describe it. What is . . .”

Normal Psychometry was a tactile ability. Touch let you tap into the echoes of strong events, some auditory, some visual, mostly emotional. Voices and images would flicker past like a speeding carousel.

This was different.

Independent of touch, my Psychometry spell reached out with greedy and grasping efficiency, instinctively piecing together sounds and sight into layers of ghostly film. Entire scenes were projected around me in dull, old colors. It wasn’t quite vision—it was the anticipation of vision based on intangible elements like echolocation and the overlapping memories of those who had stood here. The entire spell depended on those memories, actually: in any given moment, there were slices of the room that hadn’t been included in the cone of vision that every person saw, leaving grayish-black spots scattered across my field of view.

“Narrate,” Brand said, loudly enough to get my attention.

“Lots of things. So much. It reaches back so far. But these images are brightest—” I gestured to the rear of the temple. “Division. Argument. Speeches. A man tried to stop them.”

“Who did?” Brand asked.

“I think he’s Lord Fool’s seneschal? He tried to stop people from leaving. They turned on him, in the end.”

I walked through a ghostly mob of people dressed in torn jeans, mismatched clothing, and fabric that would be riotous with color under normal light. A man—too rugged to be pretty, too pretty to be handsome, but wearing the Fool’s seal of office—was gesturing to the crowd that was slowly backing him to the wall.

As I focused, his words whined into a distorted, vibrating clarity.

“It is not the way forward!” the ghost-seneschal shouted. “You’re retreating to a myth. The Lowlands compound is a trap!”

“Lowlands compound,” I repeated. The dust in the air made my voice rasp.

The visions were beginning to flicker and fade. Psychometry was a fleeting magic. I’d have needed to meditate for a massive amount of time to power the sigil spell for more than a brief handful of minutes—and I hadn’t had the time.

I picked up my pace to a jog, hearing the reassuring sound of Brand’s footsteps before me. Moving in dizzy loops, I tried to isolate the thickest gathering of images, trying to sense any pattern that may provide valuable information.

“Zurah,” I said. “Are the rooms beneath us still unfinished? Like they were when the temple was translocated?”

“Yes. They’re used for storage, I believe.”

“Movement. Paths,” I said, seeing all the overlapping traffic, but all toward the hewn stone stairway. Why go down to unfinished rooms? “People—”

Psychometry died with a brief monochromatic flicker. The buffer spell that had been twined around it remained, but I didn’t like the feeling—like cotton batting being wrapped around my head. I flicked a hand and dismissed the spell.

“People what, Rune?” Addam asked.

“Most of them went that way. There’s got to be something downstairs.”

* * *

Brand traced the rim of the tunnel entrance with his flashlight.

“It angles down,” he said. “Pretty sharply.”

“Perhaps it connects the temple to Lord Fool’s underground property,” Addam said.

“At the very least, it’s a sure bet it goes into the Warrens, if not the Lowlands,” I added.

“We need support,” Zurah said. It had taken a second healing spell to keep her on her feet, and her voice was not steady. “We need to check in with the Dagger Throne to see if they found Vadik. We need to see if any of those attackers are alive and able to be questioned. We need to tell Judgment that we suspect Lord Fool is the victim of foul play.”

“You’re right,” I told Zurah, “but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m going down that tunnel now.”

“Little Brother,” she began to say.

I held up my hands. “This is not me being headstrong or impulsive. The people who attacked us may have been guarding the tunnel, which means their absence may be reported. We have a very, very narrow window to take advantage of that.”

“Rune, I have great respect for your abilities, but Lady Jade had us all pressed tight under her thumb. You remember that.”

“I know, and trust me, I have no desire to go into battle against her unless I’m there to hold the Tower’s jacket. But this is a chance to learn more about what’s happening. You heard Mayan—sending teams into the Warrens is problematic. Large, armed parties attract the wrong sort of attention. But just me, Brand, and Addam? We could slide in, observe, learn.”

“One hour, and then I’m coming after you,” she said. “I’ll stay and make the arrangements up here.”

I shifted my gaze to Brand and Addam, mutely asking if we were all on the same page. I needn’t have bothered. They’d dig a tunnel with their own bare hands if it brought us closer to Max and Quinn.

“Will you look after Lord Fool’s dog?” Addam asked Lady Death, because he was Addam.

“Of course.”

“We will contact you within the hour,” Addam said.

“Then go,” Zurah said. “Stay safe, and gods’ speed.”